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As is the case with many character driven independent films, The Visitor focuses on one of those lives of quiet desperation. In this case, it’s Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins), a widowed economics professor living in Connecticut. Walter limits his contact with students, co-workers, and just about everyone else, spending his nights drinking wine and listening to classical music. Jenkins, who has a familiar face thanks to appearing as the doctor, executive, neighbor, or friend in every other movie you’ve ever seen, is brilliant at conveying a life that is basically over. He’s running out the clock and hardly fighting it, despite a half-hearted attempt to learn piano (the instrument his wife played.) Against his will, he’s assigned to go to New York to present a paper and heads down to stay in an apartment he owns but rarely visits.
When he arrives, he finds Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian musician, and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), his girlfriend, living in the apartment, thanks to an unscrupulous real estate agent. Walter doesn’t have the heart to throw them out on the street and offers to let them stay while he's in the city for the conference. Zainab is wary due to the couple’s illegal residency status but Tarek, friendly and outgoing in an almost too good to be true way, begins to break through Walter’s wall by teaching him the drum. As Walter begins to come out of his shell, a little, Tarek is arrested following a misunderstanding in the subway and, due to his illegal alien status, is tossed into a “detention center” in Queens. This leads Tarek’s mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), to come out from Michigan and Walter invites her to stay in the apartment as well.
While all of this asking strangers to live with you sounds a bit far fetched, it feels very natural. The relationship between Walter and Tarek is a little “movie-cute” but enjoyable as Walter begins to reengage with part of society. It’s after Tarek is arrested however, that Walter is really forced to do what he seems to hate most, interact and care about other people. He’s not mean or unfeeling, he’s just been in a deep freeze for so long that he doesn’t have the ability to see things from anyone else’s point of view. Watching him warm up is really a joy and the budding relationships between Walter and Tarek and, later, Walter and Mouna are perfect in tone and nuance.
The film is fairly quiet and character driven, although it does touch on the politics of immigration. Tarek is such a nice and friendly guy that his arrest and detention seem to be fear and bureaucracy run amok. The fact that he is, in fact, in the country illegally is mostly brushed aside. Several characters point out that he “didn’t do anything,” but, of course, he did. That said, with the exception of a couple of outbursts and a few subtle ironic posters and visual images, McCarthy mostly lets the humor, tenderness, and humanity of his characters take precedence over political diatribes. It’s the smart choice.
While all four leads turn in strong performances, the movie rises on Jenkins’ talent, which is formidable. He turns Walter into a real person rather than a cliché and that, in turn, makes the whole movie work. Even hard hearted conservatives, like myself, will find much to like in this quiet and actorly film.
Los Angeles police officers are corrupt. Really corrupt. We get it Hollywood. Here’s yet another in a long line of films about corruption in the LAPD. Don’t believe the film’s misleading trailers. Street Kings is not a movie about cops cleaning up the streets. This is a movie about cops cleaning up after themselves.
Take Training Day and cross it with the FX television series The Shield, and you have Street Kings. Keanu Reeves plays Detective Tom Ludlow, a dirty cop who works with a team of dirty cops. The difference between Tom and the rest of his squad is that he doesn’t seem to realize he’s a sleaze. His commander describes him as “the point of the spear”, and they use him whenever they want to abuse their badges to have a bunch of bad guys executed quickly, cleanly, and without the reading of Miranda rights. Tom is pretty good when it comes to killing and his commander is even better when it comes to covering up for his wanton slaughter.
Things change for Tom when his ex-partner is murdered in what appears to be a random act of gang violence. Ludlow may be a point and shoot killing machine, but he’s also loyal to his brothers in blue. He’s rocked by the death of his partner, and when the department inexplicably refuses to investigate his killing, Tom takes it on himself to figure out what the hell is going on. For Keanu Reeves, that means a lot of looking bewilderingly constipated, something he’s pretty good at.
Making fun of Keanu Reeves’ limited acting range is kind of like throwing rocks at a retarded kid though, and I’ve always been a big supporter of his. Sure he has only a scant a few facial expressions at his disposal, but they’re good expressions, and when he’s put in the right situation Keanu Reeves really works on screen. Unfortunately, he’s not give much to work with here. He guzzles vodka from tiny airplane-sized bottles, but it’s more of an affectation than a genuine character flaw. Tom and Street Kings are both standard stuff. Another convoluted cop corruption movie filled with unlikable characters and a dubious anti-hero who is only a hero because he seems to think he is, or because he shoots first.
Some of the action is good, and Chris Evans is interesting as a minor character who doesn’t get a lot of play. Forest Whitaker huffs and puffs his way through the movie like a walking corpse, he’s good at looking like he’s about to drop dead from a heart attack. Unfortunately there’s not enough originality here to deliver anything better than a few cheap shootouts, and there aren’t enough action sequences to qualify Street Kings as a serious shoot-em-up movie. Director David Ayer seems to be trying to put together some sort of commentary on our violence soaked culture, but if he has a message it never quite comes through. Street Kings isn’t a bad movie, it’s just that it’s also not a very new one.
When I was a junior in high school, one of my friends bet me twenty dollars that I couldn’t make a cake, without mix, using only Hostess products and items in my mother’s refrigerator. I drove to the store, picked up Twinkees, Cupcakes, and Suzi Qs, threw ‘em all in a big mixing bowl, and went to town for twenty minutes. I added eggs, a little flour, vegetable oil, a smidgen of milk, and some butter and plopped my concoction into the oven. Forty-five minutes later, my friends and I took it out, grabbed a fork, and dove in. We all marveled at how bizarrely average it was–neither good nor bad–just kinda there. You see, cobbling together a laundry list of delicious ingredients doesn’t guarantee a tasty result. Just ask anyone who rooted for the 2002 Sacramento Kings or the poor bastards who wasted their time on my cake.
Prom Night isn’t so much a movie as a series of scenes from other films which the screenwriters glued together to resemble something movie-esque. A boyfriend and girlfriend are apprehensive about going to different colleges. A stalker is sent away to jail and escapes. A girl has recurring dreams, which sometimes turn out to be real and sometimes turn out to be fantasy. Creepy music plays almost constantly. You’ve seen all of this before in other, better motion pictures. That’s not to say Prom Night is the worst film ever made. It’s not. For a movie to be worthy of that heinous moniker, it would need to do more than just exist. Like my cake, Prom Night is edible, it just doesn’t affect the audience positively or negatively.
Fifteen year old Donna (Brittany Snow) is your typical pretty-cute-for-the-movies but a bombshell in real life fifteen year old. Then a young teacher, creepily played by the lead singer of the Wonders, begins stalking her and does some Charles Manson shit to her entire family–in front of her. He’s sent away to jail but conveniently breaks out in time to ruin her Senior Prom. She also has an underdeveloped jock of a boyfriend (Scott Porter) and a best friend with gigantic breasts (Dana Davis). Two cops without a shred of back story are given too much screen time, and an aunt and uncle show up, if for no other reason than to let viewers know Lauren Davis from Boston Public is still alive and working.
The Prom itself resembles an episode of My Super Sweet Sixteen, complete with a red carpet outside the posh hotel banquet room the dance takes place in. All of the main characters (sans the cops and Harry Senate’s girlfriend) book a suite on the third floor and spend most of their time traipsing back-and-forth. This provides plenty of opportunities for the filmmakers to creep the audience out with through-the-stairwell-cameras and which-portion-of-the-suite-is-he-in mysteries.
It would be easy to chastise everyone involved in this project for producing a film utterly and completely void of even the slightest original thought, but in all honesty, it’s not their fault. If I’m forced to assign blame, I’m sending all of those evil thoughts in your direction. That’s right. You, the paying customer. Outside of The Orphanage and a handful of thought-provoking horror movies created since 2000, everything else has been recycled shit, sewn together and Febreezed so the more ignorant viewers don’t notice the pungent odor. It’s time we, as a society, start demanding more of horror movies than scantily-clad barely legals screaming at regurgitated maniacs. If you want a superficial amalgamation to go see with your girlfriend, take her to Prom Night. You’ll probably have a decent time and never think about it again. If you want to see a piece of art that pushed the genre forward even an inch, skip this neutral piece of cake.
The world of My Blueberry Nights is a beautiful one full of color, emotion, and pathos. It’s also utterly unrealistic, like trying to understand the human condition through the diary of a terribly romantic 12-year-old girl. Writer/director Won Kar-Wai’s script may exist in strange parallel universe contained wholly in the all-night diners and dives of a fantasy America, but it’s forgivable. His film is so beautiful and the performances he gets from his actors are so brimming with quiet power and life that it doesn’t matter if we’re in the real world or on the set of a badly paced soap opera. It works.
It stars Norah Jones. That’s right, Norah Jones, the singer. She plays Elizabeth, a New York girl recently dumped by her boyfriend and finding solace hanging out in a corner café run by British immigrant Jeremy (Jude Law). Her evenings are spent self-pitying in his café, talking, and eating blueberry pie while Jeremy slowly falls in love with her. Lost in her own problems she doesn’t see it, and decides to escape her mental quagmire by leaving the city. She travels cross country , working her way to the next town off tips she earns waitressing in an assortment of random establishments.
That’s how we see her and everyone in the movie; through the windows of the places Lizzy works… literally. Wong Kar Wai shoots everything through obstructed views: outside a window with colored writing on it, around a corner, through a string of hanging lights. In the wrong hands it could have been an annoying gimmick, but in My Blueberry Nights it adds to the sense of actually being there in, wherever this is, as if we’re all voyeurs peeping in on these forlorn lives. It doesn’t hurt that visually, it ends up making the whole thing look gorgeous in a dreamy, moody haze of grainy, carefully splashed colors.
There’s plenty to see. Along the way Elizabeth encounters others, all damaged by love in one way or another. Whether it’s an alcoholic cop (David Strathairn) abandoned by his wife (Rachel Weisz) or a poker-playing daughter estranged from her father (Natalie Portman), Wong Kar-Wai seems to know how to get the best out of his actors. Most of all though it’s Norah Jones who runs away with the film. Even when the script might seem contrived she doesn’t. She’s as authentic as it gets. It doesn’t hurt that unlike the usual suspects, she looks nothing like an actress. She’s simply a person, one who it’s easy to identify with on a very basic level.
Still, no matter how great the people are in this movie it’s hard not to find fault with Wong Kar-Wai’s bland script. It’s a standard, pretentious, indie-film story rooted in New York and told with more genuine feeling than it probably deserves. The result is an uneven movie with amazing moments, and then all the excessive slow motion in between. My Blueberry Nights has a cast that makes it better than it ought to be, and Wong Kar-Wai’s direction is interesting. Now just imagine how great it could have been if he’d had a decent story to go along with it.
What do you get when you pull together a bunch of MIT math students and secretly send them off on getaways to Las Vegas with a legal but frowned-upon systematic way of beating the house at Black Jack? You get college students with a lot of extra cash in their pockets running around Vegas in limousines and expensive clothes. What did you expect?
On weekdays they casually walk the campus as average college students, but on the weekends they take to the tables in disguise, bilking casinos out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s not the kind of company you’d expect a quiet genius like Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) to keep. He’s such a workaholic that his own mother tells him he needs to get a life. But when Ben finds himself faced with the prospect of needing $300,000 to pay for Harvard Medical school he welcomes an invitation from faculty member and team leader Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey) to join the club.
Based on the true life exploits of MIT students, 21 is an entertaining twist on the heist flick. Director Robert Luketic, whose previous efforts include Legally Blonde and Win A Date With Tad Hamilton, finally breaks loose from the romantic comedy chain gang and proves he’s more than just the next Garry Marshall. Not that there would be anything wrong with that, but the world doesn’t really need a second person cranking out Princess Diaries.
Luketic may be entering new territory in his own career, but his first foray into the drama/thriller genre feels a lot like other movies that have come before. At least a half-a-dozen films come to mind for me and the comparisons are unavoidable, but Luketic makes them work to his advantage. Playing on the strengths of those elements from other gambling and heist dramas, he stays true to the story he’s trying to tell, striving to avoid the clichés that could so easily creep in.
His second smart move shows up in the form of his top notch cast. Spacey is even sharper than usual, setting the perfect tone for his much younger fellow cast. Though the movie isn’t a major player in the drama department, Burgess plays his role as if it were. That extra effort makes the more emotional moments of the movie work, especially the romantic build up between nerdy Ben and foxy fellow team member Jill (Kate Bosworth). Luketic’s background in romance pays off, but his actors are the ones that sell the otherwise unlikely match up.
The movie’s major flaw, is in the timing. Luketic is right at home with the fast paced parts of the movie, showing off a new-found flair for stylized action shots and a gift for getting the most out of his actors in very short takes. He even sneaks in a brilliant cameo by a Bruce Campbell look-alike, complete with after shave joke and manly drunken brawling. When the action is on, Luketic knows just want to do. When the moments mellow, however, the blood pressure drops right out, and the movie flirts with becoming downright boring. It feels too long as well and at nearly two hours running time could stand to lose a few pounds of celluloid.
The old saying goes that the love of money is the root of all evil. It’s a principle that the movie seems to embrace, but in the end abandons in favor of several amusing if not slightly predicable plot shifts. The moral is still there, for those seeking something deeper from 21, but at its heart this is a movie meant to be enjoyed just for the fun of it.
As is the case with many character driven independent films, The Visitor focuses on one of those lives of quiet desperation. In this case, it’s Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins), a widowed economics professor living in Connecticut. Walter limits his contact with students, co-workers, and just about everyone else, spending his nights drinking wine and listening to classical music. Jenkins, who has a familiar face thanks to appearing as the doctor, executive, neighbor, or friend in every other movie you’ve ever seen, is brilliant at conveying a life that is basically over. He’s running out the clock and hardly fighting it, despite a half-hearted attempt to learn piano (the instrument his wife played.) Against his will, he’s assigned to go to New York to present a paper and heads down to stay in an apartment he owns but rarely visits.
