Directed by: Clint Eastwood Written by: Anthony Peckham Full credits at IMDb
Hey, I...like[d] Freeman’s performance [here]—which is saying something, because I don’t usually like Morgan Freeman. He always acts with his voice, and what I liked most here is that he was forced to assume an accent, and so it was like watching an actor I’m not sick of. Of course, he won’t win the Oscar—that would have been like giving Obama an Academy Award. (The Nobel Peace Prize isn’t enough?) Because...the Obama parallels are glaring[...]: the assassination paranoia; the thrilled, historically oppressed black population; the looming unemployment problems. Did you notice the way he alienates his base with his message of compromise reconciliation? And yet he still manages to push through rugby reform. Obama should call a meeting with Morgan Freeman right away.
This turns out to be a Profile in Rugby Courage, and...it’s a great movie right up to the point that it becomes terrible.
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine.
Once again, the Oscar [nomination] goes to... the big, brash, brawny performance! In The Messenger, that comes courtesy of Woody Harrelson, whose character has the thankless task of delivering news of army casualties to the dead soldier’s Next of Kin. He’s as emotionally unmoveable in his duties as a Buckingham Palace guard—no tears, touching, or stutters—as you might expect from a character named [S]Tony Stone. (Why not Rocky Rock?) Gee, I wonder if he’ll break down and cry by the end of the movie? Anyway, the better turn comes from Stone’s new partner, Will, played by Ben Foster...It’s a much quieter performance, characterized more by welling eyes than scenery chewing, all the more surprising as it comes from Foster, who I know more for bouncing off the walls in Alpha Dog or going full retard in Freaks and Geeks.
Foster, of course, has to tone it down because epic emotions and high-volume drama are all around him, provided by the family members to whom Rocky and Will must deliver bad news, most of whom blame, as in displace their anguish and rage on—wait for it—The Messengers...
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine.
Directed by: Pierre Morel Written by: Adi Hasak Full credits at IMDb
From Paris with Love, a politico-hilarious buddy action-comedy, concerns an American special operative invading a foreign country (France, home of chess-playing sex crazies) and engaging in indiscriminate murder and mass destruction of property. Hey—just like last year's Taken! But this time, it's funny. Director Morel, who also helmed that exuberant Liam Neeson revenge fantasy, is shaping up to be the War on Terror's greatest, and perhaps only, satirist.
John Travolta stars as the secret agent and has a gleeful time, his best work in years, embodying the archetypal boorish American, with his muthafuckin this and cocksuckin that, his love of firearms, energy drinks and cheeseburgers (there's a cute Pulp Fiction reference), his mild racism and action hero bons mots. He's rude to waiters, encourages coke-snorting on the Eiffel Tower elevator(!), and initiates scenes of epic violence, like the "Shaw Brothers chop suey show," a guns-blazing shooting spree, he puts on in at a Chinese restaurant...
Directed by: Henrik Ruben Genz Written by: Henrik Ruben Genz & Dunja Gry Jensen Full credits at IMDb
"Based on actual events," Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig) follows Robert (Jakob Cedergren), a cop from Cop[enhagen] out of water, and at loggerheads with the locals, in the Danish countryside-town to which he has been relocated. Oh, so it's like Hot Fuzz? Right, except it's not funny (critics have been calling it "darkly comic" because they think that's a synonym for "Scandinavian"). Oh, then it's like Sleepy Hollow? Well, yeah, except it isn't scary. Then, like a Coen Brothers movie (isn't Fargo essentially a Scandinavian movie?)? What, with all the weirdoes that occupy the margins; or a David Lynch movie, with its anxious edge of malformation and menace? Yes, it's an insubstantial imitation of all of those—and more! It feels terribly 90s, when such half-considered emulations arrived with frequency, as though you should be renting it on VHS—or taping it off pre-Queer Eye Bravo—because you saw a preview for it before whatever Miramax misfire you'd misguidedly rented the day before.
Written & Directed by: John Lee Hancock Full credits at IMDb
I’m so sick of these fucking Oscar movies! Up in the Air may have been the most vexing of the lot [I've seen] so far, but The Blind Side, disgusting in its every detail, is by far the most insipid—and, uh, racist. And, uh, American. It’s about three of this country’s favorite things: Christianity, Football, and dumb black folk succeeding thanks to the charity of white people. I argued in [an earlier piece] that Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire was conservative in its own tricky way, but this movie wears its Republican agenda like a badge of honor. In Lee Daniels’ movie, Precious succeeds thanks to a network of social institutions; Michael Oher, the hero of this movie—who, in Real Life, went from homeless to N.F.L. star—succeeds thanks to the intervention of privatized forces: generous and wealthy individuals, private schools and private tutors. Look at that Free Market, takin’ care of business!
Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Directed by: Patrick Alessandrin Written by: Luc Besson Full credits at IMDb
D13:U opens three years after its ultimatum-less predecessor left off. "The government has changed," a title card imparts. "But nothing else." Right: Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) and Leito (David Belle) again must unite to defeat a nefarious government plot to bomb the titular ghetto. But much else, in fact, is different: the impoverished denizens of the walled-in slum, now self-segregated by ethnicity, have more face tattoos; there's more slo-mo, more awesomeness-reinforcing replays of the ante-upped action, more unwinding with sexy hos. In short, another man is sitting in the director's chair.
Pierre Morel helmed the rip-roaring first-entry in this Franco franchise-to-be, but has since gone on to collect paychecks in American dollars; screenwriter-producer Luc Besson, the Apatow of Gallic action, appointed Patrick Alessandrin to take over, and the new director, usually successfully, mostly mimics Morel—except the action editing isn't as precise, the storytelling not as taut...
Directed by: Lee Daniels Written by: Geoffrey Fletcher Full credits at IMDb
It’s easy to see why Tyler Perry signed on to this movie as an executive producer while it traveled the festival circuit; his critic-proof bank-busters have a strange dual politics that Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire borrows: a call for personal responsibility that also recognizes the need for a social support system. It takes a village...I guess those two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive; that’s just what I’ve learned from polarizing cable news programs. Anyway, it’s emerging as the New Politics of the black middle-to-upper class: people of color need to stick together. But they also need to take care of themselves. (Because Precious’ horrible, horrible mother is a welfare abuser, the movie also strikes me as an argument for Clintonian welfare reform.) Precious is like Madea Goes to Harlem Hell.
And it’s a very sensationalist trip to hell...
Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Directed by: Edward D. Wood, Jr. Written by: Ed Wood & Alex Gordon Full credits at IMDb
Ed Wood’s reputation as “The Worst Filmmaker Ever” is bullshit; his talentlessness is a myth, begat in the Age of Irony as a haughty reaction to the filmmaker’s conspicuous compromises in the face of budgetary constraints. It’s easy to laugh, for example, at his Bride of the Monster from 1955—at its poorly edited-in stock footage, at many of its non-professional actors—but it’s just as easy to appreciate its virtues: the touching details (the police captain who pours a glass of water for his pet bird), its critical depiction of police (callously rounding up hobos, bullying newspaper peddlers), its sense of humor (“this is the 20th Century!” the police captain says. “Don’t count on it,” a reporter replies), its battle of the sexes banter, and its exploration of marriage vis-à-vis the vanquishing power of love.
Written & Directed by: Rian Johnson Full credits at IMDb
Movies themselves are the long con in The Brothers Bloom, a romantic metafilm about the mendacity of storytelling that unfolds with the sophistication and guessing-game complexity of a Tony Gilroy contraption—albeit without the movie-star-glamour fetish. That’s not to say the film isn’t without Big Names: Adrian Brody, putting his naturally mopey anguish to good use, stars as little bro to Mark Ruffalo; together, they constitute the eponymous, world-famous swindlers, out on one last con: to bamboozle a million smackers from eccentric heiress/hermit Rachel Weisz (never better). Ruffalo, a sort of stand-in for writer-director Johnson, writes the narratives for their months-long rackets, and Brody—a stand-in for…himself? The actor, longing to break free of prescribed boundaries—makes them click. Weisz is us, the audience, longing to be strung along on an adventure, even if it’s all a ruse.
Johnson’s previous feature, the estimable Brick, had an easy hook: John Huston meets John Hughes. But this film refuses to be so easily pinned down. Style (and substance) and flair burst out of every frame and speaker; Johnson—hell, everybody—is firing on all cylinders here, with a twisty story played out by top-notch actors engaging in expressionistic gestures against ornate backdrops. The director evokes a host of others: Wes Anderson, in the dandy preciousness and reverence for anachronism (trans-Atlantic steamers!?!); Quentin Tarantino, in the dialogue’s eloquence; Charlie Kaufman, in the storytelling self-awareness; and any of the Old Masters, in the expert visual style (not least in the elegant slow motions or graceful tracking shots). But Johnson is no derivation or sum of his influences. He’s an American eclectic, on the cusp of (God willing!) a long and exciting career. Grade: A
Written & Directed by: Chris Fuller Full credits at IMDb
The circa '97 St. Petersburg of Loren Cass, a classy low-budget indie about Floridian disaffection, is somnolent and sickly and sad: while sleepy jazz seeps from car stereos, and blacktops are so devoid of cars you can lie right down on them, the gas stations and city buses are bathed in an emetic green glow, the diners awash in blue shadows like the cover of a Sinatra record. By day, it's a sunny American town; by night, it's on the verge of dissolution, disintegration: the high school hallways are eerily empty, the traffic signs corroded--even the graffiti is fading. The streets, meanwhile, pulsate with violence.
Set in the aftermath of the 1996 riots sparked off by a police shooting, Loren Cass features spurts of abrupt, seemingly unprovoked, racially motivated melees that recede just as quickly as they erupted. The fists flail between angsty young men; the adults are absent: either asleep in front of a staticky television, sitting stock still in their easy chairs, or sneaking swigs from a desk drawer bottle. (The film's only young woman is too busy waiting tables and bedding men of all colors to get involved.)
Directed by: Jason Reitman Written by: Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner Full credits at IMDb
So Ben, the director of Juno strikes again! This time, with perhaps the most vexing and offensive film of the Oscar season. (Hey, just like two years ago!) Not the worst—I still love Clooney, even if this is his blandest and most forgettable work in years—but Up in the Air easily sums up what’s wrong with the Oscarbrow: it’s a dumb movie cloaked in respectability, quirky enough—even if it doesn’t have a hamburger telephone—to seem Original without ever actually being unique. Or, you know, smart.
[...]
The movie’s dripping with zeitgeist and yet already feels dated. (For starters, its airline check-in scenes seem soooo pre-underpants bomber.) Worst of all, like Juno and Reitman fils’ first film Thank You For Smoking, it’s smugly conservative but hides its politics behind the hipness of cynicism and alienation...
Keep reading my (lengthy!) discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Written & Directed by: Michael & Peter Spierig Full credits at IMDb
Vampire fiction has an abundance of possible allegorical avenues to explore, and Daybreakers takes a short walk down just about all of them: is this sleek slice of dystopian futurism a parable about the unsustainability of current farming practices? Or peak oil? Or drug addiction? AIDS? Diabetes? Undocumented workers? Corporate malfeasance? Warmongering? And how does the Holocaust and rape imagery fit in? Well, it doesn't, really. And, regarding which of those metaphors Daybreakers sticks to, the answer is: none of the above. But, as with Park Chan-wook's recent, similarly scatterbrained vampire-epic Thirst, that isn't necessarily a flaw.
Hey, I...like[d] Freeman’s performance [here]—which is saying something, because I don’t usually like Morgan Freeman. He always acts with his voice, and what I liked most here is that he was forced to assume an accent, and so it was like watching an actor I’m not sick of. Of course, he won’t win the Oscar—that would have been like giving Obama an Academy Award. (The Nobel Peace Prize isn’t enough?) Because...the Obama parallels are glaring[...]: the assassination paranoia; the thrilled, historically oppressed black population; the looming unemployment problems. Did you notice the way he alienates his base with his message of 
