Crazy, but not that crazy

Oh, boy. This is a good one.

Normally, I balk when I’m confronted with film characters who are mentally ill, have odd neurological ticks or are addicted to some sort of chemical. Partly, this is because I spend so much time in the real world with such people, and the fictional versions are rarely convincing.

For every virtuoso performance like Joaquin Phoenix’s unhinged drifter in The Master, there are a dozen performances like Denzel Washington’s preposterous caricature of an alcoholic in Flight.

When I read that Silver Linings Playbook was about two psychologically troubled people, I was initially concerned, and I wasn’t encouraged when the first few scenes of the film took place in a mental hospital.

But shortly after Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is discharged by his extremely concerned mother (Jacki Weaver) and I watched them and Pat’s obsessive-compulsive father (Robert De Niro) communicate, or fail to, as a family, I saw that director David O. Russell was going for authenticity, not parody, and those worries dissipated. Continue…

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A Freudian Bond movie. Really.

I need a martini. And a cigarette.

In 2006, Casino Royale saved the James Bond franchise, ending the redundant self-parody that had characterized the movies since Moonraker in early 1979. Two things happened. Following the amazing success of the grimy, naturalistic, and nearly effects-less Bourne Identity, director Martin Campbell made Casino Royale as gritty and physically possible as the previous film, Die Another Day, was plastic and absurd. But probably more important, Daniel Craig was cast as Bond. Continue…

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A world of false profundity

I was entertained, but the movie isn’t nearly as good as its makers want you to believe.

David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, considered one of the greatest literary achievements of the last two decades by many critics, has been on my bedside table or very nearby since it came out in paperback in the United States in 2004.

I’m not sure why, but I never opened it. I meant to, I swear. I love long, weird books, and that’s Cloud Atlas: There are six narratives that take place in wildly different times and spaces – the journal of a 19th century shipwrecked notary, an investigative journalist in 1970s San Francisco, a post-apocalyptic future where a tribesman is visited by a member of the last technologically advanced society, among others – and they’re connected in weird and wonderful ways.

The connections are tactile when one character in one time is reading the letters of another in another time. But the connections are more importantly thematic and metaphysical. Cosmic even. In a long novel, these sort of connections can slowly, subtly get under your skin. That seems to be one of the reasons the fans of the novel Cloud Atlas are so intent, even evangelical about its excellence. Knowing that such an experience is waiting for me, I keep the book on my bedside table. And it’s also why I was disappointed with the film adaptation, a technically astonishing but falsely profound epic made by the people who brought you The Matrix and Run, Lola, Run. Continue…

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Loop-de-looped

Fun and exciting. Just don’t think about it too hard. Unfortunately, I had to.

I love the idea of time travel. I fantasize about it a great deal: going back and stopping 9/11, going forward and finding out the right lottery numbers, visiting ancient Greece to see the Parthenon in its original form, or to 1970s San Francisco to visit pre-AIDS Castro. I’m always excited by time travel stories, from those great Star Trek episodes, to HG Wells’ The Time Machine, even to dorky shows like Quantum Leap. But when the time travel involves people visiting themselves in the past and trying to fix the future, things go awry, because the paradoxes start piling up. I either get annoyed or I have to force myself to ignore the annoyances. I had to do this with the Terminator franchise and with Heroes; if I thought about it too much, I could poke holes in the plot and my enjoyment would stutter. This is how I felt while watching Looper, the brainy, mostly thrilling new time travel thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Bruce Willis’s younger self. Continue…

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Argo see it!

My current prediction is that Argo will win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The thing about making movies based on true stories is that it’s hard to keep them suspenseful. This is especially so when the story is so famous, and everything but the smaller details are rather well known.

Ben Affleck’s fantastic new film Argo is based on such an event: The Iran hostage crisis from 1979 to 1981, in which 52 employees of the American embassy in Iran were held captive after the United States government foolishly gave asylum to the country’s loathsome, brutal king. Argofocuses on the six employees who escaped, hid at the Canadian ambassador’s house, and were smuggled home to safety and a massive hero’s welcome. Continue…

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