Welcome to the first installment of "Monday at the Movies," the first of what should be a more frequent way of updating the blog without the time-consuming aspect of full reviews. Full reviews aren't gone by any means, but they'll be more infrequent and saved for special occasions (good or bad). Check back each Monday for a look at what The Cinema King's been up to and what he's thought during his travels.
(This post will be a bit longer than usual, since I'm playing "catch-up" on the movies I've seen in the last month or so. Christmas is a great time for the movies.)
Fail-Safe (1964) – I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m in love with Sidney Lumet’s work, and this was a bit of an unusual choice for a New Year’s Eve movie choice. But as always with Lumet I wasn’t disappointed. The film’s treatment of measures to prevent an accidental attack on Moscow in the height of the Cold War still carries all the tension it must have fifty years ago, due in large part to Lumet’s capacity to induce anxiety via his careful manipulation of the camera. High marks also to Henry Fonda, who brings his trademark integrity and earnestness to the role of the troubled President of the United States, who has to convince the Russians that the bombers are not sanctioned while wrestling with a number of impossible moral conflicts – which are then asked of the audience at the film’s startling and alarming conclusion. While the film becomes a bit heavy-handed when the President deplores the policy of mutually assured destruction, Fonda’s intense delivery sells it in a way akin to Michael Rennie in
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). If this film doesn’t grip you and hold on until the very end, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) – Stieg Larsson’s runaway bestseller gets a stellar treatment here in the hands of director David Fincher. The book was addicting like very few I’ve ever read, and the film doesn’t disappoint. Fincher keeps the plot moving (despite a few tweaks from the novel) in a quick and cerebrally engaging way, but the real star here is a career-making performance from Rooney Mara as the troubled hacker Lisbeth Salander, who embodies the character and all her subtle quirks opposite a typically stoic Daniel Craig. The suspects in the disappearance under investigation – Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Joely Richardson – all do good work, especially Skarsgard who never disappoints (see
Pirates of the Caribbean,
Thor, and
Mamma Mia for a sense of his range). I’m willing to forgive Trent Reznor for stealing last year’s soundtrack Oscar from Hans Zimmer, because the music here is suitably unsettling, creating a mood perfectly complementary to the visuals Fincher crafts. The film might leave some cold because it’s not standard Hollywood/awards season fare, but it’s a movie which requires thoughtful engagement and a critical understanding of the “man’s inhumanity” theme that pervades the work.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) – I can’t remember the last time I saw a straight action film, one that didn’t play games with the audience or deliberately try to subvert the genre with a series of improbable twists. Pixar veteran Brad Bird (
The Incredibles,
Ratatouille) does a fine job with this fourth
Mission: Impossible film, which fortunately doesn’t require the first three installments to make sense. The acting doesn’t accomplish much beyond providing bodies to live out the film’s action sequences; it’s impossible, for example, to forget that Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise and not Ethan Hunt. But those action sequences are something else indeed, thrilling and exciting in the best escapist tradition. Kudos to Bird for yanking the breath out of my lungs even in moments when I knew that they wouldn’t kill the star, and if the franchise continues like this (even with Jeremy Renner, who seems to be groomed for taking the reins) I may have to accept this mission.
Panic in the Streets (1950) – This, my first experience with the legendary director Elia Kazan, wasn’t a knockout. The premise is promising: investigators have 48 hours to find the murderers of a plague victim before they infect New Orleans with the disease. Richard Widmark is more than capable as a public health official, and a young Jack Palance is appropriately ominous as the murderer, but the film suffers from a split focus, never finding a balance between pursuer and pursued. There are long stretches of film where we don’t see Widmark, for example, a problem which drops a lot of the tension in the film. Compounding this problem is a dated and distracting misunderstanding of germ theory, which makes some of the film’s twists a bit, shall we say, inaccurate. Perhaps in the 50s it held up better, but as the second installment in a TCM double feature with
Fail-Safe,
Panic in the Streets didn’t raise much commotion for me.
Rango (2011) – I had extremely high expectations for director Gore Verbinski’s first animated film. And being a big fan of the
Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the inclusion of Johnny Depp as the star was icing on the cake. Unfortunately, I think my high expectations were insurmountable for the film, which ultimately disappointed me. The story of a thespian chameleon who becomes the sheriff of the town of Dirt,
Rango flirts with the western genre without ever doing anything productive with that sporadic flirtation. Depp’s voice acting is first-rate, giving life and nuance to Rango, and the other voices (Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Bill Nighy, and Timothy Olyphant channeling Clint Eastwood) do good work, too. But the story is a bit weak, overladen with scatological humor and other jokes that try too hard. I’d love to have seen what the film would have looked like in the hands of a more capable screenwriter (i.e., someone from the Pixar stable).
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Not everyone was in love with Robert Downey Jr.’s second outing as the master detective, but I was – although not initially. Downey and Jude Law still have excellent chemistry as the eccentric Holmes and his straight-man partner Watson, but the scene stealer here is not Stephen Fry as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft (who’s quirky but doesn’t quite gel) but Jared Harris as archenemy Professor Moriarty. Harris is a calm yet psychotic counterpart to Holmes’s intellect, evenly matching our detective at every turn. While the first half of the film struggles to find its footing, the second half rebounds from the uncertainty with a compelling Holmes-v-Moriarty cerebral match that spans several nations. It might be spoiling something to say that the film adapts “The Final Problem” among others, but it’s not spoiling anything to say that director Guy Ritchie does a good job adapting the source material to his own unique style and sensibilities. The standout feature, though, is once again the vast amount of infectious fun that Robert Downey Jr. seems to be having, and I can’t wait for the next film.
That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!
The Debt (2011) –
The Debt barely got any play when it
came out under the radar last year, which is both a surprise and a shame,
because there’s enough A-list material here – done successfully, to boot – to entertain
most audiences. Parallel narratives reveal
what really happened when three Mossad agents (Jessica Chastain, Sam
Worthington, and Marton Csokas) pursued a fugitive Nazi official (Jesper Christensen)
and how the experience affected them later in life. The older agents are portrayed by “big names”
– Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds, and Tom Wilkinson – all of whom turn in their
usual exceptional work; Mirren and Wilkinson find themselves at moral odds over
the truth of their experience, with Wilkinson’s determination matching Mirren’s
internal and external scars. But it’s
Chastain who gives the best performance; granted, she gets the lion’s share of
the film as the younger Rachel, but her work in The Debt proves why she’s a rising star in Hollywood. She is tough and vulnerable, holding her own
against Christensen’s Dr. Vogel (who’s the smarmiest Nazi this side of Ralph
Fiennes in Schindler’s List) as a
proper action heroine while also allowing the audience to see just how
traumatic her encounter is. It’s an
interesting companion piece to Munich,
but director John Madden wisely avoids the preachy moralizing Spielberg
deployed in his 2005 Mossad movie (which, coincidentally, also co-starred
Hinds). It’s hard to believe this is the
same director behind Shakespeare in Love
and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,
since The Debt is more intense and
more severely compelling than those two (not to denigrate either, of course),
smartly playing on the relationship of past to present while brilliantly
leading the audience to several premature conclusions. In short, The
Debt is overwhelmingly underrated.
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
– After 12 Angry Men, I’ll follow
Henry Fonda into any movie, particularly with the expectation that he’ll be
playing a character of similar moral fiber (Juror #8 is, after all, one of
cinema’s best good guys) – even if I’m not the world’s biggest devotee of
westerns. The Ox-Bow Incident, regarded as a classic, stars Fonda as a
drifter suspected of rustling before he gets enfolded into a lynch mob in
pursuit of a trio of suspected murderers.
The “plausible doubt” element (familiar to us 12 Angry Men fans) is of course the central conceit of the film, as
is an interrogation of the validity of vigilante justice (familiar to us Batman
fans). My father rightly pointed out
that the film feels a bit like a Twilight
Zone episode, and I think he’s onto something; the film is sans the
supernatural, but it includes the morality play aspect and the simplistic
cinematography, as well as the cast of character actors in smaller roles. What’s disappointing is that the film feels a
bit like a 22-minute story stretched into 75 minutes, repetitive at times and unfulfilling
in others (as in a hasty subplot involving Fonda’s sweetheart). Perhaps worse, Fonda is criminally underused,
likely due to the size of the large supporting cast. It’s not that the movie is bad – it just isn’t
great. And it suffers by the unfair comparison to 12 Angry Men (which I contend is a
perfect film) that I held in my head the whole time I was watching The Ox-Bow Incident.
