Tag: Emily Watson

The Book Thief

“The Book Thief”, based on Markus Zusak’s novel, is both tragic and whimsical to a fault.

The Book Thief Movie

There’s no rule that Nazi Germany be depicted only as gray with splashes of red swastika flags, but to see it prettied up in snow white colors for much of Brian Percival’s “The Book Thief” makes the contrasting themes a bit off-putting.

Although it gets a pass on the light-hearted and nuanced performances of its lead actors, “The Book Thief” forms an unholy marriage between historical melodrama and a childlike fable. It feels overly precious, and it becomes both tragic and whimsical to a fault.

Percival’s film is based on Markus Zusak’s novel of the same name, and it follows a little girl named Liesel (Sophie Nelisse of “Monsieur Lazhar”) as she’s being dropped off with a new German family. Her mother is a Communist on the run and her younger brother has just passed away from illness, and now Liesel is alone with her new father and mother, Hans and Rosa (Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson).

Liesel cannot read and slowly begins to learn with her father, but when Hans takes in a sickly Jew on the run named Max (Ben Schnetzer), Liesel befriends him and helps nurse him back to health by reading him banned and stolen books. Continue reading “The Book Thief”

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”

War Horse

In “War Horse” Steven Spielberg has made a big, weepy, melodramatic, old-fashioned war epic that gave me giant, black, soppy horse eyes as I watched it.

Time and again its expansive locales, swimmingly patriotic John Williams score, folksy character actors, cloying tearjerker plot developments and dopey comic relief moments typically involving livestock recall how John Ford would’ve done it much better in a number of his movies, and Spielberg knows it.

Perhaps more so than “Hugo,” “Midnight in Paris,” “Super 8” or even “The Artist,” “War Horse” is a throwback to Classical Hollywood in so many ways that from a modern lens the film just feels so phony and unrealistic but oh so right. Continue reading “War Horse”