July movie reviews

TELL NO ONE. Thriller. This French film begins with a young couple vacationing on a lake. But she goes back to the house after a minor argument and disappears. Eight years later, the doctor husband is still grieving her loss. He was suspected of her murder, but the police could never prove it. One day he gets an e-mail, and it opens a video that appears to show his long-lost wife alive and well. He begins to pursue the clues in a series of videos, but at the same time the police start investigating him again for her murder and other crimes. He has to go on the run . The movie unfolds at a perfect pace, works well as both an action piece and a mystery, and all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place by the end. My only small quibble is that a lot of the pieces are put together in the end via one long monologue. But that's only a small complaint. This is one of the best movies I have seen this year. (This movie is based on an American novel, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't remade into an American film.)

THE DARK KNIGHT. As I have said, I am not a huge fan of comic-book/superhero movies, but I did really like BATMAN BEGINS. This sequel continues the development of Batman (Christian Bale), and this time he is pitted against The Joker. The Joker is a great villain, doing evil for the pure sake of proving humans are no good. Heath Ledger is amazingly creepy as the bad guy with no hint of comic book about him. Like the first film, this is also a good movie, full of amazingly good actors (Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, etc), and is more than just a series of action scenes. It actually asks philosophical questions about the nature of people. I thought the first half was a little padded, and it took to long for it all to gel and move forward. But once it picks up, it totally kept my interest. It's very dark, maybe even morally ambiguous. It's not a popcorn movie at all, unless you prefer to view it that way.

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. Filmmaker Werner Herzog (GRIZZLY MAN) goes to Antarctica to explore the beauty of the place and what draws people to such an isolated place. This documentary is full of interviews with people who march to the beat of a different drummer, fascinating tidbits about the continent itself, and beautiful visuals (both the landscape and underwater). My only quibble was that I occasionally found the music (by Henry Kaiser) really annoying. Otherwise, a very fine film to watch for on PBS or Discovery, probably, if you don't catch it in the theater.

GONZO: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HUNTER S. THOMPSON. This documentary is a biography of Hunter Thompson, author of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and many Rolling Stone magazine articles. He was incredibly talented but at the same time probably a bit mental, self-medicating with massive quantities of pills and alcohol. There is a lot of video and interviews with tons of people who knew him, plus readings from his own writings. I found the information about his background and escapades interesting, if a bit superficial. But there is a little too much of the "times" of his life, which to me felt like revisiting the history of the 1960s and 70s that I already knew. But if you are not that familiar with the politics of the era, this will probably be more interesting to you. And Thompson certainly was a fascinating character, so it's worth seeing.

X-FILES. I WANT TO BELIEVE. Mulder and Scully back together again, although I would say that even people who never watched a single episode of the TV show would get this movie. Both characters have left the FBI. Scully is working as a pediatrician, and Mulder, who was apparently drummed out of the FBI, is holed up in a little room, clipping newspaper articles about mysterious occurrences. But when an FBI agent goes missing, the FBI asks Mulder for his help because a psychic is involved (and has found a clue - a severed arm buried in the middle of a snowy field). Because the psychic is also a pedophile priest, he is a reprehensible character that Scully can't bear to deal with. But Mulder, of course, wants to believe in him and in redemption. This movie is OK, but not great. Unlike the TV show, I didn’t find the relationship between Mulder and Scully interesting. And one psychic priest doesn't an X-file make, in my opinion. The movie reminded me more of a Robin Cook thriller than of an X-file story.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Brendan Fraser is a scientist trying to prove that his missing brother was right about the possibility of the existence of volcanic columns that would lead to the center of the earth. Which would be like Jules Verne’s vision of another world. With his nephew, Brendan goes to Iceland to explore some volcanic activity. While out hiking the volcano (with a beautiful blond guide, of course), they are all three stuck in a cave in a rock slide. So begins their adventures, including runaway trains, fantastic creatures, and treacherous geography. Great fun for kids, I would think, especially if you see the 3-D version, I suppose, which I did not. I didn't think it was a great movie for adults.

WALL-E. Wall-E is a little robot left on earth decades after the humans leave the planet because there is too much garbage. Wall-E spends his days collecting and compressing trash, with only a cockroach for company. One day a space ship sends out a robot to investigate if there is any life on earth. Wall-E and the robot EVA are attracted to one another (hey, it's a kids' movie) and Wall-E ends up catching a ride on the space ship back to the mother ship. The mother ship is something like a cruise ship where humans have lived for years. There stuff happens involving malfunctioning robots, an evil waste management company CEO (Fred Willard) and humans that have become fat because they haven't moved in years. Because the robots don’t speak, this felt almost like watching a silent movie, which is kind of different for a children's movie. That said, an adult viewer could see this as a fairly dark tale with political undertones. I suppose kids would like it for different reasons, but I just don't know. I didn't love it like the critics are.

HANCOCK. Superhero movie. As it opens, Hancock (Will Smith) is an alcoholic bum sleeping on the streets. He does have superpowers and can save people from evildoers, but he is a unhappy guy, not very nice. So instead of being grateful, the people he saves think he is an asshole and demand that he pay for all the mayhem he causes when rescuing people. When he saves the life of a public relations man (Jason Bateman), in gratitude he takes Hancock on as a project to make him more likable and more of a hero. Which is working, and Hancock becomes more popular and less bitter. Then, there is a plot twist that I didn't see coming. This is like two completely different movies. The first half is pretty funny, and quite entertaining. The second half is also entertaining, but more in the superhero mold, with battles and big action sequences. The combination was kind of odd, but fun to watch nevertheless. It's the first half that sold me.

WANTED. James McAvoy is living a dreary life as an accountant with a horrible boss and a girlfriend who is cheating on him. Things are pretty awful until one day he goes to the grocery store where Angelina Jolie saves him from being killed. So begins his introduction into a world of assassins. He founds out that his father was an assassin, and he is meant to be a member of the Fraternity as well. (Of course, they are good assassins, "killing one so that thousands may live".) So he begins training. The movie has great style, and you may consider it worth watching just for that alone (and a great rocking soundtrack). And I like James McAvoy quite a bit. But I thought there was too much with the jittery camera and graphic violence. And I found the movie's theme that it is better to be a killer than an ordinary person amoral and actually quite reprehensible, even if it is just a movie. Still, I think the director has great potential to do action movie if he can resist the urge to have someone's head explode every five minutes.

GET SMART. Based on the 1960s TV show. In this, Maxwell Smart (Steve Carrell) is an analyst who longs to be an agent. When the intelligence agency CONTROL's security is breached, and all the agents are compromised, Max is the lone staffer who can investigate what is going on. Along with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), they travel to Russia trying to catch the bad guy (Terence Stamp) and stop what he is doing. In this movie, Smart isn't quite the idiot he was in the TV show, but he still can be pretty clueless. Pretty straight-forward plot, nothing great, but I thought this is the perfect movie for someone who just wants to watch a cute little movie, be amused, see some action, and not worry about watching someone's head explode.

ROMAN DE GARE. French thriller. The movie begins with three stories: a bickering young couple driving to her parents' house for a visit, a middle-aged man speeding out of town while the radio tells of an escaped pedophile/serial killer, and a popular author being interviewed on TV. At first, you are not sure who the man driving out of town is, but it becomes clear pretty soon. And then he meets up with the young woman, and he tells her he is the ghost writer for the author. But then says he is kidding. And so the three stories come together. For the first 3/4 of the movie, I was definitely interested and wondering where it was all going to end up, but then I found the last quarter completely predictable and it fell flat. Compared to TELL NO ONE, a complete disappointment in the end.