Category: Movies

In theaters.

The title Kick-Ass is something of a misnomer. Sure, wannabe superhero Dave Lizewski, a.k.a. Kick-Ass, is the ostensible protagonist, but the best he can hope to achieve is status as a sidekick. What’s more, he doesn’t have a good reason—an interesting reason—for wanting to be a superhero. In the opening narration, he bluntly acknowledges that he doesn’t have a traumatic past or a loved one to avenge; he just naïvely thinks costumed vigilante crime-fighting would be cool. But there is someone in the movie who has excellent superhero credentials, the training and equipment and open eyes, not to mention a darkly fitting rationale for following that path. For a variety of reasons, the movie is not titled Hit Girl, but no matter: she’s the reason to see it, think about it, be disturbed by it, and remember it. Hit Girl is what’s wrong and what’s right about the movie. Hit Girl is the movie, no matter its name.

In theaters.

I wasn’t completely on board with How to Train Your Dragon until that dragon made its first real appearance. Oh, sure, the human hero Hiccup is cute and all, and the dragon attack on his village is exciting and well done, but meeting the Night Fury up close was what really captured my attention. The animators don’t try to anthropomorphize the creature. It doesn’t talk, and it doesn’t understand every single word humans say. It is clearly alien, clearly dangerous, and thus absolutely fascinating. And yet, gradually, the movie also reveals dragon traits that feel familiar. I’ve heard it described as dog-like, but I think the dragon, whom Hiccup eventually names Toothless (a joke, not a descriptor), acts more like a cat. In fact, Toothless’s big golden eyes and his many feline mannerisms reminded of nothing so much as my cat Luna, and that made me love him all the more—which is appropriate, seeing as How to Train Your Dragon is, in a weird way, a sort of romance of domestication and human-animal symbiosis. If only my Luna could fly!

In theaters.

The story isn’t much—an ungainly little hero tale about an orphaned boy on a quest—but The Secret of Kells isn’t about the story. Nor is it just about the undeniably gorgeous hand-drawn animation inspired by the medieval art of its subject matter. No, what makes the movie so striking and lovely is the way that animation arouses the emotion of its story. The raw plot might be awkward and poorly paced, but the evocative imagery makes it work in spite of itself. One can’t help but feel the joyful freedom of a walk in the woods, the giddy excitement of artistic inspiration, the gnawing fear of a community under siege. The animation gives the story resonance, and the story, slight though it may be, gives the animation meaning. The result is an engaging, wondrous little gem.

On DVD.

Bright Star is beautifully romantic—isn’t that what I’m supposed to say? Certainly I have no reservations about saying that writer-director Jane Campion’s portrait of the relationship between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne is exquisitely filmed, with restrained, finely shaded performances from Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish. But romantic … I don’t know. I feel like there must have been more to John and Fanny’s relationship than Bright Star provides, and watching the movie, I kept sympathizing with the lovers’ friends and family who try to get the couple to be practical. That makes me feel like a hard-hearted clod, by the way, but even setting my android tendencies aside, something about Bright Star doesn’t sit right with me. Something is missing, no matter how elegant and delicate the film is.

In repertory at Film Forum through February 18.

If you were introduced to director Akira Kurosawa through his acclaimed films from the 1950s (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, among others)—all of which are feature shadowy, evocative black-and-white cinematography—the bold color of Ran, released in 1985, is disconcerting at first. Seeing the familiar figures of feudal Japan in vivid reds and blues and greens rather than the familiar dreamy grays is a jolt—but a welcome one. Kurosawa makes great use of his color palette, showcasing intricate costumes and breathtaking locations and even color-coding the three warring sons and their armies. The color, along with Kurosawa’s familiar panoramic direction, helps make Ran a gorgeous film to behold.

It’s also an affecting one—which I don’t take for granted, considering that the story is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play that has always eluded me, to some extent. But besides relocating the familiar tale of an aging, misguided warlord from ancient Britain to feudal Japan, Kurosawa and his fellow screenwriters have tweaked the details, alluding to backstory and character motivations that don’t exist in the play. The result is exceedingly bleak—perhaps even more so than the tragic Lear. With Lear, one could argue that the king steps wrong in choosing who to trust; Cordelia might have been a fine heir. But Ran seems to argue that conflict and betrayal are all but inescapable. The youngest child is still the most affectionate and loyal, but he, too, is caught up in the heirs’ power-plays, which arrive early because of the warlord’s abdication but which were inevitable. (The movie’s title means chaos.) Frankly, if Kurosawa weren’t such a great director, Ran might have been unbearably grim.

On DVD.

I missed the showing of Throne of Blood, the movie I most wanted to see at Film Forum’s ongoing Kurosawa festival, which ticked me off royally until Sean pointed out that it wasn’t as though I had lost my one and only opportunity to see it. It is, after all, available on DVD and has been for years. Oh yeah. So I rented Throne from Netflix and watched it at home. Happy ending!

Throne of Blood interested me most because it’s a reworking of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, and I love watching different people tell the same story. It could be any story—a fairy tale, a classic novel, a mythologized historical event—but Shakespeare’s plays are particularly rich for nuanced repetition. People from different generations and cultures and philosophies have returned to the plays again and again, creating countless Hamlets and Richards, countless Juliets and Portias, and the contrasts among them never stop intriguing me. (Kurosawa also adapted King Lear into the samurai epic Ran, which I hope to catch during its two-week Film Forum run in February.)

Kurosawa’s Macbeth is more fatalistic than most, and his protagonist, by extension, is marginally more sympathetic. That’s compelling on its own, but what really makes the movie work is how gloriously cinematic it is, with one perfectly orchestrated, evocative sequence after another—all the more impressive when you consider that the movie’s narrative roots are in seventeenth-century Elizabethan theater and its visual roots in fourteenth-century Japanese Noh theater. Yet there’s nothing stagy about the dynamic middle-distance shots of frantic horseback riding or the eerily fluid special effects of the witch’s entrance and exit or the agonizingly still, taut framing of Lady Asaji (Lady Macbeth) as she waits for her husband to return from his regicidal mission. Throne of Blood works as a retelling of Macbeth because it works first and foremost as a movie.

In theaters.

Have the purists who self-righteously reject the idea of Sherlock Holmes as an action hero actually read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, or are they just working off the pop-culture image of a wiry, effete man with a magnifying glass stuck to his face? And regardless, why must anyone treat Doyle’s stories as sacrosanct? They’re pulp (influential pulp, but pulp nonetheless) featuring a flat, static protagonist—a protagonist who is described, by the way, as an expert at boxing and fencing and who also ably dispatches his foes with a cane and riding crop. So I really don’t see why anyone should be annoyed by Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes getting into a few fistfights in between deductive reasoning.

If you want to bent out of shape about the movie’s lack of fidelity to its source material, the better target would be the affectionate, congenial relationship between Holmes and Watson. In Doyle’s stories, Holmes is perpetually rude and condescending, treating Watson less as a friend than as a tiresome lackey. When I read the stories as a kid, I never understood why Watson would put up with Holmes, but their friendly rapport is the best thing about director Guy Ritchie’s new movie. As Watson, Jude Law gives his most charming performance in a decade, and Downey is as charismatic as always. Together they have great chemistry, making the movie far funnier and more entertaining than it would be otherwise. Screw fidelity—the truly un-Doylian elements of Sherlock Holmes are the only things that make it worth watching.

In theaters.

It seems churlish to complain that The Princess and the Frog is rather preachy, considering that its sermon is remarkably similar to one I’ve been delivering since I was about twelve years old. I agree, of course, that aspiring to be a princess, passively wishing on stars and dreaming of princes sweeping in to save the day, warps a girl’s priorities and undermines her own resourcefulness and individuality, but to hear that from Disney—well, let’s just say the messenger warps the message. The movie cuttingly parodies princess culture, lampooning a spoiled little girl who laps up fairy tales and demands countless poufy dresses like those of her bejeweled idols, but the hypocrisy is hard to take. Have the filmmakers ever visited the Disney Store? Who do they think their audience is? They’re doing more than biting the hand that feeds; they’re spitting on it, in a way that often feels hypocritical and occasionally feels cruel.

Maybe that’s not fair, but the movie makes it hard to ignore the metatextual Disney themes when it goes so far as to directly evoke and reject elements of such classics as Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty. That kind of thing creates a sense of smugness that weighs down what is otherwise a charming, if slight, bit of fairy tale rehabilitation. Set in a sweetly romanticized Jazz Age New Orleans, The Princess and the Frog is beautiful in its way, with a few genuinely lovely moments, but its baggage weighs it down. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a mediocrity—it’s better than that, and the traditional cel animation is worth celebrating—but this isn’t one for the pantheon.

In theaters.

My opinion often shifts on reflection. I think it’s important to acknowledge an initial experience—that immediate, visceral reaction—but as meaningful as that is, it’s not the only thing that matters. No doubt some cynics believe that those who don’t hold onto their first opinion are just allowing others to influence them—and certainly that’s part of it, though it needn’t be a bad thing—but I think the process of evaluating how one feels about something is more complicated than that. It takes time, and in that time, the ground inevitable shifts, sometimes merely settling, othertimes shaking cataclysmically.

Up in the Air hasn’t suffered a cataclysmic reversal, but it definitely has fallen in my estimation the longer I’ve thought about it, sorting through what I liked and what I didn’t, sifting through irrelevant personal tangents and more meaningful critiques. I’ve rewritten this damn introduction multiple times, to the point where it seemed dishonest not to acknowledge that I’ve done so. And in the end, the movie just doesn’t sit right with me.

On DVD.

When I was nineteen years old, I spent a couple of weeks traveling by rail around Europe, some of that time with three other college girls, some of it with a male acquaintance (a companion of convenience, not romance—we could barely tolerate each other), and some of it on my own. Those days were some of the best of my life. I saw a production of Puccini’s La bohème in Rome and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at Notre Dame. I cried in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà and Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac. I walked along snow-covered streets in Vienna and pebbly beaches in Nice. I learned how to read train tables, how to bargain in street markets, and how to drink a shot of tequila.

It was enormous fun—a grand adventure—but more important than that, more important than everything I learned about art and architecture and music, was the resourcefulness that trip taught me, the independence, the self-confidence. This is not to say that I believed myself to be invulnerable—to the contrary, there were times when I was confused and scared, and with reason—but despite that, because of that, I learned to trust myself. I learned how to be brave and how to fake it when I wasn’t. I learned how to find my own way when no one was around to hold my hand. I treasure the memory of that time. As cheesy as it might sound, those two weeks helped make me who I am today.

So Taken breaks my heart. It’s a well-crafted but painfully alarmist thriller about a father trying to save his teenage daughter from the sex traffickers who have kidnapped her from the luxurious Paris apartment where she was vacationing with a friend. Daddy hadn’t wanted his little princess to go in the first place—too dangerous—but Mommy insisted, and look what happened, Daddy was right, the world is too dangerous for girls on their own. Watching Taken, I imagine hyper-vigilant parents taking its lessons to heart and forbidding their daughters from studying or traveling abroad, denying them the kind of opportunity I had, and I want to scream with frustration.