Public Enemies, Easy Virtue, Transformers II

As the Halifax summer has to date been typified by angry, black-gray, rain-swollen skies of a decidedly apocalyptic tone, I have seen a fair number of films of late, but have not, you may remark, blogged on many. To begin addressing this backlog, I will dispense of those films viewed at home and instead concentrate on my visits to the theater, which, I lament to relate, have not been rewarded by silver screen magic for the most part.

Public Enemies (Michael Mann, 2009) (Park Lane) I have tried several times in the past few days to write about Public Enemies, and I just don't seem to be able to get my thoughts on "paper". The problem, you see, is that I was greatly anticipating the film, and even after watching it I still want to love it so much - I mean, what's not to like? Depression-era Chicago echoing with the bass thunk-a thunk-a thunk-a of tommy gun fire, gangsters playing cat and mouse with earnest G-men prosecuting J. Edgar Hoover's "war on crime" with the "latest scientific methods," gleaming straight-8 Ford sedans powering away from the heist. There's also Johnny Depp, portraying John Dillinger, recently paroled and out to reclaim his crown as the king of the waning golden age of bank robberies, and Christian Bale playing Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent charged with tracking down public enemy number one. The movie poster alone still gives me a thrill...

That's a lot to love, and we can add to that the fact that the film nods to some of the serious issues arising from the prosecution of the war on crime: the birth of the FBI and Hoover's Congressional battle to be granted interstate jurisdiction, the advent of modern scientific techniques in police work, and the mob making its shift from gun-blazing larceny to the more "respectable" pursuit of corporate crime such as sports gambling (and one can assume prostitution and drugs).

So why didn't I love this movie? Well, the easy answer is that despite lavish sets replete with highly polished hardwoods, gleaming chrome, and snazzy pin-striped suits, the film did not manage to create a convincing world. Throughout the 140-minute run time I was keenly aware that I was sitting in a theatre watching a film - a beautifully crafted film, but still one that did not invoke my sympathies or raise my ire.

I think that there are two main reasons for this. The first has to do with the filming itself, and is a little hard to describe. Whereas most big budget movies you go to see have a soft, post-processed patina over them that renders them "dream like" and allows for easy entry by the viewer, Public Enemies shifted between this soft-tone picture and a higher-contrast "real life" visual mode in which lighting popped and edges were sharp and defined. Essentially, I found myself always aware that I was watching actors on a set playing roles - think about the difference between watching your favorite drama (Say Sopranos) and then watching the "behind the scenes" special features where raw footage is shown. (Addendum: I have recently learned that Mann shot Public Enemies with digital HD cameras, which could go a long way to explaining its sterile feel. Oh for the days of cracking and popping celluloid!)

Which brings me to the second problem, which I am well aware borders on sacrilege. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale never became believable characters for me: I never felt like I identified with or was emotionally invested in the plights of either main character. The movie didn't touch me. Now this is partially a deep-rooted flaw in the film as a whole, which focuses very strongly on the characters of Dillinger and Purvis but is so concerned with looking slick and polished at every moment that it never lets us into the messier recesses of their hearts or minds. But it is also partially - here it comes - a problem with Depp and Bale, who play their roles with a cool reserve that seems almost arrogant.

I enjoyed Public Enemies, but, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't love it and can't recommend it out of hand. As I overheard one audience member tell a friend he met in the lobby after the show, "It was great at the beginning when they were robbing shit and shooting everything up, but then it got kinda slow." Well, the slower part - the adagio, so to speak - should have been the best part, uncovering the persona under the swaggering gunman...but never did.

As an addendum, I believe that Slate Magazine may have said it best: "It's like spending an afternoon...at a beautifully lit wax-museum display inspired by earlier gangster movies."

Easy Virtue (Stephan Elliott, 2008) (Bayers Lake) I was out last night with a friend who is a working actor in Halifax's performing arts community, and she was aghast to learn that I had not been swept away by this screen adaptation of a Noel Coward play - perhaps some stories are not meant to escape the stage to the silver screen. I went to see Easy Virtue on a Sunday night in every expectation that I would be treated to an hour or two of delightful whimsy - an incisive, Wildean stab at the heart of upper-class Victorian manners.

John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) is returning to the sprawling family estate to present his scandalous race car driving, pant wearing, cigarette smoking, American wife, Larita (Jessica Biel), to his stiff-upper-lip, no-sex-please-we're-British family. The family estate, ruled with staunch propriety by Mrs. Whitaker (Kristin Scott Thomas), is fading into financial ruin but still keeping up appearances, a fact little known by John's sisters and met with indifference by her husband (Colin Firth), who long ago stopped caring about appearances and tradition.

A delicious scenario for a comedy of "old-country manners meets new world vigour" to be sure, but is ultimately squandered and ends up largely bland and lifeless - which is a shame as it starts out with some degree of promise. The odd gag elicits laughs, such as when Larita accidentally sits on and kills Mrs. Whitaker's dog, but the dialogue - which is reputed to sparkle on stage - falls largely flat in the incapable hands of the cast. This should perhaps be laid largely at the feet of Ms. Biel, extends to Mr. Firth, who has never been known for dramatic range, but certainly not to Ms. Scott Thomas, who, despite her impressive credentials and arguable strong performance even in this film, just is not strong enough to pull the whole film up by its bootstraps.

Catch Easy Virtue the next time it plays on a stage near you, I am sure your local theater group will breathe more life into it than this crew has.

Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (Michael Bay shudder, 2009) (Bayers Lake) Let's be brief: pure, utter, unadulterate, SHIT. Painful dialogue that makes you cringe delivered by hacks that insult the words actor/actress (Shia LaBeouf should be taken out and shot), sophomoric jokes that range from dogs humping legs to Mom getting high by mistake and chasing all the university hotties. The intelligence that conceived this travesty of a film is akin to the brilliance of the political and military minds that ended its mildly more interesting precursor, Transformers, by deciding to stash the recently defeated carcass of the most dangerous alien robot in the world at the bottom of the ocean - where no one would ever find it. Evil laugh. LAME.

But you don't go to this kind of film for brilliant acting or sublime scripts, right? You go for special effects and action, right? And state-of-the-art special effects films are a legitimate creation, after all, often pioneering new techniques that allow other artists in the industry to add to their collective palette. Except that this rationale is wearing thin these days, with CGI having reached a point where it, in itself, seldom manages to blow the tech-jaded audience away.

In addition, Transformers II did not even manage to leverage the technology that it had at its disposal to good effect - I would have loved to have seen the Autobots and Decepticons transform from cars, airplanes, and motorcycles into awesomely powerful super robots, but was even cheated of this. Every transformation starts with the disguise incarnation starting to convulse a little, upon which the camera zooms in and shows a bunch of randomly shifting pieces of colored metal before pulling back and showing the massive resulting robot, which has a mass at least an order of magnitude large than the original, and massive weaponry to boot (hmm, I guess that that five-foot-long, barrel-girth cannon was hidden in the muffler...).

Why oh why did I not walk out of this 2 hour and 30 fricken minute travesty? Why oh why was the surely 100s of millions spent to make this lemon not spent to completely eradicate hunger in any of numerous countries around the world where suffering is so rife?

Away We Go: A Happy Ending that I Can Believe

Away We Go (Sam Mendes, 2009) (Park Lane) In the opening 10-15 minutes of Away We Go, a dispirited and recently pregnant Verona (Maya Rudolph) turns to her partner Burt (John Krasinski, of The Office fame), and asks the simple question: "Are we fuck ups?" Burt assures her that they are not.

But as I sat in the theater, already in love with this film, I knew that the real answer was "yes."

There I sat in the dark, in every way as fucked up as Verona and Burt - young, unmarried, not overly successful or stylish by the standards of grocery store checkout line magazines, and largely without community roots - and wanted to tell her that I understood exactly why she felt that way. Yes, they probably are pretty "fucked up," and that that is absolutely fine: I already knew that these were truly beautiful people and that I would love to have them over for the barbecue that I am planning...

Away They Go
So Verona and Burt hit the road, travelling across the United States and into Canada to visit friends and family in search of a "home" - a community to nestle into, feel a part of, and raise their little daughter in. During their travels, they are exposed to numerous examples of how "family" can manifest itself and what "success" can mean: in Phoenix they meet Verona's former co-worker (Alison Janney), who could mount a serious bid for worst mother of the century; in Tucson, they meet Verona's sister (Carmen Ejogo), who constantly pushes Verona to recall their long-deceased parents; in ???? they visit Burt's childhood friend (the always enjoyable Maggie Gyllenhaal), who is a "cuckoo for coco puffs" spiritually aware mother in the most patronizingly detestable manner; and in Montreal, they meet the possibly perfect couple with a gaggle of adopted kids but a secret torment over Mom's inability to conceive.

And along the way Verona and Burt start to learn what family, success, and community mean to them, as is the tradition of the great American road movie. These lessons are divided by city into vignettes of a sort, and are not maudlin or cliche in anyway - they are incredibly poignant and heartwarming, and touched me deeply. One of the strongest of these moments for me was the scene where the young couple lay in their hotel room in Phoenix, with the shadow of the "mom from hell" hanging over them. As Burt reassures Verona, we see a shadow of sadness cross her eyes as she buries her face into the pillow and laments that no one else seems to be in love the way that they are.

Sounds sappy, I know - but this is only one of several points in Away We Go when tears of tenderness and joy welled up in my eyes - where I felt an aching to be inside the beauty of the relationship I was watching. Indeed, I was truly moved by this film.

Not All Sentimental "Crap"
But Away We Go is not a tearjerker at its core - I am just a sucker for over romanticizing these things :) The film is essentially half road movie in the vein that Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown claimed to be/tried to be/so disappointingly was not, and half unabashed romantic comedy - and nothing gets me running to the theatre quicker than the newest summer rom-com. (Sarcasm anyone?)

Our saving grace on the rom-com front is that the romance is real and the comedy is side-splitting. Krasinski is far from a great actor, while Rudolph has a gift for displaying subtle emotions with her facial expression, but the bottom line is that as characters Verona and Burt are very likable people and their on-screen chemistry is undeniable. There is a tenderness that is endearing and altogether absent in much of the rom-com fodder we are subjected to.

Away We Go also delivers on the comedy front, keeping the theatre in stitches for much of the movie's 98 minutes and effectively counterbalancing its more serious themes of life, love, and community. While the opening scene is almost shocking and throws you off kilter in an "uncomfortable laugh" kind of way, the film keeps up a stream of good-natured humour that never sinks to the crass - keep your ears perked for the pregnant seahorse discussion. I read Dave Eggers' "You Shall Know Our Velocity" and enjoyed it, but I had no idea he could write such sparkling comedic dialogue.

Let's End on a High Note
The credits role on Verona and Burt as they arrive at their new home, where we have no doubt that they will love and cherish each other for eternity and raise a cute and precocious little girl: a happy ending that I believe and that I left the theatre virtually aglow with. Indeed, the crisp, cool Halifax air seemed cleaner and made me feel somehow more alive and the outlines of the buildings and telephone poles seemed sharper and more solid - my whole word seemed imbued with a sense of optimism.

Can you tell that I liked this film? Can you tell that I recommend it highly? Thanks for the tickets Jess :)

I may even forgive Sam Mendes for Revolutionary Road if he keeps this up....

Lymelife: What Would Han Solo Do?

Last night I saw a commercial for Star Trek claiming that it was "the first great movie of the summer." Now I have great affection for the Star Trek franchise, I did think it was a great movie (see post), and can't really argue with box office results ($193 million domestic as of May 26), but feel compelled to put a word in for one of the legion 98-pound weaklings that are trying to fill seats alongside the ~$160 million intergalactic fantasy.

Lymelife (Derrick Martini, 2008) (Bayers Lake) Like Star Trek, Lymelife tells the story of a teenage boy growing up and trying to find his way to become a man, and is a film that I think easily deserves the adjective "great," along with a few others such as "compelling," "engaging," and "beautifully made" - it was obviously a labour of love for Martini, and held me spellbound.

Jimmy Bartlett (Kieran Culkin) is at that awkward age that is clinically labeled "puberty," but could perhaps be more appropriately titled "chronically awkward" - witness our hero in his tighty whiteys posing in front of a full-length mirror in his bedroom, Han Solo's pistol menacingly in hand as he rehearses what he wishes he could say to the bullies who torment him, or, with scrawny chest puffed out, reeling out "slick" pick up lines to the girl who thinks of him "like a younger brother."

It is scenes such as this one - so true to real, everyday, average life - that make Lymelife such a special movie. We follow the pains and triumphs of an average boy growing up in perfectly rendered 1970s America, replete with turtlenecks, orange everything, and Star Wars collectibles.

We see him humbled at school and virtually ignored at home, where the litany of standard teenage woes is complemented by a womanizing father (Alec Baldwin, excellently cast as a bitter and lonely man) who uses any excuse to escape the realities of marriage and fatherhood, a mother (Jill Hennesy, of Law & Order fame) rendered miserable by the move from downtown New York to the isolated and tick-ridden suburbs, and an older brother (Rory Culkin) driven to join the army to escape his dysfunctional family and the economic malaise strangling the global economy as tensions in the Middle East boil over.

This noxious brew of fear, resentment, and misunderstanding lends Lymelife an overwhelming sense of doom that is perhaps best embodied by the deer tick, which is lurking in the forests surrounding burgeoning suburban America, waiting to infect the masses with Lyme disease. Jimmy's neighbour, Charlie Bragg (played by Timothy Hutton in one of the strongest performances of the film) has been infected, and the resulting near madness has torn his family apart. The Bragg family's situation mirrors what is happening to Jimmy's family in many ways, except that the Braggs are being destroyed by a chance infection, not by a string of questionable personal decisions and explosive personalities that are reeking havoc in the Bartlett household (although Cynthia Nixon's turn as Charlie's wife hints that it was headed nowhere good in any case.)

Indeed, as I have commented so often about other films I have reviewed and loved, Lymelife is not necessarily a pleasant movie to experience. It does not pull its punches or glamorize the world it reflects - instead it forces the viewer to see things as they really are, in the process arousing emotions that are primal, but seldom allowed such almost embarrassing free expression.

Its a lot to take in, but so is life
The natural point of comparison for Lymelife is Ang Lee's masterpiece The Ice Storm. Both films take us inside the minds and hearts of young boys trying to navigate the slow disintegration of their families for reasons that they little understand. Both are also set in the 1970s, and present the time as being so much more bleak and bland than it really could have been - right?

Perhaps the key difference between the two films is that Jimmy is older than The Ice Storm's Paul Hood (a very young Tobey McGuire), which means that the perspective we share is more mature (or at least maturing), and increasingly aware of the subtleties of what is happening - it also means that he is more able to make his own choices. Indeed, Jimmy is a much more active than is Paul, implying that Lymelife is more about its main character than it is about the brooding milieu that surrounds him, as is the case in Ice Storm.

This point is perhaps in no way better illustrated than in the general trajectory taken by each film. Whereas Ice Storm inexorably pushes towards an indescribably tragic conclusion, Lymelife is ultimately warm and even hopeful as Jimmy makes more choices for himself, becoming a man in his own stead, and seems to be escaping the drama that surrounds him. I won't go into details, but suffice to say there is a girl involved - a young lady that I feel guilty for not mentioning as much for her budding beauty as for her strong performance.

Letter to the Editor
If I may editorialize for a moment, Lymelife is a perfect example of the myriad of insightful, artistic, and deeply touching films that are being made every day in countries all over the world - but being shown only in the precious few theaters that are willing to accept less than top dollar by not pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Go see this film - if we don't watch quality cinema, there is no guarantee that cinema artists will continue to find patrons for their creations.

Angels and Demons, Taken

The Bad and the Blase
Yesterday I promised to write about the good, the bad, and the blase (to stretch the term a little), and I seem to have only gotten around to the good. I am ready to make good on my promise, save the need to decide which of today's films is bad and which one is "blase."

Angels and Demons (Ron Howard, 2009) (The Oxford) I am going to have to start with the blase, a term for which I think that Angels and Demons is a poster child.

Based on Dan Brown's blockbuster novel of the same name and following the phenomenal success of The DaVinci Code, Angels chronicles a night in the life of Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a symbologist who has been summoned to Rome by the camerlengo (essentially the deputy pope, played by Ewan McGregor) to save Vatican city, the College of Cardinals assembled in papal conclave to select a new pope, and thousands of pious onlookers from annihilation at the hands of the resurgent order of the Illuminati.

In Angels, the Illuminati, which also figured prominently in The DaVinci Code, have stolen a particle of dark matter - considered by some to be the "god particle" due to its presumed role in the genesis of the universe - from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Bent on destroying the Catholic Church for its history of persecuting scientists and free-thinkers, the Illuminati have kidnapped the four top candidates for the papacy, and are planning to murder one each hour ahead of midnight, when the particle of dark matter will be unleashed with a force akin to a nuclear detonation of significant magnitude - incinerating Vatican City and its environs.

A Whole Lot of Nothing
It is no small feat to summarize the plot of Angels and Demons, as is evidenced by the number of Wikipedia links in the preceding paragraphs. Indeed, like The DaVinci Code, the action in Angels plays out against a rich tapestry of secret societies, conspiracy theories, the long-standing "feud" between religion and science (here typified by Galileo's execution for heresy), and the Vatican pageantry that plays out largely behind closed doors.

Add to this fertile ground the talents of a director who has contributed to notable projects ranging from the recent Frost/Nixon and Changeling to Inventing the Abbots, Apollo 13, and Willow, and respectable and generally reliable actors like Tom Hanks and Ewan McGregor, and one would think that Angels has the stuff that magic is made of.

So why is the movie so mind-numbingly boring? Indeed, perhaps the best word to describe my reaction - even while ensconced in the cinema, surrounded by the soundtrack and warmed by its glow - is blase. I just didn't care. Not that the film isn't beautiful to look at. Indeed, no expense was spared in crafting an onscreen world that drips with the atmosphere of modern Rome, its ancient churches and sculptures, and the mystique of Vatican City.

Weakest Links
The film's key failings, I believe, are twofold. Firstly, as is evidenced by the aforementioned profusion of Wikipedia links, there is a lot of extremely interesting history underpinning the narrative, but this translates into a lot of screen time spent providing context - Dr. Langdon and his sidekick for the film, Vittoria Vetter (Ayelet Zurer), essentially give the audience numerous mini lectures. This is acceptable in Brown's ever-so-slightly more engaging novel, but does not make for scintillating cinema. Angels strikes a better balance between education and action than did its unwieldy predecessor, The DaVinci Code, but nonetheless left this viewer drumming his fingers at times.

The other weakness of this film arises from the action that is supposed to balance the education. There is lots of rushing through the dark, crowded streets and squares of Rome, there are shadowy villains and murders most foul, and there are the lives of thousands and a cultural trove of near matchless value (the Vatican library) at stake, but the film still failed to convey a sense of jeopardy. There was no sense of impending doom, no aura of evil, no hero to root for (the church? the mild-mannered professor?) and no villain to pillory (the amorphous society of the Illuminati? the shadowy villain who's face is revealed a few times but is never named? the ultimate kingpin shockingly revealed at the end to yawns and indifference?).

Yawn. Stay home and watch reality TV - it is probably more interesting for it anthropological implications if nothing else.

Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008) (Home) Or stay home and watch Taken, which represents the bad film in this triptych of reviews, but is nonetheless infinitely more engaging than the blase.

Brian Mills (Liam Neeson) is a former special forces member who has retired from the life in order to be close to his 16 or 17 year old daughter Amanda, who lives in LA with his ex-wife and her super-rich new husband. Mills feels pretty pathetic and appears pretty irrelevant to his daughter's life as the film opens, but becomes intimately involved and highly relevant when Amanda's summer trip to Europe lands her in the clutches of an Albanian ring that runs a network of sex slaves.

Cue look of internal anguish that is Neeson's trademark, and a murderous rampage through Paris in hope of finding his daughter within the 96-hour window that these abductions apparently present before the victim becomes statistically irretrievable. I am tempted to watch this film again just to count how many knee-capped, garroted, and otherwise dispatched bodies litter Mills' path across Paris - I would lay odds that it approaches 40.

Now sex slavery and human trafficking in general exacts a horrid toll on its victims across the globe, but in this film it is treated largely as a plot device. We are not being educated about the problem or enlightened about attempts to stem the tide. No, Taken is unabashedly an upscale Steven Segal film about kicking ass and not bothering to take names - i.e., its a bad film.

But if your choice is between suffering the more cerebral but entirely un-engaging Angels and Demons or indulging in the throw-away action hero antics of Taken, I recommend that you opt for the latter.

Star Trek

Well my friends, it has been a bad few days for a long weekend (read: rain), but a good weekend for a movie lover (read: screen time). Yup. When skies cloud and an insidious chill settles on the city, its time to find a plushly upholstered seat in the cinema and let yourself be carried away by the good, the bad, and the blase...

Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009) (IMAX) Let's start with the good. I was a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), and always had a soft spot for The Original Series (TOS), but I am far from a die-hard Trekkie, not having a single syllable of useful Klingon in my vocabulary.

Overall, however, I am enough of a fan to salivate at the idea of a new Star Trek movie despite all of the painfully bad screen time we have been subjected to (read: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Generations (gasp and shudder), and Insurrection) in hopes of once again experiencing the thrill that has embedded the franchise so deeply in western culture (read: Star Trek TNG, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (perhaps the best of them all), and First Contact).

The newest Star Trek outing predates all of the above in terms of chronology, and definitely outstrips many of them in terms of quality: J.J. Abrams, admittedly not a long-standing Star Trek fan, got a lot more right than wrong.

The interesting thing about Star Trek is that it is more about the characters than the stories or the technology. The movie begins in the days before Kirk was Captain and Spock was logic-bound first officer, and follows the events that forged the characters we know so well from TOS. Thus, getting it right for Abrams essentially means getting the right actors to inhabit the roles, something that, after much deliberation, I must say was well accomplished.

Chris Pine's turn as James Tiberious Kirk was the hardest for me to swallow. The brash, reckless, womanizing drunk was such an off-putting personality that I allowed my personal dislike to cloud my better judgement - I forgot how essentially vain, impulsive, and basically unlikeable William Shatner's Catptain Kirk was in TOS. As I have commented so many times before, the character may be essentially unlikeable, but may be serving the best interests of the film in being so - as is the case in Star Trek.

Zachary Quinto's Spock is a much more palatable incarnation for all of his crusty inflexibility. Quinto's task was no easy feat considering that he was starring opposite Leonard Nimoy in the flesh, and risked being overshadowed by the denture-wearing (according to DreamQueen) progenitor of the character. Instead we watch Quinto straddle the line between impulsive human and logical Vulcan in an entirely believable and endearing manner - we don't understand Spock's dilemma as much as Kirk's, but we definitely like him a lot more.

The rest of the menagerie is also well-represented:

• Uhura (Zoe Seldana) is portrayed with confident, modern sexuality that is in keeping with her 1960s incarnation, which seems muted by modern standards, but pushed the boundaries of propriety in its day by participating in television's first ever interracial kiss.
• Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) is played sternly and seriously, and seems to miss a bit of the congenial humor that typified the original character. However, his role is far from pivotal in this film, and has room to mature. No complaints overall, save for Urban's overly strong resemblance of Matt LeBlanc of Friends fame...
  
• Chekov (Anton Yelchin) is played to a T measured against the TOS template, with the always enjoyable and seemingly perpetually young Yelchin punching his heavily-accented English for comic effect
• Sulu (John Cho) is also spot on by comparison to George Takei's 1960 portrayal - overly serious but steady as a rock. Sulu sees some action in this film, and that could foreshadow bigger things to come for his character in future outings.
  
• Scotty (Simon Pegg) is barely introduced in this film, but has all the Scottish brogue and sarcastic humor that one could want from the surly chief engineer.

Indeed, a lot of the supporting cast of Star Trek are merely introduced to us as token nods to their place in the pantheon - suggesting that they will have amply opportunity to flesh out their characters in films to come. Much as Casino Royale did for the Bond series, the latest big-screen incarnation of Star Trek pushes the reset button on the franchise, working from a blank sheet and setting a high standard for the sequels that are sure to come.

I'd love to end on that positive note, but must say that there was one thing that bothered me about the newest Star Trek outing: the darkness of its mood/tone. This is best typified by - not surprisingly - the Romulon bad guys, who inhabit an oily black spaceship seemingly fashioned of ominous tentacles. There is nothing redeeming in the Romulons, who appear in this film as heavly tatooed, brutish humans rather than the more alien guise portrayed for most of their history.

Now I know I am usually looking for a darker and/or more serious edge to films that insist on the sun only shining on TV. However, in this case I could not help but miss the naive optimism of Star Trek TOS or even TNG. You see, Star Trek has always been the one sci-fi future that shows humanity having overcome war, famine, economic inequality and other base desires, emerging a still-flawed but entirely admirable creature.

Overall a small complaint against a wall of praise, and one that I will not insist on, as I do not want the new film to be held hostage to the standards of its long and storied history. And this, I think, is the point - the newest Star Trek, rather like the most recent Bond outings, was made for a new generation of fans that are not measuring it against its predecessors.

So neither will I.

Che: Part One

Che: Part One (Steven Soderbergh, 2008) (Oxford) Before heading to the theater to view Che: Part One, Steven Soderbergh's biopic of the omnipresent revolutionary, I figured that I should know more about him than the fact that he was instrumental in Castro's Cuban revolution and graces at least 500 gazillion t-shirts worldwide. I optimistically pulled up Wikipedia's entry on the bearded revolutionary, but quickly got distracted by something else (ie, my job) and decided that the film itself would have to serve as an education.

Because that is what the biopic usually is: we learn the story of a person's life - the actions and reactions that shaped their life story - and the core social and/or political beliefs/philosophies/ideas that drove them. Basically, we learn about the fight and why it is fought.

Half a Film and Half a Story
Except that in Che we really only get 50% of this package deal - and I don't think that other 50% will be offered up in part two! Intertwining the Cuban guerrillas' slow march through the dense and mountainous terrain to Havana with Che Guevara's later journey to New York to harangue the United Nations about the crimes of capitalist America, Che: Part One is a slow but nonetheless enjoyable history of the actions that comprise Che's involvement in the Cuban revolution. It rings of authenticity, and is beautiful to look at as a result.

However, it is the 50% that was missing that nags me. I appreciate greatly the sacrifices made to slowly crawl over densely forested mountains and wade through engorged streams while fighting a technologically and numerically super force, and I think that this is clearly and effectively captured by the film. What is not conveyed to the viewer is why Che or the guerrilla's undertook this daunting campaign.

There are certainly the odd references to the corrupt nature of the puppet government of Batista, the unfair advantage taken by corporations, and the lack of basic services delivered to the Cuban people - indeed, Che takes it upon himself to try to ensure that all of his fighters are literate. However, the film fails to capture - and in truth does not even try to convey - the political and social ideas/philosophies/beliefs that impelled the Cuban revolution and inspired Che.

And the latter is the most important - I do not, after all, want to be subjected to a piece of sociopolitical propaganda on the evils of the capitalist west and the virtues of the revolution. However, if the goal of a biopic is to increase the viewer's understanding of the subject - in this case Che - then I think that it is important that we be given some appreciation of what they believed in and why they were fighting.

Indeed, as the slow progress over mountains and through valleys progressed, I found myself wondering why these people were following Che. I could easily understand why they would believe in the revolution based on my preexisting hazy knowledge of the situation, but the portrait of Che that was presented was not inspiring or uplifting. He was a reticent intellectual at worst, and a stern schoolmaster at best - always having the best interests of his men at heart, but never showing any connection to them on a human level.

As a highly politicized figure in a film that could easily have generated great controversy, I can understand the filmmakers' insistence on strict adherence to the historical facts of the revolution. However, I can't help but feel cheated by their decision to complete ignore the spirit of the man and of the times - I don't feel like I know or understand Che the man any more than I did before entering the Oxford Theatre.

Where was the inspiration for the filmmakers, let alone the revolutionary? Maybe I should return to Wikipedia to try to learn more about what ideas and beliefs drove Che the man, about the wellspring of his passion.....

Kate Winslet: Little Children & Revolutionary Road

When I last wrote about Kate Winslet, in the context of her Oscar winning performance in The Reader, I managed little more than gushing - the film had rendered me speechless, leaving me with nothing else to give. Winslet's turn as Hanna Schmitz, the strangely innocent holocaust gaurd who is caught by her past, sent me in search of other films starring the virtuoso actress that had impressed me in notable films such as Finding Neverland and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but really was frozen in my mind as young Rose parting the sea on the ill-fated bows of HMS Titanic.

Some images die hard.

Little Children (2006, Todd Field) (Home) Last night I curled up in a blanket to escape the still frigid climes of Nova Scotia and immersed myself in Winslet's turn as Sarah Pierce in Little Children, a film that also left me awestruck, but that I can hopefully address with at least a modicum of critical distance.

Little Children follows the budding relationship between Sarah and Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson), two young parents who feel trapped in comfortable, even affluent, suburban lives that could be postcards for the ever-foggier American dream. Sarah is married to a drab older man and has borne him a child that she feels little connection to, while Brad is married to the super-hot (always) but bitchily controlling Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) and plays stay-at-home Dad to their son.

Both are primary caregivers: such being Sarah's part to play in her "picture perfect" life, while Brad cares for his son while not studying for the bar exam that he does not want to take in order to become a lawyer that he does not want to be.

Voice of Reason
The first hour of Little Children is punctuated by the ever-reasonable voice of the omniscient narrator, who lets us know precisely what each character is feeling or thinking in a dispassionate, almost analytical manner. We never doubt the narrator's omniscience, because the truth of his reportage is ever apparent on the screen. Indeed, we even begin to adopt his analytic distance, feeling an anthropological fascination with the relationship we are witnessing, much as Sarah opened the film by explaining her anthropological fascination with the inane lives of the desperate housewives that she rubs shoulders with before Brad's appearance.

When their first passionate embrace - inevitable but somehow unexpected - leads to animal lust, we feel tension break like a thunderhead cracking open - the analytical distance is shortened like a choke chain viciously tugged. I gasped, clutched the sofa arm more tightly and let the electricity of their union slow through me. Sweet release.

But its not that easy, as the omniscient narrator reminds us about 20 minutes later, reimposing the perspective of a biologist beginning a dissection. Sarah and Brad are still part of postcards, after all, and wives, husbands, and children - little children - circumscribe the potential of their relationship.

The Pervert
Which is where the pervert comes in. Initially a side story, but increasingly prominent as the passion and deception grows, Ronnie is a convicted pedophile who has completed his sentence and returned to the neighbourhood to live with his ever-loving and surely long-suffering mother.

Initially I had trouble pegging Ronnie's role in Little Children, and I am still not sure that I fully understand it. Sure he plays a role in Brad's rebellion against his domineering wife, and certainly he represents jeopardy to the children that can only help being Sarah and Brad closer together in a protective circle.

But what stuck with me as I pondered the film last night and this morning was Ronnie's mother, who accepts that her son is guilty of the crime of exposing himself to young children, but still stands by him in the stolid belief that his crime was the past:"but we can always choose the future." I am paraphrasing, to be sure, but this is the essence of her eternal optimism for her son's potential to get a girlfriend, build a relationship, and "be good."

We Can Always Choose the Future
And that is a key reason for Ronnie's role in the film, it seems to me. He shows us that we truly can't always choose the future. He is a pedophile, pure and simple, and his only escape is horrifying and entirely lacks satisfaction for the audience despite its poetic appropriateness. We feel sorry for him, for god's sake....

And this perhaps is also the essence of the situation Sarah and Brad find themselves in. Dissatisfied with wholly-enviable lives of comfort and limitless potential, they feel trapped in roles they are not sure that they want to play, and, like many adulterers before them, find escape and new hope in each others' arms literally - and in the dream of running away and starting over figuratively. Bat can Sarah and Brad choose their futures?

Little Children left me in awe, pure and simple. WATCH THIS FILM.

Revolutionary Road (2008, Sam Mendes) (Home) The other film that I encountered on my journey through Kate Winslet's career was Revolutionary Road, which reunites her with Leo DiCaprio in a role that is surprisingly similar to that she plays in Little Children.

April (Winslet) and Frank (DiCaprio) met and fell in love with each other and with the idea they are dramatic outliers in the cookie-cutter landscape of 1950s, suburban America. They fell in love with the idea they were somehow better than the average Joes living in little pink houses all over post-war USA, commuting to drab jobs in corporate America, and raising the next generation to play the same role ad infinitum.

Except that they live in a large, sprawling, white picket-fenced "little pink house" in the suburbs, Frank commutes every day to a drab job that he hates, and April stays home to raise the next generation of kids that we can only assume are destined to the same fate. And it makes them feel like failures who have compromised their dreams in trade for a wooden nickel. And this makes them bitter, which makes them lash out at each other, and makes them miserable.

Until they remember the dream that glowed around them when they first met: Frank had been to Paris, and in Paris, he believes, people are really alive. And this dream grows in April, who believes that moving to Paris is their ticket out of mediocrity, out of compromise, and out of misery - she believes that she and Frank can choose their future.

Which would be all well and good if the viewer really cared. If we looked at them and empathized with their "untenable" situation, wished that they could escape the confines of their "smothering" lives.

But we don't. Instead we feel that they are spoiled and selfish, like they feel that the world owes them something that it clearly doesn't. After all, like Sarah and Brad in Little Children, April and Frank made all of the decisions that led them to the comfortable if glamourless lives they now live.

Perhaps if we saw April and Frank being loving parents to the children that occupy the edges of Revolutionary Road like wooden props of convenience we could care. Perhaps if Frank were less flippantly cool and assuredly better than everyone around him. Perhaps if April ever said or did something realistic to try and improve their lives.

But no. Perhaps the one great scene in RR comes when the mentally ill son of a neighbour throws a tantrum and tells them in no uncertain terms how selfish and self-deluded they are. How they have sold out anything real they could have been in support of the illusion that they are somehow princes and princesses merely passing for paupers.

Game, Set, MATCH.
I hadn't realized until I sat down at the keyboard how similar these films are in the scenario that they present. Hell, even Titanic is about two young people feeling trapped in lives they weren't meant for and are struggling to rise above.

In Little Children this milieu plays out as a complex, compelling, physically and emotionally engaging drama. But in Revolutionary Road it ends up under the tires, making Titanic look like an insightful and intelligent accomplishment. Little Children accomplishes a modern work of art, Revolutionary Road wastes good talent.

Antz - but not the movie...

Remember the animated film Antz, starring the voices of Woody Allen, Dan Ackroyd, Anne Bancroft, Jennifer Lopez, Sharon Stone, etc, etc? Well I loved the movie when I saw it in the theater in Seoul, and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone that missed it - great animation, excellent dialogue, lots of laughs, and a refreshing take on the tried, tested, and true "rescue the princess" storyline.

Well, I am talking about antz today, but these antz have more in common with the pests in Joe's Apartment than the accidently heroic and always wryly mirthful Woody Allen variety - these are, after all, the antz in my apartment, and those of my tenants.

Carpenter ants to be precise.

Now these are not fire ants that will bite people, but are objectionable nonetheless by: a) their presence; and b) the fact that they are almost certainly slowly munching away at the structure of my building. I have found one colony in the basement in a badly chewed and distrubingly soft section of the rim joist, and am afraid that there is another upstairs in the third-floor unit - which by all reports is crawling with them.

Now I would love to find some natural deterant to convince these creatures to move on - scattered mint leaves, chalk lines, or cinnamon - but as a landlord I am in the position of having to act quickly and decively - so the pest control people it is.

So far in my life as a landlord I have had few serious issues to deal with, the largest being the replacement of a few ceiling fans and some other fixits on the third floor, but the challenges are likely to continue arising.

The Mouse and the Motorcycle
Like this morning, when I was greeted by an e-mail about the rodent that has moved in to keep the antz company in the attic unit. And this is not the cute and perky Stuart Little of the big screen, nor Beverly Cleary's equally adorable little rodent from The Mouse and the Motorcycle, which I read repeatedly as a child.

No, this is the "yucky, yucky mouse" that my tenants are not too happy to share their unit with. Now antz are one thing, and don't ask me for the logic behind my thoughts on this matter, but I just don't like the idea of dispatching mice with miniature guillotines.

Suggestions are welcome...

Sunshine Cleaning: The sun always shines on TV

Sunshine Cleaning (Christine Jeffs, 2009) (The Oxford) Sunshine Cleaning opens with a suicide in a sporting goods store and quickly moves through a CSI-style investigation scene (with a decidedly less earnest tone than its network TV namesake) before reaching the less glamorous (or at least less glamorized) part of the process - after the fingerprints are dusted, the splatter tests run, the site inventory completed, and the body wheeled away, it is time to clean up the blood.

It stands to reason that every grizzly crime scene has to be buffed and polished so that the location can be restored for day-to-day use. It also stands to reason - as we learn in Sunshine Cleaning - that this would be a pretty high paying job, not the least because of the general aversion to handling brain matter and body parts, but also because the crime scene is often literally smeared with biohazard (I promise that that is the most graphic that I get in this post!).

Enter Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams), former cheerleader and girlfriend to the captain of the football team who has since "fallen" to the point where she works as a maid to support her precocious and ever-so-movie-cute son Oscar - its a prototypical "peaked in high school" situation. Long story short, Oscar is not fitting in in public school, and Rose wants to place him in an expensive private school that she cannot afford. Unless....

See where we are going here? Rose's married cop "boyfriend" hooks her up with a crime scene cleanup, and next thing you know she and her reluctant sister Norah (Emily Blunt) are disposing of blood-soaked mattresses and scrubbing all manner of biological matter from walls and floors.

Of course this does not instantly solve all of Rose's problems, and instead serves as an avenue for introducing more of her own - such as her difficulty dealing with her fall from "queen of the prom" status - and the misfortunes of her entire family: Norah's conflicted search for love in a less-than-orthodox manner, Oscar's inability to understand what he is a "bastard" child, and her father's (Alan Arkin) affinity for get-rich-quick schemes.

Short Cuts
Yeah, there are a lot of stories going on in Sunshine Cleaning, but it is not confusing, convoluted, or overly cerebral. In fact, despite its gruesome subject matter, the film is decidedly light-hearted and - real moments of despair and sadness aside - is actually suffused with hope and wholesome family goodness.

For the obvious reason of its title - and the perhaps coincidental involvement of Alan Arkin - I, and a lot of people that I have spoken to, automatically refer to Little Miss Sunshine when I discuss Sunshine Cleaning. I have searched IMDB, and besides Mr. Arkin and the word "sunshine," there seems to be no correlation.

That being said, I enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine, but not nearly as much as the legion of adoring moviegoers seem to have - the movie on the whole was just a little bit too glowing with perky and positive energy. I enjoyed Sunshine Cleaning greatly - and liked it a lot more that LMS - but still must say that it also bordered a little on the side of overly happy and excessively positive.

I don't mope around in all black or anything, but especially given its subject matter, I would have welcomed a bit more of an edge - some black humour to balance the family affirmation storyline. I mean, these girls are cleaning brain matter off the walls of seedy motel shower stalls for god's sake! That's gotta mess with your head, and I would have liked it if the film had explored this a little bit.

On the other hand, maybe this theme would have been the straw that would have broken the camel's back. As I mentioned, there are a lot of story lines and themes in this film, most of which are never resolved or even explored in any depth - adding another is perhaps the last thing that it needs.

This lack of resolution of many story lines, I feel compelled to add, is not necessarily a negative. Sunshine Cleaning plays fast and loose with a lot of heavy themes, but we don't finish the film feeling confused or cheated - we end it with a warm glow, with a bit of sunshine of our own to take home from the theater.

A feel good movie that I can wholeheartedly recommend. Sure I would have liked something with a little more edge (I'm not asking for Bringing out the Dead here), but am really happy with what I got :)

Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982) (home) Sophie's Choice holds a prominent place in my memory, as the novel was always laying around the house when I was a child, and I often heard my mother express her admiration of the film. I finally sat down with the movie the other week, and was left in awe for days following - I believe that Sophie's Choice could be close to being a perfect film.

Sophie's Choice tells the stories of Stingo (a VERY young Peter McNichol), an ambitious southerner recently moved to New York to follow his dream of becoming a great author, and two eccentric housemates who befriend him: Sophie Zawistowski (Meryl Streep), a polish immigrant and survivor of Auschwitz, and Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline), a flamboyant provocateur who slowly loses his sanity as the narrative unfolds.

The real core of the film, however, is Sophie's experiences under the Nazi occupation of Poland in WWII, as told in flashbacks that punctuate the modern drama. This slow and measured retelling of her past life adds depths to the wisp of a character that Sophie is in modern New York - indeed, the modern Sophie is almost numb, bringing nothing to the table but ethereal beauty and a channel for Nathan's eccentric fancies and brutal tempers.

It is in her recollections that we learn what stripped Sophie to this vapour of a person, leaving her less than half a spirit in need of someone else's passion, someone else's desire, someone else's joie de vivre to animate her. And these recollections lead ultimately to the single choice that made her what she is today - and that shocked me to silence and stillness.

Beauty to be Told
One would think that the story of a shell of a woman recounting her memories of the holocaust and living vicariously through a madman would be pretty depressing fare, but this is far from the case. Sophie's Choice bubbles with simple joys of the moment as Stingo, Sophie, and Nathan indulge their every imaginative whim on the wings of childlike spirits mixed with copious quantities of wine.

This childlike innocence imbues Sophie because it is all that her wartime experiences left her with, Nathan because of his madness, and Stingo because he is but a child, first venturing out into the world to test a dream that has yet to be seriously challenged. The innocence also innoculates the story, serving as antidote to the pain and suffering recounted in its backstory.

A compelling, emotionally mature story, characters that you want to be real, and Meryl Streep - beautiful beyond compare - are engaging and affecting. Viewing Sophie's Choice is an incredibly intimate experience that touches you somewhere deep inside and glows and grows inside you long after the credits have rolled.

Charlie Bartlett

Underestimated, Overlooked
Charlie Bartlett (Jon Poll, 2008) (home) Critics don't make movie decisions for me, but a good one can help me narrow my options. Thus, when Bob Mondello of National Public Radio listed Charlie Bartlett as one of the Neglected Films of 2008 Still Worth Watching, I paid attention and was rewarded.

Starring Robert Downey Junior and Anton Yelchin, who seems to have played bit parts on every major TV drama but is only now moving into film, Charlie Bartlett tells the story of a super-rich youth who has been kicked out of every private school available for running entrepreneurial scams that unnecessarily line his pockets and - more importantly - give him a thrill.

When his over-medicated and far-from-nurturing mother finally reaches her last straw, Charlie is dispatched to public school - wisely eschewing the limo in favor of the bus, but seemingly oblivious to the equally voluble statement made by his crested dinner jacket.

What follows is a mix of standard high-school movie plots following an arc from bullied and ridiculed outsider/geek to beloved school hero/rebel dating the Principal's attractive daughter and prescribing psycho-active medications to fellow students in ad hoc therapy sessions held "confession style" in adjacent bathroom stalls.

What!?!?!?!?!

You see, Charlie Bartlett is strictly American Pie in many senses - but it is the really funny and good-natured 1999 original, well-baked pie rather than the numerous half-baked sequel pies that followed. However, in the place of American Pie's single-minded obsession with all jokes adolescent and sexual, Charlie Barlett is also a refreshing and funny take on standard fish-out-of-water fare - a feat accomplished largely by Yelchin's strong performance, as he really captures and conveys the "I don't know who I am" feeling that being a teenager is all about.

What Charlie Bartlett ends up being is absolutely hilarious and heart-warming. We care about Charlie because we never resent his riches, we understand his motives, we see that the adults around him have little more idea of who they are than he does, and we never fail to appreciate that he is ultimately a good guy who will make the right decisions.

No Coins Please
To shift frames of reference a little, what Charlie Bartlett reminded me of most was the work of young-adult Canadian lit author Gordon Korman. Those who read Korman in their younger days will recognize a bit of Artie Shaw from one of my favorites, No Coins Please.

Charlie Bartlett, like much of Korman's earlier work (not having read his later outings), is a variety of pure, innocent pleasure that leaves you smiling and feeling good about the world without the "I just ate too much sugar" sick-to-the-stomach hangover that feel-good films can induce - Charlie Bartlett has an edge, and it should not be overlooked.

Watchmen

I first read the graphic novel of Watchmen in the early 90s, when a large part of my life revolved around comic books. I came to funny books a little late in life, and it was publications like Watchmen that sucked me in - it, and series like Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, were being written for a more mature audience that would understand how the complexity of Bruce Wayne's life as the Batman could lead him to face challenges such as an addiction to performance enhancing drugs and would appreciate what that pollutant of the body could do to his mind.

These were not the perky shenanigans of Archie, Jughead, and the crew - after all, Betty and/or Veronica never got pregnant, Reggie was not the deadbeat father of a legion, and I do not recall Moose being imprisoned for assault.

The worlds that drew me into the comicverse were dark, moody explorations of conflicted characters who inhabited gritty realities in which right and wrong were divided by a murky and ill-defined line. Morality was relative at best. And they were illustrated in matching style, depicting worlds of shadows and fear that needed heroes - and heroes that were often uncertain whether they could or should meet this need.

From the Page to the Screen
The movies that have been made from these comic books have rarely captured this murky atmosphere or cared to delve into the twisted minds of the heroes/villains that inhabit them. There are exceptions, of course, in the form of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman and the franchise's two most recent outing, Batman Begins, based on Frank Miller's seminal "Year 1" (Batman 404-407), and the weaker but more politically/socially pointed The Dark Knight.

Other good adaptations abound, I am sure, but the Batman franchise sticks out in my mind because it is the comic book series that was nearest and dearest to my heart.

Perhaps needless to say, I had been anticipating the film version of Watchmen for some time, hoping against hope that I could add it to this list.

Who Watches the Watchmen
Watchmen (Zack Snider, 2009) (IMAX) A lot of fans of the graphic novel are watching Watchmen, that's who, and I think that for them - like myself - it is a rewarding experience. The movie is faithful to the graphic novel to the point of recreating exact panels from the pages (something that the better Batman movies have also benefited from, if in a less methodical manner), even to the point of limiting camera pans so as to frame each scene as if it were a cell on a page.

Perhaps more importantly, however, is the fact that Watchmen is faithful to the mood and ambiance of the alternative reality against which the narrative unfolds: a 1980s America where Nixon is serving his 5th term, there are rumours that an actor named Reagan may run for office, the world sits precariously on the brink of thermo-nuclear war, and costumed heroes have been outlawed.

It is a gritty, dismal reality in which signs of riches or privilege come off as brassy and cheap - tarnished by an aura of corruption and sleaze. Rorschach, the one hero who remains active, is our window into this world, and surely his twisted internal darkness lends to the oppressive feeling that imbues the setting.

Most of these heroes - which is one of the most intriguing aspect of the story for me - are regular men and women who have faded back into more-or-less regular lives. These are human beings that rose above their all-to-human weaknesses - fears and traumas - to become something more than mere man - like the Batman, they do not have superpowers, but via dedication and determination overcame their demons and kept themselves physically up to the challenge of fighting evil.

The only exception to this is Dr. Manhattan, a man who was turned iridescent blue and gained the power to manipulate matter at the atomic level through the standard scientific-experiment-gone-wrong. Interestingly, Dr. Manhattan is as tortured a character as any of his less superhuman compatriots, and spends much of the movie musing on whether or not he is still human and what - if anything - is his tie to the planet earth and the human race that he was born into.

I don't want to get into the minutiae of the story, as I do not want to risk spoilers for any who have not seen the film/read the book - also, the story itself is so complex and multi-textured that I feel a quick synopsis would quickly swell to fill the available space (which is how much exactly on the interweb?). However, I do want to emphasize that this is a story - and film - of questions.

• Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?
• Are vigilantes and their personal crusades a ray of light in the darkness or a menace to society?
• Can large for-profit corporations work for the common weal, or does their very nature render all such efforts self-serving?

Thus, I highly recommend that Watchmen neophytes sit down with the newly reprinted graphic novel and enjoy the delicious pleasure of reading a comic book when you obviously have "better" things to do ;) For the reaction of a first time reader, head over to Bookphilia to check out Dreamqueen's thoughts.

This recommendation brings to light the key problem with Watchmen. I really enjoyed the film, loving the already oft-alluded to ambiance of the reality presented. However, seeing as the original comic tale spans generations, continents, and even planets, it is a tall order to reproduce it faithfully on the screen. I am certain that many newcomers to the story are left more than slightly bewildered by the amount of information that they are called upon to synthesize - indeed, at the two-hour point of this almost-three-hour saga we are still learning back story that is essential to understanding the movie.

Thus, the main weakness of this film is its fidelity, its unwillingness to compromise on the smallest detail of the story - not that I care to imagine what would have been left out if the director had had to choose.

High Fidelity
Which raises an interesting issue that dogs many a film adapted from a novel: how much artistic license can be taken with the source material? Bad choices seem to greatly outweigh good in this area, with the original Harry Potter coming to mind as a stilted, slow, overly pedantic retelling of the facts of the book that did not offer anything new on screen.

At the other end of the spectrum sits a film like About a Boy. I just finished reading the book last night, and was shocked at how different the ending of the brilliant film is from that of the book - but how appropriate and true to the spirit of the story the film version is.

Watchmen is at the Harry Potter end of the spectrum for fidelity, but achieves the superhero feat of simultaneously occupying the About a Boy end for the initiated among its viewers. Read the graphic novel and I guarantee a good read - but I can't guarantee the same enjoyment of the film, I can only share my enjoyment of it.

The Reader

The 81st Annual Academy Awards
I have to admit that I have not yet taken a close look at the results of the 81st Academy Awards, some movie critic, eh? I know some broad strokes, and, much as I already knew a week and even a month ago, Slumdog Millionaire has been anointed the best film of 2008.

Now Slumdog Millionaire, in all fairness, probably was not the best film made in 2008. That does not, however, in any way suggest that it is unworthy of its Oscar night acclaim - Slumdog did something that all movies attempt to do: it touched millions of people in an intimate way. It touched some of those people through memories of India, some through the rhythms of song, some through the poignancy of the story and some through the gorgeously filmed colors and textures.

Slumdog won best picture because it has come to mean something in the basic fabric of our cultural consciousness at this moment - and that is what the Academy Awards are: a look at what is at the core of our modern culture (as reflected in cinema) at this moment.

I will not peruse the list further tonight, because it is 9:00 pm and I am tired. No, I am not tired (and 9:00 is not my bedtime). I am drained. I am emotionally spent. I am wrung dry and completely subdued - I have been rendered silent in front of the flickering images of The Reader (oh how I wish film still flickered...).

The Reader (1998, Stephen Daldry) (Park Lane) I remember enjoying the book this film is based on when I read it years ago (despite the contrary opinion of DreamQueen), but I was not really planning on seeing the film in the theater if at all. As The Reader began I thought perhaps the reasons for my resistance were founded, as artfully posed nude shots proliferated, areolas appeared willy nilly, and seemingly shallow symbolism reared its head in the small stars of David that decorated the window-glass of the door to Hanna's apartment.

A young Michael was being seduced by a flinty, older Hanna - a former concentration camp guard in Nazi GErmany - and I shuddered in expectation of The Notebook playing itself out for the next two hours (yes, purely prejudicial slander, as I have not seen The Notebook). But sparks of a great film were already apparent even as my fears mounted - that first shot of Hanna (Winslett) in the Berlin rain - so hard, so practical, so steely in her demeanor.

And that spark blew into a flame as the themes of this film weighed upon me more and more heavily. It's easy to call out Michael's brief visit to Auschwitz as such a moment of emotional strength, but harder to explain and embrace the conflicted thoughts and feelings that are elicited by Hanna's simple honesty in the face of questioning at the Nuremberg trials - her insistence on the real necessity she saw in actions that horrify.

Similarly, it is perhaps impossible to convey the coldness, and the fear, and the longing when an old woman meets the middle-aged man she seduced as an impressionable teen.

Winslett gave a stunning performance in this film. No one even came close. Ralph Feinnes was good, if a little smarmy in the opening (I think Ralph Fiennes should be in the dictionary under smarmy). Winslett and a monumentally good screenwriter were the stars of this film, which weighs heavily as I sit listening to the soundtrack to The Piano and grope for words to convey my mood.

The film ended at the perfect time to slip into another show - Doubt was starting next door - but I could not do it. I had to savor this film, and I will do so at the cost of several other films that I have fallen behind on mentioning.

Go and immerse yourself in this film like you would in a hot bath on a cold day, when there is a hint of sadness in the air and you light a few candles and try to soak it away.