A quiet, conventional film with a surprisingly firm grip, writer/director Scott Cobb's Crazy Heart will choke you up the same way it kept you hanging in over its shaggy, two-hour shuffle: effortlessly. Much of the credit for its appeal goes to the performance of the congenitally appealing Jeff Bridges as a fading country singer/songwriter known as Bad Blake. If the character of a dissolute, downtrodden quasi-celebrity is a rite of passage for leading men of a certain age (Mickey Rourke picked up the baton last year), Bridges acknowledges the inevitability and exceeds expectations with his typically self-effacing grace. The result is a performance that makes the hackneyed feel new, natural, and almost private; it has a lived-in ease that puts an audience only too familiar with the film's trajectory (and perhaps primed to count off the clichés) on notice and off-guard.
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They say that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, and for A Single Man's George Falconer (Colin Firth), you could take that even further: Life is what happens to George when he's making plans to die. He's been inhabiting a literally gray world since the passing of his longtime partner Jim (Matthew Goode), and as he begins to plot his own suicide, he's suddenly struck by reasons to go on. Some of the things that trigger his lust for life are major, like an emotional reconnection with his best friend Charley (Julianne Moore) or a potential new romance with his student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult). Some others are small, like the scent of a secretary's perfume or an infectious smile. To the detail-oriented George -- and to fashion icon Tom Ford, making his writer/director debut here -- they all make an impression, and lucky for us, so does the film.
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Well it's December, kids, time to belly up to the box office and let old Uncle Clint give you a tingle. With Invictus, this year he's packing a story of redemption and reconciliation, South African-style. It features an unassailably heroic elder statesman, his unlikely young aide-de-camp, lots of athletic hoo-ha and a terrifically loaded socio-historical context winnowed within a millimeter of credulity. Morgan Freeman worked for years on an adaptation of Nelson Mandela's autobiography but eventually abandoned the project: it was simply too much story, too much history, to fit into a feature film. By choosing Clint Eastwood to adapt a more self-contained episode from Mandela's life -- the alliance he built with South Africa's rugby team as president in 1995, an elaborate campaign to win the World Cup that he felt would help unify a broken country -- Freeman let go of his attachment to a comprehensive portrait. Indeed, a product of his ruthless narrative efficiency is Eastwood's useful (and often very successful) habit of sacrificing story for sentiment.
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Coca-Cola is having an interesting Oscar season. A can of the stuff makes a cameo in The Road, a serendipitous discovery that turns out to be the most powerful reminder of a better world the film has to offer; in The Lovely Bones, however, the two bottles of Coke shown chilling in a pedophile's underground "clubhouse" are a young heroine's first clue that the world is a worse place than she could have ever imagined. I suppose all attention is good attention for Coca-Cola Co., but I had to wonder what they made of the shot of George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), lowering a bottle to crotch level and popping the cap right in the face of 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan). The moment is crass, overblown and jarringly ineffectual; metaphor as hissing bludgeon. Its suggestion is also the ultimate in anti-product placement and one of the more obvious reminders -- in a film filled with aesthetic bloopers that beg for someone, anyone (even the suits at a global soda-making conglomerate) to step in and do some vetting -- that Peter Jackson answers to nobody.
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Artists of all stripes repeat themselves, whether through themes, motifs or hues, and James Cameron is no exception. So the question I've been asking myself as I count down the days to Avatar's debut is this: just how much of the long-awaited 3-D space blockbuster was predicted by the man's inauspicious debut, 1981's Piranha Part Two: The Spawning?
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A frustrating cobble of war story, familial drama and domestic melodrama, Brothers has more affecting moments than it deserves, owing to a couple of exceptional performances and a weary nation's weakness when it comes to both sad soldier stories and Jake Gyllenhaal's soulful gaze. A remake of Suzanne Bier's 2004 film, Brødre, Brothers tries to work so much mitigating dramatic circumstance into its rather classical narrative -- two brothers, one good, one bad, are forced to reevaluate their roles when one is faced with an unbearable challenge; there's a girl -- that the title, central relationship is the one that never comes into focus.
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[Editor's note: This review was originally published Sept. 11, 2009, as part of our TIFF coverage.]
Less than 24 hours after watching George Clooney sit across from an Iraqi goat and telepathically snuff it out of existence, I was watching him do essentially the same thing to a stream of ill-fated members of the American workforce in Up in the Air, Jason Reitman's astutely observed and surprisingly uplifting meditation on one man's pathological tendency towards isolationism. That that man, Ryan Bingham, would choose the career path he did -- working for a third-party concern leased out to corporations who'd rather avoid the face-to-face messiness of large-scale layoffs -- only serves to enable his particular form of sociopathy. Ryan crisscrosses my land and your land like a mighty, modern-day Paul Bunyon, proudly wielding his axe and swinging his downsizing blows so efficiently, he's often out the door before his targets even realize that they've been reduced to stumps.
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[Editor's Note: We featured a capsule review of The Road during our TIFF coverage. What follows is a more extensive review -- and second opinion -- from staff critic Michelle Orange.]
Offering a sort of antidote to 2012's decadently catastrophic version of the world's end, which seems to stop just short of shooting confetti out of Christ the Redeemer as he tumbles into the sea, The Road positions itself as an apocalypse for the thinking masochist. Although riveting eyeballs to the spectacle of our most sacred monuments crumbling is old and reliably lucrative cinematic hat, the apocalypse is also a concept that has moved major artists to their greatest work, the most recent examples being Margaret Atwood's sequel to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, from which this film is adapted. Director John Hillcoat, in attempting to realize McCarthy's vision of the planet -- and the fragile concept of humanity -- in chaos, delves so deeply into his source material that he commits the one sin Roland Emmerich, with his dominatrix-like wielding of sensual pleasure and punishment, cannot be accused of: he loses sight of the audience.
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As the adult Pippa Lee, the comely, gracious, unfailingly appropriate wife of a newly retired New York publisher, Robin Wright speaks in a small, high voice that suggests a kind of atrophy. It's the kind of voice that might result from years of unuse, of sealing even the most meager opinions behind the warm but empty smile of a literary consort, and Pippa is the kind of woman who has endured countless cocktail party conversations without once being spoken to herself. In the opening scene of Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, she disappears into that smile when one of the guests at the dinner party she is throwing to celebrate her husband Herb's (Alan Arkin) new home in a Connecticut retirement community pays her a tribute that doubles as a dismissal: "You are the very icon of an artist's wife." This now-common misuse of the term -- that is to suggest fame and/or the ultimate embodiment of a concept or state of being rather than a religious symbol or representative sign -- here seems pointed: Pippa has been frozen not into an idea but an ideal, a picture of herself.
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It's too bad for Sandra Bullock that The Blind Side will most likely find its biggest following among football fans, the religious right, and parents looking for anything to watch while their daughters are down the multiplex corridor shrieking at New Moon. Bullock delivers a terrific performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy, the Memphis woman whose family's adopting of homeless young Michael Oher set the groundwork for his education and eventual advancement to the National Football League. Blond, brisk and all business, she's easily the best thing about the film, which otherwise slumps into a cloying, condescending morass that doesn't do her fine work any favors.
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Let's get this out of the way: Team Jacob. All the way. Whether he's repairing motorbikes, chasing stealth vampiresses through a forest on all fours, or simply standing outside a car window, begging the girl he loves not to fly to Italy to intercept the ritual suicide of the dude she's totally hung up on, Jacob is the closest thing that New Moon has to a plot-generator, and for that we salute all 18 of his abs (on display for about 70% of his screen time, and capable of inducing a squeeing only audible to wolves). The second chapter of The Twilight Saga is at once a vast improvement over its predecessor -- thanks to the assured hand of director Chris Weitz, whose grasp of filmmaking is more sophisticated, if less viscerally emotional, than Catherine Hardwicke's -- but a step backwards in terms of storytelling.
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Somewhere in the middle of Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, police lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) bets on New Orleans and loses big. Cage, looking like he wandered off the set of The Shield and humped all the way to Louisiana in a bad suit and a mescaline haze, is in the grip of several addictions and neck-deep in various permutations of shit, but he just can't stop betting on the Saints. Over the course of this punchy, seriously strange (if less seriously essential) film, McDonagh becomes an extension of the blighted port -- one of the friendliest cities in the country and also the most violent -- making up rules as he goes along, incandescently self-destructive yet plainly bent on his own survival.
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For a certain percentage of the population, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen is the Sexiest Man (Kinda) Alive. For the rest of us, he's much too emo to get worked up about. But all is not lost! With Extreme Makeover tips from even the crappiest vampire-themed flicks, he might sparkle for everyone yet!
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Sealed somewhere inside the careful thematic scaffolding and deliberate, searching narrative excavation of Pedro Almodovar's 25th film is a more creaturely pulse. Its presence is felt throughout Broken Embraces -- and note that title, like something pulled from Sirk's cold storage -- but only to the point of teasing suggestion, a faint thumping that can't quite pump life into the film's various and extenuated limbs, much less reach Almodovar's signature throb. Even beautifully executed, formally flawless constraint does not quite suit him, and the question is not why he locked his heart so deeply inside this mildly disappointing film -- it is as clear an emblem of his personal and cinematic passions as any film he has made -- but how he managed to, with not only all of his old faithfuls on hand but one character literally dressed up in his clothes.
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If and when the world ends, please let it be as fun, loud, optimistic and excessive an apocalypse as the one Roland Emmerich puts forth in 2012. The $200 million, 158-minute spectacle is the state of the art in global woe, less oppressive than Emmerich's climate-change call to action in The Day After Tomorrow and infinitely more sincere than the tongue-in-cheek devastation of Independence Day. Thus having arrived at a certain blockbuster zen, Emmerich has distilled his life's work to one message and one message only: If we're all f*cked, then we might as well be entertained.
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