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.
A casually clever countryside caper, the kind the British do so well, mostly about love – or is it sex? There are no car crashes – albeit a stampede of cows – and no patent absurdities – albeit a number of stretches. There are, however, a number of fun characters, all gracefully identified in cameo credits, and various morals to choose from. It’s not Gosford Park or even Cold Comfort Farm, but it passed the time pleasantly, and without the pretensions of, say, City of Final Destination.
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.
This had more the feeling of a short story – by O.Henry, say – than the movie equivalent of a novel. Not because it was short, which it was, but because it offered a slice of life, a la Woody Allen, without reaching any conclusions. Yes, it was a comment on the human condition, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, as the narrator intoned. Also a comment on the difficulty of relationships, the instinct to rationalize, and overall self-centeredness. Helena was the worst at not noticing others around her, but not by much. By the film’s end, every character had made a major attempt at improving their lives, all without success; and for some it amounted to courting disaster.
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.
Less a plotted melodrama than a fascinating character study for which Jesse Eisenberg should get an Oscar nomination, at least. He does more with his eyes than most actors this year have done with their entire bodies. Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin is good, too, but I can’t say as much for the rest of the cast. The Woonsocket twins are absurd caricatures, made tolerable only by their putdown at the hands of Larry Summers. We know, of course, the outcome of the movie before we go in; so Sorkin and Fincher are probably justified in not bothering to build suspense. Instead, they concentrate on portraying how an individual such as Mark Zuckerberg can be so brilliant as to invent the social product of the decade, yet personally so inept that those who know him either hate him or sue him. Curiously for a “true story,” the movie spends a lot of time on locations that never existed: depositions in which the antagonists square off and a party scene that makes Harvard look like Animal House.
Given that George Clooney has such good looks, good voice, eyes that twinkle and adequate acting ability, why can’t someone teach him to run? First in Michael Clayton, now in The American, this macho sexpot starts to sprint…and moves like a girl!
Really, this movie is all about George Clooney, or should I say, George Clooney’s character. He is present in every scene, and if he is not onscreen, he is on the other end of the phone call, or the rifle sight. It is fundamentally an existential drama, as Clooney comes to decide, a bit too late, what in life is worth living for, and his hardboiled persona begins to reveal some cracks.
Otherwise, the movie makes no sense. Who is Clooney working for? Why is he working for them? Why is he offered tens of thousands to build a rifle? Why couldn’t they just buy one from a Chechen arms dealer? How is he able to construct this perfect piece of equipment with spare parts he finds in a garage? By withholding all backstory and placing events in Sweden and Italy, we don’t know who’s the good guy, who’s the bad, or why Clooney is who he is. All we see is an agent in the middle of an obscure assignment who meets a gorgeous(!) prostitute and questions the life he is leading. As I say, an existential drama.
It’s also approximately the 37th movie I’ve seen this year in which a character smokes – often, as here, quite gratuitously. Whatever happened to the campaign against tobacco products in the cinema?
This movie humanizes Major League baseball players in a way few others have, and gives meaning to Ozzie Guillen’s rant, earlier this summer, about the lack of support offered Latino players, compared to Asians. More to the point, it is a positive view of (illegal) immigration, supporting the view that these are good people, just trying to better their families’ lives, hurting no one. But best, it is an honest character study of a gifted athlete, lost in a foreign culture, who finds a way that defies the normal melodramatic arc we expect from the movies. Oddly, the least realistic aspect of the film is the way the actors play baseball. (Netflix)
The most claustrophobia-inducing film I’ve ever seen, 93 minutes entirely inside a coffin, with one actor who can barely move, lit mainly by his Zippo lighter but often in total darkness, Buried adds one more cinematic chapter, for the politically minded, to the story, Why We Shouldn’t Be In Iraq. Along the way, his phone calls – on a cell phone left in the coffin by his ransom-minded captor – point up the daily selfishness and occasional duplicity in the outside world, without distracting our focus from the panicked, desperate Everyman, buried alive. While American heartthrob Ryan Reynolds is good, if not great, as the captured truck driver, it is interesting that the movie – a metaphor for U.S. involvement in the Middle East? – is a Spanish production, directed by Rodrigo Cortes.
Emma Stone proved a worthy successor to Ellen Page’s Juno in this story of the smart teenager up against the world around her, except for her supportive parents who can’t really help. Thomas Haden Church and Lisa Kudrow were reliable as the adult presences at her high school, and the story was sweet, so long as you got past any concern that none of this could actually happen. Call it a parable, or a modern gloss on Hawthorne, to be enjoyed and not taken seriously.
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