Movie Monday 12-14-2009

Every Monday I will be recapping everything I watched in the previous week.  To avoid rehashing the synopses, the wiki for each film is linked.  The films are listed in the chronology of when I saw them.

1. Terminator Salvation (2009, dir. McG):  The fourth movie in the Terminator series is probably the third best.  It’s not as bad as the third film starring Nick Stahl and Claire Danes, but it neither captures the same feeling of dread as Cameron’s first nor is it as cool as the second.  The actors seem to do just about as well as they can with a mediocre script.  It feels more like an introduction to more Terminator movies, which isn’t a horrible thing because there is some promise in the Anton Yeltchin character.  Maybe it would have been better if they had either shortened or lengthened it by 20 minutes.  I’d like to say that Sam Worthington stole the show enough to warrant his emergence as a superstar, but there were no real highs.  There were no horrible lows, though, either.  McG knows how to blow stuff up good and that was, apparently, enough to make 170 million.  Grade: C

2. Flame and Citron (2008, dir. Ole Christian Madsen):  This delicious Danish thriller is about two resistance fighters during World War II and their attempt to free Denmark of the Nazis.  I love resistance movies and this one is no exception, but it’s not quite as exciting as Melville’s Army of Shadows, which I consider to be the standard of greatness for resistance movies.  As in every film about the resistance two things are certain: the title characters cannot trust anybody but themselves and there is a mole in their organizations.  You probably recognize Citron as Le Chiffre from Casino Royale (Mads Mikkelsen) and Flame as one of the young Swiss Guard in Angels and Demons (Thure Lindhardt), but they do such a fine job at embodying the two fighters that their previous work does not hinder their authenticity.  Exciting and tense, the highlights of the film is a scene in which Flame is trying to assassinate the Danish head of the Gestapo in a  wine cellar and the final shootout between Citron and a company of Nazis.  More than anything else, I think this is an examination of a time when morality was ambiguous because the need to justice and vengeance was so strong.  Grade: B+

3.  Brothers (2009, dir. Jim Sheridan):  Finally…a movie that takes advantage of how alike Jake Gylenhall and Tobey Maguire look.  Brothers suffers from the mis-advertisment bug.  It’s being advertised as though it is a thriller, which in places it might be.  Their are scenes of harrowing psychological and physical trauma, but at the heart of the film is the relationship between the two brothers.  Everything in this film is polished and good enough, but the performance Jim Sheridan pulls out of Tobey Maguire is ultimately what I remember about the film.  Sam, a marine who is married to Grace and has two children, is redeployed to Afghanistan.  His gunship is shot down and he is presumed dead.  It’s not a spoiler to mention that he is not, in fact, dead and that bad things happen in the aftermath of the crash.  Sam goes from a calm, confident father/soldier to a restless, scared time bomb consumed by paranoia and the thought that his wife did not stay faithful.  At one point, after he has returned home, Sam is shaving and his wife comes into the bathroom.  It’s a small scene, but the fear that Sam shows really foreshadows the coming scenes.  It comes really close to being melodramatic, but Sheridan seems to rein in the actors before they reach that point.  Brothers isn’t a Nicholas Sparks novel, after all.  Grade: B++

4. Five Minutes of Heaven (2009, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel): In his follow-up to Downfall, Hirschbiegel tells the story of two boys: one of them shoots the other’s brother because of their clashing religious beliefs.  Set in 1970s Belfast for the first 20 minutes, the story shows the shooting, simultaneously, from both points of view.  The film flashes forward to a meeting of the two, now older and played by Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt respectively for a television taping of their first meeting since the shooting.  Neeson plays the grown-up murderer with enormous guilt and a desire to prevent his crime from happening again.  Nesbitt, who steals the film, plays the grown-up brother and it is evident that the character has neither moved on with his life nor forgiven Neeson’s character.  The title refers to Nesbitt’s desire to murder Neeson and how that moment would be his five minutes of heaven.  Hirschbiegel doesn’t seem to want us to take sides; the point is not that murder is wrong.  That is obvious.  The point is that terrorism and vengeance leaves victims on both sides of the fence and is, ultimately, completely self-serving and purposeless.  At least that’s what I took from Five Minutes of Heaven.  Grade: B=

5.  Dr. No (1962, dir. Terence Young): This is the first James Bond movie.  Having seen it for the first time, I realize why people love Sean Connery’s James Bond.  It’s the same reason I love Daniel Craig’s Bond from Casino Royale: neither are films are formulaic parodies of previous Bond movies.  This one is the original, the one before James Bond movies became predictable and cliché.  Julius No is such a solid villain that he has been the mold from which all other Bond villains (with few exceptions) have been molded.  From the three blind mice in the beginning to the heroic rescue of Honey Ryder, Dr. No is a whole lot of fun.  Grade: A-

6. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009, dir. Werner Herzog): Nic Cage is one BAAAAAAAAD LIEUTENANT!!  I don’t really know what to say about this film.  It’s one, like a lot of Herzog’s best work, that requires multiple viewings.  At the end of one of his earlier films called Stroszek, the titular character goes into a tourist trap with rabbits driving toy firetrucks and chickens playing toy pianos.  He gets on a ski lift with a frozen turkey and a shotgun after abandoning his car to do donuts in the parking lot and kills himself.  Bad Lieutenant is like 122 minutes of that.  The plot doesn’t matter; just Nic Cage.  And Nic Cage goes absolutely bananas.  I haven’t seen a performance quite like it.  He plays a glorious car wreck that you can’t help staring at as you drive past.  In a good way.  Grade: B++

7. Invictus (2009, dir. Clint Eastwood):  I’d say that this is the best Eastwood picture of the decade if it weren’t for Mystic River, Gran Torino, Letters from Iwo Jima, Changeling and Million Dollar Baby (sorry Blood Works and Flags of our Fathers…you lose!).  Invictus is predictably inspiring.  Nothing is really unexpected, but that’s okay.  Eastwood realizes that the story isn’t about shaking things up and he restrains from straying from his purpose.  Through the film we find out how innovative a thinker Mandela is through his empathy and compassion.  Mandela, through the Springboks, shows how to reach compromise and manipulate his people not for his own political gain, but for the good of the country.  This is something that rings home for me and probably does to most moderate-minded Americans who wish that the partisanship of our government would cease in favor of the real greater good instead of the greater good of a political party.  Mandela and Eastwood realize how important sport is: it  helps galvanize a population and both treat it with the utmost respect.  One of my friends asked me why people follow sports: I’d show him this movie as my answer.  It brings us together.  Maybe the message behind the movie is greater than its plot.  Additionally, Eastwood shoots the game of rugby as well as anybody has since Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 masterpiece This Sporting Life.  Invictus is a film with more heart than guts, but that doesn’t stop it from being great.  Grade: A–

8. The Cove (2009, dir. Louie Psihoyos): Every year in Taiji, Japan, 23,000 dolphins are herded into a cove by fishermen and culled mercilessly, for no apparent reason.  The Cove is about a group of activists and filmmakers who try to uncover this killing.  The plot unfolds much in the same way as it did in Man on Wire.  The filmmakers hatch an elaborate plan to get camouflaged cameras into the cove.  The best part of the film, though, is how they seem to anticipate every question that I raised about the practice of cetacean culling.  When I thought that the Japanese were entitled to their own traditions, the filmmakers showed me that the practice of mass dolphin killing is virtually unknown and reviled in cities other than Taiji.  When I thought that it was no big deal because they must eat the meat, the filmmakers showed me how dolphin meat has been rendered toxic by the rising mercury levels in the ocean.  When I thought that the practice was a small one, they showed me how the Taiji government was pushing dolphin meat as the new protein for school lunches and how the fisheries are selling dolphin meat to people when they thing they’re getting whale meat.  The point is that I had some very reasonable questions about why this practice is bad and the film answered all of them without resorting to the “dolphins are cute” defense.  This is an important film with bigger implications: 7 out of 10 people on Earth consider fish their primary source of protein and we believe that the ocean is a limitless source of seafood, an inexhaustible  all-you-can-eat buffet waiting for us to collectively waddle up for seconds.  This is a film that changed the way I think about dolphins.  I’m not an environmentalist by any means, but aren’t we supposed to be better than this?  Shouldn’t we avoid inflicting pain and suffering onto things if it can be avoided?  The Cove isn’t just a great film; it’s an important film.  See it.  Grade: A

 

Until next week, friends.

 

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