Category: Movies

In theaters.

I usually include a brief summary of the premise when I write about movies, but I haven’t a clue how to manage that with Paprika. The brilliant but bizarre anime feature slips in and out of reality without notice. The plot twists frenetically, the characters take on multiple guises, and the imagery challenges Western expectations about what animation can accomplish.

Only ninety minutes in length, Paprika feels longer, not because it drags (it doesn’t) but because it’s so rich and dense and stimulating. It’s the kind of movie that demands that you give yourself over to it, that you accept its phantasmagorical world and let go of any preconceived notions you might have had about where the story will take you—and that kind of aesthetic submersion is thrilling. Once Paprika was over, I immediately wanted to watch it again.

In theaters.

I feel kind of guilty. Several appealing smaller movies are playing in theaters—Once and The Valet and Paprika, to name a few. I’ve been meaning to check them out, but what do I go to see this week? Ocean’s Thirteen. I’m so embarrassed.

But Ocean’s Thirteen is exactly the sort of summer movie I adore. Unabashedly frivolous and unfailing cheerful, breezy and witty and jaunty, it just puts me a good mood. The fluffy confection of a plot doesn’t withstand much scrutiny, and each character isn’t so much a three-dimensional being as a single adjective in human form. But none of that matters. With Steven Soderbergh directing and George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia, and company charming their way around the screen like old-fashioned Golden Age movie stars, Ocean’s Thirteen represents a triumph of style over substance—and I mean that in the best way possible. Sometimes substance is a drag.

In theaters.

We all have our weaknesses. I, for example, am fond of storylines that don’t follow formulae and am a complete sucker for actors who seem to be having fun on screen. If you give you me that, I’ll forgive all manner of sins like, oh, a completely nonsensical plot, wildly uneven tone, and slack, overlong pacing.

Take the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I’d be the first to admit that it’s not good—what with that completely nonsensical plot, wildly uneven tone, and slack, overlong pacing—but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to having enjoyed it anyway.

In theaters.

No one should ever cast Tobey Maguire in a supposedly sympathetic role that tilts toward whiny. He can’t pull it off. His doughy face oozes petulance, and his protestations sound like the mewlings of a four-year-old deprived dessert. Spider-Man 3 has lots of problems—a slack, rambling plot; an overabundance of villains; special effects that (with one major exception) aren’t that special—but the worst is that Maguire’s Peter Parker is a pathetic figure—pompous, self-absorbed, and extremely whiny—and that Spider-Man 3 matches him all too well.

In theaters.

I don’t doubt that television is an extraordinarily difficult field in which to cultivate an artistic vision. It is unabashedly business-oriented, focused on ratings (and ratings of narrow demographic groups, at that) to the exclusion of virtually everything else. So the satire in The TV Set—the story of a sitcom pilot’s troubled development—feels almost naturalistic, the humor derived not from exaggeration but from a bleak laugh-so-you-don’t-cry sensibility.

And yet I still had the nagging feeling that the movie is stacking the deck, and that annoyed me. The comedy is funny but whiny, grating after a while. It hits its target, but when your primary target is a crass TV executive, that’s not a particularly difficult target to hit.

In theaters.

Gerd Wiesler is an unlikely protagonist. A member of East Germany’s much-feared secret police, the Stasi, he is conducting an interrogation when we first meet him in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall. Wiesler has deprived his subject of sleep and forced him to sit awkwardly on the backs of his hands for hours, and the man is ready to crack. He is pitiful, begging for rest, crying with exhaustion, repeating his cover story with increasing desperation, and Wiesler never flinches, never stops pressing the poor man to betray his friends.

But Wiesler isn’t a sadist. He’s a consummate professional, performing even his most horrifying duties with great skill and tireless efficiency. Only gradually do we realize that, more significantly, Wiesler is also a true patriot, a quietly earnest believer in the unrealized ideals of his decaying country. What first appears to be bloodless workmanship is actually something more complicated: not zeal, exactly, but the sincerity of a man who believes he is doing the right thing.

The Lives of Others tells the story of how Wiesler loses that belief, how he awakens to the corruption of the Stasi and begins to incrementally reject the organization’s goals and methods. It takes the shape of a thriller but has the soul of a character study, tracking Wiesler’s gradual transformation parallel to that of Georg Dreyman, a playwright on whom he has been assigned to spy. The elegant pairing, subtle and thought-provoking, is indicative of the artistry of the film, the remarkable feature debut of writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

Sunday, February 25. 

I began following the Academy Awards at age ten when I found my mom watching some sort of staged presentation of “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid on TV. Despite my mixed feelings about the Disney musical (why did Ariel have to be so stupid?), I knew all the words to all the songs, so I was excited to learn that the musicians and dancers were performing “Under the Sea” at an event where it might win an award. I settled down to watch, and it did, in fact, win, and I was happy. What’s more, I was hooked.

In theaters.

I wasn’t interested in seeing Breach, the new based-on-real-events movie about the capture of FBI mole Robert Hanssen. The previews looked conventional, and the star, Ryan Phillippe, has never been a favorite of mine. Then I saw that it had been written (with two others) and directed by Billy Ray, and my attitude changed immediately. Ray is no big-name auteur, but he is responsible for Shattered Glass, a meticulously crafted gem of docudrama and a real favorite of mine.

Ray’s scrupulous attention to detail impresses me each time I see Glass, which tells the story of a scandal at The New Republic magazine, the revelation that one of the writers had been passing off outrageous fiction as fact. Surely the earlier film’s thoughtful, thought-provoking examination of why we believe lies and how they go unnoticed would translate well to a story of deception and betrayal at the FBI. But Breach failed to live up to the promise of Shattered Glass. It didn’t give me as much to think about, and it didn’t capture my imagination.

In theaters.

My brother and I—along with a variable assortment of family members—usually go to the movies on Christmas night, but this year we stayed home. None of the new releases really inspired me. I didn’t feel like a Motown musical, and the post-apocalyptic Children of Men looked too grim for the holiday.

I finally made it to Children of Men this past weekend and soon realized I was wrong about it not being a good Christmas movie. It’s definitely grim, but it’s grim in a way that’s perfectly appropriate for Christmas. As bleak and frightening as director Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film is, it scratches out a bleary, hard-fought sense of hope. Beautifully acted, beautifully crafted, and beautifully told, it’s my favorite movie of 2006. That’s why it’s taken me so damn long to write about it.

In theaters.

Curse of the Golden Flower ends with rivers of blood—blood from the wounds of the few characters who have survived and the life’s blood of the many more who have died, not to mention all the blood and brains and bile from the countless extras whose mutilated corpses litter the scene. The movie ends, in other words, like one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. That kind of grisly, epic grandeur is clearly Zhang’s goal, and he succeeds insofar as the comparison to Shakespeare is inevitable, if not particularly flattering: At best, Curse is a Titus Andronicus. It doesn’t even approach Hamlet.