Month: April 2012

Movies to See this Week

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THE KID WITH THE BIKE

Don’t miss The Kid with the Bike, an extraordinary film that tells a riveting story of unconditional love. It is emotionally powerful without being sentimental and is gripping without stunts and explosions – one of the year’s best.

The Hunger Games is a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable with excellent performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Stanley Tucci.

The Deep Blue Sea is well-crafted and deeply, deeply sad tragedy of a woman (Rachel Weisz) who loves too much.

In Footnote, a rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father. This potentially comic situation reveals the characters of the two men.

The drama Detachment features a top-rate performance by Adrien Brody as a teacher in a hellish school system that decays teachers’ souls. In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail in Rampart. The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.

I haven’t yet seen The Salt of the Earth, which opens this week.  You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is the edgy game changer comedy Young Adult.

The Deep Blue Sea: a woman who loves too much

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Simon Russell Beale and Rachel Weisz in THE DEEP BLUE SEA

In The Deep Blue Sea, an ordinary love triangle becomes a profound tragedy.   A woman (Rachel Weisz) leaves her affluent and prestigious older husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a younger man (Tom Hiddleston) who is more vital, but aimless, troubled and unreliable.  The younger man cannot match her love for him.

The fling is doomed.  The tragedy is that she knows it, but cannot help herself.  As with many addictions, her passion for him drives her to do what she knows is self-destructive.

The story is set is grim post-war London and director Terence Davies  vividly paints the period and place.

One magically evocative scene takes place in an underground station serving as a bomb shelter during the Blitz.  A man sings Molly Malone in a plaintive tenor, with his fellow Londoners joining at the chorus, as the camera slowly pans the train platform filled with people waiting out the raid.  In another scene, a pub is filled with singing patrons.   Everyone is having fun, sharing a moment of trivial conviviality, but Rachel Weisz is looking at her lover and having a moment of profound feeling.

Weisz is excellent, and all of her scenes with Beale are especially searing.  The Deep Blue Sea is well-crafted and deeply, deeply sad.

The Hunger Games: the harshest reality tv ever

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Jennifer Lawrence in THE HUNGER GAMES

I was impressed by The Hunger Games, a well-paced, well-acted and intelligent sci-fi adventure fable for tweens – and for the rest of us, too.

Since I apparently live under a rock, I was unaware of the source material, the popular and acclaimed young adult fiction trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The only reason I saw The Hunger Games was to accompany The Wife, who had read the first Hunger Games book. I hadn’t even seen the trailer, so I went in totally blind.

The story is set in the future, where several generations after a rebellion, an authoritarian government plucks teenagers from the formerly rebellious provinces to fight to the death in a forest.  It’s all broadcast on reality TV for the entertainment of the masses.  Children killing children – it doesn’t get much harsher than that.

Jennifer Lawrence plays the heroine, a poor Appalachian girl who volunteers to compete in place of her little sister.  Lawrence starred in Winter’s Bone, my pick for the best movie of 2010.  Here she carries the movie with her performance as an incredibly determined and resourceful girl. Her character is completely candid and unfiltered.  This creates a moment that is all the more powerful when she has to pull off smarmy inauthenticity for an insipid TV interview.

Stanley Tucci is brilliant as the oleaginous reality TV host – it’s an Oscar-worthy performance.

DVD of the Week: Young Adult

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With Young Adult, screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno) and director Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air) are challenging the current mode of comedy itself.  They turn many comic conventions on their heads in this nastily dark comedy, and Young Adult is on my list of Best Movies of 2011.

Played by Charlize Theron, the main character is stunningly non-empathetic,  utterly self-absorbed and thoroughly unpleasant.  She was the prom goddess in her small town high school, and has moved to the city for a job with a hint of prestige.  With a failed marriage, a looming career crisis and no friends, she’s drinking too much and is in a bad place.  So she decides to return to her hometown and get her old boyfriend (Patrick Wilson) back – despite the fact that he’s gloriously contented with his wife and newborn infant.

Naturally, social disasters ensue.  Along the way, the story probes the issues of happiness and self-appraisal.

Patton Oswalt is wonderful as someone the protagonist regarded as a lower form of life in high school, but who becomes her only companion and truth teller.

Young Adult is inventive and very funny.  Its cynicism reminds me of a Ben Hecht or Billy Wilder screenplay (high praise).  Note:  This is NOT a film for someone expecting a light comedy.

Whither Reese Witherspoon

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Reese Witherspoon winning an Oscar in WALK THE LINE

After the very brief February appearance of the universally panned This Means War, Brooke Barnes wrote in the New York Times:  “Hollywood keeps trying to turn Reese Witherspoon into a Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts for a new generation. A new generation keeps refusing to take the memo.”

It’s a good point.  Starting in 1998, Witherspoon acted in a string of smart, high quality movies, most notably Pleasantville,  Election and American Psycho, culminating in an Oscar for 2005’s Walk the Line.  The operative word is “smart”, and even in the popular hit Legally Blonde, Witherspoon played a smart woman who was only acting like a ditz.

But since then she’s been plugged into popular crap like How Do You Know and This Means War, with very little artistic or commercial success.

Happily, I see that Reese Witherspoon is taking on what look to be some high quality projects.  She’ll be starring with Michael Shannon in the film Mud, by writer director Jeff Gordon (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter).

She’ll also be acting with Colin Firth in Devil’s Knot, Atom Egoyan’s (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) version of the Robin Hood Hills murders and witch hunt, the subject of the three Paradise Lost documentaries.

And she’ll star in Big Eyes, writer Scott Alexander’s (The People vs Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon) screenplay for bio of the artist Margaret Keane, whose husband claimed credit for her works.

The common thread here for Witherspoon is avoiding Hollywood fluff to work with top quality filmmakers.  At last, good for her.