Shattered Glass

Grade: A

In 1998, it was uncovered that reporter Stephen Glass had fabricated stories published in “The New Republic.”

In the best film of the year to date, Writer/Director Billy Ray has turned in a brilliantly layered and complex parable on the manipulations, judgments and dysfunctions inherent in any office culture, an expose on media integrity for our time, and an excruciatingly honest and intimate portrait of how the need to be respected and appreciated can manifest itself in thoroughly different and often destructive ways.

Hayden Christiansen, so woefully bland and stiff as Anakin Skywalker in the last “Star Wars” installment, here is nothing less than mesmerizing as a young reporter gone very, very astray. His performance is so deeply personal -- likable and endearing and yet simultaneously pained and soulful -- that we believe in him long after it is still rational to do so and inexplicably find ourselves rooting for him long after that. It is an examination into how one justifies and even embraces what is false as though it were true, so desperate is the need, so profound the insecurity. Part charlatan, part desired charmer, part needy kid brother, we come to not merely sympathize but to empathize in what is the best performance I have seen this year.

As a less charismatic, more workmanlike, unfairly indicted editor, Peter Sarsgaard is also excellent as an everyman we suspect simply because it is somehow easier, judge simply because we have chosen to be manipulated into doing so. How as a culture we love those with striking blue eyes, an endearing smile and the ravenous desire to please, and how often we dismiss and even defame those who work hard and with integrity but who somehow fail to make us laugh and feel good about ourselves. The dialogue sparks, the supporting players are all first rate, and one leaves the film surprised at how intellectually intriguing and emotionally involving it all is. This is far far more than the cautionary tale one expects upon entering the theater.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0323944/

Veronica Guerin

Grade: C+

Cate Blanchett speedily rises above an annoyingly mediocre film, providing a rich, textured performance amidst a paint-by-number screenplay.

Any film that begins with a “based on a real story” moniker immediately throws a red flag on the play. It’s what Woodward and Bernstein would call a “non-denial denial,” i.e. “no matter how occasionally boring, cliché-ridden, or strikingly dramatic this all seems, it’s okay because it really really happened. Really, it did. Really.” A reporter for a popular newspaper in Ireland, our real life (really) heroine deals head on with an epidemic drug crisis by infiltrating the underworld and drawing links to organized crime. You know, the guys with broken noses who own horses. The first hour is quite laborious, repeatedly reminding us of every single undercover film of the same ilk. Gangsters whose names we confuse, cops who leave the room so the reporter can stumble on the evidence she needs, a threatened family begging her to stop seeking the truth, a young tyke turned prostitute to support his drug habit. It is a testament to Blanchett’s talent that we are interested in any of this at all. She plays a strong, smart, determined individual, filled with gut instinct yet often lacking in judgment, wary of who gets to see her vulnerability. She is a fully realized person, thanks less to the written word than to Blanchett’s performance, awash in a sea of caricatures and underdeveloped relationships.

Any possible tension or suspense is utterly depleted when the story’s ending is telegraphed in the film’s first five minutes. Director Joel Schumacher, rarely known for his subtlety, should here be embarrassed by a slow motion and unendurably stylized finale, replete with voice over, that reminds one more of the death scene and subsequent funeral in “Gandhi.” Perhaps the people of Ireland indeed view her as “Saint/Martyr Veronica,” but a film that matched the sophistication and introspectiveness of its leading lady would have made for a far more compelling story.

[Please note: the above comment is not meant to cast any aspersions on “Gandhi,” which remains one of my favorite films of all time.]

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0312549/

Pieces of April

Grade: B

What, oh what, is it about the Thanksgiving holiday that always brings out the worst in families? Perhaps it’s the fact that every year we’re forced to revisit a lifetime of sibling rivalries and parental hostilities during a single hour of gorging, usually replete with early rising on a day off, mass transit suffocation and traffic jams, and god damn football games playing in the background. Or mayhap it’s just the fact that we’re celebrating a holiday where the pilgrims slaughtered their dinner guests as soon as dessert was finished.

This low budget (we’re talking one hand held camera low) Indy captures all the anxiety, drama, bitterness, bad memories and loving pathos of just about everybody’s Turkey day experience. The cast-away daughter living in a hovel in New York City replete with a cast of ethnically diverse and psychologically questionable neighbors. The parents incapable of remembering which child belongs to which memory. The walked-on egg shells, the senile grandparents picked up at the old folks home, the jokes about the bad food to come. If some of the characters are a bit too broad, the situation (a family trying to force a happy memory before their wife and mother dies) a bit too hokey, the badness of our cook just a bit too over the top bad (she tries to mash uncooked potatoes, for example) the second those damn turkey salt and pepper shakers are placed on the wobbly card tables we know we’ve come home.

This one is small, sweet, unassuming and very endearing. But, dear god, one of these Thanksgivings I really am gonna’ order in Chinese food and hide.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0311648/

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Grade: A-


Uma Thurman seeks violent revenge on those that have wronged her. This is not the plot in a nutshell. This is the plot. This is also one of the most violent movies ever filmed. Blood drips, oozes, flows, sprays and yes, even fountains. It may not be my cup of sake. Yet it is all oddly and undeniably brilliant.

Director Quinton Tarantino again proves that he is an auteur. Few directors of our time have a filmmaking style so definably their own. There is a sickness, a deeply twisted, morbid, disgusting sickness in his work and worlds to be sure, yet there is also a bravura filmmaking vision that is thrilling to watch unfold.

Essentially an homage to kung fu movies few of us have actually seen in the first place (apart from edited glimpses during afternoon movies shown on television during our childhoods -- does anyone else remember “Creature Feature” week?) Tarantino clearly has a passionate regard for these films, and there is something authentic and audacious in his presentation. A mixture of heightened reality, over-the-top absurdist theater, stylized animation, and surreal violence, one’s heart can’t help but pump at twice its normal speed by the extraordinary beauty of the filmmaking, the never-ending adrenaline filled tempo, and the ever-present gore on display. Even odder, the piece also manages to often be quite amusing.

The New York Times had it right with this one – this is a film that inspires both “awe and revulsion.” Toward the end of “The Godfather,” another auteur builds an operatic moment as the music crescendos and murder after murder is committed in rapid, breathless succession. Tarantino manages to fill his screen with similar tension and sustain it over the course of an entire film. Ultimately, the success of a work of this kind is how quickly one plans to attend its second installment. When it opens in February, I will certainly be there the very first weekend. I just won’t eat beforehand.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0266697/

Mystic River

Grade: B+

Extraordinary ensemble acting, a compelling if flawed screenplay, and solid if straightforward direction by director Clint Eastwood make for a thoughtful and sometimes powerful film. If the movie is not quite the second coming of filmmaking as ascribed by many a critic low these last weeks, this is certainly no fault of the film itself.

Sean Penn is virtually flawless as a criminally tainted yet devoted family man, casting a reserved spell of control over his surroundings. His character drips from every pour, and it is an oily, menacing, engrossing and curiously sympathetic portrayal. While Penn has been receiving most of the acclaim, he is matched in greatness by Tim Robbins (admittedly not among my prior favorite actors) as the painfully introverted embodiment of damaged goods. While undermined by a somewhat melodramatic and incomplete storyline, they nevertheless provide some exquisite film acting. Strasberg would be proud.

A rather implausible plot devise (an abduction that stretches believability on several counts) launches an epic yet intimate tale of familial relations, murderous intrigue and pathetic betrayal set against the tableau of an insular community. Part whodunit, part opera, the film is always fascinating if not always convincing. Yet the distrust and deception inspired through lifelong relationships irreconcilably wounded by the past makes for some first rate drama.

Frustratingly, the film is also diluted with weird screenplay ticks, including an excellent Kevin Bacon as an investigator who keeps receiving “crank” phone calls from the wife who has left him for no reason we are privy to or care about, an equally good (if slightly too weepy) Marcia Gay Harden who seems to be missing some major character and plot definition, and an inexplicable Lady Macbeth turn by a wasted Laura Linney. Multiple relationships remain unclear, forced plot points are awkwardly revealed, and we are left with the sense that there is much more here than meets the eye, only the chessboard is missing several important pieces. A quick cutting third act simply doesn’t crescendo to the heights that it should.

This is one intensely performed, richly stylized, uncomfortably ambiguous, slightly too ambitious potboiler.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0327056/

The Station Agent

Grade: B+

Off the beaten trail, unapologetically quirky, quietly human slice-of-life story (the very best kind) about three of life’s wounded misfits trying to live their lives and find their place in the world.

A self-isolating dwarf, simmering in a defensive hostility born of a lifetime of jokes, derision and human unkindness, moves into an inherited and abandoned train station in a small town, determined to be left alone and detached from the world, enveloping himself in his fascinated study of trains. There he meets an over-the-top friendly Cuban food vendor, equally determined not to leave anyone alone and in peace, an artist trying to survive her own familial pains, an odd little girl who regularly appears out of nowhere and a hot-to-trot young librarian. These people are not the stuff of standard family drama, but they are as real and compelling as they are bizarre and idiosyncratic. While one can’t help but wonder how Writer/Director Thomas McCarthy developed this cast of characters and storylines – if they are based on any real life experiences it is a unique life indeed – this is one of the year’s most original and inspired stories.

Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale are all equally fine here, and there is both laughter and nice sentiment throughout. The occasional overly dramatic flourish never really gets in the way of this kindhearted and straightforward take on lonely people finding life and friendship beyond loneliness and silence.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0340377/