Irreviews

The Debt is entertaining enough – it’s not a terrible movie. But it really disappointed me and failed to leave me with much of anything. It’s really very average.  It’s just an average, Hollywoody political action film,  one that suffers from some serious and fundamental flaws.

First, I am not a big fan of the parallel past/present narratives approach taken in this film. In fact, I can’t think of a really good film that uses this storytelling technique. Some great films have used flashbacks – Missing, for example – but telling two parallel stories in different time periods always strikes me as a bit of an artistic cop-out.

One result of the two storyline approach is that they wind up skipping the setup for the main part of the story (the kidnapping of the surgeon of Birkenau.) The viewer is just plunged into the action, and all we get are a few mumbled lines like “we finally found him, now we’ll show the world what he did,” and a decent-but-minimal sequence describing the plan to escape to West Berlin with the surgeon. If they had bothered to write a proper set up, it would have included things like the following: How many years did it take to find the surgeon, and how did they track him down (since he was openly practicing as a doctor in the middle of fucking Berlin, the layers of deception that kept him hidden must have been intricate and fascinating – why not explain it to us?) Who were the two agents already in the field that she was joining – how long had they been there, what were their histories, what was their operational relationship to each other, and what exactly had they accomplished since going to East Berlin? What were the details of her mission, and what was her background (for instance, if she really was a translator then why did she fight so incredibly well?) What was the extent of the supporting network in East Berlin available to help the three conspirators? And how about a little more information about what this “surgeon” actually did?!

A well-written 10-20 minute section with information like this would have given the movie a lot of badly needed texture, the kind of texture that makes you want to watch a movie again. As a point of comparison, think about The Day of the Jackle and its absolutely masterful set up during the first 10-20 minutes – think about all of the texture and interest that is generated during that set up, and how it carries forward through the entire film. Its setup is one of the big reasons that you never get tired of watching it. The Debt has none of this, and it’s one reason why the film is kind of boring and one-dimensional.

On top of this problem of no set-up we have the additional and rather common problem that they didn’t write enough dialog. The main result of this is that the pivotal character of David, played by Sam Worthington, simply did not work at all. I know he’s supposed to be a man of mystery, but you have to convey the mysteriousness in a compelling and coherent way! The character of David is just a blank space, and Worthington was badly miscast, as he has no warmth and charisma to fill in the blank where interesting dialog should have been. The implied love story between him and Jessica Chastain fell completely flat, and since a lot of the important action in the film is based on the feeling between these two it’s no wonder that the film leaves you a little cold and disappointed. I didn’t even believe that David was a warrior zealot. I didn’t believe anything about him, except that he did not seem like a Mossad agent at all. The character of David and its casting was a huge problem.

An additional problem: I simply do not believe that the surgeon of Birkenau would have turned into Hannibal Lecter when they took him hostage. I don’t believe it for one second! I think he would have been a dour German soldier and would have kept his mouth shut. The whole Hannibal Lecter thing was manipulative and silly, and a terrible artistic decision, because it distracts from much more interesting elements of the story.

Finally, the ending of this film is just lame and stupid and makes no sense. I’m not going to spoil it, and I’m sure many people will disagree with me, but there you have it.

Basically I think the overall problem with the film beyond the structural complaints listed above is that the film made no effort to tell a story well. Instead, it is content to waste all the machinery of a political espionage thriller to explore (in a simplistic and boring way) the relatively uninteresting idea that “you shouldn’t tell a lie.” It’s George Washington and the fucking cherry tree all over again. Surely they could have done something better with all this!

I should mention some good things about the film. I also thought that the action scene when they try to smuggle the guy out via the subway station that was accidentally left behind the Berlin Wall was quite good – not great, but quite good. And I like the people in the film. Jessica Chastain is a really amazing actress. She certainly has range – I was stunned to find out that she was the same person who played the blonde ditz in The Help! I will definitely be watching for her movies in the future. Tom Winkinson continues to strike me as one of the top five actors out there, male or female. He might not have a ton to do in this film, but he has this knack of making something out of almost nothing that is simply remarkable. And that fellow who played the young Stephan (Marton Csokas) is really underrated, in my opinion. He’s like a Euro Russell Crowe. I wish he was in more films! And Helen Mirren is solid and classy as always. They had a really good cast assembled (except for Worthington) but unfortunately it was in the service of really mediocre material.

The Debt: entertaining, but far from great.

I really enjoyed Cracks. It’s not the kind of film I would add to my collection and enjoy over and over, but it was well-written, well-acted and interesting. The film used subtext beautifully and in layers, like the way you gradually realize that the “diving team” is actually just all the girls in the school whose parents don’t want them. The character of Miss G. is really well-written and fascinating. She is part surrogate mother, part humanitarian, part fraud, part hack-psychotherapist, part ham, part savior, part lonely spinster, part sexual deviant. It’s a wonderful character, played with skill and marvelous sensitivity and restraint by Eva Green. It’s the kind of character that few go through the trouble to write nowadays. The kids are a wonderful ensemble, and each girl on the “team” has a distinct and pleasing personality that comes through clearly without ever distracting from the fascinating group dynamic they are all involved in, and the relationship of the group to Miss G..

It is interesting how much better this film is than Never Let Me Go, another grim British boarding school film, one that got significantly more positive press than Cracks. Given a choice of watching one of these two films again, Cracks wins without a moment’s hesitation.

I won’t say anymore, so as to not give anything away. I recommend that you check out this film if you are in the mood for a smart, classy and diverting change of pace.

Yellow Brick Road is bleak, but it is a somewhat decent movie up to maybe the last fifth of the film. The opening sequence with the photos and the old sound recording of the survivor is actually really effective, better than the whole rest of the film, and proves again how a strong opening can sustain a film no matter how mediocre it is from that point on – I would argue that the opening minutes of this film sustain it through a full three-quarters of the movie.

The set up that follows the opening sequence is actually not bad. It’s not a great set up, but it is surprisingly effective given how compressed it is and how little dialog there is in it. I thought the scene when he meets the girl who knows where the trailhead is was quite good. As for the main body of the film, sure it’s full of holes and many things are either not explained or don’t make complete sense, but that’s kinda beside the point. This is an “atmosphere film,” and it has just enough of it to hold everything together, barely! They might not have made the whole premise seem plausible, but they did not fall so far short that one can’t enjoy the movie.

I should point out that the acting and the dialog in this film is decidedly better than it looks in the preview – lines in the preview that sound horrible actually sound pretty good in the film. This film is not really a Blair Witch thing – it’s considerably better than The Blair Witch Project: it is way creepier, its creepiness is more coherent, and the acting and character development is superior. Actually, I think the no-name actors did quite a good job, especially the town girl that tags along with the expedition. The dialog is not great, but it is not embarrassing either, and is decently executed.

Given the incredibly strange narrative path the film proceeds down, I was really wondering where it could possibly end. On this score I guess one could say my worst fears were realized – it is unrelentingly bleak and violent, and leaves you with very little sense of what actually happened. But with that said, there is something strangely natural and inevitable about how it all winds up. It’s almost believable, and this artistic restraint makes the film worth seeing, in my opinion. It’s just so fucking bleak I don’t know how anyone can stand it!

I guess I would recommend this film if you like horror and want to see something in the genera besides slasher movies. Just don’t see it if you are feeling down about life.

I really wanted to like Main Street because it has a lot of actors that I really like: Colin Firth, the fabulous Patricia Clarkson, Amber Tamblyn, Orlando Bloom (yes, I think he has a nice, interesting quality on screen and his acting isn’t all that bad if he sticks to certain simple roles,) the guy that played “the Ronimal” in Cedar Rapids, and even the venerable Ellen Burstyn. But the sad fact is that this film is a complete mess. The most important thing I can tell you about this movie is that the trailer is fucking brilliant – it makes the movie look way better than it actually is. Yet another case of the people making the trailer being better filmmakers than the actual makers of the film.

Main Street had three potential stories: 1) a story of a young girl (Tamblyn) torn between her love for a townie (Bloom) and her desire to escape her dying town, 2) the story of a shady corporation (represented by Firth) that wants to exploit a dying town to set up a hazardous waste treatment plant, and 3) the story of an old lady (Burstyn) who is running out of money and thinks she might need to sell her house. The preview makes the movie look like a skillful blend of stories 1 and 2, but unfortunately actual movie spends 80% of its time on story number 3. But story number 3 is not a story, it’s a circumstance, and as a result there is not much else for the filmmakers to do except let Ellen Burstyn go hog-wild, ripping off these tedious and endless monologs about how she feels about her house.

Patrica Clarkson is as always dignified and skillful, but she has nothing to work with here. Orlando Bloom was cast really well and was primed to turn in a really good performance in this roll, but again he had no lines and nothing to do. The really great sounding narration (by Bloom) in the preview is not in the film at all (except at the very end, when it’s too late.) This was unfortunate, because this film could have used some well-written, well-delivered narration. Amber Tamblyn is stuck in an undeveloped backwater plot line that literally has no connection to the main story – she barely has any real interaction with Orlando Bloom (the preview makes it look like this beautiful, nuanced love story). She is such a good actress, why can’t she find any decent rolls to play?

What saved Main Street for me a little was Colin Firth. He actually succeeded in transcending his stifled film persona and turned in a performance that could almost be called charismatic. Unfortunately, it was in the service of a complete turd of a movie, but it was still fun to watch him break out of his shell a bit. But don’t get me wrong: Firth is not a reason to actually watch this film.

As a final remark, let me say that the ending of this film was so awful that it left my wife and I speechless. And as anyone who reads this blog will know, we are not usually at a loss for words if we don’t like something in a film.

I really hate to slam this movie, because I think it’s heart was in the right place, but it is just a dog of a film.

So the two Black Swan girls are now trying to out-do each other in nearly identical Generation-Y comedies. First Natalie Portman teams with Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached, and now Mila Kunis teams with Timberlake in Friends with Benefits. Who’s getting the better of this war? Well considering that we shut off No Strings Attached about half way through, wondering why we even lasted that long, and we made it all the way through Friends with Benefits (wincing a bit,) I guess Mila wins. But the real reason she wins is that is she can pull of this kind of role and Natalie Portman definitely cannot – in fact, it boggles my mind why Natalie Portman is driving headlong for this image as a Gen-Y sex kitten. I can’t think of a less suitable match for her. She is, and always will be, that amazing and bizarre kid in Beautiful Girls. Mila, on the other hand, gets that callow, neurotic, emotionally-vapid Gen-Y chick thing perfectly. Plus she is very warm on-screen, has a pretty good voice, and is a fairly decent actress – all clear advantages over the now-vaunted Ms. Portman.

Friends with Benefits shows the frightening reality of Generation-Y love. It might have attempted to be cute if it wasn’t so damn cold and robotic in spirit. I found myself wondering “what the fuck is wrong with these people?” Even when they fall in love, they don’t really fall in love. The “friendly” sex quickly crosses a line from cute to gross and repulsive. When she sucks him off into her mouth and then comes up for air, she kind of reminded me of the sex replicants in Blade Runner (not a good image!) And I find it really fascinating the way they put Generation-Y pop music at the forefront all through the film, because it gives us a chance to ponder how bad popular music became in the 90’s. The decay didn’t start with all this autotuned shit we have now. It pretty much started in 1993. I mean, who could respond emotionally to any of that music in the movie – basically, all any of it is worth is an ironic smirk or maybe a self-conscious chuckle. I consider this a huge problem. Eroticism started to die in pop music sometime during the 1990’s because this is when it started to die in our society. How can you have a romantic comedy when there is no substantive notion of “romance” anymore. Let’s hope they keep making 1980’s romantic comedies, to move us and give the younger generations something to dream about.

The film’s script is in a lot of ways a bizarre mess. They introduced too many competing storylines, and then in its final third the film loses all focus and never comes back together (despite some serious desperation toward this end during the film’s finale.) The film is also distractingly incongruous. Kunis is supposed to be an executive recruiter – she looks and acts nothing like an executive recruiter. Timberlake is supposed to be a big-shot artistic director – he looks and acts nothing like a big shot artistic director. She looks like she works at a Starbucks and he looks like an out-of-work actor waiting tables at the NoHo Star. And nobody, I mean nobody commutes to work by antique motor boat from New Jersey, and ties their boat up to the public pier parks along the Hudson.

As far as the whole “flash mob” thing goes, all I can say is that I’ve lived in New York for 16 years and not once have I ever seen a flash mob, or heard of a specific occurrence of one. I’m not saying they don’t occur. I’m merely suggesting that people not weigh the “flash mob phenomenon” too heavily in their deliberations as to whether or not to move here (as Timberlake does in this film.)

As for Mr. Timberlake, I think the bottom line is that he is just a bad actor, period. He’s all guns and abs (his guns are positively frightening, as is his neck.) But in addition he is a really visually unpleasant guy, especially when he takes his shirt off. He looks like a slab of bacon (uncooked.) And he has extremely unattractive hair, questionable skin, and a whiny, unappealing voice. I don’t know who decided this dude was the next leading man, but good heavens! Between him and Ashton Kutcher, we’re all doomed.

Friends with Benefits: it’s a pretty dreary affair, really.

In my opinion The Whistleblower is a must-see, and will probably wind up being among the year’s best films. I would not personally call it a great film, but it is very, very good, especially by the meager standards of modern cinema. My wife and I saw The Whistleblower this week at a 7 pm show at Sunshine on the lower east side. There were about eight people in the audience. I find this very sad, because several decades ago this kind of movie would have gotten much more press and better distribution. I hope this review encourages more people to go out of their way to see this exciting and important film .

The Whistleblower deals with the topic of human sex trafficking, and given the extreme heinousness of this trade, coupled with its almost complete lack of exposure in the U.S. as a real problem, one can applaud the effort of the filmmakers to bring this abomination to the attention of the general public. But the film also deals with a deeper, more subtle issue: the severe conflict of interests that arise when private contractors (i.e. unaccountable multinational corporations) are sent by the United States into desperate, destroyed countries with ambiguously defined missions involving the welfare of average people.

It is on this second topic where The Whistleblower is at its best. The various scenes where Rachel Weisz meets head-on the institution-wide insanity that has the UN monitors participating in the sex trade (not just consuming it, but running it) are all really strong and edgy, and capture in a creepy way the amoral trance that the UN superstructure fell into. There are three scenes in particular that are simply riveting and unforgettable, while remaining completely low-key and realistic (not a very common combination these days.) I won’t describe them here, so as to not spoil the marvelous spontaneity of these scenes. But seeing these scenes gives me hope for the future of film making – at least someone still remembers how to do it well!

But the film also does a good (and disturbing) job of showing the completely hopeless and inhuman lives these poor unfortunate woman fall into by virtue of societal circumstances that bring out the worst in people with any scrap of power or influence, and make all the others extremely vulnerable to their depravity and cruelty. These scenes are not easy to watch – this movie is not The Help, folks, we are well beyond Hollywood’s “reality limits” here. But at least you see something real, and are forced to acknowledge that this shit is going on in the same world we live in, while we spend our time recording outraged rants on YouTube about how horrible Rebecca Black is.

The film does a good job covering a lot of boring but important ground in the beginning, while simultaneously getting the main plot line rolling quickly. And what’s more, they somehow managed to do this without resorting to narration. Once the main story is in motion, the scene sequence is well-paced and surprising, and one is completely gripped by the story.

I have to hand it to Rachel Weisz. I really admire her. The woman is starting to develop a small monopoly on strong, empowered female roles in serious movies. I’m not sure I think she is the greatest actress in the world, but she has grown on me, to the point where I now get excited about the next “Rachel Weisz film” At least there is one actress out there finding good, powerful, dignified roles to play! Brava, Rachel!

The eternally sexy Monica Bellucci dials it in another direction here, and gives a great little performance as a completely terrifying, soulless bureaucrat, robotically carrying out her very human-intensive job without the least bit of sensitivity or thought. The role brings a nice flavor to the film – it reminds me of the Elizabeth Ashley role in Coma. I thought all the other supporting and incidental casting was solid.

Go see this film! It’s totally worth it!

Why would you make a film about the RECENT horrors of racism in the American south, and then have it be totally antiseptic, bland and completely nonthreatening? What is the point of doing this? Are we so fucking emotionally retarded in this country that we can’t handle anything but puff pastry renditions of history? It’s like Hollywood has done very sophisticated market research to figure out the exact limit on the amount of “reality” that can be permitted in this kind of film, before people start leaving the theater with ideas in their heads.

The Help is entertaining enough, I suppose, but it does not stray one inch beyond “the formula.” There is not one scene with spontaneous energy in the entire film. Everything is very clean and fake-looking – nothing rings true, nothing! The film has no edge what-so-ever. The casting involves a lot of talented people, but none of the roles are cast in an inspired way, and all the performances are a bit one-dimensional (Compare this film to Mona Lisa Smile to see multi-dimensional performances in young female roles within a similar period piece.) Emma Stone comes across like a sexy Martian who just stepped out of her flying saucer. And please, someone, write Viola Davis a role where she can play a powerful, sexy, bold, confident, sophisticated woman, instead of this same mumbling, downtrodden working stiff she keeps getting stuck with!

Just to round out my commentary, let me just add that all the humor in the movie is telegraphed from a thousand miles away, the music is completely unoriginal and unremarkable, and like so many filmmakers nowadays they couldn’t be bothered to write a full screenplay, so they have poor Viola Davis do a bunch of bland and boring narration throughout the entire movie.

I don’t know what else to say about this film. It’s not bad – my wife and I both enjoyed it for what it was. Go see it if you want to see a decent, Hollywoody social issues film that will amuse without ruffling your feathers too much.

Crazy, Stupid Love is a pretty fun movie, but I feel that it took the formulaic way out at too many junctures in the story. Basically, without Steve Carell’s warmth and charisma this film would have been in trouble. He glues the whole thing together. What amazes me about Steve Carell is not so much how funny he is (I actually don’t find him hysterically funny) but what an incredible screen presence the guy has and frankly what a good actor he is with serious material. People don’t get to see this very much because he tends to take these hammy roles all the time, but anyone who has seen Dan in Real Life will know just how good he can be with serious material. This film is nowhere near Dan in Real Life, which is a modern classic in my opinion, but Carell does get some chance to glow with the material in Crazy, Stupid Love.

The film has some other problems as well. Julianne Moore is so cold as an actress that I really did not believe that she was Steve Carell’s soulmate. As my wife pointed out, they really could have switched Moore and Marisa Tomei, who I believe could have pulled off the role of the wife much better. Compare the Carell / Moore screen relationship to the similar relationship of Tomei and Matthew McConaughey in The Lincoln Lawyer, and how much more believable it was in The Lincoln Lawyer that there was still a spark of love bonding the couple despite all the many problems they faced – a good part of this was Tomei’s skill, warmth and flexibility as an actress. With Moore, all you register is her coldness. In the end, my wife and I agreed that Moore was the main problem with this movie.

Emma Stone is a bizarre and marvelous quantity in films. I’m not sure what I think of her acting, but she has great screen presence and an incredible voice. I wish she had more of a role in this film. As for Ryan Gosling, I really don’t like him as an actor, but I felt he was actually pretty tolerable in this role.

Crazy, Stupid Love does have some nice moments, and on the whole the dialog is really not bad. I just kept hoping that it would transcend itself at some point and it never did, but that is not a crime. This is a fun movie, probably the only date movie of the summer. Go enjoy it for what it is and leave it at that.

I have very little to say about this movie. It’s not great. It’s not good. But it is a diverting piece of mediocrity that does not leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, and in the current movie climate that is definitely saying something . If you like Matt Damon or Emily Blunt, you will probably enjoy this film.