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.

The Wolf Of Wall Street

3.5 Stars (out of four)

Martin Scorsese's most recent film, The Wolf of Wall Street, is an undeniable classic.  But just about everybody should be appalled by it and hate themselves for loving it.  Like Seinfeld, the characters depicted in this film are the lowest, basest, most reprehensible and repugnant human beings ever committed to celluloid this side of Hitler.  But, God help me, they are some of the most interesting and entertaining figures I have seen in years.

The only synopsis of the film I can muster is men behaving badly.  And getting incredibly rich in the process.

That's really all you need to know about the plot.  Even Leo breaks the fourth wall several times during the film (his character is narrating the story) and says directly to the audience when explaining complicated stock deals that you don't really care about what's happening, let's just move onto the next super-charged scene of bacchanalian excess.  And that really sums the film up. Energy and excess.  The poster is not hyperbolic of its depictions of the events therein.  Just about every vice is on display here, but it is presented with such verve, such aplomb, that you want to be directly in the middle of it.  It is Wall Street on a steroids, meth and cocaine mixer.

Like most of Scorsese's character studies, it is about evil men in evil situations.  Scorsese has often been a grotesquely distorted funhouse mirror of Aesop, telling twisted morality tales with over-the-top characters in almost every one of his films from The Departed, Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Casino, Raging Bull to even Cape Fear. But there is a key difference between all those great films and this one.  In the case of The Wolf of Wall Street, there are no consequences, no judgement in the movie's denouement.  In every other film, Scorsese has fearlessly showed that a criminal lifestyle is exciting.  It is glamorous.  It is fast-paced and never boring, and yes, it does pay at first.  But in all the aforementioned movies, he has also been very pointed in saying that the lifestyle has a cost and punishment, and his characters usually meet a bad end, whether they be good guys or bad guys.  Scorsese's worlds are very dog-eat-dog, and not great to inhabit.  They injure and scar everyone they touch.  But usually the bad guys get what's coming to them in the end.  In The Wolf of Wall Street, this doesn't happen.  It is an amoral movie about amoral characters, who don't really suffer in the end.  Despite Leo's character going to prison, he makes the point that he's rich in a place where everything is for sale.  The end is the same as Seinfeld's:  that despite their going to prison for being the most selfish and self-absorbed people on Earth, it really isn't a big deal.  This is satire in its blackest of black hearts and will be off-putting to many, but my God, it is a finely and entertainingly-told tale.  It is not for everyone.  If you have delicate sensibilities about anything, this is not the movie for you.  But if you can stomach it, it is well-worth your time.  A truly adult film made for adults.  I wish there were more of them.

Frozen (2013-Disney)

3.5 stars (out of four)

I have to make an apology to most people who saw this before me and I was dismissive of their opinions.  But in my defense, this movie has been horribly marketed because I thought it would be similar to the animated crapfest, Happy Feet.  But Frozen is truly a very good animated film.  It is not quite like anything Disney has done before.  It is very similar in tone and theme to the many films from Disney, but also vastly different.

The story is based on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen.  The main story focuses on two  Norwegian sisters Elsa and Anna.  They are the heirs of a kingdom on a fjord and are inseparable as little girls.  It turns out the elder, Elsa, is born with an ability to create snow and ice.  She and Anna play together in Elsa's worlds of ice and snow until she accidentally injures Anna.  Their parents take them into the woods where trolls revive Anna but warn their parents that Elsa's ability will only get more powerful as she ages and she could easily kill her sister if she were to cast ice into Anna's heart.  Her parents immediately separate the two sisters from each other and close their castle walls to protect everyone until Elsa can learn to control her power.  Soon after, her parents are killed in a sea voyage, leaving the girls to grow up isolated from each other and the world until Elsa's official coronation.  When the big day comes, during an argument, Elsa plunges the kingdom into permanent winter.  When the people are terrified by this, Elsa exiles herself.  Anna tries to go after her to convince her to stay.  In another argument, Elsa accidentally injures Anna again, this time in the heart.  In order to save Anna, only an act of true love will heal her.  The rest, I will not reveal to avoid a spoiler, but it is great and unexpected.

At first glance, this appears to be another Disney princess-theme film, with princes included.  But this is a film under Disney's newest head of animation, John Lassiter, one-time head of Pixar.  He was one of the creative forces behind Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., A Bug's Life, Up, Cars, Wall-E, Ratatouille, and others.  Anyone even remotely familiar with these will also realize that Pixar never approached their material and subjects in a orthodox fashion.  They were always fresh, original and unexpected.  Since he has taken over Disney's animated department, Lassiter has helmed Tangled (which I haven't seen yet) and Wreck-It Ralph (see review).   Now Wreck-It Ralph was fun, but not too inspired.  I will be watching Tangled soon.  But Frozen was fun AND inspiring, but from an unexpected source.  Rather than romantic love, the movie focuses on the bond of familial love, in this case, two sisters.  Also, it focuses on the necessity being happy with yourself before you can be happy in anything else.  Both of these themes are much more positive roles for our sisters, nieces and daughters to live by.  What I loved so much was that the movie was not what I expected.  I am usually pretty good at picking movies, but this is one that slipped through the cracks.  This is why I love movies.  They always have the capability to surprise me, and Frozen is a prime example.  I recommend it to anyone at any age.  It is really good.

Cleopatra (1963)

2 Stars (out of four)

50 years ago, 20th Century Fox made the sensational flop, Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  Much has been made of the making of this movie, that even though it was the highest grossing film of 1963, it ran at a loss since it did not make up its cost.  It was the most expensive movie ever made (adjusted for inflation), very diva-ish behavior from Liz Taylor, and most notoriously, that Liz Taylor and Richard Burton started a sexual relationship on the set, even though they were married.  It is one of the movies that suffered from toxic press, which many assumed had a huge effect on box office.  But the critical element that I never knew was whether the movie was any good.  So I set out to see if the movie was any good, and I have to say...sort of.

To start with, the movie is like a Doors song.  I think that The Doors never made a 3-minute song that they could perfectly do in 7 minutes.  This movie is way too long.  At FOUR hours, eleven minutes running time, this is the butt buster of butt busters.  It is almost as if they tried to use every piece of footage shot in the film.  There are so many superfluous scenes which draw it out way much longer than it needs to be.  Antony and her death scenes are almost fifteen minutes alone.  The other problem I have with the movie is something that dates the film.  It was obviously made in 1963.  It was taking a very puritanical look of the Cleopatra story.  It shows some very unpleasant material, but because of the morals of the day, they could not show graphic violence or sex, yet they insinuate a lot of it.  There are some almost nude scenes with Liz, probably very shocking in its day.  HBO's superior Rome miniseries is so much better as it delved into the backstory so much more deeply than this movie did.  This is the most dynamic and interesting period in Roman history, and the story is very dramatic.  This particular movie is obviously a showpiece to flatter its stars, and because of that, there are long, lingering scenes that could have been easily truncated.  However, there are some good aspects as well.  The acting is top notch by Taylor, Burton and Rex Harrison.  There really aren't too many duds in the cast.  The production design is also fantastic.  The costuming and sets are beautiful and lush.  It easy to see where most of the money went.  Every scene is beautiful.  There are even some exciting battle scenes.  So all told, the goods offset the bads, so that's why I gave it essentially a 50%.  It is not great, it is not horrible.  The incredibly long running time and drawn out scenes make it a tad boring.  It is worth at least one watch.

Lone Survivor

3 Stars (out of four)

Lone Survivor is being advertised as one of the best war movies since Saving Private Ryan.  I think that's overselling it a bit, but it is good.  Wahlberg is pretty adept at picking decent films, and this one is no exception.  It is the true story of Operation Rec Wings, where SEAL Team 10 was sent on a mission to capture/kill Ahmad Shahd, a notorious Taliban commander who killed several US servicemen as well as several Afghan civilians he thought we collaborating with the Americans.  All but one of the team was killed when they were discovered, as the title suggests.

SPOILER ALERT!  If you don't want to know what happens, don't read the following paragraph.  Sorry about the spoilers, but I have to give them to talk about the aspect of the movie that I find interesting.  The movie opens with shots of SEAL BUD/S training and then propels us into Afghanistan cerca 2005 at Bagram Aitfield.  Our group of guys are introduced and quickly get a mission to kill a notorious Taliban commander in an operation code-named Red Wings. Four of them are flown out into a remote area in Kunar Province and they quickly discover that this commander is surrounded by several hundred fighters.  The SEALs abort the mission, but run into an old man and two boys who are goat herders.  They detain them and briefly argue about whether to kill them or not to avoid being compromised.  The SEALs let them go, and quickly find themselves in a horrific firefight.  All but Wahlberg are killed within the first day (not the spoiler, it's in the title).  The second day, Wahlberg runs into another afghan who takes him to his village and gets word to the nearest American base that Wahlberg is in the village.  The Taliban find him later in the day and are about to behead him until the afghan stops them and tells them Wahlberg is his guest.  The Taliban commander threatens and then later comes back to kill everyone in the village.  The village fights back, and then the Americans show up and take Wahlberg back to safety.

What the movie was showcasing besides the bond of these soldiers, was the 2000-year-old Afghan code of Pashtunwali, which obligates an Afghan to protect a guest in his house no matter the consequences, among other things.  It also makes a very important point that is lost in many war movies like this that many, if not most Afghans, are not the Taliban, and in fact, hate the Taliban, but they are stuck in the middle of a conflict that was not their making.  This code of conduct helps makes sense of a brutal world, as many traditions do.  It is refreshing to see a war movie that does not totally demonize the other side through gross stereotypes.  However, while the movie rightly lauds Pashtunwali, it conveniently forgets that this code is indirectly responsible for bringing the U.S. there in the first place.  The Taliban originally invoked the same code to defend al-Qaida when they sheltered bin Laden, Zawahiri, and senior al-Qaida fighters and leaders after 9/11.  Tradition can sometimes work both ways, but what is important to note is that Afghans take Pashtunwali very seriously and are fiercely honest in their application of it.  The other curious omission was any information about posthumous Medal of Honor recipient Lt. Michael Murphy who died in this mission.  At the end of the movie, pictures of the real members of Operation Red Wings are shown.  It mentions their names and ranks, but nothing else.  Lt. Murphy was the first Medal of Honor recipient in Afghanistan, as well as the first naval recipient since Vietnam.  I am not criticizing, but it is a very notable oversight.  My only other real complaint is that while the movie is good, it doesn't really have a lot of depth like Saving Private Ryan or Platoon has.  The movie is essentially one long action film.  It is exciting and tense, but in the end, is not overly thought-provoking as other, more superior war movies have been.  It is pretty violent, but not exceedingly so, but my tolerance for that is pretty high, so many may disagree with me on that.  All in all, it was good, but not great, but is worth seeing.