Category: Movies

In theaters.

I wanted to love Juno. You don’t see that many movies with a young female protagonist, particularly one who isn’t monomaniacally obsessed with boys, and this one has such an appealing cast, such promise. I wanted to love it, and I didn’t. Even setting aside the hype, Juno is a disappointment.

In theaters.

Looking to Disney for a provocative satire of fairy-tale princess movies is foolish. I knew that going in, but I was hoping, anyway, for some of the pluck of “Petronella” by Jay Williams or “The Long-Nosed Princess” by Priscilla Hallowell—stories I loved as a little girl for the way they applied the magical just-so quality of fables to stories featuring female characters with agency and personality. I wasn’t fundamentally opposed to happy endings or even to princesses; I just couldn’t get interested in girls who only sat there while the boys had all the fun and made all the decisions.

But Enchanted was a disappointment, both to the adult me disgusted with the whole princess culture and to the child me, hidden underneath the cynicism and doubt, hoping for an heir to Petronella and long-nosed Felicity. The movie makes feints in their direction. It lightly tweaks a few conventions and moralizes that after the whole love-at-first-sight thing, you might spend a while getting to know your Twoo Wuv, but all that is just filigree over a story that, at its core, is indistinguishable from those of the movies it teases: just another passive heroine, another lifeless romance.

In theaters.

The conventional wisdom regarding No Country for Old Men is that it represents a return to greatness for the Coen brothers, a return to the glory of Miller’s Crossing and Fargo. Maybe that’s true, but when I watched it, I didn’t see their fingerprints. I saw Cormac McCarthy’s.

I was introduced to McCarthy’s work during a seminar I took spring term of my senior year of college. I was miserably sick at the time (either a relatively mild case of shingles or a relatively bad case of mono, depending on which doctor you believe—it infuriates me that I don’t have a label to ascribe to two of the worst months of my life), so I stumbled through Child of God and Suttree and Blood Meridian in a weary, queasy fog—an all too appropriate state for those books, which, despite their lyricism, are so nightmarishly grim that they’ll leave you dazed if you aren’t already. Honestly, I don’t consider myself a particularly idealistic person (and god knows I’ve become angrier and more paranoid in the past few years), but if I shared the shockingly cynical, pessimistic worldview McCarthy’s work seems to reflect, I’d end my life.

In any case, watching No Country for Old Men was like reading Blood Meridian. I appreciated its artistry and even enjoyed parts of it in a detachedly intellectual sort of way, but I spent much of the time desperate for it to be over.

In theaters.

We’re used to seeing George Clooney project buoyancy. Even when he’s not pulling off Las Vegas casino capers, even in more serious films (The Good German, for example), he seems like someone who believes in happy endings. It’s an old-fashioned sort of quality (I mean that in a good way), and it’s reassuring.

None of that buoyancy can be seen in Michael Clayton, though. The movie is unsettling in large part because Clooney himself seems so unsettled. From the very beginning of the film, he exudes demoralized, despairing self-loathing—which I might have taken more in stride coming from another actor, but which rattled me coming from Clooney. Clayton reminded me of how Alfred Hitchcock used to cast James Stewart as his (anti-)hero: the discomfort of seeing all-American Jimmy descend into neuroses and corruption and ugliness made the movies that much more troubling. By this, I mean no disrespect to either Clooney or Stewart. Both are to be admired for their ability to subvert their movie star personas in service to a darker work. In fact, Michael Clayton is a perfect example of that.

In theaters.

The story of My Kid Could Paint That shifts several times over the course of the documentary. Initially, it’s about what it means to be a prodigy. Later it evolves into a discussion of how we experience and assess modern art. But ultimately, it becomes a meditation on the twenty-four-hour media machine’s use and abuse of “human interest” subjects, the ethics of turning an individual’s life into a bite-sized narrative, and the responsibilities that journalists do and do not have toward the private people they cover. That’s a lot to pack into barely eighty minutes of footage—I wish that documentarian Amir Bar-Lev have delved deeper—but despite the film’s shortcomings, it prompted a great deal of thoughtful, provocative, heartfelt discussion in my home, and honestly, what more can you ask of a documentary?

In theaters.

Eastern Promises is a perfectly good thriller, maybe even a better-than-average thriller, and if I’d gone into it with no expectations of any kind, I might would have enjoyed it more. But with David Cronenberg directing and Viggo Mortensen starring, I was gleefully anticipated A History of Violence 2, with a dash of the mordant humor and social consciousness of screenwriter Steven Knight’s previous effort Dirty Pretty Things, and Eastern Promises simply didn’t live up to those expectations.

In theaters.

I’m not a huge fan of Julie Taymor’s Titus, but I’ll never forget the moment when Titus’s brother discovers his niece, Titus’s daughter Lavinia, outside the city. Raped and brutalized, her tongue and hands savagely cut off, Lavinia stands atop a tree trunk with twigs protruding from the stumps of her arms and tears streaking her ash-white face: a silently weeping scarecrow against a pale blue sky. The image, paradoxically, is hauntingly beautiful—which is sort of a problem. Taymor has created a gorgeous tableau, dazzling in its aesthetic artistry, but the emotional context is muted. The sheer beauty overwhelms the horror.

That kind of visual splendor disguising emotional vacuity is a recurrent problem in Taymor’s work, on both stage and screen, and her latest film, Across the Universe, is no different. Admirably ambitious yet ultimately rather shallow, Universe is pretty but empty. I remember the set pieces vividly; the story I’ve already half forgotten.

In theaters.

The image of ash falling from the sky is immediately arresting; the quiet terror it evokes, inherent and inescapable. Writer-director Chris Gorak doesn’t deserve any credit for that. He does, however, deserve credit for trusting that such quiet terror will be enough to give his thriller, Right at Your Door, the tension it needs to hold our nerves taut for ninety-six minutes. Someone else might have thrown in screaming crowds, explosions, and crashing cars, but such standard action material could have been brushed away. The ash—along with distant plumes of black smoke and a few dead birds—lingers in the mind, a signifier of once-unimaginable horror we now conjure up all too easily and vividly.

Right at Your Door plays on those fears, but it’s not cheap. It deserves credit for that, for sidestepping exploitation in favor of something more thoughtful and emotionally true, but I can’t say I enjoyed it, exactly. It feels like a cautionary tale, vaguely pedantic, earnestly warning me about dangers I acknowledge but on which I don’t want to dwell.

In theaters.

When I was about 12, I watched the old Robert Redford movie Three Days of the Condor with my mom, but I couldn’t get past the premise: CIA assassins targeting one of the agency’s own researchers, who Knows More Than He Should, even if he doesn’t know that he knows. This was so silly, so unrealistic, I complained. Nodding thoughtfully, Mom explained that the movie came out in the 1970s, soon after Watergate. People were paranoid then and angry. Murderous, far-reaching conspiracies just didn’t seem that far-fetched. But I just rolled my eyes. Stupid movie.

Watching The Bourne Ultimatum this past weekend, I felt Mom’s explanation come rushing back to me. In this new movie, a black-ops arm of the CIA merrily stomps on the Constitution with complete impunity (and not a little incompetence). The agents eavesdrop indiscriminately, employ torture, and assassinate private citizens in public areas, and none of it struck me as particularly silly or unrealistic. It’s a great thriller—taut and compelling—but it made me long for the days when I could roll my eyes at such paranoid, cynical plotlines.

In theaters.

When traditional hand-drawn animation studios suffer, commentators often point to Pixar, the shining jewel of American animation, for an explanation. “See?” they say. “The future is in computer animation. Like Pixar.”

That assessment breaks my heart. How can someone look at Toy Story or Finding Nemo or The Incredibles and determine that they owe their superiority to the use of pixels rather than brush strokes? Of course the animation is visually striking, even groundbreaking, but that’s not what makes those movies worth treasuring. Pixar is special not because they use computers or even because they use those computers well. Pixar is special because the people who work there are great storytellers. It really is that simple.

The studio’s latest, Ratatouille, lives up to the Pixar standard with charm, gentle humor, and a love letter to the enduring joy of cooking.