Archive for category: Reviews

A very fun caper movie, with an all-star David Russell-led cast: Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence. The plot alternated moments of excruciating tension and hilarity, the latter mostly coming from Lawrence. Bale was unrecognizable as the guy from Out of the Furnace, and Adams conveyed a vivid intelligence and a spectrum of emotions while somehow managing to stay in her dress. Somehow – maybe because it was ultimately a comedy – the movie lacked the depth, the gravitas, to make it seem much more than fun – but hey, what’s wrong with that?

I caught up with two movies that had escaped me when I flew to and from New York after Thanksgiving. Both were fine airplane movies, largely because they had subjects of inherent interest to me: fracking and rock’n’roll. The former featured star turns by Matt Damon and Frances McDormand, excellent as always, and nice support from John Krasinski and Rosemarie Dewitt. The story, however, played like a first script by actor-writers, with a neat twist at the end that unfortunately didn’t jibe with everything that came before. That Damon and Krasinski were the writers and producers as well as stars of the film led me to think this little flaw had been glossed over. Unlike fracking, the film was cute but not very deep. Not Fade Away mined the New Jersey milieu of the Sopranos, with James Gandolfini in his familiar paterfamilias role. The story was well-worn, but no less enjoyable for that, of high school friends forming a rock band in the basement, then falling apart over girls, creative differences and, well, just growing up. In the end, this is just another high school story, but there’s something in every high school story that resonates, plus this had music selected and composed by Steven Van Zandt, so it all rang pretty true.

Swann in Love is a minutely detailed account of a love affair, focusing entirely on Swann’s feelings, day by day, every moment of longing, pleasure, and above all, jealousy. Nothing really happens; there is no climax or denouement; it is just a portrait, of Swann in love, and how that love affects and changes him. Substitute Adele for Swann, and you pretty much have what happens in the inexplicably titled Blue. Not surprisingly, the movie, like Proust, is French – and the affair is homosexual. The acting, by the teenaged Adele Exarchopoulos, is every bit as remarkable as the novel’s prose. Adele is totally convincing as the young, unformed adolescent, coming to grips with her sexual feelings. It is, along with Cate Blanchett’s, the performance of the year. Lea Seydoux, in the Odette de Crecy role, is appropriately magnetic and inscrutable. The movie is not everyone’s cup of tea – nor is Proust – but it is a remarkable achievement.

A feeling of weightlessness, enhanced by my 3-D glasses, set in with George and Sandra’s first roll in space and remained the identifyingly unique feature of this otherwise generally weightless survival story. Actually, the less said about the story itself, the better. Somehow, Sandra Bullock’s character changes from a somewhat incompetent space traveler who crashed the simulator in training every time and needs George Clooney’s calm voice to tell her which way is up (granted, a bit tricky in space), to a one-woman marvel who, on an upset stomach, calmly navigates Russian and Chinese space stations and singlehandedly manages a descent to Earth (I assume it is Earth, based on the movie’s title, not the landscape) without any help from Houston or prior experience. I was ready for, and would have preferred, a more ambiguous ending: let Sandra find her resolve, with the Clooney apparition’s help, and push the button in the re-entry capsule. Let the viewer decide whether she makes it, or not. “Ground control to Major Tom…”