Babel

At its core, Babel is a film about innocence. When thinking back on this fairly brutal and violent film, it is odd to realize that not a single malicious act is committed. The great tragedies here come from misunderstandings rather than hatred. It is a masterpiece of miscommunication for if any of the characters could truly communicate across the divide of cultural and personal difference, then none of the cataclysm here would have taken place.

Alejandro González Iñárritu has made masterfully interwoven films in the past on a smaller scale. He began with the low budget Spanish language indie Amores Perros and then graduated to the more complicated Oscar nominee 21 Grams. Here he works his happenstance magic on a transcontinental level, making the lives of a Japanese schoolgirl, a Moroccan family, an American couple, and a Mexican nanny all loosely intertwine.

The events of the film do not quite click together with the potency of Iñárritu’s earlier work. The involvement of one story within the other is minimal. Here he is stressing thematic connections more than a domino effect in plot (something which is still a factor nonetheless). Language and culture become walls of separation between these people no matter how badly they try to extend themselves to one another. Iñárritu seems most infatuated with the relationships between parents and children and how they play out globally. In addition to the gap between cultures, he also seems to be fascinated with the generational divide that leaves parents unable to meaningfully connect with their children. As with the other characters in the film, he seems to suggest that the solution is simply to be silently supportive. Language between people of different mindsets only serves to complicate sentiments beyond recognition.

This is an absolutely beautiful film about well meaning people trapped in complex worldwide mechanizations. Iñárritu captures an amazingly magical quality through his ability to make moments between two individuals feel like the sentiments of fallen nations and vice versa. Near the end of the film, feuding spouses played by Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt reconcile by telling each other “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t my fault.” These could very well be the apologies of warring nations everywhere.

Grade: A+

Catch A Fire

Despite its harrowing subject matter, director Phillip Noyce’s Catch A Fire comes off feeling like a very soft and unremarkable thriller. It takes the physical anguish and moral ambiguity of Patrick Chamusso’s life of rebellion against South Africa’s opressive white government in the 1980s and digests it into an unthreatening PG-13 genre piece that does little to highlight the intensity and social significance of its tale.

Derek Luke gives a stunningly authentic performance as Patrick and finds himself in fair contest with the steely gaze of an impressively sedate Tim Robbins as Nick Vos, the man investigating Chamusso’s terrorist involvement. The sincere work of the actors is matched by Noyce’s nicely simplistic style as a director. Unfortunately, what begins as a genuinely visualized portrait of South Africa devolves into a thriller of the lamest kind and becomes visually rigid in the process. The life of the movie is in its characters and their motives, but the film lacks the layer of thoughtful meditation that would really give its events depth. It never really navigates the very important transition of Patrick from accused terrorist to actual freedom fighter. Complexity gets lost and explosive action sequences become dominant in the second half. There’s so much more that could have been done with this kind of story that it feels doubly annoying to see everything go to waste.

Still, there are great performances and a number of effective scenes here. In its entirety, it’s a muddled and unsatisfying film, but there are moments of wonderfully portrayed drama. If it had only utilized enough subtlety to deliver its message without becoming an obvious and sloppy mess, it could have been a great film.

Grade: B-

DVD of the Week: Slither

For those of you who have burned out your copy of Shaun of the Dead, here is another tongue in cheek horror homage just in time for Halloween. B-movie guru James Gunn directs Nathan Fillion (Serenity) and Elizabeth Banks (The 40 Year-Old Virgin) in a brilliantly stupid parody of creature features with just enough of its own grotesqueness to stand as a mildly horrific venture in its own right. Puns meet entrails in this wickedly funny and utterly ridiculous monster movie. It should be taken very lightly, but not underestimated in its ability to be silly creepy fun.

Flags Of Our Fathers

Flags Of Our Fathers is the third great film Clint Eastwood has directed in just fours years. It’s a brilliant elaboration on the many World War II films that have come before it. Unlike many more traditional films of this genre, it truly humanizes the battle at Iwo Jima and deconstructs the American mythology of its famous photo. It celebrates the messy youthfulness of the soldiers as much as their deeds in war and argues that it is there character as individuals that should be remembered more than their impersonal function in iconography. Heroes, according to the film, are things we make up to help us feel better. The men in the photo considered themselves merely humble soldiers inferior to the ones who died in battle.

The film juxtaposes the truly grisly events at Iwo Jima with the resulting promotional tour that the surviving men from the photo were sent on to raise money for war bonds. This campaign often involved the omission of unfortunate details and occasionally some outright lying to the public in order to keep their hopes up. There’s ambivalence as to whether these deeds should seen as acceptable or grotesque. Eastwood is not much interested in condemnation or attack. He mostly wants to examine the situation in all of its complexities.

What he does decidedly say about the men from the photo is that they were overwhelmed and unready to become national spokesman and public “heroes.” They feel morally aggravated by being treated as though they alone performed acts undertaken by thousands of soldiers (many of whom died) and find that their efforts to voice appreciation for their fallen comrades seems to fall on deaf ears. The public demands heroes and they have been cast in the roles. Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) is least able to accept his title, leading to serious issues with alcohol and a mostly tragic life thereafter. Renny Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe) are more comfortable in the limelight, but both find themselves settling for menial jobs when the public quickly forgets their names and faces and moves onto the next salable spectacle. The epitome of hollow gratitude comes when Hayes is stopped in the middle of plowing a field later in life to take a photo with a family of tourists. “That’s a hero kids!” says the father as they drive off and leave him to his meager life.

The flashbacks of the battle and the events of the bond tour intersect in this overlapping and time jumping narrative framed by Bradley’s son’s interviews with veterans while researching his book (Tom McCarthy plays the author here but James Bradley is the actual coauthor of the book upon which the film is based). Their greatest intersection comes at a highly exploitative stadium show in which Hayes, Bradley, & Gagnon are told to reenact their famous planting of the flag poses atop a paper-mache mountain. The three men are haunted my horrible memories as the crowd cheers for their victory with no real understanding of the lives it cost.

Grade: A

Marie Antoinette

It’s difficult to define the strengths of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Coppola creates such beautiful mood pieces that words often fail to properly describe the experience of watching them. What one must know about this movie before viewing it is simply that it is not a historical biopic of any kind. It is a spirited and romanticized character portrait aimed at capturing the exuberance, the loneliness, and the destructiveness of reckless youth. Even though it’s an entirely 18th century story, it almost feels as if Coppola is in some ways channeling her own nostalgic memories of a miserable and wonderful moment of young freedom in her life and theorizing what that would be like if at 18 you happened to also be the queen of France.

Sofia Coppola has become the foremost auteur of female isolation films. Her movies focus on young women who find themselves misunderstood by society and trapped by their inability to satisfyingly communicate with the people around them. In Marie Antoinette, Coppola envisions the tale of the infamous French queen as a fish out of water tragicomedy in which the very beautiful and very young Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is exploited for the sake of national interests and married off to the future king of France (Jason Schwartzman).

Though this is a stylistically lavish and almost surreal comedy about the French court, it’s also an emotionally subtle and highly understated drama about very repressed characters. Dunst has never been better than she is here. She exposes the wild glee and the quiet remorse of Marie Antoinette with very minimal amounts of expressive dialogue. You can feel the life in her eyes fade away as she’s ensnared by French protocol and transformed into a reluctant ruler. Schwartzman is also quite good as the charmingly pathetic Louis XVI and does equally beautiful things with small glances or the subtle clasping of his young wife’s hand.

Coppola also doesn’t brilliant work here as a director, making what would otherwise be a stodgy costume drama into a liberated and relatable story of young rebellion on a grand scale. She guides Marie through innocence in to decadence and eventually on to maturity. It’s a brilliant journey of style and character and Coppola never fails to make every moment flourish with color and life akin to the fiery spirit of her muse. The film looks and feels as Marie does. It begins simple, descends into decadence, emerges with natural warmth and in the end finds itself destroyed. Those who feel that Coppola’s style is meant to mask some sort of shallowness need only to look at the final shot of the film to be corrected. Here Coppola subtly suggests the entire French revolution with one very simple image. Her style here is not a mask. It’s an examination of superficiality in the life of Marie and an exploration of her life through visual aesthetics.

Grade: A+

Running with Scissors

First time feature director Ryan Murphy brings a prickly wit to the already dry humor of Augusten Burroughs’ memoir 'Running with Scissors.' The film takes a bleakly comical look at the misadventures of Burroughs’ childhood when his unstable mother left him in the care of her eccentric psychiatrist, Dr. Finch. Relative unknown Joseph Cross holds his own as Burroughs against an ensemble of talented actors including Annette Bening in a brilliant performance as Burroughs’ mother, Brian Cox and Jill Clayburgh as Augusten’s odd surrogate parents, and Evan Rachel Wood as the rebellious daughter of the family with whom Augusten most identifies.

It’s a story that takes quit a trip in terms of tone and style and the movie doesn’t always make the considerable leap gracefully. There’s a distancing sense of irreverence layered over even the most dramatically disturbing events of the film. It tends to withhold earnestness and offers up a safer, humor coated tragedy instead. Despite that, the humor hits the right marks in most places and the cast carries even the most detached material further than could ever be expected. Bening brings a tender sense of neurosis to her character even when her nervous breakdown becomes a comic spectacle. It’s a hard feeling to get used to, but eventually the film resolves its contradicting moods and creates a warmly bitter and humorously cynical look at what could truly have turned into melodrama in the wrong hands. There’s a simplicity in the more emotional scenes that works extremely well here. Scene stealers Wood and Clayburgh get to express their characters’ deepest fears and wishes with just a few words and maybe a good scream or two. The film’s best footage comes from the wordless montage shots of Cross and Woods in pure frenzy as they tear apart the very house that confines them to the ache of Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat.”

This is a solid dramedy laced with black humor and centered around a surprisingly tender heart. There’s not a lot that really distinguishes it from the post-Royal Tenenbaums slew of films about eccentric families, but this is certainly a well done entry into the not yet dead genre. Most importantly, it brings a sense of personal perspective that keeps genre contrivance at bay and reality at the forefront.

Grade: B+

The Prestige

The Prestige is a meticulous and smartly structured feature from director Christopher Nolan that unfolds the story of late 19th century rival magicians as though the film itself was an illusion of the time. Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) both start their careers in magic as part of an act created by magical gizmo mastermind Cutter (Michael Caine). Eventually, Borden’s maverick personality causes a break in the friendship and the act, turning the former friends into dangerous rivals determined to sabotage each other’s solo performances for years to come. Their story leads to an elaborate and perilously twisty tale of betrayal, romance, and magical ethics as the two battle over a dazzling trick (“The Transported Man”) and an even more dazzling assistant (Scarlett Johansson as Olivia).

Nolan manages to keep his many overlapping stories in perfect harmony. It’s rare for a period piece of this level of intricacy to fly by with such efficiency, but Nolan unravels this delicate story with amazing ease. He also makes the film visually stunning and perfectly designed for the period, adding a depth and authenticity that something this fantastical could surely use. He manages to create a world where brutal reality and ideal fantasy stand side by side. After all, the film maintains that the job of a great magician (and possibly also a great filmmaker) is to let the viewers forget reality for a moment and let them believe that they really can achieve the impossible.

Jackman and Bale are superb sparing partners here and Caine is as good as ever playing ringleader to the magic circus and pseudo narrator to the film. The biggest surprise in the cast is Scarlett Johansson who after giving stiff performances in such recent films as Match Point and The Black Dahlia finally recaptures some of the charm and sincerity of her earlier, less glamorous work.

This is a topnotch stylistic drama that bends and folds its many narratives into a complex ball of mystery and then gradually peels away one layer after the next. Even though some of the major turns are foreseeable, Nolan stages them with such brilliant intensity and the cast delivers such amazing performances, that they feel perfectly satisfying nonetheless. Moreover, there’s a lovely sense of logic to these twists that defies the conventional demand for an entirely sudden and brash twist ending which depletes the value of the events that have come before it. Everything here merely comes to a twisted, vicious, and perfect conclusion.

Grade: A

DVD of the Week: American Dreamz

This is a relatively slow week for DVD, but your best bet is probably this cultural parody from director Paul Weitz (In Good Company, About A Boy). Dennis Quaid gives one of his most effective comedic performances as a thinly veiled caricature of George W. Bush in a story involving politics, terrorists, and American reality TV. Hugh Grant apes “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell with equally slim subtlety, but with wickedly tongue-in-cheek fun. The implausible premise involves the president becoming a guest judge on the titular mock “Idol” series while good hearted terrorist to be Omer Obeidi (Sam Golzari) competes against blonde ambition prototype Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore) to be America’s next singing sensation. The film is often too much of a blunt instrument, making obvious and overly outlandish critiques in uninteresting and redundant ways. However, it does have moments of brilliance where it exposes with absolute audacity the media constructed images of everyone involved. Its subject specific material about Bush and “Idol” falters, but its general portrayal of media manipulation touches on some hysterical truth. The talented ensemble cast also includes Willem Dafoe, Marcia Gay Harden, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Judy Greer, Jennifer Coolidge, Jon Cho, Chris Klein, Seth Meyers, & Adam Busch.

Infamous

By the time Isabella Rossellini poses the question “Do you think your book is worth a human life?” the difference between Infamous and its oft compared predecessor, Capote, has been made clear: Capote was subtle. While Bennett Miller’s more simply titled and generally simpler film was a beautifully photographed and haunting tragedy of sheer brilliance, Douglas McGrath’s Infamous amps up the flamboyance and whimsy, making it a palatable alternative despite its obvious inferiority.

The film takes a different approach to the story of Truman Capote’s experiences in researching 'In Cold Blood' by delaying his arrival to Kansas and placing far more emphasis on his time spent as a star conversationalist amongst other New York City socialites. This increases the opportunity for comedy and wry wit, which are the films greatest strengths and also the strongest parts of Toby Jones’ charmingly silly but awfully soulless depiction of the legendary author. Both Jones and the film fall flat when the events of the story turn truly tragic. Capote was an eerie film with doses of dark wit. Infamous is a full blown comedy that just happens to end with a hanging or two. It really can’t balance its laughs with its chills and as a result its ending is a painfully muddled and shallow take on what should have been a very powerful finale. The film’s heart seems invested in Capote’s love of gossip when it should really be invested in the film’s more emotional arresting developments.

Besides Jones’ over the top performance as Capote, the movie boasts an array of famous faces doing almost nothing. In addition to a barely on screen Rossellini, it also features Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis, and Gwyneth Paltrow doing very little at all. It’s the immediate cast of supporting players that do the best work here. Daniel Craig and Sandra Bullock both offer rougher and distinctively different takes on Harper Lee and Perry Smith respectively. They’re nice surprises in a mixed bag of underperforming talent.

Infamous is definitely a downgrade from last year’s Oscar winning biopic, but it’s still a funny film with some deeply effective monologues delivered by Bullock and a few very heartbreaking sequences involving Craig as convicted killer, Smith. It lacks Capote’s quiet depth, but it still has a nice enough spirit to function as a humor piece if you’re willing to forgive its generally overwritten and often insincere dramatic material.

Grade: B-

DVD of the Week: A Prairie Home Companion

This charming and bittersweet ensemble dramedy from esteemed director Robert Altman is certainly this week’s most worthwhile rental option. It adapts classic elements of Garrison Keillor’s long running variety radio show of the same name into a cinematic narrative that mixes the typical events of a weekly broadcast with entirely fictitious behind the scenes tragedy and high jinks. Death (in the form of the newly brilliant Virginia Madsen) visits the show during its final broadcast to take the life of one if its cast members. The film addresses the melancholy of losing a loved one (or show) but never becomes overly maudlin. It’s mostly a rambling riff of calamity and fun that features amazing talent like Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, and the recently redeemed Lindsay Lohan in performances that blur the line between on-air improv and character revelation. Kevin Kline also does hysterical work here as Guy Noir, the show’s head of security who’s racing against the clock to try and save the show from the wrath of a corporate big wig known only as Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones). Mortality, frivolity, and musicality collide in this sentimental but never saccharine portrayal of a beaten but undefeated group of performers who seem sadly lost in the modern age of lifeless, flavorless radio programming.

The Departed

The Departed is an almost perfect crime thriller from legendary director Martin Scorsese. The main story involves a new police recruit named Bill Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) who goes undercover in a gang run by the infamous crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) just as Costello plants his longtime surrogate son Collin Sullivan (Matt Damon) undercover as a police officer. The two men work back and forth against one another with limited knowledge about each other’s identity. By the middle of the movie, they end up in an all out race to unmask the other before their undercover standing gets compromised. The film creates an exciting world of complete deception where everyone’s loyalties are unsure and no one is safe from anyone.

Unfortunately, the movie is marred by its own tendency for excess. Rather then savoring its brilliant moments, it tends to overstretch the material and ends up working against itself. During its climax, the film manages to create a sense of pure dramatic agony as gunshot wounds occur to the most unfortunate recipients. Instead of letting these painful and shocking deaths stand as distinctly tragic outcomes, the film piles on so many gunshots to the head that the entire scene becomes one big meaningless splatterfest. Had the movie demonstrated a bit more restraint here and elsewhere when potency takes a backseat to bloodlust and exhilaration, it would have been a much better film.

As it stands, this is still one of the most entertaining thrillers of the year. Underthinking certainly helps to reduce the amount of hole poking done to its tangled web of characters, but there’s enough genuine dramatic story to make these characters worth caring for or worth loathing depending on whom you’re speaking about. Most importantly, the film has a fresh sense of vicious wit. In addition to being a visceral tragedy, this is also a very funny depiction of rough men in ruthless situations that has no shame in getting laughs from violent assaults and other dark incidents when it pleases.

Combine this mix of thrills and laughs with Scorsese’s visual flare and outstanding performances by the entire cast and you have a slightly overdone but entirely enjoyable film.

Grade: A-

Little Children

Director Todd Field certainly exceeds his 2001 full length feature debut, In the Bedroom, with this dark and tragically funny tale of suburban angst. The story (adapted from a novel by Tom Perotta) centers on the immaturity of adults in life and love and the ways in which they are defined by their relationships to children. Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is slowly beginning to resent her own child now that her distant and unfaithful husband (Gregg Edelman) has stopped helping to ease the burden of being a fulltime child caretaker. She’s become weary of the tedious daily routine she endures and aches for some time alone from her demanding daughter. She meets Brad (Patrick Wilson) whose wife (Jennifer Connelly) is equally distracted and whose life is equally monotonous. What begins as time shared during their children’s play dates evolves into an affair that shakes them both out of their boredom. These events coincide with the arrival of Ronald, (Jackie Earle Haley) a recently released sex offender jailed for indecent exposure to a minor. His presence irks the community and sends what was once a seemingly quaint suburb into a tailspin of questions, concerns, and moral upheaval.

The precise definition of morality finds itself bent and stretched over the course of the film. Neighbors instantaneously begin a brutal campaign of harassment meant to convince Ronald to leave town. Unlike the quick to judge suburbanites, the film regards Ronald as a dangerous man, but it also acknowledges that he is a person. His past is dark and dreadful, but he is still a real human being with flaws akin to the affairs and the other hidden salacious habits that exist within the community. Despite the neighbors’ insistence that Ronald is the only one amongst them with the potential to harm or offend a child, the community quickly proves to be a place where parents can do damage to their little ones as well. A distracted Sarah slowly steals away the enthusiasm of her daughter while Brad’s son is nearly abandoned for equally selfish reasons.

Winslet and Wilson are beautifully subtle in their melancholy as parents who want so desperately to be more than simply parents. They want to go beyond their roles in life and become exhilarating individuals (obvious comparisons are made between Sarah and Madame Bovary in parts of the film). It is these efforts to become as reckless and impassioned as literary characters that threaten to destroy their opportunity to live simple but happy lives.

The film passes no specific judgment on any of the involved parties, but merely exposes the flaws in the moral conduct code of suburbs like this. Neighbors all call irrationally and grotesquely for the castration of Ronald as if that would be enough to fix the brokenness of the entire town. Such a thing would not be a solution to anything at all, but only another travesty in a long line of awful things that take place here. Hopefully, they learn this in the end.

Grade: A+

DVD of the Week: Thank You For Smoking

This brutally dark and tremendously incisive comedy from first time writer/director Jason Reitman is one of the very best movies so far this year. Its astoundingly talented cast includes Aaron Eckhart, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, Robert Duvall and a variety of other notable names. Not since Barry Levinson made Wag the Dog in 1997 has an American comedy been so bravely unfiltered regarding the issues of political and cultural manipulation. Smoking capsizes the arguments of both pro-tobacco and anti-tobacco lobbyists and serves as a virtual textbook on ways to defuse instances of political doubletalk. All of its characters get so caught up in the game of exploitation that they cease to pursue the actual truth. Smoking uses plain honesty to address this system of persuasion by which truth is irrelevant and a strong marketing campaign makes all the difference. It’s a brilliantly funny and culturally significant film.

The Queen

Director Stephen Frears continues his brilliant and eclectic career by helming this charming and surprisingly lively account of Queen Elizabeth II’s behavior following the tragic death of Princess Diana. The queen was notoriously absent from public sight for several days, choosing instead to remain true to the regal principle of keeping personal matters private. England was already enthusiastic about pursuing a more modern rule and the queen’s perceivably uncompassionate demeanor at this time damaged their affections for the monarchy even further.

The film is not so much a blaring critique of the queen as it is an affectionate satire. It sympathizes with her passion but hysterically spoofs her stiff methods. This is most true in the performance of Helen Mirren who imbues Elizabeth II with as much subtle vulnerability as she does overt steeliness. She illustrates beautifully the passionate but disconnected persona of the queen.

Other then developing a hesitant fondness for the rigid royalty, the film does little extra in terms of shaping a strong narrative. At times it serves as a tribute to Diana and at others Frears toys with symbols of royalty to dramatic effect, but there’s just not much driving this movie forward. As funny as it is, the charm dries out by the film’s end at which point the extensive day to day details of the mourning process start to feel like slow moving filler meant only to delay the queen’s small but inevitable concession. It’s a wonderfully insightful portrait of a complex public figure, but the film just doesn’t have enough other material to make it a truly engaging viewing experience. Mirren is the real magic here and her Queen Elizabeth II is most certainly worth a bow.

Grade: B

The Last King of Scotland

Underinformed people attending a showing of The Last King of Scotland might be surprised to know that Forest Whitaker’s brilliant onscreen interpretation of former Ugandan leader and mass genocide perpetrator, Idi Amin, is actually a supporting role. Press materials and synopses all point to Whitaker’s work as the main attraction (which it is), but the real story here is about a Scottish doctor living in exceedingly comfortable quarters who journeys to Uganda in search of a personal adventure. James McAvoy gives an overshadowed but equally flawless performance as the doctor, Nicholas Garrigan.

The decision to make Ugandan newcomer, Garrigan, the eyes through which the audience views the film helps to frame the potential unwieldy narrative. It’s clear that the film’s main objective is to capture the menace and unexpected charm of Amin, but by encasing this in a more general story, it avoids the tendency of many biopics to tediously meander through the lives of their subjects. The film isolates a specific and notably intense moment in time in order to illustrate the overall tone of Amin’s regime. It also casts the dangerous man in the midst of a political thriller of sorts, allowing a conventional genre to be the basis upon which director Kevin MacDonald shapes this tale of deadly political corruption. Though Nicholas Garrigan did not really exist, his fictitious work as Amin’s personal physician brings us into the story with appropriately amateurish eyes. We meet Amin with as much openness and enthusiasm as Garrigan does and become slowly disgusted in just the same way. Garrigan’s presence not only inhibits overelaboration, it also gives us a clean pair of eyes with which to experience the complex character of Amin.

Unfortunately, there are also a number of poor choices made regarding this device. Garrigan sometimes dominates the film too much. For example, subplots involving his brief relationships with a fellow doctor (Gillian Anderson) and one of Amin’s wives (Kerry Washington) feel superfluous and weaken the film’s momentum. The movie is a bit too long and can sometimes drag in moments like these that don’t directly deal with Garrigan’s connection to Amin. Regardless, The Last King of Scotland is an exceptional film. It wonderfully meshes the stylistic habits of a thriller with some deeply disturbing true events in order to craft a chilling character portrait that will not soon be forgotten.

Grade: A-