Wilmington On Movies - October 16, 2008

W.
plus reviews of The Secret Life of Bees, Max Payne, Sex Drive, Filth and Wisdom and A Girl Cut in Two
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

W. (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone is one the most ambitious, accomplished and gutsy of all active American filmmakers; he never makes an uninteresting movie. But, in W., an in exhaustive, engrossing and irreverent bio-drama on our likable but often ludicrous current president, George W. Bush, Stone hasn't been ambitious or exhaustive enough.

It certainly takes guts to make such an irreverent and ultra-critical look at a sitting U.S. president and his inner circle, and to rush it into release right before the election of W‘s successor. And it‘s a good job. Working with his Wall Street co-writer Stanley Weiser, Stone is able to develop a coherent view of the Texas rich-kid party guy turned over-reaching, God-fearing prexy, and make it stick.

Well-written, well-cast and directed with Stone’s usual boldness and rich detail, the movie has top-notch performances by Josh Brolin as the prodigal Bush son (as good as Will Ferrell, but not as funny), James Cromwell as his folksy/patrician dad George H. W. Bush, Elizabeth Banks as his perky wife Laura Bush, Toby Jones as a sneaky little Karl Rove, Bruce McGill as bedeviled CIA director George Tenet, and Jeffrey Wright as a beleaguered Colin Powell. And there’s an absolutely astonishing job by Richard Dreyfuss as Vice President Dick Cheney, a performance so spot-on perfect in both externals and interior life that Dreyfuss almost begins to seem more like Cheney than Cheney himself. (Maybe he could fill out the guy’s term.)

But this isn’t the movie Stone could have made about the Doofus-in-chief, and I think that may be because it’s too short, even at 131 minutes, to encompass all the goofy contradictions and crazy twists of Bush’s story and character. Essentially this is a grand, loony portrayal of American moneyed mediocrity and who it can rise disastrously to the top. Maybe, like John Frankenheimer‘s excellent George Wallace, Stone should have made it for TV, done it as a mini-series at four or even six hours long. Then it could have covered all the bases this movie, understandably, misses. And gotten a huge audience as well, as did Recount, about a major Bush trick that this movie neglects.

W. also, of course, couldn’t dramatize the Bush era’s most recent debacle, the stock market fall. But you can’t catch everything. It does manage to prove very well that Bush was both a horrible president, but also, as has often been claimed, a great guy to have a beer with. I guess W. missed his calling. But Dreyfuss hasn’t. His Dick Cheney will haunt your dreams.

The Secret Life of Bees (Two Stars)
U. S.; Gina Prince-Blythewood

A would-be To Kill a Mockingbird, this good-hearted but tepid adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd‘s Civil Rights-era bestseller, by the writer-director of Love and Basketball, traps an excellent cast -- Dakota Fanning as a young runaway who thinks she shot her mother long ago, Jennifer Hudson as her plucky companion, Paul Bettany as her hot-tempered dad, and Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo (best in the movie) as the Boatwright sisters, who make honey and harbor runaways -- in a well-meaning but sluggish preachment that lacks the rapture, adventure and honeyed sensuality that would have made this story work better.

Max Payne (One-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; John Moore

Mark Wahlberg deserves better than Max Payne, and so do we. This dour but visually gaudy neo-noir thriller, adapted from a popular video game, stars Wahlberg as vengeful, heart-broken, killing-machine cop Max, whom we see wandering through a very dark and snowy New York City, battling the bizarre corporate drug-crime conspiracy that may have killed his wife, child and ex-partner-cop.

All the while, Max keeps running into mythical winged monsters, bad cops, frame-ups, an Internal Affairs investigation run by Ludacris (as slick cop Jim Bravura), bad drugs, bad weather, bad dialogue, bad living conditions, a good-bad heroine (Mila Kunis), a good (or maybe bad-good) ex-boss named B.B. (played by Beau Bridges) -- and an occasional good angel.

The movie, in case you were wondering, is pretty bad itself, though the film noir design (by Daniel T. Dorrance) and urban-nightmare cinematography (by Jonathan Sela) are good. Wahlberg might have been okay too -- he was sensational as another hardcase cop in The Departed -- if he had half a chance. The script won’t let him. The story is hackneyed, shallow and ultra-violent, the dialogue is unspeakable (or to be more precise, not worth speaking), the plot is sometimes dull and the structure often incoherent (we don‘t get the crucial revenge-spurring murder scene until more than halfway through), the snow is incessant and the actors -- except notably for genial, ambivalent Bridges -- look as if they're in a state of hopeless confusion, burning anger or deep depression.

I don’t blame them. Once again, Max Payne demonstrates the danger of adapting big-budget movies from video games, especially if you also hire neophyte writers to do your script. In this case, the culprit/victim grinding out the bloody shtick is Beau Thorne, a debuting young scribe from Texas -- who said that he had to simplify the original video game plot for his scenario, and who here almost does for screenwriting what fellow Texan George W. Bush did for the presidency. (Happily, their politics clearly aren’t the same.)

I love neo-noir, but Moore almost drowns us in gloom here. Adding to the torpor is the sometimes funereal pace of the non-action scenes. Not a good strategy. When you have dialogue this empty and clichéd, it’s best not to linger over it. The winged monsters of movie ineptitude will swoop down and get their claws in you soon enough.

Sex Drive (One-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Sean Anders

A raunchy, gross-out road comedy about sex crazed nerds and nervous virgins on the loose -- which then tries to make amends for its dumb-but-calculated plot and trashy gags with a heart-warming climax in the Judd Apatow vein -- Sex Drive is pretty bad, but a little better than you might imagine, thanks to a lively cast and an excellent cinematographer (Tim Orr, of David Gordon Green’s movies). On the other hand, if your expectations for this one are low, you’re right.

In this brainlessly cheerful leer-fest, college-bound geek Ian (Josh Zuckerman) steals his macho-man homophobic brother’s (James Marsden) vintage Pontiac GTO for a Chicago-to-Knoxville ride with his pals, glib seducer Lance (Clarke Duke) and (Ian’s real crush) stalwart Felicia (Amanda Crew). The three endure endless foul-ups, so Ian can hook up with the hot Internet babe Ms. Tasty (Katrina Bowden). Why? How? Ms. Tasty has declared herself ready to de-virginize desperate Ian -- who has been posing on the net as a hot-talking football stud.

Yarggh! Ptooey! The actors are not bad (especially Duke, and Seth Green as an Amish hipster) and the cheap laughs keep coming. But director-writer Sean Anders aims so low that, when he hits his targets or his prime target audience (indiscriminate teens and twenty-somethings looking to get lucky on a date), it’s like watching a boxer beat up a blind man. And, given the level of the humor -- which includes masturbation, fellatio fantasies, road kill jokes, Amish orgies and Internet sex gab, and ends with a peek-a-boo shot at an old man‘s scrotum -- I’m surprised that no blind men were hired here and beaten up. (They do stomp a small animal.)

This shameless geeks-and-babes farce may give you a chuckle. But, unless you're desperate to be de-virginized yourself, and willing to settle for a fellatio fantasy, you‘ll probably feel bad in the morning.

Filth and Wisdom (One Star)
U.S.-U.K.; Madonna

Madonna’s film directorial debut is no cause for celebration. Allegedly influenced (according to the material girl filmmaker) by Godard, Pasolini, Fellini and Visconti -- it looks more like something inspired by Curly, Larry, Moe and Shemp -- in drag, on an off-day. This alleged movie, directed and written by Madonna in collaboration with Dan Cadan, one of the crew on her and Guy Ritchie‘s disastrous Swept Away remake, is about three young London flatmates: Eugene Hutz as A. K., a cynical Ukrainian musician who pays the rent as an S&M guy; Holly Weston as Holly, a baby-doll-gorgeous blonde ballet student who pays her end as a stripper/pole dancer (despite her dance training, she can never quite get the knack of the pole) and Vicky McClure as Juliette, a crusader for African relief working as assistant to a horny Indian pharmacist who has a crush on her and likes to sniff her coat.

Also sniffing around is the gifted Richard E. Grant, in what has to be the nadir of his career as the melancholy blind, gay poet Professor Flynn, who has given up writing (something the screenwriters might consider too) and lives for the fleeting moments when A. K. wanders down, steals one of his books and tells him what a great poet he is. Unless Grant was once cast as the hindquarters of a giant bunny in a Manchester Easter pageant, I refuse to believe he has ever played a worse part.

Hutz‘s A. K. acts as our guide into this world of sin, stripping and sniffing, explaining to us in close-up the movie‘s intriguing philosophy: that filth and wisdom are two sides of the same coin, and that one must wallow in filth to attain wisdom. Hmmmm. Doesn’t he mean that stupidity and wisdom are two sides of the coin? Or that cleanliness is next to Godardliness? Or that filth I win, tails you lose? At any rate, there’s one thing in Filth and Wisdom that works right and I don’t mean Holly‘s pole. The music is terrific, including Hutz’s contributions as front man for the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. Madonna should remember rock the next time out and maybe forget Satyricon and Salo.

A Girl Cut in Two (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
France, Claude Chabrol

A Girl Cut in Two is an excellent Chabrol thriller about a tortured triangle -- among Ludivine Sagnier as a ravishing TV hostess, Francis Berleand as her selfish, famous-novelist lover and Benoit Magimel as an even more selfish -- and ultimately, murderous -- spoiled-rotten rich boy. (Caroline Sihol as his mother plays an even worse person.) The story, from a Chabrol-Cecile Maistre script, is reminiscent of the notorious Thaw-White-Evelyn Nesbit murder case that Richard Fleischer portrayed so memorably in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (with Joan Collins, Ray Milland and Farley Granger). But the French cast is even better.

This is a noir gem: a socially and psychologically lucid, riveting Chabrol portrait of bourgeois evil, with a chilling climax. I sometimes wish Chabrol would occasionally use a different composer than son Mathieu. But it’s still wonderful to have the old New Wave giant -- and maker of Le Boucher, Violette, L’Enfer and La Ceremonie -- around, still active, still wickedly brilliant, still knocking them dead. (In French, with English subtitles.)

MW on DVD
Co-Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Four Stars)
U. S.; Steven Spielberg, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull whirls us off once again to that delicious, zingy, over-the-top world of recycled Saturday Afternoon serials and pop culture that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg opened up back in 1981, with Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a high-stakes blockbuster movie reunion that really works -- though not necessarily in the ways we’d expect.

In the movie, director Spielberg, story-writer/executive producer Lucas and star Harrison Ford bring back their brawny brainchild Indiana Jones after 19 years -- bomber jacket, fedora, bullwhip and wisecracks in place -- for a sequel that puts Indy, in his 50s (and Ford at 65), in 1957 -- the era of blacklists, black leather jackets, bomb shelters and black-and-white TV. Then they send him off on a fantastic quest that seems to derive from the old movie serials, ’50s sci-fi and Carl Barks’ great ‘50s Uncle Scrooge comic novels about Duck family expeditions to Atlantis, El Dorado or the Seven Cities of Cibola.

El Dorado and the city of gold are the legends mined this time by Lucas and Spielberg -- and by writer David Koepp, who has provided the series’ top script since Lawrence Kasdan’s nifty Raiders blueprint. The result is a smashing movie sequel blockbuster that begins with a bang, reproduces most of the wonder, excitement and sass of the original, idles for a while, and then becomes something truly weird and wonderful. More important, it’s a damned good movie, one capable of pleasing both the mass and the cognoscenti -- or at least that part of the cognoscenti that hasn’t decided to go terminally smart-ass.

I wouldn’t claim massive originality for Koepp’s script then or later, but, truth to tell, none of the Jones series has been very original, except stylistically. That‘s the whole point of the series, which is a conscious throwback -- intended to let Spielberg and Lucas’ own generation feel the pleasures and frissons of youth recaptured, while seducing later (or earlier) generations as well. Crystal Skull follows that James Bondian sizzler start with the usual format: the introduction of the quest, the action set-pieces, the comic or expository interludes and the final explosive grand finale. In this case, though, what’s new is old, and very pleasantly so.

Crystal Skull may have an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style jawbreaker of a title, but it’s no boring parade of clichés, as some have suggested; clichés of a kind have been the series’ lifeblood from the start, but the four Jones movies, whatever flaws they may have, are never boring. Crystal Skull is different from the first three movies in the series -- but how could it possibly not be? The other three were sharp, hard-edged, lean, fast and spectacular. This one is understandably dreamier, softer and more vulnerable.

Ford is 19 years older and so is everybody else: Spielberg, Lucas, love interest Karen Allen, and the rest of the veterans. It’s an older man‘s movie, in fact, a bit like Rio Bravo crossed with The Bengal Tiger and The Ten Commandments-- and the presence of Shia LaBeouf, who plays a kind of cocky Ricky Nelson type to Ford‘s John Wayne, only enhances the sense of mortality.

Spielberg is a better director here than when he made Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucas a better producer and Ford a better actor -- and the hold-over crew, including ace editor Michael Kahn, and ace composer John Williams, are more expert as well. By a heavy margin, Crystal Skull has the most talented cast ever to grace an Indiana Jones movie - and they all seem to having a grand old time, especially Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone and John Hurt.

Most of all I liked the continuous, near-symphonic flow of the action and cliffhangers (and I mean cliffhangers) that make up this movie’s incredible last act, the wild mix of horror-movie shockeroos and epic tongue-in-cheek adventure: the ant’s eye shots of inexorable insect invasions, the three successive and amazing waterfall drops, the endearingly ridiculous swordfight on the racing-side-by-side truck and jeep, and the A.I.-like science fiction poetics of the saucer scene. And, after all that, I liked the deliberately Norman Rockwell-ish last scene and the final old-man-wins hat gag.

Is it the last Indy? I hope not. This one deserves another. Meanwhile, let’s hear it for movie whip-snappers and whipper-snappers alike -- but especially for the old guys. Not to get too schmaltzy, but “over the hill” can also be the place where you find the next adventure. Long may they rove and ramble, dig those dreams, dodge those snakes, go over those waterfalls and drive those flabbergasting trucks.

Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days (Four stars)
Romania; Cristian Mungiu, 2007 (IFC)

Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which won both the Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is a new Romanian film of relentless narrative power and nerve-racking impact. Set in Communist Romania in 1987, in a world that (in important ways) mostly no longer exists, it’s an ultra-realistic drama about young people, living near the end of the Nicolai Ceausescu dictatorship -- two college woman trying to arrange an illegal abortion, in a country where terminating pregnancies after four months is considered murder. (Hence the title.) The movie, terrifically well written and acted (especially by Laura Vasiliu as the thoughtless unwed mother, Anamaria Marinca as her hard-pressed friend and Lad Ivanovo as the abortionist), also introduces a brilliant new director-writer, Cristian Mungiu, and reintroduces the highly gifted cinematographer, Oleg Mutu, who shot Cristi Puiu‘s devastating Romanian gem of two years ago, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

Mungiu and Mutu make Four Weeks in a rigorous and beautifully controlled style: each scene shot in a single take, the camera catching all the details with an almost ruthless voyeurism. As we watch this piercing, anxious story unfold, we can feel the cold and breathe the air of that ‘80s dictatorship, with its barren streets, empty halls and wary, beaten-down people. One of 2007’s best films, precursor perhaps -- along with Lazarescu, Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest and others -- of a Romanian New Wave that may prove as rich and memorable as the Polish, Czech, Yugoslavian and Hungarian waves that swept through the old eastern Communist bloc states before it. Within this spellbinding slice of life, Mungiu and Mutu suggest a whole angst-ridden, repressed, tyrannized society, a hell that was here only yesterday. (In Romanian, with English subtitles.) Extras: Featurette.

Mongol (Three and a Half Stars)
Russia; Sergei Bodrov, 2008

Based on the early life of Genghis Khan, this is a really fascinating historical saga: a movie that deftly combines epic sweep and adventure with psychological depth and dramatic intensity. Shot on location on the Mongolian plains -- a wilderness where vast stretches of empty-looking land are traversed occasionally by riders and horses, and where forests and rivers lie under a seemingly limitless sky -- Bodrov’s movie has the gusty appeal of one of the visually majestic “adult” Westerns, like Red River, The Searchers or Little Big Man, or a great Japanese historical samurai epic like Seven Samurai.

A large part of what grips you is the way the movie upsets our expectations, taking a real-life figure almost universally regarded in the West as a villain -- the Mongolian general-conqueror Genghis Khan -- and presenting him instead as a genuine hero and also a mystery: a man of nearly unfathomable density and extraordinary achievements. Some, though not all, of what he shows, comes from the record (such as it is) and from the myths it inspired. So what we get here is a mixture of a Beowulf-like saga with something like The Life of Napoleon -- told from Beowulf’s or Napoleon’s point of view.

Bodrov is immeasurably aided by his star: Tadanobu Asano, the Japanese actor whom he’s chosen to play Khan, or “Temudgin,” the name by which he’s known in youth. Asano (also in Takesho Kitano’s Zatoichi) is an actor of remarkable gravity and quietude, but Bodrov shows us Temudgin, not in a string of glorious victories, but during a period when he knew mostly defeat and subjugation himself: from 1172, when he was nine, through the years of his exile and separation from his promised wife Borte (Khulan Chuluun) to his first great solo victory against the combined forces of his virulent enemy Targutai (Amadu Mamadakov) and his one-time blood-brother, Jamukha (Sun Hong Lei).

A powerful triangle emerges. Jamukha loves Temudgin, whom he wants to be his second-in-command. And Temudgin loves Borte, whom he first chose as his bride when he was nine and she ten, shortly before his father Esugei’s murder -- and who has remained faithful to him, as best she could, even when the two are hundreds of miles apart. All three actors play it to the hilt --especially the Chinese star Sun (a magnetic, smiling Jean Reno type). Yet it is crucial that Temudgin, until the last heart-stirring battle scene, never has the upper hand. It as if we were watching our Napoleon-Beowulf also as the Count of Monte Cristo, with much of the biography taking place in the awful prison, the Chateau d’If.

Bodrov tells his epic wonderfully well. This is Mongolia as it was or might have been in the twelfth century, but it’s also the classic fantasy-world of the epic, the Western, the historical adventure. It‘s a strange land in which we are both witnesses and “strangers here ourselves,” and in which we watch, enrapt, another people, lives drenched with emotion, and a hero whose shadow looms large on the turbulent battlegrounds and dangerous plains. (In Mongolian, with English subtitles.)

PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC

Short Cuts (Four Stars)
U.S.; Robert Altman, 1993 (Criterion)

Robert Altman‘s masterpiece: a masterly interweaving of a number of Raymond Carver stories, reset in Southern California, with a all-star cast that includes Tim Robbins, Robert Downey, Jr., Julianne Moore, Frances McDormand, Madeleine Stowe, Annie Ross and Jack Lemmon. I won’t say more, because I wrote the essay for Criterion‘s package. But this is the ensemble king at his best, and one of his own personal favorites.

PICK OF THE WEEK: BOX SETS

Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection (Four Stars)
U.S.; Alfred Hitchcock, (MGM)

Hitch never dies.