Jun 20, 2011
(rated R, 107 mins.)
A movie about movies for people who like movies, appears to have all the elements: Low budget, cameos of the top Hollywood stars and Steve Soderbergh directing in what most are calling his follow-up to “Sex Lies and Videotape”. Soderbergh, obviously in an experimental mood, may have chose the wrong experiment. It’s the kind of movie you get to make when you’ve won your Oscar and have a string of hits like “Out of Sight” and “Traffic”, one guesses. Clearly a labor of love for him and just a plain labor for us moviegoers is the story of complicated characters including Julia Roberts, David Hyde Pierce, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener, Mary McCormack and Blair Underwood. Linda (McCormack) would love to be loved. Carl (Pierce) loves his wife Lee (Keener) but Lee is looking to be loved by Calvin (Underwood). Catherine, who is really Francesca (Roberts) finds true love but Gus loves himself. With me? Didn’t think so. Set in contemporary Los Angeles, over a 24 hour period, the story attempts to bind together fragile relationships that are hard to follow in the first place.
Jun 20, 2011
Dirty fingernails, a cigarette and a rundown trailer are the introduction we get to Ray (Melissa Leo) a desperate mother of two boys, ages 15 and 5, earning minimum wage. When her husband (the one we haven’t met) takes off and leaves her with the balance due on her dreamy pre-fab house, she must come up with a way to make the $4,372.00 or she loses her $1,500 deposit. Within minutes of watching this film in which her son, T.J. (Charlie McDermott) play daddy to his younger brother, while she works at the Five and Dime, we want to break out our checkbooks. But just before we do, Ray’s path crosses with a Mohawk woman, Lila (Misty Upham) who has a way of smuggling in illegal immigrants from Quebec to upstate New York, where the two women live. Tired of stealing-from-Peter-to-pay-Paul, Ray takes the risk to join her, using her own car, which entails driving across the frozen river, avoiding state troopers, and well, you get the point. As the river freezes, the drama, urgency and feelings of desperation heat up for both the audience and for Ray. Every time a situation heightens to assumed disaster, you’ll find yourself repositioning yourself in your seat for a hopeful near-miss. Grounded in the characters and only the circumstance – no flashy sound effects, big stars or big budget – we are motivated by only Ray’s need to feed and protect her children. Melissa Leo deserves to carry this film and does, with the weight of a love that only a mother could understand. Oscar contender hands down. Four tiaras
Jun 20, 2011
Opening with actual 1970s video footage including the U.S. turning over the Watergate tapes, it’s the last few hours of our resigning President, Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella). On the other side of the globe, British playboy and talk show host, David Frost (Michael Sheen – he was Tony Blair in “The Queen.”) is accustomed to interviewing the Bee Gees. When Nixon decides to sell his interview, agent Swifty Lazar (Toby Jones) convinces him to go with Frost over CBS’s Mike Wallace, because it will be easier, not to mention he’ll come out looking like a rehabilitated human to the American people. Frost hires Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) to dig into the stories behind Viet Nam and Watergate, while Frost finds financers – to back his out-of-pocket $600,000 risk that this interview just cost him. As the movie builds to the climatic one-on-one sit down between the two – beginning March 23, 1977 and lasting four days – one can’t help but wonder how you may have ever thought ‘who would want to see a movie about Nixon being interviewed?’ Instead the film is completely riveting. You’ll hear a pin drop and you’ll see the unraveling of the behind the scenes – how Nixon’s games and wit earned him the nickname “Tricky Dick.” Director Ron Howard portrays Nixon as less than a villain and more of a man we find flawed and tragic; a victim to his own foolish mistakes. Langella gives a performance of a lifetime able to translate from stage (where he won a Tony Award for the same performance) to the big screen. He doesn’t look like Nixon, he doesn’t act like Nixon, and then all of a sudden he does a complete metamorphosis into Nixon and you’re sure it is Nixon. Langella will not only be nominated for an Oscar but will undoubtedly win. But while the movie itself is close to flawless, its biggest challenge will be attracting a young crowd or history lovers. If you liked “Good Night and Good Luck” – and this is way smarter – you’ll love this. Though its R rating will limit younger audiences, too. Four tiaras
Jun 20, 2011
(Rated R, 122 mins.)
Yet another take on the infamous Jack the Ripper, who made his name slaughtering prostitutes in Victorian London. This time there’s a chilling alleged conspiracy involving the highest powers in England, and it’s up to Johnny Depp, starring as Inspector Fred Abberline, to unravel it. When we meet him, he’s smoking in an opium den — maybe they should have called it “Jack the Tripper.” In fact, the movie often plays like an opium dream, full of paranoia, spooky fantasies, and an unintentionally comical love interest embodied (and how) by Heather Graham, as a hooker whose relationship with Inspector Abberline may be more than professional. The film comes off as a noisy attempt to be the ultimate anti-Merchant/Ivory. Going for a kind of Victorian-period-piece-meets-horror-film, the Hughes Brothers, who previously directed “Menace to Society” and “Dead Presidents,” wind up with a muddle. At least they got the title right.
Jun 20, 2011
Girlfriends will tell you every detail of their love life, their marital problems and which ensemble they wore last night, but bring up the subject of money, and even the closest of friends are guarded, or have opinions on how you should be spending yours. Frances McDormand is an angry clothes designer, fed up, tired and married to a husband who could be gay, so she screams at people who cut in front of her at Old Navy. Why is she there in the first place? Catherine Keener plays a screenwriter whose troubled marriage is exaggerated by a house renovation, while Joan Cusack is the happily married one who has a huge inheritance. Her biggest concern is that her husband spends too much on baby shoes from Paris for their child. What the three have in common is their love and concern for their fourth friend, Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) who is a school teacher turned cleaning lady. And while she may be the poorest, she seems to be the happiest. While its amusing and reflective of any forty-something woman’s own little issues, in some shape or form, it feels like a packaged formula of “Bridget Jones” meets “Sex and the City’s” Carrie Bradshaw, but with a sense of “Crash” since their lives keep intersecting, yet I’m never sure why. In Los Angeles rich friends wouldn’t socialize with a maid. Nevertheless, I laughed, I related and I felt good after I left the theatre, even if it felt more like a sitcom idea than a complete movie. TWO CROWNS
