The Croods; Rush; A Most Wanted Man

The Croods

The Croods is fine.  It’s pretty, it tells a nice story, and its voice cast includes personal favorites Nicholas Cage, Emma Stone, and Cloris Leachman.

That’s about all I can say for it, however.  I didn’t laugh.  I didn’t cry.  I just sorta rocked along pleasantly for an hour and half.  That ain’t bad.  It ain’t great, either.  It’s fine.  No, really.  It’s fine.

Rush

I spent the first hour or so of Rush not enjoying the movie.  Like Amadeus, the film sets up a conflict between a natural talent (Chris Hemsworth, a British Formula One driver) and a grinder (Daniel Brühl, his Austrian nemesis (the actor also appears in A Most Wanted Man, discussed below)).   Thing is, I identified with the grinder. Hemsworth’s character put my teeth on edge.

Then the movie took an unexpected turn, went in an entirely different direction than I’d expected, and made me hold my breath, tense in sympathy to the action onscreen, and hang on every twist and turn of the competitors’ races.

I feel like I started out with Days of Thunder and finished with something wonderful.  Rush is the most surprising movie I’ve seen this year. 

A Most Wanted Man

Some deaths get to you, even if you never really knew the person in question.  I still miss Phil Hartman.  I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.

In A Most Wanted Man, Hoffman plays the Hamburg chief of a small German intelligence organization occupied with hunting terrorists.  The film, based on a John le Carré novel, occupies itself not with fast cars and gadgets, but with the nondescript, dedicated, and frequently exhausted people who actually make the intelligence community go.  Hoffman, overweight, disheveled, and brilliant, is a perfect match for this world.  His character belongs in dimly lit bars, crafting plans and making deals, and I believed in him every step of the way.

The plot?  Well, it’s a le Carré story, so it features twists and surprises and a kind of mundane weariness that feels all the more immediate because we can imagine it happening right in the next booth over.

The effect?  Well, mostly sadness.  Sadness for the characters in the story, but particular sadness for the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of our generation’s great actors and a talent that I’m sure to miss for a long time to come.

In Time

In Time is a workmanlike dystopian haves vs. have-nots science fiction picture. 

Here’s the story: in a few hundred years, someone figures out how to halt the aging process at 25.  To stop overpopulation, at 25 a one-year counter starts ticking off on the person’s arm.  Once that counter goes to zero, the person drops dead.  As with any economic system, people separate into haves and have-nots.  Everyone seems more or less ok with this, until one man (Justin Timberlake) trips to the fact that the haves are rigging the system.

It’s a neat premise that follows in the grand tradition of science fiction as social commentary and popular entertainment.  Add that Timberlake is a likeable film actor and that both his love interest/accomplice (Amanda Seyfried) and antagonist (Cillian Murphy) know how to hit their marks, and you have a fine picture.

So, what’s the difference between “workmanlike” or “fine” and “good?”  Ambiguity.  Vision.  Creativity.  In Time feels like a low-budget third draft.  It’s all too simple and clear to be actually “good,” and the use of time as a metaphor for money stops being interesting after about ten minutes.  Toss in a future LA whose very best neighborhood appears to be the Wilshire District around 7:00 am on a Sunday and technology that’s only about $100,000 worth of production budget cooler than our own, and you wind up with “workmanlike” and “fine.”

And yet, workmanlike and fine are, well, fine.  I don’t recommend that you go out of your way to see In Time, but if dystopian haves vs. have-nots science fiction is your thing, well, have at it.