Midnight in Paris (2011)

Woody Allen has been steadily making movies for longer than I've been alive.  His current rate seems to be to make on movie, usually about 90 minutes or so long, every year.  Now, of course, producing a movie a year for a career as long as Allen's means many may not match up to the quality of his best films, most of which are behind him.  But every so often, he comes out with another one worth seeing, including 2011's Midnight in Paris.

It is worth noting, of course, that Midnight in Paris, though fun, is rather light fare from Allen.  It lacks the experimental story structure of Annie Hall or the deep character work of Vicki Christina Barcelona.  There isn't even the wacky slapstick of his early comedies like Sleeper.  There's comedy to Midnight in Paris, just for me mostly to make me smile as opposed to really laugh out loud.  I don't get the idea that there's much to this that's all that deep.  The movie, basically, has two things going for it.

The first is Owen Wilson.  Allen has reached an age where even he can no longer play the neurotic romantic lead to increasingly younger actresses (if he ever could post Mia Farrow).  Instead, he's cast a variety of Allen stand-ins, many of whom channel Allen's own film persona to one degree or another.  Larry David's take, in the so-so Whatever Works, basically comes across as a half-assed, or maybe whole-assed, Allen impression.  With Owen Wilson, there's a shift.  Though Wilson has some lines and scenes where he confesses to be afraid of death and making very Allen-like statements, none of this seems to wash away the screen persona of Wilson himself.  He seems more like an Owen Wilson character, something of a carefree slacker, then he does the overly analytical Woody Allen character he might have been in anyone else's hands.  Wilson's Gil seems inclined to stay in Paris like he just drifted there and seems to like the place.  Allen's own take probably would have been due to a romantic ideal that the past somehow seems superior to the future.  Yes, that is written into the character, but it comes across as more of an excuse for Wilson to enjoy the bohemian joys of Paris.

The second strength is Paris itself.  The film opens with a series of shots of Paris before breaking into the main action.  Allen's used this technique before, mostly with his native New York City in movies like Manhattan.  This establishes Paris as a character, and a fairly romantic character as it is.  The viewer can much more easily believe that so many people have fallen in love with the City of Lights, in ways that are lacking in other movies where a trip to Paris seems to be the highlight of a person's life (I'm mostly thinking here of Anne Hathaway's trip there with Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada).  It is also easy to believe that just waiting at the right spot could allow a person to visit the time period of the city that they most want to see.

The movie opens with Wilson's Gil on a trip to Paris with his fiancee and her parents.  They're there for business.  Gil is talking about moving there.  He's a frustrated writer trying to finish a novel instead of being a Hollywood hack, and Paris has a long history of attracting artists.  His wife-to-be and in-laws-to-be, sadly, are merely materialistic rightwing stereotypes, something Allen doesn't paint as full-characters as well he does Gil himself.  Included are fiancee Inez's know-it-all male friend (the kind of guy who thinks he knows more than a native French tour guide played by the former French First Lady Carla Bruni), and it becomes clear Gil is not going to be happy with this match even if he doesn't realize it yet.

Then, while out walking, he gets a ride to the 1920s, hears Cole Porter perform, meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and then Ernest Hemmingway, and starts to get some real writing advice from people he really respects but have been dead for decades.  He goes back to the present but can't get Inez to go with him, and starts up a tentative relationship with a woman (played by Marion Cotillard) who's about to break it off with Pablo Picasso.  She herself longs for another, long gone Paris in the 1890s, and it is this that leads Gil to learn a valuable lesson about the grass and when its always greener.

Midnight in Paris is a fun movie, where atmosphere adds more to the movie than anything particularly deep the characters learn.  It's hardly Allen's best, but its above average for the man this late in his career.  His best films may be behind him, but that doesn't mean he still can't produce an enjoyable flick worth 90 minutes of the viewers' time.

Saved! (2004)

My wife has over the course of our relationship introduced me to various movies she loved.  I've done the same, which means she's seen Ghostbusters and I've seen 2004's Saved!.

Saved! tells the story of a young, confused Christian girl named Mary.  Mary is part of a super-Christian cliche that seems to rule their Christian high school in a manner similar to the plastics in Mean Girls.  Mary, being raised by her single mom (Weeds' Mary-Louise Parker), is shocked, SHOCKED, to learn her chaste boyfriend Dean is actually gay.  Having been told for her whole life that being gay is a major sin, she takes it upon herself to "fix" him by having sex.  Not only does it not work, Mary's pregnant, Dean's father found his gay porn and shipped him off to the ominously-sounding Mercy House, and the cliche leader Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore) seems to be increasingly controlling over Mary and the other members, as well as Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound brother Roland (Macaulay Culkin).

Culkin, actually, is one of the gems of this movie.  The Christian stuff seems like too-easy satire.  Culkin as a sarcastic voice of, well, not-quite reason plays off well with the school's transfer student Cassandra (Eva Amurri Martino).  Cassandra is suspected of being everything the Christians are out to oppose as stereotypically as possible.  She's said to be a stripper and Jewish!  This makes her a prime target for Hilary Faye's attempts to save a soul.  Predictably, they don't work.

As a whole, it's not an awful movie, but at the same time I don't think it's saying anything new.  The aforementioned, far superior Mean Girls goes out of its way to humanize all the sides, making the movie's ostensible villain out to be sympathetic by the end of the movie.  Saved! does not grant Hilary Faye the same treatment.  She's the bad guy, a Christian bigot and hypocrite, the only one who seems unable to learn a lesson about what it really means to be a Christian or even just a decent human being.  She's caught in her lies, loses her prestige, and crashes her van into a giant Jesus billboard.  Mary, her mother, her new boyfriend, her old boyfriend, Roland, Cassandra, even perhaps the minister, all seem to learn something about forgiveness and being a real Christian or even just a decent human being given Roland and Cassandra are more or less athiests.

As much as this movie is played for laughs, some of them a little too easy, upon seeing this all I could think of was Jesus Camp, a documentary that came out two years after Saved!  Jesus Camp takes all the stereotypes of unyielding Christian schools and shows that it is, sadly, very real, if not outright worse than anything shown in this movie.  Saved! is charming enough on its own, but knowing there's people out there really like the Hilary Faye character, only not being played for laughs, takes some of the humor off an otherwise fairly harmless movie.

The Town (2010)

Not that long ago, Ben Affleck was probably not the most respected Oscar winner around.  True, he'd won it for co-writing a screenplay, but everyone knew him more or less as an actor, a so-so one at that, and as half of the odious "Bennifer".  Truly, whoever came up with the idea of combing celebrity couple names into one moniker has earned a place in Hell.

At some point, Affleck dumped one Jennifer in favor of another one, settled down, started making better choices in his career, and now is a fairly good director as evidenced with The Town.  He's not a great director, not yet, but he's apparently learned quite a bit about how to frame a film and keep it moving.  While I doubt Affleck will ever get a second Oscar for acting, perhaps someday a second for directing could be in the cards.  But, as I said, not yet.

The Town starts off with a simple statement of fact:  one neighborhood in one city has produced more bank and armored car robbers than any other place in America.  Whether this is true or not is immaterial.  This is the premise, that this has been going on so long it's become a family business passed along from father to son, and here we have Affleck's Doug MacRay, a one-time aspiring hockey player now following in his incarcerated father Chris Cooper's footsteps.  He has a crew of childhood buddies, all of whom have a role to play, and best friend Jim "Jem" Coughlin, played by the great Jeremy Renner, may need a special eye kept on him since he seems the one most likely to fly off the handle and commit an act of violence, something Affleck really doesn't want his boys to do.  By their calculations, if everything goes right, no one needs to get hurt doing what they do.

Of course, there are wrinkles.  Movies like this do not exist solely to show off Affleck, Renner, and Co.'s ability to plan the near-perfect heist and get away.  First up, Affleck falls hard for a bank manager the group took hostage after one robbery, and though at first trying to make sure she doesn't recognize the gang unmasked, the relationship continues.  I don't think I've seen Rebecca Hall in anything other than Woody Allen's Vicki Christina Barcelona, but she does a fine job here.  Jim's sister Krista, a drug-addicted single mother who used to date Doug and may or may not claim her daughter is his (it isn't) seems to lack much of a purpose, but the usually ironically named Blake Lively has enough good scenes to warrant her presence.  The late Pete Postlethwaite in a fairly small role is the surprisingly sinister mob boss who runs a cover business inside a florist shop, a man who doesn't seem to do much until near the end of the movie when he shows just how dangerous he really is.  Finally, Jon Hamm's FBI agent in charge of the investigation is there to bring the boys in.  He knows who they are; he just has to prove it.  Hamm's basically a straight-arrow good guy, and that may be enough for this film, which ultimately doesn't ask him to do much else.

Aside from Renner and Hall, I didn't find too many of the actors leaving too much of an impression, but as a crime movie, the film works well, establishing character and motivation for most of the major players (Hamm being the exception), and giving a thrilling escape or two.  Affleck, shooting in Boston near his childhood home in Cambridge, acts also as a co-writer, wisely choosing to up the ante on each successive crime until the ultimate robbery of Fenway Park.  The neighborhood, Charlestown, seems to have its own morals and honor code, and the crew largely obey it, but when Hall, Hamm, and Postlethwaite get involved, there can be only ending for the crew, and it won't be a good one.

King Kong (1933)

At some point, someone, somewhere, thought it would be pretty cool to unleash a giant animal in the streets of a modern city.

The original King Kong may not have been the first, but it was certainly the most memorable.  The movie has, after all, been remade twice, to say nothing of letting the big ape hang out with Godzilla, and served as inspiration for every large ape that ever climbed a skyscraper with a woman in his hand, or in the case of author Terry Pratchett's Discworld humor/fantasy novel series, had a giant woman climb a tall building with an ape in her hand.  By the standards of modern movie making, Kong doesn't hold a candle.  He's clearly created in a more claymation-style effect as opposed to the 1970s guy-in-an-ape-suit or Peter Jackson's CGI overlaying of Andy Serkis, but there's something to this, the original Kong, that still packs a punch.

What may be most interesting is how little Kong is actually in his own movie.  He doesn't leave the screen for very long once he appears, but you have quite a wait for that.  The movie clocks in at just under an hour and 45 minutes, with an overture, and Kong appears sometime after the 45 minute mark.  All the really memorable stuff with Kong happen in the last hour of the film, and aside from the promotional material, audiences seeing the movie for the first time in 1933 probably had no idea what Kong was.  Certainly the characters in the movie do not.  Producer/director Carl Denham, playing by the fast-talking Robert Armstrong, only knows of a mythical god-like thing on a mysterious island known as "Kong".

As much as I really enjoy this movie, there's a lot the audience needs to take with the metaphorical grain of salt.  Denham is apparently making a movie with himself as the only crewmember, no script, and one actor, the just-off-the-streets Ann Darrow (playing so memorably by Fay Wray).  Anyone who knows anything about dinosaurs knows most of the ones seen on Skull Island were not carnivorous, plus basic science tells us no gorilla could ever get that big without being crushed to death by the weight of its own body.  Plus, no one stops Denham with the basic thought that whatever it is he wants with a giant gorilla that has been anything but friendly could possibly be a good idea.  His arrogance causes a lot of death and destruction, none of the which the movie faults him for (perhaps the sequel Son of Kong does, but I haven't seen it in a while).

What the movie has, though, is a highly memorable monster in the form of the title character.  The first 45 minutes are rather slow, and don't seem to be going anywhere.  It's largely stuff that is important to the plot, such as Denham's luck with finding a girl for the voyage to a place only he knows about, his finding and recruiting of Ann, what he has on board, some screen tests and other character-based stuff to establish Ann and love interest John Driscoll's (played by Bruce Cabot) personalities and some sort of 1930s film idea of love and courtship.  Once Kong emerges from his jungle retreat, the movie turns to straight action as Kong takes on and defeats all comers on his island, is brought to New York, goes on his famous rampage, and dies the iconic death fighting some biplanes.

While Denham's final line on how beauty killed the beast is indeed noteworthy and memorable, I was inclined to see an inadvertent environmental message here:  importing a nonnative species to a region that's never seen anything like it before is a really bad idea.  Keep the rabbits out of Australia and the King Kongs out of Manhattan and everyone will be better off in the long run.

Signs (2002)

There was a point in the past where M. Night Shyamalan was considered a director of quality films and Mel Gibson a bankable, perfectly sane actor.  Those days are past for both men, with Shyamalan making a series of films that at the very most seem to have impressive trailers, and Gibson being relegated to straight-to-DVD features since being outed as an anti-Semite and possibly a misogynist.  When the cast of The Hangover II prevent Gibson from giving their movie a cameo due to his past actions while convicted rapist Mike Tyson doesn't warrant so much of a peep, that's not good.

But that's the present.  The past had both men working together to give the world Signs.

In terms of where this is for Shyamalan, it's probably safe to say that he's reaching the end of his credibility as a filmmaker here.  The guy was known for his plot twists, most notably in The Sixth Sense, and to a lesser extent Unbreakable, but has since become the guy who made a movie about killer trees and having a fairy tale creature declare a character played by himself will write a story that will change the world.  Signs, with its alien-invasion-foiled-by-water scenario somehow manages not to get there.  Yes, as Cracked.com has pointed out these aliens might have been more successful if they'd just managed to invent pants, or maybe the raincoat, but that's not the issue.  Bruce Willis being dead the whole time is less shocking since the clues are all there.What Signs has going for it instead is simply that Shyamalan manages to keep things moving well enough that maybe the viewer doesn't notice the whole water thing during the movie.  It can strike later, surely, but the movie has a good deal of suspense going for it, good pacing, and a good score, all to keep the viewer off-balance.

It also helps that the movie is more about one man's faith than it is about the aliens.  These days it would impossible not to know Mel Gibson is a very...devout man.  The Passion of the Christ is proof enough of that.  Having him play a man struggling with his own faith after the very freaky death of his wife is something else.  Gibson is capable of a great deal of onscreen charisma, so it's easy to get wrapped up in his problems.  Round out the cast with Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, and Abigail Breslin and you have a fairly potent core cast.

The movie is far from perfect, obviously.  Future Shyamalan problems are cropping up here.  He gives himself a small but crucial role to pass along important information, and no matter how wrapped up you are in the movie, that water thing will eventually get back to you.  Still, its a mild, fun ride that can hold the viewer's interest (maybe) long enough to tell its story, and that may be all that matters for a filmmaker like Shyamalan.

War Horse (2011)

No one would doubt Steven Spielberg's credentials on the antiwar front.  The famous opening D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan is every bit as brutal and awful as its reputation and it would be impossible for him to top it with the remainder of the movie (and he doesn't).

For all that Private Ryan shows the bloody consequences of young men on both sides of a conflict being chewed up and spat out by war as realistically as the medium of film will allow, War Horse manages a similar feat with more symbolic methods set during an earlier World War.  After a disastrous cavalry charge right into German machine guns, alternating shots show riders on horses being replaced by riderless horses dashing past the guns.  The effect is about the same.

Based on the stage play, War Horse shows the horrors of war through the eyes of a complete innocent, the title character, a horse named Joey.  Early in the movie, we see Joey's birth and training under the watchful eye of a kid named Albert Narracott.  Albert's parents are poor farmers behind in the rent, so Joey is sold to a cavalry officer and sent off to war.  Once there, the horse changes hands and sides multiple times, witness to the horrors that happen, both in and out of combat.  No one the horse encounters is free of the war, and Spielberg manages to show the piles of bodies, both human and equine, whenever he really needs to, but neglects to show much of the actual violence that kills man or animal.  The revolving sails of a windmill, for example, cover up the execution of some deserters quite effectively.

If anything, Spielberg does a better job this time around in keeping both sides of the conflict morally similar than he did in Private Ryan.  German soldiers, as well as British ones, are just as likely to be portrayed positively, something Private Ryan's climax fails to do.  Also gone is the dehumanization process of Private Ryan, however, given how much Joey's presence seems to bring out the best in most people he encounters.  One effective scene shows a British and German soldier working together to free Joey from a tangle of barbed wire.

While generally I'd say something about the acting in most movies I discuss, War Horse puts me in an odd position.  None of the humans are bad.  In point of fact, all of them do an effective job, and few are what might be classified as name actors.  I was curious to see how well Tom Hiddleston did when he wasn't being smacked around by a large Aussie with a big hammer, and as the cavalry officer who first buys Joey, he does very well.  And for some reason, I can't escape Benedict Cumberbatch, who I saw not 24 hours earlier in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and appears here as another cavalry officer.  The biggest name in the cast is probably David Thewlis, best known for the Harry Potter series, and I had a bad case of "I know who that is!  Where have I seen him before?" for Liam Cunningham as an army surgeon before looking him up and seeing he is Davos Seaworth on HBO's Game of Thrones.

But the real stars, besides Spielberg's ability to craft a story, were the horses.  Animal actors are almost certainly hard to get a good performance out of.  They don't have human emotional ranges and they can only be trained but so much.  And yet, the various horses, maybe by simply being there and looking in the right direction, alongside Spielberg's ability to get the right shot at the right moment, creates the illusion, which is all film is anyway.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

The spy movie, for many, is the high-flying adventure epitomized by James Bond.  Bond shows up, grabs some gadgets from Q perhaps, goes off, blows some stuff up, beds at least one girl, makes some quips and saves the day.  The quip part, at least, has been tempered if not outright removed with the ascendency of Daniel Craig as a more serious 007, but the basic idea of Bond as a guy who gets things done in exciting ways is what draws the viewers back again and again, with fans discussing who the best Bond ever is (it's Sean Connery, though Craig comes close).

Real espionage, of course, would probably look very different.  It's quiet by nature.  The only time a good spy agency's actions would get out would be when it screwed up.  And this initial screw-up is what sets in motion the plot of 2011's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  There's nothing remotely Bondish about Gary Oldman's George Smiley, who actually says very little and, though armed for a crucial scene, never even fires a gun.  In fact, guns play very little part in the action of this movie, which has a low body count even if you count one unfortunate bird that flies into a classroom.

Much has been made of Oldman's Oscar-winning performance, so I suppose I should add to the Greek chorus here.  My first exposure to Oldman was in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where he hammed it up as the title character.  Later there were the turns he had in both The Professional and The 5th Element.  All of these movies showed a big ham of an actor.  I might have written the guy off had I not noticed how much of a non-presence he took as Commissioner James Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies.  That is hardly an insult.  Oldman's Gordan is a quiet family man, not the kind to run around in padded armor to save the day but still willing to work just as hard and not to show off.  It makes sense that Gordon would be quiet, honest, hardworking, and dedicated to doing what was right (as seen when, in Batman Begins and he's still just a street cop, he refuses to take any bribe money like his partner, something that apparently he is alone in, and still insists he's not a snitch either so as to uphold both his personal integrity and his sticking to the cop code of keeping quiet on such matters).

Oldman's Smiley is much the same way.  I said in my previous entry that Moneyball is a movie often defined by silence.  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy makes Moneyball look like your typical Michael Bay film by comparison.  Oldman's lead character doesn't even speak for the first fifteen or so minutes of the movie, and seems more intent to simply watch what is unfolding around him, to say nothing of letting other characters tell him what he needs to know.  He has one long monologue about halfway through, detailing his attempts to get a Soviet to defect only to have the man rebuff him, explaining that to Smiley the most dangerous man is the true believer, and that's about it.  He has conversations, but generally says less than everybody else in the room.  Add to this that the viewer (and other characters) rarely know what's going on inside that man's head.  Fortunately, Smiley isn't a cold man.  He seems to be genuinely delighted to be figuring things out as he goes along.

This comes in handy.  The movie begins with Mark Strong (in what seems to be a rare good guy role) as a British spy, going to meet with a potential defector in Hungary, when something goes wrong and he appears to be shot.  His boss, John Hurt's "Control", is out due to some politicking and he's taking the silent Smiley with him (which seems to please everyone left behind).  A year or so later, after Control has died, Smiley is quietly brought back in to figure out which of the men just under Control (which included Smiley himself) is a secret mole working for the Soviets.  Since he'd been gone for so long, Smiley is not only the perfect man to look into things, he's also the only one of the group that is known to be innocent.

Besides Oldman, Hurt, and Strong, the movie does have a good number of familiar faces, many with very unfamiliar hair cuts, including Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, Ciaran Hinds, and the BBC's Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch.  The net result is an excellent spy movie that doesn't revolve on brawn and gadgets but brains and observations, where the quietest man in the room may be the only key to figuring out what happened and who's to blame.