→ August 29, 2011
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (film).

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo two years ago and didn’t care for it, between the awkward prose, stilted characters, and violent revenge fantasy that fueled the story, so I gave up on the trilogy rather than plowing through the two subsequent, longer books that followed. The film adaptation of the book garnered very positive reviews, however, as Larsson’s plot, too thin and angry for a 600-page novel, worked well in a 150-minute film that was ultimately powered by Noomi Rapace’s star-making turn as Lisbeth Salander.

If you haven’t read the book, the basic plot is that Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative journalist in temporary disgrace who is hired by an aging industrialist to solve the 40-year-old disappearance of the industrialist’s niece Harriet. The industrialist used a research firm to investigate Blomkvist first, and the reclusive, tortured hacker Lisbeth Salander, who did the actual research, ends up teaming up with Blomkvist to try to solve the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance and find the previously undetected serial killer whose identity Harriet seems to have deduced right before she vanished.

Salander’s character is all hard edges, from her eidetic memory to her flawless cracking skills to her extremely insular personality to her refusal to talk about the traumas of her past. Her portrayal ends up critical to the film, not just because she is the Girl of the title but because Blomkvist’s character is about as dull as an old butter knife. Rapace, a Swedish actress whose English-language debut will come in the next installment of the Sherlock Holmes reboot (which, as a fan of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, I have to say looks like a circus freakshow’s take on the character), inhabits the character with a brooding intensity and a barely concealed rage that keeps threatening to explode through the surface. But even when she is violently raped – more on that scene in a moment – by her legal guardian (long backstory there), she channels that rage into a violent, controlled revenge that gives her what she wants by reversing the balance of power. Conveying all of this through Larsson’s clipped, unrealistic dialogue is not simple; it puts more responsibility on the actress involved to convey it through body language, tone, and facial expressions, and Rapace does so from start to finish. It was no small shock to see her out of character in one of the DVD extras and discover she’s kind of cute. There is no cute to her portrayal of Lisbeth.

That rape scene, though … I’ll confess that my wife and I both voted to fast-forward through it. We’d both read the book and knew exactly what was coming, but the thought of watching that attack on Lisbeth in real time was repulsive, and the film does not shy away from just how violent the attack was, or just how much of a violation it was. That scene in the book is all about power and powerlessness, and there’s no question that those aspects come through in the film version. Even at double the normal speed, it went on too long to stomach, and watching Lisbeth get her revenge doesn’t erase it for the viewer any more than it would erase it for her character.

The last half of the movie is all about Blomkvist and Harriet looking for clues in old newspapers and business records for the identities of the serial killer’s victims and, eventually, his identity as well. There’s tension as they visit the sites where various bodies were recovered, but no real drama until Blomkvist blunders into the killer’s grasp and has to be rescued by Lisbeth in a scene of fake-tension – you know Blomkvist isn’t going to die with two more films in the series, but the book and film both push him to the brink of death before it happens. In other words, don’t watch this just for the plot, which is mildly interesting but also extremely sick (reflected in the book’s original Swedish title, which translates to Men Who Hate Women). Watch it for Rapace’s performance as Lisbeth, and for the tremendous prep work that had to go into creating all of the documentary evidence that she and Blomkvist eventually use to find the killer.

–

I commented on Twitter that I was unlikely to go see the English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, due out in theaters this winter, because these remakes tend to fall short of their originals. This isn’t strictly a language issue for me, but a cultural one. For one thing, large American studios that remake foreign films tend to Hollywoodize the films to increase their commercial appeal, often changing plot elements, dumbing down smarter dialogue, softening harsher elements that might scare away viewers or hike the film’s MPAA rating, or employing more marketable actors who might bring their own audiences. They have every right to try to make more money, of course, but these are not factors that typically increase the quality of a film. For another thing, there is a pretty clear insinuation in these remakes that the studios believe that Americans will not – or can not – tolerate a film with subtitles. I’m not exactly Mr. Art Film Snob, but I’ve seen at least 20 films with subtitles in at least eight foreign languages and have never once felt that my opinion of a movie suffered because it was subtitled. You get used to them in a matter of seconds, and then you don’t notice them for the rest of the film. Did Inglourious Basterds fare worse at the box office for its heavy use of subtitles? No. So why do we need an English-only version of a film that was made very well by native actors in their own country?

Several readers argued that the director of the English version, David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network), makes it worth watching on its own. I understand that the director of a film can have significant influence on its ultimate quality, but in this case, I’m not concerned about the directing but of the script itself, and as far as I can tell, Fincher wasn’t involved in the screenplay, which was adapted from the book (not the Swedish film) by Steven Zaillian, whose filmography since Schindler’s List skews towards big-budget and commercial efforts, including Mission: Impossible, Hannibal, and, of interest to most of us, Moneyball. I’d also consider it a negative that the filmmakers were reportedly offering too little money for the role of Lisbeth, not because I think money buys you a better actress but because it sends a signal that the studio and/or Fincher don’t see Lisbeth’s role as the crucial one. I might eventually see the English version, but the early indicators on the film’s quality are not all that favorable in my eyes.

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→ August 24, 2011
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Up in the Air.

The more I thought about Up in the Air after watching it, the more I realized what a terrible movie it is. It was pleasant enough for the first two-thirds or so, mostly because the three principal actors are all excellent in their roles, but one insanely stupid plot twist just exposed how many other holes there were in the script to that point.

George Clooney – who seems to be morphing into Cary Grant as he ages – plays Ryan Bingham, a consultant who flies around the country and fires (or, really, lays off) employees whose bosses are too cowardly to do it themselves. He’s also a straight-up mileage whore who has set a life goal of becoming the seventh flier ever to reach ten million mileages in American Airlines’ AAdvantage program. (The film doubles as an extended infomercial for American, Hilton Hotels, and Hertz.) And Ryan moonlights as a hired motivational speaker, praising a life of independence from both physical possessions and interpersonal relationships. Then, of course, he meets the perfect woman and has to change his entire philosophy, all while toting around an overconfident and highly naïve 23-year-old Cornell grad (love the stereotyping of the Ivy Leaguers – remember, kids, it’s bad to be smart!) while they teach each other Big Important Lessons about life and love and psychology.

Clooney, Anna Kendrick (as the Cornell grad, Natalie), and Vera Farmiga (as Ms. Perfect) are all superb, extremely convincing even when their roles turn out to be paper-thin (Kendrick’s) or internally contradictory (the other two). There’s an effortless chemistry between Clooney and Farmiga that makes his transition from one-night-stand to budding romance not just believable but almost invisible – before you know it, he’s falling for her, even though we’re missing a bunch of steps in the story. You might watch the film just to see these three actors, all nominated for Academy Awards for their performances, do their thing, but I think you’ll want to punch the screen before it’s over.

And the reasons are many. One is that we never learn why Ryan is so afraid of commitments. He came from small-town Wisconsin, but this isn’t the budding urbanite in search of culture beyond his homogenous, provincial upbringing. His sisters are his only family, and he’s mostly abandoned them until one of them gets married, but there’s no obvious reason why – both characters, in bit parts, are sweet and care for him even though they don’t seem to have much in common. Another is that Natalie ends up something of a prop for Ryan to play off rather than a fully-developed character in her own right – she changes as the plot needs her to change.

(This movie was, on some level, ruined for me beforehand by Will Leitch. Will’s become my go-to movie reviewer for after I’ve seen a film, because I find his observations are often so spot-on that they influence my interpretation of the movie. He nailed Up in the Air, especially on the glaring inconsistencies in the script, although I think he went easy on the plot twist, which I’ll get to in a moment. But you’ll notice I’m saying a lot of the things he said, and I’m sure that’s not an accident: He set me up. So now I read him after I’ve seen a movie and want an expert’s opinion, using Roger Ebert as my go-to guy before I choose to see a film.)

That plot twist – big spoiler alert here – is a killer, though. Alex (Farmiga, who by the way looks like what I expected Claire Forlani to look like at this age) is Ryan’s female analogue, another road warrior looking for NSA sex in high-end Hiltons but not much more than that, until the two start meeting up a little more often and then spend more quality time together at a conference, where he asks her to be his date for his sister’s wedding, to which she agrees without much debate. There they have the classic Hollywood falling-in-love weekend, and you might think they’re headed for happily ever after … until he surprises her at her house in Chicago, only to discover she has a husband and two kids, after which she berates him as if it’s his fault that she hid this significant life detail. (“I’m a grown-up.” No, sister, you’re a raging narcissist, and possibly a sociopath as well.) Alex is two completely different characters that have virtually no crossover, and the idea of this independent, too-perfect paramour also being a loving mom who also is willing to abandon her kids for a romantic weekend with the guy with whom she says she only wants casual sex is such a farce that it blew up the whole movie and made me realize how badly I’d been bamboozled by everything that had come before it.

I will give Up in the Air credit for one thing, however: Someone involved in writing the story at least grasped the world of frequent flyer/guest point accumulation. Ryan is absurd in that regard, and his underlying motivation is murky, but the absurdity of the portrayal is the source of its humor. Either you’ve been a heavy traveler and understand using every trick possible to max out your points, or you know someone who has. I’ve never traveled as much as Ryan has – I’ve never been above the first level of “elite” status on any airline – but I do it enough to make me a mileage junkie, with affiliated credit cards and one eye always on promotions that might boost my miles or bump me up in status. That nod to people who fly as part of their jobs was a cute touch – but it added virtually nothing to the strange, unfinished plot about Ryan Bingham’s life choices, and when Sam Elliott makes his Coen-esque cameo as the pilot on the flight where Ryan reaches the ten million mile threshold, it’s like we’ve been airlifted into a separate film entirely. The worthwhile parts of Up in the Air could have been aired on a flight from Chicago to Milwaukee, but I like to get a little farther off the ground than that.

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→ August 23, 2011
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Inception.

Inception is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Ocean’s Eleven with a few sequences directed by Michael Bay – in other words, a heist movie that involves sneaking into someone else’s dreams, but with lots of guns and blowing shit up. The first two parts are clever and pretty tightly done, but the movie’s gradual devolution as the heist progresses, combined with a hero/antihero protagonist, cut off the film’s upside for me.

Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is an expert “extractor,” a mercenary spy who can infiltrate the dreams of other people and extract critical information. Cobb and his partner in crime, Arthur (an impressive turn by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) employ a dream-within-a-dream trick as their specialty but fail to extract information from Saito, a Japanese executive who then hires them for the biggest job of their careers – an “inception,” or planting a new idea in the target’s mind rather than extracting an existing one. Cobb returns to his father-in-law, who originally trained him in the field, to hire a new dream architect, (Ellen Page, largely wasted as a prop whose “architect” skills come up once in the final heist), and then travels to Kenya to add a chemist (Dileep Rao) who prepares the powerful sedatives used to put the target to sleep, also allowing for a crazy and somewhat pointless chase scene. When the team is assembled and begins attempting to extract the information, however, they encounter two problems: The target has been trained to fight potential extraction, and Cobb himself isn’t fully capable of leading the mission.

Neither my wife nor I found the plot confusing – everything’s pretty clearly explained, but never at such length that you want to go get a cup of coffee till they finish – but the very short cuts in the final third of the movie are incredibly distracting, and a horrible choice of colors made the final battle within the target’s mind impossible to watch. For some reason, that final dream level takes place in what looks like a military facility in a tundra, and everyone – team members and the armed “defenders” who are projections of the target’s subconscous – is dressed in white, usually with hats or hoods up. Other than Ellen Page, whose long hair identified her, everyone else looked alike.

Other decisions with the visual and sound effects brought far more benefits to the finished product. When the characters are falling in the first dream level, they lose gravity in the second, meaning Arthur first must fight the defenders in zero-G conditions (I cannot imagine how much fun that was for Levitt to film) and then concoct a solution to wake his comrades up without the benefit of an in-dream “kick” (usually a fall). The team also uses music to signal an imminent kick within the multiple layers of the dream, and the use of ever slower music the deeper the dream-level helped build tension while also clarifying the varying speeds of time within each dream.

The film seems to skirt the major problem with its central character – that is, that Cobb is no hero, but actually a selfish ass. He takes his team into a high-risk venture where the main reward is primarily his and the risk to the remaining team members is terrifying. He doesn’t inform his team that he’s having a technical problem that has a significant negative impact on their chances of success. Even within the mission, his personal motivation to reach the goal causes him to stay on course even when the risk of failure is increasing. We have to root for Cobb to succeed because he has two young kids at home who have lost their mother and have no immediate hope of seeing their father, but that alone can’t whitewash the fact that he’s put four other people at great risk to achieve his own personal ends.

Of course, the main question about Inception is how to interpret the ending – once again, spoiler alert – although my wife and I both found it fairly unambiguous; her remark after the film was that she was “waiting for the big twist” that never came. The director, Christopher Nolan, has refused to clarify the ending, stating instead that the important part is not whether the final scene represents reality or a constructed dream, but that Cobb has chosen this scenario as his reality, to leave his fugitive life behind and “return” to his children. He’s also pointed out that parents who see the movie are far more likely to accept the concluding scene as reality than non-parents because of our deep desire to see Cobb and his children reunited, which is undoubtedly true. However, we both felt that the only hint of ambiguity in that final scene was the fact that the camera goes black as Cobb’s totem wobbles but before it falls – and unless you want to argue that it’s a dream where Cobb has altered physics but didn’t show it to us until that very point, I don’t see how the totem wobbles without eventually falling. (I admit it was a visually arresting shot, however.) Had Nolan wanted to make it truly ambiguous, he could have ended the film before the kids turned to see Cobb, which would have made it consistent with his other dream-states in the film. Nolan took care of some superficial stuff to try to create confusion, like keeping the kids in similar clothes (although in different shoes), but somewhere along the line, there was a decision to give the ending a little bit of Hollywoodization so the audience at least gets the cathartic moment of Cobb and his kids reunited, but for us that airbrushing pushed the ending past any question of whether it was real.

I’m shifting my standards slightly here, however, to the detriment of Inception; by the standards of mainstream Hollywood films, Inception was intelligent and thoughtful, well-acted, and sharp-looking. But if you remove the frippery of rampant gunfire and chases and the sentimental ending, there’s a smarter movie underneath that had an action film grafted on to it – a successful commercial decision that kept the film from reaching its full artistic potential.

If you like the concept of entering another’s dreams or thoughts, check out the film I mentioned in the first paragraph, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the two or three best movies I’ve ever seen, where two ex-lovers attempt to forget each other by having their memories of their relationships professionally erased – until one changes his mind during the procedure.

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→ August 21, 2011
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.

I’m mixed on the final installment in the Harry Potter film series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two. On the one hand, it was pretty true to the book, including a number of key sequences, plot points, and quotes, without feeling terribly rushed about it. On the other hand, it doesn’t stand well on its own – it is very clearly the second half of a film, not a complete film in its own right – and the pacing that worked fine on the printed page proved very uneven on the screen.

Harry has to jump through specific hoops to get to the final, climactic battle with Voldemort, and J.K. Rowling made sure to get several of his friends in on the action in that melee, although for some reason Ginny was barely present in this half of the movie. Some of those hoops don’t translate terribly well to the screen, or just lacked the necessary contest of the books, but the film jumps back and forth between action scenes and Harry’s more cerebral quests, creating pacing issues but also keeping the film from becoming incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the story. (That is, those are the good guys, those are the bad guys, they’re fighting. Everyone can grasp that much.) The battle sequences often seemed cut off by the need to get Harry back on screen, though, meaning it didn’t have the same intensity as part one, which remains the best of the eight films if we view these two parts separately.

The staccato cuts also mean that none of the actors beyond Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) gets to stretch out much, meaning we get more mugging and less acting from some outstanding performers. Helena Bonham-Carter looks certifiable as Bellatrix Lestrange but is largely left making faces at everyone, while Alan Rickman – as central to the success of the films as anyone outside of the three main characters – might end up hoping for a Judi Dench exemption if he wanted a Best Supporting actor nomination. I wrote in my review of part one that Rupert Grint and Emma Watson had shown substantial growth as actors, but here they’re reduced to bit players, and the development of their relationship earns little screen time and scarcely any explanation.

The movie looks amazing, both in scenery and in special effects, with the initial attack by the Death Eaters on Hogwarts the effects highlight of the series. (That scene was preceded by a necessary yet too-short return for Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall.) Rowling has always been one of my favorite authors for the depth of her descriptions, and the films have lived up to the prose in sights and sounds, including some of the more difficult settings like the goblin bank Gringott’s.

But that Gringott’s scene encapsulates why I found this second half somewhat unsatisfying. It looked the part. Everyone involved in the scene did his or her job. But there was so much time spent on setup and so little on the climax of the scene that even though you saw them escape (and do quite a bit of damage along the way), the escape doesn’t stick with you as much as the setup does. I can tell you how it looked, and the tension of the scene before the betrayal, but what happened after that didn’t have the same power.

I mentioned half-jokingly the possibility of Alan Rickman getting an Oscar nomination for his role as Severus Snape, one of the meatiest roles outside of the big three across the series. The films themselves were not Oscar-worthy, but knowing the Academy’s penchant for honoring successful series as they close, I did wonder if they’d throw one nomination at someone in the film just to acknowledge the series’ existence. (That is, something beyond a technical award or an award for costumes or design.) Rickman would be my choice, since Daniel Radcliffe would have a difficult time cracking the competitive Best Actor field. Helena Bonham-Carter was convincingly crazy, but she’s barely in the movie and her part was too thin to be award material. Then again, they nominate so many films for Best Picture that perhaps the academy will shoehorn Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two into that category as they did with Toy Story 3: we hope you feel like it’s an honor to be nominated, because we have no intention of actually giving you the award.

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→ August 6, 2011
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True Grit

The 2010 version of True Grit (iTunes versionicon) earned ten Academy Award nominations – winning none, so I hope it truly is an honor just to be nominated, otherwise the Coen brothers must be really pissed off – which accurately reflects the quality of the acting, the screenplay, and the visuals. It’s also an unusually mainstream film for the Coens, who seem to specialize in cult favorites or films that garner more acclaim from critics than at the box office. I enjoyed the film more for its critical aspects than for the story, and would rank it as above-average but have a hard time pushing myself to call it plus.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father was robbed and murdered by a hired hand named Tom Chaney, who subsequently fled into the Indian Territories (now constituting the bulk of Oklahoma) to escape arrest. Mattie, ostensibly in a frontier town to collect her father’s body and belongings, hires the dissolute bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn – over his objections – to catch Chaney, with the condition that she accompany him on the chase. They are joined by the arrogant Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, himself pursuing Chaney for the murder of a state senator and a dog in Texas. (It is unclear which was the greater transgression.)

The Coen brothers were, as far as I can tell having not read the novel, faithful to the original work, or at least far more so than the 1969 adaptation for which John Wayne won an Academy Award. (I haven’t seen that film either.) That decision appears double-edged to me, for while it means they stuck to Mattie’s perspective and gave her character a richness it might have otherwise lacked, it also leads down the figurative and literal slope of coincidences and sentiment in the film’s final fifteen minutes. Everything is a little too clean and perfect. You knew that a snake would come into play. You knew someone would fall into the hole in the ground. The Coen brothers didn’t have to kill off a main character to make the film a little grittier, pun intended, but it seems that their loyalty to Portis’ original work won out.

Two aspects of the film stood out over all others. One, obviously, is Hailee Steinfeld, who portrays Mattie and was just 12 years old when True Grit was filmed. Her performance was absolutely critical to the movie’s success – she needs to be tough, firm, adult-like in sensibility yet still maintaining the naïveté of a child of her age; if she’s not believable, nothing that comes after in the film would matter. She must be able to boss around the grizzled, alcoholic Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges) and yet to be vulnerable when she’s first exposed to violence or finds herself disdained (or worse) by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). And she owns the screen in her negotiation with the dismissive horse-trader that ends with her talking him into a corner and out of his money, a scene where you would easily forget Steinfeld’s age were you not reminded of it within the dialogue. That she accomplished this at her age in her first significant film role is remarkable and justifies the passel of awards she won for her work, as well as the nomination for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (an award won by Melissa Leo for The Fighter).

The other aspect that stood out is the cinematography, which is not something I ordinarily notice in films unless it’s done poorly. But the Coen brothers played True Grit as a classic Western epic, filling the screen with wide-angle views of the countryside, using plot elements like having Mattie on top of a cliff while a battle rages below as an excuse for Roger Deakins to give us an expansive shot of the dusty plateau where the climactic encounter of the book occurs.

(I admit I would have loved to have seen an outtake featuring Rooster Cogburn ordering a White Russian, but maybe that’s just me.)

As for the Best Picture race of last year, I’d still give The King’s Speech the nod over True Grit; both were well-acted, but the two lead performances in The King’s Speech were better than any of the three major performances here. Both films benefited from some contrived drama – the former by altering historical circumstances, the latter through a little coincidence and some silly foreshadowing – but The King’s Speech did so more subtly.

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→ August 3, 2011
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The Secret of Kells.

The Secret of Kells is a stunning hand-drawn animated film that draws on the history of the Book of Kells and on Celtic mythology to create a mysterious and beautiful origin tale for that book, a work of religious, artistic, and cultural significance in Ireland. Nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2009, where it lost to Up (from Pixar, which has won six of the last eight such awards, including the last four), The Secret of Kells deserves a much wider audience than it’s received so far, and shows there is a place for old-fashioned animation alongside the technical marvels of CGI.

The story takes place at the Abbey of Kells, in Ireland’s County Meath, sometime between 900 and 1000 A.D., after the abbey at Iona had been sacked by Viking raiders. The Abbot of Kells, Abbot Cellach, oversees the construction of fortifications around the abbey in expectation of a similar Viking assault, yet also tries to protect his nephew, Brendan, but appears to have more than just a familial interest behind his strict treatment of the boy.

Brendan is fascinated by the work in the scriptorium and becomes fast friends with a refugee from Iona, Brother Aidan (who, like Cellach, is based on a true historical figure), an illuminator who is working on the Book of Kells, an illustrated book of the Gospels that is described in more vague terms in the movie (e.g., that it will “turn darkness into light”). Yet to help Aidan continue his work, Brendan must violate the orders of his uncle to stay within the walls of the abbey, and ends up heading twice into the forbidden forest to find materials for ink and a sacred lens*, meeting and befriending a childlike fairy named Aisling who helps him both by saving his life (several times, as she likes to remind him) and by building his confidence so that he can continue his work with Brother Aidan.

*The lens, called the Eye of Collum Cille in the movie, draws its name from the same saint for whom the church of St. Columbkille in Brighton, Massachusetts, is named – which I know primarily because I used to pass it every time I headed to a game at Boston College.

The star of the movie, despite an intriguing story and strong voicing (led by Brendan Gleeson as Abbot Cellach), is the animation, which draws heavily on ancient Celtic art while also showing more recent influences, from Miyazaki (especially our family favorite, My Neighbor Totoro) to Tim Burton to the exaggerated look of the animated humans in The Triplets of Belleville. The forest backgrounds are lush, while the winter scenes are stark and gothic – it reminded me of a classic Flash game, A Murder of Scarecrows – and Celtic images recognizable to viewers of almost any background abound in the film, including a dreamlike sequence where Brendan fights a snake in the form of an ornate Celtic knot.

Without any knowledge of the history of the Book of Kells, however, the plot is a little obtuse. What little is known of the book’s origins is incorporated into the film, but its religious and artistic significance are assumed rather than explained. (Of course, long explanations can be about as interesting as watching paint dry, so this is hardly a flaw.) The heavy of use elements of Irish mythology, from the Aislings to the pre-Christian Celtic deity Crom Cruach to the cat Pangur Bán, based on a cat in an ancient Irish poem of the same name, was less of an issue because the context of those characters filled in the blanks in our knowledge.

What The Secret of Kells is not, however, is a children’s movie. There’s plenty of implied violence in depictions of Viking raids, including the final sacking of Kells, and a flash of actual violence. Brendan’s quest for the eye of Collum Cille leads him into the battle with the snake and other dark sequences that would be scary for smaller children. It’s a wonderful movie for adults and older kids, however, replete with visual candy, outstanding Celtic-inspired music, and a story that veers from sweet to serious in just an hour and change.

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→ July 29, 2011
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The King’s Speech.

Lots of baseball content the last few days, including breakdowns of the Colby Rasmus trade, the Carlos Beltran trade, and the Kosuke Fukudome trade, plus my regular Klawchat yesterday.

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I can’t say if The King’s Speech was truly the best picture of 2010, although it was honored with the Academy Award of that name, since I haven’t seen the other contenders. It is, however, a completely worthy recipient of the honor, one of the best-acted films I have ever seen, with a screenplay that takes some fairly dry subject matter and turns it into a rousing, emotional film even though the audience already knows how the film must end.

The King’s Speech dramatizes the relationship between the stammering Prince Albert, Duke of York, later King George VI, and an Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who used unconventional methods to help the Prince overcome both the stammer and his resultant fear of public speaking. The Prince avoids most public speaking duties until, in the movie at least, he is forced to surmount this obstacle when his brother Edward, Duke of Wales, abdicates the throne to marry an American divorcée. While not quite historically accurate in its chronology or its portrayals of certain secondary characters, the film avoids the less forgivable sins of lionizing (or demonizing) its central characters or crafting an excessively sentimental narrative.

Colin Firth, as the titular King, and Geoffrey Rush, as Logue, both deliver command performances. Firth won the Oscar for Best Actor with a tense portrayal that conveys a constant sense of anxiety whenever he’s asked to speak in any kind of difficult situation, often evoking that dread through slight changes in his facial expression or a sudden explosion of temper (where the rage is merely a cover for an inner fear). But while Rush was challenged less by his role, his performance seemed totally effortless, exuding a calm confidence when his character is at work that proves superficial in the handful of scenes when he’s outside that sphere. (Rush won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1996 for another brilliant performance as a musical prodigy who suffers a breakdown due to schizoaffective disorder in the marvelous film Shine.)

No other character receives close to the screen time of the two leads, although there’s talent in abundance. Derek Jacobi is somewhat wasted as the sycophantic Archbishop of Canterbury, while Helena Bonham Carter provides a cornucopia of pained, worried expressions as Albert’s confident wife Elizabeth. I didn’t even recognize Guy Pearce as the rakish yet vaguely effeminate Prince Edward. The film also reunites Firth with Jennifer Ehle, who plays Logue’s wife Myrtle here but is best known for playing Elizabeth Bennet to Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s canonical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Where screenwriter David Seidler and director Tom Hooper succeed most is in the film’s pacing. The story requires scenes of struggle for Prince Albert, but aside from the first, which introduces the film’s main dramatic element to the audience, we are never forced to endure the embarrassment for long. And while they sacrificed some historical accuracy by condensing the time Logue and the Prince worked together and by delaying the benefits the Prince received from the therapy until the final speech, it gave the film the necessary tension to allow that final speech – after England’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939 – to become an emotional crescendo that closes the film.

The most touching scene, other than the King’s success and the applause he receives from his inner circle (after they all clearly doubted his ability to do it), was when he returns from his coronation and his two daughters see him in full regalia. The two young actresses playing Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth (the current Queen Elizabeth II) are asked to do very little in this film, but their expressions are priceless: he left the house as “Daddy,” but returned as a king, and I doubt there’s a little girl in the world who wouldn’t be impressed to see her father in that costume.

Two interesting side notes on this film: The writer delayed pursuing production of the film at the request of King George VI’s widow Elizabeth (known to my generation as the Queen Mother or the “Queen Mum”), who asked him to wait until after her death because she found the memories of that period too painful; and (per Wikipedia) nine weeks before filming began, someone discovered several of Logue’s notebooks from that time period, allowing the writer to incorporate some of that material into the final version of the script.

Next film in the queue is True Grit. Several of your top suggestions, including Inception, The Lives of Others, and The Social Network, aren’t available for rental on iPad, so they’ll have to wait a bit.

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→ July 26, 2011
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Winnie the Pooh.

I’ve got a new column up on how relievers are overvalued in trades and I appeared on today’s edition of the ESPN Baseball Today podcast.

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We took our daughter to see the new Winnie the Pooh movie on Saturday, as the two original books (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner) are among our favorites. The books are largely sweet and gentle as you might expect given Pooh’s reputation, but there’s a fair amount of dry wit sprinkled throughout the books, with somewhat sharper characters than you might expect if you’ve only seen earlier Pooh films, such as the supercilious Rabbit or the disdainful Eeyore. (Obvious disclaimer: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which is the studio behind this film.)

The movie, produced by Disney Animation Studios (which is, of course, run by two Pixar executives, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter), has the hand-drawn look and feel you’d expect from a Disney film with some nods to the drawing style of Ernest Shepard’s original illustrations. It draws from three stories from the two books – “In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One,” “In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump,” and “In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings” – although only the first one has its story survive the transition more or less intact. The three are intertwined with new elements, including the Jasper Ffordian construct of having the characters interact with the printed words and letters in multiple scenes, in a single story arc that sees Pooh in search of honey for his noisily empty tummy, Eeyore in search of his tail, and all of the animals in the forest setting a trap for a monster called the “Backson” that they presume has kidnapped Christopher Robin. That Backson stands in for the mysterious Heffalump – the “backson” bit in the book was just a misunderstanding of Christopher Robin’s sign, not a creature – but a hint of the grotesque in a song and animation sequence that seems to allude to the interludes like Salvador Dali’s segment in Hitchcock’s Spellbound … or the dream sequence in The Big Lebowski.

Much of the grown-up humor in Milne’s books is in the tone of the descriptive text – it always reminds me a bit of Wodehouse’s style – that might not translate well to the screen, or might leave the movie a bit too sedate if they tried, even with the narration from John Cleese*. To compensate, the movie contains far more physical comedy than the books, including Rabbit (probably the character most changed in appearance from the books) standing in front of a door that is about to be violently opened, with predictable results. But those scenes earned some pretty substantial laughs from the youngest audience members, so they served their purpose even if it occasionally did feel like Bugs Bunny was about to make a cameo.

*It amuses me no end that Cleese, the front man for the greatest and perhaps most subversive comedy troupe in history, has now become a beloved elder statesman, appearing here and as the lead sheep in Charlotte’s Web.

The great strength of the film, though, is the voices. Jim Cummings voices both Pooh and Tigger, giving the latter the same voice he uses for the Disney character Pete while adding Tigger’s trademark lisp, while the former is as good an approximation of the classic Pooh voice as you might find. (And tell me he doesn’t look like a certain GM currently working in Los Angeles.) Craig Ferguson’s Owl is haughty and imperious as Owl should be, but beyond those two Disney stuck with professional voice actors rather than bigger names, such as choosing Tom Kenny, the voice of Spongebob, for the underutilized Rabbit. The decision points to an emphasis on quality and even legacy over short-term commercial gain; these are iconic characters whom viewers expect to sound and act in certain ways, and it looks like the way to achieve that is to use professional voice actors over celebs.

They did bow to celebrity with the theme song, although if you’re looking for a cute voice you could do a lot worse than Zooey Deschanel, who does two other songs in addition to the classic “chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff” tune. The film also features seven original songs by Robert Lopez, co-creator of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, although I’d only call “The Backson Song” memorable.

The film runs a quick 69 minutes and is preceded by the short film The Ballad of Nessie, a very cute take on how the Loch Ness Monster came to be, animated in a distinctly Seussian style. Winnie the Pooh did bother the Milne purist in me for some of the modern flourishes, but judged on its own merits it’s a wonderful film for the preschool (or kindergarten, in our case) set, right up there with My Neighbor Totoro among our favorites.

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→ July 21, 2011
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Man on Wire.

New post over on ESPN on Leonys Martin and a few other prospects, plus today’s Klawchat transcript and today’s Baseball Today podcast.

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The documentary Man on Wire
 won the Oscar for the best long-form documentary in 2008 and has the honor of being just one of two films with at least 100 reviews to hold a perfect critics’ rating on rottentomatoes.com, the other being Toy Story 2. The film uses the narrative style of one of my favorite genres in fiction, the heist or con story, to describe the event that captured national headlines and launched its protagonist into global stardom.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, in 1974, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit and a few of his friends brought about a ton of equipment up to the unfinished roofs of the Twin Towers and strung a wire between them, after which Petit spent about 45 minutes walking, sitting, and lying down on that tightrope, about 450 meters above the ground, attracting a crowd of gawkers and, eventually, the authorities. (The film’s title comes from the police report on the incident, where the first three words under the heading “Complaint” are those of the title, written in capital letters.) It was an audacious, foolish, and incredibly wonderful achievement, and a beautiful memory of a time when those towers stood for something other than 9/11.

Petit’s history with the towers actually predates their construction; he relates first learning of the plans to build the towers and immediately realizing that conquering them was his life’s dream. Fortunately for us, he had a trove of archival footage, both still and video, which is incorporated into this documentary, which gives us a window into his preparations for the stunt, the relationships between members of the team, and the fact that fashion in the 1970s was awful even in France. (Men + overalls = regret.) The narrative jumps back to Petit’s first efforts as a tightrope walker, including his walks between the towers of Notre Dame and between two arches on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, before plunging into the long-planned caper in Manhattan, including how they got all that gear past security and how team members were nearly caught in both towers the evening before the walk.

The most impressive part of the movie for me wasn’t Petit’s exploits or the explanation of how his ragtag team managed to sneak all that equipment to the tops of the towers, but of the reactions of two of the NYPD officers on the scene. Both men, shown in interview clips from 1974, make it clear that they recognized right away that they weren’t just watching some criminal or mischief-maker, but were witnessing history, watching one man do something so amazing that people would still talk about it thirty-plus years later. To be able to remove oneself from the moment, and to subdue the natural indignation of the officer of the law towards one who would so flagrantly mock it, is a testament to both of these men and to the wonder that Petit’s endeavor inspired.

Although the effort ends in victory, as Petit completes his walk and ends up serving no jail time, the film ends with bittersweet notes due to Petit’s loss (or perhaps repudiation) of his devoted lover, Annie, and the apparent (and not well-explained) decline of his friendship with the one team member who stuck it out to the end. That friend, Jean-Louis Blondeau, breaks down in tears twice in the film’s final segments, but has had harsher words elsewhere for his former colleague, accusing Petit of fabricating various too-good-to-be-true anecdotes in the film. (Blondeau is professional photographer, and I imagine much of the archival footage was his.) The lover, the still-pretty Annie Allix, is gracious in accepting that Petit’s walk in the clouds altered his life forever, and perhaps realized through his betrayal of her that he would never be as committed to her as she was to him – or as he was to himself. Petit is charming, but beneath that charm lies a self-assured nature that might be megalomaniacal in other contexts, such as the sentiment that perhaps the towers were built specifically for him to climb and walk.

Man on Wire is exquisitely made and paced, never dragging, rarely wasting words or time (aside from the pointless “reenactment” of Petit’s post-walk “celebration” with a female admirer that looks more like an outtake from Benny Hill), giving everyone his or her say even while Petit is the star of the show. Most importantly, the directors allowed the event to speak for itself, rather than larding the film with opinions from people uninvolved in the preparation or execution of the walk. The images and Petit’s words will transport you to that foggy morning in August, 1974, but with the benefit of the backstory behind this amazing achievement.

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→ July 17, 2011
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In Bruges.

You’ve probably seen my midseason prospect rankings update by now, but if not … there it is.

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I’m a few weeks behind on this, but I watched the dark comedy In Bruges (currently just $4.69 on DVD at amazon) a few weeks ago on my last work flight. I’d seen positive reviews of the film when it was in theaters and kept it in my queue for years, but finally got back into watching movies regularly when I got an iPad last month and have a hell of a list to work through. As for In Bruges, it absolutely had its moments, driven mostly by a really strong performance by Colin Farrell, but by the end of the movie I was kind of wondering what the point of all the violence was – unless the point was that there is no point at all.

Farrell plays Ray, a young hit man who bungled his most recent job by accidentally killing a child who was hidden behind the man he was paid to assassinate. His boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), has sent him to Bruges along with the more experienced Ken to await instructions on their next job … which turns out to be for Ken to kill Ray over the death of the child. Ken wrestles with his conscience over the assignment now that he’s gotten to know Ray. Ray, meanwhile, is completely despondent over his mistake (but not over the death of the target) and contemplates suicide in between attempts to seduce the drug-dealing Chloe, an incompetent effort that leads to a confrontation with an American couple in a restaurant that, of course, ends up interfering with everyone’s plans. It is a screwball comedy at heart, except that in this one half the characters end up maimed or dead.

The strength of In Bruges is subtle, living in the layer beneath the obvious plot about contract killings and before the carnage at the end of the film. Ray isn’t cut out emotionally for his line of work, between his remorse and his short temper – and he absolutely hates Bruges, or as he calls it, “fookin’ Broozh.” Ken, meanwhile, wants to play the tourist, turning the trip (which was sold to them as an escape from the authorities) into a relaxing sojourn. Harry is a little bit of a stock character – the ruthless gangster/loving family man character has been around long enough that he’s totally expected – although his interactions with Ken when the latter refuses the assignment provide some of the film’s best dialogue.

When the shooting starts in earnest at the film’s end, though, we’re given a ten-minute stretch of action film where the plot is resolved through violence and a few funny coincidences, as well as a concluding meditation on the point of the violence that felt a little tacked-on. Within the span of those ten minutes, we go from that dark comedy to a chase-and-shoot (although, again, they do mix in a hilarious scene where Harry and Ray are standing off with a very angry and even more pregnant hotelier in between that) to light philosophy. Would the film have been better with a less violent climax? Or simply a more comic one? Shouldn’t the philosophizing have permeated more of the film (or did it, and I just missed it)? Most importantly, does it make any sense to say you enjoyed the first 90% of a film but not the ending when the ending was, in terms of plot, properly executed?

As for what’s next … I’ve got a long list of films to catch up on, but I’m open to suggestions. I’m particularly light on anything in the last five years – that is, since my daughter was born.

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