Change Your Image
Lmiklowitz
I like good movies. What are good movies? They describe the human condition with honesty and humor and leave us with valuable insights.
Reviews
Golda (2023)
Film lives up to its title
For those who gripe that there isn't more history of other wars or more about the Arabs, remember the title: Golda. This is a story about the 75-year-old prime minister trying to stay alive as were the thousands of "boys" who fell in battle. For a small country of almost 3.7 million residents, almost 2,700 deaths touched almost every family.
Helen Mirre, shows us the pain of her character who struggled to stay alive going for late-night secret cobalt treatments for cancer as she is fueled by sheer willpower to lead a war making life-and-death decisions with conflicting opinions from her advisors. As the first and so far only woman in that office, she doesn't get ministers to stand when she enters the room as they would for a male. She.heads a troupe of many fine actors. Her loyal personal assistant Lou Kaddar is played with conspicuous understatement by Camille Cottin. Liev Schreiber sounds like US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who still lives at this writing at age 100 on May.27, but doesn't look like him.
The audio the prime monster and military leaders hear of the battle scenes are poignant and tragic. Golda Barrie's a small notebook where she posts casualty figures. She hides her compassion when she ruthlessly threatens Kissenger with making for Egypt "an army of widows and otphans" if Israel can't get a list of its dead and imprisoned Israelis and replacement of fighter jets and tanks.
While Director. Guy Nattiv is Israeli, he doesn't soft-pedal the drastic damage the Egyptians did in overwhelming Israeli forces, killing and imprisoning soldiers and destroying most of its fighter jets and tanks. The Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal, and were in range of entering the major city of Tel Aviv. He also recounts how Israeli tanks and troops crossed the Suez on pontoons to capture Cairo, as Egyptians had crossed north into the Sinai peninsula, but were ambushed by Egyptian troops that stayed behind. The war ended 19 days after Egypt's preemptive strike the afternoon before the high holiday of Yom Kippur as Kissinger mediated a peace treaty between Egyptt and Israel that returned in exchange for no more warfare the Sinai peninsula to Egypt and the Golan. Heights to Syria, two areas Israel seized for defense during the 1967 War.
Golda took the blame for not preparing better for the 1973 attack even though Fefende Minister Moshe Dayan (with the eye patch) denied vehemently that an attack was imminent. Her Mapai party likely would have lost their majority if Dayan had resigned. She says she will grieve the deaths until her dying day and resigns in 1974. Despite her chain smoking prodigious amounts of cigarettes, even during radiation treatment and taking a break from her oxygen mask. It's amazing she lasted until December, 1978 when she was 80 years.
Etz Limon (2008)
They talk at each other and create misery
This film is rich in irony. It presents a microcosm of Israeli-Palestinian relations that go nowhere and lack empathy, but create torment for both sides. The Israeli Defense Minister and his wife (the Navons) move into a large, modern home at the Green Line, the border of the West Bank of the Jordan River to the east. Their neighbor is a middle-aged widow (Salma Zidane) who lives alone in a stone house and tends a lemon grove she inherited from her father from which she ekes a modest income. She is assisted by an elderly man who has worked for the family for 50 years. The defense minister's nervous security chief draws down on the two of them as they walk through the grove and surprise him. They never give each other more than uninterested glances. The defense minister accepts the advice that the grove must be cut down for security purposes.
The widow receives notice written in Hebrew from a Hebrew-speaking soldier. She does not speak the language and goes to a town elder to translate, invading the all-male sanctum of a social hall. Although the letter offers the possibility of compensation, the elder warns her that her people do not ask the occupying Israelis for it.
Soon the grove is fenced in and posted. When she sees the trees turning brown from lack of water and lemons spoiling on the ground, Salma climbs the fence in the long dress to care for the trees. She panics even the distracted soldier in the watch tower who spends time in the tower listening to tapes with inane sample questions to prepare for a logic test. He speaks Arabic, so they can converse.
Salma finds a Palestinian attorney in town in a shabby office to take her appeal of the taking of her grove to Israeli court. His name is Daud and like the David of the Jewish Bible, he agrees to take on the giant. He doesn't ask for a fee.
The minister's wife (Mira Navon) observes the widow several times. Their eyes meet, but they never greet. They wouldn't likely be able to speak a common language if they did and learn that they each have a child living in Washington DC whom they call. They are close in age and similar in appearance, tall and slim with long, brown hair. One dresses in pants suits, the other in dark long skirts and head covering in front of men. Mira asks her husband to dissolve the order to rescind the order to cut down the grove. He says he will rely on the decision of the Israeli security service.
When the Navons throw a big housewarming party, they serve catered Mideastern food, taking care it is kosher for their politically connected orthodox guests. When they realize the caterer did not include an important item, lemons, they send a couple of soldiers to collect some from the fenced grove. When Salma sees them, she climbs the fence again and physically struggles with the soldiers, falling to the ground and being dragged briefly until the minister orders the soldiers to stop. The minister's wife apologizes in Hebrew, her first spoken words. The party is interrupted by gunshots coming from the grove. Armed soldiers search the widow's house for terrorists and leave its contents in shambles after they don't find anyone.
Meanwhile their conflict attracts local, then international, news. The grove owner loses in the military court. She wants to appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem. In the end the solution is not satisfactory to either side, not an uncommon result in litigation. Could the Israeli defense minister and the grove owner found a way to resolve their concerns in a mutually agreeable way? Probably if they had tried to talk. Both sides were defiant. Will their respective peoples be able to resolve their disputes and live in peace and cooperation for a better life? The film does not give as hope, but shows the need.
La Môme (2007)
This movie is worth seeing for the leading actress
Marion Cottillard as the "The Little Sparrow" (La Mome) is the main reason to see this film about the short and tempestuous life of Edith Piaf.
The movie is not as dramatic as Piaf's life. Born in December 19, 1915, She sang in the streets of Belleville district of Paris, following the footsteps of her mother. She married at 17 and had a daughter, who succumbed to meningitis two years later. Accounts portrayed her as a dutiful mother despite her trying to build a singing career on the streets. Soon Louis Leple'e discovered her strong voice as she sang on the street in the Pigalle district and booked her in an elegant cabaret on the Champs Elysee Boulevard, La Gerny. He gave her the nickname of La Mome. Then Leple'e was murdered.
A new agent, Raymond Asso, and other husbands and lovers followed. She attracted talented singers, actors and songwriters. She was a devoted friend who put her own career on hold to mentor young singers like Yves Montand, her lover, and Charles Azvanour. Marlene Dietrich was a close friend. Piaf called world boxing champion Marcel Cerdant the love of her life, although they could not marry because he had a wife and three children. He perished in a plane crash in October, 1949. She investigated spiritualism and mediums to communicate with him.
Despite her addiction to morphine for pain and alcohol, liver disease, and severe arthritis compounded by two car crashes, Piaf returned to the stage in 1955 at the Olympia in Paris and Carnegie Hall in New York, where she was the first variety singer to appear at the classic-music venue.
It is not the script that is melodramatic, but Piaf's life. Nonetheless she remained positive with her lifelong love and generosity for people, her religious faith, and her devotion to music. She passed at 47, leaving a very worn body.
Cotilliard portrays a shy, gamine singer to a severely debilitated woman who can barely walk, shaving her hairline and her eyebrows. Her lip-synching is very realistic. She dominated the movie. The story line zig zags with way too many flashbacks. Fortunately dates in supra titles help.
A Mighty Heart (2007)
Less American-centric than most films
This film may give us an insight how the U.S. is seen around the world and why they are targeted. The cast of many Pakistanis who don't have previous film credits gives us a feeling of authenticity. Co-producer Brad Pitt and leading actress Angelina Jolie have an international perspective having done an international adoption.
Americans live privileged lives, especially in foreign countries, where they stand out by the vehicles they ride in (new SUVs), fine suits, posh hotels with piano jazz in the lobby watering hole, and attitudes. However, the Americans in this movie aren't shown to be arrogant. The Daniel and Marianne Pearl are shown to be polite and differential. The counsel officer is not shy about admiring Pakistani torture as Pakistani investigators and police take the lead.
The camera shows how Pakistanis live, from the walled mansions of the privileged to the shanties of the anonymous underclass. The demi-monde of jihadists consists of the unnamed in office jobs or those with first names on the street who blend into the crowd. The digital age may have destroyed the veils. Now the ubiquitous call phones and computers can be used to assign responsibility. The Pakistanis take call records of the cell-phone number of an incoming call and then check the call records of the numbers which called that phone, and the numbers which called those numbers, to find leads. They use an IP number to find the computer on which e-mails and photos of Pearl were sent.
At the walled-in Pearl house, where more than half the movie is shot, live-in journalistic assistant, Asra Nomani (Archie Panjabi), who rented the house, continues to be a quietly competent researcher for Daniel (Oscar winning screenwriter Dan Futterman), the South Asia Bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, and his wife, Marianne (Jolie), a journalist of French and Cuban ancestry and six months pregnant. He's an American whose grandparents and parents lived in Israel and a nonpracticing Jew.
As a matter of recent history now, the Pearls went to Pakistan to cover the effects of the post-9-11 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. On January 23, 2002, a day before he is scheduled to leave the country, Daniel keeps an appointment in a restaurant to meet the elusive radical Sheik Gilani, who advocates violence to further Islam. Daniel is advised that he'll be safe if he's in public. However, the sheik apparently did not know of this meeting. Daniel, who sends his cab away, walks into the trap and does not return home for dinner with guests while Marianne is shown to disguise her concern that he has not called her cell phone as promised.
The Pakistani press initially blames India and accuses Asra, an Indian, of being their agent, even printing her home number in India. The interior minister abruptly dismisses Marianne during a meeting and refuses to launch a national search. How any man of any culture could dismiss Jolie stretches credibility. She is radiant, dignified and articulate during the month-search. She can read subtleties in the photos of Daniel for the authorities. She and Asra present strong female roles of competence and determination. Asra maintains a chart of suspects and their connections on a white board. The names and aliases are uttered quickly, and the chart becomes more complicated.
The blame game stops when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell advocates for Pearl, and President Pervez Musharraf promises the U.S. to rescue Pearl and find his kidnappers. Pakistani investigators labor around the clock to undo their embarrassment. The congenial Captain (Irfan Khan) leads the Pakistani investigation at night with raids and interrogations and visits the Pearl home by day, sympathetic to Marianne. He's slow to anger while interrogating pain-racked suspects.
The story line is linear and clear. The film editing is quick, but fairly easy to follow, giving us quick glimpses of matters left unsaid. For example, Marianne keeps a Buddhist shrine in her bedroom, which might explain her composure and her respectfulness when she addresses the kidnappers during a television interview.
As the film draws to its inexorable conclusion, there is no suspense, but a curiosity of how the characters will react. Jolie said she found grief in herself to show how Marianne might have done it. Jolie's mother had terminal ovarian cancer at the time (she died in January, 2007). Marianne was later to have said that Jolie got it right.
For a cause that promotes international communication, the kidnappers' viewpoint is not expressed directly except in epilogue that they saw Daniel as an American journalist (religion is not mentioned), and he tried to escape three times. In the end three Arabic speaking men came reportedly came for the ritual execution. Later Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who is imprisoned by the U.S. at Guantanamo confessed and also protested that he had been tortured. Three Pakistanis were sentenced to 25 years in Pakistani court. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheik was sentenced to life as the ringleader and is appealing his sentence. The Daniel Pearl Foundation was created to promote cross-cultural communication through journalism and music.
Zwartboek (2006)
Sex and violence aren't enough for a film without meaning
No question, this is one gripping film. It was hard to believe 2:25 hours had passed, in contrast to the several glances of the watch in about the same amount of time during Spiderman, wishing it would be over.
There are high production values. Many millions of Euros or dollars went into blowing up things and make-up for bullet wounds, not to mention the large hanging vat of human feces. Now why would they have suspended it to the ceiling other than for the dramatic value in the script? The suspended scheisse is a metaphor for the plausibility of most of the movie. Good fiction makes sense. Having a strong cast won't carry a shaky script. Director/screenwriter Paul Verhoeven has good command for the sensational, potboiler (Robocop, Showgirls, Basic Instinct), but he is out of his element when he tries to make a definitive statement on the cooperation of Holland's citizens with the Nazis. The reality in Holland as in France as is in the U.S. when power changes from one major political party to the other, some people can land on their feet and get along and go along.
We think that of Rachel/Ellis a few times, but she shows her true feelings at least twice: when she throws up in the beginning of her deception and later when she threatens to quit the Resistance if a betraying Dutch police inspector isn't removed from his office. Carice van Houten is eye-grabbing as the endangered Jewish gamine, Rachel Weiss, who later gives herself an all-over hair bleaching to look Teutonic. She has wonderful chemistry with the affable local Gestapo chief Sebastian Koch, who doesn't even raise his voice. The two live together in real life.
The double and triple crosses are worthy of Hitchcock, but near the end there are several accusations made, and they are not all resolved, particularly one against the Resistance leader Gerben Kuiypers, whose son Timothy was captured.
So many plot points were not worthy of belief: How could a bullet coming from the front just graze Rachel/Ellis forehead and then heal so quickly without a scar?
How did Rachel/Ellis get so good a command of German? There are several good incidents of plot foreshadowing, but this isn't one of them. If Muntze is that suspicious of Ellis why doesn't he have her followed when she goes "home" to get clothes? How could so great a guy as Muntze rise to head to Gestapo in Holland after operations in Poland and France?
How could Resistance member and doctor Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman)survive so many fire fights even though he shoots without cover, certainly rank-and-file Gestapo couldn't have been trusted with the knowledge?
How could Muntze after presumably hearing a full confession from Ellis trust her to continue to work in a sensitive position in Gestapo headquarters? How could Hans have become so silent so quickly when he had been so forceful, heart attack for a man presumably in his late 30s to 40?
Whose side was Ronnie on in arranging the final jail break, of Muntze and Ellis? How does Ronnie keep from getting her head shaved by the mob as a Nazi whore?
Why would attorney Smaal keep such detailed records in his black book, which could have been a ticket to execution for him and his wife if it had fallen in Nazi hands? And why doesn't Verhoeven ever put a gun in Ellis'/Rachel's hand when she is in mortal danger?
Sex and violence makes the time of the movie go quickly, but leave the viewer unsatisfied after its over. There needs to be meaning, too.
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Special FX 10, acting 5 = Eye Candy
We're not supposed to take this movie seriously. It is comic strip with live actors. I told myself that after each implausible occurrence, contrivance, and camp acting. But the special effects are amazing. It was eye candy, tasty at first, but 2:20 will make you diabetic.
Rosemary Harris was wasted as Peter Parker's Aunt May, his mother figure. Her acting brought gravitas and pathos as the aging widow deeply devoted to her nephew. She thought she was in a drama rather than a comic book.
Toby Maguire is engaging, if not an expert actor. His moves during his personality change showed a fascinating side of him.
Bruce Campbell, who has had cameos in the previous two Spidey flicks, stands out with this shtick as a snooty French maitre d'.
The set of Manhattan with apparently some bogus street names is quite realistic.
If you're 10 years old, chronologically or otherwise, you're gonna love it!
The Namesake (2006)
Mira Nair creates another film from the heart
After being touched by the heart and intelligence of Monsoon Wedding by Mira Nair, I couldn't wait to see her newest film. She lived up to expectations. With a good novel for starters, Nair succeeded in recreating the story in the different medium of film with poignancy and wit. The story of four generations of a Bengali family from Calcutta is universal as it embraces the joy of family and support and the pain of loss.
The story begins with the third generation and an arranged marriage when Ashoke Gangouli (Irfan Khan), a physics doctoral student in New York, returns home to Calcutta to marry an intelligent and accomplished young bride their parents have selected, Ashima (Tabu). The husband takes his new bride back to his New York apartment. She is homesick for her family and city and daunted by the bleak and cold climate, but she perseveres with the care of her attentive husband.
The film quickly spans 20 years, starting with Ashima's introduction to New York, and soon her first baby, a boy. While waiting for Ashima's 85-year-old grandmother to pick a name, they must declare a name for the birth certificate so they can leave the hospital. Bengali children have a "good name" (formal) and a nickname. The parents give the bureaucrat the baby's nickname, Gogol, after the father's favorite writer, the sullen Russian Nikolai Gogol.
Soon Ashima is holding another bundle of joy, a girl, and father and son, now about four or five, are walking out on the jetties of the bay. Ashima experiences another loss of a family member.
Scene by scene the children matriculate through elementary school and graduate from high school. As purely American teenagers with attitudes, brother and sister consider their parents hopelessly old-country. Gogol learns of his namesake's eccentricities in English class where his classmates tease him. He demands his parents change his birth certificate to his good name, Nikhil, a pun, even if he will be called "Nicky" in the U.S. Gogol's parents don't seem to realize their son is stoned and are perplexed by his screaming rock music. He cannot bear to talk to the daughter of his parents' friends they have invited to the house. This is another loss of family, they suffer.
A three-month stay in Calcutta that summer teach them about their roots. A trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, the palatial mausoleum a grieving shah built for his wife. The impressive designs and inlays inspires Gogol to choose his career and major at Yale.
Cut to a debonair and suave Yalie (Kal Penn, the Kumar of Harold and Kumar movies). At this point the narrative pace slows down. "Nick" has won the admiration of an extremely WASPish and wealthy blonde student named "Max" (Jacinda Barrett) who wants to marry him. His parents are mystified over her, but they encourage the couple even though she violated her beau's instructions and touched and kissed his parents. Ashoke calls his son away from her visit and tells him the main reason he calls him Gogol.
In the end two of the main character we are so fond of find away to balance their loss of loved ones with their personal freedom. Stories told honestly illuminate the human condition and resonate with people around the world. This is such a story. I really appreciate Nair's sensibilities. The photography is especially witty, too.
Dreamgirls (2006)
Overwhelming, spectacular and gritty!
This is one of the best adaptions of a Broadway musical I've ever seen. The chiefly African-American audience I watched the movie with was equally blown away. We laughed, gasped, sniffled and applauded--even applauded a celluloid image--in the same places. Why not? This is a story of how black music was whitened.
The screenplay employs an interesting technique of starting a song as part of the plot with the characters are in regular clothes and then continuing it with full production values with glitzy costumes, wigs, lighting and audience on stage.
Dreamgirls is like Ray with big production numbers. It shows the gritty side as well as the glamor of show business as daring performers attempted to break through beyond race music to the chiefly white audience of pop, where the money is. The performers are currently advised to "lighten it" (that is less racy with less lust and less pelvic writhing) to be commercial. Still, their original songs are covered by even lighter artists, not just more pop black stars, but even whites.
The script, by director, Bill Condon, and book, by Tom Eyen, make the point, who introduced the song "Hound Dog", written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, both white? No, it wasn't Elvis, but Big Momma Thornton, in 1953.
We soon see that it isn't even enough to have a catchy song, but how much the promoter pays to have the record played on the radio. These are the days before Congress outlawed payola.
With all the wonderful accolades given to the Dreamgirls, all well deserved, Eddie Murphy emerges as did Jaimie Foxx in Ray, as very musical and a superb performer. While Ray stayed close to his piano, Murphy as the composite character James "Thunder" Early, with a cap to cover the space between his front teeth, struts in satin pants and runs the gamut from rhythm & blues of Curtis Mayfield and Smokey Robinson, boogie, and finally to raucous soul of James Brown. He skips over the social-commentary stage of Marvin Gaye because he and the "girls" can't sell it to their agent. Who knew Murphy could pull this off, we can assume with Condon's direction? Early is a tragic figure who tries hard to crossover and appeal to "the kids" as the popular sounds change quickly from the mid-1960s into the next decade.
The score by Henry Krieger and lyrics by Tom Eyen takes the Dreamettes through local Detroit R & B for what was then called Negro race music to audiences to a lighter Motown sound to appeal to the white kids, who buy records and show tickets, and then through the flower-child era of the late 1960s to definitely Caucasian disco in the 1970s. There is a very realistic scene in what looks very much like the Fontainebleau Hotel's night club in Miami Beach where the Dreamgirls get their big break in front of a white, mainly Jewish audience, which accepts them as it did in the late 1960s for the Supremes and Diana Ross.
There are many glances and nonverbal reactions that make the film quite clever. The director, in this case Condon, is usually responsible. These glances sometimes, but not always, can be seen on the Broadway stage. Condon translated into the big screen the direction and choreography of the late Michael Bennett.
Unlike Murphy, Jamie Foxx puts away his musical chops for the role of suave Cadillac dealer and then agent for the Dreamettes and soon Early, Curtis Taylor Jr. He renames them the Dreamgirls, makes them sound less black and, and breaks through to white venues soon after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished segregation in public accommodations. He's the closest thing to Berry Gordy, Jr., who created the Motown sound.
Songwriter and composer "C.C." (Clarence Conrad) White, younger brother to big-voiced Effie White of the Dreamettes, is memorably played by Keith Robinson. He is a composite of the teams of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Leiber-Stoller, cranking out those hits. He can lighten the boogie, but draws a line at disco.
Not enough can be said about the women. Effie as the largest Dreamgirl with the biggest voice and most attitude is played by American-Idol reject Jennifer Hudson, who should win many awards for her work. First Taylor replaces her for the slimmer and blander Deena (Beyonce' Knowles) so that Effie, who can do the runs and the belting, must sing backup with the youngest, Lorrell (Anika Noni Rose). Then she is told that her absenteeism and lateness is causing her to be bounced from the group for not being professional (we later learn that she had a good reason). Since Effie loves him Taylor and they have a relationship, she realizes that she is being forced to give up both ties. She registers her protest in the show stopping number which ends act one of the play.
The previews of "And I'm Telling You, I'm Not Going," gave the impression that she screams her head off in the number. Not so, at least not right away. She takes a long time to build to the climax. She arrives shortly before the Dreamettes open in Miami Beach to learn that she has been replaced by a slim, curvaceous black singer. Michelle (Sharon Leal). Effie starts the song quietly and hurtfully. Taylor stops and listens, and a dolly camera makes rings around her. He finally turns and leaves, and Effie (Hudson) sings a musical tantrum. When she's done, our audience, seemingly emotionally spent, broke out into strong applause for the screen. I couldn't have been the only one with goosebumps.
There's plenty of laughter, too, from Early and from the looks. Most of us left 2 hours 11 minutes later emotionally drained.
The Good Shepherd (2006)
Confusing and intriguing
The movie jumps back and forth in time periods. Sometimes we're lucky enough to get a TV image of President Kennedy in the Cuban Missle Crisis to know that we've suddenly entered the time-warp from the 1940s to 1961. Other times, there is no such clue such as a jump of probably a few hours or days such as when a perfidious German woman assistant gets her just reward. We don't know whether to dispatch those assassins with silencers on their pistols after the screenplay writer or the film editor.
The scope of the film, while seeming grand at first as it sweeps quarter century, turns out to be rather microcosmic with a series of vignettes instead of a unified story line. The focus remains mainly on the effect of the cloak and dagger on one man, Edward Wilson Sr., and his wife and son and the conflict of loyalties to country and family. Since the account is fictionalized history, we're not sure what to accept as biography and history as we watch the homo-erotic, cross-dressing elite WASPy Yale camaraderie turn into boys playing with big toys and geopolitics. Wilson, apparently pattered after James Jesus Angleton, is bred to elitism and public service from childhood and matriculates to Yale in the late 1930s to make the necessary career connections.
The good shepherd lays down his life for his flock, according to a parable of Jesus. After Allies win World War II, wartime intelligence, among them the fictional Wilson and his classmates, continue their work as shepherds to keep the Free World free, or at least a reasonable facsimile.
"Central Intelligence Agency" consumes their lives as did their Yale secret society "Skull and Bones," which reportedly has the loyalties of Presidents Bush 41 and 43 and Sen. John Kerry, among other government and business leaders. Why isn't "the" used with the name of the agency? We're told it is because "the" isn't used for God either.
The film is nonetheless interesting for its strong acting by the studied taciturnity of Matt Damon and the effete professor Michael Gambon with a secret life. The ethnic portrayals add some color to the white bread. Director Robert DeNiro mugs in a role reminiscent of "Wild Bill" Donovan, a lone Catholic wary of recruiting others for agency. Joe Pesci is, what else?, the Italian mobster in Florida. John Tuturro is the street-smart Italian army sergeant Ray Brocco, who follows Wilson to the CIA to bruise his knuckles as an interrogator. Angela Jolie transforms from a lusty patrician daughter looking for husband material among her brother's Yalie classmates to a long-suffering wife in pearls. Alec Baldwin is the ubiquitous G-man in trench-cost.
There are a number of lesser-known actors in the ensemble who were superb like Laura (Tammy Blanchard), the deaf woman at Yale who is the only one who brings out love from Edward Wilson Sr. Mark Ivanir and John Sessions as dueling defectors were especially memorable as was Oleg Stefan as Wilson's Soviet counterpart.
The Queen (2006)
The Queen rules
Helen Mirren delivers an overwhelmingly nuanced performance of the ruling monarch, HM Queen Elizabeth II, an institution of more than half a century. The actress may have earned a footnote in acting history as the only actress to play Elizabeth I and II in one year for different productions.
Michael Sheen s Tony Blair as a twitchy, adoring green prime minister who seems to get a headache every time he telephones the queen. He makes it easy to understand how the real Blair could have become "Bush's Poodle" in supporting the Iraqi invasion.
James Cromwell as the dull Consort Prince Phillip and Alex Jennings as the tearful ex-husband and prince, heir to the throne. who seeks to smash tradition, round out an excellent cast.
Director Stephen Frears and Writer Peter Morgan make us feel we are really flies on the wall in Buckingham and Balmoral palaces and at 10 Downing Street. They create a British West Wing. As a Yankee, I don't know how accurate they are, but I'd like to believe that Her Majesty as a mechanic during The War can really diagnose front-end damage to her Land Rover after she wrecks it crossing a stream.
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
'Jackass' meets 'Easy Rider'
This movie works on two levels. It is a Jackass-meets-Easy-Rider for adolescent minds who love crudeness. It may also appeal to more open-minded people who try to find social satire within it and test contemporary limits of decency. Sasha Baron Cohen and his writers don't explore the satire any further than having Borat cluelessly utter and do the most offensive things and showing how Americans react.
If repulsive is funny, this movie should be hilarious.
Some people on his southern route from New York to L.A. exceed his unassuming crassness, ultra-nationalism, racism, anti-Jewish prejudice, and sexism. Because these Americans are clued in, they are just plain mean. Others show their better natures and either try to assist this bumpkin or draw the line on decency. As bad as the movie makes Kazakhstan look, it sometimes makes the United States look worse. When Borat is at a Pentacostal prayer meeting, watching prominent American citizens in suits, including a judge and members of Congress, speak in tongues and swoon in religious ecstasy, we wonder who is stranger.
Yes, you will probably laugh, but there are different reasons for laughter. Sometimes it covers a sense of discomfort from breaking social taboos. Borat just can't get the hang of what to do with a toilet and how it works. Despite intense study with an etiquette coach, he presents a little white plastic bag to the dinner party hostess at the table in front of guests. There's not just nudity, but hairy and obese nudity and fellatio. There is a lot of that kind of laughter in this movie. It makes Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor look mild.
That said, the hand-held camera work and editing are very effective for the candid scenes with apparently unsuspecting "ordinary people." The 90 minutes passed quickly as I followed with interest to see how many taboos of political correctness Borat would break. I lost count. It began with incest, rape, bestiality, anti-Semitism, male chauvinism and sexism, double fellatio, planning to kill and killing pets, and much more. How this movie got nothing more restrictive than a PG 17 is unbelievable.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Shows the edgy and sweet side of family life
The first third of the film is very difficult to watch. The Hoover family is a Norman Rockwell tableau from Bizarro-land. Each member of the family in Albuquerque, NM, is wildly idiosyncratic. There is fun in the dysfunction with a lot of black humor.
The father is the creator of a "Nine-Point Plan" for success where there are only winners and losers. He's waiting manically for a call from an agent at a convention in Scottdale who is pitching the plan.
His father is a sex-obsessed, heroin-snorting senior who seems to say whatever comes to mind.
Their teenage son refuses to speak, but says much in short, heavy-handed writing like "I hate everyone" and "Welcome to hell." He has his nose in Nietchze's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" for most of the movie.
The mother's brother is an unemployed Proust scholar with bandages on his wrists from a recent suicide attempt after being spurned by a male graduate student who hooked up with a rival. Steve Carell is outstanding.
The mother is an enabler who pretends everything is okay and tries to keep the family functioning.
The only light comes from the unsinkable bespectacled,precocious daughter whose optimism and love doesn't quit. She brings out the best in her cynical grandfather and everyone else. Abagail Breslin, a newcomer, gives a memorable performance.
Somehow Olive manages to come in as first runner-up in a girls' beauty contest while visiting her mother's sister. She's been spending a lot of time with Grandpa working on a new number for a future contest. Then the fateful call comes: the first-place winner has been disqualified, and Olive is being invited to compete in the finals in Redondo Beach, CA. After weighing the options, the parents decide that the only way they are going to go there is to drive. Dad's old yellow VW bus (without head rests or seat belts) is pressed into service on I-10 for the 700-mile trip. Despite their own personal agendas, they are devoted to Olive and her dream.
The trip is also a voyage into the psyche of each of them. The brother and the father are thrown into despair, but Olive in her unassuming way helps them hold on with her innocent love.
They make it five minutes late to the pageant. After falling on his knees, the father manages to get the ice-queen director to let the daughter register. The story builds to a climax in this world of preternatural sex kittens. The brother and uncle beg the mother to keep Olive from competing, but the decision falls to Olive.
In the end, it is love and loyalty that redeems this family. They committed to be part of this yellow VW Noah's Ark out of devotion to Olive. By the end of the first leg of the trip, they have been transformed. The return trip should be at lot more peaceful.
There are some real shortcomings in the premises that take a lot of suspension of belief. As a former VW bus owner, I know the mechanical details are not plausible. The VW bus' transmission fails, so the father is advised to get the bus rolling up to 20 mph so he can shift into 3rd gear. There are many laughs as the family members run and push and then jump into the side opening, but clearly the van is not moving faster than 5 mph. Then the script departs from verisimilitude when the father has to deal with a funeral home in California that is nothing close to reality. It couldn't have happened in one afternoon to make a report, get clearance of the medical examiner, and complete a cremation and have the ashes returned. I'm not carping, tho, the depth of human interactions makes up for these shortcomings.
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
I thought this was going to be b-o-r-i-n-g, but I was wrong!
If there were categories in the Academy Awards for turgid technical data made interesting, this movie would get it, hands down. An Inconvenient Truth is not inconvenient to watch. And it is important to see because the fate of our planet is at stake. It is our Spaceship Earth that shelters us from the harshness of space. Our crew members are of every nationality, race, religion, and everything else that separates humankind. Surely, we must learn to live together in cooperation, or we will not live at all.
Sharp editing moves this film lot faster than Cars. Al Gore, defying danger in a cherry picker to reach the high point at the right side of his projected graph to create suspense, is a tongue-in-cheek hoot. That's as much action as you'll see except for the excellent animations. No trucks were harmed in the making of this movie.
The facts come steadily, but slowly enough to absorb. The animation helps reinforce the message. This is a pedagological wonder that educators would do to imitate, if they could afford to duplicate it. Camera crew followed Gore and his projectors around the U.S. and to China and the Poles--and loping through airports--to capture his highly sophisticated "slide shows." A recent AP story surveyed some 28 climatologists who affirmed the accuracy of the facts except for some minor details that they said were not serious errors.
There is no doubt there is global warming, especially of the oceans. Any idiot with a thermometer can measure it. Gore's big graph of hundreds of millions of years shows average temperatures getting higher in a jagged slope. Cause and effect is always a tough correlation to find, but Gore shows us a contemporaneous graph of carbon dioxide levels. The two look like they could fit together. The steepest slopes are in the last ten years, especially since 2000. When the oceans get warm enough, the natural circulation will stop eventually and temperatures will plummet into another ice age, scientists predict. While gradual warming was increasing in a linear fashion, there comes a "tipping point" when the effects increase exponentially--and we may already be there.
Although another big freeze will solve the problem, and the Earth will probably survive it as it has before, the climatological changes wreak havoc on the world as we and other little fragile creatures know it. The melting of the polar and Greenland ice sheets, already well under way, will put major cities under water. Animation shows water covering a good part of the south end of Manhattan including the site of the World Trade Center. The warming trends have upset natural cycles so that caterpillar larvae now mature before baby birds hatch, depriving them of a food supply. Heat waves around the world have been more intense and so has drought in the cracked moonscapes of impoverished central Africa so that Lake Chad is more like a gully. In temperate climates around the world, including the U.S., mosquitoes, flies and other insects are advancing farther north than ever before, bringing new diseases with them. We've seen more frequent and more powerful hurricanes in the last several years in the Southeast U.S., unprecedented floods in the Northeast, and killer heat waves such as the one that killed hundreds in temperate-zone Europe in 2003. Earth's creatures will probably adapt, but there will be continued insurance premium hikes as coastal homes continue be washed into the sea--and a lot of death and hundreds of millions of refugees, those from drought seeking water, those from floods seeking higher land.
After presenting the case, Gore concludes with showing how our present technology can use sources energy that do not contain the carbon in fossil fuels like oil and gas. Solar and wind energy is plentiful and renewable, and hydrogen is already being used. The technology already exists to remove carbon dioxide from the air. The most low-tech equipment are trees. We need to cut down fewer and plant more.
Will this entertaining movie be force for changing public opinion and public policy? From what I can see, the people who go see it are those already inclined to believe it. If the film can galvanize their beliefs and convince those who are undecided we are not doomed. The human mind seems to be hard-wired to grasp immediate threats and react, like terrorism. However, we don't readily perceive gradual threats like global warming that would do far more damage.
Superman Returns (2006)
Special effects great, script and acting mediocre
Okay, so this is a bad choice to see after the witty dialogue of The Devil Wears Prada, but is it too much to ask for a Superman movie to have witty dialogue and subtle acting as well as incredible special effects? You have to suspend all disbelief to avoid getting annoyed. And I'm someone who in childhood, with change jangling in my pocket, waited at the newsstand for the newest Superman comics to be delivered on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Brandon Routh has the air of an Eagle Scout, but no depth, as Superman. Kate Bosworth is a bit more nuanced as Lois Lane. Kevin Spacey is a characturized bad guy, as he should be.
The special effects are perfect for big and loud Imax.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Cinematography a delight for the eye
The cinematography is beautiful both of The City and the fashions. Manhattan hasn't been so lovingly displayed since Woody Allen.
Meryle Streep turns Miranda Priestly into a three-dimensioned and complex character, not the flat evil persona of the original novel. Streep has never looked more elegant with small waist and arched back. She gets some inspired lines of dialog. It's hard to believe this is the same woman who played a frumpy housewife 11 years ago in Bridges of Madison County. Miranda Priestly will become a classic character of the cinema like Cruella de Ville long after the movie.
Anne Hathaway plays Andy Sachs, the bright and eager journalism-school graduate in preppy sweaters skirts who wants to be a journalist, but takes a coveted assistant's job fetching Starbucks to her icon boss, whom she hadn't even known before the interview. That's the easy part of the job, balancing four grandes in a cardboard holder. To Andy falls several Herculean tasks as well. Hathaway's conversational style, wardrobe and body language changes, but she tries to be in that rarefied fashion world, not part of it. Occasionally Miranda lets her know she is pleased, but Andy loses her personal friends, who don't see the distinction. (She's already experienced indulging the whims of her self-absorbed boyfriend who sulks if he feels he's not getting enough attention. Miranda is only a few notches above him.) In the end Andy has to decide whether she is willing to let herself be absorbed by a way of life that sacrifices people for the cause of art and ambition.
Stanley Tucci as Nigel, one of Miranda's deputies, is serves as a mentor to Andy. Adrian Grenier,Simon Baker, and Daniel Sunjata are some very eye-catching hunks in contrast to the estrogenic environment.
House M.D. (2004)
House M.D. is so intellectually pure, it is amazing that it is on FOX
Speaking as only a recent discoverer of House, M.D.--that's what you get for leaving the T.V. on after American Idol on Tuesdays--I am really impressed with the quality of the show, and I wonder how it would get on FOX, which seeks the common denominator. I am impressed with the quality of writing. The dialog is Sorkinesque: fast and witty. The medical research is complicated, timely, and, from what this layperson can determine, accurate. The script writing is excellent, taking us on a labyrinthine journey in 48 minutes or so to find the correct diagnosis. David Shore plays with us by inserting allusions to that other egotistical loner who jumped to hasty wrong conclusions, Sherlock Holmes. The characters have depth. I hope this show will last a few more seasons. Since John Wells turned E.R. into medical mayhem with helicopters and planes crashing into the emergency room and firefights with automatic weapons, there haven't been any good medical shows to watch.
Flirting with Disaster (1996)
A fantastic parade of character actors!
My college-aged son checked out the VHS of this 1996 movie from the public library because he likes director/screenplay writer David O. Russell. He said he thought I would like it. Boy, was he right! I was then treated to 90-some minutes of wonderful dialog and interesting plot twists and a travelogue across America. The characters are so idiosyncratic, but have enough realism to be engaging. Stiller plays a neurotic NY Jew (any other type for Stiller?) who cuts the apron strings of both neurotic, overprotective parents and embarks with his wife (Patricia Arquette), baby son, and the unstable and lusty representative of his adoption agency (Tea Leoni), who constantly video tapes, to find his birth parents.
The journey becomes more complicated along the way, and after additional unplanned destinations they pick up a most odd couple to travel with them.(I'm so proud that I have managed to avoid so many spoilers with that sentence.) The weird characters in memorable roles played by both the famous and the obscure include Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal as Stiller's adoptive parents, Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda as Stiller's other parents, Josh Brolin and Richard Jenkins as the gay G-men, Celia Westing as the southern belle with the glass zodiac animal collection in San Diego who may be the birth mom, David Patrick Kelly as the paranoid former Hell's Angel in Kalamazoo who may be the father, Charlet Oberly as the fascist B & B operator, and Glenn Fitzgerald as the hostile effeminate brother. I haven't broken out in so many hoots in a long time!
The Da Vinci Code (2006)
This movie is definitely not boring, just bogus
New York Times critic A. O. Scott filed one of the first reviews of this movie, from the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday the day before opening. The film was not released ahead of time to reviewers, which, by conventional wisdom, signals a turkey. Scott kvetched about how boring it was. There is no ennui. The film kept me jumping with ambushes, chases and plot twists to keep my adrenalin level high.
The contrasting scenes between 21st century Europe and medieval Europe in flashbacks are eye-catching. Hanks is low key, but he's usually low key, whether he's a high school teacher turned captain overwhelmed by battle and responsibility or a lone castaway on a Pacific island using assorted washed-up cargo items like a deflated basketball to keep his sanity.
If you want to see how bogus Dan Brown's story is, check out the History Channel this week for programs on Opus Dei, Leonardo DaVinci and other topics suggested by the story. How much more powerful this story would have been if it were more grounded in fact! And certainly a case can be made from facts in the Gnostic gospels and other sources for all that is suggested. There has to be worldwide hunger for a better understanding of the Christian mythic monopoly given how a book with such awkward writing could sell some 65 million copies.
Inside Man (2006)
A rare, intelligent movie
It is like "Do the Right Thing" meets "Dog Day Afternoon" meets "Mission Impossible" meets Alfred Hitchcock. Unlike MI, however, the many fast-paced plot twists and turns make sense. There are pauses for social lessons as Spike Lee can deliver them. The cinematographer takes our eyes on an architecture tour of exteriors and interiors. Denzel Washington is superb as a underpaid, middle-level detective with enough sense to know that he is being conned all the way around, by his city as well as the "perps." Clive Owen is fascinating as the cool and cerebral mastermind. Memorable performances by Jodie Foster and Christopher Plummer, too, as steely cool aristocrats. The plot structure is made more complex with flash-forwards, but they can be followed. We never find out how this plot came to be hatched, but we can surmise when we discover all the conspirators. By all rights, this film should be rewarded next year as Crash was rewarded for teaching about race relations. We'll see.
Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004)
Unbought, Unbossed and honored
Shirley Chisholm did not take the easy road. The film doesn't really go into her motivations, so we don't now why she took on the double whammy of being not just black, but female at a time the country, even the nascent feminists, were trying to wrap their heads around what it meant to have equality of the sexes.
We don't see that she had much of an organization, but the congresswoman from Bed-Sty had some aides and she traveled. Surely she needed financing to pay for the plane tickets, the hotel rooms an the salary, but it is not explained to us how she got it. The footage, both archived and contemporary, shows her with an immense amount of dignity and calm. Her uninhibited and justified comments after she is double-crossed by an old friend shows us another side. Her reflections during an interview for the film inform us that she didn't want to be remembered as the first black woman to do what she did, but rather someone who tried to make a difference. There wasn't a long line after her doing what she did. The laudatory film shows that there wasn't much future in it, even 32 years later in 2004 when Carol Mosley Braun tried it.
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005)
Looking for Muslims in Hindu India gives better insight into American humor
Albert Brooks is one of my favorite comedians. I initially was looking forward to seeing this movie and thought the premise was very funny. I now see that this movie does not give us much insight to Muslim humor, but will let us see once more how ethnocentric American culture is. It's a really funny movie if you're steeped in American culture and don't care about how the rest of the world thinks, which unfortunately describes most Americans, so it should be commercially successful. The movie, however, does more to give us an insight into American humor.
Reading the annoyance in postings of Muslims from various parts of the world to this site has given me empathy. Imagine how U.S. citizens would feel if a Muslim humorist set up base in Mexico to do a study of humor in America. Yes, Mexico is in the Americas, so their inhabitants can be called Americans, too. Yes, there are many Americans from the U.S. living in Mexico. My research indicates that 12 per cent of India's 1.1 billion people are Muslim. Brooks says there are 150 million. Imagine how U.S. Americans would feel to see ourselves portrayed with guns quoting the 2nd Amendment guzzling beer or smoking pot as Muslims from Pakistan are portrayed with automatic weapons high on opium or something.
Brooks' movie illustrates his insight that humor there is Hindus telling jokes about Muslims and Sikhs telling jokes about Hindus, always making fun of the other guy who is not there. Well, true to form, Brooks goes back to America (the U.S. part) and makes fun of the Muslims. Maybe humor has to be ethnocentric to be funny. He claims that he got a wonderful reception at the Dubai film festival, better than he would have expected from the Cinema 1 in Manhattan. The posters here from Dubai don't seem to have been happy ticket buyers. I'm hoping a Muslim humorist does an homage and makes a film about finding humor in America (U.S.). I would wince if the focus were on Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy, but it would be fair game.
Syriana (2005)
A cinematic haiku
Syriana is a montage of exotic locations, intriguing situations, and engaging characters. It suggests of numerous geopolitical relationships and conspiracies without spelling them out. We get impressions that suggest that U.S. foreign policy follows oil, that assassination is one of the tools of the trade of U.S., that the Agency has no loyalty to its agents, that agents have latitude to engage in many kinds of mischief, and that terrorists can be easily recruited from expendable laborers. The impressions go by faster than we can contemplate them. George Clooney dedicates himself both behind and in front of the camera to a taught, fast-moving drama that becomes cinematic haiku. It suggests rather than expresses.
Rent (2005)
So much saccharine
The good news is that the singing and dancing in larger-than-life form is dazzling. Another piece of good news is that six original cast members of eight main characters reunite in this film.
The bad news is that the movie tries to one-up the original La Boheme and gives the story a cheesy and incredible happy ending and, Mimi a new destiny. Her AIDS turns out to be not so fatal, even after she is found with a high fever after almost a month living in the streets. After her death scene she suddenly awakes, tells of her near-death experience, her fever breaks, and she says she feels great. With so much saccharine, I expected the last song to be "The Sound of Music." Chris Columbus goes from G rated movies like Home Alone to pandering with way too much hot lesbian action from Maureen and Joanne and booty dancing from Mimi and Maureen.
None of the people I've polled so far, from college students to the middle aged, say they were moved to tears by any part. They, like me, sat through the 135-minute saga of self-destructive youth dry-eyed. We agreed that the only thing we were sorry for was that the movie didn't end 30 minutes earlier, but kept going with more reprises. Personally I don't mind hearing about "525,600 minutes" another time or two, but that's how long the movie felt.
Walk on Water (2004)
Meetsooyan!
This film is truly excellent, meetsooyan! It examines issues of terrorism, homosexuality, war crimes, hatred, love, prejudice, stereotypes, the need to belong to humanity, and many others with heart, empathy, courage and humor. The writing is so fine! The casting is very appropriate. Eyal, Axel and Pia are real people. The actors who played them have real screen-appeal. Eytan Fox's directing is wonderful. The camera work is polished. We also get a travelogue through Israel and an insight to current attitudes and music. I was fascinated.
Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) is a typically macho Israeli man who not only wants to forget he has emotions, but he really cannot cry if he wanted to owing to some unusual tear-duct disorder. He works as a hit man for a government security agency. When his wife commits suicide, Eyal is sent on a mission his mentor doesn't expect he can mess up in his delicate emotional state, tracking down a Nazi war criminal in his 90s. Eyal poses as a travel guide to take the Nazi's grandson, Axel Himmelman (Knut Berger), on a tour of Israel while visiting his sister, Pia (Caroline Peters), who has renounced her family and lives in on an Israeli kibbutz, communal farm. Eyal is eavesdropping to find any hint the grandfather is still alive. At first Eyal is contemptuous of the grandson's sympathy for the Palestinians and his lifestyle, and he imposes his thoughts and actions upon his affable client. Gradually he comes to realize that Axel is no armchair liberal. The plot twists keep coming and we hold our breaths seeing how stereotyped people will react to the unexpected.