Tag: Emily Mortimer

Lars and the Real Girl

If your brother showed up to your house with a sex doll he believed to be his real life girlfriend, you could have one of two reactions: Either you could go along with his delusion and try and help, or you could lop the head off the damn thing and try and help that way.

“Lars and the Real Girl” is a sitcom-y but sweet story about a man with a social phobia stuck in a delusion. It’s approach for self-help is the former, and it becomes obvious how drastically different a film this could’ve been if it adhered to the latter. But by straining to avoid cynicism and discrimination at all costs, “Lars and the Real Girl” overcomes what would otherwise be cheap, sitcom laughs.

Ryan Gosling shows magnificent range as Lars, the awkward but undeniably endearing disabled person who brings home a plastic girlfriend. He has a crippling fear of social situations and experiences a burning pain at the touch. But at almost every moment Gosling is just naturally beaming.

As we see him sitting with this slutty doll, we laugh with him, not at him. Everyone in town cares so much for him that much of Craig Gillespie’s film is about his family and friends more than it is about Lars. Continue reading “Lars and the Real Girl”

Hugo

Who other than Martin Scorsese could make a kids movie about the first pioneer of cinema and make it the most visionary, lovely and wondrous film of the year?

Scorsese’s “Hugo” is certainly a departure for the legendary director, and Brian Selznick’s equally imaginative children’s book would likewise be a hot commodity to many other directors, but few people other than Scorsese could wholly embody his love of cinema and general nerddom for silent films and trick artists like Georges Melies and get away with it.

That’s the selling point for me and other adults speculative about how Scorsese would handle a children’s film. “Hugo” could actually double as the biopic of Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), the story of how as an adult the magician turned filmmaker who made the masterpiece “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) became a quiet recluse who never spoke of his films after nearly all of them had been forgotten and destroyed.

Scorsese worships the man, arguably the first auteur of film, and he honors Melies by literally recreating his films in stunning color and 3-D cinematography.

For all the movies being re-released and up converted into 3-D today, the last one I thought would get the treatment would be “A Trip to the Moon.” Yet I’m giddy at watching this fantastical mystery story for children simply dripping with film history, and there is something wonderfully fulfilling about seeing a moon with a rocket poking out of its eye floating mystically above the screen. Continue reading “Hugo”

Our Idiot Brother

 

A leading man who would use the expression “geez louise” over the F-word is foreign to us in the movies. “Our Idiot Brother’s” Ned proves a character doesn’t have to be a silly man-child to be free of cynicism, snark, bitterness and charm.

Discovering Ned’s ability to survive in the real world (and similarly in the movies) of negativity and deceit is the appeal of this loving and warm indie comedy. That’s because “Our Idiot Brother” is not a film of Ned’s growth but of his sisters. Continue reading “Our Idiot Brother”