The Adjustment Bureau – 5

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The ridiculous – no, silly – plot concept, that an “adustment bureau” monitors and controls human fates – by opening doors to a different dimension but having to run on foot to catch a bus – is not saved by a central romance between the normally likeable but here personality-free Matt Damon, who seems to have added the pounds Natalie Portman lost for The Black Swan, and Emily Blunt, who is also deprived of all background surrounding her character (why was she crashing a wedding? why were security men chasing her?). For all I could figure out, Inception may have been just as absurd, but it was so fast-paced you didn’t have time to think about it. Here, there was nothing but time, and stupid hats from 1958.

Barney’s Version – 3

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“Unpleasant,” “absurd,” “pointless” are the descriptors that come to mind when reacting to this purported comedy, with “insufferable” not far behind. A little Paul Giamatti can be interesting, although I’m tiring of even that, but a whole movie of him smoking cigars, drinking and behaving badly is hard to take. Then there is the question, why would three women – two with looks, one with money – marry him? He supposedly turns into a heartwarming figure at the end, thanks to Alzheimer’s Disease, but by then it is way too late.
While I am on the subject of smoking, have I noted in these pages that every movie I have seen in the last two years, not counting children’s films and a few rare exceptions, has shown a character smoking. In more than a few, such as Barney’s Version, it is hardly a plot point; it is instead a major character crutch. I wonder if some actors could convey “troubled” without a cigarette in their hand? Of course, some will offer the excuse that they are “setting the scene” in the 1950s or before, when smoking was much more prevalent. But even then, many people did not smoke, and more often than not the exact same movie could be made without anyone lighting up. Were the protestors from 20 years ago, like Andy Tobias, rebuffed in their efforts to get Hollywood to go smokeless, or did they just get tired and give up?

Another Year – 7.5

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Sometimes, it seems, not much happens in a year: we grow tomatoes, have a barbecue party, lose a friend from work – oh, and our son gets engaged. Not much there for a movie, it would seem, but Mike Leigh’s ensemble actors make the mundane sufficiently dramatic without, for the most part, histrionics. The exception here was the manic performance of Leslie Manville as their divorced friend, looking for love in all the wrong places. She was hard to take, but she propelled the story, from the hopefulness of spring to the desolation of winter. Another year.

Biutiful – 7

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Most of the movie was Javier Bardem’s face, which expressed a range of emotions, almost all melancholy. The backdrop was the Europe of 2009’s Gomorrah, this time in Spain instead of Italy, with sweatshops of Chinese illegals, Senegali street merchants, and cops on the take or on the make. A fair amount of explanation was left out, whether from insufficient translation or excessive editing I don’t know, which may have contributed to the ambivalence I felt about Bardem’s character: intense as it was, I was not sorry to see him pass away.

Just Go With It – 8

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Depth aside, everything you could want in a night at the movies: humor, romance, cleverness, cute kids, gorgeous women, Jennifer Aniston. This was only my second Adam Sandler movie, but both featured a gentle kindspiritedness, if such a word exists, that let me relax and enjoy the gags, many of which were quite original. Most memorable was my favorite sheep joke of all time. But the great pleasure was watching Jennifer Aniston – funny, beautiful and made to seem accessible: America’s sweetheart, indeed. Nary a moment passed without producing a smile, if not an outright laugh; and when Jennifer and Adam lay down in their separate beds and realized they were in love, it was truly touching.

Zambezi – 1

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Two second-rate TV ‘specials’ covering the upper and lower halves of the river, but nothing distinguished one part of the river from another, or this river from any other. Shots of animals often had no connection to the river, in any case, and were nothing we didn’t see in better films 20 years ago. A pointless, repetitive, uninformative nature documentary.

Troubadours – 1

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This was such an annoying film I’d give it a negative score if I could. Different rock eras were conflated and confused, and no legitimate story line emerged. The filmmaker took his access to the James Taylor/Carole King Reunion Tour and purported to base the story of the Troubadour nightclub in L.A. on it, but he wound up making a movie about Taylor and King. Greater talents like Elton John, Jackson Browne and the Eagles were reduced to subservient cameos, and telling a story of “singer-songwriters” without Bob Dylan is as misguided as basing a movie about the L.A. scene on a mildly boring singer from Massachusetts.

Nostalgia for Light – 3

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If there was a connection between Chilean astronomers searching out celestial bodies and Chilean widows digging nearby in the Atacama Desert for bones of the “disappeared,” I slept through it, one story being told as slowly and undramatically as the other. The widows’ quest struck me as particularly pointless, but that may just be me.

The Still Moment – 5.5

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This is the kiond of film a film festival is for: totally uncommercial, produced on a used shoestring, aimed at a mini-market – but made with such singleness of purpose that its message comes through pure and clear (unlike Nostalgia, Zambezi and Troubadours, below). The message: surfing is about oneness with nature, with commitment and abandonment producing, if lucky, “the still moment.” The medium: scratchy, backlit interviews with surf pioneers, filmed in washout that matched the vintage ’60s clips of the surf world. Someone in the audience called it “Zen,” and it was.

Face to Face – 7.5

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 A dream cast of diverse individuals, who came alive in turn with each rationalizing monologue. Although se in an alternate resolution proceeding, rather than a jury room, the program’s description of “an Australian 12 Angry Men” rang true. Our perception of the characters developed and changed as we learned more about them, and the act of senseless violence that brought them all together became both more comprehensible and less important as the story wore on. The one drawback: each character’s role was so neatly developed and coherently explained, and things dovetailed so well in only 90 minutes that the movie’s origin in a stage play was a bit transparent; and while a live performance causes us to suspend disbelief, a movie requires rather more realism to be convincing. Still, there were very funny moments, producing the most laughs of the week for me.