Category: Movies

In theaters.

Movement is near to nature—as a bird flying—and it is the spoken word which is embarrassing. The voice is so revealing, it becomes an artificial thing, reducing everybody to a certain glibness, to an unreality. Pantomime to me is an expression of poetry, comic poetry. I knew that in talking pictures I would lose a lot of eloquence.

—Charlie Chaplin

I love that line. I don’t entirely agree with Charlie Chaplin (I’m a word person, after all), but it is truer than I would like that words—even the right words—often are inadequate. An image, a gesture, a silence often means more than words ever could.

To demonstrate the point, I give you Wall-E, Pixar’s latest animated gem and, according to many, the studio’s masterpiece. It is, indeed, a gorgeous movie, one destined for a cherished spot in my DVD collection, but I don’t think it’s as perfect as its most passionate fans believe, and I’d even guess (with unforgivable arrogance) that Chaplin would agree with me. The wordless passages—the opening act, the zero-gravity robot ballet, the poignant history-of-art epilogue over the closing credits—are just as profoundly beautiful as everyone says, but whenever dialogue enters the picture, the movie dips from greatness to goodness. The words aren’t bad (though they do veer toward the heavy-handed), but they simply can’t compete with the poetry of pantomime and suffer by comparison. In this instance, at least, Chaplin was right.

On DVD.

I’d forgotten that parody could be this sharp, this smart. Too many movie parodies are like Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, and their ilk: cheap, junky, kitchen-sink productions that throw countless dumb gags and are lucky to hit their target one out of ten times. Hot Fuzz is much more targeted and infinitely funnier. A witty, well-observed, affectionate rib on action movies, it expertly cracks wise on the characters, the situations, and even the camerawork of the genre, and the cumulative effect of all those perfect details makes Hot Fuzz a riot.

In theaters.

To be blunt, The Fall is a failure. It doesn’t achieve the epic grandeur to which co-writer/director Tarsem clearly aspires. Its emotional arc is incoherent, its climax is muddled, and its conclusion is weirdly off-point. And yet few failures are so interesting, so visually hypnotic that one can dismiss the story entirely and treat the movie as a travelogue across a dreamscape. I can’t recommend The Fall, but I can’t regret seeing it either.

In theaters.

Seeing Indy again was fun, but I was most excited about the return of Marion, whom I adored as a little girl. As played by Karen Allen, Marion was nobody’s blushing damsel or flighty ditz. She was proud and smart and resourceful, a fitting match for Indiana Jones—and she still is in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Allen and Harrison Ford both are showing their years (and I mean that in the best way possible), but they still have a great, crackling chemistry, and the reunion of their characters is so charming that I didn’t even roll my eyes at the movie’s sappy coda. (Well, that’s a lie. But I didn’t roll them that hard.)

I can’t say everything else about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was as much fun as the reappearance of Marion Ravenwood, but the movie has its moments, I guess, and nobody embarrassed him- or herself. And when you’re talking about a series entry arriving nearly two decades after the previous installment, maybe that’s not bad.

In theaters.

As Sean and I left the movie theater, Sean pointed out how Iron Man is a second-tier Batman. Both Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne (their everyday identities) lack superpowers, per se, but possess such extraordinary wealth and ingenuity that they can build or acquire technology to compensate. Sean prefers Batman’s backstory, but I think it’s not so much Batman as Batman’s world that makes him more compelling. I’m hardly a comics aficionado, but what impresses me about Gotham is its moral complexity. The villains aren’t necessary evil, or at least they weren’t always, and Batman himself walks a fine line between justice and vengeance. The world is shaded in gray, without absolutes, which is why it feels so resonant, so recognizable, superheroics notwithstanding.

But Iron Man (at least as portrayed in this movie—I’ve never read the comics) exists in a sharply black-and-white universe, which wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t make so many feints at real, contemporary issues. This Iron Man tries to have it both ways—grittily recognizable universe and pat, rah-rah heroics—and the dissonance is painful. It’s a shame because Robert Downey Jr. is great, and the robotic exoskeleton thing is pretty cool. Iron Man has much to recommend it, but I walked out of the theater not with a grin but a wince.

In theaters.

Nothing makes you appreciate a good car chase like a bad one, so I guess I can thank Vantage Point for renewing my admiration of old Steve McQueen flicks, the Bourne movies, and John Frankenheimer’s oeuvre. Also, much of Vantage Point takes place at the beautiful Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, Spain, so that’s nice. And … yeah, I think that might be all the praise I can muster for this dumb, dull, disjointed mess of a thriller.

It’s not like I was expecting a cinematic masterpiece, but with so many interesting, talented actors on screen (the cast includes Dennis Quaid, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, and Forest Whitaker), I thought it would be fun, at least. Instead, it was just painful watching them muddle through a screenplay so flat, so devoid of feeling, that each was forced to spend the vast majority of the movie wearing the same expression. Quaid: panicky. Hurt: self-righteous. Weaver: bitchy. Whitaker: mildly retarded. By the time the movie finally dragged its way to the incoherent, interminable car chase from hell, I wanted a semi to flatten every single character and put the actors and me out of our misery.

On DVD.

In many, if not most, of the best short stories, the conclusion is inexorable. The tale advances elegantly, carefully, constantly toward its destination—no detours or loose threads. The theme unfolds, the climax arrives, and the final sentence reverberates because it rings true to every word that came before it. The story can end no other way.

In its first two-thirds, I Am Legend feels like one of those short stories—beautiful and relentless—and if the movie only ended at the darkly resonant sequence that caps those two-thirds, it would be a brilliant, brutal cinematic short story. But it doesn’t end there, of course. It spins off into something safer and less interesting. It’s not bad, exactly, but the jarring shift in tone and theme (not to mention quality) make the ending a disappointment. The rest of the movie is compelling enough to make it worthwhile, but the thought of what might have been is hard to shake.

In theaters.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a screwball comedy playing out beneath a looming shadow. No matter how effervescently perky Amy Adams is, no matter how adorable Lee Pace is, no matter how charming the rest of the cast is, the darkness is always there, waiting to swallow them all.

It’s an odd way to conduct a comedy, particularly one of this genre, and it doesn’t always work. The tonal shifts are often awkward, leaving madcap passages slight and solemn passages overearnest, but in a few scenes, Miss Pettigrew manages to span the chasm between giddy and sober. For a moment or two, the movie, set in London on the brink of World War II, feels eerily contemporary and poignant and special.

In theaters.

It’s times like this that I feel like a killjoy. Be Kind Rewind is a terribly sweet movie with a good heart, and my argument against it boils down to “Sweet isn’t good enough.” That sounds cold, even to me, but damn, it’s true, and truth be told, it makes me a little bit angry. Writer-director Michel Gondry squanders his story’s vast potential and his own visual ingenuity on treacle: it may be sweet, but it’s all empty calories, and it’s not nearly as rich as it could have been.