The Sessions

Early in Ben Lewin's wonderfully touching film The Sessions, sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Greene is undressing paralyzed poet / journalist Mark O'Brien when he shrieks and swears to heaven. The scene is startling because Cheryl's ministrations to that point had been tender and enticing. Soon it becomes clear that O'Brien's yelp was not from physical pain but fear of the intimacy he desired so badly. He's conflicted, trapped by polio in an inert body, only able to move his head. He hires the surrogate so that he might experience lovemaking because, as he says, at 38 he's past his "sell by" date. The terrific screenplay was written by Lewin and based on an essay "On Seeing A Sex Surrogate" written by the real O'Brien, who died in 1999 at the age of 49. As played by the luminescent Helen Hunt (Mad About You, As Good As It Gets) and the extraordinary character actor John Hawkes (Deadwood, Lincoln), these two people become much more to each other (and to the audience) than therapist and client. They are -- as O'Brien's priest and confessor (William H. Macy) says -- companions on a journey of discovery, one that is by turns illuminating, joyful, humbling and, in the end, truly and honestly painful. Enormously human, this is an adult film that deals frankly with sexuality. Highly recommended.

Killing Them Softly

Andrew Dominik's "Killing Them Softly" is a briny and not entirely satisfying diversion that has the feel of a Guy Ritchie film but without the narrative complexity or humor.  "Killing" bears some resemblance to Dominik's movie from 2007, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," a lugubrious nearly three hour study of the title characters and fatal event that features yards and yards of dense introspection. Killing, though not nearly as long as "Assassination," is also talky and stars Brad Pitt, who appeared in "Assassination" and Richie's "Snatch." In "Killing," Pitt  is a wet worker hired by the Mob to clean up the mess created by an amateurish hit on one of the syndicate's many poker enterprises. He's told that the games are on hold until the culprits are dispatched. So, time is of the essence. Even so, Dominik is a patient director with a taste for lengthy set pieces, the most interesting in "Killing" are the tense initial poker house robbery, an excruciating pummeling of a witless mobster (Ray Liotta) during a downpour, and a riveting 15-minute cocktail conversation between Pitt's Jackie and a boozing, forlorn sociopath named Mickey, played to perfection by James Gandolfini. Dominik has crafted a manly film that is not altogether satisfying and, inexplicably, has as a backdrop the Wall Street collapse and presidential election of 2008. The movie's odd coda, despite being a surprisingly astute assessment of America's national obsession, doesn't quite fit Pitt's character or the film, for that matter. Bloody, explosive violence and unceasing use of the F-word makes this movie a decidedly adult affair.

Samsara

Ron Fricke's Samsara is a peculiar kind of documentary travelogue.    Through truly spectacular 70 mm cinematography, Fricke appears to be taking viewers not on a dispassionate tour of 25 countries and exotic locales but rather on an exploration of authenticity of human existence on our planet. This authenticity -- and its antithesis, the synthetic -- is displayed in dozens and dozens of ways. The film is an extraordinary kaleidoscope of images; the camera's eye is unwavering whether trained on Egyptian sand dunes, the painted faces of African tribesmen or a poultry processing plant in the Philippines. Fricke, who took five years to assemble the images, has not crafted a conventional narrative and there is no dialogue, just a fascinating bed of world and new age music to underscore (not always subtly) what's on the screen. Samsara is the term used to describe the Buddhist belief of unending life and rebirth and often includes the notion of suffering as being man's natural state. Recommended.

Mildred Pierce

I hope everything is peace and joy for you today BUT if by this evening you're looking for a little perspective on familial dysfunction do consider renting Mildred Pierce. This 1945 murder mystery stars Joan Crawford and tells the story of a woman's pursuit of the American dream only to be dogged by her spoiled daughter, played by Ann Blyth. Crawford won the leading actress Oscar for her Mildred, and Blyth was nominated as best supporting actress. The orginal was remade by HBO last year and starred the redoutable Kate Winslet, who won the Golden Globe for her performance. Here's a spirited little clip from the orignal, which is a cinematic classic. http://youtu.be/5Hd15nSDZrM

Life of Pi

Like Martin Scorsese's Hugo and Steven Spielberg's Adventures of Tintin from last year, Ang Lee's Life of Pi is a cinematic masterpiece that pushes so many technical boundaries that its awesomeness nearly overwhelms the wonderful human story all of the wizardry should be supporting. Life of Pi, based on the novel by Yann Martel, tells the story of an Indian lad named Piscene (newcomer Suraj Sharma) who is the only member of his family to survive the capsizing of a freighter transporting them and the family's zoo to markets across the Pacific. Pi eventually finds himself alone in a lifeboat with a territorial Bengal tiger named Richard Parker (the name given to many literary shipwreck victims). I've not studied the trades to see how Lee was able to coax such a wonderful performance out of Sharma's co-star but the tiger is stunning and the two of them are worth the price of the ticket. Because the narrative is told in flashback, the film's mystery is not whether Pi survives but what he has to do to keep body and soul together. And speaking of soul, the film is steeped in Eastern spiritualism, which is refreshing, but its message of faith, loss and redemption is universal. Young children might be frightened by a couple of scenes of animal predation and the early 20 minutes of storm seas in a lifeboat might make some viewers quesy. Highly recommended -- especially in 3D.

Sinister

The real demon in Scott Derrickson's Sinister is the monomania of the lead character -- a real crime author named Ellison Oswalt (props to screenwriters Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill for a great name) looking for his next red meat bestseller. As played by Ethan Hawke, Oswalt is a bundle of unrealized potential, married to an affectionate British beauty (Juliet Rylance) and father to two fairly innocuous moppets -- the girl (Claire Foley) is a budding muralist and the boy (Michael Hall D'Addario) is an androgynous mess of pre-teen attitude prone to night terrors. As the film opens, Oswalt has moved his family to an unnamed town and into the house where a grisly family murder took place. Inexplicably, he keeps this important little detail from his wife, who when she's not cooing and pledging undying support is a whining scold. (So both hot and cold taps work.) Before long, as Oswalt settles into the investigation of the murders (8mm footage of which he finds in the attic along with home movies of other family murders dating back a few decades) he hears bumps in the night and discovers creepy occult connections between the current and previous unsolved murders, most importantly that in each case one of the children in the family went missing. With the help of a star-struck and nameless county deputy (The Wire's James Ransone) and a university professor (an uncredited Vincent D'Onofrio) he fits the pieces of the puzzle together. The film has a few solid jolts but otherwise is a mass of borrowed ideas. I do like that the lead character is a journalist on the hunt for the truth. I don't like that he's a self-involved, manipulative ass. See it if you like but leave the kids at home.

Lincoln

When reflecting on Steven Spielberg's films, one doesn't have to consider if the movie was visually stunning, intelligently crafted or well-acted. Spielberg, who I consider along with Martin Scorsese to be the two greatest living Hollywood directors, attracts superior talent from among actors, cinematographers, set designers, etc. His movies are always put together marvelously, but that does not always translate into box office success. No, in appraising Spielberg's work, one asks what it is that sets his latest offering apart from the rest of his impressive catalog. In the case of Lincoln, it's Daniel Day-Lewis's towering performance as the 16th president during the weeks shortly after his re-election when he waged a historic war of politics and principles pushing for congressional passage of the 13th Amendment. In essence and effect, codifying his Emancipation Proclamation.  Day-Lewis's rendering of Lincoln is near perfection -- or maybe it is ABSOLUTE perfection for I cannot imagine any other actor pulling on Lincoln's lanky shell without even a hint of self-consciousness or theatrics. His performance is uncanny and unaffected. The other extraordinary element is the Oscar-caliber screenplay by Tony Kushner, known best as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Broadway stageplay Angels in America. Kushner, who also wrote the screenplay for Spielberg's Munich, has put such marvelous words in the mouths of his principal players -- Day-Lewis, Sally Fields as Lincoln's slowly unhinging wife Mary, Tommy Lee Jones as Lincoln ally Congressman and radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens, among a host of others -- that I felt a little high from the loftiness of the oratory and humanity in its sentiments. Lincoln is a splendid motion picture from its totally disarming start to its (typically Spielbergian) tearful ending. Highly Recommended.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

My plans to see Lincoln (the movie not the capital of Nebraska) reminded me that this ridiculous Disney adventure starring Nicolas Cage opens with the assassination of the 16th president. Despite that the movie is wholesome family entertainment, blessedly free of profanity, vulgarity and bloody violence. The bad guys are vanquished, warring spouses are reunited and everybody ends up filthy rich. It also stars celebrity Republican Jon Voigt, a curiously unengaging Dame Helen Mirren, a snarky Ed Harris and the mysteriously asexual Justin Bartha. Feisty Diane Kruger also stars but along with most of the rest of the cast is horribly wasted. If you want to see her really act rent Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. She's marvelous.

Cloud Atlas

The directorial combination of filmmaking visionaries like The Wachowski sibs (The Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) held great promise for Cloud Atlas, and the sprawling, puzzling karmic film doesn't disappoint -- for the most part. The more cynical moviegoer might see casting the same actors in different stories about individual and societal battles against exploitation -- on the High Seas in the 1800s, in 1930s Cambridge, in a bombed-out post apocalyptic universe where people talk like Daufuskie islanders and in a futuristic Asian consumer capital called Neo Seoul -- as more of a gimmick than a bold new cinematic storytelling device. I can't entirely disagree. The idea that we're all connected is not exactly groundbreaking and having the same people crossing one another's paths (both for good and for ill) in so many different contexts might be more cleverness than is required to make the point. And yet I thought the casting worked, mostly, but in several instances I caught myself wondering which of the actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving, among them) was under the prosthetics. But beyond the gimmickry and the new age mysticism the film is unquestionably an accomplishment, often breathtakingly beautiful and engaging, but I'm not sure its premise will sustain much cocktail conversation. Not because the movie lacks worthwhile ideas -- it actually may have too many -- it just seems to lack a meaningful payoff after all the musing. Still, it's worth seeing, even at its substantial length -- nearly 3 hours. Recommended.

Skyfall

Sam Mendes is known best for his idiosyncratic character studies (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road) so I was curious about how he would approach the latest entry in the 50-year-old Bond franchise, Skyfall. All of the requisite chases, gun play and extended battles are on wonderful display along with several simply gorgeous foreign locales -- Turkey, Shanghai, Macao -- but this time we also get a level of psychological complexity that few if any of the previous Bonds ever displayed. Daniel Craig's 007 is not only tireless and deadly, he's also deep. Who knew? The depths of his obsessions (martinis, women and country and not necessarily in that order) are plumbed a bit in this "episode" and his love/hate relationship with M (the heavenly Judi Dench) is of particular interest as a crazed former British agent (a creepily effete Javier Bardem) tries to take down MI6 and M herself. A failed assassination attempt during a Parliamentary hearing on an MI6 breach sends Bond and M on the run, in James's tricked out Aston Martin, to the Scottish highlands and his boyhood homestead, the eponymous Skyfall. It is there the film's bloody brilliant last battle is waged and much is revealed and resolved. See this film, you must.

Tootsie (1982)

Some films do an exceptional job helping folks get in touch with their humanity. Sydney Pollack's Tootsie is a terrific example of just such a movie and seems especially appropriate considering our country took some important steps toward more fully realizing our collective, undeniable humanity this week. (Oh, and Stepen Bishop's song, though dripping with sentiment, is for the ages. Peace.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cJO22cegxBs

Flight

Robert Zemeckis' Flight is an immaculate presentation of two wrecks -- the plane crash referred to in the title of the film and the absolute spiraling devastation of the life of the man piloting the aircraft. Denzel Washington, a true force of nature and as disciplined an actor as any when he's on (and even when he's off, most of the time) carries this film on his broad back from start to finish. He owns this picture of a man whose life is a disaster of the first magnitude but who's fighting tooth and nail to keep from acknowledging that it is. Washington's pitiable Whip Whitaker is paired with the lovely British actress Kelly Reilly, who plays the drug addicted photographer / "masseuse" Nicole, a woman Whitaker meets in the hospital after the plane crash. She's recovering from a heroin overdose, and they meet in the stairwell where fiending paitents meet to smoke. An intriguing monologue by an addling cancer patient (James Badge Dale) who wanders into the stairwell sets Whip and Nicole on paths of redemption and loss. In addition to Reilly and Dale, Washington's riveting performance is matched by Don Cheadle's as his attorney, Bruce Greenwood's as the pilot's union rep and John Goodman's as Whitaker's ponytailed dealer. Zemeckis' recreation of the crash is a marvel and his direction of the NTSB inquiry that closes the film is equally as mesmerizing. Highly recommended.

Les Miserables

It's interesting that Hollywood decided to go with Silver Screen A-listers (Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway) for the film version of the musical Les Miz, a tremendous show that features many roles with very difficult vocal parts. But of particular interest is the casting of Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the lousy, slovenly, filthy and conniving Thenardiers (see below). I don't get it.

ParaNorman

 

Chris Butler and Sam Fell's animated feature ParaNorman is in the class of recent "children's" films that aren't really for youngsters. They're actually for adults with unresolved Daddy or Mommy issues, memories of classroom bullying or the sudden death of a loved one that open up torrents of regret. Child actor Kodi Smith-McPhee (The Road and Let Me In) voices the title character Norman, a reclusive boy who sees and talks to ghosts (yes, he sees dead people). This gift -- and not his spiky hair or lugubrious manner -- has turned him into an outcast at home, at school and on the streets of his little New England town that was cursed after torching an innocent girl as a witch back in colonial times. The colonists' horrible deed comes back to haunt them every year as the disquieted spirit of the murdered girl comes to raise hell. Despite the spooky goings-on, the story is chockful of important stuff about intolerance, mob rule and familial dysfunction, most of which will fly over the heads of the young ones in the audience. Smartly, Fell and Butler, who wrote the screenplay, wrap the lessons in beautfiully construted scenes that pop even in tired old 2-D, which will delight the rugrats and not get in the way of their parents' appreciation of the film's wholesome message. Recommended.

Torch Song Trilogy

In celebration of S.C. Pride weekend I would like to recommend Paul Bogart's Torch Song Trilogy, the film version of Harvey Fierstein's Tony Award winning stage play. I hate this poster but think the 1988 film is pretty nifty though a bit dated. Fierstein is like caviar -- delectible in small portions but, unfortunately, he only comes in gallon-size drums. The film, which also stars Matthew Broderick, Brian Kerwin and Anne Bancroft, is froth and a little fury and includes some fun drag numbers featuring Harvey, Cats' Ken Page and the then ageless, now deceased, Charles Pierce. Oh, about the poster, everyone in it has been pinched and powdered from hell to breakfast and the marvelous Miss Bancroft looks all "good-googly-goo," like she's been goosed. In all it's pretty life-affirming but ham-fisted in places.

Seven Psychopaths

Martin McDonagh's unsettling funny though dyspeptic second feature, Seven Psychopaths is a comedy despite the outrageous amount of blood spilled and spewed. Hundreds of gallons, it seems. Seven Psychos is the tale of a half dozen murderous head cases -- played with quizzical insouciance by A-list wackos Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Tom Waites among others -- who cross paths, leaving mounds of bodies at every intersection. It is often shockingly hilarious, that is, it often feel it shouldn't be. McDonagh, who also wrote the script, has set the proceedings in Los Angeles for the most part and Joshua Tree National Park for the final showdown. He gives his cast free rein to ring every drop of subtlety from the contentious encounters and the unspeakable events that follow. You can imagine McDonagh winking knowingly at the audience, even though his performers give absolutely nothing away. The work of the cast is overwrought and as broad as the Mojave Desert but I really enjoyed the film, as I did McDonagh's earlier feature In Bruge, which like Seven Psychos featured some inspired work by Colin Farrell. In the latest, Farrell plays a blocked screenwriter trying to finish the script for a film titled Seven Psychopaths. Yes, it's a wormy contrivance but in the end it works surprisingly well. Recommended.

Argo

The beauty of Ben Affleck's Argo is not just in its stunning period perfect cinematography but in the tautness of the film's storyline. As the true tale of a CIA operative's plan to lead six American foreign service workers out of a revolting Iran in 1980, Argo lays out with crystal clarity what was at stake and builds the dramatic tension strategically until the picture's breathless finale. Affleck stars as Tony Mendez, the CIA Moses who is the brains behind the scheme to smuggle out the workers, who were hiding in the home of the Canadian ambassador. He plans to pull them out disguised as a Canadian crew for a sci-fi adventure movie. The idea is absurd but it's greenlighted by Langley and off we go to Tehran where the streets are overlfowing with hatred of all things U.S. Watching the whole affair would be nearly unbearable if Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio had not concocted a delightful parallel storyline about Hollywood finagling and Tinsel Town shenanigans. Brilliant. Argo (the name of the fake film and the real operation) was an incredible mission, sure to fail, and Affleck captures masterfully the confusion, fear and frustation of that operation and of that turbulent period in American history. Quite an achievement, I must say.

Bird 6: Cock of the Walk

End of Watch

David Ayer's End of Watch is a police buddy drama made for folks who have had their fill of cop movies. The body count is waaaay too high for it to qualify as a chick flick and there aren't enough references to male genitalia or flatulence for it to rate as a bromance but it will probably appeal to some members of both of those audiences. Its closest comparison, IMO, would the '70s police series Adam 12, if one of its leads had been Hispanic and both Malloy and Reed had dropped F-bombs like they were Tic-Tacs. 
End of Watch follows LAPD patrol officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his partner Mike Zavala (Michael Pena) as they get drawn deeper and deeper into each other's lives and into the orbit of a brutal Mexican cartel. The heart of this film (and it has enormous heart) is the devotion these guys have for each other and for the women in their lives (Anna Kendrick and Natalie Martinez, both splendid). Gyllenhaal and Pena invest their characters with emotional intelligence and sincerity and deliver two wonderful performances for a story that isn't really that complicated. And maybe that's why it's so good.
Dreadful things are foreshadowed early on, but Ayer keeps the story locked down pretty tightly, so the last 10 minutes are unexpected and riveting. The film's epilogue is especially affecting, as well. Recommended.

Hayden Panettiere

 

My problem with Hayden Panettiere? She was orders of magnitude too slutty for Heroes, her relationship with her creepy, controlling murderous father in that series was waaaay beyond Electra complex, her fairly spectacular beauty seems to be matched by uncharted denseness as evidenced in this quote from her Heroes days: "I hate how people say I'm growing up fast." Honey, they were talking about your bust. And now she's starring as a slutty country singer in an ABC series named after my favorite film. WTF?

Looper

Yes, Rian Johnson's Looper could easily be the new Blade Runner. It's kinetic and violent and prophetic and masterfully directed and acted. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as an assassin who conducts mob hits at the gate of a time portal through which  the unfortunate victims are shoved from the year 2072 back to 2022 where Joe the Looper waits, blunderbuss in hand. This way, there's no body to connect the mob to the hit.  It's an intriguing idea made even more so when Joe the Younger faces his future self (Bruce Willis) at the portal, kills him and then doesn't and thus begins the journey along the Moebius strip that is this film's twisting narrative. Johnson, who also wrote the screenplay, has crafted a  world that borrows a bit of the yin yang / future-retro of Mad Max and the grimy dystopia of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. The film is arresting and absorbing in its imaginative detail, even down to Gordon-Levitt's uniquely Eurasian features being molded to reflect more of Willis's, except (spoiler alert!) Gordon-Levitt has attached earlobes and Willis does not. It's not enough to derail the story but for those fixated on continuity issues (like me) might find it a bit of a distraction.

Leon Russell

 

 

Leon Russell turned 70 in April, has a bit of a paunch and walks with an ebony cane but he has a stevedore's forearms, undoubtedly from years of piano pounding. Russell was at the Neighborhood Theatre, a boite off of North Davidson in Charlotte, where he and his four exuberant bandmates played a respectable assortment of his more rolicking tunes for a couple hundred appreciative fans. The set included fan favorites -- Out in the Woods and Tight Rope from Carney, Delta Lady and a smattering of others from his first solo album Leon Russell, Back to the Island from Will o' the Wisp, and a blistering Rolling Stones medley. In his signature Stetson and sunglasses, Russell sat at an electronic keyboard at stage left where he intoned and howled his classic tunes with no more audible articulation than a latter-day Dylan but it didn't matter. The songs were standards delivered with fresh, driving back beats that kept much of the audience on their feet. Dylan's own A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall was barely recognizable under the throbbing bassline and screeching guitar -- it rocked. The show was Leon's 90-minute dance party, and the Master of Space and Time was in great humor as he shared a rambling tale about George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh that featured a cameo from inventor / visionary Buckminster Fuller and a swipe at a certain Republican presidential candidate. A new album produced by Tommy Lipuma is on its way.

The Master

It will be interesting to see which of the male leads in The Master will be nominated for the Oscar. Nominating both Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman would assure neither wins though both deliver astounding performance in a film that is as enigmatic as any I've ever seen. What's it about? It's about truth and lies and how they're absolutely essential to human life. At least that's my reading.

I must confess I don't think it's a GREAT film. Its core puzzlement about the complex relationship between the master (Hoffman) and his not so stellar, moonshining but loyal disciple (Phoenix) seems to be a notion without solid mooring. Or it could be I'm too dense to get Paul Thomas Anderson's meaning beneath the surface of the story of one manipulative fraud trying to "save" another manipulative fraud. Singular performances -- including Amy Adams and Laura Dern -- are wonderful, and Hoffman and Phoenix's "chemistry" -- in every sense of that overtaxed word -- is truly potent.

Arbitrage

 

Nicholas Jarecki's Arbitrage builds up a great deal of momentum but ultimately falls apart. Richard Gere, who delivers a mostly fine performance, stars as Robert Miller, a venture capitalist trying to sell his cash-strapped company, which looks great on paper, to a banking concern. His scheme begins to unravel when the buyer holds up the purchase for one more audit, Miller's daughter begins to suspect book cooking, his mistress dies in a fiery car wreck from which Miller walks away, and the son of his former driver is collared by the cops after helping Miller flee the accident scene. Jarecki, who also wrote the screenplay, piles the calamities high and, for the most part credibly, but they start to tumble in the last act showdown between Miller and his devoted and boozy wife, played to unimpressive effect by the usually captivating Susan Sarandon. Arbitrage contains many fine moments but it's cynical ending doesn't deliver a satisfying pay off.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

What is this sad, hopeful and totally wonderful world director Behn Zeitlin has created in Beasts of the Southern Wild?  A young girl named Hushpuppy (an astounding and preternaturally gifted young actress Quvenzhané Wallis) lives with her ailing father Wink (an affecting Dwight Henry) in separate mobile homes in a backwash region of a low-lying coastal city that is threatened by winds, water and wild boar. To say this film is surprising is such an understatement that I'm a bit embarraassed to use it. But it is such a refreshing cinematic experience, totally devoid of cliche and sentiment but absorbing, heartbreaking and uplifting. It's a revelation that walks the line between stark reality and magical realism. See it at once.