In Children of the Green Dragon, a hangdog Hungarian real estate agent must avoid getting fired by selling a rundown warehouse that is currently rented to a shady Chinese import company. The Chinese watchman is tasked, for his part, to prevent the sale of the warehouse – or face an additional year of involuntary servitude. Surprisingly, they bond.
This movie is about the culture clash between the two guys. Their relationship blossoms despite that and despite their competing job interests. Then both become fascinated by an edgy pizza delivery woman. It’s a funny and sweet little film.
The film is titled A Zold Sarkany Gyermekei in Hungarian.
This Norwegian comedy, set in a sport that even the Norwegians find to be odd and boring, is HILARIOUS. The star of a curling team suffers a psychotic breakdown and, after years of treatment, is released from an asylum heavily medicated. To win money for a friend’s lifesaving operation, the curling team must win a tournament and the star needs to go off his meds to regain his game skills.
It’s a broad comedy, but the key is that the actors aren’t trying to be funny, a la Jack Black or Will Ferrell. Instead, they play it absolutely straight, relying on the characters, situations and dialogue to generate the laughs. And laughs, they are aplenty.
The curling star tries to maintain despite his recurring hallucinations of floating pink lint. One of the Norwegian curlers, a womanizer with unusually low standards, keeps lapsing into American gangsta street talk. Another has a long-lost father who turns up as, of course, a Rod Stewart impersonator who doesn’t sound remotely like Rod Stewart. And then there’s the kissing dog. You gotta see this movie – it’s a top drawer broad comedy.
It’s playing again at Cinequest tonight (March 2) and tomorrow (March 3).
In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail. Woody’s Dave Brown is always seeking control. He manipulates his superiors. From behind his badge, he unleashes sadistic brute force on every other unfortunate within his sight. Yet he is a man out of control, whose impulses to bully, to drink and to seduce increasingly endanger his job security, his finances and what is left of his relationship with his family. He is already skating on the edge of self-destruction when one brutal incident is caught on video and goes viral a la Rodney King.
Rampart benefits from the one of the best large supporting casts – less an ensemble than a series of great single performances as individual characters tangle with Dave Brown. Ben Foster (The Messenger) is brilliant as a homeless man with too many drugs and not enough meds. Robin Wright is also superb as an emotionally damaged lawyer who sleeps with Dave until his paranoia takes over. Sigourney Weaver and Ice Cube are two LA officials who see Dave as a walking, talking threat to public order and the City treasury. Ned Beatty is the retired cop who has kept his finger in the police corruption racket. The Broadway star Audra McDonald plays a cop groupie that Dave meets in a bar. As one would expect, Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon are excellent as Dave’s two amiable but bullshit-proof ex-wives. Brie Larson and Sammy Boyarsky are especially effective as the daughters, who figure in Rampart‘s most breathtaking scenes.
Rampart is a singularly visual film – we always know that we are in the sunwashed, diverse, sometimes explosive anarchy that is LA. The movie is structured and shot to heighten the experience of both the chaos that Dave causes and that the chaos that he feels. This is Oren Moverman’s second effort as writer-director, the first being the searing The Messenger, also starring Harrelson and Foster. Moverman keeps Rampart spinning along wildly as we wonder what will happen next to unravel Dave Brown’s life.
If you need some redemption to leaven a very dark story, this is not the movie for you. Rampart reminds us that not everyone finds redemption.
Thin Ice is the Fargoesque story of a sleazy Wisconsin insurance agent whose small scam spins into a major crime. By the time that he gets into real trouble, he has already lied to everyone in his life so often, that no help is available.
Greg Kinnear plays the ethically challenged agent who is always “on”; if he asks you the time, you know that he is trying to turn your money into his money. Literally.
Kinnear is excellent, as is Alan Arkin as the old farmer that he is trying to fleece. Billy Crudup plays the psycho ex-con who becomes Kinnear’s unwelcome partner in crime. David Harbour shines as go-getter young salesman. So does Lea Thompson as Kinnear’s soon-to-be-ex-wife and Bob Balaban as a fastidious luthier (look it up if you have to). And keep your eye on Michelle Arthur, who plays Kinnear’s long suffering secretary.
Thin Ice is entertaining while Kinnear gets more and more entangled in his own web of lies and the pressure builds. The final reveal at the end (a loooong eight minutes or so of exposition) is kinda lame, and doesn’t stand up to the top films in the genre. Still, it’s a harmless and fun diversion.
You might ask what the script of a silent movie looks like. Well, here’s the screenplay for The Artist, a film with only three lines of spoken dialogue (and a fourth line while the credits roll). BTW in a silent movie, the cards that pop up between live action shots are called “intertitles”.
In the crowd, a young woman right at the front is staring at him in rapture. She drops her bag and, as she bends to pick it up, a swell in the crowd pushes her underneath the arms of the policeman in front of her, out of the crowd and into George. She stares at him, more in love than ever, delighted to be there. The police wait for someone to give orders. George doesn’t quite know what to do. Nobody moves. The young woman finally bursts out laughing, which, after a moment of shock, causes George to laugh too, thus placating the cops and tacitly signaling to the photographers that they can take pictures of the scene. The flashes seem to lend the woman self-confidence who, in a very carefree manner, begins to clown about in front of them. George is delighted at the sight, by the whole scene and, realizing this, the young woman steals a kiss. Flash. The image becomes static, then dissolves into the printed picture on the front page of “The Hollywood Reporter” newspaper, along with three other pictures of the scene and the headline WHO’S THAT GIRL?
Safe House, the first big Hollywood movie of 2012, is a fine paranoid spy thriller. Ryan Reynolds is a green but determined CIA agent who finds himself isolated in South Africa and forced to bring in rogue superspy Denzel Washington. Like Hannibal Lector, Denzel’s character Tobin Frost over matches everyone he faces; it takes entire teams of elite commandos to trap and transport Frost, so Reynolds has his hands full. Not to mention that more teams of elite commandos keep popping up, trying to kill them both. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa keeps his pedal jammed to the floor, and this two hour movie flashes by in what seems like 90 minutes.
It takes a screen presence like Denzel’s to make Tobin Frost, with his unique mix of charisma, menace and lethal skills, credible. Reynolds holds up well against Denzel, and the always excellent Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson and Sam Shepherd round out the cast.
I wouldn’t rate Safe House at the very top of the genre. Espinosa didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to flesh out the characters played by Farmiga, Gleeson and Shepherd, who all end up playing oft-recycled types. And there are some holes in the plot that you’ll recognize in the few moments when you can catch your breath (See spoiler below the trailer).
But the action and thrills are there, and the extremely well-paced Safe House is a satisfying watch.
Spoiler alert: Since the CIA knows about Reynolds’ girlfriend, why don’t they kidnap her or at least tap her phone to help them track down Reynolds?
Well, given the upcoming Oscars, I should weigh in on The Help and its four Oscar nominations. Based on the well-received novel by Kathryn Stockett, it is the story of black maids raising white children amid the hatefully poisonous racism of 1963 Jackson, Mississippi. Unfortunately, the film is overlong, plodding and wastes the talents of an unholy multitude of our greatest actresses.
I am told by The Wife that the characters in the novel are full and textured. The problem with the movie is that the characters are cartoonish cardboard cutouts of real people. Unfortunately, Stockett’s novel was adapted by director Tate Taylor, and he stripped any hint of nuance or ambiguity from virtually every role. Octavia Spencer and Allison Janney play characters that have a mix of human virtues and foibles. But the rest of the awesome cast – Olivia Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain, Cecily Tyson, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen and Emma Stone – must play either saints or bitches.
Davis and Spencer are nominated for acting Oscars, and I wish them well. But here’s a baffler – Chastain is a brilliant actress who has delivered not one but FIVE superb performances this year (Take Shelter, The Tree of Life, The Debt, Coriolanus, Texas Killing Fields), yet she is nominated for the one role written so broadly that she is obviously acting (The Help).
The actor Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The title character is a fierce and successful military leader upon whom is thrust political leadership that he has not aspired to and to which he is utterly ill-equipped. It’s not going to end well, and that’s why they call it tragedy.
Coriolanus is devoted to the idea of Rome, which inspires his heroism in its defense. But he despises most Romans and thinks it would be insincere to show them the least civility, which doesn’t bode well for his political career. Fiennes does a good job playing Coriolanus, an oddball for whom “curmudgeon” doesn’t begin to tell the story.
Unfortunately, Coriolanus is propelled into the peacetime limelight by his ultra-ambitious mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and an able and well-meaning politician (Brian Cox). Redgrave and Cox are splendid, and their performances are highlights of Coriolanus. Coriolanus is well-acted, including by Jessica Chastain, the wonderful Irish actor James Nesbitt and even, surprisingly, Gerard Butler.
Fiennes the director has done well to set Shakespeare’s tale of ancient Rome into the present. This story of war and politics comes alive in today’s world of cable television news, with its crawling captions and pundits, protest demonstrations and soldiers in Humvees. By stripping away the swords and togas, Fiennes helps us recognize the ambition, personal stubbornness, political treachery and the fickleness of public opinion at the core of the story. As Shakespeare probably wanted to, Fiennes is able to put his audience into realistic warfare. Coriolanus was filmed in the Balkans and, indeed, Butler certainly looks like a Serbian warlord from the very recent past.
The problem with Coriolanus is that we admire Coriolanus’s high-mindedness less than we cringe at his social obtuseness. But Fiennes (and Redgrave and Cox) have given us one of the best cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare.
A contemporary Iranian couple had planned to leave Iran for a better life in the West, but, by the time they have wrangled a visa from the bureaucracy, the husband’s father has developed Alzheimer’s. The husband refuses to leave his father and the wife leaves the home in protest. They are well-educated and secular. The husband hires a poor and religious woman to care for his father (and she does not tell her husband about her job). Then there is an incident which unravels the lives of both families.
This is a brilliant film. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi has constructed a story in which the audience sees and hears everything that happens, but our understanding of the events and characters evolve. We think we know what has happened, but then other narratives are revealed. Likewise, the moral high ground is passed from one character to another and to another. It’s like Rashomon, but with the audience keeping a single point of view.
Much of that point of view is shared by the ever watchful teenage daughter of the educated couple. She desperately wants her parents back together, views everything through this prism and is powerless to make it happen. She is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.
Religion towers above the action – and not in a good way. It guides the actions of the religious couple into choices against their interest. The Iranian theocracy restricts the choices of the secular couple and of the judges trying to sort everything out. Almost every character is a good person who is forced to lie to avoid some horrific result otherwise required by the culture.
One final note: it will be a lot harder to make an easy joke at the expense of American lawyers after watching the Iranian justice system in A Separation.
The realistic angst of the chapters makes this a difficult film to watch – not a light date movie for sure. But the payoff is worth it, and it’s a must see.
This film is on the top ten list of over 30 critics and is Roger Ebert’s top-rated film of 2011. It is a lead pipe cinch for the Foreign Language Picture Oscar.
There are two reasons to see Pina 3D – to watch modern dance and to marvel at the use of 3D in a dance film. This documentary shows the work of the late German choreographer Pina Bausch performed by her dance troupe; it’s at least 90% dance performance.
But the singular feature of the film is director Wim Wenders’ use of 3D – the movie audience is transported on to the stage with and among the dancers. It’s been easy to dismiss 3D with all the crap 3D product out there, but master directors like Martin Scorsese (Hugo) and Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) can use the technology to make a film even more brilliant. Wenders (Paris Texas, Wings of Desire) does that with Pina.
Now, if you don’t like modern dance, you’re not going to like this movie. But, if you do, you should catch this film during the week or two that it will be out in theaters in Real 3D; I’m not going to recommend it in 2D unless you’re a huge dance fan.
