Reviews

We have essentially two female characters in the whole film, Erica (Rooney Mara) and Christy (Brenda Song.) The former's rejection of Zuckerberg is painted as the catalyst for his journey to the top. The latter lady is a Facebook "groupie" who jumps Eduardo in a public restroom, becomes his girlfriend/glommer-on, and then, in the film's most ridiculous scene, goes ballistic because his relationship status on Facebook is still 'single.' Oy vey. THE SOCIAL NETWORK's approach to the fairer sex is about as complex as those found in any of Fincher's films – which is, not complex at all. (No offense, Ripley…) Perhaps this remove is meant to convey Zuckerberg's own mystification with women. But considering the director's track record… Hey, the guy's not Almodóvar.

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Something about INCEPTION kept hitting me as a re-statement of MEMENTO, with $200,000,000 to spend. The big emotional revelation is similar in more ways than one, while the bells and whistles here dwarf the neo-noir economy of Nolan's breakout indie. With every movie, the man's budgets get bigger, hey good for him, and this is by far his biggest non-Batmovie. He's grown accustomed, perhaps, to making those movies, but that now familiar style bleeds over here, (booming Hans Zimmer score check, Wally Pfister helicopter shots check,) when INCEPTION could have benefited from being weirder by a quarter. For all the possibilities a film about a dreamworld presents, it's disappointing that Nolan sticks so close to what he knows. From INSOMNIA to BATMAN BEGINS to THE PRESTIGE, Nolan puts some sort of snowbound castle in almost every movie he makes. Cue act three of INCEPTION, set in: some sort of snowbound castle. Hey, the guy likes ice! Leave him alone! But Tom Hardy skiing around this fortress picking off baddies like he's James Bond isn't exactly the stuff from which dreams are made… Though it was interesting to read that in the press rounds for INCEPTION, Nolan let it slip that he'd like to direct a James Bond installment himself. Whether that's an empty promise remains to be seen, (hint: it will never happen ever,) but the finale of this film shows potential for a Nolan Bond. That is to say, it's a sequence that might have worked better in another movie.

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What's most wonderful about TOY STORY 3, and what sets it apart from the rest of the series, is how it approaches the character of Andy, the kid who was given Buzz Lightyear for his seventh birthday back when nobody had ever heard of Pixar in 1995. Andy's always been a sweet kid, a kid worth the loyalty of Woody, Buzz and the gang, but beyond that, he's been, well, a kid. As we catch up to him in part three, however, Andy's leaving home for college, and his choice of what to do with his toys – bring them, store them in the attic, or trash them – frames the story. The film's insight into Andy proves its best asset, because unlike parts one and two, the toys in this final chapter have a complex relationship with their owner, and their journey is not about simply getting back to him at all costs. It's about the question of where a toy's place in the world is – where it has value, and when. That the end of childhood is the jumping off point for this series capstone makes it not only the darkest of the three, but the most rewarding, at least for a former kid. If you are one, you will more or less love this movie.

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Summer blockbuster season always brings with it at least one big disappointment. This year's comes right up front – and what a disappointment it is. IRON MAN 2 is a classic sequel in the worst sense: we've got more villains, more heroes, more money in the budget, and none of it amounts to an experience that comes even close to that of its predecessor, which stood out in 2008 as smart, effervescent counter-programming in the summer dominated by the dour DARK KNIGHT.

The problems with IRON MAN 2 are bone deep, but they manifest themselves everywhere on the surface. While the first film focused neatly on Tony and his development from careless cad to honorable hero, this sequel gives him nowhere to go, and at some point in the filming/editing, director Jon Favreau must have realized this; hence, his new movie's many secondary characters and subplots receive a disproportionate share of screen time here. Tony is all but discarded as a dynamic character – and it becomes very clear very early that without the original's central arc (and I ain't talking arc reactor, hiyo,) there's really not much novel about this franchise.

This CLASH OF THE TITANS, it turns out, is a marked improvement over its original version, at least for someone (me) who has no nostalgia for the original. That it's almost an hour less than AVATAR is one of the best things about the film; whereas AVATAR was predictable and long, CLASH is predictable, but brief. The plotting is brisk and action-packed, eye-roll dialogue is kept minimal, and, it's good, stupid fun watching Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes partake in the time-honored tradition of great British actors slumming it for blockbusters. As divine brothers Zeus and Hades, these guys are clearly havin' a laugh, just as Sir Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith did in '81 when they screwed around Mount Olympus for a hot shilling.

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What I love about GREMLINS 2 THE NEW BATCH, is the fact that as a sequel, it fundamentally changes the format of its franchise – something even Spielberg's own sequels haven't ventured to do. (TEMPLE OF DOOM being the exception.) GREMLINS 2 THE NEW BATCH, is a film not made to the specifications of its original. Sure, the same rules apply to the little buggers, but this is a film that amps up the comedy of its premise to an almost Mel Brooksian level, while cutting back on the horror element of its significantly scarier predecessor. A wise decision; once you've seen the Gremlins metamorphose once, it's diminishing returns from there on out. Dante and writer Charlie Haas clearly understand this – so rather than duplicate beat-for-beat that thing that made them rich the first time, they take a different tack, essentially switching genre, and garnering superior, though less financially lucrative, results. That's called risk-taking. And it's something you don't frequently see in studio film-making.

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Apart from being raucously funny from first line to last, Rock's film is a document of worth – at least for an ignorant cracker like me. The well chosen and well-edited talking heads that make up the film debate forthrightly the merits of painful chemical hair relaxants (a vaunted tradition,) and human hair weaves (a staggeringly expensive habit,) and why such excesses are so deeply ingrained in African American culture. Is it just common sense to cover up nappy roots? Maybe such extreme measures are an outgrowth of a minority self-image crisis in a primarily Caucasian country? Or, maybe, in spite of the questionable causes of seeking out "good hair," it simply isn't worth f***ing with a woman who wants to look her best. (This is the side that Mister Ice-T takes, in his infinite, smutty wisdom…) In discussion, Rock handles his subject alternately with reverence and irreverence, and his film comes away with few concrete conclusions; though it works like Michael Moore's muckracking at its funniest, this isn't any sort of agitprop. The tone is playful and provocative, and though the topic runs a little low on steam around the hour mark, that only means that Rock has to fill the last portion of his film with the finals competition of the Bronner Brothers International Hair Show, a display every bit as absurd as the climax of ZOOLANDER, but all the more hilarious for its, you know, actual, objective reality.

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-Greg

What was most striking re-watching DONNIE BRASCO at the end of the '00's, is how ahead of the Sopranos curve it was, particularly in terms of depicting the degrading day-to-day of a mobster. Sure, we've spent the better part of this decade watching Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti struggle with the banal/evil duties of the family soldier, but Pacino's Lefty is avant garde of the whole Satriale's gang.

Two years before Tony took his crown, British director Newell came at the central issues of Los Sopranos – duty, alienation, and betrayal – with a calculated remove that an American shooter weaned on Scorsese and Coppola might not have been able to pull off. Witness a scene in which a very young-looking Paul Giamatti, playing an FBI surveillance technician, prods "Donnie" on the definitions of "fuggedaboutit" (a term that found new life as a t-shirt slogan during the Sopranos' heyday.) Newell, an outsider himself – and a bit of a chameleon, as established filmmakers go – succeeded in making a film that remains fascinating twelve years on, because it asks questions of Mafia culture, rather than revel in, or glorify it.

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-Greg

There's just not much to say about CRAZY HEART that you probably wouldn't infer from its trailer, or anticipate from your still-fresh memories of THE WRESTLER. That film was a peek behind the veil of pro-wrestling, a revelation of the sensitive men behind their violent personae. Country music, however, isn't defined by a veiling of emotion – quite the opposite. Country is, almost by its nature, baldly confessional music. So sadly, CRAZY HEART never supplies the voyeuristic thrill of THE WRESTLER, because unlike the character of Randy "The Ram" as juxtaposed in and out of the ring, there's nothing about Bad Blake that's not perfectly presented in the songs he performs throughout this film – just as James Mangold's WALK THE LINE didn't really add anything to the story of Johnny Cash that listening to 'At Folsom Prison' hadn't already told you about the man.

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-Greg

Scorsese is far from home off the Massachusetts coast, but he's not gone far thematically, and SHUTTER ISLAND is actually a refreshing return to self-reflection, following the amoral romp THE DEPARTED, a film full of highly-entertaining kills, with a minimum of meditation on them. In this asylum for the criminally insane, however, Marty's found himself an ideal setting for a study of the brutality that's defined his career. Is violence the ultimate logic – a gift from God himself – as one character puts it? Or is violence simply madness – and are all those who commit it, if they're not mad already, driven irreversibly mad by it? It's a potent question, and one the director addresses here with care, if not subtlety...

Though SHUTTER ISLAND is something less than perfect, its effects are lingering, the questions it raises not easily dismissed. And the conclusion drawn by this brutal funhouse of a movie, ultimately, is a disturbing one: violence can't be undone. To put faith in human recovery in the face of sadism – either global, or personal – is to play a losing game. Once the crime's committed, the case can never be truly solved.

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-Greg

Between the sixteen endings of RETURN OF THE KING, and the 790-minute Empire State Building climax of KING KONG, it's fair to say that extended death scenes have become Peter Jackson's forté. I'm a sucker for his KONG – but the scene of Susie Salmon's abduction and murder is hard to classify as entertainment. And yet THE LOVELY BONES is not a bad film because of objectionable subject matter. It is a bad film because it's the sum of uniformly bad artistic choices: The cinematography is a sloppy muddle, with cameras moving when they needn't and shouldn't, especially in domestic scenes. Sequences like the killer's introduction, peering through the windows of a dollhouse, are over-edited, where a simpler, cleaner presentation would do better. The musical score by Brian Eno is off the mark in almost every moment – most criminally, a 70's fabulous disco in heaven, set not to K.C. and the Sunshine Band, but to classical strings (AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS.) Worse still is Susie Salmon's ceaseless voice over. The post-mortem narrator's been done before, but it's hard to think of a more miscalculated application than this. Though Penn & Teller urge us to politely golf clap whenever the title of a film is worked into its dialogue, when Susie announces, apropos to nothing at film's end, "these are the lovely bones…" and then attempts to briefly unpack that statement, the only possible response is to groan – not clap.

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-Greg

In NINE's pile-on of beauties, (hellooo Judi Dench,) Marion Cotillard and Penelope Cruz emerge unscathed as wife and mistress respectively. Sophia Loren phones it in, content, it seems, to accept her beatification as Prima Donna of Italian cinema, and so her part is nothing more than an extended, softly-lit cameo. But it's Nicole Kidman who takes the crap cake, her upper lip sliding disconcertingly down her face before your naked eyes. In a film of spotty accents, (DDL not exempted,) Kidman gives up on the whole pesky 'Italian thing' after about two minutes. Why bother, really? 'Chilly' is a word I'd always use to describe Miss Kidman, but after watching NINE I'd suggest her next director check for pulse before rolling camera.

8½, che bel film, is presented in an ambiguous dream state where reality blends seamlessly with Guido's memory and fantasy. NINE reduces this to a binary: there's objective (and oh-so stressful) reality, and then, there are musical numbers. It's very clear when we're meant to be in Guido's fantasy: everyone's singing and dancing… and boring me to death. And worse yet, to reaffirm this conceit, Marshall shoots all the musical interludes the same, from the point of view of the audience. This gets old, in a hurry.

The biggest crime of all is that none of NINE elicits any emotional response. 8½ endures, truthful and touching, because it defies structure to create an impression of life on earth and the challenges – the impossibilities, even – of representing it in art. It's not a portrait of an artist, it's the world as seen through the eyes of one. NINE, not just a copy of a copy but the very opposite of its original, is too enamored with its own style, structure, and performers, to truly be about anything but itself.

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-Greg

AVATAR is a film like no other, one not so much filmed as it is built, using motion capture technology and three-dimensional doohickery. And AVATAR is, to that end, the most wicked 3-D movie ever made… In every other dimension, however, the only astonishing thing about this film is how average it is.

Cameron, it appears, doesn't have any real interest in contributing to cinematic dialectic apart from advancing its technology. He fills his brave new world with recognizable characters, well-trod arcs, and stock themes. Take for example "Saheri," the electro-chemical bond that flows through the Na'vi, into all living things on Pandora. In one scene, as Sully attempts to ride a wild creature (one of several,) and Neytiri shouts out "Saheri," Cameron might as well have subtitled it 'use the force!' That's not to say all this doesn't work as it should, just that the feeling one gets when sitting through the exposition of Saheri isn't awe, it's a gentle sense of déjà vu. And, though it's not exactly ill-conceived, (Cameron set out to make a record-breaker, and that he has made,) this inescapable familiarity works against the capital 'N' Novelty that's the only real triumph of the film.

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-Greg

With BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, Werner Herzog colors in the margins of a smart, if somewhat straight screenplay with bizarrerie that improves the pace in the film's midsection. Between the appearance of drug-induced iguanas, (with shaky, patent-pending Iguana-Cam,) and a metaphysical break-dancing ho-down that begs to be watched on repeat, it's hard not to get a thrill from the genuine weirdness Herzog injects into what would appear by its title to be another unnecessary remake. He manages to make a strong case not only for his own remake's existence, but even a case, in some cases, for remakes.

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