In Bruges

IN BRUGES works because it's so remarkably well written. It has the arresting dialogue of a play, the quality of performance one expects from people who need to entrance their audience on the strength of their words alone. The fact that it also features beautiful photography of a beautiful location adds value and dimension to the proceedings, making this an altogether satisfying movie.

Further, IN BRUGES leads me to reevaluate Colin Farrell. This is the first time he's ever interested me, and I was both surprised and delighted to find him assaying such an interesting, perplexing character, at once childlike and possessed of great depth.

I liked this film's story; I liked its performances; I loved its dialogue. I'd gladly spend more time IN BRUGES.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL was a great surprise. I was busy with other things when it came out, so I missed Ebert's very favorable review and the positive word of mouth it generated. It took a coworker's raves to get me to sit down for the movie, and I must remember to thank that guy.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL has an uninspiring setup, one that could work for any number of comedies with varying success. A guy's girlfriend dumps him. He goes to Hawaii to forget her with a change of scenery. She turns up at the same resort with her new boyfriend. But other comedies don't have the guy writing a rock opera of Dracula with a soul-baring tune that makes you want to both laugh and cry (and laugh). Other comedies don't have supposed villains who turn out to be among the funniest and most noble characters in the picture. Other comedies don't have that perfect combination of raunchy humor and gentle understanding that are the hallmark's of producer Judd Apatow's ouvre.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL does make the common mistake of forgetting the "comedy" part of "romantic comedy" in most of the third act, but it makes up for it with a stitch of an ending. This is a charming, funny, marvelous film, one well worth seeing.

I've been raving about it to my coworkers.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

I blame J.R.R. Tolkien for the wasteland that is the fantasy genre.

Tolkien was a jealous guy. He looked at the mythologies of the world and thought, "Why don't the English have a compelling, fun mythology like the Norse and the Romans?" Then he thought he'd create one and, thus, _The Lord of the Rings_ was born. But _The Lord of the Rings_ was so good, so influential, that it bent the Western approach to fantasy and locked it into a thralldom to Late Medieval milieus.

So it is that the modern viewer may come to THE THIEF OF BAGDAD unfamiliar with the rich and delightful world of Arabic mythology. This is a world of crystal balls, flying carpets, invisibility cloaks, and winged horses. It's a world of scoundrels and shamans, thieves and kings, djinn and devils. It's a world of Indian princes, Mongol raiders, and Chinese slave girls. It's rich, exciting, entertaining stuff, and it's brought to life wonderfully by Raoul Walsh in 1924's THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, starring Douglas Fairbanks. As the thief, Fairbanks is all muscle tone, mischievous grins, and cheesy '20s moustache. He's also a great deal of fun as the lying, scheming, wholly redeemable man who learns that happiness must be earned. But how does he learn this lesson? By journeying through some of the most exciting and visually impressive set pieces I've seen in any film of any era.

How can silent era, low-tech sets compete with the wonders dreamed up by the Lucases of today? Because when we see them, we know that they're real. People actually made that magnificent papier mache Buddha, that wonderful Caliphate-era palace, those dazzling underground and underwater environments. We don't care that the ship on the storm-tossed sea is actually a cardboard boat among fan-blown sheets, because THE THIEF OF BAGDAD sells that ship, it sells that sea, it sells everything it shows us because such obvious care and craft went into its design and execution.

I love THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, and I love that it reintroduced me to the world of Arabic mythology, a world I'd largely forgotten. This movie is thrilling, it's exciting, it's a flat-out great time at the pictures. Queue it up.

I betcha Tolkien loved it, too.

PS Yes, I know that caliphate-era Baghdad isn't Arabia, but the stories in the film do come from _The Arabian Nights_, so I'm lumping 'em into Arabian mythology anyway.
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Water

Deepa Mehta's WATER is beautiful, touching, and topical . It pulled me into its world and made me want to stay.

WATER centers on Chuyia, and eight-year-old in '30s India. Chuyia's parents married her to some guy at an age so young she doesn't even remember the ceremony, which (I suppose) was standard practice. But then the guy dies, and Chuyia's an eight-year-old widow in a country in which a widow's options are (a) throw herself on her husband's funeral pyre, (b) marry her husband's younger brother, or (c) join an ashram and spend the rest of her life in servitude, foregoing her wants and needs and being seen as a cursed woman. Chuyia's parents go with (c), dumping the poor girl at an ashram from which, she's sure, her mother will come to get her any day now.

That's about the first ten minutes. As we follow Chuyia's life and the lives of those she meets, we get a glimpse into another world, one from which we're separated by distance and time, and Mehta and her collaborators make that world come alive with rich colors, lush cinematography, and fine performances. The film, made in Sri Lanka after its Indian sets burned down, boasts images which deserve framing and hanging, the kind of stuff you rewind just to bask in, all while hewing to the requirements of Hindi film: WATER works in two musical numbers, but they're so subtle and so carefully done that they don't serve as holidays from the movie; rather, they enhance it. Further, WATER makes its holy city of Varansi look inviting and intimidating and exotic, like a dream of India. It creates a full world beyond the frame, one in which Ghandi's coming and people feel compelled to reevaluate their politics, their faiths, their very lives in anticipation of great changes on the horizon.

But for all that, the movie wouldn't work if we didn't believe in the people we found there. And I believed in the people in WATER. From Chuyia, played by the extraordinary child actress Sarala with an earthly reality that's rare in the film of any nation, to Seema Biswas as Shakuntala, an older widow beginning to question her faith and her lifelong devotion to millenia-old proscriptions. The film takes a slight misstep with the two characters involved in its love story, Kalyani (Lisa Ray) and Narayan (John Abraham), who appear to be in love merely because they're the two best looking people in India, but I accepted their relationship anyway because, hey, they're the two best looking people in India. As these people, and the people near them, live on the screen, I grew to care about them, to invest in them, and to continue to wish them well after the end credits rolled.

And though the film is set in the '30s, it's still topical. As an end title informs us, thousands of Indian widows are forced to live in ashrams today, unaware that they're legally able to lead any lives they choose, even to remarry. WATER challenges this injustice not through haranguing, but through humanizing. As such, it gives life to the issue and motivates us to consider those aspects of our own lives that are dead fossils of the past. This is a film that works on every level. I'm glad my wife put it in my hands.

American Gangster

AMERICAN GANGSTER is smart, carefully made, and vastly entertaining. With Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe toplining, and Ridley Scott directing, I wouldn't expect anything else.

In the film, Denzel Washington plays Frank Lucas, the guy whose idea it was to ship heroin to the U.S. in the coffins of KIAs returning from Vietnam. Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the detective who finally figures it all out. Interesting enough, but, as is so often the case, it's all in the execution.

And the execution is first rate. Washington and Crowe are two of the best actors working today, and it's always a pleasure to watch them do their thing. Scott took the time to put together a marvelous simulacrum of Vietnam - era New York, populate it with believable people, and make it come alive. I bought into the world of this film, I bought into the people living in this world, and I lost track of time as I grew engrossed in their world.

This is good stuff, team.