Black Hawk Down Movie Review

As I rewatched Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down for the first time I more than a decade, two other war Berchtesgaden more than a year later. The similarities are numerous. Both are based on books that attempted to recount, in as much factual detail as possible, the events surrounding are large contingent of American soldiers in conflict. Both were released toward the end of 2001, coinciding with post-9/11 American jingoism. Both focus heavily on the responsibility soldiers in combat feel toward each other more than to the ideology or politics behind the war. And both unflinchingly portray some of the horrors and carnage of war. The other is the more recent Lone Survivor, whose primary focus is on the fact of soldiers in harm’s way pulling for each other. The latter film has faced criticism for being a form of war porn, which you could also say to some extent about Scott’s film. But I think the positives to take away from all three far outweigh any negative observations regarding the depiction of blood and guts in battle scenarios.

The Impossible Movie Review

Sometimes you have to attempt to erase your preconceived notions of a movie before you go in to see it. With The Impossible, Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s retelling of the true story of a family of five that survived the devastating 2004 tsunami in Thailand, I had plenty. The trailer did the film no favors as far as I was concerned. I made two predictions when I saw the trailer: 1) the film would be an appalling depiction of that terrible tragedy for its focus on a rich white family that made it through while hundreds of thousands of poor dark-skinned people died around them; 2) the film would be a cloying and phony emotional tug at the heartstrings, cynically designed to extract false tears from the audience. I was wrong on the second, but absolutely dead-on accurate on the first.

Short Cut Review: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

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 Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, directed by Lasse Hallström from a Simon Beaufoy adaptation of the novel, a fisheries expert played by Ewan McGregor is enlisted to help a wealthy and eccentric sheikh realize his dream of bringing salmon fishing to the country of Yemen and an environment totally unsuited to the sport. Along the way he falls in love with Emily Blunt. It's a pleasant enough light romantic comedy that has occasional forays into more serious subject matter, most of which are easily forgivable. Beaufoy retains mere hints at the political satire that are the fore in the novel. It might have made for a more interesting film had been a more faithful adaptation in that respect.

Haywire Movie Review

Before going to see Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire I kept referring to it as “the ass-kicking movie.” It’s hard to argue that I was wrong in my terse description. The whole thing is a ruse to showcase the talents of Mixed Martial Arts competitor Gina Carano in several brutal action fight scenes.

The film opens with a cracker of a fight scene. The stage is set in a tranquil roadside diner somewhere in upstate New York. Mallory (Carano) approaches cautiously, enters and sits down. She’s soon joined by Aaron (Channing Tatum) and their conversation reveals tidbits of a plot we’re not yet privy to. The dialogue here is not the lazy expository garbage of your typical action film. Instead they speak like characters who already know the history and have no concern for the audience’s knowledge. Suddenly and without warning, Aaron has thrown his coffee in Mallory’s face and smashed the cup on her head before they start brawling in the tight confines between the counter and the booths.

Moulin Rouge! Movie Review: Ten Years Later, It Still Does It

“Love Is Like Oxygen.” “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.” Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong.” “All You Need Is Love.” At least that’s what pop music tells us as well as Christian, the young penniless Bohemian writer looking for truth, beauty, freedom and love in turn of the twentieth century Paris in Baz Luhrmann’s kinetic marvel Moulin Rouge! It’s ten years ago this month I first saw this movie on DVD and shortly thereafter I sought it out in the one Manhattan theater that was still showing it. It simply astounded me even though I fully expected to be repelled by it. I’m not a fan of musicals in general, but it quickly became, along with West Side Story, one of only two examples of the genre I truly adore and landed on my list of favorite films of the first decade of the 21st century.

Beginners Movie Review

What happens when a gay person feels compelled by the shame of societal norms to remain in the closet for the vast majority of his life? What if that person married and had a child? What would be left behind in the motional wreckage wrought by such a deception? Beginners seeks to explore these questions, not so much in an obvious way, but through the quiet reflections of Oliver (Ewan McGregor), who informs us at the beginning that his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), came out to him 4 years before dying of cancer at the age of 75.

Polanski's Ghost Writer Traffics in Too Much Conspiracy Theory

The Ghost Writer, the new film from director Roman Polanski and based on a novel by Robert Harris, is a movie made for people who think 9/11 was an inside job, that no man has ever set foot on the moon and who subscribe to the Gospel According the Michael Moore.

That is to say this is a film that will appeal directly to conspiracy theorists and other people who are incapable of using logic to discern facts from fantasy. It stars Ewan McGregor as the eponymous hero brought in for a quick touch-up on the highly anticipated memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a thinly disguised stand-in for the real life Tony Blair.

McGregor’s Ghost is a last minute replacement after his predecessor’s untimely and somewhat suspicious drowning death off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, where Lang now spends most of his time tucked away in a dreary, lifeless beach house. He is kept company there by his longtime assistant and mistress, Amelia Bly (for whom they bafflingly cast Kim Cattrall), several bodyguards, a couple of ominous house workers, and a wife (Olivia Williams) who is never shy with her opinions, be they political or related to her husband’s personal affairs. The already written memoirs are a closely guarded secret and may contain damning evidence that will inculpate Lang in the war crimes for which he has been accused.

What could have been the makings of a savvy political thriller ends up as a hack job. Co-written by Polanski and Harris, a former British political reporter who became disillusioned with Blair in the wake of the Iraq war and the WMD fiasco, the story would have us believe Lang is a complete tool of the American government. I thought finally a film would have something more interesting to say other than the tired trope that the US Government is all-powerful and capable of manipulating not only its own inner politics, but the foreign policy of other nations. And not just carrot-and-stick incentives, but absolute hands on manipulation. The film, and surely the novel before it, have their roots in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate from 1962, but Harris seems to have lost sight of the political satire woven throughout that classic.

Polanski directs with the sure hand of a veteran filmmaker. He is able to rely on his skill as a storyteller rather than the shocks and jolts that typify the genre. And although he manages to inject moments of humor, the film has a tendency to take itself too seriously most of the time. Movies that traffic in conspiracy theory can be diverting fun. They can be spun into taut thrillers that keep the action moving at a quick clip, making us forget how harebrained the plot really is, but they run into trouble when they start believing the hokum they’re peddling.

The look of the film is dreary and gray, as it takes place on a beach resort in late winter. This seems to be an attempt to couch the film in drabness, hinting at the darkness below the surface, but the result is a muddy looking film. This is not aided by the occasional use of CGI and blue screen technology which is distractingly low-budget. It’s the kind of cheap effects work I would expect on a TV movie, but not from a studio feature film.

Brosnan and Williams are well cast, as is Tom Wilkinson in the key role of a Harvard professor who knew Lang during their university days at Cambridge. These three gifted actors do what they can with a paper-thin script. They are the only actors with any real pathos to convey. Each one may or may not have something to hide, which is real juice for any actor to relish in. Wilkinson comes across as perhaps a tad too sinister in his one scene while Williams (perhaps more a result of weak screenwriting) can’t conceal her true colors. Brosnan, on the other hand, is just magnificent. He’s cocksure in the face of damning accusations, frustrated by his lack of political will (the source of which is revealed in the end), and confident in his beliefs. The film leaves aside what is perhaps the most interesting character development. Without revealing too much, Lang has very strong courage of someone else’s convictions. Thinking back on the performance you realize Brosnan got it just right.

McGregor, while good, doesn’t have much to do except look scared, surprised, shocked and occasionally ambivalent. It’s a thankless role and I might even go so far as to call his entire character the MacGuffin of the film. But my biggest complaint is why Kim Cattrall, sporting a barely passable English accent, was cast at all. She’s a C-list actress, a veteran of Porky’s and Police Academy who became a latter day star because she was a 40-something woman willing to take her clothes off on “Sex and the City”. She’s barely up to the challenge of playing a woman who is both manipulator and manipulated in ways she’ll never know.

SPOILER WARNING: In general, this is not very compelling stuff. It wants to demonize a PM accused of war crimes for failing to avail himself of the justice system (rich judgment coming from a man who has been a fugitive from justice for more than 30 years) while at the same time disregarding him as a puppet for a much more powerful and nefarious organization. Add to that the hilarity of the big revelation that the memoir contains a secret code. Really? Seriously? The deceased writer hid the big state secret in the text of a ghost-written memoir? And the implicated individuals fear this as some sort of hard evidence? And let’s not forget that this movie does nothing to advance the evolution of cinematic depictions of the Internet: a keyword search that reveals the secret identity of a CIA operative? Perhaps that’s the reason for the recent enmity between Google and China.