What was the last movie you saw at the theaters?

Superman - was so excieted but found it dissapointing, before that Pirates 2 - The ending suprised me... in that there wasn't one. Lord of the rings style.

The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry)

French director Michel Gondry was something of a superstar in the music video business before he turned to feature films. His first two efforts were the underappreciated Human Nature (2001) and the rightfully praised Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), both from Charlie Kaufman scripts. This time Gondry wrote the screenplay himself, and while it is definitely Kaufmanesque it is also wonderful in its own ways and signals Gondry is going to be more than a flash in the pan. Gael García Bernal stars as Stéphane, a young man with a childlike sense of the world who spends much of his time trying to discern reality from his dreams. He wants to be an artist, and his mother gets him a job at a small calendar company in Paris. But the position is not a creative one and he is asked to do little more than typesetting. The mundanity of the job further fuels the encroachment of the dreamworld in his day-to-day life. But that is nothing compared to what falling in love does to him. Charlotte Gainsbourg (My Wife Is an Actress, Jane Eyre) is Stéphanie, an odd young woman who also has an artistic temperament and little outlet for it, who moves into the apartment next door. While initially attracted to her friend, it quickly becomes clear - especially in his ever-present dreamworld - that Stéphane is falling for Stéphanie.

Stéphane's dream sequences are elaborate, but they're also very crude in a way. They often start from a makeshift television studio in his mind, Stéphane TV, where he is the host to his subconsious. But the set and all of the objects in his dreams are not the dense exotic imagry of something like Gilliam's Brazil nor does Gondry use any CGI, rather Stéphane's imagination looks as if it were crafted by a team of six-year-olds; cardboard tubes, brightly-colored construction paper, glitter and cellophane make up the world inside Stéphane's head. This sensibility is also in his art, like the calendar he propses called Disasterology where he lovingly renders the most infamous tragedy for each month or his inventions like a time machine and 3-D glasses for seeing the world. The mix of dreams and childlike wonder are constantly amusing, and the movie also doesn't shy away from asking what are the lines between a vivid imagination and schizophrenic tendencies or an inventive pursuer of love and a creepy stalker.

Gael García Bernal is excellent. In the past five years or so Bernal has become an international star in films like Amores Perros (2000), Y tu Mamá También (2001), The Crime of Father Amaro (2002), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Bad Education (2004). The Science of Sleep further adds to his stature as one of the very best young actors working today. He has an ease with the comedy and oddball nature of Stéphane, yet is also always playing the truth and the pain under the surface, making this character who could be quirky to the point of totally unbelievable in lesser hands a fully formed and complex person. Which isn't to say his perfdormance isn't fun as well, because he can be hysterically funny. Gainsbourg too is well cast, and it's easy to see why Stéphane forms such a bond with her, yet she can also play the darker edges of how unsettling it would be to have that kind of attention focused on you. The supporting cast is very good too, especially Alain Chabat as Stéphane's co-worker and confidant.

Gondry and the cast all work that delicate balance of quirky silliness and emotional darkness very well, and that tone fits perfectly with the visual style of the dreamworlds. Can't hardly wait to see it again.


GRADE: A-




Man of the Year (Barry Levinson)

Nine years ago director Barry Levinson scored when the release of his political satire Wag the Dog (1997) which serendipitously coincided with the breaking news of the Lewinski scandal, and the parallels in the film seemed prescient. Since then he's helmed a string of disappointments, the worst being the tired and unfunny would-be comedy Envy, that seem almost impossible that they could come from the man responsible for Diner, Tin Men, Avalon, Bugsy and the Oscar-winning triumph of Rain Man. Could another timely political satire get his career back on track?

Perhaps. Sadly Man of the Year ain't it. Robin Williams stars as Tom Dobbs, a successful comedian with a cable show in the political satire mold of "Real Time with Bill Maher" and "The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart". During the tail end of a Presidential election cycle Dobbs half-jokingly throws his hat into the ring. Though he's known for his irreverant comedy, while on the campaign trail he is reserved and tries to stick to the issues which he's passionate about. Because of this seriousness and his success in getting on ballots in more and more States he's allowed to participate as the third party candidate in the last televised debate. His manager and head writer (Christopher Walken and Lewis Black) have been urging him to take the gloves off and be the same kind of funny loose canon he was on his show but has shelved for the campaign. Midway through the live debate he finally does, and of course the crowds and public eat it up. With two weeks left before the election Dobbs goes into high gear as a political comedian who also happens to be running for President of the United States. He doesn't expect to win of course, but is enjoying injecting pointed wit and irreverence into the process. Surprise surprise, Dobbs actually wins. How will the new President Elect deal with the very real pressures of the job, and will he be able to keep his ideals, non-partisanship and comic sensibility even as he sits in the Oval Office?

And that's half of the movie that Man of the Year is. While using the current popularity of a Jon Stewart type is a new wrinkle, the idea of an honest outsider finding himself at odds with the political system behind the closed doors of power isn't exactly new. Nor, unfortunately, does the movie have anything new to say. But as disappointing and routine as that is, what really sinks the ship is the OTHER plotline. While all of this rather standard stuff is going on, Laura Linney plays a programmer at a MicroSoft-like company that has gotten the exclusive contract to computerize voting this election. A couple weeks before the election she finds a glitch in the system that leads to improper tabulation. She reports it to the owner of the company, who's stock has just gone through the roof with the contract, and on advice from his shady legal counsel (Jeff Goldblum) they bury the memo since there's no feasible way to correct the problem by November and keep the stock sterling. When Dobbs wins she notices the same irregularity in the results, and when she goes to the boss to express concern she is threatened and told to forget it. Then they break into her home, inject her full of illegal drugs and discredit her, just in case she gets a crisis of conscience and tries to go public with the fact that the election results are incorrect. She figures the one person who she has a chance of convincing is the President Elect himself. She meets him, they begin to fall in love, then the bad guys come back at her to shut her up for good.

This mix of an essentially lighthearted Dave-like look at American politics coupled with this badly done Parallax View conspiracy thriller is incongruous, to say the least. Neither half of the movie is done particularly well or with anything new to say, and slamming them into each other makes it all the worse. It goes from what could have been a very mild if forgettable comedy to a mess of hacky nonsense. Robin Williams is Robin Williams throughout, and Linney does the best she can given the unenviable task of trying to play terrified and paranoid in what is supposed to be a comedy. Walken is a little too subdued and too straight to be amusing even in his usual Christopher Walkenish ways, and Lewis Black gets only a couple lines to do his thing. It doesn't work as a satire, it doesn't work as a comedy and it doesn't work as a thriller. It just plain doesn't work.


GRADE: D-

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

School for Scoundrels (Todd Phillips)

Very average, unoriginal, instantly forgettable comedy. Jon Napoleon Dynamite Heder stars as a sweet but ineffectual loser who is unassertive at work and shy around girls. He's clued into a semi-secret class at the learning annex that he assumes is some basic self-confidence seminar. In fact it's run by a pompus ******* who calls himself Doctor P (Billy Bob Thornton) who informs his classful of losers that they need to become pricks like him if they want to get anywhere in life. This means becoming violent and confrontational with anyone who gets in your way and lying to get what you want. The advice works, kind of, and when Heder's character starts to become the stand-out in the class Dr. P becomes competitive and aims to take him down and steal the pretty girl he's infatuated with (Jacinda Barrett). Exactly everything that you think would happen from that set-up does, and nothing more. There are some good physical gags sprinkled throughout and a few chuckles along the way, but this is about as routine as they come. And ripping off the basic dynamic of Anger Management where a student and teacher both try for the same love interest...I mean, if you're going to recycle something why not aim a little higher?

Heder and Thornton do their things that they always seem to do. I don't know how many more movies we're going to have to suffer through in the next couple years where Heder plays essentially this same sad sack loser, but I doubt this will be the last. Billy Bob seems to be phoning it in, adding nothing of interest to the tired script that asks him to do the Bad Santa thing with even less gusto than the unnecessary Bad News Bears remake from last year. The supporting cast has some decent people in it, including David Cross, Sarah Silverman, Luis Guzmán, Todd Louiso (High Fidelity, Jerry Maguire) and Matt Walsh ("The Upright Citizen's Brigade"), but most of them only have a scene or two and aren't asked to do much. Ben Stiller is the only stand-out in the cameo roles, harkening back to his sketch comedy days on his television show with a character who is a cross between Ratso Rizzo and Travis Bickle, and he perks up the movie...for the six and a half minutes he's actually in it. Mostly it just limps along to the inevitable conclusion, with no energy or wit behind it and certainly no surprises or invention.


GRADE: D+

I saw a preview of SHORT BUS. Lots of sex, but the "plot" was decent. We'll see how big of a release it'll be in the US.

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You don't know me! You don't know my eyes!

The last film I saw was Superman Returns. It was quite good. It's a shame that the expected exicitement and audience number didn't reach near the height that was expecting. I would hate to see the whole superman franchise wither and die.

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The U.S. vs. John Lennon (David Leaf & John Scheinfeld)

Good documentary focusing on the period in the early 1970s when former Beatle John Lennon was deemed a risk to the Nixon Administration, leading to harassment and a trumped-up deportation proceeding. The film starts with the 1971 "Free John Sinclair" rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sinclair was an activist who was jailed for pot dealing (two joints to an undercover poilcewoman) and sentenced to ten years. A benefit concert was held to raise awareness, and Lennon was the headliner who wrote a song for the occasion. The event got so much publicity and generated so much support for Sinclair that he was released almost instantly. From that moment the film goes backwards to Lennon as a young boy who was essentially orphaned by two parents who didn't want him and covers his rebellious tendencies in school and as a Beatle. The infamous 'bigger than Christ' controversy was only the first step, and as the decade became more and more turbulent culminating in the watershed of 1968, Lennon changed too and became politically active. The most memorable episode from this period was probably the honeymoon with Yoko in Amsterdam and Montreal that they turned into "Bed-In" media events and John unveiled his anthem "Give Peace a Chance". When John and Yoko moved to New York they befriended the likes of Abby Hoffman, Jerry Reuben and Bobby Seale. These friendships, coupled with the success of the "Free John Sinclair" concert and his general anti-War sentiments in his music and his public speech, apparently scared the White House and J. Edgar Hoover enough that they monitored his activities and then sicked the immigration department on him in an attempt to silence him in the States and lessen his potential impact, especially on the new electorate as a new Constitutional Amendment gave eighteen-year-olds the power to vote in the 1972 Presidential campaign.

The documentary has plenty of archival footage and the now public F.B.I. file on Lennon to work from, and the interviews include everyone from Yoko and their immigration attorney Leon Wildes to Bobby Seale, Ron Kovic, Angela Davis and John Sinclair to George McGovern, John Dean and G. Gordon Liddy to Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Walter Cronkite, Tommy Smothers, Geraldo Rivera and others. Can't say as any of the information was new to me, but it's all presented very well and makes you miss John all the more. Miss him for his music, sure, but more for the human being he was. And considering the current Administration is just as quick to label dissent as unpatriotic, this is a timely look back as well. My favorite line of the movie is Lennon's. On the courthouse steps after finally having his ridiculous deportation proceedings defeated and becoming a "green card"-carrying citizen, the media asks him if he harbors any ill-will toward Strom Thurmond, John Mitchell or any of the other Government officials who tried to silence him. Lennon's quick quip back is, "No. I believe time wounds all heels," then he flashes that trademark smile. Time has shown the Nixon White House and blowhards like Thurmond for what they are, and it has also shown John for what he was. Go see The U.S. vs. John Lennon for a reminder and a celebration of that.


GRADE: B+

crank

Thanks for the great review, I will not miss this one when it gets here, I am a big John Lennon fan

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

Star Wars III

Tell me plz how did you do this picture. I need to know!
And the last movie that I saw is "crank"!

Are you kidding me? Don’t you really know how to do animated .gif from video?

Ok. It’s very simple thing! All you need for this is converter. Personally I use THIS

Way of the Peaceful Warrior...

click

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Undercoverlovers 100 REDUX

I believe it was "Little Miss Sunshine"

Great review Pikey, it has just started here, I think I will see it now after reading your review

World Trade Center

It's a great film

The Departed (Martin Scorsese)

After helping to define the modern gangster genre with Mean Streets (1973), GoodFellas (1990) and Casino (1995), Martin Scorsese returns to the world of organized crime, though this time coming at it from a much different angle. In those previous films, Scorsese took a naturalistic approach to the material. Yes his camera movements and editing style were evident, but as far as how the characters and their job of being criminals was tackled, it was stripped of the mythology of the '30s and '40s movie mobsters and looked at the workaday life of a criminal. Mean Streets and GoodFellas especially were less Operatic than Coppola's Godfathers. Those films influenced a couple generations of subsequent filmmakers, not just in America but around the world. One of those distant influences can be seen in Wai Keung Lau & Siu Fai Mak's Mou Gaan Du - Infernal Affairs (2002), so it's all coming full circle now that Scorsese is remaking it.

The Departed is set on the Irish South Side of Boston, where Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) rules the streets with his murderous crew (including Ray Winstone and David O'Hara). Like most kingpins his activities are well-known, but the Police can't ever seem to make anything stick well enough to bring him down. Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) are higher-ups in a special department that has virtual autonomy to work their own way to get Costello. They hand-pick a young recruit (Leonardo DiCaprio) to work deep undercover and infultrate the crew. He has ties to the neighborhood and relatives who worked for Costello over the years, so he seems like a natural choice. At the same time Costello is doing some influtrating of his own, with his own hand-picked kid from the streets (Matt Damon) who has enrolled in the academy with hopes of working his way up the ranks and giving the criminals their own inside man. Both the crooks and the cops suspect they have moles in the midst, but neither one can identify the other. And so starts a cat & mouse game of disinformation, loyalty and deception.

For those who know Infernal Affairs, all the major beats and similar character types are in place, and though the finale has a couple additional little layers to it, this is a pretty straight remake in terms of plotting and basic dynamics. But Scorsese and company do also make it their own. The Boston setting in contrast to Scorsese's usual New York City stomping grounds (NYC has served as the backdrop for ten of his feature films from Mean Streets through Gangs of New York) is a nice change. And Scorsese is going back to the new genre myths that have been formed in his wake. There is almost no sense of what Costello and his crew do on a day-to-day basis to make their living. And for his first real depiction of the law enforcement side of the coin, there isn't much procedural detail either, other than as it relates directly to the undercover assignment. The movie takes for granted that the audience knows from hundreds of other movies and television shows how the good guys and bad guys do their things. The Departed is not a documentary-like look at either world, rather it is a genre exercise of pure entertainment. Much like Spike Lee's Inside Man from earlier this year, this is an unabashed good old fashioned "movie" movie from a filmmaker who usually does much more.

Scorsese's early work was largely influential, but rarely worked strictly inside genre, instead working against the expectations and modes. The first time Scorsese really consciously attacked a genre was his other re-make, Cape Fear (1991). But while he reveled in playing with and amping up the thriller conventions, he also added a dark moral complexity that most even less over-the-top efforts address. The Departed is much more straightforward in that regard.

When all is said and done, The Departed works very well. It's not really set up as a mystery for the most part, as we know immediately who DiCaprio and Damon are. It's more about the fun of watching each side play the game. The "twists" during the conclusion are fine, and even if you haven't seen Infernal Affairs you'll probably anticipate most of them. The acting is good to great pretty much all around in this star-studded cast. Leo and Matt are both well-suited for their duplicitous roles at the center of the narrative. Nicholson doesn't really do anything he hasn't done before, but it's a magnetic movie star performance all the same. The one aspect I missed from the original is there was much more of a bond and mutal respect between what are the Nicholson and Sheen characters in the remake. That relationship is even better examined in the first Infernal Affairs sequel, but it's definitely more prevalent and palpable in the original rather than Scorsese's remake. Sheen and Nicholson do have one face-to-face meeting, but there was just more of a personal dimension to the cat & mouse game in the Hong Kong film.

The supporting cast is terrific. Alec Baldwin and Wahlberg steal every secen they're in getting the funniest dialogue, and Winstone is a great presence as always. The one weak link I thought was Vera Farmiga as the sole female role of any wieght and screentime. Kelly Chin was more credible in the original as the psychiatrist treating one of the moles and in love with the other. I don't buy Farmiga as either a doctor or a lover and while the role is a bit underwritten I suspect a better actress could have made more of it. But it's a relatively minor quibble, and even with Nicholson in there it's really DiCaprio and Damon's movie and they're both very good.

There's a nice energy and look to the movie with longtime collaborators editor Thelma Schoonmaker and D.P. Michael Ballhaus making it all sing across the screen. It's two and a half hours long (about forty minutes longer than the original), but doesn't drag at all; very well paced and constructed. And while there is violence and the threat of violence throughout, most of the bloodletting is saved for a Hamlet-like final act...and then it gets VERY bloody. It's not especially ambitious and doesn't have the arc of something like Michael Mann's Heat, it's just a damned enjoyable flick.


GRADE: B+

Saw Click earlier. I enjoyed it a lot, especially since I normally can't stand Adam Sandler. I couldn't believe that this film was directed by the same guy who directed The Waterboy .

It's not a laugh fest, but it does have a few honest laughs in it and a surprising amount of emotional punch (which would have been even more powerful had they not tacked on a happy "it was all a dream" ending).

And it has Christopher Walken in it.

Also, look out for a brief glimpse of the fully built Freedom Towers in New York (oh how I hope they change the name ) in the futuristic scenes.

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"When I was younger, I always wanted to be somebody. Now that I'm older, I realise I should've been more specific."

The Departed

It was all great except the total cop-out ending. That kind of left me on a sour note.

What about the ending is a cop-out to you?