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.

Looper Movie Review

When a filmmaker ventures down the wormhole of time travel as a narrative device, he’s setting his film up to be prodded and picked apart in the minutest detail to discover all the flaws and inconsistencies. The best time travel movies tend to be the ones that have some intelligence about the process and implications of traveling to the past, but mostly they succeed when the time travel becomes secondary to other elements in the film.

Take a film like Back to the Future, for example. Yes, without the time travel there is no story, but the breakneck pace, the good writing, the funny jokes all take precedence over the fact of Marty going 30 years into the past. In the case of Rian Johnson’s Looper, I could talk about a paradox that unravels the entire story if we follow logical consistency, but we’re dealing with a science fiction action film that relies on something that doesn’t exist and is only theoretically possible in terms of traveling forward in time. In Johnson’s film, the only time travel happens backward.

The Five-Year Engagement Movie Review

SPOILER WARNING: I can’t completely discuss my main criticisms of this film without revealing how the story plays out through the end. Read ahead at your own peril.

Emily Blunt is such a charming actress and has such a light breezy quality to her performances that it’s easy to watch her in just about anything. She has generally been the best aspect of bad and mediocre movies like The Devil Wears Prada, The Wolfman and The Adjustment Bureau. Jason Segel is a charming actor of a different sort. He’s funny, but doesn’t force it. Wisecracking comedy comes naturally to him and his big and goofy demeanor is a valuable asset for likability. They make a fine on screen couple in The Five-Year Engagement and initially I found myself, in spite of all inner protestations toward rom-coms, hoping for the best of a lovely little romance. We know going into any romantic comedy that at the end of the movie, no matter what happens as it runs its course, the couple will be together. The trick to be overcome is in making the journey surprising or at least interesting. The Five-Year Engagement gets about twenty-five percent of that formula by being somewhat interesting and almost never surprising.

The Adjustment Bureau Movie Review: A Bunch of Empty Shirts

The empty shirts go marching in.

What is it with black actors who achieve critical praise and then start taking Magical Negro roles? Morgan Freeman and Will Smith are the prime examples, but now Anthony Mackie? The character actor who made some noise in The Hurt Locker? In The Adjustment Bureau, he plays Harry Mitchell, a member of an adjustment team (angels, perhaps?) who are able to make things happen in the world according to “The Plan.” Who designs The Plan? That would be The Chairman, a character we never see but whom Harry and his partner Richardson (John Slattery) speak of in hushed tones. I leave it to you to decide who or what The Chairman is or represents.

The Wolfman Movie Review

This review is based on the extended cut version.

Can anyone remember the last time Anthony Hopkins made a film that didn’t look like a complete sellout? In the last decade or so he’s probably made one film that’s worth watching – The World’s Fastest Indian. You should seriously give it a look because The Wolfman is anything but worthy of two of hours of your time.

The Wolfman is director Joe Johnston’s attempt at bringing back that old Hollywood monster movie feeling. He’s trying to invoke nostalgia from the appearance of the Universal logo, which is a retooling of the one used in 1941, when Lon Chaney, Jr. donned the wolf makeup and chased Claude Rains around the backlot. It has an opening scene that suggests we might be in for a wonderfully campy ride, with a bombastic and ridiculous musical score, fast cuts of wolf’s claws, growling and snarling on the soundtrack and just enough dripping blood from the victim to be scary without tipping the balance toward gruesome.

No, The Government Actually Has Very Little Control

The Adjustment Bureau opens today. Here's political reporter Ezra Klein's take on the idea that some overarching government bureaucracy can possibly control anything more complicated than the organization of a fundraiser.

Nearest I can glean from the trailer, the film concerns a secret agency that has a hand in controlling the outcomes of basically everything in political life. As much as many people would like to believe this is the case, most everyone who works in and writes about politics would probably tell you that the reality of government is generally a disorganized mess.

Shhhh, don't tell this to the idiots in the 9/11 Truth Movement. For them, any outward appearance of disorganization is probably just further evidence of the tremendous depth of the conspiracy. They're so clever they've led every political reporter to the conclusion that government doesn't know what it's doing most of the time!

I don't have any immediate plans to see the movie. For one it's not going to play at the cinema in Seville that shows films subtitled and I refuse to see dubbed films. Also it just doesn't interest me a whole lot. It's unlikely to make my video list later this year.

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.