Category: Movies

In theaters.

The documentary La Danse opens not with ballerinas but with a series of static shots of the innards of the building in which they rehearse and perform: coiled wires, cracked plaster, sturdy columns. Eventually Frederick Wiseman’s camera moves on, intermittently, to the dancers, but the same coolly observational aesthetic remains as the film cuts about the Palais Garnier. It’s as though an alien has floated down to study the Paris Opera Ballet, indiscriminately taking in everything from the dancers, choreographers, and artistic director to the costume makers, cafeteria cashiers, fundraisers, maintenance workers, and even the beekeeper (?) who manages the hives (?) on the roof.

As bizarre and unexpected as the beekeeping sequence is, it does seem to suggest Wiseman’s outlook on his subject: that it is abuzz with disparate activity that nonetheless builds toward a single goal. That’s a romantic notion rendered with paradoxical dispassion—and I don’t find it particularly convincing, if that’s even what the directed intended. Regardless, the effect is both mesmerizing and frustrating.

In repertory at Film Forum through November 19.

At first glance, Moira Shearer isn’t much to look at. She has a flat, moon face and overplucked eyebrows and a sort of lemony countenance. But then she begins to dance, and she becomes a presence, beautiful and alluring. Dance transforms her into a glittering star.

Shearer’s captivating performance is part of what makes The Red Shoes so spellbinding—that and Anton Walbrook’s deliciously Mephistophelean impresario and the smart, biting screenplay and Jack Cardiff’s intoxicating Technicolor cinematography. More than anything else, though, the titular ballet at the film’s center is what makes it so special. Like Shearer, the ballet is transformed. Unshackled from the confines of a stage and the limitations of physics, it embraces the celluloid realm yet somehow never loses sight of the dancers’ graceful physicality—a paradox, perhaps, but a beautiful one.

In theaters.

Several years ago, at the peak of the backlash against the movie Sideways, A. O. Scott wrote an essay for the New York Times in which he argued that critics overpraised the movie largely because the average critic is a schlubby, geeky, middle-aged man all too eager to buy into a story about a schlubby, geeky, middle-aged man who wins the heart of the luminous Virginia Madsen. I’ve heard similar insinuations about An Education, in which the luminous Carey Mulligan falls for a man nearly twice her age, but though I understood where Scott was coming from with regard to Sideways, the sneer at An Education mystifies me. The movie is not about the older man’s fantasy of seducing the younger woman; it’s about the younger woman’s fantasy of being seduced by the older man. If it flatters anyone, it’s not schlubby, middle-aged geeks but artsy, awkward young women who have more book-learning than life experience but who want desperately to change that. And yet An Education is not itself naïve. An elegant coming-of-age story, with a rare female protagonist, it walks the line between rosiness and darkness with grace and insight and a big heart.

In theaters.

Bruce Willis has made an art of aging—not of looking younger than his years (or trying to, clinging to youth with hairplugs and a lifted Botox face and a grotesque steroid-enhanced body), but rather of truly aging well. He looks great for a man in his fifties, but he still looks like a man in his fifties—always—and he uses that. In movies like Sin City and Live Free and Die Hard and now Surrogates, he sticks to his same old action genre, more or less, but acknowledges that he’s not the invincible, yippee-ki-yi-yay-motherfucking kid he once was. He lets himself creak a little bit when he moves, and it’s compelling and cool, and Nicolas Cage, for one, should take a lesson.

The effect is particularly noticeable in Surrogates, in which Willis plays not only Tom Greer, grizzled police detective of the near future, but also Greer’s uncanny, bewigged, smooth-faced “surrogate,” a kind of robot representative he controls remotely from the comfort and safety of his home. In Greer’s world, virtually everyone uses a surrogate to interact with the outside—an intriguing premise that raises all kinds of questions, from the practical to the philosophical. Sadly, the movie all but ignores those questions in favor of a routine whodunnit, which is why I spent most of the movie pondering Willis’s aging and other tangential thoughts. I guess I give it credit for providing the material for my flights of fancy, but its failure to develop that material itself makes it a disappointment.

In theaters.

Of all the time-wasting Internet videos out there, one of the more interesting types are the mock trailers that completely recast the tone of the subject, advertising Mary Poppins as a horror movie, for example, or The Shining as a happy family comedy, with music selections and narration dramatically changing the way we perceive the familiar scenes. In a strange way, The Informant! is like that on a grander scale. With its subject matter of corporate espionage and corruption, it might have been a thriller. That’s certainly how the main character, FBI informant Mark Whitacre, imagines the situation, likening himself to the hero of a Michael Crichton or John Grisham novel. But instead of recalling The Insider, The Informant! shifts gears, subtly pitching itself as a bone-dry comedy with idiosyncratic retro flair.

At first, I assumed that this was all director Steven Soderbergh’s doing—he seems to love playing with genre and tone—but then I changed my mind. It’s not just the direction; the odd little grace notes are already there in Scott Z. Burns’s screenplay, particularly in Whitacre’s digressive internal monologue. Why would you have the guy pondering the noses of polar bears if you expected the material to be played completely straight? But then again, maybe the ultimate responsibility for the quirkiness of The Informant! lies with the real-life Whitacre, whose exploits are eventually revealed to be so bizarre that a conventional interpretation would likely fall flat, overwhelmed by twists that defy belief. But wherever the inspiration comes from, The Informant! works. Its slippery self-presentation is part of its considerable charm.

In theaters.

The conventional wisdom about Julie & Julia is that it’s half of a good movie: blogger Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is obnoxious and chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is awesome. I understand why they say that. Streep’s big, enthusiastic performance is a joy to behold, and Child is an icon; her magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a true achievement. By comparison, Julie is slight, her angst insignificant. Who cares? To which, if I’m being truly honest, I must reply: I do. I care because I identify with Julie’s angst and her dramatic arc. If Julie & Julia had been just Julia, it would have lost much of its meaning, and as that meaning strikes a chord with me, I cannot want that, even when Julie is a bratty narcissist. Perhaps this makes me a bratty narcissist, too.

In repertory at Film Forum through September 17.

The great actor James Mason gets top billing in Carol Reed’s moody, noirish 1947 film about a Irish nationalist wounded in a robbery for the cause and abandoned by his crew, but the credits are misleading. Odd Man Out isn’t a star-driven picture, and even though Mason spends more time onscreen than anyone else, a good deal of that time he’s not doing much, just staggering about, slipping in and out of consciousness. His character, the badly injured Johnny McQueen, is in no condition to act; instead, throughout, he is acted upon.

And that’s just one of the ways in which Odd Man Out defies expectations. What initially looks like a thoughtful heist flick turns into a series of character studies with heavy religious undertones. Despite the noirish cinematographic touches, the movie doesn’t have much in common, thematically, with the genre. And despite the title card’s assurances that the movie is “not concerned with the struggle between the law and an illegal organization,” clearly meant to be the IRA, that’s not precisely true. Odd Man Out dramatically portrays a town under lockdown, where citizens can’t trust the police or one another, where people are gunned down in the streets. The question of who is ultimately at fault—the British police or the Irish nationalists—might not be the focus, but the ramifications of that conflict are.

In theaters.

The amusingly paradoxical thing about Quentin Tarantino is that his movies constantly reference other ones—a blizzard of allusions and homages and old-fashioned knock-offs—and yet a Tarantino movie is instantly recognizable as a Tarantino movie. He’s a magpie but somehow a unique magpie—distinct even from those whose work he has appropriated.

And what is that—the ability to take something old and transmute it into something new—if not art? As aggravating as Tarantino can be, there is true virtuosity about his work that I always enjoy, sometimes despite myself. I might be in two minds about Inglourious Basterds, but in my gut, I love it in all its messy, bloody, problematic glory. No one makes movies like Quentin Tarantino.

In theaters.

Charles Dickens’s books have been made into movies, but the most successful adaptations, I think, are miniseries. The intricate stories and enormous casts need time to flower into the lavish gardens they are on the page. One can compress the novels, of course, but in doing so, one loses a great deal of what makes Dickens Dickens.

I think of the Harry Potter books in much the same way. Author J. K. Rowling owes much to Dickens, from her unapologetically sprawling plotlines to her numerous tellingly named characters. As with her predecessor, the charm of her writing is in the imaginative little details, the emotional beats, the vivid sketches of minor players, the immersive world she creates—exactly the sort of elements that tend to be squeezed out in film adaptations. And frankly, that’s why I’ve never had much interest in the Harry Potter movies. I’ve seen the first (I’ll never forgive director Chris Columbus for the flat, inert portrayal of the death of the unicorn, a scene that resonates with loss and foreboding in the novel) and the third (I’ll happily watch virtually any film directed by Alfonso Cuarón), but only once each. Even Cuarón’s effort disappoints me as much as it delights.

So I didn’t have any plans to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but then Sean wanted to go and I wanted to go with Sean, and here I am writing about it. I have to admit it was better than I expected—quite good in some spots—but still, ultimately, not good enough. Movies simply aren’t the best medium in this case.

In theaters.

True satire spares no one, and In the Loop is as true as it comes: mercilessly sharp, brutally unsentimental, and absolutely hilarious. The movie targets (albeit with fictional characters) the transatlantic political machinations that lead to the invasion of Iraq, but it never actually names that country or makes any more than the vaguest references to the Middle East. For all the high stakes we know to be there, most of the characters are too wrapped up in bureaucratic infighting to pay them much heed. That breathtakingly cynical vision of an already dark chapter in the history of both the United Kingdom and the United States leaves me with mixed feelings. Despite the precision and brilliance of its barbs, In the Loop doesn’t always ring true to me, and I can’t figure out whether that’s because I’m too cynical, not cynical enough, or simply cynical in a different way.