Category: Movies

In theaters.

The best way to describe Wong Kar-wai’s moody, impressionistic wuxia epic is as a tone poem—a metaphor I particularly like. Tone poem isn’t just a pretty term; it refers specifically to a type of composition that emerged during the Romantic period. Before then, most orchestral works were symphonies, and symphonies followed rules, a specific architecture that outlined musical structure before a composer wrote a single note. The tone poem was a rejection of that architecture, an attempt to use the orchestra to convey something different: a story, a painting, a tableau, a feeling. Without the architecture, a tone poem can feel amorphous, but it can be beautifully evocative, too. Freed from symphonic strictures, the tone poem can find textures and flavors and colors so vibrant that the missing walls and roof hardly matter.

In Ashes of Time Redux, a reworking of his 1994 film Ashes of Time, Wong, like Liszt and Dvorák and Debussy before him, rejects the architecture of his medium. Ashes lacks a firm narrative and solidly defined characters. Even the swordplay that inevitably crops up in wuxia is vague and painterly here, conveying atmosphere without articulating details. It’s bewildering, even frustrating, until you stop trying to make sense of it, stop trying to find an A-leads-to-B-leads-to-C plot, and appreciate the haunting, mercurial, doleful enigma for what is.

In theaters.

Burn After Reading looks and sounds like a spy thriller: self-consciously dramatic score; many shots of dark-suited legs walking briskly down anonymous, sterile hallways at CIA headquarters; convoluted plot packed with deception and betrayal. But this is Coen brothers movie (and one of their “idiot” movies at that), so despite the slick trappings, Burn After Reading is always off-kilter, not out-and-out farce but not quite right, either.

The preview gives away all the best laughs, but even if the gags weren’t spoiled, the bleak undercurrent mutes some of the hilarity. Supposedly Joel and Ethan Coen wrote Burn concurrently with No Country for Old Men, their Oscar-winning Cormac McCarthy adaptation, and if that’s not true, it should be: the same creeping nihilism permeates both films. In No Country, Kelly Macdonald’s breathtaking final scene pushes back against some of the darkness, but Burn revels in its own pointlessness and amorality to the very end. It’s funny, and it features some amusing performances, but it leaves behind a disconcerting void.

In theaters.

Well, if nothing else, writer-director Guillermo del Toro can still create a gorgeous image. His creepy beasties are memorable and immediately identifiable, and he has a real knack for creating a striking tableau. But I’m a little concerned about the deterioration of his storytelling abilities. The Devil’s Backbone (2001) is rich with subtext, nuanced characterizations, and dramatic power. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) has a beautiful narrative arc with a devastating climax. Even Blade II (2002) has a darkly twisty plot and a surprisingly emotional finish.

But Hellboy II is silly even for a summer movie. It has no sense of momentum or peril and the weakest, most transparent conclusion I’ve seen in an ages. Predictability isn’t even the real issue. Inevitability can feel fated and tragic, but here it’s just stupid. The first big scene with the villain telegraphs exactly how he’ll meet his doom, and he could, in fact, be taken out at any point after that, without any muss at all. When the end finally arrives, it’s not triggered by anything, really, but the fact that the movie is on its final reel, which makes the scene ludicrously anticlimactic. That’s just bad storytelling. I wasn’t anticipating a masterpiece, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect something halfway decent from a guy with a Oscar nomination for best original screenplay on his résumé.

On DVD.

I refused to go see The Counterfeiters in theaters (it played at the Angelika for months) because I was annoyed that it had won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film when Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days hadn’t even been nominated. (Yes, I am that petty.) The thing is, I actually was interested in the premise (stories about moral quandaries fascinate me), so once it came out on DVD, I decided to stop being a brat and give it a chance.

As it turns out, The Counterfeiters is pretty much what I expected: not a great film, but a good one with a remarkable lead performance and a provocative story to tell. It’s not half as visionary as Persepolis, nor as raw and taut as 4 Months, but it’s not a cheap Holocaust-exploitation pic either (cough*Life Is Beautiful*cough). It didn’t deserve to beat out two of the best movies of the year, in any language, but neither did it deserve to be the subject of my silly, pointless boycott.

In theaters.

Part of me wants to just say “I’m not the target audience” and leave it at that. Yes, producer Judd Apatow’s crowd turns out work that can be broadly appealing, witty, even insightful, (though not always, by any stretch), but let’s not kid ourselves: first and foremost, these are movies made by, for, and about overgrown man-boys. Not being an overgrown man-boy myself, maybe I don’t completely get it.

I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that: comedy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What frustrates me about Pineapple Express is that it is to my taste—most of the time. And than along comes a gag or plot turn so discordant and unappealing that I feel as though I’ve been physically pushed out of a circle. After a moment, I swallow my distaste and start laughing again, only to again encounter one of those repellent stink bombs. And each time the movie pushes me away, I become less eager to rejoin it, less certain that I want to keep this company.

In theaters.

At first glance, Transsiberian looks like the typical story of innocents abroad. Jessie (Emily Mortimer) and her husband, Roy (Woody Harrelson), stumble into grave danger as they travel from Beijing to Moscow via train. Jessie is reckless, Roy is naive, and both make several foolish decisions, but interestingly, the culture clash between entitled Americans and world-weary Russians is merely a backdrop to the truly compelling subject: Jessie and Roy’s troubled marriage and, even more specifically, Jessie’s tortured sense of self.

The rest of the movie—with the drugs, false identities, and mobsters—is all pretty generic, but Jessie is a fascinating character, and Mortimer plays her beautifully. She’s not always likable, certainly not that admirable, but she’s wholly real and engagingly human, and she makes the movie worth seeing.

On DVD.

I always feel sheepish in situations like this. I’ve discovered something cool and new, something I’m excited about—which would be great except that my “discovery” is nothing of the sort. Countless people have already been there and have already offered the same observations and insights. And when my new find is an acclaimed, iconic, hugely influential director like Sergio Leone, the sheepishness is particularly acute. How in the world have I not “discovered” him already?

Even over the phone, I could hear my brother’s amusement as I happily babbled about Once Upon a Time in the West, my first Leone film. Henry Fonda plays the bad guy! Leone’s use of sound to rachet tension is incredible! Composer Ennio Morricone is a brilliant melodist! The big reveal of Harmonica’s shadowy motives actually lives up to the buildup! Director Quentin Tarantino has virtually duplicated some of Leone’s key shots in his own movies! Smoky eye makeup can look really cool! Michael would agree with me and bounce back ideas of his own, but I know him well enough to hear his unspoken thoughts: You really didn’t know the black hat was going to be Henry Fonda?!

In theaters.

Note: This isn’t so much a review as it is a navel-gazing meditation on what The X-Files once meant to me and how that meaning has faded. I tried to write a real review, but I wasn’t able to disentangle my reaction to the movie from my one-time infatuation with the TV show, and I finally gave up. Consider yourself warned.

“Trust no one” was the line most associated with The X-Files back when it was in its prime. That phrase reflected its convoluted conspiracy-oriented mythology, not to mention larger premillennial fears, so that was the phrase that magazines and the like used when talking about it. But for me, that was a misrepresentation, for much of the show’s drama comes out of the fact that Mulder and Scully both have someone they do come to trust: each other. The truly archetypal X-Files phrase appears on Mulder’s iconic flying-saucer poster in block capitals: “I want to believe.”

In theaters.

Consider the title fair warning. Dark doesn’t even begin to describe the latest Batman movie. I don’t think much of the ratings system, but if you’re going to have one, it’s outrageous that The Dark Knight is rated PG-13. True, I don’t recall any swearing or exposed breasts, but the violence is wincingly graphic and deeply unsettling and not remotely cartoonish. Comic book source material notwithstanding (and frankly, turning up one’s nose at the medium is a breed of snobbery for which I have no respect), this is a movie for grown-ups.

And that, of course, is part of the reason it’s so good. Director Christopher Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan aren’t content just to sell action figures and blow stuff up, and their ambition shines through in every scene of The Dark Knight. It isn’t as perfectly conceived and crafted as their previous collaboration, the underrated The Prestige, but unlike most summer blockbusters, Knight gets under your skin and leaves you talking. It stays with you.

In theaters.

Conveying paranoia is one of the things movies do best—and not just showing it but making you feel it along with the characters. Looming images, wary pans, jumpy camerawork, and carefully doled information can create a delicious sense of anxiety, the perverse thrill of jangly nerves and bated breath.

The French thriller Tell No One achieves those tense heights of paranoia beautifully (a few sequences have real Hitchcockian flair, not quite Cary-Grant-in-the-corn-field but admirably close), but if falls short of what might be the more difficult trick: the dismount. As long as the threat against protagonist Alex Beck is left vague and shadowy, Tell No One works the classic man-unjustly-accused theme to great effect. Undefined, the threat feels overwhelming, but once the movie starts spelling everything out in long explanatory flashbacks, it begins to feel small and sordid, a letdown.