November movie reviews

Lots of great performances, but no films I'd see again.

THE ROAD. It's sometime in the future, and humanity is on the brink. Something apocalyptic has happened – no animals survive, most crops are gone, fires everywhere, earthquakes, and most plant life is dying. Only a few humans are left, and things are so dire that some are resorting to cannibalism. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and young son are on the move, trying to make it to the coast. The father is doing everything he can to protect his son (even teaching him how to commit suicide if capture by cannibals is imminent). The landscapes in the movie are great visuals of the devastation, and I really felt the father's desperate need to give his son a life with hope, but the movie is a tad slow moving, and really, so bleak, it's hard to recommend.

PRECIOUS. Clarisse Precious Jones is 16 years old, nearly illiterate, morbidly obese, and pregnant with her second child. She lives in 1989 Harlem, and her home life is filled with abuse of all kinds. But a teacher sees her potential, and recommends her for an alternative school where she gets one-on-one attention. And that helps her start to come out of her shell and begin asserting herself. The movie is very well-acted, and I think I was supposed to find it inspirational, but Precious' mother is such a monster, and the abuse so horrific, I just couldn't appreciate the movie. It just bummed me out.

THE MESSENGER. A sergeant is back from Iraq, recovering from his wounds. He isn't fit for combat duty anymore, so until his tour of duty is up, the Army puts him on the detail that notifies military families that their loved ones have died. Not easy duty. A captain (Woody Harrelson) shows him the ropes. Number one rule - don't get involved with the families. But the sergeant can't help developing feelings for one of the widows (Samantha Morton). Great performances and a good depiction of how war can wound men, but for some reason this movie didn't really engage me. I felt like I'd seen this emotionally wounded soldier before. It didn't seem as original as THE HURT LOCKER, which I liked quite a bit. That showed a completely different negative effect of war on soldiers, one you don't often see (adrenaline junkies).

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. Max is a wild little boy, lonely, imaginative, with the typical ups and downs of childhood. One day he behaves really badly, even biting his mother. At her reaction, he runs away, across the sea, to the land where the wild things (big monsters, looking just like Maurice Sendak drew them) live. He declares himself king, and with them, he does all the things little boys like to do, like build forts and have battles. The wild things mostly represent his emotions, with Max being closest to Carol, who also has fits of rage. (There's also the sweet monster, the one nobody listens to, the complainer, etc.) But Max must eventually go home, where all is well once again. Well done, but too mature for kids, and I just wasn't all that interested in the fantasies of a little boy. I can't identify.


THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX. Animated film based on a book by Roald Dahl. Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) has promised his wife he will settle down and not hunt chickens anymore. But he wants to live a full life, so he moves his family out of a burrow and onto a hillside with a view overlooking the poultry farmers. And decides he must have that one last score. But he gets in trouble, and he and all his (animal) neighbors bear the wrath of the farmers coming down on him. This is a weird little movie, which shouldn't be a surprise, since it was directed by Wes Anderson (Royal Tanenbaums, Darjaleeng Express). I couldn't get into it. I felt like I should be taking psychedelics to appreciate it.

PIRATE RADIO. In 1966 Britain, BBC Radio would only play one hour of rock and roll music a day. So ships offshore would set up radio stations and play the music 24/7. This movie is about one of those ships. The crew is a cast of characters; the owner (Bill Nighy), the American (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the young guy, the dumb guy, the sexy guy... Occasionally amusing, but there's just no story here. There's no character development. It's the music of my adolescence, so I enjoyed that, but I would recommend just buying the soundtrack rather than seeing the movie.

SKIN. Sandra Laing was born in 1950's South Africa. Her parents (Alice Krige and Sam Neill) were white, but she looked black. This was a problem for the system of apartheid. Because the law insisted everyone be classified one way or the other, she was classified white, then "colored", and back and forth. Her father loved her and fought very hard for her to be classified white (if she wasn't she could have been taken away from her parents, couldn't go to good schools, etc). He fought for her to be white because he knew her life would be better is she were white, but she didn't look white, and so wasn't accepted. Even her father was actually quite racist. He insisted she date white boys, but that wasn't working out so well for her. She ends up living in the black community, but that's not a panacea for her troubles. It's an unbelievable story, but true, so this movie really points out the ludicrous-ness and evil of apartheid, but for some reason the movie didn't move me. It might be because I knew the general facts of the story from the previews, so seeing the movie didn't add a whole lot. Sophie Okonedo plays Sandra, and does a good job, but as the real Sandra said, the end of apartheid came too late for her, leaving the viewer just feeling bad for her.