Category: Reviews

CIFF Review: Walesa: Man of Hope

This Polish biopic about Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement in Poland, is modest and workmanlike.

“Walesa: Man of Hope” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. 

Despite being a moving, inspirational portrait of an influential Polish activist and political figure, you will not find any orchestral score in “Walesa: Man of Hope.” No strings, no swells, no cymbal crashes and timpani designed to jerk a tear; not in this biopic. The songs that punctuate Andrezj Wajda’s film are Polish pop and punk songs, music plucked straight from the garage.

This is the music of the working man, and although hitting the beats of a standard biopic, “Walesa” keeps its head down and does a workman-like job just as its protagonist would. It’s a modest film of a simple man, but also a great one.

Lech Walesa (Robert Wieckiewicz) joined the solidarity movement in the 1970s. The Soviet Union had control over Poland, and the nation was stuck in poverty with the Communist mentality to view working class, human labor as little more than a resource. Over just a few years, Walesa became the relatable figurehead of the movement. With a big sniffer over a sly, gruff smirk, he reached the working class in ways the young, rebellious liberals could not, eventually leading city wide strikes, negotiating for the poor and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The film joins Walesa in the early 1970s as his first child of six is about to be born. When a riot starts outside his apartment, he takes off his wedding ring and his watch and tells his wife Danuta (Agnieszka Grochowska) to sell them if he doesn’t return. He’s arrested, interrogated and forced to sign a document that’s bound to come back to bite him. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Walesa: Man of Hope”

Captain Phillips

“Captain Phillips” is a shrewd thriller about leadership and respect more so than action and bullets.

Armed Somali pirates have just boarded the Maersk Alabama. The leader of the group, a skinny pirate named Muse (Barkhad Abdi), announces to Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) that this is just business and “Every-ting will be OK.” But when Muse demands to see Phillips’s hidden crew by threatening to shoot someone, something really interesting happens.

“I thought you were a businessman! Is this how you do business?” In another movie, that trigger gets pulled. But in Paul Greengrass’s “Captain Phillips”, the clever routine of shrewd negotiation, strategy and respect continues. “Captain Phillips” is a pulse-pounding thriller, but it’s a film about leadership more so than action and bullets.

Phillips was a real shipping captain whose boat was hijacked by pirates in 2009. The film opens with Phillips saying a tough goodbye to his wife (Catherine Keener) as he leaves for his voyage around the coast of Africa. They talk of the tough job market for their son and how tough the American way has become.

It’s a feeling Muse knows all too well. His commute involves him trudging to the ocean at the behest of gun-toting warlords. He’s allowed to pick his crew from a crop of dozens, but his real options are awfully limited. Continue reading “Captain Phillips”

CIFF Review: Last Vegas

Hopefully this is the last time such legendary actors humiliate themselves like this.

“Last Vegas” screened as the Chicago International Film Festival’s Surprise Screening. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. 

One would hope that a movie called “Last Vegas” might be the last time some legendary actors starred in such a simple, dumb comedy to be humiliated. Somehow such a thing seems unlikely, especially when this is hardly the first time Robert De Niro has signed up for such a pitiful exploit.

The difference is that Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline and De Niro will all likely survive “Last Vegas” mostly unscathed. Jon Turtletaub’s film is unfunny enough to be listless, a litany of Vegas set pieces with old people that are hardly even designed to be funny, and yet it still manages to fall far short of the kind of outrageous raunch and madcap insanity that came to define the “Hangover” sequels. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Last Vegas”

12 Years a Slave

“12 Years a Slave” is the heaviest, hardest film to watch of the year, but it’s much more than a grim history lesson.

A black woman in tatters is sitting in a cart crying uncontrollably as she pulls up to a luxurious Southern plantation home. A wealthy white woman comes to greet her new “property” and asks her husband why this one is in tears. She’s been separated from her children in the slave trade; it couldn’t be helped, he explains. “Poor woman,” the new master opines, “Your children will soon be forgotten.”

Such coldness despite an occasionally glossy and soothing tone is business as usual in the masterpiece “12 Years a Slave.” Like the stylish but burdensome “Shame” before it, Steve McQueen’s film is by far the heaviest, most difficult film to endure of the year. It should not be taken lightly that this is a film about slavery and all its harsh colors. Such devastating films are usually just about braving it only to learn a history lesson. “12 Years a Slave” is about maintaining your fortitude and still knowing who you are when you come out the other side.

The film is quite simply the story of a free black man living in upstate New York in 1840 who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years. That the man lived to tell his tale and write the memoir that inspired this film is magnificent enough. But McQueen uses Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) story to show us what freedom is. It’s not the ability to live in wealth and privilege, to live free of pain or to be allowed to walk where you please. Northup earned his freedom by remembering who he was when the time came. Being strong enough to retain that memory: that’s freedom. Continue reading “12 Years a Slave”

Gravity

“Gravity” is a jaw-dropping sci-fi that rewrites the rules of cinema.

For all of the innovative, jaw-dropping, never before seen CGI wonder in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity,” the impossibly balletic movement of Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera and the impeccably seamless 3-D effects, one of the film’s most impressive and memorable things is something Cuaron has withheld.

In space, there is nothing to carry sound. Satellites collide and rupture into millions of pieces, jetpacks soar and glide through the stars and astronauts dangle from floating space stations, clinging with their last ounce of strength to avoid floating into the distance, and nothing is to be heard.

Although the swell of an orchestra will remind you this is a Hollywood film, “Gravity” shatters the mold of what it is to be epic. Today’s tentpole movies are all noise and bombast; the multi-million dollar visual effects are par for the course. Unlike “Avatar,” “Life of Pi” and “Hugo” before it, 3-D and CGI are not here to enhance. Working through technology that needed to be invented, Cuaron has invented something breathtakingly original.

His focus on sights, not sound, story nor style, has nearly taken cinema back to its silent day roots and helped to imagine a future vision for what cinema can be. Continue reading “Gravity”

Rush

Ron Howard’s “Rush” hits its stride in thrilling, driver’s eye perspectives of Formula One racing.

Formula One is a near impossible sport. Only the right combination of near-death daring, speed, mechanics, weather and precise skill can not only win the race but also allow you to finish it in one piece. When all the extraneous parts come together, it makes for sheer, cathartic fun.

Ron Howard’s “Rush” feels that way when it hits its stride. “Rush” is a formulaic sports movie with a driver’s eye mentality that grants an infinitely more heart pounding sensation even when the narrative and drivers seem to be going around in circles.

Americans have never caught on to Formula One the way the rest of the world has, but they know rivalries, and they know assholes, especially foreign ones. “Rush” has both, it being a biopic on an infamous rivalry between the smarmy and posh Brit James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and the blunt, coldly calculating Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) during their 1976 season.

Hunt drove for McLaren and Lauda for Ferrari, each forcing their way into the big leagues with equal parts skill and money. Their rivalry is built on the fact that they’re both jerks inside the car and out, testing each other in harsh conditions while trading barbs about their wives and general appearance. Continue reading “Rush”

Don Jon

The ideas in “Don Jon” are occasionally as thin as its meat-head protagonist, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt brings charm to the part.

After seeing something as gratingly powerful as Steve McQueen’s “Shame,” it perhaps occurred to Joseph Gordon-Levitt that for most, Internet porn is not as severe as a crippling sex addiction, and yet it’s prevalence suggests something much deeper about our culture.

This is nothing new. The think pieces about how it’s changing our kids’ perceptions about sex, relationships and what defines someone as attractive are everywhere. Vanity Fair wrote one just this week. The media has immense influence, and it most strongly affects those who already display a level of naiveté and arrogance.

That’s perhaps why the eponymous protagonist of Gordon-Levitt’s “Don Jon” is not just a narcissistic Jersey boy but also a lowest common denominator schmuck without much to his name beside his seedy browser history. In his attempt to make a film about addiction, media overdose and modern, self-centered personalities while still keeping “Don Jon” a swift, funny, 90-minute sex romp, Gordon-Levitt is somewhat grasping at straws, making the ideas in it as thin as the movie’s buff hero.

Yet JGL’s ability to make Jon disarmingly charming even as he’s playing the fool is what makes this indie comedy rise above the rest of the rom-com, media trash the movie condemns. Continue reading “Don Jon”

Prisoners

“Prisoners” floors you by depicting the unclear nature of evil.

There’s a woman in Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners” who lost her son 26 years prior to this film’s events. She shows Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) the one tape she watches of her missing son each morning and dejectedly declares, “No one took him. Nothing happened. He’s just gone.”

Detective thrillers and crime procedurals have conditioned us into always expecting an answer and motivation behind the terrible things that happen in the world. We’re left unsatisfied when we don’t get the answer we were looking for, if the puzzle pieces don’t paint a complete portrait or if the ending isn’t nice and tidy.

Rarely in life is this ever the case, and like David Fincher’s cryptic “Zodiac,” “Prisoners” attains intense thrills and gravitas through scattered clues that seem to be everywhere and answers that are nowhere. It’s a studio film that minimizes on the action set pieces, the family melodrama and the pretentious psychology to show that evil is not only omnipresent, but it’s the real mystery.

The two young daughters of the Dover family and the Birch family go missing much like that first boy 26 years earlier; they just disappear. On Thanksgiving Day the two girls go across the street, we get a close-up of a barren tree outside their suburban home, and they’re gone.

Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) suspects the timid loner Alex Jones (Paul Dano) swiped his daughter. With flat, stringy hair, thick glasses belonging to another decade and a junker RV, he certainly fits the description, but when Detective Loki is brought in to interrogate, Alex is clean and seems incapable of anything so sinister. When Alex is let go without charge, Keller intervenes and abducts Alex himself, demanding the answer he knows must be there.   Continue reading “Prisoners”

Lee Daniels' The Butler

“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is a “quietly subversive” film with surprising depth and nuance despite its massive cast and ambitions.

There’s a scene in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” where Martin Luther King Jr. is speaking with Louis Gaines (David Oyelowo), the Freedom Rider son of the film’s eponymous protagonist. Louis is ashamed that his father Cecil (Forest Whitaker) is a servant for a living, but Dr. King corrects him and says that the butler’s hard work ethic and dignity has a long history of slowly breaking down black stereotypes.

They’re “quietly subversive,” he says, which is a perfect label for “The Butler.” This loosely true story about a White House Butler who served through five administrations and 20 years is strongly melodramatic, but it views our nation’s most iconic racial history through a more critical, nuanced lens. Cecil’s complex persona goes against some of the themes depicted in modern race relations films, and it broadens Daniels’ scope to a film that is saccharine, suspenseful and silly.

It’s a fine line for any specifically “black” film to walk. We’ve come a long way from the days when Sidney Poitier was leading the charge in African American cinema, an actor who “The Butler” name drops directly. The Civil Rights era has been tread so many times that the genre itself has evolved to something of a post-racial state, even if the reality we live in hasn’t. Continue reading “Lee Daniels' The Butler”

The Grandmaster

“The Grandmaster” is a tense, dazzling kung fu movie that oozes artistry, culture and style.

On the most recent Sight & Sound Critics Poll in 2012, Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” was voted the 24th best movie of all time, the highest of all films from this century. “In the Mood for Love” is a lush tone poem, bursting with color and passion in moody, emotive style.

In broadening his palette to a period piece martial arts studio film, it would be easy for a stylist such as Wong to fall into the same trap as countless other directors who got messy once allowed to paint on a bigger canvas.

“The Grandmaster” however immediately stands out from the crowd. Wong’s stylization breaks from the modern Hollywood tradition and achieves ethereal tones just seeping with emotion in all its slow motion, camera twirls, hazy filters and silvery gray undertones. Wong’s film is a sly, tense, mysterious and immense work of art that just barely keeps from buckling under its own weight.

“The Grandmaster” is the biopic of the Ip Man (Tony Leung), a true-to-life martial arts master from Southern China who fought during World War II, traveled to Hong Kong in the ‘50s and became a teacher responsible for the training of Bruce Lee. Early portions of the film show him training for a fight with a kung fu rival to the North named Ma Sang (Jin Zhang). He’s the heir to the Gong family lineage of fighting styles, but the rightful heir Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang) seeks retribution and is the only true warrior who rivals Ip Man’s skills. Continue reading “The Grandmaster”