Watchability 5. Likeability 4. Credibility 0. Even as a total fantasy, this star vehicle for Julia Roberts and Clive Owen left much to be desired. As a guessing game – when were there reactions real, when were they acting? – it wasn’t worth the effort. If you’re going to make a spy movie, bring back the Cold War at least, please.
How you feel about Revolutionary Road, either the book or the faithful movie adaptation, depends on how you react to Frank and April Wheeler, for this is really a character study. They are certainly not likeable characters, but that wouldn’t matter if they were comprehensible. And they should be equal. Unfortunately, Kate Winslet is an acting heavyweight, while Leonardo DiCaprio comes across as a half. His face is square and doesn’t fill the screen; Winslet’s is long and does. His physique is frailer than all the men around him and, unlike them, he looks silly in his ‘50s attire. And there must be some way of venting anger in between Eastwood’s teeth-gritting and Leo’s sweeping his wife’s cosmetics off her dresser. Putting this book onscreen is a tough assignment, better suited to a Japanese director, I suspect, and casting is crucial. Here, Leo and Kate just didn’t work.
Without question, the worst-acted movie of the year, and the plot warn’t much better. Other than Eastwood, the actors seemed to be reading their lines, after checking the teleprompter. Eastwood’s softening to the Hmong family next door belied his characterization, and Sue’s bold approach to him made little sense, either. On top of The Changeling, I fear that Clint’s best days are behind him.
The first hour was relentlessly depressing: Tiivii is told he has TB, is sent from his Arctic home to a big-city sanatorium, where no one speaks his language – and he makes no effort to learn French. Things perk up a bit when they locate an Inuit boy with TB who can translate, but the tugs on the heartstrings are too obviously plotted. Why anyone would want to make a movie on this subject, or spend 90 minutes in a TB sanatorium without communication beats me.
P.S. Hard to believe, as I discovered later, that this beat Amal, my favorite film of last year, for the Canadian “Oscar.”
Billed as Festival Director Roger Durling’s favorite, this Czech movie was beautifully and sensitively acted, but the simple story of a gay teacher’s coming to grips with his sexual preference undoubtedly appealed to the Durls more than me. (Why he didn’t rave about the somewhat similar Yngve surprised me.) Other than reflecting on how different cultures in different (modern) eras respond to homosexuality, I didn’t have many other thoughts as I left the theater.
The unfortunate title aside – there was no “man” in the movie and it was about so much more than loving Yngve – there was nothing I would change in this Norwegian coming-of-age story, a study, much like Juno, of that age when teenage rebellion and angst run up against real-world consequences. There was the dorky friend, the sexy girlfriend, the divorced parents, the loner bandmate, and holding it all together was the redhead Carlje, trying to live with the conflicting emotions that were tearing him up inside. The story revolved around good rock music, a real plus, and the culture was just different enough, yet totally recognizable, to add flair to the familiar story. Think Catcher in the Rye, Ebony Tower, The Graduate…I smiled from the opening scene to the end – a wonderful SBIFF experience.
Amazing film of a leopard in the wild does not, of itself, make a great movie. In fact, this was a pretty bad movie: anthropomorphism abounded and Jeremy Irons’s melodramatic narration didn’t help. But worst was the convoluted story – not very interesting to begin with, then told in flashbacks so long one forgot the point they were meant to illustrate. Ultimately, shots of leopards running up and down trees, without much context from the Okavango Delta or other wildlife, became rather boring.
I was less than enthralled throughout, partially because I was never comfortable with the premise: a troubled mother abandons her infant in the backseat of a taxi and the genial driver spends two days trying to return or find a home for the baby. Not that this couldn’t happen – although finding such a saintly and handsome driver isn’t likely – just that my mind resisted it. Nothing much happens: the movie seems content to give us an overview of modern Kabul, and the ending is neither dramatically satisfying nor realistic. And I couldn’t help but compare this to two much better films from last year, Amal and The Kite Runner.
At first I dismissed this as a Sicilian version of the Sopranos without plot, humor, recognizable characters or professional camerawork. By the end, though, I knew the people and their stories had coalesced into a bleak, violent and scary world of an Italian crime “family” that read more like a nature documentary in its realism than the fiction you wished it were. There was a subtle arc, as we started with the young boy delivering groceries, watched how he was inexorably drawn into the gang, and ended with the world of the bosses, which made the child’s play along the way, even with machine guns, seem just like that. A postscript spelled out the impact this criminal syndicate has on people around it: a 20% increase in cancer, for starters, in the areas where they dump toxic waste. This was not for the fainthearted, but it was remarkable moviemaking.
It was rather shocking to me to learn that the L.A. Times didn’t seriously undertake to impartially cover the news until 1960, when 4th-generation
Otis Chandler became publisher. Until then, it openly touted the Chandlers’ business and political interests, “inventing L.A.” in the process. This documentary was highly polished but lacking in focus: the first half was devoted to the history of L.A.; the second to the story of the Times, and the family feuding that killed the dynasty. As a primer to the L.A. backstory, however, it was a boon to this newcomer.
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