Category: Reviews

Shattered Glass

Watching “Shattered Glass” makes me reconsider the importance I gave to all of my heated discussions in the newsroom. Here is a movie that treats human interest story telling with starry-eyed fascination and yet is so sympathetic and tepid without ever boiling down to the real story at stake.

The story of Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) is well known by me and any of my peers who have taken a journalistic ethics course in the last 10 years. Glass was a young reporter for The New Republic, a Washington D.C. based political mag with a distribution that included Air Force One, who in 1998 was found to have either partially or fully fabricated more than half of the 40 magazine features he wrote. He had for some time duped his editors by showing only his hand-written notes as evidence for fact checking. But when a small online tech magazine stumbled across a story he did on a hacker infiltrating a major software company, it was revealed that the company, the people, the locations and all the details had been complete fiction. To cover his tracks, he created phony business cards and websites and even had his brother pose as a source.

Glass’s story is more interesting than the movie is. Not only has “Shattered Glass” managed to horribly date itself in less than a decade, it goes about portraying Glass all wrong. Continue reading “Shattered Glass”

The Messenger

Death is never by the book. In “The Messenger,” two soldiers delivering the news to parents and wives that their relative has been killed in action overseas do all they can to lessen the blow, but no news of this nature ever goes according to plan.

This job then is as tough as anything in the field. It requires massive conviction and strength under pressure. But as one commander says, this job is a more important way of serving your country, because doing this is holy.

The two up for the job are Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) and Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), Stone a veteran showing Montgomery the ropes. No hugging, no added sympathy, no lingering, no sunglasses and no doorbells. The Yankee Doodle jingle followed by a death telegram is not a great way to start one’s day, Stone explains.

But Director Oren Moverman does not envy or glorify their job for one moment. As they hit home after home and break the hard news, there’s an unexpected complication and reaction behind each door. One family learns what has happened to their son before the soldiers say a word. One father nearly beats his daughter when he learns she “married that dirtbag after all,” and then is instantly crushed to hear the bad news. Another man lashes out in anger at Montgomery and Stone, saying, “Why aren’t you dead?”

These sequences are so devastating and unpredictable that you could make a separate movie about each family as soon as Montgomery and Stone walk out the door. Their episodic nature feel as intense and isolated as the war sequences in “The Hurt Locker,” and the psychological ramifications have the emotional impact of the firings in “Up in the Air.” Continue reading “The Messenger”

The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson doesn’t make deliberately quirky indie comedies or inscrutable art house films. He makes fantasies. “The Royal Tenenbaums” is just the story of a dysfunctional family, not an epic voyage to the bottom of the sea or the tale of an adventurous talking fox, and yet it feels as wonderfully strange and exotic as any of those.

That’s because just about every Wes Anderson film ever made is the most wholly Wes Anderson-y movie you’ve ever seen. His style drips over every moment in his framing, his tone and his quirky imagination. “The Royal Tenenbaums” more than any of Anderson’s films perhaps is like visual poetry in the way the film’s offbeat dialogue punctuates his quick cuts.

His shots are exploding with wild imagery. None of it is natural or has a purpose; it is merely beautiful to look at. One room has two giant murals on the wall featuring tigers and hunters, and another room reveals the head of a giant stuffed badger to be mounted on the wall. Continue reading “The Royal Tenenbaums”

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

When John Madden assembles the cast of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” in a line as they wait at the airport, he’s only Helen Mirren away from having gathered all of British acting royalty. He’s smart then to not place them in a dopey, dreck filled romantic comedy about octogenarians living it up in India.

“Marigold Hotel” is the best kind of coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water story: one that doesn’t create a bunch of embarrassing, sitcom-y stunts and one that doesn’t turn the whole movie into a travelogue. Continue reading “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”

Game Change

When Sarah Palin first appeared on the national political stage, she struck me as someone straight out of a reality show or a Disney movie. She had such cartoonish and folksy charm that made her believe so strongly in the backwards, extreme right wing rhetoric she stumbled over that she couldn’t have possibly whined her way into the spotlight.

The HBO film “Game Change” is unkind to Palin, painting her as a teenage brat while confirming little more than I already suspected about the 2008 campaign.

It’s a movie that doesn’t provide behind the scenes insight as it does re-enact the story from an insider perspective. McCain is losing the election, he needs a bold move, and they take a chance on a nobody without properly vetting her. Palin (Julianne Moore) proves to be an incompetent nutcase, she goes rogue, they lose the election, and everyone responsible smacks their heads in embarrassment. End of story.

What we see of McCain (Ed Harris) and his campaign advisor Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson) are little more than reaction shots. “Game Change” is filled with sound bytes of McCain’s team saying, “She’s doing great!” or “Oh god!” This much seems obvious. It has nothing new to add, no contrarian viewpoint of people defending her or calling her bluff. Continue reading “Game Change”

Punch-Drunk Love

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” is so much more than an “Art House Adam Sandler Movie.”

Most movies are pretty surreal when you think about them. When you’re watching a formulaic romantic comedy for instance, you suspend some disbelief and know that everything that happens is a little strange.

So for Paul Thomas Anderson to make a genre picture with Adam Sandler but call attention to just how odd a movie can be, he’s really making a more realistic, elegant and beautiful movie than anything Adam Sandler would usually star in.

“Punch-Drunk Love” has been generously referred to as “The Art House Adam Sandler” movie, and since its release in 2002, it’s used that label to justify its cult appeal. It’s become a favorite PTA film for most of his fans, displaying all the life and gravity of “There Will Be Blood” with the charms of “Boogie Nights.” Continue reading “Punch-Drunk Love”

The Interrupters

“The Interrupters” is a film that sees change happen before the camera. It’s not just talk, and it’s not just pain or violence; it’s action.

If alcoholism and obesity are diseases, then why isn’t violence? Violence is caused by a behavioral disorder created by human beings. Like a contagious virus, violence spreads through our communities until we are all dead.

We treat it with words, with punishments and with more bullets. We need to eradicate it from our streets. We need the logic of science and reason to end this epidemic. We need to understand violence, not fear it. It must be targeted at its source.

The Violence Interrupters of Chicago’s Englebrook neighborhood adhere to this mindset. They’ve been infected with this plague before and survived it. They are the Dirty Dozen vigilantes doing what the police and professional counselors are not because they know it first hand.

Their story as told in “The Interrupters” is a riveting, emotional and powerful documentary that embeds itself on these Chicago streets and finds answers. Continue reading “The Interrupters”

The Dictator

There’s a moment when we see The Dictator of Wadiya Admiral General Aladeen play a game on the Wii specifically for dictators. In it, he swings his arm as if playing Wii Tennis, but instead he’s cutting off a video game avatar’s head. It’s not exactly offensive because it’s so dopey.

“The Dictator” is much like that Wii game, cartoonishly violent and gross, but never truly edgy or interesting. Continue reading “The Dictator”

The Kid With a Bike

When the young boy Cyril (Thomas Doret) stabs his foster mother Samantha (Cecile De France) in the arm and escapes from her home, it is one of the only times we see “The Kid With a Bike” from her perspective. For the first time, we realize how much she loves Cyril and how much she struggles to control him. Like any kid, neither he nor us can know how deeply a parent’s love goes. For that matter, we never fully know how much Cyril loves his absentee father or his bike that takes him wherever he needs to go.

“The Kid With a Bike” is a lovely film about attachments and the complex emotions that go along with them. It’s one of the best movies of the year.

It begins a month after Cyril’s father Guy (Jeremie Renier) abandons him at an orphanage. For weeks now, Cyril has been desperately calling his home and getting only a disconnected line. He blindly believes his father is still there. His father would never leave him, and more importantly, he would never forget to give Cyril his bike. Cyril evades his supervisors and his teachers to see his house for himself, and we realize instantly that Cyril is a smart, energetic kid with a relentless, unhealthy obsession. Continue reading “The Kid With a Bike”

Dark Shadows

I didn’t know “Dark Shadows” was based on a soap opera until my friend amusingly explained this: “It was this kind of boring soap opera that no one watched until one season they introduced a vampire to the show and everyone’s minds just exploded.”

The problem then with Tim Burton’s “Dark Shadows” is its inability to just make my mind explode.
Burton has always been a unique director. It’s possible that none of his films can be strictly classified into one genre, and “Dark Shadows” is no different. This one begins on a note of period piece horror fantasy with scents of the original “Dracula” in the film’s gorgeous CGI iconography.

This opening takes place in 1772 with the Collins family establishing a thriving colony on the American coastline. The son Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is cursed by the witch Angelique (Eva Green) when he gives up her for his true love, Josette (Bella Heathcote). Angelique turns Barnabas into a vampire and imprisons him for 200 years, only to wake up in the swinging 1970s. Now Barnabas returns to his surviving ancestors and fights to rebuild the family business, taking down Angelique, also now two centuries old and running strong, in the process.

The fish-out-of-water game is old-hat no matter what setting or mythical creature you put into the formula, and although Depp revels in manipulating everything with an elegantly antiquated misunderstanding of modern technology, slang and etiquette, Burton never knows how to own any of these jokes.

The film and its dialogue constantly teeter on understated comedy and a haunted house ghost movie without ever dipping into campy, absurd or soapy territory. Burton will instead play an Alice Cooper song or some other ‘70s rock staple to suggest the change of tone, and the film never has go for broke laughs or campy charm. Continue reading “Dark Shadows”