“Kindness. That can kill you here.” — Ed Harris as Mister Smith in The Way Back
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Reversible Errors (TV 2004) Strong cast, weak movie. To be fair, it’s not really a movie … it’s a TV miniseries. Because it was made for TV, Reversible Errors is full of “pause for commercial break” setups and an obvious break point in the middle where “continued next week” must have been inserted. Probably also because it was originally made for TV, where it was shown in two two-hour-long episodes, the story is unnecessarily dragged out, with key plot points repeated again and again. The characters, even the ones played by the principle stars, William Macy and Tom Selleck, are cold and remote. The only sympathetic character is the lowlife criminal Squirrel, played by Glenn Plummer. I gotta tell ya … it’s hard to sit through a three-hour snoozer when you don’t like any of the characters. It’s even harder when scenes fade to black every five minutes and your conditioned response is to hit the fast forward to zip through commercials that are no longer there! If I didn’t know better … witness the excellent Jesse Stone TV movies (also with Tom Selleck) … I’d swear off made-for-TV movies altogether. |
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A Prophet (2009) I shouldn’t review this movie, because I didn’t finish watching it. I admit it. I’m squeamish. I started thinking about watching something else when the main character, the prisoner Malik, began practicing hiding a double-edged razor blade in his mouth. When he popped the blade out with his tongue, blood running down his chin, and used it to slice open another prisoner’s spurting jugular, I was already reaching for the remote, having decided I had no interest in watching a grim, hopeless, violent movie about lowlife murdering scum in prison. Just then I heard we’d killed Osama bin Laden and had all the excuse I needed to turn off the DVR and put on MSNBC. Seriously, you wanna watch a movie that glorifies brutish violence, you go right ahead. Me, I’ll settle for the real thing, and Osama’s head on a pike. |
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Black Swan (2010) Wow, two in a row I couldn’t watch all the way through. I’m sure Black Swan is great, but I couldn’t handle the physically self-destructive aspects of Nina Sayer’s madness. The part I watched was largely about self-mutilation (and pornographically so). I had to leave the room less than an hour into the movie, so it’s not fair for me to review Black Swan at all. But I will say that Natalie Portman’s portrayal of the pushed-beyond-the-edge ballerina is totally convincing … I knew it was only a movie, but I couldn’t go on watching it. My daughter told me later I missed all the sex. Oh, well. |
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Sniper: Reloaded (2011) A sequel, Sniper: Reloaded jumps over material viewers of the first film would know but that I didn’t, having never seen the original. But it’s not hard to follow. A young marine is adept at shooting people who are shooting at him, hitting everything he sees first time, every time. He also rescues some children and gets the girl. Along the way we learn that he is the son of the sniper in the first movie, and apparently sniper skills are hereditary. He’s really quite a guy! Sniper: Reloaded is reminiscent of those early filmed-in-the-Philippines Chuck Norris movies … it has the same cheap feel. |
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The Way Back (2010) Seven prisoners escape a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. Three cross into India after walking 4,000 miles. The Way Back is an epically-scaled survival story, all the more impressive in that it’s based on actual events. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s a hell of a story and a hell of a trek, and the sweeping photography of Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and the Himalayas is breathtaking. The story is gussied up for a mass audience — on the shores of Lake Baikal the escaping prisoners are joined by a teenaged girl, and you can see her heartbreaking death coming, literally, a thousand miles away — but the story keeps a certain essential starkness, and I couldn’t help wondering how the movie would have turned out under the directorship of Werner Herzog. He probably would have made the escapees’ ordeal even more bleak (and left out the girl) and maybe The Way Back would have been stronger for it, but it is a damn good movie just as it is. You’ll certainly want to be thankful for your pampered life after watching it. I was. |
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The Invasion (2007) This is the second remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1956 sci-fi classic. One problem with remakes is the audience knows what’s going to happen, so in this case the writers change things around a little by adding a kid … but we still know. I always get a kick out of the pod people (by the way, the writers also dispense with the pods in this version, but they add lots of puke so it sort of evens out). The pod people in this remake are just great, a cross between country club Republicans, Stepford Wives, and Mormons. That, unfortunately, is the only good thing I can say about The Invasion, which is otherwise predictable, cheesy, and low-budget. Of the three movies, The Invasion comes in last. My favorite version? Actually that would be the 1978 remake, which shared the title Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the original, with Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams. The original is well worth watching too. This one? Not so much. |
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Catfish (2010) Taken at face value, Catfish is an amateur documentary made by three young guys from New York City. It’s about a long-distance Facebook relationship one of the three falls into, his dawning recognition that something isn’t right, and an impulse trip to Michigan to find out what’s really going on. It’s fascinating, tense, and unsettling, and as other reviewers have observed, it’s a great companion piece to The Social Network. On reflection, the elements in the documentary come together too easily, too perfectly, too cinematically, and I join the chorus of reviewers who believe Catfish is a scripted movie based on a clever screenplay. Oh, not that there aren’t plenty of people using social media to create phony histories, personalities, even entire lives; not that Catfish won’t blow you away … just that it’s probably not the innocent low-budget documentary it appears to be. Well, whatever the hell it really is, it’s great, and you should watch it. |
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part I (2010) A lot of people are getting rich piggybacking on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise. One gets the feeling this movie is, in large part, a machine to hoover spare change out of fans’ pockets. But at the same time, Harry Potter fans are well served by this next-to-last movie’s faithfulness to the book. My problem with this one (and the one before it, and the one to come later) is that I no longer remember much of what happened, but the producers assume I do. The movie doesn’t really explain what the big deal with the horcruxes is, and by now I’ve totally forgotten why Dumbledore died or who Sirius Whats-His-Face is. All I know is the movie is about good and evil, and it’s quite dark. Harry, Hermione, and Ron are older and the sexual tension is at a high pitch. Voldemort and his minions are fantastically bad. Draco Malfoy is beginning to realize he’s on the wrong team. Dobby the Elf dies (aw). Everyone else is pretty much a cardboard cutout. Intense, dark, fan-pleasing, and ultimately very very commercial … that sums up my reaction. Of course I will watch Part II when it comes out, how could I not? But the great pleasure I felt watching the first two or three Harry Potter movies is long gone, replaced now by mere curiosity over how they’re going to play the kids’ adulthood, and who’s going to lose his or her virginity, and with whom. |
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Secretariat (2010) I’m pretty sure Disney Studios set out here to capitalize on the popularity of 2009’s The Blind Side: replace the football player with a horse and voilà: instant money-maker. Secretariat is a Disney production all the way, from the money-grubbing ads and previews at the beginning to the making-it-all-look-easy script, to the fresh & clean family-values hubby and children to the scenes of minimal and easily-resolved conflict, to the friendly black guy who takes care of the horse while apparently having no life of his own, to the invisible and odorless road apples. There’s not a hint of life as you and I know it in Secretariat. It’s so Disney, I’m scratching my head trying to figure out where the P in the PG rating came from … oh, right, I remember now … the scene where the pregnant mare lays down on the hay and two seconds later there’s little Secretariat prancing around, all evidence of the birthing process magically vanished, and Secretariat himself not even moist from just having popped out of the womb. That one reference to actual life is what probably earned this movie its PG rating. Sorry, Disney, adding an all-Jesus-all-the-time musical soundtrack can’t make up for that! |
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Mother (2009) Like another Korean movie I recently reviewed, The Chaser, this too is a murder mystery with strong characters, suspense, interesting twists, and a combination of great cinematography and story-telling power. Seriously, Korean films are first rate, at least the ones I’ve seen. As with an older Korean film by the same director, The Host, Mother has an off-center feel to it. Yes, it’s about a brutal murder and a mother and son caught in a seemingly hopeless fix, but at the same time the director has a wry sense of humor, particularly evident in the opening and closing scenes when the mother, played by Hye-ja Kim, does this loopy, charming dance. And I know I harp on this a lot, but how refreshing it is to see a tight, suspenseful murder mystery with no Hollywood-style exploding cars or exchanges of gunfire. Great stuff. |