Posted by Allen on May 11, 2009 under Movies, Reviews | 
Now this is what I want out of a summer blockbuster. Star Trek delivered all of the action, all of the spectacle, all of the emotion, all of the characterization I could have asked for and then some. [1] I found myself immersed in the world, in the stunning visual design and the engaging characters, in a way I’ve never been before with any of the previous Trek films or TV shows. Star Trek truly managed to do something new with these characters and ideas that have been around for forty years: make me care about them.
I truly loved the fact that, unlike other recent reboots and reimaginings which simply restarted their stories from scratch, Star Trek managed to explain its own revised continuity as part of the story itself — admittedly, the world of Trek is much more suited to such meta-shenanigans than other series. Director J.J. Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were able to utterly reset our expectations of this world and these characters while still letting the previous stories stand. And wow, do they up the stakes in a big way; there’s one event in partiular in this newly-reimagined universe that would have seemed unthinkable in the original series. When they say “everything you know is wrong”…well, it’s still hyperbole, perhaps, but it’s not as far from the truth as you might think.
Not Exactly Spoilery But Certainly Geeky Digression: I read a comment on a well-known science fiction author’s site today from a commenter who was pissed off because, he said, the new movie threw out all of the previous continuity, rendering moot all of the stories we’ve experienced before. I took away the exact opposite idea: to me, the new movie said “everything you’ve already seen still happened, but now this is happening, too.” But maybe it was a little bit easier for me to take that particular bit of continuity shuffle from all of my years of reading comic books, where this sort of thing is far from a novel idea, especially for readers of DC Comics and/or Grant Morrison.
Anyway.
One of the things I never quite understood about the original Enterprise crew was exactly why this crew was supposed to be special. Yes, Kirk and Spock in particular were compelling characters-cum-icons — there’s a reason they’re still part of the pop culture landscape after forty years — but to me the original Trek always felt like “Kirk and Spock and Those Other Guys (Oh, and the Woman, Too).” (This isn’t a point I’m interested in arguing — it’s just my relatively uninformed opinion as someone who was never much into Trek.) But in this movie, Abrams and company show that each of these people is indeed special in his or her own way and adds his or her own special brand of brilliance and ultra-competence to the crew. Abrams gives each of the main crew a chance to show off their various skills, and it works spectacularly. I felt like I was watching these characters for themselves and not for their (not-even-assigned-yet) Five Year Mission.
And speaking of the characters, the casting in this new movie is almost perfect, especially given the fact that none of these characters is exactly as you remember them from before incarnations. The worst possible decision would have been for Chris Pine to have attempted to ape William Shatner; except for one (I’m sure very conscious) moment toward the end of the movie, he utterly avoids any Shatnerisms. But he brings the core essence of Kirk — the complete self-conifdence, the lusty roving eye, the anti-authoritarian streak — and makes this new James T. Kirk a compelling, if different, character in his own right. Zachary Quinto’s Spock is much more at war with his dual nature than his predecessor, though he’s certainly the actor who looks the most like his character’s previous portrayer. I especially enjoyed Anton Yelchin’s Chekov and Simon Pegg’s Scotty, both of whom were primarily played for laughs. (It worked, too — Star Trek was quite a bit funnier than I expected it to be.)
Not Exactly Spoilery But Certainly Geeky Digression: I found it notable that while most of the secondary characters never had their full names mentioned on the show — usually that information got revealed in after-the-show sources like movies or novels or role-playing games — every one of the main Enterprise crew gets his or her full name dropped at some point in the new movie. Just another little touch I liked.
Yes, the science is wonky and didn’t make much sense. I truly didn’t care — some people like science fiction for the science, but I’m more into the fiction part. And the fiction in this movie worked fantastically for me. I was sad when the movie ended and came out of the theater already looking forward to the inevtiable sequel.
Grade: A
[1] This opinion was not colored by the fact that I’d just seen the craptastic Spider-Man 3 twelve hours before.
Posted by Allen on May 8, 2009 under 100-Word Reviews, Movies, Reviews |
Welcome to the first installment of 100-Word Review, in which I — you’ll never see this coming — review a movie, TV show, book or whatever in exactly 100 words. Most of the time, this will be used either for items which are not very current and not worth the time for a full review, or for things about which I just don’t have that much to say. And no, these introductory words don’t count for this one.
What the holy hell? How could the same people who made one good and one very good Spider-Man movie make such utter, irredeemable dreck the third time out? A nonsensical script, special effects which not infrequently looked half-done, a fucking dance sequence, people…really, please can someone tell me what the hell happened here? Characters spouted off wretched dialogue and changed motivations and attitudes on a whim, major plot points were determined by ridiculous coincidence, Tobey Maguire…I’d heard this was bad, but holy crow, it was way worse than I’d imagined. Please, please don’t let these people make a Spider-Man 4.
Grade: D
Posted by Allen on July 19, 2008 under Movies, Reviews |
If Batman Begins represented a step or several forward from the superhero movies that came before, so does The Dark Knight represent another leap. The Dark Knight retains all that I loved about its predecessor – note-perfect acting[1], solid writing, gorgeous cinematography and art direction – and adds several new flavors to its casserole of excellence, most notably a deepening complexity and thoughtfulness. The Dark Knight isn’t a superhero action movie. It’s an ethical treatise with punching.
(Perhaps very mild spoilers to follow, but likely spoilers only to those who’ve never paid any attention whatsoever to Batman and his rogues gallery.)
Heath Ledger as The Joker
What does it mean to say someone is a “hero?” How far would you go to save the ones you love from danger? How about people you don’t even know? How far can you be pushed without losing yourself to madness? The Dark Knight asks these questions and turns them over and over, examining them from numerous points of view, presenting several ideas but never providing answers – The Dark Knight is an action movie that wants to engage your brain as much as, if not more than, your adrenal glands. Most of the major characters faces down at least one of these ethical quandaries (except for the force-of-nature Joker, who clearly gave himself over to madness long before this story starts) and each makes choices true to character. That a movie about a man dressed as a flying rodent and a psychotic clown dares ask these questions at all is astonishing; that The Dark Knight does so with such force, daring and reflection is almost beyond belief.
Director Christoper Nolan and his co-screenwriter/brother Jonathan Nolan get what makes these characters so fascinating and so iconic. They understand what those of us who read comics have understood for decades: that there are depths to be plumbed there, that the easy identification of Batman as silly spandex hero[2] isn’t the true measure of the character. The Nolans understand the deep-seated near-schizophrenic split between Bruce Wayne and Batman, and they understand that while the Joker will always be Batman’s most notable enemy, his truest mirror is Two-Face.
While I still have trouble imagining any superhero movie ever receiving a Best Picture nomination, I’ve never seen one that deserves it more than The Dark Knight – this movie’s not so different thematically from 2006 Best Picture winner The Departed, which considered similar ethical questions. And those predictions that Heath Ledger will receive a posthumous Best Supporting Actor nomination could well likely prove to be spot on: Ledger really was that creepy, that riveting, that good as the Joker. Ledger’s Joker should wipe all memories of Jack Nicholson’s wacky clown from the cultural consciousness – his Joker now surely must be considered definitive. Ledger even manages to find the humor in this most decidedly unfunny clown. His gait, his voice, his manner all contribute to create one of the most engrossing and engaging movie villains in a long, long time. I never before considered myself a fan of Heath Ledger; I am now, and I wish I had more of his work to look forward to.
Most of the other actors have much more grounded, less showy parts to play (of course), but they do so with as much skill and grace as Ledger. Christian Bale one again proves to be an excellent Bruce Wayne; while these movies don’t play up Batman’s supposed role as “World’s Greatest Detective,” we certainly do get a sense that Bale’s Wayne/Batman (much like Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in Iron Man) thinks about what he’s doing and the weight he’s chosen to carry on his shoulders. Gary Oldman’s James Gordon, one of the only honest cops in Gotham, gets far more screen time than he did in Batman Begins, and Oldman nails Gordon’s solid nobility in the face of chaos and madness. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are, well, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman; neither’s role is large, and more screen time for either would have been welcome. Maggie Gyllenhaal brings sass, charm and intelligence (three qualities which Katie Holmes entirely failed to bring to the same character in Batman Begins) to her Rachel Dawes, the only significant female character in the movie; more screen time for her also would have been a good thing. But The Dark Knight runs two-and-a-half-hours as is, and the movie devotes so much of its energies to dissecting the characters of its three leads that some of the minor characters had to stay pretty minor.
Strangely, Batman himself is almost a supporting character in The Dark Knight – perhaps one reason why the word “Batman” isn’t in the title. There’s even some ambiguity as to whom, exactly, the title of “dark knight” could be referring – Batman or the film’s true protagonist, Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent. (Yes, Batman is the “dark knight” as countered by Dent’s “white knight,” but Dent ultimately goes to some pretty dark places.) The Dark Knight is Dent’s story, the telling of his evolution from moral crusader in pursuit of justice to agent of chaos in pursuit of fairness, most certainly not the same thing. Eckhart’s Harvey Dent exudes a fire and passion for his crusade, and the distorted reflection in the mirror he holds up to Batman provides the most gripping character exploration ever seen in a summer blockbuster superhero movie[3].
The Dark Knight is dark and disturbing and one of the tensest movies I’ve seen in a long while; it’s also fantastically smart and daring and complex, and it ultimately suggests a fundamental belief in human nature’s capacity for goodness. That dichotomy, as much as anything else in Christoper Nolan’s masterpiece, represents the core appeal of Batman himself, and that appeal is why these characters endure. Nolan has just assured that his vision of them will endure a lot longer. Grade: A.
[1] The major exception to that “note-perfect” acting was from the mannequin-like Katie Holmes; her replacement by actual actress Maggie Gyllenhaal was a significant upgrade.
[2] Please note that I have plenty of love for silly spandex heroes, too, but that interpretation has long since proven not to work out so well in movie form (ref. Batman and Robin, 1997).
[3] I don’t mean to damn with faint praise; I do realize that “gripping character exploration” isn’t normally a hallmark of big-budget summer action flicks.
Posted by Allen on June 30, 2008 under Movies, Reviews |
For all of the usual Pixar brand of amazing technical virtuosity on display in WALL-E (and believe me, there’s plenty of it), it’s the wonderful characterization which makes the movie such a joy to watch. That director Andrew Stanton and his wizards at Pixar were able to draw such well-developed characters with such little dialogue is testament to the skill of their animation and story departments. I have trouble imagining a more human movie about robots.
If you’ve seen director Stanton’s previous masterpiece, Finding Nemo — and really, if you haven’t by now, you really should — that depth of character won’t surprise you in the least. WALL-E himself shows himself to be one of the more appealing leads of any of the Pixar films; on retrospect, this big-hearted, curious, noble, romantic little waste-collection robot is probably the most likable lead Pixar’s ever created. All of the film’s robot characters have distinct, well-crafted personalities, and almost none of them have much dialogue to speak of (pun intended). I think WALL-E and Eve spoke ten different words between them, yet there was never any problem communicating with each other or with the audience.
During the early parts of the movie, the audience is expected to piece together for themselves what happened to Earth, but once the setting changes, the Kid Gloves of Subtlety come off in favor of the Brass Knuckles of In Your Face. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; the less-subtle bits also provided a good deal of the movie’s comic relief. WALL-E might be a love story between two robots, but it also falls cleanly in the Science Fiction Film With a Message mold. The same segments of the population which allowed themselves to get lathered up about the environmental message in Happy Feet will be thoroughly pissed off by WALL-E, which amplifies the green message and throws in several helpings of condemnation of our consumerist society to boot. The two other main themes I took from the movie — Open Your Eyes to the World Around You and Follow Your Own Directive — likely won’t go over any better with the crowd who’d be upset with the Take Care of the Planet one. But I think all of these points are valid ones to teach our kids (and adults). More than valid, really. Essential.
Anyway , it’s nice to see that Pixar has next year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar wrapped up early. One critic mentioned that he thought WALL-E could be up for Best Picture, but now that the Academy Awards have a separate animation category, I’m not sure any animated flick will ever get a Best Picture nomination again. I’ll be curious to see if it gets a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Andrew Stanton, especially given the paucity of dialogue; my suspicion is not, though my hope is yes. I guess we’ll find out in February.
Grade: A.
(Related side note: the short feature before the movie is one of the best they’ve done yet. Hysterical, and also dialogue-free, as most of their shorts are. Do not arrive to the movie late.)
Posted by Allen on June 30, 2006 under Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews |
There’s a scene early on in Superman Returns which beautifully establishes director Bryan Singer’s priorities for his latest superhero epic: the Kryptonian rocket which Superman has apparently been using during his mysterious time off Earth crashes in a cornfield near his mother’s farm in Kansas. We don’t see the ship land, however, not directly; we see Martha Kent’s face and reaction as she watches the crash and explosion through the window in her kitchen. We see what she sees only as a reflection in a windowpane. From the outset of the movie, Singer tells us he’s more interested in the characters and the emotions of his story than he is in the special effects; he’s ultimately more concerned with the man than with the super.
Speaking of that man: as difficult as it was, I tried very hard not to hold the fact that he’s not Christopher Reeve against new Superman Brandon Routh. [1] I thought Routh was just fine, but clearly Routh was no Reeve, a man I’m firmly convinced was genetically engineered to play Superman. Routh mostly aped Reeve’s performances, especially his bumbling Clark Kent, and he made a decent go of it. And I certainly don’t blame Routh for mimicking Reeve here; I’m sure he was instructed to do so by Singer. Since this movie was lifting the aesthetic of the first two Superman movies whole-cloth, Routh’s performance actually would have been out of place had he not tried to copy Reeve. And while Routh might not have the screen presence that Reeve did, his Superman still captures the easy grace and charm of the character.
Even if I didn’t like Routh’s Superman as much as I did Reeve’s (and to be truthful, that’s not even a fair fight), I far preferred Kate Bosworth’s Lois Lane to Margot Kidder’s. I never liked Kidder’s Lois as I didn’t find her at all attractive, appealing or charming — I couldn’t understand why Superman would fall so heavily in love with this woman who was more annoying than anything else. Bosworth, on the other hand, has plenty of the appeal and charm Kidder lacked. Her Lois, while still being younger than I might have liked, also had enough of the flinty edge underneath I expect from Lois Lane. Bosworth did a wonderful job of conveying the heartache and confusion Lois felt when Superman disappeared and the internal fight when he returns. (As much as I liked Bosworth, though, I will have to admit to a few quibbles with some of Lois’ parenting choices: the intrepid journalist endangering herself is one thing; putting her five-year-old son in harm’s way certainly wasn’t her brightest move.)
Kevin Spacey brought much more menace to the role of Lex Luthor than Gene Hackman did, and I appreciated this more evil Lex: to me, Lex Luthor’s not supposed to be the buffoon Hackman portrayed him to be. I was afraid from the previews that Spacey was going to camp up the part, but luckily all of the campiest bits were used in the trailers; past that, Luthor was the hyper-intellectual follicularly-challenged menace he’s supposed to be. Roger Ebert said he didn’t think Spacey was having any fun with his role, and I can see thinking that if one is using Hackman’s Luthor as the measuring stick — Hackman clearly looked like he was having a better time with his Luthor, but that doesn’t make his a better performance. I don’t believe Luthor is supposed to be a fun character. This is a man willing to kill billions of people; what should be fun about that?
You might be asking yourself at this point: “Hey, all of this stuff about the characters is cool and all, but what about the action, man?” Yes, the action sequences were every bit what I expected them to be. Every penny of that rumored $200 million budget was on that screen. Singer’s Superman does the sorts of things you expect Superman to be doing, and the special effects have advanced to the point where not only can he do the impossible, but he can look damn good doing it. The plane/shuttle rescue in particular was breathtaking to behold, exactly the kind of thing done regularly in the comic books but formerly impossible to pull off in the movies, and the Superman Saves Metropolis sequence made me wish Metropolis would be in such peril more often. My only problem with the action sequences was that there weren’t enough of them, but as noted above, Singer was emphasizing the man over the super, so the action took something of a backseat to the characters.
My one major complaint with Superman Returns — and it’s a complaint serious enough to knock my overall grade for the movie down a half a notch — was with the Beatdown of Superman sequence. (I don’t feel it’s a spoiler to mention that this scene occurs since it’s featured prominently in the most recent trailers, but you might want to skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens.) A depowered Superman gets thoroughly whipped by Luthor’s goons. That much I can deal with, even if I don’t like it — the problem I had was with the fact that Superman doesn’t fight back at all, save for a feeble grab at Luthor’s legs. He didn’t as much as take a swing at his attackers, and that’s not true to the spirit of the character. Superman does not crawl away from a fight on his hands and knees, even if he’s in pain and has lost his powers — it’s not his powers that make him Superman, but rather his willingness to fight for, as Daily Planet editor Perry White says in this movie, “truth, justice, all that stuff.” Superman’s mission is traditionally called the “never-ending battle,” not the “as long as I have super-strength and invulnerability battle.” Seeing a battered Superman crawl through the mud in pain and humiliaton struck a very wrong chord with me; I don’t see why the scene would have lost any power or resonance had he fought back against his attackers yet still been overwhelmed by their greater numbers.
Still, Superman Returns was a glorious “welcome home” to a character who hasn’t graced the big screen in far too long. Superman is the iconic superhero, and it’s good to see him finally get the super treatment he deserves.
Grade: A-
________________________________________
[1] I normally don’t advocate writing reviews by comparing different movies or different intrepreations of a character, but Singer invited us to do exactly that by so closely following the vision Richard Donner put forth in 1978. Not comparing the two would both feel dishonest and like the review was incomplete. Singer took the exact opposite tack with Superman Returns from the one Christopher Nolan took with his masterful reimagination Batman Begins: while Begins completely repudiated the four previous films in the series, Returns is slavishly faithful to Superman and Superman II. Nearly every memorable moment from the first movie was either recycled, updated or knowingly echoed with a wink in the new movie. I certainly appreciate wanting to ground the audience who grew up with the originals to feel like this newest entry in the franchise was still part of the same universe, but it almost felt like too much on occasion.
Posted by Allen on June 3, 2006 under Comic Books, Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews |
Let’s say for just a minute that you’re not just like everyone else. There’s something about you, either something with your body, your heart or your head, that sets you apart from what society likes to define as “normal.” Maybe you hate whatever it is that makes you different; maybe you adore it; maybe you’ve just realized that whatever it is is still you and you’ve simply come to terms with it.
Let’s say someone offered you a pill or a shot that would take that difference away forever. In a matter of seconds, whatever it is that makes you unique or makes you a freak, whichever way you look at it, could be wiped from your genetic code forever. No longer would you stand out. Would you do it?
That’s the central question asked of the mutant population of X-Men: The Last Stand, and it’s a fascinating question I wish could have been explored more thoroughly, though perhaps a massively-budged summer superhero action flick isn’t the ideal place to dissect issues of ethics. In some ways, The Last Stand is both the most and the least of the trilogy: it has the loftiest ambitions (both in terms of the action and in terms of the philosophies debated) but is the least cohesive and pays the least attention to character detail.
For the first time in the series, it’s easier to understand Magneto’s (Ian McKellen) point of view than it is Charles Xavier’s (Patrick Stewart): a “cure” for mutation has been discovered, and Magneto correctly realizes that what begins with mutants being cured voluntarily likely won’t end that way. If the cure proves effective, no way will mutants as powerful and potentially dangerous as Magneto or the X-Men be allowed to roam around free. Xavier favors moderation and discussion to resolve the situation; Magneto favors war. The Last Stand tries to present both sides of the philosophical and ethical debate it raises, including showing that some of the good guys might find the cure appealing (though, curiously, none of the bad guys seem to). However, the debate doesn’t get as much play as it really needs to: The Last Stand is the shortest of the three X-Men movies and there’s a whole lot of Stuff Blowing Up that needs to be squeezed in to the 1:45 running time.
Director Brett Ratner commendably kept the feel of the movie nearly identical to the vibe cultivated by Bryan Singer in X-Men and X2: X-Men United. Ratner wisely realized that this movie was the final film in a trilogy, and therefore it wasn’t the time to be radically changing the look or tone of the series. (The fact that he signed on to the production mere weeks before shooting began probably contributed to that descision.) And The Last Stand certainly feels like the last part of a trilogy — there’s a desperation and a sense of real consequence that the previous films couldn’t pull off because sequels were sure to come.
With The Last Stand, however, it’s clear that should there be any further sequels, they’ll likely be focusing on the younger X-Men that were featured here, and probably on some new cast members as well. I won’t get into any details yet, but I’ll say this: as action-packed as the first two movies were, The Last Stand is the one where Things Happen, and they Happen in a Big Way. One of the scenes were Things Happen had me filled with dread (since I had a suspicion what was about to occur) and had my heart pounding in my chest in a way that I haven’t felt in longer than I can remember, so kudos to Ratner for manipulating my emotions successfully.
Unfortunately, in their desire to make these Things Happen, the filmmakers (Ratner and screenwriers Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg) skipped over some fundamental details like story construction and characterization to do it. The Juggernaut himself could easily have fit through the plot holes in this script. And the writers seemed fine with changing some characterizations or relationships if they needed to do so for the sake of their plot (chief among the problems here: the relationship between Xavier and Wolverine is show to be strained for, as best I can tell, absolutely no reason and no gain to the film).
I’m willing to cut Penn and Kinberg a little slack, though, because even if they didn’t get the small character moments just right, they sure went for broke with some of the big ones. There’s a surprising amount of emotional heft to X-Men: The Last Stand, and much of the cast deserves praise for their work. As mentioned above, Big Things Happen, and when those Big Things Happen the filmmakers don’t shy away from showing the characters’ reactions. Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Famke Jannsen all played the intense emtions their parts required well. (I do feel sort of sorry for Jannsen, though — most of her role consisted of standing still while the FX crew did all of the work. But when she was given some meat to work with, she did a surprisingly impressive job.)
Overall, X-Men: The Last Stand was a slightly weaker film than its predecessors, though it certainly wasn’t for a lack of reach. And while this movie might indeed have been the last stand for the first generation of celluloid X-Men, I can’t wait to see what the next generation brings.
Grade: B
(Note: I specifically didn’t touch on many story points in this review, because I’m going to have a spoiler-heavy follow-up posts about the story in the next couple of days. I’m also likely going to have one more X-Men related post I’ve got brewing — trilogy of movies, you get a trilogy of posts about it.)
Posted by Allen on January 13, 2006 under Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews |
In the opening moments of Walk the Line, Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) gently thumbs the edge of a buzzsaw in the wood shop of Folsom Prison moments before his infamous concert before its inmates. The blade of this saw, an instrument which altered the course of Cash’s life when he was eleven years old, sums up all of the man’s struggles in one simple visual. His desire to do right by the people he loves, his desire for forgiveness and love and acceptance and redemptionthose desperate wants are the thin line of a saw blade, and with every fall off the edge, the cuts run deeper.
It’s difficult to discuss Walk the Line without comparing and contrasting it to 2004’s Ray. Not only did both movies deal with roughly the same periods in the lives of their subjects (Ray Charles, obviously, in the case of Ray), but the subjects themselves were far more similar than they might have seemed from looking only at their album covers. Both Charles and Cash grew up dirt-poor in the South; both lost a sibling as a child, and both felt responsible, though neither truly was; both were revolutionaries within their chosen musical styles; both suffered through drug habits that threatened to destroy their careers as they were riding the peaks; both were shitheels to the women who loved them. Walk the Line even feels like Ray, like the second episode of “VH1 Presents: Musical Genius Drug-Addict Shitheels. From the South.”
The direction by James Mangold wasn’t flashy (which might be my only complaint about the movie, minor as that is). It felt as if Mangold was employing the “turn the camera on and get out of the way” approach to film direction, and in this case that proved to be a shrewd choice. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon both learned to sing and play their instruments for this movie, and that work pays off: knowing that the actors were really performing the songs added a gut-level believeability to their parts that wouldn’t have been there had they been lip-synching to the original tunes. [1] That detail allows Phoenix’s Cash to feel less like an impersonation than Jamie Foxx’s Charles. [2]
| Walk the Line (2005) |
| Grade: A- |
| Starring: |
Joaquin Phoenix
Reese Witherspoon
Ginnifer Goodwin
Robert Patrick |
| Directed By: |
James Mangold |
| Written By: |
Gill Dennis
James Mangold |
| Studio: |
20th Century Fox |
Phoenix was the perfect choice to play Cashthe dark hair, the solemn set of his face, the depth and darkness that always seem to play just beneath his features, even in lighter moments. Phoenix has a gravitas to him, that particular screen presence that can’t be manufactured, and that weightiness fits the role of Johnny Cash perfectly. It wasn’t all black and heavy with Cash, though, and Phoenix lets the softer side of Cash come through, a much larger softer side than one might have expected from the man’s image and music. The Oscar nomination coming Phoenix’s way is well-deserved. Just a fantastic performancethe image of pure joy on Cash’s face as he sings on stage with June the first time stayed with me for awhile after the lights came up.
Reese Witherspoon freed herself from the breezy comedies she’s been largely confined to over the last several years and showed once again what she’s capable of when given strong material. Witherspoon’s assignment for this movie was a difficult one: she had to play a performer whose public persona was airy, theatrical and a bit sillybut more importantly, had to play the private June Carter, a woman for whom none of those words applied. Witherspoon’s natural charm makes it easy to see why Cash falls so hard for heras does Jerry Lee Lewis, June’s two ex-husbands and, undoubtedly, most of the men who met herbut in addition, she conveys the inner strength and resolve of June Carter beautifully. She’s certainly more than earned her own Oscar nomination for her performance.
I was also pleased to note that Cash’s first wife, Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), isn’t played as the villain of the piece: she’s not simply the woman standing in between John and June. [3] It would have been easy to portray Vivian as a shrew, to make the audience root for John to leave her and run into June’s arms, but Mangold and Goodwin don’t go for the easy way out, presenting her instead as a woman coming to grips with the fact that she and her husband have different wants out of life. Goodwin plays pained very well; her realization that John has been in love with another woman for years was as heartbreaking for the audience as for her.
Walk the Line ends at a point which I would have imagined would have occurred far earlier in the movie: it ends with the coming together of Johnny Cash and June Carter. (That’s not a spoilerthis isn’t a will-they-or-won’t-they story. And, anyway, it’s biography. You already know they’re going to get married.) When the credits roll, the audience knows there’s still plenty of story left to tell, but we’ve know we’ve been told the important partsthe parts that made Johnny Cash the man and the musician he was. Anything more would have been crossing the line.
Technorati: Walk the Line
Posted by Allen on December 26, 2005 under Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews |
One of the things I most admire about Steven Spielberg is his ability–and his willingness–to balance his desire to make his deepely personal Films with his desire to make big-budget crowd-pleasing popcorn-chomping Flicks. He’s equally adept at making both kinds of movies and has created classic examples of each, though I have to admit I have something of a preference for his Flicks. When directors of his ability apply their talents to big action movies, you know that you’re usually going to get one of those all-too-rare combinations: a smart, well-made blockbuster.
So as soon as I heard that Spielberg was making War of the Worlds (based, of course, on the H.G. Wells novel), I knew the result would likely be something I was going to enjoy–Spielberg plus Scary Monsters of Some Sort plus Big Special Effects will almost always equal an entertaining movie in my book. When a director as completely in command of his skills as Spielberg decides its time to put a good scare into his audience, a scare is just what they’re gonna get. And make no mistake: War of the Worlds is far more horror movie than action movie.
Spielberg realizes that this story has been told plenty of times before: he knows that there’s an excellent chance that most of his audience has at least some familiarity with the basics of the story. The audience probably knows just who or what the attackers are, and they probably know the circumstances which eventually bring about the attackers’ defeat. In fact, Spielberg counts on that fact. Because his audience knows the plot, he can leave out some details and assume the viewers can fill in the blanks he intentionally leaves empty.
Spielberg keeps the focus of his movie on a very personal level, staying entirely with Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning as a father and daughter with a less-than-ideal relationship. That choice proves to be what makes War of the Worlds different from the great many other aliens-inavde-planet-Earth movies that have featured largely the same plot–and what made the events of the movie so much more frightening. Neither the characters nor the audience ever get a clear confirmation as to just what’s happening. We–and they–get speculation and rumors from other characters (contradictory rumors and speculation, at that), but we never get those familiar scenes, for example, of The President Receiving Intelligence From His Staff and Making the Big Decisions. We get very little report of what’s happening with the Martian attackers in the rest of the world–we don’t, as a matter of fact, ever know for sure that they’re Martians (one of those details Spielberg left up to our common experience with this story). We never even find out definitively what’s happening outside the New York-Boston corridor.
| War of the Worlds (2005) |
| Grade: B+ |
| Directed By: |
Steven Spielberg |
| Written By: |
Josh Friedman
David Koepp
(Based on the H.G. Wells novel) |
| Studio: |
Paramount/DreamWorks |
An interesting side effect of Spielberg’s telling the story the way he did was the changes it necessitated in the type of protagonist he used. Cruise’s Ray Ferrier isn’t a typical Big Hollywood Action Spectacular Hero: he’s not particularly sympathetic (at first, anyway); he’s not the one leading the Forces of Good against the Evildoers; he’s not the Chosen One; he’s not the cause of or the focus of the aliens’ actions; he’s not the catalyst for the aliens’ downfall. He’s just a guy. He’s a guy focused entirely on trying to protect his children from the insanity destroying his world. He’s the focus of the story only because Spielberg chose to make him so, not because the larger story demanded it–Ferrier is completely inconsequential to the larger story, and that fact is what makes his journey so compelling.
There’s one drawback to Speilberg’s commitment to the personal, though: the ending of the movie felt startlingly contrived. When the focus is on the Big Picture, simply defeating the enemies would be enough to create a happy ending, but that doesn’t work as well when that focus is on the Very Small Picture. The details necessary to make sure the audience went home with smiles on their faces didn’t strike me as true in War of the Worlds; had Spielberg been completely honest with his story, he would’ve realized that this movie was one that likely shouldn’t have had a happy ending.
Posted by Allen on October 2, 2005 under Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews |
Joan Allen does staid-and-proper so well, she seldom gets the chance to play sexy. In fact, I can’t remember ever finding her particularly sexy in any movie I’ve ever seen her in. I don’t mean that as a knock against Allen; so many of the parts she’s played have called for Frosty Joan or All-Business Joan rather than Sensual Joan. But in Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger, she gets to fill the screen with a casual sexiness born of intelligence and experience and confidence and passion, and it produces easily one of the most appealing performances of her career.
Allen plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a woman whose husband has just run off with his Swedish secretary as the movie begins, leaving Terry with four daughters (aged 15 to 25), an enormous house and an even bigger empty vastness in her heart. We never learn just what business Terry’s husband was in, but it was lucrative enough that she didn’t need a career of her own; with her husband suddenly gone, her daughters practically grown and no work to throw herself into, she throws herself instead into bottles of alcohol.
Terry finds a comfortable drinking buddy in former baseball star Denny Davies. Costner here gets to slide easily into the only part that ever seems completely comfortable on him: agreeable jock, or in this case, agreeable ex-jock. Costner’s Denny Davies appears to be nothing quite so much as Bull Durham’s Crash Davis aged fifteen years (Denny even wears a jacket remarkably similar to the one Crash wore thorughout Durham), and that association between the two parts works as a kind of cinematic shorthand into the character. Denny coasts through life on what fame he’d earned as a major-league pitcher, hosting a sports-talk radio show but refusing to talk about baseball.
The romance that slowly develops between Terry and Denny is completely believable in its messiness, its awkwardness, its sputtering stops and starts; their relationship feels far more like a real-life relationship than a movie one. These two people are both lonely, hurt, desperate and missing something inside, and they find connection through their shared misery. And that connection slowly leads them both back toward the light.
| The Upside of Anger (2005) |
| Grade: B |
| Written and Directed By: |
Mike Binder |
| Starring: |
Joan Allen
Kevin Costner
Alicia Witt
Erika Christensen
Keri Russell
Evan Rachel Wood |
Those parts of the movie that don’t deal directly with Terry and Denny and their relationship suffers in comparison to the strengths of their scenes together. None of the four daughters truly gets much character development; Evan Rachel Wood seems particularly wasted as Popeye, the youngest of the Wolfmeyer women, who seems to have wandered in from the screenplay for American Beauty. All four are lovely, to be sure, but each seems to be more of a symbol of parenting woe for Terry to act against than characters in their own right. There’s an ill-advised illness scare thrown in to no real effect. And that ending–it feels like a cheat, though it’s not, and improbable though it might be, it does effectively change our perceptions of everything we’ve seen and felt up to that point.
From the title “The Upside of Anger,” you might expect the movie to be about the benefits that could come from channeling anger and using it to create positive change in one’s life, and there is indeed some of that present. Writer-director (and co-star) Binder doesn’t lay out every little detail of the story’s causes and effects but rather lets the viewer piece them together, and fitting that puzzle together helps illuminate the title somewhat. We see, for example, the fight between Terry and daughter Emily (the oh-so-exquisite Keri Russell) in which Emily unleashes her anger on Terry for now allowing her to go away to college to study dance, but we don’t see the resolution; the next time we see Emily, however, Terry’s driving to see her at that very college, so we can assume that it’s likely Emily’s outburst convinced Terry to let her go, or at least played a part in doing so.
But the movie’s also about the difficulties some people face in moving forward with their lives, especially when faced with large degrees of loss. Terry can’t seem to bring her life forward after her husband leaves her and can’t accept that her daughters indeed are moving on with theirs without her. Denny has never been able to leave his baseball career behind. To Terry and Denny, the true upside of anger is its ability to smash through the stranglehold of the past and the fear of the future and allow life to progress once again.
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