Short Cut Movie Review From My Collection: Volver

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

In Volver, Pedro Almodóvar takes on the ghosts of the past – literal in the case of his female protagonists; metaphorical in terms of his home country. He tackles so many subjects, plot elements, genres, and themes (many of which have formed the basis of his previous work) that the film should winde up crushed under the weight of its own indulgence. But Almodóvar, mixing elements of melodrama, Spanish telenovelas, magical realism, comedy, thriller, and mystery has a fleeting directorial hand, keeping everything so expertly balanced that the film remains equally light in spirit and severe in tone.

Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) is a working class mother, but like any good Almodóvar heroine, she fulfills several roles simultaneously: daughter; sister; wife. One night she is unexpectedly forced to cover up a horrific act in order to protect her teenage daughter. Meanwhile, all the women in her family go through their lives deceiving people in various ways. There’s the ghost of her mother (Carmen Maura) living unnoticed with her aunt; Raimunda’s sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas) covering up the eventual discovery of this strange phantasm (if that’s even what she is), and the long ago crimes committed and concealed that now begin to surface. The ghosts of our past will always come back to haunt us, Almodóvar seems to be saying with this movie that has little room for anything not directly related to the lives of women. Men are given short shrift in their minor roles before being disposed of, sometimes quite literally. Even a dashing young man who flirts with Raimunda, suggesting a romantic subplot, disappears as abruptly as he arrived.

Overall this is one of Almodóvar’s most purely entertaining films, eschewing all the weighty melodrama that made most of his films more difficult to sit through. It is wickedly funny at times and exhibits a beautiful and intimate understanding of Spanish life and superstition in los pueblos.

Short Cut Movie Review - Half Nelson

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden adapted this story of a drug addicted public school teacher in the inner city from a short film they made two years earlier. Ryan Gosling was Oscar-nominated for playing the middle school teacher and girls basketball coach whose student discovers his secret addiction. Fleck directs entirely with handheld cameras, sticking true to the typical cinema verite style that so many gritty urban dramas employ. The young Shareeka Epps is a standout as the sensible and quiet Drey, who is essentially alone and in desperate need of an adult role model with an older brother in prison and a mother who works double shifts as an EMT. Gosling and a local drug dealer name Frank (Anthony Mackie) vie to be that role model. Neither is particularly well-suited to the job and the movie does either a sly or an irresponsible thing in making us hope Drey steers clear of Frank in favor of her teacher.

Fleck is much less interested in the perils of addition than he is in the moral quandary of a white drug addict thinking he’s a better mentor for a child than a dealer. Unfortunately he doesn’t know quite where to take the story or how to end it convincingly. Drug addicts don’t often arrive at happy endings, and when they do it takes a lot more time than Fleck devotes to it.

Short Cut Movie Review - Mission: Impossible III

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

The writing partners Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci, along with director and co-writer J.J. Abrams, tried to give IMF agent Ethan Hunt a little more personal stake in the spy game by giving him a fiancée (Michelle Monaghan). To allay any suspense regarding the action movie cliché of the hero’s lover being in danger, Abrams opens the film with a sadistic scene of the villain, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) attempting to extract information from a bound Ethan (Tom Cruise) before killing his fiancée. This allows the anticipation to build differently, knowing what their fate will be and also knowing that once he capture Davian early in the film, we will see him get away. Having flesh in the game isn’t quite enough, apparently, because they also gave Ethan a female spy protégé (Keri Russell) for whom he feels a need to exact revenge.

Ving Rhames returns as Luther, the team’s computer expert, remarking about their mission to break into The Vatican that it’s a cakewalk compared to Langley, referencing the centerpiece break in of the first film. Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys Myers round out the IMF team, with Billy Crudup serving as Ethan’s boss and Laurence Fishburne adding severity and gravitas as the IMF director. The action dutifully pumps along. Abrams has continually proved himself a whiz of an action director and this is where he had just begun to cut his teeth. It’s generally a fine effort as far as these things go.

From My Collection: Inside Man Movie Review

I’m kind of a shameless sucker for heist movies. I love the team camaraderie and the way the films are usually structured, often beginning with an opening heist teaser, followed by a gathering of the team members, the training and planning stages and finally the execution. Spike Lee’s Inside Man turns a lot of the conventions of the genre on its head by beginning with the heist and allowing it to unfold with the audience in the position of the hostages and the police. We don’t know what the plan is, what they want to steal, or how they plan to make their escape. Hell, we don’t even know who is involved. It all gets pieced together slowly over time as the main detective slowly catches on, at which point it’s too late.

From My Collection: The Departed Movie Review

When Frank Costello asks a man how his mother is and he replies that she’s on her way out, Frank’s rejoinder, “We all are. Act accordingly,” sets a tone for the film. As the title suggests, death hangs like a pall over Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. It is a film in which most of the characters live with the fear of death around them at all times. They are cops and they are criminal mafia.

The story is of two young men, played by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, who become embroiled in an elaborate plot to take down Costello’s crime organization from one end and infiltrate the Massachusetts State Police Force from the other. Damon plays Colin Sullivan, the mole inside the State Police investigative unit for organized crime. He is recruited by Costello as a boy in an extended prologue that introduces most of the major players. Then there’s DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan, a new police recruit fingered for a special deep undercover assignment to help bring Costello down.

Miami Vice Movie Review

If there’s been a common theme running through the films of Michael Mann it’s been the presence of hard-working men determined and expert in their professions. Think about Russell Crow and Al Pacino in The Insider, Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat – the cop and the criminal – two sides of the same coin facing off against one another. “Miami  Vice,” the hit TV series for which Mann served as executive producer, though a bit lighter and more freewheeling than his feature films, contains the initial germinating seeds of the same theme. These seeds are brought to fruition in Mann’s feature film update of that same series, this time with a hot new cast including Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx.

Pixar's Cars Movie Review

Pixar’s Cars was the only film in their continually impressive lineup that I hadn’t seen. This was due in part to the fact that it was released during my first year living abroad and I had quite limited access to English language films that were not dubbed into Spanish. Also, it was the first of the Pixar films to receive only lukewarm critical praise. I had little reason to seek it out until this year which saw the release of the sequel.

At first glance it looks like a difficult sell. It’s the story of a rookie on the racing circuit named Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) whose goal to be the first rookie to win the Piston Cup (Cars’ version of the Indy 500, I suppose). His main rivals are an aging racer named The King and a brash veteran called Chick Hicks (Michael Keaton). After finishing in a photo finish 3-way tie, a 3-car race is scheduled in California. McQueen wants to get there as quickly as possible to schmooze a big sponsor, but fate leads him on a different path – to a small town in the middle of the desert.

The Devil Wears Prada Movie Review

The Devil Wears Prada is one of those Hollywood productions based on a best-selling novel, cast with big name movie stars, filled out with great production values, all in service to a lifeless script.

The screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna is based on the novel (unread by me) by Lauren Weisberger. The basic plot is thus: fresh-faced college graduate Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) seeks idealized position writing articles for a publication such as The New Yorker (it seems no one told Andy that in 2006, print publications were going the way of crank-start cars and anyway, big-time magazines generally don’t hire inexperienced 22-year olds as writers). She gets a (sort-of) lucky break getting hired as the junior assistant to Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep), a fashion maven and editor-in-chief of Runway fashion magazine. It’s a job “a million girls would kill for” and if Andy can last a year she’ll have her pick of great magazine jobs.

Top Ten of 2006

This list was made in early 2007, but posted on 17 April 2014 and backdated to 1 January 2007.

1. Little Miss Sunshine dir. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

2. The Departed dir. Martin Scorsese

3. El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) dir. Guillermo del Toro

4. Letters from Iwo Jima dir. Clint Eastwood

5. Volver dir. Pedro Almodóvar

6. Children of Men dir. Alfonso Cuarón

7. Babel dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu

8. The Last King of Scotland dir. Kevin MacDonald

9. Apocalypto dir. Mel Gibson

10. Thank You for Smoking dir. Jason Reitman

All films seen from 2006 (based on US commercial release dates)
* review available on this site
+ from my collection
bold titles received at least 1 Oscar nomination

16 Blocks dir. Richard Donner [USA]
2 Days in Paris dir. Julie Delpy [USA]
49 Up dir. Michael Apted, Michael [UK]
Apocalypto dir. Mel Gibson [USA]
Ask the Dust dir. Robert Towne [USA]
Babel dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alejandro [USA, Mexico, France]
The Black Dahlia dir. Brian De Palma [USA]
Blood Diamond dir. Edward Zwick [USA]
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan dir. Larry Charles [USA]
Brick dir. Rian Johnson [USA]
+*Cars dir. John Lasseter [USA]
Casino Royale dir. Martin Campbell [USA]
Children of Men dir. Alfonso Cuarón [USA, UK]
Clerks II dir. Kevin Smith [USA]
Copying Beethoven dir. Agniezska Holland [USA]
The Da Vinci Code dir. Ron Howard [USA]
+*The Departed dir. Martin Scorsese [USA]
The Descent dir. Neil Marshall [USA]
*The Devil Wears Prada dir. David Frankel [USA]
Dreamgirls dir. Bill Condon [USA]
Factotum dir. Bent Hamer [USA]
Find Me Guilty dir. Sidney Lumet [USA]
Flags of Our Fathers dir. Clint Eastwood [USA]
Flannel Pajamas dir. Jeff Lipsky [USA]
The Fountain dir. Darren Aronofsky [USA]
Free Zone dir. Amos Gitai, Amos [Israel]
The Good German dir. Steven Soderbergh [USA]
Hostel dir. Eli Roth [USA]
The Illusionist dir. Neil Burger [USA]
An Inconvenient Truth dir. Davis Guggenheim [USA]
Inland Empire dir. David Lynch [USA]
+*Inside Man dir. Spike Lee [USA]
El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) dir. Guillermo del Toro [Mexico]
Lady in the Water dir. M. Night Shyamalan [USA]
The Last King of Scotland dir. Kevin MacDonald [USA]
Letters from Iwo Jima dir. Clint Eastwood [USA]
Little Children dir. Todd Field [USA]
Little Miss Sunshine dir. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris [USA]
Manderlay dir. Lars von Trier [Denmark]
Marie Antoinette dir. Sofia Coppola [USA]
*Miami Vice dir. Michael Mann [USA]
Mission: Impossible III dir. J.J. Abrams [USA]
Nine Lives dir. Rodrigo Garcia [USA]
Notes on a Scandal dir. Richard Eyre [UK]
The Painted Veil dir. John Curran [USA]
Paris, je t'aime dir. various
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest dir. Gore Verbinski [USA]
The Prestige dir. Christopher Nolan [USA]
The Queen dir. Stephen Frears [UK]
Saw III dir. Darren Lynn Bousman [USA]
A Scanner Darkly dir. Richard Linklater [USA]
Scoop dir. Woody Allen [USA, UK]
Shortbus dir. John Cameron Mitchell [USA]
Stranger Than Fiction dir. Marc Forster [USA]
Superman Returns dir. Bryan Singer [USA]
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby dir. Adam McKay [USA]
Thank You for Smoking dir. Jason Reitman [USA]
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story dir. Michael Winterbottom [UK]
Tsotsi dir. Gavin Hood [South Africa]
United 93 dir. Paul Greengrass [USA]
V for Vendetta dir. James McTeigue [USA]
Venus dir. Roger Michell [USA]
+*Volver dir. Pedro Almodóvar [Spain]
World Trade Center dir. Oliver Stone [USA]
X-Men: The Last Stand dir. Brett Ratner [USA]