Movie Review of WAR WITCH and THE SILENCE by Howard Casner

Posted: March 16, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

War Witch, written and directed by Kim Nguyen, a Quebecois filmmaker, is about a 12 year old girl, Komona, who is abducted and forced to be a guerilla for a rebel army somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The story is brutal and frank and worthwhile.  It’s a film that probably should be seen just because of the horrifying and important subject matter.  At the same time, I wish I could say I liked it more than I did; but if truth be told, I felt most of it didn’t really show me anything I hadn’t seen before.  When it did, when it’s revealed, for example, that Komona has the ability to see the dead, it’s quite thrilling and scary in a way that I wanted the rest of the movie to be, but wasn’t.   But this aspect of the film, which was new and exciting, never really seemed that integral to the rest of the story (it’s called War Witch, but I often felt the Witch part of the movie was almost an afterthought).  In the end, I think the real issue for me, and I hate to be heartless, is that I never felt that Komona was a real person, but was more of a symbol of all the atrocities that are taking place in the war torn areas of Africa.  I never became as deeply and emotionally involved as I did, say, with Hushpuppy from Beasts of the Southern Wild.  Nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the 2012 Academy Awards.

 

 

In The Silence, a teenager is raped and killed and her body disposed of in a lake.  The culprits are never caught.  Twenty three years later, another teenager goes missing, from the exact same location and everyone wonders if there is a connection.  That, basically, is the crux of this German murder mystery, the second film from writer and director Baran bo Odar: why was the murderer of the first girl silent for so long and why did he decide to speak now, twenty three years later?   And who in the audience wouldn’t want to know the answer to that?

 

The Silence certainly starts off well and there is much to like.  It’s intelligently written and emotionally involving.  The characters are well drawn.  It has some beautifully sweeping God’s eye views that are thrilling to watch (for some reason that I’m not sure I can explain, there is something riveting to the way bo Odar films a car from above pulling out of a garage and driving out of the parking area of an apartment complex).   But somewhere along the way, the whole thing loses its forward momentum.  I’m not totally sure why, but I suspect it’s because bo Odar is trying to make something out of the story that it was never intended to be and the harder he tries, the more clearly it appears that he isn’t quite succeeding.

 

The Silence is what is often called over directed.  Bo Odar uses alls sorts of camera angles and editing tricks and stylistic flourishes to make us think this is not really a movie about a twenty-three year old murder, but a study of a group of people who are haunted by unexplained tragedy.  In the same way, the screenplay is also overwritten, constantly getting off subject to focus on the personal lives of the various characters to show the audience that it is not about who did it, but the people something was done to.  What happens is that about half way through, one wants to say, okay, I get it, these people are broken, haunted, destroyed—now can we get back to why someone would kill someone in the same way someone was killed twenty three years earlier?

 

This directorial approach is the same method Chan-wook Park employed for Stoker and Orson Welles for Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai.   But in the end, just as Park and Welles, no matter how hard they tried , couldn’t disguise the fact that they were dealing with routine material, and that there was no there, there (though at least Welles is a ton of fun when he did it), no matter what bo Odar does, The Silence is basically an Agatha Christie whodunit and no more.

 

So I was hardly surprised to find out that the movie is based on a book in a series of books by Jan Costin Wagner, a German crime fiction writer who sets his stories in Finland.   It has that feeling of a mystery in a string of mysteries, thrillers filled with those quaint characters that reappear again and again, with a plot that starts out with one of those intriguing hooks that instantly rivet one, and in which any deeper meaning is merely along for the ride and not the goal itself.  It’s very reminiscent of those crime series one watches on television week after week, like Beck, or  Wallander, or in the U.S., Columbo.  But perhaps the most telling aspect of bo Odar’s attempt to make something more out of the story than what is here is that the books by Wagner have a reoccurring character the mystery is built around, detective Kimmo Joentaa.  As far as I can tell, this character is not in the movie, perhaps another attempt by bo Odar to make it seem less like a whodunit and more like, well, “art” (but for my money, a somewhat unsuccessful ruse).

 

The acting is a mixed bag, which also doesn’t help.  Ulrich Thomsen as the original murderer (don’t worry, I’m not giving anything away, this happens in the opening scene) is the strongest performer here, one of those bad guys that one almost comes to have some empathy for.  But the cast is also filled with a couple of people who go a bit overboard, like Sebastian Blomberg, as an officer grieving over losing his wife to cancer (in his defense, he’s also stuck with one of the most incompetent bosses you’re ever going to see in detective fiction).   And in the end, the mystery is never totally resolved; why the murderer did it is revealed, but not why he waited so long to do it (and though the solution is intriguing in an Agatha Christie whodunit way, it’s not all that convincing).

Movie Review of Oz The Great and Powerful and The Monk by Howard Casner

Posted: March 13, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Oz The Great and Powerful, the new fantasy film written by Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire and directed, for some reason, by Sam Raimi, is a movie about a man with Peter Pan syndrome and has commitment issues who ends up in a land far, far away where he gets caught up in a cat fight between three woman (Michelle Williams, Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz) who are jealous of each other’s looks and/or the man in their lives.  Yes, that’s about as much imagination as is shown in this conglomeration culled from the characters in the books of Frank L. Baum (of The Wizard of Oz fame).

 

It’s also a movie starring the incredibly, if not profoundly, miscast James Franco (easily as miscast as he was as host of the Oscars) in the titular role.  It’s a movie in which every scene is designed for maximum 3-D effect, while the scenery, characters and dialog are as flat as Franco’s acting (and with backgrounds that have rarely looked as much like matte drawings as they do here).  It’s a movie in which Zach Braf, a former romantic lead of such outings as Scrubs, Garden State and The Last Kiss, has fallen to such depths as to be cast in a second lead, as a flying monkey no less, yet he still steals every single scene he is in.

 

And finally, it’s a movie that can’t have a satisfactory ending because the filmmakers have painted themselves into a corner.  The only truly dramatically satisfactory resolution is for Oz to return to Kansas to save former girlfriend Annie (Michelle Williams) from a loveless marriage.  But he can’t leave Oz because he’s got to be there when Dorothy arrives.  But his character arc needs to be resolved, so he ends up kissing Glinda (also played by Michelle Williams, and I suppose that from the filmmakers’ points of view, one woman is the same as another, so it really doesn’t matter if Oz ends up with Annie or Glinda as long as they are played by the same actress), but we know that this relationship can’t last because there’s no such relationship when D-girl arrives.    And isn’t there something just a little creepy in that a lead character in a family film is awarded with sex for saving the day?

 

Oz The Great and Powerful doesn’t work.  It’s unimaginative in design, acting, direction and writing.  Perhaps it’s best to say that it’s a movie that is no Jack the Giant Slayer and let it go at that.

 

Meanwhile, The Monk is also about a character that is also supposed to be charismatic and inspiring.  It’s the new movie written by Dominik Moll (who also directed) and Anne-Louise Trividic.  Moll also directed the highly recommended films With a Friend Like Harry… and Lemming and there seems to be a theme here—that of some evil or perverseness worming its way into a seemingly safe situation.

 

The Monk is about, well, this monk Ambrosio who lived in Spain in the late 18th century.  He’s very popular.  His sermons draw SRO crowds.  I have to be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure why.  His homilies are pretty doom and gloomy stuff and the character, as played by Vincent Cassel, is not the most charismatic of preachers.  He’s actually much better at confession where he’s able to cut through bullshit with a butter knife.

 

Ambrosio’s main philosophical point is that Satan has no more power over any of us than we can stand.  I guess that was too much of a Job like statement, because it’s not long before Satan (played by Sergi Lopez, one of the go to guys for playing the devil these days, I guess) arrives to take up the gauntlet the monk has thrown him (Lopez is actually in the opening scene, which in many ways kind of demonstrates one of the structural weaknesses of the story—since the audience doesn’t know this is Satan, it never gets related to the rest of the story until the movie’s over, which isn’t very satisfactory).  But at any rate, Satan sends evil to the monastery and since this is based on a Catholic novel written in 1796, evil must arrive in the form of a woman.   And Ambrosio’s beliefs are quickly proved wrong because Satan’s power is greater than the father can withstand and Ambrosio is soon heading toward an Oedipal like tragic ending.

 

But the movie never quite worked for me mainly because Satan is able to defeat Ambrosio by using magical powers and forcing Ambrosio to do things he would never normally do.  Satan’s not the devil here, he’s a Jedi knight.  So instead of being emotionally involved in Ambrosio’s downfall, all I could think was, “Hey, that’s cheating”.   I guess the whole thing’s suppose to be some sort of metaphor, but if so, it all felt a bit too vague to me until I didn’t know what the moral of the story was supposed to be: beware of Satan because he’s really Yoda?

 

The real problem with the movie, though, may be the basic structure.  It’s a tad all over the place.  There are three major through lines and the movie takes a bit too long in bringing them all together (and one never seems satisfactorily integrated).  And the movie also tries to implicate the monk for the fate of a young nun, something to which Ambrosio’s guilt is tenuous at best and to which I called “shenanigans”.

 

I understand that the great prankster filmmaker Louis Bunuel wanted to make a movie of the novel over the years and one can see why.  It has all the ingredients that would appeal to someone with the impious sensibility of that anti-Catholic filmmaker.  And he quite possibly would have been able to bring a certain perverse vision to the material that might have been more successful.  But for me, this movie is just a slight misstep in Moll’s career.

Movie Review of STOKER and JACK THE GIANT KILLER by Howard Casner

Posted: March 5, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

When Michael Haneke, the acclaimed filmmaker of Amour and The White Ribbon, came to the U.S., he met with a producer who gave him a script to consider.  It was an action film of some sort, a WWII something or other, a story totally inappropriate to Haneke for anyone who knew anything about his films.  To paraphrase his reaction, he asked, Is this what Hollywood is?  A place where they just grab any old thing they have lying around in a drawer to give you that hasn’t been produced yet?

 

This is what I thought while watching the movie Stoker.  It’s directed by Chan-wook Park, the popular South Korean director of Oldboy and Thirst, and though I can’t say that’s how he got hired to direct this film, it certainly feels like some producer just had it lying around in his drawer and foisted it upon him.

 

The film was written by Wentworth Miller (his first foray into screenwriting, but I guess he had to do something to pass the time while behind bars) with Erin Cressida Wilson (Fur, Secretary) given credit as a contributing writer.  In many ways, it’s basically one of those women in danger films that almost every actress made at one time or another in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, from Barbara Stanwyck to Joan Crawford to Katherine Hepburn (yes, even Hepburn made one).  As in those films, a psychopath or sociopath or psychotic sociopath or sociopathic psychotic worms their way into a household; anything from camp to high tension occurs (and usually both).  In this entry in the once popular subgenre, when the patriarch of a wealthy family dies, his brother suddenly shows up at his funeral and takes a rather creepy interest in his niece (the man is called Uncle Charlie for those who like film references and have seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt).   Various bad things happen as a result.

 

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the screenplay.  It certainly gets the job done.  At the same time, for someone of Park’s oeuvre, it’s rather routine.  No, I have to be honest here.  It’s very routine. No, that doesn’t quite do it.  It’s ridiculously and insultingly routine.  Is this really the best the U.S. can offer a filmmaker of Park’s stature?

 

To Park’s credit, he directs the hell out of the movie.  He fills it with odd angles and creepy sounds (there’s suppose to be some through line about the niece, India, being able to hear things other people can’t, though there never seemed to be a pay off for it).  There’re all sorts of overlaps and dissolves and plenty of visual metaphors (like a spider crawling up India’s leg and going between her thighs—subtle much?).   Park gives it the old Orson Welles try (who also had to constantly flaunt his directing in order to cover up lackluster material as in Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai).  And it must be said, Stoker is often an effective and even beautiful movie.

 

But it’s also one of these stories where people go missing and no one seems that concerned about what happened to them, unless it’s convenient for the plot.   Everyone who knows Charlie’s secret seems extremely worried about India, but not her mother, Evelyn, who in many ways is chopped liver by the time the movie is over.   The two both share the same house with Charlie, but it’s only India who anyone is concerned about (I thought sure the big revelation was going to be that Charlie was actually India’s real father, but no, this interest of Charlie’s for India was left a bit vague for me).   And the ending doesn’t really resolve anything or provide a satisfying emotional resolution.  In fact, by the time it was over, I was wondering whether a bit too much of it ended up on the cutting room floor.

 

The movie is nicely cast for the most part.  The actors do the best they can with the material.  Mia Wasikowski is India and she’s fine (she’s very good at sexual yearning and having an orgasm while playing the piano with her Uncle).  Nicole Kidman handles the material well in her roll as an escapee from a Tennessee William’s play.  The strongest acting comes from that remarkable down under discovery Jacki Weaver, and her performance here may make her one of the finest character actresses in films since Thelma Ritter.  Mathew (A Single Man, Matchpoint, Watchmen) Goode is Uncle Charlie; he’s lovely to look at, but his performance is a bit flat, like his American accent.

 

I know I’ve been really hard on this film.  But I think it’s because Park deserves better.  The U.S. film industry has chewed up and spewed out many an artist over the years and I would hate to have the same thing happen to Park.  But Stoker is not a promising beginning for an American career.

 

I saw Jack the Giant Slayer.  Yes, I did.  It was at this nice theater I love to go to and there really wasn’t much else showing and a friend wanted to go for lack of a better movie out there to see, so we went.   It’s not a disaster.  If only it were; it would have been a lot more fun.  It’s actually, in certain ways, better written and acted and at times cleverer than Stoker.   It’s directed by Bryan Singer (are we ever going to have another movie like The Usual Suspects again), has four authors (yes, four), and stars Nicholas Hoult, Ewan McGregor, Eddie Marsan and Ian McShane, with Stanley Tucci as the gay character who can’t be identified as gay because that would be offensive.   But one spends most of the time wondering why any of them actually wanted to do the film.  It’s one of those movies in which a woman claims to be raised by her mother to be a feminist, but the chief lesson she was taught is to marry for love.  It’s one of those movies meant for a family audience, but it has so many people being slaughtered, that it’s just kind of depressing.  It’s one of those movies where the good guys’ army is being massacred, but they never seem to run out of soldiers.  In the end, it’s just one of those movies, one of the worst things a movie can be.

Movie Review of NO and THE GATEKEEPERS by Howard Casner

Posted: March 2, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | 846 Comments »

The movie No takes place in Chile in 1988 when the country’s president, Augusto Pinochet, has been forced by international pressure to hold a referendum on whether he should hold free elections.  His solution to keeping his seat of power is to give both his side and his opponents fifteen minutes a night, and no more, as a period of time in which to make their case (and Pinochet, as the reigning government, would basically then also have the rest of the day to indirectly make his case—like American politicians when they run for office even when they are “not running for office”).  In response, the other side convinces the top ad man of Chile, Rene Saavedra, to run their campaign.

 

The basic conceit of the story, and it’s a good one, is that instead of creating serious ads that deal with the seriousness of the subject seriously, Saavedra decides to sell the referendum the way he sells soda pop—with a jingle and upbeat music, showing lots of attractive people singing and dancing and partying (though Saavedra does seem to have an odd fetish for using mimes in everything he does—but it is the 1980’s).  And thus the campaign for “No” (or actually “No more”, which he cleverly turns it into) is born.

 

The film is directed and written by Pedro Peirano (who also directed the cult favorite Tony Manero about a serial killer obsessed with the lead character from Saturday Night Fever) from a play by Antonio Skarmeta.  Peirano’s stylistic approach is to shoot the movie digitally with a washed out brown patina that makes it look like those ancient home movies your relatives would make you watch every holiday.

 

I’m not sure why this approach was chosen.  It doesn’t give the story a nostalgic feel (like the black and white photography of The Last Picture Show).  It doesn’t give the movie a new wave neo realism feel (like The Bicycle Thief).  All it does is give it a feel of Mad Men meets mumblecore, with all the enervative energy that latter aesthetic movement provides.

 

The most interesting and dramatically compelling moments in the film are when the characters debate the approach that Saavedra wants to use; whether they want to treat the campaign with all the gravity it deserves, or whether they want to win.  And Saavedra and his supporters have a point.  You don’t sell beer by convincing people how good it tastes or any facts about the product, you sell it by showing tons of sexy people partying while drinking it.  And Saavedra’s commercials are great; they made me want to vote “No”.  But so little of the movie seems focused on this aesthetic conflict, the movie sort of feels like it’s kind of meandering.

 

Gael Garcia Bernal plays the lead.  He’s not that effective, but I don’t think it’s his fault.  He doesn’t really seem to have much of a character to play.  His adman is almost as dull as the brown patina suffocating him.  He’s certainly no Don Draper.  Which may be the real problem here.  In the end, maybe the movie should have listened to its central idea and used a bit more of Sterling Cooper.

 

 

The Gatekeepers, the new documentary directed by Dror Moreh, is basically a series of talking head interviews with all the surviving former leaders of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency.  It’s a worthy film on an important subject with the most revelatory aspect of the film, at least to me, being that all the interviewees seem to come to the same conclusion: that the troubles that exist between Palestine and Israel today are the direct result of Israel not upholding the Oslo accords while allowing Israeli’s to move onto Palestinian land.  I was quite shocked at hearing this (not at the factuality of what they said so much as that these men would actually admit to it) and am a little surprised that this part of the film hasn’t received more attention.

 

But though the subject matter is important and in many ways fascinating, I have to be honest and say that I did find my mind wandering more than I would have liked.  It’s not that it’s boring.  It’s not exactly.  But there are times when it did feel like I was attending a series of history lectures at college.  Like the professors, the talking heads get the job done and are sometimes riveting, but in that hit and miss way that’s not much more exciting than attending classes.

Movie Review of LORE, LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE and YOSSI by Howard Casner

Posted: February 28, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments »

Lore, the new German import written by Cate Shortland (who also directed) and Robin Mukherjee, is a movie filled with taut and tense images, one crowding after the other, confrontational, harsh, difficult.  There’s very little dialog.  The whole story is told in anxious edits and quick juxtapositions, nervous close ups and cropped frames that all feel on edge.

 

The basic story revolves around Lore, a teenager and daughter of two very important members of the German Nazi party.  She and her younger sister and much younger twin brothers, as well as a newborn, lead privileged lives.  When Hitler kills himself and her parents are arrested, the care of the family is left to her and she has to take them all the way across Germany to her Aunt’s farm in Olm.   When Lore and her siblings are about to be taken in by some American troops for traveling without permission, they are rescued by Lore’s worst nightmare, Thomas, a Jewish man just released from a concentration camp and who claims to be their brother.  His papers and his background get them the permission to carry on.

 

Lore has moments of power and it’s never uninteresting.  The acting, by Saskia Rosendahl as Lore and Kai Malini as Thomas, is strong; Thomas especially has haunting eyes that are hard to look away from.  Lore’s realization that her father was not just someone in the Nazi party, but a perpetrator of great horrors, is affecting.  The things the group has to do to survive are often horrifying and moving.

 

At the same time, when Lore and the others make their way to their Aunt’s and Lore does something to show the completion of her character arc, the loss of innocence and her coming of age, I found I wasn’t quite as moved as I wanted to be.  There are probably several reasons for this.  One is a revelation about Thomas that, I think, watered down his part in her journey (I knew he wasn’t quite who he claimed to be; but who he did turn out to be, was a disappointment as far as I was concerned).

 

In addition, Lore’s journey is two parts.  One is her sexual awakening (which never quite got awakened) and her realization of the horrors of what Germany did.  These two journeys didn’t always fit well together and each weakened the effectiveness of the other.  And finally, what Lore went through was moving; but somehow the realization that the Nazi’s weren’t very nice people isn’t as powerful or unique a journey as it perhaps once was.  In the end, there may not be enough new here.

 

 

I couldn’t begin to tell you why I really got a kick out of Abbas (Certified Copy) Kiarostami’s new film Like Someone in Love.  I’m not sure what the point was.  It’s very odd and quirky and kind of off kilter and all of the twelve points of the indie cinema law.  But I really enjoyed it.

 

The movie is basically a series of conversations in which someone won’t take no for an answer.  The plot revolves around a prostitute Akiko (played by Rin Takanishi with a perky pout) who doesn’t want to go on her next job.  The john is Takashi (Tadashi Okuno, who has a calm look of constant bewilderment on his face), a professor of books on sociology and violence, but once Akiko comes over, he frustratingly tries to put off doing some work for a colleague who has called.  The next day, Akiko’s boyfriend (Ryo Kase, with a pair of the most expressive doe eyes since Sylvester Stallone) confronts Akiko because he won’t accept that she wants to be left alone.  He doesn’t know she’s a prostitute and when he meets Takashi, he assumes he’s her grandfather.  I wouldn’t say hilarity ensures, but awkwardness and quirkiness certainly does.

 

There’s something about Kiarostami’s approach to telling the story.  The opening scene begins with someone talking in a restaurant, but the speaker is not seen.  It’s disorienting, but intriguing, as the speaker continues arguing with someone who just won’t leave her alone.  Then Akiko is revealed, on her own at a table, while people enter and exit the restaurant and the world goes on around her.   This hyper realistic background, a constant leit motif (perhaps most haunting when Akiko has a cabbie twice drive her around a monument where her Aunt is waiting for her) is often mesmerizing.  It’s the way the whole movie is shot, constant confrontations played out in front of a naturalist background, that pulls you in and keeps your riveted.

 

The movie just kind of ends with a shocking act of violence.  If this is Kiarostami’s attempt to tie everything together by commenting on the professor’s books or field of study, I’m not sure it achieves its goal.  As I said, I’m not sure what it all means and you do leave the theater a bit puzzled. But still, I loved it.

 

Yossi is a sequel to Yossi & Jagger, the 2002 movie written by Avner Bernheimer and directed by Eytan Fox, about a love affair between two men on the front lines in the Israeli army.  It sends with the sudden and tragic death of Jagger in Yossi’s arms, shot by the enemy.  Neither was ever able to tell anyone about their relationship.

 

It’s fourteen years later and Yossi (still played by Ohad Knoller) has not gotten over Jagger’s death.  He is now a doctor, but still closeted, haunted, his body not the soldierly trim it once was, and, perhaps worst of all, his grief has left him with a nightmarish sense of fashion.   After a few stressful days at work, brought on partially by the mother of Jagger coming into Yossi’s hospital for a check up, Yossi decides to take a vacation.  He ends up giving a ride to some soldiers heading to a resort, one of whom, a handsome young thing (Oz Zehavi), becomes more and more interested in Yossi, something that Yossi has a hard time comprehending.  But the question then becomes, can someone start over, are there second chances in life, can someone come back from a tragedy and find happiness?

 

The sequel is written by Itay Segal, but still directed by Fox.   It’s a moving and never boring.  At the same time, it feels a bit slight, especially after Fox’s last film, the amazingly clever and powerful The Bubble, a modern day adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.  And it may feel a bit too much like an older man’s fantasy (Fred Astaire made a few of these films).  But there is also something moving in catching up with Yossi and seeing him find new meaning in life.

Movie of Review BEAUTIFUL CREATURES by Howard Casner

Posted: February 20, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | 173 Comments »

Beautiful Creatures, the new slough of despair, riddled with angst teenage film written and directed by Richard LaGravenese, is one of those movies that preaches against intolerance and bigotry and then makes cartoons out of every Christian in town, except for the one who’s black and therefore a true believer (stereotype much?).   It’s also a teenage version of Bewitched in which a mortal falls in love with a witch (oh, all right, Christine O’Donnell, they are not witches, they are casters—happy now?), but with more adolescent ennui and existential dread.  Finally, it’s also one of the myriad of films that we’re going to be plagued with (and I mean plagued) as various producers desperately try to fill the void that has been formed by the absence of the Twilight franchise.

 

I think it’s safe to say that Beautiful Creatures didn’t do a lot for me (I only went because I finally decided it had a better chance of working than that new Die Hard film—unfortunately, from what I’m hearing, I made the right choice).

 

To be fair, there is one marvelous scene near the beginning of Beautiful Creatures that did suggest the movie might actually go somewhere.  Not anywhere great, mind you, I wasn’t that optimistic; but, you know, somewhere.  In this scene, our hapless hero Ethan (played by Alden Ehrenreich, who has such an unnerving resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio, he could play his younger brother) is put under a spell by caster Macon (Jeremy Irons—yes, that Jeremy Irons) and asked what he’s going to do with his life.  It’s already been readily established that he is applying to every college more than a thousand miles away in order to get out of his podunk, one-horse town.  But instead of going there, he instead finds himself spouting out that he’s going to college locally so he can take care of his father and end up teaching in town, making a disastrous marriage and cheating on his wife and drinking heavily and having a heart attack at age 52, etc., etc., until he dies at age 62 by hanging himself (but with the rather brilliant coup de grace that his body won’t be found for a few days).

 

But alas and alack, this going somewhere twas not to be, for a few scenes later, Macon and another character, Sarafine, who has taken over the body of the local religious bigot Mrs. Lincoln (played by Emma Thompson—yes, that Emma Thompson), have a lengthy pax de duex  in a church that goes on and on…and on.  And at this point, this very point, the movie crashes and burns and, to mix metaphors, gets buried so deep, not even George Romero could resurrect it.

 

And speaking of Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson, not to mention Viola Davis and Eileen Atkins and Margo Martindale (yes, that David, Atkins and Martindale), why is it in England when they use their great actors and award winners for escapist fare, they give them movies like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the James Bond films, but in the U.S. they give them stuff like…like…well, like this?

 

But you have to hand it to them.  All the actors are game and they play it all as if it were written by the bard himself (one doesn’t know whether to give them credit where credit is due for that, or just sit down and weep tears of Dido).  At any rate, it hardly matters.  Most of the time one just sits there not entranced by their performances, but just trying to figure out why they would make a movie like this.

 

Yeah, I don’t think Beautiful Creatures did a lot for me.

Movie Review of SHANGHAI CALLING and 5 BROKEN CAMERAS by Howard Casner

Posted: February 20, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | 16 Comments »

At the end of Shanghai Calling, the new ex-pat comedy written and directed by Daniel Hsai, a reporter summarizes the central character’s journey by telling the audience that our not-so-intrepid hero has changed, but that perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising: Shanghai, itself, is a changing city and it can have that affect on people.

 

I found this observation to be a bit odd, to say the least, mainly because the character is never changed one iota by Shanghai.  In fact, this up and coming city barely phases him a bit.  What changes him is pg.  101 of whatever screenwriting book is popular at the moment.  It’s not Shanghai that does the trick.  It’s formula, and not a particularly impressive use of it either.

 

This central character is called Sam.  He’s one of those obnoxious, egocentric, vain, know it all, extremely full and sure of himself (well, you know the type) characters (and to top it all off, he’s a lawyer, a deadly conglomeration).  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, he’s also incredibly bland, boring and banal (an even deadlier conglomeration).   He is sent by his bosses to Shanghai to run the local office of his law firm because he’s of Chinese ancestry, even though he doesn’t speak the language and hasn’t, as he states somewhat hyperbolically I suspect, been further than 79th Street in New York (he’s played by Daniel Henney, who, it must be admitted, is rather deft at double takes).  Cultural misunderstandings, legal shenanigans and romantic entanglements ensue, all on the exact page numbers they are suppose to ensue on, I would bet.

 

It’s almost impossible to care what happens to Sam.  Well, not exactly.  He’s actually the kind of character you want to fail.  He’s the kind of character you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.   So, as only happens in the movies, he’s cast as the romantic lead.  Yes, for some reason that only film deities can imagine, when he meets the female romantic lead, a woman who thought her first husband was such an awful excuse for a human being that she moved with her daughter to Shanghai to make sure she never has to set eyes on him again, she actually thinks Sam might be husband material (of course, this might actually explain her first disastrous relationship if this is the sort of choices she keeps making in men).

 

Which is where formula, like Ecstasy, really kicks in, and in high gear.  It’s as if Hsai suddenly came to the realization of, OMG, we have to make this guy likeable in order to have a happy ending, so Hsai suddenly, out of nowhere, gives Sam something to do that’s not true or consistent with who he is, that’s not only not organic to his character, but is so totally out of it—he has Sam bond with a little girl.

 

And the story just gets clunky, clunkier, clunkiest after that.  It’s one of those plots where the hero is desperate to get something done, so he stops for a drink or has lunch instead (again, seemingly for no other reason than Hsai needs Sam to do something likeable).  It’s also one of those plots that depends on Sam coincidentally running into people at just the right time (like the said female romantic lead).

 

Other plot turns are confusing.  Sam makes a legal suggestion to a client that his assistant strongly advises him against.  The point is to demonstrate how pompous and unwilling to listen this asshole of a hero is.  But it’s unclear why the assistant advised against Sam’s course of action.  And by the time the whole rigmarole is over, it actually seems that Sam’s advice was the correct course of action.  His first act story reversal and second act plot twists are not caused by his advice being wrong, but by a crook who would have been a crook no matter what Sam told his client to do (there’s also something a little fishy here wherein a client gets a licensing agreement signed without his lawyer being present or handling it himself; but I can’t really answer to that).

 

At the end, there is, in many ways, a significant scene in which Sam has to decide whether to stay or leave Shanghai (and if you don’t know what decision he’s going to ultimately make, you need to get out to the movies or watch TV more).  To help in this decision, there is a montage where Sam remembers all the people he has run into while in town.   What’s odd is that I couldn’t figure out how any of these encounters could have convinced him of anything, much less make him want to stick around.  It’s a last ditch effort to fulfill a typical, and somewhat clichéd, character arc, and it, like the movie as a whole, comes up a bit short.

 

 

5 Broken Cameras is a documentary about a Palestinian farmer who used five cameras over the years (replacing each one as they were broken) to record a history of his family and other locals’ resistance to the encroachment of new Israeli settlements on their land.  The subject matter is important and there are some powerful moments (and some funny ones, as when the Palestinians try to use the Israeli’s own ploys against them—you build a building on our side of the border and refuse to take it down because it’s against the law to tear down concrete buildings, we’ll build a concrete building on your side of the border that you can’t tear down because it’s against the law—though they take it down anyway).   At the same time, as much as I wanted to be gripped by what was going on, I never felt fully drawn in.  The directors, Emad Burnat (the farmer who filmed the events) and Guy Davidi, were never able to create a strong enough narrative to affect me as emotionally as I wanted or needed.  But it does have an optimistic ending—the border fence came down and the Israeli courts forced the authorities to give back some of the farmland that was taken.

SIDE EFFECTS, a review of the movie by Howard Casner

Posted: February 15, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment »

The 1980’s called; they want their villain back.

 

Side Effects is the new thriller written by Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh (it’s suppose to be Soderbergh’s penultimate movie, but time will tell).  I have always considered Soderbergh to be the Michael Curtiz of contemporary cinema.  Like Curtiz, he helms solid movies that are well crafted and quite entertaining.   And like Curtiz, that’s all they usually are.   Curtiz was not a particularly great director, just a superb craftsman of routine studio assignments.    He only made one really great movie, Casablanca, and that was great only by accident.  It’s hard to say whether Soderbergh will ever even achieve that (his best chances right now are Traffic and Che, with Che being the far superior choice).

 

Continuing in that tradition, Side Effects is well made, but also a tad routine.  It gets the job done and is entertaining, but one can’t say much more than that.   In fact, if truth be told, one can actually say a lot less.  I really don’t think it works all that well; at least not for me.

 

The basic premise revolves around a psychiatrist played very handsomely by Jude Law (as if there is any other way for him to play a character) who proscribes a particular medication for a patient, Rooney Mara (of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fame); let’s just say that after that, things go a tad awry for the good doc.  Also on board for the ride is Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays Mara’s former therapist.

 

The movie begins as a social message picture that has such a serious anti-medication slant that it almost seems as if it was written by a Scientologist.  It accuses the psychiatric industry of exploiting people (mainly women) in order to sell drugs that probably aren’t helping or needed (and if they work, it’s not because they work, but because the users have been manipulated into believing they work).  There is a whiff of hypocrisy here because the screenplay feels like it’s just as exploitive of the people using medication as the pill industry is.  Burns and Soderbergh don’t really care about the medicated and their illnesses and desperation any more than the pill industry does.  In both cases, the poor schnooks are just there to further an agenda.

 

But then something happens.  The big plot turn that changes everything.  And it’s shocking and people gasp and sit up in their seats—except for me, who turned to his friend and told him exactly what was going on (I even knew what was going to happen before it happened).  And since the characters aren’t all that interesting, all I’m doing now is waiting to find out whether I’m right or not.  And I am.

 

The final third of the movie is the most interesting.  That’s when Law starts fighting back.  What he does may not always be that convincing (what he does is more what someone does in a movie than in real life), and I do feel that Burns and Soderbergh cheat a bit here and there, but it is entertaining and fun and suspenseful, so there’s that to make up for the rest.

 

But there’s another issue here.  The big co-villain is that staple of 1980’s villainy, the evil lesbian.  And I suppose there is something to be said for progress.  I’m not sure what, but still, if this movie had been made back then, there quite possibly would have been demonstrations in the street.  Now we’ve progressed to the point where a lesbian villain casts not a whiff of controversy.  But when you combine that with the other staple of movie villainy, the woman trying to do a man’s job, but is incompetent at it because she is a woman and is therefore much weaker than a man because she is a victim of her own inherent unstable emotional state, the whole solution to this thriller feels depressingly uninspired and unimaginative; somewhat like Magic Mike, but without all the rear nudity to keep you interested.

 

What may be even more depressing is that Law reconciles with all the people who betrayed him, including a particularly unsupportive (and not quite believable) wife (let’s just say that women don’t come off too well in this movie—even of Law’s two partners, though both want him out for what happened, the woman’s a “bitch” about it, while the man is more understanding and even tempered).   I didn’t understand why Burns and Soderbergh chose to do this.  I bought this even less than the plot as a whole and thought that after everything Law went through he deserved a much happier ending.  But que sera sera.

 

Burns and Soderbergh have collaborated before, on Contagion and The Informant!, and in both  cases, the movies were much more original and exciting.  Here, to be perfectly honest, I felt that they were phoning it in, and getting the wrong number at times.

56 UP movie review by Howard Casner

Posted: January 29, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 3 Comments »

There are a few sure signs that I’m getting older.  One is that pain I feel in my legs and feet if I stand for more than fifteen minutes.  Another is waking up every morning two hours earlier than I ever did as a teenager (and not needing an alarm clock for it).  Another is the number of times I have to visit the facilities every night.  But perhaps no sign is so definite and so certain as the release of a new entry in the Seven Up! series (and I’m not talking the soft drink).  Yes, Virginia, it’s that time of the millennium again.  I’m seven years older, deeper in debt, and 56 Up is in the theaters.

 

For those of you who may not know, Seven Up! was a documentary made in 1964 that profiled fourteen seven year olds of various backgrounds.  It was originally intended as a one off TV special.  Seven Up! was directed by Paul Almond, but Michael Apted, who did research for Almond, had the idea of coming back every seven years to see what has happened to their subjects and the two have joined forces on the documentaries ever since.   Their basic idea, and the driving force of the series originally, was to see if there is a class system in Britain and whether one’s future is determined by one’s past.

 

I hesitate to describe going to 56 Up as visiting with a group of friends I haven’t seen for seven years.  I mean, it’s such a cliché.  At the same time, I don’t know how else to talk about it.  It’s silly in many ways.  I’ve never met these people.  I’m not related to them.  And yet, after all this time, I have an emotional attachment to them and I have to know how they are getting on.

 

Well, they’re all 56 now and in many ways, that’s about all there is to say about them.  They’ve gotten older, but it’s hard to say that much else is going on.  Most are married, have children, have made a life for themselves and there is little chance now that anything will change all that significantly for them (except for taxes and…, well, you know).  For the most part, with a couple of exceptions, their lives are just going on like they always have.   I’m not sure what to make of that.  In one way, it’s very comforting, I suppose.  It’s even very moving.  In another way, it’s very depressing from an existential point of view.  This is it.  This is life.  It’s not a Shakespearean tragedy (or a comedy).  It’s not even a boulevard melodrama ala Ibsen and Strindberg.  There’ no long day’s journey into night here.  It’s just life.

 

The original idea, that of examining the class system, seems to have fallen by the wayside to a great degree, and when brought up, often feels a bit forced. No one seems to want to talk about it much except the directors.  At the same time, the movie just about proves the truth of that system to some degree.  The ones to the manor born are still pretty much there.  The ones who were not never managed to get much past the working/middle class.  And of those, many are finding their way of life slipping through their fingers in ways that the uppers aren’t as the social safety net that England is so famous for is being reduced (strangely enough, almost no one blames Margaret Thatcher—they all feel sold out by Tony Blair and the labor party).

 

56 Up starts out well with some fascinating looks at Neil, the participant who had to drop out of Cambridge due to mental illness and found himself living on the road, and Jackie, a working class girl who has faced a number of people dying or who have died.  At the same time, as the movie goes on and each person is given their due, this entry finds it a little difficult to keep the forward momentum going.  It gets a little tedious here and there as the filmmakers struggle to bring more meaning to various participants’ lives than there is.  And Apted and Almond couldn’t really come up with a satisfying final scene to tie it all together.  In fact, it just kind of runs out of steam and ends.  But still, I loved it and was moved by it as I always am.  And all I know is that though I can gladly wait for 62 Up (there’s no hurry, really, take your time), still, I can’t wait for 62 Up.

LET MY PEOPLE GO! a movie review by Howard Casner

Posted: January 26, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | 4 Comments »

I had a friend once who was, one might say, a tad flamboyant, a tad Jack McFarland.  When I introduced this friend to an acquaintance of mine, the acquaintance said of my friend, “Every time he takes a drag off his cigarette, it’s like he’s having an orgasm”.

 

That was one of the first thoughts I had upon laying eyes on Ruben, the central character of Let My People Go!, the new farce written by Mikael Buch (who also directed) and Christophe (Love Songs) Honoré.  But perhaps no one could describe him better than his husband Teemu, who tells him he acts like a French actress (Isabelle Adjani to be exact, and though I can’t argue with that, I think Norma Shearer, suffering and suffering in costumes by Edith Head, is more apt).

 

Ruben is French, but he lives in Finland and works for the post office (he puts on his uniform as if he were preparing for his close up, Mr. DeMille).  The world he lives in is as candy coated as he is with houses of vibrant colors and lawns manicured to within an inch of their lives.  He and Teemu live a fairy tail existence.  That is, until IT happens.  I won’t tell you what IT is, but suffice it to say, IT does (in a bit too forced a manner, perhaps, but still…) and Ruben panics.  Panics?  He shrieks and cries and cries and shrieks and shrieks and cries (you get the drift) until Teemu throws him out.  And Ruben sees little choice but to come home to Paris in time for the holidays. (Oh, did I mention that Ruben’s Jewish and is getting home in time for Passover?  Well, if I didn’t, he is and he does.)

 

And then comes one of the central ironies of the story as we find out that Ruben didn’t flee to Finland so he could be free to be the drama queen he is.  No, he went to Finland to escape a suffocation of DQ’s, a family so  “me, me, me”, it makes Ruben look like the normal one of the group.  His brother is a bully with anger management problems; his sister, who is treated badly by her husband, greets Ruben by whispering in his ear that she’s getting a divorce and don’t tell anyone; his father, who has left home, waxes profoundly (or so he thinks) that he is to be pitied for being in love with two women at the same time; and his mother (played by that refugee from Pedro Almodovar films, Carmen Maura) has asthma attacks while doing aerobics to Hava Nagila (no, I’m not kidding—this is almost worth the price of admission alone) while worrying that her son won’t have a child to continue the Jewish race.  (Oh, did I mention they were Jewish?  If I didn’t, it’s kind of important because one of the themes seems to be that if you looked up Jewish in Roget’s, you’d find drama queen there.).

 

Let My People Go! Is really a showcase (would a movie about a DQ have it any other way) for Nicolas Maury, who plays Ruben as if he was to the Adrian gown born, bursting with a petulant flamboyancy because no one will treat him with the respect a true DQ deserves (how can he, with so much competition).  Ruben is the sort of character who usually gets marginalized in films and TV as an accessory (like a Gucci Bag) for the female lead, or the straight gay man’s best friend so that the gay man won’t seem so…gay.  So it’s refreshing to see one take the center stage spotlight he so richly deserves (at least in his own mind).

 

Though fun, the movie isn’t much more than that.  The farce hits its mark at times, but it never quite reaches the heights of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (which also starred Ms. Maura) or The Birdcage.  But it’s sweet and satisfying and a perfectly good time in the theater.

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