Rent

Grade: B+

In 1996, “Rent” transferred from a small home downtown to Broadway, winning the Tony for Best Musical and becoming something of a phenomenon – partially because of a solid and original score, partially because of a driving and exciting energy, partially because of a NYC zeitgeist, and partially because of the dramatically premature death of composer/lyricist Jonathan Larson literally hours before the show opened off-Broadway.

Then the anti-“Rent” backlash began. Naysayers started denouncing it as loud, theater queens started trashing it as crass, and critics – many of whom weren’t all that fond of it in the first place – criticized it as being over-hyped. The lines were drawn, with “Rentheads” on one side and iconoclasts on the other. How one feels about the film version will likely depend on which side of the aisle one sits on.

Me, I’m a fan. I find the pulse raw and invigorating, the story moving and operatic, and the music often quite wonderful.

Director Chris Columbus’ adaptation is more workmanlike than visionary. Part Alphabet City travelogue and occasional music video, Columbus keeps the story of a group of friends at the height of the AIDS epidemic personal, intimate, and unembellished. Mixing a modern pop/rock score with the old-fashioned approach of people bursting into song and dance in crowded streets is surprisingly effective in its ability to represent New York City’s harsh, isolating yet vibrant personality, not unlike the thousands of New Yorkers who close out the world around them with Ipods and headsets. Much of the original cast has returned for the film, and some performances suffer from over-knowing the material, a dull sheen surrounding the zillionth performance. Yet Adam Pascal (Hot Hot Hot), Jessie L. Martin, Idina Menzel and newcomer Rosario Dawson provide sweetly emotive, often beautifully sung, and deeply involving performances. While Columbus fails to find his editing stride to replace excised recitative and scene changes are often choppy cuts or sloppy fadeouts, montages help fill in weak expositions and close-ups help explain song lyrics and emotions lost on the stage. Some attempts to open scenes up are quite effective (most notably a memorial service not unlike the hundreds of such services people attended in the 80’s and 90’s) and some misplaced and klutzy (most notably a commitment ceremony that seems more a 2005 political commentary than anything relating to the story’s time, place, and characters). The passage of time is quietly represented in simple yet profoundly moving ways.

What the play “Angels in America” did to galvanize the stage around HIV/AIDS, “Rent” has done as a musical. It was, and remains, a touching and important work.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0294870/

Walk the Line

Grade: B-

Joaquin Phoenix inhabits the skin, spirit and soul of the "man in black" in a film that – no matter how accurate the story – still adheres to a tired, tedious, cliché-ridden formula.

Show me a happy childhood and I'll show you someone you've never heard of before. The rags to riches story simply must begin with the brutal death of a more-beloved sibling and a cold, distant, isolating parent. Alcohol, drugs, and a bad withdrawal from chemical dependency must all feature prominently. Since no one stumbles onto stardom and success in a vacuum, there must be relationships with other stars (usually portrayed by B-rate actors) established at the outset of one's career. Ray Charles met Quincy Jones outside a dumpy bar in Seattle; Johnny Cash spies Elvis Presley (portrayed by WB alumni Tyler Hilton) outside a dumpy recording studio in Nashville.

While closely based on truth every step of the way, a little originality – no matter how utterly fabricated – would be most welcome. Dark and brooding, there is a dull joylessness in the burdensome predictability of the story.

What makes the film worthy is a transforming performance by Joaquin Phoenix (who I've never cared for truth be told) who communicates a talent and vulnerability that transcends worn and weary material. He delivers the most treadmill dialogue with a depth of sincerity and weight that makes one believe it comes from demons deep within. He also demonstrates that any actor lip synching their way through the portrayal of a real-life personality is merely delivering half a performance – here Phoenix delivers a lifetime of dusty roads and defiant insecurity through his vocal chords. And, yes, he really does an amazing job of sounding like Cash without bordering on impersonation.

As the long-patient, long-suffering non-girlfriend, Reese Witherspoon imbues June Carter with spunk (Lou Grant would hate her) and strength – she is a smart, confident career woman with a low-tolerance for bullshit. Deviating refreshingly from the proto-typical woman-behind-the-man, she is not keeping any home fires burning.

Now, can we please find a music star who was born into wealth, adored by everyone he knew, hated booze and pills, skipped, whistled and smiled incessantly, was happily married and died in his nineties?

Would that be boring, or what?

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0358273/

Jarhead

Grade: B

War is hell, whether or not you actually get to pull the trigger.

In an age where battle is waged from thousands of feet above the clouds, with bombs meticulously dropped on unseen victims and the romantic image of man-to-man combat largely a thing of the past, our troops nonetheless continue their old-school training –running mile after mile to rhythmic drills, hazing one another with abundant cruelty and camaraderie, firing at human cutouts and crawling through the mud underneath barbed wire netting with live ammo flying overhead. They prepare for a type of war that is out of fashion, attending screenings of “Apocalypse Now,” enraptured by the glory they presume will one day be theirs.

Director Sam Mendes juxtaposes the propaganda of basic training with the reality of modern day warfare. Thousands of troops spend months in the desert waiting for Operation Desert Storm to begin. Trained in combat, they are ill-prepared to wait. Days become weeks become months. They wait. Unable to use the skills they have so arduously prepared for, hydrating becomes a drilled task, they wait.

The film is cordoned into three distinct sections – boot camp, waiting, engagement. The former and the latter we have seen in dozens of other war movies, Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” among the more notable. Yet it is in the waiting – the tedious, frustrating, psychologically charged waiting – where the film tells its own unique story. Soldiers shoot at nothing, drill for nothing, and struggle to remain sane. We never come to know or care about these people, although Jake Gyllenhaal (with the body of a Greek god) and Peter Sarsgaard imbue a sense of dignity into underwritten roles, two marksmen without a target to mark.

The film casts no perspective on the rightness or wrongness of this or our current engagement, focusing instead on soldiers carrying out their responsibilities – from the mundane to the insane – with a mixture of fear, tedium, and inevitability. Mendes, as per usual, fills the screen with stunning visuals of oil fields ablaze, bomb detritus blowing into the faces of stunned soldiers, and desert sands blackened with the remains of charred no-name casualties of war. When machine guns finally launch a torrent of rapid fire, it is an explosive masturbatory release without objective or purpose, a metaphor for the role of soldiers in a different age.

A homecoming after the war is forced and pretentious, a Vietnam Vet of another time attempting to bond with soldiers of an entirely different ilk and experience. The film ends on a holier than thou note that betrays the simplicity of soldiers trying to make sense of their role in a world that has outlasted their usefulness.

What irony, flashing 15 years forward, that we are back in the same region fighting the kind of war these soldiers were originally trained for, and losing.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0418763/