Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2015.3
- Scanners (1981) — 6/10
- This is a David Cronenberg movie about very special people who can control other people’s minds with their own. The movie is very much of its time—it is basically an action-adventure story of conflicting mind-control factions. The pacing is quite slow by today’s standards, but the story is pretty interesting—even if the parts involving computers are laughable. Also, about a quarter of the movie is taken up with people squinting and sweating at each other, trying to blow up each other’s minds. That all makes it sound terrible, but it’s better than that. It’s worth it if you need to round out your Cronenberg collection, but hard to recommend for non-fans.
- Melancholia (2011) — 5/10
This is a Lars von Trier movie about a family of not-very-nice people who have enough money to have a wedding on a gigantic estate in what looks like a castle. Kirsten Dunst is marrying Alexander Skarsgård. Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland are all part of the wedding party. The bride is suffering from … melancholy. The movie starts at the end, with the mysterious planet crashing into Earth—did I forget to mention the approaching planet?
Everyone moves in super-slow motion to a very sad soundtrack. It doesn’t pick up a tremendous amount of speed after that. We get to watch a bunch of rich people being dysfunctional and decadent and broken. It’s somewhat like Gatsby in this way, I suppose, but it’s still not much fun to watch. The orchestral soundtrack is ludicrously loud compared to the majority of the whispered dialogue. Perhaps this is also supposed to be jarringly suggestive of melancholia. Dunno. The timeline is disjoint and the night seems to last forever; it’s hard to tell what time it is throughout the movie. It is utterly impossible to determine whether the bride is clinically depressed or just a callous, shallow, stupid person. Banging someone other than your husband, especially on your wedding night and most especially when that someone is someone that you just met, is not a very endearing characteristic.
If nothing else, the film paints a good picture of what it must be like to have an objectively wonderful world irrevocably sullied by the miasma of depression. Sweet God, is this a boring, depressing movie, though. Mission accomplished, Mr. Von Trier. The colors are flat (as a depressive views the world), voices are dim, whispered, lifeless, the planet moves closer, suffusing everything with a flat, shadowless light, as on a cloudy day, though the sky is clear. It’s sweet relief when the planets collide and the ensuing catastrophe sweeps everything away.
Gainesburg is quite strong; Dunst isn’t, really, despite all protestations to the contrary (she won Best Actress at the Cannes film festival). I feel the reaction is more to two things: (1) she set the bar so ridiculously low in many other movies she’s been in and (2) she wasn’t shy about showing her admittedly spectacular breasts in this movie. That alone is probably enough to send male reviewers into a tizzy. There’s something almost but not quite Kubrickian about this movie, especially towards the end, with Gainesburg’s desperation echoing that of Wendy in The Shining. Not really recommended, though.
- Hugo (2011) — 7/10
- This Martin Scorsese film is an homage to cinematic and directorial legend George Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley. The movie takes place in a train station, in which Hugo lives and kind-of earns his livelihood as the keeper of the clocks. He has inherited his passion and talent for clockworks from his now-dead father, played by Jude Law. The boy Hugo (played by Asa Butterfield, of Ender’s Game) was less annoying than anticipated, as was Chloë Grace Moretz as his friend. Sacha Baron Cohen has a more-or-less straightforward role as the train-station guard, obsessed with imprisoning orphans. The boy, his father, an automaton and Méliès himself all contribute to tell the story of his (Méliès) impact on cinema, as well as that of his wife. Interesting and well-made, with learning about Méliès himself being the most interesting part. Recommended.
- Under the Skin (2013) — 8/10
- Here we go again: this is a movie starring Scarlett Johannson in which she gets well and truly naked, even going so far as to pose so in front of a mirror. And yet, it is exactly the people who would not watch a movie because of this who will enjoy her performance much more than those who would watch for more prurient reasons. She’s very good, but because she’s an actress, not because she’s naked. There is little dialogue—and what there is, is in a nearly incomprehensible Scottish brogue—much surrealism and almost no explanation or closure. It’s not a long movie and you really have to pay attention, but it’s a good film and it’s probably an important one to see, if you’re at all interested in trying something new. The soundtrack is ethereal and the characters are named “The Female”, “The Bad Man”, “The Dead Woman” and so on. As well, the long shadow of Kubrick peeks forth in this Brian Glaser film. This is the summary on IMDb: “A female drives a van through the roads and streets of Scotland seducing lonely men.” That nails the plot, in its entirety, as far as the action goes. It is utterly insufficient as far as the unspoken and hinted-at goes. Recommended.
- Watchmen (2009) — 9/10
- I’d watched this film before, but not since I’d finished reading the comics last year. The plot of the film follows the books almost slavishly. In that, it does well, even though the comics have a lot of exposition, which makes for a slower movie than we’ve perhaps come to expect from so-called “superhero” movies. The books are about the history of a troupe of self-nominated heroes from the 1930s up until the present-day of the late 1980s, when the world is threatened by nuclear conflict. In that, author Alan Moore crafted a world that only slightly diverged from reality. That is, it was close enough to be familiar and not require any explanation, but divergent enough to be fascinating. As in the comics, part-time narrator and uncompromising literalist Rorschach stole the show, unable to understand how the solution to the world’s greatest problem could be rooted in an even bigger lie. The film was a bit longer than necessary, but well-worth the ride. Recommended.
- Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) — 6/10
- Werner Herzog felt the overarching need to honor the original Nosferatu (1922) by remaking the film, almost scene for scene, but starring Klaus Kinski in the eponymous role. The pacing was quite slow and some scenes muddier or more confused, but it was still decent. If you’re a Herzog or Kinski fan (guilty as charged), you’ll need to add this one to your repertoire. Saw it in the original German.
- Ong Bak 2 (2008) — 2/10
- I don’t even know what this movie is about. It’s a lot of decent production effects to show people fighting in a jungle with knives and some primitive martial arts. Lots of sweatiness, tribes, blood and elephants. I didn’t even finish watching it. Couldn’t get into it. It shows that, now that pretty much anyone can make a pretty, technically solid movie, the pendulum might just swing back to making movies about things again. Saw it in dubbed German, but it didn’t matter. Not recommended at all—just terrible.
- The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) — 6/10
- Despite IMDb’s insistence on filing his name below all of the British fossils also in the movie, Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire fame) is the star. He is the exuberant, loquacious and fast-talking proprietor of the eponymous hotel. There is also a bunch of elderly British flotsam in the form of Judy Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Ronald Pickup and Penelope Wilton. Dench plays the same role she always plays. Smith is a good deal more racist than Mrs. Mcgonagle, and Wilkinson is gay. Nighy is the only one with any real appeal, honestly. It’s an relatively watchable flick about finding yourself in your golden years, maybe? Or how Britain ejects its unneeded generations to find themselves in a similarly abandoned India? But they’re all worth something and it’s not too late to find love? I’m not sure. The film had its moments, but it’s hard for me to recommend.
- Love is Strange (2014) — 6/10
- I expected much more of this film about a long-time New Yorker couple played by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina. They are finally allowed to marry in their state of New York, but soon after doing so, Molina is fired by the Catholic school where he teaches music (fun fact: the head priest was played by Hollis of Northern Exposure). Lithgow’s painting hardly suffices to support them, so they are forced to depend on their families until they can get back on their feet. The families are self-absorbed in a very New York kind of way and they all seem to be largely and inexplicably unhappy. The couple is split up, at least temporarily, no-one seems to be having any fun and the mood is either defeatist, drunken, melancholy or a mèlange of all three. Fun fact #2: Lithgow’s nephew is played by Ed, considerably aged from his Northern Exposure days. Marisa Tomei plays well, but her character is small-minded, horizonless, overprotective, selfish and apparently deeply unhappy. The movie was kind of a downer, when I expected something a bit more celebratory. Not recommended.
- The China Syndrome (1979) — 7/10
- This is a movie starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Wilford Brimley and Michael Douglas about the dangers of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant in California. The issues today are essentially unchanged from the late 70s: corruption and incompetence in construction, corruption in maintenance, corners cut everywhere, the inexorability of a business that generates billions for its investors. Fonda and Douglas play a reporter and her cameraman, respectively, while Lemmon plays the plant director with a conscience and Brimley plays the company man. All in all, better than expected and much better than Earthquake, another disaster movie from around the same era. Recommended.
- Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) — 5/10
- At nearly two hours, this sequel clearly lacked an editor with some steel in his or her spine. The lead trio is funny and has decent chemistry, but they’re not funny enough to carry the nearly endless repetition of the same joke: the Three Stooges-like stupidity of the three of them. Bateman is marginally smarter than the other two (like Mo Howard before him), but he also refuses to abandon them. Chris Pine plays the son of the real horrible boss, played by Christoph Waltz. Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Aniston reprise their roles from the original, as does Jamie Foxx as Motherfucker Jones. Foxx’s parts stand out, so it’s not surprising so many of his scenes were included (the car chase had its moments). Aniston is possibly even filthier than in the original, but—just like everyone else—is clearly trying too hard. Or the script was trying too hard. Cut it down by half an hour and it might be a much funnier movie. Not recommended.
- Un Prophète (2009) — 8/10
This is a French movie about a young. timid man named Malik El Djebena, sent to jail for an unspecified crime of violence against a police officer. He is of Arab descent but grew up in France. He has no friends inside or outside, neither among the Arabs nor among the French. The Corsicans approach him and give him an ultimatum: to kill a new Arab prisoner or suffer the consequences. He manages it—his first murder—and is taken up in their ranks, though not really accepted.
He slowly gains power, learning Corsican, making himself more useful, trying to make a space for himself in the criminal world. He is more-or-less honest compared to the others around him, but not an honorable man. He evinces fealty to one good friend he made in prison, with whom he goes into business while still inside.
As the deals grow, so does the threat of violence, culminating in a very risky but finally successful mob hit on a rival gang that he and his by-now cancer-ridden friend execute all on their own. The Corsicans, the French, the Africans and the Arabs are all scheming against each other, with the Prophet pushing out a place for himself. When he returns late from a furlough, he is put in solitary for 40 days—during this time, he avoids being in gen-pop for the repercussions of the hit he’d executed the day before.
Luciano’s (the Corsican don) power continues to wane as first his supporters are moved to another prison and then many are killed in the aftermath of Djebena’s hit. Finally, he is on the bench where he used to hold court, accompanied only by two other prisoners who don’t even know that this is “his” bench. The Prophet is taken in by the Arabs, who were helped considerably by the bloodletting among the Corsicans and Italians. Luciano’s time is past and the Prophet is in ascendancy.
In the end, he is released and he leaves the prison gates with his good friend’s wife and child, who he’d promised to look after and support (his friend had since died of cancer). As they walk from the prison, he is followed by several carloads of his supporters. So it ends up being a feel-good story of triumph for Djebena.
It’s a well-made, well-acted and well-written film about the criminal world of France, quite long at 155 minutes, but nonetheless worth it. The French Godfather, perhaps. Saw it in the original Arabic, French and Corsican with English subtitles. recommended.