..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Orphan, The Ugly Truth, The Answer Man, Shrink, Katyn
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Orphan (Two Stars)
U. S.; Jaume Collet-Serra, 2009
     
Orphan is a shrieker that tries to have a soul, but just winds up with another batch of frozen, bloody dead bodies sliced and diced to order. It’s a horror movie about an outwardly smiling but inwardly sinister adopted little girl who wreaks havoc in an affluent family with a tragic past -- and the moviemakers try to graft the dark mood and surly styles of the family shockers The Stepfather and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle onto the evil-little-girl plot of The Bad Seed.
      
But though Orphan boasts some strong acting by the entire cast, especially Vera Farmiga and (more erratically) Peter Sarsgaard as the troubled parents Kate and John Coleman (she‘s suspicious; he’s susceptible) and adorable little Aryana Engineer as good little girl Max -- as well as an incredible young villainess turn by Isabelle Fuhrman as bad little Esther, the orphan from hell, and a genuine blood-chilling shockeroo surprise toward the end, I didn’t like it much.
       
The scenario, by scriptwriter David Leslie Johnson and Alex Mace, is fairly predictable, until the writer and director pull their terrific toward-the-end twist; then disappointingly, it gets predictable again. As we watch, in supposed paranoid, paralyzed fright, Little Orphan Esther is plucked from the adoption lists by skittish Kate and obtuse John, after a traumatic Coleman accident, loss and bloody nightmare sequence. But Esther soon proves cold consolation. Beneath her Angel face, she’s manipulative, sneaky, deceptive and murderous: a more sophisticated, continental  and even seductive version of “Bad Seed’s” killer-tot Patty McCormack.

As Max and older brother Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) discover more and more that’s dangerously awry about Esther, and as Kate investigates her by Internet and John fatuously denies everything (like a right wing TV commentator trying to rationalize Iraq or the crash), things get more and more out of hand, until all Last House on the Left  hell breaks loose in the last act.
    
It’s a classy movie in some ways (the roster of producers includes both Joel Silver and Leonardo  DiCaprio), with better actors and acting than we usually get in shows like this. But for most of its length, director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax) gives it an ugly, creepy look that doesn’t feel right, as if we’d gotten somehow trapped in the bad little girl’s head instead of her feisty but fearful mom’s. I also found the credulous John, as played by the usually very reliable and dependably smart Sarsgaard, to be a shocking ignoramus, at least about Esther. (Margo Martindale plays a more believably duped counselor.)
      
It’s hard to over-praise Fuhrman. She has an incredibly hard assignment, and brings it off almost spotlessly well. But I couldn’t help feeling the movie was exploiting her a little. If they’d really wound us up tight in their gory story, I wouldn’t have felt that. 
      
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The Ugly Truth (Two Stars)
U.S.; Robert Luketic, 2009
     
This slick but obvious -- and somewhat dopey -- romantic comedy about the love/hate antics of an uptight Sacramento TV producer (Katherine Heigl) and her unabashedly macho star romance advice TV guy (Gerard Butler), who together combine for an unlikely hit show called, natch, The Ugly Truth,  proves once again that the Golden Age of the screwball comedy -- and even the heyday of Woody Allen and his imitators -- seems behind us. It may be too easy, in the age of Apatow and Farrelly, to just crack a dirty joke and pretend you’re Preston Sturges. And not every dirty joke is funny.
       
Can’t anyone writer a clever, witty sex comedy any more? (No, I‘m not counting Apatow and his gang -- the balls-out bunch who gave Heigl her break with Knocked Up.) In any case,  Heigl’s stiff, self-absorbed, politically correct Abby Richter, a blonde with complexes, and Gerard Butler’s let-it-all-hang-out slobbo charmer Mike Chadway, a sexist with attitude, aren’t very believable, either individually or as a couple. And they’re not very funny either -- though it’s not the actors’ faults. Both of them, to paraphrase Allen in Play It Again, Sam, try to keep up a level of charm that could bring on a heart attack.
        
What’s wrong? Well, almost everything. The movie tries to get us to believe that Heigl, a stunning blonde even in her early severe exec outfits, besides making lots of moolah, has trouble attracting guys. Give me a break. Hell, even with a poor personality, Heigl would probably have trouble batting suitors away. (It might have been easier to portray picky Abby as getting lots of unwelcome attention but having trouble keeping the right guy.)
    
It’s hard to buy Butler as both a brutally truthful throwback type at first and then also the helpful advisor he becomes with Abby. It’s like watching Blimp Rushbomb morphing into Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Shouldn’t Mike have more of a motive for helping Abby out? Like, initially, trying to get rid of her? In broad overall strokes, these characters don’t make much sense, and they don‘t play right in the smaller nuances and details either. They’re just a couple of sex fantasies, written as standard movie star type-roles. By the end, when they’re screaming at each other in a hot air balloon, you’ve had more than enough of them and their writers.
    
Just as Heigl and Butler are no Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant here, Eric Winter, as Abby’s love object next door Colin, is no Ralph Bellamy.  And the writers -- Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith -- are no Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur or Charles Lederer. (Why not go all the way: director Robert Luketic ain’t no Howard Hawks.) If His Girl Friday is the quintessential American workplace romantic comedy, The Ugly Truth is one more overdressed wanna-be workplace romcom rolling right off the sex-romp cliché program. It‘s the equivalent of a fashion plate TV news presenter prattling off a teleprompter -- exactly the kind of vacuous phony-baloney that supposedly straight-talking Mike is supposed to be blasting away.
    
The movie also lacks funny, or even very interesting, secondary characters, which used to be one of the treasures of good or great American movie romantic comedy writing. I thought that Legally Blonde -- also a collaboration between Lutz, Smith and Luketic -- was a pretty cute little movie. But, after watching this, I began to wonder if Reese Witherspoon didn’t blind me to the not-so-ugly truth.  

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The Answer Man (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; John Hindman, 2009
     
In The Answer Man, Jeff Daniels, with a fine measure of actor’s skill, subtlety and sardonic self-deprecation, plays Arlen Farber, an oddball author who really won the lottery: Arlen, years ago, wrote a cult best-seller called "God and Me,“ and then vanished into reclusive sub-J. D. Salinger anonymity in Philadelphia, the city of Eraserhead, here masquerading as Woody‘s "Manhattan.” People keep coming into his life though, including a pushy addict bookseller (Lou Taylor Pucci) and fetching chiropractor Elizabeth (Lauren Graham), who cures his chronic back problems, after Arlen literally crawls in on his knees, in the same way Marilyn Monroe cured JFK’s.
    
But, since Farber’s still devoted fans still regard him as a personal pipeline to God Himself, comedic problems await the bashful scribe, along with more romance, a book sale and more bad backs.
       
This is almost a good movie, and it may be only my temperament that keeps me a bit outside its charm radius. Certainly, it’s been well written and directed (by newcomer John Hindman) and very well acted, especially by Daniels. But it needs something more, maybe a stronger comic antagonist, to rile Farber up. No, I‘m not thinking of Lucifer. Or even of Kevin Spacey. (See below.)

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Shrink (One-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Jonas Pate, 2009
     
Kevin Spacey (see above) plays an emotionally ragged, scruffy and mega-tormented Beverly Hills psychiatrist named Henry Carter, a role that seems almost too right for him. But the movie isn’t right, even though Robin Williams shows up as one of  Henry’s a-list clients, a sexaholic star actor named Jack. (Coppola allusion or Nicholson allusion?) Good as Spacey and Williams always are, maybe this would have been better with Spacey, in his goombah mode, playing Jack and Williams doing one of his imporov shprtizes, inserted throughout the movie at odd intervals. (This is a movie with a lot of odd intervals.)
   
But then again, why stick Kingsley -- or Spacey or Williams -- in another sub-par, sub-bad and sub-beautiful “Inside Hollywood” flick, whatever Short Cuts or Crash ensemble pretensions it might have?

Carter's client list also includes Dallas Roberts as a wired-up agent, Saffron Burrows as a mellowing bombshell, and assorted other Hollywood stereotypes, some of whom look as if they couldn’t get past the Bret Easton Ellis club bouncer, and none of whom have been handed any surprises by screenwriter Thomas Moffett. There‘s even a scene by the Hollywood sign, which deserves better.  

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Katyn (Four Stars)
Poland; Andrzej Wajda, 2007
    
War is Hell, or at least Purgatory, and few filmmakers have shown that more clearly than the 83-year-old Polish master, Andrzej Wajda. Wajda is a sometime cinematic genius who is one of the last members left of  the great generation that included Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and Satyajit Ray, and also perhaps the very best of all Polish filmmakers, living or dead. (That’s not counting émigré Roman Polanski. Or maybe it is counting Polanski, who sometimes lacks Wajda’s depth or humanity, and who, after all, started out as one of Wajda‘s young ‘50s actors.)
     
Wajda’s first three features, the “World War Two" trilogy of A Generation (1954) Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), are all WW2 classics. So is his 1990 Korczak. And so is his most recent film, the Oscar nominee Katyn -- one of this year’s American release foreign movie masterpieces.
   
Katyn is a deeply human, woundingly personal story. In 1940, 15,000 Polish Army officers were systematically and brutally massacred -- by either the Nazis (who were initially blamed) or the Russians (a dicier choice, especially after Poland went Communist after the war). One of the victims was Wajda’s father, and two of the characters in this kaleidoscopic look at the massacre, the characters caught up in it,  and its aftermath, are based on Wajda’s parents: missing Polish officer Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski) and his desperate wife Anna (Maja Ostaszewska).
     
There are many other characters also in the movie, a complex ensemble piece with a truly superb cast, and we are plunged into their problems, one by one, before Wajda finally shows the massacre and identifies the true culprits. (It’s not springing any spoilers to finger the Soviets, something the Polish audience who made Katyn a smash hit, already largely knew.)
     
When the flashback to the slaughter finally comes, after we’ve already seen the long development of  pain, shame and darkness left in its wake, it’s so murderously effective that it surpasses the alleged shocks of almost every horror movie in the Orphan vein. It’s also a stronger anti-war war movie than The Hurt Locker, though perhaps it’s unfair to compare them. Katyn is a both a portrayal of national tragedy and a testament of  burning clarity and intensity. It’s also a front rank late work by one of the greatest of all 20th and 21st century filmmakers, the master Andrzej Wajda. (In Polish, with English subtitles.)  

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
July 23, 2009

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