The final Harry Potter book will be
split into two films, with the first to be released in 2010. So at least one of the books will receive enough time for a proper film treatment.
→ March 13, 2008
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Harry Potter and the two-part finale.
→ March 11, 2008
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The Namesake (film).
The film version of The Namesake
The story … well, that’s the problem. The story lacks a coherent center. It is the story of a family, or perhaps the story of a culture clash, but either way it suffers without a central character to anchor the plot. The movie’s first half or first two-thirds or so focus on Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, the husband and wife and eventually the parents of Gogol Ganguli (the namesake of the film’s title), who takes over as the movie’s center through its finish. We start with Ashoke nearly dying in a train wreck in India, then we’re presented with the arrangement of his marriage to Ashima, and then they’re married and arrive in the U.S., where he’s lived for a few years since the accident. The movie settles in to a sweet sequence on the early years of the Gangulis’ marriage, then suddenly their two children are teenagers, at which point Gogol’s unusual name becomes a key plot element.
The movie jumps too quickly to achieve the epic scope of a novel that is attempting to tell the story of the clash between Indian and American cultures through the example of a single family. At one point, the scene changes and we see Ashima talking to a co-worker. She utters two sentences, around fifteen words. The scene ends, we’re taken somewhere else, and we never return to the previous point. This can work in a movie that’s trying to evoke a frenetic feeling in the audience, but a movie of deep emotions and big themes shouldn’t be rushing from one plot point to the next.
As another example, take the film’s last third, where Gogol wants to change his name, has a white girlfriend (the worst-drawn character in the film – about as three-dimensional as a piece of paper), then marries a Bengali girl in a 180-degree reversion to his roots, and then sees that marriage end in one of the less believable relationship-ending conversations you’ll see. (At the risk of spoiling something, let’s just say that Gogol must be telepathic to figure out his wife’s secret from the one verbal slip.) Gogol’s life alone, including his journey from assimilated American teen to proud son of Indian immigrants to one-foot-in-each-world yuppie to his uncertain future would fill a two-hour movie without any trouble. Squeezed into forty minutes, it feels cursory and unsatisfying.
I’m underselling the movie by focusing on this treatment of a rich plot. Ambition in a movie plot is a good thing, and the fact that they couldn’t fulfill the story’s promise is a minor criticism as opposed to the criticism I have of most movies, which is that their plots couldn’t fill a thimble to the halfway mark. The acting by all three of the leads in The Namesake is outstanding; Kal Penn’s performance will add yet another nail in the coffin that House is very slowly building itself, as I’ll have a hard time taking him seriously as a goofball. (Yes, I know he played Kumar, but that’s not exactly in my Netflix queue.) Some of the scenes shot in India are gorgeous; the costume design in the two Indian weddings is outstanding; and I thought the (almost) wordless scene between Gogol and his bride on their wedding night was really well done, a strong piece of writing that took its cue from how people actually interact with each other. The Namesake is absolutely worth renting; I’m just lamenting the movie it could have been instead.
→ March 5, 2008
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Howl’s Moving Castle.
I’m a big fan of the movies of film director Hayao Miyazaki, but just got around to seeing his last release, Howl’s Moving Castle
Sophie is a 19-year-old girl working in her family’s hat shop, but after an odd encounter with a handsome young wizard in the streets of her town, she’s visited by the Witch of the Waste (voiced by Lauren Bacall), who casts a spell that turns her into an elderly woman. She sets out in search of the wizard Howl and his “moving castle,” a building that walks on mechanical legs, powered by the fire demon Calcifer (Billy Crystal). Her hope is that Howl can reverse the aging spell cast on her, but it turns out that Howl and Calcifer both have spell problems of their own.
Howl’s moves along well until its final quarter, at which point the plot becomes needlessly complex and ends up in a horribly clichéd and quick resolution. It’s a shame, because the first three-fourths of the movie is strong and the writers were unafraid to deviate from the normal paths of animated films. (The movie was adapted from a young-adult novel by Diana Wynne Jones.) Howl’s starts out as an action film, then settles into a more deliberate pace to try to explore the psychological drama behind the characters’ various curses, but never fulfills that promise before returning to action-film pacing and rushing to the finish.
As with all Miyazaki films, Howl’s has more than its share of arresting imagery and sheer inventiveness. The design of the moving castle is phenomenal, and it threatens in some ways to become a character in its own right (and perhaps it should have). The landscape scenes are gorgeous and rich, with layers and textures that are more associated with CG on these shores. The folks at Pixar who oversaw the English dubbing made a pair of inspired choices of voice actors in Crystal, who does a sort of poor man’s Robin Williams/Genie with Calcifer, and Lauren Bacall, whose voice is perfect for the evil witch who turns out to be something a bit deeper than that.
If you’re not already a Miyazaki fan, the place to start is with his masterwork, Spirited Away
→ February 26, 2008
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Eastern Promises and The Bourne Ultimatum.
Continuing with our recent theme of praising understatement in television/cinema, Eastern Promises
Eastern Promises stars Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, the tough, stoic, possibly psychotic driver for a Russian organized crime family in London. A teenaged girl connected to that family ends up dying while giving birth in a hospital with midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), who is of Russian descent, attending. But what appears to be – and was marketed as – a straight-up thriller where Anna ends up chased by the mob because of what she knows about the dead girl turns instead into a series of interconnected threads around shifting loyalties within the crime family. Nikolai and Anna are well-drawn, complex characters, revealed in layers as the film goes on, as is Kirill, Nikolai’s boss and the son of the crime family’s patriarch. Even into the final scenes, we’re still learning about these characters.
Mortensen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance, which was superb and utterly convincing, although I didn’t really see how any of us benefited from seeing him naked during the film’s major (and ultra-tense) fight scene. Watts was also superb in her role, and I was impressed by the filmmakers’ decision to dress her down for the entire film – her hair and especially her makeup were appropriate to the role, and while Watts is unspeakably pretty even without makeup, she was credible for the way she was presented.
The film’s ending, however, hinges on a misjudgment and a coincidence to lead to the climactic scene, which I can only imagine the scriptwriter envisioned first and had to work backwards to lead the characters to that place and situation. The misjudgment revolves around the unstated assumption that the hospital would not have a vial or two of the baby’s blood around, which strikes me as unlikely. The coincidence, the one sloppy bit of scriptwriting in the entire movie, revolves around Anna leaving the hospital just as Kirill arrives. A few seconds either way and the final scene never happens. The improbability of it all cracks the veneer of belief the film creates to that point, although the resolution itself is strong enough to complete the storyline and provide sufficient cover for the film’s few, minor lapses.
—
The Bourne Ultimatum
The first film in the series, The Bourne Identity
Incidentally, Matt Damon reversed course and has now signed on to appear in a fourth installment of the series, which will give Julia Stiles a chance to stand around and look pretty some more, a task for which she seems rather well qualified.
→ February 21, 2008
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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (film).
If you haven’t read the book, I can’t imagine how confusing the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
In that regard, HP5 was reminiscent of the the first film
While the screenplay gets the bulk of the blame for this mess, someone else, likely the studio, is to blame for the short running time of only 128 minutes prior to the credits. The two-disc DVD edition contains about 15 minutes of deleted scenes, most of which would have at least helped give some body to and slow the pacing of the main film had they been included. (There is also a hilariously weird scene of Emma Thompson, sadly wasted in a minimal role in the film proper, making a mess of her meal at the welcome feast. There’s also a cute behind-the-scenes look hosted by Natalie Tena (Tonks), who is rather fetching in her lavender wig.) There’s little question that the substantial audience of readers who go to see the films will tolerate a 150-minute movie if it’s good enough, and there’s no reason why the studio couldn’t flesh it out with a “director’s cut” that runs as long as three hours. What we may have here, however, is the manifestation of the old saw about the Chicago Cubs: If the revenues are going to be huge no matter how mediocre the product, why spend more on the product and cut into profits?
The film had some high points. The special effects continue to improve; the Floo network transitions are quick and realistic, and the scenes in the Ministry foyer were very impressive. Tena was also thoroughly underutilized as Nymphadora Tonks, both because she’s adorable but also because the character gives Harry another person in his orbit who clearly cares for him. The young ladies continue to get cuter, although Evanna Lynch is too cute to be playing Luna Lovegood and the space-cadet voice was a bit cloying. And the sequence in the Ministry of Magic worked reasonably well because it’s supposed to be frenetic, although again, it could have been longer. It’s a shame that the writers, the director, and the studio are wasting such rich, vivid material; I wonder if twenty or thirty years hence, someone else will decide to “update” the series with a more serious attempt to bring the books to life.
→ February 17, 2008
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Waitress.
Waitress
The film revolves around Jenna (Keri Russell), a waitress in a pie shop in a small Southern town, who discovers she’s pregnant and is not happy about it. Her husband, Earl – good luck watching the rejuvenated Law & Order after watching Jeremy Sisto in this movie – is a colossal jackass, abusive, controlling, and dumb as a post. (He’s the one real stock character in the film.) She ends up having an affair with the town’s new gynecologist (Nathan Fillion), a married transplant from Connecticut. Jenna is surrounded by characters at the pie shop, from her two waitress co-workers to the gruff head chef to the 80-year-old owner, Joe, played to the hilt by Andy Griffith as a grumpy old man, who gives everyone (including Jenna) a hard time about everything, but also fills the slightly hackneyed wise-old-man role.
The movie is alternately funny and painful. Jenna has a talent for making up new pie recipes, but gives some of them silly names based on what’s going on in her life, like “I Don’t Want to be Pregnant with Earl’s Baby Pie.” (Her co-worker Dawn: “I don’t think we can put that on the menu board, huh?”) Yet aside from the rare moments of pleasure she gets at the pie shop, Jenna is miserable. She’s trying to save up to leave her husband, but is repeatedly stymied. She’s afraid the baby will trap her in a bad marriage forever. She makes a connection with her doctor, but there’s no future in that while both are married. It’s a black comedy in the sense that the underlying life we see is so grim, with Jenna trying to find a way to start her life over but unable to create the opportunity; in fact, she gets her chance through an external source, which sort of makes up for the way that the opportunities she creates are stymied one by one.
Waitress succeeds because the droll humor and the film’s obvious sympathy for Jenna (and thus ours) overcome its flaws. The turning point at the film’s end is a bit too perfect, but writer Adrienne Shelly did set it up throughout the movie. Earl is a one-note character, perfectly defined by the fact that when he comes to the diner to pick Jenna up, he starts beeping his horn before he’s even pulled up to the front door; I found myself averting my eyes almost every time he came on screen because his treatment of his wife was so dated and misogynistic. I suppose such people exist, but Earl seemed too sharply defined and exaggerated. There was something a little too creepy about Dawn ending up dating her “stalker elf,” Okie, even if the point was to provide an example to Jenna. And perhaps the movie’s biggest sin in my mind is the pie-making -pouring cooked custards into unbaked pie shells (you have to blind-bake them), laying the horizontal strips of a lattice top over the vertical ones (they should be woven), and mashing fillings after they’ve been poured into the crust (the juices would turn the bottom crust into mush).
These hiccups don’t interrupt the movie’s undeniable charm, driven by some witty writing and a fantastic performance by Russell in the lead role. It’s a date movie with brains, or perhaps an indie take on the romantic comedy genre, or a film that just defies easy categorization. We could use a few more of those, come to think of it. I’ve been debating offering some sort of easy rating system, but if I had one, this would get my highest mark.
As an aside, no review of Waitress would be complete without a mention of its tragic backstory. After the movie was completed but before it was accepted to the 2007 Sundance festival, writer/director Adrienne Shelly, who also played Jenna’s unlucky-in-love co-worker Dawn, was murdered in her Manhattan office-apartment by an illegal immigrant construction worker whom she caught stealing money from her purse. It’s an artistic loss, as Shelly clearly had a lot of promise as a writer, and a terrible personal loss for her family: Waitress was written a few years earlier as a love-letter to her then-unborn daughter, who appears at the end of the film as Jenna’s daughter as a toddler.
→ February 7, 2008
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Mansfield Park adaptation.
So we just finished the Masterpiece Theatre showing of the new adaptation of Mansfield Park, and it was enjoyable as a trifle of a movie, but dreadful as an adaptation. I simply could not get past Billie Piper, in the lead role of Fanny Price, as a brunette who dyed her hair blonde in the early 1800s … and then couldn’t be bothered to do her eyebrows!
Mansfield Park is easily my least favorite of Austen’s novels due to its wimpy protagonist, despite all of Fanny’s defender’s claims of her “quiet strength,” which is revisionist bullshit – she’s a damned wimp and even in the one time when she stands up for herself, she’s sorry to have made others around her upset. There’s nice, and then there’s doormat. Fanny Price is a doormat.
The adaptation has turned this somewhat dark novel into a paper-thin romantic intrigue. All of the tension of the novel is gone. Mrs. Norris (yes, like the cat in the Harry Potter series, although here she is a live person) spends the novel tormenting Fanny at every turn; she’s scarcely in the movie at all. In the novel, when Fanny rejects the advances of Henry Crawford, the entire family (she’s staying with her aunt and uncle) turns on her in a relentless attempt to persuade her to accept his proposal, ultimately sending her back to her own poor family as a punishment. Here, she’s not invited on a day trip, and before we know it, Henry has run off with her sister – an event which, by the way, is a total shock in the novel and yet is foreshadowed in the first twenty minutes of the film. And so on. There is no tension in the movie, yet the book is wracked with it. At worst, couldn’t the screenwriters have found some middle ground.
I’m not the only Janeite who thinks so, for what it’s worth – the second of those links focuses on yet more unladylike behavior, as we saw in the new take on Persuasion. I admit that it’s a hard novel to adapt because a faithful version would be oppressive and bleak, but let’s at least stay true to the time period.
The Complete Jane Austen series is continuing with the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice shown in three parts, starting this Sunday; it is well worth watching in its own right, but also stands as perhaps the supreme literary adaptation, period. The series then breaks, resuming on March 23rd with another old edition, this time of Emma, starring Kate Beckinsale.
→ February 3, 2008
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Once.
My wife and I just watched the most wonderful little film. It stars nobody. It earned under $10 million at the U.S. box office. Its director/writer said you could fit a summary of its plot on “a postage stamp.” It clocked in at 81 minutes before the credits rolled. And it was fantastic.
It’s called Once
I don’t mean to oversell the film – it’s not Citizen Kane, or, more to the point, My Fair Lady – but it’s a very sweet and honest movie. The plot revolves around an Irish busker who meets a Czech immigrant woman on the street; over the next several days, they form a quick bond around music and end up forming an impromptu band and recording a demo of the busker’s own songs. Without giving away the ending, that’s about it for the plot. It’s much more about capturing little sentiments, often wordlessly, and other times via the movie’s original songs (the star and the director were both members of an Irish band called The Frames). Best of all, it avoids the forced plot twists that drive so many Hollywood films today, instead letting the characters drive the simple story.
You might have to like acoustic-based indie rock to fully get into the movie, but the songs themselves are deftly integrated into the storyline, and director John Carney manages to sneak in the occasional nod to music videos. Rent it or buy it, and then root for the song “Falling Slowly” at the Grammys and the Oscars over the next few weeks.
→ January 26, 2008
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The Simpsons Movie.
I was cautiously excited to see The Simpsons Movie
Didn’t happen.
I understand I’m in the minority on this one, but I didn’t find the movie to be all that funny. Early Simpsons episodes were packed with jokes, and often had a strong bit of social commentary. The movie felt like it had the same number of jokes – funny ones, that is – and degree of social commentary that you’d find in a 22-minute episode, spread out over 78 minutes. (I know the listed run time is 87 minutes, but that includes the credits, which had a few Easter eggs … but still, they’re credits. They don’t freaking count in the run time.) The humor was inconsistent, so I laughed hard a handful of times, although I had only one moment where I had to pause it (Ralph Wiggum’s sole line in the film), but it wasn’t as relentless as it should have been, and too much of what was funny was easy physical comedy – easy because you can draw a cartoon character hitting himself in the eye with the claw end of a hammer, but good luck getting an actor to do that on film.
The social commentary was just as disappointing as the humor. The target is the current Administration, but the line is dated – Cheney’s running the show, the government is incompetent, Halliburton, etc. In 2002 or 2003, it would have been funny. Now, we’ve heard these jokes for years, and they’re stale. And some of them are so incredibly forced that it’s painful to watch. When a government robot overhears Lisa saying that they’re fugitives, the scene cuts to a giant NSA room of agents listening in on private conversations. The agent listening to the Simpsons’ conversation jumps up and shouts, “The government actually found someone we’re looking for! YEAH, BABY, YEAH!” There was a good joke in there somewhere, but that wasn’t it. Besides, the government found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and dropped a bomb on his head while this movie was in production; I’d say that counts as finding someone they were looking for.
The bar for animated movies now is quite high. Pixar has churned out one brilliant movie after another based on strong writing, but the plot of this film was thin (of course, the show’s the same way) and the snarking missed its mark. The first two Shrek movies were dense with jokes (“Catnip.” “That’s … not mine.”) in a way that The Simpsons Movie wasn’t. And the fact that two of the funniest bits in this movie were in the commercial – the Spider-pig segment, and the ten-thousand-tough-guys rant – didn’t help matters either. If this is one of the funniest movies of 2007, we have let our standards for funny slip, because there just wasn’t enough of the funny in The Simpsons Movie, and there wasn’t enough of the other stuff to balance it out.
→ January 25, 2008
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Knocked Up.
Finally got around to seeing Knocked Up
Knocked Up scores biggest by avoiding the Big Artificial Conflict that wrecks almost every relationship comedy. I’m going to demonstrate this by using one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, the positively fecal The Object of My Affection
Where Object and so many movies fail, Knocked Up succeeds. Yes, Alison and Ben break up, but it is an inevitable occurrence, the result of a slow build of tension that explodes in a hilarious, foul-mouthed screaming match that starts in a car and ends in a gynecologist’s office. It also serves as a pivotal plot point that gets Ben to grow up, which, frankly, I’d been waiting the whole movie for him to start doing. And, most importantly, Apatow picks up the movie’s pace after the split, avoiding the typical slowdown in most relationship comedies that comes after the writer has forced the two people apart and now needs to spend a solid 45 minutes showing us how miserable they are without each other. We don’t see Alison or Ben miserable; we see both of them acting responsibly, and we see Ben doing something about his half of the problem. What a decidedly grown-up concept.
The main actors were all very good. I’ve been a Katherine Heigl (Alison) fan since “Roswell” – the season-three hairstyle sold me, since you can’t pull that look off if you’re not flat-out gorgeous – so I didn’t need much convincing on that one. Seth Rogan (Ben) was outstanding as a very unlikeable guy who, it turns out, is more clueless than jackass. (Speaking of which, I don’t get the criticism that the movie is “sexist,” which Heigl herself even intimated in a recent Vanity Fair interview. Ben starts out as a goofball and a ne’er-do-well, he’s depicted as reaching in the relationship until the very end of the film, and his friends are socially retarded. Alison’s successful, smart, and funny. This is sexist … how?) Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd are hilarious as a vaguely demented married couple whose relationship is slowly disintegrating under the weight of two kids and his busy job; Rudd’s scene in the Vegas hotel room with Rogan was one of the film’s highlights. And Harold Ramis has a great cameo as Ben’s father.
The movie does have some missed notes and unevenness. Joanna Kerns as Alison’s psychobitch-mom-from-hell was jarring, and she appears just once as a sort of comic foil and doesn’t resurface until the closing credits. The Asian doctor was just as one-dimensional before a jarring character change near the film’s end – it’s like he was there for the joke, but then Apatow needed him to be more normal, so he altered the character. In general, Apatow uses his one- and two-scene characters as sharply-defined props to create slightly forced comic moments, when his specialty is building comedy from real situations. I thought ending the movie with a scene where Alison sees the nursery Ben set up would have been perfect, but that’s just me being sentimental. And I wish that the idea that Ben is a skilled handler of people – he wins two interpersonal negotiations near the film’s end by using conciliatory tactics in one and firm tactics in the other – had been explored a little more earlier in the film. If it was a latent skill, fine, but show us a glimpse earlier on rather than having him emotionally tone-deaf in all of these situations where he’s with Alison and says the absolute worst possible thing.
If you can handle some vulgarity and don’t mind marijuana usage as a running gag, Knocked Up is worth the rental. But if you’re married with kids, it becomes a must-see, because there’s another layer of humor that you’ll get that the non-parents in the audience just won’t quite appreciate.