The Last King of Scotland

Grade: C+

A young, idealistic, beautifully blue-eyed Scottish doctor spins a globe to decide his fate, his finger landing on the country of Uganda. We all know this is how Doctor Dolittle ends up leaving London for Seastar Island in search of the Great Pink Sea Snail, but there’s something entirely fabricated that runs like a thread throughout this tale of a man’s journey into the heart of darkness that is Idi Amin Dada.

The catchphrase “Inspired by Actual Events and Individuals” should forever be sticken from movie-making lexicon – you just know you’re in for an inauthentic experience.

James McAvoy is quite fine as fictionalized doctor Nicholas Garrigan, who arrives in Uganda with unbridled enthusiasm, youthful albeit recklessly raging hormones, and wide-eyed gullibility. Thrust via implausible circumstance (which makes sense, since his character never actually existed) into the services of a newly placed and awe-inspiring dictator, a somewhat movie-of-the-week screenplay leads us through his personal journey of adoration and self-aggrandizement, building sense of doubt, fear and betrayal, and ultimate recognition that he has given himself over to your basic paranoid schizophrenic nutcase. While the very real Idi Amin slaughters hundreds of thousands of his people off-screen, the fictionalized good doctor deals smugly with fictionalized priggish Brits who all try to warn him what he’s gotten himself into, gets himself into a fictionalized affair with one of his boss’s wives who proceeds to get fictionally pregnant and in need of a fictionalized abortion, and plots a fictionalized assassination attempt. While McAvoy reacts to it all with a genuine sense of gravitas and dread, the inherent melodrama of this central figure’s make-believe story stretches the telling of a very important cautionary tale beyond respectability. When even the famed airport raid on Entebbe is misappropriated as a backdrop to an action subplot out of a Bruce Willis movie, Director Kevin Macdonald and screenwriters Jeremy Brock and Giles Fodel (based on his novel of the same name) lose all moral authority.

Forest Whitaker gives a toweringly lifelike supporting performance as the one man who seems to have actually existed here – the evil, bi-polar, twisted dictator himself. He simultaneously exudes charm, paranoia, intelligence, and menace, and seems genuinely devastated to be blowing the heads off of and torturing all those who have “betrayed” him. He’s clearly just misunderstood, the poor guy, and Whitaker twitchingly captures the delusional and tragic swagger of a mass-murdering despot.

The time has come for filmmakers to stop inserting false white protagonists to represent the “outside onlooker” that they believe film-going audiences need to find identification. Just tell us stories from the inside looking out, and trust us to do the rest.

.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0455590/

Notes On a Scandal

Grade: B

The lesbian as psychopath stereotype is alive and well in this wickedly voyeuristic tale of a stalker teacher’s obsession with a younger educator. Think “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane” and you’re getting warm.

One half expects Dame Judi Dench to tell everyone to “fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” or even mayhap to break out the wire hangers. It’s a grand dame performance – cool, bitchy, calculating, quirky, and great great fun to watch. The story lacks any genuine intrigue, Richard Eyre’s direction is dully straightforward, co-star Cate Blanchett is rarely more than serviceable, and the score by Philip Glass is downright obnoxious (violins frantically screeching) but Dench is Dench is Dench, and when she’s on screen (which is virtually the entire breezy 91 minutes) little else matters.

The joke about lesbians and second dates is applicable here, as in an instant Dench sets her sights on a married woman with children in tow. Friendship begets infatuation begets Glenn Close and bunny rabbits and, while it’s never particularly menacing, Dench makes it thoroughly riveting. Gestures of peripheral kindness are misinterpreted as sweeping declarations of dedication, inappropriate affairs are manipulated into indebtedness, even the death of a beloved kitty becomes a calculated ace in the hole when all else seems to fail. It’s all more than a little homophobic, but Dench is so deliciously kooky it’s hard to take much offense. Her nastily pointed voiceovers alone are worth the price of admission – dry, scathing and venomously judgmental in their commentary.

When – no small thanks to Dench’s machinations – everyone else’s lives start to crumble, there is little doubt who will end up on top of all the carnage.

.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0465551/

Babel

Grade: A-

Skip the pretentious “Syriana,” the over-hyped “Children of Men,” and the excruciating “Crash.”

If you’re seeking a subtle, intelligent, emotional, and gripping film about racism, immigration, weaponry, international politics and how these elements collide to both devastate and ennoble our planet, this is the one to see.

A flawless ensemble of superstars and unknowns alike tell four disparate stories spread across the globe in Mexico, Morocco, San Diego and Tokyo. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu brilliantly interweaves time, place and meaning, leaving us only slightly off-balance as the pieces slowly, smartly and inexorably come together. A poor Moroccan family acquires a rifle to ward off predators preying on their sheep, and a yarn of unintentional gun violence, traumatized families, displaced grief, innocent babes and illegal caregivers, the consequence of carelessness, the humanity of the individual and the inhumanity of our borders slowly and thrillingly unfolds.

Brad Pitt turns in a career-defining performance as a husband and father trying to keep it all together amidst personal grief and jarring happenstance. A man truly in the wrong place at the wrong time, Pitt disappears into himself – gray, ashen, weathered both by the Moroccan sun and the tragic circumstances of his life. This boy can act.

Adriana Barraza is glorious as an illegal nanny who temps the fates simply by daring to have her own life while caring for children unceremoniously dumped into her charge by emotionally and physically absent parents. Rinko Kikuchi pains as an over-sexualized teenager unable to process her own overwhelming grief, Mustapha Rachidi humanizes a family and community our xenophobic nation consistently seeks to dehumanize amidst our fantasy of moral supremacy, and Mohamed Akhzam quietly moves as a healing hand amidst the politics of an injured American on foreign soil.

A single, indiscriminate gunshot will have ramifications for all their lives, and Iñárritu passionately yet understatedly makes the personal political. In a world where no one knows how to communicate with one another, where culture and language are unrelenting obstacles to our interconnectedness, the individual seems far less important than media headlines and governmental spin-doctoring. The film delicately provides a road map for how far astray we have gone and where hope remains for our redemption, without proselytizing ad nauseum or dumbing down the storytelling. If the camera lingers too lovingly on specific moments of ethnic diversity, and if one of the storylines never quite folds into the whole as organically as one would wish, the film remains a finely balanced work of condemnation and idealism nevertheless.

In the book of Genesis, we learn that the Tower of Babel was built by all of humanity to reach the heavens, and that God destroyed the tower and changed the one language of humankind into many different languages to ensure such an attempt could never happen again.

It appears even God is guilty of profound and sadly irrevocable errors in judgment.

.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0449467/

Children of Men

Grade: C+

The feel good hit of the season it ain’t.

Never-endingly dark, bleak, oppressive and brooding, this wouldn’t in and of itself present a problem (some of my favorite films, not to mention favorite people, share many of these same qualities) if the film weren’t also rather dull, sometimes self-important and ultimately pretty pointless.

We are 20 years into the future, the youngest living human being has died at the age of 18, and a state of national mourning has ensued Princess Diana style. You see, for some much theorized but ultimately inexplicable reason, the world has gone barren and only the United Kingdom has been left standing (the cheeky bastards). Anyone trying to immigrate into the country in search of luxuries like food and shelter are locked in cages where they rave and mutter to one another in a diversity of foreign tongues (although the most prominent language seems to be German, and Holocaust imagery – burning bodies, ominous checkpoints and hooded firing squad lines – abound, implying a culture that has become the evil it abhors). The British government is bad bad bad for keeping people out and taking away everyone else’s individual rights, one supposes because it would be to difficult to bash the United States since it no longer exists or George Bush since he’s no longer President. This is the future after all, and any current political commentary is purely coincidental.

In the middle of it all, a pregnant woman appears (how this happens we’re never really sure) and madcap mayhem ensues. The resistance movement wants her (to what end we’re never really sure) the government can never ever know about her (for what reason we’re never really sure) and a boat of freedom adrift in very foggy waters offers her safety and serenity (what this represents we’re never really sure of, either). Throw in some well-placed Christ-like imagery, do-it-yourself suicide kits, lots of machine gunfire and an awful lot of gray shading and you have an apocalyptic vision to be proud of.

Clive Owen is appropriately dreary and empathetic in one of the more underwritten leading roles of the year, a former activist turned bereft cynic forced by an ex-flame (played like wallpaper by Julianne Moore) to reactivate his heroic leanings. The always welcome Michael Caine does hippy throwback exceedingly well, and Clare-Hope Ashitey definitely has spunk as a pregnant woman all of humanity wants a piece of.

Director Alfonso Cuarón gets the imagery just right, simultaneously futuristic and retro, a vision of the war we all currently imagine in Iraq consuming the entire planet. Unfortunately, destruction, bedlam and an overall sense of catastrophic dread do not an engaging or cohesive story make, and a much anticipated payoff never arrives. A brief scene of eloquent clarity and import – warring factions only momentarily ceasing fire in astonished recognition of human life – never quite finds its way to the rest of the movie.

.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0206634/