The Green Zone (2010)
Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matt Damon, Brendan Gleeson,Greg Kinnear
The Green Zone looks and feels like the last two Bourne Identity movies. And why shouldn’t it? Matt Damon, the star of the series, is in the lead. Paul Greengrass, the master of cinema-verite violence is the man behind the camera. However, it is anything but The Bourne films. As opposed to the snappy, tight, well-written screenplay by Tony Gilroy, this movie seems to be nothing but one giant, mindless chase scene, with vague references to revisionist thought on the American invasion of Iraq. Brian Hegeland’s screenplay falls flat on all fronts; lacking any semblance of character development, plot development, or really any kind of thing in terms of a truly cohesive story. Many different auteurs have used genre pieces to make comments on various socio-political issues. However, in the case of The Green Zone, Greengrass’ effort is mediocre at best.
Judging by the topic and the style of this movie, it seems as if it should be a slam-dunk for Greengrass. The man who shot to prominence with Bloody Sunday, a pseudo-documentary about the infamous Irish massacre, and then shot into the stratosphere with The Bourne Supremacy, has shown the perfect amount of dexterity and showmanship in the past. He was able to take a potentially divisive story like United 93 and turn it into one of the most compelling movies of 2006.
The Green Zone cannot be saved by the intricately orchestrated action sequences or the interminable chase sequence at the end of the film. While the thirteen year old boy and me wanted to jump and cheer each time something blew up, I could not find myself really caring much about what was going on. Near the climax I found myself wondering, “why do I care that he’s being shot? “ or “why do I care about any of this at all?” Unfortunately, The Green Zone does not supply the viewer with any sort of revelations about the Iraq war, nor does it supply any kind of commentary on the conflict. In the end, it is nothing more than a trumped up action film that happens to be set in Iraq.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Art House Brazil
A Deriva (Adrift) (2009)
Directed by: Heitor Dhalia
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Camilla Belle, Debora Bloch
A Deriva is the latest in a slew of high-minded movies coming out of Brazil. What was once a nation that seemed to be identified with nothing but Chiquita Bananas and the samba, has produced one challenging and intelligent movie after another. Starting with Central Station (1998), followed by Behind the Sun (2001), and finally the infamous City of God, Brazil has become the powerhouse in Latin American cinema. These movies almost entirely focus on the poor and forgotten parts of Brazil, as if these directors were hoping to erase the image of shimmering beaches and women in bikinis and paint over it a mural of poverty, crime, and dilapidation. A Deriva strives to take a different angle from these movies; it attempts to show the trappings of upper class life during the end of the period of military dictatorship in Brazil. While it succeeds on some levels, the movie falls flat in others.
At its core, A Deriva is a tale of a family torn apart by marital infidelity by the patriarch of the family (Vincent Cassel). This infidelity is witnessed by the protagonist, the fifteen-year-old Fillipa, who is coming of age while the family spends a summer in the posh beach resort town of Buzios. What follows are a string of wonderful performances, an interesting and very adult look at what marital infidelity and marriage can mean, and one painfully flat performance by the object of the father’s affection.
The movie is held together by Vincent Cassel. There is no other way to phrase it. He is the beating heart of this movie and gives one of his best performances since La Haine (1995), a performance that is all the more spectacular realizing that he is speaking in his non-native Portuguese. The supporting cast gives admiral performances as well, Laura Neiva as Fillipa, Debora Bloch as Clarice the mother, and the other actors give good performances. However, when it comes to Angela, the young woman with whom the father is having an affair, the story falls flat. Camilla Belle spends most of the film walking around looking like the Carmen Miranda character from Looney Tunes cartoons. Rather than being a seductive figure, something that could attract as much scorn as she does during the course of the movie, she comes off as lost and silly. If not for the performances by Cassel and Bloch, the movie would fall apart the minute that Anglea is first seen by Fillipa. Thankfully, it does not.
Buzios is a beautiful beach town. It is a town infamous amongst the elite of Brazil for a reason and when Ricardo Della Rosa is a given a chance, he photographs the scenes beautifully. Unfortunately, the sections of the movie where he is not allowed to do so bring to mind a quote from Billy Wilder:“ Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.” Mr. Dhalia has written a very mature, very adult, very interesting screenplay about coming of age and witnessing a broken marriage. Better yet, he has the ability to look further into how two adults deal with and try to manage a marriage. Unfortunately, he tries too hard to let us know that he is doing that, throwing the camera around in random flashes of hand-held, out of focus blues and greens.
A Deriva is a terrific change from what has been the general fare to reach our shores from Brazil. It is well thought-out, well directed, and by and large well-acted. If only the director could have been comfortable enough with the film he produced to avoid the trappings of a less-confident director and left the camera where it belongs, on the story at hand.
Directed by: Heitor Dhalia
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Camilla Belle, Debora Bloch
A Deriva is the latest in a slew of high-minded movies coming out of Brazil. What was once a nation that seemed to be identified with nothing but Chiquita Bananas and the samba, has produced one challenging and intelligent movie after another. Starting with Central Station (1998), followed by Behind the Sun (2001), and finally the infamous City of God, Brazil has become the powerhouse in Latin American cinema. These movies almost entirely focus on the poor and forgotten parts of Brazil, as if these directors were hoping to erase the image of shimmering beaches and women in bikinis and paint over it a mural of poverty, crime, and dilapidation. A Deriva strives to take a different angle from these movies; it attempts to show the trappings of upper class life during the end of the period of military dictatorship in Brazil. While it succeeds on some levels, the movie falls flat in others.
At its core, A Deriva is a tale of a family torn apart by marital infidelity by the patriarch of the family (Vincent Cassel). This infidelity is witnessed by the protagonist, the fifteen-year-old Fillipa, who is coming of age while the family spends a summer in the posh beach resort town of Buzios. What follows are a string of wonderful performances, an interesting and very adult look at what marital infidelity and marriage can mean, and one painfully flat performance by the object of the father’s affection.
The movie is held together by Vincent Cassel. There is no other way to phrase it. He is the beating heart of this movie and gives one of his best performances since La Haine (1995), a performance that is all the more spectacular realizing that he is speaking in his non-native Portuguese. The supporting cast gives admiral performances as well, Laura Neiva as Fillipa, Debora Bloch as Clarice the mother, and the other actors give good performances. However, when it comes to Angela, the young woman with whom the father is having an affair, the story falls flat. Camilla Belle spends most of the film walking around looking like the Carmen Miranda character from Looney Tunes cartoons. Rather than being a seductive figure, something that could attract as much scorn as she does during the course of the movie, she comes off as lost and silly. If not for the performances by Cassel and Bloch, the movie would fall apart the minute that Anglea is first seen by Fillipa. Thankfully, it does not.
Buzios is a beautiful beach town. It is a town infamous amongst the elite of Brazil for a reason and when Ricardo Della Rosa is a given a chance, he photographs the scenes beautifully. Unfortunately, the sections of the movie where he is not allowed to do so bring to mind a quote from Billy Wilder:“ Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.” Mr. Dhalia has written a very mature, very adult, very interesting screenplay about coming of age and witnessing a broken marriage. Better yet, he has the ability to look further into how two adults deal with and try to manage a marriage. Unfortunately, he tries too hard to let us know that he is doing that, throwing the camera around in random flashes of hand-held, out of focus blues and greens.
A Deriva is a terrific change from what has been the general fare to reach our shores from Brazil. It is well thought-out, well directed, and by and large well-acted. If only the director could have been comfortable enough with the film he produced to avoid the trappings of a less-confident director and left the camera where it belongs, on the story at hand.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Hooray. Another Noah Baumbach Film
Spring has come and Noah Baumbach has decided it is time to grace us with a new movie to correspond with the thawing of winter. Greenberg, is another in a slew of suspended animation- adult/child movies that have made Judd Apatow into an “auteur.” The difference between Mr. Apatow and Mr. Baumbach is that Apatow makes the movies with heart and genuine enthusiasm that seem to jump out of the screen. Meanwhile, Mr. Baumbach has been at work in what I am sure is a Greenwich Village apartment, slaving away at what he has deemed as an intellectually important film.
Mr. Baumbach has made five movies in his career, the progeny of two critics; he has poked, prodded, and strived to make “intellectual” independent movies. Instead, he has made movies that amount to nothing more than fluff, full of dialogue and stories that would be found in any college screenwriting course, featuring the always sophomoric topics of family dysfunction, suicide, and sexual dysfunction.
While he made a few movies under the radar during the early 1990’s, he came to prominence with The Squid and the Whale (2005), a loosely autobiographical film about a divorce. He followed this with another tale of family dysfunction with Margot at the Wedding (2007). These two movies were largely met with great reviews, a fact that mystifies me to this day. Both movies press the audience’s buttons and take the viewer to uncomfortable places, especially as they deal with the relationships of the characters. However, they offer no solution, ask no real questions, they just display each character as they go through relatively banal situations in upper-crust bohemia.
Baumbach strives to replicate the strained marriages of Bergman movies, while lacking the depth of soul to replicate the great director’s work. Making references to esoteric movies like The Mother and the Whore, or making snide jokes about masturbation does not constitute intellectualism nor does it constitute an intriguing or challenging movie. Doing the movie in the style of cinema-verite, only further turns the movies into some kind of hodge-podge of Cassavetes’ stories, while lacking the immediacy that his movies presented. Yet, people are charmed by these movies, critics regularly laud them, seduced by his snarky remarks and unlikeable characters.
All we can hope for now is that Baumbach will give us another work in collaboration with one of his regulars, Wes Anderson. Anderson, another critical darling, used to be an interesting filmmaker. He made movies like Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998), and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), all of which Anderson co-wrote with Owen Wilson. All of these movies managed to have a moral center, wonderfully comic moments, and good performances, while also asking interesting questions and presenting interesting answers to them. His matter of fact, almost un-emotional and detached style of having dialogue delivered by the actors worked. It was interesting, new, and still managed to bring the audience into the sphere of the movie.
Strangely, or not so strangely, when Anderson stopped writing with Wilson, and joined forces with Baumbach for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) the movies took a turn for the worse. All of a sudden the movies lost their style, their zip, and their panache. The characters that the audience formerly were able to identify with, empathize with, and enjoy for the duration of the movie were gone. Instead, a smarmy new form inhabited the screen, one without interest, without likable characters, without any sort of intellectual merit; they became flat boring stories about “exotic” places that lacked any kind of soul. This trend, while most heinously committed by The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, continued with their next collaboration, The Darjeeling Limited- another flat piece about brothers trying to find themselves in exotic India. This had a companion piece that was accessible from the Internet, a short film featuring Natalie Portman, that was almost unwatchable, entitled Hotel Chevalier. The short movie is about boring people living in the lap of luxury in Paris, who sit in bed discussing their relationship for fifteen minutes without any emotion. The conclusion is just as enthralling as the opening. For those that missed it, kudos to you.
The latest, a stop-motion adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, is just as bad as the others. The only thing that saves the movie is the stop-motion animation done by the same team that created Wallace and Gromit’s movies. If it were not for the animation of the movie, it would have been just as vapid and flat as any other creation by Anderson & Baumbach.
Noah Baumbach has decided to grace us with his presence and present another morally bereft, vapid, and insidious piece of filmmaking that should be relegated to college short film classes. The hole that John Cassavettes and Ingmar Bergman left for intellectually strident movies about troubled relationships has yet to be filled, no matter how entitled Mr. Baumbach seems to feel to attain that role.
Mr. Baumbach has made five movies in his career, the progeny of two critics; he has poked, prodded, and strived to make “intellectual” independent movies. Instead, he has made movies that amount to nothing more than fluff, full of dialogue and stories that would be found in any college screenwriting course, featuring the always sophomoric topics of family dysfunction, suicide, and sexual dysfunction.
While he made a few movies under the radar during the early 1990’s, he came to prominence with The Squid and the Whale (2005), a loosely autobiographical film about a divorce. He followed this with another tale of family dysfunction with Margot at the Wedding (2007). These two movies were largely met with great reviews, a fact that mystifies me to this day. Both movies press the audience’s buttons and take the viewer to uncomfortable places, especially as they deal with the relationships of the characters. However, they offer no solution, ask no real questions, they just display each character as they go through relatively banal situations in upper-crust bohemia.
Baumbach strives to replicate the strained marriages of Bergman movies, while lacking the depth of soul to replicate the great director’s work. Making references to esoteric movies like The Mother and the Whore, or making snide jokes about masturbation does not constitute intellectualism nor does it constitute an intriguing or challenging movie. Doing the movie in the style of cinema-verite, only further turns the movies into some kind of hodge-podge of Cassavetes’ stories, while lacking the immediacy that his movies presented. Yet, people are charmed by these movies, critics regularly laud them, seduced by his snarky remarks and unlikeable characters.
All we can hope for now is that Baumbach will give us another work in collaboration with one of his regulars, Wes Anderson. Anderson, another critical darling, used to be an interesting filmmaker. He made movies like Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998), and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), all of which Anderson co-wrote with Owen Wilson. All of these movies managed to have a moral center, wonderfully comic moments, and good performances, while also asking interesting questions and presenting interesting answers to them. His matter of fact, almost un-emotional and detached style of having dialogue delivered by the actors worked. It was interesting, new, and still managed to bring the audience into the sphere of the movie.
Strangely, or not so strangely, when Anderson stopped writing with Wilson, and joined forces with Baumbach for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) the movies took a turn for the worse. All of a sudden the movies lost their style, their zip, and their panache. The characters that the audience formerly were able to identify with, empathize with, and enjoy for the duration of the movie were gone. Instead, a smarmy new form inhabited the screen, one without interest, without likable characters, without any sort of intellectual merit; they became flat boring stories about “exotic” places that lacked any kind of soul. This trend, while most heinously committed by The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, continued with their next collaboration, The Darjeeling Limited- another flat piece about brothers trying to find themselves in exotic India. This had a companion piece that was accessible from the Internet, a short film featuring Natalie Portman, that was almost unwatchable, entitled Hotel Chevalier. The short movie is about boring people living in the lap of luxury in Paris, who sit in bed discussing their relationship for fifteen minutes without any emotion. The conclusion is just as enthralling as the opening. For those that missed it, kudos to you.
The latest, a stop-motion adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, is just as bad as the others. The only thing that saves the movie is the stop-motion animation done by the same team that created Wallace and Gromit’s movies. If it were not for the animation of the movie, it would have been just as vapid and flat as any other creation by Anderson & Baumbach.
Noah Baumbach has decided to grace us with his presence and present another morally bereft, vapid, and insidious piece of filmmaking that should be relegated to college short film classes. The hole that John Cassavettes and Ingmar Bergman left for intellectually strident movies about troubled relationships has yet to be filled, no matter how entitled Mr. Baumbach seems to feel to attain that role.
The Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall
The Ghost Writer is without a doubt the best movie so far in 2010 and perhaps the best movie that Roman Polanski has done since Tess (1979). It is an adult, thinking-man’s thriller. It requires patience, it requires thought, and (God-forbid), it challenges the audience while watching a movie. It tells the tale of, well, a ghostwriter who has been hired to write the memoirs of a Prime Minister who was forced to leave office. As the ghostwriter becomes increasingly involved in the inner-workings of the Prime Minister’s life, everything is not as it seems, and could have dire consequences.
First- the movie is beautifully photographed. Absolutely gorgeous. It is almost so pretty that it distracts from the movie itself. Polanski has substituted the Northern Coast of Germany for Cape Cod, and cinematographer Pawel Edelman captures it in beautiful cobalt blues and grays.
Secondly- the performances are by and large fantastic. The usually stiff Pierce Brosnan is smarmy and stately as ex-Prime Minster Adam Lang, Ewan McGregor borders on being a Woody Allen-nebbish as the Ghost Writer, and Olivia Williams shows them all up as Ruth Lang, Brosnan’s wife. James Belushi and Timothy Hutton give delightful performances in what are no more than brief cameos, and Tom Wilkinson is sinister in a role that reminds me of some of Hitchcock’s best mystery men. The one low point is Kim Cattrall’s cardboard performance as Lang’s secretary/ mistress. She seems to not know where she is supposed to be or what accent she is supposed to be doing as she waffles between an American and British accent for most of the film.
The movie is, for the first time in a long time, something that is reminiscent of Hitchcock in its story, its intrigue, and its ability to build tension. It is the first time in a long time that I can remember actually tensing in my seat as the movie built speed toward its climax. I would rather not give away the ending, but it features one of the best reveals in recent cinema.
I highly recommend viewing The Ghost Writer, perhaps the best movie that is in the theaters during this dead zone between the Oscar season and the coming summer-blockbuster explosion-fest.
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall
The Ghost Writer is without a doubt the best movie so far in 2010 and perhaps the best movie that Roman Polanski has done since Tess (1979). It is an adult, thinking-man’s thriller. It requires patience, it requires thought, and (God-forbid), it challenges the audience while watching a movie. It tells the tale of, well, a ghostwriter who has been hired to write the memoirs of a Prime Minister who was forced to leave office. As the ghostwriter becomes increasingly involved in the inner-workings of the Prime Minister’s life, everything is not as it seems, and could have dire consequences.
First- the movie is beautifully photographed. Absolutely gorgeous. It is almost so pretty that it distracts from the movie itself. Polanski has substituted the Northern Coast of Germany for Cape Cod, and cinematographer Pawel Edelman captures it in beautiful cobalt blues and grays.
Secondly- the performances are by and large fantastic. The usually stiff Pierce Brosnan is smarmy and stately as ex-Prime Minster Adam Lang, Ewan McGregor borders on being a Woody Allen-nebbish as the Ghost Writer, and Olivia Williams shows them all up as Ruth Lang, Brosnan’s wife. James Belushi and Timothy Hutton give delightful performances in what are no more than brief cameos, and Tom Wilkinson is sinister in a role that reminds me of some of Hitchcock’s best mystery men. The one low point is Kim Cattrall’s cardboard performance as Lang’s secretary/ mistress. She seems to not know where she is supposed to be or what accent she is supposed to be doing as she waffles between an American and British accent for most of the film.
The movie is, for the first time in a long time, something that is reminiscent of Hitchcock in its story, its intrigue, and its ability to build tension. It is the first time in a long time that I can remember actually tensing in my seat as the movie built speed toward its climax. I would rather not give away the ending, but it features one of the best reveals in recent cinema.
I highly recommend viewing The Ghost Writer, perhaps the best movie that is in the theaters during this dead zone between the Oscar season and the coming summer-blockbuster explosion-fest.
Top 10 Movies of 2009
In one of the worst years for movies in memory, I have somehow managed to pull together an all too-important top ten list.
Best of 2009
1. Linha de Passe
2. Un Prophete
3. Sin Nombre
4. The White Ribbon
5. Where the Wild Things Are
6. A Serious Man
7. The Baader Meinhof Complex
8. In the Loop
9. Sugar
10. Crude
Honorable Mention: The Cove, The Hangover, Broken Embraces, Up in the Air
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