Short Round: A Separation (2011) ****/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 12:00 AM


If you had to boil down A Separation to a simple, one sentence description, I guess you would call it a movie from Iran about the last days of a dying marriage. But it’s so much more than that,  and at the same time still a very small, domestic story. The separation in the title refers not only to the impending dissolution of the marriage, but also to the walls that inevitably spring up between people because of our inability to perfectly communicate what we’re feeling, and our inability to completely understand the positions of others.

The inciting incident of much of this film doesn’t actually involve the man (Peyman Moadi) and his wife (Leila Hatami), but the man and his housekeeper (Sareh Bayat). She’s pregnant, and a misunderstanding between her and the husband regarding questions of missing money and why the man’s Alzheimer suffering father has been tied to a bed and left alone lead to a shove that may or may not have caused her miscarriage. Throughout the film we’re not quite sure of the truth behind the money, the grandfather, the shove, or the miscarriage; yet we’re left to pick the situation apart for ourselves and take sides. The disagreements on the matter that will inevitably spring up between audience members are much of the fun of this movie. But that’s pretty much where the fun stops.

This is mostly a difficult, gut wrenching drama that’s a rather taxing experience to get through. Questions of duty, morality, and religious law loom over everything. Every character seems to be genuinely trying to be the best they can, and still we’re left to sit and sweat as horrible things happen and good people suffer miserable circumstances. You often get the feeling that if someone with perspective, someone who saw the whole picture could just swoop in and clear all of this up, then everyone could go back to being happy. But in real life that isn’t possible, and this movie is nothing if not authentically presented. If you’re the type of person who can’t take too much awkwardness and misery in your cinema, then probably you should avoid trying to digest this story. But, for everyone else, the level of the filmmaking here is so impressive that A Separation simply can’t be missed.
0 comments

The Grey (2012) ****/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 3:52 PM


The first thing you have to do if you’re going to go see The Grey is get any advertising for the movie that you may have seen out of your head. Joe Carnahan has made a damn fine film here, but it’s not the one that got advertised on TV. All of the trailers sold this as a movie about Liam Neeson boxing wolves in big, stupid action scenes, and while that would be awesome in another, more ridiculous movie, no such thing ever happens here. The advertising also portrayed Neeson’s character as a loving husband, doing whatever he can to survive his ordeal, and get back to his wife. Nothing could be further from the truth. This movie is way bleaker, way more depressing than that. Actually, Neeson and his wife are no longer together, and there’s no chance whatsoever  that she’s coming back to him. The character we really meet is a broken, hopeless man surrounded by people he despises and searching for a reason to live. If you go in at peace with all of that, then you and The Grey should get along just fine.

Still, if you’re coming into this movie as a fan of Neeson’s recent reinvention as a tough as nails action star, don’t think I mean that this isn’t going to be the movie for you. Neeson gets plenty of chances to be both stern and taciturn and also to kick massive amounts of ass. The action might not be as over the top as what was advertised, but what you’re left with is a grueling survival film; and one that’s pretty thrilling to watch. This isn’t even so much a man vs. nature tale as it is a monster movie with nature stepping in as the monster. Neeson and his co-workers are a crew of oil workers whose company plane goes down in the Alaskan wilderness, and in addition to the wolf pack stalking them, they’ve also got to deal with bitter cold, thigh deep snow, rocky cliffs, and raging rivers all conspiring together to make sure that no one gets out alive. The Grey’s plot is structured a lot like a slasher movie. We watch the main character’s friends get taken out one by one, leading up to a big showdown between the shadowy killer and a protagonist who has finally become hip to his tricks. Don’t expect the typical slasher movie ending though, this story isn’t about who wins and who loses, who survives and who dies; in the world of The Grey nobody wins.
2 comments
Read more »

Red Tails (2012) **/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Friday, January 27, 2012 at 2:35 PM


Red Tails is the sort of movie where it doesn’t take long to realize that what you’re watching isn’t going to be very good. Right off the bat, the opening credits looked like something out of a bad TV show from the 70s. Here we are, witnessing an assumedly big budget World War II era dog fight, and all of the action is obscured by giant red words right in the middle of the screen. What you’re left with is a swirling of colors and some really painful dialogue being delivered by really stiff actors. This is the sort of movie that opens with the line, “Germans! Let’s get ‘em!” and never lets up from there. If that’s the sort of thing that sound like good, clean fun to you, well then I assure you it is not. Their is nothing that is self aware or “just for fun” about this movie at all. Everything it has to offer is delivered with the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon, but we’re supposed to react to it all like what we’re watching is high drama.

A little bit of heavy handed drama is something I was completely prepared for when I was coming into this one though. What I wasn’t prepared for was just how bad the acting in the opening sequence was. I literally couldn’t believe how clunky and miserable every line reading came off as. More than just bad takes, it sounded like what we were getting was rock dumb dialogue being delivered as purposely awfully as anyone could manage. This death by acting was just evident in the opening scene, and a few others where white pilots in big bomber planes are involved though. Once the focus goes over to the Tuskegee Airmen and their all-black fighter squadron, the acting improves about 1000%. Was it an artistic choice to cast only white actors that are terrible at their job, in order to make the black actors who come in later look that much better? Was this a strategy the director, Anthony Hemingway, was using to recreate the experience of black pilots outflying white pilots in the back of the audience’s minds? I realize I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but I have no other explanation for how every white actor flying a plane in this movie managed to make the pilots in A New Hope look like masters at their craft. If the decision was purposeful, I think it’s a really interesting strategy; but one that failed completely.
0 comments
Read more »

Short Round: The Way (2011) **/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 11:13 PM


A movie about an aged Martin Sheen walking The Camino de Santiago for the purpose of spreading his adventurous, dead son’s ashes out over the course of the route sounds like it should be pretty interesting. That the son is played by Sheen’s real life spawn, Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed this picture, adds even more intrigue. I mean, come on... Estevez made Men at Work, and that was awesome. Unfortunately, The Way is no Men at Work.

The only words I can think of to describe this movie are awkward and clumsy. We have a standard road trip structure, where a person on a journey meets some people and learns some lessons on their way; but instead of being content to trust in that structure, Estevez and the source material’s writer, Jack Hitt, feel the need to force-feed attempted poignancy into every scene, every character, and every exchange of dialogue. It all fails, and the process of watching it try so frequently and fail so thoroughly is exhausting. Even the jolly, comic relief character can’t be trusted to not be there with secret ulterior motives of making us cry.

Without question, The Way is a movie with its heart in the right place. It wants to be nice and inspiring, and it yearns to touch people. But its obvious yearning only makes its myriad failures all the more awkward to endure. This is a movie that can’t even photograph the French and Spanish countryside with any sort of artistic panache. By the time I had endured this film’s hour and fifty-five minute runtime, I felt like I had actually taken the entire 800km journey right alongside these miserable characters. Avoid at all costs.
0 comments

Haywire (2012) ***/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 9:00 PM


If you want to make a good action movie there’s only a few things you have to do. First, you have to stage dynamic action scenes that are at the same time simple and thrilling to follow. Soderbergh deftly manages this with Haywire. The film opens with an intense fight sequence that suddenly breaks out in the middle of a remote diner, and it doesn’t let up from there. We get foot chases, car chases, rooftop chases, tons more fight sequences, and even a few gunfights; and they’re all fun to watch and easy to follow. Goal one accomplished. The second thing you have to do to make a good action movie is introduce me to a character that I grow to care about, and then make me nervous when you put them in danger. If you can get me emotionally engaged in the fate of your character, and make me believe that they are truly vulnerable, then your fun to watch action scenes suddenly transform from being pretty pictures into engrossing experiences. Unfortunately, it’s here where Soderbergh comes up short. While I enjoyed watching this little action romp enough, I can’t say that I ever really cared about it.
0 comments
Read more »

Short Round: The Arbor (2011) ****/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On at 4:54 PM


I want to say that The Arbor is one of the best documentaries that I’ve seen in a long time, but I’m not sure if that’s the case or not. Is this a documentary? It certainly has documentary elements. What director Clio Bernard is giving us is a look at the life of English playwright Andrea Dunbar, whose play “The Arbor” was a fairly autobiographical look at life in her low income neighborhood. Or, more accurately, she’s giving us a look at the ramifications of this woman’s life. She died at young age, leaving young children behind, and much of this film’s focus is on audio interviews with said children, now that they’re adults.

The interviews aren’t presented to us straight though, they’re lip synched by a cast of professional actors. And these lip synched interviews freely intermingle with video footage of the actual Andrea Dunbar when she was alive, as well as footage of another set of actors performing “The Arbor” on minimalist sets positioned in public, on the street that gave the play its name. If you think that all of this sounds really pretentious, it is. But also, it works.

Though gimmicky, the lip synching aspect of the film never wears out its welcome, and all of the other stuff is expertly edited in, not to create a sense of disorientation, but instead to color and illuminate what we’re given in the audio interviews. Dunbar’s children have had hard lives, that’s clear from the beginning, but what isn’t clear right away is just how deep down the rabbit hole of despair and abuse this story is going to take us. The Arbor has secrets, and it gives them away one at a time as it peels back its layers. Following along with the Dunbar children’s testimonials is a journey that constantly engages your attention. Too often documentaries focus too fully on just informing, and they end up coming off as interesting but dry. The Arbor worries about storytelling first, and that in combination with it’s skilled, gutsy execution manages to put it head and shoulders above the rest of the pack.
0 comments

Contraband (2012) **/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 10:06 PM


Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) made his bones in the criminal world as a smuggler. He was the best. Anything you need to get over a border undetected, big or small, he could find a way. But that was the past. Now he has a wife (Kate Beckinsale) and kids, and he’s traded his life of crime  for a legit business where he works as a security consultant, and a home life that is considerably less thrilling than making drug runs over the Panamanian border. Yes, life is pretty good for Mr. Farraday. Until one day when his wife’s younger brother (Caleb Landry Jones) botches a job for a mumble-mouthed drug dealer (Giovanni Ribisi) and gets the family in over their head to the number of around $700 thousand. It then becomes up to Farraday to come to his family’s aid, step back into the criminal life, and perform one last, high risk job to keep his wife and kids out of danger.

If all of that sounds overly familiar, it’s because Contraband is the sort of brainless action movie that gets churned out by the hundreds every year and that doesn’t have an original bone in its body. On the page, especially considering this is one of those remakes of a recent foreign film, Contraband has no reason at all to exist. But it also has a couple elements that make it seem like it might be worth your time. The supporting cast features talented names like Ben Foster, J.K. Simmons, and Diego Luna. And the movie does feature an action packed armored car robbery sequence that includes machine gun wielding bad guys wearing duct tape bandit masks. Duct tape bandit masks have to count for something, don’t they?
0 comments
Read more »

Carnage (2011) ***/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 10:14 PM


The appeal of a movie like Carnage is in its simplicity. The story is very basic, two boys have had a fight on a playground leading to one of them having some teeth knocked out, and now the children’s parents are having a meeting in a Brooklyn apartment to decide what is to be done about the matter, but that’s all you need. Just get four people with four different perspectives in a room, introduce a conflict, and suddenly you can explore human nature and make pretty much any bit of commentary about society you want. All you need is character and conflict. I imagine it’s exactly that beautiful simplicity that drew Roman Polanski to adapting this story, which was originally a play written by Yasmina Reza, to the screen. That being said, I’m still not sure that this particular story was one that needed to be translated to film at all.

The term “comedy of manners” get’s thrown around a lot when describing stories that satirize the ridiculous foibles of the different social classes, and I’m going to use it here one more time, because what Carnage does is comedy of manners to a T. This movie weaves an absolute tapestry of awkwardness. There isn’t a single second of it’s 79 minute runtime that isn’t spent sitting in a room with four characters that are having very tense, very pointed and phony interactions. All four of these characters, at least in the beginning, are steeped in ludicrous amounts of useless social politeness, to the point where their interactions take on a sort of horror element. The characters less resemble real people than they do horrific plastic mannequins trapped in a web of manners. Anger and resentment boils under the surface of all their polite coffee offering and cobbler eating, and watching them trade thinly veiled barbs is like watching a steaming pot ready to boil over. This meeting of the minds takes place largely in real time as well, so you never get a break, you’re never set free by a jump cut to something else. You’re stuck here in this moment, just like the characters. After a while it all becomes an exercise in how much abuse you can sit through, and whether you find humor in that or you just find it awful and off-putting will largely be a matter of preference.
0 comments
Read more »

Short Round: A Dangerous Method (2011) ***/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 2:14 AM


Director David Cronenberg’s new film about the lives of famous psychiatric scientists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, A Dangerous Method, didn’t feel much to me like a David Cronenberg movie. That’s not to say that it wasn’t nice to look at, or wasn’t well made, just that it lacked that certain manic energy and unpredictability that Cronenberg’s signature work usually has. This was a pretty straight forward character drama told in a period setting. And I’d even go as far as to say that the movie was kind of slight. It doesn’t go enough into the development of psychoanalysis to really be a movie about that, it doesn’t go enough into Jung’s relationship with one of his patients to really be a movie about that, and it doesn’t go enough into the strained friendship between Jung and Freud to be a movie about that either. As it is, it feels like we’re getting the bullet points of three different films. I think this movie needed to pick one of those stories and really focus on it, dig deep, and take a closer look. But it didn’t, so I guess that’s neither here nor there.

What’s good about the movie are the performances it gives us from Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen. Fassbender is playing Jung, Mortensen Freud, and they both look really comfortable stepping into such famous shoes. Both of these actors are fun to watch in an inherent way, so they know that they don’t have to fluff up these performances with historical impersonations or wonky period speak to make them entertaining. They play the characters very straight and subdued, and watching the subtle little things they do when bouncing back and forth off of each other was much of the joy of the film. On the opposite side of the coin I found Keira Knightley’s performance as the patient that Jung starts an affair with to be embarrassingly overacted. In the early scenes, where she is afflicted of terrible mental illness and having fits, she looks less like she’s a disturbed person struggling with inner turmoil and more like a cartoon character sticking her finger in a light socket during an episode of Tom & Jerry. And later on, when she’s recovered and trying to fit back into normal life, she doesn’t so much play developmentally arrested as she does Shirley Temple. Knightley’s big performance is probably the most Cronenberg aspect of this film, but next to the sophisticated work that Fassbender and Mortensen were doing, it just looked out of place.
1 comments

Short Round: Tiny Furniture (2011) **/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On at 1:23 AM


Every once in a while Hollywood likes to take a movie like Tiny Furniture, where a young filmmaker cobbles together every little bit of money and resources at their disposal, makes a small scale independent film, and actually gets it seen, and turn it into a success story. And who can blame them? It’s pretty impressive how far a movie this small, that stars filmmaker Lena Dunham’s real family and is set in their real apartment, went. But what I wasn’t very impressed by was the movie itself.

I hesitate to use the word hipster when writing a movie review, but in this case I feel sort of forced. This story about wealthy white people in their mid twenties making mountains out of molehill problems seems so concerned with having cred and earning cool points that it comes off as being very self-conscious. Almost to the point of making me uncomfortable when I was watching it. So yeah, this thing is obnoxiously hipster. And melodramatic. The protagonist acts like she’s 12-years-old, whining and crying about everything, getting into screaming matches with her mother and sister over nothing, and constantly trying to sleep in her mother’s bed like a little child. I get that there was some commentary about the fear of progressing into adulthood going on here, but when not coupled with any sort of concrete conflict or forward moving narrative the whole thing ends up about as entertaining as watching a little kid throw a temper tantrum.

And what was the deal with Dunham showing off her body so much? We watch her shave her legs in the bathtub, squeeze herself into unflattering tights. There’s shots that seem to be framed to focus on her pimples, multiple comments about how sweaty she is, and all seemingly to no end. There’s no point where she learns to accept her body in this movie, or any indication that this is even one of the conflicts of the film. So what was the point? It felt like I was getting hit over the head with some sort of feminist manifesto “teaching” me that normal looking girls can be in movies too. Well thank you for that wisdom. The camera work here isn’t poor, and every once in a while there’s wit in the endless rambling, but ultimately I found that this one had very little to offer. As a filmmaker Dunham knows how to stick to a story that she can pull off given her limitations (naturalist dialogue, real locations, no dynamic camera movements), but her limitations seem to be so great that there’s no reason for her to be telling a story at all.
0 comments

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) ***/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 9:02 PM


David Fincher’s new adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s first Millenium Series story, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is a pretty unique tale. It simultaneously details a shamed reporter’s (Daniel Craig) attempt at solving a decades old murder that took place on a secluded Swedish island populated by a wealthy family of Nazi sympathizers and introduces us to a tattooed, standoffish computer hacker (Rooney Mara) who is struggling to deal with a lifetime of abuse at the hands of men. It doesn’t seem like these two stories should be able to coexist, but they do, and they even begin to weave together in intelligent ways that produce very interesting and very unique results.

I should have walked out of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo thinking that it was one of the most original mystery movies that I had seen in a long time, but the whole time I was watching it I couldn’t help but compare it to two other films, and with good reason. This movie gets released while we’re still very much in the wake of both the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which just played most U.S. theaters last year and was very well received, and also Fincher’s previous film from a year ago, The Social Network, which I consider to be his best work. Those are some titanic movies to be in the shadow of, so how does this one measure up? Despite the fact that this is largely perfectly fine filmgoing on its own, I have to say, it doesn’t measure up very well.
2 comments
Read more »

War Horse (2011) ***/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Saturday, December 31, 2011 at 3:52 PM


At this point in his career, Steven Spielberg has become so famous and has developed into so much of an auteur that you pretty much know what to expect when you go into one of his movies. It’s going to be sappy and sentimental, it’s going to be one of the most beautifully shot things that you see all year, and everything is going to be heightened by a sweeping John Williams score. There’s always going to be enough craftsmanship on display that the latest Spielberg joint will earn your respect, but the variable is how much you’re going to actually like it when you’re leaving the theater. When you buy into what Spielberg is selling, you leave the theater soaring. When you’re not so into the story he’s telling, you’re generally going to walk out feeling like you’ve had your heartstrings yanked to the point of bleeding. For me, War Horse was one of those Spielberg stories I didn’t quite buy. Though I spent much of my time in the theater marveling at the Janusz Kaminski cinematography, I also spent an equal amount of time rolling my eyes at how cloying everything was.
0 comments
Read more »

Short Round: The Artist (2011) ***/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On Monday, December 26, 2011 at 1:33 AM


The idea behind The Artist is a fun one; making a silent movie about silent movies in 2011. It’s a gutsy gamble to make a modern audience sit through a film with no dialogue or sound, and it was an interesting exercise seeing if director Michel Hazanavicius had what it took to keep the whole thing engaging and entertaining all the way through. Happily, he does. The Artist is a fun little romp that kept me entertained enough from start to finish, that used its sound free limitations in several clever ways to set up sight gags, and that was brought to life in gorgeous black and white photography that always gives you something new to marvel at. And still, The Artist suffers because it feels more like a dare accepted, a challenge met, than it does a story that anybody actually wanted to tell.

Our lead character is George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a huge star in the silent film era. When we first meet him he runs afoul of a Hollywood wannabe named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), who we watch rise from tabloid fodder, to extra, to famous starlet over the course of the film. Conversely, we watch Valentin as he goes from the top of the world to destitute; a relic left behind in the switch from silent films to talkies. This sound like a rich premise that could be a good way to explore Hollywood history, the development of technology and the effect it has on man, what role vanity and ego plays in our development, or countless other interesting angles. But instead all The Artist really gives us is a whimsical, schmaltzy love story and a melodramatic, blunt force fall from grace yarn that feels like it could have come out of one of the most minor works of the film era in which the story is set.

And it gives us downright unlikable characters starring in those stories as well. Valentin starts the film as a self important goober, the sort of fellow who salutes a painting of himself when he leaves the house every day and goes back out on stage for every extra round of applause he can milk out of a crowd. And he ends the film as a prideful, vain shell of a man who really has no one to blame but himself for his sudden downward trajectory. Peppy starts the film as an insufferably cutesy social climber almost drowning in manufactured spunk and spirit, and she ends the film as a pathetic lapdog, panting at George’s feet and nuzzling his crotch no matter how many times he kicks her away. They both develop and change over the course of the film, but from people I didn’t like into people I liked even worse. The effect was a story that I had a hard time attaching to. The Artist was nice to look at, it impressed in how well it pulled off its gimmick, but I don’t understand how it’s getting hailed as one of the best films of the year by many. I refuse to opine that a lot of people are overrating it just so they can seem high-minded and cultured for liking something that is silent and in black and white, so instead I’ll just assume that everyone fell hopelessly in love with the adorable, well-trained dog that serves as one of the main characters, and were overly kind to the production because of that.
0 comments

Short Round: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) ***/*****

Posted by Nathan Adams | Categories: , | Posted On at 1:23 AM


If you took the attention to production detail of the TV show Mad Men and turned its gaze at the bland, gritty, ugly 70s instead of the slick, modern, idealistic 60s, you would get something that looked a lot like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson’s new film about the cold, detached players in the British spy game of its era. The story is an adaptation of a spy novel by John Le Carre that focuses mostly on the rooting out of a Russian mole high up in the British intelligence hierarchy; and like most secret agent spy movies it’s a dense plot with a lot of players, a lot of spy jargon, myriad conflicting motivations, and just a whole lot of information that needs to be processed by the viewer. Alfredson and his screenwriter try to help you along by pacing things glacially and lingering over all of the important little details, but it still doesn’t do enough to ensure that you’re going to understand everything that’s happening on the screen during your first watch, or even how grave the developments and revelations that play out over the course of the story are.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that you don’t really have to understand everything that happens in this movie to get something out of it. Understanding the broad strokes of the mole plot is enough, because what’s really on show here are the production design, photography, and performances. Though Britain in the 70s isn’t the most cinematic setting a movie can have, the level of detail that went into creating all of the beige blandness of this film’s world is pretty astounding to take in. And the costume designer, at least, adds some flair to the proceedings by giving all of the players unique looks. That’s all secondary to the performers who are bringing the characters to life, however. This film boasts a cast list including names like Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Mark Strong; and all of these powerful British actors are just as great bringing these closed book, super paranoid characters to life as you would imagine. Oldman especially impresses in the lead role, putting on a clinic in minimalist acting that always keeps you concentrated on his face, even though it’s hardly ever doing anything. When the actor finally does emote once or twice in the film, it hits hard after all that stoicism.

But while each of these individual aspects of TTSS are kind of interesting to dissect on their own, when added up they equal a problem: it’s slow moving, but with good reason, it’s bland and drab, but impressively so, the characters are cold and closed off, but for dramatic effect; however, even with all those buts, that still makes this a slow, drab, cold trip to the movies. TTSS feels like something you could find on PBS in the afternoon and fall asleep to. All in all, that’s not the worse thing in the world to be, it can even be kind of pleasant on occasion, but it doesn’t make for a movie that’s easily recommended.
0 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)