short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Get Him to the Greek (2010, USA)

Get Him to the Greek is both too long and too short. Fifteen minutes shy of two hours, the comedy overstays its welcome and its thin premise, but what’s more bothersome is that it does so while simultaneously leaving out elements that would make the emotional notes hit harder – we never see Aldous Snow with his son before the midway point; we hear only one of his songs before the grand finale concert, meaning that there is no resonance with hearing them at that point; we never understand why Aaron and Daphne should stay together, since in their only shared scenes, she’s nothing but a bitch to him.

That said – all hail the hilarious Sean Combs. Showing the same comic touch (and surprising sense of humor about himself) he displayed 10 years ago in Made, Diddy is actually my favorite thing about Greek, easily stealing scenes from Russell Brand and Jonah Hill. Every time he shows up, the movie gets a shot of adrenaline in the shoulder.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Season of the Witch (2011, USA)

Yep – I saw it. What can I say? I’m a sucker for Ron Perlman and Nic Cage’s ever-astounding wigs. (And this one’s a doozy – the best way to describe it, at least at first sight, is something akin to shoulder-length blonde dreadlocks.)

Season of the Witch is terrible, but it also commits that cardinal sin of many terrible movies – it’s boring. After a pretty hilarious Crusades montage, the action swiftly slows down when Behman (Cage) and Felson (Perlman) defect and return to . . . Europe? Sure. (Everything has a fake-ish name, and how they accomplish this journey on their own while on the run from the authorities is anyone’s guess. There weren’t a lot of direct flights between Jerusalem and Northern Europe back then.)

Anyway, they’re back in Europe, and after some fun meet-cutes with the Black Death (Christopher Lee probably had in his contract that his face would be so obscured with boils no one knew he was in this), they are charged with taking a witch to a monastery to stand trial for infecting the countryside with the plague. What follows is a lot of lame is-she-or-isn’t she blather, all conducted in the most contemporary language possible. There are rotting corpses, a bridge doing same, some wolves, etc., but the whole thing is pretty dull until the group makes it to the monastery. What happens there is nearly hilarious enough to warrant sitting through the middle of the film (the CG budget must have been about $15), but unless you’re a medieval historian – in which case Witch will most likely give you an aneurysm – this is definitely a hangover rental for the bad movie-loving crowd.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Micmacs (2009, France)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet Micmacs is like Ocean’s Eleven goes twee. Call them the Whimsical Eight. Scarred (literally) in childhood and adulthood by the products of two arms manufacturers, Bazil (Dany Boon) and his wacky crew of junkyard misfits plan an elaborate scheme of revenge. And it’s Jeunet’s trademark wackiness that is the main problem in Micmacs, as it never syncs with the subject of international arms dealing. His visuals are typically fantastic, but even they tend to wear after a bit, as he repeats the same motifs ad nauseam (is there a person in that suitcase?). A misfire, for sure, all the more disappointing considering the five years since A Very Long Engagement.

(Incidentally, I wasn’t a fan of how every black character in the film was noted as being African – aren’t there any French-born people of color? I'm pretty sure there might be.)

Friday, January 07, 2011

The King’s Speech (2010, UK/Australia)

I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for a British costume drama – my first favorite film was A Room With a View - but with that disclosure made, The King’s Speech is an excellent film, with terrific performances by Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. Though occasionally drifting towards melodrama, it always reins itself in before getting too carried away, helped by the performances as much as by the spare cinematography – in particular the use of extreme close-ups, which serve to humanize some very grand characters. Perhaps this will be Firth’s year come the Globes, and possibly the Oscars, seeing as how he was more or less robbed for his performance in A Single Man (no offence, Jeff Bridges).

Sidenote – I’m a fan of Timothy Spall, but how impossible is it to play Winston Churchill without turning him into a caricature? Jowls? Check. Cigar? Check. Gruffness? Check. I haven’t seen Albert Finney’s version in The Gathering Storm, but in general it seems like a pretty thankless role for a roster of excellent actors (Spall, Ian McNeice, Brendan Gleeson).

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Winter’s Bone (2010, USA)

I know it’s unfair to compare a movie to its source novel too much. So I’ll start off with what I think the film version of Winter’s Bone got right – the casting, for starters, is pretty spot-on. Jennifer Laurence is every bit as strong as she’s been touted as Ozark tough-girl Rhee Dolly, and John Hawkes is terrific as her meth-aggro uncle, Teardrop. The movie also feels right – the visuals, including threadbare homes and cold hilly woods, sync right up to the ambient sounds of distant gunfire, dogs barking, and truck engines being gunned. But seeing as I read Daniel Woodrell’s novel just a couple of months ago, I can’t help but get hung up on how wrong the ending of the film felt to me – and here there be spoilers.

At the end of the novel, Rhee is presented with a choice – to live the life of the Dolly clan and quite likely end up like her friend Gail, weighed down by children, a tumultuous marriage, and never-ending financial woes, or to risk betraying her people by joining up with the local bail bondsmen, a probable path out of poverty and a way of assuring the futures of her young brother and sister. But the end of the film has the bail bondsman walking away without making his offer, leaving the final exchange between Rhee and a fellow adult (since adult is what seventeen-year-old Rhee becomes through the course of the film) a bittersweet moment with her uncle Teardrop, who is a Dolly through and through.

This change still leaves some ambiguity (what will Rhee do with her unexpected windfall? The book says, but the film does not.), but positions Rhee much closer to her clan than the final pages of the book does, and in doing so, it changes her journey. What kind of provider will she be? Does she truly have as many options? In some ways, the film presents a much bleaker picture of Rhee’s immediate future, though there’s no question were she to follow the lead of the bondsman from the novel, there would certainly be trouble. I’ll have to dig around a bit to see if I can find explanation for this shift, why the filmmakers chose to leave Rhee so squarely aligned with the Dollys, and as such, less her own person.