In time for the Oscars, reviews of most of the movies I saw in 2010 Part III
I watched 42 of 2010's theatrical releases. As much as I'd like to write a thoughtful dissertation on each of them, I'm too busy with my own stories (I'm revising "Every Airship Needs a Wizard" and "Painter" (aka "Black Mist," aka "In Its Place") and mailing "The Dream"). So I gave myself 10-20 minutes per movie to crank out a couple paragraphs, then got burnt out around 30 reviews. Enjoy!
Harry Potter 7.1 (2010)
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
The Illusionist (2010)
Knight and Day (2010)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (2010) **1/2
Directed by David Yates
Tagline: "It all ends here . . . and next summer!"
This video pretty much sums up my feelings toward the most recent "Harry Potter" movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4FyZwAFZII
"HP7.1" looks great and is well-acted and well-directed, with an atmosphere full of dread and melancholy. But is there any humanly possible way to plot these movies without everything devolving into babytalk-sounding gibberish that reads like it's being made up along the way? Characters keep going places for reasons I don't understand (and not in the good, David Lynch-sort of way), and looking for maguffins that may or may not have been mentioned 3 movies ago.
Yes, yes, I know I'm supposed to have read the books first in order to understand the movies. But I'm watching the movies so I don't have to read the books. Besides, what makes " Harry Potter" so special that it can get away with "you have to read the books first?" Wouldn't someone cry "elitist" if you said "You have to read 'Crime and Punishment' before watching ' Match Point'" or "You have to read 'Sculpting in Time' before any Tarkovsky movie" or "You have to watch 1969's 'Playtime' before 2010's 'The Illusionist'?"
When did pop culture become so, well, demanding? When did every rapper have to have 3 names to keep up with (e.g. Notorious B.I.G = Biggie Smalls = whatever his real name was; Puffy = Puff Daddy = P-Diddy Coombs; Big Snoop Dogg = Snoop Doggy Dogg = whatever his legal name is)? How many TV dramas are left that don't require you to watch every single episode to keep up with the story?
If you're a Harry Potter fan, you're expected to have read all the books and re-watch all the DVDs right before each movie comes out. Even if (or maybe especially if) you think the series jumped the shark around Book 5 or 6 or whatever.
Is it the mainstreaming of "geek / nerd culture?" Or the co-opting of "geek culture" by consumerism, which ain't all that difficult because geek culture was really just about which products you buy anyway? Where you can't enjoy TV or music or movies unless you get all obsessive about it like we used to do in high school? Who knows these things.
The Ghost Writer (aka The Ghost) (2010) ***1/2
Directed by Roman Polanski
When it comes to thrillers, Roman Polanski really has his shit together. The rest of his life, maybe not so much. "The Ghost Writer" is one of those movies where ever shot is precise, nothing is unnecessary, and there's a constant, vague sense of impending dread.
I love how "The Ghost Writer" begins. It's the middle of the night and rain is pouring. A ferry pulls into dock and all the cars drive off, except one. Workers on the ferry trip its car alarm while trying to see through its windows. No one's inside. Cut to: early the next morning, a dead body has washed up on a beach.
Next we meet a nameless ghostwriter, played by Ewan McGregor doing what he does best. He's convincing and likeable, yet there's always little something untrustworthy or insinuating about him to keep him being a constant audience surrogate. He hears about how the former prime minister is working on his memoirs, but his ghostwriter was recently found dead in mysterious circumstances.
The ex-PM is played by Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan has never exactly worked as a traditional leading man for me, but he's great at vaguely sinister, womanizing ivory tower types, like in this movie, "The Fourth Protocol," and "The Tailor of Panama."
Ewan knows he shouldn't take the job but, in classic noir fashion, he needs the money, and damned if he isn't a curious about how his colleague died. So the ghostwriter goes out to the former prime minister's chilly, ominous seaside home . . .
Like all Polanski movies, there's deadpan humor, like when Ewan tries to ride a bicycle through thick gravel in the rain. Or when he asks directions from a threatening witness in his investigation. "Turn to the left and it'll take you straight to the highway," the man says. "Turn to the right and you'll go into the forest, and maybe no one will ever see you again."
Get Him to the Greek (2010) **1/2 or ***
Directed by Nicholas Stoller
A fun gross-out comedy in the Apatow mode, in which affable man-children indulge in drugs and pointless sex, only to learn the importance of monogamy and family. Therein are the appeal and the limitations of the Apatow mini-genre: we get to escape our responsible lives for 90 minutes to indulge the secret antisocial temptations we never act upon, only to be reminded in the end why we don't give in to temptation. (And by "we," I mean men. Maybe someday someone'll make the female version of the Apatow flick.) The downside is that we can't always ignore the wheels turning beneath the movie, leading it to its inevitable conclusion.
This time around the man-children are a drugged-out rock star (Russell Brand) and a spineless record company toady (schlubby Apatow regular Jonah Hill). The rock star fell hilariously from grace thanks to a music video in which he described himself as a "white African Jesus." The toady has to get the rock star to his comeback concert, and the rock star is determined to get there as late and stoned as possible. Sean Coombs is the scene-stealing record company executive. If there's one thing I love, it's fired-up rulers of petty kingdoms, bellowing insane commands with utter seriousness. I mean, I love that in movies. Not so much in real life.
The Illusionist (2010) ****
Directed by Sylvain Chomet, adapted from a screenplay by Jacques Tati
"Bravely downbeat" is the best description I've read of "The Illusionist."
If I were in an edict-declaring mood, I would say that the passage of time is the truest subject of cinema. I think Tarkovsky said something to that effect. Let stories be for literatures, let moments be for painting and sculpture. Movies are for time getting away from us. What is Rosebud besides the desire to go back?
So we come "The Illusionist," from French director Sylvain Chomet, whose "Triplets of Belleville" is my pick for the best animated film of the 2000s. "The Illusionist" is based on a screenplay by the late, great Jacques Tati that was never filmed. Tati made his name through films about time getting away from us. His all-forgiving, 70mm masterpiece is "Playtime," about well-meaning people being befuddled by a hypermodern Paris.
With "The Illusionist," Tati is back from the grave as the penniless magician Tatischeff. It's the 1950s and his world of music halls and vaudeville is fading. He makes friends with a drunken Scottish nightclub owner, a teenage girl who wants to see the big city, and various other holdouts from the dying world. But it's only a matter of time until the march of time gets the better of him. Even his pet rabbit is ornery.
He carries a photograph with him, whose sitter is never really identified. But what does that matter? Don't we all have a memory of something we wish we had done differently, or a place long-gone where we wish we could return?
Knight and Day (2010) **1/2
Directed by James Mangold
"Knight and Day" is a throwback to the 1990s, when action movies were based around movie stars and easily-digested one sentence summaries, not on preexisting movie, TV, comic book, or video game franchises. In this case, everywoman Cameron Diaz is drawn into a romantic web of espionage by superspy Tom Cruise, who may have been betrayed by his own agency, or who may lost his mind. I know "everywoman Cameron Diaz" might seem a little preposterous, but I have a friend in Colorado who could be her little sister.
The movie plays off Cruise's public persona as a crazy man, and both leads are beginning to show their age a little, making the theme of "someday really means never" more resonant. They jet off to various locations and shoot things and fall in-and-out of love and trust, sometimes doing one without doing the other. Supporting players include a weaselly Paul Dano ("There Will Be Blood") as the inventor of the maguffin and the perpetually sleepy-gay Peter Sarsgaard ("Flightplan") as the spy on Cruise's trail. I don't know about you, but I love saying "Sarsgaard."
My only complaint about "Knight and Day" is that it's so fluffy it practically evaporates. My wife liked it more than me, and I think the crowd at the dinner-and-drinks-and-movie place did too. The crowds there tend to be a little bit older than at the multiplex, and they appreciate movies not having to do with stuff they heard about on the internet. "K+D" also features the biggest laugh during a gunfight I've seen in a long time.
Copyright © 2011 by Peter Kovic
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