MoviesMakeMeHappy

Shortness: The Painted Veil

2008-12-03T11:57:00.001-06:00

The Painted Veil (Warner Independent Pictures, PG-13)

What happens when you combine a cheating wife (Naomi Watts) her bland immunologist husband (Edward Norton) and a cholera epidemic in a small Chinese village? Well, madness does ensue, but, unfortunately for them, it's not the slapstick kind.

Not much really happens in this lush telling of Brits in 1920s China, but it is interesting to watch. Watts and Norton make the kind of believably mismatched couple who can only become close in an impossible situation. They risk their lives stupidly time and again in a dangerous game of one-upmanship, simultaneously punishing themselves and each other.

The fun (if you can call it that) in a film like this, is seeing who can actually make it out sane and alive. If you know your tragedies, you'll be able to spot the survivor by the half-way point. That won't, however, take anything away from the experience.

Serious Funny: Look Both Ways

2008-11-18T18:30:00.013-06:00

Look Both Ways (Kino International, PG-13)

As much as I like big, Hollywood-player heavy films, sometimes a small movie is just right. The director is an unknown property. The stars might as well be people you run into at the gas station. And, when the end product is as good as Look Both Ways, you quickly realize those things couldn't matter less.

Meryl Lee (Justine Clarke) and Nick (William McInnes) are having a crappy day. She just got home from her dad's funeral, he just found out he has cancer, and they meet at the site of a horrible accident. Take that, rom-com-meet-cute.

Look Both Ways is a study in sudden change and how people deal with it. For Nick, this means obsessively going over everything he's ever done that may have lead to his cancer. While Meryl Lee is besieged by images of impending doom: sharks in the community pool, careless drivers that run her over and masked intruders who attack her at home with knives and guns.

Writer/director Sarah Watt has filled her film with simple characters in the midst of life-changing events that stick with you. It also strikes a perfect balance between moments of real-life comedy and pain. Watt realizes that personal experience can turn a character's anguish into the audience's amusement.

Clarke and McInnes are perfect as the mix-matched leads who meet at the perfect time in their lives. Clarke's Meryl Lee is believably lonely and dissatisfied. So often when Hollywood films pick actresses to portray women like her, they are unrealistically gorgeous. Clarke is perfectly pretty, but we have no trouble seeing her as someone with a small, solitary life.

McInnes is ideal as a man with a once exciting, globe-trotting life. He's all rugged-handsomeness and new-found vulnerability. Someone who wouldn't have given Meryl Lee the time of day before the exact time they crossed paths.

Foreignocity: Slumdog Millionaire

2008-11-18T17:31:00.006-06:00

Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight Pictures, R)

If films like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later didn't convince you that director Danny Boyle knows what he's doing, then Slumdog Millionaire certainly will.

Indian street kid Jamal (Dev Patel) gets the chance of a lifetime when he appears on his country's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. But, after making it through with only two questions to go, the authorities figure no "slumdog" could know all the answers without somehow cheating. Jamal then has to explain to his interrogator how a poor kid from the slums managed to learn so much.

Boyle, along with writers Simon Beaufoy and Vikas Swarup, use flashbacks to tell Jamal's story, and every one is vivid. Diving into a dung heap to get an actor's autograph, living with his older brother in a city dump, making easy money from tourists at the Taj Mahal...All leading to his triumphs on the popular game show.

Slumdog Millionaire takes the hard, run-down living of street life and constantly contrasts it with the small moments of splendor in his short life. Jamal's memories, for instance, are usually filled with the dusty, fast-paced images of someone lying, stealing and begging just to survive. But, his most recent memory of the girl he longs for, Latika (Freida Pinto), is a bright picture fixed in glorious slow motion.

It would be easy for me to say that Patel and Pinto make this movie great and leave it at that. The truth, though, is that literally every performance is amazing. From the children who portray the street kids at various ages, to the cop (Irrfan Khan) who listens to Jamal's stories and the doubtful game show host (Anil Kapoor).

There are several new-comers to film populating this movie, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see many of them for years to come.

Dramarama: The Brave One

2008-10-20T00:00:00.003-05:00

The Brave One (Warner Brothers, R)

Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) is living a quiet, contemplative existence in the city she loves, New York. She has a career as a talk radio host, a doctor fiance and big, lovable dog. But one night in the park will soon change that.

Erica and here fiance head out to walk the dog one night and get attacked by a group of thugs. After handing over all their possessions, they receive a brutal beating that leaves Erica comatose and her beloved dead.

The Brave One deals with what it takes for someone to regain the courage to venture out in a place where everything they've loved and held dear has been so horribly ripped from them. For Erica, that means arming herself and showing New York's criminals that they aren't always the boss.

The big debate here is whether or not Erica is doing the right thing. She starts off just wanting some way to feel safe, but quickly becomes a woman on a mission; looking in all the dark corners of the city for trouble to stop and wrongs to avenge.

Director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) does a fantastic job making us feel Erica's fear after the attack. In one scene, as she tries to leave her apartment for the first time since being released from the hospital, we see her apprehension. The walls of the long, narrow hallway leading to the outside slowly close in. The closer she gets to the door, the less she can see - the light from outside is so bright it's blinding. Eventually, we find Erica back in her home, knowing she couldn't find the strength to leave yet.

The performances in The Brave One are astounding. Foster is perfectly frail and broken as Erica, and she somehow maintains this even after she begins to defend the people of New York. We only see flashes of the anger that hides beneath. Terrence Howard does solid work as Detective Mercer, a man hot on the trail of the city's vigilante force.

Foster and Howard make for an interesting team. Their characters share a similar loneliness that has very different origins, and the audience can see them connecting on several levels. You can easily believe that if circumstances were different, they'd possibly be made for one another.

Watch for one particular instance near the end of the film (you'll know when you see it). This is a moment so cool it made me applaud and cheer in my own living room. And, think that just maybe, Erica and Mercer will find their way back to each other once the dust settles.

Foreignocity: The Lives of Others

2008-10-10T16:52:00.003-05:00

The Lives of Others (Sony Pictures Classics, R)

Most of us can live our lives basically the way we want to. You travel when and where you want, talk to who you like and ignore people you don't. But, the inhabitants of East Germany in '84 have no such luck.

The Stasi (East Germany's secret police) have the citizens on lockdown. Every move they make is liable to be recorded, written down or reported back to Stasi agents by an informant. Such is the case with popular playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). His plays have always towed the socialist party line, but when a leading Stasi minister takes an interest in Dreyman's actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck), the order goes out to wire Dreyman's apartment and find something to pin on him.

Within days, long-time agent Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) begins to split his time between teaching at the Stasi school during the day and spying on Dreyman and Christa-Maria at night. But, the loyal Stasi soon finds himself becoming interested in their lives in ways he never dreamed of.

The Lives of Others paints a full, bleak picture of life in a closed society. In a world where every word and deed can come under scrutiny, there are no bright colors or crisp shapes. The film is colored beige, brown and tan; everything is well-worn and used to the end of its life. The paranoia seems to have seeped through and taken away all youth and joy.

Muhe is perfect as Wiesler. We get the feeling that the character would probably be just as unsociable and bland had be been raised in West Germany, which makes his actions even more perfect. For all his un-excitable ways, Muhe manages to imbue Wiesler with a subtle, growing spark. For instance, when Wiesler takes important evidence to a superior, we don't see that spark in his eyes, but in the way he holds the document.

The Lives of Others is filled with small, gem-like moments such as this one. And even though it stretches on a bit too long past the two hour mark, it's definitely worth your time.

Should I Waste Two Hours On This?: Dan In Real Life

2008-05-17T08:47:00.007-05:00

Dan In Real Life (Walt Disney Studios, PG-13)

I had heard a lot about this movie around the time it came out and despite my instincts that it wouldn't be that great, I Redboxed it anyway. You know what? I was right and everybody else was wrong.

Dan (Steve Carell) and his three daughters have driven to Rhode Island for an extended family getaway with his parents and siblings one weekend. It doesn't take long for Dan to meet Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a local bookstore, have one of those deep, meaningful conversations with her and fall instantly in love. The problem? Dan soon finds out Marie is dating his brother, Mitch (Dane Cook).

I had so many issues with this film that it's hard to know where to start. First off, I don't like Marie. It's obvious from the get-go that Dan is interested in her romantically. And what does Marie do? She encourages him by not telling the poor slob that she's seeing someone until after they "connect".
I'm convinced that no decent person would do this, certainly not a character I'm supposed to feel for.

Another problem is that Marie is with Mitch, and I don't mean that this is a problem for Dan...It's a problem for me. There is honestly no way in hell a woman who seems as worldly and sophisticated as Marie would date douche-man Dane Cook. I was hoping the character of Mitch would be a college professor or scientist or globe-trotting journalist, but he's not. He's just an overgrown frat boy who works as a trainer in a gym.

Now I'm getting to the biggest issue I had with this film. NO FAMILY ACTS LIKE THIS ONE. I understand it's a weekend family reunion of sorts, but these fuckers do everything together. And when I say together, I mean, like, all 18 of them. Walking on the beach, eating every meal, exercising, bowling, having a family talent show complete with a stage and costumes, competing in some odd crossword puzzle challenge, on and on and freakin' on.

I'm pretty sure the writer of Dan In Real Life was an abused orphan who never actually had a real family and this is his ultimate fantasy of what family life must actually be like. This was such a glaring oddity from early in the film that I became more and more angry as the entire clan did stuff together. If I weren't currently well acquainted with a white family I would wonder if white folks really do act like this when they get together.

At one point, these supposedly super nice/family oriented people decide to set lonely Dan up on a date with a woman that he grew up with who still lives in town. Apparently, she had a pig face as a child. Do you know what these gracious, lovely people do? Begin making fun of her pig face (without her around, of course) to the extreme of creating a song about it. The scene went on forever, too. What the fuck, you guys? I'm supposed to like these assholes? Seriously?

While Dan In Real Life isn't horrible, it's not believable or good enough in other ways to make me not care that it's not believable.

Shortness: SherryBaby

2008-04-21T11:59:00.003-05:00

SherryBaby (IFC Films, R)

Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is fucked up. She just finished a three year prison sentence and hasn't seen her young daughter in as much time. Sherry's also battling a serious drug addiction and a dependence on sex that could undo her attempts at total rehabilitation.

SherryBaby is a hard film to watch. We see her take one step forward and then half a dozen steps back into the pit she's trying to claw her way out of. I've known people like this; ones who make you wonder how they could have gone so wrong so early in their lives. In Sherry's case, though, one moment at her daughter's birthday party makes everything crystalline. And to heart-breaking effect.

Shortness: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

2008-02-25T19:38:00.002-06:00

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)

Yeah, I see what you're doing here, and no, I don't care. It's all too Waiting For Godot for me. Fifteen minutes in I had a headache.

Approach with caution.

Should I Waste Two Hours On This?: Sunshine

2008-02-05T00:08:00.000-06:00

Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, R)

I blame Alien. That movie gave us an oft repeated sci-fi formula which goes like this: big space ship + small crew + the future + a dangerous mission = impending doom. It might not be the most original concept anymore, but Sunshine takes the formula to new heights.

The small crew in question was charged with reigniting our dying sun. After years in space, and when they’re just days away from completing their mission, they get a most unlikely surprise. They also entrust a major decision to their ship’s physicist, Capa (Cillian Murphy), who admittedly isn’t sure which of their two choices is better. Once Capa announces a verdict, though, the crew is on their way to a task much different from the one they planned for.

Because of the science fiction prescription, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that things will go from bad to worse to pretty damn fucked up really fast, and all the audience can hope for is to have fun getting there. Thanks to director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland (both of 28 Days Later fame), we do.

Boyle fills the screen with dazzling and disturbing images: the sun rising slowly over the ship’s horizon and incinerating a man trapped outside during a spacewalk, a nuclear reactor sparking to life, and a white room flowing with a crew member’s spilled blood. The visuals of Sunshine have all the more impact because while everything is futuristic, the technology and characters are still relatable.

For instance, there are few Star Trek moments in Sunshine. As stunning as the sight of the space ship is, it’s not much more super-charged than the kinds of space travel we have now. They do have something holodeck-like aboard their ship, but the experience isn’t fully interactive. And after a couple of years seeing the same people everyday, the crew is going a bit (understandably) batty.

The credit for this goes to Garland, who also smartly populates the crew with the right mix of likeables, crazies, ultimately-unsuitables and villains. Among the cast, all work well for their parts. Murphy continues his streak of strong, silent types who are forced to prove their worth. Michelle Yeoh is her usual steely, gorgeous self as the calm and very practical Corazon.

The biggest revelation in the cast for me was Chris Evans. He gives believable effort to tough, efficient Mace, and shows us that maybe there’s more to him than the grinning man-whoredom of Johnny Storm (The Fantastic Four).

Blockbusterish: Live Free or Die Hard

2007-08-06T01:29:00.000-05:00

Live Free or Die Hard (20th Century Fox, PG-13)

No one can say John McClane (Bruce Willis) doesn’t try. No New York City cop has single handedly thwarted as many terrorist plots or killed as many Euro-trash bad guys. And just when McClane has settled into a cozy life of divorced, over-protective dad-dom...guess who needs his help?

For one, nerdy computer hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) needs his help. McClane is sent to bring Farrell in for questioning after the FBI realizes that their computer files were hacked. What starts off as a routine suspect transport quickly turns into a life-or-death struggle, as McClane faces off against a band of henchmen sent by super-hacker Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) to kill our favorite Mac advocate.

Remember when McClane was the baddest hero on the block? No? Well, that’s because it’s been a long time, my friend. McClane is still a real guy who can think (or, more often, shoot) his way out of any problem. But do we care anymore?

Honestly, the answer is a little bit yes and a little bit no. Any action fan is going to love the adrenaline in the fast paced, almost non-stop action. McClane and the baddies are up to their old tricks: jumping, running, shooting, crashing and bleeding with the best of them. I’ve read that most of the action sequences were actually stunts as opposed to being filled with CGI and other computer-assisted whatnot, and you can tell. You feel like you’re in the action a lot of the time; whether it’s a blackout that causes a dangerous traffic jam in a New York City tunnel, or an explosion that threatens to flatten McClane and Farrell.

So, what’s the problem? Well, I was surprised that I didn’t feel very…excited. There was no edge-of-the-seat-nervous-stomach stuff that usually comes with rooting for an underdog in an impossible situation. Can McClane get out before the room blows up? Will he survive an attack by a karate-chopping badass? Is he going to get past Gabriel’s disciples to face off with the man himself? Of course! He’s John McClane, fucker!

My only real issue with Live Free or Die Hard (cool title, by the way) is that for all the magnificent action, the series is just tired. We know McClane is going to win. Everything. Against everyone. All the time. Yes, he gets banged up, but we never believe he’s in actual danger because he’s always made it through before.

And Willis? I like him, so I hate to say it, but he’s tired, too. At least he looks and sounds tired throughout the film. Frankly, that doesn’t help things a bit. To a certain extent I understand that may have been a conscious choice. The guy’s got to be thinking, “I’ve got to save the country by myself, again? Really?” But we don’t need that telegraphed to us for the entire movie. Every time Willis appeared on screen I sensed lethargy. The exact opposite of what you need in an action movie.

Listen to me, Bruce. When they try to talk you into Die Hard 5: Even Harder Dying, yell “yippee ki yay,” turn, and slowly walk away.