Winter's Bone

Ozark noir. Jennifer Lawrence plays 17-year-old Rhee, who's forced to look after her kid brother and sister because her father is a convicted meth maker, and her mom is "sick." (She doesn't talk, for reasons we don't know.) When a bail bondsman informs Rhee that their house will be taken from them if her father doesn't show for his upcoming court appearance, she resolves to track him down. For just about the rest of the movie she visits a string of cousins and half-cousins and other distant relatives (she half-jokes, "we all share blood one way or another") who are all pretty much devoted to the lofty career opportunities provided by making, selling, and taking Methamphetamines.

I suppose the reason I was dissatisfied with this film is because I expected it to be a more absorbing mystery, something spellbinding. Winter's Bone is a much more deliberately paced thriller. It offers subtle enjoyments. The characters are imbued with a gritty, weather-worn rural quality. The actors seem plucked from the Arkansas mountains to perform their parts. Very few people are painted in black and white colors. Because everyone is so morally ambiguous, you're never sure who to trust or to root for, except the girl. Lawrence carries the picture mightily well. She's easy to root for, being the plucky, resourceful type, and possibly the only non-drug addict in the movie.

Winter's Bone has a rustic gloominess which gives the viewer a sense of dread and foreboding. We don't ever know what to expect. However, I found a lot of the searching for clues repetitive, and only minimally rewarding. There's a lot of build up to a climax that somehow feels anti-climactic. Perhaps it was the trash junkie in me that was waiting for a shootout ala L.A. Confidential or something as terrifically suspenseful as last year's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Winter's Bone is hard and realistic, but a bit too measured and stable, especially considering the instability of the characters' myriad situations.

Directed by Debra Granik. With John Hawkes, Lauren Sweetser, Garret Dillahunt, Dale Dickey,  Isaiah Stone, Ashlee Thompson, Tate Taylor, and Sheryl Lee.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek's Cutoff (2010) is about a harrowing journey along the Oregon Trail. The party of eight is lost, and their supposed guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), doesn't have a clue where they're going (although he tries to maintain the illusion that he's leading them to the promised land). It's a demystified Western. The cowboy isn't the hero, the Indian doesn't miraculously know English or save the day, and most of the characters are impotent.

As impressive and admirable a picture as this may be with its sparseness and economy and gritty realism, it's more a test of endurance than a piece of entertainment. It works out like a short story you read without feeling anything. Michelle Williams's performance comes through but only because her character is written to be the strong one. Everyone else is practically mute.

With Will Patton, Paul Dano, and Rod Rondeaux. Written by Jon Raymond. Directed by Kelly Reichardt.

The Kids Are All Right

I'll be up-front, dear readers, and let you know that this review is riddled with spoilers. So if you have not yet seen The Kids Are All Right (2010) and are planning to, you may want to read cautiously.

Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a couple who each had a kid via artificial insemination (from the same donor). The movie picks up where the elder sibling (Mia Wasikowska) has just graduated from high school. Just eighteen and trying to embrace her newly acquired "adulthood," she decides to contact her biological father (played by Mark Ruffalo), at the urging of her younger brother (Josh Hutcherson). The donor-dad wins the kids over, and even one of the moms (Moore) (and by winning over I mean sleeping with her). Suddenly, Bening feels threatened by what she sees as an intrusive re-emergence of this man's involvement in their family.

This is a comedy-drama that accepts the idea of a non-traditional family unit without trying to preach about it to us. I suspect viewers will take this either as a sign of cultural evolution or devolution, depending on their beliefs. I could evaluate the movie's morality, but then I'd have to go back and evaluate the morality of all the other movies I've watched, and the books I've read, and the music I've listened to, and frankly, I'm not willing to admit to that much hypocrisy. (Besides, we may not want to admit it, but one of the reasons we like movies is because they force us to deal with difficult subjects.)

If The Kids Are All Right pushes unwanted and disagreeable values on its audience, then there's nothing new in that. We aren't meant to agree with everything that's put before us, and I think the responsibility is ours to figure out our own beliefs. When movies confront complex, controversial social issues like gay marriage, perhaps we can be happy on the occasion that they do so with minimal preachiness.

The little fling between Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo actually backs the whole social message into a corner regarding the nature of sexuality, and whether or not it's a fixed construct or in flux. The movie sloughs that off out of spinelessness, and Ruffalo's character is promptly cut off from the kids.

Despite the considerable plot flub of basically writing Ruffalo's character out of the story at the end, I enjoyed the movie. It has some hysterically funny moments, and the actors succeed well. They rise above both the movie's inclination toward sentiment and its need to be hip by pretending it's not attracted to the sentimental. Julianne Moore is one of the best actresses working today, and she gives a wonderful performance in this that was overlooked in favor of Annette Bening, who turns bitchiness into an art form the way Mary Tyler Moore turned bitter, passive agressive detachment into an art form in Ordinary People. (Bening's character isn't just bitchy though. She's understandably threatened, and you do feel for her, particularly during the dinner scene where she finds out about the infidelity, after she's finally warmed up to liking Ruffalo's character).

Likewise, Mark Ruffalo is one of the best actors we've got. In this he's less pathetic than usual. He's not aimless or compulsively abusing drugs and breaking the law like in You Can Count On Me or What Doesn't Kill You. And the "kids" turn in fine performances, even though their characters' involvement in the story gets a bit out of focus as the plot unfolds). Actually, I think the title is the most overtly preachy thing about the movie. It's an assurance that no one in the real world can hold onto, and one that the characters in this movie aren't dumb enough to hold up as some kind of idealistic mantra. However, The fact that Ruffalo's character is so mistreated is the real thorn in this movie's side. All the story threads are plausible and absorbing and often very amusing, and then at the end you feel you've been cheated out of a vital resolution between father and children (even if he's had no involvement in their lives up to this point, it seems the wheels have been incontrovertibly set in motion). Cutting him off is a slight that reeks of evasiveness. But then, they're trying to preserve something that he threatens to dismantle. (Didn't he?)

The Kids Are All Right traipses through a minefield of political correctness only to chicken out in the end. It garnered a lot of positive reviews because people interpreted its non-preachiness as an act of daring bravado from Hollywood. In fact, the real bravery is in the way the movie makes hash out of everyone's idea of stability: both the gays and the straights are so screwed up in this movie that you think, maybe everyone can get along in the end. But Ruffalo's character turns into a sort of punching bag against traditionalism, even though he's not traditional in any way. And the others are held up as martyrs for the cause of progress. Well, okay. But, I really felt bad for Mark Ruffalo's character. I think you got that though.

The movie is superficially hip because of its gay context. Without it, this would be another bland family drama. What's good about The Kids Are All Right are the characters (and the actors), and the way the movie complicates their relationships. Those complications are like a fun detour, derailing the movie's march toward sentiment. They're a welcome shock to the heart of stability. But at its heart, The Kids Are All Right is a gooey family sitcom about mothers not wanting their children to grow up. Nothing too earth-shattering in that. 


Written by the director, Lisa Cholodenko, and Stuart Blumberg. Also starring YaYa DeCosta, Kunal Sharma, Eddie Hassell, and Zosia Mamet.

Shutter Island

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Somehow I missed seeing Shutter Island in theaters, where it must have been all the more exciting to experience. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a marshal who journeys, by ferry, to a foreboding island off the New England coast, called Shutter Island. On it is an ominous facility that functions as a lunatic asylum, run by the calm, collected, and creepy Dr. Cawley (played with stiff, serene menace by Ben Kingsley). DiCaprio, along with his partner (Mark Ruffalo), has come to help locate an escaped patient. The people on Shutter Island are totally deranged, so it's a dangerous situation. Director Martin Scorsese is intent on keeping you on edge from start to finish. However, I found myself almost completely relaxed. I enjoyed the plot and how it unraveled, and there were suspenseful moments, but there wasn't the unbearable tension and anticipation you might expect from a movie like this. At least, I didn't feel it.

Perhaps it's because from the word go I was expecting some kind of bizarre, shocking plot twist. We've--audiences--been conditioned to expect such things. I think modern audiences can look back to The Sixth Sense as the moment we were so embarrassingly (or pleasurably?) fooled by a movie. Of course, it's been done dozens of times before, but in recent movie memory that is the movie that stands out for sheer tom-foolery. Hitchcock did it with Psycho. More recently than that, Jonathan Demme did it at the end of The Silence of the Lambs.

Audiences these days seem to fancy themselves uber-sophisticated when it comes to figuring thrillers out before they reveal themselves to us, yet desperately in need of the kind of movie that takes us along for the ride and completely dupes us. Thrillers, in that sense, deliver the most visceral and exciting experience that we get from movies. We love stories because we love watching them unfold, and the suspense makes the work of an audience member akin to the work of a detective, fetching clues and trying to make guesses about the outcomes, the motivations, and the mysteries, of movies. This must offer at least a partial explanation for how well horror movies--even dumb ones--do at the box office.

A thriller is almost a sure thing as far as making money is concerned, especially if you can get Leonardo DiCaprio to star and Martin Scorsese to direct. Scorsese piles on the atmosphere here, and yet the movie has stark, rich colors to it, colors you don't typically find in a dark and eerie suspense yarn. He goes against that film noir dark-alley quality. Even the scenes in usually dimly lit places are disturbingly well-lit. DiCaprio lights a match that might as well be a spotlight. It never seems to burn out, either.

The opening shot looks obviously computer-generated, though, and that's one of the things modern movies struggle to fight. Filmmakers may save a lot of money to construct the scene virtually, but there's often a phoniness to the scene that floats to the surface, and you wonder how the actors can really trick themselves into believing they're on a real boat and a real ocean. But, for all that, the opening shot also retains a noirish quality, thanks mainly to the costumes. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wearing their hats and their trenchcoats look like two separate Dana Andrews in Laura. They're bound and determined to figure out the mystery that confronts them, but then the movie takes on a sort of Key Largo turn: a magnificent storm disarms the asylum's security system and the inmates start wandering about. All of them are homicidal maniacs (or very close), we're told.

If Shutter Island doesn't blow anyone out of the water, at least it's refreshing to see Scorsese making a movie that's just out to entertain you. He's not trying to do something important and Oscar-worthy like that awful mess The Aviator, or even The Departed, which finally got him what many considered a long-overdue Academy Award. The movie is a hallucinatory mess of a good time, nowhere near as bloated as the misfired Christopher Nolan movie Inception. It's just a crackling, old-fashioned thriller. From the novel by Dennis Lehane. The supporting cast is appropriately nightmarish: Max Von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, and John Carroll Lynch.

Please Give

Please Give is a movie about the tragedy of existence. If that sounds like hell, that's because it is. Nicole Holofcener, who wrote and directed the movie, is keenly aware that her subject matter is grim and unappealing. She laces each scene with comic undercurrents. They're not throwaways--they're more like hilariously grim reminders that there isn't much value in taking things too seriously, whether it's age, work, or social relationships.

It's set in New York City, a place that seems ideal for capturing the feeling of a lost soul wandering through a sea of other lost souls, invisible in the noise and the quiet desperation. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), a husband and wife who buy furniture from the children of dead people, are waiting for their 91-year-old neighbor Andra (Ann Guilbert) to die so they can expand their apartment into hers (which they've already purchased). Andra has two granddaughters, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet). While Rebecca masks her disdain for her grandmother by taking care of her like a dutiful grandchild, Mary is openly hostile toward her grandmother. Andra doesn't give a shit about anything. She's too old to care about maintaining relationships, and her body parts are failing, rapidly decaying her quality of life.

Rebecca is a radiologist who specializes in mammograms. She deals with the beginning of death, the initial shock of bad news. Andra stands (or rather, hobbles) at the thresh-hold of death, waiting to go just as everyone else is waiting for her so they can move on with their lives. Kate works in the aftermath of death. She's got a bleeding heart but can't seem to find a way to deal with it. She keeps giving money to homeless people. And she tries assuaging the guilt she feels (for being some kind of Antiques Roadshow Grim Reaper) by helping the less fortunate, or at least thinking about helping them. She tries visiting with the elderly, then the mentally disabled, but she's all jelly inside and gets overcome by her own sympathy. It's like the sympathy she feels--as well as the correlating sense of helplessness--is the only thing that gives her life meaning. Kate wants to stop feeling guilt, but she isn't willing to really change the things that make her feel guilty (or think about why they do). Moreover, she's unwilling to face the bleak realities of her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, played by Sarah Steele.

Keener's character is just irritating. The things she doesn't seem to be aware of are matched only by her disgustingly patronizing good intentions. Peet's performance is wonderfully vivid as Andra's beautiful elder grandchild, who feels like a loser despite her beautiful features. She's having an affair with Alex for some untenable reason. Her callousness is made to be a point of comic release for us. It's like she says what we're thinking. She vents the inner frustrations of her nicer, shell shocked sister.

The performances make Please Give worth seeing. It has a slightness about it though, as though we will forget what we've seen. The humor--which is deep at the heart of the movie--lets us laugh at the characters' sense of self-seriousness, drawing something much more real out of them. But watching Please Give is also like catching a little glimpse into the lives of real people. Holofcener explored similar stories of frustrated women in Friends With Money. She's making good movies that aren't getting seen by very many people, but you can check out Please Give via netflix's instant streaming feature.

Black Swan

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) wants to be the lead in Swan Lake. Her obsession with being a perfect ballerina leads to some kind of psychological breakdown a la Roman Polanski's Repulsion. It's the weirdest movie of 2010, one that leaves you feeling cold and disturbed by its bizarreness. Director Darren Aronofsky keeps us up close and personal with Nina throughout the movie, and I don't think there's a single scene she's not in. Her creepy, conniving nemesis, Lily (Mila Kunis), seems innocuous except for the fact that movie keeps telling us over and over again that this is about Nina's destruction in order for another ballerina to take her coveted place. It's like All About Eve in terms of the mousy young novice snatching the spotlight from the aging star. Except, there's a scene in a bar where Nina tells a young man that she's a ballerina and he's completely disinterested in ballet and doesn't even know Swan Lake. So, Nina is obsessed with and being torn apart by something that no one cares about. It's an attempt at marrying "high" art (ballet) with "low" art (movies), and I think in the process they're both taken down a few notches.

The movie has moments that make you think Nina is possessed by a demon. Is this The Exorcist all over again? Then Nina takes some ecstasy at Lily's urging and it seems more akin to Aronofsky's earlier Requiem For A Dream. Black Swan is a movie about how truly beautiful and perfect art can only be so if you are willing to die for it, to be completely consumed by it. And the act must be completed to truly work. There is no half-hearted attempt at perfection. Perfection is death, we are told. Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) as the director of the ballet company, seems convinced of this, but it really just seems like he wants to get laid. He's been feeding such fiddle faddle to the previous ingenue Beth (Winona Ryder), who's forced into retirement by her age (and she's not content to exit the stage in a graceful manner). Beth winds up being hit by a car and disfigured, rendered ugly and useless. And so only the young can truly experience the perfect beauty of art. Those past their prime can die by their own hand but not by the perfection of their craft. 

Meanwhile, Nina has a really sordid relationship with her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), who reminds you of the mom in Carrie (Piper Laurie). The mother-daughter relationship seems to contribute to Nina's madness, but then Aronofsky doesn't seem convinced about what the cause of her madness is. Perhaps it's simply a combination of Nina's unhealthy relationship with her mother and her obsession with being perfect, of being the Star. Regardless, we are being prepped for some kind of Jeckyll and Hyde transformation throughout Black Swan. You spend the entire movie so mired in Aronofsky's cold, freakish world that you experience a feeling of relief when it's all over and done with. Sure it's affecting, but it's also pretty dismal.

Aronofsky loves playing with the imagery of the Double. The movie is full of mirrors. We're beaten over the head with the doppelganger image. And pink seems like the color of death in Black Swan. A pink cake incites a bit of tension between mother and daughter. The hospital curtains in Beth's room are pink. The flowers filling the floor of her room are pink. The towel Nina uses to cover up an increasing pool of blood is pink. Pink, the most obvious and disinteresting symbol of innocent girlhood, becomes a cinematic device just like the mirrors to insinuate things that eventually come to the surface. It's all about Nina's sexual coming of age. The movie's much-celebrated eroticism is something out of a college fraternity boy's wet dream. Nina must find herself via sexual experimentation. She needs to "loosen up" in order to perfect her art. Her skill is brilliant but it's too forced, too skilled in fact, to really propel her into the realm of total emotional abandon. But it's all so creepy that you feel like the worst kind of voyeur for watching.

Wonderful World

Wonderful World is a movie about a man named Ben Singer (Matthew Broderick) who's really cynical and expects disappointment and negativity at every turn. Apparently he didn't always view the world this way, but then he got divorced and felt himself becoming alienated from his daughter and bored with his copywriting job (not to mention irritated at the perceived level of idealism of those around him). His only real glimmer of hope is his roommate, Ibou (Michael K. Williams), an African immigrant who goes into a diabetic coma early in the film, initiating Ben's journey down the road of not being such a grumpy pessimist. He meets Ibou's sister when she comes from Africa, and they enjoy a little romantic relationship while they're waiting for Ibou to wake up. It's The Accidental Tourist all over again, except they've replaced flakiness with foreignness. Sanaa Lathan, as the sister, is quite beautiful, and she has a natural warmth about her that makes her character really rather charming.

Matthew Broderick seems to gravitate toward parts where he's a perpetual loser. His pasty, frowning demeanor served him well in movies like Election and You Can Count On Me. In Wonderful World, there are moments when you wonder why on earth you're supposed to care about this schmuck, but his supreme annoyance with the world is somewhat understandable, and he's very believable as a grump. He just can't connect, but he's reawakened by African exoticism and values. Perhaps it's a bit much to believe, but okay.

Wonderful World has a remarkable slightness about it, although you feel compelled to watch anyway, if only to see what becomes of Ben. There's such an inclination that he will dig his own grave and bury himself too, and there's an inkling of belief that in fact Ben gets a kick out of being kicked when he's down. When he gets fired, he's forced to take a job as a pizza delivery man. He faces an uncomfortable moment when he delivers dinner to his former boss (William Ragsdale), who doesn't even seem to recognize him. It's humiliating and degrading, but even more it's a victory for Ben, confirming all of his worst notions about human nature. He's a man in search of such victories, and it's all too easy for him to discover them. He tries to sue the city for neglecting his roommate Ibou--another such search for confirmation that the world is vile and heartless. We're told that, yes, the world is heartless, but we shouldn't give up the ghost so easily. We should put on a happy face regardless and make the best of things.

It's a bit of a Hallmark message for a movie that wants so desperately to be an "indie" drama. Broderick's character, in one of his rants, makes an interesting comment about movies that they're only valued by how much money they make. Indeed, this little film has gotten virtually no notice by critics or audiences, and I think it deserves to be seen. Not because it's a great movie, but because it's interesting. Even as flawed as it is, it was more affecting than most of the high-grade junk that's produced from the studios. It's light even when it's heavy, and it's charming even as it reproduces scenes from other movies we've seen a million times. The movie is downright repetitive at times, but we're pulled into its games rather easily.

With Phillip Baker Hall, as the Man, who keeps turning up in Ben's dreams and marijuana-induced hallucinations. Written and directed by Joshua Goldin.

The Fighter

For me, boxing is about as uninteresting as good taste is to Kathy Griffin. I liked Cinderella Man but it's such a bland subject to me that much more is needed than the back and forth of the two prizefighters and the ever popular theme of an underdog triumphing over insurmountable odds. Apparently entire cities of people can rally behind a boxer as though he's a symbol of all their hard work, blood, sweat, values, etc., but how many times do we have to sit through a movie that's made of such subject matter before we're asleep with boredom? Director David O. Russell makes The Fighter less about boxing and more about the family of sleazy, opportunistic worms and their selfish investment in the career of son/brother Micky Ward, whose brother Dick had his time in the limelight in the 1970s against a fighter named Sugar Ray. Dick is now a crack addict, and the addiction keeps pulling him apart from his brother as both a friend and a trainer and mentor. Nevertheless, Dick's mom Alice, who manages Micky's boxing career, is blinded by Dick's past glory and is convinced that he's necessary to Micky's success. She's waiting for Dick to make his big comeback, and biding her time with Micky's boxing campaign. They're thrilled that HBO is doing a documentary on Dick until they discover it's a documentary about the horrors of cocaine addiction.

As Micky, Mark Wahlberg does a formidable job playing the emotional center of the movie. Wahlberg will probably not get the recognition he deserves for initiating The Fighter and for his performance, but he's quite good. The problem is he's not really playing anything new for himself as an actor. He's basically a nice guy. We feel confident that he can do what is needed to win, and we trust Wahlberg as an actor to carry the film. Christian Bale, as Dick, has the more extreme character. His glassy-eyed stares and wobbling swagger make him seem a bit nightmarish--he's trying to show us the ravages of addiction and in the process becomes something increasingly hideous. I wasn't even particularly sympathetic towards him. He seemed like a leech sucking away his younger brother's potential, urged on by the Mama Leach, Alice (Melissa Leo), whose part is probably the most delicious one in the movie (along with the parts of her seven dried-up, spaced-out daughters, who do pretty much whatever Mama tells them).

 This is probably one of the funniest movies of the year. Russell gives us such a bleakly comic look at this royally f***ed up family that it has the effect of watching an episode of Jersey Shore. They revel in the gutter as though it were lined with satin and roses, and their opportunism is so unveiled that you can't help but laugh at their efforts to protect their turgid family unit from outside invasion. Amy Adams, as Micky's girlfriend, represents the first real threat to the family's shell. She sees how much they're ruining Micky's chances to really succeed as a prizefighter, and she has the audacity to stand up to their "us verses the world" act.

The relationship between Dick and Micky is truly what drives the film's story. Without Micky's fear of letting go of his brother--of essentially betraying him by realizing how destructive Dick is to Micky's career and his life--he could easily move on to brighter pastures and recognize his potential. However, it's not as simple as Dick being a useless leach. He's got instincts that can't be ignored when it comes to boxing, and Micky realizes that he does still need his brother's help. Perhaps the dramatic tension is a bit predictable, but the movie's comic realism helps to lighten the load of the drama. We're already enjoying the juicy scenes of the family in-fighting more than the boxing anyway.

Overall I'd say The Fighter exceeded my expectations because it went so much against the grind of the typical boxing movie, and I was very thankful that David Russell and everyone else involved in making the movie took the care to be funny and realistic in their approach. With Jack McGee and Frank Renzulli. Written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson.

The King's Speech

My expectations going into The King's Speech were low. It looked like Oscar-bait. It looked like a lot of scenes of Colin Firth making animalistic stammering noises to show us how painfully he struggled to improve his speech. While the movie had moments where it seemed to be aiming for an Oscar, the story it told was fascinating, and didn't need to be elevated into awards material. It's about British royalty, particularly British royalty in the 1930s, and so what it needed was to be taken down a few notches. Geoffrey Rush gives the movie this necessary derailing. He plays Lionel Logue, a speech therapist to whom the Duke of York (soon to be King George VI) goes for help with his impediment. Lionel is not impressed with the pomp of George's royal status and doesn't afford the future king any extraneous privileges.

Firth is somber looking in another tasteful performance (he was very somber and tasteful in 2009's A Single Man, as an English professor), but he manages to break through the clinched veneer of his character to let a little humor and a lot of vulnerability into his performance. As his wife, a young Queen Mother, Helena Bonham Carter has such a high amount of potential within her as an actress. You can sense the wit she carries inside herself as it comes through in little movements, facial expressions, and in the way she carries herself. It's quite fun watching her leading her husband around like a shepherd with one of his sheep, and yet never overtaking his station. She's quite lovely, and quite an intelligent, fiery actress. Watching her keep that fieriness in check is fascinating because she seems to be in such command of her performance.

The movie cannot resist giving us a bit of the World War II treatment, tapping into the tension that was stirring in Europe in the 1930s. Of course it's obvious that England needed a king who could get his way through a sentence without stammering incoherently, especially during a time of war, so WW2 gives the story weight and significance. After all, why are we to care about a privileged royal son's speech problems? Surely the sympathy belongs to the underlings of the empire who cannot afford the luxury of a speech therapist. Surely we are better off caring for Rush's middle class dwelling and his middle class family. And yet the Logues are never portrayed as greedy, pining opportunists trying to glom onto the king's prestige. They are content with who they are much more so than the king himself. There's a scene when the radio carries the news of impending war, and you get a sense of the fear in their faces that one or both of their sons may be summoned to fight for the Crown.

Colin Firth may get the bulk of the award recognition for this picture (and he is good here), but I believe it is Geoffrey Rush who carries The King's Speech, and Helena Bonham Carter as well. Their performances were among the highlights of the movie. The cinematography of Danny Cohen was another. At first I groaned because I was afraid the murkiness of the exteriors--London is known for its rainy, foggy days--would make the movie a dull, depressing drag. But Cohen manages to make it visually interesting and gives the material a fluidity that it desperately needs. You can't squeeze much juice out of crusty upper-class British drama without a little help, and it's partly to the cinematographer's credit that The King's Speech is so watchable. It's not only watchable, it's quite funny, with a particularly amusing scene of the king shouting profanities at the top of his lungs as a vocal exercise.

Also starring Guy Pearce as David, the eldest son of George V and briefly his successor (his philandering ways force him out of the throne), Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, Claire Bloom as their mother, Michael Gambon as George V, Eve Best as David's American lover, and Jennifer Ehle as Lionel's wife. Written by David Seidler. Directed by Tom Hooper. 111 minutes.

The Tourist

The Tourist is an American remake of the French film Anthony Zimmer (2005). It stars Angelina Jolie as a British woman who meets an American tourist (Johnny Depp) while on a train from Paris. Depp's character, a banal, unwitting math teacher from Wisconsin, becomes the fall guy in Jolie's plan to help her lover, a career criminal named Alexander Pearce, escape from both Scotland Yard and a greedy gangster (Steven Berkoff) from whom Pearce stole around 800 million dollars. It's a simple adventure story, botched by three writers (Christopher McQuarrie, Julian Fellowes, and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck) who don't seem to know what they're doing or how to make a good romantic adventure pop with suspense and charm. They don't seem interested in giving us a good time so much as filling time. Perhaps the writers were just sloppy in their construction of the story, or perhaps they merely translated a sloppily constructed story from French into English. Either way, what you have is a movie that is entertaining for a while until you start to think through it and become frustrated with the laziness with which it was all thought out.

Some random Scotland Yard agent is apparently an informant to the gangster mentioned earlier: he leaks the information about the man Jolie claims is Pearce (but is really the schoolteacher played by Depp). The movie rests on this little mishap and on the incompetence of another Scotland Yard agent, played by Paul Bettany, who keeps botching operations because he fails to do his homework thoroughly. At the climactic scene where the gangster is about to kill Jolie and Depp, it is this agent who refuses to let his men fire on the gangster and his goons because he's waiting for Pearce to show up. When Bettany's superior (Timothy Dalton) miraculously arrives on the scene, he orders them to fire on the villains, and the heroes are saved by a modern-day deus ex machina.


The Tourist reminded me of several movies. It seemed a little reminiscent of Charade and even North By Northwest, and more recently of another Angelina Jolie movie, Salt, and Knight and Day (also from 2010) which starred Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. That movie was mindless but more engaging because the stars were I think a bit more relaxed. Jolie seems as inaccessible as ever with her cynical, exotic version of Audrey Hepburn-esque elegance. While I can totally buy their being a romantic pair, the movie doesn't give us enough of them together where they're actually able to fall in love with each other. In the end we discover why this seemed unnecessary to the writers, but until that time it's just bad writing and even worse disinterested writing. They didn't bother with a better script, possibly because they knew it would be Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp playing the parts. Depp is so reserved that you wish some of the magnetism of which he's capable would shine through, but he's forced into playing the inept, charmingly clumsy American tourist, so he's likable but boring. He becomes a puppy following Jolie's character around out of blind love. The movie is passably entertaining, but you long for so much more than that, and it becomes quite a disappointment in the end.

There were things I liked about The Tourist, however. There's a lightness to the movie that is much appreciated in an era when most filmmakers' approach to subtlety involves a megaphone and a sledgehammer. The simplicity of Depp's motivation is perhaps what drives his charm. As far as we know he's been deeply hurt before, and it's like he's a lost soul wandering through the city of love. Jolie's character, on the other hand, is ambiguous. We wonder what she's really up to, and her duplicitous behavior is the right contrast to Depp's character. The movie tried to use its Venice locale well, particularly during an exciting boat chase where Depp's character is handcuffed to the railing of one boat, and Jolie is rescuing him from Berkoff's goons. It's a marvelously well-done scene. I think it outshined the finale, which should have been even more exciting given the build-up with the chase scenes in the middle of the movie. It's the writing that messes everything up. The star appeal and the basic elements of the plot are alligned for a better movie than is given to us in the end.

True Grit

A plucky fourteen-year-old girl--who looks like Anne of Green Gables with brown hair--nags a grizzled old marshal into hunting down the man who killed her father in cold blood. Jeff Bridges takes Rooster Cogburn (the part that garnered John Wayne his only Oscar for the 1969 version of True Grit) and turns him into a comical force to be reckoned with. He banters back and forth with Matt Damon, who plays a Texas ranger who's hunting the killer for a different murder. You can tell Bridges was having fun with his part, and Damon's natural likableness comes through in his role even after a scene where he repeatedly welts the pesky little girl for her stubborn refusal to let them take care of her vengeance. She's determined to see justice served.

The Coen Brothers never fail to let the brutality of their characters come through. They seem to have a morbid fascination with bodily disfigurement, as I recall the knife in M. Emmett Walsh's gloved hand in Blood Simple. It's not just that he gets stabbed. Frances McDormand plunges it into his hand while he's stretching his arm out of one window and into another, so that he's stuck in that position in excruciating pain, and as sleazy as his character is, the audience groans in agony right there with him. In No Country For Old Men, we squirmed in our seats as Javier Bardem repeatedly dealt his own sadistic brand of "justice" with that strange oxygen tank device, which left little holes in people's foreheads. In True Grit, it's like the Greatest Hits of Movie Disfigurement. Hands stabbed, chests stabbed, eyes pecked out by birds, a tongue bit through, teeth yanked out with abandon, serpents nesting in a rotting corpse. There's a scene of a hanging early on in the movie, and we see the brutality of execution matched by the creepy fascination of the spectators who've come to it like it's a carnival show. The audience watches as the man in the middle makes a pathetic speech about being raised improperly and pleads for mercy with tears streaming down his face, and then has his head covered by one of those black sacks. When the native American on his right is about to speak, the executioner simply pulls the sack over his head and he's denied even the slightest bit of dignity.

It's like a Western mixed with Grand Guignol, and yet there's a consistent thread of humor that topples the brutality over like a heavy statue on loose, grainy soil. One minute we're absolutely frantic with the grotesque horror of it, the next we're laughing because Bridges is giving Matt Damon shit about being a Texas ranger who mounts sheep instead of horses or one of a hundred funny zingers that he slings at Damon's character (and vice versa).

As the girl, Hailee Steinfeld pulls off the difficult task of being the emotional heart of the picture. Her naive idealism and her stick-to-itiveness is charming even when the cynical reality is evident in the facial expressions and the words of the men. Josh Brolin plays Tom Chaney, the man who killed her father, and his entrance into the story is well-timed because it is so unexpected. He's totally scummy, an interesting change from his last Coen Brothers movie, where he was the hero we rooted for (even though he was an idiot at times).

The suspenseful scenes are well-crafted. They tug at our emotions and heighten our senses in a calculated sort of way, and the directors seem to have everything carefully in place emotionally speaking. The images are pretty--there's a lovely shot of the girl as an adult (Elizabeth Marvel, who also narrates) walking away from a field and her black silhouette is set against the sky. It's striking even if it's a deliberately cinematic shot. The opening shot is the gradual reveal of a clapboard house at night that's glowing from the oil lamps inside. It's very beautiful, and it captures the rustic image the directors were going for with this.

Fair Game

Fair Game is a political expose first and a movie second. It's a documentary thinly masked as narrative, and director/cinematographer Doug Liman doesn't seem too care in which form the viewer receives his film as far as that goes. He does seem rather concerned with the image of his main characters. How does one evaluate a movie that's so politically charged? It deals with Valerie Plame, a CIA agent whose identity was outed in a column by writer Robert Novak in 2003. The issue was Joe Wilson, Plame's husband, who claimed to know for a fact that Iraq did not purchase uranium from Niger. And of course that all has much to do with whether or not Hussein had WMD's. Since Wilson's article, "What I Didn't Find In Africa" threw suspicion on the President's campaign against Hussein, conflict arose. In an effort to stop Wilson, his wife, Plame, became a target of Vice Presidential aid Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

If it sounds complicated, that's because it is. And the movie is based on books by both Plame and Wilson--drastically different from the way the media reported the scandal, often referred to as "Plamegate." In the lead role, Naomi Watts is surefooted and strong and poised and noble. She's accused by the media of being a nothing desk agent who stunk at her job, and she takes it all in stride while her blowhard husband (played effectively with that lovable loose cannon Sean Penn) whores himself out to the media in an effort to fight back. Whether you believe in Valerie Plame the Sacrificial Lamb or Valerie Plame the Incompetent depends very much on how much homework you've done outside of the film.

As entertainment, Fair Game is at its best when it deals with the story of an Iraqi doctor (played by Liraz Charhi), who is tapped by the U.S. to funnel information from her brother, a high-ranking scientist working directly under the Iraqi government.  Plame is spearheading the operative to get this information--using Charhi's character as a tool--and the whole deal goes bad when Plame is revealed as a CIA agent. That portion of the story is abruptly dismembered from the rest of the movie (perhaps this is in line with the real events, but it's frustrating regardless). The politics of war run deeply through the movie, and it's difficult to divorce such a vital strand from Plame's story of inner-torment as she copes with her worlds (marriage, career and social relationships) careening out of control.

There's a lot of real news footage in Fair Game that further takes us out of the narrative and into the documentary. Actors playing political officials like Libby and Fleischer and Rove cannot compete with the real footage of Bush and Cheney and Rice, et. al. It's fascinating, but you wonder why Liman didn't just go straight for a documentary format. Maybe he's hoping to collect some Oscars on his mantel (the Academy does love important work, and Fair Game reeks of importance). Watts may even land herself an Oscar, although Penn's bombastic performance is the one that really leaves you on edge. He's positively frightening in one turbulent scene after another, and when he's not losing his temper, he's a live wire waiting to do so, grinning like a prophet and a politician roled into one.

Liman's camerawork, by the way, is more than a little dizzying at times. Perhaps he was trying to create camerawork that was as fuzzy and convoluted and headache-inducing as this whole scandal.

With Ty Burrell, Sam Shepard, Bruce McGill, Brooke Smith, David Andrews, Noah Emmerich, David Denman, Polly Holliday, Geoffrey Cantor, and Adam LeFevre. 108 min. ★★½

The Ghost Writer

Director Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer is a mystery yarn of the spell-binding variety, in which Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer who is hired to finish the memoirs of a former British prime minister named Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Lang's last ghost writer died of an apparent suicide while working on the book. Meanwhile, Lang is being investigated by the British government for war crimes. (He allegedly authorized the torturing of terror suspects). McGregor becomes immersed in the mystery just like his predecessor, bringing us along for the ride.

This is by far the most enjoyable movie I have seen in 2010 (or rather, it's tied with Robin Hood and The Social Network and Easy A). It's a sharp and tingling political thriller with a subtle sense of humor that keeps it from being unpleasant. Polanski's artistic touch is here too. There's a wonderful seen at the end where McGregor hands an incriminating note to another character at a large gathering, and it passes hands about twelve times as it goes from him through the crowd to the recipient.

McGregor does a nice job in this, and it's a really first-rate movie, a liberal's political thriller. Viewers to the right will likely think Lang was just doing his job, but the movie attempts to ruffle our political outrage while keeping us on the edge of our seats. Tom Wilkinson has a nice and ominous part as one of the heavies, a shady academic with ties to the former PM--he has some wonderful double entendres (his presence is always a trifle menacing and severe) that add to the tension of the movie.

Just about everything in The Ghost Writer is subtle. The movie develops in layers. We get glimpses of the tense relationship between Lang and his wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams) and the underlings (including his personal assistant/mistress, played by Kim Cattrall) who work for him at his home on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts. Lang, as we come to learn, acted in the favor of the U.S. on numerous occasions in his political decision-making. (The only non-subtlety in this movie is that Lang is a stand-in for Tony Blair).

There's certainly something to comparing this movie to Hitchcock. It has an unnamed double, like the second Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca, and it has a bit of the everyman-on-the-lam theme that fueled North By Northwest among other Hitchcock movies. However, The Ghost Writer doesn't operate like a hacky imitation of another director's work. (Polanski doesn't have to do such things, after all). It's a movie that taps in quite successfully to the political, technological and thematic current of the early 21st century. The movies are starting to integrate the tech-savvy habits of humans with less awkwardness, although it's still a bit strange seeing McGregor's character doing research on Google. It almost takes you out of the picture for a moment (not to mention the fact that he finds exactly what he's looking for, which is so improbable).

Also worth mentioning is the lovely score by Alexandre Desplat--it reminded me of Bernard Herrmann's score in that trashy De Palma thriller Sisters (1973). The xylophone dances on top of the suspense scenes with an intriguing boldness. It somehow manages to both lighten the mood and drive the film's organic sense of mystery and intrigue.

Based on Robert Harris's novel, The Ghost, it was adapted for the screen by Harris and Polanski. With Jon Bernthal, Robert Pugh, James Belushi, and Timothy Hutton. 128 min. ★★★½

The Next Three Days

In The Next Three Days, which was filmed on location in Pittsburgh, Russell Crowe looks puffy and inept as a high school English teacher who devises a plan to bust his wife (Elizabeth Banks) out of jail. She was convicted of murdering her boss three years earlier, but Crowe's character isn't interested in whether or not she did it: he just wants his wife back. Crowe is the movie, because Banks spends most of it stuck in the slammer awaiting his visitations, and while she gives a successful performance, it's Crowe's task to make this movie believable.

The improbabilities that bog this movie down are manifold. It's hard enough to believe that Crowe's character could successfully break anyone out of jail, but the movie covers that problem by letting him fail, frequently. He tries to find people in Pittsburgh's ghettos to get him fake I.D.'s and winds up getting his face smashed (and his pocket picked). In fact, you get the feeling that his own lack of street-smarts will dissuade him from undertaking the operation altogether, but he persists, even when it seems impossible to prove his wife's guilt.

The movie is suspenseful and keeps your stomach in knots, but it's the moral ambiguity that makes The Next Three Days a little more interesting. You start to think that Crowe's character has gone bonkers just like Don Quixote, who comes up during a discussion in his class, and provides a clumsy impetus for our understanding of Crowe's transformation. He simply refuses to accept the reality of his wife being in prison for murder, so he opts for an alternate reality. Quite interesting, but the movie doesn't have the strength of its convictions. [SPOILER] We're let off the hook at the end because Bonnie and Clyde turn out to be nice and innocent, not mean and cold-blooded. Crowe makes it work, but the movie is just a heartbeat away from being an absolutely inconceivable mess. With lesser talents it would have been just that, but as it is, I liked it for the most part.

Adapted from the French film Pour Elle (Anything For Her) (2007). Directed by Paul Haggis. With Liam Neeson, Brian Dennehy, Jason Beghe, Olivia Wilde. 125 min. ★★½

Morning Glory

I'm sure that in retrospect the studio executives behind Morning Glory regret releasing it so close to the premiere of the latest Harry Potter installment. Morning Glory is slight and episodic, light and fluffy entertainment that doesn't have much umph to it: Rachel McAdams plays Becky Fuller, an endlessly energetic but naive young producer who is handed the task of salvaging Daybreak, a morning talk show that no one watches.

It's sort of about how McAdams's character grows from being a career-obsessed single woman to a more well-rounded, on top of the game, mature woman who's willing to let a little romance (provided by Patrick Wilson) into her life. It's also sort of about her struggle with a grizzled, iconic anchorman (Harrison Ford, looking as lively as a corpse) who is forced to co-host Daybreak much to his chagrin. Ford's character, named Mike Pomeroy, feels that such trivial subject matter is beneath him, while his co-host (played by a marvelously funny Diane Keaton, who's given less than she deserves but does wonders with it) revels in seeing the beloved newsman taken down a notch.

McAdams has a very likable quality that sustains an uninteresting character. She's Mary Richards without the gutsy spunk that made her character grow from timid to tough. She's not sassy enough to be Murphy Brown, and she doesn't have the nerdy humanness of a Liz Lemon. (Notice that all these characters come from television.) I don't think we'd care a wit about Becky Fuller if someone less charming and sympathetic and likably idealistic were playing her. But McAdams pulls it off at least to a point, and we're willing to root for her, but the movie doesn't really give us much to root for. Becky's dream of being offered a job at NBC on The Today Show will clearly have to be sacrificed so that she can preserve the familial quality she facilitates when she takes over Daybreak, but there's so much squabbling and chaos between the crew and the personalities on the set that we never really see that growth: it's all bombastic lunacy fueled by angry jibes at each other until suddenly they're this big, warm, oozing family that needs each other and can't bear to part with each other, but the movie doesn't really bridge the gap between these two points. Call it laziness or a lack of focus on the part of the writers.

This is the kind of movie we go to to see good actors climb into juicy characters and take pot shots at each other. We get that to some degree, but Morning Glory never makes up its mind: is it a cute, romantic working comedy or something leaner and smarter or something preachier? It dabbles on all sides, and so the result, while passably entertaining and at times laugh-out-loud funny, is mixed, if not uneven. Jeff Goldblum does some wonderfully funny work as Becky's boss--he's got such a good deadpan delivery that you enjoy his character ragging on Becky -- it gives her something to fight against. Keaton and Ford have some enjoyable tension but it's like a less intense version of Walter Mathau and Jack Lemon squabbling and hurling insults at each other in Grumpy Old Men. ★★½

Howl

I like James Franco because he makes interesting career choices. I won't say his choice to do General Hospital last year was daring, or provocative, or interesting, but it's refreshing to see an actor doing what he wants to do. On the other hand, Franco's newest movie, Howl, is kind of daring. Howl is about Allen Ginsberg and his phantasmagorical poem ("Howl"), which was accused of being obscene.

The movie traces the trial in which David Strathairn and Jon Hamm face off as lawyers on opposite sides of the case, while a cartoonish-looking Bob Balaban sits sternly at the bench with his gavel. Interspersed with the courtroom drama story, which is the most mainstream thing about Howl, are scenes of Franco as Ginsberg, being interviewed by an unknown person, talking about his writing style, his thoughts on art and the creative process, his homosexuality, his relationships, and his mother, who died after she underwent a lobotomy.

The standout in Howl is the animation: a visual representation of Ginsberg's poem, which is the third part of Howl's intercutting story. It's vividly mad and madly vivid, a fascinating realization of Ginsberg's rambling, chaotic, sensual style. Such an ambitious attempt at uniting poetry and film makes Howl worth seeing, although it's probably not going to find much of an audience. It's more of a documentary than a piece of narrative, and the courtroom drama section of the movie is, despite being the most traditionally dramatic aspect of the movie, not the emotional center of the film. Is it an attempt to ingratiate the movie's form with mainstream audiences? I'm not sure, but I think it does provide a bit of respite from the trippy animated scenes and the scenes where Ginsberg talks to the camera like it's his shrink. Franco has a sort of droll, blase way of reading the poem (and speaking in general) that is charged with an energy that comes from his chest and seems to force its way out of him. His voice is a strange combination of lethargy and passion: he's like a stoner who's simultaneously mellow and unhinged.

Jon Hamm and David Strathairn don't really have much to do other than defend their side of the "obscenity in literature" argument, and while they are good actors who do convincing work, it's not very challenging work. Hamm is easy to like, so of course it's not hard to put him on the side of open-mindedness, and Strathairn does a good job playing the stuffy, wormy conservative villain who wants to outlaw what he doesn't understand. The judge's decision isn't really very momentous, but then we're left with the impression that this was never the point of Howl. Instead, it seems more an attempt to give a voice to someone who had trouble being understood but struck a chord with his incoherency. Ginsberg's poetry has been compared to jazz in its rhythm and its style, and indeed it seems like linguistic jazz--seemingly unstructured and unpredictable, going against the rules of form and style, but penetrating the senses with its dark, deep and fluid imagery.

Directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. With Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, Treat Williams, and Alessandro Nivola. ★★½

The Social Network

Perhaps the timing of the movie of how Facebook came into existence is itself a statement about how fast things move today: It's remarkable that only seven years after its inception, Facebook and its founder are the subject of a movie. As Mark Zuckerberg, Jesse Eisenberg accentuates the characteristics that the public has picked up on through various media about the computer-whiz-kid-billionaire, namely the social awkwardness (ironic for a guy responsible for creating a social networking site, and yet, not so) and the abrasive cockiness that alienates him from every social circle he idolizes. It is this alienation, this supreme idolatry, that motivates Zuckerberg, we're led to believe.

Eisenberg as an actor is one who disarms you: he's scrawny and geeky but also likable and he has a fresh face, and good comic timing. We were rooting for him in The Squid and the Whale even when he plagiarized that Pink Floyd song, and we wanted him to survive the frenetic madness of Zombieland. Here, however, his likability disintegrates. It seems all too obvious that he (as Zuckerberg) means what he says exactly how he says it: he's not a victim of bad social skills, he just doesn't make the effort to follow the same rules as the world he lives in. (One character puts it best: "You're not an asshole. You're just trying so hard to be one.") He's a Harvard student who has the intelligence but not the charm that so often goes hand in hand with the world of good breeding and old money and suits and ties. (Rather than the jeans-and-hoody apparel Mark dons throughout the movie; from the classroom to the corporate headquarters, he has no airs about dressing toward a certain perception.)

The supporting cast is headed by Andrew Garfield, as Mark's only true friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin. Eduardo isn't willing to take the risks that Mark is, and his cautious lip gets him in the end, but ultimately it's Eduardo we identify with: he's the one we care about, while Mark is left holding the bloody knife. Justin Timberlake plays on the sleaziness of his own persona as Sean Parker, the founder of Napster (in real life his name is Shawn Fanning), who oozes with the kind of seedy, shameless, suaveness Mark wants. When Sean enters the story, he tears them apart, but he makes Facebook stronger. Good business and bad friendship go hand in hand. Armie Hammer and Josh Pence play twin brothers (both Harvard students) who file a lawsuit against Mark for allegedly stealing Facebook from them.

As a movie, The Social Network captures both the condescending upper-crustiness of ivy league culture and the sexy, glittering allure of fame and fortune. If you want the former, we're told, you can finish your degree at Harvard and participate in exclusive final clubs and do crew and get a job in N.Y.C. The sexy glittery stuff, however, is L.A.'s department. Indeed, The Social Network captures the fascinating rift between these two cultural centers, places of such stylized, unyielding self-importance that they are gulfs apart from each other in the ways and means of achieving it.

 One of the best things director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin do is limit the exposition. If you need to know who Mark Zuckerberg is and what Facebook is, you certainly don't need to watch The Social Network. Rather than spoonfeed the audience such details (one of the benefits of filming this so promptly), the makers go back and forth between the execution and the arbitration. We see the details unfold, and we see the rift that has occurred at virtually the same time. The storytelling power isn't in finding out what will happen so much as finding out how it does. The opening scene between Eisenberg and the girl he wants, the girl who in effect sets the events into motion for him, allows us to instantly dislike his character, so there's not really a question of reverberating loyalty. We're in it for Eduardo, even though he should have seen things as they were. His niceness--his blindness--gets in the way.

The movie isn't mean--it's pretty objective. Eisenberg may not be likable, but you don't really feel yourself hating him, either. He's like Ebenezer Scrooge in a way--you feel sorry for him after you see the events of his life, many of which unfolded the way they did because of his greed. And yet, he gets the gold in the end. This is the fairy tale where they didn't all live happily ever but they didn't care because they had enough money to fill in the unhappiness.

With Rashida Jones, Joseph Mazzello, Rooney Mara, and John Getz. Adapted from the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. 120 min. ★★★½

The American

The American is James Bond minus the camp. George Clooney, who is himself beginning to show his age, plays Jack, an assassin in hiding, who relocates from Sweden to a rural Italian village after his cover is blown. There he falls in love with a prostitute (Violante Placido) while working on his latest assignment: designing a very complex weapon for a hit that somebody else is going to make.

Jack feels at odds with his age. There are scenes of him trying to maintain his virility (working out, making love to his new-found girlfriend, and carrying out some impressive stunts as he flees the occasional trigger man on his trail). It's like Paul Newman in The Drowning Pool: Clooney's no spring chicken but he can still put up a good fight.

The movie is in as much conflict with itself as Jack. It looks and feels European (and not just because of the filming locations), visually speaking. The visually arresting images take their time, and the dialogue comes only in spurts. We're made to endure Clooney's paranoid unraveling as though we had nothing better to do. The impending tragedy of Jack's empty life as an assassin is only marginally interesting: Clooney is better when he can talk his way through a movie, so after a while, we get restless, bored of the endless scenes of Jack looking stoic and going through the motions. Only during his moments of paranoia do we get even a shade of his emotions, which appear to have dried up long ago. And I suppose that's the point of it all, but getting the audience to feel empathy for an assassin is uphill work, and the director (Anton Corbijn) doesn't really pull it off.

A few scenes between Jack and a local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) seem like obvious and contrived attempts at being deep. Jack's was never to be a religious salvation. The action scenes are quite exciting, but they are few and far between. (And perhaps they're more exciting because the rest of the movie is so slow.) It's not a complete failure, but The American probably won't please those seeking non-stop thrills, and those looking for something very deep might be left scratching their heads. The script is by Rowan Joffe from Martin Booth's novel, A Very Private Gentleman. ★★½

The Town

The Town is the kind of intense, gritty cops-and-robbers drama that has flooded television networks, but because of its ballsy, brassy energy, it commands our attention more than something we might catch while flipping channels. Here was I, so eager to banish Ben Affleck to that circle of hell reserved for actors who make movies like Gigli, and then he comes along with The Town. It's not the kind of movie for needless hyperbole. It's simply a gripping movie that succeeds in getting us to feel sympathy for the bad guys. There's never a moment when we want the main character, Doug McCray (Affleck, who also directed and co-wrote), to get caught by the relentless FBI agent (Jon Hamm) who's determined to see him die in prison.

When McCray develops a romantic relationship with a former hostage (Rebecca Hall), he decides to give up the dangerous criminal life he's led for so long. But walking away from a career of bank robbing isn't easy when there are other parties involved. The conflict isn't very original, but fresh-faced Hall makes it believable that McCray would want to leave his criminal life behind. Jeremy Renner, who turned in such a strong lead performance in The Hurt Locker, commands the screen in every scene he's in as one of McCray's cohorts, the one who's unhinged and trigger happy (partly because he's served nine years of his life in prison).

The movie is surprisingly funny even in the midst of the most horrific circumstances. Renner has the look of a mad genius, and Affleck is cocky but cool: he always has one more trick up his sleeve and is bolstered by a unique ability to keep calm in any event. Hamm, who doesn't take any crap from anybody, has a natural light-heartedness (seen more fully in his 30 Rock appearances) that mixes unexpectedly with his stern good looks.  Also starring Blake Lively, Owen Burke, Pete Postlewaite, and Chris Cooper. ★★★

You Again

What do you get when you combine Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Betty White, and Kristin Bell with a bad movie? A bad movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Betty White, and Kristin Bell.

You know you're in for it when the lead character (Bell) is overshadowed by the other characters, none of whom are well-defined beyond some shallow caricature. Bell, who had pimples and glasses in high school and became the class scapegoat, has turned her life around nearly ten years later as a successful public relations analyst who's just been handed a big promotion. But her brother (James Wolk), a schmaltzy pastiche of a 50's goody goody and an 80's yuppie, has become engaged to the girl (Odette Yustman) who terrorized her during her ugly duckling phase. Soon the rest of the plot unravels before our eyes: Bell's mom (Curtis) was the one-time BFF and later the arch nemesis of Yustman's Aunt Mona (Weaver). Some kind of catfight showdown is surely on.

The plot is promising, but the script by Moe Jelline is ill-conceived: it's a bad mix of some wedding weekend gone awry and some high school nostalgia piece. If the actions of these characters were even a little believable or made even a little sense, we might be more inclined to forgive the scattershot laughter and the limp jokes. The presence of talent does not guarantee that the talent will deliver the movie from incompetence, and to see such a waste here (how do you get Cloris Leachman and then only show her for 30 seconds?) is truly disheartening. ★