Monthly Archives: April 2012

Review: “The Raven”

29 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For the Birds?

Grade: B (RENT IT)

IT’S MIDNIGHT IN THE MIND of Edgar Allan Poe.  Make that a “midnight dreary” in the mind of America’s Master of the Macabre and Inventor of the Detective Story played with passionate intensity by John Cusack in the new thriller “The Raven.”  It’s refreshing to see Cusack step out of his hipster box but much less so to see his love interest in the “The Raven” (played here by Alice Eve) literally boxed up alive and buried under the floorboards.  Claustrophilic camerawork and costume design by Danny Ruhlmann and Carlo Poggioli, respectively, create a Victorian America sufficiently “grim, ungainly,” as Poe writes of his eponymous raven in the 1844 poem, “ghastly, gaunt, and ominous.”  It’s too bad that “The Raven” is closer to the flightless turkey than to a bird that truly gets off the ground.

From director James McTeigue (“V for Vendetta”), this pitch-black thriller is set in the fall of 1849, just weeks shy of Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore.  At forty years old, the real-life Poe was found drunk, delirious and wearing another man’s clothes.  This is the bankrupt Poe who’d grown inconsolable in the wake of his young wife Virginia’s death from tuberculosis.  (Virginia was not only the author’s first-cousin but a surprising thirteen-years-old when she married the gloomy author in 1836.)  Likely inspired by the popular “Sherlock Holmes” series, “The Raven” turns its nineteenth-century literary man into something of a caped crusader.  Poe teams up with the dashing Inspector Emmett Fields (Luke “The Wire” Evans) in order to solve a string of murders that mirror those imagined by Poe on the page.  We’ve all heard of life imitating art and vice versa, but here we have, with the gory recreations of Poe’s tales of torture and immurement, a rare case of death imitating art.  They must protect Emily, Poe’s fiancée (Alice Eve) while avoiding the blows of Emily’s imperious father (Brendan Gleeson).  “Over my dead body!” Gleeson protests at one point to which Cusack smirks: “Is that an option?”

Screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare give us a fun and foul-mouthed Poe who insults his drinking mates as “slobs,” “philistines,” and “mental oysters.”  He spouts some great lines – “Is imagination now a felony?” – but the plot points otherwise will strike you as familiar.  The pace, like Cusack’s performance, is lively but the script pulls from so many other films that it leaves Cusack, like a mangled marionette, hanging between too many masters.  Is it comedy, romance, Jack-the-Ripper horror or psychological thriller?   Cusack laments twice in the film: “Melancholy has followed me like a black dog all my life.”  The other black dog dragging him down is a plot, while clever at times, that doesn’t quite rise to Poe’s level of sustained originality and madness.

Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”

26 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“One Fish Two Fish”

“A FISH IS A FISH is a fish, right?” asks Kristin Scott Thomas incredulously, as the PM’s press secretary Patricia Maxwell in “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” a unique romantic comedy spawned by the Paul Torday novel and the unlikeliest of plots: a progressive sheik and fishing enthusiast (played by Amr Waked) dreams of one day creating a salmon run in the arid deserts of Yemen.  This not only entails the relocation of 10,000 North Atlantic salmon to Yemen but a way to improve the Middle East’s image amongst British voters.  The wealthy sheik has friends in high places, including his assistant Harriet (the lovely Emily Blunt) and Dr. Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a fisheries scholar brought on to jumpstart the project.  The possibility of a romance is floated: Harriet’s boyfriend (Tom Mison) has been deployed to fight overseas and Fred’s estranged wife is as cold as ice.  Because the film is directed by Lasse (“Chocolat” and “Dear John”) Hallstrom, “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” has a mildness to it, however, closer to monkfish than the pungency of salmon.  Well performed and paced, Hallstrom’s fish-of-the-day is a total original: it swims upstream whereas most rom-coms are mere groupers and cling to cliché.

Another fishy film to wash ashore is David Gelb’s debut documentary, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” which centers on sushi-master and octogenarian Jiro Ono, chef and restaurateur who runs this tight ship: a basement-level establishment called Sukiyabashi Jiro in the Ginza district of Tokyo where just 10 patrons at a time will pay upward to 30,000 yen to belly up to the bar.  Gelb’s film elevates the chef to the level of demigod; watch as he instructs his diligent sons, especially Yoshikazu who weathers his father’s blows and manages the restaurant along with a team of aspiring chefs told to massage octopus for hours on end and handle fatty tuna like it’s fine china.  Gelb’s dreamy documentary really crests when it leaves the table: it’s not, of course, a study in sushi but in Chef Ono’s incredible dedication to his art.  It’s more a study in character and the determination to perfect one’s craft than a loving look at what’s on the plate.

With both these fresh catches in mind, it’s worth recalling the famous lines of Rudyard Kipling whose separatist song goes like this: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”  In both “Salmon Fishing” and “Jiro Dreams,” East meets West and that meeting place smells fabulously fishy.

Review: “Chimpanzee”

21 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

“Stuffed Animals”

Grade: B- (RENT IT)

IN THE DARWIN wars of today, Richard Dawkins is sometimes called “Darwin’s bulldog” or most outspoken advocate.  But back in 1863, plenty of English naturalists came to Darwin’s defense, including Thomas Henry Huxley whose review of the Origin of Species helped to shape the public’s view of evolutionary biology.  In Man’s Place in Nature (published in London four years after Darwin’s Origin), Huxley wrote:  “On all sides I shall hear the cry – ‘We are men and women, not a mere better sort of apes, a little longer in the leg, more compact in the foot, and bigger in brain than your brutal Chimpanzees and Gorillas.  The power of knowledge – the conscience of good and evil – the pitiful tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all real fellowship with the brutes, however closely they may seem to approximate us.”  To this Huxley could only reply that no absolute line could be drawn between the “animal world and ourselves.”  He pointed in particular to the cerebral hemispheres of a Man and of a Chimpanzee to show their overwhelming similarities.

To further collapse the distance between man and monkey, there’s now “Chimpanzee,” the new wildlife film from Disneynature, which follows an orphaned chimp named Oscar in the Tai forest of Ivory Coast in Africa.  The film’s real strength is its dazzling cinematography: time-lapse sequences of jungle birds and glow-in-the-dark mushrooms.  Whether little Oscar knows it or not, he’s ready for his close-up and filmmakers Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield provide us with astoundingly up-close and personal angles of him cracking nuts, climbing trees, and, well, since this is Disney, looking downright adorable.  The only bit of pathos in “Chimpanzee” is when Oscar’s mother is slain by a rival group of chimps (led by the unimaginatively named Scar), leaving our little one to starve and scramble vainly to find new sources of support and sustenance.  Fortunately for Oscar, along comes Freddy, his group’s alpha male, who improbably adopts him and shows him the ropes.  Narrated by Tim Allen, “Chimpanzee” is a wonder to look at but the relentless anthropomorphizing of its star’s experience turns Oscar into a lifeless stuffed animal thrown atop a toy bin rather than a wild animal struggling to survive.  This is the only nature documentary that ignores the fierce fact that it’s a jungle out there.

Most of what really constitutes wild nature – the chimps’ strategic ambush of a colobus monkey after which they tear it limb-from-limb, the brutalities of mating and the threats of leopards – are kept carefully out-of-view.  “Chimpanzee” is designed for small children, after all, but to strip a wild animal of its wildness only to foreground its cuteness is to paradoxically control and contain it, which makes a trip to see “Chimpanzee” not so much an eye-opening experience but a trip to that most depressing of places, the city zoo.  Fothergill and Linfield leave you with the odd sense that a civilized animal is no animal at all.

Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”

14 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

“Into the Wild” 

Grade: B (RENT IT)

“ZOMBIELAND” MEETS “THE MATRIX,” “The Cabin in the Woods” is the only movie in recent memory to start as a horror film and end as a stoner comedy.  But how this clever crisscrossing of genres plays out is part of the film’s fun, which is, there will be blood and laughs.  Not all of it works – it interrupts itself too much with heavy-handed meta-moments – but as the brainchild of cult collaborators Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel”), “The Cabin in the Woods” is far from a negligible experience at the cinema.  Its deliberately dull opening is a little inside, literally: organization men in lab-coats Richard Jenkens and Bradley Whitford are discussing some kind of production replete with in-jokes and an unclear sense of what exactly they’re operating.  After the title credits hit you like a Mack truck, abruptly cut to a pair of good-looking girls in and discussing their underwear and you’re suddenly back in the land of a horror movie, of girls gone wild on the last day of their lives.

Were students in a film criticism course given “The Cabin in the Woods” to review, it would be a formidable challenge in how not to spoil the main plot-point, thus destroying the experience for filmgoers, yet still convey the film’s basic premise.  There’s a major actor in this film’s last act that goes unbilled because of the secret way in which the Jenkens and Whitford characters parallel the story of five friends who rent a Rambler and travel to a remote cabin in the woods.  The ill-fated group includes two couples, one blond (Chris Hernsworth and Anna Hutchinson), one brunette (Jesse Williams and Kristen Connolly) and a lovable stoner figure (played with panache by Fran Kranz).  That the friend group is doomed is determined by a whole host of horror movie clichés on display: the jock in a varsity jacket, the sexually uninhibited blond destined for a grinder, even the crusty country-folk who warn the kids from the big city that they’ll help them find the cabin but that “getting back…well, that’s your problem.”  Then up come Jenkens and Whitford again and like Greek gods hovering over a stage of mere mortals, they appear to be pulling the strings here and calling the kids “lambs” on a “killing floor.”  Say no more except that in the tradition of the “Scream” series, “The Cabin” is a cabin-within-a-cabin-within-a-cabin.

Insofar as “The Cabin in the Woods” is ultimately a comment on the audience’s thirst for blood, Goddard and Whedon’s film belongs in the same family as the immensely popular “The Hunger Games.”  What does it say about contemporary culture that some of our most popular forms of entertainment are highlighting the popular thirst for a blood-sport wherein we, complicit in the crime, get to know and love our victims?  Have we never left the Roman Coliseum?  Could it be that, in the long wake of September 11th, we’re still coping with the fact that death and destruction can be televised for all the world to see and that worse, for most of us, the suffering of others exists not side-by-side but on the TV screen?  Perhaps the most stinging social comment here is when Marty the stoner describes himself as the victim of “angry gods” because those “angry gods” are us.

Review: “American Reunion”

06 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Stiff-less”

Grade: D (SKIP IT)

“CONTROL YOUR BODY!” barked one harried mother to her small son as she shepherded both her children through the movie lobby and toward the usher.  The parental command was strikingly apropos as we diverged, she into “The Lorax” and I into a nearly empty showing of “American Reunion,” the pathetically pointless addition to the “American Pie” franchise and asinine add-on to that 1999 original, the sequel from 2001, and “American Wedding” from 2003.  The teenage sex comedy occupies a peculiar place in the field of American movie genres.  Before there was Howard Stern on the radio, there was “Porky’s” (1982) in theatres to stoke the sexual fires of the adolescent mentality and later, its heir “American Pie” to show just one way to enjoy a pastry that you won’t see on the Food Network.

That “American Reunion” opens with the bedroom music of R. Kelley;’s “Bump N’ Grind” – “My mind is telling me no/But my body is telling me yes!” – further drove this point home, for the “American Pie” films have long exploited the pubescent struggle between bodily drives and social mores, libido and law, or put in more Freudian terms, the id and the super-ego.

Since “American Wedding,” poopy pampers and the “Real Housewives” series have put a domestic crimp in their single man’s style.  There are zero surprises in store when Jim (Jason Biggs), Stifler (an amusing Seann William Scott), Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), Oz (Chris Klein), and Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) regroup for their 13th reunion at East Green Falls High School.   Freed from his corporate temp-job and living with his mother, Stifler toasts his friend with this: “Let’s make this weekend our bitch!”  What is surprising is that none of the main characters have matured much.  Written and directed by Jon Hurwitz, “American Reunion” doesn’t exactly develop the characters created by Adam Hertz; instead, they’ve regressed further into genital jokes and the antics of topless drunk girls.  Fortunately, there are comic veterans Eugene Levy (Jim’s Dad) and Jennifer Coolidge (Stifler’s Mom) to lend the film some sincerity.  Having his eyebrows trimmed by son Jim and daughter-in-law Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), Levy tells them: “Those caterpillars are my trademark.”

Earlier in “American Reunion,” after defecating in a cooler and destroying a prized pair of jet-skis, Stifler boasts to his buddies: “C’mon guys. That was funny!”  “Yeah,” Jim shoots back, “in high school.”  Ditto that.  The year of the original film’s release, 1999, is also telling because it dovetails with Prince’s apocalyptic pledge, from 1982, that “we’re going to party like it’s 1999.”

Someone needs to tell Stifler and the gang that the party’s over.

Review: “Detachment”

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

“No Sub Left Behind”

Grade: C (SKIP IT)

HELL ISN’T RED.  Hell isn’t rocky nor is the inferno fiery and subterranean.  Hell, as Tony Kaye’s overwrought new drama, “Detachment,” would have us believe, is a public high school classroom somewhere in the greater New York area.  Few of us need to be reminded that high school can be a hateful place, but “Detachment” provides us with one substitute teacher’s perspective on the crumbling public education system in America today.   Adrien Brody plays Mr. Henry Barth and with his Modigliani mug – the pencil-thin head and nose thrice broken – gives his best performance in a decade.  “I’m a substitute teacher,” says Henry, “There’s really no responsibility to teach.  The responsibility is to maintain order and to make sure no one is killed in your classroom.”  And he isn’t kidding.  The students in “Detachment” kick, curse, leave their bras at home, kill defenseless animals in the gym, even commit suicide in public places.

The hyperbolic “Detachment” is a let-down for fans of Tony (“American History X”) Kaye but a sigh of relief for fans of Adrien Brody insofar as the leading man, since winning the Best Actor Oscar in 2002 for Polanski’s “The Pianist,” has followed a career-plan on loan to him from Nicolas Cage: win movie-acting’s highest trophy – and Brody is the youngest actor to do so at age 29 – and subsequently fritter your legitimacy away on cine-trash for the multiplex.  With the exception of that comical cameo as Salvador Dali in “Midnight in Paris” – “Rhinoceros!” – Brody has gifted us these god-awfuls: “The Jacket,” “Splice,” and “Predators.”  Yet he’s the sympathetic center of Kaye’s edu-drama, informed by Marcia Gay Harden (as Carol, the school’s principal) that “you will find many of your students functioning under their grade level.”  That’s understatement.  A faculty of great actors – James Caan, Blythe Danner, Tim Blake Nelson, and Christina “Mad Men” Hendricks – aren’t just underpaid teachers but zookeepers.  In one outrageous scene, Lucy Liu flies off the handle and tells a drop-out that her life will become a “carnival of pain.”  Henry’s life only worsens after 3:15: his grandfather repeatedly wets himself in a nursing facility, confesses to incest,while a prostitute named Erica (played by a cherubic Sami Gayle) whom he generously allows to live in his apartment keeps using that apartment as a brothel.  Kids, these days!

Kaye’s screed on how used-and-abused our teachers are in this country’s public schools is tarnished by over-the-top moments and distracting bits such as first-person testimonials – who exactly is Brody talking to in these interview cut-aways? – and animated sequences in which birds fly and towers crumble.  To give us a real sense of the existential hole in which Henry lives, Kaye opens his film with an epigraph from Camus and ends with a passage from Poe in which we’re heavy-handedly told that the House of Usher is really a metaphor.  “You’ve always been so closed off,” Henry’s grandfather says of Henry’s detachment.  “Why is that?”  Beyond Henry’s opaque character, everything in this film is over attached, pedantic and like Henry’s pupils, in-your-face.   A film with big ideas but excruciating execution, “Detachment” is not so much drama but diatribe.