Present Tense

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.

I watched these two seemingly vastly different movies last week. One features a child molester and a psycopathic teenager, the other offers an uptight octogenarian and a young politician. They don’t seem to have anything in common, but really they do: unlikeable characters.

As far as unlikeable characters go the teenage psychopath (Ellen Page) isn’t so bad. I’ve dated girls who were arguably sicker and possibly more vindictive. But the child molester (Patrick Wilson) was too much for me. At one point, he makes a tearful confession to attempt to explain why he molests children. The idea here is to make his character more human, so that we viewers will switch allegiance from the teenage girl, and instead begin rooting for the pedophile. But it just completely backfires for me: I find myself wondering why I am watching a movie about such reprehensible characters.

Does anyone like being toyed with like this at the movies?

The quick answer is, “Yes!”

At least, I enjoyed watching the redemption of the distasteful royal characters in the Queen. Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) is delightfully imperious, even when she behaves so coldly toward poor Diana, Princess of Wales, who in some ways steals the show even with no character playing her part. Although Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) is never really an unlikeable character, he gets the most ham handed scene in the movie: halfway through, as we’re all but on the side of the Queen, he upbraids one of his colleagues for not realizing how strong, resiliant, and noble the Queen truly is. You can’t help but feel director Stephen Frears lost faith in his audience’s ability to grasp what was going on, and decided to have Tony Blair explian it all, as if it were a cheap detective story. Despite this scene, Sheen does a fabulous job, too.

This is the story of Chris Gardner (Will Smith), who makes very poor business decisions until finally, triumphantly, he becomes a millionaire stock broker. If it weren’t a true story, you would laugh at its Hollywood ending. But it is a true story. And if the movie’s ending seems like a fairy tale, its perspective seems also somewhat jarring. Typically Hollywood portrays stock brokers as shallow and self absorbed, but this movie holds them out as heroes. And Chris is going to break into their ranks no matter what it takes: We watch as he loses his marriage, his home, and ultimately his pride.

I love Chris’s penchant for remaining unflappable, despite being thrust into humiliating circumstances. At one point he is interviewing for a position in an upscale brokerage firm in a T-shirt and soiled pants. When the boss rhetorically asks what people would say if the firm were to hire a person who interviewed with no shirt, Chris unhesitatingly chirps, “He must have had on some really nice pants.”

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