Big Bad Wolves

3.5 Stars (out of four)

There are some movies that demand attention, no matter what you may think of them.  Straw Dogs, The Terminator, Robocop, Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers, A Simple Plan, City of God, Fargo, The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, and Big Bad Wolves.  As you can see from the movie poster, Quentin Tarantino hailed Big Bad Wolves the best film of 2013, and it's no wonder.  The Israeli gem is quite the diamond in the rough.  I like to describe it as Reservoir Dogs without the happy ending.  Those of you that know the story know what I mean by that.

The plot is actually fairly simple.  It starts with a man being brutally assaulted by cops who think he is a serial child killer.  Their beating on this man is surreptiously recorded and put on You Tube which makes them have to free the killer.  Not long after, the killer strikes again.  Unfortunately for him, the girl's father is an old special ops guy who ran operations in Lebanon.  He picks a deserted house, and with the help of one of the disgraced cops, takes the suspect to this house and systematically tortures the guy until he tells them the truth.  But like all movies like this, complications arise with often hilarious and/or gruesome results.

The reason Tarantino likes this, I assume, is not really the story, but the telling of the story.  As most Tarantino fans know, his stories are never orthodox either in their subject matter or telling.  Grisly stories are nothing new, but to tell that story with aplomb and flourish without degrading into camp is a hard and fine line.  Big Bad Wolves does this with great results.  It is at times serious, tense and nail biting, but at others funny and unexpected.  But the movie never swerves from its emotional core, about a very despicable man and the lengths one may go to in order to avenge a wrong.  This movie is fresh, original, and I look forward to other outings by its writer and director, because if this is what I can expect anytime from them, a new master has joined the ranks.  Rarely have I felt this way about a director the first time I saw them.  It is nice to have a bloody good time sometimes.

Philomena

3.5 Stars (out of four)

In this age of fairly mindless actioneers, it is nice to see that there can be a film that slows down and portrays normal people.  A movie for adults about adults that has real quality.  Philomena is a nice, simply-stated film about an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances.

The film, based on a true story, starts with the protagonist, Philomena Lee played by Dame Judi Dench, a young woman in 1950's Ireland who meets an attractive young man at a fair.  The course of nature takes over and she becomes pregnant.  This causes her father to banish her from the house into a convent where she is forced to have her child (breech-birthed without an aesthetic as penance for her sin) and work in the convent for four years to pay back the debt, in what could be fairly described as being in prison.  The mothers were allowed to see their children once a day for one hour.  It turns out the convent would sell the children for adoption to rich couples, many of the from overseas.  Her child is taken away to America, and for the next 50 years, she has wondered about his fate.  Finally, in a state of melancholy, Philomena tells her daughter about the existence of her half-brother.  Her daughter contacts a reporter who takes on the human-interest story, and the rest of the movie is the adventure they have trying to find the fate of this man.

This movie has a lot of depth and there is a lot going on.  Philomena is a deeply religious Catholic who has been deeply wronged by the church in a day when morality was much stricter more rigid.  It is a movie of loss, anger, despair and forgiveness, all of which are subtly, but unmistakenly etched on Judi Dench's face.  This is not a movie with dramatic shouting and confrontation, but rather quiet revelations, reflection and determination.  I have never seen a performance quite like it.  We are used to the bombastic performances of Brando, Pacino, Nicholson and Washington as our yardsticks of what is dramatic range.  But the Brits have something to teach us in the art of subtlety, of illicting a performance, not banging you over the head with it.  Maybe it is that stiff upper lip thing, but in a medium where the close up can speak volumes, this is the type of performance that should be lauded and copied.  Philomena is perfectly written.  She is witty, yet a little dotty.  An old lady that is not worldly, but is quite wise and very likeable.  It is deliberately paced (read slow), giving us detail after detail gradually.  This is definitely not the movie for the post-MTV, ADD generation.  They will be whining "I'm bored!" in the first ten minutes.  But for those who like an intimate story well-told, this is the movie for you.

The Monuments Men

2 Stars (out of four)

Wow!  I haven't put anything up since Jan 19th!  I must be going into withdrawal.  Anyway, I saw The Monuments Men about a week ago, but now I finally had time to say something about it, and unfortunately, it's not that good.  (Both the movie and my comments). I really wanted The Monuments Men to be good.  It had a great cast, an note resting story, but just falls a little flat.

There is no secret that Hitler had grand plans for his thousand-year-reich.  By 1940, they were all falling apart.  One of those plans from the failed little artist was to rip off all the art in Europe and put it in his grand Fuhrer Museum that was to be built in Austria.  He went around Europe looting every museum, church and private collector in order to obtain pieces both for this museum and for the private collections of his cronies.  So, the Americans and British put together an odd platoon of men who were artists and historians to get the art back when they hear Hitler is destroying most of it.  The idea is to find the art and restore it to its rightful owners.  To add to the race, the Soviets have their own group, the Trophy Brigade, who are on the same mission, but in their case, to take it back to Russia as spoils of war.

So, an interesting story, but badly told.  First, it has been pointed out by critics that the movie is a bunch of clichés.  This is kind of true.  All the men are older, so they have the requisite basic training scenes of mirth, old men doing young men jobs, lamenting they are too old for this, etc, etc, etc.  While the jokes are fine and light, they are trite and played out.  You see much the same type of thing in Space Cowboys, Armageddon, or even Stripes.  But the most glaring problem to me is that the movie appears to suffer from a lot of post-production cuts.  If that is not the case, there is absolutely no excuse for the disjointed story and ham-fisted sentimentality.  I could not connect with any character.  There was nothing particularly interesting about any of them.  Since most were A-list stars, it seems they had to get equal screen time or something, but it seems that they spent so much time on the group, we could not sympathize with anyone.  Ocean's Eleven, another ensemble picture with two of the stars returning in this one was much more coherent and fun.  There are some real moments; my favorite being when one of them gets a record from home where his daughter and grandchildren sing I'll Be Home For Christmas.  But most of the rest of the moments feel fake or shoehorned on and have no impact at all.  They don't feel real.  Another interesting criticism I happen to agree with was pointed out by a friend of mine.  She noted that the whole point of the mission was to return stolen art or else Western Civilization would fall apart because no one in the future would see these precious treasures and be inspired.  There would be nothing to connect us to our past.  The issue she pointed out was that a lot of these pieces were stolen from private collectors.  While the crime was horrifying in its scale, this art was mostly in private collections that the general public would never see.  Outside of the laudible mission to right a great wrong, that is robbery on a grand scale, how does this protect the past as was the original intent of the mission, to restore our past to future generations?  Most of this art would be rightfully restored to their proper owners and then never seen again, thereby negating the original premise of the mission. In any case, I really wanted the movie to be good, and it is merely okay.  It was fine, but a big letdown.