All of Us Strangers (5/5 Stars)

Adam (played by Andrew Scott), a writer, sits alone in his apartment not writing. His building was recently built and so is almost uninhabited. One night the fire alarm goes off, Adam evacuates, and finds that he is the only person to do so. As he looks up at his building, he sees an apartment with a light on, the only apartment in the building with a light on, and a man looking down at him. They notice each other. Back in his apartment he hears a knock on his door. It is the man he had a moment with earlier (Paul Mescal). He introduces himself as Harry and offers his friendship in this lonely building, maybe more than that. Adam considers it but declines.

He thinks twice of it in the coming days and when he notices Harry again in the building lobby he strikes up another conversation. They start an intimate relationship. Around the same time, Adam visits his old neighborhood and indeed, the house he grew up in. He finds, without explanation, the ghosts of his deceased parents, frozen in age right before they died in a car crash when he was about nine years old.

What follows is a series of extraordinary conversations between Adam and his Mom (Claire Foy) and Dad (Jamie Bell). They are curious as to how his life turned out and how he is doing. Adam comes out as gay to his mother who is mainly worried, in a 1980s way, that such an identity would lead to stigma and illness. Adam explains that things are different nowadays. Then he has a conversation with his father who with bemusement explains that he already knew he was gay. That conversation turns when Adam questions his Dad as to why he didn’t comfort him when he was being teased at school because of it. After considering the matter in full, perhaps for the first time, his Dad apologizes in a moment of sublime warmth.

Adam’s interactions with his parents are not confrontational and his parents aren’t defensive. Instead, Adam is curious about why his parents did or did not do things and the explanations given, generally, are that his parents are human beings that sometimes make mistakes. Maybe if they lived long enough, they could have gotten it right eventually, but they died when Adam was still young. His parents are happy that Adam has found in his new relationship with Harry. The plot turns in a way that I won’t reveal when Adam attempts to introduce them to each other.

“All of Us Strangers” was adapted by writer/director Andrew Haigh (Lean on Pete) from a Japanese novel entitled Strangers by Taichi Yamada. Without reading the novel, you can feel the Nippon seeping through the screen. It makes a lot of sense that the original story is about a man in Tokyo feeling lonely. Meeting ghosts as a matter of course without the obligatory “this can’t be real” scene is very Japanese. But reading the synopsis of the novel’s plot one gets an idea of how great an adaptation this could be. (I won’t know for certain until I read the book, which is now on my list. Ask me in a couple of years about it.) Apparently the homosexual identity of Adam and the very personal conversations about sexuality with his 1980s parents were all superimposed by Andrew Haigh on a Japanese novel about ghosts.

Sometimes when the emotions of a story are so raw, it helps to have a creative barrier to better aid the audience to digest the story. Japanese movies in particular can be so intense that sometimes I feel the subtitles help the experience. After all, when you don’t understand the language, you kind of assume that the acting is perfect and don’t find it distracting. (It is hard to imagine Grave of the Fireflies, a movie about fire bombings and starvation, being endurable without the helpful emotional salves of a foreign language and anime.) It is then commendable that All of Us Strangers, a live action movie in English, hits all of its notes with appropriate delicacy. In particular, the performance of Andrew Scott is meticulous in its execution. This movie excels in the Japanese art of small things.

There is one very special moment in this movie that is a lock of my annual award of Best Use of a Song. One of the ghost encounters has Adam travel back in time to the night of his parents’ death as they set up a Christmas tree in the warmth of the family home. Playing on the radio is “Always On My Mind” by The Pet Shop Boys. This song, like the movie, is an exceptional cover that transforms a heavy handed lyrical ballad sung by the likes of Elvis Presley into a normal brit pop tune with 1980s synthesizers and beats that only upon further introspection reveals tender and moving lyrics. Movies, music, poetry, I mean art in general has a utility in our lives that this scene is a shining example of. For most of us, it is hard to articulate exactly how we feel, either by lack of talent or by lack of nerve and probably both. But sometimes you can just point to a song, a dialogue, a phrase, a picture and say this, this is how I feel. All of Us Strangers is one of the best movies of the year.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (5/5 Stars)

Billions of Blistering Blue Barnacles!

When Steven Spielberg’s action-adventure classic “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” opened in France way back in 1981, plenty of the reviews kept on repeating an obscure word, Tintin. Curious as to what the French word meant, Spielberg asked for a translator to find out. It turns out the French critics were consistently comparing Indiana Jones with a long cherished French series of comic books by Herge named “The Adventures of Tintin.” Indiana and Tintin had plenty in common. They were both intrepid adventurers (Indiana an archeologist and Tintin a journalist) whose exploits brought them to exotic locales in search of mysterious artifacts or ancient treasure. Both stories employed a break neck pace of action adventure and situational humor, not to mention some classic colorful characters met along the way.  So it is no wonder that Spielberg (with much help from Peter Jackson) would be the perfect choice to adapt Tintin into a movie and apparently has been working on this one off and on for more than twenty five years. As one who has read almost every single Tintin comic book (they are great!) I can say that this movie could not have been done better. It is Tintin and everything that was great about it. I hope they make many sequels. If you were one of those that were disappointed by the last Indiana Jones movie, than you must go and see this one. It is exactly what you want from that type of movie.

The plotline of this movie takes elements from several great Tintin books, most noticeably “The Crab with the Golden Claws,” “Red Rackham’s Treasure,” and especially “The Secret of the Unicorn.” Tintin notices a model ship of the pirate Red Rackham’s 17^th century galleon at a flea market and pays a pound for it. Almost immediately other interested parties ask to buy the ship from him. They give him dire warnings. Tintin takes the boat home with his journalistic curiosity fired up. He does research on Red Rackham at the library and comes home to find his apartment ransacked. There is something about that boat that people want! Could it hold the secret to Red Rackham’s lost treasure! What follows is a series of holdups, secret messages, code-breaking, marvelous coincidences that lead to strange far off adventures, espionage, intrigue, and the like. Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) is accompanied by his faithful dog Snowy. Along the way he meets an alcoholic skipper named Archibald Haddock who has a tendency for swearing colorful phrases like “Billions of Blistering Blue Barnacles!” and happens to be one of the two last descendants of an age old feud between two pirates, Captain Haddock and Red Rackham. Captain Haddock is played by Andy Serkis, the best motion capture actor in the business (he also did Gollum, King Kong, and the Ape in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”). The last descendant of Red Rackham is played by Daniel Craig. There are also plenty of thugs with guns that like to capture and kidnap Tintin and to be outwitted by an escaping Tintin. We are also treated to two bumbling police officers named Thomson and Thompson. They are identical twins that wear the same black suits and bowler hats so try not to get them mixed up. They are voiced by the comedic duo of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), an inspired choice of casting if there ever was one.

The Adventures of Tintin employs the best use of animated motion capture that I have ever seen. This is a particular type of animation that was pioneered by Peter Jackson for the character of Gollum in LOTR and made into entire movies by Robert Zemeckis. It is a poor substitute for live action in that the humans never quite escape the uncanny valley (this was one of my main dislikes with a movie such as Beowulf), but since Tintin is a comic strip, the characters make more sense inhabiting the uncanny valley than they would in the real live action world. The Tintin drawings themselves were rather simplistic. To search for an actor that looked exactly like Tintin would have resulted in finding a pretty weird looking actor. It is better this way.

Not to mention the control that animation gives the makers in constructing some ridiculously intricate action sequences. Take a look at the climatic chase scene that starts at a palatial villa and goes all the way down to the Oceanside through winding streetscapes while a tidal wave of water from the local dam gushes down right behind them. It is shown almost entirely in one shot without any edits or changes in camera angles. This is something that would be impossible to shoot in live action, but since it is animation we get to view a ridiculously intricate sequence that never cheats or confuses. The planning that must have gone into it was obviously extensive and the result is very good. Of course a movie that is live action like “Mission Impossible” will always be more effective thrills wise (you won’t get vertigo watching an animated film) but that doesn’t mean animation can’t be exciting or fun and Tintin is all of that.

The Adventures of Tintin should be a lock for the Oscar for Best Animated Picture. This should be the first time in many years that Pixar (Cars 2) does not come home with the trophy. 

Flags of Our Father 11/27/06

Clint Eastwood's new war movie left something to be desired. Most of it was good enough, definitely the battle scenes and the subsequent publicity tour. The biggest problem was the over abundance of voice over narration and the subsequent confusion. 
It was very confusing as to who was tellling this story, when, and how. Only at the end did I finally understand that it was the son of one of the soldiers that was visiting other veterans and interviewing them. If that's so then this story is being told by that son. So it's his story. Therefore Eastwood should have made that clear up front and then given the son more background. That way when the end of the movie come around, and it happens to be mostly about the son, I the viewer shouldn't think that the final scenes have very little to do with the movie. The movie was a bit anti-climatic. It's what's stopping this movie from becoming something other than run-of-the-mill. 

The battle scenes have a weird look to them. This isn't really a complaint, but it sort of looked like a video game and when it didn't look like a video game it looked like 'Saving Private Ryan.' On that note I really liked the casting of Barry Pepper. As one may remember he was the sniper in 'Saving Private Ryan.' Having him in this movie gave it a more authentic feel. Ryan Phillipe does a fine job too I guess. Most of the other guys I plain didn't recognize. 
There is so much talk about the flag-raising and how it was paticularly meaningless to the men who did it. But Eastwood also makes such a big deal over the flag-raising also that it completely substitutes the rest of the battle. This begs the question I think. Why didn't Eastwood make a movie about the battle of Iwo Jima and not about the flag-raising if he thought the flag raising wasn't that great. There's a look and feel to Eastwood's movies that makes them seem great, but I find that I look closer and I can never quite find the heart. The movies don't go to much farther than skin-deep. That's why I rarely watch an Eastwood film twice, although this one is definitely worth seeing once. I hope it doesn't win any oscars.

King Kong 12/19/05

I watched most of this movie with an open mouth and a wide grin on my face. To say that this movie was three hours of the most amazing sights I have ever seen is an understatement. I officially crown this movie as the best remake ever. I hope other action remakes will take note of this movie. It is not only an upgrade on visuals but also the storyline. There actually is a certain plausible romance between the ape (the beloved Andy Serkis) and the girl (Played by Naomi Watts with a beautiful scream) and other casting choices such as Jack Black as the insane director and Adrian Brody as the playwright are spot on. There are action sequences that build and build, One especially starting with a giant gila lizard, then a giant centipede, then a tyrannosaur, then two tyrannosaurs, escalates and escalates further and farther on then you would think possible. It is truly heart-pounding. The dinosaurs and other creatures in this movie are not typical. They have oversized teeth and truly frightening faces. One scene especially in a dark valley is especially chilling. The city of New York, shown first as Depression era, changes overnight with the arrival of Kong into a metropolis full of bright lights and dizzying colors. The amazing spectacular, popcorn eating grandness of this movie I have never seen before, but for one thing to point out. There are so many special effects in this movie. Not for once did I think any of them were gratuitous. Everything had a purpose to the story, and that my friends is indeed rare. I would not be surprised if this film shatters box office records. A grand tip of the hat to Peter Jackson. This is a film I will surely see again, and I have already planned on buying the DVD. Wow, Wow, Wowza.