Irreviews

Mother and Child is one of a certain kind of movie that I always find difficult to watch. I think this is because it deals seriously with the emotions of our own mortality, which is a good thing, but its only message concerning how to deal with this difficult issue is to “cling tighter,” which I do not find a very comforting or useful prescription – quite the opposite, in fact!

But setting this aside, Mother and Child strikes me as a serious and well-crafted piece of work, one that definitely keeps you engaged. At the center of the film are two of the most horrible, emotionally fucked-up shrews to ever grace the silver screen. For a long time it is rather difficult to watch these horrible woman acting out on everyone – when Jimmy Smits tells off Annette Benning for being a total bitch on wheels, you kind of want to cheer. Luckily, the performances in these roles (Annette Benning, Naomi Watts) are really excellent. There is a somber honesty about their approach to the characters that allows them to grow convincingly as the movie moves forward. Sam Jackson is great in a supporting role. Plus, this film featured quite a few personal favorite character actors that you don’t see much: Amy Brenneman, Jimmy Smits, and Marc Blucas from The Jane Austen Book Club, Elizabeth Peña from Lone Star, and most notably the marvelous Kerry Washington – it’s very nice to see a talented and warm actresses like her landing good, dignified lead roles!

The writing in this film, while rather painful at times, is quite strong and engaging. There are a bunch of really memorable scenes in this film that you find yourself thinking about afterwards. Sometimes the style of the dialog reminded me a little of the mid-nineties indie renaissance – think Lone Star. It was not quite up to that level, but was still very refreshing compared to the general aversion to dialog exhibited by most modern filmmakers.

I would recommend this film. It is well-written and well-acted, decently paced, has a pretty decent score, and it doesn’t crap out in the end. Just don’t expect a very uplifting experience when watching it!

A Prophet feels about 5 hours long, and as the running time is under 3 hours this is decidedly not a good thing. I suppose that for what the film is, it is, technically speaking, “pretty good”. The story just has this feeling that it’s never, ever going to end! I mean, no one loves a slow, thorough movie more than me, but this film quickly crosses a line and starts to feel like we’re watching a 24 hour web cam, through which we observe these filthy, disgusting assholes living their revolting prison-lives in excruciating, mind-numbing detail. New plot lines keep coming up and it feels like nothing is getting resolved. When you spend most of a movie wishing it would end, that really tells you something about the artistic merits of what you’re watching.

Plus let’s face it: gangsters are SO FUCKING BORING!!!. They have no emotional range, they have bad skin and greasy hair, they pull people’s eyes out with spoons, and all they talk about are things like “I want you to hit so-and-so”, or “everything you are is because of ME!”, and on and on and on. Christ, who could enjoy watching this crap?

The main character is almost completely unlikable. He’s ugly, he’s stupid, and he’s basically pretty evil. And boy do we get a mouthful of this greasy little turd. We watch him kill people, we watch him jerk off to porn and fuck whores in prison, we watch him serve food to people and wash windows, we watch him kiss the ass of the fat disgusting gangster that pulls the strings in the prison. I ask you, honestly: does this sound like fun?

I can’t condemn the movie outright, because A) we didn’t turn it off, and B) it can’t be denied that the film is very detailed and even somewhat stylish. But the bottom line is it’s a bunch of thugs in prison, acting in a way that makes it very clear that they really deserve to be there. Just not the kind of movie you return to again and again.

The Damned United relies almost exclusively on the acting flair of Michael Sheen, and as he possesses incredible electricity on screen this strategy is not a complete failure and makes for a fairly enjoyable movie. But the film suffers from some basic problems. First off, it is pretty clear that Brian Clough was an outstanding coach – you don’t take no-account, provincial teams from the bottom of the second league to the top of the Premier league without some considerable skill, and it has to be more than the skill of his partner Peter Taylor (played by Timothy Spall) in spotting talented young players. But the movie decides to portray Clough as entirely a product of Taylor’s player acquisition, and basically spends no time developing Clough’s construction of the team or his orchestration of the Derby County’s incredible rise to prominence . It’s just not very believable, frankly. This unfortunate portrayal of Clough as a coach is exacerbated by the fact that even the player acquisition is handled somewhat perfunctorily – for instance, they are satisfied with simply showing brief, one off conversations like “we need a midfielder with great feet – let’s get so-and-so” and then presto, you see the team rising in the standings in a half-assed montage. This is fine as far as it goes, but it must be said: it does not make for a very riveting film-watching experience. In fact, it smacks of a certain laziness.

The second problem is that the film cuts back and forth in time between the Derby County rise to power and the 44 days that Clough headed Leeds United, the problem being that the Leeds United section is not very exciting or even interesting. The Leeds players don’t want to play for Clough, period. And so they lose all their games. Nothing else happens! The movie stalls every time we switch back to Leeds, and as Leeds takes up about half the movie this means that the film is in a full stall about half the time. Not a good state of affairs.

The deeper problem here is that The Damned United is really all about Clough’s obsession with his arch nemesis Don Revie, and makes no attempt whatsoever to be a proper sports movie. The problem with this is that Clough’s Revie obsession simply does not support a movie all by itself, at least not the way it was handled in this film. It’s interesting, but they can’t be bothered to dig deep enough to really pull it off, and they certainly can’t pull it off without developing other aspects of the story. So what’s left in the end is a somehwat cartoonish character study and not much else. It’s a shame really – there might have been a really good sports movie in this material.

The Damned United can be recommend just for Sheen’s performance, but the artistic vision of the film is too limited to make it anything more than light entertainment.

The Ghost Writer is not a bad film. I think it kind of wants to be a David Lynch film, maybe with a little Coen Brothers stirred in, but it’s very halfhearted about it. The story is rather serious: murder, war crimes, mysterious clues from the dark past of the Prime Minister. But at the same time the filmmakers are weirdly indifferent to building dramatic tension or even treating the material seriously! Instead they busy themselves with mousing around, playing up the Lynch/Coen-like aspects of the set-up – everyone acting a little weird, everything a touch stylized, attempts at humor popping up in really odd places, shit like that. At the same time, no real attempt is made to bond the viewer to the developing plot in any way.  It’s as if the filmmakers are saying “you can turn this off at any time, it’s okay with us.” In fact, when the film finally starts to pick up in the last half-hour, you’re not even sure why you still care about the story. Add on top of this a bad score that is clearly composed for the purpose of conveying a completely unserious tone, and you are left with a seriously conflicted film. But somehow, the film works well enough to be somewhat enjoyable despite all this!

Ewan McGregor is a really weird quantity in films. He seems to pick these strange, kind of light-hearted, badly written roles all the time, and he has an affect that undermines or invalidates any material he’s in. He’s actually sort-of decent (and pretty funny) in this particular role, but at the same time he never seems the slightest bit real in it. It is very nice to see the marvelous and underrated Olivia Williams getting a interesting part as the former Prime Minister’s tough and smart wife. The others (Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, etc) are solid but unremarkable, as are all the supporting actors.

The only thing that really struck me in the film was the little scene with Tom Wilkinson. Wilkinson is so great! He has this knack of taking almost any material and without the slightest bit of overacting turning it into a riveting scene. He fits himself into scenes so beautifully, bringing exactly what the scene needs to be effective, and nothing else (in this way, he’s like opposite of people like Pacino, De Niro, and Streep, who blast to smithereens every scene they are in) . When Ewan McGregor goes to visit Wilkinson and find out what his somewhat mysterious connection to Brosnan really is, Wilkinson’s performance lifts the scene so much that during that moment you actually forget you are watching a muddled, badly paced drama with an ineffectual lead, and suddenly start responding to the movie as if you are right in the middle of a super tense and interesting thriller. Unfortunately this scene is only 5 minutes long, and then you are back to the real film.

One final complaint: They rip of Antonioni so badly in the film’s final scene, they should be ashamed of themselves.

The Ghost Writer: I would say it is probably worth seeing on Netflix if you can’t think of anything else to put on your cue. Despite all it’s problems and the weirdly indifferent attitude of the filmmakers, the story is a bit better than a lot of junk I’ve paid to see in theaters this year. Just don’t expect too much from it.

It’s worth it to see a super-hairy Anthony Hopkins rip his white shirt off with a roar and a flourish, and then chest bump with the other werewolf before they start their death-match! I laughed pretty hard at that one (although I’m not sure the filmmakers intended for that scene to be comic).

Other than that, all I can say is this is a very silly and inconsequential film that to its credit does not take itself too seriously. The story is not very interesting or exciting, but it somehow does not grate on the viewer either (which is saying something in this genera). Oh, I should add that there are a lot of exposed entrails in this film, lots of them!!! But they don’t look real (nothing in this film does) so don’t worry too much if you are squeamish.

The Next Three Days is a complicated movie to review. When I first walked out of the theater, my impression of it was that it was a mediocre American version of what would have been a great French film (it was adapted from an actual french film, but I have not seen the original version) . There are things about The Next Three Days that are great. There are things about it that are bad. After thinking about it for a couple weeks, I decided that I actually liked it quite a bit, and might even watch it again sometime. With the benefit of time, the good things definitely outweighed the bad. Its problem turns out to be that it lacks certain key qualities that would have taken the good, interesting story and made it timeless. But it is still a good, interesting movie.

What the film gets right is exactly what everyone is complaining about: that it is “slow”. Well, true, but that slow, deliberate quality also gives the film a certain depth that the vast majority of action-dramas do not have. It lets the viewer take in the magnitude of what the guy is doing. When the escape actually happens, it is tense, believable, and consistently surprising, and you have a connection to the events by virtue of having seen how long it took to put together, and the level of sacrifice the guy had to make to pull it off. Could they have done a better job portraying this? Yes. But all the same, I think they did pretty well.

Russell Crowe is very good as the weird, tortured husband, and it is fascinating and rather painful to watch him make his various attempts to set up his plan. The scene with Liam Neeson doing his Taken-style monologue is fantastic. (This monologue is the reason I went to the movie – it totally makes the whole preview.) Elizabeth Banks is great to look at, and does a good solid job as the wife. The supporting casting and the incidental casting are iffy, but somehow it does not seriously detract most of the time. The star here is Crowe, and he definitely delivers.

So what does not work in this film? Well for one the music is GOD AWFUL, and I have a tough time getting past that fact. Not only does the music suck, but it sounds like it was recorded on a fucking boom box! If this film made one change, and that one change was to give it a decent score / soundtrack, that alone might actually have gone a good way toward smoothing over the film’s other problems, which are inconsistent pacing and  inadequate exploration of the main character’s emotions. It would not, on the other hand, solve the problem that the casting and writing for the cop characters are both bad, and it would not solve the terrible, gutless, cringe-worthy epilogue with the two cops that both made no sense whatsoever and destroyed the delicious ambiguity of the husband’s motivation.

Still, I don’t care what the critics say. This film is a lot more interesting, exciting, and enjoyable than the vast majority of the crappy action dramas that are out there. It’s worth seeing, in my opinion.

The King’s Speech is a good, enjoyable film. Performances are solid across the board, it’s pretty well written, decently paced, and it’s content is historically interesting. It does make use of some camera techniques that I don’t really care for (for example, using weirdly distorted lenses to exaggerate the King’s anxiety) but the film is strong enough that these distractions didn’t diminish my enjoyment of it. The use of music is a little heavy handed, but again, not a game-breaker. I personally would not call this a great film, and I doubt I would ever feel the need to watch it again, but it’s a very satisfying experience the first time through. I recommend it!

Robin Hood is a fun film. No, it’s not great, and it’s a pretty outrageous re-imagining of history, but frankly it all hangs together surprisingly well. The music is pretty forgettable, there is some ill-advised cheese in the relationship between Robin and Marian, and I’m getting tired of all these bald villains in movies nowadays (enough already!) But on the whole the movie is pretty enjoyable. Let me put it this way: If I was given a choice between watching this again or watching Braveheart again, I would pick Robin Hood in a second.

Russell Crowe is again teamed with Ridley Scott, playing another “grunting role,” but I found this one more tolerable and interesting than Gladiator.  William Hurt is actually decent in a small role – I never thought I would ever say anything good about William Hurt, but there you are. The supporting acting is uneven, but it doesn’t really matter that much in this case. You’re watching to film to see Russell Crowe kick ass, and that is indeed what you get.

Then there is Maid Marian. She starts off as the typical downtrodden 12th century woman, but as the film progresses she emerges as more and more of a “kick-ass broad”, culminating with her showing up on the final battlefield in chain-mail, swinging a freaking broadsword, and wearing the sexiest helmet ever created. Ridiculous, but fun!

Robin Hood: a diverting action film that never gets too full of itself. I would check it out, especially if you avoided it on the recommendation of film critics. It really is a lot better than most of the shit I’ve been seeing this year.

Sanaa Hamri directed Something New (2006) which was a really wonderful little movie exploring race relations in Los Angeles. Something New was the primary reason that my wife and I wanted to see Hamri’s latest effort, Just Wright. Well, Just Wright is definitely several steps down from Something New, but it is a smart, classy and well-made little film, given the limitations of its genera.

A good amount of Just Wright is devoted to showing real NBA players interacting with the stars of the film – it’s the film’s gimmick, clearly. I must say, the NBA players are not too bad playing themselves, but it definitly does not make for a movie that you would want to watch over and over! I didn’t hate all the “let’s show this guy is friends with Dwyane Wade and Dwight Howard” stuff, but it didn’t do a lot for me either.

Besides all that, Just Wright is a nice little story of a black sheep getting her due – always a winner of a theme! I am not a Queen Latifa fan, but I must say this is probably the only film I have ever liked her in. It’s not a great performance, mainly because the material is just not written well enough, but she is likable and winning in the black sheep role. The fellow playing the basketball star is also solid – he is warm and earnest on screen, which is pretty much all he needed to do.

I would recommend the film, tentatively. I mean, it may not be great, but compared to crap like The Social Network this film looks outstanding. At least it has female characters who are dignified, can speak, and who hold real jobs!

It ironic that the main character of this film is driven crazy by the utterance of cliches, because this entire film is nothing but a stream of cliches from Allen’s past work. He’s got all his tired old pet ideas in there: the Max Von Sydow misanthropist who interacts with the world only through the woman he lives with, the “Mickey Sax” hypochondriac character obsessed with the completely uninteresting concept that we’re all going to die at some point; the dumb blond who hooks up with a brainy older man who takes care of her, the idea of people sitting around debating religious platitudes (like if there was a God, why did Hitler exist,) the old-timey jazz theme music (straight out of Sleeper, where it was done much better); the blond ditz who turns out to have artistic talent as a photographer (discovered by a wise and sensual older man); the exploration the 1960’s Black/Jewish experience; the idea of three people living together in a mutually sexual relationship; the guy that tries to commit suicide for “existential” reasons and fails in a semi-humorous way. Christ, doesn’t Woody Allen have any new ideas after all this time? What does he do all day, sit in the shower and obsess about the same crap he was exploring 30 years ago, crap which I might add was already kind of stale back then?

Like I’ve pointed out in other reviews, there are only two Allen films that I can stand at this point: Manhattan Murder Mystery (because it is very clever and captures upper-middle class middle-age life in NYC really well) and Vicky Christina Barcelona (mainly because of Hall and Bardem.) I still respect his old stuff like Sleeper, Play It Again Sam, and Love & Death, but I seemingly have no desire to ever see them again. The rest are just insufferable to me, and Whatever Works falls squarely in this later camp.

The problem with Woody Allen is that he got stuck somewhere around Manhattan, and basically never got out of being stuck – the two films above were exceptions that prove the rule. He became stuck on a set of concepts which he obviously feels are intellectually and philosophically cogent – the inability to deal with one’s own mortality, and the impossibility of loving relationships to endure. This is fine, except that his treatment of these concepts is always sophomoric at best, and I think this is because he lacks the soulfulness and the spiritual depth necessary to make an interesting statement on these topics. It’s all like the ramblings of a brainy, isolated teenager. He really has nothing to say about mortality or love, other than “do the best you can and try not to think about it,” which, I’m sorry, is just not a compelling philosophy of life. I always found the climax of Hannah and Her Sisters to be idiotic – he watches the Marx Brothers and because they are having fun he decides that he can just “dumb-down” for the rest of his life. Phuleeeeese!

Whatever Works is not a terrible film, but it is basically nothing but a catalog of Woody Allen’s past attempts at exploring love and mortality. It’s not very funny, not very insightful, and rather tiresome. I can’t really recommend it.