Movie Reviews

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a majestic epic, fascinating in its virtue and extraordinary in its execution. It’s lifted from a 40-page short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and transformed into a nearly 3-hour, multi-decade spanning epic by Oscar winner Eric Roth (Forrest Gump). It’s personified in equal parts by director David Fincher and his favorite celluloid subject Brad Pitt, each trampolining from a career of films trendy and cool (Se7en and Fight Club, collaboratively) into something grander, more classical, and more Oscar worthy. It’s a film about life and death, love and understanding, pulled through the prism of a story about a man who aged backwards. It’s an adventure, and in it’s heart, a crowd pleaser. It’s Mom’s comfort food, with a 5 star presentation.

Directed by Ron Howard and adapted from his own Tony-winning play by Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon is a brilliantly tempered account of the drama surrounding the post-Watergate interviews between our deposed president and a British/Australian talk show host. Historically reminiscent and insightful, it often comes off as a History Channel program, with the same detail-labored pacing and dawdle. But what appears at first to be simple and slow is in actuality an expertly choreographed showdown, a fight night featuring an aged champ and the snappy newcomer challenging his crown. Frost/Nixon fits the mold of every great boxing flick, complete with trainers, training, rounds, corners, bobs, weaves and uppercuts. Only the weapons are not fists, but wits and words. It’s a battle of wills, a series of jibs and jabs exchanged along the way to a powerful K.O. In the end, it’s as much a sports movie as The Wrestler.

Every so often a film comes around that is so un-inspirational in its quality, so middlingly good, that it is difficult to find an argument either for or against, and therefore troubling to review because we don’t really feel one way or another about them.  Generally a critic will send these films off with a shrug.  I myself have probably labeled them as films that are “just there.”  But when said film is a buzz-generating, award-gathering film like Milk, “just there” becomes the heart of the argument.
  Milk is the winner of at least eighteen 2008 film awards, and is the source of numerous Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director (Gus Van Sant), Actor (Sean Penn, as title character Harvey Milk), Supporting Actor (Josh Brolin, as Harvey’s closeted, struggling political opponent) and Original Screenplay (the true story was arranged for the screen by Dustin Lance Black).  Is it good?  Sure.  But is it great?  It’s obvious by now that I don’t think so.

Seldom does a Hollywood heavyweight depart the scene with less pomp and more circumstance than did Paul Newman last week when he succumbed to cancer at age 83. The blue-eyed heart-throb of the 50s and 60s was an instant hit and became a mega star who extended a smoldering rebel personna career throughout a half century of memorable film performances. Starring vehicles such as "Hud", "Cool Hand Luke", "The Verdict", "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "Somebody Up There Likes Me", "The Hustler", "Sweet Bird of Youth" and "Long Hot Summer" will delight movie goers for decades to come. His elderly turn as a mob kingpin in 2002's "Road to Perdition" was a fitting bow to a storied career that ranked him alongside film legends John Wayne and James Stewart. And, like them, he was able to disassociate his spectacular career from his private life.

Watching a new Clint Eastwood movie is like listening to an old record for the first time – you expect it to be great, partly because of the pedigree, and partly because it’s withstood the test of time. And indeed what you get is a classically mastered artistic output, laced with grandeur and an aura of importance. But being “classic” unfortunately does not necessarily translate into “great.” Sure, there will be good qualities – the artist/art is classic for a reason. It certainly isn’t guaranteed to live up to your expectations.
Such is the case with Eastwood’s latest Oscar bid, Changeling. Graced with a seasoned, studied hand and emotionally arresting story material, Changeling is sensational in concept but middling in execution. It LOOKS great, of course, and it presents itself as nothing short of masterful. And anyone not made of stone will surely fall victim to the emotional pits and falls of a mother battling police corruption and oppression in a quest for the safe return of her kidnapped son.

Pride and Glory isn’t really anything to be proud of and definitely isn’t glorious. Like last year’s We Own the Night, it’s a NYC police drama about a family full of cops dirtying in the muck tracked in by the familial black sheep. Only whereas Night emphasized an organic narrative sense, Pride emphasizes fractured grit. Whereas Night danced along on sleek camerawork and directorial knowhow, Pride is clumsy and amateurish. And whereas Night was flawed but occasionally gripping, Pride is really just flawed.
But of course it is. It’s suffered numerous set backs, release date changes and festival booings. It stars a Box Office-allergic Colin Farrell rocking a poorly masked Irish accent, while playing a New York native (I like this guy, I really do…but he’s pretty much a curse at this point). And the final draft was rewritten by Joe Carnahan (Smokin’ Aces), a writer/director who seems just about as overrated as anybody can be.

George W. Bush is a lot of things to a lot of people, but rarely is he viewed as a celebrity. In actuality, he may be more that than anything else…or at least that’s the theory posited by director Oliver Stone and the folks behind W. Whereas previous White House based flicks from Stone center on particular events or crises (Watergate, The Bay of Pigs), W. only loosely weaves in an out of our President’s decision to invade Iraq and instead largely concentrates on his long, bumpy road to being the man that would make such a decision. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and the film covers what it can, but essentially adds up to nothing more than well-packaged, well-presented cliff notes.
But that isn’t really very surprising. What’s really surprising is that the film generally comes across with little to no political agenda. Bush is portrayed as both dimwitted and intelligent, sympathetic and spoiled. He’s never really presented as a competent president, but he’s also never seen as anything really horrible – at worst, he’s a man (perhaps too easily) led astray. All in all, however, Stone looks to portray an evenly unbiased and insightful picture.

Body of Lies

As far as next wave geo-politcal thrillers go, Body of Lies is standard theatrical entertainment. It traverses territories in Jordan and Iraq, wields over-zealous government official and stereotypical evil Islams, and sails through the twists and turns of a structural roller coaster ride. All the while it fails to challenge anything within you – like so many of its brethren, this film is passably entertaining but generically forgettable.
Directed by Ridley Scott and written by The Departed’s foul mouthed scribe William Monahan, Body of Lies aims for deception as an art form but settles for trickery as a cliché. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Special Agent Ferris, a dedicated field op who’s lost his wife and sense of normalcy to a life abroad. He’s the street team for Russell Crowe’s bureaucratic Ed Hoffman, a man who treats the war on terror like fantasy football. He does the research, makes the calls, subs his players and watches the game, but he’s never REALLY a part of it. He’s involved, yet detached. And Ferris resents him for it.

The air is crisper. The mornings are darker. The leaves are cluttering the long. And as we embrace these changes as shift towards a cozier Holiday season, so to must we embrace Hollywood’s annual shift from summer fun to fall quality. Each year it never fails – the “serious” films of “artistic integrity” are backloaded to these final few months before the awards season, replacing the innocently fun and intentionally stupid with the occasionally existentially stupid. Here’s a list of buzz-gathering films to look forward to this season.
Appaloosa – Directed by Ed Harris, written by Ed Harris, and starring Ed Harris, this western revival is just screaming for an Oscar (the last Ed Harris-helmed film was the award winning Pollock). Riding sadle-by-sadle with Vigo Mortenson as law men looking to clear out tough-guy Jeremy Irons, Harris will look to clear out the Oscars as well. And as an added bonus, the movie’s supposed to be quite good.

Eagle Eye is about as implausible, circumstantial, unoriginal and unbelievable as a film comes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun. Like the last collaboration between director DJ Caruso and star Shia LaBeouf (last year’s equally questionable yet entertaining Disturbia), it’s heavily influenced by (aka borrows a lot from) previous films, this time siphoning from the likes of War Games and Enemy of the State. It tiptoes the line separating “familiar” from “derivative,” using its desire for popcorn entertainment glory like a balancing pole.
Still, there are moments in this film when none of this actually matters, when the goal of blockbuster entertainment is accomplished with such rip-roaring authority that it’s darn near impossible to drift away with thoughts of implausibility.