Shine a Light Movie Review

It’s only natural that Martin Scorsese would have made a Rolling Stones concert film. He was one of the first film directors to employ rock music on the soundtrack of his films and has continually returned to the Stones, even using “Gimme Shelter” three times, although it is sort of ironically absent from Shine a Light. But also Mick Jagger is a quintessential Scorsese protagonist. Watching him preen, gyrate, strut, and bounce on stage calls to mind Tom Cruise winning at pool in The Color of Money, the explosiveness of De Niro in Mean Streets, or his unpredictability in Taxi Driver, and the ferocious energy of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. At the risk of sounding grandiose, there’s even a comparison to be made to Willem Defoe in The Last Temptation of Christ in Jagger’s ability to lead the crowd in The Beacon Theater, a historic temple of performance. Archival interview footage even reveals Jagger’s self doubt prior to performance – feelings that Defoe’s Jesus would find familiar.

Short Cut Review: The Fall

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.

This one I'd seen before. It's a visually stunning work filmed in more than two dozen countries over a period of several years. An injured and depressed movie stuntman in a 1920s convalescence home tells a tale of murder and revenge to a young Romanian girl, at first as a means to persuade her to steal morphine pills for him. Catinca Untaru gives one of the best child performances I've seen.

The Incredible Hulk Movie Review

The Incredible Hulk has the distinction of being not only the best teaser for The Avengers, but perhaps the most capable of standing alone, the most brisk in its storytelling. It falls somewhat short of Iron Man, which elevated the bar slightly by having a charismatic actor and hero in Robert Downey, Jr., who really kept those films light on their feet. Edward Norton in the Bruce Banner role is more sullen and brooding, as anyone with a Hulk affliction likely would be. He can’t risk being around anything stressful or anger-inducing lest he transform into a huge green rage monster, tearing up everything in sight and then waking up nude in another country (his first incident in the film takes him from Brazil to Guatemala).

Seven Pounds Movie Review: 118 Minutes of Incoherence

First published on American Madness on 19 December 2008.
Republished here with a minor editorial adjustment that does not affect content.

Scene: Ben Thomas (played with unending weepiness by Will Smith), despondent, in close-up makes a 911 call to report his own impending suicide.

Cut to: Ben swimming in the blue Pacific. His voiceover, in pressing sadness, informs us, “In seven days God created the world. And in seven seconds I shattered mine.” Yet I recall God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. And what about those seven seconds? No explanation is ever offered.

Cut to: Ben making a phone call to the customer service center of a mail-order meat company. The employee handling his call is Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), a blind man without an angry bone in his body, as evidenced by his unwillingness to strike back when Ben released a tirade of insults over the phone. This will prove to be Ben’s test of Ezra to discover if he is worthy - worthy of what is the mystery that unravels over the course of 118 difficult minutes.

Revolutionary Road Movie Review: Portrait of a Decaying Marriage

First published on American Madness on 23 January 2009.

Republished here with a typo correction.

Emotional abuse and marital discord have not been this explicitly depicted on screen since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton devastated each other and another young couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The barbs slung in that older film were exchanged between a husband and wife, long-married and bitter. Edward Albee’s play on which it is based poked holes in the mythology of the American dream, part of which necessitates being a happily married couple.

Milk Movie Review

First published on American Madness on 20 December 2008.

Republished here with a typo correction.

Director Gus Van Sant has taken a break from his often inaccessible forays into (almost) experimental film to make Milk, a very typical Hollywood biopic about Harvey Milk, the nation’s first openly gay man to win major elected office and then assassinated shortly thereafter. I don’t use ‘typical’ pejoratively, rather as an observation of how Van Sant’s film follows most of the conventions of the genre and as a contrast to his other recent work. Van Sant also directed Good Will Hunting – a formulaic Hollywood film that I love.

Gran Torino Movie Review: Growl and Scowl, Grrrrr

First published on American Madness on 19 December 2008.

Republished here with minor editorial adjustments that do not affect content.

The last few years have brought Clint Eastwood a great deal of critical success as a director. He’s recently had a four film streak beginning with Mystic River in 2003 that have brought three Best Picture Oscar nods, including a winner in Million Dollar Baby, and renewed praise for the aging movie star. This year Eastwood has given us another two films, each of which has the scent of awards season contenders, but ultimately fail to deliver on the promise of greatness that we may have unfairly come to expect from him.

Changeling, which opened in October, rides high mostly on the backs of the performances of Angelina Jolie and a refreshingly understated John Malkovich. Unfortunately the film, which tells the true story of a Los Angeles woman whose young son went missing in 1929, veers off into the wilderness of courtroom drama. It wears out its welcome after about ninety minutes of what could have been a taut drama, but instead becomes an outsized spectacle.

Defiance Movie Review: A Tale of Jewish Vengeance

First published on American Madness on 11 January 2009.

Republished here unaltered.

Defiance, one of several Third Reich-themed films arriving in cinemas this awards season, is a marginally enthralling Hollywood entertainment. Director Edward Zwick has proven a capable hand over the years at making solidly entertaining action films (The Last Samurai; Glory) that also strive at a message of slightly greater importance. Written by Zwick and Clayton Frohman based on a book by Nechama Tec, it tells the true story of the Bielski partisans – a group of Jews led by the Bielski Brothers (Tuvia, Zus, Asael and Aron) who resisted the Nazi occupation of Poland and survived in the forest for 4 years until the war’s end.

Wanted Movie Review: Matrix Lite - Not the Same Great Taste, Less Fulfilling

First published on American Madness on 30 January 2009.

Republished here unaltered.

A young man works day in and day out in a soul-crushing office job. He’s thoroughly dissatisfied with his life, which he views as devoid of any meaning. One day he’s visited by a mysterious stranger in the form of a beautiful woman. He is saved from someone who seems to be after him and brought to meet a ragtag team led by a wizened black man who will give him spiritual guidance while training him to free his mind and become a highly skilled fighter and assassin.

Hancock Movie Review: A Different Kind of Hero

Will Smith as John Hancock, looking smug after carelessly destroying a freight train.

Hancock is sort of a “What if…” movie with regard to superheroes. What if there were a superhero who was good, but rude and offensive and generally left more of a mess in his wake than was worth the good deed done? It also rather amusingly deals with the problem of birds getting in the way of a hero in flight, a subject never broached by any incarnation of Superman. John Hancock, played by the reliably charismatic Will Smith, is such a guy. He’s got the strength and flying ability of Superman, but none of the finesse. When he takes off and lands he leaves giant holes in the street. He drinks most of the time and is generally regarded as a public nuisance. He saves lives not to the final applause of astonished onlookers, but to jeers and sneers (and a lot worse) of a public that is tired of his antics.

Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona Movie Review

Over the decades Woody Allen has continually returned to the same themes again and again, revisiting them with different characters and settings, always closing his films with a satisfactory resolution, but continuing the ambiguity in his next outing. Chief among these themes has been love, passion and fidelity.

His 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona looks at two sides of the same coin in Vicky (Rebecca Hall), the pragmatist looking for a stable dependable love which she has in her fiancé, Doug, and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), the impetuous free spirit open to new experiences and more willing to find love in whoever comes along. The two are best friends recently arrived in Barcelona – Vicky studying Catalan identity and Cristina tagging along for adventure. Luckily for them and for the audience Vicky has a family connection to Mark and Judy (Kevin Dunn and Patricia Clarkson), who give them a place to stay in their picturesque villa.

Top Ten of 2008

This list was made in early 2009, but posted on 17 April 2014 and backdated to 1 January 2009.

1. WALL-E dir. Andrew Stanton

2. Doubt dir. John Patrick Shanley

3. Milk dir. Gus Van Sant

4. Man on Wire dir. James Marsh

5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days dir. Christian Mungiu

6. Happy-Go-Lucky dir. Mike Leigh

7. Entre les murs (The Class) dir. Laurent Cantet

8. Revolutionary Road dir. Sam Mendes

9. The Dark Knight dir. Christopher Nolan

10. Slumdog Millionaire dir. Danny Boyle

All feature films seen from 2008 (based on US commercial release dates)

* review available on this site
+ from my collection
^ no United States theatrical release

titles in bold received at least one Oscar nomination

21 dir. Robert Luketic [USA]
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile) dir. Christian Mungiu [Romania]
Appaloosa dir. Ed Harris [USA]
Australia dir. Baz Luhrmann [Australia, USA]
Be Kind Rewind dir. Michel Gondry [USA]
Body of Lies dir. Ridley Scott [USA]
Bolt dir. Chris Williams and Byron Howard  [USA]
+Burn After Reading dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen  [USA]
Cadillac Records dir. Darnell Martin [USA]
+Cassandra's Dream dir. Woody Allen [USA, UK]
Changeling dir. Clint Eastwood [USA]
Che: Part One dir. Steven Soderbergh [USA]
Che: Part Two dir. Steven Soderbergh [USA]
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian dir. Andrew Adamson [USA]
The Class (Entre les murs) dir. Laurent Cantet [France]
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button dir. David Fincher [USA]
The Dark Knight dir. Christopher Nolan [USA]
*Defiance dir. Edward Zwick [USA]
Doubt dir. John Patrick Shanley [USA]
The Duchess dir. Saul Dibb [USA, UK]
Elegy dir. Isabel Coixet [USA]
^Empties (Vratne lahve) dir. Jan Sverak [Czech Republic]
Encounters at the End of the World dir. Werner Herzog [USA]
The Fall dir. Tarsem Singh [USA]
Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters) dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky [Austria]
Frost/Nixon dir. Ron Howard [USA]
Frozen River dir. Courtney Hunt [USA]
Gomorra dir. Matteo Garrone [Italy]
*Gran Torino dir. Clint Eastwood [USA]
*Hancock dir. Peter Berg [USA]
The Happening dir. M. Night Shyamalan [USA]
Happy-Go-Lucky dir. Mike Leigh [UK]
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay dir. Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg [USA]
Hellboy II: The Golden Army dir. Guillermo del Toro [USA]
In Bruges dir. Martin McDonagh [UK, USA]
*The Incredible Hulk dir. Louis Leterrier [USA]
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull dir. Steven Spielberg [USA]
Iron Man dir. Jon Favreau [USA]
I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime) dir. Philippe Claudel [France]
Kung Fu Panda dir. Mark Osborne and John Stevenson [USA]
Let the Right One In (Lat den rätte komma in) dir. Tomas Alfredson [Sweden]
Man on Wire dir. James Marsh [USA]
*Milk dir. Gus Van Sant [USA]
Miracle at St. Anna dir. Spike Lee [USA]
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day dir. Bharat Nalluri [UK]
Pineapple Express dir. David Gordon Green [USA]
Quantum of Solace dir. Marc Forster [USA]
Rachel Getting Married dir. Jonathan Demme [USA]
The Reader dir. Stephen Daldry [USA]
Recount dir. Jay Roach [USA]
*Revolutionary Road dir. Sam Mendes [USA]
Righteous Kill dir. Jon Avnet [USA]
Role Models dir. David Wain [USA]
Saw V dir. David Hackl [USA]
*Seven Pounds dir. Gabriele Muccino [USA]
*Shine a Light dir. Martin Scorsese [USA]
Slumdog Millionaire dir. Danny Boyle, Danny
Smart People dir. Noam Murro [USA]
Standard Operating Procedure dir. Errol Morris [USA]
Step Brothers dir. Adam McKay [USA]
Synecdoche, New York dir. Charlie Kaufmann [USA]
Tropic Thunder dir. Ben Stiller [USA]
Valkyrie dir. Bryan Singer [USA]
*Vicky Cristina Barcelona dir. Woody Allen [UK]
The Visitor dir. Thomas McCarthy [USA]
+Wall-E dir. Andrew Stanton [USA]
Waltz with Bashir (Vals im Bashir) dir. Ari Folman [Israel]
*Wanted dir. Timur Bekmambetov [USA]
^Die Welle (The Wave) dir. Dennis Gansel [Germany]
Wendy and Lucy dir. Kelly Reichardt [USA]
The Wrestler dir. Darren Aronofsky [USA]
Zack and Miri Make a Porno dir. Kevin Smith [USA]