Hobbits, Slaves, and the French

hobbit-bilbo630-jpg_045907There are way too many movies released in December. Luckily, most of them are the good ones up for awards consideration.

Last week, the San Diego Film Critics Society, of which I am a member, chose Argo as the best film of the year. It also won best director (Ben Affleck), best adapted screenplay (Chris Terrio), and best editing (William Goldenberg).

While that movie was released more than two months ago, many of the movies that we nominated for multiple awards were released in the last few weeks or haven’t even been released yet. So, I have been to a lot of review screenings and watched a lot of special “For your consideration” DVDs. I have seen some amazing films. But it’s frustrating that so many of the good ones all arrive at the same time. It’s hard to see all of them and give them their due. And it’s why I’m reviewing three new movies this week instead of just one. Continue…

|         

Hitch and Alma

More fun that a shower full of psychos. (And the LGBT Weekly link is here.)

Few directors have had a run of brilliance that Alfred Hitchcock had in between 1958 and 1963, when he directed in successionVertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds; four of the greatest films ever made.

But surprisingly, Hitchcock was still racked by self-doubt during that period, terrified that he was not good enough; that he was being surpassed by younger directors; that he would never be accepted and praised by his peers.

It is the middle of this period, during the making of Psycho, that is the focus of Sacha Gervasi’s delightful movie about Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren), a screenwriter with whom Hitchcock collaborated on every film he made, whether she was credited or not. Continue…

|    

Time for Pi

Gorgeous, if rather flawed. (Here’s the LGBT Weekly link.)

When you begin a novel with “I have a story that will make you believe in God,” you have made a bold promise that is very likely to be left unfulfilled. But that is how Yann Martel begins the Booker Prize-winningLife of Pi, with the narrator explaining that an old man has told him this story with just such a lofty goal.

The film version of Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee and written by David Magee, begins similarly, with Pi Patel (Irrfan Khan) telling his life story to a writer (Rafe Spall), who had heard from an old man in India that Pi’s story would make him believe in God.

That the film failed to make me believe in God, and I venture to bet that it failed to convert anyone else, is not surprising. But I was surprised that it was only the film’s photography that inspired and moved, while the story left me rather disturbed. Continue…

|    

Mad about polio

Helen Hunt, FTW.

If you’ve been reading my reviews, you’ll know that I tend to dislike movies about people with disabilities, maladies, or unfortunate circumstances overcoming their problems, usually with swells of mediocre music and a cheap plea for tears. It’s not that I don’t like seeing people succeed when the odds are more likely that they’ll fail; rather it’s that the movies are usually obvious and formulaic.

I don’t like knowing the ending of the movie before the opening credits are finished. And that’s just one of the reasons I did like The Sessions, which focuses on a man who suffered severe polio as a child and was left unable to move any of his muscles below his neck. By the end of the credits, we know that despite having to spend most of his life in an iron lung and unable to move, he graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English and was a working poet and journalist.

So, now what? He wants to have sex. Continue…

|    

It felt four score and seven years long.

I like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter a lot more.

The last time Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner collaborated was Munich, the taut, emotionally devastating thriller about the Israeli agents who hunted down the perpetrators of the kidnapping and massacre of Israeli Olympians in 1972. So, I had high hopes for their latest. Lincoln stars Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, Sally Field as Mary Todd and Tommy Lee Jones as the abolitionist senator, Thaddeus Stevens. Unfortunately, instead of making apolitical thriller or a war movie, Kushner and Spielberg have given us an over-long, turgid lesson in Congressional politics and facile morality. The main plot of the film is Lincoln’s wrangling for the passage of the 13th Amendment – to end slavery. Day-Lewis does Lincoln better than anyone ever has, but the whole movie is a dirge. At least the absurdist Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter imagined an audience and tried to entertain it.

|