Category: Reviews

In theaters.

OK, so I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but my personal perfect storm of familial, financial, and meteorological stressors (don’t ask) seems to have abated somewhat, so I decided to check out one of the many Academy Award–nominated movies I haven’t seen.

When I was young and foolish and in possession of far too much free time, I made a point of seeing at least four of the five nominees in each major Oscar category, but that’s not going to happen this year. Most of them simply don’t appeal to me. But Milk looked reasonably promising, and I’d become interested in its iconic subject after Sean and I visited San Francisco a year and half ago, so Milk it was.

Biopics are notoriously middlebrow, of course, but screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, director Gus Van Sant, and star Sean Penn manage to avoid many of the clichés and pitfalls of the genre. Most notably, they avoid turning Harvey Milk into a plaster saint. The portrait they create is beautifully messy and textured and vibrant. He’s not perfect, but you can feel why people loved him, why he meant so much to so many.

In theaters.

When I first saw the preview for director David Fincher’s new movie, I thought it was an adaptation of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a novel I read (and disliked) several years ago. Of course, I was wrong about the preview. I learned later that novelist Andrew Sean Greer had lifted his premise from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it is that story that is dramatized in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

To be frank, though, I don’t see why Fitzgerald and Greer and Fincher and his screenwriters are all so enamored of the conceit of a person who ages backward, born in the body of a shriveled old man and gradually “growing down,” so to speak, to die as an infant. Beyond the obvious (and depressing) parallels between infancy and old age, I just don’t see what I’m supposed to get out of it.

In theaters.

I have a fiction handicap (that is, not an imaginary ailment but a disability that keeps me from truly enjoying a great deal of fiction), and it is this: I don’t believe in destiny. No, more than that: I despise the very concept of destiny, not just intellectually but emotionally, spiritually, viscerally. It doesn’t make sense to me. It angers me. I’m okay with true love and coincidence, but once people start talking about how something was meant to be, or everything happens for a reason, or the future is written in the stars, or someone can only be happy with his One True Soulmate—when that happens, I pull away. My heart goes hard. I simply can’t follow where that goes.

That reaction is a big problem with countless stories, countless books and movies, so as damaging as I think the idea of destiny is, I kind of wish that my reaction weren’t so extreme. Take Slumdog Millionaire. It’s a good movie, and I loved, say, the first two-thirds of it. But then our hero, Jamal, starts talking about his childhood sweetheart, Latika, as his One And Only Love—nothing else matters, they are destined to be together, she is his only desire—and he’s behaving in a manner that is, by any rational measure, obsessive and unhealthy and, frankly, frightening. He ignores her expressed wishes, he scorns his own future, and it’s all supposed to be romantic, and I’m just thinking, No, no, no, no, NO.

To me, this is bad writing. I don’t believe that Jamal, that anyone, would behave in this way under the given circumstances. It’s too ridiculous, too extreme. Hell, that whole conflict—the whole star-crossed Jamal-and-Latika melodrama—seems contrived and stupid. I understand that we are supposed to go along with it for the sake of the story, and I try—I do!—because I’ve been enjoying the movie. And I guess I enjoy the rest of the movie, too—kind of. But when it ends, I feel detached, unmoved, disappointed. I know that’s partly my fault, but surely it’s partly the failure of Slumdog Millionaire as well?

In theaters.

One might think that it was terrible luck for Let the Right One In, a small Swedish vampire movie, to hit American theaters alongside the Twilight juggernaut, but I suspect the timing was actually a blessing (perhaps even intentional). The slow-moving subtitled film can’t actually compete with Stephenie Meyer’s massively successful franchise, but it can piggyback on the vampire madness as a kind of counterprogramming. Contrarians and snobs, who might otherwise have overlooked the moody little genre flick, will seek out Let the Right One In so they can rave about the good vampire movie, the one that doesn’t feature constipated acting, simplistic sex-is-bad messaging, and goofy sparkle-skin mythology. You laugh, but obviously the trick worked on at least one person.

The ironic twist is that Let the Right One In turns out to be a genuinely great movie—disturbing and haunting and beautifully filmed—and it deserves more than to be used as an ineffectual shiv in the side of a dumb Tiger Beat blockbuster. I hope that the audience it attracts with spite takes the time to admire its subtleties and appreciate it not just for what it isn’t (i.e., Twilight) but for what it is.

In theaters.

Thus far, I’ve managed to avoid reading Stephenie Meyer’s vampire series. I know enough about the books—and about myself—to know that I would really dislike them, and although that kind of makes me want to read them anyway so that I can make rude comments about them, I try to avoid caving into that perverse impulse.

Unfortunately for my attempts at being a better person, my fourteen-year-old niece mentioned over Thanksgiving that she really wanted to see Twilight, the new film adaptation of the first book (she’s read them all), and I couldn’t resist offering to take her. I felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, accompanying a genuinely besotted fan so that I could sink my teeth into the object of her affection, but I think she suspected the truth (she kept glancing at me in the theater to gauge my reaction), and she got a free ticket out of the trip, and of course I love her and would never be rude to her.

Plus, truth be told, I didn’t hate the movie as much as I had expected. Director Catherine Hardwicke makes the most of the Pacific Northwest setting, giving the whole film a rainy, verdant beauty. In a few scenes, notes of levity manage to sneak into the otherwise morose story and charm me in spite of myself. And finally, I underestimated how endearing Brooke’s enthusiasm would be. I couldn’t share her love of Edward and Bella, but her excitement was mildly contagious. In my own way, I enjoyed the movie as a weird hybrid of melodrama, comedy, and aunt-niece bonding.

In theaters.

In a 2007 Associated Press article that endeared him to me forever, Matt Damon was quoted derisively contrasting the classic James Bond with Jason Bourne, his own franchise character:

[Bond is] an imperialist and a misogynist. He kills people and laughs and sips martinis and wisecracks about it. Bourne is this paranoid guy. He’s on the run. He’s not the government; the government is after him. He’s a serial monogamist who’s in love with his dead girlfriend and can’t stop thinking about her. He’s the opposite of James Bond.

Paul Greengrass, director of the last two Bourne movies, agreed:

[Bond is] an insider. He likes being a secret agent. He worships at the altar of technology. He loves his gadgets. And he embodies this whole set of misogynistic values. He likes violence. That’s part of the appeal of the character. He has no guilt. He’s essentially an imperial adventurer of a particularly English sort. Personally, I spit on those values. I think we’ve moved on a little bit from all that, the martini shaken, not stirred.

I quote Damon and Greengrass at length partly because I love how cutting they are in their assessment of the Bond mythos (“I spit on those values”—wow!) but mainly because I think it’s striking how the Bond reboot, starring Daniel Craig, seems to reflect their critique. I’m not suggesting that the Bond crew is responding specifically to Damon’s and Greengrass’s opinions (the timing is off, for starters). Rather, they seem to have recognized independently just how dated—often offensively so—the character is.

The funny thing is that the new Bond looks a lot like Damon’s Bourne: less quippy and gadget-oriented, at odds with his government, and in love with his dead girlfriend. Personally, I appreciate the change—and I adore Craig’s performance—but is he even Bond anymore? I mean, I shed no tears for the loss of the classic Bond, whom I find tiresome, but for those who did love the old guy, it must be weird to see him so inverted.