Reviews

I'm trying to figure out whether or not this is the worst movie I've ever seen. I'm leaning toward not, because the first fifteen minutes are sublime. Truly. As breathless and tense and real as the opening of MIdnight Express, where you know that somebody in a foreign country is about to make the worst move of their life and that only hell will follow, and you feel powerless to stop it. But once Lucy gets inside that building, all attempt to tell an emotionally or narratively coherent story are tossed squarely out the window, and from that point on not a single thing any character does is what that character would do in any given situation. Plus dull and no attempt to establish emotional stakes, except for one very affecting conversation between a mother and a daughter which, like those opening fifteen minutes, saves this, barely, from being the worst movie I have ever seen.

I can see Mrs. And Mrs. Windsor on a big comfy sofa in Montecito scrolling through the 1 star reviews and comfortably telling themselves 'Oh they are all just jealous of the lives we lead'. I'm sorry, Your Royal Sussexes, it's not envy. It's the leaden filmmaking and the risible auto-hagiography. Meghan, you're a talented and engaging actor. Harry, you're a smart fellow with all the possibilities in the world at your fingertips You can most definitely do better than this, and I have every faith that you will. If you just step back and take the harder look at yourselves that all of us, at some point, have to take, whether we want to or not.

I love Spike Lee. Do The Right Thing? Jungle Fever? Inside Job? BlackKlansman? As good as movies get. This one? What wasn't expositional was didactic. Every conclusion was foregone. Great actors giving broad, expositional, didactic performances.I felt like I was doing homework. To be honest, we only lasted twenty minutes, so maybe it turned into a masterpiece the second we changed the channel. Which is not to say I won't be the first in line for the next Spike Lee Joint. He's a great artist, and when great artist miss big it's because they swung big.

Any season of television that begins with Miles Davis playing Rogers & Hart and ends with a choir singing a Chopin Mazurka has to be a ten out of ten for me. There are a lot of smart screen and television writers nowadays who can put together jim-crack entertainment that engages, amuses and even moves us, but how many writers are actual trail-blazing where-the-hell-did-that-come from artists with something deep to say about life on planet earth? It took us a couple of episodes to stop expecting a half hour comedy rhythm of jokes and after that we watched straight through, blown away. And the episode with the two realtors is beyond beyond sublime, up there with the greatest TV episodes ever. Thank you Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard for this magnificence.

Considering the magnificence of Coogler's Fruitvale Station -- a deeply moving piece of art -- it's hard to understand how this movie could exert so little effort in even the most rudimentary building up of characters and stakes that matter to those characters and to the audience. I could not figure out who I was supposed to root for or why. And then there's the credibility of this country that is sort of known about in the outside world and sort of not known about, and glowing blue airships taking off over American cities with only a couple of kids in a basketball court noticing. And how exactly does the Vibranium economy work and enable the building of those magnificent skyscrapers? (Two stars instead of one is because of the gorgeous exhilarating shot of the ship landing in the city for the first time.) And why on a movie of this budget couldn't somebody hire a really good dialect coach to get the accents uniform and convincing? Given the billion dollars and the worldwide acclaim I must be wrong. Or maybe I was out of the room when they did the hypnotizing.

Relentlessly raw, authentic and sad: I hope that description doesn't drive you away because it is also brilliantly directed and intensely human, and there is a loving relationship at the center that lights it all up like the sun. A scene in an arcade where the two main characters are doing Dance Dance Revolution together had me weeping. Catch this one, however you can.

IMDb says I have to add more lines so I'll say that the casting is as good as casting gets -- one character after another is blazingly real. And the cameo by Malkovich does not feel like a gimmick: he's a genius, and therefore always welcome.

Imagine that you are the family of Christian Adams, the German wine merchant who died on Flight 93 on 9/11. You go to see the movie, bracing yourself for what you know will be a harrowing, painful experience. And what do you see? You see your loved one portrayed--based on no research whatsoever--as a collaborator and traitor to the passenger rebellion. This is inexcusable, chauvinistic and insensitive. Why, I would also ask, are all those passengers sobbing on their phone calls when in fact the reports are that they were calm? The truth would have been more moving. All of that said, the movie is powerful and I was sobbing hard at the end, and all other contenders for Oscar for best editing should not bother renting tuxes. Still: the film would have been ever better without the unnecessary creation of a villain among the passengers. Did Mr. Greengrass not think that the hijackers were villain enough?

***SPOILER ALERT*** Theodore Dreiser's estate, as well as the screenwriters of A Place in the Sun, should be clamoring for credit and dough. Radio Days was a love letter to Amarcord but it didn't rip it off point for point, beat for beat. I sat there in the theater saying: in the next scene the Shelley Winters character will tell the Montgomery Clift character that she is pregnant... in the next scene the father in law will offer the Montgomery Clift character a spectacular business opportunity... in the next scene, while happily at home with the Elizabeth Taylor character, the Montgomery Clift character will (gasp!) get a call from the police. And having read most if not all of Patricia Highsmith's books, I also knew pretty well how it was going to end. When in an early scene the main character was reading Crime and Punishment I even knew that somehow, one way or another, he was going to kill an old lady in her apartment. And yet... and yet... why five stars? Because over this overcooked oft-eaten meal Woody Allen lays one dazzlingly rich precise detail of life and character after another. One brilliant example--the wealthy parents of a newborn are never ever seen with their baby, because unseen nannies are always caring for it. And in the final scene, when a new baby comes home, the parents don't go anywhere near touching it--the nanny carries it and they coo at it from a distance. Brilliant. Woody, you are a greater director than George Stevens! You don't have to eat his leftovers!

Fellini had And The Ship Sails On. Hitchcock had Frenzy. Spielberg has Always. I'm sorry but dumping big vats of red stuff on forest fires, practice ones or real ones, does not dramatically equal dropping bombs on Nazi enemies. The vaguely 40's-esque dialog and attitude throughout don't help. Even the performances aren't tip-top: they all seem to know they're in a movie--you can feel the craft service table just outside the frame. But it's Spielberg, which means there's a restless and brilliant imagination at work in every shot, so if you go in knowing the great man dropped the ball on this one, there will be something here to enjoy. And then you can rent Saving Private Ryan or Amistad (underrated and masterful) and get back on the boat.

Can the culture please retire this legend now? It's based on a story that's three sentences long and it's crazy to make a movie which spends over an hour on each sentence. Dinosaur after dinosaur, yucky bug after yucky bug, awesome shot of New York City 1931 after awesome shot of New York City 1931, tiresome crack from Jack Black after tiresome crack from Jack Black. And yet piece by piece a magnificent piece of work--truly breathtaking kinetics of man, woman, monkey and computer--but in the service of what? I did, however, form a whole new intimate relationship with the face of my watch, and worked out the cooking logistics for a party my wife and I are giving on Christmas day, and...

It's been three days now and this Brokeback Brain-flu shows no sign of letting up. I've tried watching other movies, going out with friends, reading, working, but nothing works: not unlike Jack and Ennis, I'm stuck on Brokeback Mountain. Why am I awash in an aching flood of longing? That wasn't my life at all up there on that screen--I haven't lived a life of regret and lost chances. When I was twenty, thirty two years ago, I spent a magic summer with a girl I fell in love with the second I saw her--and we've been together ever since. We're surrounded by our almost grown children, we have careers we love, we're still discovering things about each other and forging all kinds of new paths in our lives. So why the aching and the longing and the sweet-sad regret that took hold of me the second I heard the first strains of Santaolalla's awesome score and haven't yet let go? Is it that the themes of pain so powerfully explored in this great work of art go deeper than the satisfactions and achievements of any one life? Is it that the movie says something eternally true about how alone we remain no matter what arms may hold us? Looking back, the last time I walked around in a movie for days and days after seeing it was The Last Picture Show, over thirty years ago. . So maybe it's about the magic combination of Larry McMurtry and Randy Quaid. Whatever it is, this movie is now up there with The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Wild Strawberries, The Last Picture Show, etc. I was beginning to think I'd never again see a movie that I would consider calling the best movie I ever saw in my life. But I have. Thank you, Mr. Lee and Ms. Proulx.

It's an uncomfortable feeling, watching talented actors (the awesome Barry Shabaka and others) and writers (John Ridley, the man who wrote the awesome Three Kings) strain and strain for a joke and never entirely land one. Dismayingly two-dimensional characters, tired routines (guy coaching guy about how to talk sexy to a girl, somebody walks in and thinks it's a romantic/sexual moment between the guys, ha ha ha), strained plotting--something about a woman being hounded by a broadly drawn completely non-real anti-abortion activist and a broadly drawn completely non-real pro-choice activist--an old fashioned nudge-nudge wink-wink attitude to sex--a ridiculously caricatured would-be politician with a fake expensive watch--all adding up to a mish-mosh of wannabe. Where will it all go? Will the innate talent of all these players make it work as the series progresses? Will this be the old quality-challenged Showtime or the new?

This show is as good as it gets. As in, Six Feet Under good, without being any kind of clone: it's its own magical world, of which there will be many future clones, but nothing will ever come close to this for wit, emotion, pacing, or perfection of casting. This show says This Is Us like nothing I've seen in a long time. Showtime has done some good shows, and they've been getting better (after decades of astonishingly lazy creative thinking) but in Weeds the we-try-harder network finally has a true destination series. For one thing, Mary Louise Parker, who is always brilliant, here manages to pull it off with none of the mannerisms that have colored some of her lesser roles: she is luminescent and true in every moment. And the kids? And the son's girlfriend? You get this weird feeling there was no camera around--there couldn't have been for people to come off this completely real. Bravo bravo bravo! Can't wait to see episode 2.

Okay so you escape from your rundown low-rent home with a few meager groceries in a box and you get to a way upscale house in the suburbs with every pot, pan and kitchen device known to man, every piece of furniture and home decor placed as if by the hand of God, and you get all upset at the person who only brought the meager groceries, and then you start making peanut butter on untoasted bread and spreading it with a wooden spoon because you don't have a knife, and since somebody in the scene is allergic to peanut butter, well, that's the end of it, you're all just going to go hungry. But wait: didn't it occur to the brilliant writer, producers and directors who made this movie that the kitchen in which these people are standing would be stocked to the rafters with every kind of bread, spread and condiment known to man? That the drawers would be packed with every spreading utensil ever invented? Didn't they remember that two of the people in the scene not only live in this fancy house but were there a few hours ago and would know where every package of cream cheese, loaf of whole wheat bread and bottle of cranberry juice would be stored? That's just one scene in this inexplicably dull and meandering mess. The rest of the movie? Don't get me started.

I just saw the movie and right now it feels like one of my top all time favorites. As in up there with Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and 400 Blows and La Dolce Vita. I don't know why ten fragments of stories should have that power. Maybe because the writing is genius? No pandering to conventional standards of entertainment, just a great author mining vein after vein of truth and freeing his brilliant actors to be intensely fearlessly human at every second. This is the movie that Crash wishes it was (and I thought Crash was awesome). No preaching. No "ideas." Just the human heart on display. Amazing that a woman lying in a hospital bed facing a mastectomy got the biggest laughs--because Kathy Baker, speaking Rodrigo Garcia's lines, so completely captured the frustration and helplessness that all of us have felt that all the audience could do was laugh in recognition. Go see this one.

This is the movie for our time: In which not Believing, even in the absence of evidence, even in the presence of evidence to the contrary, is seen as a failing, as a sign of personal limitation. A movie in which thousands of male-only elves gather Nuremberg-style in the vast brick factory town in which they are enslaved and cheeringly salute their huge radiant white master as he emerges from his palace. In which the only annoying character, the only source of even the slightest conflict or disharmony, is a big-nosed glasses-wearing wiry-haired know-it-all kid--a classic and offensive representation of The Jew. In which a character actually says, without irony, that the true spirit of Christmas is what's in your heart. It's also ridiculously badly plotted and conceived. There isn't the slightest threat at any time, there isn't even the simplest reason given for why the train has to be on time -- not even an old standard like getting the gifts to the kids to the good children on the other side of the hill. So all the chutes and ladder chases, while fun at first, and gorgeous (the runaway ticket sequence is in itself a classic, exciting piece of film-making), get screamingly boring because A: nothing bad is going to happen if the heroes fall and B: nothing good is going to happen if they succeed. The first fifteen minutes are fantastic--even kind of rapturous--because for that amount of time it works like Van Allsburg's books do: the pure wondrous delight of the images. But what follows is devoid of humor, irony, authentic wonder or compelling storytelling, and also gives us the sappiest most forgettable songs imaginable. Did the filmmakers--who have done such spectacular work on other films--fail to note that Shrek didn't go for 50's greeting card melodies--that Shrek used an oddball, relatively obscure Leonard Cohen song, sung by the ironic, out-of-the-mainstream Rufus Wainright, to back up the love montage? It says something really good about our country that Shrek, with its irreverent humor and authentic sense of wonder, is going to beat the red velvet pants off the box office of Polar Express.

I have heard Rubinstein, Ashkenazy, Serkin, Horowitz and Gilels play at the height of their powers, in well-heated concert halls, well fed and surrounded by love and support -- and not one of them ever played, or need to have played, a completely note-perfect concert. It is absolutely not possible that anybody, after four years of not practicing, in air so cold you could see their breath, starving and frightened, hands curled in pain and exhaustion, could play a note perfect rendition of Chopin's G Minor ballade. The scene would have been far more moving if he had given a moving performance in spite of mistakes and slurs and missed passages. But this movie, literal and plodding, did not have the imagination to make that crucial moment into a real scene. Unfortunate.

The man who gave us Splash, Cocoon and Parenthood gave us this incoherent muddle of cliched characters, poor plotting, you've-got-to-be-kidding dialogue and melodramatic acting? I guess everybody has a bad day at the office now and then. He's allowed.