Matchstick Men

In my review of BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I wrote that I was happy to have Nicolas Cage back.

I was wrong. He never left. I just hadn’t been seeing his more interesting stuff.

MATCHSTICK MEN pairs Cage with Sam Rockwell. The two form a conning team, working together to cheat the unwary out of a few hundred dollars here, a couple of thousand dollars there. It’s steady work, not particularly glamorous, but it pays the bills and keeps the pair flying below the radar. Everything’s going fine until Cage rediscovers a long-lost daughter (Alison Lohman).

That’s the hook, but it isn’t the reason to see this film. Nicolas Cage supplies the reason. He delivers a remarkable performance as a master of his trade and a disaster at his life. A bundle of ticks and compulsions, he only seems real when putting on his act. It’s fascinating to watch, and it’s even more fascinating to watch his character develop over the course of the film.

Yes, Sam Rockwell is fine, but it seems director Ridley Scott can’t quite figure out what to do with him. Alison Lohman sells her role as the long-lost daughter, and the always welcome Bruce McGill is every bit as awesome as we’ve come to expect. But Cage walks away with this film. He is something to behold.

Hamlet 2

HAMLET 2 violates so many of my truisms of film that I should hate it.  I love it.

I don’t like dark comedy, yet this film goes very dark.  I don’t like the comedy of embarrassment, yet this film puts its protagonist through an amazing amount of humiliation.  I don’t like blasphemy, yet this film blasphemes so joyously that I can’t get the tune of “Rock me, sexy Jesus!” out of my mind over a week after having seen the film.

Here’s the setup: underfunded, underappreciated, and undertalented, Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) runs a threadbare theater department in a Tucson high school that couldn’t care less.  Inspired by “inspirational teacher” movies and a sad obliviousness to reality as experienced by everyone else on earth, Marschz pushes on with his sorry adaptations of Hollywood films, played to unsympathetic audiences by marginally talented students.  But when his program gets cancelled and all grows dark, Marschz decides to take one last chance on writing and staging his own original musical, “Hamlet 2.”  Yes, he knows that everyone died at the end of Hamlet.  But what if Jesus showed up in a time machine?  Now, we’re on to something!

HAMLET 2 goes on to lampoon everything we love about “inspirational teacher” movies, inspirational theaters, high-school drama clubs, and drama in general.  In the process, it delivers achingly funny moments of self-awareness and over-the-top awfulness that, to my surprise, got me chuckling about ten minutes in and kept me laughing all the way ‘til the end credits.

I shouldn’t have loved HAMLET 2, but it does what it does so well that I can’t help it.  Rock me, sexy Jesus!

A Prophet

A PROPHET tells the story of Tahar Rahim, a small-time criminal sentenced to hard time in the French penal system. Rahim doesn’t know how to read. He doesn’t know how to handle himself. He doesn’t even know how to get away with petty crime. But the French penal system will teach him all that, and more.

A PROPHET takes Rahim from petty criminal to major player. In the process, it both illustrates some unintended consequences of even the most humane systems of punishment and rehabilitation. Further, it creates an absorbing, compelling narrative. Like THE GODFATHER, A PROPHET actually gets us to root for the bad guys, hoping their schemes will come to fruition and they will find their way. A PROPHET had me on the edge of my seat for every phase of Rahim’s development, putting my desire for greater justice at odds with my sympathy for a young guy surviving and thriving on wits in a harsh environment.

Everything about this film works. From the performances to the writing to the direction to the attention to the details of crimes and criminality, A PROPHET creates a total world, immerses us in it, and compels us to care about what happens there. It’s powerful stuff, and easily the best film of its type that I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Do not miss A PROPHET. It’s one of the best films you’ll see this year.

The Ghost Writer

Ewan MacGregor ghost-writes celebrity autobiographies.  Pierce Brosnan, a former (but recent) British Prime Minister, needs a ghost writer top help him finish his memoirs.  His last ghost writer, you see, turned up dead.  The circumstances were … unusual.

So we find ourselves on windswept Martha’s Vineyard in the cold and unforgiving weeks of late autumn.  There aren’t many people about, but there’s lots of mystery.  And Brosnan is so much what he seems that he can’t possibly be what he seems.  Can he?

Here’s how you do a mystery.  THE GHOST WRITER layers on the foreboding, slathers it with atmosphere, and uses both to complement a finely constructed, well-wrought tale that keeps us engaged from front to back.  We get caught up in MacGregor’s development.  We want to learn what happened to the previous writer.  We want to find out what will happen to the current one.  And we want to get to the heart of the story. 

This is the good stuff.