Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky has directed five films, Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, and now Black Swan. In the first two films, Aronofsky established his brand specializing in disturbing visuals of what was happening in the heads of crazy, drugged-out, unhappy people. Then came The Fountain which is a weird multi-dimensional, multi-time-period epic. Two years ago, he made The Wrestler which broke the mold. It was a nice little movie with strong characters and a compelling story that got a couple of Oscar nominations. With the exception of The Wrestler, I find Aronofsky movies interesting from the point of view of film techniques, but not so interesting as movies. Which brings us to his latest film, Black Swan, which takes Aronofsky back to his roots presenting disturbing visuals of what is happening in the heads of crazy, unhappy people, in particular, Natalie Portman.

In Black Swan, Portman portrays a ballerina, long lost in the obscurity of the corps de ballet, who gets her big chance to star in Swan Lake. She is picked by the director (Vincent Cassel) to replace the aging star of the ballet troupe (Winona Ryder). That's right! You heard me. There has been another Winona Ryder sighting! Anyway, Portman's character is a bit stressed out, not just by her debut on the big stage, but also by the director's emotional abuse, her stage-mother mother (Barbara Hershey), and her competitor for the part (Mila Kunis). Oh and she is anorexic too.

Anyway, this all a bit too much for Portman, who then becomes the stereotypical Aronofsky character who loses it, and starts to experience delusions, hallucinations, nightmares, and you name it. In a mirroring of the ballet itself, Portman begins to see herself undergoing a metamorphosis from the good swan to the evil one. The problem with the Aronofsky brand, seen in Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and Black Swan, is that all his energy seems to go into the visual effects and not into the story and characters.

None of the characters in Black Swan are at all three dimensional, and some, like Barbara Hershey as Portman's mother, and Vincent Cassel as the director, are barely one-dimensional. Mila Kunis does the best job with her character as Portman's would be friend and competitor. I haven't seen Kunis (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) before, but she manages to put some nice complexity into her character. It's nice to see Winona Ryder who is trying to make a bit of a comeback with character parts after so many years in the wilderness. She was also seen in Star Trek last year.

Portman struggles mightily to do something in Black Swan but is defeated by the banality of her character. But the blame has to rest with Aronofsky, who after discovering the importance of character and story in The Wrestler, has completely forgotten it again in Black Swan. This movie is a terrible waste of a nice cast and also of an interesting plot idea. I say "idea" because that is all that it is, and it doesn't get developed beyond a stressed out ballerina who doesn't eat enough and starts to hallucinate. I was excited to see this movie but then very disappointed that the old Aronofsky is back. There are lots of better Christmas movies out there. Go see them.

Love and Other Drugs

Love and Other Drugs is directed by the veteran, Edward Zwick. He seems like a weird choice to direct what seems on the face of it to be a romantic comedy. His last few films, Defiance, Blood Diamond, The Siege, and Courage Under Fire, are all war films of one sort or another. But I think that he gives Love and Other Drugs an edge that it might not have had otherwise. The setup of the movie is slightly strange anyway. This is a love story about a slacker (Jake Gyllenhaal) turned Viagra salesman, who has spent his life getting along on his good looks, and a reclusive artist (Anne Hathaway) with Parkinson's disease. Part of the movie is a bit slapstick as Gyllenhaal and his mentor (Oliver Platt) try to get doctors to sell more Zoloft and Viagra.

But the love story between Gyllenhaal, who has never committed to anything in his life, and Hathaway, who has decided that she doesn't ever want to depend on anyone, is pretty raw. It's not quite as amazing as the stuff going down in Rachel Getting Married including fistfights with Debra Winger, but Love and Other Drugs doesn't pull its punches, at least until the unfortunate climax where the romantic Hollywood formula is applied, and Gyllenhaal engages in a high speed chase down the interstate so that he can flag down Hathaway and express his undying devotion.

But up to that point, Love and Other Drugs is pretty interesting. Gyllenhaal and Platt are good at the comic relief as they lie in wait to ambush doctors and bribe their receptionists. Gyllenhaal first sees Hathaway while in a doctor's waiting room. The predictable wild sex is followed by the breaking down of a lot of walls on both sides as Gyllenhaal has never fallen in love before, and Hathaway has vowed never to fall in love again. The movie ends up being a juxtaposition of slapstick humor and serious romantic issues but it mostly works. The two leads don't just look good but can act as well. And the director keeps things moving. This movie probably won't make my top ten for the year but it's worth seeing.

Eeeeeeeew!

You gotta love Danny Boyle. He has directed Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Millions, and my pick for best movie of the year two years ago, Slumdog Millionaire. He makes unusual movies and mostly they are very good. His new movie is 127 Hours, the real-life story of Aron Ralston (see pic). He's the hiker who was trapped when I rock fell on his arm while he was way off the grid in Canyonlands National Park. Since he didn't tell anyone where he was going, and he was unlikely to be found, he had a choice of slow death, or to try and cut his arm off so he could get away. You all know what he did. Anyway, this may seem like a strange choice for a movie. It's definitely dramatic, but the whole story is about a guy stuck by himself for days while he cuts his own arm off. Yuck.

 

James Franco took on the role of Ralston, and the story is shown in very straightforward way. 127 Hours doesn't waste a lot of time with the back story. In the first scene, Franco is loading up his backpack and getting ready to leave for Canyonlands. The one bit of foreshadowing is that he can't find his Swiss Army knife. He does meet and help out a couple of cute female hikers (Amber Tamblyn & Kate Mara). They invite him to a party, but he fails to tell them where he is going and soon after, he falls into a fissure when a boulder gets loose and ends up with his arm wedged beneath it. He has a little water but no food. So he tries various things to shift or lift the rock but to no avail. 

Franco has a video camera and begins a running commentary including messages to his friends and loved ones. At this point in 127 Hours we start to get the back story of his life.  We meet his parents (Treat Williams & Kate Burton) and his ex-girlfriend (Clémence Poésy) and find out that he's a bit of a slacker who works in a outdoor gear store, and hasn't committed to anything except extreme sports. As time goes on and the water runs out, the flashbacks turn into hallucinations. The supporting cast are good but they aren't on screen very much. If Franco's parents and ex look familiar, you've probably seen them around. Treat Williams has done a bunch of TV and movies (Once Upon a Time in America) and Kate Burton played Meredith Grey's Alzheimer's-inflicted mother on Grey's Anatomy. Clémence Poésy played Fleur Delacour in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The subject matter of 127 Hours, coupled with the fact that the viewer is forced to watch while Franco breaks his arm and then hacks it off with a very blunt instrument, is a bit of a turn off. My girlfriend wouldn't even go into the theatre. She saw Fair Game instead. I watched 127 Hours, but I have to say I closed my eyes quite a bit during the last half hour or so. Despite this, it's a very good film. Franco is great. During what is, in essence, a 90 minute soliloquy, he does a very good job of being upbeat and keeping the story moving, as does the director, Danny Boyle. It's a very simple storyline with a minimum of subplots and the viewer gets dragged along inexorably toward the uplifting but very gory climax. The plot is unbelievable, no more so because it is true. Not only does Franco cut the arm off, but then he has to rappel down a cliff (with one arm) and walk out until he runs into some hikers and is rescued. It is an amazing story told very well but I just don't think many people consider it to be a date movie.

Morning Glory

The wattage in Morning Glory is very high. The stars are Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton, two giants of the screen, plus Rachel McAdams, a very good up and comer. Plus Jeff Goldblum is included for the freak factor. Then, we have Director Roger Michell (Venus, Notting Hill), the writer Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada) and the producer JJ Abrams (Star Trek, Lost). So what went wrong? Why is this movie so bad? I mean my expectations weren't too high. But with Ford, Keaton, and McAdams in the mix, I did expect it to be at least OK. The problem is as always with the script. They spent untold millions on the cast and didn't care enough to have some witty words for the stars to say on screen. That being said, I do get some entertainment value from watching a group of professional actors trying their hardest to rise above the material. And to their credit, the cast of Morning Glory try to do just that.

The plot of Morning Glory, such as it is, follows the ups and mostly downs of the bottom-rated network morning show. The longtime female host (Diane Keaton) is in need of a new partner. She goes through them like drummers in Spinal Tap. The new producer of "Daybreak" (Rachel McAdams) has just been hired by the head of the network (Jeff Goldblum), and decides to go after the network's Walter Cronkite-esque, former anchorman (Harrison Ford). Ford's character is described as "the third worst person in the world." The first two are Kim Jong-il and Angela Lansbury. In case you didn't notice, this is supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, it's about the funniest line in Morning Glory. No wait, the only funny scene in the movie is when Ford goes on a bender the night before his debut on the morning show and McAdams looks for him in every bar in NYC only to find him drinking with Morley Safer, Bob Schieffer and Chris Matthews. 

But if anything, Ford's character is the worst person in the world and very one-dimensional at that. Here's where the "try to rise above the material" part comes in, because Ford tries really hard to get a least two dimensions out of his character, and I did appreciate the effort. The most wasted talent on Morning Glory is Diane Keaton. Did she see a script before she signed on? I can't believe she did. She is barely in this movie, appearing on the set with Ford or McAdams every 15 minutes or so.

Morning Glory is a Ford/McAdams movie for better or worse. And McAdams tries as hard as Ford does to rise above her one dimensional perky-loser persona. They give her a boyfriend (Patrick Wilson), also terribly wasted in his few scenes. See him in Angels in America for an example of three-dimensional characters. At least I sort of liked McAdams' character and (maybe) wanted her to succeed, whereas you get tired very fast of Ford rejecting McAdams' every suggestion even though you know that it will turn out that Ford isn't the worst person in the world and a heart-warming ending. And, Diane Keaton, what a waste. What I won't do is waste more of your time reading this. Don't see Morning Glory. See one of the many good movies that these good actors have been in.

The Boy who Lived then Died then Lived

It's hard to remember a world before Harry Potter. But it is only 13 years since the first book appeared, and 9 years since the first film. So the actors playing Harry, Hermione, and Ron (Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint) were 11 years old in HP and the Sorcerer's Stone (see pic above) and are about 20 now (see pic below). It took me a while to get caught up in the Harry Potter mania, but by the time the last book came out I was a believer. I was observing at Mauna Kea when HP and the Deathly Hallows was released so someone had to drive down the mountain and buy books for everyone and bring them up to the observatory.

The movies have had four different directors including Chris Columbus (1 and 2), Alfonso Cuarón (3), Mike Newell (4), and David Yates (5,6,7,8).There are 8 films because HP and the Deathly Hallows has been split into two films. Part II is due out in July 2011. On the whole the movies have been good, and have followed the books pretty closely for fear of a backlash by the teens (now twenty somethings) who have memorized the books. The main actors, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint have been more than adequate, but it has been a joy to see the panoply of British character actors who play the supporting cast. The author of the books, J. K. Rowling, had asked that the whole cast be British so we get to see Richard Harris, Michael Gambon, John Hurt, Robbie Coltrane, Ralph Fiennes, Julie Walters, Helena Bonham Carter, Bill Nighy, Richard Griffiths, Jason Isaacs, Timothy Spall, Rhys Ifans, Maggie Smith, John Cleese, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Emma Thompson, Miranda Richardson, Brendan Gleeson, Robert Hardy, and Imelda Staunton. These great British character actors have 28 Oscar nominations between them.

If you haven't been living on Alpha Centauri for the last 13 years, you know all about Harry Potter, and you know that HP and the Deathly Hallows is the last book of the series in which Harry is on a collision course for a final confrontation with "He Who Shall Not Be Named." But that is going to happen in Part II along with the decimation of the cast of characters that we have come to know and love. With the exception of Mad-Eyed Moodie (Brendan Gleeson) everyone is pretty much still alive at the end of Part I. Unlike the other books (and movies), HP and the Deathly Hallows is not set at Hogwarts. Instead, Harry with lots of help from Hermione and a little from Ron is scouring the Earth for the pieces of Voldemorts soul that are hidden in seven Horcruxes. As Harry is about to leave on his quest, Ron says, we won't last two days without Hermione. He is so right.  She has this great bottomless bag which contains among other things, a tent. Besides Horcruxes, the big word in HP and the Deathly Hallows is Apparate. Every time that Voldemort sends someone to kill Harry, which is basically all the time in Part I, he and Hermione and Ron are forced to Apparate, which is the equivalent of "Scotty, beam me up" in Star Trek.

I went to see HP and the Deathly Hallows with my girlfriend who has seen all of the Harry Potter movies but hasn't read any of the books. She was whispering to me all through the movie asking who was who and what was happening. HP and the Deathly Hallows is a bit similar Lord of the Rings. I don't think you can follow who is doing what to whom if you haven't read the books.

All this being said, HP and the Deathly Hallows Part I is pretty good. It is really nice to see Harry and Hermione and even Ron again. There is a fair amount of standing around wondering what to do (by Harry and Ron, never by Hermione). But the movie gets going, and I do love it when the Avada Kedavra curses start flying. There are one or two new faces including Bill Nighy as the Minister of Magic. He won't be back for Part II. As usual my fav, Nymphadora Tonks (Natlia Tena), is given short shrift. But Snape (Alan Rickman), Neville (Matthew Lewis), and Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) are only in about one scene apiece, and McGonagall (Maggie Smith) none at all.

Even though there's so much going on (it was a very thick book) that only Harry, Hermione and Ron get a lot of screen time, pretty much every character from the previous six Harry Potter books, who is still alive and kicking, shows up in HP and the Deathly Hallows on one side or the other. Although, we only see Dumbledore dead. It was nice to see Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poésy)  (Book 4) and Ollivander (John Hurt) (Book 1) again, but do you remember who they are? There are lots of details mentioned maybe once or twice in some previous book like the fact that Harry and Voldemort's wands are related that come into play in HP and the Deathly Hallows. And did I mention that you really need to know what a Horcrux is. HP and the Deathly Hallows suffers a bit from the fact that it is Part I and is setting the scene for the climactic confrontation between the Order of the Phoenix/Dumbledore's Army and the Death Eaters, and in particular between Harry and Voldemort. Now we just have to wait until July. I'll wait until then to go on and on about how I can't accept Hermione and Ron as a couple. At least they don't kiss in HP and the Deathly Hallows. The only kissing that Hermione does is with Harry while naked! Better go see it....

Never Let Me Go

It's amazing how someone can come out of nowhere and become the "it" girl. Last year, Carey Mulligan was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for An Education, and this year she appears in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Never Let Me Go. One minute, she was nowhere and the next, she is everywhere. Same for Andrew Garfield who also stars in Never Let Me Go and in The Social Network. Garfield and Mulligan along with Keira Knightly are young adults who have grown up in what seems at first to be a normal private school except for the fact that the students are afraid to go outside the school grounds and never go home for holidays. As we soon learn, they are being raised for only one purpose to be organ donors to the person they have been cloned from.

Never Let Me Go begins when the main characters are young children and they are only dimly aware of the future ahead of them. One teacher (Sally Hawkins) tries to tell the students what is really going on but she gets sacked by the imperial headmistress (Charlotte Rampling). But even Rampling is ambivalent toward these cloned children.  As she says later, "We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all."  Later as young adults, they know what is happening, but are very fatalistic about it. There are no attempts to escape their fate like in The Island where Ewen McGregor runs away when he finds that he has a similar fate awaiting him. In Never Let Me Go, it is rumored that the only possible means of escape is to fall in love in which case their sentences are stayed for a few years. But this proves to be a false hope and so we have to watch as first Knightley's character and then Garfield's start to undergo the knife and begin to die.

Never Let Me Go is based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro who also wrote The Remains of the Day and The White Countess. The director, Mark Romanek, yet another music video director, has directed only one feature film previously, One Hour Photo, and that was 8 years ago. But that movie was probably good preparation for Never Let Me Go which has little or no action and is all about the internal emotions of the three main characters as they come to terms with their "nasty, brutish and short" lives.  The cast is very good, particularly Mulligan, who has shown in her other roles a gift for understating her character. Garfield also seems well matched to this role. And Knightly, in a rare supporting role, is good as the most unhappy of the trio. Never Let Me Go is not a happy film but it is very well done.  This film like so many others is about the characters being in death spiral that cannot be stopped. And there are lots of scenes of long longing looks between the doomed students. But Never Let Me Go is a very beautiful film despite its quiet desperation. It will be getting a few Oscar nominations I think.

The Social Network

The Social Network probably had the most buzz of any movie coming out in 2010. It generated huge interest because, well, most of us, myself included, are part of the 500 million users of Facebook. And, of course, this review will be posted on Facebook when it is finished. But beyond that, while The Social Network is clearly a biopic of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook (more on that later), it is clearly a fictionalized biography. And when you are watching the film, it is fun to try and guess what is true and what isn't. As is made clear (murky?) in the many lawsuits that started to fly around once Facebook (originally The Facebook) became a phenomenon, it wasn't just the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). First there are the Winklevoss twins, who hired Zuckerberg to write the code for their social networking site, and also Zuckerberg's best friend and partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). And then there is Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the inventor of Napster who woos Zuckerberg away to California.

Although some (much?) of The Social Network has been fictionalized, it's a fun movie to watch. This film is all about betrayal. And, of course, the fact that the Winklevoss twins won their law suit and got $65 million, and Saverin (as portrayed by Garfield, pictured at right) won his suit and is now a billionaire, might give you an idea of who screwed whom. The role of Sean Parker (as portrayed by Timberlake, pictured below) who was instrumental in convincing Zuckerberg to screw his friends over, was an eye opener for me. 

The Social Network was written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) so my expectations were high going in. And I'm happy to say that the movie lives up to its hype. Somehow, Sorkin and Fincher have made a story about geeky guys sitting at computers 24/7 into an intense spy thriller. The Social Network is a lot like The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's book and movie about the Mercury astronauts. It is a meta-history, mixing real and fictional events into something that none the less feels right. 

It's very fun guessing what is real and what is fiction while you are watching The Social Network. Jesse Eisenberg was born to play Zuckerberg and he projects an amazing arrogant, geeky nastiness. Andrew Garfield, who I really haven't seen before, but now have seen twice in a month (He's also in Never Let Me Go), is a revelation. He's wonderful as the loyal friend of Zuckerberg who gets screwed over and fired, but then sues and wins.

Zuckerberg and his friends mostly stayed out of the fray as The Social Network was opening, but they were very serious about stating that Zuckerberg has had a girlfriend all along. My favorite scene in the movie is aright at the beginning and sets the tone for the whole movie. It shows Zuckerberg's girlfriend (Rooney Mara) dumping him except that he doesn't know that he is being dumped. It is a great scene written by the wonderful Aaron Sorkin, where there are about five conversations going on at once. When Zuckerberg's girlfriend leaves, she says, "You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole."

Get Low

Robert Duvall seems like he has been around forever. He has been making movies as long as I've been seeing them, starting with Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962. He has been nominated for an Oscar six times, winning once for Tender Mercies. He's one of the best of all time. His new film is Get Low which is a nice starring vehicle for an actor who is 79 years old. Duvall's character is a mysterious old hermit in the 1930's, who arrives in town one day to arrange his own funeral which is to take place while he is still alive. After the local minister (Gerald McRaney) demurs, the director of the local funeral home (Bill Murray) and his assistant (Lucas Black) step in and offer to arrange the funeral, for a price. At first the reason for Duvall's character to want this kind of funeral after avoiding human contact for 30 years is mysterious. One person who may know something is Duvall's sweetheart (Sissy Spacek) from 50 years ago. But even she is in for a surprise when all is revealed.

The story of Get Low is loosely based on a real-life hermit in Tennessee who arranged to have a funeral in 1938 while he was still alive. The funeral became a huge event with as many as 8,000 people attending. The denouement of Get Low is also a huge funeral with Robert Duvall in attendance along with a casket that he made himself. Of course, this is a movie so Duvall has a dark secret that has been eating away at him all these years and he wants to unburden himself before he dies. Even though Get Low has several A-list Hollywood actors, it still has the feel of a small Indie movie. The director, Aaron Schneider, is a first timer but he is a long-time cinematographer and won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short in 2003.

 Get Low is an entertaining movie, not the least just to see Robert Duvall and Bill Murray together on the screen. The two roles of curmudgeonly hermit and smarmy funeral director were made for these two guys. Lucas Black does very well up against these heavyweights and it's nice to see Sissy Spacek too. The two parts of the story, the first, whimsical, and the second, very dark, don't fit together that well, but Get Low is still worth putting on your Netflix lists even though it is mostly gone from the theatres. I'm guessing Duvall will get an Oscar nomination for this one.

Once Upon a Time in the West... of Italy

It's true. I love George Clooney. I've found that people seem to love him or hate him. He's made some films that I really like, Ocean's Eleven, Michael Clayton, Up in the Air, and Good Night and Good Luck. You can argue that he doesn't have much acting range and that he always plays the same character. But he does take chances with his roles and can do quite a bit with that one character he plays particularly in Up in the Air and Michael Clayton. His new movie is The American. In this film, Clooney's character is having a very bad day, over and over again. He plays a world-weary hit man who is reaching the end of the line. The first scene (very Fargo in Sweden), where he has to dispatch a couple of hitmen sent to kill him and then kills his girlfriend (Irina Björklund) because she has seen too much, makes it clear that he is a sociopath, but a very good-looking sociopath.

Then, he is off to Italy so that he can shoot a movie while staying at his nice house on Lake Como. Oh wait, I am mixing up George Clooney and his character. He gets in touch with his handler. We know there is trouble ahead because his handler always gives a big sigh when he answers the phone and hears Clooney's voice on the other end. Clooney is given one last job to do, involving many long scenes of him building a sniper rifle out of spare parts borrowed from an Italian auto mechanic who is the illegitimate son of the local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) who befriends Clooney and tries to save his soul. But as Clooney says, "I don't think God is very interested in my soul." He is making the gun for a beautiful hitwoman (Thekla Reuten) who appears from time to time to shoot and flirt with Clooney. But his romantic interest is in a prostitute (Violante Placido) (yes with a heart of gold) who offers him a dream of what life could be like if he actually had a life.

In case we aren't getting what kind of archetype Clooney is playing, he walks into a bar one night in the little Italian town where he is hiding out and Once Upon a Time in the West is playing on the TV. The barman explains that the director is Sergio Leone, an Italian. The American isn't exactly a remake of Once Upon a Time in the West but there are similarities. At first glance, Clooney seems to share some sociopathic tendencies with Henry Fonda's evil assassin, but in the end he is more like Jason Robard's desperado who is seeking some redemption at the end of his life. And the ending of The American has some echoes of Once Upon a Time in the West. In case you were wondering, no one plays a harmonica in The American.

 The American is an interesting character study, but only of one character, that of Clooney's hitman. Paolo Bonacelli, as the old priest who is Clooney's last hope, does the best job of making a real character in his few scenes. Everyone else other than Clooney is a bit one-dimensional. The director, Anton Corbijn is yet another music video director. That being said, The American is the Anti-Bourne movie. There are no montages of 2 second cuts and after the first scene of the movie, Clooney doesn't kill anyone until near the end. The American is all about the death spiral of Clooney's hitman and so it is just a matter of time before it all falls apart. And this movie is all about watching and waiting with Clooney for this to happen. Don't see The American if you are having a bad day.