The Bourne Ultimatum Movie Review

Matt Damon never smiles in The Bourne Supremacy. I think that’s also true in The Bourne Ultimatum, which is the darker and slightly more sinister installment in the trilogy. It picks up where the previous film left off, after Bourne has tried to achieve some redemption by apologizing to the young woman whose life he altered when he murdered her parents. Most of the movie cleverly, it turns out, takes place between that apology scene and the epilogue of The Bourne Supremacy in which he calls Pam Landy and insinuates that he’s looking at her through her office window.

The Bourne Supremacy Movie Review

If The Bourne Identity was the grounded, relaxed version of an action spy film, then its first sequel The Bourne Supremacy is the next step in kineticism, ratcheting up the energy as Bourne remembers more about his past and becomes more deeply embroiled in layers of cover-ups he can’t understand.

It picks up two years after the events of the first film. Bourne and Marie are hiding out in India until an assassin (Karl Urban) shows up and accidentally kills Marie (Franka Potente) instead of Bourne. Meanwhile in Berlin, Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), a CIA bureaucrat, is working a case to uncover a mole within the organization. Someone is also setting up Bourne as a rogue agent. The old Treadstone project that made Bourne has become Blackbriar. Landy is kept at arm’s length by Abbott (Brian Cox, returning in his role as the head of the Black Ops program).

From My Collection: The Bourne Identity Movie Review

I’m revisiting the original trilogy of Bourne Movies after seeing Jason Bourne. I guess that’s backwards, but the inspiration didn’t strike until I found myself disappointed in the new movie. Seeing how frenetic the editing was, I felt that Paul Greengrass had taken his style to an extreme. I didn’t recall that the two he directed were similarly edited.

The Witch Movie Review

As a first time feature film maker, Robert Egger demonstrates a skilled and assured hand at how to handle material that is delicate on several fronts. The Witch, which he wrote and directed, deals with puritanical religious dogma of the seventeenth century, witchcraft, and also the conventions of horror and psychological thrillers. So much could have gone wrong in setting a tone and a pace, but Eggers gets most of it right.

For starters, he set his film nearly four centuries ago in New England. As such the dialogue, much of which is taken from contemporaneous transcripts and texts, contains a style that, to the ears of a 21^st century American, sounds like something out of a restoration village where actors pretend they know nothing about modern technology. Also the family at the center of the movie, who have been banished from the village for “prideful conceit”, exercise such deep religious conviction that we might feel uncomfortable laughter coming on. But the events that transpire are no laughing matter.

Blackhat Movie Review

I have found myself over the years consistently enthralled by Michael Mann’s movies. He creates stories of men entirely dedicated to their professions, seemingly without limits. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro faced off as detective and thief, two men who would stop at nothing (including the loss of a relationship) in completing the mission in Heat. Daniel Day-Lewis was a frontiersman trying to save the woman he loved in The Last of the Mohicans. Tom Cruise was a fiercely professional hitman toying with Jamie Foxx’s cab driver in Collateral. And Foxx and Colin Farrell lived the lives of undercover narcotics detectives in Miami Vice. Mann sets these stories amid the allure of gorgeous cinematography, often making well-known cities look like brand new tailored playgrounds for men with fast cars and guns, whether it’s L.A., Miami, or Hong Kong in his latest, Blackhat.

Ex Machina Movie Review

It’s worth admiring a movie that attempts to tell a story of big ideas and deal with philosophical challenges, even if the execution isn’t what one might consider perfect. If there’s at least a modicum of kill and effort put into the craft of the storytelling and filmmaking, any missteps are easy to gloss over. Alex Garand’s Ex Machina, a science-fiction thriller takes the issue of artificial intelligence and cuts to the core of meaning behind consciousness and, by extension, humanity.

It Follows Movie Review

It’s long been a sort of tradition in the slasher sub-genre of horror films that those who choose to have sex are doomed to succumb to a horrific death. It was enough of a trope that Wes Craven’s post-modern slasher film Scream listed it as a surefire way for any of its characters to seal their fate. It’s no coincidence then, that It Follows, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, uses sex as the precise mechanism by which its characters attract the attention of the slow-moving, but undeterred creature that wants to take their lives.

A Walk Among the Tombstones Movie Review

Played in all earnestness as a tribute to the private investigator sub-genre of crime fiction, Scott Frank’s adaptation (which he also directed) of Lawrence Block’s A Walk Among the Tombstones is about as grim and nihilistic a treatment as you’re likely to see in a mainstream movie. The character Matt Scudder featured in more than a dozen of Block’s books and some of those have been adapted to the screen before. But Frank, who is no stranger to pulp fiction and mystery stories involving a tough PI (Frank wrote the screenplay adaptations of both Get Shorty and Out of Sight), doesn’t bother trying to reinvent the genre or to put a new spin on it. A Walk Among the Tombstones is effective classic mystery storytelling. It’s more hard-edged and just plain evil than any adaptation of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade ever was, but the hallmarks are there.

The Imitation Game Movie Review

Maybe I’m just not easily impressed anymore. Maybe it’s because I rarely see any of the really bad movies anymore and so by comparison, the stuff that is really good seems so ordinary. The Imitation Game is supposed to be one of the year’s best movies, but it is so utterly conventional, I just found it sort of dull. This is the story of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped decode the messages churned out by Enigma, the Nazis’ communication device, which should be a ripe subject for a fascinating story. The machine Turing developed to break the code laid the foundation for modern computing.

Snowpiercer Movie Review

Joon-ho Bong’s first English language film turns out to b e a bleak allegory about the future (or the present, perhaps) of the human race. Snowpiercer is based on a French graphic novel about a future dystopian Earth that has fallen into a worldwide catastrophe of ultra-cold temperatures and snow. A single train running on a perpetual motion engine makes its way on a round-the-world track taking one year to make the circuit. On board are earth’s only survivors, divided into the working class at the tail section and an aristocracy up front.

The allegorical implications are obvious and hardly worth exploring. It’s a story of the haves versus the have-nots. The people in the tail section survive on protein bars for sustenance. They have no access to any real food or nice clothing that the wealthy have. Revolution is brewing in the air, as it apparently has in the past but been suppressed, led by Curtis (Chris Evans) and his second, Edgar (Jamie Bell). Their mentor is the one-armed, one-legged Gilliam (John Hurt), who pushes Curtis to lead the revolution. Octavia Spencer and Ewan Bremner play two of the revolutionaries who breach the gates along with Curtis, motivated by the removing of their small boys to the front of the train for who knows what? Their first order of business after breaking through the squad of armed guards and three security gates is to release Nam (Kang-ho Song) from the prison section. As the designer of the train’s security system, Nam is literally their access to the front.

Representing the order and oligarchy is Mason, played by a frightfully unrecognizable Tilda Swinton, whose buck teeth and large thick glasses make her a monster. She espouses an unbreakable philosophy of fealty to the train’s engine and its designer, Wilford (played later by Ed Harris). She shows up to teach object lessons to people who refuse to submit. Seven minutes with an arm sticking out of the trin leaves it frozen solid and ripe for smashing.

The screenplay by Bong and Kelly Masterson, based on a French graphic novel, emphasizes themes like cycles (years and seasons are no longer noted by natural progression of the earth around the sun, but by the annual passing of certain landmarks); extinction (cigarettes, bullets, and chickens are all things believed at various points in the story to be extinct, suggesting mankind’ limited time in future history); and perpetuity or eternality (the new god is the “eternal” engine and its operator is humanity’s savior). Wilford and the engine are spoken of by the likes of Mason in terms of such deference and adoration that I thought for sure they would turn out to be mirages. Humanity has essentially been reorganized along familiar lines with new entities supplanting the old (cycles and perpetuity again). Wilford even tries to convince Curtis once he reaches the front to take over the operation. No one lives forever, after all. This is a story about maintaining survival of the species.

The technical challenges of making an action thriller set entirely inside a train must have been great. Bong is a master of camera manipulation. He has a brilliant sense of space and timing and location. His action directing is beautifully organized and choreographed through the whole film. I’m not sure his camera ever “crosses the line.” That is to say, in every shot the direction toward the rear of the train is always left of frame so we never forget where everyone came from and where they’re headed.

And this is an unusual action film in featuring some notable acting. Swinton of course is memorable and brilliant as always. John Hurt and Ed Harris are reliable, bringing empathy and gravity, respectively to their roles. Jaime Bell is youthful and eager, deftly representing a generation of young adults on board who have no memory of anything prior to the train. And Chris Evans, who has demonstrated some surprising actorly skill as Captain America, shows some genuine promise in Snowpiercer. There is a dark side here that makes me anticipate some interesting things in his future if he makes good choices.

It’s the ending I found most beguiling and there’s really no way to talk about it without talking about it so exit now if you don’t like spoilers. There’s an ambiguity that I think Bong wanted out of the ending, but I’m not sure there’s any way to read it as anything but certain doom for humanity. The train blows up and is knocked off the mountain by an avalanche presumably killing everyone on board except two kids: Nam’s seventeen-year old daughter (Ah-sung Ko) and a young boy who was helping to operate the engine. Common wisdom on board has always been that nothing can survive the freezing temperatures, but in the distance they see a polar bear, implying that life goes on (cycles of nature, which actually is eternal unlike the engine). These two kids are the last two human beings on earth. Is Bong implying that they are also a new Adam and Eve and that’s supposed to be an optimistic ending?

I guess it’s a kind of Rorschach test for the audience. One can be hopeful in the possibility of additional train survivors. But when you consider that these two we see, at least, have no survival skills for nature, having been born on the train, the future is bleak. That’s only a piece of what sets Snowpiercer apart from typical summer popcorn movies. It’s got something to say and it’s technically savvy and interesting. I remain pessimistic with regard to the film’s conclusion, but not for what the success of Snowpiercer says about film culture in general.

Classic Movie Review: King Kong

One of the great pleasures of revisiting the really old classics is to see how concise Hollywood storytelling used to be. Watching the original King Kong from 1933, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and written by James Creelaman and Ruth Rose, I was amazed by how much adventure is packed into such a tight timeframe. It’s a little more than half the running time of Peter Jackson’s bloated remake from 2005, but their stories are virtually identical and most of the set pieces have the same basis.

From My Collection: A Simple Plan Movie Review

My history with A Simple Plan is very special. In 1998 I had seen lots of excellent movies that I really admired, but had yet to find a perfect 10. On New Year’s Eve I saw three movies. One of them was Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a movie I didn’t have any significant expectations for outside of being interested in Billy Bob Thornton and the premise of the film: three ordinary men find a bag full of money. What should they do with it? It was probably about halfway to two thirds of the way through when I had a realization that the film was on its way to my standard of perfection if only it could avoid any third act missteps. And then it made it. It arrived to the end and Scott B. Smith, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel, had made all the right choices and I stood in awe of this minor little film that was simply astounding.

Nightcrawler Movie Review

I always admired Jake Gyllenhaal’s talent as an actor. His performance in Prisoners demonstrated a real step up in his game, after which I realized he had even more to offer. But now he stars as Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler, which features a Gyllenhaal performance that blew me away like I didn’t think possible. That’s pretty impressive considering his body of work.

We first see Bloom at night, concealed in darkness. He’s clipping the metal chain link of a fence. A security guard stops him. He maintains a friendly, though slightly awkward interaction with the guard. We think he might be able to talk his way out of the situation when suddenly he attacks. Next he’s driving along, the back of his truck loaded with scrap metal, including the chain link, and his wrist bearing the watch that he spied on the guard. The minor violence of the scene leaves such an impression because this young man comes across as so unassuming and physically harmless.

Summer of Sam Movie Review

I can’t say with any certainty what it was like to live through the summer of 1977 in New York City because I wasn’t born yet, but Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam tries to capture it, or at least some stylized and possibly fantasy version of it. It was one of the hottest summers ever in the city with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees, leading to brown-outs and an eventual blackout. There was a serial killer on the prowl, gunning people down as they sat in their cars at night. Lee’s movie makes it seem like all the killings happened during those few months, but in reality they started a year earlier and were well spread out chronologically with only a couple of the shootings occurring that summer, although Lee includes recreations of nearly all of them scattered throughout the film.

Key Largo Movie Review

Lauren Bacall wasn’t a great actress. This much I’ve learned from watching the four films she made with Humphrey Bogart. But she was a great movie star. She had tremendous screen presence and could practically make the tough Bogart roll over and beg. In Key Largo, their final film together, although I didn’t tally the minutes, I would venture to say they share more screen time than in any other of their previous three outings.

Key Largo was based on a now obscure stage play by Maxwell Anderson about a WWII veteran who runs afoul of a once-notorious mafia kingpin while passing through the Florida Keys and spending time with the family of a slain war buddy. The action is very dialogue heavy, a lot of it indoors in various settings around a hotel mostly closed for the off season. It’s not the most expressive film for a John Huston-directed picture, but he makes the most out of the cramped settings.

Classic Movie Review: To Have and Have Not

Warer Bros. struck gold with Casablanca in 1942 and their blatant attempt to recapitalize on that success came in the form of To Have and Have Not in 1944. It was very loosely based on the Hemingway novel of the same name and bears far more resemblance to the tale of a defiantly neutral anti-hero eking out a loving in Vichy Morocco during WWII than it does to Hemingway’s tale of a tough fisherman in Cuba running contraband to Key West. The Howard Hawks film transplants the story to Vichy Martinique and has Bogart’s Harry Morgan frequent a nightclub with a friendly piano player (played by Hoagy Carmichael) and then brings in a dame, Maria Browning, played by Lauren Bacall in her first screen appearance and first of four alongside her future husband.

Like Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca, Harry tries not to take sides for or against the Vichy government. He’s a man trying to make a living until he is pulled into a deal that has him actively aiding rebels fighting against Vichy. The parallels to Casablanca are so remarkable I can’t believe it’s considered an adaptation of Hemingway’s work rather than Curtiz’s film. There’s a Captain Renard, a police inspector played by Dan Seymour, whom you can almost hear announcing, “Round up the usual suspects.”

One significant, though unnecessary, addition is Harry’s fishing boat partner, a comically bumbling alcoholic played wonderfully by Walter Brennan. Were it not for the history-making pairing of two legendary movie stars who generate some fiery on screen chemistry with the aid of fantastic and sizzling line penned by William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, there wouldn’t be much left here to call classic. To Have and Have Not should have been relegated to Hollywood’s dustbin except that Bacall made such a huge impact on the film’s director and star. Together they impacted the world and became forever solidified in the public consciousness as one of the great Hollywood couples.

Dark Passage Movie Review

Did women’s voices mature earlier in the 40s? Why, when we watch actresses in their early twenties from that period, do they sound like grown women, but today’s young actresses sound like little girls? is there something in our culture today that values infantilizing girls so that they intuitively maintain their immature squeaky whiny tones? Perhaps the question answers itself. Or maybe it’s nothing so deep and dramatic. Maybe actresses then received formal theatrical training like singers to develop their voices. Whatever it is, Lauren Bacall had one of the great all-time sexy mature female voices, even at twenty-two, when she starred in only her fourth feature, and third with Humphrey Bogart, Dark Passage.

Classic Movie Review: The Big Sleep

There’s a legend about the making of The Big Sleep that the filmmakers contacted author Raymond Chandler to ask who had killed the chauffeur in his Philip Marlowe detective tale. He replied that he had no idea. The story, true or not, illustrates the mind-bendingly complex plotting of this classic film noir that has enough plot twists, double crosses, and murders to fill three or four movies.

Humphrey Bogart is Marlowe, the private detective hired by the wealthy patriarch of the Sternwood family to deal with a blackmail scheme involving Carmen (Martha Vickers), the younger of his two daughters. Vivian Rutledge, the elder daughter played by Lauren Bacall, involves herself, setting off a tension-filled relationship between her and Marlow for the remainder of the film. To try to recount the plot or even the basic story would result in a senseless explanation. As directed by Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep is an exercise in style. This is one of the great classic noirs, though it does lack a number of the genres hallmarks.

A Most Wanted Man Movie Review

Roadside Attractions

Master spy novelist John le Carré’s novels have been adapted into films several times. One, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was made twice, the more recent of which may go down as one of the great spy thrillers. Now comes A Most Wanted Man, based on his 2008 novel, which is on the same plane, if not as deeply intricate and taut as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The film, directed by Anton Corbijn and adapted by Andrew Bovell, is a brilliant exercise in restraint. Unlike Corbijn’s last film, The American, it has a great deal of forward momentum, generates real suspense, and is not nearly as opaque. And make no mistake about it – A Most Wanted Man is profoundly and subtly critical of American foreign policy with regard to the war on terror.

Under the Skin Movie Review

A decade after his last feature, Jonathan Glazer returns after the critical and commercial failure of Birth (unseen by me) with a film so beguiling, bewitching, off the wall, and off the charts that it begs to be seen by even the most skeptical of viewers. Under the Skin is certainly not for everyone and I don’t mean that in terms of content. The directorial method and storytelling structure are often maddeningly oblique. The screenplay by Glazer and Walter Campbell is based on Michel Faber’s novel of the same name, although from my reading of Wikipedia’s description, it’s really more a jumping off point.