Change Your Image
ecko_47
Reviews
Right at Your Door (2006)
Visceral Realism gives way to heavy-handed commentary.
"Right at Your Door" starts out so well. In Los Angeles, an unemployed musician (Rory Cochrane) sees his white-collar professional wife (Mary McCormack) off to work. Minutes later, a series of dirty bombs bearing a mysterious "molecular toxin" goes off across Los Angeles.
Writer-director Chris Gorak, an accomplished art director who worked on "Fight Club" and "Minority Report," does a lot with very little here, using Cochrane's terror, radio reports and the briefest glances at ash clouds and emergency vehicles to create a real sense of panic, while keeping the worst destruction off camera.
But then, as soon as Cochrane seals himself into his house and we're forced to settle in with a handful of survivors, the movie slowly but surely loses its hard-earned claustrophobia. The dialogue devolves into endless F-bombs and actorly exhales. The characters devolve into boring narcissists. And the movie devolves into a broad-brush dark satire of emergency bureaucracy that feels a lot sillier than the post-9/11 panic attack of the first half-hour.
Age of Love (2007)
'Swamp of Lust' is more like it
In "The Age of Love" a genial Australian hunk named Mark Philippoussis is made to face a conundrum: Would he rather seek true love with one of seven seasoned, sexually available women in or near their 40s, or with one of several moist-eyed, sexually voracious women in their 20s? This proves a real poser, because Philippoussis is exactly 30 years old, and thus old enough to appreciate a woman with experience. Yet he's also an internationally famous tennis player who has long since grown accustomed to having his pick of the world's attractive women.
Will he choose character over skankiness? Philippoussis' brow furrows and his eyes seem to cross. No amount of muscles, dimples and international charm can help him here. Any and every decision he makes is going to end in tears, heartbreak and anguish.
"It's like throwing some piranhas in the deep end with me," he yelps.
Yes, but while Philippoussis believes he's talking about the women vying for his affections, they're the least of his problems. For "The Age of Love," in the tradition of "The Bachelor" and its romantic-competition ilk, is the most heartless kind of TV spectacle. Posing as a wish-fulfillment show for the love-and-excitement-lorn, it's actually a high-tech humiliation-fest. Its contestants set in motion to eviscerate one another's most delicate hopes and dreams, all for the delectation of the network cameras.
That these people may be a trifle narcissistic, or maybe lacking in some crucial measure of judgment, seems clear. But these are minor flaws compared with NBC's diabolical trick of inventing and airing such emotional bloodsport.
Particularly given how NBC's dark imps have concealed "The Age of Love's" most distinctive, and repellent, wrinkle from the folks at the center of the game: The older women will be competing for Philippoussis' affections with a gang of women nearly half their age.
And while this writer is not a morality professional (he merely plays one while musing on the lives of TV characters), I suspect the viewer may want to think a bit about his or her role in this whole affair, too.
Heaven knows the "Age of Love" contestants, from Philippoussis on down, haven't put much thought into how the show is going to play out for them.
For Philippoussis, the goal seems to have something to do with brand extension. He's a pretty good tennis player, but at 30, he's nearing the end of his pro circuit days. Fortunately, he's also an alarmingly handsome man who has already spent a lot of time in front of cameras with his shirt off. With a vast American market yet to be conquered, his managers must have flipped at the notion of a major network airing a Philippoussis-centered reality show.
And maybe it's the best possible thing, Q-rating wise. But the internal havoc begins just moments after Philippoussis takes residence in the gleaming Los Angeles skyscraper where "The Age of Love" is set. Standing on a balcony next to a shimmering pool, the tennis player is greeted by a procession of elegant women who have been coached to greet him with special emphasis given to their ages.
"I was born in 1967, so that makes me 40!" one chirps.
Philippoussis' shock is a bit too evident, and it only gets worse when the others turn out to be just as old, and even older. When one turns out to be 48, with a son who is nearly his own age, the tennis player is close to tears.
"She could be my mom," he says, gloomily, in a post-game interview. "The thought of that just freaks me out." The women, on the other hand, are thrilled. For all their accrued experience -- the careers, children, ex-husbands, real estate holdings, etc. -- they're all eager to settle down with the right guy. And clearly, a hunky pro athlete with dancing eyes qualifies, as their first glimpse at Philippoussis, via a video introduction, proves.
"Oh my God!" one cries.
"What a sweet guy!" chimes in another.
"He looks like my next husband!" gushes a third.
At which point the women realize, seemingly for the first time, that they must destroy one anthers' hopes in order to achieve their own.
"Game on!" one growls.
You can already anticipate the gamesmanship, subtle and otherwise, that comes to define the group's interactions with their quarry. All of which creates a wicked undercurrent that makes the flirty small talk even more excruciating than usual. One woman is sent home, tears stinging her eyes, even as Philippoussis urges her to know how lovely and special she truly is.
She should be grateful. Philippoussis has just spared her from the twist that comes with the arrival of six new women. All are in their early 20s, all prone to halter tops and extremely short shorts. In fact, nothing about their dress or behavior will seem out of character for an average, if high-end, prostitute.
That sounds harsh, I know. And yet you try to find another way to describe half a dozen women who allow themselves to be presented, en masse, as a kind of writhing tableau, all of them regarding poor Philippoussis -- now in complete hormonal meltdown -- with winks, leers and lip-smacking.
Could it get worse? Yes, it could. A brief montage at the end contrasts the older and younger women by showing the latter squirming around their bachelorette pad (which has been equipped with hula hoops, for some reason) while their elders occupy themselves in their apartment by reading novels, doing laundry and, I swear to God, doing needlepoint.
"The Age of Love" will not end happily for anyone. Including Western civilization.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)
If treasure ye seek, there be none here
Like its predecessor films, "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" is meant to be, in large part, a comedy. But the only laughs at the press screening (We movie reviewers get to see this early) were afforded in retrospect, when reviewers recalled the plea of the studio that they not reveal details of the plot's twists and resolutions in writing about it.
Reveal 'em? I'd bet a wooden eye that there wasn't anyone in the room who could understand 'em! Unless you watch the first two "Pirates" movies in the hours before you see this one, unless you have a Ph.D. in "Pirates of the Caribbean" studies, you will have no idea what in blazes is going on nor, I reckon, will you give an undead monkey's patootie.
In what's shaping up to be a summer of deflating third-films-in-the-series, "At World's End" is the loudest, dumbest, slowest, least entertaining and most annoying by a very comfortable margin. The second "Pirates" film did quite a bit to erase the good will created by the first. This one makes matters worse, leaving you feeling angry, cheap and suckered -- after the coma lifts and the raging headache subsides, that is.
Director Gore Verbinski and a team of writers who should wear masks when picking up their checks have turned their serendipitous blend of comedy and action into a grotesque special effects franchise laden with jokes that were already tired when the first film dragged to its conclusion. They have let the tail grow so big that it not only wags the dog but dashes its brains out against a mast.
The ineptitude of "At World's End" is evinced in its hoohah about the goddess Calypso, the mythological sea nymph who, here, has been trapped in human form by a cabal of pirates. For reasons too complex to explain (wouldn't want to spoil those precious plot twists!), she is released from her fleshy bonds, morphs with unintentional hilarity into a giantess and . . . disappears from the film without rhyme, reason, explanation or purpose. A good 15 minutes has been spent fussing about nothing. Add 21/2 hours to that and you pretty much sum up the whole ordeal.
For the record, a crew led by Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) sets off to free Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) from Davy Jones' Locker, a spectral underworld comically filled with multiple Captain Jacks, so that he can join a council of pirate bigwigs assembling against the British; Jones himself (Bill Nighy) is in the thrall of the evil capitalist Beckett (Tom Hollander), who controls his heart and thus his invincible ship; Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) struggles to free his dad, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), from Jones' crew; and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) pursues both Will and Captain Jack, unsure whom she truly loves.
Throw in several more plot lines, a few new characters, the icky romance of moony Bloom and knock-kneed Knightley, lots of computerized fighting and sailing, and painfully tiresome comic relief involving Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg, and it amounts to nearly three hours of slow misery, none of which rises to the level of a "surprise" or "twist" that can be spoiled for anyone.
Grudging credit is due to some of the special effects and, especially, to Keith Richards, the only one among all this prattling mob who knows that less is more. Of course, he's granted a mere 90 seconds of screen time before the film succumbs once again to its congenital pointlessness. The pang of regret you feel at his departure is the sole emotion this mess ever manages to stir.
28 Weeks Later (2007)
The Infected Strike Back
"28 Weeks Later" is gory, wicked and fun, that rare and impressive sequel that can stand alongside the film that inspired it.
In 2003's vicious and frighteningly real "28 Days Later," a horrifying strain of athletic, bloodthirsty, virus-fueled zombies overran Great Britain, and "Weeks" is a vision of civilization trying to get a handle on that terrifying nightmare and rebuild in its wake.
The creators of the first film, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, serve as producers here, putting their gory baby in the hands of Spanish writer-director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo ("Intacto"), and it turns out to be a trust well warranted.
For starters, Fresnadillo and his co-writers know that we still vividly recall the horrors of "Days," so they begin in mid-plague, as it were, with a ragtag group waiting out the invasion in a rural cottage. Among them are Don (Robert Carlyle) and Alice (Catherine McCormack), a couple whose children are on a school trip to Spain and thus safe from the virus. Alas, Mom and Dad are not. After a stunning assault on their hiding place, Don escapes alone.
Presently we learn what has happened in the wake of the awful outbreak: the quarantining of Great Britain; the death of the infected from starvation; the introduction of NATO troops to secure London for repopulation. Don's children (Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton -- I swear those are their names) are among the returnees, and, determined to reclaim a remembrance of their mother, they sneak out of the secure area to their old house for mementos. What they find is much worse, and before the chief science officer (Rose Byrne) can get a handle on the situation, the infection has blossomed again and the military does what militaries are meant to do.
Just as "Days" contained echoes of 9/11, so does "Weeks" allude freely to the Iraq war: the use of tools of warfare against an invisible force that turns civilians into enemies; a "green zone," surrounded by snipers, within which a new country is being planned; the decision to destroy a place in order to save it.
But that's subtext. On the surface is a thrilling and chilling and sometimes grisly zombie movie that occasionally loses its way in genre conventions but generally keeps you locked into a heightened tension. I give the slight edge to the first movie because I prefer Boyle's craft to Fresnadillo's, but the action is more intense here, and I greeted the thought of a third film -- virtually assured in the closing shots -- with a little yip of "Yes!" Likely you will, too.
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Spidermediocre
With the first two "Spider-Man" films, director Sam Raimi took on the thankless job of transferring one of the most popular comic book superheroes of all time to the big screen and managed the trick with grace, energy and aplomb.
As depicted in those films, young newspaper photographer Peter Parker was a lovable nerd, his alter-ego Spider-Man was a saucy and valiant altruist, his sweetheart Mary Jane Watson was a sweet but somewhat broken flower, his best buddy Harry Osborn was a happy dope crippled with Oedipal neuroses, and his nemeses -- the diabolically warped scientists Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin -- were suitably juicy, fiendish and larger than life.
The two "Spider-Man" movies were rivaled only by Tim Burton's "Batman" films in bringing the paneled page to the big screen -- and they constituted a second fine series from Raimi, who made his name with the "Evil Dead" movies.
But somewhere there exists a well where filmmakers go to dredge up the creative magic required for films like these. The producers of the "Batman" movies found that well dry after Burton was replaced by Joel Schumacher, who made two awful films.
Now Raimi's latest effort, "Spider-Man 3," is here, and while it's nowhere near as catastrophic as, say, "Batman & Robin," it's long, wan and tired in the vein of "Superman Returns." There's still a lightness of touch -- Raimi can reliably punctuate a film of this scale with skewed humor -- but the verve, the thrill, the razzle and the dazzle are all but gone. And I suspect people who love Spider-Man from the comic books will be more disappointed with it than people whose chief connection to him is through the movies.
Raimi has all his stars back: Tobey Maguire in the title role, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, James Franco as Harry, Rosemary Harris as Aunt May. They're joined by two new faces: Thomas Haden Church as career criminal Flint Marko who transforms into the Sandman, and Topher Grace, as Parker's career rival, Eddie Brock, who becomes the anti-Spider-Man known as Venom.
They're all perfectly suited to their tasks: the strengths of Maguire, Dunst, Franco and Harris have been steady throughout the series; Church and Grace fit their roles nicely; and such stalwarts as J. K. Simmons, Elizabeth Banks and, especially, Bruce Campbell provide swell comic moments.
But the comedy is surrounded by a lot of melodramatic storytelling, little of which truly compels: In addition to a romantic crisis with Mary Jane and a protracted effort to reconcile with Harry, Parker's host to an alien parasite that changes his personality, he learns that Marko is the real killer of his Uncle Ben, and he accidentally creates -- and then must vanquish -- Venom. And the action scenes, so impressive in the previous films, bring nothing new or especially memorable.
"Spider-Man 3" is a likable film -- Maguire's personality, or Raimi's channeled through him, is genuinely charming. But the tenor of the film is too often too muted, melancholy and enervated for something of its size. When Parker first figured out how to swoop through the city on his webs in the first film, it imparted a rush. But nothing here quite ever catches so big a breeze; far too often, it feels grounded, dutiful, dull. At the end, Parker is ambivalent about both his romance and his crime-fighting career. And I suspect that audiences might feel similarly uncertain about further Spider-Man adventures.
Hot Fuzz (2007)
'Fuzzy Vice'
The very best parodies don't only mock the things they make fun of; they also embody them.
Take "Shaun of the Dead," the 2004 zombie movie from the team of writer-director Edgar Wright, writer-actor Simon Pegg and actor Nick Frost. It was a delicious comedy, a sharp satire of English manners, a spoof of zombie movies and a pretty brain-eater picture all in one. You couldn't help but love it.
Now the trio have taken on another hoary genre -- the Hollywood cop-buddy action movie ("Bad Boys," the "Lethal Weapon" films) -- and transported it, lovingly but with wicked, piercing humor, to the English countryside. The result is "Hot Fuzz," a film that's terrific fun as a comedy if not quite taut as an instance of the genre it spoofs.
As in "Shaun," "Fuzz" skewers movie clichés and lifeless verities of English life with merciless wit. Once again, the goings-on are only a slight distortion of the movie genre being sent up. And once again, the weakest portion of the film is the last, when plotting and the impulse toward a full-circle ending smother the script's vitality. It's delicious comedy overall, though, building on, if not exactly surpassing, the promise of "Shaun." Pegg is Sgt. Nicholas Angel, a London cop so gung-ho and effective that his superiors have to get rid of him: He simply makes everyone else look slack. Shunted off to the crime-free village of Sandford, Angel finds his resolve even more unwelcome, if that's possible. The cops are witless clowns, and they and the townsfolk care more about winning the "village of the year" contest than about what little harmless crimes occur. But then people start dying -- always by accident, always with plausible explanations -- and Angel just knows that something big is going on. With his only ally the particularly stupid officer Danny Butterman (Frost), he determines to ferret out the killer that he believes is afoot.
It sounds like your basic A-B-C police-fish-out-of-water picture, which, of course, is part of the point. Pegg and Wright explicitly introduce standard bits of the movies they're mocking, then ingeniously undermine them with humor while leaving them standing: hard-as-nails Angel is an absurd martinet with ludicrous devotion to duty, yet he really is tough and smart and good at his job; Danny is almost too stupid to credit, but his passion for the very movies that are being parodied fuels the satire even as he never truly overcomes his ineptitude.
Around his heroes, Wright has an embarrassment of swell English actors having a grand time: Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy as Angel's dismissive London bosses; Jim Broadbent as the village police chief (and Danny's father); small-town cops including the sneering detectives Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall; and a gallery of iconic village types including Timothy Dalton as the local grocery tycoon and lady-killer.
As in "Shaun," the final act is overstuffed with action, and while some of it amuses, you feel that the film has fallen on the wrong side of the line separating parody from its object. Moreover, it doesn't make as much of the theme, shared with "Shaun," of male bonding and maturity.
But it's smashing fun, nonetheless, made with razor wit and continual invention and far, far fresher than not only Hollywood buddy-cop movies but also Hollywood's own spoofs of them.
Pathfinder (2007)
One Lost
Twenty years ago, there was a terrific Norwegian action film called "Pathfinder" set in the Dark Ages and dealing with a boy whose family is slaughtered by marauders; villagers take him in. When the boy has grown into a young man, the marauders return, affording our hero the chance to repay his benefactors by avenging himself on the bad guys. It was brisk and chilly and had a real sense of mythic resonance. It was good.
Here, now, is another film called "Pathfinder," virtually identical in plot. And it is everything the original was not: muddled, ugly, pointless, silly, incoherent, overly familiar and exceedingly dull. It is not good.
German director Marcus Nispel, who remade "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" a couple of years back and likely is working on a lousy new version of something else now, has an eye: The film is handsome. But he has no ear or brain -- or at least not those parts of the brain that deal with such niceties as narrative, character, dialogue and logic.
Karl Urban (Eomer to "Lord of the Rings" fans) stars a Nordic boy raised by Native Americans after being left behind in a Viking raid of North America. Probably the filmmakers (a dozen producers are credited) thought the introduction of Native Americans allowed for soulful depths. Actually, it allows for painfully dim clichés about prophecy, spirits and discovering "who you are" -- as patronizing in its way as the most insult-ridden cowboys-and-Indians movie of the '30s.
Other characters include a heroic love interest (Moon Bloodgood), a wise elder (Russell Means) and a mute sidekick (Kevin Loring). These brief descriptions are about all the depth these characters ever acquire.
Most of "Pathfinder" is given over to ridiculous chases and fights that remind you how skillful "Apocalypto" was at similar scenes. Someone who had never seen an action movie wouldn't credit a minute of it. In a way, it's perfect: You can't imagine anyone seeing this mess and not feeling lesser for the experience.
Death of a President (2006)
Meh
Death of a President is well, intriguing. The film starts off fairly quickly by setting the stage, President Bush is giving a speech in Chicago and on his way out, is shot in a Hotel by a Muslim extremist (ala RFK). He is whisked away to an area hospital where he is pronounced dead soon thereafter. The movie then takes a sudden, sharp turn, throwing the audience into a series of faux interviews featuring fictional characters, either your boring talking-head analyst or your 'I was there' type, all delivering a fairly straight forward description of what happened and what happens next and it doesn't really work. It feels like the information from the interview are being spoon-fed to you and you're expected to take notes and turn in a paper first thing next class. After about an hour of this, then we go into the formulaic dystopian aftermath stuff that we have seen done in so many movies, some successfully, others not so much. In summary, DOAP feels like nothing more than a sub-par rehash/update of Oliver Stone's JFK (a supreme movie to say the least) who's purpose is to try and be provocative but in the end is cinematic flamebait.
The Good Shepherd (2006)
Cold Warrior
"The Good Shepherd" is a rich, sprawling film stuffed with fine performances and capable of expanding to take in vast chunks of history or narrowing to concentrate on delicate human moments.
It's a movie in which world-shattering events and piercing domestic crises are given credibly equivalent weight. Directed with smooth craft by Robert De Niro (!) it reveals a great depth of detail and parallels actual events so plausibly that it's relevant today although it deals with events of more than 40 years ago.
Matt Damon stars as Edward Wilson, a taciturn and precise scion of New England whose life has led him from family tragedy to study at Yale to intelligence service in London and Berlin during and after World War II to a position as spymaster at the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency in the first decades of the Cold War. Wilson is a bloodless mixture of patriotism, poetry, shame, guilt and WASP noblesse oblige. He's a scholar and a Skull and Bonesman, a closet romantic and a professional cipher, a world-class compartmentalizer who keeps his private and working lives rigorously separate -- or at least as separate as events allow.
Wilson first appears in April 1961, when he authorizes the CIA's botched attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro by invading Cuba's Bay of Pigs, and the film travels backward into his life as he tries to uncover the source of the intelligence leak that doomed the operation. We meet his father (Timothy Hutton), his favorite professor at Yale (Michael Gambon), his Skull and Bones brother (Lee Pace), the deaf girl he loves (Tammy Blanchard), the fast girl he has to marry (Angelina Jolie), the FBI agent who first engages him in spying (Alec Baldwin), the founder of the wartime intelligence agency who recruits him (De Niro), his tough second-in-command (John Turturro) and his nemesis, a Soviet spymaster (Oleg Stefan). It's a full, colorful company, spanning the globe and the years, and yet all of them have their proper places in Wilson's obsessively tidy mind.
Damon is the buttoned-down, bled-white center of the film, a still, calm, hyper-alert presence whose silences force others to speak rashly but which also keeps at arm's length the people to whom he should be closest. It's a fine turn in a film filled with wonderful acting: Baldwin's seedy G-man; Gambon's shady aesthete; Blanchard's earnest shy girl; Jolie's domesticated, willful wife.
Now and again, Eric Roth's script slips into melodrama (how does a Russian spymaster get in and out of the U.S. so readily?). But it's full of believably pseudo-historic detail. De Niro stages the film with impeccable fidelity and moves it along with remarkable fluency and grace. It's nearly three hours long and dense with twists and secrets, yet it plays like a dance: smooth and handsome and full of life.
It's the type of film that may be forgiven its imperfections when they are compared with the vastness of its accomplishments.
Alpha Dog (2006)
'Alpha Dog' Has bark, but little bite
Like Larry Clark's "Kids" and "Bully," "Alpha Dog" takes inordinate pleasure in watching a cast of young actors indulge in trashy behavior for the sheer lurid thrill of it. It's got skill and craft and some good acting to recommend it. And it's based on a true story. But its soulless posturing and jaded cynicism are far more repellant than cool.
The film is a retelling of the story of Jesse James Hollywood, one of the youngest people ever to appear on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
In writer-director Nick Cassavetes' vision, Hollywood (renamed Johnny Truelove and played by Emile Hirsch from "Lords of Dogtown") is a craven punk who inherits his criminal tendencies from his father and grandfather (Bruce Willis and Harry Dean Stanton, respectively) and whose empire of drug dealing, violence and partying is built on the work and muscle of a circle of sycophants.
Johnny is terrified, for instance, of Jake Mazursky (Ben Foster), a local hothead who owes him money but has no fear of him or his goons. After several violent confrontations, Johnny has the idea to get the dough by kidnapping Jake's younger brother (Anton Yelchin) and hiding him in the care of Johnny's second-in-command, Frankie (Justin Timberlake). But give a job like that to an idiot and, predictably, it's gonna go wrong.
The material is plenty sensational, but unlike Clark, whose relish for voyeurism and exploitation result in harrowing viewing, Cassavetes has a strange ambivalence toward the nasty world he depicts. He likes showing the sex and drugs and fighting all right, but he uses distancing tactics such as scrambling time or labeling new characters with such tags as "Witness #11" or having a journalist interview the principals about their retrospective thoughts.
His work with actors is similarly uneven: Hirsch, Timberlake (!) and the whiny Yelchin are good, but Foster is allowed to chew the scenery with heedless abandon, and Sharon Stone's performance as the kidnapped boy's mother varies from sympathetically strung-out to laughably self-indulgent. Had the film been more tempered in its textures, had Cassavetes chosen a surer attitude toward his subjects, it might have been devastating. As it stands, though, it's far more showy than substantial.
Notes on a Scandal (2006)
Her wicked, wicked ways
"Notes on a Scandal" packs more heat, acid, danger and drama into its brief running time than most films of nearly double the length.
Directing Patrick Marber's script of Zoe Heller's novel (also known as "What Was She Thinking?"), Richard Eyre ("Iris," "The Ploughman's Lunch") whips up a rich, tart stew of heated melodrama, bitter comedy, cunning social observation and knockout acting. The result is pungent and toothsome, a blend of Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter and "To Die For" -- a bracing concoction decidedly not for the delicate of disposition.
Judi Dench stars as Barbara Covett, an spinster high school teacher of North London who holds the world around her in contempt and makes her way like a hungry spider, spinning webs of sticky charms to coax friendships from younger women who have no idea of her true nature. One September morn, her attention is drawn to the new substitute art teacher, Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), a shimmering, willowy presence in whom Barbara invests a reservoir of longing.
Invited for Sunday lunch, Barbara is introduced to Sheba's husband (Bill Nighy), her children and her bohemian past. Presently she learns even more: Sheba is enmeshed in a sexual affair with one of her students (Andrew Simpson, who, like the character he plays, is beyond the British age of consent of 16). For Sheba, this is a shattering situation, with implications of scandal, divorce and even prosecution. For Barbara, though (remember her surname), it's a pry bar through the use of which she can break into Sheba's life and assert herself as adviser, best friend and perhaps more.
This bare-bones account of the plot gives an idea of the sort of sensational tactics available to Marber and Eyre. To be sure, they aren't in the least afraid of using them liberally: Scenes of sex, stalking, vengeance-taking, mental breakdown and violent explosion happen throughout the film. It's as lurid a domestic drama as you could crave.
Yet the details of the story cannot compare in sheer scalding impact to the dialogue: Barbara mocking Sheba's schoolgirl romance with a firm, "You are not young!" or Sheba rubbing Barbara's girl-crush in her face with a sneering, "You think this is a love affair?" or the dozens of heartless observations that pad Barbara's diaries, from which the narration is drawn. Marber, who wrote both the play and the film "Closer" as well as some inky comedy for Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge character, drops these lines into the script like mortar shells, and Eyre never lets up on the pace to give us a chance to recover from them.
Its raw nastiness alone might have recommended the film, but Eyre has populated it with extraordinary performances that make it truly first rank. Dench is haggard and spiteful and manipulative and wheedling and cruel, a catalog of human failings and neediness as credible as the best Iago. As Sheba, Blanchett has a fully believable frailty and spaciness bred in a combination of privilege and vacancy. Nighy, fast becoming one of the most irreplaceable actors in the cinema, truly feels like someone decent on whom a series of incomprehensible catastrophes has fallen. And young Simpson has both the altar-boy shyness and the astounding cheek to make his character seem entirely real. It's simply a bravura festival of fine acting.
There's a lot of disquieting material in "Notes on a Scandal," and many people will be put off by depictions of a liaison between a grown woman and a teenage boy, or of a tacitly lesbian spinster as a spiteful harridan. But it's staged and played with such razor-sharp technique and feels so much like a slice of actual (if not ordinary) life that its accomplishments simply trump such reservations. Eyre and his collaborators spring wicked trap after wicked trap, and the deeply human pain you feel and witness is utterly delicious.
The Last King of Scotland (2006)
Idi Amin in his glory
He thundered and loomed and joshed and clasped. He made terrible threats and effusive promises. He laughed and raged and told bad jokes and saw enemies in the shadows and was equally at home in a dashiki as he was in a kilt.
He was Idi Amin -- or, as he preferred, His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, King of Scotland, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. And his rule over Uganda in the 1970s was as capricious and bloody and mad as that ridiculous title suggests.
Amin, who died in exile in 2003, was a massive figure -- comical and quixotic and utterly deadly -- whose image has faded from popular culture, where he was once a favorite subject for documentaries and comic spoofs. But with "The Last King of Scotland," Amin, as portrayed with ferocious, convincing energy and zeal by Forest Whitaker, returns in all his ghastly glory. And Whitaker is so good as to ensure that anyone who sees the film will never forget Amin again.
Technically, "Last King" isn't Amin's story. It rather concerns itself with the misadventures of Nicholas Garrigan, a (fictional) recently minted doctor who decides to taste a bit of the world before inheriting his father's medical practice in Scotland. Spinning a globe, he hits on Uganda, where he makes a brief run at a fling with a married woman (Gillian Anderson) before his fateful encounter with Amin, after which he is sucked up by the president as if by a tornado, moving to the capital city, running in fast crowds and serving both as personal physician and trusted adviser to the mercurial madman.
Garrigan is played by James McEvoy (Mr. Tumnus from "The Chronicles of Narnia"), and it's a quite able performance: frisky and assertive and sexy and foolish in turns. But he positively vanishes beside Whitaker, who delivers a career-best performance as the sweaty, insidious, booming, glad-handing monster (and I say "career-best" with Whitaker's work in "Bird" well in mind). The readiest comparison is "Training Day," in which Ethan Hawke was very good and could barely hold his place on screen next to Denzel Washington. For this performance alone, "Last King" is a substantial piece of work.
Otherwise, the film is estimable but not quite great. Working from an adaptation of Giles Foden's novel of the same name, director Kevin MacDonald creates an episodic and sometimes meandering story involving palace intrigues, adultery, British interference in Ugandan affairs and the famous raid on Entebbe, where the airline passengers hijacked by Palestinians were rescued by Israeli commandos. Some of this is supported by solid performances by Kelly Washington as one of Amin's wives and Simon McBurney as a British diplomat. But it still lacks the force of a more straightforward narrative.
As if to mirror the squirrelly storytelling, MacDonald and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (who's worked on many Dogme films) adopt a herky-jerky camera style, which, along with fussy editing, actually manages the unlikely trick of diluting Whitaker's performance. Too often we want to stare into that titanic, crazy face, only to have our attention diverted to McEvoy's milky reaction. We don't need a stand-in for our shock and awe here -- Whitaker summons it quite effectively.
The Queen (2006)
Caught in the Reign
"The Queen" is all-together remarkable not only for what it is but for what it isn't.
Director Stephen Frears' film of Peter Morgan's script explores the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the summer of 1997, when Blair arrived in office and Diana, the former Princess of Wales, died in a car accident in Paris.
It imagines what life was like at Balmoral, the Royal Family's estate in Scotland, and at 10 Downing St., the Prime Minister's home and office, during that unforgettable week when seemingly all the world, and surely all of Britain, found itself in mourning for a dazzling young woman of so many striking qualities and contradictions. It takes a handful of living, non-fictional characters -- the queen, Blair, princes Philip and Charles, Blair's wife and various aides to all parties -- and attributes words, thoughts, actions and emotions to them. And it does so without ever stooping to parody, shorthand or even received wisdom. Almost everyone in the film is granted full-blooded human depth, and the result is a deeply satisfying drama.
"The Queen" is also quite funny and, at turns, moving. Frears and Morgan -- who collaborated in 2003 on "The Deal," a TV movie about Blair's Machiavellian rise to power -- have wonderful antennae for little telling details, contrasts and absurdities. They juxtapose the timid, always-on-tip-toes staff of the queen with Blair's gung-ho American-style team. They balance the grand pomp and luxury of Her Majesty's daily world with the house-full-of-kids life of the Blairs, where fish-stick dinners and crayoned walls are the norm. And they make their film really special by showing us the ways in which the queen comes to recognize Blair's talents, especially his sense of public mood, just as he finds himself praising her qualities of honor, strength and grace when his aides and wife jeer at the very thought of her.
It's a film that shows us Prince Charles crying, Elizabeth swearing, corgi dogs frolicking and the Blairs fumbling in matters of royal protocol and yet treats none of it in a campy or satiric manner. The remarkably versatile Frears ("My Beautiful Laundrette," "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Grifters," "High Fidelity," "Dirty Pretty Things") once again blends comedy, drama and something like social reportage to convince you utterly of what you're watching. The more you know about contemporary British politics, the more credible the film feels, which is a heck of a trick, but it's smashing entertainment as a story, and it's studded with memorable bits.
Most of those have to do with Helen Mirren, a splendid actress at something very near the top of her craft in the title role. From the opening credits, when she fixes the audience with a gaze that is at once open and opaque, Mirren's Elizabeth is the unhidden yet unknowable center of the film. But she is no trope or symbol. Through her diplomatic tussles with Blair, her rustic Highlands romps, her firm dealings with her frustrated son and opinionated husband, her quiet colloquies with her shrewd mother, and her gradual recognition that her stolid response to Diana's death has pained her subjects, Mirren plays an otherworldly woman in a fashion that's palpably real and human. It's a dignified, intelligent, tasteful and, most of all, living depiction. (Mirren won an Emmy this summer for playing the title character of the mini-series "Elizabeth I," and right now she's a good bet to win the Oscar in February -- a mighty big pot to win with a pair of queens.) Equally fine is Michael Sheen as Blair (reprising the role from "The Deal," in fact). There's a sense of an impression in the portrayal (Blair's manner of speech is more slippery, befitting the man), but Sheen gives us immediate access to his ambition, confidence and cunning. Members of the royal family react to Diana's death by shutting themselves up and offering neither word nor gesture to a public that was inundating the royal palaces with funereal mountains of flowers. But Blair negotiates with the queen to coax her into a more human and politically expedient posture. Watching Sheen, you're absolutely convinced that he can pull the delicate trick.
Frears presents other notable performances: Sylvia Syms as the Queen Mother, Alex Jennings as Prince Charles, Roger Allam as the queen's chief aide and Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair. The one sour note is the estimable James Cromwell, whose Prince Philip is neither written nor cast credibly, a one-note Johnny who almost always rings false.
Or, rather, he rings as you may have feared they all might. Face it: You go into "The Queen" expecting something like Kitty Kelley or "The Osbournes." But what you get is a film of nearly Shakespearean political, social and personal complexities, made with assured wit and craft. Lord knows Elizabeth will likely never see it. But it truly is worthy of a queen.
Rocky Balboa (2006)
'Rocky' Hits the mat
There's a telling moment in "Rocky," the 1976 crowd-pleasing, Oscar-winner that launched the career of Sylvester Stallone.
In it, Rocky Balboa, the Philadelphia club fighter who's been given an unlikely chance to fight heavyweight champ Apollo Creed, wanders into the arena the night before the bout and glances up at a huge banner of himself hanging over the ring. Compared to that gigantic image, Rocky is a credibly small and human figure, a man thrust into something far bigger than he can comprehend.
In the four sequels that appeared over the next 14 years, Rocky and the fellow who created and played him came more and more to resemble the steroidal cartoon on that banner and less and less to feel like flesh-and-blood people. The formula was always the same -- hokey melodrama leading up to a big, grueling fight -- but the reality had been bled from the enterprise. Rocky became a joke and a bore.
Now an additional 16 years have passed, and Stallone, whose career has been something of a rumor since 1997's estimable "Cop Land," has chosen to don once again the mashed-up hat and mashed-up mouth for "Rocky Balboa," which we're promised is the old pug's last outing. While Stallone likely hopes to go out with a bang, this small, manipulative movie doesn't have any real punch to it. Yes, when Rocky finally gets into the ring, he provides a few visceral thrills. But so little rings true or real about the picture that you feel a bit suckered, as if you bought an expensive pay-per-view boxing package and wound up watching a first-round knockout.
The textures of "Rocky Balboa" are redolent of the first film in the series. We join the former champ one wintry morning (it's always winter in "Rocky" movies) in his gloomy South Philly row house as he's preparing for the glum duty of commemorating the anniversary of the death of his wife, Adrian, by driving with his brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) to visit the places where he met and wooed her.
He's a sad case, banging around the old neighborhood in search of traces of past happiness, sitting mutely in a folding chair at Adrian's grave site; telling tired tales of the ring in an ill-fitting jacket at his restaurant (named Adrian's); reaching vainly out to Rocky Jr. (Milo Ventimiglia), who, smothered by his famous father's shadow, works in the financial world and rarely visits home.
After we've been peppered with an overload of reminders of (and clips from) the previous films, an absurd series of contrivances arises.
A TV boxing show uses a computer simulation to see how Rocky would fare against the current champ, the invincible (and idiotically named) Mason "The Line" Dixon (played by former light heavyweight champion Antonio Tarver).
The ensuing hubbub inspires Rocky to apply for a boxing license, just to engage in a few club fights. Tarver's managers, recognizing that their fighter is waning in popularity, go further, reckoning that an exhibition between their guy and Rocky -- with proceeds going to charity -- could boost the champ's image. Despite the protests of Rocky Jr., the Pennsylvania boxing commission, TV boxing experts, barroom loudmouths, and Marie (Geraldine Hughes), his mousy new not-quite-girlfriend, Rocky steps up to face what looks like certain doom.
Cue the training montage.
Cue the big fight.
In all three of his capacities here -- writer, director, star -- Stallone is wobbly. The script has a grinding quality: Again and again, somebody decides not to do something or to tell Rocky 'no,' and Rocky makes a long speech about inner character and heart and grit, and all is well again. The rest of the cast seems in place merely to give Rocky obstacles to overcome, particularly Tarver, whose Dixon has none of the menace or charisma of Rocky's previous foes.
Visually, the first half of the picture depends too heavily on flashbacks, while the fight scenes are diluted by hokey effects (including black-and-white-with-color trickery stolen from "Sin City"). Speaking of visuals, Stallone himself is a bit of a shock, his face a porcelain landscape of plastic surgery don'ts, his body saggy despite its evident strength. (Yes, I hope I look as fit at 60, but I also hope to have the wisdom to keep my shirt on when there's a movie camera running nearby.) "Rocky Balboa" isn't a catastrophe. Some of its rue and nostalgia seems genuine, perhaps a reflection of the vagaries of Stallone's own career. But the chief thing it's got going for it is its connection to past glories and emotions. Inadvertently, it proves that you truly can't go home again -- not even if you never left home in the first place.
Eragon (2006)
'Eragon' Crashes and Burns
Anyone remember "Willow"? In 1988, George Lucas tried to launch another fantasy franchise, this one following an ersatz hobbit (Warwick Davis) who gets sucked into an epic Hero's Journey quest. The movie, directed by Ron Howard, has its charms -- Val Kilmer is hilarious and cool as the rogue swordsman -- but it suffers from too many blatant, connect-the-dots story lifts from "Lord of the Rings" and Lucas' own "Star Wars" trilogy. Sometimes it's fun, but it never feels fresh.
Well, "Eragon" is a less-funny "Willow." The movie's a mostly dreary adaptation of Christopher Paolini's blockbuster young-adult fantasy novel, published when the author was 19. (He started writing it at 15.) I can't speak to the book, though my stepdaughter assures me it's a very cool read if you're 12. The film, however, is such a Xerox-copy derivative of "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings," it left me wondering if "Eragon" was a best-seller because it had a cool cover, a great title and an unusual author bio.
Decide for yourself. Here's the story of "Eragon," with citations.
An opening narration ("Lord of the Rings") says that a great sect of supernatural warriors has been wiped out by an evil king ("Star Wars").
Just before she's captured, a fleeing princess ("Star Wars") accidentally leaves a supernatural artifact ("Lord of the Rings") in the care of a blond farm boy named Eragon, who lives with his uncle ("Star Wars") in a bucolic countryside estate ("Lord of the Rings").
The artifact reveals powers long thought extinct ("Lord of the Rings"): a baby dragon that hatches out of a bright-blue lozenge. The evil king and his evil wizard sidekick ("Star Wars," "Lord of the Rings") send screeching warriors to hunt down the farm boy ("Lord of the Rings"), killing the boy's uncle in the process ("Star Wars"), which sends Eragon on a quest with an elderly warrior mentor ("Star Wars," "Lord of the Rings").
Aided by the geezer and a rogue sidekick, the farm boy tries to rescue the princess, find a hidden resistance and master long-forgotten magic ("Star Wars"). The climax features a battle with ogre-like warriors trying to take a fortress city ("Lord of the Rings"), intercut with an aerial dogfight in a canyon full of towers ("Star Wars").
Throw in a few young wizard nods to "Harry Potter," and you're good to go. The Tolkien/Lucas shout-outs get so numbingly blatant after a while that you start pining for something more original. "Krull," for instance.
Now, of course, Lucas was himself borrowing liberally from myth expert Joseph Campbell, "The Dambusters" and Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress." Tolkien was hip-deep in centuries of mythology, and neither he nor Lucas invented the quest story. But "Eragon's" nods go beyond plot to shot-for-shot lifts from Lucas and "Rings" director Peter Jackson. If you've been missing Jackson's swooping helicopter shots of people traveling on mountaintops, do I have a movie for you! And a shot of Eragon pining for adventure while staring at a sunset is so ridiculously familiar I half-expected him to see two setting suns.
But even that might be forgivable if the movie was funny, charming or in any way exciting.
Director Stefen Fangmeier, a well-regarded special-effects man and second-unit director ("Master and Commander," "Galaxy Quest") does a superb job visualizing the CGI dragon. But Fangmeier is working with a script without a single memorable line and far too many characters and creatures with silly names. The orc stand-ins are called urgals, but if you don't know the book, you keep mishearing dialogue along the lines of "The Urkels are coming!" The director also is stuck with good performers -- Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Robert Carlyle, Djimon Hounsou -- who look vaguely embarrassed.
To be fair, Fangmeier was working with a budget that kept the film from feeling as epic. By the time a pack of fat bald guys with greasy makeup and red contact lenses attack a fortress made largely of wooden poles, it feels like you're watching a Renaissance fair get overrun by pro wrestlers.
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
Pleasingly Predictable
t couldn't be more straightforward, but the new inspirational melodrama "The Pursuit of Happiness" is like a Rorschach test. If you bring to it the desire to smile and suffer and laugh and cry with its protagonist, you likely will. If you expect its tale of struggle and triumph to set your teeth on edge, it'll do just that. And if you come to it with no preconceptions at all, it could strike you as flat, formulaic and pat or sweet, inspiring and real. It all depends.
The question, then, is whether the film's mutability is a sign of mastery or of a failure to make something substantial of itself. The answer, maddeningly, is a little of both.
Directed by Gabriele Muccino ("L'Ultimo Bacio") from a script by Steve Conrad ("The Weather Man"), the film tells the based-on-truth story of Chris Gardner, a luckless but bright San Francisco salesman who dreams of being a stockbroker and loses his wife and the roof over his head while pursuing that unlikely goal. Homeless, broke and desperate, Chris manages, however, to hold onto his son, Christopher, as well as to his ferocious personal determination and his winning sense of humor.
Life throws bean balls and knocks Chris to the ground, but, eyes ever on the prize, he gets right back up every time and pushes on. Oh, he loses his temper once or twice, and tells some harmless lies, and does a couple of things that he's probably ashamed of today, and even cries one night when he is well and truly crushed. But they don't make movies about folks who succumb to such moments, no they don't. Which is another way of saying that if you can't figure out where this picture is headed then you need to surrender your car keys and checkbook to a trusted friend because your brain is broken.
Chris is played by Will Smith in a performance that's being buzzed about as the rapper-comic-action star's breakthrough as a legitimate actor (which makes you wonder what the buzzers were doing when Smith was deservedly nominated for an Oscar in the lead role in "Ali" or delivering a subtle performance in "Six Degrees of Separation" more than a decade ago). There's real range in Smith's work here: frustration, irony, despair, grit, wit, professional savvy and, especially, parental warmth.
The latter is especially important to the film and arises from the relationship between Smith and the young debuting actor who plays Christopher, one Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, Smith's 8-year-old son. The fact that there's real on-screen chemistry between a real-world father and son is no mean feat -- just ask Sylvester and Sage Stallone. The repartee of the two Smiths can be playful, strained, clingy or tender as the script calls for. It's not mere behaving; it's real acting.
Also real is the atmosphere provided by Muccino, who assiduously resists any temptation to sugarcoat or gussy up the texture of the film. In his native Italy, he has specialized in plausible melodramas; here he uses contrast-rich photography, grimy sets and a firm control of the film's rhythms to keep the Hollywood treacle mostly at bay.
Unfortunately, the script has an episodic quality that, combined with Muccino's restraint, results in a feeling of bloodlessness. The narration also has a self-satisfied quality, which mirrors a smugness that occasionally creeps into Smith's eyes. These sorts of things push you away from the film and make it seem like a series of moralistic tableaux about somebody's hard road to the top.
Still, there's a decency at the film's core and a desire to do the predictable thing in a generally unpredictable fashion. Those traits make it impossible to reject "Happyness" out of hand. Muccino has an assured technique, and big Smith and little Smith are strong. When the film finally gets to where you always knew it was going, you can rightly feel satisfied if never exactly overwhelmed.
Unser täglich Brot (2005)
This bread's hard to chew
The recent film "Fast Food Nation" imposes a fictional narrative onto the factual expose of Eric Schlosser's informative and horrifying book about (among other things) the industrialization of agriculture. The documentary "Our Daily Bread" makes no such concession to its audience's need for story, presenting virtually wordlessly scene after scene of modern food production in action.
It's a cliché at this point to note how modern consumers are alienated from their diets, making no connection between the plastic-wrapped pieces of muscle they purchase in the supermarket and the animals they were once part of. Still, Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter presents dozens of memorable and fascinating images, not all of them of the gross-out variety. In fact, there's even an abstract beauty to some of what we see, at least until we realize it's all part of a vast killing machine.
Difficult to sit through, "Our Daily Bread" is nonetheless an important record, invaluable for those with the courage to watch it.
Blood Diamond (2006)
A Worthless 'Diamond'
So halfway through "Blood Diamond" some guy gets shot -- it really doesn't matter who -- and somebody starts tending to the wound, and somebody else inquires after the fellow and this exchange occurs:
"How's his pulse?"
"I can feel it sometimes."
Right there is just about the most positive thing that can be said about this nitwit, sanctimonious, overblown picture. A thriller about the nexus between the diamond trade and Africa's never-ending wars, it's part action film, part buddy movie, part love story, part political tract and, in sum, much less: a meandering, preachy, condescending mess that only occasionally bursts into life and even then at such a tepid level that you can hardly call it living. As a social-conscience film, "Blood Diamond" demonstrates the worst sort of hypocrisy, straining to incorporate trite lectures about so-called "conflict diamonds" -- raw stones used by governments, warlords and rebels to purchase armaments -- while treating ordinary Africans in one moment like noble savages and in the next like cartoonish clowns out of a Three Stooges movie. Time and again, the film's white characters -- a soldier of fortune turned diamond smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio), the world's stupidest journalist (Jennifer Connelly), a holier-than-thou ambassador (Stephen Collins) -- make grand speeches about how the selfish indifference of westerners leads to the suffering of innocent Africans. And then comes a scene like the one in which a threatening group of tribesmen are disarmed by a pretty white girl with a camera who wants to take their picture -- a moment of racist caricature that would make the ghost of Stepin Fetchit squirm. The context of this harebrained seesawing between the moralizing and demoralizing is a thriller about the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, which was fueled in part by the sale of conflict diamonds. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a proud and decent fisherman, is separated from his family in the unrest and forced into slavery in a diamond mine. He finds a rare pink diamond the size of a peach pit and spirits it away, becoming the centerpiece of a chase involving the smuggler, the journalist, government troops, an army of mercenaries and a rebel militiaman who has captured Solomon's oldest child and turned him into a drugged killing machine. Director Edward Zwick ("Glory," "Courage Under Fire," "The Last Samurai") mounts some impressive action sequences: battles in dilapidated cities and shantytowns and chases through jungles. And DiCaprio acquits himself quite well with a broad Rhodesian accent and despite a completely stereotypical character. But Hounsou is once again forced to carry the burden of white men's guilt as a man of almost comically unsullied honor, and Connelly is awful, just awful, as the type of only-in-the-movies journalist who gets stories by flirting with sources. Look, there's no doubt that the resources of Africa have been exploited at the dear expense of the people of that benighted continent. And diamonds may in fact be the least of it. But this is the type of material best dealt with in a documentary such as "Darwin's Nightmare" or "Black Gold," or in a melodrama populated by actual human beings such as "The Constant Gardener." Here, by attempting to thrill us with bang-bang action, Zwick and company seem to want to distract us from their message. And when they finally deliver it, their ham fisted treatment absolutely kills it.