I left Stone, a dreary pseudo-noir starring Robert De Niro as a parole officer and Ed Norton as an inmate angling for release, wondering both what happened -- I know it involved recession-era Detroit, inchoate religious overtones, and Milla Jovovich's nipples -- and what happened. Why did this film, built on a solid generic foundation with some of the finest materials in the business, fail to come together?
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Randall Wallace's Secretariat opens with a voice-over by the movie's star, Diane Lane, quoting from the Book of Job. If, like most sane people, you're inclined to flee movies that open with biblical quotes, you might want to concentrate on the image that accompanies those words: The camera shows us a racehorse who's just been loaded into the gate and who, it would seem, is anxious to run. The lens creeps in close to show us his supernaturally alert, twitching ears, his enormous, restless eyes, his nostrils big as portholes. Crikey! Forget the biblical stuff -- if that horse's bold, magnificent face doesn't strike the fear of the Lord into you, I don't know what will.
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The press notes for Inside Job, Charles Ferguson's debilitating cross-section of the financial crisis, include a glossary of the exotic terms used within. The inclusion is both handy and beside the point: Though it steadfastly defines the snow-blinding language and dialectic crimes of its native speakers (CDO before CDS except after CRA?), even more than it wants to inform Inside Job seeks to enrage. Ferguson, a one-man, self-appointed oversight committee whose last film, No End In Sight, shed brutal light on the mistakes made in the first months of the Iraq war, here balances that film's white-burning heat with a little old-fashioned whup-ass, using every skill in his arsenal to position the film's version of events as the righteous truth. The blow is mortal, but it's not entirely clean.
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Most of Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe is so breezily entertaining, and so bracingly clear-eyed about what total pains in the asses writers can be, that its final 15 minutes feel like an all-wrong slap in the face. That's not completely Frears' fault -- he's essentially being true to the source material, Posy Simmonds' 2007 graphic novel of the same name, about marital misbehavior, deception and dueling egos at a writer's colony in the English countryside. Still, the movie's ending leaves a sour tone that Simmonds' book -- a tart-tongued story accompanied by beautifully soft-colored, naturalistic drawings -- somehow deftly avoids. That doesn't make Tamara Drewe a complete failure as a movie. But it does raise some questions about how even a relatively faithful film adaptation can go off the rails by hitting a few wrong notes, simply in the way particular moments are re-created or framed. A filmmaker can get almost everything right, and still, in the last 15 minutes, pretty much blow the whole thing to bits.
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A poorly conceived blind date is what brings Holly (Katherine Heigl) and Messer (Josh Duhamel) together, and an equally unsatisfying date movie plays out the weird wish-fulfilling story of couplehood and compromise that follows. Holly's friend Alison (Christina Hendricks, whose otherworldly hotness will not be tamed by an overlit chick flick) and her soon-to-be husband Peter (Hayes MacArthur) decide that a date with Messer will at least get Holly back onto the field (she was turfed by her boyfriend of three years, we find out later), but the duo don't make it out of the driveway. The clichés that they manifest happen to clash (kind of hard to get on a motorcycle in a narrow power dress; kind of assy to set up the end of your night with another woman while the first one is sitting beside you) and the date tanks. Or that's what the script says; the scene is unconvincing, and there's a lot more where that came from.
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We're not supposed to laugh at the mentally ill, which is why, at the movies, we sometimes just have to -- not out of fear that we too might someday turn out to "be that way," but because, if we're honest with ourselves, we know that we all carry traces of whatever "that way" is. It's Kind of a Funny Story -- directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson, Sugar) and based on Ned Vizzini's 2006 semi-autobiographical novel about a 15-year-old's stint in a psychiatric hospital -- opens up that safety valve affectionately and unoffensively.
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A scene from the trenches: Two exhibitors are talking shop at grating volume in the screening room where a showing of Nowhere Boy is running 15 dastardly minutes late. One of them wonders why more of their peers aren't in attendance. "This is an art screening, without stars," the other scoffs. "Are you kidding me? Not that Christine Scott Thomas isn't a star -- but she's an art star."
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This morning Case 39 snuck into theaters, and I snuck in right behind it. (What's up, one other guy in the theater?) When a studio -- in this case Paramount -- shelves a movie for almost four years, and then declines to screen it, it can be tough to ignore the clutter of context once you finally do sit down to watch the thing. Questions poke in: So what was the studio so afraid of? Did the director (horror newcomer Christian Alvart) lose the picture? Were the stars (Renée Zellweger and Bradley Cooper -- love connection, y'all) unhappy? Did they put the first screening of the day in an IMAX theater to bilk the critics obliged to see it out of another three bucks?
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In a pop-culture world that's coming dangerously close to vampire overload, the last thing we need is another picture about lovelorn bloodsuckers. But Matt Reeves' Let Me In -- a somewhat faithful yet distinctive reimagining of Swedish director Tomas Alfredson's 2008 Let the Right One In -- shouldn't be lumped in with all the other rascally vampire dramas out there clamoring for our attention. Let Me In, like the pre-teen vampire at its center, is a rare creature on the contemporary movie landscape: It's a remake that surpasses its predecessor in depth and vision. And it's an adamantly un-sadistic horror movie that uses poetic visual suggestion (accented by some well-placed gore) to lure us into its dark little heart.
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Catherine Corsini's Leaving is a cheery little number that opens, and pretty much ends, with a shotgun blast. In between, Kristin Scott Thomas, as Suzanne, an affluent doctor's wife living all-too-comfortably in the south of France, falls desperately in love with Sergi López's sensitive, brawny, Spanish ex-con construction guy. As the result of this forbidden attraction, she makes some passionate, intuitively guided decisions and some rash, lousy ones. But as the ominous crack of that shotgun suggests, this isn't a story that's going to end well.
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A turbulent attempt to turn a 2003 jumbo bestseller of pop socio-economics into a pot-stirring documentary, Freakonomics features six great directors and one unhelpfully vague theme: Exposing "the hidden side of everything." That's the kind of subhead that looks great on mass-market book covers, but Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's wide-ranging, anecdotal approach to the difference between correlation and causality has lost some of its cumulative mojo in translation, partly because after seven years the pot is pretty well stirred, and partly because the medium demands narrative focus.
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By the time you read this, New Media -- including its tenacious, multi-tentacled offspring, Social Media -- as you knew it last year, last month or even yesterday, will no longer exist. The story of New Media is so perpetually new it's being written and overwritten even as we speak. Shouldn't movies -- those lumbering, endangered beasts that, done right, take months and sometimes even years to make -- be the worst mode for examining even just one angle of this quicksilver mirror world? What hope does a relatively old-school filmmaker like David Fincher have, as he takes on one of the most amorphous and ambiguous success stories in the Internet's short history, of capturing lightning in a bottle?
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Infinitely worse than you dared to hope it wouldn't be, You Again dumbfounded and then defeated me. That's a pretty limited spectrum of response, and yet I left the film feeling like I'd just crossed the Gobe with four actresses on my back. The shock is still too great to talk about the fifth -- Betty White -- except to say that, although like the rest of the free world I am glad that she's back in heavy rotation, someone needs to lay down the rules of fair use, and penalties must be called when she is deployed to such pitiable effect.
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Two or three documentaries about the Unites States' totally FUBAR education system ago, I recall a school administrator saying that he no longer attends the lotteries held to determine which children will get into the school of their choice, and which will be condemned to -- horror of horrors -- their local public school. His heart couldn't take it anymore, he said.
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Wall Street! The place where money never sleeps. Where greed is still good. Where the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. Where a penny saved is a penny earned. Where the men are men and the women are women. Where the wild things are. Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain. If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere.
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