Did you realize it has been 17 years since Martin Scorsese last made a notably good feature film? (Not counting the excellent documentary on Bob Dylan). My review on the uneven -- but not bad -- "Shutter Island" is here:
http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/409-shutter-island
Friday, February 19, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
'V.D.' -- Nothing to Clap About
The romantic comedy "Valentine's Day" has a handful of laughs scattered among too many actors and too many stories. My review of it is here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/component/content/article/74-movie-reviews/403-valentines-day
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Kill and Kill Again
Mel Gibson stars as Mel Gibson in “Edge of Darkness,” a Mel Gibson film not dissimilar to several other Mel Gibson films.
This time out, he’s a cop (check) going outside the constraints of the law (check) in righteous anger (check) to seek vengeance (check) on the vast conspiracy (check) that killed his daughter (check and check).
The conspiracy here is vast and powerful and not always fully explained, but it has something to do with making nuclear MacGuffins and arranging the paperwork so it seems as if they come from other countries. Not that it matters. What is important is that these guys are so bad, they kill everyone twice. Sometimes, they poison you and then they shoot you. On other occasions, they fatally irradiate you and then they drown you. When they try to kill a character by running him or her over (in a bit of stunningly fortuitous timing), the character manages to survive.
Gibson has been down this path many times before, but the role he plays doesn’t seem repetitious so much as familiar (although also, perhaps, unnecessary). Because he is a movie star, we sometimes tend to forget that he is also quite a capable actor, and after some histrionics at the beginning he settles nicely into the role of a deeply grieving father trying to cope with the violent death of his only child.
As he goes throughout the day, he hears her voice and sees images of her as she was when she was about 5. These intimate scenes, heartbreaking in their dramatic irony, are the best in the movie; we share his deep sense of loss when he recalls such a sweet and frisky girl (the young Gabrielle Popa), and we are saddened to think that as a young woman she will be killed twice.
This being a Mel Gibson film, we understand that his grief will be translated into outbursts of furious violence directed at the many people responsible. Gibson is well into his 50s, but he still does violence well. Still, these scenes are the picture’s weak link, and that is probably the fault of the writers, William Monahan and Andrew Bovell. Gibson’s character seems to have a sixth sense about who is a bad guy, and he acts accordingly, even if the villains aren’t doing anything threatening. Yes, he’s a cop and his intuition is finely tuned, but some of this stuff he could only know if he has read the script.
Let’s put it this way: You don’t want to be following him in a black van. Ever.
Much of the information he acts on comes courtesy of Ray Winstone, who is the movie’s most interesting character. Winstone plays a secret, um, well, he’s kind of a contractor who, er, actually, it’s kind of hard to say what he does. But he appears to know everything (which comes in handy when it comes time for exposition), he sees himself as a moral arbiter (that’s the interesting part), he lurks around in scary parking garages out of movies of the ’70s and he is currently working for evil guys who, to their eventual dismay, drive black vans.
The film is based on a highly praised 1985 British miniseries of the same name, and the reason we don’t always understand how Gibson’s character knows what he knows might be due to the adaptation of the source material. The filmmakers had to squeeze more than five hours’ of information into something less than two, and it seems likely that some of the explanations got lost in the translation.
We are just to take it at face value that there is a vast conspiracy and that Gibson can piece it all together. That isn’t too hard a concept to believe, because he’s done it all before.
(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)
This time out, he’s a cop (check) going outside the constraints of the law (check) in righteous anger (check) to seek vengeance (check) on the vast conspiracy (check) that killed his daughter (check and check).
The conspiracy here is vast and powerful and not always fully explained, but it has something to do with making nuclear MacGuffins and arranging the paperwork so it seems as if they come from other countries. Not that it matters. What is important is that these guys are so bad, they kill everyone twice. Sometimes, they poison you and then they shoot you. On other occasions, they fatally irradiate you and then they drown you. When they try to kill a character by running him or her over (in a bit of stunningly fortuitous timing), the character manages to survive.
Gibson has been down this path many times before, but the role he plays doesn’t seem repetitious so much as familiar (although also, perhaps, unnecessary). Because he is a movie star, we sometimes tend to forget that he is also quite a capable actor, and after some histrionics at the beginning he settles nicely into the role of a deeply grieving father trying to cope with the violent death of his only child.
As he goes throughout the day, he hears her voice and sees images of her as she was when she was about 5. These intimate scenes, heartbreaking in their dramatic irony, are the best in the movie; we share his deep sense of loss when he recalls such a sweet and frisky girl (the young Gabrielle Popa), and we are saddened to think that as a young woman she will be killed twice.
This being a Mel Gibson film, we understand that his grief will be translated into outbursts of furious violence directed at the many people responsible. Gibson is well into his 50s, but he still does violence well. Still, these scenes are the picture’s weak link, and that is probably the fault of the writers, William Monahan and Andrew Bovell. Gibson’s character seems to have a sixth sense about who is a bad guy, and he acts accordingly, even if the villains aren’t doing anything threatening. Yes, he’s a cop and his intuition is finely tuned, but some of this stuff he could only know if he has read the script.
Let’s put it this way: You don’t want to be following him in a black van. Ever.
Much of the information he acts on comes courtesy of Ray Winstone, who is the movie’s most interesting character. Winstone plays a secret, um, well, he’s kind of a contractor who, er, actually, it’s kind of hard to say what he does. But he appears to know everything (which comes in handy when it comes time for exposition), he sees himself as a moral arbiter (that’s the interesting part), he lurks around in scary parking garages out of movies of the ’70s and he is currently working for evil guys who, to their eventual dismay, drive black vans.
The film is based on a highly praised 1985 British miniseries of the same name, and the reason we don’t always understand how Gibson’s character knows what he knows might be due to the adaptation of the source material. The filmmakers had to squeeze more than five hours’ of information into something less than two, and it seems likely that some of the explanations got lost in the translation.
We are just to take it at face value that there is a vast conspiracy and that Gibson can piece it all together. That isn’t too hard a concept to believe, because he’s done it all before.
(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)
'Dear John': Letters to Nowhere
The pace of the story of “Dear John” shifts and varies. Sometimes it ambles. Other times it meanders.
Surprisingly, the picture starts out strong, with a sun-dappled romance on the beaches of South Carolina. An earnest young man meets a good-hearted young woman and they fall in love against a golden backdrop of full moons and first kisses in the rain. Theirs is the kind of romance that makes women in the audience sigh while the men wonder if Peyton Manning really is that good or if he just benefits from an unusually powerful and well-disciplined offensive line (hint: He really is that good).
It’s a chick flick absolutely, but at least it is well made, at first, with honeyed photography and cunning dialogue that reveals the two lovers’ growing relationship.
But their time together is destined to be brief, and not just because the film is based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. She is a college student who has to return to school, and he is a soldier who must go back to do vague and undefined special-ops things overseas. But they promise to write each other every day.
And that is where our interest begins to dwindle. Problem No. 1 is that having two actors endlessly read letters back and forth is never cinematically satisfying, particularly when the letters are as mundane as these. Problem No. 2 is that the film doesn’t seem to know where it is going and it certainly doesn’t know where to end. And Problem No. 3 is that one of the lovers, the earnest young soldier, is played by Channing Tatum.
Tatum looks like a chiseled piece of marble, and unfortunately he acts like one, too. If he knows how to give inflection to his words, any inflection at all, he keeps that knowledge a well-hidden secret.
Tatum’s opposite in the film is Amanda Seyfried, who will never be confused with Meryl Streep (who played her mother in “Mamma Mia”), but she is appealing enough in the dewy-eyed, romantic part of her role. It helps that Seyfried is unconventionally beautiful, with the face of a Botticelli by way of Modigliani.
The director is Lasse Hallstrom, which may explain why the romance scenes are so effective (Hallstrom’s many fine movies include “Chocolat”). But he never quite finds the movie’s handle, and it appears possible that, despite the popularity of the original novel, there may be no handle to find.
Writer Jamie Linden also gets the romance right, but little else. His story lacks cohesion. It spends so much time on what appears to be unrelated tangents that we know the tangents will eventually become the point of the film. This tactic of feinting in one direction before taking the story off in a different one is probably supposed to be a twist, but it feels more like a bait and switch.
Eventually, with so little happening so much of the time, we just get tired of it all. Our interest wanes, and even the most romantic-minded people in the audience start thinking about football. When, after many false starts, the movie finally comes to an end, we check our watches and are surprised to learn that it didn’t last much, much longer.
(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)
Surprisingly, the picture starts out strong, with a sun-dappled romance on the beaches of South Carolina. An earnest young man meets a good-hearted young woman and they fall in love against a golden backdrop of full moons and first kisses in the rain. Theirs is the kind of romance that makes women in the audience sigh while the men wonder if Peyton Manning really is that good or if he just benefits from an unusually powerful and well-disciplined offensive line (hint: He really is that good).
It’s a chick flick absolutely, but at least it is well made, at first, with honeyed photography and cunning dialogue that reveals the two lovers’ growing relationship.
But their time together is destined to be brief, and not just because the film is based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. She is a college student who has to return to school, and he is a soldier who must go back to do vague and undefined special-ops things overseas. But they promise to write each other every day.
And that is where our interest begins to dwindle. Problem No. 1 is that having two actors endlessly read letters back and forth is never cinematically satisfying, particularly when the letters are as mundane as these. Problem No. 2 is that the film doesn’t seem to know where it is going and it certainly doesn’t know where to end. And Problem No. 3 is that one of the lovers, the earnest young soldier, is played by Channing Tatum.
Tatum looks like a chiseled piece of marble, and unfortunately he acts like one, too. If he knows how to give inflection to his words, any inflection at all, he keeps that knowledge a well-hidden secret.
Tatum’s opposite in the film is Amanda Seyfried, who will never be confused with Meryl Streep (who played her mother in “Mamma Mia”), but she is appealing enough in the dewy-eyed, romantic part of her role. It helps that Seyfried is unconventionally beautiful, with the face of a Botticelli by way of Modigliani.
The director is Lasse Hallstrom, which may explain why the romance scenes are so effective (Hallstrom’s many fine movies include “Chocolat”). But he never quite finds the movie’s handle, and it appears possible that, despite the popularity of the original novel, there may be no handle to find.
Writer Jamie Linden also gets the romance right, but little else. His story lacks cohesion. It spends so much time on what appears to be unrelated tangents that we know the tangents will eventually become the point of the film. This tactic of feinting in one direction before taking the story off in a different one is probably supposed to be a twist, but it feels more like a bait and switch.
Eventually, with so little happening so much of the time, we just get tired of it all. Our interest wanes, and even the most romantic-minded people in the audience start thinking about football. When, after many false starts, the movie finally comes to an end, we check our watches and are surprised to learn that it didn’t last much, much longer.
(Note: This review originally ran on www.boomerlifemagazine.com)
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