Movies

DVD of the Week: Inception

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Inception is the year’s most successful Hollywood blockbuster and now available on DVD.  Because it was written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), we expected it to be brilliantly inventive and it exceeds that expectation.  The story places the characters in reality and at least three layers of dreams simultaneously.  A smart viewer can follow 85% of the story – which is just enough.  Then you can go out to dinner and argue over the other 15%.  The Wife said it was “like The Wizard of Oz on acid”.

Leonardo DiCaprio leads the cast, but the supporting players give the best performances: Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger and Tom Hardy.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Black Swan

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Natalie Portman plays a ballet dancer competing for the role of a lifetime.  Her obsession with perfection  is at once the key to her potential triumph and her potential ruin.  Barbara Hershey brilliantly plays what we first see as another smothering stage mother, but soon learn to be something even more disturbing.  Vincent Cassell (Mesrine) captures the charisma of the swaggering dance master who pushes the ballerina mercilessly. Portman’s dancer has the fragility of a porcelain teacup, and, as she slathers herself with more and more stress, we wonder just when, not if, she’ll break.  The tension crescendos, and the climactic performance of Swan Lake is thrilling.

Fresh from The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is another directing triumph.  In fact, parts of Black Swan are as trippy as Aronofsky’s brilliant Requiem for a Dream.  I expect Aronofsky, Portman and Hershey to be nominated for Oscars.

Coming up on TV: Stagecoach

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John Ford's Stagecoach

This iconic 1939 Western was John Ford’s first Western sound film and the first of the seven that he shot in Monument Valley. It’s a conventional Western plot, exquisitely executed with a young and vital John Wayne leading an outstanding cast. Watch for stuntman Yakima Canutt jumping from horse to horse in front of the runaway stagecoach.  Plays on TCM on Saturday, December 18

Yakima Canutt jumps horses in Stagecoach

For other great movie choices on TV, see my Movies on TV.

Fair Game

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Ripped from the headlines, this is the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.  We already knew the story of Joe Wilson exposing the Bush Administration’s false WMD pretext for the Iraq war, and the White House striking back by outing an American covert intelligence operative –  Wilson’s wife, Plame.  But this film adds two more dimensions to the story.

First, this screenplay is based on Plame’s book, and the first act chronicles Plame’s exploits as a CIA officer.  She indeed ran undercover operations.  The depiction of real life, contemporary spycraft is even more thrilling than a fictional spy movie.

Second, the story also explores the excruciating pressure on the Plame/Wilson marriage.  Joe is an able and principled guy with a little too much testosterone.  His short fuse leads him to act impulsively to pick a fight that has even more severe consequences for his wife.  In principle, Joe is right, but Valerie’s career is ruined, her family’s safety is threatened and her social life is shattered; she is both scared and resentful.  And at the moment that they are under the most unbearable stress, each of them wants to react by moving in an opposite direction.  Will the relationship survive?  This dimension – a study of an adult relationship – makes this film much more than a typical history.

Love and Other Drugs

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Love and Other Drugs has the advantage of two winning leads and lots of sex.  Anne Hathaway gives a profoundly deep and textured performance as a smart and horny woman urgently living life to the fullest in a desperate race with Parkinson’s Disease.  Jake Gyllenhaal nails the role of a charismatic and relentless serial seducer. And the two of them have lots of sex.  Fully naked sex.

Unfortunately, Love and Other Drugs peters out into a Disease-of-the-Week movie, albeit pretty good for that forlorn genre.

One moment in particular illustrates how much better this film could have been.  Hathaway emerges from a Parkinson’s support group uplifted and empowered, while Gyllenhaal has just received an unvarnished description of living with Parkinson’s from the husband of a later stage patient.  We see what she doesn’t – that the two are no longer on the same page.  Peter Friedman plays the patient’s husband with an authenticity that will be recognized by anyone who has experienced caregiver fatigue.  It’s a great scene – but then the movie turns sappy.

Sadly, the overly broad comic relief attempted by Josh Gad as Gyllenhaal’s little brother merely distracts from the story.  So does the sappy score – beware soulful piano in the third act. And when a movie climaxes by having the boy race to catch the girl in the nick of time, it’s as much of a cliché to catch up to the bus as it is to pant up to an airport loading gate.

DVD of the Week: Mademoiselle Chambon

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The year’s best romance, Mademoiselle Chambon is available on DVD this week.  Finding one’s soul mate in middle age, when one may have serious commitments, can be heartbreaking.  Here, the two people are not looking for romance or even for a fling.  He is a happily married construction worker.  She is his son’s teacher.  They meet (not cute) and do not fall in love (or lust) at first sight. He is unexpectedly touched by something she does, and she is touched that he is touched.  Despite their wariness, they fall in love.

The lovers are beautifully acted by Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlaine in two of the very finest performances of the year.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.

Coming up on TV: Sweet Smell of Success

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Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success

Billy Wilder’s 1957 Sweet Smell of Success contains Tony Curtis’ most subtly acted role.  Curtis is a Broadway press agent who is completely at the mercy of Burt Lancaster’s sadistically nasty columnist.  Many of us have experienced being vulnerable to the caprice of an extremely mean person – Curtis perfectly captures the dread and humiliation of being in that position.  Plays December 6 on TCM.

Coming up on TV: Seven Days in May

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Douglas MacArthur, I mean Burt Lancaster, with Kirk Douglas in Seven Days in May

“I’m suggesting Mr President, there’s a military plot to take over the Government of these United States, next Sunday…”

John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) is a master of the thriller, and his 1964 Seven Days in May is a masterpiece of the paranoid political thriller subgenre.  Edmond O’Brien’s performance is best among outstanding turns by Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Frederic March and Whit Bissell.  Plays November 25 on TCM.

For other great movie choices on TV, see my Movies on TV.

Morning Glory

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If you’re looking for a light comedy with an appealing lead, then Morning Glory with Rachel McAdams will work for you.  McAdams is funny, cute and sympathetic.  There is promise in the setting – the achingly insipid world of morning television shows. And Diane Keaton nails her supporting role as a jaded but desperate TV anchor.

But Morning Glory would have been more successful if it trusted its source material and performers and didn’t TRY so hard to be funny.  Harrison Ford plays a wooden character woodenly.  There is no electricity in the thread about McAdams’ love interest with Patrick Wilson.  And – here’s a pet peeve of mine – there are two utterly random musical interludes.

DVD of the Week: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

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The stage version of Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 madcap comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown has opened on Broadway, starring Patti LuPone.  The show is not getting the best of reviews, but the Almodovar film is hilarious and available on DVD.

Carmen Maura plays Pepa, a voice-over actress who has been dumped by her voice-over actor boyfriend, Ivan.  Pepa has a gal pal who has discovered that her new squeeze is a Shiite terrorist.   Ivan has a lunatic wife (who is armed and bewigged), a bespectacled son (a very young Antonio Banderas) and a new feminist attorney girlfriend.   Everyone converges in Pepa’s apartment, on the streets of Madrid and on the way to a flight to Stockholm.  Along the way, there is a mambo-loving Mad Hatter of a cabbie and some barbiturate-spiked gazpacho.  Comic mayhem ensues.

Almodovar had made several movies before, but Women on the Verge was the art house hit that first brought him to the attention of American audiences.  Today he is one of our very best film makers.  His Talk To Her (2002), Bad Education (2004) and Broken Embraces (2009) each made the top four on my lists of the years’ best films.

For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.