An efficient suite in the mode of Hitchcock's pure cinema, the opening of The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski's eminently suave town-car thriller, relaxes willing viewers right into the director's velvet grip. It comprises the arrival of a night ferry and the evacuation of the below-deck parking lot: an abandoned mini-SUV grows conspicuous; eventually it is all that remains. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman's ever-watchful camera moves in for a closer look just as a tow truck clamps down on the unclaimed vehicle's bumper, causing it to blink its lights and mewl in a protest that seems both witty and forlorn. In fact it is a hedge against the true alarm of the next image, that of an ocean-battered corpse. Just like that, we have received much of the information we will need to follow the conspiracy-driven storyline that unfolds. We have also been notified of Polanski the playful ironist's return to slow-boiling, street-slickened noir.
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As you read this, audiences are going to be of, um, two minds about Shutter Island. Is Martin Scorsese's thriller a rollicking example of an A-list filmmaker having fun with B-movie conventions? Or is it a bloated waste of time and talent that hinges on a switcheroo we could see coming back when Engor met Oomo? Either way, there's no doubt that you can do a lot worse with island-set schlock. I know, I've visited those grim shores -- read on for a guided tour.
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"You act like insanity is catching," Leonardo DiCaprio's Federal Marshal cracks in the opening minutes of Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's swollen Valentine to B-movie brain-benders of the noir and Hitchcockian schools. Before long, of course, we have reason to think it might be, and not only because the droning cello notes that accompany Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) on their journey to investigate the Ashecliff Asylum have escalated to a state of pure, keening hysteria before the duo even breach the gates. A simple assignment -- that of locating a missing patient amid a facility for the violently insane -- becomes tangled in psychological and pseudo-historical thickets so dense that one's own brain begins to scramble in the bid to maintain order.
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The Wolfman, Joe Johnston's gallingly leaden remake of the 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. classic, both lives and dies by its transformations. Its most obvious selling point is also its most successful: Johnston nails the depictions of a humble man's gruesome morph into a flesh-hungry monster. And yet the film itself is felled by a rending confusion about whether it is at heart a genteel narrative thriller in the gothic mold or a single-player limb-ripper that, with a few programming tweaks, could easily find a spot at the Xbox Olympics.
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Hollywood's haste and pressure to manufacture blockbuster franchises have resulted in some spectacular landmarks (Twilight, Transformers) and duds (Speed Racer, The Incredible Hulk -- twice) of late. But it has rarely allowed for a genuine curio like Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the first of what Fox hopes will be at least five adaptations of Rick Riordan's hit kid-lit series. I say why not? Flaccid as this family-targeted romp can be, there's something to be said for seeing such campy, bizarro, mass-market craziness blown up for the decade to come.
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As this season's gift to the lovelorn, Valentine's Day rates somewhere between a pink carnation from the boss and the off-label SweetTarts left out in the break room: nothing personal is offered or gained and you really have to work to enjoy it. Expanding the laughably low concept they last applied to He's Just Not That Into You, rom-com scientists Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein squeezed even more big names (19 are above the movie poster's title) into another set of vaguely interlinked tales of love gone wonky. The A-list overkill yields at least one interesting result: in the quest to cover every demographic and circumstantial cliché, director Garry Marshall and screenwriter Katherine Fugate may have made the first romantic comedy for the ADD generation.
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Built from the brittle bones of British novelist David Peace's quartet of novels, the Red Riding Trilogy reimagines a bleak and bloody period in Northern England's history in a broad-shouldered, brutal noir mold. Three directors have accepted the challenge to prove that -- despite the plot's reliance on crime thriller catnip like child murders and police corruption -- every failed society fails in its own, godforesaken way. It's heavy trucking on paper -- Peace's grim take on a decade of moral and systemic decay in Northern England divided critics with its esoteric, often impenetrable poetic style. But on film, his vision of a country rotted almost to its core substitutes mood and atmosphere for the intricate narrative that was lost in translation. I'm unconvinced that these neo-noir downers had anything specific to say about life in England in the 1970's and '80s, although their aesthetic case for the country's free-ranging miserabilism is airtight.
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Another in the increasingly inbred line of romantic melodramas to spring from the fertile loins of Nicholas Sparks, Dear John is as inspired as its title, a reference that originated with the scores of break-up letters sent to soldiers deployed overseas during World War II. Director Lasse Hallström certainly brings the pastoral pretty to the first 40 minutes of this story of a young couple -- a Green Beret and angelic deb played by Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried -- who meet during a spring break spent in their native Charleston, South Carolina, and then are essentially separated for the rest of the film: beach grass has never looked better, or more prolific.
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Not as bad you'd think and yet nowhere near what could be called any good, When in Rome is a romantic comedy without much to offer in the way of character, conflict, or canoodling. Got lots of concept, though, if you're into that -- so much so in fact that it trammels the chemistry its two stars share. Without the plot's shabby scaffolding tossed up around them, Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel might have had a shot at bringing some actual interest in their inevitable pairing. Instead their better moments seem stolen from a movie that's beneath their charms; short of meeting lame in the Irish countryside and bickering their way to Dublin (hello again, Leap Year), I'd rather watch these two do just about anything, including escape from the clutches of a sleepwalking script and an auto-pilot director, to beat those nasty odds and claim their love.
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If it seems like the nuclear weapons scandal powering the densely plotted narrative of Edge of Darkness has been airlifted straight out of the '80s, it's because it kind of was: Extracted from a 1985, six-part British miniseries, the film's indictment of the enmeshed interests of private and public sectors is both topical and pleasingly retro. And yet in this version the nuclear intrigue, which contained and safely detonated the British audience's fears about unregulated proliferation and corporate mendacity (as Silkwood did on this side of the pond in 1983), threatens to add an awkward dose of sci-fi fantasia (retaining that moldy title was the first mistake) to an otherwise flatfooted but surprisingly agile trenchcoat thriller.
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Among the most anticipated titles of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival -- as well as one of its most haunted, troubled productions -- the Ryan Gosling/Michelle Williams relationship saga Blue Valentine finally reached the screen at Sunday afternoon's world premiere. Twelve years in the making, director Derek Cianfrance's film endured more stops, starts and development hiccups than perhaps any other in the festival competition. I desperately wanted to like it. Alas, there could be no more screeching halt than the plotless, indulgent, grueling, indier-than-thou melodrama that ensued after the lights went down.
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The high-octane recession parable The Company Men entered the Sundance zeitgeist Friday night, screening again this morning to a monumentally stuffed, 1,270-person strong Eccles Theater. The question going in seemed to be, "Do we really need another Up in the Air right now?" The answer, of course, would be "No." But The Company Men isn't just another Up in the Air. It's better.
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After the disappointment that greeted such early darlings as Howl and Hesher around Park City, word finally started getting around late Friday about what people like. You know we're into the documentary Restrepo, and I've heard promising news about Boy and The Freebie -- just another few I'm going to have to add to the growing list of Sundance must-sees. But I've got one to toss on to the others: A nuanced, nasty little Australian crime import you'll be hearing (and hopefully seeing) about called Animal Kingdom.
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Scott Stewart deserves credit for making Legion into a film that could be described as both a blasphemer's delight and a right wing Christian propaganda flick, but I suspect the audience it finds will be closer to the geek/stoner collective, who will take in its self-serious absurdity smiling with glee. Stewart, a veteran effects artist making his directorial debut, co-wrote the script with Peter Schink, and I suppose sharing the blame is something of a blessing, should they ever called to account for it. An apocalypse horror film crossed with a reverse Exorcist premise -- God, and not the devil, is possessing the weakest of the human race and having them turn against the strong -- I would prefer to think that Legion was written by a Final Draft program possessed by Pat Robertson's subconscious.
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Despite a decent cast and a powerful story, Extraordinary Measures plays with the soothing blandness of an Oxygen movie-of-the-week. Almost completely -- even strangely -- forgettable, it is without risk and seemingly indifferent to its own rewards: even the uplift that is its due and raison d'être can't muster the effort to get off the ground. "Inspired by true events," the film tells the story of a Portland, Oregon family stricken twice with something called Pompe disease, an affliction connected with Multiple Sclerosis which only affects small children, cutting their life expectancy down to nine years.
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