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11Feb

Beasts of the Southern Wild

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As I watched Beasts of the Southern Wild, director Benh Zeitlin’s mystical, philosophical sojourn in the “Bathtub,” a fictional bayou settlement in southern Louisiana, I had two reactions: 1) I thought, this is the kind of film that sheltered, privileged city-dwellers probably love, because it allows them to spy on and empathize with rural “little people” for a brisk 90 minutes or so; 2) I thought, this is the kind of film that residents of the Bathtub — if they were real and assuming they ever watched movies — would likely detest. There is very little plot, lots of mumbo jumbo about man’s place in the universe, artsy-fartsy photography, and a “can we all get along?” sentimentality.

Oh, and I had a third thought: The people of the Bathtub would make excellent subjects for a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. If nothing else, Beasts is a welcome reminder that, between the coasts, America is many things, none of them apartments on the Upper East Side or cop chases in South L.A.

Young Quvenzhane Wallis, five years old at the time of filming, has been nominated for an Oscar for her starring role as “Hushpuppy,” a spunky Bathtub resident who lives in squalor with her ailing, abusive father. Wallis is very good; she has an expressive face and loads of charm. But Best Actress good? Lord, no. Maggie Smith has nothing to fear. At least not yet.

Not a lot happens to Hushpuppy in this movie. We are voyeurs of her poverty-stricken lifestyle in the heat and humidity of the swamp. But we needn’t worry much about her because, although her drunken father occasionally beats her and her neighbors are all illiterate pigs, these people like each other. And Hushpuppy is wise beyond her years. And the Bathtubians(?) don’t much cotton to encroachment by modern civilization, which threatens their idyllic way of life. So we can thank them for 90 minutes of their time and go back to our apartments and cop chases in South L.A. Grade: C+

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Director: Benh Zeitlin Cast: Quvenzhane Wallis, Dwight Henry, Levy Easterly, Lowell Landes, Pamela Harper, Gina Montana, Amber Henry, Jonshel Alexander Release: 2012

Watch Trailers and Clips (click here)

08Feb

Gone Girl

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by Gillian Flynn

Did smirking Nick Dunne kill his gorgeous, albeit pampered, young wife? As I read for clues, the plot twists kept coming but I persevered … persevered … persevered – stop. Alas, about two thirds into the story, Gone Girl lost me.

Flynn’s mindbender is peppered with clever asides about marriage, co-dependence, and the perils of marrying a sociopath, but it’s also decidedly lacking in sympathetic characters; if her people aren’t flat-out crazy, then they’re something conceivably worse: relentlessly cynical. But we all love a good villain, and the cat-and-mouse shenanigans between the less-than-perfect Dunnes are often delicious (imagine Nick and Nora Charles with homicidal streaks). The problem here is plot: There are simply too many “yeah, right” moments.

02Feb

Reviews in Short: February 2013

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Art School Confidential Quirkiness has done well for Terry Zwigoff, the creator of off-the-wall gems like Ghost World and Crumb. Zwigoff’s Art School is certainly peculiar, blending youth romance with satire about what constitutes “art.” And oh, yes: There is a subplot about a vicious serial killer terrorizing the school campus. Hey, I did mention that Zwigoff is into quirky. But despite funny supporting work from John Malkovich and Jim Broadbent, this time Zwigoff falls flat. Art School is often slow and it’s hampered by a dullish Max Minghella as the young hero. Release: 2006 Grade: C

*****

Safety Not Guaranteed tries hard to be a lovable fantasy-romance, but male lead Mark Duplass, as an eccentric who claims to know the secret of time travel, comes off stiff and childish. There are also some jarring shifts in tone — it’s difficult to sustain whimsy when your quirky comedy suddenly morphs into an armed-heist thriller — but doe-eyed Aubrey Plaza is disarming as a kooky “emo girl,” a magazine intern sent to investigate oddball Duplass. Release: 2012 Grade: C+

*****

House at the End of the Street Until it gets stupid, stupider, and stupidest in its last act, during which every horror-flick cliché ever clichéd comes into play, House is a decent enough thriller. But not even Jennifer Lawrence — smack in the midst of Major Movie-Star Momentum — can rescue that silly third act. Lawrence, playing a typical teen who moves with her mom to a house with some atypical neighbors, at least doesn’t embarrass herself. Release: 2012 Grade: C

*****

The Aztec Box What hath the Blair Witch wrought? Aztec is yet another low-budget, found-footage horror flick, this time involving the unearthing of a cursed Mexican artifact. I say “low-budget,” but that’s not really the problem here. The problem is a run-time that’s about 20 minutes too long, much of it inane home-movie footage that really should have remained lost. Release: 2013 Grade: D

*****

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara You might not agree with all of McNamara’s “lessons,” but this mix of archival footage and interviews with the former Secretary of Defense could be one of the best films about war — and the all-too-human leaders who wage them — ever made. McNamara is alternately brash and humble as he chronicles his uniquely American life, culminating with his years as advisor to two presidents during the hellish Vietnam War. Release: 2003 Grade: A

25Jan

No Easy Day

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by Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer

“In all of my deployments, we routinely saw this phenomenon. The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger a pussy he was. The leaders were less willing to fight. It is always the young and impressionable who strap on the explosives and blow themselves up.” Those words are from “Mark Owen,” co-author of No Easy Day and one of the Navy SEALs responsible for killing Osama bin Laden.

The book is a compelling look at the day-to-day life of an elite SEAL, and I’m sure it’s a great recruitment tool for the military. However … if only Owen had left it at that. Owen (a pseudonym), who claims that he and his fellow SEALs don’t much concern themselves with politics, does little to hide his disdain for Barack Obama, and presumably liberals in general – yet has nothing to say about the “young and impressionable” Americans who died in the bogus war begun by Obama’s predecessor.

16Jan

David Copperfield

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by Charles Dickens

They say that people don’t read books anymore, and they say that the few who do, don’t read long books. Especially long, old books. So I suppose there isn’t much of an audience these days for novels like David Copperfield, Dickens’s 729-page coming-of-age classic, and that’s a shame, because books might not get any better than this.

Unlike Tolstoy (the endless battle scenes in War and Peace), and Hugo (an interminable description of the Paris sewer system in Les Miserables), Dickens avoids bloat in Copperfield. It’s not “perfect” – Dickens’s affection for some characters borders on sappiness, and a few of his plot coincidences stretch credulity – but in the two categories that matter most, strong characters and story, I’m not sure that it can be topped.

Wait, I take that back. There was a little book called Great Expectations ….

11Jan

Compliance

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I am a cop. You are not, and I’ve just ordered you to do something distasteful. Will you do it? You might say, “Of course not” — but there are scientific studies proving that, more likely than not, you will.

That’s the moral dilemma faced by several characters in Compliance, writer-director Craig Zobel’s squirm-inducing drama based on a series of real-life telephone hoaxes perpetrated in the early 2000s. On paper (see sidebar below), what happened to employees of a rural McDonald’s outlet stretches credulity. It’s to Zobel’s credit that, after watching his dramatization of the incident, the behavior of several unfortunate fast-food workers doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

A summary: A man calls the restaurant and, claiming to be a police officer, asks to speak to the manager. The “cop” informs her that one of her employees is accused of stealing from a customer. Police, this man says, are at the moment short-handed, and would the manger mind helping them out? Would she please begin by strip-searching the female employee?

Ridiculous, you say. Even should the manager acquiesce to this absurd request, certainly the young girl would have none of it. Ah, but you are not an 18-year-old girl from the sticks of Kentucky (Ohio in the movie), needful of your job, intimidated by police, and conditioned — as most of us are — to respect authority. The stressed-out manager succumbs, the fearful girl succumbs and, once the manager’s middle-aged fiancé enters the picture, a relatively harmless prank escalates to sexual assault.

I have no idea how true-to-life the proceedings are in Compliance, but Zobel’s step-by-step direction and some superb acting by Ann Dowd, as the manager, make the outrageous seem plausible. That is, plausible until the sex assault. The motivations of both parties to that event are … curious, at least to me.

Zobel claims that his film is a composite of scores of similar telephone hoaxes that plagued the Midwest 10 years ago, but the plot of Compliance adheres closely to the recorded facts of the Kentucky incident. Not so the ending, in which it’s implied that the bad guy gets caught. In reality, the primary suspect in the hoax was acquitted of all charges. Grade: B+

Director: Craig Zobel Cast: Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, Bill Camp, Philip Ettinger, James McCaffrey, Matt Servitto, Ashlie Atkinson Release: 2012

Watch the Trailer (click here)

*****

Above: Ogborn and Nix during the assault, from security video.

Never mind those stories you hear about “stranger danger” on the Internet; one of the most successful scams of the early 2000s involved nothing more than that relic of low-tech communication, the humble telephone.

On April 9, 2004, someone claiming to be a police officer called McDonald’s assistant manager Donna Summers. Using a combination of guile and homework (the caller knew the actual name of Summers’s regional manager), the fake cop spun a tale of customer theft and asked Summers to strip search employee Louise Ogborn, who was then 18. Later (the incident went on for several hours), Summers’s fiancé, Walter Nix, continued to follow “officer Scott’s” instructions — including a spanking of the naked girl and the coercion of oral sex from her. Eventually, employees grew suspicious and contacted the real police.

Nix went to prison and Ogborn successfully sued McDonald’s. But “officer Scott” was never found. Said a (genuine) police detective assigned to the case: “There was a lot of things, in my mind, that I think they [Summers and Nix] could have done — and I don’t understand why they didn’t do them.”

Above: Nix, at left, and Ogborn leaving court.

Below, part of the actual security video:

04Jan

Reviews in Short: January 2013

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Midnight Movie If you like low-budget horror, there’s a lot to like about this one. It has a spunky heroine (Rebekah Brandes) who might be the most appealing “scream queen” since Jamie Lee Curtis, a clever setup (trapped with a killer in a movie theater), and one line — “You want her? You gotta go through me first!” — that, in context, is priceless. Sadly, it also has the usual bane of low-budget schlock: a plot that quickly turns preposterous. Release: 2008 Grade: C+

*****

Source Code It’s Groundhog Day for poor Jake Gyllenhaal, who must repeatedly travel back in time to prevent an act of terrorism — and repeatedly get blown up in the process. Clever ideas are introduced, but cramming action-movie sequences, a budding romance, and metaphysical musings into one 93-minute film results in an incoherent mess. Release: 2011 Grade: B-

*****

The Orphanage This Spanish chiller about a woman (Belen Rueda) returning to her childhood home, an orphanage, is a handsome production, replete with moody, haunting atmosphere — but not much in the way of actual scares. Orphanage doesn’t insult your intelligence, which is refreshing, but several plot elements in this ghost story are a bit, ahem, familiar. Release: 2007 Grade: B

*****

The Paperboy An odd mix of black comedy with lurid sex, murder, and mayhem, The Paperboy is too all over the place to completely satisfy, but individual scenes and performances are memorable — especially drooling, malevolent John Cusack as a Florida swampland hick who might have been unjustly imprisoned for murder. Release: 2012 Grade: B-

*****

Orphan With just a tweak here and a nudge there, Orphan might have joined the likes of The Sixth Sense and The Exorcist as one of the great horror films. It has a delicious twist, some fine performances and, unlike those other films, it manages to frighten without resorting to the supernatural. Eleven-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman, utterly convincing as the titular demon-child, almost — but not quite — pulls off a pivotal transformation late in the film; if she had, Linda Blair might have had competition in evil kid horror-movie history. Release: 2009 Grade: B+

03Jan

Skyfall

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In Skyfall, the legend of James Bond continues — and therein lies a problem.

When we go to a Bond movie, do we really care about his “back story,” or that he grew up as an orphan from Scotland? Do we wrack our brains trying to analyze the Freudian implications of Bond’s relationship with his boss, the redoubtable “M”? I don’t think we do. I think we go expecting to be entertained, but the Daniel Craig films are so preoccupied with being taken seriously that they sacrifice a sense of mischief. 007 films are not meant to be Greek tragedies; they are big-budget B-movies.

The producers of Skyfall did get one thing right this go-round when they cast Javier Bardem as the villain, Silva. Bardem’s smarmy bad guy is a scenery-chewing hoot — and a welcome change from the sluggish proceedings leading up to his introduction. A scene involving Silva’s, uh, mouthpiece, revives memories of Richard Kiel, the metal-toothed henchman (“Jaws”) in a pair of 1970s Bond entries. It’s a memorable scene, and it’s too bad there aren’t more like it, and too bad there isn’t more Silva in the film.

I am not a big fan of director Quentin Tarantino, but after viewing Skyfall I wondered if he might not have done a better job than Sam Mendes. At least Tarantino has a healthy appreciation of what makes a movie fun. Mendes seems to think he’s making Zero Dark Thirty, but Bond movies work best as live-action cartoons.

p.s. Everyone seems to be weighing in on whether Craig or Sean Connery plays the definitive Bond. My two cents: Connery. Sean Connery. Grade: B-

Director: Sam Mendes Cast: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Berenice Marlohe, Albert Finney, Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, Ola Rapace Release: 2012

Watch Trailers and Clips (click here)

13Dec

The Redbreast

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by Jo Nesbo

Caustic critic Joe Queenan once wrote, “There is no earthly reason a mystery or thriller needs to be more than 175 pages. After a mystery writer passes the 200-page mark, it’s all ballast.” I suppose there are exceptions to Queenan’s rule, but not in this case. The Redbreast, Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbo’s 500-plus-page marathon of serial killings and romance in frigid Oslo, is mildly interesting. The characters are … mildly interesting. The sole aspect of this plodding novel to avoid a been-there-done-that sensation is its background theme about Norway’s tortured history during WWII, a topic about which I knew little.

In 2004, Norwegian book clubs declared The Redbreast the “Best Norwegian Crime Novel Ever Written.” Across the border in Sweden, I’m guessing that Henning Mankell suppressed a chuckle.

10Dec

Casino Royale (2006)

Posted in Books, Movies, TV & Web, Oldies | 1 Comment

James Bond got his license to thrill in 1962 because the first film based on Ian Fleming’s novels, Dr. No, had its tongue firmly planted in cheek. Bond, as personified by Sean Connery, kissed and he killed, but always with a wink at the audience. And we were delighted to be in on the joke. Later, in the Roger Moore years, the 007 franchise went too far and began to confuse wit for self-parody. In Octopussy, Moore/Bond even donned a clown suit. Were we supposed to laugh with him, or at him?

So now we have Daniel Craig in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. The tone of Casino Royale, Craig’s first outing in Bond’s tuxedo, is much too somber for a film loaded with outlandish set pieces. Both the movie and Craig have little sense of camp — but a modicum of camp has always distinguished the best Bond films.

The Good Stuff: As we’ve come to expect from this series, the producers do not skimp on the budget. The scenery, much of it shot in Prague and the Bahamas, is eye-catching and glamorous. There is some amazing stunt work in the opening action sequence, and an extended poker-playing scene is suspenseful, good fun.

The Other Stuff: The “Bond girls,” although fetching, do nothing to make us forget 007 hall-of-famers like Honey Ryder or Pussy Galore. The main villain (Mads Mikkelsen) is unexceptional; it’s hard to respect a bad guy who at one point gets the snot kicked out of him, and whose signature prop — an asthma inhaler — is a pale imitation of great gizmos past, such as Oddjob’s hat.

Casino Royale’s producers have said that they were seeking a more realistic tone for Craig’s debut. But when so much about Bond’s world is inherently ridiculous, too much realism can spoil the fun. What this movie needed was a hollowed-out volcano. Or perhaps Oddjob’s hat. Grade: B

Director: Martin Campbell Cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, Caterina Murino, Simon Abkarian, Ivana Milicevic Release: 2006

Watch Trailers and Clips (click here)