Game Change

When Sarah Palin first appeared on the national political stage, she struck me as someone straight out of a reality show or a Disney movie. She had such cartoonish and folksy charm that made her believe so strongly in the backwards, extreme right wing rhetoric she stumbled over that she couldn’t have possibly whined her way into the spotlight.

The HBO film “Game Change” is unkind to Palin, painting her as a teenage brat while confirming little more than I already suspected about the 2008 campaign.

It’s a movie that doesn’t provide behind the scenes insight as it does re-enact the story from an insider perspective. McCain is losing the election, he needs a bold move, and they take a chance on a nobody without properly vetting her. Palin (Julianne Moore) proves to be an incompetent nutcase, she goes rogue, they lose the election, and everyone responsible smacks their heads in embarrassment. End of story.

What we see of McCain (Ed Harris) and his campaign advisor Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson) are little more than reaction shots. “Game Change” is filled with sound bytes of McCain’s team saying, “She’s doing great!” or “Oh god!” This much seems obvious. It has nothing new to add, no contrarian viewpoint of people defending her or calling her bluff. Continue reading “Game Change”

Rapid Response: Dangerous Liaisons

“Dangerous Liaisons” knows just how ridiculously soapy, ridiculous and steamy it is, and Stephen Frears’ movie works better than the play.

What’s great about “Dangerous Liaisons” is that it knows just how soapy and ridiculous this all is. It’s set in stuffy, aristocratic France, but everything about this story is sex, love and revenge all the time. It’s absurd, but here, it works.

I saw an adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s play of the same name (he’s also the screenwriter) and think it’s a lot better as a film. The play is all talk and gossip. It’s bogged down under names and archaic language. The elaborate web of steamy fucking becomes impossible to follow in that setting. Here however, Frears’s cross cutting does the story wonders. He jumps from bed to bed, drawing room to drawing room and keeps the many liaisons, dangerous or not, in check. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Dangerous Liaisons”

Punch-Drunk Love

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” is so much more than an “Art House Adam Sandler Movie.”

Most movies are pretty surreal when you think about them. When you’re watching a formulaic romantic comedy for instance, you suspend some disbelief and know that everything that happens is a little strange.

So for Paul Thomas Anderson to make a genre picture with Adam Sandler but call attention to just how odd a movie can be, he’s really making a more realistic, elegant and beautiful movie than anything Adam Sandler would usually star in.

“Punch-Drunk Love” has been generously referred to as “The Art House Adam Sandler” movie, and since its release in 2002, it’s used that label to justify its cult appeal. It’s become a favorite PTA film for most of his fans, displaying all the life and gravity of “There Will Be Blood” with the charms of “Boogie Nights.” Continue reading “Punch-Drunk Love”

Rapid Response: To Catch a Thief

“To Catch a Thief” is not Alfred Hitchcock’s best thriller but his best romance with the grace and lushness of Old Hollywood.

Could it be that all modern romances draw not from the tender love scenes in “Casablanca” and “Gone With the Wind” but from Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief,” which contains a moment so lovely to look at and so passion filmed that it’s hard to believe Hitchcock could ever have filmed it?

The scene in question is in a darkened hotel room along the French Riviera, with fireworks in the background and the glorious Grace Kelly beckoning in a stunning white dress to a resistant but suave and certain Cary Grant. She’s desperate to inflame his passion and his weakness for jewelry and beauty, and with each mysterious and aloof remark to pull himself away, she draws him back in with her infectious and seductive understanding of him. The orchestrations are sprawling, the lighting is soft, and the image is perfect. Continue reading “Rapid Response: To Catch a Thief”

The Interrupters

“The Interrupters” is a film that sees change happen before the camera. It’s not just talk, and it’s not just pain or violence; it’s action.

If alcoholism and obesity are diseases, then why isn’t violence? Violence is caused by a behavioral disorder created by human beings. Like a contagious virus, violence spreads through our communities until we are all dead.

We treat it with words, with punishments and with more bullets. We need to eradicate it from our streets. We need the logic of science and reason to end this epidemic. We need to understand violence, not fear it. It must be targeted at its source.

The Violence Interrupters of Chicago’s Englebrook neighborhood adhere to this mindset. They’ve been infected with this plague before and survived it. They are the Dirty Dozen vigilantes doing what the police and professional counselors are not because they know it first hand.

Their story as told in “The Interrupters” is a riveting, emotional and powerful documentary that embeds itself on these Chicago streets and finds answers. Continue reading “The Interrupters”

The Dictator

There’s a moment when we see The Dictator of Wadiya Admiral General Aladeen play a game on the Wii specifically for dictators. In it, he swings his arm as if playing Wii Tennis, but instead he’s cutting off a video game avatar’s head. It’s not exactly offensive because it’s so dopey.

“The Dictator” is much like that Wii game, cartoonishly violent and gross, but never truly edgy or interesting. Continue reading “The Dictator”

The Kid With a Bike

When the young boy Cyril (Thomas Doret) stabs his foster mother Samantha (Cecile De France) in the arm and escapes from her home, it is one of the only times we see “The Kid With a Bike” from her perspective. For the first time, we realize how much she loves Cyril and how much she struggles to control him. Like any kid, neither he nor us can know how deeply a parent’s love goes. For that matter, we never fully know how much Cyril loves his absentee father or his bike that takes him wherever he needs to go.

“The Kid With a Bike” is a lovely film about attachments and the complex emotions that go along with them. It’s one of the best movies of the year.

It begins a month after Cyril’s father Guy (Jeremie Renier) abandons him at an orphanage. For weeks now, Cyril has been desperately calling his home and getting only a disconnected line. He blindly believes his father is still there. His father would never leave him, and more importantly, he would never forget to give Cyril his bike. Cyril evades his supervisors and his teachers to see his house for himself, and we realize instantly that Cyril is a smart, energetic kid with a relentless, unhealthy obsession. Continue reading “The Kid With a Bike”

Dark Shadows

I didn’t know “Dark Shadows” was based on a soap opera until my friend amusingly explained this: “It was this kind of boring soap opera that no one watched until one season they introduced a vampire to the show and everyone’s minds just exploded.”

The problem then with Tim Burton’s “Dark Shadows” is its inability to just make my mind explode.
Burton has always been a unique director. It’s possible that none of his films can be strictly classified into one genre, and “Dark Shadows” is no different. This one begins on a note of period piece horror fantasy with scents of the original “Dracula” in the film’s gorgeous CGI iconography.

This opening takes place in 1772 with the Collins family establishing a thriving colony on the American coastline. The son Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is cursed by the witch Angelique (Eva Green) when he gives up her for his true love, Josette (Bella Heathcote). Angelique turns Barnabas into a vampire and imprisons him for 200 years, only to wake up in the swinging 1970s. Now Barnabas returns to his surviving ancestors and fights to rebuild the family business, taking down Angelique, also now two centuries old and running strong, in the process.

The fish-out-of-water game is old-hat no matter what setting or mythical creature you put into the formula, and although Depp revels in manipulating everything with an elegantly antiquated misunderstanding of modern technology, slang and etiquette, Burton never knows how to own any of these jokes.

The film and its dialogue constantly teeter on understated comedy and a haunted house ghost movie without ever dipping into campy, absurd or soapy territory. Burton will instead play an Alice Cooper song or some other ‘70s rock staple to suggest the change of tone, and the film never has go for broke laughs or campy charm. Continue reading “Dark Shadows”

Rapid Response: Rain Man

The Best Picture winner “Rain Man” has not aged well, showing its colors as a movie that defines its character by its disability.

“Rain Man” has not aged well. It was revolutionary when it came out in 1988. Few movies were truly talking about disabilities, and few had as ambitious of a performance as Dustin Hoffman’s in portraying a character, let alone someone other than a background supporting character, with autism.

But since then, the culture has evolved in its awareness of disabilities. The best films about disabilities make their characters defined by things other than their afflictions. They show disabilities in everyday life.

Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt is not precisely defined by his disability, but the film uses him as a means for a plot. “Rain Man” is entirely focused on whether or not autism has misconceptions surrounding it and if someone can form a relationship with a person who cannot express their feelings in the same way society understands. It uses him like a trick dog, testing his ability at the card table or with a calculator (now a cliche ripe for parody, along with him riding down the escalator in a suit) only for the payoff that “special people” aren’t just “bad special.” Continue reading “Rapid Response: Rain Man”

We Bought a Zoo

If you are even the slightest bit less jaded, cynical and bitter to life and movies than me, the film critic who cannot enjoy anything but dark, thoughtful art house movies in black and white and a foreign language, then do not hesitate to see “We Bought a Zoo.” It will make you feel elated. You will bawl your eyes out with tears of pure sunshine.

“We Bought a Zoo” is possibly the most joyously tepid movie ever made. It is schlock, formula tearjerker filmmaking to perfection. It is as dopey and exuberantly cute and infectious as any movie you will ever see ever.

Watching it, I felt like Benjamin Mee’s (Matt Damon) teenage boy, just rolling my eyes and muttering under my breath at every passing moment to all the fun emotions and happy people around me.

Except like a teenage boy, I’m brooding and hating it all for no good reason. It’s lame and bad and predictable and stupid and formulaic, but it’s all so HAPPY.  You don’t watch the movie or think about it; you just cheer in glee. Continue reading “We Bought a Zoo”