The movie delivered on the book’s strengths – original plot, interesting characters – as well as its weakness – a frustratingly unsatisfying ending. It’s hard to know how someone who hadn’t read the book would have been affected by the plot twists and turns; for us, we watched and mentally checked off how Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, et al., matched up with the memory of our reading experience. The long movie time went by quickly.
A thoroughly unpleasant movie experience. After our friend Jeremy Shamos gets knocked out, we are left with five highly neurotic characters who have zero appeal among them. Director Inarritu heightens the unpleasantness with a distracting continuous-tracking camera shot. What’s funny is how reviewers complained that the theater-critic character was unrealistic, when the entire movie was unrealistic.
Atmosphere, characters and great acting – what more could you want? A plot that makes sense? Nah, just keep us guessing and move it along, a la Lehane’s earlier Shutter Island. (I mean, why would a punk keep wearing a broken watch?) Tom Hardy’s near-autistic bartender was astonishing: you could read the blankness behind his eyes. John Ortiz was just as good at showing the cop’s intelligence and James Gandolfini fell in between, smarter than the average, but not smart enough. And when you need to personify malevolent violence, it’s nice that we now have Chechens. But mostly we were on edge the whole dark movie, which is a good night out.
What was fascinating was trying to figure out how the filmmakers got their footage of Adam Winfield with his psychiatrist, his defense lawyer, his parents. Perhaps someone decided when he got arrested that his best hope of justice was to film everything. Getting such cooperation from codefendant Morlock, after he was sentenced to 24 years detention, was also noteworthy. The film itself, however, could as easily have been reduced to a 20 Minutes segment.
Tedious in the extreme, even when seen on a transocean airflight. The opening montage of actual Vermeer paintings made everything that followed pale in comparison. An analogy might be watching someone without much personality dissecting a Penn & Teller magic trick for 90 minutes, as opposed to watching the trick itself.
A good-spirited hoot of a movie. Lots of character-based laugh-out-loud moments and fun ’80s music amid all the whizzing around. It came across not so much as a Star Wars parody as a Star Wars reductio ad absurdum, with a raccoon in place of R2-D2 and a tree for 3CPO.
A totally engrossing spy thriller from John LeCarre’s novel put us right back in the world of Homeland, The Honorable Wpoman and Chinatown, all of which we watched on home TV last week. Washed-out cinematography put us in the grey underworld of Hamburg, and Philip Seymour Hoffman dominated the screen like a beached whale. The acting was perfect and all the women beautiful, and the story held together better than everything else we’ve tried to puzzle together recently. But what resonated most was the unhappy ending, in which the greater powers frustrated Hoffman’s work and planning, leaving us with an empty screen and the inevitable thought: “Forget it, Jake – it’s Chinatown.”
There are worse ways to spend a Thursday afternoon than watching Keira Knightley morph from nice-looking to irresistible – it’s in the eyes (not the teeth) – and listening to decent music – more like Once than Kinky Boots – although I can’t say the same for the Mark Ruffalo character. The story itself ranged from cliche to fantasy – the way Ruffalo was able to drive and park his car, you’d think he lived in Zanesville, Ohio, not New York City – but, like the music, there was nothing horribly offensive. I do acknowledge the originality of the closing credits, which were not only the briefest I’ve seen in years but also unspooled while the film’s main plotline was still running.
A mess of a movie, somewhat salvaged by an extraordinary performance by Chadwick Boseman. A bunch of disconnected scenes add up, dramatically, to nothing. The scenes of James Brown’s youth, weakly reminiscent of the much better Ray, explain little, although one is rather surprised that as a youth he had no rhythm and couldn’t carry a tune. You want to root for the hero, but it’s hard when, as in Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic, he has so many troubling personal characteristics. And then there is the Dan Aykroyd problem: trained on SNL he can create a character but he can’t act. In short, nothing in the film is terribly satisfying, including the flashback editing, designed to hide the dramatic deficiencies, except for Boseman’s electrifying impersonation of Mr. Dynamite, the hardest-working man in show business (also not evident). He was stellar in 42 and Oscar-nomination-worthy here, for his acting, his dancing, and even his hairstyles.
A charming passage through the growing-up years of one Mason Evans; our own youths may have been different, but we recognized the situations, with lots of nods and knowing smiles. Richard Linklater’s technique – filming the same actors over a 12-year period – gets all the attention, deservedly – but one shouldn’t overlook the performance of Patricia Arquette, the single mom who makes bad choices in men but holds her family together. The talkie nature is reminiscent of the Linklater’s series with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, but it’s astonishing how much better this movie was than his latest, Before Midnight.
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