The Railway Man

3 Stars (out of four)

I must admit, I was looking forward to this one.  The Railway Man promised to be a fascinating look into the life of a man who faces his nemesis head on in what looked to be a great confrontation.  Would there be revenge or forgiveness? And it does deliver.

Kind of.

The Railway Man is not really that complicated.  It is about a British WWII veteran who was captured when the British Army surrendered to the Imperial Japanese Army at the fall of Singapore.  Through a series of flashbacks, we see Eric Lomax, a young engineer who was captured and put to work on the railway line next to the Kwai River (the same river of another movie you may have heard of).  By using scavenged parts, Lomax builds a radio which eventually gets discovered and he is brutally questioned about it until the Allies arrive at the end of the war.  Intercut with the flashbacks is an older Lomax (Colin Firth), as he struggles with his memories of his wartime.  He meets his future wife, Patti (Nicole Kidman) be happenstance on a train and they fall in love.  She begins to see he has a severe case of PTSD.  She tries to help him, but he won't let her in.  She then seeks out his friend and fellow captive Findlay (Skellan Skarsgård) to tell her what happened, which he does.  He also sends a newspaper article with her detailing that one of their torturers is still alive.  Lomax goes back to Singapore to kill this man, but realizes he has to forgive if he is to move on.  In the postscript, we find the men became very good friends for over thirty years after that.

This movie is a little sad because it reaches for greatness and falls short.  It is not a bad movie by any means.  It just falls short.  Maybe it is due to editing or whatever, but you just can't connect with the characters.  You don't get to know any of them long enough to really understand and empathize with them.  You don't really experience the true horror of either the war or the suffering after.  It feels as if both subjects are only touched on superficially.  I never really felt the enormity of the suffering in either case as I did in more effective movies like Schindler's List.  Maybe it is a fault of the narrative with its cutting back and forth in time.  You don't really feel for anyone, so the emotional denouement at the end falls a little flat.  Nicole Kidman, in particular, is criminally underused.  She merely serves as the plot device for the narrative to unfold, so all she gets to do is sit and listen attentively to the storytellers as the director focuses on her beautiful blue eyes.  But in the end, this is a movie about the importance of forgiveness, and the last ten minutes are spellbinding.  A wonderful coda to a pretty brutal movie when all is told, but in the end, is too little, too late.  I would recommend it, but wait for the rental.

Under The Skin

2 Stars (out of four)

IMDB lists this as "An alien seductress who preys on hitchikers in Scotland."  That's it.  That's the perfect explanation for Under The Skin.  What it should have added was that this was probably one of the most expensive student films ever made.  Quite frankly, it's only selling point is that Scarlett Johanssen takes off her clothes a lot in this film.  Otherwise, there's not much else to say.

Under The Skin starts off with very long shots of Scarlett in a truck, trying to pick men up.  When she does, she lures them into a house where she and they take off their clothes and she lures them into some kind of black pool where they die.  This is intersperced with long tracking shots of Scarlett walking, her butt while she's walking, her emotionless face while she's walking, her legs while she is walking, her eyes while she is walking, her hair while she is walking, her back while she is walking, her boots whiles she is walking, her lips while she is walking, her butt while sh...wait, did I already say that?  There are also exciting action scenes of her examining herself in a mirror many times, both clothed and naked.  Did I mention she's naked a lot on this film?  Anyway, at some point she runs into a nice guy after having a crisis of conscience, I guess.  I don't know, it's never explained.  She has sex with him and then inexplicably runs away into a forest.  She then runs into a logger who tries to rape her, and during that, rips open her skin.  We see she is an alien wearing a woman suit which it peels off.  The logger runs back, douses it with gasoline and sets her on fire.  It dies.  The end.

This movie is what cinephiles call deliberately paced (read slow).  It is also almost completely dialog-free.  In almost two hours, I'd say about ten minutes of that time is there any dialog.  The director, Jonathan Glazer, must have some kind of Zvengali-like hold on Scarlett Johanssen, because he spends most of the rest of the time lovingly photographing her entire body for extended periods of time (and in the end, if I'm honest, the only real reason to watch this time-waster).  How he managed to convince one of the hottest actresses right now (literally and figuratively) to do this film is beyond me, but I wish I had that kind of mojo.  Now, much was made of Uma Thurman being Quentin Tarantino's muse, as he used for essentially three movies.  But, Glazer must, like the rest of us males in the audience, really be infatuated with Scarlett, because that's what this movie seems to be about.  Instead of Under The Skin, it should be named Scarlett Johanssen's Beautiful Supple Body or Scarlett Johanssen Is The Most a Beautiful Woman In The World, because there is no other explanation for the film.  It is a weird cross between Alien, Species and Eraserhead.  It has Alien's pace (with none of the eerieness), Species' nudity and plot (without the excitement), and Eraserhead's strangeness and coherency.  In the end, don't go in expecting an entertaining movie or even a thinking movie, just a lot of nudity.  Oh, and did I mention Scarlett is nude a lot in this film?

By the way, for such a crapfest, I really love the movie poster below.

The Fog of War

4 Stars (out of four)

The Fog of War is deceptively simple.  A documentarian sits down with former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and interviews him about his experiences in WWII, his time in the Ford Motor Company and finally, of course, his time as Secretary of Defense during Vietnam for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.  It is also a guidebook to live life, and also a warning about committing a nation to war.  The movie is set up in ten rules on living life and on the nature and conduct of modern warfare.  Intersperced are segments of interviews that roughly takes us through McNamara's life and career in sequence.

Now, the movie seems to be coming from a slightly accusatory air, or at least that's what I thought when I first watched it.  But Errol Morris, the documentarian who takes us through this interview, is surprisingly even-handed except for one or two times when he ham-handedly tries to get McNamara to admit responsibility for Vietnam and it's escalation, as many Americans do.  Now, McNamara is no fool, and does not let himself be drawn into an argument about Vietnam.  In fact, he mostly avoids many details to not stir up any more controversy.  But, he is very introspective throughout, and does accept some responsibility for Vietnam in his role as Secretary of Defense.  But he correctly puts the onus on Johnson, and to a lesser extent, Kennedy.  Hippies will hate it, as their bugaboo is not contrite enough.

But what is really important is that McNamara gives future presidents and generations a clear warning.  War is not glorious or great, but it is sometimes necessary.  One must be clear as to the reasons for going to war, understanding your enemy, and in the end, be proportional.  We are in an age with nuclear weapons, and there will be no winners in that case.  McNamara understands the world for what it is, and argues that war should be avoided at all costs as it may be the last.  Hopefully those in power will heed that warning.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

3.5 Stars (out of four)

So, I went into The Winter Soldier with a great deal of trepidation.  I loved Captain America: The First Avenger the same way I loved Iron Man.  These superhero movies work when you just let the story speak for itself.  These are interesting characters with interesting backgrounds.  But both movies are also deeply flawed.  Their final act always have to end on a violent denouement.  Now I get these are superheroes, fantastic beings in a fantastic world.  But what makes them good is that they are deeply relatable to us: flawed, fearful, but overcome it in the end.  The problem is that final act always feels tacked on, rather than well thought out like the rest of the plot.  Iron Man has to fight a bigger iron man.  Captain America has to fight a WWII villain with lasers and stupid, CGI visuals.  These movies also tend to get sequelitis, that is they must have everything and more.  Make it bigger and bigger for no reason other than spectacle.  And while The Winter Soldier is bigger, it got smaller, more personal, as well, making it that rarity of rarities, a sequel that is actually better than the original.

The Winter Soldier is fairly simple enough.  Cap (Chris Evans) now works for Nick Fury and SHIELD.  It opens with him on a mission with a team of SHIELD agents including Black Widow (Scarlett Johannsen) to free a SHIELD carrier from pirates.  They succeed, but Black Widow also downloads a bunch of data from the computers to give to Fury.  Cap has a hard time with this and confronts Fury, and sets up the central theme of the film: Trust.  Who can be or is worthy of trust?  This plays beautifully for Cap as he is a man out of time, coming from an earlier and earnest age.  He is the idealistic Superman to Fury's pragmatic Batman.  Cap threatens to resign, but then Fury is attacked in an assassination attempt by a mysterious assassin, the Winter Soldier, a Soviet relic from the Cold War.  Fury, near death, contacts Cap to help him, saying SHIELD is overrun internally by agents from the evil HYDRA group.  Cap agrees, and sets off with Black Widow to foil HYDRA's latest gambit.  They even intorduce The Falcon, Cap's partner since the 1970's comic.

Now, I know this plot description doesn't say much, but I don't want to spoil anything.  Suffice to say, it is a lot of fun.  But what really makes this film so good is that it works on many levels.  One, Cap is a morally upright guy from a bygone age working in an organization whose mission deals with moral shades of gray.  It also deals centrally with the issue of trust, trust in Fury, trust in the Black Widow, trust in the mission, trust in the team, trust in the worldview.  All of these elements get rocked in Cap's world, a man dedicated to good and what's right.  It really gets into Cap's head and how he tries to reconcile this alien world and all its complexity.  Cap is not an idealist.  He has seen the ugliness of war and yet still fights for what is right.  His eyes are wide open, but his heart refuses to give into the easier, morally ambiguous route and let darkness overtake him.  To him, the ends never justify the means.  While in The Avengers, this makes him almost a characicture, in this movie, that earnestness is what makes him great.  This movie also works from the fact it is really a mystery movie, full of intrigue.  No gods or space monsters to destroy the Earth here.  Mostly a whodunit, an onion with layers to peel.  I liked the change of scope.  It's still a superhero movie, but it is much more personal.  In the end, these are the movies I find good.  Unfortunately, the movie gets a little muddled with plot.  It loses it's way occasionally, but I am willing to bet that was post-production cuts.  Coincidences happen, big plot points suddenly resolved, that sort of thing.  But all in all, a great film, probably the best Marvel film next to Iron Man.

Noah

1 Star (out of four) - Based on material as is

4 Stars (out of four) - Based on unintentional hilarity-May be a modern cult classic.

Okay.  We have all heard the scathing reviews of Noah.  There will be some of that here, too.  I will address both the positive and negative in this review.  SPOILER ALERT!  However, if you don't know this story by now, shame on you!  Go back to Sunday school and look it up in Genesis in that black book you can find in the pews.  We'll wait...

We're back.  We all know the Biblical story of Noah, except apparently Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel, who co-wrote this steaming pile.  So, I will open by saying the movie bears a similarity to the source material in that there is a guy named Noah, some animals, a boat and some rain, but that's about where the similarities end.  Anyway, we open with the Fall of Man and now humanity has been split into two lines: the sons of Cain and the sons of Seth.  The sons of Cain turn Pangea into a choked and barren wasteland filled with industrial cities.  They forge steel armor and weapons at least two thousand years before the Iron Age.  This should be a relief to Bible literalists, though, as they say the Earth is approximately 6000 years old.  And to demonstrate how truly dastardly the sons of Cain are, they *gasp!* eat meat.  They number in the thousands, these sons of Cain.  On the other side is Noah, with his wife and two sons.  At the beginning of the film, we see Noah as a young boy receiving some kind of blessing that is transferred Jedi-like through a snakeskin.  Before the ceremony finishes, Noah's father, Lamech (more on him in a moment) is killed by the sons of Cain.  We then flash to an adult Noah, apparently the only descendant of Seth.  How the sons of Seth propagate is beyond me, since according to the story, the sons of Cain are evil and the sons of Seth can't live with them.  Noah is a veggan Jedi Knight of some sort because he kills people a lot with cool martial arts skill.  So one day, Noah Wan Kenobi has a disturbing dream where he sees the Earth and everyone in it drowned.  This bothers him, so he takes his family to see his grandfather, Yoda Methuselah, who helps him explain the dream.  They drink tea laced with magic mushrooms and Noah has a director's cut vision where a voice tells him innocents will be saved and then all the animals float to the surface in the vision.  Noah Wan Kenobi interprets this as the Creator (not God) telling him to build a big boat.  The problem is, what to do?  Pangea is a scorched wasteland with no trees.  Yoda gives Noah Wan Kenobi a magic seed to plant.

On the way back to wherever, Noah Wan Kenobi meets a rock monster (yes, you read that correctly).  Apparently, Lamech had fought the sons of Cain with a light saber (yes, you also read that right) with many of these rock monsters and whupped some major son of Cain butt somewhere in the past.  These rock monsters are fallen somethings (not angels) that are now mad they're stuck on Earth away from the Creator.  But Noah Wan Kenobi convinces the rock monsters (still all very much happening here) to help.  One would think it's like debating a rock, but that's how cool Noah Wan Kenobi is.  He can make rocks agree with him. Anyway, he plants Yoda's seed, a bunch of trees grow, and the rock monsters build the ark.  Animals come, rains come, people die after a pitched battle with the rock monsters and Noah Wan Kenobi keeping them off the ark.  Noah Wan Kenobi is so dedicated to eliminating all of humanity, that he even briefly becomes Darth Noah and attempts to kill his granddaughters who were born from a barren woman (don't ask), but at the last minute, falls in love with them and doesn't do it.  We then find out that the infallible Creator decided to change he/she/its mind and let Noah Wan Kenobi decide humanity's fate.  Oh, by the way, after the waters recede, our pious protagonist finds some grapes, invents wine, I think, and then goes off on an extended bender leaving his elderly wife and sons and daughter (not in-law) to do all the work of rebuilding the world.  And there's a rainbow.  The end.

Now, believe it or not, I have only scratched the surface with this plot synopsis.  It only gets weirder the longer you watch it.  Noah has about the same level of similarity to the Bible as Showgirls has to A Star Is Born.  I haven't seen this much blatant disregard for the source material since Battlefield Earth.  Just a few differences from the Bible just for clarity's sake: no rock monsters; Noah tried to save humanity, not eliminate it; he spoke to Gid directly and never wavered from his mission; he didn't need peyote to do it; actively pleaded with people to get on the ark, not beat them back.  In all points, Arronofsky totally subverts the important themes and lessons of the story of Noah to make Star Wars, essentially.  I'm not sure what was going through his head, but his story has strangeness levels that reach and possibly surpass the grandest heights set before in such movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Brazil and Zardoz.  The movie makes no real sense and doesn't even follow its own rules.  To make this even more tragically funny, there is so much real talent in it.  It has no less than three Oscar winners (Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Anthony Hopkins) and two Oscar nominees (Nick Nolte and Darren Arronofsky).  I don't know what Rasputin-like hold Arronofsky has over this very talented cast to convince them to play in this stink bomb, but they all seemed dazed as they muddle through the horrible script.

That all said, it is worth the price of admission.  This, by all accounts, appears to be a serious attempt to make a serious movie.  It is not self-conscious at all.  It is not slyly winking at us to join in the fun.  It is somber, almost biblical in tone and even ends with pompous and pretentious Bible movie-type music.  And this is precisely why I also give it four stars on unintentional hilarity.  This is exactly the type of film that becomes a cult classic.  You can't intentionally make a cult film, like Snakes On A Plane.  They got a name for that-it's called crap.  But this is way above that.  Everyone involved from the cast and crew set out to make a big Hollywood movie.  It is beautiful and pulled off well, that's why the one star instead of BOMB.  It is so big, so pretentious and ultimately falls so flat that makes Noah a wonder to behold.  It's like looking at the Grand Canyon.  Only by looking at the entirety of it does it make one appreciate the...awesomeness of it.  Noah should be viewed the same way.  Only by considering all the elements that brought this crapfest to life can you appreciate its total craptitude.  I sat on the theater shaking my head asking, "How did SO many incredibly talented people get it SO wrong?"  It is on par with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  The layers and layers and layers of badness just have to be seen to be believed.  And it is worth every penny if you go in with that attitude.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

3.5 Stars (out of four)

So, I have a confession to make.  I have seen many of Wes Anderson's movies:  Moonrise Kingdom, The Life Aquatic, I <3 Huckabees.  I hate them all.  I don't get them.  Wes Anderson, to me, is like the Coen brothers.  I obviously see how well they're made from a craftsmanship perspective.  He is a very good director with a singular vision and asthetic that is uniquely his, like Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese or Spike Jonze.  But the twisted stories, self-aware dry humor and vaguely unnatural aura has always been off-putting to me.  Something never feels quite right whenever I climb into the worlds he creates.  But now I see that all his efforts were building to the correct story for his talents, and The Grand Budapest Hotel is that story.  Be warned: This movie is not a farcical screwball comedy.  The commercials don't do it justice because it is almost impossible to express all the nuances of this films in two minutes.  The movie veers abruptly and wildly in tone and is at times absurd, crude, funny, shocking, nostalgic, odd, relatable, distant, excessive, intimate, cruel, gleeful, and ultimately very sad.  And it pulls off all of this in a tight narrative that has some very important things to say.

The movie starts in the 1960s in a fictional Eastern European-esque country in a grand hotel that has seen better days.  The hotel, like its customers, is decaying on the inside, but still manages to keep a nice, but fraying outer façade.  A relic from another time that has no place in its present surroundings.  A young writer, played by Jude Law, strikes up a conversation with a mysterious older man who is the owner.  The owner than proceeds to tell him the history of the hotel and of its concierge M. Gustave, played with gusto by Ralph Fiennes in the second role he was born to play after Schindler's List.  M. Gustave ran the hotel in what appears to be pre-WWI times.  He is an efficient, prim, and driven lothario who beds old, rich women who are his devoted clientele to the hotel.  Apparently, he is a draw just as much as the hotel.  He takes on a new immigrant orphan as a lobby boy trainee, essentially a bellhop whom we later find is the man telling the story to Jude Law.  One day, one of M. Gustave's paramours dies inexplicably and leaves him a priceless, but incredibly ugly painting, much to the families' chagrin.  This sets off an increasingly surreal series of events that puts M. Gustave and his lobby boy in a grand chase, set against the backdrop of international intrigue and war.  While the war may be WWI, the movie never really says, but what is important is that the war is bringing in a totalitarian and repressive government that is killing a brighter age of civilization and ushering in a new age of repressive modernity devoid of feelings and humanity.

Whew!  And I am just scratching the surface of this plot.  There are star-crossed lovers, loyalty, betrayal and on and on and on.  But what really defines this movie is its central question:  Is civilization dead?  Has the modern age killed all that was once good and fine in this world?  The story obviously thinks so.  M. Gustave is the paragon of that dying world with his courtesies and mannerisms.  But the movie does more than that.  It is not looking through rose-colored glasses at a gilded age.  It also makes no bones about pointing out the racism and classism that was under the genteel façade of "civilization."  It also points out the crudity and crassness just lurking under the surface that we choose to ignore out of courtesy.  But the movie also asks if this is preferable to the modern world, gray, hard and cold?  A world that crushes individuality and freedom under its bootheel?  The movie argues that the spirit of vibrancy and humanity can still exist under all of that that, isolated in small oases amidst a cold, cruel outer shell.  But the price for the efficiency and progress that modernity brings, the soul gets chipped away and dies inside.  I could write a book on the subtle underpinnings that lurk underneath this rather absurd universe, but the absurdity of the actions and the surrealness of its tone only heighten the ultimately sad lament in the story.  Do yourself a favor and get a sitter for the kids and go watch a truly adult and fulfilling film that does not pander or condescend.  You'll be glad you did.

Session 9

2 Stars (out of four)

I'm on a quest.  Some say it is a fool's errand, yet I keep plugging away.  That is, I want to find a great horror movie.  Not just a good one, but a great one.  This is no easy task.  In every other genre of filmmaking, it is very easy to point to a great example of what each film in that genre strives to be:  Casablanca, Star Wars, Ben Hur, The Wizard of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, The Lion King.  We've all seen them, we all love them.  Even horror has its classics, but for some reason, ever since the late 70's, filmmakers seem to have given up on the horror drama and given in to the cheap, slasher genre with utter glee.  A celebration of the shock, rather than the truly dreadful.  Out of this morass has crawled a couple of genuinely good movies, but unfortunately, Session 9 is not one of them.

Session 9 starts with a hazmat crew bidding on a contract to clean out the asbestos from an old mental hospital that is going to be remade into condos or something like that.  The crew's leader Bill is desperate.  He needs the job or his business will go under, so he drastically underbids every other offer and agrees to finish the job in one week.  His partner Phil, played by David Caruso, doesn't think this is a good idea, but they hire another couple men for the job.  Unfortunately, one of the men stole Phil's girlfriend, so there is immediate tension in the crew that builds and builds as if there is some malevolent force in hospital with them.  Is it some lingering, evil presence that never left because of the building's horrific past, or is it just all in their minds?

The movie starts off interestingly enough.  I had high hopes that it would be a good, mental thriller filled with ever-increasing dread.  And for at least half of the film, the movie delivers as promised.  The small crew with their impossible deadline begins to turn on itself as old resentments and new frustrations churn together in a simmering anger pot.  But when the movie introduces an ambiguous evil spirit, it starts to go off the rails.  By the end, it pulls a cheap bait-and-switch and abruptly finishes, almost as if the writer didn't know how to resolve the plot.  I see this tendency a lot in horror films, where they try to be something grander than they are and then fall flat.  It almost as if the writer paints himself in a corner plotwise and can't resolve it.  They build a complex puzzle they can't solve and in desperation, throw up their hands and say, "I give up!  Kill everybody!" There are some intriguing side stories in Session 9, but they ultimately end up as red herrings to cover up a standard killer-on-the-loose story.  But, to the director's credit, he shoots for grander heights.  He should be applauded for trying to do something better, but ultimately failing.  It is maybe worth a watch if it's a rental, but finally, just an average film and a tad disappointing.