In America

Grade: B+

For those of us who tend to perceive the American Dream as something akin to fortune, fame, and climbing social status, it is a refreshing and plaintive reminder that, for many, the “Dream” has more to do with simply letting go, saying goodbye, and beginning anew.

Reminiscent in affectionate tone if not in style to Barry Levinson’s “Avalon,” a multi-generational story of Jewish immigrants, this story follows a nuclear Irish family forging their way in a slum of New York City in the 1980s, coping with numbing loss amidst the realities of basic survival in a new land. The performances are uniformly compelling, most notable Paddy Considine as a father trying to smile through his own trepidations and frozen emotions. There are also two exceptionally natural performances from the children here, Sarah and Emma Bolger, who are at their best when the screenplay allows them to act their ages and doesn’t force them to become wise beyond their years. The film also does a lovely job of moving beyond the image of New Yorkers living (as many of us do) isolated behind locked apartment doors and captures a sense of neighborhood even in the poorest of locales. A simple, handheld camera style adds to the overall feel and grit of the work.

This is a slice of life portrait very much at its best when characters are allowed to simply exist within their own time, space and reality, when contrived moments, overly written dialogue and forced characters don’t impinge on the deliberately paced ambience. Alas, people living with AIDS abound with spirituality, characters occasionally over- psychoanalyze one another’s grief or suffer from flashback hallucinations, and artificial situations and plot points tend to take us away from the quietly affecting heart of the film. Still, this is a modest, sincere, and even poignant semi-autobiographical work from writer/director Jim Sheridan, filled with genuine heart and kind moments.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0298845/

The Cooler

Grade: B

Part drama, part goofball comedy, part gangster movie, part romance, this movie will be enjoyed best when one decides to just give in to its unique nature and just sort of go with the flow.

William H. Macy plays a born loser, so much so that he is hired to jinx everyone around him at a B-rate casino that has seen much better days. His luck begins to change when he falls hard for the woman of his dreams (beautifully acted by Maria Bello) and the craps tables suddenly heat up in his presence. Things just ain’t what they used to be.

Alec Baldwin, a leading man gone paunchy, gives a great performance as a mobster-esque club owner equally unwilling to allow his “cooler” some happiness or allow his casino to change with the times. This battle between the decay of the old and the glitzy artificiality of the new has a nice “Atlantic City” feel to it, and this film owes its predecessor for a similarly mildewing look, feel, and metaphor.

Tired out lounge singers are hooked on drugs, running a club through violence is second nature, love is always suspect, things may turn on a dime or roll of the dice – we’ve seen it all before, yet this one has a nice quirky sensibility all its own.

More Movie Info: http://chevy.imdb.com/title/tt0318374/

21 Grams

Grade: B+

An exceptional screenplay – one of the year’s finest – and equally extraordinary acting are only somewhat undermined by directorial ostentation and flourish, annoyingly jarring camera work, and a rather hideous film score.

I would argue that Sean Penn, a wonder in the recent “Mystic River,” is even better and more naturalistic here as an everyman struggling through an “only a month left to live” diagnosis. Benicio Del Toro (who left me fairly cold in the over-rated “Traffic”) and Naomi Watts (ditto the bloody pretentious “Mulholland Drive”) also provide richly pained and complex performances as a reformed criminal and reformed drug addict, respectively. How these three lives intersect makes for some fascinating, unconventional, thoughtful storytelling. The writing here is crisp, the emotions raw and believable, the plot a jigsaw puzzle that slowly and intricately weaves together bits and pieces of action moving back and forth in time, all the while becoming clearer as the characters become more known to us. A sense of inextricable dread hangs in the air.

Why, then, is one left so intellectually stimulated and yet so emotionally cold? Director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, who manages to get some stunning work from his company of actors, alas makes the mistake of employing a self-consciously grainy, choppy, colorless filmmaking style that forever distances the audience from those very same performances, never for a moment letting us forget we are watching a director direct, a camera operator filming, an editor editing. A loud, overbearing accordion drones its out-of-place music, repeatedly yanking us out of the action and making us wonder what the composer could have possibly been thinking. A more subtle and straightforward (dare one say mainstream) technique could have turned this story with these actors into a masterpiece. As it is, the film remains gripping, provoking, and eminently frustrating.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0315733/

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Grade: B

Way too long a title for a quality but somewhat pro-forma adventure yarn to be sure. My biggest regret is that I didn’t get a super-combo, because a medium popcorn and soda just doesn’t cut it for this overblown (at 2 hours, 20 minutes) but pleasantly entertaining action flick. The popcorn was devoured after the first, and sad to say most enthralling, 20 minutes.

Russell Crowe has charisma to burn as the prototypical sea captain, admired by his men, respected by his crew, with just the right air of compassion mixed with arrogant drive. He is matched by nice acting all around, and truly stunning visual effects that breathe new life into an oft-told story. If the dialogue is too garbled by crashing waves and the actors aren’t given quite enough to make them much more than interchangeable, there is also the authentic sense of wind in one’s hair, water drenching the body, and claustrophobia slowly closing in. There is nothing terribly new here, although it is impressive how archetypes can still manage to live if infused with enough energy, belief and full steam ahead, sail straight into the wind determination. Every sea-faring character is represented, from the captain’s best friend who provides the moral compass, to the mystical all-seeing yeoman, the young sailor who knows no fear, and the meek officer who knows no strength. Yet it all feels more authentic than it has a right too, less the carbon copy and more the original thing itself than one would expect.

The disappointment is that the story is not original either, and what begins as an exuberant and breathless ride slowly becomes too pat, predictable, and lacking in pathos. Moments are variously reminiscent of everything from “Moby Dick” to “Titanic” to “The Perfect Storm” to “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” (no, I’m not kidding), with just a touch of “Henry V” at Agincourt thrown in for good measure.

Still, the look of the piece is quite expansive and impressive, it doesn’t take itself too too seriously, and is a nicely beguiling entertainment. But one must severely question critics who are so desperate in a thus-far lackluster year that they keep proclaiming solid films to be epically great ones. This is to no fault of the filmmakers, but it is most certainly to the detriment of filmgoers. It is time for people to get a grip.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0311113/

Love Actually

Grade: D

HATE, REALLY.

Several weeks ago, I was utterly captivated by a pre-movie trailer. It was the likes of Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, and Colin Firth in one of those delightful British romps where you laugh, you’re touched, and you never stop grinning from ear to ear.

So much for trailers. The best of this movie was encompassed in those three brief shining minutes. The rest is a convoluted, contrived and thoroughly excruciating mess.

I know what you’re thinking, because I thought the same thing – you’re thinking “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” “Notting Hill.” “Bridget Jones’ Diary.” “About a Boy.”

Loved them.

This ‘aint them.

This treacle of some half dozen marginally intertwined stories fall into three equally charmless categories. The “how many times have we seen this before?” plotline – a new couple taking to the dance floor just as the fast music suddenly goes slow and romantic. The adorable guy who has fallen in love with his best friend’s fiancé (wait – do you think she’ll notice all of his wedding footage happens to only capture her? “But, you don’t like me,” she softly opines, as the moment of revelation dawns on her face.) The adoring wife who stumbles on the jewelry bought for the husband’s secretary (what, oh what, will she think when she opens her Christmas gift, certain that it’s the necklace, only to discover it’s a CD instead???) The precociously cute youngster who speaks dialogue so far beyond his years you just want to beat him down with a stick. We’ve been through all of this territory before on episodes of “The Brady Bunch,” “The Partridge Family,” and any number of Lifetime movies for women and gay men.

Then there are all those unbearably contrived “just add water and stir” instantaneous relationships – the adorable Prime Minister who falls (for no explicable reason) in love with a staffer. Or the adorable man who falls (for no explicable reason) in love with his maid, although they don’t even speak the same language (wait, let’s put up goofy subtitles explaining what she’s actually saying so we can appear both sophisticated and funny at the same time!) There’s even a sort of homosexual thing (I think, it’s all sort of hard to tell) thrown in for good measure (for no explicable reason) that is as trite as it is confused.

And, of course, there are countless moments that are just mind numbingly stupid, from the stand-in porn stars who have deep conversations while pseudo-screwing each other, to a cameo by Billy Bob Thornton as the President of the U.S. that just sends shivers of horrible writing up one’s spine, to an unlucky in love Brit convinced that all the babes await him in Wisconsin. You know you’re in really really big trouble when convinced you’re watching a dream sequence – and it isn’t. There’s at least an hour of extraneous footage here simply ripe for editing.

With the exception of Emma Thompson, who somehow manages to rise above the material, all of our stars either phone in uninterestingly bored work or spend much of the time mugging for the camera (Alan Rickman’s facial expressions are particularly cloying). Plotlines meander in and out of each other for no apparent reason and end everywhere without meaningful, believable, or often even decipherable closure – the finales to several stories literally seem to have fallen on the cutting room floor. Many of these vignettes don’t even bother to end happily; in fact, several relationships are sad and more than a little pathetic. The tone is literally all over the place for no particular rhyme or reason.

Yet again, a screenplay this phony and forced should never have been made in the first place. At 2 hours and 8 minutes, this is not only dreck, but long-winded dreck as well.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0314331/

The Matrix Revolutions

Grade: F

Nothing will strike fear in the hearts of “Lord of the Rings” fans more than this stultifying, phantasmagoric embarrassment. How a trilogy with such incredible promise could end on such a mortifyingly horrendous note will no doubt be the subject of much conjecture to come. The fact that the movie is mind numbingly bad bad bad in and of itself makes it one of the year’s worst, but the shamefully dramatic heights from which it has fallen will no doubt earn it a special place on the mantle for the ten worst (and without question most disappointing) movies of the first decade of the 21st century.

There’s a famous baseball team I’d like to tell you about. Who’s on first, What’s on second, I dunno is on third. Who’s on first? Who. The first baseman? Who. The name of the guy on first? Who. That’s what I’m trying to get you to tell me!

So begins the first half of this movie, and I defy anyone but the most diehard fanatic to have the slightest clue what anyone is talking about. The rest of us just sit there silent and stunned. Think of the audience watching “Springtime for Hitler” in “The Producers.”

Oy vey, what an epic catastrophe. Near as I can tell, the Ewoks are fighting against the technologically superior Stormtroopers to save the planet of Endor, er, I mean, Zion from total annihilation Lando Morpheus Calrissian (a strangely bloated and inactive Laurence Fishburn) races home aboard his starship the Millennium Falcon to lower the evil empire’s defense system, while Luke Skywalker (Keanu Reeves) battles Agent Darth Vader Smith, replete with piercing operatic music and Christ-like emphasis, for the future of all humanity. What I don’t really understand is why the great and powerful Wizard of Oz also makes a guest appearance in this “Return of the Jedi” rehash, but one of the never-ending cascade of elements that make no sense whatsoever in this unbearably indecipherable mess. It’s as if the filmmaking reigns were turned over to Lorne Michaels who decided to turn the story into a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

But, didn’t Mel Brooks already make “Space Balls?”

Any philosophical vision or intrigue in the first two films has vanished, and we are left with laugh-out-loud awful funny dialogue (my favorite is “cookies need love”), bombasticly over-the-top performances (did William Shatner teach a class or something?), and embarrassingly cartoonish special effects. And, for those who have already seen the movie, can anybody please explain what's up with the little Indian girl???? Michael Cimino has finally found a movie that gets him off the hook for “Heaven’s Gate.”

This film is to moviedom what “Dance of the Vampires” was to Broadway. So bad it’s almost glorious. Get me outta here – Hey Aaaaaaaaabbbbbooottttttt!!

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0242653/