The Artist

The Artist (2011) is about a Hollywood star's rise during the silent era of film and consequently his fallout during the transition to talkies. Jean Dujardin plays the actor, George Valentin (the last name recalls the real-life silent screen legend Rudolph Valentino). George refuses to believe that talkies are anything but a fad, and is eventually upstaged by a charming young woman whose first taste of celebrity occurs when she bumps into George at a press conference and they indulge in a spontaneous photo shoot. Her face is splashed across the newspapers with her lips firmly pressed against George's face, and pretty soon she's doing bit parts in pictures, then rising in status and eventually becoming Hollywood's latest girl-next-door.

What seemed at first like it was merely a gimmick to make the film stand out during Oscar season--this is a silent movie, you know--actually made The Artist endearing. George is followed around by his adorable dog Jack, a terrier, and their companionship is absolutely vital to this movie's likableness. Jack becomes a character all his own, something that rarely works out in movies.

I was puzzled by the use of Bernard Herrmann's famous score from Vertigo near the end of the movie. Thematically, it worked (that may be Herrmann's best score), but it didn't exactly make sense to use it. After all, The Artist takes place from about 1928 to 1932, and Vertigo was released in 1958. Couldn't they have composed something themselves? It's such a recognizable piece that its anachronism is pretty obvious to anyone who knows a little about movies.

The humor is what really resonates in The Artist, and the dramatic scenes are moving without being heavy. There's always an undercurrent of humor that in effect relieves those dramatic scenes of their maudlin tendencies. Instead of feeling corny or weepy, The Artist feels like fun--it's richly entertaining. But don't be fooled into thinking this is somehow original. It's really just Singin' in the Rain with a little Citizen Kane thrown in for good measure.

Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius. With Berenice Bejo as Peppy Miller, the up-and-coming actress who unintentionally steals George's thunder. She's gorgeous, unassuming, and smart; also with John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, and Malcolm McDowell.

Drive

First-rate. It exists in some kind of alternate universe that's a mishmash of now and the 80s. Drive (2011) has a lusciously compelling pull to it--a sort of poetically violent dream set against Los Angeles, which never ceases to be a place of intrigue on the screen. Ryan Gosling plays a stunt man who makes money on the side as a getaway driver. He gets involved with his neighbor and then, when her husband is released from prison, agrees to help him get some mobsters off his back by knocking off a pawn shop. Things go awry.

What struck me most about Drive was its dreamlike quality. It envelopes you under a lulling canopy of cinematic comfort--fast-paced car chase, romantic suggestion, a subdued tension between the main character and everyone else, as though he doesn't really belong--and this almost soothing layer yields to dappled rays of violent energy riveting throughout. Gosling's character--he's known only as The Driver-- seems completely dulled over by the things he's done and seen, and yet he has heart. He's not in it for the money, but out of an almost antiquated sense of heroism. He's trying to protect a woman and her young son from heartless thugs. But he brutalizes himself in the process of trying to protect Innocence.

Drive has sparse dialogue. This is refreshing in a world where most movies have nothing to say and confirm this with an incessant barrage of mindless chatter. In Drive, the actors are forced to convey much with few words. Facial expressions, deliberate pauses that turn into drawn-out silences, all become far more telling, and more fascinating, than what could be accomplished by lots of talk. What's said has greater weight because there's less fluff to the dialogue. It's economical.

And the music (by Angelo Badalamenti)--it's deliciously synthesized. This is where Drive feels like it came out of the 80s. But the music isn't corny or over-the-top. It acts like an incubating sheen over the film--and over the audience--imbibing you, massaging you into this movie's unusual balance of calm and chaos.

Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn. With Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Issac, Christina Hendricks, and Ron Perlman. 

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The anti-Bond spy movie, from the book by John Le Carre. Gary Oldman plays Smiley, an ex British intelligence agent who's called back on the job when his former boss (John Hurt) suspects the presence of a mole in his department. You have to go into this expecting a deliberately paced movie that doesn't spoon-feed you the whole plot. It's not action-packed. It's not about the sexy gadgets and unbelievable action sequences, but the withered perseverance of an aging spy who may not be sexy or hyper-masculine, but makes up for that in sheer intelligence and mental fortitude. It would have been nice, I suppose, if this movie had been a little faster paced at times, and there's a certain Britishness to it that reeks of stuffy good manners, and yet the movie is totally absorbing, even when it's difficult to follow. It has an actual mystery to it, which is something you generally don't get from a Bond picture. And Gary Oldman is a convincing lead, a bit embalmed perhaps, but he gets his character's human side across nonetheless.

Benedict Cumberbatch makes a strong impression as Oldman's right-hand-man, the scrappy assistant who knows how to get information without getting caught. Tom Hardy is also an interesting character, a spy who allegedly defects and becomes a target of British intelligence as a result. Colin Firth is one of the higher-up members of the British intelligence agency. He's good, but maybe it's only because we've come to expect good performances out of him that we don't demand proof of his acting talent. He's our new Laurence Olivier.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy lacks that little spark that might have elevated it to a great piece of entertainment (like David Fincher's Zodiac or Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential), but it's still a convincing movie, if too carefully constructed for its own good. Visually, it's a remarkable movie, capturing the gloom of England and Cold War Europe. It's one of the few movies in recent memory that looks believably set in an earlier time period than the present. The Cold War paranoia is alive and well in this movie, and perhaps it's the fact that the Cold War is now more than 20 years ended that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is worthwhile because of its seeming irrelevance. It goes down easier than something about more recent (or current) global conflicts, because we feel like it's behind us. But the shadowy phantoms of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy have a way of lingering in your mind after the movie's ended, and even if you feel a bit dazed from the overlength, you appreciate that this movie doesn't insult your intelligence or pander to your emotions in some infantile fashion--the way we're used to being treated at the movies.

Directed by Tomas Alfredson. With Mark Strong, Ciarin Hinds, David Dencik, Stephen Graham, Simon McBurney, Toby Jones, Kathy Burke, Christian McKay, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Roger Lloyd-Pack, and Konstantin Khabensky. 2011.

Margin Call

Margin Call takes place over about a 24-hour period in which a New York investment bank foresees the impending financial crisis of 2008 and tries to save itself, effectively screwing over everyone else in the process. Kevin Spacey heads the cast as a middle man who grapples with the morality of selling out at the cost of so many other companies' very existence.  

It's a grimly keen assessment of Capitalism; a lovely little tragic-comedy full of lonely figures in business suits trying to hold on to as much of their money as possible. All the business-world jargon that confuses most of us in real life sputters out of the lips of the characters in this movie with irony: half the time no one knows exactly what is meant by "volatility index" and the like. You keep waiting for the movie to translate it for you. Even the big boss (Jeremy Irons) asks for plain English when a meeting is called to discuss how to deal with the storm that's brewing.

This movie humanizes the business world and dehumanizes it at the same time. It placates the idea of class warfare by suggesting how infinitely culpable every one was in the economic downturn that continues to problematize our money matters here and abroad.

It's a tight, compelling little economics thriller with capable performers in front of the screen. There's no maudlin sympathizing with the Wall Street types. Director J.C. Chandor apparently prefers to appear objective. While that's seemingly impossible to do, in the process, he keeps the movie's subject from lending it a sense of self-importance. The fact that it takes place in one brief period (virtually a day and a night and the following morning), gives the movie a sense of urgency. It's a slick move, like something out of a bad Western, and you can only appreciate the fact that Chandor wasn't trying to make this the Godfather of Wall Street movies.

As a result, what we've got here is a pretty damn good movie. Spacey is wonderfully good. Zachary Quinto, as an intelligent young employee who has a mind for numbers (he's got a doctorate from MIT to boot), shows promise. He was a good Spock in Star Trek and here he demonstrates his ability to play other types of characters. Demi Moore is restrained, and therefore pretty good, as one of the higher-ups. Simon Baker too plays his character--one of the bosses--with a sleazy passive confidence. With Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci (showing a remarkable screen presence in his brief but important role), Penn Badgley, and Mary McDonnell.

J. Edgar

Clint Eastwood's lumbering biography of J. Edgar Hoover, the founding director of the FBI. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose mission is apparently to play every major public figure in the last 100 years (he played Howard Hughes, now Hoover, next year he may be playing Sinatra, and on top of all that he's going to play Fitzgerald's iconic literary figure Jay Gatsby in the upcoming Great Gatsby project), is not right for the part. In the scenes where he plays the old Hoover, it's pure camp. DiCaprio, resembling a doughy lollypop under piles of make-up, unsuccessfully tries to look old and withered but determined.

The alleged love affair between Hoover and his right-hand-man, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) is explored with an amazing lack of finesse, and what could have been electric turns out to be limp and unsatisfyingly bad drama. Eastwood seems to be pleased with how important he's (allegedly) become as a filmmaker, but he should remember his chief duty: to entertain. J. Edgar is nothing if not bloated and boring. Shall we tally up the Oscar nominations now?

Naomi Watts plays Hoover's dedicated secretary. A less interesting part I couldn't imagine for such a talented actress. Judi Dench plays Hoover's domineering mother. The film dithers on whether or not to portray their relationship as creepy or sentimental. Josh Lucas plays Charles Lindbergh in the most interesting part of the movie: the investigation of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. It's a pity the rest of the movie is so tediously unsustained. With Ken Howard, Lea Thompson, Stephen Root, Ed Westwick, and Jeffrey Donovan.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson's posthumously popular novel brought to the screen by writer Steven Zaillian and director David Fincher. I haven't read the book or its sequels, nor have I seen the 2009 Swedish filmization of the novel. But this American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was sheer exuberance. Fincher seems to be getting better and better. His 2007 Zodiac is just about the best film of that decade, and he seems to have found a way to further explore the themes of obsession, murder, and the inevitability of the past, with his latest movie.

Daniel Craig plays a reporter in Stockholm who's being sued for malice by a sleazy businessman. He's left broke and discredited as a journalist, so he accepts an unexpected job offer from an ailing Swedish tycoon (Christopher Plummer): to uncover the mystery of his niece Harriet's disappearance in 1966. He enlists the help of a resourceful girl named Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) who's obtained a surprising level of street-smartness at 23. She knows how to carry herself, but not before being mistreated by many, including the pervy social worker who doles out her allowance at the expense of her dignity more than once.

The movie is absolutely smashing entertainment, delivered with such panache and skill that you hardly notice its near three-hour running time, except for at the end a bit. The setting is perfect material for a tingling mystery. Indeed, the makers of this (and of course we must also credit the late author, Larsson) know what ingredients to put into a movie to make it exciting and suspenseful, and yet nothing seems carelessly inserted. Everything is well layered. You soon realize that what you're getting with this movie is good old-fashioned thrills merged with modern sensibilities.

It engages with the technological innovations that have so reshaped our world in the last fifteen years, without seeming too clumsy about it. On the other hand, the product placement is like a minefield. Apple products and Google searches pop up around every corner. (How do you get around Google and Macbooks these days without seeming like commercializing your entertainment?) I can give the movie a pass for that because it was so damn good.

Daniel Craig, who may also be our best Bond yet, carries the movie successfully: he's the kind of actor you're willing to believe because he's in good shape. He cares about himself and so you care about him. Mara, who had a bit part in Fincher's The Social Network, gets her turn at the wheel here, and she doesn't disappoint. She has enough brass to topple a Swedish magnate.

This movie doesn't hold back. It's refreshing to see something really vital and unbridled for a change, but it would be foolish to bring younger viewers to this, considering some of the content. (Lisbeth is raped by her disgusting case worker. He gets his in a scene that's a sort of revenge fantasy that feels morally justified but equally disturbing.)

With Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgard, Steven Berkoff, Joely Richardson, and Embeth Davidtz. ★★★½

My Week With Marilyn

It has a certain surface charm to it, particularly if you're interested in old movies and movie stars. But like Marilyn Monroe herself, My Week With Marilyn isn't that deep or that interesting. Nor is Michelle Williams's performance something to write home about. She's not embarrassing or inept, just unaffecting. She merely rustles up images of the real thing, who, we're reminded, was actually dull. Her inner circle may have sucked up to her like she was a brilliantly innovative and intellectual devotee to the craft of acting, but the bottom line is that people were fascinated with Monroe because they wanted to have sex with her or because they wanted to be like her, and that was why she was famous and adored (and hated, too, I imagine). The film offers up the classic "I'm-beautiful-so-no-one-thinks-I-can-act" portrait of Marilyn but declines to comment on it. This movie tries to make an awards grab without any fingers.

The "my" in the title is Colin Clive (Eddie Redmayne), a British film buff of a privileged family background who lands himself a job as third assistant director on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), which was directed by and co-starring Laurence Olivier. Redmayne's performance failed to win me over to his character, who just seemed like a spectator throughout the movie. His clunky narration at the beginning tries to rush us through his efforts to ingratiate himself with the British movie studio operated by Olivier. But his character doesn't at all appear to be fleshed out properly. He's just a kid with a wide-eyed love of movies, and his love never really comes across on the screen. He can smile and look entranced, but his movie love isn't infectious the way it ought to be.

Playing Olivier, Kenneth Branagh nails the voice and even manages to convince you that he looks like Olivier, midway through the production. Julia Ormond doesn't fare as well portraying Vivien Leigh. I just couldn't buy it. Maybe I'm not familiar enough with what Leigh looked like and sounded like off the screen (since most of us know her from her performances as deluded Southern belles).

The problem with My Week With Marilyn is that it's too bowled over by its subject matter, and expects us to feel the same without trying to win us over. The closest it gets to achieving this is during the brief moments where Williams performs two songs. The movie is momentarily transformed into something with real movement and passion and fun. But it doesn't last, and for most of the time, we're just supposed to sit back and adore Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe. I don't think anybody took into account the possibility that some of us don't care about people's bizarre nostalgic obsession with a Hollywood bombshell. There are much more interesting actresses from that era. And Branagh's performance as Olivier, which is probably the most interesting aspect of the movie, will likely be ignored.

With Judi Dench as the actress Sybil Thorndyke, Emma Watson (who needs to stick to playing kids until she actually starts to resemble an adult) as a wardrobe assistant, Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller, Dominic Cooper as Milton Greene, Marilyn's assistant, and Zoe Wanamaker, as Paula Strasberg, daughter of Lee and acting coach of Marilyn. Directed by Simon Curtis.

Young Adult

Young Adult is like a reunion of Fast Times at Ridgemont High entwined with a comedic reworking of Fatal Attraction. Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a semi-visible ghost writer of a popular teen fiction series. She decides to return to her hometown ostensibly to write what will be the final book in the series, but in reality she's returning to woo her high school sweetheart, Buddy (Patrick Wilson). 

The movie is funny in the first half, and amusing in an aimless way. For a while, Mavis is an appealing anti-heroine because she's quirky, irreverent, and a drunk. Theron's acting is much more interesting after her character has tossed back a few shots of Maker's Mark. But as she descends more and more into her obsession with getting back her now married ex, who's just become a father, the movie derails, making you realize that there isn't much of a movie to begin with. Just a thin veneer of a story, hatched seemingly fifteen minutes before the director, Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno), yelled, "Action."

One bright spot is the performance of Patton Oswalt, playing Matt, a former high school classmate of Mavis, whom she ignored during their adolescent years but who now assumes the role of a sarcastic sidekick, pouring sour grapes over Mavis's quixotic quest to rekindle an ideal that probably isn't as great as she remembers it.

What I can't understand is why Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody couldn't figure out some more interesting things for Patrick Wilson to do. He's got a great comic streak and he's commanding enough to be a strong presence in any story, but here he is wasted. In fact, a lot of this movie seems to be lost in a sea of missed opportunities for the actors. Theron's performance is okay, but she could have been better. She's drunk in most of the movie, and while (as mentioned earlier), the booze makes Mavis more interesting, it also makes her less appealing as a lead.

Young Adult seems like a movie made for Cameron Diaz. Theron is too other-worldly. She's cold and distant. It's very difficult to care about her. She's crazy and self-destructive, and Wilson's character seems so content with his new domestic life that Mavis's plan as would-be homewrecker has no guts: it's an empty bag which she's left holding at the end of the movie. And Cameron Diaz could have pulled off the girl-next-door turned career-girl with ease. (And it might have made up for Bad Teacher).

With Elizabeth Reaser, Collette Wolfe, and Mary Beth Hurt.

The Descendants

Are modern filmmakers afraid of emotion?

Hip as we audience members might like to think we are, we go to movies for catharsis. We spend our lives so glazed over and blitzed out that we turn to movies to help us reconnect with the emotions that we've buried deep inside, and then we learn how to express them on cinematic terms: we stage, we enact high drama using the minutiae of our daily living as its impetus, ignoring the fact that the intensity of the performance doesn't match the very undramatic qualities of our lives. And so when December rolls around, in metronomic timing with the holiday season, the "important" movies are released: the ones about Big Serious Life Problems: family dramas and poignant biographies of famous people who made Big Choices and "changed the world." We flock to these movies like geese to bread crumbs.

Movies often used to be histrionic in terms of expressing emotion. Perhaps filmmakers and studio executives were keenly aware of what audiences wanted: big emotions for the big screen. (This might have come about during Hollywood's ill-fated attempt to compete with TV in the 1950s.)  But then the march toward realism reshaped what people thought went into a good story, so the trick became this: A filmmaker had to convey great emotions without making it obvious or overwrought. Soon this obligation was taken up by the smaller movies as the gulf began to widen between the mindless big-budget Hollywood fodder and the self-important indie movies.

Now we have The Descendants, which is being heralded by many and is already up for major awards. George Clooney, playing a lawyer and family man named Matt King, is receiving high praise for his performance as the husband who must face certain cold realities after his wife Elizabeth goes into a coma: she was cheating on him, and he wasn't exactly Husband-- or father-- of the Year.

The title of the movie refers partly to a land deal between Matt's relatives and a commercial developer. The land, some of the most beautiful untapped oceanfront property in Hawaii, has been part of their family for generations, but the money from the sale would pull many of Matt's relatives out of debt and into permanent financial security. Matt must prove to us that he's with it enough to resist the financial lure of selling out and patch things up with his comatose wife and "troubled" teenage daughter in two hours or less.

But the title also refers, inadvertently but most definitively, to us, and to movies. This movie is a descendant not only of the bloated, emotionally overcharged family dramas, but of the slight, we-can't-be-cheesy-if-want-to-be-hip indie films. The director, Alexander Payne, has made some of these before (About Schmidt and Sideways). Payne somehow manages both: he cuts away whenever he's afraid of the movie being too serious, and when the wife of Elizabeth's other man comes to visit, erupting in tears and platitudes about forgiving her, Matt nudges her out of the room. "That's enough. That's enough." I think this movie wants to have it both ways. The moment with Clooney's character trying to silence the gushing spouse was to me representative of the director's desire not to be too emotional. But emotional enough for the movie to feel important and to be a major contender for some Oscars.

Nevertheless, This movie is quite good. It has a funny side to it that punctuates the scenes, keeping them from being maudlin. And as much as Payne seems unsure of expressing the dramatic emotions of the story, he manages to do it, to let the characters and the audience feel for what's going on in the movie.

I was impressed by the performance of Shailene Woodley, as Matt's teenage daughter. She gave such a strong performance that I found myself more interested in her story than in her father's. People will assume George Clooney is giving a good performance because he's George Clooney, and while he's certainly better than say a Kevin Costner or a Tom Cruise, he's not always as believable as you'd like him to be; maybe he's too identifiable, the way Tom Hanks is. You always know you're watching George Clooney play a lawyer whose wife is dying. Apparently this works with most people. Some may even believe that Tom Hanks himself served in World War II.

The Descendants is entertaining, and affecting, and I really liked it. But why does the seriousness of the subject matter predetermine a movie's chances at being considered great or important or award-worthy? And moreover, why do all these movies have to come in December? (This question may be a no-brainer, but is worth uttering nonetheless.)

Gazing at the coming attractions, I couldn't help but wonder if filmmakers and studios and audiences have all gone soft in the head and hard in the heart. We're getting more crap than ever. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close purports to be about a child's emotional journey after the death of his father (played by Tom Hanks, the Father of Movie Audiences, apparently) in the World Trade Center. The bad title I will put aside to argue about another day, because the movie itself looks so preposterous. Now that we've established Tom Hanks as a WWII veteran, we can also place him in the WTC. Is there any American tragedy this man hasn't been through?

We are indeed the descendants of some very unfortunate choices in Hollywood that have made the state of movies so depressing (all money-related). Yes, good films continue to be made, but they tend to be overlooked when we can't brand them as good for us, or massive in their scope or their emotional appeal. The Descendants is an example of a good movie that suffers from wanting to pander and not wanting to at the same time. It's a miracle that something worthwhile and engrossing was able to register, as indeed it seems more and more a miraculous occurrence any time there's a good movie to be seen. I think The Descendants transcends all the self-seriousness and all the slightness that has been popping up on the screen over the last ten or fifteen years.

With Amara Miller, Judy Greer, Robert Forster, Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard, Mary Birdsong, Rob Huebel, and Michael Ontkean. Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.

The Ides of March

The Ides of March is, at its most obvious, about how corruption is unavoidable in politics. It can be inadvertently bumped into, but regardless, it sticks like glue, leaving an indelible impression. The impression is either on the public, when they are made aware of the corruption, or on the corrupt person who chooses to keep one improper act a secret by committing more improper acts: corruption begets corruption.

Beneath the moralistic, cynical representation of the inherent corruptibility of politics and politicians, George Clooney's latest picture is an attempt to burst the balloon of the Idealist, the one who believes that it's possible for a politician to change the world for the better. It's done with a kind of effortless, winsome skill, because Clooney plays the kind of politician, at the surface level, that you know Clooney wishes could really exist; the kind of politician (again, only at the surface) that Clooney wishes he could be, were he to ever step into the political realm himself. As the hip young(ish) presidential candidate, Clooney's Governor Mike Morris is progressive, answers the questions he's asked, and isn't afraid to say what he really thinks, regardless of how it will be received by the media or the public. He plays the ultimate white liberal--stylish, sophisticated, and dedicated to principle. (Of course, we find out pretty soon what his true colors are.)

Ryan Gosling plays Morris's junior campaign adviser, a rising hot shot who seems to be incapable of making a wrong move or a bad judgment. He believes fully in the cause of his boss, who is trying to win the Democratic primary election against a more traditional, less viable candidate who still has a shot of winning because he's willing to play dirty. Morris refuses do get into the mud. This ultimately becomes a test of wills: how long can a politician afford not to play dirty?

The Ides of March has a conspiracy thriller-esque aura about it, but it's just an aura. The film is deliberately paced, which is fine, but after a while you realize it's not really moving toward anything. There aren't any really pulse-pounding moments, the kind of tingling excitement you expect from a political thriller. Even though the title suggests something dramatic on a Shakespearean scale, The Ides of March is tame. You begin to realize that the lack of pulse-pounding is symptomatic of the lack of a pulse. It's a characterological analysis, not a thriller, which would be fine if it added up to more at the end. It's only intermittently compelling, and ultimately forgettable.

The actors make up for the movie. Ryan Gosling's performance is strong: he demonstrates his capability as a leading man. His character undergoes a major moral and idealistic shift in the film, and he adapts to this shift with masterful control of himself. That's the whole point of the movie, that the real political players will make dramatic, character-changing shifts in the blink of an eye without blinking an eye. But The Ides of March leaves you feeling unaffected by its story and its sobering message, probably because it's telling you something you already knew. It's a moderately entertaining reminder of why we are so disenchanted with politics on both sides of the aisle.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Jennifer Ehle, and Max Minghella co-star.

Fright Night

The original Fright Night (1985) was a celebration and a send-up of camp. The movie opens to a dimly lit suburban neighborhood around midnight, and the audio of a late-nite horror movie program leads us into the bedroom of our hero, Charlie Brewster, who's too busy making out with his girlfriend to notice what's going on at his new neighbor's house, at first. Fright Night 1985 is something special to me, so I felt ambivalent toward the idea of a remake.

The 2011 remake gives Fright Night a contemporary make-over. It would seem like a refreshing antidote to the banality of Twilight, which is pure drivel as romance or as gothic horror.

We'll start with the good things: Anton Yelchin makes for a convincing Charlie Brewster, the put-upon boy-who-cried-wolf of the movie, who's unwilling to accept his nerdy friend Ed's claim that Charlie's new neighbor, the dashing Jerry Dandrige, is a bloodsucking vampire. As Dandrige, Colin Farrell is wonderfully ominous. He's so enjoyable as the vampire that you have a hard time sympathizing with the would-be victims. Dandrige likes screwing with his prey, playing darkly funny little mind games with them. Unfortunately, the scenes of Dandrige attacking his victims fall flat. There's something unconvincing about the way he tears open their necks (and their deaths seem meaningless the way they do in slasher movies). Only the satisfaction in Jerry's face works for those scenes--his insatiable appetite for blood is momentarily soothed, and he reminds you that the vampire is the ultimate junky.

The Peter Vincent character, played as a doddering old coward by Roddy McDowall in the 1985 version, has been altered for humorous affect to be a Las Vegas hack occultist with a nightly horror show. David Tennant plays him, and he invests some momentary comic relief, but his part never gets knitted into the story with any real panache. He and Charlie don't really mesh as a duo--they aren't given enough time.

Which brings me to the not-so-good stuff. The movie plays all its cards too soon. Characters aren't developed, relationships either, with the right pacing or momentum. We're meant to assume a lot about these relationships that, without experiencing them in the right ways and amounts of time, end up hurting the movie. It's harder to care about the characters let alone be scared for them. The humor in the movie is good because it keeps things light and helps avoid heavy-handedness, but at the same time no one seems very invested in what's happening. And there isn't that affection for the genre that makes a good horror-comedy click and resonate the way it should.

The rest of the cast includes Toni Collete as Charlie's mom (well-played for more comic effect), Imogen Poots as his girlfriend Amy, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Ed. He doesn't even come close to the off-the-wall performance of Stephen Geoffreys in the first film. He's too subdued, too nerdy to be frightening when he inevitably turns into an enemy. And that's the real problem with the remake: it's not all that scary. But it's good for a laugh, and probably worth seeing for Colin Farrell's performance alone.

The scene at the end with all the vampires is another problem. It reminded me of the part in Salem's Lot when they stumble upon Barlow's coffin under the house but are accosted by all his vampire henchmen. It's also mildly reminiscent of that wonderfully giddy moment in Re-Animator when all the corpses shoot up out of their gurneys in unison. Unfortunately, director Craig Gillespie doesn't seem to know how to make that scene pop the way it should. It feels deflated. The only other thing I'll say about the ending is that its kind to the viewer in not subjecting us to twelve phony climaxes the way so many action and horror movies feel obliged to do---the finale is nicely compact.

Beginners

Too pretentious to be interesting. Beginners feels like a movie that's supposed to be good for you: it's full of realism, a somber dose of the tragedies of life and the breakdowns in human relationships that stay broken and unmanaged for years, often going to the grave that way, in a state of arrested development, shell-shocked critical condition. In that sense, Beginners has no actual feeling at all. We begin to acquire a sense of having been sedated as we watch real life unfold and wonder when the movie is going to start.

The story, which meanders with little actual purpose, can be summed up in about the sappiest, most harebrained fashion imaginable: it's about lost chances and new beginnings: 38-year-old Oliver can't seem to make a relationship last, so he's full of doubts when he falls for a French actress (Melanie Laurent). He's also trying to make sense of the loss of his parents within a relatively short span of four years (not to mention their cold and loveless relationship for 44 years, which he learns stemmed from his father's latent homosexuality). Bereft of his wife, the father (Christopher Plummer) comes out of the closet and embraces his inner Gay.

The movie reaches for something powerful and moving but stops short deliberately to avoid being pegged as sentimental or sappy. It wanders in search of the movie it refuses to become. We keep being confronted with these kinds of movies: they're largely independent, and they're largely marketed as some kind of realistic alternative to the high drama we saw in those glossy 1950's soapers, like All This and Heaven Too and Suddenly, Last Summer. Those movies hovered precariously into the atmosphere of camp, whereas movies like Beginners go the opposite way, reaching, rather limply, toward indifference. Maybe that's why Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven (2002) made such a strong impression on me. It was throwback to those 1950s movies where the emotions ran the gamut. If nothing else we could laugh at them. In Beginners it hardly seems appropriate. Like giggling at a funeral.

Anything, even camp, would be a refreshing change from Beginners, which stays comfortably at room temperature. The emotions are there, but they're stifled. We feel for the characters anyway, because director Mike Mills is adept at organizing the right images together (and he has a solid cast to work with). How could you not feel pity for a giddy, grandfatherly type--Captain Von Trapp, nonetheless--who's dying of cancer? There's a scene where he finds out it's too late to continue with treatment, and he has a painful, wrenching expression on his face: life has played a cruel joke on him, and we see the wretched irony in his expressions.

Seeing Beginners is neither cathartic nor entertaining, it's just a bummer. Especially if you were looking forward to your Friday night.

Side notes: the relationship between Oliver and his late father's Jack Russell terrier is the closest this film comes to being endearing. It's genuinely touching. Also, Mary Page Keller plays Oliver's mother in flashback, and her scenes are among the film's brightest spots. She's so jaded by the squeaky clean banality of domesticity--and the grim realities of a loveless marriage--that she likes breaking little social conventions just for the hell of it. Her son carries that tradition into his adult life, but somehow those scenes don't register as well, and the movie doesn't do enough of that--doesn't appropriate enough of that droll humor--to really get anywhere with it.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The 2001 Planet of the Apes remake was so dismal that I went into this one with low expectations. But Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an entrancing diversion, with James Franco as a scientist injecting apes with a virus that makes them super-chimps. He's working on a cure for Alzheimer's, and even tries an experimental batch on his ailing father (John Lithgow), who's got Dementia.

You're never sure if director Rupert Wyatt intends for this to be funny, but it is. The movie doesn't exactly wink at the audience, but with Franco in the lead, who's never far away from being tongue-in-cheek, you feel the director has given the audience permission to laugh and have a good time. Besides, the movie is genuinely entertaining, and makes good use of San Francisco as its setting (including a well-paced and exciting showdown between apes and police on the Golden Gate bridge).

The computerized apes look fairly realistic. CGI never sells itself to me all the way. There's something not quite believable in it, but the creators of these formidable creatures accomplish quite a lot with the technology at hand, and the movie avoids hokeyness for the most part. The apes are compelling characters, and most of the time they're the more sympathetic creatures in the movie.

With Freida Pinto as a veterinarian/love interest, Andy Serkis as Caesar, the star Ape, Tom Felton, as a scummy caretaker at the facility in which Caesar becomes a captive, and David Oyelowo as Franco's boss, the man holding the purse strings behind the mad scientist's work.

Submarine

Richard Ayoade's Submarine (2011) is a coming-of-age story about Oliver Tate, a 15-ish year old boy growing up in Wales. Oliver fancies himself the hero in the story of his life. He narrates the movie, which is divided, with tongue in cheek, into sections. Oliver's grand view of his own middle-class adolescent life is made a spectacle on the screen, but not for schadenfreude. We laugh with him rather than at him, because we identify with him and his idiosyncrasies. We're also keenly aware that he is like us. He's our underdog imported from the UK. He gets beat up at school, when he refuses to publicly proclaim the bully's ex-girlfriend a slut, and his valiant act of chivalry wins him over to us. So his grand, inflated perception of his life is charmingly quixotic. And yet he's not out of his head. He seems aware of reality, perhaps more conditioned and adjusted to it than most. He also tries to fix things. He isn't given over to cynicism, just perceptiveness.

The movie's visual playfulness (lots of cutting back and forth and cinematographic tricks that are deliberately maneuvered to get our attention) is in fact a part of its deadpan humoristic style. It has the look of those so-called important foreign films that fiddle with the camera and the editing more than mainstream American movies do. It doesn't look experimental, but it's offbeat enough to be noticeable--and even refreshing. It reminded me ever so slightly of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, except Submarine has infinitely more narrative drive. It's also a lot funnier. Without a sense of humor this movie would have been dreadfully heavy-handed.

Oliver's coming-of-age results from two important events: The girl for whom he incurred a punch in the nose becomes his girlfriend, his mom starts flirting with the wacky mystic living next door. (We find out later that he was her first love, so Mom is experiencing a nostalgic kick, exacerbated by the now sterile relationship with her practically comatose husband, who's a marine biology nut). Oliver's girlfriend introduces a lot of new adult feelings, from lust to grief (her mother has cancer). He's tormented also by the threat of his own parents splitting up. And the sort of off-kilter, mildly annoyed relationship he has with them turns out to be more important to him than he realized before. Ultimately, Submarine's villain isn't the bully or the cheating mother, but Blandness. Oliver sees nothing around him but banality. That's the reason his mother starts flirting with the kooky Ninja next door (who gives seminars on translucency or transcendence or some other such nonsense).

The actor who plays Oliver, Craig Roberts, approaches the part with a deadpan facial expression that belies a certain passion for living, one that is awakened by the events that unfold throughout the movie. He seems to walk through his life--and this movie--in a dreamlike state, but he's attuned to the dream and its visceral impact on his senses. And he's such a deeply layered character that you know there are whole other stories to be told about him and through his eyes. And he's wonderfully funny, too.

The movie has that sense of triviality that so many of the independent films seem to relish. They're not the grand Tennessee Williams-style dramas that Hollywood used to roll out every year, in CinemaScope. Those factory-made family sideshows are entertaining in their glossy campiness. And we may think that we have grown past them in our movie tastes, but that kind of high camp drama lives on today in just about every dramatic television show on the air. Movies like Submarine seem almost slight in their movement away from the grandiose. It's a lovely little film, though.

Submarine opened tonight at 5 Points Theatre. It will be playing through July 28. Also starring Noah Taylor, Paddy Considine, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, and Darren Evans.

Phase 7

Phase 7 (2011) is an Argentinian import that bears the mark of American exports. It's a science-fiction thriller that will remind you of George Romero's The Crazies (1973) and Dawn of the Dead (1979) and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), and probably a lot of other apocalyptic thrillers you've seen. (Precinct 13  may not have been exactly apocalyptic, but it depicted the breakdown of the police at the hands of a relentless gang, and that's a distressing enough signal to the viewer to feel like a local apocalypse). This is the apocalypse, on a budget.

In the wake of a worldwide epidemic, a young man and his pregnant wife find themselves quarantined inside their Buenos Aires high-rise. The plague is never named or explained, and they're told by health officials to simply stay put and make as little contact with others as possible. Inside the largely untenanted apartment, some of the residents go a little stir crazy (or perhaps it's the onset of the disease, which is so undefined it can become anything the viewer wants to read into it). Soon one of them becomes paranoid and violent, and the other neighbors are forced to defend themselves against his shotgun.


It's a funny, fast little romp--violent, paranoid, gleefully derivative, and cuckoo enough to keep you wondering what the director, Nicolas Goldbart, is capable of. He also wrote the screenplay, and his movie resembles that early scene in Dawn of the Dead when the soldiers raid the run-down apartment complex looking for walking corpses. The gas masks and the sanitized-looking uniforms, designed to ward off infection, also evoke memories of Romero's cheap, earlier Crazies, which was remade last year. In The Crazies, Romero basically recreated the situation of Night of the Living Dead, but made it seem slightly more credible. Phase 7 has clearly been indoctrinated into those kinds of movies. It somehow finds its own unique, scaled-down story within that framework, and those who are inclined will find deem it satisfying entertainment.

It will be playing this Friday at AMC Orange Park (midnight, so technically Saturday). It stars Daniel Hendler, Jazmin Stuart, Yayo Guridi, and Federico Luppi.

Horrible Bosses

What's most fun about this movie is seeing Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Colin Farrell playing audaciously horrible human beings who drive their subordinates (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis, respectively) to want to murder them. Aniston hasn't been this much fun in years, and you probably already knew Spacey was made for this kind of live-wire psychotic CEO part. Farrell is the least recognizable (physically), and yet you get the feeling he's had some experience playing the "tool" before.

Horrible Bosses may not score any points for originality (it acknowledges its plot similarities to Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and ignores its similarities to the Jane Fonda-Lily Tomlin-Dolly Parton workplace comedy Nine to Five), but at least it treats us to some moderately dark humor delivered with nothing but fervent zeal from its cast. Most of them seem delighted to be playing such over-the-top characters for once. Bateman and Sudeikis pretty much do their usual schtick. Charlie Day scores highly as an easily agitated dental assistant whose boss (Aniston) has been sexually harassing him with impunity.

Midway through, the movie takes an unexpected turn that changes it from a darker version of Office Space to a darker version of the afore-mentioned Nine to Five, which was about three women kidnapping their sexist boss so that they could make some worker-friendly changes in the office. It's the kind of wish fulfillment fantasy employees will cheer for, and yet there's always a bitter feeling in the back of your mind that you're rooting for three would-be killers.

Horrible Bosses ties things up too conveniently at the end, but it's a diverting enough hour and a half. Directed by Seth Gordon. With Jamie Foxx and, in a bit performance, Donald Sutherland.

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick's latest, The Tree of Life, is like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Wonder Years on acid. I left the theater with mixed emotions. It was a haunting movie with the kind of breathtaking visual lyricism you expect from a Malick film. He is known for his visual patchworks like Days of Heaven (1978), for which cinematographer Nestor Almendros won an Oscar. But Days of Heaven had problems. Malick emphasized the imagery over the story, which was a love triangle set in the turn-of-the-century wheatfields of Texas. The film was shot in 1976 in Alberta, Canada, and when the actors (Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, and Linda Manz) finally saw the movie in 1978, they were shocked at how unrecognizable it seemed. Malick had cut whole scenes of dialogue and what was left was a visual pastiche, beautiful, yes, but also vacant, almost muted. Pauline Kael quipped that it was "an empty Christmas tree" on which "you can hang all your dumb metaphors."  More importantly, Kael observed that "what is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily upon us, but we're not quite sure what it is." Most of the other New York and California critics were more adoring of the movie. However, Malick disappeared from movie-making for twenty years, returning to direct a remake of The Thin Red Line, released in 1998, and then the Christopher Columbus opus, The New World, released in 2005.

I found moments of The Tree of Life completely in sync with Pauline Kael's observations of Days of Heaven. On the other hand, having seen Days of Heaven several times, I was able to compare the two. Malick latched onto a story somewhat more dexterously in The Tree of Life than he did in Days of Heaven. He's always been something of a poetic director, and I think you can only appreciate the kind of image-saturated heaviness he does on a large screen. Watching this or Days of Heaven on your TV will probably kill the movie experience altogether. He's also got a need to be pretentiously philosophical, and show-offy, the way Kubrick was in 2001. The only difference is that Malick's pretentiousness is more out of reverence for the beauty of nature (or perhaps reverence for his appreciation of the beauty of nature) and in 2001 Kubrick seemed to be daring us to be bored/in awe of his technical achievements. He was turning film into opera and demanding that we applaud with reverential deference. Malick might be doing the same thing with nature. Sometimes you think you're watching a National Geographic documentary sans narrator.

But then, about thirty or forty minutes into the movie, Malick calmed down with all the floaty, emotionally manipulative nature imagery (it's beautiful, yes, but it does go on and on) and the visually maneuvered philosophical pontificating about the beginning of the universe and the dawn of life. He zooms in on this middle class, 1950's Texas family headed by the stern, hard-ass dad played by Brad Pitt. He's a proud, stiff-upper-lipped father of three boys. Their mother (played by Jessica Chastain) is all elegance and passivity. She's beautiful and mysterious and genuinely loving, but her spirit is mastered by her rigid husband. He's not without love or kindness, but he seems so afraid of losing his family that he resorts to being a control freak to avoid loss. And so, he alienates them with his domineering temperament. It made you understand all fathers in a fresh way: all at once trying to be brave and tough, tender and buoyant, never really sure of themselves. The boys are trying to figure things out themselves, and the oldest one (Hunter McCracken as a child and Sean Penn as an adult) experiences a loss of innocence that comes with growing up. He learns what death is, he learns the fluid give-and-take of faith when he's told about God and then experiences tragedy for the first time.

Malick can't resist himself though, and he goes back to being cuckoo at the end. By then, though, we're more willing to accept his directorial idiosyncrasies. Besides that, I appreciated the movie's attempt to tell the story visually, relying less on dialogue. And while this technique brings the movie into sometimes new and strange ground, it also made The Tree of Life refreshingly lyrical and offbeat. Sean Penn's presence is virtually a cameo as the oldest son, grown up, trying to make sense of life in the New York business world. He's mourning the loss of his youth, and there's also a heartbreaking story about one of his brothers.

Maybe it's triter than we think. Perhaps The Tree of Life might just be a gag on the audience, trying to whip us up into an ecstatic frenzy. I can hear the pretentious film-goers praising the movie's more esoteric moments as something only the enlightened could understand. I don't think even the director knew what was going on in some of those parts. This would have probably made more sense during the era of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. It's a good film and a bad film, moment-by-moment.

Bad Teacher

Note: Since I panned Bad Teacher four years ago, I have done a complete 180. I think it's a smart and hilarious movie, and I actually have watched several times since first seeing it in theaters four years ago. The fact that I was so wrong about this movie has been weighing on me, so for the reader who may happen across this review, please know that I now feel very warmly toward Bad Teacher. Cameron Diaz is one of the funniest actors working today, and this movie is one more reason she's always worth watching.

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In Bad Teacher, Elizabeth (Cameron Diaz) wants to marry a wealthy man she can glom onto for financial security. Her fiance dumps her, and in order to pay for a boob job so she can attract a new man, she goes back to teaching middle school English. She doesn't exactly teach, though. She mainly pops in a movie like Stand and Deliver or Dangerous Minds (movies about teachers who change students' lives) to wile away the time. Unlike the teachers in the movies she shows to her students, however, Elizabeth typically spends the school day hung over, sleeping on her desk like one of the teenagers she's supposed to be teaching.

This movie might be a spoof of that ridiculous genre of teachers-as-world-changers films. It has moments where it tries to do that. But the writers (the screenplay is credited to Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky) didn't really think it through that far. They apparently had one thing in mind: having Cameron Diaz say and do things that no teacher could get away with in real life. While this is funny, it also wears thin when you realize that the movie isn't going in any particularly clear or interesting direction.

She meets a potential new mate in Scott (Justin Timberlake), a fresh-faced new substitute who hails from a wealthy family. (They have a wristwatch dynasty.) Scott seems too good to be true, but his character never develops to the point where we understand what his deal is. He starts dating rival teacher Amy Squirrell (Lucy Punch), who makes all teachers look bad (not to mention irritating, over-zealous, deluded, and out-of-touch) and arouses Elizabeth's competitive spirit. Meanwhile, Elizabeth balks at the advances of the friendly gym teacher (Jason Segel), who may be kind of a slob but is at his core a pretty good guy.

That's pretty much the story. Bad Teacher runs out of direction before it begins, and you enjoy some of the comic set-ups that unfold, but the whole time you wish for a better movie. You wish the writing were more structured because it could give the cast the chance to fly comically. As it is, they merely carry the dead weight of an unimaginative script. Cameron Diaz has always possessed a strong ability to relate to the audience, but she's marginalized by her own character in Bad Teacher. When she rolls her eyes at some inanity that's happening to her, we're rolling ours too. When she reacts with hostility to the stupidity of her students' papers, we're totally with her. But the movie hasn't developed her character, her relationship with the students, or the students' characters, enough for that aspect of the story to really work. The movie juggles several different loosely connected plot lines and then mashes them together in an attempt to bring continuity and coherence. There's also no force in Bad Teacher. It doesn't build up the way it should, and you can sense that it's going nowhere fast pretty early early on. The lack of comic suspense makes every scene feel like a sitcom sketch with no payoff (the writers work on The Office).

As a comedy, it's funny but in a dumb way. You'll feel like a jackass for laughing, or maybe a vulgarian, but you'll probably laugh anyway. Just not as much or has hard as you laugh in Bridesmaids, which is a movie that, despite its predictable plot, is one of the funniest comedies of the year. Bridesmaids had a cast that was allowed to bring the comic scenes to a full-on boil. Here, things only simmer if they ever get heated up at all. 

It's not enough for a movie to be dirty or for it to revel in badness. There needs to be some reason to root for the protagonist, even if she's on the level of an anti-hero. This is the problem of The Hangover and Sideways. You couldn't really be on the side of the main characters because they were self-centered pricks. The boys who wrote Bad Teacher have constructed a woman after their own heart in some ways. She's mean and crude and calculating but she's also lazy and disinterested, to the point that you wonder how she motivates herself to stoop even to the level of whoring herself out for a husband. It's like a combination of some Victorian marriage comedy and Sex and the City, without the witty dialogue or the prudish morality. Bad Teacher is too deflated to resonate the way it should have. Cameron Diaz carries it the movie, or maybe drags it, but I kept wanting more from her, and I knew she was capable of giving more if the makers had known what they were doing. I wanted them to use the smart side of Cameron Diaz. She was so good in In Her Shoes, where she played a similarly dysfunctional person. She pulls off the snarky bitchy thing well, but you keep wondering why her character has such low-brow ambitions in life. We're never given enough to justify or understand this.

And don't even think about seeing Bad Teacher if you want some kind of a morality tale. It's not out to instruct. That was probably the only consistent thing about the movie. While Elizabeth violates a lot of ethics rules with a shocking level of impunity, to punish her would have shown a lack of conviction. I guess they figured, hell, if you're gonna do it, do it. If this movie is about anything, it's about rooting for the heels of society who cut corners and don't give a crap about how they affect others. To give Elizabeth some kind of miraculous change of heart at the end would have been a fraud. Elizabeth is the disingenuous type. She's not about to have that blinded-by-the-light moment where everything turns around for good.

The makers of Bad Teacher certainly don't care about Elizabeth being respected or good at her job. She's really just an outlet for anyone who was ever been a teacher (or maybe just anyone who ever hated his job) to do all the wrong things and not get caught.

Directed by Jake Kasdan. With John Michael Higgins, Phyllis Smith, Eric Stonestreet, Thomas Lennon, and Molly Shannon.

The Beaver

In The Beaver, which is directed by and co-starring the wonderful Jodie Foster, we watch Mel Gibson suffer some kind of nervous breakdown onscreen, and Foster, as his devoted wife, somehow doesn't crack, too much, under all the pressure. Gibson plays Walter Black, the executive of a toy manufacturer who suddenly just stops functioning. Something clicks inside him, something inexplicable, and he's no longer the Walter that his employees, his colleague (played by the elegant Cherry Jones), his wife, or his two sons (Anton Yelchin and Riley Thomas Stewart) knew.

As an eccentric form of coping, Walter adorns a beaver puppet on his hand, and from that point on speaks "through" the puppet (using his Australian accent for the beaver). This brings back to life the old Walter in a new way, but on the other hand, the puppet is weird, and Walter's wife wonders how long this "therapy" will continue.

Meanwhile, Walter's teenage son Porter doesn't get on well with his dad. He didn't before the beaver thing started, and he certainly doesn't now. Porter supplements his income by writing papers for other high schoolers (and charging 200 dollars a pop). He's desperately trying to keep track of all his father's weird habits so he can teach himself to eschew them. With all the money he's saving, he can try and travel in an effort to separate himself from his painful memories.

But what is the true source of the pain? The movie is sort of vague in that department. Obviously Walter changed dramatically and this affected everyone in his life. But why did he change? And how do you classify the change? And how do you fix the change? The Beaver lets these merciless questions linger in the air as its story unfolds, and gradually you stop asking why and accept the realities. I think that's what Jodie Foster and the screenwriter, Kyle Killen, were trying to get across from the start: that most of the time explanations are elusive, and in the end they don't change much anyway.


The movie dances between abject horror and dark comedy at all times. You may be on the verge of tears as The Beaver tugs ruthlessly at your heartstrings, milking you the way certain movies do (soft music swells, and a touching image conjures up memories of your own inner-pain). But the movie, I think, critiques our tendency to be taken in by overly sentimental movies just as much as it tries to take us in, to elicit tears and sympathy from us like an old woman who knows how to look pathetic in order to garner pity.

It seems like some wryly funny comic wind buffets the lowest moments of the characters, whether it's Walter or his wife or his teenage son. When Walter is trying to commit suicide, he bungles it badly, and we've really no choice but to laugh at this poor, pathetic man, who's so screwed up he can't even hang himself correctly.

I liked The Beaver a lot, and I wasn't sure I would. It seemed so eccentric. But Jodie Foster has helped create something worthwhile in this movie. It doesn't seek to answer the problems of life for us, but instead, it has the tenacity to demonstrate how truly disturbed our worlds can become, and then reminds us not to expect too many answers too soon, if ever.

Also starring Jennifer Lawrence. Playing exclusively at 5 Pointes Theatre.

Jane Eyre

A compact adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's semi-gothic romance, directed by Cary Fukunaga and written by Moira Buffini. It's hard to fathom the skill involved in telling Jane Eyre under two hours without missing the subtle, deliberately paced story elements which have made the book such an enduring tale. What the movie lacks as far as development it makes up for in visual energy and pace. It captures the grimness of the plight of women--particularly lower-class women--and yet there's an ethereal lightness that Adriano Goldman captures in his camera work. He brings a breathtaking sense of vitality to the new Jane Eyre.

The casting is spot on. As Jane, Mia Wasikowska knows how to convey the turbulent spirit of her character. Her passion refuses to be quelled by social conventions. And yet she refuses to disrespect herself or her sense of right and wrong. As Rochester, Michael Fassbender has the right mixture of rugged incisiveness and vulnerability. I think Charlotte Bronte would agree that Rochester is a dick, but Jane somehow sees past the irritating aspects of his personality to the good inside him, the tortured soul.

During the fateful wedding scene (I'll avoid spoilers for those of you who haven't read the novel or seen any of the other film adaptations), I laughed because it seems one of the fixations of Victorian literature has been the tortured hero, the man with a deep, dark secret. It's always such a shock to everyone else, or at least to the heroine, who's so innocent, so unspoiled, that she could never imagine some other kind of life for her darling husband-to-be. Men have the remarkable quality of being both earnestly guilty for our actions and ravenously hungry for more. Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll/Hyde character is perhaps one of the best embodiments of this in all of pop literature. Bronte's Rochester is another. He's pure appetite.

Jane makes it plain in the movie that she might be just like him if she could. The constraints put on women at the time forbid this, of course, and the movie is a testament to how wretched was the condition of most women. They were taught propaganda by cruel, hard Calvinists without a speck of compassion in their veins. Jane refuses to believe the propaganda, and Mia Wasikowska somehow manages to convey all the complex emotions of the character with very little dialogue to put her feelings into words. She's a woman who thinks and feels so much more than she can say, and the movie itself is the same way. There's so much tacit emotion within the frames, so much that cannot be contained by the frames. You feel that the makers could have done something even more spectacular with an original work. Adapting Victorian novels seems almost like an obstacle, except that it allows us to experience a kind of oppression (and repression) we might not otherwise understand.

I don't want to spend too much time comparing Jane Eyre the movie to Jane Eyre the book. I think that's an unfair way to look at the latest incarnation of the Bronte story, because I think we should evaluate the movie for what it is, rather than what it isn't. We can't fault the filmmakers for not making a direct translation. What would be the point of making the movie, then? What we can be glad for is a literate, passionate yet controlled movie that isn't bogged down in exposition, and somehow manages to capture a magnetic sense of lyricism. There's not really any romanticism about the past. There's the picture of two souls who feel lost without each other. They're spiritually connected. Near the end, St. John (pronounced Sin Jin) lightly mocks Jane for speaking to Rochester even though he's nowhere nearby. St. John asks incredulously, "why are you talking to the air?" Jane feels a connection to him, an urgent calling. St. John, a devout minister and missionary, whole-heartedly believes in spiritual connections, but not that kind. He's unable or unwilling to consider the possibility. Jane, on the other hand, is willing. She doesn't shut life out, as much as life has tried to shut her out.

Judi Dench plays the head housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax; Jamie Bell plays the devout preacher St. John; Imogen Poots is Rochester's vapid flirt, Blanche Ingram; Sally Hawkins plays Jane's unfeeling Aunt Reed; and Romy Settbon plays Adele, Rochester's ward.

Playing exclusively at 5 Pointes Theatre thru June 23!