La Vie En Rose

I hesitated to write this review for the past few weeks.  I didn't know -- don't know -- if I could really describe how transformative Marion Cotillard's performance was.  She truly became Edith Piaf.  While I watched the film, I had no point of reference to compare the two, but I just knew that Marion metamorphosized into Edith: so broken, abused, neglected, mentally and physically ill.  

I don't think that the point of the film was to make Edith a likable person -- she was someone who intrigued me, not someone that I necessarily routed for because I liked her.  From the very beginning, the little girl who was raised in horrible conditions, became the product of her surroundings.  It was like a first run conception of Behind the Music.  In a really weird way this movie drew out my social worker skills (which are always at the ready) -- I honed in on the neglect, deviant upbringing, lack of medical care, lack of emotional support, physical and emotional abuse, and rampant substance abuse that produced this wonderfully talented, broken woman.  Edith was a real life china doll; delicate, timeless, stylized, and so frail.  I don't really know what to write, just simply Marion Cotillard's performance was mind blowing and I became totally enraptured.  A must see.                     

Highly Anticipated DVD Release Tuesday!

Psyched for the release of Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Men Who Stare At Goats, Toy Story and Toy Story Two: Special Edition

Our Family Wedding

Shmeh.

Another movie about two families opposed to a marriage that happens despite their objections and everything works out just fine.  America Ferrera, sweet as always.  Carlos Mencia, annoying.  Forest Whitaker, what were you thinking?  Regina King, bangin'.  Lance Gross, I don't really know who you are, but I like you better on TV.  Charlie Murphy, funny.  Taye Diggs, super delicious.    

It's not really worth it, unless it's on TV.  

An Education

I left the theater feeling totally satisfied with my movie-going experience.  

I needed to put that out there because there were only two other films that did that for me in the past several months: Up In The Air and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

A beautifully acted and written coming of age story about a teenager who has a love affair with an older man and the consequences that come along with innocence charmed and changed.  Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is as cute as a button.  Peter Sarsgaard as David was so believable: I really was drawn into his puppy love for this young girl.  He was so charmingly manipulative and creepy without going overboard.  The chemistry between all of the actors drew me in and  just gripped me.  There were some terribly uncomfortable moments which made my creepy-o-meter dial go crazy, but the story lead me through it, to land safely on the other side.  I basically figured out what would happen in the end, but it was a satisfying ending without let-down or regret.

Terrific.  Truly.       

Alice in Wonderland in 3D

Who better than Tim Burton to bring Wonderland to life? I have watched (and own) more than a few Alice in Wonderland movies and cartoons.  All are wonderful in their own way and all try to translate the rediculous irrevereance that Lewis Carroll created in his infamous volume.  No matter that he was a pedophile and that I have a strong internal struggle concerning my love for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There and the knowledge that Carroll was an icky, icky man.  Tim Burton is a wacky guy, and really the perfect one to show us what Wonderland should look like.  

There was a lot of hype surrounding this movie, which ended up being not bad, but not exactly what I wanted.  I intended on seeing it like at least 3 times, but 1 viewing turned out to be enough.  Visually, Wonderland was expansive, colorful, fantastical, and all the things that it should have been.  And yet the expansiveness reminded me of The Neverending Story and the nothingness that encompassed the kingdom.  Wonderland should not have been that way.  I understand that it was part of the new conception of the story, but still.  I really wanted every scene to be full of fantastical creatures and scenery.  I would have liked Alice to stretch and shrink like in the book, all distorted and contorted, which I think suits Burton's morbid style.  I wonder why that didn't happen.  I liked the evolution of the story, beginning in the reality and with the wacky personifications of the wonderland inhabitants.  I wasn't crazy about it being really named Underland and that the focus was so much on the feuding sisters.  The frabjous day battle should have been fought by a knight or at least a man, rather than Alice, to keep true tot the poem, but within the context of the film, forgivable.  All the characters and actors that brought them to life were nearly spot-on: Mia, Helena, Johnny, Anne, Crispin, Matt, Stephen and the entire cast.  Blue caterpilllar should have not been blue, but I forgave that knowing that Alan Rickman lived inside.  Johnny Depp was of course amazing, that is his baseline, I expected no less.  Although in my mind's eye the Hatter doesn't look like that.  But that's ok. 

Overall, I think that this was a solid effort (can't believe I just wrote that about TIM BURTON) and will be one of the top films illustrating Wonderland, but nothing will ever match my imagination or the singing flowers in the original Disney version.  

Ghost Town

Ricky Gervais has a way of making fluffy, makes-you-feel-all-warm-inside movies.  Ghost Town was no exception.  It was better than The Invention of Lying, which was another fluffy romantic comedy.  Ghost Town was a sweet story about Bertram Pincus a grumpy dentist who lacks any desire to interact in a socially conscious way with others, who dies for a few minutes when he undergoes a routine operation.  He then can see dead people.  One dead person (Greg Kinnear), who was an adulterer and not very honest husband needs help from Bertram in order to finally cross over.  I don't want to spoil the story, but in the end love blossoms and Bertram's heart grows three-fold.  Very cute.  I liked that it was a simple, innocent flirtation and budding romance storyline rather than lusty sex scenes -- which I totally would not want to watch anyway with Gervais in the male lead.   

Shutter Island

written by guest blogger Brendan Hinkle

The problem with talking about a movie that hinges on a plot twist is that you can't really say what you want without ruining the movie for everyone who hasn't seen it. I'll have to do this in two flavors: Regular and Spoiler-Free.

Spoiler Free

One quality I value in a film probably more than I should is atmosphere. If a movie is truly successful in creating atmosphere—in surrounding me in its mood and making my suspension of disbelief effortless—I can basically forgive it anything else (example: I both really, really enjoyed The Illusionist and recognize that it's boring as hell). That's probably not the only reason I really liked Shutter Island, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Even before Leonardo DiCaprio sets foot on the almost comically-foreboding titular island, Scorsese never misses an opportunity to make the movie feel more like a fever dream than a story: a rhythmic monotony permeates most of the scenes (whether from crashing waves, pounding rain, howling wind, the growl of a jeep engine, or a needle grinding against a record); the shadows are over-saturated, seeming to pull at any instance of color; lights are almost painfully bright (especially in, but not limited to, an affecting recreation of a migraine). Most of all, the jarring, aggressive score doesn't carry or accent the action so much as chase the audience through it.

Speaking of action: Shutter Island may be classified as a thriller, but it seems to go out of its way to avoid the Build Tension -> Shocking Payoff -> Build Tension structure usually employed by the genre. There are a few BANG-SURPRISE! moments to be sure, but I spent most of my time bracing for a Bang! that simply never came. That would make for a deeply unsatisfying experience if Scorsese didn't stack sequences like that one after another, until the tension was almost unbearable. It builds an overwhelming sense of dread without ever granting the audience the relief of resolution.

The result is deeply engaging, which helps me forgive the fact that the plot itself is kind of unsatisfying. More on that below.

Regular

Man, how about that twist? Pretty cool—or was, back when I first watched Fight Club. Or The Sixth Sense. Or back when I read basically anything written by Edgar Allen Poe ever.

The reveal that Leo's the one who's batshit-crazy is handled in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. I'm not sure if they were trying for Kafka-esque mundane horror or if they just got it wrong, but either way, I didn't really give a damn about Ben Kingsley's expository monologue, and I certainly wasn't shocked by a twist that was broadcast full-blast for the last two-thirds of the movie. (Once—just once—I'd like it to actually be the government performing mad experiments to beat the Ruskies.)

Given that everything we were watching was psychosis, I'm wondering why Scorsese didn't go even bigger with all the great atmospheric shtick I talked about above. One possibility is that he wanted to keep it (relatively) low-key, so as to avoid blowing the "mind-blowing twist" (that's what the ads say, anyway) before the climax. I guess that's possible. But really, I can't shake the feeling that Shutter Island really would've been something amazing (instead of just very good) in the hands of someone from the More-Is-More school of film-making, like Darren Aronofsky or Danny Boyle (see Requiem for a Dream and Sunshine, respectively).

Don't get me wrong: I really liked it for what it is. I just can't help wondering if it couldn't have been more.