Set amid the stark dualities of the new Bombay, Mumbai Diaries follows four characters whose lives suggest the various ways one can experience what writer Suketu Mehta dubbed the "maximum city," and the social and economic determinism that closes each of those experiences off from the others. The film, writer and director Kiran Rao's feature debut, is marked by an ambition as grand as it is vulnerable to classist cliché. Rao's ultimate achievements -- including a balanced, doleful tone and moments of city symphony elegance -- are undercut by the arrangement of her characters into narrative castes that cross paths but can't quite connect.
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It's a noble thing to make a movie that tries to capture the way real people speak. But how do you know how close you're getting? And even when you put raunchy turns of phrase or the most current slang in your characters' mouths, are you really capturing the reality of those characters' -- or of anyone's -- lives? Language is either a part of the landscape of a movie or it's window dressing, the first thing you notice. Can movie speech be believable and natural when it jumps out at us?
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Before Hollywood discovered it could reap huge profits by adapting comic books, mainstream movies used to attempt subjects that might have something to do with real grown-ups' lives. That impulse rarely surfaces these days, but it's the motor that drives The Company Men, John Wells' downsizing drama set in the Boston area circa 2008, just as the economy was beginning its long, slow-motion crash.
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Caution: This is not a bad movie. Yes, we're one sentence in, and I've already broken a major Bad Movies We Love rule. Addams Family Values is perfectly cast, hilarious, and the best showcase of Joan Cusack's insanity since she wore clown leper makeup in Working Girl. But Addams Family Values qualifies as a BMWL because it's a freakishly dated '60s sitcom making a go of '90s family fare, an ooky onslaught of puns and one-liners, and a movie so ridiculous that its theme song is the Tag Team opus "Addams Family (Whoomp)." It's a Bad Movie We Love because rational filmmakers would've never let it happen, but somehow this goofy riot prevailed. Thank God.
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The kind of filmmaking excitement that director Peter Weir brings to movies is bone deep. It doesn't emerge in the flashy flourishes that come off as compulsively exhibitionistic -- the "Dude, Where's My Camera Car?" school. Instead, in the potent and dream-like The Way Back, Weir's subtle control is evident by the way he uses sound, embracing the allure and menace it simultaneously evokes. And we're reminded how crushingly obvious many directors are about incorporating the aural aspect of their work; generally when the audience is aware of it, it's used like a blunt object by horror film directors.
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Martin Zandvliet's Applause is a small movie with modest ambitions, and accordingly, it packs only a modest emotional punch. But as a showcase for its star, the Danish actress Paprika Steen (possibly best known for her role in Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 Dogme picture The Celebration), it's still rewarding in its own quiet, jarring way.
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Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid is a lush, chilly entertainment that's a little bit Hitchcock (in its wickedness and coolly composed visuals) and a little bit Sirk (in its numerous over-the-top flourishes, often involving disastrous household accidents). In the end, it's perhaps not enough of either. But the picture glides by on its stylishness and on the strength of its performances. What it lacks in passion it makes up in bravado, and its showiness alone is seductive.
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The stoic drama A Somewhat Gentle Man is photographed in a palate of steel gray tones that match Stellan Skarsgård's complexion. It's a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal. Man has the confidence of knowing exactly where it wants to go, and when it wants to arrive; however, you may be just as familiar with the territory as the driver.
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The Dilemma, Ron Howard's cheerless, would-be relationship farce, begins with two couples around a dinner table and ends with two men running into each other's arms. Ronny (Vince Vaughn) and Nick (Kevin James) are tight. Friends since college, they share their lives, they share a business -- Nick designs car engines and Ronny sells them to Big Auto -- and they've shared a woman at least once, just to keep things on the level. They share, in other words, the kind of bond that has transformed a certain kind of comedy into a homo-social love story, a soft-core sausage fest.
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Garrett, the crass, crabby showrunner played by Eddie Izzard in Every Day, has a refrain meant to inspire the stable of television writers who script his Gray's Anatomy-ish show: Shock me. Shock me! Write something shocking! Jaded and suffering from character arc exhaustion, Garrett is meant to be a joke and he is: Incest, bestiality, and public sex (ideally with a hooker who has AIDS) are his idea of fresh and new; the craven, ratings-mongering type he embodies wouldn't pass his own smell test.
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The idea of Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet so inflaming the fanboy community is amusing, since that group's 20/50 vision also had it tsking its disapproval about Michael Keaton as Batman and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man (corrective hindsight brought them on board for the latter). But as with those previous strip-to-screen revivals, this new Hornet excited me; Seth Rogen as Britt Reid in a film directed by Michael Gondry sounded very promising.
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Season of the Witch has nothing at all to do, in theme, tone or mood, with the Donovan song of the same name. If only! No great-sounding nonsense warbling about beatniks out to make it rich, or rabbits running in a ditch, or even about the necessity of picking up every stitch. Just a Crusades-era Nicolas Cage traipsing round Ye Olde Europe in chain mail and unwashed hair, trying to transport a supposed witch-girl from point A to point B at the behest of his Church -- which, by the way, he's lost faith in.
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Perhaps only hip hop rivals country music in its obsession with authenticity. The mainstream reckoned with both genres in the 1990s, and in the fallout some purist concessions were made: Top 40 crossovers like Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus were not fake country but new country. Success is plenty real, after all -- especially in the form of millions of record sales -- as are its pitfalls. Oscars are pretty real too, as the stars of many Nashville-flavored films well know. While filming her own country epic in that city this past winter, Gwyneth Paltrow probably shed a few extra inky tears in honor of Jeff Bridges's Oscar win for his similarly screwed up songbird in Crazy Heart.
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Did Nicole Kidman think she was going to simper through award season without the "Bad Movies We Love" treatment? Eyes wide shut, indeed, lambs. Though we're all excited for the million and one laughs of Rabbit Hole (which I keep mistakenly calling The Velveteen Child-Slaying), it can't possibly compare to the fun of Nicole's 1990 quest into NASCAR cinema, Days of Thunder. It stars her nephew Tom Cruise, too.
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Blue Valentine is such a mannered, affected piece of filmmaking that in its early minutes, I wasn't sure I'd be able to survive it. A prematurely aged Ryan Gosling, wearing an aggressively receding hairline -- the character he's playing appears to be 27 going on 62 -- is roused from an armchair snooze by his young daughter, who informs him, with the kind of solemn urgency that kindergarteners pull off so well, that the family dog has gone missing. Gosling's Daddy Dean, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, scoops the girl into his arms (her name is Frankie, and she's played by a grave charmer named Faith Wladyka) and the two head out into the family's scrubby yard on a search mission.
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