Paradise Now

Grade: B+

A dignified journey into the heart and mind of a terrorist.

Two best friends raised in a Palestinian refugee camp are called upon to offer up their lives and become martyrs for the cause. Small of budget and occasionally overflowing with polemics about whether or not acts of terrorism are the last but only remaining resort of a beleaguered people or merely the advancement of an alibi for one’s enemies, the film is joltingly nonviolent and soberly reserved. Less about Middle Eastern politics and religious fanaticism and more about individual despair, watching how victims can also become victimizers in the name of statehood, security and solidarity forces us to relocate our perspectives if not redraw our borders from where they stood before.

Kais Nashef brings tortured soulful dignity as a young man denied and devoid of option, opportunity or hope. Fearful of death and loathing of life, his basic decency stands in striking contradiction to our perceptions of those willing to strap bombs around their torsos and murder the innocent. As a friend with less sophisticated inner turmoil, Ali Suliman desires a blaze of glory and eternal loyalty to a friend. A scene in which he stands ill at ease with a machine gun while videotaping his denunciation of Israeli policies and a farewell to his family is filled with sadness, frustration, and surprising humor.

Part thriller and greater part human tragedy, the film inserts enough revelations and plot-twists to intrigue and surprise, but without the air of suffocating self-importance or mass convolution so prevalent in the film “Syriana.” Both films extrapolate on national culpability in the making of terrorists, yet this one manages the deed with far more subtlety and significantly less pretentiousness. While characters hem and haw too often, reversing and recommitting themselves to the barbaric task at hand, filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad has personalized without defending, and created empathy for the unforgivable.

In the end, we are reminded that the true casualties of war and occupation are not flags, but people.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0445620/

King Kong

Grade: C

‘Twas Peter killed the beast.

Anyone who knows me knows that I consider “The Lord of the Rings” saga the single greatest cinematic achievement in my lifetime. I now live in fear Peter Jackson will become a one trick pony.

In what is effectively three long hours of big-budget blue screen animation, actors melodramatically emote and a really big ape bats its eyes and beats its chest. In between, dinosaurs rampage, disfigured bats fly, oversized creepy crawly arthropods slither, and Jackson tries to gross us out for no other purpose than to gross us out. In this he succeeds. Occasionally enthralling effects (NYC in the 1930s is especially dazzling) are overwhelmed with two-dimensional computer generated wallpaper, as actors row rowboats on non-existent waves, race in between animated gargantuan gorilla legs, strike poses and look alternately shocked/scared/sad at various items Jackson will paint in later. What Jackson probably intended as a (decidedly campy) homage to a classic style of soundstage filmmaking instead looks and feels flat, artificial and often rather cartoonish. Jackson also falls back on some rather familiar set design and camera technique, as though some LoTR models were still hanging around and just calling out to be reconstituted (the home of Skull Island’s human inhabitants is strikingly reminiscent of regions Sam and Frodo were known to tread). Slow motion photography, an elvish choir, and a Gollum-like fall from the Empire State only add to an overall sense of smoke and mirror duplication.

Naomi Watts helps create a credible chimp/chick relationship, Andy Serkis does worthy double duty as a pirate-like longshoreman and the “motion capture” movement behind Kong, Jamie Bell (forever trapped as “Billy Elliot”) is as sweet and soulful as ever, although Adrien Brody is a miscast hero and Jack Black’s acting technique as the film’s impresario is rather dubious at best. Relationships and storylines seem to build and literally die on the jungle vine (alive, alive, oops dead, alive, dead, dead, alive, sorry wrong, he’s dead) and for some inexplicably wrongheaded reason Jackson and fellow screenwriters Fran Walsh (a.k.a. Mrs. Jackson) and Phillipa Boyens have excised all explanation for Kong climbing the Empire State Building in the first place. Home, folks, he wants to go home. Sorta’ like how I felt about an hour in.

Tedious, plodding and surprisingly soulless, bland and unmoving, a kitchen sink and a pretty sunrise does not an awe-inspiring epic make.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0360717/

Transamerica

Grade: B-

You’re likely to spend the first 20 minutes debating whether he’s attractive enough to pass for a woman. Then you’ll remember you’re watching Felicity Huffman. Her choices of voice, posture, and mannerism are so extraordinary, one utterly believes she has been forced to live most of her life as a man, and is only now learning how to be a woman.

If only the screenplay were quite so believable.

On the brink of a sex-change operation a male-to-female transsexual discovers she may be a father. What begins as a forced encounter to get the teen out of jail and her therapist off her back turns into a cross-country road trip of discovery and cliché-ridden situations. Kids are molested by their stepfathers, cars are stolen by innocent looking hitchhikers, and lonely bachelors open up their homes and fall “Tootsie-style” for the woman with the penis. Kevin Zegers is also quite good (and exceedingly adorable) as an over-sexualized yet vulnerable youth, but neither father nor son seem quite as dimly naive as the screenplay necessitates. Even after attending a rather farcical trannie party (which apparently spring up in every western town on a regular basis) this street kid/drug using/male prostitute can’t quite figure out for himself his traveling companion may not be everything that she seems, and is repeatedly (and vitriolically) taken aback by revelations he should have deduced for himself ages ago. Huffman comports herself with a world-weary savvy and wise-cracking wit, yet is easily conned by used car salesmen, indigent parents and cocaine-snorting teenagers alike. A side trip and speedy reconciliation with a non-Jewish Jewish mother, doltishly good-natured father and estranged sister feels completely contrived, false and predictable.

While emotional responses rarely seem to honestly match characters and situations, there is genuine sweetness between traveling companions, the film has a kind and compassionate heart that isn’t afraid to take risks, and Huffman gives one of the year’s best performances.

It’s a good time for sexual and gender identity in the movies.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0407265/

Syriana

Grade: C

The title is as cryptic as the storyline.

Before writer/director Stephen Gaghan should be able to use his apparent doctorates in socio-economics, geo-global political philosophy and covert operations in Saudi Arabian territories, he really should get a B.A. in screenwriting first.

There is an engrossing, illuminating commentary in all this, but it is securely blindfolded, wrapped in lead and buried in concrete.

George Clooney, Steve Soderbergh and company have an axe to grind that is all well and good. American greed and self-interest is responsible for international instability and the indoctrination of terrorists. Fair enough. Sadly, American sanctimony and left-wing megalomania is often responsible for self-involved, indecipherable moviemaking as well. From Washington, D.C. to Langley, Virginia to Geneva, Switzerland to Beirut, Lebanon to Princeton, New Jersey to various spots in Baghdad and Iran (in the film’s first 15 minutes no less) a scoreboard would still make it impossible to follow how dozens of characters intersect with dozens of other characters in dozens of locales sprinkled throughout the planet. CIA agents, former CIA agents, oil magnates, Saudi princes and kings, economic advisers, poor Pakistani immigrants, corporate lawyers, Department of Justice operatives, terrorists for hire, and various fathers, wives and children of the above are ALL major players in this over-saturated screenplay. And, just when the earth becomes too small for Gaghan’s world, satellites manage to enter into the picture as well.

In the 1970’s, a long list of movie stars in a single film almost always spelled disaster – “The Poseidon Adventure,” “The Towering Inferno,” “Airport ‘75, ‘77 and ‘79.” In the 2000’s a long list of movie stars has started to spell another type of disaster, one that occurs when an insular group of people is so self-obsessed with making a point they forget the need to let others in on the joke. George Clooney, Christopher Plummer, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, Matt Damon (who really needs to break free of the Clooney rat pack) William Hurt and Amanda Peet all do fine work with underwritten roles, and the film has a sleek look, a smart edge and a sophisticated feel, but it is simply impossible to follow and maddening to decipher. A conspiracy piled on top of a conspiracy piled on top of a conspiracy piled on top of a conspiracy, speed reading subtitles, good bad guys and bad good guys and good good guys and bad bad guys and my eyes start to glaze over. Throw in graphic scenes of torture (that I still don’t understand the reason for) dead children (‘cause even businessmen have a home life) and a heartstring ending in the midst of fundamentalist kamikazes and American-instructed assassination and I really need a nap.

I have a respectable I.Q. I graduated college. I make a decent living and even write in my spare time. Don’t make me feel like an idiot ‘cause you can’t get your shit together and tell a comprehensible story. Wanting to say something important and actually saying something important are two very different things.

{Note: According to the official website, “Syriana” is “a very real term used by Washington think-tanks to describe a hypothetical reshaping of the middle east.” The fact that the filmmakers never even bother to let us in on this little secret is yet another example of their impenetrable elitism.}

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0365737/

The Producers

Grade: D

There are two rules to successfully translate a Broadway musical to film.

Rule #1: Never let the original Broadway Director direct the screen version of the show.

Rule #2: NEVER LET THE ORIGINAL BROADWAY DIRECTOR DIRECT THE SCREEN VERSION OF THE SHOW!

Having Broadway tickets to see Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in “The Producers” when the show first opened was like having Willy Wonka’s golden ticket in your hand. Lane was delivering one of the most massive star turns Broadway had seen in years, Mel Brooks had written a major league, convulsively hysterical hit, and Susan Stroman directed and choreographed with originality, excitement and flair. The show deserved the raves and the record number of Tony Awards. I’ve seen it four times. Great, great show.

Then the creative team became chicken shits.

First they fired London star Henry Goodman during his previews (who was going to be quite good in the role, receiving a deserved standing ovation the performance I attended) for daring to recreate the part in his own image after Lane departed. They replaced him instead with an understudy willing to give a weaker carbon copy version of Lane’s performance. Terrified of taking a misstep and ruining the cash cow franchise, creativity quickly gave way to $ signs. When Lane and Broderick came back for a second limited run in the show for major bucks, even they were playing with it rather than playing in it. To quote Max Bialystock, “Lord I want that money!”

And then someone had the asinine, fool-hearty idea of allowing Stroman to direct the film version of her own success. Why they didn’t just set a few cameras on the stage of the St. James Theater I’ll never know. Utterly lacking in a single moment of spontaneity, creativity or spark, this pointless endeavor is the oddest translation of a Broadway musical one is ever likely to see. Without the slightest recognition of working in a new medium, every performance is geared to the last row of the balcony, every scene a moment by moment recreation – sans magic or inspiration – of the original Broadway production. Every broad facial tic, every abrasively loud inflection, every overly-shticky double take is an attempt to ensure those without a touring company coming to town will still be able to lay claim to seeing the Broadway show. Filmed in a bland, colorless, flat, old-fashioned movie musical style, Stroman completely mistakes opening up the material to street locales and fantasy segments for freshness, innovation or personality. Then, to add insult to injury (and I admit to feeling somewhat personally violated) they neuter the material of much of the raunchy, politically incorrect, offensive humor that made it all so bitingly, irresistibly funny in the first place.

Nathan Lane (love him though I do) is far too broad for the big screen, but it is Matthew Broderick that is the genuine disaster here – his whiny, one note caricature was always a tad too irritating on the stage, but on film one truly wants to slap the crap out of him. Other original cast members Roger Bart and Gary Beach (gloriously funny in his Tony-winning role as a flamboyantly gay Adolf Hitler) are also embarrassingly gigantic, and movie stars Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell add nothing but weaker singing voices than their original counterparts. Broadway vets the likes of Andrea Martin, Debra Monk, John Barrowman, Karen Ziemba and Richard Kind are all afforded cameos by the director. A gift certificate to Tower Records would have been a much kinder present.

When the curtain rises on the classic “Springtime for Hitler” number, the camera pans the crowd and – as in the classic original film version – the audience is stunned with mouths agape. I know exactly how they feel.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0395251/

Brokeback Mountain

Grade: A

A love poem.

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are my heroes. Inspiring not because they are two bankable heterosexual stars playing gay, but because they both bring an integrity, rawness and bravery of performance that should forever inform how actors choose their roles and decide to play them.

This is a groundbreaking work.

Director Ang Lee has captured the intimate, unadorned essence of Annie Proulx’s beautiful short story and transformed it into a work of simplicity and majesty. Filled with heartbreaking tenderness, sadness and rage, “the love that dare not speak its name” wears its quiet heart and deeply felt silences courageously on its sleeve. Two ranch hands meet against the ravishing vistas of Wyoming. Their animal lust for one another blends with the cold, harsh, secluded nature that surrounds them, until they leave the wilderness and force themselves into expected lives of conformity and resignation. Yet they cannot let go of one another. Lust becomes love. Through a period of some 20 years, their ache for one another never wanes, never wavers or diminishes, and it is a thing of wrenching beauty to behold. Against the backdrop of Rodrigo Prieto’s eloquent cinematography, this is a love story never before seen on a major Hollywood screen. It gives one a heartfelt sense of arrival and hope.

Ledger and Gyllenhaal have electric chemistry together. Most is unexpressed, muted and silent, yet there is a need in their connection that seems at once bottomless, delicate, unbridled and explosive. Much of their time both together and apart is wordless, yet it is a silence that fills the screen with love, longing, loneliness and despair – their extraordinary performances bring a simplicity and honesty that are profound in their soulfulness. Michelle Williams is incredibly moving as a wife who loves her husband yet is equally trapped in his denial, and Kate Mara is touching as a daughter longing to share in a father’s life and come to know a man isolated in his repression. Gustavo Santaolalla’s haunting score pierces the psyche, and screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry (who has mastered the reserved western sensibility in his novels) here know how to convey so much with so little. No one articulates innermost feelings with language – not lovers, husbands & wives, children & parents – but volumes are spoken through their eyes, through their vulnerabilities, and through their pain.

It should be lost on no one that, a year after this story was first published, a young man named Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered against the ravishing vistas of Wyoming.

Stunning. Visually, audaciously, emotionally stunning.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0388795/

Pride and Prejudice

Grade: B

You would have to be an illiterate philistine never to have read the novel or seen one among the multitudes of available versions of this Jane Austen classic.

Just call me a philistine. And a former British Lit major no less.

Having no prior experience with this prototypical romance, there is much to be enchanted if not terribly surprised by. From the moment our star-crossed lovers appear on screen and all others disappear from sight, there is a sense of melodramatic inevitability about it all, albeit filled with delightful panoramas, quick witted humor, and kind-hearted courtship.

Like a runaway locomotive, this film has a story to tell, and by God it’s going to tell it quickly. Unlike the most recent 1995 five-hour made-for-TV version, this one has a “need for speed” Tom Cruise would admire, and every scene of someone standing elegantly on a cliff (hair and dress blowing resplendently in the wind) is matched by dozens of here now, never heard from again characters and more exposition than one’s 20/20 hearing can hope to hold on to. Still, falling in love for no particular reason isn’t exactly rocket science, and watching two highly attractive people swipe at, challenge, fancy and ultimately swoon for one another can be beguiling if not taken too seriously. Keira Knightly glows on screen with a smile that lights her way and, while utterly too long melancholic for his (or our) own good, Matthew MacFadyen still cuts quite the swath as a leading romantic figure. While one can’t help but feel whiplashed by a relationship so truncated only cupid’s arrow could justify the passionate attraction, it’s still all rather jolly to see how this chess piece quickly captures that chess piece making way for another chess piece to move into its place and explain away check, check, and ultimate checkmate. One must assume, however, that Ms. Austen did it all with a bit more graceful unfolding and lingering emoting.

Brenda Blethyn is rather annoyingly one-note as a matchmaking mother, and Judy Dench is classic Judi Dench in a throwaway (but ever-entertaining) cameo. Yet Donald Sutherland is the best thing about this movie as a dignified, harried, somewhat chagrined father. Not since Tevye the dairyman has a patriarch had to contend with such a shrilly meddlesome wife and five daughters in search of five husbands. A scene in which he displays the joy at a daughter finding true love is a subtle crescendo of paternal emotion, and yet again provides certitude that Sutherland is one of the true greats.

Beautifully shot, acted with committed (if inexplicable) motivation, and bound to be a favorite among high-schoolers everywhere looking for the abridged version at test time. As for me, I have already added the five hour version to my Netflix queue.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0414387/

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Grade: A-

The spirits have been kind that I have lived to see this day. That I have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous derision for my negative takes on the first three installments, accused of having no heart, no imagination and no whimsy in my soul when – truth be told – it is the first three “Harry Potter” movies that lacked heart, imagination, and whimsy.

Partially because of a richer, more complex story to be told, partially because of a maturing cadre of young actors and juicier roles for more accomplished ones, and partially because of a director fearless enough to take the heart and plot of a book without treating it like a sacred scroll, this “Harry Potter” – finally, at long last – is pure magic. Finally, finally J.K. Rowling’s world has come to vibrant, personal life on the big screen. The wand has been waved.

Striking in its dark tones, sarcastic and playful wit, burgeoning sexuality, genuinely moving pathos and frightening storytelling, Director Mike Newell has conducted an eerie, weighty opera filled with grand themes of friendship and betrayal, loyalty, lust and loss. No longer the “gee-gosh” boy apprentice, Daniel Radcliffe displays thespian chops as the threat against his life grows and he begins to own responsibility for a world unwittingly in his care. If the giggles continue to be too forced, his anger and terror percolate and his tears move – make the next bunch ASAP as one would now loathe to see an installment without him in the lead. Under the care and feeding of Michael Gambon, Albus Dumbledore has now become flesh and blood, prone to outbursts of fear, anger and sadness as much as all-knowing staid bravado – a eulogy delivered near film’s end is filled with genuine sentiment and defiance. Ralph Fiennes is, well, Ralph Fiennes, and knows how to make one hell of an impact with limited screen time. His dark Lord is one part pure evil, one part oily smarm, one part giddy showman – make no mistake, the threat he represents feels unnervingly real.

Intricate without being confused, Newell knows how to use imagery to convey moments heretofore difficult to visualize from Rowling’s descriptions, yet never allows special effects to overwhelm storytelling. He brings his own artistic vision to the piece, enhancing rather than merely replicating a world born in words. The visuals are the best they’ve been to date, thrilling and mesmerizing, yet feel far more organic and less computer generated than earlier attempts. After three strikes in a row, screenwriter Steven Kloves has finally figured out where to enhance, where to let be, where to re-imagine and, most importantly, where to pull out a pair of bewitched scissors – one is glad the rules of Quidditch rather than those of baseball apply here.

But, at its heart, this is a tale of youthful innocence coming into its own, of seeing the world as less mystical and more ghoulish, less pure and more fraught with shading and shadow, a world where life, death, and spirit are inexorably, painfully, blessedly linked.

At 157 minutes, this one puts the last 454 to shame.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0330373/