The Beaver

Jodie Foster’s The Beaver is a fairly successful and affecting film about a middle-aged man (Mel Gibson) who, unaccountably, has drifted into a deep depression that has dismantled his business and his family. He is rescued (sort of) by a beaver puppet he finds in a dumpster. (It actually plays better than my summary suggests.)

His wife (Foster) and teenage son (Anton Yelchin) have had it with Downer Dad (and, yes, that plays as harshly as it sounds) and when he begins channeling his ego through a puppet that talks like the macho-version of the gecko from Geico it delights his younger son (Riley Thomas Stewart) but is not a sign of positive healing to other folks – at first. The puppetry – which I thought for a minute was a sign that the film was to be read as a parable – is surreal at times, played for broad laughs at others, but Gibson pulls it off with brio.

The movie comprises parallel stories that track Dad’s ups and downs with that of older son, Porter, who writes cribbed essays and term papers for classmates for pay so that he can take a pre-college trek across the country to visit sites that altered the course of history. (Now that’s an interesting idea for a movie.) Yelchin is a fine actor but his character was an annoyance to me because, again unaccountably, he despises his father and fears becoming like him, which, of course, all but seals his fate.

Much of what Foster puts on the screen is entertaining, and Gibson (as difficult as he might be for some folks to stomach) is pretty terrific. The story, written by Kyle Killen, has some puzzling elements – primarily the reason for Dad’s gloominess and why No. 1 son is such a gigantic pill. I suppose when you’re working on 90 minutes and change, some exposition has to be sacrificed.

Blue Valentine

Derek Cianfrance is best known as a documentarian and his beautifully crafted "hate story" Blue Valentine has the rawness of real life, which is what makes it nearly impossible to watch. Cianfrance directs Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, both riveting in their roles as a young couple who should be neither married nor parents but they are and are in torments. Told with a fluid, time-shifting narrative line, Blue Valentine delineates with documentary clarity where the innocent romance between these two damaged people began to unravel -- and it was almost immediately after they met. Williams is indeed spectacular, and Oscar-worthy, as the conflicted enabler Cindy, who has nothing left to give to a man she thought she loved but now loathes beyond speech. One particularly sickening moment comes late in the film when Gosling's Dean -- an irredeemable, self-serving narcissist who has been dipped in charm -- tries to embrace Cindy in her father's kitchen as hollow gesture of reconciliation. She whimpers and cringes during the embrace and her revulsion oozes off the screen. It's a devastating moment in a truly powerful film.

The Eagle

Kevin Macdonald's sword and sandal epic "The Eagle" has a cruisy Abercrombie & Fitch style that is not incidental considering the film stars Channing Tatum who epitomizes A&F's homoerotic narcissism. Tatum is strikingly handsome and cameras love him but he seems to be most comfortable in front of one when he's dancing (see Step Up). And yet, Tatum isn't half bad as the Roman cohort centurion Marcus Aquila on the hunt in the British Highlands for the ninth legion's lost golden eagle emblem. He doesn't show nearly as much skin as he customarily does in his movies, which might be a sign that he wants to be taken seriously from now on. The film still has a sticky masculinity, most of it provided by Tatum's buffed-up co-star Jamie Bell, who plays Aquila's bitterly aggrieved slave Esca. Bell, who I've always thought is a fine actor with a distinctively jug-eared handsomeness, doesn't seem to mind playing second fiddle to hunkier leading men, many of whom he ends up outshining (see Defiant & Jumper). That's true of The Eagle, too, though the circle Bell acts around Tatum is not nearly as wide as I expected it would be. In the end, Tatum carries the flick nobly (as the poster suggests) though his accent is spotty and he has no acting range to speak of. The Eagle is entertaining enough though not groundbreaking in any sense and, oddly, there is not a single female speaking part.

The Green Hornet

Reposting to correct error. Kato was not John Cho (of Harold and Kumar) but Jay Chou (of ....) .

The problem with Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet is not Seth Rogen's now familiar schlubby self-centeredness (which pretty much is the extent of his character portfolio). The problem with the movie is its length, loudness and loutishness. I thought Rogen's Pineapple Express (which he also scripted with Evan Goldberg) had the same problems, even though that film was crafted by a different director. That's not to say The Green Hornet has no entertainment value. It has piles and piles of it, if you enjoy visually arresting martial arts battles (courtesy of Jay Chou's Kato), high-speed vehicular crack ups and the destruction of urban architecture. It also features Christoph Waltz, the menacing Nazi interrogator from Inglourious Basterds, as a sartorially challenge criminal mastermind. For a former newshound like myself, the picture packs some clever insights into contemporary journalism, and the final (endless) shoot-out actually takes place in a newspaper press room. (The first time that's been done, I bet.) In the end, if you like Rogen's schtick (and not everyone does) and you enjoy your jokes evenly divided between smart and snark (ditto) and your gun-play deafening, then The Green Hornet is the ticket. P.S., I saw it in 2D and don't think I missed much.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Terry Gilliam is an auteur with a singular vision so you know what you're going to get before the first reel starts rolling: fish-eyed lenses, dream(y) sequences, enormous puppety heads, slapsticky pratfalls and a bit of moralizing and vanquishing of evildoers. In other words, you get Monty Python on steroids but that...'s a really good thing. I enjoy Gilliam's films, mostly, but often they leave me feeling like that enormous diner from The Meaning of Life ... just one more clever cinematic device and I'll explode.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a Gilliam picture through and through with the mixed blessing of also being Heath Ledger's last film, the one during the filming of which he died. Ledger is wonderful as a mysterious conman who is taken in by Doctor Parnassus's traveling troupe of fantasy merchants who are on the run from a thousand-year-old deal with the devil. (Yes, Dr. Faustus.) The recasting of Ledger's unfinished scenes didn't feel as gimmicky as I had feared and considering the story is about getting lost in the fertile imagination of the title character, played sportingly by Christopher Plummer, having Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell step in wasn't at all jarring.
I was also delighted to see Andrew Garfield, who delivered a sparkling performance in this year's Social Network, as the film's lovelorn protagonist and Lily Cole, a striking young British actress with whom I was unfamiliar, as the good / bad doctor's daughter. Rounding out the principals in this entertaining picture was Verne Troyer (Austin Powers' Mini-Me) as Parnassus' trusted company foreman.

Tron: Legacy

Some films get a pass for sheer audacity, even if their weaknesses are tough to overlook. I think Tron: Legacy fits that category. It's an audaciously visual and aural (thanks to Daft Punk) experience that is much more captivating and mind-bending than the over-praised Inception, IMO. The weaknesses of the Tron sequel, however, are the story and the mystic logic of the universe that computer ubermensch Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) created back in the day (read Tron [1982]). His son, Sam, played with brio by Garrett Hedlund, enters his "dearly departed" dad's digital world and reunites with his father, now a zen master of sorts, to battle the elder Flynn's digital clone, Clu (played by a digitally younger Bridges). Both Sam and the picture are aided immeasurably by the presence of the winsome Olivia Wilde (Dr. House's 13) as Quorra (pronounced Cora), the last surviving member of a race of "beings" that miraculously appeared one day and was nearly exterminated in short-order by the maniacal Clu. The movie's fight scenes are beyond spectacular but they all culminate, more or less, with Kevin Flynn admitting that maybe he'd made a mistake in reaching for perfection. Yes, it's all nonsense but it's a beautiful ride.

Valhalla Rising

Mads Mikkelsen (the bleeding-eyed Le Chiffre from Casino Royale) plays One-Eye, a mute and half-blind escaped Viking slave from some unidentified Nordic outpost who, along with his towheaded child interpreter, hops a ship bound for the Holy Land to rescue Jerusalem from the infidels but doesn't quite make it. This is t...he premise of Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising, a curious episodic film that's more a collection of striking tableaux than an actual motion picture, IMO. The script contains little actual dialogue, mostly burly unwashed men (they're Vikings but they sound like they're from the Scottish Highlands) sitting in a longboat or on a boggy shore essentially waiting to die. That is to say, the film is beautifully shot (despite the bloodletting) and even though it makes motions toward heavier philosophical questions about the divine and the sacred it doesn't offer much to think about.

The King's Speech

The King's Speech has many delightful moments but not a sufficient number to justify this eye-rolling poster that suggests it's a comedy. It most certainly is not. At the heart of this story of England's King George VI (the father of the current monarch) is his struggle not only with his speech impediment (a stammer)... but more importantly with the trauma that created it. This element gives the film such resonance and emotional gravitas that I didn't mind its predictable structure. The speech of the title (if you read it as "oration" and not "elocution") is a crowning achievement of movie storytelling and is enormously satisfying. Colin Firth as the king, Geoffrey Rush as his speech tutor and Helena Bonham Carter as George VI's Queen Elizabeth are individually and collectively wonderful.

127 Hours

Danny Boyle's 127 Hours devotes so little time establishing the main character of this riveting and, yes, briefly repulsive film that it got me wondering: Was Boyle using the harrowing experience of climber / cayoneer Aron Ralston as a device to put us all on notice that, to misquote the bumper sticker, "Life is too short to be a dick."

Of course, other readings are just as plausible, including that it is simply a cinematic rendering of Ralston's tale of his misadventure, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place." But Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, Sunshine) is such an intelligent and insightful filmmaker that I can't resist thinking more is going on here. No matter. It's a splendid movie whatever the case.

The supremely egoless James Franco carries this picture in a tour de force performance as Ralston, who was pinned by a bolder against the wall of a narrow canyon in Utah. Franco's Ralston is a rambling and self-centered man-child but not stupid or careless -- just unlucky. Through flashbacks and hallucinations we get a sense of who Ralston is, but it is never clear if these dreams are reliable memories, wishes or premonitions or a mix of all three.

Despite his quirkiness, Ralston's resourcefulness (and spiritedness) saved his life as he eventually snipped and sawed and hacked his way through the tissue, veins and nerves of his right arm to free himself from the rock. The amputation scene, which lasts about 3 minutes, is craftily staged by Boyle but it is, unquestionably, not for weak stomachs. Even so, it must be seen to get the full effect of this terrific film.

The Tourist

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Tourist is as beautiful and anemic as its star Angelina Jolie. The film, which also stars Johnny Depp, does not provide enough fiber in terms of story or red meat in terms of action to be a full cinematic meal. (Stop that metaphor!)

This tale of mistaken identity fails to put the wrong guy (Depp) in real peril, and unlike her earlier performance in the star vehicle Salt, Jolie does not work up a sweat here. I actually got the feeling she's was indifferent to the outcome of all of the cat-and-mousing as I was.

Von Donnersmarck stages two uninvolving chases and an interminable last act that would have been much more satisfying -- oddly enough -- if either Jolie or Depp (or both) had not survived the last reel. Tedioso!

True Grit

The Coen Brothers' decision to remake (remodel) the 1969 classic western True Grit seemed curious to me, but the smartness of the film's screenplay, the seamlessness of the cinematography and key performances testify to the Coens' gifts and vision as filmmakers. I loved it.

The story of the odd pairing of a young girl ...and a gristly lawman on the trail of the scoundrel who shot down the girl's father is intact but the language has been refashioned into something bordering on Shakespearean, like David Milch's HBO series Deadwood, without the unrelenting profanity. The script sparkles with intelligence -- as most Coen scripts do.

Hailee Steinfeld's performance as the aggrieved 14-year-old Mattie Ross has been highly praised and deservedly so. She's tremendous. A horse-trading scene between Steinfeld and veteran character actor Dakin Matthews near the beginning of the film is splendid and is an early indication of the quality of this young lady's performance. That Steinfeld's work and that of Coen fave Jeff Bridges (the Dude) as the aging and drunken marshal Rueben "Rooster" Cogburn and Matt Damon as the officious Texas Ranger LaBeouf (pronounced LaBeef) were ignored by the Hollywood Foreign Press (Golden Globes) is curious indeed.

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is the movie from hell ... which is a good thing. It's the story of the sexually repressed ballerina from hell (Natalie Portman) who is tormented by the stage mother from hell (Barbara Hershey), stalked by the understudy from hell (Mila Kunis) and fondled by the company director from hell ...(Vincent Cassel). All of this hellacious drama is played out to the strains of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake.

Comparisons have made to Polanski's Repulsion in which Catherine Deneuve goes quietly mad over a long weekend in her Paris apartment. While Deneuve's repressed manicurist's frightening walk into madness felt gradual, Portman's prima ballerina Nina's downward spiral into hell is rapid and precipitous. Aronofsky's introduces Nina as needy, unstable and borderline masochistic.

It would be easy enough to lay Nina's estrangement from sanity at the door of her controlling and whacked out Mom who doesn't know the meaning of personal boundaries or the controlling and whacked artistic director whose idea of creative tension involve forcing his tongue down Nina's throat and other appendages elsewhere.

Don't mistake, both of these characters are truly repugnant, but I think Aronofsky might be going for something else here in this film. Portman's Nina is wound so tightly by her own monomaniacal quest for transcendent perfection that she's driven herself crazy. No, the demon mother and predatory dance master don't help, but I think Aronofsky is saying that in the end we're all our own creations.

The Fighter

David O. Russell's The Fighter is a superb boxing movie that doesn't have a whole lot of boxing in it -- at least not the type that goes on in a roped ring. Most of the sparring in the film is between a quartet of exciting heavy hitters -- Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo -- which isn't to say their battles are any less bloody than those staged in Atlantic City, Vegas and London. In fact, if you listen carefully, you can actually hear the crunching of bone and tearing of sinew as these champion performers hurl their anger, bitterness and frustration at each other and the world they can't seem to affect quickly enough.

Wahlberg and Bale play boxing brothers in a large Lowell, Massachusetts, family that has investing its hopes and dreams in the two sons. Bale's Dicky became a town legend when he knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard during a bout, although the circumstances of the champ's tumble has been disputed. Dicky is now a washed up and washed out crack addict whose only obsession other than scoring rocks is training his younger brother Micky (Wahlberg) to a boxing title, two pursuits which appear to work in opposition to each other. He's walking disaster for himself and his family. Wahlberg, who appears to be a favorite of Russell's having appeared in the director's Three Kings and I (heart) Huckabees, delivers one of the most focused performances as the conflicted but devoted younger brother. He is the heart of the picture.

Melissa Leo (a personal favorite of mine since her days on Homicide) plays Alice Ward, mother to both Dicky and Micky, and a creature of singular domineering neediness -- an inspired character and performance.

And the redoubtable Amy Adams plays Micky's love interest and muse whose flintiness ignites her boyfriend's desire to free himself from the control of his enmeshed and carnivorous family and try to chart a course of his own design -- and take her along with him.

Yes, Russell does stage three exciting boxing matches, and they are filmed smartly and economically, and all in service to this true story of love and liberation. It is a terrific movie.

Man from Earth (2007)

Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth (2007) ponders the nature of life and probes questions of mortality, history and knowledge, more precisely, how is it we know what we know. It's how these undeniably heavy themes are introduced that makes the film such a surprise.

A respected and highly favored history professor has announced to his colleagues that he's leaving after 10 years on the faculty. His friends -- among them, a biologist, anthropologist, archeologist and psychiatrist -- gather at his home to say goodbye and ask him why he's leaving his tenured position so suddenly. It's then that he reveals he's actually 14,000 years old. From that incredible premise, Bixby, a celebrated sci-fi writer who died the year after this film was released, crafts a decidedly theatrical but satisfying treatment of the meaning of life that contains not a single cliche and has a fascinating reveal in its last quarter. Highly entertaining and not just for eggheads.

Love and Other Drugs

Brokeback Mountain co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are reunited in Edward Zwick's Love and Other Drugs to do a whole different kind of two-step as a couple of supremely insecure but glib people engaged in all manner of painful, and painfully funny, battles with themselves, each other and the world.

Gyllenhaal plays the emotionally stunted pharmaceutical salesman Jamie who despite all of his natural proclivities falls in love with his f-buddy Maggie (Hathaway), who has erected walls around her heart 12 feet high and 4 feet thick because she's going through the early stages of Parkinson's disease and fears abandonment. Both Gyllenhaal and Hathaway are stellar, as are Oliver Platt as Jamie's antacid-popping partner and Josh Gad as Jamie's rich and doughy younger brother, who gets some of the best lines in the film.

If you enjoy watching beautiful people cavort acrobatically, sans apparel, while espousing at length about what little use they have for human connections, you'll love this movie. You might recall that Zwick was one of the creators of thirtysomething and that program's knowing sensibility about human frailities is all over this movie.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- part 1 of the final installment in the book / film phenomenon -- veteran Potterologist David Yates delivers many wonderful things to the audience -- a cogent, intelligent story; even more imaginative camerawork; inspired animation; splendid performances by every living actor;... heartbreak and humor. And for ardent fans of the diminutive wizard, who comes of age in this film, the movie settles once and for all the question that keeps them up at night. The answer is boxer briefs. (The other burning question was answered when Daniel Radcliffe dropped trou for Equus, first in London and then on Broadway. Cheeky bugger.

Unstoppable

Tony Scott's hugely entertaining Unstoppable is a tried-and-true Hollywood action flick in which hardworking blue-collar stiffs -- in this case Pennsylvania railroad workers in pursuit of a runaway train -- outsmart and outmaneuver (literally in both cases) the suits in headquarters, whose only interest is minimizing t...he damage to the company's stocks. Denzel Washington, who plays a veteran railman, is a consummate performer who is uncommonly good at playing opposite younger actors, here Chris Pine as the hotheaded and insecure newbie conductor Will. Pine is equally as adept at playing callow youthful studs, who take their lumps but eventually end up saving the day despite their faults. Rosario Dawson as a railyard supervisor, Kevin Dunn as a callous corporate v.p., and Kevin Corrigan as a federal railway inspector each make strong contributions in this story that was leanly crafted by Mark Bomback. Good times.

Catfish

Catfish is a curious documentary about a long-distance online relationship that takes a couple of bizarre turns before the big reveal -- which was telegraphed from the first frame but was for me surprising all the same. And that's the puzzlement. Why was the second half of this film so riveting and haunting?

Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost filmed Schulman's brother Yaniv's eight-month courtship of the mysterious Megan and follow him to her home in Michigan after Yaniv (Nev) begins to suspect she's not who she claims and wants to see for himself. Well, of course she's not but it's who she really is
that's the core of this unsettling movie.

Those of us who spend a lot of time on Facebook might feel a special sympathy for the battered souls drifting about in cyberspace who occasionally bump into each other -- for better and for worse -- and hope we are not counted
among those poor saps who find comfort in the virtual. Others might find it tempting to wag their fingers and cluck their tongues disapprovingly at the folks at the center of this drama: "See? That's what you get!" To do so would be to miss the point altogether, I think.

Some have questioned whether this documentary was staged, at least in part. Perhaps. But to me that's not reason enough to dismiss the picture's message(s) about authenticity, connectedness and the undeniable human need to be and feel loved.

Hereafter

I believe Clint Eastwood's enduring legacy as a director will be a catalog of films that are, collectively, a tribute to human decency in spite of human frailty. Eastwood appears to be drawn to stories about damaged people caught up in circumstances of their own contrivance or those created by nature or fate.

And so we have Hereafter, which appears to be Eastwood's treatment of that imponderable question, "What's Next?" ~ and all three reasons for human misery are on display. Matt Damon, the co-star with Morgan Freeman of Eastwood's Invictus (2009), is George Lonegan, a psychic who has been gifted with the ability to speak to the dearly departed by touching the hands of a survivor.

This curse, as Lonegan calls it, has made it difficult for him to form lasting relationships and so he is resigned to a life of lonely bachelorhood until ... . The script by Peter Morgan. who wrote Frost/Nixon and The Last King of Scotland, also features the stories of a French journalist (the beautiful Cecile de France [is that her real name?]) and a London school boy (played by the twins Frankie and George McLaren), both of whom have had close encounters with death -- the journalist during a tsunami (the creation of which is an impressive cinematic feat) and the boy as he watches his twin die after being hit by truck.

Eastwood and Morgan bring the three characters together in a final reel that is teary (an Eastwood signature move) and ultimately uplifting (ditto). The question "What's Next" is not answered but, in the end, that's really not the point of the film, which is actually to get viewers to ask ourselves "What About Now?"

Like Dandelion Dust

Jon Gunn's Like Dandelion Dust is a quietly, cunningly affecting film about the battle between birth and adoptive parents over a 6-year-old boy. Both sets of parents -- Mira Sorvino and Barry Pepper as the "birthers" and Cole Hauser and Kate Levering as the adopters who've been the only parents the boy has known ~ are raggedly desperate because of their personal weakness but supremely loving of the boy, Joey, played by Maxwell Perry Cotton. Gunn directs both Sorvino and Pepper, the decidedly lower-middle class couple who are victims of their own poor choices, in deeply moving performances that are played almost entirely on their faces. Hauser and Levering ~ whose wealth sets them apart but not altogether positively from the birth parents ~ are also wonderful in this refreshingly intimate and memorable film.

Red (2010)

Is Robert Schwentke's Red enjoyable? Well, yes and no. Everywhere you turn there are the wrinkled though not unattractive faces of Hollywood stars shaking off their age to do some ridiculously contrived bit of super-spy action to get the oldsters in the audience, among whom I proudly counted myself, to guffaw and applaud in appreciation. Take that you whipper-snappers! It's all explosive fun. Bruce Willis -- at 55 he's only three years my senior-- leads a cast of cinema legends (Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, Richard Dreyfuss) in a secret agent parody based on a DC comics series about retired covert assets who strap on their semi's to take on the bad guys, which, according to Tinsel Town's liberal establishment is the vice president of the United States and his private contractor handlers. Most of it is played for laughs, though I wish, for once, they wouldn't sacrifice the black guy to remind us of how noble we are.

Let Me In

The chilling "Let Me In" is as much about everyday childhood predation as it is about the mythic variety represented in smarter vampire lore. This wonderfully enigmatic film, directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield), focuses on the relationship between the eternal tween Abby, played with preternatural intelligence by Chloe Moretz (the true star of Kick Ass) and the tortured and disaffected Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who formed a mesmerizing duo with Viggo Mortensen in The Road). Though Reeves, who also wrote the screenplay, stages a few startlingly bloody feeding scenes the real horror for many who see this film will surely be the torture the delicate and lonely Owen endures at the hand of a child bully as sadistic as any I've seen. Kudos to young Dylan Minnette for this truly frightening performance. Let Me In is disturbing in many, many ways and very few of them have to do with the undead.

The Social Network

The first five minutes of David Fincher's The Social Network, scripted by the inestimable Aaron Sorkin, is quite likely the best and briefest exposition of a central character I have seen in film in quite awhile -- if ever. Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard student who co-founds Facebook, ripping off c...lassmates and friends along the way. The scene takes place in a bar where Zuckerberg is having a beer with his "girlfriend," Boston University student Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). By the end of the scene, he's insulted and demeaned the young woman eight ways to Sunday and is so blind and deaf to his own callousness that he is mystified and pissed off by her dropping him like a sack of potatoes. Later he trashes her on his blog, which sets him on the path to worldwide notoriety and disdain. I've enjoyed Eisenberg's work -- Adventureland, Zombieland and The Squid and the Whale -- and his performance as the accidental sociopath Zuckerberg is remarkable.

My Art

Harbison Forest Sunday Morning

A rare sighting.