March movie reviews

DUPLICITY. Julia Roberts is ex-CIA, and Clive Owen is ex-MI6, and they have a past together (she seduced him and stole some documents). Now ex-spies, they are currently employed by two competing personal-care (lotions, creams, shampoos) corporate giants (headed by Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, who are always good). Julia and Clive are working together to try to pull off a scam stealing corporate secrets. Or are they working against each other? They don't really trust each other. This is a typical "sting" type movie, where you don't know who is playing whom, and who will be the recipient of the final double-cross. I was surprised a little at the end, but I didn't find the original sting to be all that interesting. I mean, really, who cares if one corporation steals a product from another corporation? I also didn't get any sparks between Clive and Julia, and to me their patter seemed very forced (not to mention it's repeated about four times!). So I thought the movie not terrible, but just OK.


I LOVE YOU, MAN. Sydney (Paul Rudd) is getting married, and when announcing the engagement to his family it comes out he has never really had any guy friends. Who will be his Best Man? So he goes on a quest to find male friends. He is a really nice guy, but kind of a dweeb, so it's gonna take time. He has some disastrous matches with guys he just doesn't connect with. But eventually he meets Jason Segel (from Forgetting Sarah Marshall), and they really do hit it off. Jason introduces Paul into the ways of male friendship (metal music, fart jokes, talking about sex...) Good supporting cast, too (JK Simmons, Jane Curtin, Jaime Pressley Jon Favreau). This is a pretty amusing movie, not a gut-buster, but funny enough to be worth seeing.


THE GREAT BUCK HOWARD. If you are not old enough to remember The Amazing Kreskin, he was a guy on 1960's talk shows (I remember him from Mike Douglas) who did memory, psychic, and magic tricks. The character Buck Howard (played by John Malkovich) is based on him. Here, Buck is down and out, touring cities like Bakersfield and Wausau. Colin Hanks quits law school, and ends up being Buck's road manager. (The movie was written by a guy who was the Amazing Kreskin's road manager, and the movie is dedicated to him.) Buck is a challenge to work with, because he doesn't seem to realize that his time in the sun has come and gone. He keeps wanting to get back on the Tonight Show. But he lacking the people skills that might get him back in the limelight. Plus, he has some bad luck. This is an inconsequential little 90-minute movie, but Buck is a great character, and there are quite a few laughs ("I don't drink distilled water. I am not an iron."). Produced by Tom Hanks, who is also in it, with cameos from Jon Stewart, Conan O-Brian, Martha Stewart, Regis, etc. Worth a rental.


SUNSHINE CLEANING. Amy Adams plays a single mother having hard times. She cleans houses for a living, relying on her slacker sister (Emily Blunt) and get-rich-scheming dad (Alan Arkin) to help out. She is also having an affair with the father of her son, who married someone else. He is a cop, and one day he suggests that she do crime scene cleanup to make more money. So she does, and finds a place for herself that builds her self-esteem. There will be ups and downs, though. This movie is being promoted as a comedy, which I don't think it is. It's more like life; sometimes it is funny, and more times it is not. But Amy Adams is really wonderful, and the supporting cast is great, including the man who runs a local cleaning supplies shop who helps her out. The movie has a lot of heart, and I would recommend it.


TWO LOVERS. Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) is suicidal, apparently after a bad break-up with a fiance. He has gotten out of the hospital, and is living with his parents and working at their dry cleaning business. One night, the family of his father's potential business partner comes to dinner, and they have an attractive daughter. Despite his depression, Leonard can come to life and be quite charming. And he and the daughter enjoy each other's company. She is a very nice girl, and part of his social milieu. She would be a good match. But Leonard meets another woman in his building (Gwyneth Paltrow) and although, or maybe because, she has obvious problems, he is instantly attracted to her. She is exciting and pretty and probably everything his ex-fiance wasn't. . Clearly the first girl is a better fit for him, but he yearns for the excitement of the second. But mostly what he desperately wants is to be loved. So he'll end up with one of them, but will he choose the right one? An original movie, with realistically flawed grown-ups (not caricatures) looking for romance; I liked it.

CORALINE. An animated film, directed by the same guy who did NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. This one is about a little girl who feels somewhat neglected by her busy parents. They move into a new house, and she discovers a door that leads her to a parallel dimension, where her parents dote on her and everything seems wondrous. But of course, there is a dark side to the "perfect" world, and the little girl will find herself having to save herself and her real parents from the alternate reality. This movie is too dark for little kids. I am not sure who the audience is.... I enjoyed the fantastical visuals, but was not that taken by the story. (I did not see the 3-D version.)

GOMORRAH. The Camorra is to southern Italy what the Mafia is to Sicily. This Italian movie follows the stories of several people living in town, mostly in the housing projects controlled by this organized criminal gang. There's a man who delivers payoffs to people in town, another running a garment factory, one (politician or businessman, I wasn't sure), signing contracts to manage toxic waste (which is dumped in quarries), a child who delivers groceries to townspeople, drug dealers and and two teenagers who are enthralled by the movie SCARFACE. The stories aren't connected at all, except that the characters mostly live grim lives pretty much controlled by the Camorra. There is certainly no glamour (rightfully so) in the lives depicted here, just intimidation and murder. Because there isn't any kind of connection between the stories, I wasn't that carried away by the movie. It won the grand prize in Cannes, however.

MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY. Micah and Jo wake up in bed the morning after a wild party. They've slept together, but they don't even remember each other's names. Jo lives with her boyfriend, and Micah is still trying to get over a past girlfriend. So after coffee and breakfast and some awkward conversation, they go their separate ways. But Jo leaves her wallet in a cab, and Micah tracks her down. And so he convinces her to spend the day together. They don't really talk much, just a little here and there, kind of feeling each other out. The most interesting aspect of the movie was their discussion of the challenges of being black (and a tiny minority) in San Francisco. That, and checking out the neighborhoods they walk around in (including Yerba Buena), sort of kept me interested. But realistically perhaps, you only get to know so much about someone in 24 hours, and it's hard to know them well or root for them. I certainly didn't dislike the movie, but I can't say I really enjoyed it either.

HARVARD BEATS YALE 29-29. One of the all-time great college games happened between Harvard and Yale in 1968. This documentary goes back and forth between the taped game and comments by the players (including Tommy Lee Jones!) As depicted by the movie, the Harvard team was full of middle-class and working-class kids on scholarship, most of whom were against the Vietnam war. The Yale team appears to have been composed of upper class establishment types. Yale was led by an unbelievable talented quarterback (the inspiration for B.D. in Garry Trudeau's DOONESBURY), and was expected to win handily. And they were ahead 22-0 at the half. As you can tell by the title (which was a headline in the HARVARD CRIMSON newspaper after the game), the momentum changed. What an exciting game! This is a great movie for football fans, very entertaining.

February 2009 movie reviews

THE INTERNATIONAL. Clive Owen stars as a former Scotland Yard investigator who is now working for Interpol. He has teamed up with Naomi Watts, a district attorney with New York City. They are both somewhat obsessed with trying to get evidence against a Luxumbourg-based bank that is laundering money for organized crime, involved in arms deals, etc., etc. But it is a powerful bank whose tentacles are everywhere. And it appears the bank officers are willing to kill anyone who gets in their way. Back and forth - will the investigators get the evidence they need to make their case? This political thriller isn't a true action film, and some of the explanation of what's going on was lost on me, but it is fun in this day and age to have a bank be the villain. There is a climactic scene with terrific visuals in the Guggenheim Museum in New York that made the movie worth the price of the ticket for me.


WALTZ WITH BASHIR. The filmmaker in this animated movie is talking with a friend about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon when he realizes that although he served in the army during that time, he has no memory of the war itself. So he travels around interviewing people who were with him, to see if he can recover his memories. Because it is animated, the movie can shows each person's perceptions of the war as he or she remembers it. In watching this movie, it may help to remember/know a little history of that time, which includes the assassination of a Lebanese leader, and a massacre of Palestinians in refugee camps. Animated, in that way of WAKING LIFE or POLAR EXPRESS. Sometimes it seems real, sometimes more dream-like. Very intense documentary - it would have been unwatchable (I think) if not animated. Nominated for Best Foreign Film (Japan won).


TAKEN. Action thriller starring Liam Neeson as a former CIA agent who has quit his job so he can be closer to his teeange daughter. He's divorced, and the daughter lives with her now-remarried mother and wealthy step-father. With all that money, she's a bit of a spoiled brat. Still, she doesn't deserve to be kidnapped, which is what happens when she goes to Paris for the summer. Dad goes into overdrive to bring his daughter home safely. Because of his background, he can do anything. This isn't a especially original movie for the action genre, but it's not horrible. If you don't want to commit to something deep, and don't care about whether it's believable or not, this is the movie for you, and it's only 90 minutes long.