The advertising campaign for Roger Michell's Morning Glory makes it look like every dismal, overly calculated Nancy Meyers comedy you never wanted to see: A perky young go-getter is fired from her job as a low-level producer on a New Jersey morning-TV show, but bounces back by landing a job on a bigger show in New York, whose ratings she rescues from the toilet even as she juggles the high-maintenance egos of the on-air talent. Oh, and even though she works too hard to spend much time on her love life, she still manages to find a nice boyfriend. If you're in your right mind, why would you go anywhere near a movie like that?
more »
Only a month ago, to mark the 65th anniversary of the founding of the Workers' Party of Korea, North Korea fired up its first Web site. Notoriously prohibitive of communication of almost every sort, as well as having one of the largest military forces in the world, North Korea defends its borders from outside influence with extreme prejudice, guarding as vigilantly against military invasion as it does against the infiltration of old Baywatch episodes and Kim Kardashian's scintillating Twitter feed.
more »
If casting is half the battle, then Fair Game director Doug Liman was already three-quarters of the way home when he signed Naomi Watts to play former CIA agent Valerie Plame and Sean Penn her blustering diplomat husband. As Plame and Joe Wilson, Watts and Penn get to sink their chops into one of the most cinema-friendly true stories in recent history; if a guy in a bathrobe writing world-beating code could be conjured into a blissfully entertaining movie, what might be done with the story of a spy, who did spy stuff in war time, until her righteous husband blew a couple of inconvenient whistles and her own government ruined her life? Featuring George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice as themselves? Refresh that, Sorkin!
more »
Todd Phillips' Due Date is a massive wedgie of a comedy, which is to say it's a comedy of extreme discomfort -- it's so unnerving, in fact, it sometimes seems more like an experimental theater piece than a mainstream entertainment.
more »
Danny Boyle's 127 Hours is a jaunty little exploitation picture with prestige movie cred. By now you probably already know that in 127 Hours, James Franco's character -- based on real-life adventure boy Aron Ralston -- saws his forearm off with a cheap, not-particularly-sharp multiuse tool, an act of desperation that's necessary to save his life when he becomes trapped in a claustrophobically narrow Utah canyon. That arduous sawing -- it's more a smooshy kind of hacking, if you want to know the truth -- comes near the end of the movie, though it's also the dramatic centerpiece, the moment we're all waiting for from minute one. There's no suspense in 127 Hours, only anticipation: We know what we're there for; we just need to hang around to see how it plays out.
more »
More surprising than the fact that For Colored Girls, Tyler Perry's deliriously lush, regrettably swollen adaptation of Ntozake Shange's 1970's Broadway phenomenon, doesn't work is the extent to which it almost does. Shange's earthy, epiphanic tone poem -- an ode to the ascendant black woman, and her many iterations -- presents a considerable screenwriting challenge: Its characters are colors, its impact a combination of sustained lyrical -- and lexical -- intensity and theatrical choral force. Perry's ambition in translating the work to the screen is determined and true; the film's main fascination is that of watching a director struggle to honor Shange's choreopoem and then lose the battle not with the material but with himself.
more »
There may be no grand sociological explanation for it, but 2010 has brought us two animated films whose heroes are actually so-bad-they're-good villains. The first was Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud's diabolically wonderful Despicable Me, in which Steve Carell provides the voice of a pot-bellied, beak-nosed crankypants whose stone-cold heart is warmed by a trio of orphanettes. Now Dreamworks Animation offers its own entry in the mini-genre with Megamind, featuring Will Ferrell as an alien baddie with a bulbous noggin who realizes, too late, that an evildoer without a counterpart do-gooder is like Lex Luthor with no Superman: When there's no one around to make you look truly bad, the best you can aspire to is mediocrity.
more »
A companion film to Days of Glory, Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 feature about Algerian soldiers who fought for France in World War II, Outside the Law is another historical drama with a heavy heart and a knack for genre. Where Days of Glory inhabited the grimy trenches of the combat movie, Outside the Law frames the story of three Algerian brothers angling for a revolution in post-war France within the look and feel of a gangster epic. As in his previous film, the narrative is a portal to writer/director Bouchareb's ongoing examination of Algeria's struggle against colonial rule, and the legacy of those who fought both for France and against her, often in the same lifetime.
more »
Terrorists aren't very funny when they're flying planes into your buildings. But aspiring terrorists who accidentally blow up unfortunate sheep, or who choke on the SIM cards they've been trained to swallow, or who return to the same beauty shop over and over again in search of massive quantities of hydrogen peroxide, ostensibly throwing the shop proprietor off the trail by using a high-pitched phony-femme voice (without bothering to shave off that telltale beard) -- now those kinds of terrorists might be good for a laugh.
more »
Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is another in a growing line of documentary audits of the run-up to New York's annus horribilis, and the second offered by director Alex Gibney this year alone (Casino Jack and the United States of Money, about the Jack Abramoff scandal, was released this spring). If you can turn your mind back to 2008, you'll recall that it was the year New York governor Eliot Spitzer resigned amid a good old-fashioned sex scandal, right before the economy finally collapsed and the country was delivered into a sequel to the Great Depression. No wonder retro's all the rage!
more »
The Saw films have proved, with each grim installment, that Americans can turn anything into a franchise. We so want what's familiar, to revisit where we've been, that it hardly matters if our first -- let alone any subsequent -- experience was enjoyable. It's how we choose familiarity over originality, mediocrity over the unknown, or Applebee's over a local bistro, even if we claim to prefer the alternative. It's how the Saw franchise has become as dependable as Old Navy, its absurdly underlit rooms and time-triggered torture devices as cozy as a pair of shoddily stitched jeans. As certain as the globe turns, another outlet opens its doors each October.
more »
Midway through Waste Land, Lucy Walker's tightrope inquiry into the confluence of art, altruism and exploitation, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz notes that his hometown of Sao Paolo is "not a pretty place, unless you look from very far away." He's standing over a vista of the teeming city of 20 million when he says that -- the meaning is quite literal -- and yet it resonates across Muniz's attempt to turn the largest garbage dump in the world, and its workers, into an elite modern art project.
more »
It's often a sad day when a movie series -- the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or the nearly completed Harry Potter saga -- comes to an end. And I know there are some who will shed a tear in the closing moments of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third and final installment in the Swedish-made series based on the novels of the late Stieg Larsson. But as the end credits of this last dour Swedish snooze-a-thon started rolling, I clapped my notebook shut as if it were the last day of school. Huzzah! Bring on David Fincher. Please.
more »
Apparently, distinguished actors getting their gun-toting genre jollies is all the rage this fall. A British companion piece to the recent Red, Wild Target stars Bill Nighy as Victor Maynard, a hit man who dispatches death with incomparable flair and conscienceless ease. Victor lives a life of precision, which means it doesn't really involve people other than those he's contracted to kill.
more »
If we need another movie about unhappy middle-aged married people who have to be jolted out of their complacency so they can learn that life really is worth living, then Jake Scott's Welcome to the Rileys is hardly the worst result we could hope for. James Gandolfini is Doug Riley, an Indianapolis plumbing-supply salesman who still cares for his emotionally fragile, agoraphobic wife, Lois (Melissa Leo). But his frustration with her is understandable: When he trundles into the couple's bedroom after a long day, he finds the nightie-clad Lois reading in bed, her hair wrapped into prim little pincurls, a highly effective sex-prevention method. No wonder he's having an affair with the waitress -- played by Eisa Davis -- down at the local pancake joint.
more »
