Cedar Rapids is an “aim low” comedy about a lame guy (Ed Helm) whose life is so boring that an insurance agent conference in Cedar Rapids is a revelatory experience. It’s got John C. Reilly as the Wild and Crazy Insurance Agent and is directed by Miguel Arteta, director of the underrated The Good Girl and Youth in Revolt. Releases February 11.
Hanna is a paranoid thriller starring Saoirse Ronan as a 16-year-old raised in the Arctic Circle to be a master assassin by her rogue secret agent father (Eric Bana), and then released upon the CIA. She is matched up against special ops wiz Cate Blanchett. Hanna is directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist). Releases April 8.
The Way Back is inspired by the story of a 1940 escape from a Siberian prison; three men slipped out of the gulag and walked out of Siberia, across Mongolia, across China’s Gobi Desert, through Tibet and over the Himalayas to freedom in India – a trek of 4000 miles. This is not a spoiler, because, at the very beginning of the movie, we are told that three men make it from the gulags to India. The remaining dramatic tension is in finding out which three of the seven who start the journey will finish it.
Of course, director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, Master and Commander) knows how to make a movie, and it is beautifully shot on locations chosen to illustrate the magnitude of the distances and the challenges. It is well acted, especially by Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Saoirse Ronan and Colin Farrell.
It’s a tremendous survival tale that results in a good, but not great movie. It comes down to this: eleven months of trudging through dangerous, unfamiliar territory while suffering from starvation and exposure is really impressive, but not that engaging.
Somewhere: It's Dad/Daughter Month at the Chateau Marmont
Now is the time to catch future Oscar contenders on the big screen, especially crowd pleasers like True Grit, The King’s Speech and Black Swan.
True Grit is the Coen Brothers’ splendid Old West story of Mattie Ross, a girl of unrelenting resolve and moxie played by 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld in a breakthrough performance, and Jeff Bridges is perfect as the hilarious, oft-besotted and frequently lethal Rooster Cogburn. The King’s Speech is the crowd pleasing story of a good man (Colin Firth) overcoming his stammer to inspire his nation in wartime with the help of a brassy commoner (Geoffrey Rush). Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a rip roaring thriller and a showcase for Natalie Portman and Barbara Hershey.
Biutiful is a grim, grim movie with a great performance by Javier Bardem in a compelling portrait of a desperate man in desperate circumstance, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel).
Somewhere is Sofia Coppola’s (Lost in Translation) artsy portrait of a man so purposeless that he can find no pleasure in pleasure. An A-list movie star (Steven Dorff) is living at the Chateau Marmont with his expensive toys, booze and drugs and an inexhaustible supply of beautiful, sexually available women, but without Without any purpose or connection to others, his debauchery is completely joyless. To his surprise and discomfort, his eleven-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) moves in for a few weeks.
I strongly recommend Rabbit Hole, an exquisite exploration of the grieving process with great performances by Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhardt, Diane Wiest, Sandra Oh and Miles Tenner. The Fighter is an excellent drama, starring Mark Wahlberg as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Christian Bale) and trashy mom (Melissa Leo). Fair Game, the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, is also excellent. All are on my list of Best Movies of 2010.
I Love You, Phillip Morris is an entertaining offbeat combo of the con man, prison and romantic comedy genres. Red Hill is a stylish contemporary Aussie Western. Season of the Witch is a bad Nicholas Cage/Ron Perlman buddy movie set among the plague, crusades and witch hunts of the 13th century.
This is Sofia Coppola’s (Lost in Translation) story of an A-list movie star (Steven Dorff) living at the Chateau Marmont with his expensive toys, booze and drugs and an inexhaustible supply of beautiful, sexually available women. Without any purpose or connection to others, his debauchery is completely joyless. To his surprise and discomfort, his eleven-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) moves in for a few weeks. He slowly finds some connection to her, but then she leaves for summer camp and he is aimless, again.
Somewhere is an artsy portrait of a man so purposeless that he can find no pleasure in pleasure.
Fanning is great as the kid. Surprisingly, Jackass‘ Chris Pontius shines as the movie star’s best bud.
Well, here’s some grand news – Roger Ebert is bringing back At the Movies as Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, beginning around this Friday, January 21 on PBS. The co-hosts will be respected film critic Christy LeMire and up and coming film critic and blogger Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. Ebert himself will appear with the aid of computer-generated speech in the “Roger’s Office” segment. The show will also include movie bloggers Kim Morgan (sunsetgun.com) and Omar Moore (popcornreel.com). Ebert and his wife Chaz have gone back to the show’s roots and are producing the show for public television stations.
Here’s another delightfully trashy gem from Sam Fuller, my favorite tabloid reporter turned Hollywood auteur. In The Naked Kiss, a prostitute opens the movie by beating her pimp to a pulp, and then moves to a new town, seeking a new beginning in the straight world. She gets a job as a nurse at the clinic for disabled children, and becomes engaged to the town’s leading philanthropist. She thinks that everything will be great unless someone reveals her tawdry past. But, instead, she discovers that her Mr. Perfect is molesting the crippled kids! (Only Sam Fuller could pull this off!)
Biutiful is about a great performance by Javier Bardem in a grim, grim, really grim role. (Yes, this film is grimmer than Bardem’s The Sea Inside, in which he plays a suicidal paraplegic.) In this film, Bardem plays Uxbal, a Barcelona lowlife who lives by perpetrating various petty scams. Low level crime does not pay well, and he lives in poverty with his kids, who he cannot trust with his bipolar, alcoholic wife (who is sleeping with his brother). Then he receives a medical death sentence – only two months to live. And then, things get even worse!
Can he leave his kids with a stable life? Can he find some redemption? It’s a compelling portrait of a desperate man in desperate circumstance, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel).
Has anyone has five better performances in the past decade than Bardem in The Dancer Upstairs, The Sea Inside, No Country for Old Men, Vicky Christina Barcelona and Biutiful? Bardem won Best Actor at Cannes for Biutiful.
Okay, I’ll admit that I saw Season of the Witch because the trailer made me laugh out loud. I thought that it might have been goofily bad enough to qualify for my list of 10 Movies So Bad They Are Fun. Unfortunately, it’s just bad and not much fun.
Season of the Witch is a Nicholas Cage/Ron Perlman buddy movie set among the plague, crusades and witch hunts of the 13th century. Cage and Perlman play two knights who, after slaughtering more than their share of women and children infidels, become disgusted with the Crusades. The deserters find themselves back in plague-ridden Central Europe escorting a comely accused witch to her abbey trial. Along the way, they encounter the cheesiest of CGI effects, the most portentous of soundtracks and every medieval cliché.
My recommendation: get some laughs from the trailer and skip the 95 minute version.
Now is the time to catch future Oscar contenders on the big screen, especially crowd pleasers like True Grit, The King’s Speech and Black Swan.
True Grit is the Coen Brothers’ splendid Old West story of Mattie Ross, a girl of unrelenting resolve and moxie played by 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld in a breakthrough performance, and Jeff Bridges is perfect as the hilarious, oft-besotted and frequently lethal Rooster Cogburn. The King’s Speech is the crowd pleasing story of a good man (Colin Firth) overcoming his stammer to inspire his nation in wartime with the help of a brassy commoner (Geoffrey Rush). Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a rip roaring thriller and a showcase for Natalie Portman and Barbara Hershey.
I strongly recommend Rabbit Hole, an exquisite exploration of the grieving process with great performances by Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhardt, Diane Wiest, Sandra Oh and Miles Tenner. The Fighter is an excellent drama, starring Mark Wahlberg as a boxer trying to succeed despite his crack addict brother (Christian Bale) and trashy mom (Melissa Leo). Fair Game, the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson story with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, is also excellent. All are on my list of Best Movies of 2010.
I Love You, Phillip Morris is an entertaining offbeat combo of the con man, prison and romantic comedy genres. Red Hill is a stylish contemporary Aussie Western. Season of the Witch is a bad Nicholas Cage/Ron Perlman buddy movie set among the plague, crusades and witch hunts of the 13th century.
There’s not much original in Red Hill, a contemporary Aussie Western, but it is stylish and well-made – and we don’t see a lot of Westerns these days. Some critics has remarked on the violence in Red Hill, but it is not extreme.
At 95 minutes, the story moves along quickly. There is a lot of subtle humor, not from gag lines, but from the absurdly relentless persistence of the rookie cop, the facial scarring that makes the outlaw even scarier and the inopportune appearance of a very hungry panther.
