Babel | Blood Diamond | Bobby | The Departed | The Devil Wears Prada | Flags of Our Fathers | The Illusionist | An Inconvenient Truth | Jesus Camp | Jonestown | Letters From Iwo Jima | Little Children | Marie Antoinette | Prairie Home Companion | The Queen | Volver | World Trade Center | United 93
Babel, the third collaboration of director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, partakes of the same structure of overlapping lives and fates as their earlier Amores Perros and 21 Grams, and as such, has taken a substantial shellacking by crickets after its New York and Los Angeles openings last weekend. “We’ve seen this before!” goes the cry. Not, “What do you see this time?”
This is the worst of Ed Zwick's films because it is utterly unfocused, trying to shove virtually every White Man In Africa stereotype in the movie book into 2 hours, 23 minutes. If you want a pure experience, you should probably dump out here. I won't be doing big spoilers, but the structure may spoil it enough for you...
We Didn't Just Hate Bobby
to the tune of We Didn't Start The Fire, by Billy JoelLindsay Lohan, Heather Graham, Young Stoners, Nick Cannon
Lobby Chess, Joy Bryant, Guy Who Played Frodo
Bill H. Macy, has affairs, overacting, underwears
Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, And EmilioThe Departed is a departure from the muck of Gangs of New York and the moroseness of The Aviator, a welcome return to vulgar, vivid, visceral elegance for the 63-year-old director, and his serene, bloody confidence on the contemporary mean streets of Boston matches the exuberance he’s wrought in contemporary Manhattan settings. It’s the first picture of his I’ve fully admired since Goodfellas, a while back in the last century.
I find myself calling this film No Sex & The City, with sex as a symbol not only for a lack of sex, but for a lack of any edge whatsoever. Basically, it seems that screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and the development team at Fox decided to make The Princess Diaries III with Vogue as a backdrop, adding the Devil from The Devil Wears Prada as the Wicked Bitch of The East.
If you are looking for a movie about the hypocrisy (or honorable slight of hand, if you prefer) of the government in using the image of the flag raising in the pursuit of financing an ongoing and growingly unpopular war, you will be sadly disappointed. We get the surface of it, from paper mache recreations of the flag raising to stuffy cocktails parties to overripe Times Square celebrations.
An Inconvenient Truth
MCN Review: The marketing has done an excellent job of making it look like it's a real movie. But even Michael Moore's weakest effort had more umph than this thing.
DVD Review: In addition to building a solid case for the dangers posed by global warming and unchecked industrial development, David Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth helped prove that Al Gore wasn't a robot, after all.
The Illusionist
The Illusionist is a long-gestating project that Bob Yari ended up backing with Michael London as one of the three producers. Edward Norton plays the humorless Illusionist. Paul Giamatti plays the not-as-funny-as-Giamatti-was-clearly-ready-to-make-him police chief who is under the thumb of the scenery licking, bulgy-eyed Rufus Sewell. And what brings them all together is the lovely Jessica Biel, whose creamy skin and bee-sting lips offset her modern woman vibe... along with some very... slow... dialogue... readings...
Jesus Camp
MCN Review: You really couldn't ask for a better title for a movie than Jesus Camp. And to make the film that launchs of A&E's new Indie Films business, they couldn't have picked a much better filmmaker than Boys From Baraka's Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady.
Movie City Indie Review: Jesus Camp is terrifying in its portrayal of sadistic things which are deeply oppressive, suffocating in its study of hostility to youth and knowledge, and I hope nothing else the rest of this year on screen, in the press, or in real life makes me feel as hopeless and helpless about the future of America.
Jonestown: The Life & Death of the People's Temple
What is fascinating about this film, besides the basic story, is how Jones, like Hitler, Castro, and others before him (and since) offered "his people" 80% something wonderful, making their lives better and reaching for something that almost anyone would have to applaud out of context. And then there is that 20%... crazy... dictatorial... murderous... hateful. It is easy to wonder from the outside, "How could they follow that maniac?" This film does a great job of exploring that issue.
To say that this film is one of the great sophomore efforts of all time (by director/co-writer Todd Field) is no overstatement. And to write that Tom Perrotta is fortunate that this only the second film made from one of his books, since seven years after Election this is one of the few films worthy of being a successor to that unexpected achievement, would be fair, but too easy.
To say that this film is one of the great sophomore efforts of all time (by director/co-writer Todd Field) is no overstatement. And to write that Tom Perrotta is fortunate that this only the second film made from one of his books, since seven years after Election this is one of the few films worthy of being a successor to that unexpected achievement, would be fair, but too easy.
Of this brightly colored world, Sofia Coppola says, "I mean, it's not a documentary or a history lesson, I wanted it to be impressionistic and as close to what it might have felt like to be there at that time. When I saw ‘Amadeus’ and they were just speaking in their regular accents, they felt like real people to me, as opposed to someone living in some other era that I couldn't relate to."
Set within the framework of the final performance of a doomed radio variety show, not unlike the real A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor’s surprisingly unpretentious screenplay uses a murder mystery to link the disparate acts, performers and backstage staff to the show’s demise, a fate tantamount to the draining of Lake Wobegon.
The Queen is Frears' latest and it is so simple and so complex and so polished to just the right degree of shine that he makes something so few can do look effortless.
If United 93 was, in fact, either clear in its telling or unflinching in its style, it might have been the film that would rip the still unhealed scab off 9/11, part of the healing process, but also a painful moment requiring examination.
Almodovar works outside of the box and each person should be allowed to discover the turns in that map for themselves. But I will say this… the film is emotional, but it is also fun, wild, busty (Mr. Cruz's push-up is on par with Ms. Roberts' in Erin Brockovich), mournful, loving, and loaded with the brio of life.
These tears were never jerked out by the movie. They fell of their own volition, in scene after scene after scene. World Trade Center is not the Feel Good Movie of the Year, but it is the Feel Something Movie of the Year (at least the year so far).
