MOVIE REVIEWS
Summer Recap
Directed by Mike Judge
Featuring Jason Bateman, Kristin Wiig, Mila Kunis, J.K. Simmons, Ben Affleck
Don’t expect Extract to be Office Space, the endlessly quotable cult classic that puts jokes first and plot second. But do expect it to be more like director Mike Judge’s TV project, King of the Hill, a consistently funny look at American suburban workers who eventually learn to appreciate what they have.
In Extract, Joel (Jason Bateman) founded and runs an extract factory, full of lackadaisical workers biding their time while looking for something better. Sexually frustrated at home, jaded and bored at work, Joel is prepared to sell the factory. But a freak accident, and subsequent lawsuit, gets in the way, and then so does everything else: a potential settlement would leave him broke, a scheme to test his wife’s fidelity goes awry, and a seductive young woman (Mila Kunis) is ripping everyone off.
This is a light but thoughtful comedy, in which everybody overreaches their grasp, recoils, and then realizes how good they have it already. It may not be side-splitting or ground-breaking, but it’s smart, and the fantastic cast (also with J. K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, and Ben Affleck) will keep you laughing and thinking the whole way.
- NF (September 6, 2009)
The Hurt Locker (2009)- 5 / 5
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Mark Boal
Featuring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie
The summer’s most important movie may not have come to theaters near you. And if it did, it’s likely not the movie your friends talked about the most.
The Hurt Locker, directed by former painter Kathryn Bigelow, gets inside the heads of bomb diffusion specialists in Iraq to show how addictive war can be. Mark Boal’s script, based on his research with an actual bomb squad, is more character study than war movie, with more insights than explosions.
Set in 2004, the film focuses on Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner), the new leader of an Explosive Ordinance Disposal team. He is courageous to a fault, risking his life on every mission (sometimes unnecessarily), deactivating bombs. The movie opens with a quotation: “war is a drug.” James’ experience suggests that war might be so addictive because it allows men to indulge in other addictions, to adrenaline, to egotism, to heroism. This intensely personal understanding of James’ condition, coupled with Bigelow’s incredible camera work (sometimes frantic, other times quiet and still), gives the movie a documentary-like realism.
Some people say you can’t make a war movie while the war is still going. The Hurt Locker is not about the Iraq War, it’s about every war.
- NF (August 26, 2009)
Inglourious Basterds (2009) - 5 / 5
Written & directed by Quentin Tarantino
Featuring Christopher Waltz, Brad Pitt, Eli Roth
Writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is ostensibly a revenge war movie, with Brad Pitt leading a band of Jews to topple the Third Reich. But it’s also a genre-bending mash-up – it’s the World War II movie Sergio Leone would have made, it’s a fantasy that lets an African-American and a Jew watch Hitler burn, and it’s probably the end of Nazi movies.
Sometimes it feels like watching three or four different movies, with Pitt’s basterds scalping Nazis, Western-movie tension broken by B-movie violence, and multiple plans to trap the Führer in a movie theater. But if the tone shifts and layered film references feel capricious and scattershot, the movie’s tremendous climax brings them together in majestic fashion. An ode to the power of movies and a visual feast, the culmination is absurd and staggering even though you know it’s coming. Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s epic, and if you succumb to its insanity, it’ll knock your socks off.
- NF (August 26, 2009)
UP (2009) - 3.5 / 5
Directed by Pete Docter
Featuring voice of Ed Asner
Pete Docter’s Up was the first ever animated movie to open the Cannes Film Festival, an indication of both Pixar’s esteem and the movie’s wide-ranging charm.
Up is about Carl Friedrickson, a grumpy old man, voiced by Ed Asner. To escape the trappings of old age and to fulfill his one childhood dream, Carl uses thousands of helium balloons to lift his house off the ground and set sail for South America. He unwittingly takes 8-year-old Russell along with him, who reminds Carl of himself as a young adventurer. The movie’s first half is wonderful – a black & white montage beautifully chronicles Carl’s childhood, courtship, and marriage; Carl’s reluctant banter with young Russell is consistently amusing; and the unveiling of his balloons floods the screen with dazzling color.
But where the first half is poignant, the second half is silly – though the computer animation remains superb, the plot unravels, taking too many twists and turns to keep the audience’s attention. In the end, however, as Carl’s grouchy exterior cracks and he inspires the young, curious Russell, we are left with a rare movie that actually appeals to people of all ages, both an entertaining animation and a compelling rumination on lost, rekindled, and newfound dreams.
- NF (August 26, 2009)
On DVD
Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)
Written & Directed by Martin Scorsese
Featuring Harvey Keitel, Zina Bethune, Anne Collette, Harry Northup
4.5 / 5
Having watched much of Martin Scorsese’s cinematic progression, from the dashing, innovative Mean Streets through the near-perfect Raging Bull to the flashy, memorable Departed, it was truly fascinating to come upon his student film project – his directorial debut.
While most Scorsese films feel complete and polished, Who’s that Knocking at my Door is largely – and surprisingly – experimental and aesthetically exploratory. It is a student film not because it is immature but because of its innocent yearning for discovery and experience. Scorsese addresses and attempts to confront Catholicism and Catholic guilt here, as he does in future films, but this one feels as young and curious as Harvey Keitel does in his first performance: in the moment and eager to try something new, yet perhaps stifled by old values.
The movie centers on J.R. (Keitel) as he mentally and spiritually wrestles with his girlfriend’s troubled past. This plotline is coupled with the movie’s original story (then titled I Call First), which follows J.R. and his twenty-something friends as they kick around the streets of New York. J.R. refuses sex with his new girlfriend (Bethune) on implied religious grounds, and then he feels forced to break up with her when he finds out she’s not a virgin.
J.R.’s impure fantasies play into his confusion and guilt. Scorsese composes an elegant dream sequence of J.R., older, sleeping with several different prostitutes. The scene is widely deemed superfluous, but I found that it complicated J.R.’s mindset. It may feel over-obvious and out of place at first, but it ultimately contributes to the rest of the movie’s unfocused, wandering tone.
If Scorsese were to remake the film today, he would probably take out the fantasy sequence (his 1968 distributer required a sex scene). But that doesn’t matter watching it now: this is a first film, an experiment, and it isn’t perfect. But it is a beautiful, original, and worthwhile first step for one of American cinema’s best directors.
- Nathan Fuller
COMING SOON
The Wrestler (2008)
Gran Torino (2008)
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Frost / Nixon (2008)
Revolutionary Road (2008)
Cadillac Records (2008)
Synechdoche, NY (2008)
Wall-E (2008)
The Last Detail (1973)
Faces (1968)
The Gold Rush (1925)
The Soloist (2009)
On DVD
Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle (1994)
Written & Directed by Alan Rudolph
Featuring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Cambell Scott, Matthew Broderick
3.5 / 5
"If I didn't care for fun and such, I'd probably amount to much. But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn." – Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was not as simple as she’d have you believe, and everyone around her knew it; she used unrelenting, incisive (and often hilarious) wit in an attempt to veil her underlying despair – her lifelong unrequited love and dangerous alcoholism. Best remembered as the queen (the funniest and wittiest among mostly men) of the bookish collective founded on rapid-fire one-liners and booze known as the Round Table at the Hotel Algonquin, where the New Yorker and various other influential literary publications were born, Parker was an author, screenwriter, and poet. She spent her whole life loving a man who didn't love her back, but ended every fling with anyone who began to deeply care. Always in emotional or romantic flux, she attempted suicide several times. Though heavily jaded, Parker was almost constantly funny, acerbic, and insightful – certainly a deserving film subject, especially if portrayed by the unconventionally beautiful and self-assured Jennifer Jason Leigh.
But Parker’s writing did not die with her (though, I admit, it is a shame that it appears she is not widely read or quoted anymore). Her poems, quotes, and screenplays are readily available today, so it is troubling that the script of Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle often feels like a Greatest Hits compilation of Parker’s and the Round Table’s best lines. Perhaps that early part of her life felt like a string of one-liners, but we know now it amounted to more than that.
Rudolph often cuts to flash-forward scenes of Parker in her later years, a glass of booze still glued firmly to her palm, in a curious black-and-white, as if she lived a more old-fashioned life as she aged. The idea of these scenes contextualizes the color scenes nicely, suggesting the older Parker is with us now, recounting the formative days and nights that she was surely too drunk to remember.
However, in these scenes Leigh’s performance weakens dramatically. For most of the film, in the color scenes of endless liquor and conversation, Leigh employs a charismatic swagger: we can practically smell her alcoholic breath but are too taken by her cool confidence and her love (and deft manipulation) of the English language to notice. But in the flashes forward, the act wears thin. Leigh’s grating drawl – no longer merely a drunken slur – is all too calculated.
The direction, too, is uneven. For the film’s first half, Rudolph’s camerawork matches the script in approach – he seems to exist solely to watch the Round Table in awe, and this movie is the resulting tribute. But in the second half the spell is broken, and the film is far better for it. For instance, breaking from the repeated flashes forward, Rudolph allows the older Parker to recite a poem that simultaneously narrates the silent, wandering, younger Parker. The poem is the beautifully sad “Symptom Recital,” beginning matter-of-factly “I do not like my state of mind,” and concluding somberly,
“My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me anymore.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men....
I'm due to fall in love again.”
So if you see Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle, see it for Leigh’s mostly magnetic portrayal of the jaded, troubled poet, but you’d probably be better off simply reading Parker’s bitter, cutting quotations and poetry.
- Nathan Fuller
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