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. ★★★

The Hurt Locker

“Going to war is a once in a lifetime experience. It could be fun.”

In The Hurt Locker, written by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, we see a firsthand account of the Iraq War, perhaps as close as many of us will ever be. Whether or not it’s a completely accurate portrayal of the war matters less because it’s a portrayal of three individual American soldiers’ experience, and one in particular, played by Jeremy Renner, who seems to get off on the gamble his job as a bomb deactivator confronts him with on a daily basis. As Sergeant William James, Renner has a crazed look in his eyes as he approaches each mission. The Hurt Locker plays on some level like a video game, where each day is a new setting in which our players face new threats in unfamiliar locations.

[the following paragraph contains an early spoiler:]

Bigelow keeps it on a cinematic level though, and early on sets a tone of urgency and danger by killing off the first "bomb tech," Sergeant Thompson, played by Guy Pearce. Because Pearce is a recognizable actor, we don’t expect him to die so suddenly (although the build-up in the opening scene renders the outcome inevitable), and when this happens we know that the movie isn’t going to operate by many if any genre rules. As James and his fellow soldiers Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) approach each mission, we wonder if this is it for any and all of them.

Despite the uneasiness we experience, the movie lets us breathe at times too, and also lets us feel what the characters are feeling. We have time to catch a glimpse of the paranoia that sets in for the soldiers, who never know who they can trust. At certain moments it begins to feel like Bigelow is playing with us, but she’s playing with them too, and it really does feel like the Russian Roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, which is a movie that screams “I am an important film” where The Hurt Locker stays silent.

At the beginning of the movie we are greeted by the following quote by author Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” For more effect, that last part is left lingering by itself before the black screen disappears and we are immersed into the world of our heroes. It’s sort of irritating when movies declare their message at the beginning, even more so when they feel the need to underline it further, but it sets a tone, and follows through on that message very much so. It is unlike the other war movies I have seen; there’s a lack of grandiosity that makes it all the more effective and resonant. ★★★★

The Return of the Living Dead

In The Return of the Living Dead (1985), writer-director Dan O’Bannon treats us to a garishly funny and violent zombie spoof that seems like a strange mix of 1950’s science fiction and 1980’s punk. The production design often makes us feel like we're watching an expanded version of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video. The exuberant comic-book-feel of the horror is in that kind of vein, and the humor is in-your-face, as it should be with this kind of material.

Referencing George Romero’s 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead early on (partly to dispel confusion that this was a sequel to that movie), Return purports to tell us the "true" story of the living dead, and how it was all the Army's fault.

The disheveled corpses, sleeping peacefully in a dilapidated cemetery, are inadvertently revived when a military-developed chemical leaks into the atmosphere and over their graves. To the horror of some unsuspecting punk teenagers (with nicknames like “Trash” and “Suicide”) who unwittingly picked the graveyard as a place to party the night away, these zombies are hungry for brains and can run—fast. They can also talk, a gimmick that allows for at least two good jokes involving police radios. Despite all the problems in store for the adolescent characters, the adults apparently have much more at stake than their safety. Clu Gulager, as the owner of a nearby medical supplies warehouse, recognizes his culpability in hiding the lost military canisters that unleashed the troublesome gas into the air (infecting two of his employees—James Karen and Thom Matthews—in the process).

Return of the Living Dead is as much a part of its time as Night of the Living Dead was a time capsule of the 1960s, and yet both films seem to be telling us something very disturbing about our culture, then and now. Instead of the Bomb coming from the Russians, it comes from within our own borders, a rather chilling concept that endures even now.

Better than most of the walking dead movies, Return of the Living Dead spews gore and humor in equal doses. Despite its deviations from Romero’s “form,” zombie fans have embraced this as a minor classic with an ending as ironic as that of Night. With Don Calfa, Beverly Randolph, Miguel Nunez, Linnea Quigley, Brian Peck, Jewel Shepard, John Philbin, and Mark Venturini. ★★★½