by Dean | Jan 9, 2012 | General
On Little Children (2007):
Kate Winslet is commanding but never hammy. All the anxiety, ambivalence, femininity, and intelligence of the character of Sarah in this Todd Field movie Winslet supplies. She’s the best thing in it. An adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel (which I’ve never read), Little Children doesn’t make the grade, though. Winslet’s suburban wife becomes an adulterer in this almost dated tale of unhappy suburban sinners, and what ensues, I’m sorry to say, is a forced, uneasy denouement in addition to an uneven tone. The film is inferior to the same director’s flawed but worthwhile In the Bedroom (2001). I disagree with critic Dana Stevens that Perrotta, who co-wrote the screenplay, “is a natural match” for Field.
Field has an artistic eye, after all–he uses depth of field as though he invented it–and his scene creation is better than the script. No doubt LC was not the novel he should have filmed.
Cover of Little Children
by Dean | Jan 2, 2012 | General
Hollywood is woefully indifferent to the scripts it puts together for its action flicks (those scoundrels!), and so the one created for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) doesn’t exactly tell a high-quality story. But it’s such a wonderfully rich B-feature I was delighted to have laid eyes on it.
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his International Monetary Fund team–scratch that! that’s not what IMF stands for here–go after a mad scientist with a remake-the-world scheme. There are plenty of tight, technically savvy action scenes (Ethan’s vertical car ride to the bottom of a confined area, his effort to climb a stunning skyscraper, Jane Carter’s heated battle with a female assassin). Also, the film sort of channels pictures of the past: 2001: A Space Odyssey gadgets and “zero gravity” floating emerge.* And in Mumbai, where the story finally ends up, Tom Cruise becomes an everyman James Bond and Paula Patton, who plays Agent Jane Carter, becomes an exemplary Bond movie beauty-cum-heroine.
Irresistible stuff.
Directed by Brad Bird.
*It’s not really zero gravity, which I why I used the term in quotation marks.
Image via Wikipedia
by Dean | Dec 27, 2011 | General
The Undefeated, Stephen K. Bannon’s 2011 documentary about Sarah Palin, begins with footage of familiar people speaking about Palin in words ranging from insulting to disgusting.
Sarah Palin is not Hitler; she is not a monster. The loutish haters treat her as though she were. Bannon’s film is wholly in favor of her, using for voiceover parts of the Going Rogue audiobook and featuring people who used to work with Palin as they talk about her accomplishments. It’s also a film about Alaska and the oil industry, which became the esteemed governor’s opponent. (It’s not so much about the John McCain presidential campaign.)
The Undefeated is propaganda, though. It should have been more intelligently searching. Bannon still could have shown he was on Palin’s side had he focused on any sensible questions that have been raised about her decisions, her governance, etc. For example, was her governance in Alaska always conservative—probably not–and if not, why? Such a thing hardly would have hurt her standing as a right-winger. Palin’s respect for conservative values has long been evident.
Bannon’s film is technically well-made, but a more incisive pro-Sarah doc would have been a stronger doc.
Image via Wikipedia
by Dean | Dec 20, 2011 | General
I never saw the original Footloose movie from 1984, but the story told in Footloose the Remake (2011) is pure rubbish. It rattles along indecorously and, in spite of everything, it’s dated. Yet filmmaker Craig Brewer concentrates on it as carefully as he does the dancing. Big mistake.
Even so, at least the dancing doesn’t get shortchanged. The music does. Both “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” and a forceful White Stripes song get lost in the narrative balderdash. Footloose should have been more of a musical and less of a drama.
The movie stars Kenny Wormald (Ren) and Julianne Hough (Ariel). Ren is a teenaged know-it-all, Ariel knows nothing except how to have fun. I wish to have no truck with either of them.
by Dean | Dec 16, 2011 | General
In The House of Mirth (2001), a Terrence Davies film, Gillian Anderson offers no real surprises as Lily Bart. But she does offer skill, having an almost childlike quality and the capacity to move us. Eric Stoltz, as Laurence Seldon, does nothing either particularly right or particularly wrong, but Laura Linney, as Bertha Dorset, is true and wonderfully self-confident. She and Anderson are the best actors here. Add to this the spot-on costumes and production design and you have . . . well, not quite the Edith Wharton novel from which this commendable movie was adapted. It makes me ambivalent in a way the great novel never could.
This is the one about the woman who, without being shallow, wants to marry a man with money, but does not do so. Instead she suffers and ultimately dies, doing so as a tragic heroine more than as a victim–something Terrence Davies fails to understand. Thus he has Lily Bart not so much living as simply going downhill. Moreover, the Lily of the novel rightly appreciates the finer things in life, certainly including material things, but the film never points this up. It knows Miss Bart isn’t shallow but that’s about it. She might as well be a thoroughgoing stock heroine.
Yes, Anderson tries to rescue Lily but she can’t–can’t rescue her from what Davies has done. Though the film has its virtues, it does not understand the novel’s virtues.
Cover of The House of Mirth
by Dean | Dec 7, 2011 | General
China’s Zhang Yimou is a great film director, but House of Flying Daggers (2004) is no Ju Dou or To Live or Not One Less. These films are gripping successes, whereas the ’04 effort is a mildly serious entertainment with the absurd action of the cheap 1980s Hong Kong fare.
It’s ingeniously made, visually spellbinding, but Zhang should not have gone the Crouching Tiger route. Purveyed is a sagging story about the female member of a rebel group, the House of Flying Daggers, and the guardian captain who is in fact a government agent. A flatly superficial period piece, it belongs to a genre which isn’t big enough for Zhang. Lovely women, particularly Ziyi Zhang, are too Amazon-like, as physically superhuman as the men, and we wonder how it can be that both men and women here are even destructible. Their martial arts are god-like, you see. The climax is as nicely, darkly tragic as the climaxes of many other Zhang films, but it hardly prevents Daggers from being a bold nonentity.
House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu) (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)
