Directed by: Steven Soderbergh Written by: Scott Z. Burns Full credits at IMDb
The more prolific Steven Soderbergh becomes, the more his movies feel like perfunctorily adumbrated rough drafts--whether it's the half-baked 40s pastiche of The Good German, the vapid (if pleasurable) celebrations of jet-setting chic that characterized the Ocean's films, or the equally vapid (if less pleasurable) experiments with new technologies, like Bubble or The Girlfriend Experience.
His latest, The Informant!, a wobbly, tonally inconsistent spy farce slash character-study psychothriller, is an exercise in unreliable narration...
Written & Directed by: Cédric Klapisch Full credits at IMDb
Roman Duris, doing his Dans Paris dour, plays The Great Enunciator in director Klapisch's Paris (sans Dans), an overly broad survey of the City of Lights through glimpses of those that live within it--a portrait of "ritzy, shabby, trashy Paris," as one character describes it, told through ditzy, flabby, flashy filmmaking. A dancer dying from a bad ticker, Pierre (Duris) people-watches from his balcony, espying many of the film's characters from a divinely aerial vantage point; their narratives are like his fantasies, making him a stand-in for the clearly curious Klapisch. There's the frustrated professor (Fabrice Luchini); the single mother (Juliette Binoche); the men and women who man the fruit markets; the bitchy bakery owner; and, marginally and for good measure, an African immigrant who spends the bulk of his time in Africa.
Written & Directed by: Bob Byington Full credits from IMDb
"You know how when you're watching a movie," Jessica (Kristen Tucker) says near the middle of Harmony and Me, "and you're half-way through and you realize you don't care about the characters anymore?" Uh, yeah, are you kidding? I feel that way right now! It takes some majorly misguided chutzpah to allow such cheeky self-consciousness into a movie that feels like a glorified student film, a movie that has nothing going for it: not its ghastly DV aesthetic, not its mangled sense of humor, not its go-nowhere narrative, not its casual non-performances, not its haphazard editing. The characters? Forget about it.
Directed by: Robert Schwentke Written by: Bruce Joel Rubin Full credits at IMDb
The first rule of pretty much every time travel narrative is that you can’t interact with yourself. The Time Traveler’s Wife violates that fiat in the very first scene, forcing audiences to concede that the rules of time travel are arbitrary—which is good, as the movie’s own rules seem not only arbitrary but perfunctory. In that first scene, a grown man comforts the ten-year-old version of himself following a car crash and the space-time fabric doesn’t fall apart. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the movie.
If you cut through the romantic veneer that thinly blankets The Time Traveler’s Wife, the epitome of manipulative women’s weepies, you find the creepiest Tinsel Town picture since the pedophilic and incestuous 17 Again: at root, it’s the story of a violent, alcoholic, kleptomaniacal exhibitionist who uses his Billy Pilgrim-esque travel habit to seduce a 10-year-old girl. Eric Bana plays that unlikely hero, whose “genetic anomaly” causes him, at random, to bounce through time (without his clothes); Rachel McAdams plays the grown-up version of that little girl, visited throughout her life by that grown and naked man.
The time travel invites multiple readings, the most obvious of which is that men are unreliable—they’re never around! It also raises identity issues: is our younger self the same as our older self? Which then raises some bizarre moral dilemmas: is it OK to make out with a time traveling younger version of your husband? Is it cheating? Unfortunately, these potentially compelling thematic threads are stuffed into an inert drama whose thin conflicts are based around the petty problems of the upper classes. (McAdams, already from a wealthy family, never has to work again—not that her hands were developing calluses—after Bana uses time traveling immorally to win the lottery.) Seriously: if you can’t conceive, adopt. If your husband isn’t around as much as you’d like him to be, get a hobby.
Yet for all these complaints, The Time Traveler’s Wife isn’t terrible: Schwentke directs serviceably, staying out of the way and, thank god, taking it easy on the swelling melodramatic music; the narrative coasts along on its (incoherent) gimmick and the charm of its stars—and, for some reason, its epic love story, even though the film pitches love as entrapment; McAdams is not subject to fate but to mortal design. “I couldn’t change even if I wanted to,” she admits. For some reason, people (the Twilight crowd?) find this romantic. Grade: C+
Directed by: Dominic Sena Written by: Jon & Erich Hoeber and Chad & Carey Hayes Full credits at IMDb
Like Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, Whiteout, a frost-blooded murder mystery, transfers the Scandinavian trend in cold-clime detective fiction—albeit more prevalent in novels like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo than in film—to American soil: though here we're not in Palin country like in Mr. Batman's Pacino-led remake, but on a U.S.-controlled research base in Antarctica. As such, the film evokes another recent trend: the global warming horror movie.
Though global warming gets namechecked only once in Whiteout, and off-handedly, it's the ever-present subtext; the film transforms the culture's climate change anxiety into a polar panic, like the recent The Last Winter. There's no supernatural element here, no mystical spirit warriors freed from their icy prisons like in Larry Fessenden's gonzo allegory. But this film's murder rate is unbound when a buried artifact is loosed from its frozen tomb, the message being: what's buried ought stay buried; there's nothing but trouble under the ice—so don't let it melt!
Written & Directed by: Roy Andersson Full credits at IMDb
The 40-year-old A Swedish Love Story (En Kärlekshistoria) is radically different from writer-director Roy Andersson's recent work in that it isn't radical at all. Unlike late-career comebacks Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living, this movie has scenes that add up to a narrative, within which the camera cuts--and, sometimes, it even moves! It does so to capture the budding romance between Annika (Ann-Sofie Kylin) and Pär (Rolf Sohlman), thirteen-year-olds whose turn-ons include pinball and strumming guitars. Andersson nails the rhythms and the details of the courtship process: for the first half of the film, the kids communicate only through silent, sidelong, pseudo-secret glances while pouting their lips, sporting leather jackets, smoking cigarettes and awkwardly struggling to project cool...
Sometimes, a movie's not the best way to tell a story — especially when it comes to non-fiction. Too many recent documentaries fail because they take compelling topics and turn them into bland films: Standard Operating Procedure was a far more insightful New Yorker article than a movie; the cheaply constructed Who Killed the Electric Car? could have been streamlined into a superior Wikipedia entry. But We Live in Public, about "the greatest internet pioneer you've never heard of," serendipitously avoids this pitfall by taking video as its subject. You need to see it in order to understand it. Chronicling the career of Josh Harris, web-video pioneer and social-networking social-experimenter, the movie examines the net-kid's decade-old happenings, then merely eccentric, and lays blatant their prescient relevance: Exposing, pre-9/11, the disastrous results of freely surrendering one's privacy to a new, intrusive technology — The Web — Harris is like a time traveler: it's like revealing the carcinogenic properties of cigarettes while Sir Walter Raleigh was still learning to roll.
The more prolific Steven Soderbergh becomes, the more his movies feel like perfunctorily adumbrated rough drafts--whether it's the half-baked 40s pastiche of The Good German, the vapid (if pleasurable) celebrations of jet-setting chic that characterized the Ocean's films, or the equally vapid (if less pleasurable) experiments with new technologies, like Bubble or The Girlfriend Experience.
