Category Archives: Film Reviews

Hoot

May 5, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

Hoot, based on the Newbury Award-winning young adult novel by bestselling author and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen. That’s right, folks: greedy land developers. (Insert loud booing here.) Even this justifiably loathsome antagonist, though, can’t completely rescue Hoot, a sincere but muddled family film.

Hoot’s
story centers on perpetual new kid on the block Roy Eberhart (Logan
Lerman), a newcomer to the small coastal burg of Coconut Grove,
Florida, who finds his first day of middle school rudely interrupted by
chubby bully Dana Matherson (Eric Phillips). His face squashed up
against the school bus window, Roy sees a mysterious, blonde-haired,
barefoot kid, later to be known as “Mullet Fingers” (Cody Linley), go
streaking by outside. Roy is captivated by the kid’s blinding speed,
and the fact that he’s apparently a vagrant, since no one at school
knows him. No one, that is, except Beatrice Leep (Brie Larson), who
only further excites Roy’s curiosity by warning him to stay away.

Parallel to this intrigue is the story of a plot of land marked for
development, the future site of a new chain-restaurant pancake house.
The area is beset with vandalism, causing no small amount of
consternation for regional manager Chuck Muckle (Clark Gregg) and Curly
Branitt (Tim Blake Nelson), his dim-bulb man on the ground. Local
deputy David Delinko (Luke Wilson) is assigned to investigate, but he
falls asleep in his squad car one night on a stakeout, and wakes up to
find his windows spray-painted black. Demoted by his captain and
derided by his peers, Delinko stays on the case, determined to get to
the bottom of the mystery, which turns out to involve an endangered
species of subterranean owls. As Muckle presses forward with plans to
bulldoze the lot, can Roy and his new friends avoid capture, raise
proper awareness and save the day for their new little feathered
friends?

Satirist Hiaasen, who previously suffered the indignity of Hollywood’s adaptation of his novel Striptease,
works in much simpler and more earnest strokes here, but he’s done few
favors by the adaptation and direction of Wil Shriner, a lauded sitcom
veteran making his feature debut. Perhaps the challenges of working on
location and frequently outdoors proved taxing on Shriner’s grasp of
the big picture, because many of the adult performances are broad
and/or unfocused, seemingly copped from different pages, tonally
speaking. Hiaasen’s fellow Floridian Jimmy Buffet contributes five
ukulele-influenced tunes for the soundtrack, and cameos as a laidback
science teacher, but the film is otherwise slow-pitched at a much
younger demographic.

What Hoot does have going for it, though, is Lerman, who makes me almost wish I’d paid attention to UPN’s Jack & Bobby
before it got axed. Relaxed and naturally charismatic, he suffers
serial abuse (his parents make him write bully Dana a letter of
apology) with aplomb. If the other characters are kind of wan and
familiar and the film’s plot twists dutiful, you at least never get
tired of having Lerman as your guide. (New Line, PG, 89 mins.)

Mission: Impossible III

May 5, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

Michelle Monaghan), a nurse who believes Hunt works for the Department of Transportation. They’re engaged (crazy in love,
you see!), but when a former agent trainee (Keri Russell) gets nabbed
by sadistic and elusive arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour
Hoffman), Hunt finds himself — at the behest of his friend and
immediate boss, John Musgrave (Billy Crudup) — coerced back into
action.

After a botched extraction operation in Germany, Hunt comes across
some intel that places Davian in Vatican City the following evening, so
he takes the further ennobling step of intensely tearing up and
arranging a quickie marriage (at the hospital where Julia works?)
before re-teaming with a squad of faces both old and new (Ving Rhames,
Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q) to intercept a highly expensive
weapon known only by its code name, the “Rabbit’s Foot.” Keeping
Impossible Missions Force Chief Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne)
out of the loop, Hunt kidnaps Davian, only to have him escape before he
can get him all the way back to IMF headquarters in suburban Virginia.
From there, a timed and tense game of cat and mouse ensues, with Davian
endangering Julia and Hunt literally racing around the globe to
retrieve the items he needs in order to ensure his new bride’s safe
return.

Scripted by Abrams and his fellow Alias scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, M:i:III
is crisp in its shorthand and confident in its action staging, which
include a Shanghai high-rise siege, Davian’s high-octane escape and the
breach of the Vatican. In compressing for feature film length the sort
of head feints and twists that might play best over a full season of
episodic television, though, the film suffers significant pains. (It
also, during a climactic revelation, suffers a rather unfortunate,
howlingly delusional line of dialogue given the current state of world
affairs.) There’s a cool detachment to the self-contained and
self-absorbed narrative, with the chief irony being that the more
complicated the plot gets, the more emasculated Hoffman is as a
villain. Davian is a bad man, but as rendered here a bit of, if not a
herring, then at least a resolutely indefinable entity. The more
conspiratorial collusion Hunt uncovers, the absolute less sense some of
the actions of Davian and others make.

Lest I be derided as a killjoy, it must be stressed that M:i:III
generally hits all its beats, both dutifully and robustly. It’s a
well-made film. While none of the action sequences quite measure up to
the Langley computer-room break-in of Brian De Palma’s original, and
they eventually additionally reach a point of critical mass; you at
least leave M:i:III entertained — if exhausted and chuckling a bit at the sheer, maniacal and exposed effort of its spectacle. (Paramount, PG-13, 125 mins.)

Flight 93

May 4, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

Director Paul Greengrass’ United 93, from Universal, isn’t the only film detailing the events aboard the
sole airliner that didn’t hit its intended target on Sept. 11. The A&E movie
Flight 93 (above), releasing this week to DVD, actually beat it to the screen,
though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from most media reportage.

Directed by Peter Markle, Flight 93 is in every way the lesser
“experience” of the two films — for better and for worse — yet certainly no less
respectful and possessing of a heart in the right place. It shares with its big
screen sibling a mostly unknown if occasionally recognizable cast, and it too
plies us with small pedestrian details leading up to liftoff of the titular
flight.

Whereas for some viewers United 93 is too painfully antiseptic —
giving us a raw, gritty realism but no lasting personal identification with the
actual individual passengers — Flight 93, tighter in scope, takes the
opposite approach. It introduces characters by name via their boarding passes,
and compacts the correlated events of Sept. 11 into the film’s first 15 minutes,
all in order to spend more time on the plane and have greater leeway to intercut
the action there with more passengers’ desperate, doomed calls to their loved
ones.

Flight 93 cannot sustain this emotionality for a myriad of reasons — even
though, somewhat manipulatively, everyone safe on the ground seems to be
cradling a baby. With the hijackers reduced to more of a minimalist menace, the
panic and dread feels artificially sketched; whereas United 93 ratchets
the tension and grief-soaked anxiety up to taxing levels by showcasing the
clipped, whispering fright in all parties, in Flight 93 the passengers
huddle up, football-style, and conduct a dramatic raised-hand vote to storm the
cockpit. Still, you can’t help but have your heart catch in your throat given
the devastating simplicity of a line like, “Mom, I’m on a plane that’s been
hijacked, and I’m calling to say goodbye.”

One of the interesting things for me about both films lies in just the
experience of watching either of them with an audience, of sharing in that pain
and discomfort with others — be it a hundred people or a single loved one. In a
weird way, it’s kind of beautiful, if that makes sense, because no one
choosing to view either movie doesn’t know or think on some level that they’re
going to be moved by having all those stark real-life memories and their
attendant emotions churned up again. You can’t enter into it lightly, without
care — it’s not possible.

For that reason and others, the debate of whether or not it’s “too soon” for
Sept. 11 movies is to me a pointless and silly one, the definition of media
fire-stoking. What is popular culture if not a reflection of our current mood
and zeitgeist — certainly what titillates us, but also too what frightens and
unnerves us? Hollywood is rapped all the time — and not always incorrectly — for
its vacuousness and indulgence, for making loud, garish films about nothing.
Both United 93 and, despite its more limited production means, Flight
93 are responsible films born of the real world. They may not be for
everyone, but how can that be assailed?

Happenstance

May 3, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

Is it Happenstance that I’m just now re-posting this review of the same-named 2001 French film, originally published upon its limited Stateside theatrical release late in the year? Hmmm…

A gimmicky yet remarkably spry tapestry about the “random
interconnectedness” of life in general and romance in particular,
writer-director Laurent Firode’s debut film opens by depositing two youngsters
with identical birth dates — low-key appliance store clerk Irene (Amélie’s Audrey Tatou) and restaurateur
Younes (Algerian singer-actor Faudel) — on the same train, and then spends the
rest of the movie detailing the various and sundry zigzags of fortune, glimpsed
only by the audience, that bring the two back together.

The sheer mania of this sort of jumbled causality is
captured in a much hipper, extroverted fashion in Guy Ritchie’s East End
knuckle-dusters (Lock, Stock and Two
Smoking Barrels, Snatch) and even
in something as passingly flip as Run
Lola Run, which spins out digressive, what-if story strands in a blinking
instant. Yet Happenstance, a
charming enough cinematic riff on chaos theory (consult Jeff Goldman’s Jurassic Park explanation if necessary), doesn’t find great
self-satisfaction in its structure. Despite the fortuitous and often comic
interactions between upwards of 20 strangers, what ultimately emerges as the
film’s backbone is the prequel to a love story, the events — or fate, if you
must — that bring two people together.

In the ensemble of Happenstance,
wide-eyed Tatou is certainly less of a central figure than she is in Amélie, yet the movies, radically
different in style and approach, interestingly offer a remarkably similar
preoccupation with destiny and good will, as well as several similar scenes
(including one in which Tatou is again trapped in the apartment of a senile old
biddy). Other characters include Luc (Eric Feldman), a tranced-out
twentysomething given to pathological lies of inversion; Bobby (Frederique
Bouraly), an old man taken in by a bartender’s explication of the cyclical
nature of karma; and Richard (Eric Savin), a disillusioned father torn between
his loveless wife and the gently nagging mistress, Elsa (Lysaine Meis), eager
to introduce him to her parents and legitimize their relationship. There’s also
a mysterious old codger who counsels a stranger — a proxy for the audience — that
every detail reveals an infinity of truths, and thus has grandiose repercussions.
(Or, more colloquially, you need only to piss in the sea to make the ocean
rise). The truth about Happenstance?
A bit slight, perhaps, but a well-made and immensely enjoyable watch. (Lot
47, R, 90 mins.)

House of Wax

May 3, 2006Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Film ReviewsBrent

I’m filing this piece, originally tapped out for IGN last fall, as both a full-fledged film and DVD review, since it trips into substantive analysis (as much as the movie will allow) on both fronts. To wit:

In theory, teen and early twentysomething couples actually have to do something between dinner and making out; ergo Hollywood product like House of Wax,
a remake of the old Vincent Price flick adapted by Chad Hayes and Carey
Hayes and captured in moving form by Spanish music video and commercial
director Jaume Collet-Serra, who makes his feature debut. It’s not the
familiar template narrative (car troubles lead a group of bickering
college students into a small, abandoned, backwater town and its
eponymous wax museum overseen by a sadistic, psychopathic curator) that
grates. No, it’s the fact that House of Wax is studded with
such a choking number of incongruities and irritations, small and
large, that it eventually — or rather quickly, actually — deflates even
the possibility of vicarious shock fun.

Paris Hilton, above right, and every bit as bad
as you might assume). They’re all heading to a football game, but end
up waylaid in the bayou outback after a no-good shortcut, woodland
camp-out and car trouble conspire to foul up their plans. Split up, one
pair hitches a ride to the nearest “town,” Ambrose (which looks like
part of a backlot studio tour, even though it was constructed
especially for the movie), and comes across the House of Wax. They also
finally stumble across a peculiar mechanic (Basic‘s Brian Van Holt) who invites them back to his place for the fan belt they need to repair their car.

House of Wax takes an awfully long time before it starts
dispensing bodies, and while I wish I could say that was because of
some sense of either care or cleverness, that’s hardly the case. Wade
is pretty much the worst boyfriend ever, whether letting Carly ride
next to creepy, knife-wielding dudes in pickups, goading her into
stupid situations or leaving her alone in cars. Hilton, meanwhile, is
given such a number of fawning close-ups — including, I hesitate to
mention, a striptease with no payoff — that you could be forgiven for
thinking her billionaire father bankrolled the production. When she’s
finally offed (her death involves perhaps the worst movie hide-and-seek
intuition I’ve ever seen), the audience will likely let loose with a
collective sigh of appreciation.

It’s true that House of Wax plays much, much better on the
small screen, where many of the film’s practical effects (though
certainly augmented, particularly in the third act) are different
enough to hold your attention. Still, narratively, so much of the movie
defies plausibility that you just don’t at all get caught up in the
proceedings. (I’m no genius, but it would seem that the requirements of
climate control would necessitate that elaborately posed wax funeral
chambers not be lit solely with, oh, open flames.) Too preposterous to be truly scary, House of Wax in the
end is just what it its ridiculous theatrical tagline — “Prey, Slay,
Display” — first expressed: less a movie than a creaky claptrap poke in
the ribs, a piece of posed entertainment.

House of Wax is the fifth big screen venture of Joel Silver and
Robert Zemeckis’ Warner Bros.-based Dark Castle production shingle,
following in the footsteps of Thirteen Ghosts, House on Haunted Hill, Ghost Ship and Gothika. Owing at least in part to the accumulated clout of that pair, you know House of Wax is going to get a fair shake in terms of its DVD release, which it certainly does here. I take some umbrage with the way that Collet-Serra and cinematographer
Stephen Windon have shot the picture — many action scenes are much too
dark, most notably Hilton’s robed, pre-death dash through the woods and
an abandoned factory and some ill-advised campfire shenanigans that
incorporate handheld video footage from the characters’ points-of-view
— but House of Wax, presented on DVD in 1.85:1 widescreen, is
additionally difficult to handicap since it’s so color-corrected —
everything is given a slight blue-green tint, even in the daytime
scenes. There are no massive irreconcilabilities, but a little bit of grain is
present here and there (again, in Hilton’s death scene and some
nighttime driving sequences early in the film), but these few specks
come mostly in scenes that are darkly lit, so the inattention is both
mostly masked and not that offensive or distracting.

Dolby 5.1 surround mixes in English, French and Spanish stand alongside
subtitles in each language. Part of any almost horror film lies in the
aural presentation, and while House of Wax
isn’t particularly sophisticated in this area, its surround mix does
allow a wide variety of elements to come into play in the more charged
scenes. Of particular note is the final battle in the titular
structure; as it burns around them, viewers are given a good sense of
the gloopy running of the wax, hand-to-hand combat and the sound of the
structure crumbling in on itself.

Kicking off the slate of supplemental extras is the “B-roll and Bloopers Video Cast Commentary,”
with Cuthbert, Hilton, Murray and Padalecki. In this 27-minute,
split-screen featurette, the quartet basically sit in a room together
and watch the aforementioned footage; it’s an awkward idea rendered
much worse by the fact that the audio mix all but guarantees we can’t
hear most of the actual bloopers and B-roll footage. Highlights include
how-to footage in regards to the whizzinators used in the film, as well
as Cuthbert’s massive, comically duct-taped boots (wood blocks on top
of flats, actually), used to trim the one-foot height difference
between she and Padalecki. Remarkably, Hilton herein manages to make even more of a fool of herself, revealing that she was somehow duped by a director whose first language isn’t
English into a scene that mocks her sex tape fellatio (“Yeah, it wasn’t
supposed to be like that. My boyfriend was so upset”). This bit also
reveals that she had the entire crew scream along with her during her
first several death scene takes (because she was “embarrassed”), and
that Hilton is apparently a method actress, as she runs up and down a
flight of stairs to prepare to simulate breathlessness during
aforementioned chase sequence. Wow… priceless stuff.

Other extras include an amusing, tongue-in-cheek introduction by Silver from the set of the just-released Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,
a seven-minute featurette on the design work in the movie, a
three-minute gag reel, a 10-minute look at the visual effects work of
the movie and a 90-second alternate “cold open” in which an anonymous
character gets tossed by the neck from a moving car through a
windshield. The bottom line? House of Wax isn’t necessarily a very good movie; the acting is
of such varying quality that it really becomes a problem in sustaining
credible mood. Likewise, the relative novelty of seeing a lot of
practical effects work is somewhat stunted by a narrative that
repeatedly presses the Staples “Easy” button. That said, its DVD
presentation offers up a decent enough mix of supplemental material that
those so inclined to delve into obvious genre fare will more likely
than not find House of Wax a relatively diverting if not completely fulfilling rental. If you really want to see the original layout of the review, from IGN, click here. D+ (Movie) B (Disc)

Behind Enemy Lines

May 1, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

We swell the rolls here at Shared Darkness as time and inclination permits. Ergo, this review of Behind Enemy Lines, originally published upon its theatrical release in November of 2001:

Behind Enemy Lines
sails along on the sheer surface thrill of its let’s-play-war hook, a
satisfying piece of giddy-up entertainment that raises a few passing questions
about the American “cowboy mentality” as applied internationally before
ultimately deciding it’s a lot more fun to simply eat your action movie cake
than try to have it too.

Behind Enemy Lines, which angles to be
the official Mountain Dew “X-Treme” entry, does pretty well. Even if the film’s editing and
handheld camerawork seem to often work against each other and jittery techno
music bumps jarringly up against a traditional score by Don Davis, the bullets
whiz around you in glorious Dolby surround sound and things get blowed up good,
with everything building to a satisfying if unrealistic climax.

Another feature debut of an acclaimed commercial director
(in this case John Moore), Behind Enemy
Lines manages to avoid many of the pitfalls of similar bows due mainly to a
well-executed if functional script from David Veloz and punch-up maestro Zak
Penn, who receive screenplay credit on James and John Thomas’ original story.
The narrative, goals and what hangs in the balance are all simple to grasp and
follow; it’s an entertaining case of get-out-of-the-way moviemaking. Of course,
having two pros like Hackman and Wilson certainly doesn’t hurt either. And if
it’s a hint of their chemistry in the upcoming The Royal Tenenbaums, that’s not a bad thing at all. (20th Century
Fox, R, 106 mins.)

Melinda and Melinda

May 1, 2006Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Film ReviewsBrent

So there will be plenty of shelf-stocking with past material as Shared Darkness finds its legs. To wit, this fairly in-depth DVD review of Melinda and Melinda, originally penned and published for another outlet upon its release last fall:

Upon re-watching Melinda and Melinda, Woody Allen’s latest film,
I was struck by the thought of a largely undiagnosed paradox as it
relates to his movies, certainly of the last six to eight years. Having
moved into the canon of American filmmakers so respected that virtually
any established actor and every up-and-comer will drastically slash
their fee just to work with him, Allen has become like a great cover
band plowing through a litany of radio hits with automaton
craftsmanship — entertaining enough to remind you why you really liked
all the original material but a step or three behind something special,
seemingly serially incapable of not just recapturing some idealized
notion of past glory (who wants only that?) but also of staking out any
substantive new ground.

Charlotte Gray

April 29, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

Again, it’s an end-of-month archival expansion here at Shared Darkness, ergo this review of 2001’s Charlotte Gray, originally published upon its theatrical release. To wit:

Growing up in my cul-de-sac neighborhood, bordered by a
thick woodland with all sorts of inviting nooks and crannies, “playing war” was
a favorite weekend pastime. Us little boys would grab all manner of sticks and
brightly colored plastic weapons — later BB guns for those for whom the habit
died dangerously hard — and plunge into the woods for hours, engaging in
espionage and theatrics the likes of which make sense only in male adolescence.

There was one girl, however — the requisite tomboy sister of
the most gung-ho of the lot. She preyed on the expectations of the foolish, of
course, and almost always proved indispensable in capturing the flag or
locating the enemy fort or whatever the day’s mission was.

Watching director Gillian Armstrong’s Charlotte Gray, based on Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling novel and
adapted for the screen by Jeremy Brock, I couldn’t help but find my thoughts
returning to that girl, wondering if she was still taking gloriously unfair
advantage of the less fair sex. Rooted in fact, Charlotte Gray tells the story of an ordinary woman who finds
herself caught up in an extraordinary reality, a reality mostly explored — both
in fact, but even more so in fiction — by men.

Charlotte Gray’s
narrative as a whole, however, lacks punch and vim. With a budget of under $25
million, the film has insufficient means to truly convey on an epic scale the
consequences of Charlotte’s
actions. By necessity, then, it focuses on the personal rather than the
political. Yet Julien, though whole-heartedly sold by Crudup, lacks the
definition and shading of Charlotte;
we never grasp the full manner of his convictions, and the plot element that
keeps he and Charlotte together
(two abandoned children) is straight out of the stock dramatic playbook. Ergo, Charlotte Gray doesn’t totally get over
on the boys. But, oh, the crafty girl from my childhood? She now works in law
enforcement, no doubt targeting and taking advantage of those with misguided
expectations. Too bad she can’t give Charlotte and Julien a few pointers.
(Warner Bros., PG-13, 121 mins.)

Ali

April 29, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

Again, it’s an end-of-month archival expansion here at Shared Darkness, ergo this review of Michael Mann’s Ali, originally published upon its 2001 theatrical release. To wit:

The life story of boxer Muhammad Ali would seem to be a
no-brainer for big screen treatment. After all, it has nearly everything:
defining sports triumphs, personal tragedies, massive political intrigue, even
plenty of women. Yet like both the story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Spike Lee’s curiously stalled Jackie Robinson biopic — two other tales of shaping
influences of middle-century America that happen to be about
African-Americans — the story of Ali languished for many years until an
obsessively detailed white director wielding huge critical clout from his last
film (Michael Mann, from The Insider) and
a proven black box office star willing to sign on for a lucrative sequel from
the financing studio (Will Smith, Men in
Black II) pooled their power capital and hammered the project through the
pipeline.

Ali is a vigorously, imaginatively
directed biopic, an immersive film experience that bristles with thoughtfulness
and aspires to illuminate not only how the time and conditions of America
shaped this robust public figure, but also how he in turn shaped them.

The force of Muhammad Ali’s personality is such that it
reaches across boundaries of creed and color, age and influence. The challenge
facing Smith then, by all accounts heretofore an actor of a uniquely
contemporary presence and connection, is monumental. And I admit, going in I wasn’t
sure he could pull it off. But the result is something magical — part Smith,
part Ali, completely engaging. Smith is a bona fide lock for an Oscar
nomination, and deservedly so; he nails the singsong, preacher-shaped qualities
of Ali’s speech patterns and famously taunting raps, capturing both Ali’s
gregariousness and uncertainty — how he would actually talk trash to make himself believe.

Equally amazing, if not even more so, is Jon Voight (below center) as
Howard Cosell, the sportscaster with which Ali shared a unique rapport.
Voight’s mimicry of Cosell’s famous cadence is pitch perfect, and the
interactions between the two characters include many of the best parts of the
movie.

Working from a story by Gregory Allen Howard and a
screenplay by the writing tandem of Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher
Wilkinson, Mann and his writing partner on The
Insider, Eric Roth, craft a shooting script that presupposes a good bit of
foreknowledge regarding Ali and those surrounding him. Particular diligence is
paid to the boxing sequences (shot high and tight, there’s a thump for every
blow, yes, but also a grunt for every lunge and a whistle for every lightning
bolt miss), but the rest of the film is often rather abstract and free form.

Ali
is, after all, about probably the most charismatic figure of the 20th century,
a one-of-a-kind starburst of unyielding determination, unfettered ego and
enormous native ability who was a genuine sports icon and media superstar before jabbering to the media had become a
means to an end, a way to increase one’s star or even become a celebrity.
Mann’s film gets this, but it also dwells on mood at the expense of structure.
While these digressions are artful, I sometimes yearned for a greater narrative
discipline, a streamlining and focus on what Ali himself thought, felt and
experienced. Certain segues, like from Malcolm X’s assassination directly to
Ali’s rematch with Liston, ring false; Mann’s desire to be as inclusive as
possible in his storytelling and to capture in particular Ali’s indomitable
independence disregards — or at best fails to convey — the ferocious curiosity that
in fact drove much of the decision-making in his personal life, including his
appetite for women (portrayed here by Jada Pinkett Smith, Nona Gaye and ER’s Michael Michele; Ali’s fourth and
current wife, Lonnie, falls outside the realm of this story).

Still, even more than most films perhaps, these criticisms
are a manner of taste; the acting and filmmaking of Ali make for an absorbing experience, and when push comes to shove
I can’t name another filmmaker whose Ali biopic I would rather see over Mann’s,
and certainly not starring an actor other than Smith. The structured
schizophrenia of their collaboration, if occasionally wayward, still bears some
undeniably tremendous fruit. (Columbia,
PG-13, 157 mins.)

The Shipping News

April 29, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent Simon

It’s an end-of-month archival expansion, and this only slightly redacted review of The Shipping News, from its theatrical bow in 2001, is now being added to the rolls. To wit:

A Beautiful Mind

April 29, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

Again, it’s an end-of-month archival expansion here at Shared Darkness, ergo this review of 2001’s Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, originally published upon its theatrical release. To wit:

If genius presupposes the question, seeing the answer before the query or even the full diagnosis of the problem, we in movies rarely get a sense of that quicksilver interior monologue — the ambition, ideas and concepts that drive and motivate great inventors, scientists, mathematicians and writers. Most directors, after all, aren’t geniuses. Most studio execs aren’t geniuses. And certainly audiences aren’t comprised of geniuses — the grosses of Tomb Raider proved that.

Hence when films about genius are made, we’re usually fed cloying or melodramatic stories about compartmentalized brilliance — people with amazingly specialized knowledge but flagrantly miserable personal lives or relationships — the point of which, one assumes, is simply to reaffirm the humanity of those viewed as occupying the ivory tower. “See,” the filmmakers say, “this person isn’t really better than you — their talent comes at the expense of other desirable, mutually exclusive traits.”

Russell Crowe, the film is based on the life story of John Nash, a very real and very brilliant mathematician who battled schizophrenia and later triumphed, going on to win the Nobel Prize. Of course, his genius does comes at the expense of other qualities (talking to the opposite sex is an amusing weak point), but the grand point of the film is that it doesn’t necessarily have to, and Howard and Crowe convey this in a manner that is utterly lacking in condescension or vanity.

A West Virginia native who wins a prestigious scholarship to Princeton, Nash arrives on campus with the idea that there is a crystalline architecture to the universe that we all only briefly glimpse. He’s dogged in his pursuit of an original idea, and his theory of governing dynamics, refuting Adam Smith and centuries of philosophy, breaks bold new ground. Despite his BMOC reputation, Nash largely keeps to himself, socializing mainly with his English Lit major roommate Charles (Paul Bettany). After graduation, he accepts a teaching and research post at MIT, where he meets Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), a student who draws him out of his shell and provides a platform of continuity from which Nash can better relate to the outside world. While at MIT, Nash is contacted by William Parcher (Ed Harris) of the Department of Defense, and so also begins doing some secret code-breaking work for the Pentagon. But the stress and detail of his work proves too much, and Nash cracks. Without giving too much away, it suffices to say that the film’s advertising campaign involves a fair amount of ingenious misdirection, with the real arc of A Beautiful Mind simply being: genius, madness, Nobel Prize. Yet filmgoers are unlikely to feel ripped off or lied to, since Nash’s “diet of the mind,” in which he says he chooses simply not to indulge certain appetites, proves as exciting and interesting as any thriller plot element.

Akiva Goldsman’s script, adapted very loosely and liberally from Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nash, is by far his best writing that I can recall, and one of the best screenplays of the year. The dialogue crackles and Nash’s fellow students and later co-workers Sol and Bender (Road Trip’s Anthony Rapp and indie staple Adam Goldberg) are particularly clearly drawn and delightfully witty (“He’s your son,” mutters an exasperated Sol of Nash at one point). If some of the other characters are more cloak-and-dagger, it’s with good reason.

Of course, Goldsman also has the advantage of two top-shelf talents. Crowe delivers another Oscar-caliber performance of courage, intensity and wit, his ferocious intellectual curiosity shining through. Connelly, meanwhile, is equally remarkable. Opposite Crowe you need an actress who can emotionally take charge of scenes (hint: not Meg Ryan), whether from a position of power or not, and Connelly absolutely does. Their exceptional work, along with Howard’s sterling, even-handed direction make A Beautiful Mind a beautiful thing. For an interview/feature piece on the film, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 135 minutes)

Akeelah and the Bee

April 29, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

Akeelah and the Bee is an inspirational
drama powered by template familiarity and an abundance of earnestness. The
winner of the 2000 Nicholl Fellowship, a screenwriting competition sponsored by
the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, writer-director Doug
Atchison’s film pulls heartstrings effectively if frequently deliberately, but
locates genuine feeling with such sincerity that it stands poised to catch fire
with early summer niche audiences open to emotive counter-programming in the
face of an onslaught of bigger-budget flash.

While a very different type of movie, one of the things last
summer’s documentary smash March of the
Penguins proved was there is a market for heartfelt, broad-audience films
outside of the more traditional, big studio family fare. Though lacking that
film’s novelty, Akeelah and the Bee
could easily emerge as a low-lying, long-playing arthouse success, given proper
coddling and circumstance.

The film’s plot is a relatively straightforward and
chronological telling of personal triumph, charting the progression of Akeelah
Anderson (newcomer Keke Palmer, above), a bright but somewhat shy 11-year-old girl, through
a handful of city and regional contests to the national finals in Washington,
D.C. An excellent student with spotty
attendance, Akeelah hails from one of the poorer school districts in Los
Angeles, and is goaded into entering her class’
spelling bee by her principal, Mr. Welch (Curtis Armstrong), who’s desperate to
affect change and improve his school’s image.

Despite the objection of her mother Tanya (Angela Bassett),
Akeelah presses forward with the guidance and assistance of Mr. Welch’s friend,
forthright former college professor Dr. Josh Larabee (Laurence Fishburne). As she
meets and befriends fellow competitors that have in some cases been training
for years, Akeelah overcomes self-doubt and rallies the proud residents of her
community behind her, scoring a spot in the finals and competing for the
championship.

Some of the film is shot on location, helping give it a
rooted sense of place. While not gritty by any means, these passages help
highlight the difference between Akeelah’s world and the more privileged
upbringing of her fellow contestants. The film is likewise studded with
occasional, incisive dialogue that helps underline the racial and class divides
under the microscope, such as when Akeelah says to her principal of Dr.
Larabee, “He lives in this neighborhood? I thought you said he was important.”

While the movie is less successful in its conveyance of the
passage of time (it ostensibly takes place over the course of a year), Atchison
succeeds in the savvy casting of the kids’ roles, and his work with them.
Palmer deserves special praise for her natural work as Akeelah; she brings a
real sympathy to a role that could be cloying if just played for precocity.
It’s young JR Villarreal, though — as Javier, an outgoing fellow contestant who
develops a crush on Akeelah and helps root her onward in only the manner that a
peer can — who steals the show.

Fishburne and Bassett, reunited from What’s Love Got to Do With It, do not share many scenes together,
but each successfully fulfill their function within the narrative. As a
professor still emotionally damaged by the loss of his own child and wife,
Fishburne approximates mournful gravitas chiefly through equally clipped and
hushed tones, a technique he’s plied many times before. In the more difficult
but better sketched role, Bassett must show both a single mother’s tough love
as well as a yielding realization that Akeelah needs her unconditional support.
That the film doesn’t force a love connection between the two is appreciated. (Lions Gate, PG, 112 mins.)

Swimming Pool: A Sexy, Quasi-Foreign Mystery

April 28, 2006Film Reviews, Old Made NewBrent

Ludivine Sagnier). A tailor-made distraction in human form, the lissome, seemingly carefree Julie couldn’t on the surface be more at odds with the prudish Sarah, who’s bothered as much by her young housemate’s pert breasts as by her drinking coffee from bowls. A feather caught up in the breeze of life, Julie whiles away her time swimming and sunbathing, sometimes in an art-deco bikini but just as often in nothing at all. She also exhibits a rapacious sexual appetite that she sates with the swarthiest of men.

If Julie represents youth’s arrogance and natural, anything-goes inquisitiveness, Sarah proves to be curious too; she spies on Julie, discovers her diary and eventually starts keeping a running sidebar narrative on her computer that she uses to infuse her novel with fresh blood. Against her better judgment, Sarah’s maternal instinct is also triggered when she finds a pair of Julie’s panties in the lawn and Julie doesn’t immediately return home one night. Julie, for her part, eventually comes into clearer focus as a much more complex figure than Sarah ever gives her credit for. So… maybe this odd couple has a few things in common after all.

Swimming Pool’s muted tone hearkens back to a previous metaphysical meditation on love and loss from Ozon — Under the Sand, which also starred Rampling, and told the story of an only marginally satisfied middle-aged woman whose husband simply disappears one day at the beach. On one hand, there’s a fantastic sense of the unknowable to this film, as Julie flings her way from one man to another: what’s the story here, and how is this going to play out? Still, paradoxically, Swimming Pool’s sense of drowsy contemplation seems to portend a curveball or two, a feeling confirmed when, at roughly 70 minutes into the movie, the story’s own galloping impulse for mystery really kicks in.

Concocted by Ozon with his Under the Sand collaborator — novelist and screenwriter Emmanuele Bernheim — Swimming Pool is, I’m willing to bet, influenced to at least some degree by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. It’s a film that is interested in creativity, identity, divergent personal and professional aspirations and the very real manner in which those components coexist and intermingle within each of us. The difference is that Ozon’s movie is in some ways even more slippery; though slow in tone, it starts out being about one or two very concrete things and then, after a few delicately played twists and turns (shocking isn’t the word, cunning is more like it) becomes something entirely different, something that it clearly always was, but just not to the naked eye.

A pro’s pro, Rampling expertly conveys hidden reserves of jealousy and desire that slowly come bubbling to the surface. Meanwhile, Sagnier (whom American audiences might have glimpsed as Tinkerbell in P.J. Hogan’s Peter Pan) is utterly amazing as Julie. Light years removed from her mischievous but juvenile role as the youngest link in Ozon’s musical murder mystery 8 Women (another worthy rental, I might add), Sagnier exudes a voracious sexual energy that makes her the physical, emotional and psychological centerpiece and linchpin of Swimming Pool. As adolescent fear and desperation slowly erode Julie’s brassy, exhibitionistic veneer, Sarah crosses psychological arcs with her; it’s a carefully choreographed dance, and Sagnier and Rampling execute it with perfection.

Sprinkled liberally with life’s intangibles, almost all of Ozon’s movies — and Swimming Pool most particularly — have a deep, engaging elusiveness, the swirl of an involving dream. Auteurs of the American independent scene would do quite well to pay attention to the director’s touch with surface and subtlety; Ozon can stage a skilled, playful interaction with the best of them, but there’s almost always a latent subtext playing in the scene as well, and it’s this very exact and exacting accumulation of details that brings into starker psychological relief the complexity of his characters. Ozon is attentive to their humanity and covertly plumbs their inner psyches. We understand his characters’ dilemmas — whether they’re explicitly voiced or not — sometimes even before the characters do.

For those who found themselves caught up in the aforementioned Mulholland Drive and/or Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s exhilarating Adaptation, Swimming Pool is well worth a dip. Alluring and inventive, though at the same time possessing the understated and relaxed rhythms typified by much foreign cinema, it’s a brilliant and very sexy mystery. During and after, you’ll be lost in thought — a feeling you might not experience that frequently this summer.

United 93

April 28, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

Before bringing his frenetic touch to the spy thriller The Bourne Supremacy, British director Paul Greengrass made a movie called Bloody Sunday, which offered forth a realistic recreation of the 1972 civil rights march in Northern Ireland that devolved into a massacre. (It’s the same incident that spawned U2’s anthemic “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”) In a gut-wrenching merging of style and material, Greengrass explores many of these same themes in United 93, his grief-soaked telling of the one hijacked plane on September 11, 2001, that didn’t reach its intended target.

Frankly incapable of being judged on any level as a regular film — there’s an accompanying tension and trepidation that permeates any viewing, and it’s certainly the quietest audience with whom you’ll ever sit through an opening credit sequence — United 93 nevertheless stands as a singular achievement, although whether it’s one that people will want to re-experience remains to be seen. (Ten percent of its opening weekend grosses will be donated to a special memorial fund).

The story of Flight 93 and its eventual crash-landing in a Pennsylvania field is of course a completely known one, but instead of hiring well-known actors, Greengrass smartly went through a careful audition process — inclusive of meetings with the family members of victims — and cast an ensemble of mostly unknowns (hardcore film aficionados may recognize maybe three or four faces), all in an attempt to make the recreation of the events more believable. He further advanced this delicate agenda by also utilizing many of the flight controllers and actual governmental agents, including FAA National Operations Officer Ben Sliney, on duty that day. This gives United 93 an eerie sense of otherworldly recreation, of sometimes almost being found footage.

While some of the on-board specifics are speculative, much is known, and United 93 artfully establishes the panic of all parties involved, as internecine governmental confusion over precise rules of engagement and just what sort of situation they’re dealing with overwhelms — if only for a few hours — the best of everyone’s professionality and ability. There’s a naturally mounting tension to the chronological timeline, of course, but also some bits that many people might have forgotten, including the fact that the hijacking of Flight 93 took place after the first two planes hit the World Trade Center, and that there was much FAA confusion over the fate of American 11, and whether it had hit the WTC or was still in the air. All of this roiling chaos and uncertainty is abetted by the movie’s claustrophobic sense of space, masterfully captured by Greengrass and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s trademark visceral camerawork and further anchored by a tactfully inconspicuous score from John Powell.

What some will seize upon — more than likely as a general feeling more than anything else — is the breadth of United 93’s scope and how that may on a personal level blunt, if not the movie’s emotional currency, then its “rightness,” let’s say. In cutting back and forth between Flight 93, various air traffic control centers and the military command center, Greengrass juxtaposes the story of the doomed airliner against the frantic efforts of those charge, shifting the heavy bulk of the action to the plane only in the last 35 minutes or so. Many filmgoers may be left wanting more details about the passengers, of whom we learn very little. It’s certainly true that in offering this wider context, we lose some focus and grasp of the putative focal point.

Despite its title, though, this film isn’t “merely” the story of United 93. This tack is somewhat a function of necessity, as certain passengers’ life rights were sold to an A&E telepic, Flight 93, which bows on DVD next week, and others understandably were leery of any cinematic exploration of the subject. To focus more upon or tell the story of only one or two passengers, though, is to risk minimizing the collective heroic and moral stance of those aboard United 93. There’s a saying that truth is found in jest and death, and the latter portion of that sentiment is born out here. While the turmoil of that day marks the film on a certain level as a vicarious glimpse into hell via those that lost their lives, United 93 is also a slowly building collage of dread. Emotionally tough but completely riveting and absorbing in its verisimilitude, United 93 doesn’t suffer an exploitative impulse or frame. It is challenging and demanding filmmaking, not for everyone. But it is honest. (Universal, R, 110 minutes)

American Dreamz

April 21, 2006Film ReviewsBrent

A comedic casserole existing at the intersecting planes of love and
fame, politics and pop culture, writer-director Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz
is apt to produce uneasy feelings in general audiences not prepared for
the churning, potentially incendiary mix of elements at its core. While
not the cheeky mainstream broadside that it’s obviously and
understandably being marketed as, the film is enjoyably idiosyncratic
if a little sloppy, a rib-nudging exploration of manipulated “reality”
that asks viewers to think about the true meanings of the words hero
and martyr.

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A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Category Archives: Film Reviews

Hoot

Mission: Impossible III

Flight 93

Happenstance

House of Wax

Behind Enemy Lines

Melinda and Melinda

Charlotte Gray

Ali

The Shipping News

A Beautiful Mind

Akeelah and the Bee

Swimming Pool: A Sexy, Quasi-Foreign Mystery

United 93

American Dreamz

Metropolitan

Scary Movie 4

The Notorious Bettie Page

Hard Candy

Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy

Lucky Number Slevin

Phat Girlz