In Baz Luhrmann’s new film, Australia looks like a fascinating, forbidding country of amazing vistas and challenging terrain.
By contrast, Baz Luhrmann’s new film, “Australia,” is sprawling, silly, overlong and bizarrely bogus-looking. All of that scenery – and Luhrmann is dicking around on sound stages with green screens.
Years in the making? Why? “Australia” looks like a cut-and-paste job, a patchwork that includes a little of everything from “Gone With the Wind” to “Out of Africa” to “Red River” to “The Sound of Music.” Plot and character are both drawn in the broadest strokes; a subtle moment would die of loneliness. (More…)
About halfway through the second of the quartet of holiday celebrations in “Four Christmases,” you’ll be ready to say, “That’s enough.”
Really – wouldn’t one Christmas have been sufficient for the limited ideas and even more limited jokes of this middling comedy? (More…)
You’ll sit gawp-faced at “Milk” as the past echoes the present in eerily unfortunate ways.
And you may come away thinking – rightly or wrongly – that if Gus Van Sant’s biopic of late San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk had been released a month earlier, California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, never would have stood a chance of passing. (More…)
It would be easy to dismiss “Special” as downbeat and slow, the kind of movie you see only at festivals (where downbeat and slow are represented as poetic and deliberate) until someone makes the unfortunate choice to release it on an unsuspecting public.
Easy – and, unfortunately, true. Yet there’s something else there – something that could have made “Special” as intriguing as Darren Aronofsky’s “Pi.” But “Special” directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore never quite make that leap. (More…)
Now that hand-drawn animation has gone the way of the fax machine, Disney’s recent animated output has been so closely associated with Pixar that it takes a movie like “Bolt” to remind you that Disney hasn’t forgotten how to make an animated comedy, without the Pixar geniuses.
“Bolt” is the kind of movie you pray for as a parent: something that will amuse your tyke and keep you entertained as well. You’ll probably be laughing at different things – but you’ll both be laughing.
The kids will laugh at the slapstick; the adults will laugh at the show-biz jokes. Both are plentiful. (More…)
“Lake City” is trying to be two movies at once – and winds up giving both of them short shrift.
On the one hand, it’s a going-home drama, about a prodigal son returning to his roots to come to terms with his parent and his past.
On the other, it’s a tale of urban crime invading rustic America a la “A History of Violence.”
The latter – aside from giving rocker Dave Matthews the chance to play a vicious villain in a movie – feels tacked on to what might have been a strong clash of emotions. And it tends to undercut the other story, instead of enhancing it or giving it resonance. (More…)
I’m thinking of making a list of holiday movies in which families gather to celebrate together and wind up working out the problems that have been keeping them at each other’s throats.
These movies usually involve someone with a secret – usually a terminal illness – that overrides all the bad feelings and proves that blood is thicker than whatever.
I suppose I need to add Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale” to that list. Like “The Family Stone” and last year’s “This Christmas” (and this year’s “Nothing Like the Holidays”), it brings together a family whose members each are suffering a crisis of sorts. But this family really has no interest in making up.
And that’s in spite of the fact that the matriarch, Junon (Catherine Deneuve), is suffering from a strain of leukemia that requires a bone-marrow transplant. She needs her children (and their children) to submit to a test to find a compatible donor. Even then, there’s a chance that the transplant itself could kill her before it saves her – so the potential gift by one of her descendants might just be fatal.
“A Christmas Tale” refuses to play by conventional rules. The humor is alternately spiky and subtle. The family members have very little nice to say to each other. So why are we watching these people? Why should we care about them? Desplechin never really gives us a reason. (More…)
Everybody thinks they should be famous.
And once the fleeting nature of fame becomes apparent, everyone thinks they deserve another shot at the top. Because what’s more American than a comeback? It’s part of the modern media birthright, just like stardom.
Such is the nature of the post-reality-show world.
Even worse than the loss of fame, of course, is the loss of the lifestyle it affords. Which brings me to “The Dukes,” the directorial debut of actor Robert Davi. This easy-going movie is about coping with life and redefining success on your own terms. (More…)
“It takes a lifetime to build a future – only a hard word to tear one down,” the late soul singer Judy Clay crooned in her song, “It Ain’t Long Enough.”
And sometimes even less, as the touchingly spare new Irish film, “Eden,” shows. A study of one couple struggling to keep the flame alive in their marriage, this clear-eyed tale looks at the unspoken language of a relationship that is slowly dying by attrition.
Directed by Declan Recks from a script by Eugene O’Brien, “Eden” is a snapshot of a few days in the lives of Billy Farrell (Aidan Kelly), a telephone repairman, and his wife, Breda (Eileen Walsh), who live in a small Irish town where everyone knows everyone. The Farrells’ 10th wedding anniversary approaches but husband and wife look at it in distinctly different ways.
Billy feels trapped, feels old, feels that whatever promise he might have shown as a young man – when he famously rescued someone who fell into one of the local canals – has been drained from him by the demands of marriage and fatherhood. His spare time inevitably is spent drinking at the pub with his mates, listening to the single ones telling stories of romantic adventures from which Billy can only draw vicarious thrills. (More…)
Swirling with color, jumping with energy, awash in melodrama, Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” is the crowd-pleaser that won the audience award at this year’s Toronto Film Festival.
That it seems both conventional and familiar doesn’t diminish its enjoyability factor. It’s not exactly shameless; rather, it’s eager and effervescent, too caught up in its own excitement to worry about the niceties. (More…)
