The Grand Budapest Hotel

I’ve had it with Wes Anderson.

The Grand Budapest Hotel looks marvelous, represents a unique vision, and tells its story with wit and creativity.  I hated it.  It’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of movies.

Its love interest has a birthmark the exact shape of Mexico running down her cheek because – whimsy! 

Its one honest and noble character meets a horrific end because – unpredictability!

Its paragon of class and carriage is a vulgar buffoon because – honesty!

It concludes with an image suggesting an entire nation living in grateful wonder at its story because – self-indulgence!

I swear to God, I half-expected this movie to pull out a ukulele and improvise a tune about the wonder of dewdrops.  Up yours.  Entertain me.  Blow up a car.

Coriolanus

You don't see Coriolanus at many Shakespeare repertory theaters. It's a tough play about a hard man, the fickle masses, and one woman's insatiable drive for glory in a culture that will allow her to achieve it only through the men she controls.

Caius Martius is a patrician and a General of the Roman Republic. At home in the (relative) meritocracy of the Roman Army and a formidable battler, he wins a great victory over the hated Volscians at the Battle of Coriolae. Lauded in Rome and awarded the honorific "Coriolanus," his family sees this as his moment to stand for Consul.  But he can't do the things that politicians do. He can't pretend to be one of the people, whom he sees as a fickle, unwashed mass - there to be led or bullied. He has so completely absorbed the martial virtues that he can't stand to trumpet his victories or show his battle scars for the approval of the citizenry. In short, he's unfit to be Consul. When the entrenched politicians who see him as a threat perceive this, they mercilessly destroy his political career. The rest, well, it's tragedy for some and triumph for others. But it isn't nice and it isn't funny and it isn't pretty - not the stuff to pull in the fickle, unwashed masses who only turn up for yet another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

So bravo to Ralph Fiennes for tackling one of the more challenging plays in this, his directorial debut. Taking a page from the theatrical tradition of transposing Shakespeare's plays to any number of historical and cultural settings, he sets his Coriolanus in the Balkans of not so very long ago. He casts 300's Gerard Butler as the Volscian leader, the omnipresent (and best-ever Hannibal Lecter) Brian Cox as Senator and family friend Menenius, James Nesbitt (delightful in the BBC's Jekyll and a standout in the first Hobbit movie) as an enemy politician, and the ubiquitous Jessica Chastain (who took my breath away in Tree of Life) as his wife. Most critically and successfully of all, he landed Vanessa Redgrave to play Volumnia, his mother and a woman so hungry for glory that she'll chew through every man in her family to get it and call it love.

Redgrave is Coriolanus's secret weapon, delivering the definitive performance of the role in modern film. In a cast filled with actors varying from promising to respectable to noted to outstanding, Redgrave is great. By "great," I mean Great. Her Volumnia is a masterpiece of ambition and calculation, Roman virtue and matronly control. And, yes, even of love. Fiennes, to his credit, lets her run. He demonstrates the self-confidence to embrace a performance that outshines his own very good one and, in the process, creates something magical.

Is Coriolanus perfect? Nothing is. The film's battles and knife fights are incomprehensible and could have benefitted from the touch of an editor with more experience in the action genre (An IMdB search tells me that editor Nicolas Gaster did the outstanding Moon and the indulgent MirrorMask, among many other credits stretching back to 1977, but he appears to have no major action credits to his name.). But that's about the only glove I can lay on it. When that's all I've got, you're doing ok.

I've always respected Ralph Fiennes as an actor. With Coriolanus, he debuts as a director and interpreter of Shakespeare worthy of note. I look forward to his next effort.

Wrath of the Titans

I enjoyed Clash of the Titans.  It was a juvenile action-adventure, but it was juvenile action-adventure done right.  Its sequel, Wrath of the Titans, continues in the same vein.  This is a fun time at the movies.

The film is structured around the Hero's Journey, with a reluctant Perseus called upon once more to play a role in the struggles of the gods.  He's assisted on his journey by a cast including Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Rosamund Pike, and even Bill Nighy (CDNW) as Hephaestus.  He confronts elaborate, beautifully designed and realized monsters and obstacles, clashes swords in energetically choreographed battles, and even finds time to squeeze in a character arc.  Star Sam Worthington sells all this, acting mostly against green screens and tennis balls and making us believe he is actually riding, fighting, or conversing with all manner of creations.

Now, I'm kind of a literate guy, and this is the part where I think it's expected of me to opine that if this film inspires one person to read up on the gods and legends of Greco Roman civilization, it will have served its purpose.  Forget that.  The legends of Greco Roman civilization were, as much as anything, entertainment, and Wrath of the Titans is a proud claimant to that inheritance.  By making legends anew in the form of the big summer blockbuster, Wrath continues a storytelling tradition as old as language.  I'm all for it, I loved it, and I look forward to screening this film for my boys as much as I look forward reading to them from our tattered copy of D'Aulaire's Gods of the Greeks and Romans when I get home.

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.

The Constant Gardener

THE CONSTANT GARDENER disappointed me. It had an excellent script and a first-class cast, but it was hobbled by photography and music so distracting that I spent more time thinking about how annoyed I was than I did actually engaging with the film. Bummer. Danny Huston did provide one very bright spot, however. After enjoying his performance in SILVER CITY as a good guy who's trying to be bad, it was fun to watch him flip the characterization on its head for this picture.

The Merchant of Venice

The toughest thing about staging 'The Merchant of Venice' is ending it on the right note. Our lovers have crushed the most compelling character in the piece, grinding him to dust until he's less then an afterthought. They then proceed to Portia's home, where they play cute romantic games, and the story wraps on a variation of "and they went off and had sex." It's as if Shakespeare set out to write a comedy, found himself in the middle of a tragedy, and felt compelled to wrestle the damn thing back onto comic territory, no matter what.

The Pacino 'Merchant of Venice' handles this ending better than any other production I've seen. It doesn't let the lovers (or Jessica, for that matter) off the hook. Rather, by juxtaposing their delight with Shylock's horror and Jessica's remorse, it convicts them of a heartlessness which we can only infer from the text.

The production values, as one would expect, are world-class, and the actors nail their roles. Fiennes and Irons are brilliant and, though the homoerotic implications of their relationship threaten to overwhelm the piece, said implications pay off wonderfully as we see Lynn Collins's Portia wondering just what she's gotten herself into. Then there's Pacino. Though we can never get past the fact that it's Pacino-as-Shylock, he brings profound sadness and humanity to his role. People love to hammer movie stars when they take on Shakespeare, but I think the man acquitted himself well. (Personally, I'd love to see his take on Richard III - I think he'd knock it out of the park!)

I had high hopes for 'The Merchant of Venice,' and I was not disappointed. It's well worth the rental.