(past imperfect)
I saw this last weekend and loved it. It’s coming of age story, featuring Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson), a high school boy with a speech impediment. Hal doesn’t get the girl. Doesn’t learn how to speak normally. His father and mother break up and never get back together. His speech therapist acknowledges early on that he isn’t going to be much help. In fact, the only triumph in the entire movie involves Hal ordering a slice of pizza. Despite all this, it’s a feel good movie.
Highly recommended.
I really enjoyed this movie.
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is world weary and slick. He fixes every lousy situation that comes up at his firm, but can’t muster the strength of will to fix his own broke down life. Interestingly, his home life is in about the same shape as his firm, but this is only revealed slowly over the course of the picture, by revealing how bad off the firm actually is (the poor state of Clayton’s home life is established early on). By the time you understand how bad off things are at the firm, Clayton has already begun to see the light with his family. But this change in Clayton isn’t obvious until the final scene: the last scene felt like a toss-up, whether Clayton was looking for a pay off, or following the redemption trajectory. For me, the ambiguousness at the end was the highlight of the entire picture.
I had been interested in seeing this, but somehow never got around to it until this weekend.
I had heard about Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas when I lived in the Bronx. It seemed like every dope fiend had an opinion about who was the better businessman and who was nothing but a snitch. There was so much talk I hadn’t realized these guys were gangsters from the late 60s and early 70s.
Although it’s a true story, somehow the movie doesn’t seem to come together well. Lucas (Denzel Washington) is a smooth character, especially in contrast to the plodding Roberts (Russell Crowe). Lucas is held up as an icon of black entrepreneurial skill, despite being a gangster. I am used to movies with a bad guy that you sympathize with, but Lucas doesn’t really get a sympathetic treatment. He just is what he is. Roberts comes off like a mope.
Not sure what to make of it all.
I saw The Bank Job tonight, which is supposed to be based on a true heist story (aren’t they all!). The twist here is that some pretty heavyweight British political figures from the 70s had their asses on the line (literally and figuratively: blackmail is a big part of the plot), including one good looking princess cavorting with a few men somewhere in the Caribbean. Jason Stratham does a great job kicking everyone’s ass and getting the girl.
Here are my picks (in no particular order):
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: The Potter movies are turning into a fine franchise and this one was probably my second favorite of the whole bunch. I find myself looking forward to them, even though I’ve read all the books and know the story. Imelda Staunton was deliciously wicked.
No Country for Old Men: Some smarty pants movie reviewer (probably David Bianculli?) said that none of the recent slew of Iraq war movies spoke to the dark times we’re in as well as this picture. I have to agree. It’s an unrelenting character study of evil.
The Bourne Ultimatum: Typically the heros in these kinds of movies kill with impunity, never giving a second thought to their actions. Everything is justified (presumably) because the bad guys are just that bad. This one breaks the mold, with its The-Bad-Guys-Are-Us plot.
3:10 to Yuma: In the old Westerns, the good guy was the good guy because he was the most dynamic, driven personality in town. 3:10 to Yuma is just like that, but now the chrisma extends to the bad guy, too.
The Lives of Others: There was lots to like here, from the stazi officer’s gentle seduction as he monitors the writer’s life, to the crazy paranoia in the stazi ranks (the lunch room scene was fabulous). I’m so glad they skipped the big romantic ending and opted instead for the much subtler book dedication ending.
28 Weeks Later: Good, tense, horror. I like that it didn’t depend on buckets of blood, but relied more on the psychology of guilt and betrayal for its tension. I wish zombie Dad hadn’t kept coming back, but this flaw wasn’t enough to lessen the movie for me.
Juno: Teen pregenancy is becoming its own little sub-catagory under the coming-of-age genre. I loved the snappy dialogue, the quirky characters, even the feel good ending.
That’s it. But there are a lot of movies I haven’t had time to see. My Netflix queue is packed with a ton of good stuff from 2007, including There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, American Gangster, and Gone Baby Gone.
In 2008, I have to get out to more movies!
The triumph of evil over good.
Good has nothing going for it in this movie. The last violent scene felt like the punch line to the whole movie: Not even random bad luck can stop an evil man. In contrast, Moss (Josh Brolin) refuses to abandon or even mess around on his wife and for this he gets greased by a truck full of Mexican drug dealers.
Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is a good guy, but he can’t stop even a single one of the bad things that happens. The old man with the cats saying he would forgive the person who (presumably) had put him in the chair is good, but his situation is pretty bleak. Hell, Moss would have gotten off scot-free if not for his need to do a good deed.
Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the bad guy with the bad hair (and an unpronounceable name), steals the show. The scene with the coin and the old Texas gas station attendant is more effective at articulating an evil character than anything else from recent memory. And it contains no blood.
Just a great movie. This is a celebration of free-spirited individuality, a classic story of rising above one’s circumstances, just like most of the good old John Wayne and John Ford Westerns of the 50s and 40s. But it’s also got a Twenty-first Century sensibility, with Russell Crowe as Ben Wade, a personable cutthroat who actually wears a black hat and Christian Bale as Dan Evans, a gimpy farmer who clearly knows how to motivate even the most desperate of men. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s got a great script. I particularly liked the two reveals from last reel as Evans convinces the outlaw Wade to do something crazy.
Eastern Promises best feature is a solid plot that doesn’t seem to fall apart with scrutiny.
Viggo Mortensen ends up being rather engaging as Nikolai, but I was on the fence about him and the whole movie for way too long. That’s bad, but by far the biggest problem is that all the characters and situations are fucking depressing. Except for Naomi Watts, the bleeding-heart lead chick, everyone is a fuck up that speaks Russian and wears poor fitting black leather jackets.
It’s also got a lot of blood churning slasher shots. When did thriller movies become the new slasher movies?
I liked the last half hour quite a bit, but the first hour and a half seemd to drag on for me.
This is just a great movie.
It’s about redemption, but not just for Jason Bourne, an incredibly likeable assassin who discovered (in previous movies) that he has been turned into a killing machine by the government. Moreover, he has lost his taste for killing. In this movie, we discover his own complicity in the nasty business of turning himself into a killer. The movie doesn’t actually say, but one imagines it was September 11 that drove Bourne to such desperate measures. Now he’s sorry and wants to make up for it, indicting (but not killing!) all of the right wing loonies he’s been in bed with the past few years.
Bourne is an American everyman in a Post-Iraq-Goat-Rope-Brought-To-Us-By-Our-Paranoia world. In this movie, he has finally come around. Good for him.
Good for us.
I recently took my family to see the Disney movie Meet the Robinsons in 3D, yet I couldn’t discern any 3D. Yes, I did have my glasses on, as instructed. I still couldn’t see anything in 3D. What a rip off!
This is a terrible customer experience. I paid extra to see the movie in three dimensions, yet I was only able to view it in two. I want Walt Disney to come to my house and act out the movie for me. I can get my money’s worth and he can fulfill his contractual obligation.
I wonder if I can sue Disney? If you are a lawyer, would you please weigh-in on this?
But seriously: This was my first 3D movie, so I didn’t even realize I had this problem. Now I wish I had never gone! Instead of the comforting allure of knowing I will get around to seeing a 3D movie, I am now confronted with the cold reality of never being able to see a 3D movie. Ever.
How is this even possible? I thought seeing in three dimensions was the default view!
