If you have any sense of how the U.S. military protects both its own and itself -- its image, its insularity and its sense of entitlement -- very little in Amir Bar-Lev's documentary The Tillman Story will surprise you. But The Tillman Story isn't designed to be a shockeroo exposé; it's more a slow, steady rumble of anger and dismay at what the U.S. military, and the government, can get away with in the name of public relations, as if PR -- and not human lives -- were the most important consideration during wartime.
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Sometimes when I feel lost in the darkest thickets of professional moviegoing -- after hacking through, say, a particularly bad patch of uninspired romantic comedies, dunderheaded action movies and twee, manicured indies -- I beg the movie gods for anything that simply looks like a sign of life. But when it comes to the movies of German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, I've learned I never have to beg.
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Hyper-earnest and less than half good, Mao's Last Dancer puts a biopic gloss on a bumpy journey, that traveled by Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin from Maoist China to the Houston Ballet Company in the early 1980's. That gloss, a product of director Bruce Beresford's constitutional timidity toward his more provocatively chosen subjects, hardens to a kind of reflective coat that is worn most glaringly by the film's protagonist. By the end of 117 minutes we know the big-ticket plot points and that Li -- here played by dancer and first-time actor Chi Cao -- can dance like an angel, but as a man with a psychologically and emotionally motivated life he remains almost completely elusive.
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A film loaded with interest that somehow fails to be interesting, La Soga is inspired by true events and not much else. A crime drama set in a satellite village orbiting Santiago, Dominican Republic, and occasionally New York City, it tells the story of Luisito (Manny Perez, who also wrote the film), an assassin-for-hire working for the local police and the American government to cleanse drug-dealing U.S. deportees from the streets. Social, moral, and personal themes abound, but are mostly left wandering shoeless among the extras, as Perez and American director Josh Crook get caught up in playing gangster film, Dominican-style.
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There are three kinds of women in the world: Those who refuse to read Elizabeth Gilbert's mega-girly, mega-best-seller 2006 memoir Eat Pray Love; those who will damn well read it if they want to, even on the subway, and don't care what anyone else thinks; and those who, wanting or needing to see what all the fuss is about before seeing the movie, send their husbands into the bookstore to ask for it, lest they be marked as a woman who might be interested in reading "that" book.
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A woman well past a certain age, Smurf (Jacki Weaver), is constantly marking her grown children, like territory. Bleached and primped beyond the limits of dignity, she demands kisses from her sons, lingering and cooing over their lips; a thumb wet with saliva seems always at the ready, poised to erase a cheek smudge here, to smooth a strand of hair there.
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In Sylvester Stallone's boneheaded action extravaganza The Expendables, it's not just the characters who are expendable: The actors may as well be tossed out with the garbage, too.
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Peepli Live begins with a tight shot of the face of a man running, it would seem, for his life. Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri), a farmer belonging to the so-called Backward caste, is in fact catnapping in the ramshackle caravan carrying him back to the farm he is about to lose at auction, although his panicked sprint signifies something more than just an unpleasant dream. From the story told by Natha's startled face, Peepli Live opens out slowly to encompass several factions of Indian society, including the press, local, state, and federal politicians, and the shady elements binding them all together. It's a meticulously engineered design that a show like The Wire took several years to execute; here the strain shows within the first half hour.
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Everyone has the right to love the relics of his or her childhood: PacMan as opposed to Grand Theft Auto, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles over Dora the Explorer, New Kids on the Block trumping Taylor Swift. But nostalgia can be as cloying as it is comforting, and there comes a time when that wardrobe of ringer T's emblazoned with cartoon characters ought to be left behind. Especially if you're a grown-up guy and you have any interest in, you know, actually sleeping with a girl.
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"Let's focus on why we're here," is the refrain Jack Harris (Luke Wilson) uses to soothe a parade of thugs in Middle Men. Jack is half conflict-resolution consultant, half cleaner, and the only thing he'll admit to doing all the way is the job at hand, which involves fixing broken -- and usually shady -- deals. If it were just a little bit more fun watching this Internet-age crime caper, Jack's smooth-operator refrain might have become a sort of mordant catchphrase. Instead it's a grim reminder of the narrative incoherence that drags this well-acted and often lively movie down.
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Cairo Time is the kind of slender, willowy picture that could easily be dismissed as inconsequential, maybe even laughable: A fiftyish magazine writer, Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), travels to Cairo to meet her husband, who works for the United Nations and is stationed in the area. He's called away on urgent business and thus sends his former bodyguard, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), to meet her. The inevitable happens: Juliette's husband is delayed for days, and Tareq assumes a greater role in her adventure, first as a guide and protector and then as a friend. Nothing -- and everything -- happens between them.
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For a film meant to delve into the experience of being young, rich, and messed up in New York City, Twelve rarely lets its subjects open their mouths. Instead it plays like the filmstrip an anthropology student from Zambia might make about Upper East Side teenagers after a semester of research involving nothing but episodes of Dragnet and Gossip Girl. And maybe The Rules of Attraction, the atrocious 2002 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel of the same name. Over-narrated by Kiefer Sutherland in full "this is extremely important and also very, very cool" mode, from its first self-important minutes Twelve seems as if it can't possibly be serious. Would that it were not.
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Adam McKay's comedy The Other Guys has a lot going for it: Even though it mines perennial cop-buddy-movie material, it doesn't feel generic or strained, and unlike other recent comedies -- Dinner for Schmucks pops to mind -- it never descends into grating self-consciousness. Forget impressing us with its cleverness; it's happy to seduce us with its dumbness, and when McKay and his performers -- chief among them Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg and Eva Mendes -- dangle that shiny lure, damn it if it doesn't work at least half the time.
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Spring Fever is a work of defiance, for better and worse. Director Lou Ye's sixth film is also his first filmed in violation of a five-year ban on production imposed by the Chinese Film Bureau after the 2006 release of Summer Palace, which dealt directly with the Tiananmen Square rebellion. Shot on the sly in Nanjing, Spring Fever maps two extra angles onto an already unconventional love triangle, frankly inverting the dominant sexual dynamic of the melodrama: Three of the five participants are men, and none of them are that interested in the women.
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Although Hong Kong films are immensely popular among Americans, they seem to strike a chord mostly with a subset of young, eager fans. Average American moviegoers probably haven't heard of Johnnie To, but much worse, average filmmakers may not have heard of him either. I don't even dare to think how much better mainstream American movies would be if they showed even half the craftsmanship, energy and passion of To's latest, Vengeance, an underworld drama featuring the French pop star Johnny Hallyday.
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