Salt

Directed by: Phillip Noyce
Written by: Kurt Wimmer
Full credits at IMDb

The most glaring aspect of Salt [is] its calculated unobjectability. Of course the movie opens with waterboarding North Koreans. North Koreans are so evil! Who could dare disagree?

On its face, Salt’s title role looks kind of risky: what kind of Hollywood A-lister takes a part as a Soviet sleeper-spy committed to carrying out the orders of her comrade overlords? (Sean Penn?) That’s when you realize why the movie’s convoluted plotting has the Russian spies killing the Russian president (“Matveyev”), or why Salt kills only filthy, stinkin’, vodka-swillin’, tattoo-covered Commies: it’s a weird political cover for film and star, before she undertakes her superhero-origins-like conversion to full-on good guy. Er, gal. It’s not like she killed any Americans: I’m pretty sure that in every scene she violently disarmed her American opponents and nothing more...

Hell, even making the Russians the bad guys—bent on taking over America’s nukes, because that’s one way to win an arms race—is kind of hilarious: it’s so inherently kitschy, no matter how solemn the film looks, so pre-Craig Bond...

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Life During Wartime

Written & Directed by: Todd Solondz
Full credits at IMDb

Todd Solondz's queasy, drily comical, and morally hefty Life During Wartime might be the most important movie of the year—at least the most engaging. It speaks not just for a generation but for an entire country...The film is a follow-up to Solondz's Happiness, which capped the 90s by exploring the pernicious perversity that propped up Clinton-era prosperity. Wartime rounds off the aughts, which Solondz presents as a distorted mirror-version of its predecessor. Accordingly, these two films, and their opening scenes, are very much the same, but different. Like, the characters are the same, but played by different actors. The setting has moved from suburban New Jersey to sunny Florida.

But you can't outrun your problems...

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Get Low

Directed by: Aaron Schneider
Written by: Chris Provenzano & C. Gaby Mitchell
Full credits at IMDb

In director Aaron Schneider's schmaltzy Get Low, which uses its score like sitcoms use canned laughter-and-awwws, Robert Duvall plays Felix Bush, a hoary, hirsute hermit who plans to throw himself a living funeral party; Bill Murray is the droll funeral director tasked with making it happen. The party is supposed to give the townsfolk a chance to share the rural legends they've heard about the old loner. But really, he intends for it to serve as public, pre-deathbed confessional.

Bush can't forgive himself, and has so much self-loathing he couldn't ask for it from others: his isolated cabin serves as self-imposed prison, where he has spent 40 years as warden and sole prisoner, punishing himself for wrongs he committed as a young man...

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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About Her Brother

Directed by: Yôji Yamada
Written by: Yôji Yamada & Emiko Hiramatsu
Full credits at IMDb

Director Yôji Yamada is shaping up to be a kind of Japanese Clint Eastwood—and, like Eastwood, he’s making his share of missteps. Consider the parallels: As Eastwood cut his teeth on a popular show (Rawhide), so did Yamada spend much of his career working on a beloved series (40-some-odd Tora-San films). Both old men are now known best for something else, though: thoughtful reinventions of their respective country’s foundational genre (Westerns for Eastwood, with Unforgiven; samurai pictures for Yamada, with his Fujisawa trilogy). And, also, female-centered melodramas.

Yamada’s latest, About Her Brother (Otôto)...belongs to that category, as did his previous feature, last year’s unnoticed masterpiece, Kabei: Our Mother.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Directed by: Jon Turteltaub
Written by: Matt Lopez, Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard
Full credits at IMDb

...it’s soulless, by-committee filmmaking, cynically guaranteed to have something to appeal to every demographic. The movie’s not saying anything because it’s been scrubbed-free in advance of any kind of ideas that could potentially lose the studio a dollar.

And yet, to show you what kind of a company Disney is, no one there could even spot the unconscious cultural misogyny that pervades the movie? Magic-as-queer makes sense, Ben, because of how much this movie doesn’t like women, no matter how cute Teresa Palmer might be. You know, Nicolas Cage loves that one women, but she’s also evil, because she’s some kind of lesbian, I think, who became one with the Bad Girl...

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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Valhalla Rising

Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by: Roy Jacobsen & Nicolas Winding Refn
Full credits at IMDb

Valhalla Rising is set at first on “the fringes of the earth,” on fog-veiled hills and smoke-shrouded seas that suggest a planet only half-formed—just like the civilization taking shape upon its surface. It’s 1000 CE and Viking heathens, when not fleeing as far as Scottish moors from the approaching “followers of the White Christ,” pit their kept-humans against each other for sport, animal-men like the mute One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) who brutally beat each other with deafening thuds and revolting squishes. Valhalla’s horrifyingly elemental, all wind, iron, wood and blood; with minimal dialogue and an icy palette, Refn exploits a post-apocalyptic aesthetic to evoke pre-civilization, blurring the line between culture’s beginning and end.

Indeed: after One Eye slaughters his slave-drivers and pals up with a tween (Maarten Stevenson) to roam the awful heaths, Valhalla recalls The Road, just set 1000 years earlier…oh, and with Michael Myers as its hero and Jesus Freaks as the bad guys.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Predators

Directed by: Nimród Antal
Written by: Alex Litvak & Michael Finch

The last few years in franchise-horror have been about undoing the damage wreaked in the last-few-years before that. You know, today’s cynical, miserablist audiences won’t go for anything campy, or for that bonkers outer space shit. So Michael Bay applies the grungy, washed-out look to all the series that had been pushed to the limits of absurdity or tedium: Friday the 13th atones for Jason X, A Nightmare on Elm Street nullifies Freddy vs. Jason. The new “don’t call it a reboot” Predators seems to spring from that trend: it’s a totally cool franchise do-over that pretends something like, say, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem never happened. The only difference between this and Platinum Dunes’ assembly-line folderol is that Predators has a much more impressive pedigree, and as a result it’s actually pretty awesome.

Well, for the most part.

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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The Kids Are All Right

Directed by: Lisa Cholodenko
Written by: Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg
Full credits at IMDb

Genuinely touching and persuasively pro-family, The Kids Are All Right offers a remarkably honest and moving depiction of marriage—and it's a gay marriage! In fact, Kids portrays the ultimate Modern Family, one-upping the ABC sitcom of that name not with its lesbian moms or their teenage kids, but by tossing in the sperm donor, too. Mark Ruffalo, at his hunkiest, plays that previously anonymous jizz-giver, called 18-years-later into the lives of the kids he didn't even know he had when they seek him out.

Kids is built around easy foils—one kid's sporty (Josh Hutcherson), the other's a science whiz (Mia "Alice" Wasikowska); one mom's uptight (Annette Bening), the other's easygoing (Julianne Moore)—but none is more conspicuous than Ruffalo, playing the opposite of the family-unit itself: he's the alluring outsider, the free-loving motorcyclist with a cool record collection who allows each family member to cast off the reins long-held by their controlling matriarch...

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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