"Maggie's Plan" insists that you CAN return your annoying husband back to his first wife, for a full refund.

What do you do if you’re in a bad marriage with a man who’s still in love with his ex-wife? Well, if you’re Maggie, you hope and pray that you can give him back for a refund. That’s the “plan” at the heart of the movie Maggie’s Plan, a Parent Trap of a different sort, and a film that happily thwarts the conventions of the romantic comedy. Maggie’s Plan itself is not a romantic comedy proper, but somewhere inside, there is a romantic comedy trying to get out. Instead, it’s a study of a mistress-turned-wife, an ex-wife, and the man they have to share. Each of them is fully equipped with eccentricities and neuroses. And while director Rebecca Miller often comes dangerously close to turning these three into caricatures, she knows how to rein herself in, molding them into complex human beings instead.

At the beginning of the film, Maggie arranges for an old college friend named Guy Childers (Travis Fimmel) to be her sperm donor. He is a self-described “pickle connoisseur” (perhaps a subtle allusion to a romantic comedy I adore, 1988’s Crossing Delancey). But then Maggie meets John (Ethan Hawke), a struggling academic/writer who’s married to Georgette (Julianne Moore), a brilliant professor at Columbia. John feels ignored by the far more successful Georgette (with whom he has two children), so when Maggie agrees to read a chapter of his novel, an unexpected romance develops. Cut to a few years later: Maggie and John are married with a kid of their own, but Maggie’s unhappy. She worries about being trapped in a loveless marriage, because she’s kind of tired of John, and especially because: she’s convinced that John is, in fact, still in love with Georgette.

For better or worse, Greta Gerwig has found a niche playing a wistful girl of 30 who’s a little lost, a little eccentric, and a little too smart for her own good. In Frances Ha, she was perpetually falling apart but somehow blissfully unfazed by it; in Mistress America, her wistfulness turned her into a monstrous figure, a woman hungry for social power, whose grandiose tales often defied fact-checking. And now, in Maggie’s Plan, Gerwig plays a woman trying to make a family for herself, despite the fact that she’s never been in a stable relationship for “more than six months”. Gerwig, more than any other actress, has become a poster child for the millennial generation, lost in the fragmented sea of modern life. But that’s not to say being lost is always a bad thing. What makes Gerwig’s performances likable is an often madcap defiance against her own circumstances. In all three films, she is propelled by her own definite notions of what ought to be rather than what is.

Julianne Moore’s Georgette is French, and Moore affects a sometimes distracting but, for me, enjoyably exaggerated accent that sounds like Madeline Kahn’s Lily von Schtupp in Blazing Saddles (even though Lily was German). When we first meet Georgette, she’s participating in a discussion panel, moderated by Wallace Shawn, about the Occupy movement, along with her husband. Georgette appears to be a cold, ruthless, intellectual bitch. She’s fashionably basic, and her little top-knot bun feels like the finishing touch on a woman who could kill you with merely a glance. But Julianne Moore, God bless her, hasn’t turned into Bette Davis yet, and Rebecca Miller has genuine feeling for Georgette, who’s a lot more vulnerable than it would first appear. So instead of degenerating into the villain of the movie, she becomes Maggie’s confidant.

Ethan Hawke has the least flashy performance, which probably makes his work the hardest. John is self-absorbed, the kind of guy who likes girls who like the things he says and does. And since he’s a writer, this flaw is compounded by the fact that’s already the typical needy, self-effacing artist. But even John, it turns out, is capable of love, and not merely a jerk.

The surprise MVPs of Maggie's Plan, however, are Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph, playing Maggie's married friends Tony and Felicia. Maggie once dated Tony, but while their romance fizzled, their friendship blossomed; and she works with Felicia, who says things like, "people say I'm a bitch, but I think I'm pretty nice." Every scene with these two needed to be longer.

Maggie’s Plan feels a tad slight, but the performances of Gerwig, Moore, and Hawke give the film a much-needed substance and vitality. It could easily be just another quirky indie film about quirky New Yorkers; and it while it kind of is that, the film is also something more interesting: a meditation on the ways men manipulate women (and vice versa). Georgette controls John, makes him feel invisible, but she also makes him feel needed; his relationship with Maggie is a complete reversal of that dynamic: he turns her into his housekeeper and book editor. There’s no longer any genuine love between them. And Maggie, always stuck on her own moral impulses, cannot endure a phony marriage, or a marriage that is, as he puts it, dead. “I’m in such deep oatmeal right now!” Maggie cries early in the film. It’s a wonderful, goofy line, indicative of Maggie’s character: She gets herself in plenty of messes without ever knowing how to clean them up; but somehow, she survives.

Catching Up: Five Capsule Reviews

Below, you will find capsule reviews of some of the movies I neglected to write about this year. Most if not all of them are now available to rent or stream somewhere. In some cases, these are movies I felt conflicted about and as such struggled to find the words to describe them.

The Assassin. The most beautifully soporific movie experience of 2015. It’s a stunningly gorgeous picture you could hang in an art gallery, but make sure the seats are hard and uncomfortable, or the audience may find that it puts them to sleep. The director, Hou Hsaiao-Hsien, has every detail in place in recreating an 8th-century Chinese village (during the Tang Dynasty) where the people are beset by the coming assassin who’s sworn to kill her brother, one of the residents. There’s a gorgeous dance sequence, and it’s fun to behold all the little trinkets and bowls and other objects that populate this movie, but the film plods along with such deliberate languor that it feels like a punishment. Even the martial arts sequences, though well-choreographed, fail to breathe any life into The Assassin.

Clouds of Sils Maria. A slow-moving, very well-acted, beautifully made, but ultimately dull film about the emotional crisis of a respected film and stage actress named Maria Enders, played by Juliette Binoche. Enders is en route to Switzerland with her personal assistant (played by Kristin Stewart) when she learns that her mentor, a writer-director who put her on the map 20 years ago, has died. Maria is distraught, and rendered even more fragile when she’s faced with the possibility of doing a sequel to the original film, playing her character 20 years older and playing opposite a hot new actress (Chloe Grace Moretz). Binoche is terrific, and the film has a lot to say about fame and aging and relationships. But despite the great skill of director Olivier Assayas, Clouds of Sils Maria is too stilted. When Bette Davis played an actress having a nervous breakdown in All About Eve, it was delightfully entertaining. Sils Maria feels enervated. And Kristen Stewart, who’s earned some recognition for her performance, still hasn’t found any emotions to convey other than annoyance. 

Creed. I found myself enjoying this Rocky reboot despite the fact that I hate boxing movies and have never seen a single Rocky picture. Sylvester Stallone is surprisingly good, now regulated to the position of trainer. (Stallone carries himself with gracious wit; his performance is surprisingly subtle and endearing.) The trainee is Adonis “Donnie” Creed, son of Balboa’s rival-friend Apollo. Donnie is played by Michael B. Jordan, who carries the picture well. The movie isn’t particularly revolutionary, but it hits all the right beats, and director Ryan Coogler succeeds in making us care about the stakes. That’s more than I usually get out of a boxing movie. With Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad (who gets too little screen time as Donnie’s adopted mother), and Tony Bellew as Donnie’s rival.

Maps to the Stars. Probably the craziest movie I saw all year, starring Julianne Moore as the anti-Sils Maria Hollywood-diva-having-a-nervous-breakdown. She plays a wretched yet fragile actress whose personal assistant (Mia Wasikowska) is insane and obsessive, and once tried to kill her brother by setting their house on fire. (The assistant has some kind of psychological "connection" to her brother than drives her obsession.) This is David Cronenberg’s version of Birdman with more than a bit of David Lynch thrown in for good measure. Maps to the Stars is disturbing and weird and unsettling, and it may actually be my favorite Cronenberg movie in recent memory. But it’s not for everyone, especially when someone gets beaten to death with an Academy Award statuette. With John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams, Sarah Gadon, and Elijah Bird.

The Wolfpack. A strange, at times mesmerizing, but flawed documentary about a Peruvian recluse, his American wife, and their seven children (six boys and a girl) living in isolation in their Lower East Side apartment. The director, Crystal Moselle, inadvertently discovered the boys on one of their rare outings, and became fascinated with them. Despite having almost no interactions with the outside world, the boys developed a kind of social language based on the movies they voraciously watched and then imitated. The boys are tall and skinny with long black hair, and they dress like the thugs in Reservoir Dogs. The Wolfpack is both a disturbing movie about neglect and a strangely hopeful movie about the power of movies, but Moselle’s fascination with her subject keeps her too close to the material. The movie ignores some pretty big questions about the family’s less-than-healthy existence, and left me feeling distant rather than invested. 

Still Alice

  In Still Alice, Julianne Moore triumphs in a role that would be tempting to write off as a pointed Oscar grab. Moore’s performance—as Alice Howland, a successful linguistics professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease—is haunting and complex, showing us the progression of a disease in a very believable way without sacrificing the dignity of her character. Still Alice might have been the kind of middlebrow message movie that the Oscars delight in, except for the fact that its treatment of Alzheimer’s disease is raw and authentic. The movie doesn’t strain for prestige as much as we might expect. Instead, it weaves compelling scenes together of Alice the successful intellectual (author of noteworthy books on language development), Alice the happy wife (married to a fellow academic, played by Alec Baldwin), and Alice the mother of three grown children (played by Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish, and Kristen Stewart), who struggles with a disease but is not defined by it.

     If we have to sit through a movie as depressing as Still Alice, I’m glad we can do it in the company of the great Julianne Moore. (Granted, I’m biased. She is one of my favorite actresses, and I was more than a little adamant that she deserved an Oscar for this performance even before I saw the movie.) And yes, Still Alice is a tough movie to watch. Few films released in 2014 so boldly stared viewers in the face with their own mortality. How many of us have loved ones who struggle with this and other diseases which seemingly erase their personalities, taking them from us long before their bodies give out?

    The writing-directing team of Still Alice, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (who adapted Lisa Genova’s novel of the same name), understand how to make a movie about human suffering and frailty without giving in to the temptation to preach or pander. Of course, viewers are likely to experience a “Niagara Falls” kind of emotional reaction to this movie anyway. This is a movie that will break your heart, not the least of which because it feels like we’re watching Julianne Moore develop Alzheimer’s. That is probably the hardest thing to take: seeing an actor you love suffer on the screen in such an urgent and real way. But because Still Alice is honest, and because its emotional wallops are never cheaply constructed, its melodramatic content works beautifully, the way tearjerkers should.  

    Emotions are such tricky things, and Hollywood movies so often falter when they try to dramatize the real emotions people feel. Still Alice gets at the complexity of those emotions for all the members of Alice’s family. We see the panic in Alice’s children when they are confronted with her disease; we see the denial and cowardice (and self-loathing) of her husband, who at the beginning assures Alice that he will stand by her, never believing just how costly this struggle will be; we see Alice, bravely speaking about her illness at an Alzheimer’s convention, using a highlighter to follow the lines of her speech. (In a prior scene, her youngest daughter, an aspiring actress living in L.A. who’s played by Kristen Stewart, suggests—via Skype—that her mom’s speech is too technical, not personal enough; Alice angrily ends the chat and turns away, frustrated at how difficult the task of writing has become; but she reworks the speech, and the movie doesn’t feel the need to show her revision process: we get it in the delivery itself, and it’s moving and inviting. If a movie must offer a kind of TED-talk presentation on a degenerative illness, the way Still Alice does so is the most effective, the most poignant method: humanizing, sympathetic, not self-pitying or self-absorbed.)

    I had a hard time convincing anyone to see Still Alice with me. And it’s no wonder. How do you recommend a movie like this—even when it’s so, so good—when you know people are going to be sad watching it? At some level, we go to movies like Still Alice for catharsis. The emotional intensity of the material demands that we confront our own fears. Perhaps the most honest thing Alice says is about the way this disease assaults her very identity, which is so wrapped up in her success as a professional thinker. Still Alice doesn’t try to explain this injustice. It confronts the tragedy—and the beauty—of human existence. And believe it or not, the movie isn’t a total bummer. “How can you call my life tragic?” Alice wonders. “I’ve had a successful career, a happy, stable marriage, three wonderful children” [I’m paraphrasing].”

    So, go see Still Alice, even though you are going to be sad, during and after. But let the intense gratitude of the film wash over you as much as the sorrow. My favorite moment in Still Alice occurs during Alice’s speech at the convention, when she quotes that lovely poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, giving it a new kind of heartbreaking and beautiful meaning. I think I’ll close with it.

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 1

In this review, I’m assuming you’re somewhat familiar with the overall plot of The Hunger Games series, so while I do discuss plot points, I’m not going to bother explaining all the rules of the franchise’s milieu.

The trouble with movies like Mockingjay Part I is that they demand so little of the film medium. They’re not interested in being good movies, merely filmed readings of the novels, visual valentines to the devoted readers of the book series who want to expand their excitement and their experience of the fantasy. Harry Potter wasn’t content to be a well-told book series or even a film series. It eventually became a whole world unto itself at Islands of Adventure. And Hunger Games may one day have to follow in HP’s footsteps to give the fans what they truly want. Perhaps a Hunger Games-themed paintball park? No one is interested in adapting the series in a way that feels truly cinematic, although director Francis Lawrence does make some efforts with Mockingjay. But the movie is ultimately tethered to the book series in a way that ensures it will be a boring set-up for the finale. And viewers may likely find themselves restless with disinterest, but unwilling to criticize the movie since it’s part of a larger whole. How can we really even rate a movie like this, when it’s incomplete?

Even the great Jennifer Lawrence isn’t enough to save this movie. It’s partly her very quick rise as a respected actress—an ascendance that actually started before The Hunger Games—that has made her performance as Katniss Everdeen seem labored and gradually too familiar, too repetitive. Jennifer Lawrence already had an Academy Award nomination under her belt by the time she made the first Hunger Games (for the unsettling, murky meth-noir Winter’s Bone). Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other actors who were Oscar nominees before they were stars of hugely popular young adult movie franchises. Now that Lawrence has won an Oscar (for 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook) and a third nomination (for last year’s American Hustle), her presence in Mockingjay Part I—the first half of the conclusion to The Hunger Games—is a little bit like a 22-year-old being stuck at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving. The other grown-ups have legally recognized her adulthood, but they’re still treating her like a child. Of course, Lawrence has obligations to fulfill, and this series is her bread and butter. But Mockingjay Part I is a real yawn of a movie, and for people who look forward to what Lawrence can do on the screen, it represents a dull speed bump for an actress who has shown such promise.

It’s especially hard to watch an actress as good as Jennifer Lawrence be so inactive. Katniss Everdeen never felt more passive than in this movie. She sits, she waits, she reacts. She’s occasionally enlisted to shoot propaganda videos to rally the districts, which are fighting a losing battle against the Capital. She waits for news of her beloved Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who’s a prisoner of the Capital being used as a puppet to denounce the civil war between the districts and the Capital as radical and self-destructive. The alleged love triangle between Katniss and Peeta and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) has no momentum, especially since Peeta is seen through a glass screen for most of the film. (And how crummy is it to be Gale at this point? Always doing things for the woman he knows will never love him back the way he wants her to.) She chats with the leaders of her district—Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman—about strategy. She chats with Woody Harrelson (her alcoholic mentor). She chats with Elizabeth Banks. But none of the conversation, none of the characterization, adds up or amounts to much.

There’s also not much of a strong villain presence. The only really tangible bad guy is the face of the cold, ominous President Snow (Donald Sutherland) who’s mostly seen on big TV screens and thus needs desperately to be petting a white cat on his lap. He’s too larger-than-life to feel very threatening, and the movie drones on vaguely about the Capital in a way that never make the threats of the Capital seem real or genuinely tense. Even the big scenes—such as an air raid by Capital bombers—fails to show us the weight or the impact of the struggle. We see lots of terrified district folks running for shelter as the building around them shakes. But we don’t see the bombers and the scene is rendered ineffectual. It’s stagey in the worst way, like when the actors in a play look out the window and report on what they see since we the audience cannot actually see it. Moore and Hoffman are stern and unfeeling and dull as the leaders, always vaguely unaffected by the many setbacks and tragedies going on around them, and too noble to be capable of any real feeling.

I haven’t read any of the Hunger Games books. I saw the first film, but skipped Catching Fire. About fifteen minutes into Mockingjay, I was wishing I had skipped it too and waited for the finale, which is sure to be more entertaining (one hopes). This silly trend of expanding the final entry of series into two movies is peculiar and, I think, antithetical to movies and what they are. (Studios, of course, cannot pass up an opportunity to squeeze as much money as they can out of their pet franchises.) Even fans of the series seemed largely underwhelmed by this installment. The theater wasn’t even crowded. (Granted, it was the middle of the afternoon.) And nobody seemed excited. When I went to the final Twilight movie on opening night, half the fun was observing the audience. Those fans were having the time of their lives. The movie was a bummer—although entertaining for what it was—but the fans’ energy made it worth seeing. This latest Hunger Games entry felt lifeless.

The film is technically well-made. The director, Francis Lawrence, makes an effort to give the movie some visual feeling. In an early scene, we see Katniss emerging from a circular hallway into a large bunker, and the shot is kind of elegant. Many of the scenes in Mockingjay are visually tied together in a way you don’t expect from this kind of series. And the movie doesn’t pound you over the head with ending after ending. (I suspect that will come with Part 2). No, this film’s problem is that it’s a place-holder, and there’s so much being withheld that it’s hard to care. Even the one big advancement in the film’s plot (involving Peeta’s eventual release from the Capital) feels too little too late.

Non-Stop

For about seventy-five minutes, Non-Stop is a tense, pleasing thriller about an alcoholic, clearly unstable U.S. air marshal (Liam Neeson) who's being taunted via cell phone by an unknown passenger aboard a plane bound for London. The creeping texter claims that every twenty minutes someone aboard the plane is going to die until 150 million big ones are wired to some mysterious bank account with lots of numbers.

As the put-upon hero whom almost nobody on the plane trusts, Neeson is powerfully grim yet heartfelt. He has qualities reminiscent of George C. Scott: the same kind of subtle command tinged with pathos is present in Neeson's facial expressions, particularly in his eyes. In the movie, he's unable to get over a personal tragedy. (Always the impetus for this kind of character's motivation. Cue eye roll.) And of course this predictably becomes a way for the villain to goad him and a way for him to find what Hollywood thinks of as redemption. (I'll give you a hint: he feels guilty about being an uninvolved dad and there's an innocent little girl aboard the plane who reminds him of his daughter.)

But after operating like an exciting modern-day Agatha Christie movie--Murder on the Transatlantic Airways--that left me quite giddy with happiness, Non-Stop veers into the nether-regions of a truly craptacular plot twist from which it never rebounds fully. Yes, I was happy with the movie overall, but the twist is so lame that it's a huge let-down, because the movie has shown us such a good time until then. It feels like lazy writing on the part of the three people who hashed out this sky-thriller. And maybe it was the best they could do--I promise not to reveal any big spoilers--with a premise like this. But if Agatha Christie could churn out like 90 of these thriller type novels, couldn't they get one script right all the way? (Granted, hers weren't all great either, but she nailed enough of them in the right places.)

But I cherished those seventy-five solid minutes. And I still think if you go out and see Non-Stop (which, given what else is available this weekend, is not a bad choice), you'll agree that the movie delivers a lot of fun suspense, even after the big dumb reveal. One more quibble: the passengers begin communicating with loved ones with their phones, which causes the story to leak, and soon they're watching live news coverage of their own hijacking (some kind of weird thrill) on the screens in front of them. This is supposed to be a jab at the bad reporting that can come of a 24-hour-news cycle, but Non-Stop is such a conventional thriller (in many ways, and despite being likable) that such commentary hardly registers.

As always, it's really great to see the lovely Julianne Moore, even if she's relegated to playing the den mother, standing by Neeson's character and helping out in his feeble investigation of the suspicious and understandably rattled fellow passengers. She does get some good moments though, and the chemistry between the two of them is nice and easy. I wish there had been more.

The supporting cast, which does a fine job, includes Michelle Dockery, Scoot McNairy, and Nate Parker. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra.

Children of Men

Children of Men (2006), directed by Alfonso Cuarón and based on the novel by P.D. James, is a murky slog through the wastelands of dystopian future England, which, in the year 2027, is the only country that hasn't completely collapsed due to war and disease. The planet is also enduring a new kind of crisis: infertility. No babies have been born for nearly twenty years, so when a radical group of activists finds a pregnant Fuji woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), her safe transport to a humanist group--where her baby won't be exploited as some kind of marvelous new savior--becomes of vital importance. Enter Clive Owen, a British government worker who has ties with the radical group's leader, Julian (played by Julianne Moore). He's enlisted to give them some help in getting papers for Kee so that she can get where she needs to go. Of course, there are complications.

This is a movie full of dreary--and mostly unoriginal--predictions about the future. Cuarón lets loose with the mayhem, and uses impressive camera-work to exhibit the constant chaos of bombs going off, guns firing, bodies broken by glass and bullets and crumbling buildings, towns destroyed, and thick clouds of fog and smoke obscuring the vision of the protagonists. It's a world that becomes increasingly unwatchable as the movie winds on.

Dystopian fiction isn't exactly a new thing, but it's certainly experienced a new wave of enthusiasm in the last ten years or so. The British experienced a parallel kind of anxiety about their security at the turn of the twentieth century, which gave us Dracula, The Time Machine, and lots of other literature about the deterioration--social, moral, and biological--of society. H.G. Wells imagined England in somewhat more banal, yet far more accurate, terms in Tono-Bungay (1909), which chronicled the disruptions in the English social structure and the rise of urban civilizations. People were afraid of all the changes that were happening, which of course preceded the very big and grim change affected by World War I.

It's the same recipe bubbling up now in 2014. We live in a world of uncertainties, and the grim futuristic novels and books are glutting the market to exploit/ameliorate/fuel that anxiety. Children of Men is simply a more artful and adult version of the same thing young people love about The Hunger Games: this is a world where man's brutality has been unleashed in an uninhibited and obvious fashion, and this kind of sheer inhumanity has always grabbed people's attention. Perhaps people respond to these kinds of movies because they want confirmation that we're not so brutal here and now. Things may be bad, but they aren't that bad at least. But the people in Children of Men have the news on 24/7, which isn't much different from people now who always have the television tuned to Fox News or CNN, which are more Orwellian than people want to believe. They're the ones who feed the dystopian imaginations, and give credence to movies like Children of Men.

I found it too depressing and chaotic to care about Children of Men, and what's more, frustrating, much like Caurón's Gravity frustrated me. Here there were little things--the jarring sound of someone pounding on a door and Clive Owen taking forever to open it; that stupid little yippy dog sniffing the blanket covering the baby, whose identity Kee is trying to keep secret; the way the characters plod through bomb-riddled streets and stairways and are constantly impeded by some irritating obstruction. I suppose this is Caurón's attempt to be realistic, but it pulled me out of the movie and built up a kind of resistance in me. After a while, all patience was gone.

Clive Owen is a likable actor, and his presence bolsters Children of Men considerably. But he--like everyone in this movie--is a function of the plot, not a real character. We care about his safety mainly because he's Clive Owen. You can imagine that the author of the novel, P.D. James, had the idea about the infertility first." Suppose women just stopped being able to give birth?" Obviously, what once mattered to society would no longer matter. But the problem with these kinds of conceits is that by definition they make characters incidental and subordinate to the story. Everything must flow from that little nucleus of an idea about infertility, and while it's an interesting idea, it's very Twilight Zone-y, except Children of Men is bigger and glossier and gritter than The Twilight Zone.

Michael Caine has a small part as an aging hippy with John Lennon's hair--if Lennon had lived long enough to turn grey--and glasses. He tries very obviously to be a quirky old man, and his comic relief never really works. It always seems forced and naively at odds with the rest of the movie's grim march toward a kind of shriveled, bleak self-importance. With five writers, you'd expect something better from Children of Men. Or maybe that was the trouble. Along with the director, the script was pounded out by Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby. With Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, and Danny Huston.

Don Jon

The people sitting next to my friend and me walked out of Don Jon about thirty minutes into the movie. And why shouldn't they? Don Jon is about a self-absorbed d-bag from New Jerey (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who's a master of hooking up with women, but who admittedly prefers porn to actual physical contact. He and his buddies rate the girls at the club on a scale of one to ten, and when they spot Scarlet Johansson at the bar, all of them agree she's a "dime." Scarlet plays Barbara Sugarman (the name conjures up all kinds of licentious possibilities), a somewhat pampered girl who knows what she wants and how she can manipulate guys into giving it to her. She and Jon eventually become a couple, but he can't stop looking at porn, and when Barbara finds it on his computer, she's disgusted and breaks up with him.

If you're easily offended by crude language or nudity, Don Jon isn't your movie. As Jon describes his daily habit of trolling the internet for new XXX videos, we're met with a constant montage of images of girls from the web (most of the time just their faces, but sometimes more), and it's admittedly uncomfortable to see in a movie theater. (Porn isn't glamorous, and it isn't dignified. There's something shameful about seeing it even under these conditions.)

But Don Jon isn't about titillating the viewer. We're in the head of a guy who has become so detached from reality that he can't "lose himself" with another human being anymore. He has to go to porn. (The movie also makes some coy observations about women losing themselves in romantic comedies, their version of porn.) There are also some deliciously apt observations about the American family today, a family that's been beat into submissive silence by the booming television and the cell phones. (Jon's sister barely utters a word in any scene she's in: she's always texting, and his father has positioned his seat at the dinner table so he can watch football while he eats.)

There's something very unique about the character of Don Jon, and something very typical at the same time. I think he represents the current young American male: aggressively macho, high on his own sent, and too distracted and too hooked--whatever the drug of choice--to know how much he desperately wants real human interaction. The scenes of Jon at confession--being assigned a certain number of Hail Marys and Lord's Prayers depending on the number of times he's given into temptation--manage to be both hilariously and heartbreakingly believable.

In the end, it comes down to that same old story: boy meets girl, boy can't stop looking at porn, girl breaks up with boy, Julianne Moore sleeps with boy so he can find salvation. I do love Julianne Moore, but I feel that she has been doing this kind of thing for quite a long time. Moore plays a woman whom Jon meets at a night class, and with whom he learns to see more in a woman than just the degree of sexual pleasure she can afford him. She's wonderful--a voice of sanity amidst the cacophony.

It's hard to remember the last time an actor has so lost himself inside a character like this. Joseph Gordon-Levitt becomes the ultimate Guido (he also wrote and directed the film, and with a refreshing amount of imagination). It's almost miraculous that you could feel sympathy for him, since he resembles those idiots from the Jersey Shore, but you do. You really do. Gordon-Levitt has fashioned quite an impressive "romantic comedy," especially because it so honestly hits at some of the nerves being ignored almost everywhere else. With Tony Danza, Glenne Headley, Brie Larson, Rob Brown, and Jeremy Luke. Anne Hathaway and Channing Tatum have cameos as the actors in the romantic comedy that Jon and Barbara watch. ★★★

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.

The Big Lebowski

How does a movie acquire a cult following? The people at the not-quite-midnight screening of The Big Lebowski (1998) seemed to frolic with this movie. They were laughing like it was the first time they'd seen it, yet I imagine they'd all seen it multiple times. (Many were quoting the dialogue with the movie or even talking over it because they knew exactly what was happening onscreen). This was my first time seeing The Big Lebowski. It's one of those movies you're scolded for not seeing. People love their Coen Brothers movies with a palpable ferocity. It's bizarre until you can find yourself within that kind of ferocious love of a movie.

I'm not partial to the Coen Brothers. No Country For Old Men may be their best work, but it's also pretty hollow inside. One of the most prominent storytelling flaws in their work is the stupidity of their characters' actions. But, in the world of the Coen Brothers this is a device or a bit of storytelling genius rather than a flaw. They try to paint the characters as more real because they do stupid things. It works out being a bit infuriating--and alternately comical, depending on the moment.

As much as this movie is about anything, it's a hodgepodge of old noir movies set in L.A. The Coens appropriate elements of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, and Jack Smight's Harper. But you soon realize that the plot, about a guy (Jeff Bridges, playing the ultimate chronic loser with a flair for bowling and a penchant for White Russians) who's hired to save a crippled millionaire's kidnapped wife, is subordinate to the movie's stoner inhibitions. Bridges' character calls himself the Dude, and it's a pretentious attempt to adorn this movie with qualities that will make it what it's become, an oddball midnight movie. This theater is never packed, and it was packed.

Julianne Moore shows up as the eccentric daughter of the invalid millionaire (see The Big Sleep and Harper). She resents the hell out of her sex-kitten of a step-mother (see Harper). There's also some strand of yarn about a weird-ass cult (see Harper again). And the movie has that affectless feel that Altman most certainly wove into The Long Goodbye. No one really cares about anything. Except bowling. John Goodman gives a volcanic, uproariously funny performance as Bridges' nutso bowling partner, a Vietnam vet who's obsessed with the past and completely in love with his war vet status. Steve Buscemi plays their sidekick, the brunt of their jokes and hostility and fellow bowling buddy.


I find myself riddled with mixed emotions about this movie. I laughed a lot at the craziness onscreen. It's got moments of pure madness, and the movie's nightmarish cast and nightmarishly lackadaisical story are something to be seen, but it also bugged the hell out of me. It's visually stylish and stylized (replete with trippy drug-induced dream sequences that might have come from the mind of David Lynch), but uneven. There may be reasons to care about the characters, but only if you're willing to like their idiosyncrasies. And it's dreadfully repetitive, particularly the dialogue, which is like bad Tarantino. Goodman's character was exasperating, and you wanted him to get abused more than he did (although he also delivered some truly good moments of comedy). Bridges' character constantly bungles things in a way that grows quickly tiresome. Bridges is a solid actor, though, and he carries a movie that's practically been amputated at the gut.

A Single Man

In A Single Man, Colin Firth is George Falconer, a 50-something English professor living in L.A. (although he's a native of England) in 1962. Since the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), George wakes up, he gets dressed, he goes to work, he comes home, and everything in between is so painfully contrived that he operates more like a machine than a man. Still, there are glimmers of life amidst his cookie cutter existence. 

Living in a Leave it to Beaver-style neighborhood, George chafes against the provincialism of his surroundings and maintains a faux-sophisticated relationship with his old chum Charley (Julianne Moore), also English, the two of them isolated expatriates, unsure of their roots anymore. George is cynical, Charley pretends not to be, and the gin flows freely in their tumultuous meeting that night (this story unfolds in the course of one 24-hour-period, with flashbacks of George's former life with Jim). Charley is George's only friend, and yet there's a distance between them that George maintains. She was the one, however, that he went to the night he received word that Jim had died in Michigan in a car accident (and that he wasn't welcome at Jim's funeral).

George approaches this day with a new-found determination. He's going to kill himself.

Tom Ford, who started out his career as a production designer, makes his directing debut with A Single Man, which spends so much time in close-up that we practically become experts of the actors' pores. It's a glossy affair, one that seems at times like postcards extracted from the early 60s, and at other times recalls the sumptuous intensity of a 1950's soaper, not unlike an earlier film starring Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven). 

Christopher Isherwood's book, though very literate, is also inherently cinematic in the way it unfolds, and so the task of screenwriter David Scearce isn't one of selecting and arranging but of heightening the dramatic appeal. There hasn't been a movie this visually opulent for a long while, and I think we can attest to Ford's prowess as a production designer that the movie looks so good, and not just good, but seamlessly rich in detail; at times it appears pretentious, but there's such a thread of humor about the whole production that it takes the wind out of the deliberately high drama.

The performance by Colin Firth is top notch, somewhat reminiscent of Laurence Olivier, but then this is the kind of part that seems almost too obviously geared toward winning an award. And yet Firth does it justice, maintaining the clinched, formal composure that offsets the visual razzle-dazzle. There's a lot of Vertigo in this movie, particularly in the music score by Abel Korzeniowski, as well as the voyeuristic approach Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take to the movie. There are constant close-ups of lips and eyes and legs and backs and bodies floating in the water...it's very European without losing its Hollywood-ness.

A Single Man isn't for every taste, but it deserves much praise for what it does well and what it doesn't do. Its deadly serious subject matter could have been a lot heavier and therefore a lot grimmer if not for the humor and the visual largesse that constantly reminds us we're watching a movie. ★★★