Invictus

Eastwood/Freeman
Mandela's Lessons Come Across Loud and Clear
By Cole Smithey

Morgan Freeman's brilliant performance as Nelson Mandela is the kind of transformation that Academy Award members aggressively reward come Oscar season. Whether or not they'll be as impressed with Anthony Peckham's airy adaptation of John Carlin's book "Playing the Enemy" is questionable. The story is set in 1995, during the early days of Nelson Mandela's presidency, after he served 27 years in prison. Settling into his office, Mandela makes a point to meet with a black nationalist group that has voted to abolish the Springboks, South Africa's popular-among-Afrikaners rugby team. With calm resolve Mandela explains to his "brothers, sisters, and comrades" that it is better to lead by example than to mimic their former oppressors, who are now "partners in democracy." Viewing the Springboks as an ideal tool for promoting multiracial unity, Mandela invites the Springbok's level-headed Afrikaner team captain Francois (Matt Damon) for tea. There Mandela plants seeds of encouragement about Francois leading the Springboks to World Cup victory. Mandela mentions William Ernest Henely's poem "Invictus" to Francois as a fount of inspiration that kept him sane in prison. "Invictus" is beautiful snapshot biopic that lacks dramatic significance in its subplots. Still, the film makes its points by way of Eastwood's usual assured direction and Morgan Freeman's considerable portrayal.

Clint Eastwood has been a frequent fixture at the Academy Awards. With two films in 2006 ("Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima"), and 2008's "Changeling" and "Gran Torino," it's clear that Eastwood intends to make meaningful films until he can no longer get out of bed. Cinema audiences are all the richer for it. At 79 the former actor who jumped ranks from TV to spaghetti westerns--after working as a television cowboy on "Rawhide" (1959-1965)--is a consummate American filmmaker. Eastwood's mature approach to directing is the stuff of legend, and the proof of its effectiveness never drops from view in "Invictus." Matt Damon's Francois hardly has any lines compared to his typical roles, and with his perfectly articulated Afrikaner accent and blond hair, you almost forget that it's Damon on screen.

"Invictus" is an instructive real-life parable that equates the significance of any one man to the greater effect he can achieve through his actions and speech. South Africa's unique idea of achieving "reconciliation" with their brutal oppressors is more than just a foreign concept to western culture. It is diametrically opposed to the eye-for-an-eye religious dogma used for 500-years by colonizing brigands to effect carte blanche military takeovers all over the world.

The film opens upon the arrival of Mandela in his new post as President. When Mandela's car passes a rugby field, a white coach calls Mandela a "terrorist" to one of his white teenaged players. The man instructs the boy to remember this day (Sunday, February 11, 1995) as the day that the county "went to the dogs." Convincingly processed newsreel footage shows Freeman's Mandela addressing 100,000 protesters in Durban. "Take your knives, and your guns, and your pangas, and throw them into the sea." Upon being sworn into office, the captivating Mandela promises, "Never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world."  

Reductive public speeches such as this, given to widely different groups of people in various public and private venues, exhibit Mandela's natural gift for expressing sensitive logic to remove confusion and clearly state his heartfelt messages of unity. "Invictus" is perhaps an appropriately disorienting word to open up more social discourse among us about how to better coexist with our neighbors close and far. And yet, it doesn't matter whether or not the film achieves such lofty goals because Clint Eastwood artistically tells an intrinsically dramatic story--a sports story even--that provides a concise history lesson about a momentous year of one of the world's best equipped world leaders.

Rated PG for brief strong language. 134 mins. (Warner Bros. Pictures) (B+) (Four Stars)

December 4th Episode

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Posted by Cole Smithey on December 4, 2009 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Up In The Air

Pink Slip Flight
Unemployment Gets a Lift
By Cole Smithey

George Clooney's intentionally ambiguous character Ryan Bingham is a poster boy for America's lack of ethical direction in this thought-provoking satire about America's unemployment epidemic. Unfortunately, this film fails to swing its hammer of simmering revolution hard enough. Smarmy Ryan loves his city-hopping lifestyle--he loves collecting frequent flyer miles--doing paid gigs as a motivational speaker with a cynical message. He also works as the number-one hatchet man for an outsourcing company that lays off employees for big companies. Wanting neither marriage, kids, nor commitment, Ryan happily slips into a low-key affair with Alex (Vera Farmiga), a flight attendant who shares Ryan's shallow worldview--at least on the surface. A big snag appears in the form of upstart corporate spitfire Natalie (Anna Kendrick), whose attempt at making Ryan's job obsolete with the use of video conferencing transforms the ambitious-but-callow Natalie into Ryan's personal traveling trainee. Based on Walter Kirn's novel, the reliably humorous script is co-authored by Sheldon Turner and director Jason Reitman. After making "Thank You for Smoking" and "Juno," Reitman attacks socio-economic satire with a combination of verite sequences, light slapstick, and earthy sex appeal. The movie finds its level whenever Reitman's camera depicts the outspoken responses of people being fired from jobs where they've toiled for years. The film seems to say, "It's okay that we're all losing our jobs, because it will invariably lead us to our own individual bliss." 

2009 was the year of "altitude" at the movies. Jonathan Glatzer's miserable "What Goes Up," the Disney/Pixar winner "Up," and even Sam Mendes's insufferable "Away We Go" prepped audiences for "Up in the Air" as the last bit of optimistic helium in the year's metaphorical filmic tank. Its opening credits are full of aerial shots of snow-blown mountains, manicured farm crops, and all sorts of skylines. Reitman conveys a palpable sense of spending more time floating above the ground rather than on it for our constantly roving protagonist. Ryan starts his motivational speeches by convincing his audience of corporate drones to imagine putting all of their lives--every household possession, including car and house--into a backpack that holds them stagnate like a gigantic anchor. However, Ryan tells his audience that "relationships" are the things that weigh them down the most. This particular bit of emphasized information clashes sidelong with the heartbreaking faces of the people that Ryan sends off into limbo everyday when he dispassionately fires them from across a characterless desk with a carefully worded formula designed to numb the process. The recurring straight-to-camera montages of people resisting expulsion from their careers, characterizes the country as a systemized machine made for ruining people's lives.

The film's most fascinating aspect is the way the filmmakers contrast the material's contradicting emotional elements. We like Ryan because he's a perpetually upbeat smooth talker who, in spite of his decisively awkward job, is clearly operating inside his comfort zone. Like Aaron Eckhart's silver-tongued character in "Thank You for Smoking," Ryan is a master of spin who briefly disguises harsh realities with a toothpaste smile that never falters into the shit-eating-grin that logically lurks behind the brilliant facade. We know Ryan is a scourge of society, but at least he's a "professional." One of the film's defining scenes takes place between Ryan and Natalie when he invites her to "fire" him during a heated discussion about her idea to reinvent the company's workflow with long distance video conferencing. In seconds, Ryan reveals her incompetence, and defines the chasm between his comparably humane approach to personally pushing people into the abyss of unemployment.

"Up in the Air" is poised as Oscar-bait, and the performances from Clooney and Farmiga are some of the best from Hollywood in a year of paltry films. The movie generated big buzz at the Telluride and Toronto festivals, but it remains a picture of shiny surfaces and flimsy metaphors. Just because Ryan carries out his sister's wedding wish of taking photos of the couple's cardboard image front of various national landmarks, doesn't function as well as the screenwriters imagine toward incurring anything more than corniness. However, the film makes unmistakable the cheesy curtain of capitalism and the knife that hides behind it. In "Rosemary's Baby," Roman Polanski briefly flashed the eyes of the Devil during the satanic rape scene. The image sticks in audience's subconscious and has a way of popping up days after seeing the film. In "Up in the Air," the faces of laid off employees come back haunt you. For modern capitalism, the workers are the devils waiting to be damned to hell by the "nice" man at the gate. You'll like him; he's played by George Clooney.

(Paramount Pictures) Rated R for language and some sexual content. 109 mins. (B) (Three Stars)

Posted by Cole Smithey on December 1, 2009 in Comedy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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November 20, 2009 Episode

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Posted by Cole Smithey on November 25, 2009 in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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The Road

No Future
Hillcoat and Penhall Are at a Loss for Ideas
By Cole Smithey

"The Road" is a one-note road version of "Waiting for Godot," minus Samuel Beckett's brilliant sense of existentialist humor. Based on Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, director John Hillcoat makes no attempt to convert screenwriter Joe Penhall's straight-line rendition into a narrative arc. It doesn't help that the characters don't have names. Viggo Mortensen plays "the Man." His 11-year-old son is "the Boy" (played blankly by Kodi Smit-McPhee). After being deserted by "the Wife" (played by Charlize Theron), Man and Boy wander a gray post-apocalyptic America where no explanation of what happed to wipe out most of the country is ever given. Determined to make it south to the ocean, our homeless duo encounter marauding gangs of murderers and cannibals. The baddies are menacing enough, but any attendant suspense is blunted by the movie's lack of narrative structure. The Man has only two bullets in his revolver, reserved for murder-suicide should the situation ever require such desperate measures. Robert Duvall plays the film's most empathetic character, a fellow traveler on the film's road to nowhere.

Of Cormac McCarthy's last six novels, three have been turned into films and another one ("Blood Meridian"--to be directed by Todd Field) is due for release in 2011. While Billy Bob Thornton's laconic directorial effort with "All the Pretty Horses" (2000) went largely unnoticed, the Coen Brothers' 2005 rendering of "No Country for Old Men" shed a different kind of light on the darkly comic filmic possibilities of McCarthy's work. The Coens transmogrified "No Country" into a film that somehow encompassed implacable greed and cruelty with a jaundiced satirical eye that pushed the audience into thinking about America's political influence on its dusty border-patrolled landscape. Indeed, satire is the very thing that's missing from John Hillcoat's prosaic treatment of what should have been an expansive commentary on America's knee-jerk consumerist culture that's driving the Industrial Revolution off a cliff and taking Mother Nature with it.

John Hillcoat struck it lucky in 2005 adapting Nick Cave's wild-and-wooly Australian western "The Proposition," by nurturing a Hitchcock-inspired sense of suspense and unpredictable violence that lent historical meaning to the material. But Hillcoat is on far less stable ground when dipping his toes into an emaciated futuristic environment.

The filmmakers treat McCarthy's multi-layered survival novel as nothing more than a handing off of generational hope into the hands of strangers that seem no more capable or trustworthy than those that came before. Certainly, Joe Penhall does a disservice to McCarthy's text by inserting flashbacks about the wife, seemingly for the purpose of adding Charlize Theron's name to the credits in the hope of attracting a wider audience. "The Road" needed a more worldly hands-on auteur like a Tarantino or a Verhoeven who could craft the script and put it on film with an overarching influence of humor and editorial meaning. If you look at a film like "Inglourious Basterds" or "Starship Troopers" you find yourself pulled into a whirlpool of narrative inertia that's entirely absent in "The Road" because the filmmakers embrace an ambivalent attitude regarding subtext. For such rich source material, the filmmakers have left out the most important ingredient: ideas.

Rated R. 113 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

Posted by Cole Smithey on November 24, 2009 in Drama | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Red Cliff

Wave a White Flag
John Woo's Must-See Chinese War Epic
By Cole Smithey

John Woo delivers on "Red Cliff's" reputation as the most expensive Chinese-language film ever made. "Red Cliff" is a mesmerizing war epic that concentrates on ancient techniques of military strategy as played out on a grand stage. Set in 208 AD, the 131-minute film hits the ground running as general Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) asserts his power over the Han Emperor Xian (Wang Ning), leading his troops south to conquer regional warlords, the benevolent Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen). But Liu Bei has a secret weapon: a skilled advisor Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), whose brilliant counsel makes for some dramatic plot twists. The ensemble of actors including Vicki Zhao and Tony Leung Chiu-wai give stellar performances in a lush piece of mythic history. The balance of natural beauty, complex characters, wartime drama, and epic scale, makes "Red Cliff" a must-see movie. And you'll have something to look forward to afterward: the second half of the two-part series ("The Battle of Red Cliff") comes out in January.

Compared to typical big spectacle Hollywood blockbusters like "2012," "Red Cliff" contrasts its visually stunning epic-scale compositions with a far greater sense of historic purpose. Woo's close attention to giving every weapon and prop a sense of handcrafted design gives his actors a strong sense of time and place. There are plenty of impressive big battle scenes on land and in the water. Every flinching muscle of horse and human comes across with an understanding of the stratagem behind each massive assault.

Cao Cao's million troops easily topple Liu Bei's Xu Kingdom and cause its citizens to run off with Liu Bei's army. In the desperate situation Liu Bei sends representative Zhuge Liang to form an alliance with the wealthy Kingdom of East Wu. In order for his request to be considered by East Wu leader Sun Quan (Chang Chen), Zhuge Liang must impress the Viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) with his musical skills in a duet that speaks volumes for Woo's nuanced balancing act of tradition, wisdom, and far reaching objectives. 

The story digs in with the allies encampment on the south bank of the Yangtze River in a steep area called Red Cliff. Sun Quan's fearless sister Sun Shangxiang (Zhao Wei) plays by her own rules when she disguises herself as one of Cao Cao's soldiers and goes behind enemy lines to spy on Cao's plans. The allies effect a brilliant stroke of strategy when they purposely attract nearly 100,000 flaming arrows from Cao Cao's battleships in order to gain ammunition. Later in the story, a knowledge of weather patterns proves dramatically effective for the allies.

The script was co-written by Woo with three other writers (Khan Chan, Kuo Cheng, and Sheng Heyu), and is based on the classic Chinese novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" by Luo Guanzhong. The fictionalized story is a popular touchstone all over Asia as evidenced by its wide appearance in Asian video games and comic books. The West has nothing like "Red Cliff" to draw upon for films. So while America teens swoon over the next "Twilight" installment or the next 3-D Avatar-inspired bit of eye-candy, you can go see a big spectacle movie with some meat on its bones.

(Magnet) Rated R. 148 mins. (A-)

Posted by Cole Smithey on November 16, 2009 in Action/Adventure | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Fantastic Mr. Fox

Dolling up Dahl
Wes Anderson Finds His Genre: Animation
By Cole Smithey

Wes Anderson is famous for his quirky sense of absurdist humor. Although he might argue against it, Anderson seems to have finally found his forte—in animation, vis-à-vis Roald Dahl's 1970 children's book. With a script co-written by Anderson and Noah ("The Squid and the Whale") Baumbach, Anderson creates a magical stop-animation world inhabited by a family of foxes, various other woodland creatures, and a group of human farmers who don't take kindly to having their livestock and cider carried off by animals. George Clooney applies his signature leathery voice to Mr. Fox, a snappily dressed family guy whose animal nature wars with his interest in his family's safety as they keep house in their peaceful foxhole. Meryl Streep voices Mr. Fox's even-keeled wife, and Jason Schwartzman speaks for the couple's bratty son Ash. Ash tries to compete with his athletic cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson) who has come to stay with the family. Three nearby industrial farms (Boggis, Bunch, and Bean) prove too much of a temptation for Mr. Fox, whose plan to raid the three farms brings down more human wrath than he is prepared to handle. There are some significant coincidences between Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are" and Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox." Both stories rely on themes of the untamed animal nature inside all of us, and of child characters actively interacting in an adult world. Toward that narrative end Anderson's film better satisfies, perhaps because Dahl's book presented more developed source material than Maurice Sendak's book. Anderson's lavish attention to visual detail supports the dry wit on display in a highly original animated film geared to appeal equally to children and adults.

Wes Anderson always works with a co-writer. He wrote his first three films with Owen Wilson before writing "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004) with Noah Baumbach, whose co-writing contribution to "Mr. Fox" seems to mesh seamlessly with the intentionality of both Dahl's book and Anderson's wisecracking approach.

The director's signature gestures (unusual props, insert shots, quick hand-held pans between characters, and a fascination with active lifestyle cross-section visuals) come to life in a cinematic canvas covered in kitschy filigree. The exquisite perfection of the fur on Mr. Fox's head inspires wonder in a magical mythical cartoon way that beguiles you. The lush beauty of the film's specific style of animation breathes with an organic quality that is rich in texture, color, and sophistication.

The film opens with Mr. Fox leaning against the hilltop tree positioned directly over his family's rural England home at dusk. The sun's warm golden light reflects off the strands of wheat that blossom from the tan breast pocket of the dapper Mr. Fox. The Davy Crockett theme song ("The Ballad of Davy Crockett") plays on Mr. Fox's transistor radio and we get a sense of time, mood, and switched places; we're in an England where Davy Crockett is played on a rural radio station. Right away, the filmmakers capture your imagination with a dynamic visual style that is the polar opposite of the cold animation techniques used in "Disney's A Christmas Carol." Anderson took inspiration from Russian filmmaker Ladislas Starevich's 1941 stop-motion film "Le Roman de Renard" ("The Tale of the Fox"), whose "herky-jerky" look gave it a special organic quality.

In Wes Anderson's hands Roald Dahl's imaginative child's story takes on a meta significance as a human-development-coming-of-age story that applies across age groups, generations, social strata, and even species. Taking responsibility for emotional commitments has been a through-line in all of Anderson's films, which began with the cult favorite "Bottle Rocket" (1996) before zigzagging across muddled comic landscapes in "Rushmore" (1998), "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001), "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004), and "The Darjeeling Limited" (2007).

Like his last four films, "Fantastic Mr. Fox" falls under the spell of a roguish father figure that commands respect and suspicion for his unconventional approach to life. Mr. Fox is a loving but ambitious soul subject to the temptation of greed. Since accidentally allowing he and his wife to be captured by humans ten years ago, Mr. Fox has sworn off all criminal acts. However, when Mr. Fox eats, his true animal nature comes out and we witness the sudden and violent transformation from human to animal nature and back again. It's this same uncontrollable nature that causes Mr. Fox to enact a goofy burglary plan that leads to all sorts of fireworks. The eating transformation is also an example of the elegant way the filmmakers depict a dichotomy and unity between animal and human nature in a single stroke. The humor is fast-paced and the style is vibrant, but it's the actors that flex the characters' muscles. That's what you get here, animated characters with muscles flexed by the likes of Meryl Streep and George Clooney, funny-bone included.

Rated PG. 88 mins. (B) (Three Stars)

Posted by Cole Smithey on November 9, 2009 in Animation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire

Waking Up at the Movies
Lee Daniels Throws Down
By Cole Smithey

Lee Daniels (producer of "Monster's Ball") unleashes an urban drama pressure-cooker steeped in verite realism. "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" follows 16-year-old Claireece "Precious Jones" (well played by newcomer Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe). Precious is a 300-pound high school student, pregnant with her second baby by her step-father. Precious's cruel mother Mary (Mo'Nique) humiliates and physically attacks her daughter--when she isn't giving orders from her permanent place in front of the television. Precious's daytime reveries of red carpet fame and the adulation of her imaginary fans allows her to block out her stressful reality. The light-hearted vignettes also allow the audience a chance to breathe in the midst of an unbelievably devastating story of traumatic family abuse. Precious finds hope and support when she gets into an alternative school. Paula Patton adds some much-needed optimism as Blu Rain, an altruistic teacher whose dedication to her students enables their intellectual growth. Significant too is Mariah Carey's disarming performance as Ms. Weiss, a no-nonsense welfare counselor who listens to Mary explain her treatment of her daughter. "Precious" is an unforgettable drama whose intrinsic truth outweighs any exploitation or politics that might attend such material. If you're looking for a gritty socially-conscious movie, this is it.

Much has been made of Oprah Winfrey's and Tyler Perry's affiliation as executive producers, and indeed it's highly unlikely that Hollywood would ever back such dark neo-realist fare. After 25-plus years of exploiting America's lower class underbelly on television with shows like "Maury Povich," it might seem that "Precious" promises a more sensitive treatment of complex social problems that the masses would rather ridicule than spend time trying to better comprehend. The economic depression--that national media outlets of all stripes are quick to publicize is behind us--plays into the necessity of a more frank discussion of America's wartime environment of psychological and physical abuse that tracks back through every dollar we touch.

In the mid '30s the Depression-era Federal Theater Program allowed Harold Clurman's Group Theater to foster playwrights like Clifford Odets in taking up underclass issues in a proactive way that commanded attention and demanded action from its audience when they exited the theater. There was a freedom of intellectual ideas coming fist to fist with social problems that gave audiences a sense of urgency and empowerment. In 2009, a film like "Precious" has to tack on a post-script title ("Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire") just to properly contextualize its foundation in reality.

As a tough-minded innocent, Precious is an accidental martyr. She represents every abused victim at Guantanamo, and every incest victim who faces each day with memories that should have never been cataloged. America has become habituated to accept all forms of social abuse in the service of a "middle-class" that in reality only existed for about 15-minutes in the early '60s. Ultimately, Precious is an intelligent person able to find an escape from a filial and social trap that could just as well be made of steel.

At a certain point, our own crippled mortality must be embraced if it is to transcend the laziness, greed, and hostile cruelty that have hardened Americans into people that we never agreed to be. For as shocking and upsetting as the film is, it barely begins to scratch the surface of social problems being constantly swept under the rug by America's corporate-owned government and media. But scratch it does. You can't read the truth in USA Today, but you can watch it on the big screen, and in all of the other between-the-line places that you're too scared to fathom. You just might wake up at the movies.

Rated R. 109 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

Posted by Cole Smithey on November 3, 2009 in Drama | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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