Starring Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Emma Thompson, Olivia Williams, Cara Seymour, Sally Hawkins, Matthew Beard, Ellie Kendrick, Beth Rowley
Directed by Lone Scherfig
Expectations: Super low, but Nick Hornby wrote the script so I do expect it will be well written.
There’s nothing wrong with this movie, but there isn’t really anything special about it either. Sure, Carey Mulligan is a great new talent and really shows off her ability in her role, but there’s not much else to get excited about here. What’s the point of it all?
The film is competently made and the dialogue is well written. The acting is very good all around. I’m a big Alfred Molina fan and I wasn’t aware that he was in this, so that was a welcome surprise. Despite the fact that they got these key things right, they forgot to have an interesting story. The whole thing for me just exudes this air of being wonderfully okay.
This is a good film, more for its power to stay with you, instead of its level of entertainment. It’s the eve of America’s invasion of Iraq and Kurdish refugees struggle with their television antennas to hear some small bits of news. Three wandering children; a girl, a possibly clairvoyant teenage boy with no arms and a blind toddler come to the camp in search of refuge. The film really isn’t about the plot though. Director Bahman Ghobadi seeks to paint a picture of what these villagers feel and endure on the brink of war.
It moves at a slow pace, but this is a haunting film, filled with amazing, wide-angle cinematography of the Iraqi landscape. All of the children (who aren’t trained actors) are outstanding and show a level of depth not generally present in child actors. The film ends on a perfect, understated note, skillfully illustrating disillusionment and the fragility of life. It is a tragedy and an emotionally heavy film.
21 Up continues the series of documentary films started in 1964 that follows the lives of 14 British children. The idea for the first film, Seven Up, came about from the Jesuit motto, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Every seven years the same children are interviewed about their lives and world views. It is an incredible concept and it’s interesting to see how the children grow up.
One flaw is that some of the participants are affected by seeing the films prior to being interviewed, specifically some of the upper class children, so their answers don’t seem as real as in earlier entries. There is something to be said about the fact that they are affected at all though. It suggests that taking a step back and being able to see themselves from another’s perspective, they find that they might be more biased than they thought themselves to be. I realize that this is an unavoidable flaw but it still nags at me.
My other problem with these films is that each one gets longer than the last. Most of the material is very dry and some of the interviews don’t really go anywhere. I love the series, but they are becoming a slog to get through.
Battle for Terra (2009)
Originally released as Terra in 2007 outside the US
Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Brian Cox, James Garner, Chris Evans, Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, David Cross, Justin Long, Dennis Quaid, Luke Wilson
Directed by Aristomenis Tsirbas
Expectations: Low. I’m not too fond of 3D animation, but I love sci-fi.
I’m a huge science fiction fan. This is a blessing and a curse. In the case of Battle for Terra, it’s a bit of both. There’s nothing wrong with the film, it’s pretty good. As a long-time sci-fi fan though, there isn’t anything in this film that’s particularly new or unexplored within the genre. It is very similar to Avatar in that way. What makes this more enjoyable than Avatar is Terra‘s 84-minute runtime. It doesn’t over stay its welcome.
The film opens by introducing an alien culture living in a tree-like structure floating above the clouds. The inhabitants of the city look like ants, but they don’t have legs and they float around as well. It’s sci-fi, just go with it. One day, a mysterious ship covers the sun and some villagers get abducted. A rebellious child named Mala (Evan Rachel Wood) investigates the situation and we’re off.
The Seafarers is a documentary directed by Stanley Kubrick two years before his feature debut, Killer’s Kiss. It was thought lost for many years, but in 2008 it was released on DVD for hardcore Kubrick fans to watch and analyze. It is an industrial short made for the Seafarers International Union to show to potential members. It is notable as Kubrick’s first use of color film.
Surprisingly, there are a few moments of the budding Kubrick touch. The most enjoyable were the sideways moving dolly shots through the cafeteria. I always found the similar shot through the apartment in The Killing to be one of my favorites, so it’s fun to see what that shot evolved from. A fun 30 minutes for any Kubrick fan, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking.
Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Jennifer Coolidge, Val Kilmer, Brad Dourif, Xzibit, Fairuza Balk, Michael Shannon, Vondie Curtis Hall
Directed by Werner Herzog
Expectations: Low due to Nicolas Cage, but optimistic because of Werner Herzog.
Until now, I had not seen a Werner Herzog movie I didn’t enjoy. I unabashedly love his documentaries. His fiction films are less interesting, but so far I’ve seen enough to know that his work is usually engaging on some level and worth my time. This is not the case with Herzog’s latest, Bad Lieutenant. Nicolas Cage plays the same character he’s been playing for years, the washed up drug-addled fiend that can’t quite get his life together. Does he at least play it well? Not really, but I’ve never been a big fan. To his credit, the supporting cast is worse than he is, with an overweight, bored Val Kilmer at the top of the trash heap. Brad Dourif plays a bookie and has the distinction of being one of the few believable actors in the film.
Cage plays a drug addict cop that is slowly slipping over the edge into oblivion. He is surrounded by the rest of the clichéd corrupt cop genre characters; the call girl, the useless partner cop, the dealer, the woman with a baby at the door of the dealer’s house who let’s on where the dealer is hiding. You get the idea. Cage is investigating the murder of a family of immigrants from Senegal, but the story goes haphazardly between the mystery and Cage getting off in some way, be it sex or drugs or both. Herzog likes to deal with madness and obsession in his films, and Cage’s character has both in spades, but he doesn’t do anything to make it engaging. I love a good obsession film, but this was just boring. Cage really should hang it up at this point, or at least take a few years off. It would be unfair though to lay all the blame on the actors as Herzog seems to be as uninterested in the story as I was. I was hoping that the film might rise above the swampy filth it had been sulking in, but alas, the pull was too great. On a positive note, the film’s score by Mark Isham is pretty good in spots.
So yeah, I hated it. I do have an odd desire to re-watch it, though.