Happy Halloween

The horde approaches in Night of the Living Dead.

I'll say it again, if only for just because: happy Halloween.

It may be cliched, but it is still a worthwhile venture to provide people with some scary movie ideas for Halloween. Is there really anything better than sitting in the dark and watching a scary movie on Halloween? And, isn't it amazing that this day makes movies infinitely scarier? But, without going on too long, here are some suggestions for fright night viewing tonight, in no particular order.

Halloween- John Carpenter's original scare fest is perfect if for no other reason that its title. And, also the fact than Michael Myers may be the most bone chilling of all horror film villains.

Night of the Living Dead- George Romero's zombie thriller is probably the finest B-movie ever made. On a shoestring budget, Romero recreated a sense of apocalyptic doom all in a little secluded cabin, and it could not have been scarier.

Scary Movie- For those of you looking more for fun than fright, look no further than this stellar comedy, lampooning everything from Scream to American Pie (and is there anything scarier than horny adolescent boys?). Though you should skip the increasingly bad sequels, this is well worth seeing.

Jesus Camp- The most frightening movie I have ever seen. A hundred children speaking in tongues and a monomaniacal camp leader. You'll forget all about Camp Crystal Lake after one viewing of this chilling documentary.

The Evil Dead series- Every one is a classic in its own right with memorable images from first to last. The cult status that these films enjoy is well earned. So if you're looking for a series that is good from start to finish, look no further.

Stir of Echoes- Unfairly overlooked, this film is downright chilling. Kevin Bacon is wonderfully psychotic as a hypnotized father haunted by visions of a dead woman.

There are others, but I am sure you all have a favorite scary movie to watch. So, have fun, happy movie watching, and happy Halloween.

New Movie Review: Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton is the best movie of the year so far. Every element of this film succeeds on the highest level of the craft of film making. The writing is spot on, the direction is graceful, and the acting is top notch. This is one of those rare instances where the stars seem to have aligned to make the near impossible: a perfect film.

It is not without its flaws. It can tend to drag on in the middle, but the wait only makes the denouement that much greater. There are small things here and there. They are what Roger Ebert would refer to as the minor flaws in a masterpiece that make it human. And, writer-director Tony Gilroy's film is nothing if not brimming with humanity.

That is the greatest conflict here: the clash between those with a conscience and those without. George Clooney has never been better playing Michael Clayton, a law firm "fixer", mopping up his company's messes. He stumbles into a spider web of secrets and deceit when his friend, the magnificent Tom Wilkinson as Arthur Edens, has a crisis in wrestling with his own demons of morality.

It becomes the proverbial race against the clock as the walls begin to come crumbling down around Michael, and his options start to run dry. Clooney handles the role with suave and daring and just the right amount of paranoia. Pitted against him is the firm for which he supposed to be working, personified by a wonderful Sydney Pollack, and the company that has hired them, represented by Tilda Swinton. Like Faye Dunaway in Network, Swinton is remarkable, and sometimes frightening, as woman who has lost any sense of decency and will stop at nothing to come out ahead of the situation.

If the Academy does not recognize this film with at least a few Oscar nominations (Wilkinson should be a lock), then at least in this reviewer's opinion, they will have much for which to answer. This may be the best legal thriller ever made. The heart-pounding final act is the most exciting movie going experience of the year. Gilroy has much to say about morality and the conscience but never forgets to tell an intriguing, wonderfully nuanced story of truth, lies, and the people who control both.

See it?

Yes.

New Movie Review: The 11th Hour

There are some movies, Casablanca and The Godfather come to mind, which you should see if you are a fan of movies at all. However, there are some movies, like Schindler's List and Nuit et Brouillard, that you should see because you are human being alive on this planet. The 11th Hour belongs in the latter category.

The Leonardo Dicaprio produced documentary takes a universal look at the problem of global warming, a topic brought into popular culture by Al Gore's Oscar winning documentary from last year, An Inconvenient Truth. The film has the talking head style of so many post-Errol Morris documentaries. In fact, it is a fairly conventional film; but for once, the film art is secondary to the subject matter.

It is not the most well made documentary, but it is effective in as much as it is scary as hell. Expert after expert is brought before the camera to explain what we should already know: our planet is dying, it is our fault, and time is running out. The first hour takes the sort of pessimistic doomsday stance that a documentary like No End in Sight does.

However, The 11th Hour succeeds where lesser documentaries, like No End in Sight, fail. It does not simply present a terrible problem and call it an insurmountable obstacle or refer to it as something that happened that can no longer be helped; The 11th Hour presents real, scientific, technologically based solutions to the problems it presents. The film does not leave us feeling helpless and lost. On the contrary, we are empowered.

Despite the frightening facts presented in the first half, the overall tone of the film is hopeful. The aforementioned experts not only give intelligent descriptions of what is happening, but they posit advice and steps on what we can do to correct it. Few films fall into this category, but this is essential viewing. As a human being alive on this planet, it is essential.

See it?

Yes.

New Movie Review: Elizabeth, The Golden Age

This movie is overblown, unfocused, and self-congratulatory. It has nothing interesting to say about anything we do not already know. Anyone who has taken a high school world history class will know how it turns out, and anyone who cares about historical accuracy will be sorely disappointed. It suffers from poor writing, heavy-handed direction, and an unnecessarily flashy production.

It is a historical romance in the vein of films like Cleopatra and Shakespeare in Love. The love story here, however, makes no sense. It is not believable because we know these people will never be together, and we do not care because these people do not seem to love each other that much anyway. The romance hinges on a preposterous love triangle that is more of a straight line through Walter Raleigh, played by Clive Owen.

Cate Blanchett, returning for a second go at depicting the Virgin Queen, plays Elizabeth on the cusp of a holy war with Spain; however, she becomes preoccupied with Raleigh's charm and sense of adventure. Blanchett does fine work, but we've seen this character before, and like the overdone sets and annoyingly anachronistic music, it seems quite unnecessary. Owen is always good, but he just seems bored with the meandering plot line and nonsensical character arcs. Abbie Cornish plays the woman for whom Raleigh falls, and she is passable but not spectacular.

There is nothing really spectacular here at all. Under normal circumstances, that would not be a fair criticism, but this movie tries so hard to impress the audience that it just overwhelms us with too much of something that is not that good of a thing. It is showy and grandiose in all of the worst possible ways. It retains none of the passion and grace of the first film and has so much style that the little substance it does have is lost or unimportant. Director Shekhar Kapur would have been better off settling for the success, on just about every level, of Elizabeth and not trying to recapture it with this far inferior effort.

See it?

No.

Good Movies

Reviewing a movie like We Own the Night (see below) brings up an interesting issue: good movies- movies that are not great. They will not win awards. They may not even be terribly memorable. They are the kind of movies that one sees and enjoys, and maybe ten years later, he sees a copy in video store, remembers that positive experience, and rents it. Often, movie snobs (as I would classify myself, if only because I have been called one by friends) will forget or ignore the merits of a genuinely good movie.

If you do not know what I mean by "movie snob", think about the other forms of snobbery. They are the people who will not drink a wine that is not older than they are. They are those who listen to Mozart and dismiss The Clash as illiterate kids, punks, if you will. More relative to our conversation, they are the people who can not watch horror films because the films are silly or poorly made or any other various complaints. In short, they are people for whom subjective quality is paramount.

And, that is why there is a critical void when it comes to good movies. Great films and bad movies are similar in that they are both easily identifiable. It takes very little effort to recognize why The Godfather is one of the finest films ever committed to celluloid and that same little effort to see that the world would be a better place if Plan 9 from Outer Space never existed. Good movies, however, fall into that category of historical irrelevance that critics tend to forget.

Movies that fall into this category are dramas like Higher Learning and Less Than Zero, or comedies like My Cousin Vinny and The Jerk. Older films like An American in Paris or William Wyler's Jezebel. These are all movies that are unabashedly enjoyable. There is no reason to watch them other than to be entertained. I think the majority of people can go to movies like these and so many others and lose themselves for two hours. They can walk in, forget their lives, walk out, and maybe be a little happier than when they went into the theatre.

This is not a plea to the people or to the studios or anything like that. I think there are plenty of good movies being made. I think, and this is just mathematics, that the majority of movies released are proudly average. They will not stun, but they will entertain. This writing goes out more to people like me, people who may have lost the ability to enjoy a movie and can only focus on personal, subjective judgements.

To them, and to myself, I say:

go enjoy a good movie.

New Movie Review: We Own the Night

An official Cannes Film Festival selection this year, We Own the Night is a pretty straight-forward cop drama. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man torn between obligations to family and to business. Mark Wahlberg and Robert Duvall play his brother and father, respectively. They are police officers assigned to the very division that would seek to undermine Phoenix's business. That business involves drug deals out of the night club he runs. It seems that Russians are the organized crime go-to culture this year (see Eastern Promises), as it is a Russian crime family behind all of the dealings in said nightclub.

This is the basic set-up for a movie that feels pretty similar to a lot of other police movies put together. It does not have the humor of a Lethal Weapon movie or the heart pounding thrills of a police procedural like Zodiac. It lacks the visceral energy of The Departed, a movie to which it has been compared quite a bit. I am not sure that I really see the comparisons, but you can judge that for yourself.

There are few nice set pieces, like a rain soaked car chase at about the mid-way point and some hazy moments near the end. However, writer-director James Gray (Little Odessa and The Yards) never holds the tension long enough for the audience to get the effect he wants us to. It is rare that a movie is too short, but We Own the Night would have benefitted from a few extended sequences. Instead, Gray opts for the immediate thrill, which is often less satisfying and sometimes too easy.

Duvall and Wahlberg give solid performances, and Eva Mendes is fine as the wishy-washy girlfriend. But, the movie rests almost entirely on the shoulders of Joaquin Phoenix. His is the story we follow, and he is the one about whom we care. He has shown, most notably in Walk the Line, that he is perfectly capable of carrying a movie, and he does an admirable job here. He is able to overcome much of Gray's shaky, uneven writing and pulls a solid performance out of an average movie.

Fans of the genre will enjoy this film. Fans of Joaquin Phoenix will enjoy this film. People who are neither of those will probably not. There is nothing terribly new or interesting here. It may be better to rent any one of the various police movies from the mid to late eighties that this film seems to model itself after so much. However, is it a worthy addition to that class of film? Yes.

See it?

Yes.

New Movie Review: Feast of Love

Robert Benton directed the 1979 best picture winner Kramer vs. Kramer. After viewing Feast of Love, that is hard to believe. Working from an overly-meditative and underdeveloped script by Allison Burnett, Benton delivers a movie so sappy and bland that one wonders if this wasn't originally planned for a primetime release on the Lifetime Network (where it probably would have done quite well).

I would summarize the plot here if it were intelligible and if I thought it served a purpose. The point of a plot is usually to tell some story (hopefully an interesting one, though not always as is the case here) at the end of which characters learn something or are changed in some way. Burnett's script does not seem too concerned with providing its characters with motivations or real thoughts, and their character arcs flatline from the beginning. But, it's okay because we never really learn who these people are anyway, and the ones we do learn about we do not like. So, we do not care.

Morgan Freeman phones it in playing (for a change) the wise, world weary mentor to a group of people with problems (see The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby). Greg Kinnear does the best he can with what he's given to work (and it ain't much). This is basically true of the whole cast: talented people playing an ensemble of uninteresting and occasionally downright annoying stock characters who are put in a series of increasingly ludicrous situations.

The movie has no redeeming qualities, and for their own sakes, I hope everyone involved got paid upfront.

See it?

Only if the alternative is bamboo slivers under the fingernails, and even then, weigh your options.

In Defense of Federico Fellini

"Total Film" magazine recently ran a two part series on the 100 greatest directors of all time. Ranking at number one was Alfred Hitchcock. That is predictable. A British magazine chooses a British director who made decidedly popular (in a neither good nor bad way) films. Scorsese, Spielberg, Hawks, and Coppola round out the top five. These are not surprising choices, and they are not bad choices. These directors all deserve to be held in the highest regard and are indisputably among the great directors of all time.

However, that those directors were included is not the surprise. The surprise, and the criminal shame, is the absence of certain directors from the top. Most notably and most criminally is the inclusion of Federico Fellini on the list at #67. The argument belittles almost the entire second half of Fellini's career, calling his post-La Dolce Vita work "a byword for self-indulgence."

Never mind that what is typically known as Fellini-esque is the type of surreal, metaphoric symbolism that characterize his late work. Never mind that two of Fellini's Oscars for best foreign film came during this "self-indulgent" period. Never mind that he is almost solely responsible for keeping Italian filmmaking on the map during the formative years of the French New Wave.

All of this aside, it is still impossible and illogical to assert that Federico Fellini is anything but the greatest practitioner of his craft. He started, as did many of his Italian contemporaries, by making hard hitting neo-realist films like La Strada and Le Notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria). Unlike his contemporaries, however, Fellini branched out in the 1960s and produced what modern audiences are likely to think of when considering his work. In 1960, Fellini made La Dolce Vita, marking a shift in his work from humanistic and contemplative dramas to satiric, often comedic, and always intelligent tableaux of images and archetypes.

These archetypes laid the groundwork for the director's greatest achievement, 8 1/2. Some critics look at this film and see a director who has run out of ideas. The reality is that 8 1/2 represents Fellini at the peak of his creativity. He draws upon all of his considerable gifts and produces a film that says so much about how we think and feel that we almost have to shut out some of it. Those who ignore the artistry of 8 1/2 and claim that it is lazy and self-indulgent are missing the intentionality in everything that Fellini does. Every image in a Fellini film is carefully chosen for its specific implications on the world and for the viewer. There is nothing accidental about his filmmaking.

And, so it was with no small amount of shock and dismay that I read the "Total Film" article on the great directors of all time and discovered Fellini so near the bottom. I suppose that I must hope that history is cyclical and that, one day, Fellini will once again be revered for what he is: the greatest filmmaker of his generation, and arguably of any generation.

New Movie Review: In the Valley of Elah

Paul Haggis, writer-director of the best picture winning Crash, goes for an even higher political mark with his latest film, In the Valley of Elah, and he hits his target right on the money. The film revolves around a father, played with gravity and sincerity by Tommy Lee Jones, and his search for answers in the death of his son. The movie follows the basic guidelines for a procedural film (see: All the President's Men or this year's Zodiac) but dares to go beyond a simple exploration of beurocracy or of systems. Instead, Haggis' film becomes an intense character study in the guise of a procedural.

It would seem that Tommy Lee Jones is in the midst of a career resurgence after turning in some fine work in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and the upcoming No Country for Old Men. His brilliantly understated performance anchors a film that teeters on sentimentality, as Haggis' films so often do, but Jones holds strong at the centre and keeps the focus of the story where it belongs: on the criminal investigation. Jones' choice to not play up his feelings allows the audience to draw its own conclusions, and we still come out feeling how Haggis would have wanted us to feel anyway.

Charlize Theron plays a female detective dealing with sexism in the workplace in a minor subplot that is never really fleshed out, but that is to the benefit of the film. She is strong-willed and intense but with just enough heart showing through that we believe she truly wants to help this man. Susan Sarandon is devastating in the few scenes that she has, and with almost no words at all, she conveys all of the hurt and loss that her character experiences. The rest of the ensemble cast play most mostly army and police personnel, and all bring their A-game. However, the show really belongs to Jones' grieving but determined father.

He is the beating heart at the core of this film. We sympathize with him and can understand every move he makes. Haggis' writing, while sometimes a little on the head, is wonderfully restrained here, and he simply allows the facts of the case to carry the story forward. The writing, coupled with Tommy Lee Jones' performance, do well to keep the film grounded just left of centre, when it very easily could have gone off on an overtly leftist political bent. The great success of the film is that it alienates no one but is still able to convey a very important message about the condition in which our world finds itself.

See it?

Enthusiastically, yes.