Find Me Guilty

Sydney Lumet’s FIND ME GUILTY didn’t get a fair shake. I’m not going to argue that it’s brilliant, but it’s pretty good: it didn’t deserve its box office death. Perhaps the marketing had something to do with it. Remember all those posters with Vin Diesel dressed up as Willy Loman? At the time, I remember thinking, “How do you take a guy as charismatic as Diesel and throw all that away?

Well, the movie itself doesn’t throw Diesel’s charisma away. In fact, it relies on that charisma to get us through the true(ish) story of a charismatic New York mobster who charmed a jury into acquitting him and all of his friends in one of the biggest RICO trials to date. It works, and it does so because Diesel has the power to get an audience on his side, whether he’s playing the head of criminal enterprise, an alien convict, or a schlubby but funny gangster. I think the movie would work even better if it didn’t try to give some perspective to the proceedings by reminding us that, yes, the colorful mobsters really are bad guys and the vile prosecutors really are on the side of good. If you want to make us root for Diesel’s character, make us believe in his story, then put us in that juror’s box and convince us that he and his buddies are being unjustly persecuted. As it stands, the movie wants to have it both ways, a la “The Sopranos.” But “The Sopranos” had years to get us to know and love Paulie Walnuts. FIND ME GUILTY only has a couple of hours.

Nevertheless, FIND ME GUILTY stands as a reasonably amusing courtroom comedy, featuring a fine turn by Diesel and yet another remarkable performance from the formidable Peter Dinklage, who plays a co-defending attorney (Oh, how I’d love to have seen that Dinklage RICHARD III he did on stage a while back.). It didn’t make me laugh out loud, but it rocked along pretty well for its two hour running time. I suppose a guy could do worse.

V for Vendetta

I liked the filmed version of V FOR VENDETTA better than the comic. The comic felt like an overhyped revolt against Thatcherism, while the film makes the story more universal. While it gets in its digs at the Bush administration, the film feels more of piece with works like 1984, works which transcend the time in which they were created.

Here’s the setup: we’re in England, and things have gone sour. It’s roughly ten years after a political shift that ushered in an authoritarian government, but still thirty years or so before the system gets so entrenched that we’d be in the world of a 1984. Big Brother is everywhere, but the tvs still only go one way, if you will.

V4V asks the question, “What if someone rebelled before Big Brother could really get his hooks into everything?” In this case, that someone is an anonymous gent in a Guy Fawkes costume, a gent who was wronged by this regime and has taken is time, a la Edmond Dantes, to construct the perfect revenge. His plan? To move the people of England to rise up against their oppressors.

How he executes his plan, and how his actions affect those around him, I’ll leave for the viewer. Right now, I’m more concerned with how well the film executes its intentions; I’m happy to report that it does so quite well. Natalie Portman, the audience surrogate, reminds us that yes, she can actually act quite well. Hugo Weaving as the guy in the Fawkes costume, joins Willem Dafoe in the limited club of guys who can emote even when their face is hidden. John Hurt, who played Winston Smith in the filmed version of 1984, is a marvelous Big Brother, and the remainder of the supporting cast (including favorites Stephen Rea and Stephen Fry) also turns in professional work, without a single performance that pulls one out of the moment. The film looks slick, professional, and seamless. I bought everything it showed me, and I enjoyed the ride.

I picked up V4V on a whim – it was sitting right there on a counter at the library, and I knew I’d have a little free time coming up. I’m glad I did. V FOR VENDETTA turned to be pretty good.

Krrish

I just scouted around the internet for reviews of KRRISH, Bollywood's first big-budget superhero movie. The movie has a 100% positive rating on the tomatometer, and everyone seems to love it.

All of these people are on crack.

Somewhere in Krrish's two hours and fifty-five minutes of bloat, there's a solid little 85-minute superhero movie. Unfortunately, the filmmakers couldn't or wouldn't edit their work sufficiently ruthlessly to get to that good, fast-paced movie, so we're left with an incredibly long shampoo commercial.

Here's the setup: young Krishna is a supergenius whose grandmother hides him in a remote mountain village, far away from the eyes of evil men who would use him, if they could. The village appears to be populated by a gang of good-natured youths, a goofy sidekick, a brilliant dentist, the world's greatest hairdresser, and at least one guy who owns a gym and has access to steroids. Krishna grows up in an extended woodland idyll, maturing into an innocent gym rat with perfect teeth and hair that would put Robin Shou to shame. Oh, and he has superpowers.



Soon enough, the inevitable occurs. Krishna meets a girl, an ethnic Indian on holiday from Singapore, whose hair is even better than his.

He follows her to Singapore, where he dazzles the locals with his flowing mane.


But it isn't long before evil intervenes, and Krishna must assume a new identity - Krrish!- and save the day through the power of wind-blown locks (btw, Krrish's locks are always windblown. One of his superpowers must include the ability to levitate an invisible fan two feet from his face.).


Damn. There's slo-mo closeup of Krrish, having just risen from the sea, whipping his head about and sending perfectly lit drops of water flying everywhere. Google image search is turning up nothing.

Anyway, back to the recap. Krrish saves the world, wins the girl, and even gets a shave. There's your movie.

And it's a perfectly fine template for a movie, but it doesn't quite work. The guy who plays Krishna, Hrithik Roshan, is a skilled dancer and a fine stuntman, but his three expressions seem to be winning grin, winning grin, and palsy. The gal who plays the eventual damsel in distress (oops - spoiler!), Priyanka Chopra, appears to be more talented, but director Rakesh Roshan (Hrithik's dad, which makes the lingering shots of Hrithik's muscles, hair, and teeth kinda creepy, now that I think about it) must've told her to play to the cheap seats, because there is absolutely no mystery in her face whatsoever. It's all right there. Add astoundingly poor special effects, a score that's a direct ripoff of Danny Elfman's work on SPIDER-MAN, and the incongruous musical numbers that Bollywood demands, and you have a movie that wears out its welcome at the 90-minute mark. Had this film been edited from three to 1.5 hours, the actors would have had less time to grate; the poorer CGI sequences could have been edited out, and we might have been left with a fun, masala-flavored masked avenger flick.

But wishful thinking gets us nowhere. As it stands, KRRISH is a three hour long mess. This time around, I took one for the team.

Shrek the Third

SHREK THE THIRD ("Shrek 3," hereafter), is a joyless slog through a never ending stream of tired jokes. Sure, my kid liked it plenty, but my kid is eight years old. You gonna trust him?

Here's the setup: Just as Shrek departs on a voyage to find the heir to the kingdom, Prince Charming rallies the forces of evil to conquer said kingdom so he can, um, put on a show. Ok, fair enough. Problem is, Shrek 3 can't do anything more with this premise than it did with the two earlier, funnier installments. The fun of having fairy tales turned on their head has diminished, and this movie has little to add to that formula.

On the up side, Shrek 3 employs some terrific actors. It's always great to see Julie Andrews, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and (the surprisingly good and versatile) Justin Timberlake get work. There are no performances that pull one out of the viewing experience, though it's a shame that they're in service to such an uninspired story.

Ah, well.

Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA as a movie about constructs. More specifically, I see it as a movie about the constructs we use to give shape to our lives, and the ways in which he hold fast to those constructs even in the face of their absurdity. During the picnic, I saw two deeply damaged people trying to love each other; two people aware that a relationship was impossible, yet willing to believe in their hopes (if only for a little while).

Elita knows that Bennie knows that Garcia is her true love, and she knows that Bennie's trying to find Garcia for some malevolent purpose. Further, she knows that Bennie's no good -that no matter how much money he makes, it's all going to pass through his hands anyway. Still, she pressures him to propose to her, and she chooses to believe in her future by accepting his proposal. Later, when they're in Garcia's town, she points out that there's a church there. When Bennie doesn't so much refuse to follow through on his commitment as let it slide by him, Elita still chooses to believe.

Only when the construct is safely unattainable does Benny fully invest himself in it. When he does, he finds that the construct gives him something to live for and, perhaps more importantly, something to die for. We see this first glimmer of this fuller Bennie in the picnic scene, as he takes the first steps from nihilism to belief. Elita knows that belief will probably not end well, but she's willing to believe anyway. This is her wisdom and her strength.

Batman vs. Dracula

BATMAN VS. DRACULA retells Stoker's tale with Batman in the Van Helsing role, The Penguin as Renfield, and Vicki Vale as Mina Harker. It's a fine introduction to the Dracula story for the younger set, with the horror elements still present, if smoothed out a bit.

The animation is workmanlike, however, and the voice acting never quite captured my imagination. Further, the producers chose to make both Penguin and Joker super or, perhaps, para human, and I found that the fantastical elements of these characters detracted from the shock value of Dracula, who always works best as the unexpected supernatural player in a mundane world.

Nevertheless, BATMAN VS. DRACULA captured my boy's imagination and kept me mildly diverted. As far as kids' horror goes, you could do worse.

The Godfather, Part II

Here's the problem with THE GODFATHER, PART II: it doesn't add to the story of THE GODFATHER. Michael ends THE GODFATHER well and truly damned. By the end of Part II, all he's done is find out what hell's like. Vito ends THE GODFATHER a man of honor, by his own lights. That's how he ends here. There is nothing that happens in Part II that hasn't already been done, and done more elegantly, in the original.

So why is it so riveting? I believe that Part II's performances overcome its screenplay. Al Pacino's Michael Corleone is so interesting that I don't mind that all his character does in this film is live out the consequences of his earlier choices. Diane Keaton's Kay Corleone is so heartbreaking that I nearly wept for her. Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen is the most scarily efficient man I've seen in film in a long time. And Robert DeNiro's young Vito is everything we might have expected young Vito to be: cunning, brave, charismatic; a man who commands respect.

It's damn hard for actors to rise above their source material and bring real art from mediocrity, but this cast pulls it off. They're what make watching THE GODFATHER, PART II time well spent.

Winter Light

WINTER LIGHT is the kind of movie that convinces people who've never seen a Bergman film to never see another one.

It's quiet, it's slow, and it's 83 minutes of people thinking and talking, and sometimes the reverse. It's also quite beautiful, in a starkly Scandinavian way, as it grapples with the existential crises that mark Europe's transition to a post-Christian society.

"Eloi Eloi, lama sabachthani?" thrums like a heartbeat through this film's every scene. Gunnar Bjornstrand is a Lutheran minister who died when his wife passed four years prior. He's still giving communion, he's still counseling parishoners, and he's in a relationship with a local schoolteacher; but his heart just isn't in it. His faith had grown fragile during his ministry in the Spanish Civil War, and the loss of his wife was the final blow.

Today, we'd diagnose him with clinical depression, prescribe him something to get his chemistry back on track, and encourage him to aerobicize. That wouldn't make for compelling drama. WINTER LIGHT takes his spiritual unmooring and reflects it in the lives of what few parishioners still bother to show up for services. It gives us not just a man, but an entire culture going through the painful process of breaking away from a millenium of faith and trying to find its way in a new world without apparent answers.

This film provides fertile ground for meditation. Like most Bergman films, I think it will rattle around in my brain for quite some time.

Inherit the Wind

Here's what I like about INHERIT THE WIND: it's a courtroom drama that doesn't waste too much time with the setup. It introduces the players and the case and -bam- before you know it, Spencer Tracy and Frederick March are objecting, counterarguing, and acting their butts off for the entertainment of one and all. INHERIT THE WIND is pugnacious; it's agressive; it's funny; and it works. From supporting actors like Dick York, Norman Fell, and Harry Morgan to the surprise (for me) costar Gene Kelly, from the most perceptive observation to the most overblown speech, this is big-time Hollywood Issue-Moviemaking at its best.

INHERIT THE WIND fictionalizes the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Tracy is a fictional analogue of Darrow, March of Bryan, and Kelly of H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore reporter who brought Darrow onboard to argue the case. While its arguments seem superficial and some of its characterizations rather broad, one can't deny the film's earnestness, competence, and ability to entertain.

I laughed, I thought, and I thanked God I don't live in Kansas. INHERIT THE WIND may not be quite as deep as it thinks it is, but it's deep enough to make for a pleasant Sunday evening's viewing.

Enchanted

The line has been used before, but I'm not above petty larceny. ENCHANTED is enchanting.

Everything about this movie, from casting to costumes to color palette to CGI, is perfect. So perfect, in fact, that even little boys can groove on it. Adams, Marsden, Sarandon, and Spall (the faery contingent) play their parts with delightful servings of innocence or evil or both. Dempsey, Menzel, and Covey (the New York contingent) manage to be both grounded and hopeful. Even the choice of narrator is spot on: Julie Andrews, the woman Adams (if she's lucky) might get to be when she grows up. There's danger, but no real sense of danger, the production numbers are absolutely top notch, and everyone seems to be having a good time.

What's not to love?

Audition

AUDITION is like a very special special episode of "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," one in which Bill Bixby's new romance spirals into a hellish nightmare of torture, hallucination, madness, and death. Hey, it's Takeshi Miike: what do you expect?

AUDITION begins like a somber "starting over" tale. A man loses his wife, then is left to raise his boy as best he can. After about a decade, his son's constant encouragement to find another wife finally wears him down and he hatches a plan to audition potential mates, hoping to find that diamond in the rough. He finds something that gleams, but it could be the tip of a blade. It's good setup for a movie, and Miike plays it well, investing us in his Bixby and taking his time to build the tension in the latter half of the film. If I have one gripe about AUDITION, it's the movie's overreliance on filters to set moods and create atmosphere. It's a good thing I'm not colorblind - if I had trouble seeing blue, I'd have missed half the movie.

This is a quibble, however. AUDITION is sweet, scary, horrifying, and satisfying. I wish Bill Bixby was still around for a remake.

Two for the Weekend

THE SANDLOT is lazily written, horribly acted, altogether miserable, and a laugh riot if you happen to be a five-year-old boy. It's a story about some Boomer kid in the early '60s who moves to the San Fernando Valley and falls in, improbably enough, with a pack of Babe Ruth worshippers. It was like something a guy who grew up in New York would imagine growing up in California to be. This movie made my soul bleed.


MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, on the other hand, was surprisingly successful. As a reasonably cynical Washingtonian, I didn't expect to be taken in by Capra's paean to Americana; nevertheless, I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I think the movie sold me in a scene in which Mr. Smith has a brief conversation with a senior senator's daughter. Instead of focusing on Smith, the camera focuses on his hat. It shifts from left hand to right, gets dropped again and again, and does more to tell me its owner's state of mind than would an extreme closeup. Some movies are great because people generally think they're great. Some are great because they really are. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, thankfully, is the latter.

Strangers on a Train

Wow, what a terrific movie.

I knew very little about STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. Sure, I'd read the
basic setup, but I thought it was about two very evil men one-upping
each other for an hour and a half.

Boy, was I surprised, and not just about the characters. I was
surprised by the film's ability to deliver such clever
characterizations while never slowing down the action. I was
surprised by the sharp, perceptive performances. I was surprised by
plotting and framing that ratcheted the tension up and up and up,
delivering a payoff that surely ranks among the best climactic
sequences in the history of film.

I just plain loved STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. But I wouldn't give it the
time of day if it wandered up and said hello.

The Memory of a Killer

It's an old story: someone doublecrosses an assassin, and before long the bodies start piling up. You've got your good guys and bad guys trying to find the killer, and you've got your principled hit man working his way to the top, exacting revenge for the doublecross and bringing down The Man. THE MEMORY OF A KILLER, a Belgian picture from 2003, hews to this template, and it works as a character study and a police procedural. The character in question, Angelo Ledda, is a contract killer with early-stage Alzheimer's. The police procedural revolves around the detectives on his trail; and the genre-standard close calls, tantalizing clues, and conflicted detectives all play their parts seamlessly. It's a fine movie, but it's hampered by a head-scratchingly poor aesthetic choice.

TMK uses quick-cuts, flashing lights, and disorientation to indicate lapses in Ledda's cognition, but they do more than that. They annoy the the viewer. Additionally, it uses the hurry-up technique of cutting parts of footsteps and intermediate body language out of everyday events. I suspect that this is supposed to lend a sense of urgency to the proceedings, but it just gave the impression that the filmmaker's weren't sufficiently interested in the characters to let us settle in with them.

Don't get me wrong. THE MEMORY OF A KILLER (The Alzheimer's Case, in the original language), is a perfectly fine movie. But these choices relegate it to the second tier. Too bad.

The Bourne Ultimatum

A short time back, a friend of mine opined that THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM was essentially the same movie as THE BOURNE SUPREMACY. While I agree that ULTIMATUM was nearly a remake of SUPREMACY, I didn't mind. I liked SUPREMACY, so more of that jump-cut action was fine with me.

The thing I like about the Bourne movies is that they make hard stuff look hard. The fights look like real, brutal fights for survival, not staged dances. There is no graceful parkour: running across rooftops is hard, and dangerous. People breathe heavily when they've been running or fighting, and actions have resonance. This is not a world of easy death or winking nihilism. This is a world in which real actions have real consequences, and I always enjoy visiting it.

Damon, Allen, and Strathairn are all top notch, and the filmmakers cared enough to get serious talents such as Paddy Considine, Albert Finney, and Scott Glenn for some of the smaller supporting roles. Yeah, the story doesn't go very far and the film doesn't resonate all that much, but it's a fun ride while it lasts.

Happy Feet

HAPPY FEET is an animated movie about a tap-dancing penguin who teaches the other penguins in his flock how to dance along with their already excellent, if derivative, singing.

Compare this to SURF'S UP, an animated movie about a surfing penguin who travels to a tropical island to compete in a surfing competition.

Why compare the two? Because for some reason, animated surfing penguins are more interesting and exciting than animated dancing penguins. I don't know why. I find live-action surfing movies to be remarkably dull (and I surf), but I can watch Astair and Kelly movies all day long. All the excitement of dance vanishes when it's animated, however, even if I know that someone, somewhere, actually did those tap routines so they could get recorded and animated.

So if HAPPY FEET's big draw is the dance numbers, and the dance numbers are flat, what else has it got? Well it has excellent singing (Brittany Murphy, Hugh Jackman, and Nicole Kidman all lend their voices), and yet another tiresome performance from Robin Williams, who is at a point in his career in which he just has to scale things back a little. But those singing performances are hampered by the fact that they're all covers of popular songs, which subtracts from the spell the movie is ostensibly trying to cast.

My 7-yr-old liked HAPPY FEET, but I think it's no SURF'S UP. Give me surfing penguins over dancing penguins any day of the week.

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM is a charming film that did not deserve its quick death at the box office.

Mr. Magorium (Dustin Hoffman, appropriating an inexplicable speech impediment) is over two hundred years old and owns the magical toy shop in an unnamed metropolis which I assume to be New York. I say "the" magical toy shop because, really, how many could there be? The toy shop is a wonderful creation, full of life and fun and impossible possibilities, the kind of place that adults think kids would love to hang out in (My experience as the father of two boys is that kids would much prefer to hang out in a big yard, armed with water guns. But then again, I don't live in New York City.). Its manager, Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman, who has either grown into a downright elfin woman or has an eating problem), has worked there for nearly her entire young life and is beginning to feel that it's time to move on. And then there's Eric, the nine-year-old who can't seem to make friends but can sculpt a beautiful Abraham Lincoln out of, you guessed it, Lincoln logs. They're a happy, self-made family, but then everything begins to change. Mr. Magorium feels that it's time for him to move on, but Molly doesn't feel ready to move up. And then Mutant the Accountant (Jason Bateman, who has been note-perfect in everything, lately) shows up to straighten out the books. But how do you straighten out the books of a magical shop?

OK, so there's your story, but MAGORIUM isn't so much about intricately plotted story as it is about sweetness, and fabulous art direction, costuming, and set design. It's about the way a very small child can feel when standing before a wall of huggable stuffed animals, and it's about choosing wonder and joy. It's a lovable picture, and I loved the heck out of it.

I watch a lot of kids' movies and I wade through a lot of dross. MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM is a charming delight and a welcome change. Even if you don't have kids, this one's worth a rental.

The Game Plan

THE GAME PLAN is your basic "kid teaches parent(s) how to be adult" movie. The Rock stars as the parent, Madison Pettis stars as the kid, and Rosalyn Sanchez stands around and looks pretty. Oh, and Kyra Sedgewick is in there. She plays the deus ex machina.

Johnson's charismatic and fun. All the charisma and fun in the world, however, can't salvage a script that gives us a little monster, rather than an adorable little girl, to root for. Madison Pettis's Peyton (Yes, it's a girl's name in this world.) is so obnoxious, so overbearing, so bratty that, rather than wish for her to find her own happily ever after, I wanted The Rock to give her a good spanking.

On the up side, the unnaturally beautiful Rosalyn Sanchez is very good at standing around and looking pretty, so there's that. But that's about all this movie has going for it. Even if you have a young girl who'd fit this film's target demographic, avoid THE GAME PLAN.

Horton Hears a Who!

HORTON HEARS A WHO! is a beautifully animated, well voiced, faithful retelling of the Dr. Seuss classic. I nearly fell asleep.

Don't get me wrong. My kids loved it. Many of the people in the theater applauded when the credits rolled. It's just that I've read that story so many times that it holds no mysteries for me.

Ah, well.

Sunshine

There's a lot to like about SUNSHINE. It sports dazzling visuals, arresting sound design, and a fun twist on the reliable science fiction premise of things going wrong on a spaceship far from home. The twist, of course, is that this spaceship is on a mission that takes it dangerously close to the sun, and the star's radiation is so dangerous that it borders on tangible.

Often, a film like this will pit the feeling humanists against the cold-hearted military types. I thought SUNSHINE was going down this road, so imagine how surprised and delighted I was when the military types turned out to be right time and again. Another common pitfall of this kind of picture is a disregard for physics, and I thought that SUNSHINE handled this particularly well in the third act, when time and space get ginchy.

Unfortunately, however, physics is about the only thing right about the third act. When the movie twists, its as if the filmmakers lost faith in the inherent fascination of their premise and decided to go, instead, with a bogeyman. And then they present the bogeyman horribly, with inexplicable fuzzy-cam and at least one victim shot so amateurish that I couldn't believe it made the final cut.

Even with the disappointing close, however, I still recommend SUNSHINE. It looks great, sounds great, and is a good time at the movies for most of its run. You could do worse.