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.
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.
The fact that it struck me as unrealistic that Malcolm was able to revive a hydroelectric plant while the rest of the movie featured talking apes says how convincing was the overall illusion. The special effects were indeed special, but it was the humanity of Caesar and his cohort, as well as the performance of Jason Clarke and Keri Russell as the humans that carried the film. The story was predictable, but seeing it performed by apes gave it enough novelty; and the one philosophical thought – can one bad ape, like one bad human, ruin things for everybody? – gave it a modicum of depth. My major criticism: there seemed to be an infinite number of apes, no matter how many got shot and despite the finite resources of nature.
A young adult movie not recommended for anyone over 14 or under 12. Shailene Woodley is commendable as a teenage cancer sufferer, but her love interest is pretty insufferable and Sam Trammell as her father turns in the worst acting performance of the year. Laura Dern is good, as usual, although it’s hard to reconcile her scattery emotions with her daughter’s calm. Then again, there is hardly a scene that rings with any truth, capped by Hazel’s lugging her respirator up a ladder in the Anne Frank house. And I won’t even get into whatever Willem Dafoe is doing at Gus’s funeral. This all must have worked better in the book. If you’re 13.
It must be a half-hour into the movie before we get what we came for – Sherry, Baby – and all the music before that, including a screechy Silhouettes, is pretty execrable. That’s only one of several confounding choices by director Clint Eastwood, making this movie much more than a singalong, although that’s where the main pleasure is found. Christopher Walken’s mob boss and the Bob Crewe character are great fun, and Tommy DeVito is a convincing problem. It’s also a great touch to have Bobby from the Sopranos running the barber shop in the opening scene, establishing the Jersey milieu. There are problems: the failed safe heist is absurd, and the early 1950s seem to run well into the 1960s. But all is forgiven as the boys run through the catalogue (ex-Marlena) and the Slumdog Millionaire-style finale kept us happily in our seats well into the credits. [smoking – lots]
Absolutely gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, reminiscent of Kertesz or Brassai, brought out the purity of Ida’s faith. By implicit contrast, the drugs/sex/rock’n’roll and politics of the world outside the convent was unsatisfying, if not pointless, although filmmaker Pawlikowski seemed to be speaking just for Ida.
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