Archive for year: 2010

     A showcase, if not vanity project, for Patricia Clarkson, the movie stands or falls on how you view her character’s actions. We’re handicapped by not knowing much about where she comes from and what her husband is like, until it is too late. But existing in a kind of vacuum doesn’t excuse her blithe ignorance of her surroundings – walking into a men-only coffee shop, walking down the Cairo streets showing cleavage, hopping onto a bus to Gaza without guidance or help. I didn’t see Siddiq Ali’s lure as lover (but the women I was with did). So without a compelling romance or an understandable central character, all that was left was a formulaic travelogue, in which each scene was too obviously designed to show off a Cairo tourist attraction – mosque, felucca, souq, pyramids, etc. I’m only surprised they didn’t go to the Cairo Museum to see King Tut.

Are foreign films more “realistic” because a) they stick to more realistic plots – e.g., no gratuitous car-chase scenes; or b) because they use actors I’ve never seen before? If Matt Damon had played the young prison guard and Bruce Willis the tough-guy prisoner, would I have reacted as I did to Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right? Instead, I had no doubt that everyone in this Spanish flick, from the scrungiest prisoner to the federal negotiator, was exactly whom they were portraying. Beyond that, the setup was brilliant: the day before he is to start working, Juan Oliver is caught in a prison riot. To avoid certain death, he pretends to be a new prisoner and because of his quick wit and courage becomes an adviser to Malamadre, the head thug, in negotiations with the authorities. You can see his mind working as he weighs the consequences of every word and action, and it is the finest of lines he walks. But everyone on both sides of this standoff is faced with excruciating life-or-death decisions, and most often with two masters to serve. Nothing turns out as expected, but we don’t feel cheated. We feel we have witnessed a scintillating story, expertly played.

An attempt at mind-bending with convoluted plot and visual pyrotechnics, Inception winds up a silly movie that makes no sense on any of its purported four levels. While that is not unusual in Holllywood films today and could be somewhat forgiven if the acting were enjoyable, Christopher Nolan’s movie also suffers from horrid miscasting and bad performances all around. Leonardo DiCaprio, indistinguishable from his role in Shutter Island remains a mysterious movie star to me: he poses rather than acts and conveys no depth in the only character that even purports to be a character. The others are unengaging cardboard cutouts. How did the foreign Marian Cotillard get to be Cobb’s wife? How did Ellen Page, who seems to have wandered in from some different Hollywood universe, get to be a spatial-design genius? Is there supposed to be chemistry between her and one of the male leads? Michael Caine gets to be Michael Caine. Etc. The dialogue, instead of developing personalities or engendering emotions, is strictly used to explain the plot’s alternate universe, and it sounds more like an instructional manual than real people talking. And for action scenes, Nolan falls back on my pet peeve of action movies: dozens of bad guys, all professional killers, spray machine gun fire at our heroes and hit no one, while the good guys, who are chemists, businessmen, architects and visionaries, use pistols and rifles and never seem to miss. And does it bother anyone else that half the time the Japanese character is called “Say-toe” and the other half “Sigh-toe”?

A pitch-perfect sendup of the music business, school of Spinal Tap. Numerous laugh-out-loud scenes mixed with man-love, gross sex, and nebbishy boy-girl love – the Judd Apatow formula that I’m a sucker for. Sean Combs was a revelation – give that man an Oscar! – while Russell Brand and Jonah Hill were brilliant. (How did Jonah Hill become the leading man of the moment?) Only the excess of a crockery fight in Las Vegas marred my enjoyment.