3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds

Some critics have been calling the Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man” a black comedy. Some have been calling it a drama.

I think it’s a horror film.

Protagonist Larry Gopnik is living a life in the Jewish version of Hell. His wife has fallen for an oily acquaintance and wants a divorce. His brother’s temporary stay with them is threatening to become permanent; he spends all his time draining a cyst. His 13-year-old son is a stoner and his older daughter washes her hair all day and dreams of getting a nose job. He is physics professor up for tenure, and one of his students tries to bribe him for a passing grade. He lives in a horrible 1960s house (the artwork is exquisitely awful) bounded on one side by an angry neighbor and on the other by a temptress.

Larry is a modern Job, or at least a Job in 1967, when the film is set. God is testing him for reasons he will never know, testing him severely. The question -- answered, but never asked -- is whether he will be able to remain moral in the face of all the stress.

The Coens are looking at the Big Questions here. What is God’s plan for us? How do we know what he wants? And as Larry himself asks, “Why does he make us feel the questions if he’s not going to give us the answers?”

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens when filmmakers begin poking around in the Big Questions, the film becomes a wee bit pretentious. And maybe more than a wee bit.

A certain smugness radiates from the screen as the Coens briefly touch upon Schrodinger’s paradox, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the stoned wisdom of Jefferson Airplane, specifically the Surrealistic Pillow album.

Hey, I like Surrealistic Pillow, too. But I’m not sure what point they’re trying to make by using it so much in a movie focusing on the idea that religion, specifically Judaism, has no answer for God’s questions. There is a disconnect in this film between what they are trying to say and how they say it.

The Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, have introduced a number of fine movie actors over the years, and they do it again here with Michael Stuhlbarg, who stars as Larry. With a pained, blank look, Stuhlbarg is unsurpassable as the passive, manipulated professor, the pawn in everyone else’s game. The other actors are strong, too, but as the movie wears on we begin to feel as if their efforts are unrewarded by the lackadaisical plot.

Perhaps the best scene -- and certainly the most gripping -- is the first. Set in 19th century Poland and performed entirely in subtitled Yiddish, it tells of a poor and simple man and wife who are visited either by a blessing or a curse. The scene, which is narratively unrelated to the rest of the story, suggests the difficulty one has in determining good from evil. Or maybe it’s about how religion is just destructive superstition.

It’s kind of hard to tell.

Michael Jackson is it, mostly

Ordinarily, a movie audience should not be distracted by thinking about the process of making the film. But the viewers of “This Is It” have no choice -- this is a movie that must be judged in the context of how it was made.

“This Is It” is enlightening and entertaining, given the circumstances.

A concert film of sorts celebrating the final tour that Michael Jackson never got to perform, it was cobbled together from rehearsal footage that was not intended to be seen. All things considered, it holds together fairly well.

Shot at what appear to be uneven intervals over a three-month period earlier this year, the footage was meant to be just a keepsake for Jackson (and, one assumes, the basis of a making-of documentary). So the quality of the filming is not what we are accustomed to seeing on the big screen -- the digital cameras are not worthy of a feature-film, the focus is iffy and the sound can be indistinct.

Yet what these sub-par cameras catch is an astonishing performer, still in his prime, working hard to perfect what looks as if it would have been an absolutely astounding show. At one point, Jackson says he wants to show the projected audiences something they have never seen before, and he was well on his way to fulfilling this wish -- from Cirque du Soleil-like aerialists (seen altogether too briefly) to a bit of black-and-white video magic, seamlessly inserting himself into the movies “Gilda” and “The Big Sleep.”

Jackson revolutionized dance, and he spends most of his songs showing off his moves. He has an extraordinary ability to move seemingly without friction -- it’s an illusion he created for moonwalking, in which he appears to put his weight on one foot while actually transferring it to the other. Even knowing how he does it, it still looks shockingly unreal every time.

And of course he grabs his crotch a lot. I’ve never understood that.

If the dance is the best part of the movie, the singing is the weakest. That’s another inevitable result of having to use rehearsal footage -- he wasn’t practicing his singing, he was working on the staging, the music and the dance moves. For several songs, including “Billie Jean,“ he sings half-heartedly, trying to preserve his voice.

In other numbers, such as a group of songs he performed as a boy with the Jackson Five, he isn’t doing anything full strength. These rehearsals of works he has been performing since he was 6 were staged entirely for the benefit of the technicians, the back-up singers and the stellar troupe of dancers.

Jackson had his pick of some of the best dancers in the world b
because, face it, he’s Michael Jackson. A montage of some of them at their audition reveals the esteem they have for him; one man tearfully tells Jackson “You’re why I dance.”

The musicians, too, are absolutely top notch, another advantage to being Michael Jackson. Drummer Jonathan Moffett impresses with a driving, steady beat, but the stand-out is guitarist Orianthi Panagaris. Not only does she make her ax wail, but she’s also hot. It’s a good combination.

The show itself only stumbles once, but it’s a terrible stumble. For “The Earth Song,” it mixes simplistic ecological lyrics with embarrassingly childish images, including a little girl with butterflies facing down a bulldozer. “I love the planet. I have respect for trees,” he says, though we don’t know when he says it or whom he says it to.

You can never quite escape the freakishness of Jackson’s face, and viewers who are not inveterate fans might find themselves getting bored for 15 or 20 minutes. But even though it goes on too long, the movie leaves us wanting more.

We don’t want to watch more of the movie. We just wish it could have ended with actual footage of the concerts.

Things that go zzzzz in the night

A more precise name would be “Paranormal Inactivity,” but that would not be as marketable.

And marketing is what “Paranormal Activity” is all about. The film is a triumph of marketing. Story, character, dialogue, photography -- not so much.

Reportedly shot in one week on a budget of $15,000, the picture is in a theater near you as a result of a brilliant viral advertising campaign. The studio, Paramount, let it be known that this is the scariest movie ever made. It will terrify you so much that you will sleep with the lights on for a week after you see it. But the studio didn’t know whether it should show it. If you want it to come to your town, you have to go to a Web site and vote to see it.

How could it fail? The people who came up with that idea are marketing gods. They deserve a hefty portion of what are sure to be massive profits -- it’s hard not to make a profit when the picture only costs $15,000.

What they don’t tell you is that you’ll be so bored by the movie that you won’t have to sleep with the lights on, you’ll just be able to.

Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat play Katie and Micah (another clever idea), an attractive but insanely dull young couple who are hearing bumps in the night. Micah has bought a camera to record whatever goes on in their house while they sleep, and it is these tapes that make up the entirety of the film.

In other words, it is another version of the camcorder first-person point of view pioneered in “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield.” It seems like an effective tool, but it would be so much more effective if we wanted to watch the tapes. At least in “Cloverfield,” the camera catches the characters in reasonably interesting lives before the beastie comes calling.

In “Paranormal Activity” Katie and Micah are banal. Their conversations become repetitive -- each character has about three things to say, and they say them over and over and over. He wants to get a Ouija board to help find out what is happening. She doesn’t want him to. He wants to keep the camera on at all times. She doesn’t want him to. She wants to call a demonologist, he doesn’t want her to.

Thirty-five minutes into the film, you wish the demon would come out and eat them, already -- if just to shut them up. Every once in awhile, Katie and Micah hear a thump and a low-frequency hum, which isn’t scary. It might be scary if there were something interesting to distract us, such as other characters or a subplot. But all we get essentially is these two characters and their house.

When Micah in frustration addresses the unseen demon, “Hey, we haven’t had anything interesting happen in awhile,” we can’t help but agree with him.

Featherston and Sloat do a fine job of making their relationship believable, and their conversations seem true to life. We just don’t want to hear the same ideas repeated so many times without any frights to enliven them. And when something does happen -- they find a photograph -- it is only unintentionally funny. The demon hasn’t just been stalking her, it turns out to be a bit of a perv.

A man named Oren Peli wrote and directed the film, but you wouldn’t know that from watching it. Neither his name nor anyone else’s appears in the credits. That is because there are no credits, another devilishly clever ploy from the marketing department.

Those guys are great. Maybe they should be the ones making the movie.

Not enough lift

Was Amelia Earhart really this dull? My review of "Amelia" is here:
http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=341:amelia&catid=74:movie-reviews

Your patience will be rewarded

For years, we’ve witnessed a never-ending stream of movies about fathers learning to bond with their sons or, just as frequently, surrogate fathers bonding with surrogate sons.

It can be maddening. But every once in awhile, a picture comes along that gets it right.

The (mostly) Australian film “The Boys Are Back” takes awhile to come into its own, but it eventually blossoms into a heartfelt and moving example of the genre.

Joe is an English sportswriter living in Australia, a single father raising a 6-year-old boy by himself. The fact that his beloved wife is dead is made clear in the opening scenes, rendering pointless the next 10 minutes of will-she-die-or-won’t-she flashbacks.

Joe is apparently the worst father in the world (he is also possibly the worst sportswriter, though the film doesn’t seem inclined to agree). He is a laissez faire parent, he has no rules and not boundaries and he apologizes for everything -- even things that are not his fault. Fortunately, he receives occasional parenting advice from a hallucination of his late wife.

This device is hackneyed and shameless, but somehow it works.

“Somehow it works” is the watchword of “The Boys Are Back,” but the film’s quality isn’t really that random. The movie succeeds because of fine acting all around and the sensitive direction of Scott Hicks.

As Joe, Owen may not be brilliant the entire time, but he seems to grow into the role as the film goes along. He shows genuine love for his son, and just as important, he acts as if he believes in the terrible decisions he is making.

Emma Booth also stands out as the quietly hopeful (and conveniently available) mother of a classmate of the son, and George MacKay also makes waves as an older son who lives in England. But the whole movies hangs on the slender shoulders of Nicholas McAnulty, who plays 6-year-old Artie. His performance is so unforced, so natural and b
believable that we have to remind ourselves that he is acting.

Hicks, the director, has made one good movie (“Shine”) and a host of lesser efforts (“No Reservations,” “Snow Falling on Cedars” and the Richmond-filmed “Hearts in Atlantis”). “The Boys Are Back” falls on the more positive side of the ledger. He gives the story an unhurried sense of momentum; the scenes are just the length they need to be and they are all necessary to the plot, aside from the flashback at the beginning.

Alan Cubitt’s script suffers from the occasional howler (“So, what is it you want?” “Something I can’t have”) and is not overburdened by subtlety. Still, all movies hinge on their screenplays, and this one’s script eventually works its magic on the audience.

Hankies will not be needed. But by the end, “The Boys Are Back” will have you entranced.

Just for the hyphenate

Not to be persnickety, but shouldn't the title "Law Abiding Citizen" have a hyphen in it? You can read my review, including that tidbit, here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=340:law-abiding-citizen&catid=74:movie-reviews

Couples...Retreat!

Think of it as a warning. My review of "Couples Retreat" can be found here:

http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=336:couples-retreat&catid=74:movie-reviews

Shining brightly, for a while

It’s a pity. “Bright Star” is such an entrancing and exquisitely crafted movie, yet it drags so noticeably toward the end that you walk away from it only wishing that it had been shorter.

Like a bright star, the film shines like a supernova before it burns out too soon, collapses on itself and leaves us with a cinematic black hole.

OK, that’s overstating it. It’s still a good movie. But by the end, it is no longer a great movie.

What we get too much of is the death of poet John Keats. This story of his great love and muse, Fanny Brawne, must by necessity end with his early death. This isn’t a surprise: We know from English class that Keats died young. All the Romantic poets did, except Worsdworth, who should have.

Keats is played by Ben Whishaw and Fanny by Abbie Cornish, and it is to the film’s considerable benefit that it concentrates mainly on Abbie. As shown here, she is the one with the spark of life, she is the one who is flirtatious and funny and interesting, she is the one whose emotions spring from things that affect her. Keats, on the other hand, is just morose and moody and, you know, poety.

Cornish, an Australian actress little known on these shores (she was in the disappointing “Stop-Loss) is a revelation as Fanny. Intentionally made to look plain, she plays her as a frothy, good-time girl, in an early 19th century sort of way. She loves to dance and she loves parties, her seeming insubstantiality heightened by her interest in fashion.

But beneath this exterior gloss lies real depth of feeling, as Cornish makes clear in her carefully nurtured performance. She is smart and quick-witted in a time when intelligence and wit were not necessarily desired in women. And her fashions do look fairly stunning.

It is clear what Keats sees in her, but less obvious is what she sees in him. In this picture, he is a drip, given to prolonged periods of inactivity while waiting for inspiration to strike. When she first meets him, his poetry isn’t even all that good -- a situation that is resolved when she becomes his muse, and he matures.

We can assume that she also sees in him a certain attractiveness. Whishaw (he starred in “Perfume” and was Sebastian in the theatrical version of “Brideshead Revisited”) is darkly handsome as the doomed poet. But he’s kind of dull.

Writer-director Jane Campion specializes in movies about strong, multifaceted women -- her best films include “The Piano,” “An Angel at My Table” and “Sweetie.” Fannie Brawne fits in nicely with those characters, which is why we can’t help but wish Fanny would fall for Keats’ strong and personable best friend, Charles Armitage Brown, played by Paul Schneider (the brother in “Lars and the Real Girl”).

Understandably, however, Campion feels compelled to adhere to what actually happened.

To this end, she quotes with good effect from Keats’ letters to Fanny (her letters to him have been lost), and even from a few of his poems. The poems do show his brilliance, and they are less of a drag on the story than you might think.

But other parts of the film are. A great Romantic poet deserves a great romantic movie, and “Bright Star” fits the bill. One just wishes the last act -- the prolonged dying act -- were cut in half.

'Silence' is golden

“Lorna’s Silence” is the story of a woman who falls for her husband.

He’s a junkie and a thief, and she is part of a plot to have him murdered. But he’s a generally good person, if needy, and when he tries to kick heroin, she experiences something she has apparently never felt before -- sympathy.

“Lorna’s Silence” is the story of a cold, calculating and ultimately selfish woman who falls for her husband and learns to think about someone other than herself.

It’s an inhuman story into which creeps a little humanity. And that’s what gives it its charm and its power.

Arta Dobroshi stars as Lorna, an Albanian working scams in Belgium. She is married to the junkie Claudy (Jeremie Renier), who has been paid to marry her so she can obtain Belgian citizenship. The marriage is a sham; they sleep in separate rooms and she can’t even work up the energy to tolerate him. Her sole interest is money -- the first few scenes are all monetary transactions -- which she hopes to use to open a modest snack bar with her Albanian lover. It’s a banal dream, considering the circumstances, and that is the point.

With her newly acquired citizenship, Lorna plans to marry a Russian so that he, too, can become Belgian. For this service, he will pay her enough money to open the snack bar. But first she has to get rid of the other husband. If he doesn’t die of an accidental overdose, her unsavory associates will help him along with one.

Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne direct from their own screenplay, and they take their directorial cues from their heroine’s moods. At the beginning, they direct with ice water in their veins -- they keep an emotional distance from the story as Lorna keeps a distance from the other characters. But as she warms, so do they; the film moves from inorganic to organic. Even the setting slides from generic urban sprawl to the outdoors.

Their work, both on paper and behind the camera, is notable for its subtlety and restraint. The script, which won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival, does us the favor of refraining from explanations; it trusts us to be able to figure out what is happening. In a bold move, one that pays off handsomely, the most striking action in the film takes place off-screen and is never directly referred to.

Their work is so fine, we can almost forgive them the de rigueur use of a hand-held camera. Almost.

But the real find here is Dobroshi. The Kosovo-born actress was previously unknown in this country, but she is marvelous in the role -- you couldn’t make the film without her. She plays Lorna with a deadened soul, but you can see the flicker of hope in her eyes, the seed of humanity that takes root within her. Although her performance is strong throughout the film, she is at her best when Lorna is changing. She is quietly stunning in a scene with a couple of cops, but maybe even better in the scene with her husband where she finally realizes what it means to be needed.

She makes this bitter tale sing.