Archive for category: Reviews

Award-worthy performances by, in order, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams are backed by a supporting cast reminiscent of Mystic River or any of the growing Lehane/Affleck oeuvre. Unfortunately, for a boxing movie, the plot telegraphs its every punch. We know what’s coming; our only interest is in seeing how it gets there. Matt Wahlberg is admirable, but as boxer Micky Ward he is less credible than Hilary Swank. Bale is the real story, but I wonder if it’s better to be calculating his Oscar chances after the film than while we’re watching it.

While inclined going in to treat this as a throwaway film, Anne Hathaway’s bare-it-all performance was so compelling that I was mesmerized right up to the cliche of an ending. Jake Gyllenhaal’s low-key charm was also easy on the eyes and mind, seducing the viewer along with every woman onscreen. The corporate shenanigans verged on Up in the Air or even The Office, but representing a real company, Pfizer, gave the proceedings a patina of credibility. What kept this, though, from being a standard Julie Roberts/Hugh Grant rom-com, and belied the publicity poster, was the fundamental question it posed: should two people commit to a relationship when one of them has a debilitating physical condition that will only get worse.

The only interest for me was the cross-cultural view of the life of the Chinese factory worker, and its evidence of why they are making our blue jeans for us. The family story went nowhere in particular, and the contrast between city and country life was unconvincing: if life in the country was so much better, why did everyone leave? There was plenty here for a college student to write a paper about, but not much for the casual moviegoer to enjoy.

Unfortunatley overhyped, this expose of the 2008 financial crisis told us nothing we hadn’t already learned from Michael Lewis’s more insightful The Big Short. It wasted its skewers on academics, who were hardly major culprits, and the talking heads who provided the story line were mainly people we’d never heard of, whose legitimacy was never documented. All the major players “declined to be interviewed,” which eliminated any balance to the story and allowed filmmaker Charles Ferguson to cast aspersions, even where they were not warranted. The photography of Iceland and the Manhattan skyline was stunning, and Matt Damon’s narration was impeccable, but Inconvenient Truth or even Food, Inc. this was not.

On my personal scorecard of movies with the most gratuitous scenes of characters smoking, there is a new leader: Nowhere Boy. Scarcely a scene goes by without someone, old or young, fingering a cigarette. This factoid is of added interest, if not relevance, because director Sam Taylor-Wood happens to be the artist who created the video long shown in the Chambers Hotel lounge of the mixed-race group sitting in a bar with no perceptible movement – except for the ash at the end of a cigarette. Blink at the wrong time and your five minutes of waiting to see it fall are wasted.
There’s not that much to miss in this movie about John Lennon’s ‘youth,’ either. I use quotes, because Aaron Johnson, in a wonderfully natural performance, appears much closer to 24 than 17. Kristin Scott-Thomas, by contrast, uses one acting tic after another. There is no one, except perhaps the young Paul McCartney, we really care about, and the tortured relationships among John, his mother and aunt do little to explain the artist or the person that John became, which is the only conceivable reason for this movie’s existence.
By coincidence, a day later I was reading Keith Richards’s description of how the Rolling Stones were formed, which made the glib hookups of John, Paul and George in this film seem even shallower.