The Grouchy Editor

There isn’t much worse than a Hollywood movie that feels compelled to spell out every plot point.  “You are 12 years old,” these films seem to say to us, “and so this is why Bobby loves Susie, and this is why Susie was in that car chase, and this is why Bobby shot the bad man in the head.”

On the other end of the spectrum, however, is the “enigmatic” drama – films in which too little is explained.  Tom Ford’s A Single Man falls into this category, with its chronicle of the last day in the life of a despondent, homosexual English professor who has recently lost his longtime partner.  I haven’t read the Christopher Isherwood novel upon which Man is based, but I imagine the book relies heavily on the inner-voice technique – narration or exposition that is commonplace in print but which can handicap a film version of the story.

Much has been made of Colin Firth’s portrayal of George, the lonely professor who spends one last day putting his affairs, literal and figurative, in order while preparing for suicide.  Firth’s expressive face conveys intelligence, no question, but it also conveys little else.  George is maddeningly detached from everyone around him, from neighborhood families to casual acquaintances.  He can cut loose only with best pal Charley (Julianne Moore) – but even then only with much coaxing on her part.  Right up until the end, George remains at arm’s length from other people, including the audience.

George seems to be watching himself in his own movie.  When he learns from a child that his neighbor would like to toss him to the lions – just deserts for being “light in the loafers” – his reaction seems to be mild disappointment.  When he aims a pistol into his own mouth, he seems to be wrestling with the proper way to blow-dry his hair.  The end, when it finally comes, is not poignant but almost unintentionally funny – all that preparation, and look what happens.   As the cliché goes, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.       Grade:  B-

Director:  Tom Ford  Cast:  Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode, Jon Kortajarena, Paulette Lamori  Release:  2009

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Chloe is elevated a notch above the type of late-night erotic mysteries found on Cinemax by the strength of one neat plot twist and some top-tier actors.  Those actors would be old pros Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson, who garner sympathy for two largely unsympathetic characters.  Moore and Neeson play an upper-crust Toronto couple – he’s a charismatic college professor; she’s his smart-but-insecure gynecologist wife – living in the lap of luxury but succumbing to an oh-so-typical midlife crisis.

Enter Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), a glamorous young prostitute whom Catherine (Moore) spots from her office window and then decides to include in a fateful decision.  Catherine hires the girl to use as bait in a test of her husband’s fidelity, or lack thereof.  This decision – certainly atypical of most women, but handled deftly by screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) – sends the story in unexpected directions.

Chloe’s problem is Seyfried.  The actress certainly looks the part, but she lacks the acting chops of, say, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, or Anne Baxter in All About Eve.  Unfortunately, Seyfried proves that less is more:  The less she wears, the more watchable the movie; the less she speaks, the more believable the story.  She lacks the gravitas needed for the titular role – although her titular rolls certainly defy gravity.  Sorry.

Chloe has its attractions.  The twist, as I’ve said, is a neat one.  Moore turns in yet another intriguing performance.  And the ballyhooed sex scene between Moore and Seyfried is suitably steamy – if you like that kind of thing on Cinemax.      Grade:  B

Director:  Atom Egoyan  Cast:  Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried, Max Thieriot, R.H. Thomson, Nina Dobrev  Release:  2010

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Mathematics is at the heart of the mystery in The Oxford Murders — but don’t let that scare you away from the film.  There is something much more chilling than the Pythagorean theorem in this movie:  Elijah Wood.  Someone made the ill-fated decision to cast Wood as a student mathematician and (gulp!) romantic hero in this whodunit, and that miscalculation might be the film’s greatest mystery.

We are asked to believe that Wood’s animal magnetism (iguanas have mates, correct?) is so irresistible that not one, but two fetching young women fall into his arms within minutes of meeting his character, Martin the math major.  Director Alex de la Iglesia tried spinning the casting of his leading man this way:  “I’m delighted to work with Elijah, who undoubtedly has the most powerful eyes in the industry and who is perfect for the part.”  Well.  The young actor’s eyes certainly are powerful, in a deathray sort of way.  In Oxford, Wood is also asked to remove his shirt for a sex scene with Spanish beauty Leonor Watling.  The scene depicts a bug-eyed Wood slurping spaghetti off Ms. Watling’s chest.  It also exposes audiences to Wood’s scrawny, pale torso.  The kid is in obvious need of the spaghetti. 

To be fair, the horribly miscast lead actor is not the film’s only flaw.  I haven’t read the novel upon which the movie is based, but I’m guessing that plot developments that seem sketchy, implausible, and rushed on screen might be thoughtful and well-developed on the printed page.  The movie races through key plot points when it really should pause for all of us slow students in class.

John Hurt is excellent as famed mathematician-philosopher Arthur Seldom.  It’s the overmatched Wood’s misfortune to be paired with a consummate professional like Hurt in scene after scene – as if the romantic bits with Watling weren’t humiliation enough for one actor.

The movie did leave me with greater appreciation for people who are gifted with numbers.  Unfortunately, it also left me with a newly acquired aversion to spaghetti.       Grade:  C

Director:  Alex de la Iglesia  Cast:  Elijah Wood, John Hurt, Leonor Watling, Julie Cox, Jim Carter, Alex Cox, Burn Gorman, Anna Massey  Release:  2008

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[Rec] 2 is one of the dumbest horror movies I’ve seen in quite some time.  If you’re looking for a few good scares, I highly recommend it.

I suppose that sounds contradictory.  All I can say is, when you go to a fright flick, what exactly are you looking for – intellectual stimulation, or something that makes you jump out of your seat?  In a perfect world, an audience gets both, a la The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby.  [Rec] 2 is no art-house classic, but it does its main job and delivers some genuine jolts.

Let me describe the plot.  On second thought, I can’t do that.  The plot is ridiculous, but it’s also beside the point.  Suffice to say there is a creepy old apartment complex in Barcelona, Spain.  Some kind of virus (or demonic possession, or both) has infected the people inside, turning them into bloodthirsty savages (or zombies, or demons, or both).  Humanity’s only hope is to secure a blood sample from a young girl who was the first infectee (or Satan’s spawn, or something like that).  A Spanish SWAT team (or something like that) is dispatched to the building to save the day.  Virus, possession, demons, zombies … whatever.  The only thing that matters is that we now have potential victims in the building.

This is the kind of script in which police use a bullhorn to warn everyone away from the windows – and within seconds one of the protagonists stands in front of a window.  This is the sort of movie where our heroes are inundated with gore, carnage, and psychological horror – but their overriding priority is to make sure the video camera is still recording.

It’s a stupid plot and a stupid movie.  But if you are willing to turn your brain off for 85 minutes, it’s a lot of fun.  Directors Juame Balaguero and Paco Plaza know that handheld photography can be effective on a purely visceral level.  Combined with ominously claustrophobic apartment hallways, the jerky visuals enhance each attack.  By showing some, but not quite all, of the demonic assaults, the effect is often chilling.

The best way to enjoy [Rec] 2 is by turning your own brain into a handheld camera. Watch and record everything, but try not to think about it.        Grade:  B-

Directors:  Juame Balaguero, Paco Plaza  Cast:  Jonathan Mellor, Manuela Velasco, Oscar Zafra, Ariel Casas, Leticia Dolera, Alejandro Casaseca, Pablo Rosso, Pep Molina, Andrea Ros  Release:  2010

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Greenberg is just a little … off.  You probably know someone like him:  normal on the surface, able to carry on brief conversations with no hint of being a little … askew. But on closer examination, you begin to realize that when God handed out the Facebook pages, Roger Greenberg’s page was the beta version – raw and full of glitches.

Ben Stiller, best known for playing innocuous schlemiels in broad comedies, obviously took this role to enhance his acting chops.  He does well with the part. Greenberg, although neurotic,  is not a caricatured fussbudget, a la Felix Unger, nor is he De Niro’s taxi driver, threatening to snap at the slightest provocation.  No, Greenberg is just a little off-kilter.  He has no real friends and views the world as a hostile place, some of which might be cured by dashing off letters to the editor.

Greenberg, fresh from a stay in a mental hospital, is asked to housesit in L.A. while his brother and family take a vacation trip to Vietnam (yes, Vietnam).  Into his world comes Florence (Greta Gerwig), the brother’s assistant and a woman with issues of her own.  Florence is cute and friendly but goes through life with an invisible “kick me” sign on her back.  Greenberg and the girl have one thing in common:  a remarkable talent for sabotaging their own personal relationships.

Greenberg is a character study with no special effects, car chases, or explosions.  Some critics have commented on the unlikability of Stiller’s character.  To me, Greenberg is not that obnoxious, just mildly irritating and generally intriguing.  When he sits down to pen one of his frequent “consumer complaint” letters – to the cab company, the airline, the newspaper editorial page – he might be anal retentive, but he might also be right.

Gerwig’s downtrodden Florence is also multi-dimensional.  She takes what life hands her and makes the best of it.  What there is of plot in the film hangs on whether or not these two societal fringe-dwellers can find happiness together.  How much you enjoy this movie depends on how much you care about that.   I found that I cared.       Grade:  B

Director:  Noah Baumbach  Cast:  Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Messina, Susan Traylor, Merritt Wever  Release:  2010

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If you live in the city, or near the city, it can be easy to forget that there are multiple Americas.  Hollywood excels at showing us how rich America lives, and that’s where it spends most of its time.  We don’t call our movie capital “Tinseltown” for nothing.  When films do depict the poor, the stories are almost always drug-related, crime-related, and set in the inner city.

Then along comes a film like Winter’s Bone, just to remind us that there are other Americans out there, people sometimes referred to as “poor white trash,” people like 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence).  Ree lives in the Ozark Mountains with her mentally ill mother and two siblings, both of them still children.  When her drug-dealing father abandons the family and puts their ramshackle home up as bail bond, it’s up to Ree to either find him or risk losing the homestead.

Winter’s Bone is worth seeing for atmosphere alone.  Ree’s rural neighbors are all colorful, but flesh-and-blood colorful, not caricatures.  At times, the movie feels less like fictional drama than like an old Charles Kuralt, “On the Road” TV special.  Lawrence, in a breakout performance as the unflinching, tough-as-nails Ree, will probably get Oscar consideration, but she’s matched by sad-eyed John Hawkes, playing her deceptively resourceful uncle.

There is one flaw to this movie, and it affects its overall impact:  The story is slight.   Writer-director Debra Granik builds dramatic tension as Ree hunts for her elusive father, but the payoff is not strong.  That lack of dramatic meat isn’t fatal, but it does prevent a very good movie from becoming a truly great one.       Grade:  B+

Director:  Debra Granik  Cast:  Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Kevin Breznahan, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Shelley Waggener, Lauren Sweetser, Sheryl Lee  Release:  2010

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Let me propose a little scenario.  You go to the cinema, purchase a ticket, grab some popcorn, and find a seat somewhere in the middle of the theater.  I walk in and sit down right behind you.  You have your buttery popcorn; I have a cattle prod.  Every 10 or 15 minutes, preferably during a quiet scene in the movie, I lean forward and ZAP! you in the ass with my cattle prod.  Then we both resume watching the film, until I decide to ZAP! you again.  When you leave the theater, you tell all of your friends that you went to a scary movie and jumped out of your seat numerous times.

Sound absurd?  To me, my cattle prod and I are just a low-tech version of what filmmakers routinely do to audiences with modern horror flicks.  Case in point: The Crazies.  I counted at least half a dozen moments in which, ZAP!, a hand, face, shadow, or whatever suddenly pops into the frame, accompanied by what sounds like a ton of bricks being dropped onto a piano keyboard, or shrieking violins out of an orchestra pit from hell.  The soundtrack is nothing more than the high-tech equivalent of my cattle prod, a cheap way to make you jump in lieu of genuine fright.

In the case of The Crazies, that’s too bad, because as horror films go, director Breck Eisner’s movie is pretty good.  In fact, it’s much better than most films in the genre. Of course, the bar is set so low for horror movies that you can take that praise for what it’s worth.  But The Crazies is well directed and edited with an eye for tension. Also, the actors actually seem like real people.

I think we are overdue for a horror-movie renaissance.  The last time that occurred was in the 1970s, and the genre seems to rejuvenate itself every 40 years or so, and so the time is ripe.  Great scare films seem to have one thing in common:  We are intrigued by the characters, not just the situation.  Think of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, or Linda Blair in The Exorcist.  When I think back on The Crazies, I’ll recall it as a decent horror movie — but mostly I’ll think of cattle prods.         Grade:  B-

Director:  Breck Eisner  Cast:  Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker, Christie Lynn Smith, Brett Rickaby  Release:  2010

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you set out to satirize something, shouldn’t your movie be a bit smarter and wittier than whatever it is you’re satirizing?

I’m old enough to remember the 1980s (vaguely) and its films, and one thing I recall is that comedies back then didn’t rely exclusively on flatulence, bodily fluids, arrested development, and foul-mouthed mean-spiritedness for 99 percent of their humor.  Granted, a lot of the ‘80s movies were garbage — but they didn’t smell as bad as Hot Tub Time Machine.

God knows the ‘80s look awful enough in this film.  From the dreadful sitcoms on background TVs to the stick-your-finger-in-an-electrical-socket hairdos, it’s easy to see why the four characters who get magically transported back to 1986 want so desperately to return to the present.  Not so easy to understand is why John Cusack, an actor I once admired, now seems to be in a race with Robert Downey, Jr. to see who can taint his acting legacy the fastest.  Faring better than Cusack is gentle-giant Craig Robinson, who is featured in the few scenes in Machine that are genuinely funny.

Time-machine comedies can work.  For evidence of that, you need only go back to, well, the 1980s (Back to the Future).  But as I stared, glassy-eyed and foggy-brained, at this mess of a movie on DVD, I was happy that I had my own time machine – the fast-forward button on my remote.      Grade:  D-

Director:  Steve Pink  Cast:  John Cusack, Clark Duke, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry, Sebastian Stan, Lyndsy Fonseca, Crispin Glover, Chevy Chase, Lizzy Caplan, Collette Wolfe, Crystal Lowe, Jessica Pare  Release:  2010

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If you plan to read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, here’s a piece of advice:  Don’t feel bad about skipping certain chapters to get to the good parts.  The novel deserves its reputation as great literature, no question, but you have to be a dedicated military historian – or have the patience of a saint – to suffer through the lengthy passages that Tolstoy devotes to Napoleon’s march through Russia.

Similarly, much of The Last Station, a movie about Tolstoy’s final days in 1910, is an exercise in frustration.  The plot centers on a battle over the old man’s will.  Should Tolstoy’s considerable fortune go to his wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren), or to the Russian people, as advocated by Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) and the idealistic Tolstoyans?

I’m no Russian historian, but if we are to believe events as played in The Last Station, it seems to me that none of them were deserving of an inheritance.  Chertkov is presented as a mustache-twirling blackguard; Sofya, though charming, is not exactly a needy peasant girl.  She lives in the lap of luxury, and her self-serving “suicide” attempt (in front of a crowd of potential rescuers) is not endearing.  She is a materialistic woman, and Tolstoy himself is either naïve or misguided.  In short, there is no one to really root for in this story.

The filmmakers intend that we find James McAvoy and Kerry Condon, as young lovers who parallel old-timers Leo and Sofya, appealing enough to cheer for, but they are an afterthought to the main plot.  The film belongs to Mirren and Plummer.  They were both Oscar-nominated, and it’s amusing to see them joust.  But not amusing enough to overcome a frustrating script.         Grade:  B-

Director:  Michael Hoffman  Cast:  James McAvoy, Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, Paul Giamatti, Kerry Condon, Anne-Marie Duff  Release:  2009

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