Note: this is a belated posting of a review of Rocky Balboa, redacted, edited and tweaked from its original publication in Screen International.

Sixteen years since the last installment,
multi-hyphenate Sylvester Stallone delivers Rocky
Balboa, a stirring and pleasingly grounded tale of an erstwhile
underdog-turned-champion coming to terms with his own
aging. The most emotionally resonant film in the iconic series since the
Oscar-winning 1976 original, it also showcases by far Stallone’s
best performance in years.

While its boxing action is
acutely observed, this is first and foremost a firmly rooted character drama,
which may befuddle more gung-ho genre fans. Theatrical receipts hinge on not
only the adult audiences that have aged with Rocky returning for this one last
encore, but also young, new audiences intrigued by the character’s legend and
boomers not necessarily predisposed to Rocky
movies.

Leaving intact his humble
financial stature but ignoring some of the more dire health predictions of Rocky V, the movie finds
by-his-own-bootstraps boxing champ Rocky recast as a modest restaurateur,
telling patrons the same old war stories and kindheartedly feeding a former,
down-on-his-luck opponent for free. With his namesake son (Milo Ventimiglia) busy trying to establish a separate,
professional career track for himself, Rocky leads a pretty lonely life, kept
company only by his irascible brother-in-law Paulie
(Burt Young). That starts to change a bit when Rocky meets single mother Marie
(Geraldine Hughes), an old girl from his neighborhood.

Back in the ring, Mason “The
Line” Dixon
(Antonio Tarver) is the current undisputed heavyweight champion, but a fan
favorite he is not. Cold rather than charismatic, he’s a victim of his own
success and a lack of worthy competition. After a computer simulation on a
cable talk show pits the two fighters against one another, Dixon‘s manager sees how to revitalize his client’s image, all of which dovetails with
a reticent Rocky‘s desire to entertain a few local
exhibition bouts. A quick solicitation of Rocky and one brisk training montage
later, the table is set for a third act showdown in Las Vegas.

As it wore on, the Rocky series often dipped into macho
posing, but Rocky Balboa delivers a
very basic and relatable tale that — to its great credit — could easily be
envisioned without the boxing. In a rather savvy and smartly structured
screenplay, Stallone deftly captures the awkwardness of Rocky‘s
relationship with his son (“You throw a long shadow,” says Junior). He also, in dialogue that
sometimes amusingly indulges Rocky‘s
characteristically circuitous logic, does a good job of writing realistically
to the level of his blue-collar character; skating just around clichés, Rocky
speaks in elliptical, working man chestnuts, and their
depth of feeling and unaffectedness ring true, and quickly re-establish a strong
audience identification with him.

It’s Stallone’s melancholic,
well-worn performance, however, that most capably sells the movie. Reminiscent
of many other Stallone vehicles, there is still the scene in Rocky Balboa where he stands up to
random, mouthy jerks, only here it’s tinged with a palpable sadness that
highlights Rocky‘s humanity. It’s but one example of
how the movie trades in practical payoffs (acquaintance rather than newfound
love, measured successes rather than huge victories) instead of pompous
narrative grandstanding.

Shot chiefly, like the other
films in the series, in Philadelphia,
Rocky Balboa
exudes a working class
grittiness that further enables its story. While not a reinvention of
the
wheel, the boxing sequences are extremely well done, with announcer Jim
Lampley and a crazed ringside cameo from former heavyweight
fighter Mike Tyson lending authenticity to the proceedings. The angles
and
lighting are just right, and not a Hollywood
put-on, like too many sports films.

Underscoring the film’s inspirational
emotional appeal is an end credit sequence reprisal of composer Bill Conti’s
legendary theme. Set to real-life, modern day footage of kids and adults
alike running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it mirrors the
famed training sequence from the original Rocky
that has served as one of the series’ calling cards ever since. (MGM/Columbia, PG-13, 100 mins.)

The Good Shepherd,
a decades-spanning tale which details the genesis of the CIA as viewed
through the life of one man. While somewhat dry and slightly pedagogic,
it’s also a legitimately fascinating film — a meticulous and doggedly
authentic aerial view of the cloak-and-dagger shell games that made up
the Cold War and are no doubt part the current, forward-leaning,
vaguely defined “war on terror.”

Much like Munich (no coincidence, given that they share
screenwriter Eric Roth, who co-scripted director Steven Spielberg’s
movie with Tony Kushner and penned De Niro’s effort solo), The Good Shepherd takes a complex set of issues and provides an angled
illumination that doesn’t easily let the viewer off the hook, but
rather asks significant and probing questions about what values are
immutable, what compromises necessary, what means justifiable. At over
160 minutes, the film is desperately unsexy — it has the depth and scope of an edifying miniseries, but most of the time the same dry, somber tone as well. Still, this is quality, thoughtful filmmaking, required viewing for political and film junkies alike. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

The Painted Veil — filmmaker John Curran’s adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s classic novel, starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, who each also pull producer credits — is also an intriguing and engaging inverted tale of romance in reverse. It’s a film which locates deep and subtle truths about the manner in which infidelity and
misunderstandings can breed self-disgust in the (more) aggrieved party,
and how this in turn informs their callousness. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Night at the Museum isn’t awful, no, but there’s little about it that feels lasting. Its narrative is pitched toward adolescent
fantasy and silly, frequently obvious shenanigans to a hearty degree,
but with no sort of consistent inner logic (a la something like Home Alone, let’s say) the movie tilts toward
fleeting entertainment, with no inherent replay value or strongly felt
recollection. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

The Good German is on the one hand a romantic thriller, and also about the dirty
complicity of the bystanders of war, of those caught up in its
undertow. Still, it’s so sober and full of itself that the movie, shot
by Soderbergh himself in black-and-white, might be most primarily (and
charitably) described as a filmic exercise. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Volver is proof positive that Penelope Cruz is an actress who best makes sense
within the context and confines of her native culture; it’s here that
she seems most comfortable and alive, be it playing either alluring or
melancholic characters. Cruz’s English language films have by and large
turned her into a bauble, and while part of that is certainly in the
respective writing of these pieces, it comes through in the
performances too. Even those movies in which she affects a full-blown
arc — like Blow’s temptress-turned-harridan, for instance — Cruz seems less unique, less vibrant, less memorable.
Thankfully, English isn’t her only language. Hopefully Volver augurs many happy Spanish returns. For the full review and explication of this thesis, from FilmStew, click here.

Flags of Our Fathers are
the natural benchmark, both artistically and in terms of box office appeal, but
it will be this second half of Eastwood’s thematic double bill — a more
striking and memorable work — pushing each project on to almost certain Oscar
and Golden Globe nods.

While Flags is
ostensibly the more naturally alluring picture, it has thus far stalled at
under $35 million domestically. Told as it is entirely from a foreign perspective,
and subtitled in Japanese, Letters from
Iwo Jima lacks a narrative bent that suggests much better Stateside returns.
Early critical plaudits — the film was just named Best Picture by both the Los
Angeles Film Critics Association and National Board of Review — will help the movie
with upscale arthouse patrons, but parlaying that elite audience into
significant box office success seems an uphill climb. This may ultimately dent Letters’ chances at some top-shelf
prizes, particularly coming on the heels of last season’s Crash Oscar victory, which came amidst the lowest-grossing, least
populist slate of Best Picture nominees in recent years.

Shot back-to-back with Flags
of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima
centers more explicitly on battle and its human toll, telling of the events
leading up to the same central siege, but from the Japanese perspective.
Whereas its predecessor was at its core about the machinations of government
image-making and the media’s complicity in war, Letters is a more straightforwardly ruminative and plaintive work,
if also one whose identifications and point of focus will mark it as a tough
sell for mainstream audiences.

With an American invasion looming as a certainty, and the
dusty, rocky island of Iwo Jima being pounded on and off by Allied aircraft
loosening it up for a beachhead assault, Lieutenant General Tadamichi
Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe, above) is assigned to marshal forces and formulate a
strategy of defense. More than 20,000 Japanese soldiers have been sent to the
atoll knowing that in all probability they will not come back. Among them are
Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who wants only to live to see the face of
his newborn daughter; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara, below), an Olympic equestrian
champion known around the world for his skill and his honor; Shimizu (Ryo
Kase), a young former military policeman whose idealism has not yet been tested
by war; and Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), an unyielding and devoted military
man who would rather indulge suicide than surrender.

Glimpsed in flashback, Kuribayashi’s travels in America
have revealed to him the hopeless nature of war in general, but also given him
strategic insight into how to take on American forces that vastly outnumber his
own. Against the vehement protestations of his advisors, he orders the
abandonment of shoreline defense structures, and instead concentrates on the
digging and construction of a vast honeycomb of more than 18 miles of tunnels, caves
and pillboxes from which the much smaller Japanese forces can shrewdly target
American troops.

The first hour-plus of the film details in if not languid
then certainly somewhat relaxed rhythms the several weeks of planning leading
up to the battle. It’s here that most of the interesting character bits lay.

When the conflict comes, things change. “Everybody’s got a
plan until they get hit,” boxer Mike Tyson once famously said, and Letters from Iwo Jima provides rich evidence
of that, with Japanese discord within the ranks erupting into ritualistic suicides
and mutinous disobedience upon the massive arrival of American forces.

Several of the combat scenes within Letters fit neatly within the chronology of Flags of Our Fathers, but the lack of “crossover” cameos by significant Flags cast members or even many American
soldiers — indeed, the films are almost wholly discrete experiences — render these
sequences a bit hazy. Furthermore, Eastwood doesn’t do a particularly keen job
of establishing the spatial relationships necessary to make full, working sense
of Kuribayashi’s underground network.

There are some other intriguing parallels between the two movies,
though, particularly with regards to the disparity between actuality and the
public face that governments put on matters. Letters, though, doesn’t plumb any representation of a spin
machine; Kuribayashi merely receives dispassionate word via courier of his
abandonment by various superiors, and the fact that his forces will be bereft
of air defenses.

Whereas Flags
sometimes struggled in juggling of different timelines, Eastwood’s characteristically
unembellished style better naturally suits Letters’
story, which is more traditionally linear and character-driven. Ninomiya makes a nice impression as Saigo; though his arc
isn’t wildly cathartic, we see his cynical nature transform movingly into resolve.
As in The Last Samurai, meanwhile, Watanabe
projects a preternatural calm and confidence, while also letting us see
Kuribayashi’s tender side. He and Ihara, who plays erstwhile equestrian Nishi,
provide the film with its moral gravity.

Technical category awards noms seem certain, with longtime
Eastwood collaborator and cinematographer Tom Stern’s washed-out work delivering
an apocalyptic vision so desolate it makes one almost taste the sand. Though they don’t fit together seamlessly, nor are they
necessarily meant to, Flags and Letters stand next to one another in an
interesting fashion, and the relative novelty and pluck of the entire endeavor
will likely be enough to garner Eastwood, a beloved figure amongst Academy
voters, strong consideration for yet another Best Director Oscar nod. (Warner Bros./DreamWorks, R, 141 mins.)

Blood Diamond is a tale of forged-in-fire scruples which peels back
capitalist complicity in the smuggled jewel trade. The film centers around
amoral, black-market courier Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the
alliance he reluctantly forms with Solomon Bo (Djimon Hounsou), a local
fisherman. Solomon hides a large, pink stone he discovers while
toiling at gunpoint under rebel forces. He just wants to get his family
out of a refugee camp and, later, to rescue his young, brainwashed son
from said rebel militia. A daisy chain of mutual use, then, develops between him,
Danny and idealistic American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer
Connelly). For the complete review, from FilmStew, click here.

Set in a remote Brazilian beach town and effectively playing
to the nativist instincts of a traveler’s worst nightmares, Turistas details the gritty misfortunes
that befall a group of young adventurers when they first get marooned and then
stalked in the nearby jungles. A tangled combination of thriller elements, travelogue
and more streamlined bits of gruesome imperilment, the movie successfully
wrings some novel tension out of its exotic besiegement before eventually unraveling
in its final third.

Young Americans Alex (Josh Duhamel), his sister Bea (Olivia
Wilde) and her best friend Amy (Beau Garrett) have traveled to Brazil
for fun and adventure. A bus crash on a twisting mountain road leaves them
uninjured but stranded, and here they befriend fellow international passengers
Finn (Desmond Askew), Liam (Max Brown) and Pru (Melissa George), the latter of
whom speaks the native Portuguese. Seeking to salvage their day rather than
simply waste eight hours waiting on a replacement bus, the group treks to a
nearby cabana bar and parties late into the night.

Each awakes, having been drugged, to find all of their
possessions gone. Wandering into a nearby town, they reacquaint themselves with
Kiko (Agles Steib), a friendly young villager who was among the last people
they saw the night before. After an incident with the townsfolk, the group
follows Kiko into the jungle — but is it to safety or into even further and
worse danger?

With Blue Crush
and Into the Blue, director John
Stockwell has shown himself to be adept both at showcasing toned actors and
actresses in skimpy attire, and at capably capturing action in and around
water. Here, abetted by cinematographer Enrique Chediak’s highly saturated,
rich chroma touch, Stockwell renders the film’s locale in vivid strokes. He also
gets an admirable amount of grounding detail right, such as the group’s
delicate barefoot negotiation of a rocky street after they’ve been stripped of
their passports and extra clothes.

Where Turistas
really comes off the rail, though, is in its murky final third. As it moves to
more explicitly define its threat, the movie takes on a de-saturated,
bleach-bypass look, which might be fine were it not eventually mixed with a
nightfall of harsh, crosscutting shadows. Jittery or willfully dark camerawork can sometimes
effectively feed a film’s tension or claustrophobia, as in 1999’s The Blair Witch Project or this year’s The Descent, for example. The third act
of Turistas, on the other hand, just
feels like a dark and stressed-out mess. The movie is additionally mightily
hamstrung — mortally wounded, really — by an utter lack of spatial clarity.

As mentioned, Turistas
isn’t as strictly interested in brutality as some of its genre brethren, but it
does evidence a hearty acknowledgement of recent commercial trends. Debut
screenwriter Michael Arlen Ross seeds his generally restrained narrative with a
few innovative moments of shock violence and gore. While not compulsory, per
se, early on these moments help give Turistas
a careening sense of possibility; one is involved in the story because it seems
un-tethered to convention. The envelope is eventually pushed off the table,
though, with one scene in particular seeming to exist for no other reason than
to guarantee some word-of-mouth regarding its graphic nature.

Similarly, recalling elements of David Marconi’s 1993’s
indie The Harvest, the movie also overplays
its hand a bit in the particulars of its third act torment. When the
antagonist, a sadistic doctor named Zamora
(Miguel Lunardi), reveals his intentions, this culminates with some unintentionally
amusing, politically indignant speechifying. (Fox Atomic, R, 89 mins.)

Unaccompanied Minors unfolds against the backdrop of a Christmas Eve blizzard that leaves a clutch of solo-traveling, archetypal adolescents — the
princess, the weirdo, the preppie, the tomboy firebrand, et al. —
snowbound. After they escape the custody of well-meaning airport jockey Zach (Wilmer
Valderrama), the group is tasked with a few nominal goals, at which point they learn to work
together, ruining the evening of Zach’s nincompoop boss (Lewis Black). For the full review, from IGN, click here.

The Architect attempts to get to the bottom of that conundrum, at least to a degree. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

the smartly marketed film adaptations of the same name had already known. Chiefly, that there exists a largely untapped market of evangelical Christians for whom entertainment can serve as an extension of their religious beliefs, or at least the foundation of such. Into this breach steps The Nativity Story, a placid pass at the titular birthing-of-Jesus tale penned by earnest screenwriter Mike Rich (The Rookie, Finding Forrester) and directed by the unlikely Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown). Despite the very religious roots of its narrative, The Nativity Story is actually equally pitched, tonally, to those who might typically enjoy secular tales of uplift and — that vague, longtime favorite of marketing sloganeers — “the human spirit.” For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

3 Needles,
a sprawling anthology that spans South Africa, rural China and Montreal
in an attempt to cast a broader light on the AIDS crisis, and ask why
mankind has not bonded together more tenaciously and durably against
this common scourge. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

Emilio Estevez’s Bobby — teeming with idealism and a palpable romanticism, and necessarily bristling with the energy of a true believer — can carry a lot of weight, depending on what one wants from it.
For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

1993’s Dazed and Confused (still the preeminent evocation of high school ennui and hormonal imbalance) and has ever since steadfastly refused to be pegged down, either by genre or stylistic mode.

Linklater’s latest film is Fast Food Nation, a dramatic modification of Eric Schlosser’s eye-opening, investigatory non-fiction novel of the same name, and it takes an impressive and humanistic aerial view of the fast food industry’s death-grip on American culture,
showing how cows and illegal immigrants alike are equally exploitable and
expendable in a system that values haste and the bottom line above all
else. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. Furthermore, an interview with Linklater will follow later this week, but for an interview with costar Greg Kinnear, click here.

Steve Anderson found a good point of inquiry and attack for his first documentary feature: the most flexible expletive in the English language (with all apologies to bitch). For more fucking thoughts, from FilmStew, click here.

Waiting for Guffman, 2000’s Best in Show and 2003’s A Mighty Wind, Guest and his co-writer
and costar Eugene Levy (American Pie)
found a very specific and isolated subset (theater wonks, dog aficionados,
hippie-dippie musicians, et al) and through improv exercises with a faithful
ensemble located the humor in their seriousness and earnest obligation.

The story of the petty jealousies and rapacious career
desires that are awakened during the Oscar-touted production of a period piece
prestige film, For Your Consideration
harkens back in some ways to Waiting for
Guffman, in that turns its eye inward, toward theatrical performance. Yet
it also feels like it’s serving too many masters, and it represents at its core
a fundamental misreading of the pre-release Hollywood awards
derby buzz machine.

The story centers around the production of an independent
film, Home for Purim, that tells the
story of a Jewish family’s reunion on the occasion of the dying matriarch’s
favorite holiday. When Internet-generated rumors begin circulating that three
of Purim’s stars — faded luminary
Marilyn Hack (Catherine O’Hara), journeyman actor Victor Allan Miller (Harry
Shearer) and ingénue Callie Webb (Parker Posey), who’s involved with her screen
brother, Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan) — may be playing their way into
Oscar nods, excitement rattles the cast. Once a pair of Access Hollywood-esque tele-mag hosts (Jane Lynch and Fred Willard)
pick up the rumors, things really heat up.

For Your Consideration
is the first of Guest and Levy’s films to incorporate a straight narrative tack
instead of mockumentary noodling, and it’s ill-suited for the movie. The cast
is studded with fine performers (Ricky Gervais even pops up as an executive who
tries to tamp down the film’s “Jewishness”), and there are plenty of nice
one-liners at the expense of myopic Hollywood types. These
come from everyone from Willard’s characteristically oblivious host (“They’re
not only alive and well, but more importantly, they’re working” he says of
Marilyn and Victor) to a publicist who lectures an on-set reporter in charge of
crafting Purim’s EPK, “In every
actor, there’s a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale — you never know which
one is going to show up,” before further rattling off a hilarious list of
assumptions not to make when dealing with actors.

The comedy is broad, though, and many of the characters feel
wanly sketched, from Levy’s glad-handingly insincere talent agent, Morley
Orfkin, to John Michael Higgins’ clueless senior publicist Corey Taft, who we’re
supposed to believe is a P.R. mastermind who’s never heard of the Internet.
(“That’s the one with email, right?” he asks) It’s not that some of these angles
aren’t fair game, just that they feel both a bit hackneyed and unconnected to
the rest of what’s going on in the movie. For
Your Consideration also doesn’t seem to have a particularly strong grasp on
its main triumvirate of Marilyn, Victor and Callie, each of whom only allows a
sliver of self-centered yearning to show.

Many of the scenes don’t mesh with the established narrative
track, and when the film flashes forward from Purim’s production all the way past
its theatrical release, the most crucial timeframe of awards season jockeying —
and certainly the richest for untapped satire — is abandoned. I guess it’s
easier to fall back on some of the familiar circumstances and environments that
For Your Consideration does (clueless
producers, frustrated writers, ethnic niche comedy), but it’s a lot less
refreshing and rewarding. (Warner Independent, PG-13, 86 minutes)

Russell Crowe smiling! Truly, Ridley Scott’s A Good Year is a strange thing to behold. Dewy and inert, it’s a film that could be packaged alongside Under the Tuscan Sun and sold with matching, his-and-hers fluffy bathrobes. It’s made by people who are talented, absolutely, but also
wholeheartedly sure of that talent. The phrase “courage of one’s
convictions” comes to mind, insomuch as there’s a foolhardy confidence
that comedy has a single definitive formula that can be cracked like
the spine of a book. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

What’s in a word? Quite a lot, of course. Sticks and stones may break our bones, as the saying goes, but words still hold a very particular power to hurt, enrage, mollify and titillate. Those who think that vocabulary by and large doesn’t matter or that the examination of modern language is too much of an abstraction (“Just live in the moment, man!”) are wrong, and missing the point.

Senator Patrick Leahy and President Bush’s “one-fingered victory salute” — yet still likely appeared above with an asterisk or hyphen. While many terms — from “love” to “bitch,” and dozens more — carry a significant emotional weight and are thus potential powder kegs of response, there’s not another word in the English language that so alternately vexes, amuses and enthralls us.

Buoyed by a few animated clips from Bill Plympton, Anderson’s movie delves into the word’s history and impact through a variety of film and television clips and, predominantly, talking head interviews. The latter subjects include a wide range of folks, from many of those that you’d expect to be tapped for a project of this sort (Bill Maher, Kevin Smith, a handful of porn stars) to an equal number that you might not (Ice-T, Sam Donaldson).

Clerks director Smith — who with his debut film helped perpetuate if not invent a new lexicon of hybrid swearing, and infamously dragged the definition of “snowballing” into the light of day — speaks in a fairly reasoned form about his opinion in relation to God’s thoughts on language; fellow entertainment industry vets like Alanis Morissette, Deadwood creator David Milch, Steven Bochco and Drew Carey also have some interesting perspectives. Carey in particular highlights how those that so loudly decry the word often impart a thin veneer of classism.

While Anderson’s own personal views are clear, given the manner in which he assays the Federal Trade Commission’s seeming hypocrisy regarding fines, there are also a host of more conservative souls given wide berth within F*ck, including “Miss Manners” Judith Martin, conservative talk show host Dennis Prager, perennial political candidate Alan Keyes, Morality in Media president Robert Peters, singer Pat Boone (who uses his own surname in exclamatory fashion whenever he feels the need to curse) and Janet LaRue, the chief counsel for the Concerned Women for America. Most of these folks are equally well reasoned and articulate, and lay out a convincing case for the abetting and subsidizing of something that all parties agree should begin with more parental responsibility.

Some of the random bits of arcana tossed out in passing are hilarious (“Ford’s economics are the worst thing that’s happened to the country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking,” Lyndon Johnson is quoted as saying in a passage you won’t likely find cited in any compendium of presidential oration), and Lenny Bruce’s trailblazing comedy and George Carlin‘s infamous routine about the seven words you can’t say on television get some nice run.

Still, Anderson fails to fully plumb the history of the word, which has been around for centuries, and first appeared in print in 1475. Furthermore, there are pockets of the film that raise interesting questions about the persistence of the word’s shock value (e.g., you need a group to not accept it for it still to have heft), and I wish Anderson had spent more time with Stanford linguistics professor Geoffrey Nunberg and Jesse Shiedlower, the principal editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. These folks, and a few others, rate lower on the “star chart,” but often have more interesting and detailed perspectives to offer than, say, Ron Jeremy.

Anderson also misses a fun opportunity to deftly tie things together. It would have been interesting, for instance, to ask participants their first memory of the word, either heard or used. As is, Anderson’s work is a fleeting F*ck — quite lively, interesting and engaging in its own right, but maybe not quite the definitive fucking film that it could have been. (THINKFilm, unrated, 93 minutes)

I wrote a bit earlier about the directorial debut of former Chasing Amy star Joey Lauren Adams, Come Early Morning. Starring Ashley Judd as a woman struggling to overcome the familial dysfunction around her, Come Early Morning is a movie driven by slow revelations,
subtext and inner quietude, and while it’s not a perfect movie, amidst the cacophonous offerings of today’s
cinematic landscape, on balance those are certainly welcome things.

Adams has an interesting and
steadfastly unflashy (read: un-commercial) predilection for uncommunicative standoffishness, and
Judd can take these scenes and quietly make them naturally gripping without
injecting too many streaks of overt showiness. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

Unknown is one of those independent movies whose limited means clearly influenced its conception and creation — a mixture of Saw, The Usual Suspects and Reservoir Dogs, though perhaps not quite as interesting or trailblazing as that sounds. Starring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Jeremy Sisto, Joe Pantoliano and Bridget Moynahan, the movie centers around five guys who wake up in various stages of pain and abuse in a barren, hermetically sealed stockroom in the middle of the desert. Suffering from temporary amnesia due to a chemical leak, none of them know who they are or how they got there. Hand-holding and talking about feelings does not ensue. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

Tim Allen and Martin Short in the fight before Christmas, colorful and heartwarming holiday cheer about the difficulties inherent in juggling a family and one’s secret identity as Santa Claus.

Oh, and there are of course reindeer farting. Still, all things considered, not that bad. As Norville Barnes might say, “You know… for kids.” For the full review, from IGN, click here.

writer-director Cess Silvera’s Shottas, a Jamaican-set underworld flick executive produced by musician Wyclef
Jean, is proof that a
movie can at least on some level come across as authentic, and yet
still generate no real sympathy for its characters or involvement in
its narrative. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

Flags of Our Fathers
does. While nominally a
telling of the bloody fight for Iwo Jima in February,
1945, and the events leading up to and following the snapping of the iconic
image on ash-strewn Mount Suribachi of six soldiers
hoisting an American flag, the film in many ways is a de facto examination of
battle-bred guilt, and state-sanctioned manipulation and exploitation of image.
Jumping indistinctly to and fro in time, it commingles bloody action and more
conjectural passages in a manner that might induce fatigue in more restless
audiences.

Flags opens with
what could be construed as a pointed indictment of America’s
current geopolitical morass and those that led its charge, a gruff line of
narration that reads thusly: “Every jackass thinks he knows what war is —
especially those who’ve never been in one.” It soon becomes clear, though, that
Eastwood’s movie is a combat film by only half, and the old “War is hell”
drumbeat isn’t necessarily part of the main narrative agenda.

After a mock flag-planting in the middle of a crowded
football stadium introduces us to three soldiers, we flash back to just before
the battle of Iwo Jima. Under the leadership of Sergeant
Mike Strank (Barry Pepper), we meet John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), a
respected Navy corpsman medic; message runner Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford); and
infantryman Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a stoic Native American with a propensity
for freezing up in battle. The bloody beachhead siege ensues, along with more
Stateside scenes of several weeks and months later.

With governmental financial strictures much worse than most
of the public knows, Doc, Rene and Ira, of the six total men who raised the
flag on Mount Suribachi (the others were killed a short time later), are called
upon to take part in a war bond barnstorming tour across the United
States. With Keyes Beech (John Benjamin
Hickey) as their handler, they take to the streets, ballparks, ballrooms and
town halls of America,
even as they resist being labeled heroes.

Their reticence is well founded, it turns out. Though
visually ennobling, the image is actually a snapshot taken on the fifth day of
what would be a 40-day battle, and of it’s the second flag to be raised, after
the first is taken down at the behest of a general. Of course, none of that
matters to the hard-charging Bud Gerber (John Slattery), who presses Doc, Rene
and Ira to do their civic duty. It’s weathered, incidental mundanity repackaged
as valor, even if the young men are all steadfastly honorable about citing
their peers, fallen and still fighting, as the real heroes.

Though not a prima donna, Gagnon embraces these newfound
conditions status most readily, while Doc for the most part keeps quiet. Ira,
though, regards the proceedings as a farce, and quickly and increasingly uses
alcohol as a crutch to get him through events — fundraising dinners where strawberry
sauce is dribbled on molded white chocolate delicacies of the flag-raising —
and the indignity of the casual racism to which he is nearly constantly
subjected.

Eastwood’s characteristic direction — with its unembellished
style and perfunctory set-ups — drains affect or overt emotionalism from most
of the performances. Still, Beach manages to really make an impression as Ira,
as he convincingly conveys the swallowed weight of the torturous conflict he
feels. He’s done and seen things in war of which he’s not proud, but, like Rene
and Doc, is told to put on a public face, if only to honor them. Ira’s the
least suited to do this, and his self-destructiveness — both in the broader
context of his increasing drunkenness and writ more subtly across his pained
face — is compellingly rendered.

Eschewing a more straightforward and seductive dramatic arc,
co-screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis use author James Bradley’s
book as a wraparound device for the movie, inserting scenes of him (played by Tom
McCarthy) interviewing several of his father Doc’s fellow servicemen to learn
more about his exploits and the events surrounding the raising of the flag. But
these passages are backloaded and suffused with a timidity at odds with much of
the rest of Flags, and they give us
three discrete time periods with which to deal, which is frequently a problem
for the movie.

Additionally, some of the movie’s editing and many of its
points of inter-cutting are a bit arbitrary, and disrupt its flow. Eastwood and
editor Joel Cox seem caught midway between a more traditionally bifurcated tale
with flashback elements and a more mosaic, impressionistic style, flush with
vignettes of indeterminate time or location. Still, Flags
is interesting and evocative on many levels, and scores high marks for its technical merits; cinematographer Tom Stern captures black sand
kicking in every direction, and delivers a monochromatic look in which only the
occasional punch of blood is allowed to puncture washed-out hues of brown,
grey, black and olive. Whether mainstream audiences will flock to this far-from-flag-waving tale of a flag’s raising, however, remains to be seen. (DreamWorks/Paramount, R, 131 mins.)