Rated: PG-13
STARS: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Banks
DIRECTOR: Gary Ross
GENRE: Drama, Action-Adventure, Sci-fi
Normally, I wouldn't lower myself to see a film aimed at 15 year-old girls, but I wanted to see for myself if all the hype and the hoopla surrounding The Hunger Games--the screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins' best-selling teen novel--was justified. I didn't read the book, but in my book, a movie should stand (or stagger) on its own merits anyway.
The brief synopsis: In the dystopian future kingdom of Paner, a yearly "special" Olympics--of sorts--has been devised, which pits twenty-four young people between the ages of twelve and eighteen against each other in a battle to the death. Only one of them will come out alive and be declared the winner. (This person gets that stupid looking Mirabal Trophy from Dancing With The Stars ...NOT!.) The games serve as an ongoing punishment (and a way of keeping the uppities in their place) to the twelve outlying districts of the kingdom for an uprising against the all powerful central government, headed by President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Each district must cough up one male and one female gladiator to compete in the televised gore fest, which employs low-tech weaponry with blades, or bows and arrows, to maximize the up close and personal aspect of the killing.
Our heroine, from District 12--which appears to be the poorest and most downtrodden of the suburbs--is the brave and resourceful Katniss Everdeen, played with effectiveness by Jennifer Lawrence, (Winter's Bone) as the blue-eyed Everygirl who rises to the challenge when it's do or die. Her saving grace is that she's a crack shot with a bow and arrow. And she's our hero because, unlike those other crass kids who just want to survive, she only kills in self defense--when there is no other way out. (Back home, I noticed, she's not as compassionate--she goes deer hunting, and likes to shoot other types of small defenseless furry creatures betwixt the eyes.)
Alliances form among the contestants (like in Survivor, or Big Brother) and Katniss and her male counterpart from District 12, Peeta Mellark, (Josh Hutcherson) are there for each other. Will they make it to the end? Will romance bloom amidst the pervasive carnage? And what of the rule that only one teen must survive?
The first half of The Hunger Games drags, as it's partly exposition, and then the mental and physical preparation the kids must undergo to give themselves a fighting chance. I could sense the mostly teen audience at the showing I attended chomping at the bit like the ancient Romans in the Colosseum--because, let's face it, the video games and comic books they are into are mostly violent in nature.
The second half of the movie gave them their fix.
Woody Harrelson brings a touch of levity to the grisly proceedings as the drunken sot "mentor" to Katniss and Peeta, (gotta love those names) who dispenses mostly thanks-but-no-thanks advice on their upcoming ordeal.
Oh, and you've got to see the most MENACING looking beard in the history of filmdom--sported by Wes Bentley, as the organizer of the games. The sharp-edged design of it--as if he were wearing cutlery on his cheeks--is so heavy handed that it's funny, and it brings me to a pet-peeve about sci-fi films. You know, when the space ships that the invading aliens are traveling in are designed to look like nasty, evil creatures themselves--so there's no second guessing for us as to what they're all about. But I don't think the aliens would advertise their nastiness in such a blatantly obvious manner. In reality, evil often comes in the guise of a beautiful woman-- like a Casey Anthony--or that mass murderer in Norway with the movie star good looks.
And while the dystopian image of a future world--the one depicted in The Hunger Games--seems heartless and cold, that same world exists today. And has existed among our species since pretty near the beginning. A world where innocents--who have no personal reason to hate their adversaries because they've never even met them--are pitted against each other in a kill-or-be-killed spectacle coordinated by governments. Often for no better reason than to gain some strategic political advantage in the world.
It's called war.
Grade: C +
Rated: R
STARS: Jennifer Westfeldt, Adam Scott, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, John Hamm, Chris O'Dowd, Megan Fox
DIRECTOR: Jennifer Westfeldt
GENRE: Romantic Comedy/ Drama
Maya Rudolph, with her hair pinned up, (not a flattering style for most women--flat-out dreadful on her) and looking matronly in that bloated kind of way-- with the sound of young children screaming in the background--is enough to give any fancy-free bachelor the heebie jeebies about the prospect of "connubial bliss" in the new romantic comedy, Friends With Kids.
Kyra Sedgwick look-alike Jennifer Westfeldt writes, directs, and stars as Julie-- a thirty-something New Yorker whose biological clock is ticking. She and longtime best friend, Jason, (Adam Scott) observe their married friends, Leslie and Alex, (Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd) and Missy and Ben, (Kristen Wiig & John Hamm) and figure there must be a better formula. Neither Julie nor Jason have found anyone they want to settle down with, but both are amenable to the idea of child rearing, And though they are not physically attracted to one another, they decide to "do it" one time, become pregnant, and raise the child together while keeping their relationship platonic--which gives them both the freedom to continue to screw around with whomever. THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS!
Ah, if only there were such a thing.
So out pops an adorable kid, and things go along nicely for about two years, as our friends- without-benefits couple feels they've beaten the system and avoided the pitfalls of the dreary lives their married friends with kids have settled into. Jason meets his perfect woman, a Broadway dancer named Mary Jane, (Megan Fox) and Julie finds her hunky guy, and hey...it appears that what we have here is a forward thinking, avant garde kind of romantic comedy!
Not so fast, Kemosabe!
You can bend, but not break the romcom formula, and the ending of Friends With Kids is telegraphed from the time Jason and Julie's little scheme is hatched--though there are plenty of deftly placed road hazards along the way to keep many a- guessing about that.
The film kicks into another gear when their son asks: WHY DOESN'T DADDY STAY ALL NIGHT? Aha...now we've all got to stop and think about what it means to be a REAL mom and dad--and that becomes the essential and lingering question in Friends With Kids--and it's what gives the movie its deeper and more contemplative tone.
If you buy the idea set forth in When Harry Met Sally--that men and women cannot TRULY be friends, (unless they're both hideous) because there is always this subtle boy-girl thing operating beneath the surface, then the oh-how-I-could-never-be-attracted-to-you thing is a bit overplayed here. Both Jason and Julie are attractive people, and the awkwardness and near revulsion they seem to feel for each other when they initially hop into bed to do the deed is played for laughs--not realism!
Jennifer Westfeldt is just as big a potty-mouth as any male screenwriter, which may or may not add to your enjoyment of this film. I think I was the only guy in the theater--surrounded by chicks on all sides--and they were yukking it up throughout.
Oh, how jaded we've all become. Guess my old-fashioned side is showing, but I think we guys have lost some kind of edge when women can no longer be shocked by in-your-face sexuality.
Grade: B +
Rated: PG-13
STARS: Amanda Seyfried, Daniel Sunjata, Wes Bentley, Sebastian Stan,
Emily Wickersham
DIRECTOR: Heitor Dhalia
GENRE: Psychological Thriller
Would you begin to question your own sense of reality when everyone around you is telling you that you are delusional? Young Jill Parrish (Amanda Seyfried) never wavers from her belief in her own truth--but the questions remain, and become intensified for the audience in the new thriller, Gone, from Brazilian director Heitor Dhalia.
Jill has a history. A history of mental illness. Or so it is has been declared. A year ago she told a story of being kidnapped by a really bad dude who kept her imprisoned in a well and tried to kill her. She escaped. But her story didn't check out with the police. They could find no trace of the man, and no trace of the big hole in the ground where she claimed he kept her. Another blow to her credibility is that she spent some time in a mental institution after her ordeal.
When her sister, Molly, (Emily Wickersham) turns up missing from the home they share together, she fears that the man is back--intending to take her again, but settling for the sister when Jill wasn't home. She reports the disappearance to the cops, but due to her history, they flat out don't believe her. I found this element of Gone hard to swallow, because no matter what, the authorities are supposed to routinely follow up on missing persons reports. These cops come off as totally cavalier boobs. But, as is often the case with the psychological thriller genre, SOMEBODY has to be or do something really stupid to make the plot work.
Jill is thrust into the role of being the lone crusader trying to find and save Molly before it's too late. When the police learn she has a gun, they feel she may be a danger to herself and others, and so the "manhunt" for her is on. It then becomes a race against time--and this is where the dramatic tension is created--as Jill tries to find a potential killer before the cops nab her and put her out of commission.
Gone is a decent thriller--nothing that's going to tax your brain all that much--we know we will learn in the end whether Jill is connected to reality or a real nut job. And whether sis--who has a drinking problem--has maybe just gone off on an alcoholic bender and will stagger home later with a slurred WHASSUP, SUCKAHS? There ARE enough red herrings floating around in the soup of this movie to keep us guessing and second guessing as to who the real bad guy is-assuming he exists.
Amanda Seyfried herself may be the biggest draw for guys--she's at least a 9 on the beauty scale--with (not Betty Davis) Zooey Deschanel eyes, big as saucers. She turns in a believable performance as the girl nobody believes. (Tell me what I say!)
Nobody else worth mentioning here, but doggone if Gone doesn't deliver a satisfying "touche" type of ending that may put a smile on your face as you walk out of the theater.
Grade: B
Rated: PG-13
Stars: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Max von Sydow
Director: Stephen Daldry
Genre: Melodrama
Maybe I've been watching too many art house and independent films lately, because as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close began to unfold, I felt there was real potential there.... BUT... then that aura of SLICK HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTION just started dripping from every pore of it, and I knew what I was in for. How to describe...well...blatant manipulation of your emotions at every turn, where the poignancy of it seems manufactured, rather than stemming naturally from the story. Let's see, what would a character naturally say and do here? Hmm...forget that...gotta be something really gooey to get those tears gushing.
Oskar (Thomas Horn) is a precocious, but socially inept 11 year-old whose dad, Thomas Schell, (Tom Hanks) perished in the World Trade Center on 9/11. By all accounts, he was a good dad. He invented scavenger hunt games and made up stories to stimulate his son's imagination and get him to interact with other people. There's the fanciful story of New York's "lost sixth borough," for example. (Which kinda took me in, even.)
On the day of the tragedy, Oskar stands frozen and listens to the increasingly frantic phone calls on the answering machine from his father. He decides to conceal the recordings from his mother (Sandra Bullock). A year later, the boy is still consumed by his loss. In his dad's closet, he finds a key in a vase with the word "Black" written on the envelope. Oskar surmises that the key must have been left for him to find, and that it must fit the lock of some box that contains undiscovered messages from his father, in the event of his early demise. And that Black must be the surname of the person who holds the key (no pun intended) to this mystery. So he compiles a list of everyone in the five boroughs named Black (and there's a crapload of them) and sets off on an odyssey to visit each one of them until the mystery is solved.
Again, there were some things here that drew me in...the disparate people that he meets...their own stories of personal loss, or just the touching ways in which they send him off with love and godspeed. Unfortunately, and I don't know if this was intended, or it's just the way the inexperienced young actor comes off, (they found him from an appearance on Jeopardy) Oskar is extremely obnoxious and incredibly annoying--an insufferable little brat who feels entitled to make all the world feel guilty about HIS pain, and HIS loss, because no one else has ever experienced such things, you see. He continually spouts off from recall a bunch of amazing facts and figures in a monotone staccato voice, like some kind of idiot-savant, to illustrate his points and show us how bright he is for his age.That's fine as far as it goes--but in scenes that would seem to require it, the young Mr. Horn appears unable to convey any real nuance of emotion.
Why was he chosen for the protagonist role in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? Because Haley Joel Osment and Macaulay Culkin are grown up now...what do you want from me??? (But he's got plenty of time to learn his craft, and no doubt will improve.)
No one feels obliged to put Oskar in his place. Not even his mother, who is still dealing with her own pain, but tries to carry it with some semblance of dignity. In what is surely the most manipulative scene in this movie, her son, with venom in his eyes, tells his mom that he wishes SHE had been in the World Trade Center that day, instead of his dad. (If you can imagine.) There is a pregnant pause--we're supposed to wait for her reply because it will surely be good--but I knew immediately what she was going to say. The one self-deprecating thing she could have said designed to wrench the maximum amount of boo-hoo from the audience.
The only one who tries to rein the kid in is the mysterious man who rents a room at Oskar's grandmas place, played by the great Max von Sydow. He doesn't speak. Not because he can't, but because he's suffered a trauma of his own. The renter decides to accompany the boy on his arduous odyssey through New York City.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close also suffers from some totally implausible plot elements near the end. With all of its flaws, the film is still an extremely (see how I like to play off that word?) effective tearjerker. There was lots of sniffling going on around me in the theatre, and I know all those people didn't have colds. Me, I had a little piece of rock in my eye...or something...and kept tearing up to try to flush it out.
Bring lots of tissue.
Grade: B --
Hey kiddies...my list is appearing a little later than many others, because I wanted to make sure I had seen most of the promising films that were released right near the end of the year. In putting this list of the top eleven films of 2011 together, my main criteria were twofold:
1.COULD I RELATE TO IT ON A HUMAN LEVEL? (Meaning it had more substance than just great special effects and all kinds of crap getting blown up every few seconds.)
2. DID IT MAKE ME SMILE? (Either because it was damn funny, or because it touched my heart in some way--which always makes me smile.)
Yes, I've seen many of the films that appeared on other critic's lists, and most of them received at least a "B" grade from me...but they didn't quite measure up to the one's below. Nevertheless, feel free to argue in favor of anything you feel passionate about, (except the hot date you had last night) as I respond to all comments.
SO HERE WE GO--TIMMY'S TOP TEN (PLUS ONE) BEST FILMS OF 2011!
(Click on the title to see my full review of each film.)
11. Tuesday, After Christmas
10. Cowboys & Aliens
9. The Adjustment Bureau
8. Crazy, Stupid Love
7. The Names Of Love
6. Horrible Bosses
5. Circumstance
4. Submarine
3. The Artist
2. My Week With Marilyn
1. Young Adult
Honorable mention: Hugo, I Am Number Four, Cedar Rapids, The Ides of March, The Lincoln Lawyer, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Midnight In Paris, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.
Unrated
Stars: Mimi Branescu, Maria Popistasu, Mirela Oprisor
Director: Radu Mundean
Genre: Romanian/Art House/Drama
It won't be apparent to you at the beginning of Tuesday, After Christmas--which opens straightaway with a nude couple lounging in bed, exchanging playful banter--that the theme of the film is really about whether or not you believe in Santa Claus. But more on that later...
Our full frontal couple consists of Paul (Mimi Branescu) and Raluca (Maria Popistasu). Paul is married, but not to Raluca. Further complicating matters is that Raluca is acquainted with Paul's wife, Adriana, (Mirela Oprisor). She's their nine year-old daughter's dentist.
In any tale about a man and his mistress, the fundamental question that hangs in the air like a cloud of laughing gas has to do with if and when he's found out, and what consequences will ensue. Don't get too anxious about that, because first you're going to learn about these people in painstakingly mundane real time. That's because mundane is what REAL is, 99% of the time. It's the other one percent that most of us live for--whichever way it goes--because it's then that we feel alive. Maybe that's why happily married men cheat--as much for the risky prospect of getting caught as anything else. (There's a little glimmer of James Bond in every guy.)
Director Radu Mundean shows us the everyday-ness of Paul's home life--where indeed he seems to be content. Nice wife. Adorable daughter. That's a lot to lay on the line, Mr. Bond.
So as the holidays approach, we're off to the department store to discuss--in a lengthy scene--the pros and cons of the snowboard Paul and Adriana are considering as a present for daughter Mara (Sasa Paul-Szel) from Santa. Yes, at age nine, Mara still believes in Santa Claus. A bit old for that by American standards--but her parents seem to think it's fine. Perhaps they enjoy the hide-and-seek game of it themselves. Maybe they would like to believe in Santa, or what he represents, too.
Tension builds slowly in Tuesday, After Christmas--but it does build. And there are two superb scenes in this film that make it well worth the wait. The first is when Paul takes his daughter to her dental appointment, not anticipating that Adriana has decided to show up there too. The two lovers are understandably nervous, as Raluca explains the procedures she wants to perform to the unsuspecting wife. We know what the subtle, walking-on-eggshells emotions displayed on each of their faces mean.
The other is when push comes to shove and Paul decides to confront Adriana with the truth. These are two amazing actors--a real-life couple, by the way--in a scene that is nothing short of a tour-de-force...as emotionally draining and REAL as anything you're ever likely to see on film. It can make you feel you're eavesdropping somewhere you shouldn't be. (Which causes me to wonder if they faced that situation for real, would their attitude be, like... WHATEVER...having been there, done that with the other thing?)
Maybe what Tuesday, After Christmas is trying to say is if you believe in Santa, you're just as likely to believe in happily ever after...and that can be a real letdown when the illusion is dispelled.
Grade: A
Rated: R
Stars: Craig Roberts, Yasmine Paige, Paddy Considine, Noah Taylor,
Sally Hawkins
Director: Richard Ayoade
Genre: Comedy/Drama
There's a method to the madness of the films I'm reviewing now. I'm busy preparing my Best Of 2011 list, and have been catching up on a few promising flicks I missed when they came out earlier in the year. All because I want my list to be truly reflective of the best--according to MY impeccable taste, of course!
So now we have Submarine.
Coming of age films (the good ones) are often funny, as well as poignant. Adolescence is a time of self-discovery; of testing one's wings; of taking those first few puppy love licks of another's face...and tasting her pancake makeup... PTOOEY!
The setting is a small town in Wales during the eighties. Fifteen year-old Oliver Tate has two primary concerns: Saving his parents' marriage, and engineering a successful courtship of classmate, Jordana.
Oliver (Craig Roberts) and Jordana (Yasmin Paige) are a quirky pair. Oliver lives a lot inside his head as he narrates much of the action for us. Jordana gets off on burning the hair off his leg with a match. They both participate as do-nothing bystanders when a female classmate is bullied. But they don't really see it as bullying--more like good-natured teasing where everyone is cackling and having a good time--except, rather expectedly, the victim. We will see later that Oliver develops a conscience about it. Jordana...not so much.
Craig's parents have fallen into that comfortable rut that befalls many a long married couple. The passion is gone. Oliver knows this because he has a clever way of monitoring their sexual (of lack thereof) activity. Oliver's dad, Lloyd, (Noah Taylor) is depressed. I mean, what would you call it when he shrugs his shoulders when it's obvious to everyone that his wife Jill (Sally Hawkins) is developing a thing for her old flame, Graham Purvis--a flamboyant guru type who lectures to packed houses, espousing his new-age twaddle (not that all new-age ideas are twaddle, but his are). Purvis is played with ego-dripping brilliance by Paddy Considine.
Oliver's parents are so amusingly stiff upper lip, so pseudo-hip, that they come into his room to explain to him that his mother--in a moment of weakness--performed a sexual act on the guru. "It's alright," his father says. "We've discussed it, and we've moved on."
Great stuff, but what captivated me most about Submarine was the interplay between Oliver and his love interest. Jordana subscribes to the tenet that ya gotta be cruel to be kind, and Oliver is game to play her game. But she is holding something inside about her own family that will test the mettle of their fledgling relationship.
You'll figure out the metaphorical significance of the title Submarine as you go along.
Grade: A
