Nicholas Sparks. The name alone conjures up images of a romantic connection leaping between two people like an electric current, of fireworks illuminating the sky behind a couple canoodling at the side of a silvery lake somewhere and swearing they'll never be parted — except that she's dying of terminal amnesia and he has to leave tomorrow for an 50-year deployment in the Middle East, oh no!
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The best documentaries tell you more than you think you’d ever want to know about a subject, perhaps fulfilling a curiosity you didn’t know you had. That’s the case with Kevin Macdonald’s Bob Marley documentary Marley, which stretches out at a languorous two hours and 24 minutes without dragging or getting bogged down in extraneous details. Everything in it – from interviews with the singer’s bandmates and his widow, Rita, to vintage and contemporary images of his hardscrabble birthplace of St. Ann Parish, Jamaica, to live-performance footage that captures his extraordinary charisma – feels essential, albeit in a relaxed way. By the end you feel you’ve learned something about the man, yet his mystique emerges intact.
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There’s too much people and not enough dog in Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion, and even if you prefer people to dogs, that’s a serious problem. It would be bad enough that Kasdan squanders the gifts of two of his lead actors, Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline, in this aimless, tedious and sometimes downright ridiculous comedy-drama about a fractured family brought closer by unusual circumstances. But he does a disservice to an even more striking face: That of a mutt whom Keaton’s character rescues from the edge of the highway, an elegant, spirited creature she dubs — what else? — Freeway.
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It’s spring rummage week at the movies, with four releases – Lockout, The Three Stooges, Cabin in the Woods and Craig Moss’s vigilante goof Bad Ass – retooling old gems and selling off genres for parts. Maybe next year we can look forward to a film made up solely of references to this quartet – The Three Bad Asses Escape Lockout in the Woods? Wait, don’t Google that. I don’t want to know.
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The sci-fi action flick Lockout, directed by first-timers James Mather and Stephen St. Leger from a script they wrote with Luc Besson, features a scene in which characters somehow skydive out of orbit through the stratosphere to land, neatly and not even a little on fire, on an urban road. It isn't a sequence of events I'd ever have dreamed I needed to see on-screen, but boy, was I glad to.
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Bobby and Peter Farrelly’s The Three Stooges is not particularly great, though it is possibly brilliant, a picture that goes beyond homage to become its own rambunctious invention — it’s one big eye-poke, with footnotes. Maybe the world doesn’t need a meticulously observed re-creation of the Three Stooges’ artistry, a brand of cartoonishly violent slapstick that for decades horrified moms and other upstanding individuals. Or maybe the world needs it now more than ever. Either way, the Farrellys’ reimagining of the Stooges ouvre — which includes a backstory set in an orphanage run by nuns — is packed with so much affection, and pays so much attention to detail, that I think it’s possible to love The Three Stooges even if you never loved the Three Stooges. The picture is confident in its ridiculousness — any movie that puts Larry David in a nun’s habit has to be.
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When I was in college, I once went on a weekend trip with my two roommates to Cape Cod, where someone had scrounged up a summer home belonging to a family friend who was willing to let us stay for a few days. The owners were in the middle of renovating the place, so instead of windows there were just sheets of plastic that bulged in and out with the wind. Half the rooms didn't have electricity, and we had to go to the tap outside to get water — but hey, someone was letting us stay in their house in a scenic location far from our shabby apartment near campus, and for free. No one was complaining.
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In the States, at least, it may seem odd to make a bitterly funny movie about glum working people caught in the crossfire of political upheaval and state-sanctioned murder. But Pablo Larraín pulls it off with Post Mortem, a modest, mordant little drama set in 1973 Santiago, Chile, just as a military coup is spelling the end for democratically elected President Salvador Allende and setting the stage for the ascent of dictator Augusto Pinochet. If you were a Chilean citizen in the middle of all that, you probably wouldn’t be smiling much, and sure enough, Larrain’s protagonist here, a dour coroner’s assistant named Mario, sets the tone for the movie from the beginning: He’s a gaunt, living ghost, with lank, longish blonde-gray hair – he’d almost be hip, if only he had the energy.
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There's something immobile at the center of The Lady, a kind of Botoxed biopic with an unlikely director -- Luc Besson -- manning the syringe. Technically, that something is the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi: Here the Burmese activist is played by Michelle Yeoh, who gets the already wearisome Shepard Fairey treatment on the film's poster, and seems to have attended the special edition stamp school of acting in preparation for the role. Almost to a scene, Yeoh is so still and serene she's practically submerged, her dialogue seeming to rise like beatific air bubbles that burst into tiny, untroubled smiles at the surface. Rather than ripple out -- and risk the suggestion of any small mercy of movement whatever -- Yeoh's performance forms a kind of undertow that pulls the surrounding story and characters into the hagiographic shallows, where they float like sea monkeys with better set dressing, blooping away about Burmese democracy.
In the '70s New York Magazine ran occasional contests, in one case asking readers to submit greeting cards for unlikely occasions. Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope -- it original title was Habemus Papam -- could use one of those entries as its tagline: "Saw your smoke, now you're Pope, congrats!"
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It ought to be no fun watching characters you came to know as randy, unruly high school students turn into grown-ups with jobs, families and crappy sex lives. That’s what happens to real-life people; why subject fictional characters to it? But somehow American Reunion — the third movie sequel to Paul and Chris Weitz’s hall-of-fame teen sex comedy 1999 American Pie — makes the harsh reality jolt almost painless.
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Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope plants a sloppy, moist kiss on the sweaty brow of geek culture's premiere event. Where it stops short from also getting on its knees and offering a different sort of sloppy, moist service to the four-day San Diego affair is in the sight of one of the film's subjects weeping in the audience of a panel entitled "Breaking into Comics the Marvel Way." Comic-Con Episode IV is indulgent to a fault about everything that happens on the convention floor, but Spurlock makes the smart decision to shape the film primarily around subjects who have an economic stake in the goings-on.
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Characters in horror movies get to be forgiven a few featherbrained actions for the sake of suspense. Why go into the creepy basement after you've realized the lights aren't working? Why visit the decrepit mansion in the middle of nowhere after everyone's warned you off? Why stick around the haunted house long after a rational person would have fled to a motel at least two states away? (The upcoming Cabin in the Woods provides a clever, clever twist on this type of behavior.) Why? Because it's scary.
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Man vs. beast, man vs. man, man vs. corporation, man vs. himself — The Hunter takes all these pretty ladies out for a spin, but can’t seem to decide which one to bring home. The set-up is so swift it could easily pass you by: Martin (Willem Dafoe) is contracted by a shady outfit to bag a Tasmanian tiger, presumed extinct, in the Australian wilderness. Rumor has it there’s one left out there, and what better reason to fully extinguish a species than in the name of pharmaceutical patent? Martin appears to have no particular feeling about this assignment; as long as his toiletries are properly lined up and he’s left alone, he doesn’t appear to have a particular feeling about much of anything.
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Damsels in Distress is Whit Stillman’s first film in 14 years: For those keeping track at home, that’s the equivalent of three four-year stints at an Ivy League college, plus one year of graduate school, plus one year of aimless backpacking around Europe bankrolled by daddy. How much you enjoy Damsels will depend on your tolerance for Stillman’s particular brand of duct-taped Sperry Topsider whimsy. It’s a comedy! It’s a musical! It’s a trip down memory lane to revisit the blissful confusion of our — or someone’s — college years! Damsels in Distress is all of those things and yet somehow less, as wayward as a second-semester junior who can’t yet decide on a major.
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