Movies

Chloe and Nathalie

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Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore in Chloe

Chloe is a 2010 sexual thriller that is recently available on DVD.  It’s about an attractive and successful middle aged couple.  The wife has reason to believe that the husband is having an affair.  To make sure, she hires a beautiful call girl to tempt the husband.  In increasingly sexually charged meetings, the call girl reports back to her with explicit details of a torrid affair.

Chloe is a remake of the 2003 French Nathalie, where the couple is played by Fanny Ardent and Gerard Depardieu and the call girl by Emmanuelle Beart.  Now you would think that watching the mysteriously sexy Fanny Ardent become sexually obsessed and the smokin’ hot Emmanuelle Beart describing and acting out sex would be pretty darn interesting.  But Nathalie is dreary and heavy – even laborious to watch.  Despite excellent acting by its three stars, Nathalie is a failure.

Chloe is directed by one of my most admired filmmakers, Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Sweet Hereafter, Adoration) and his movie is paced much more crisply and compellingly than is Nathalie.  Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson play the couple and Amanda Seyfried plays the callgirl, and they are every bit as good as the French stars of Nathalie (and I prefer Neeson’s performance to Depardieu’s).  But Egoyan tries to spice things up even more with two new plot developments at the very end.  Because he had already made a superior version of the story, those developments are unnecessary and instead work to cheese out the film.

The Kids Are All Right

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Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a lesbian couple with teen kids.  The kids find their sperm donor sire (Mark Ruffalo), who invites himself into the family.  This is not what the moms had in mind.  Laughs and tears ensue.  It’s a smart dramedy with excellent performances, especially from Bening and Moore.  Bening certainly deserves an Oscar nod.  Mia Wasikowska is great as the daughter; she starred as Alice in Wonderland earlier this year and looks to have a great career ahead.

Because this was the most anticipated indie of the year. I had been expecting something more profound – and it’s not.  It’s a crowd pleaser and a good date movie that’s worth seeing, but not the game changer that I had been expecting.

Inception

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Inception is the year’s most successful Hollywood blockbuster.  Because it’s written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), we expect 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.

Cyrus

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John C. Reilly plays a sad sack who kindles a romance with a woman played by Maris Tomei.  So far, so good.  But then he learns that she lives with her very smart and very possessive adult son (Jonah Hill).  This is a very, very dark comedy and a showcase for Jonah Hill, who plays a very manipulative and creepy character with contained intensity.  Reilly, Tomei and Cathrine Keener are excellent as always.  But, overall, not the most accessible comedy.

Kisses

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I just saw a preview of Kisses, which releases August 6.  It’s a sweet Irish indie about two suburban tweens who run away to Dublin for a very exhilarating, then scary night.  The first time lead actors are excellent.  There is a very inventive chase.  Stephen Rea has a brief uncredited cameo as a Bob Dylan impersonator.  Writer-director Lance Daly kept the film only 75 minutes long – which is just the right length, and won the Irish Best Director award.

DVD pick of the week: The Girl on the Train

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The Girl on the Train (La fille du RER) is an absorbing mother daughter drama set in the Paris suburbs.

The young woman  is  Emilie Dequenne, the Belgian actress who won the best actress award at Canne when she was only 17 in the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta.  In contrast to Rosetta, she doesn’t play a force of nature, but a slacker bobbing through life on a tide of random influences.  She lives with her single mom (Catherine Deneuve), and they get along, despite the mother’s unwelcome tips on job hunting.

The daughter meets a guy, her life takes some resulting turns and then she makes a really bad choice.  The mom seeks out an old beau, now a celebrity attorney to help fix the situation.

I missed seeing this in the theater because the trailer emphasizes a faked hate crime (and I wasn’t eager to see a topical movie).  But the movie is not about the faked hate crime, which occurs late into the story.  The story is character driven.  The daughter drifts first part of the movie and is controlled by events until she finds herself in a desperate situation; she panics and sees the most stupid option as a solution.  The situation then forces the mother to re-open a chapter in her life that she had chosen to close – how far will she open the old door?

It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2010 So Far.

See the rest of my DVD recommendations.

Solitary Man

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Solitary Man: Michael Douglas plays a man whose selfishness and charm know no bounds, and whose impulsiveness drives him into spiraling self-destructiveness.   Douglas’ performance  keeps us caring about this unattractive character and there is humor in his comeuppances.  Mary-Louise Parker, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Jenna Fisher, Jesse Eisenberg and Olivia Thirlby round out the excellent cast.

Winter's Bone

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Winter’s Bone is the year’s best live action movie so far.  A 17-year-old Ozarks girl is determined to save the family home by tracking down her meth dealer dad – dead or alive.  The girl’s journey through a series of nasty and nastier Southern Missouri crank cookers is riveting – without any explosions, gunfights or chase scenes.  Every moment of this film seems completely real.  Winter’s Bone won the screenwriting and grand jury prizes at Sundance.

With just her second feature, Debra Granik has emerged as an important filmmaker to watch.  She presents an unflinching look at this subculture without ever resorting to stereotype.  Granik hits a home run with every artistic choice, from the locations to the spare soundtrack to the pacing to the casting.  I’ll be watching for her next film.

As the protagonist, 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence is in every scene.  With a minimum of dialogue, she creates a lead character of rarely seen determination.

Dale Dickey is exceptional as a criminal matriarch.  John Hawkes (the kind Sol Star in Deadwood) also gives a tremendous performance as the ready-to-explode Uncle Teardrop.

I Am Love

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I Am Love (Io sono l’amore) – the operatic tale of the family of a zillionaire Milan industrialist and how each family member seeks happiness – is less than the sum of its parts.  The movie has many successful components: another fearless performance by Tilda Swinton, searing love scenes, and some nice small touches in the screenwriting (an aristocratic family’s treatment of the new wife during a tragedy, the re-taking of a man’s suit coat, among others).  But the soundtrack’s musical crescendos at the most emotionally charged moments are too distracting, as are the over-the-top plot points in the third act.  And the character of the favorite son is written to be impossibly sweet and naive.  Marisa Berenson (whose career has been pretty quiet since 1975’s Barry Lyndon) is excellent in a small role.

There is some mouth-watering food porn (especially the glazed prawns); if this movie could generate a wider audience, the line “I made your mother prawns” would become a catch phrase, as in “I made your mother prawns and we hiked the Appalachian Trail”.

The film making is described in the New York Times.