The Grouchy Editor

Midway through a screening of Splice at my local cinema, a man’s cell phone went off in the row behind me.  The recorded message was in Homer Simpson’s voice. The man apparently had trouble turning off his phone in the dark.  Normally, this kind of interruption during a film infuriates me, but not this time.  No, I wanted to listen to Homer Simpson.  Heck, I even thought about eavesdropping on the man’s conversation, if he’d let me.  Anything, and I mean anything, to help me escape the dreary business occurring on the movie screen.

The creature in Splice, a doe-eyed lovely called “Dren” (that’s nerd spelled back— oh, never mind), was learning how to spell with Scrabble tiles.  She had put together the letters T-E-D-I-O-U-S.  My feelings exactly.  I saw how bored the creature was, and now I wanted to chat with her and Homer Simpson.  Maybe they could empathize with me:  anything to stop this ridiculous story on the silver screen.

I wanted to like this movie.  Really, I did.  The director, Vincenzo Natali, impressed me with his 1998 feature, the clever science-fiction thriller Cube.  But whereas Cube was low-budget, fresh, and unpretentious, Splice has big-budget special effects, some fairly well-known actors – and not a shred of originality.  The protagonists, a scientist couple, start out bickering and never stop bickering.  Nothing could make this couple happy; not a major scientific breakthrough, not their well-paying jobs, not even their movie-star looks.

Film schools teach fledgling screenwriters that conflict is necessary in drama, but nonstop, abrasive nagging isn’t conflict, it’s an Anacin commercial.  I wanted this couple to die.  Quickly.

The creature, given life by some mumbo-jumbo combination of DNA and cloning, was apparently a fish.  And a bird.  And a zombie.  And a porn star.  But I wanted it to go on living and killing so that everyone else in this miserable movie could die. Then I could go home and watch The Simpsons.        Grade:  D

Director:  Vincenzo Natali  Cast:  Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chaneac, Brandon McGibbon, Simona Maicanescu, David Hewlett  Release:  2010

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Ondine is a “mood movie” in search of the right mood.  For the melancholy, it has gorgeous Irish landscapes, sad songs, and broken dreams.  For the more hopeful, it’s an adult fairy tale, a gentle fable of beauty and redemption.  And for the bored … it has a plot twist straight out of Grand Theft Auto.

As you might guess, those elements don’t mesh all that well.

Colin Farrell plays Syracuse, an alcoholic, lonely Irish fisherman who one fateful day finds something bigger than a lobster in his net:  a beautiful woman called Ondine (translation:  water spirit).  To say that Ondine (Alicja Bachleda) is an enigma would be understatement.  The long-haired lass insists that she is for Syracuse’s eyes only.  She also seems to suffer from memory loss about her past.  Before you can say “Penthouse Forum fantasy,” Syracuse has the sexy nymph stowed away in his deceased mother’s cottage, where she is eventually discovered by his wheelchair-confined daughter, Annie.   Annie becomes convinced that her father’s catch is a “selkie,” a mythological creature that sheds its sealskin to become human.

That all sounds very Hans Christian Andersenish, but Ondine takes itself much too seriously to be the new Splash, and its plot is too adult for the Disney crowd.  It wants badly to be a grownup romantic fantasy, but the fisherman-selkie connection is too lightweight to resonate.  Bachleda projects friendliness — and looks great in soaking underwear — but her character is too enigmatic, too bland and underwritten.  Farrell’s fisherman is more developed, although his Irish accent is so thick that even though he’s speaking English, subtitles would be helpful.

All of this is too bad, because if the central romance was made of sturdier stuff, Ondine had the potential to be much more than what it is, a picturesque but slight romance.         Grade:  B-

Director:  Neil Jordan  Cast:  Colin Farrell, Alicja Bachleda, Alison Barry, Stephen Rea, Tony Curran, Dervla Kirwan  Release:  2010

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My expectations for The Wolfman were about as low as they can get.  This is a stale story, I thought, a familiar tale that Hollywood will gussy up with special effects, loud noises, and hyperactive editing.  Modern filmmakers will do to this horror chestnut what they did to Sherlock Holmes last year — and that’s not a good thing.

Having set the bar so low, I’ll have to say I was somewhat surprised by The Wolfman.  It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, and was even quite good in some respects.

The good:  Anthony Hopkins.  Nobody does “bad guy” with quite the élan of this veteran actor.  He’s like the kindly grandfather you’d rather not have.  When this old-timer winks at you, he’s not hinting at an early Christmas present, he’s letting you know there are bodies in the backyard.  Fans of the 1941 version would be wise not to rely on their recollection of Claude Rains in the same role; there is a plot twist involving Hopkins’s interpretation.  Also good are the film’s sets.  The Talbot estate and surrounding moors are suitably grand and gloomy.  And there are some nice insider tributes to Universal Studios and the original film.

The bad:  The movie is too long.  The first hour drags at times.  This should have been fixed by excising a good 15 minutes.  The monster transformations – which everyone in the audience expects – are not bad, but 30 years’ progression in special effects don’t show a marked improvement over the full-moon makeovers in 1981’s An American Werewolf in London.

There are worse ways to spend a couple of hours than by watching this monster-movie remake.  After all, the 1941 original was no masterpiece, itself.       Grade:  B-

Director:  Joe Johnston  Cast:  Benicio del Toro, Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins, Art Malik, Hugo Weaving, Geraldine Chaplin  Release:  2010

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There are roving bands of cannibals in The Road, the movie based on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel.  These people-eaters, who look like ordinary humans, are truly terrifying, and in the hands of a lesser director the audience would know exactly what to expect from the film:  Night of the Living Dead, Part 12.

But the filmmakers have taken their cue from McCarthy’s book:  Less is more.  Our heroes, a man and his young son, rarely have direct confrontations with the cannibals.  Instead, the film focuses on what the flesh-eaters leave behind — in a house, or in the woods — and the sense of dread this imparts is palpable.

Also effective is the relationship between father and son.  The viewer doesn’t know whom to pity more, the man, who has lived, loved, and lost almost everything, or his boy, who has never seen a live animal or experienced a treat as simple as a can of Coke.

The Road has been criticized for being relentlessly grim, and it is that.  But when it’s the end of the world, and even the ocean is dead, what would you expect, sunshine and lollipops?       Grade:  B+

Director:  John Hillcoat  Cast:  Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker  Release:  2009

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The Messenger belongs to a long line of Hollywood movies about American servicemen returning home from war.  These films include The Best Years of Our Lives (World War II), The Deer Hunter (Vietnam) and, more recently, Brothers (Iraq).  Unfortunately, The Messenger doesn’t pack the emotional punch of those other dramas.

Director Oren Moverman’s movie does have powerful moments, but most of them involve secondary characters.  When U.S. Army Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) and Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) deliver the news of Iraq casualties to stunned family members, you have to be a cold customer, indeed, not to feel their pain.  But The Messenger’s main storyline, depicting Montgomery’s torturous adaptation to life back in America, doesn’t resonate as well.

Montgomery engages in a tentative romance with a war widow played by Samantha Morton.  This bit of casting is inspired because Morton does not have typical “movie star” looks, and that affords her credibility as a blue-collar, struggling single mother.  But this tender interlude between two scarred people leads nowhere until much too late in the film.

The main problem with The Messenger is the character of Montgomery, either as written or as performed.  Foster conveys anger and intensity well, but he lacks a certain softness, some humanity with which we can identify.  He’s not as vulnerable as Dana Andrews was in The Best Years of Our Lives, nor as accessible as Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter.  Sgt. Montgomery’s emotional state might appear realistic to actual war veterans, but in a movie that seeks to send a strong message, it’s the wrong note.           Grade:  B

Director:  Oren Moverman  Cast:  Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton, Jena Malone, Steve Buscemi, Lisa Joyce  Release:  2009

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Is Exit Through the Gift Shop an elaborate hoax?  Is this “documentary” about street artists good enough to warrant excited speculation about its authenticity among the nation’s film critics?

The answer to the first question is … probably not.  The answer to the second question is … probably not.  For those who have not heard the movie’s backstory, it goes something like this:  Earlier this decade, a French immigrant to L.A. named Thierry Guetta turned his obsession with photographing everything into a more-specialized activity:  filming street artists at work.  Guetta was introduced to the mysterious “Banksy,” a British legend in the world of illegal street art.  In a neat twist, Banksy became the filmmaker and Guetta the artist, resulting in an art-world frenzy for Guetta’s work and this acclaimed documentary for Banksy.

At one point, street artist Shepard Fairey (who is not a fabrication) wonders aloud whether Guetta’s artistic pretensions are simply a con.  The enigmatic Banksy questions Guetta’s mental health.  And since the film’s release, the nation’s film critics are questioning their own grasp of reality — is this film a prank?  Did events really transpire the way we are led to believe in Exit Through the Gift Shop?

The movie is amusing — that’s all.  I did not leave the theater pondering any Big Questions:  What is art?  Is it in the eye of the beholder?  Has art become too commercialized?  No, I left the theater pondering the merits of the movie itself, which to me was mildly entertaining.  No more, no less.        Grade:  B

Director:  Banksy  Featuring:  Thierry Guetta, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Rhys Ifans (narrator)  Release:  2010

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