Archive for category: Reviews

An attempt at mind-bending with convoluted plot and visual pyrotechnics, Inception winds up a silly movie that makes no sense on any of its purported four levels. While that is not unusual in Holllywood films today and could be somewhat forgiven if the acting were enjoyable, Christopher Nolan’s movie also suffers from horrid miscasting and bad performances all around. Leonardo DiCaprio, indistinguishable from his role in Shutter Island remains a mysterious movie star to me: he poses rather than acts and conveys no depth in the only character that even purports to be a character. The others are unengaging cardboard cutouts. How did the foreign Marian Cotillard get to be Cobb’s wife? How did Ellen Page, who seems to have wandered in from some different Hollywood universe, get to be a spatial-design genius? Is there supposed to be chemistry between her and one of the male leads? Michael Caine gets to be Michael Caine. Etc. The dialogue, instead of developing personalities or engendering emotions, is strictly used to explain the plot’s alternate universe, and it sounds more like an instructional manual than real people talking. And for action scenes, Nolan falls back on my pet peeve of action movies: dozens of bad guys, all professional killers, spray machine gun fire at our heroes and hit no one, while the good guys, who are chemists, businessmen, architects and visionaries, use pistols and rifles and never seem to miss. And does it bother anyone else that half the time the Japanese character is called “Say-toe” and the other half “Sigh-toe”?

A pitch-perfect sendup of the music business, school of Spinal Tap. Numerous laugh-out-loud scenes mixed with man-love, gross sex, and nebbishy boy-girl love – the Judd Apatow formula that I’m a sucker for. Sean Combs was a revelation – give that man an Oscar! – while Russell Brand and Jonah Hill were brilliant. (How did Jonah Hill become the leading man of the moment?) Only the excess of a crockery fight in Las Vegas marred my enjoyment.

An idiosyncratic story about – or at least, a look at – relationships among five women and one man living more or less next door to each other, very much in Manhattan. Oliver Platt was bit pudgy for my taste, but the five women were pitch-perfect: my fave was Rebecca Hall (again!) in the Charlotte Gainsbourg role, from ungainly to irresistible. I sort of wanted something to happen, but ended up settling for life’s little pleasures.

Not much of a story – in fact, no story – just weak segues in Pierce Brosnan’s embarrasingly anthropomorphic and fey narration. There were plenty of “how-did-they-get-that?!” shots of whales, gannets, and stonefish, but without any common thread the “let’s-save-the-ocean” pitch came across as gratuitous.

If Martin Scorsese is such a great director, why does he cast Leonardo DiCaprio in the psychologically complicated role of Teddy Daniels? Or Mark Ruffalo as his sidekick, for that matter? Perhaps this was an unfilmable story, relying as it does on a shocking twist at the end that works far better on the page. In any case, having read the book and knowing what we did, we both found the plot just too absurd to hold together.