Rust and Bone (3/5 Stars)

There really is not much to talk about in Rust and Bone. It is a French movie written and directed by Jacques Audiard. It stars Matthias Schoenaerts as an indigent father who moves in with his sister and gets several different small jobs, one of which is being a bouncer. While bouncing at a club he breaks up a fight, which includes Marion Cotillard and another gentlemen. He offers to drive her home and she accepts. The conversation is not all that exciting or memorable and the two forget each other for a while.

And in real life they would probably never see each other again. But then, Marion Cotillard, loses both her legs at her job training killer whales at a Sea World sort of place. I am not exactly sure how it happens. The director chose to shoot the scene from below the water looking up. Anyway, Marion’s character must not have all that much friends and family because moping at home several months later sans legs, she decides to call up the bouncer (now a security guard) she had that uneventful car ride with a long time ago. And this guy remembers her, pays her a visit, and takes her to the beach, carrying her on his back in places the wheelchair cannot get to. He does this with very little fanfare as if it is not that big a deal. Why he does it or thinks it is not a big deal to do so, I really have no idea. The people in this story aren’t that articulate.

Really, they are not that articulate at all about anything. The writing here is particularly boring. Entire scenes can happen without any significant exchanges between people, leaving what is not said to the thankfully decent acting chops of Marion and Matthias. In this vein, Marion does a pretty good job as a double-amputee. But there really is not much to these roles. The movie has some novelty to it in that it contains a double-amputee, but a movie usually needs a little more to than the presence of some physical malady or tragedy to be a good movie. Otherwise it is just like a disease-of-the-week picture.

There was one scene that I particularly liked. The movie presents the Matthias character as a bit of an easy come easy go philanderer. Apparently he is good looking to the point that he can seduce a woman within an hour of meeting her. (At one point the movie presents an unfortunate jump cut. 1^st shot: Matthias is working out at the gym and walks past an attractive woman teaching aerobics. 2^nd shot: Matthias is eating a sandwich in the gym courtyard. The attractive woman stands behind in the distance smoking a cigarette. 3^rd shot: Matthias and the woman are energetically having sex in the gym alleyway. I tell you, they skipped the most interesting part of it all between that 2^nd and 3^rd shot.) The relationship between Matthias and Marion though is not particularly sexual. But at one point, after he has gotten work boxing and wins a big tournament, they go out to celebrate at the club where they first met. Marion by this time is using bionic legs and a cane. Matthias asks her if she wants to dance. She says no. So he goes off to the dance floor, easily picks up another women, and then leaves the club with her a few hours later much to the chagrin of Marion. 

There is something commendable I think about setting up one of the major characters as somebody that would plausibly do something like that and then actually going and having them do it in a scene. I thought it was pretty funny and I also especially liked the scene the next morning when Marion confronts him about it and he refuses to be anything but silently annoyed. He’s a total jerk but does have a point. It isn’t like Marion was being serious about him in their relationship and it’s not like he was lying about the type of person he was. And it’s not like Marion doesn’t understand. It wasn't a break-up scene I was watching.

But other than that the movie is pretty forgettable and I cannot really recommend seeing it, especially with so many other good movies out there.

The Dark Knight Rises (4/5 Stars)

Occupying Wall Street, if only

I would say that director Christopher Nolan’s greatest ambition with his Batman trilogy is to make the effort worth his time and talent. Here is a guy who has made some of the best and most original movies of the past ten years (Memento, The Prestige, Inception) and yet finds himself in between each of his better projects having to make yet another Batman picture. He made the first one because he was not yet a famous director. He made so much money that he was practically forced to complete a trilogy. Of course, in this day and age, trilogies are things of the past when more money can be wringed out of the type of fans that feel they are honor bound to “must see” every movie about a character (see Twilight, Harry Potter, Terminator, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spiderman).  But with this movie I think we can be certain that Christopher has finally paid all of his Hollywood dues.  From here on out we should be able to enjoy his creative license unfettered by silly comic books

Comic books are silly. They are so silly that almost every trick a serious movie director can throw at an adaptation of one cannot completely overcome the unreality of it all. It takes a great director to come close though and Nolan employs some rather great tricks to get as far as he did.  

First, he has created a true never before scene spectacle by embracing IMAX and physical effects as opposed to 3D and CGI in his action sequences. There is a rawness and realism to physical effects that makes violence feel more visceral than computer generated effects. Compare the fight scenes in this movie with another comic book tent-pole this year, “The Avengers,” and you will see what I mean. There is an element of horror present in the way the main villain Bane, played by art house muscle-man Tom Hardy, goes around beating the shit out of people with his bare hands that is noticeably absent in “The Avengers.” You look at the way he kicks ass and go, “ouch.” It’s good stuff. (On another note, a serious detriment to the effectiveness of the action is the PG-13 rating. Bane twists and breaks a lot of necks in this movie, but these actions are only visually implied and always just off-screen.)  The IMAX is incredible and actually worth paying more money to see (as opposed to say anything but “Avatar’ in 3D). The cool thing is that Nolan is not just using IMAX for cityscapes and sunsets; he is using it for conversations and fistfights. And it isn’t for just a scene; half of the movie was filmed with IMAX cameras. There is more clarity, there is more detail, and it is far grander.

Second, Nolan actively tries to ignore elements of the comic book. Take for instance the character of Selina Kyle, played by Anne Hathaway. In the comic book she is a leather bound fanboy fantasy known more often as “Catwoman.” The name “Catwoman” is not uttered in this movie, nor does Selina Kyle spend her alter ego time in fetishistic leather carrying a whip. Nolan rightly chooses to drop these details and focus on the woman. In fact, he does this with Batman, played again by Christian Bale, as well. There is far more Bruce Wayne in this movie than his alter ego. And it works too. Usually it is the villain that spruces up a sequel because the hero is already established. Not here, Bruce Wayne is a more compelling character than the mysterious Bane. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Bane is never without this breathing contraption that covers his features and masks his emotions and motivations. You need to be able to see evil geniuses without their disguises in order to grasp the understanding needed to truly fear them. Masks are for flunkies like Darth Vader. Keep that in mind as you watch this movie.

Third, Nolan always contains an undercurrent of current political issues in the Batman movies. In the second movie, we had the Dark Knight providing vigilante justice against terrorism using techniques Dick Cheney would deem absolutely necessary. (It is a relief to see a movie tilt right in its politics every once in a while if only for originality’s sake.) In this movie, we have a strong current of class warfare. One of the early targets of Bane is the stock market where he takes several bankers as hostages. Then there is Selina Kyle, the cat burglar who steals from mansions and tells a vacuous billionaire, “There is a storm brewing, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” It would be an incredible and ballsy thing to do and pull off this type of conflict. Here you have Batman, whose alter ego is a billionaire playboy who inherited all his wealth and stature, and on the other side you have Bane, a man born with nothing in what is referred to as the worst jail on Earth. He escapes and builds his army of menial laborers and wayward forgotten youth underground in the sewers of Gotham city till one day he rises up to daylight and takes over the city. Unfortunately even though Bane professes that his many acts of terrorism are acts of class warfare against the greedy and ungrateful rich amongst us, it turns out it is just a cover for more humdrum motivation. Bane wants to simply destroy Gotham entirely. I know, I know. That disappointed me too. It’s a recycled nefarious plot that the movie freely admits is identical to the one in the first movie, “Batman Begins,” except this time the villain is going to try it with a nuclear bomb.

 There is a problem with that of course visually speaking. For those that remember “Batman Begins,” the Gotham in that movie looked and felt like a leaking shit-bucket, something that would actually make sense (using warped logic but still some logic) to wipe off the face of the Earth. You can’t say that of the city in which “The Dark Knight Rises” takes place. There has been a rather grand transformation of Gotham between the years, even more so considering the way the city looked like in “The Dark Knight.” I mean the first place looked fictional, the second place looked very much like Chicago, and this one is obviously Manhattan. The inconsistency is something that might make one wonder just where the hell is Gotham and why can’t the makers make up their mind about it. As far as I can tell, they changed the city to Manhattan in order to service a plot point. They needed a place with bridges to blow up. Again, the problem is that Manhattan nowadays looks unavoidably like a big pile of money. So a story about class warfare could certainly work, but a story about destroying a city because of its wretchedness wouldn’t. I will however give the movie credit in one important respect. It wasn’t the logistical nightmare that “The Dark Knight” was. Bane’s plans may be too grandiose to be plausible but they still followed the internal logic of the character as opposed to the meticulously thought out miracles of foresight the Joker, supposedly an agent of chaos, kept accomplishing.

Let me take a moment to explain what I mean by “too grandiose to be plausible,” because that phrase strikes to the heart of what the problem is with most comic book movies. Nowadays these movies are not simply content to be fun-filled frivolity. Nolan’s Batman trilogy is perhaps the best example. There is plenty of psychology, pathos, and Deep Meaning all over these movies. However the schemes of the villains are far too successful to make any sense given how simplistically they are accomplished or on the other hand how simplistically they are brought down. Because of this, the movie gains a feeling of unreality whenever say an entire police force armed only with handguns decides it would be good tactics to charge a line of tanks and machine guns at least fifty feet away from it in a narrow alley (and actually succeeds in doing so). This feeling of unreality tends to undercut all of the psychology, pathos, and Deep Meaning. There’s this great quote from Spiderman. It goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In respect to moviemaking, writers and directors have the power to pull heartstrings, change minds, and make us care deeply for the lives of fictional people. At the same time though, if they choose to commit the viewer to such catharsis, they also have the responsibility to not fill the rest of the movie with contrived bullshit. That means if you want to make me care about Michael Caine crying up a storm, I better not see action sequences that confound the laws of logic or physics or both later on in the movie. I really don’t think that is too much to ask. For the record, “The Dark Knight Rises,” for the most part does not have this problem. It just has it to the point where I cannot say it is a great movie. It isn’t. 

Contagion (3/5 Stars)

Setting a record for the number of Oscar Winners killed in throwaway cameos.

The potential of a worldwide epidemic has been a great time-waster/audience scarer in the news for the past couple years. The virus will come from China (SARS, Birdflu) and just might be comparable to the 1917 influenza epidemic that killed about 1% of the world’s population. That was 1917, so the number of dead was only in the millions. Still, what if a virus like that came along again. Hundreds of millions might die.

“Contagion,” tells the story of such a virus in an oddly responsible way. There are no gruesome death scenes, over-dramatic wailing, or contagious zombies roaming the earth. Instead we are treated to plenty of scientists and doctors saying scientific things with patience and composure. These scientists are played by such acting heavyweights like Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslett, and Marion Cotillard. The first victim of the virus is Gwyneth Paltrow. Matt Damon plays her grieving husband. There are several other small parts played by well known actors. Jude Law plays a sensationalist blogger intent on dispensing government conspiracies. John Hawkes plays a janitor in Laurence Fishburne’s office. Jennifer Ehle and Demetri Martin are two other scientists working on the vaccine. Finally there is Bryan Cranston who plays some sort of military officer. Obviously, this is a very impressive cast. There are four Oscar winners, two Oscar nominees, and a two time Emmy winner in it. But none of this really matters except in marketing. You can put all the famous great actors on a screen and it still does not guarantee a great movie. This is especially true if the story is trying to be realistic.  

What’s the point of a Great Actor if the story does not allow for Great Acting? The Oscar winners here are supposed to be playing normal people going about exactly what they would do in this situation. This calls for understated performances, which they all do quite well. But really, it probably would have made more sense if the movie didn’t have any big name stars at all. Celebrity has a way of overshadowing underdeveloped characters. I rarely felt I was observing actual people. More often I was like, well, look that’s Kate Winslett and now she is in Chicago. Furthermore, if the movie wanted to take a realistic take on a subject that involves the entire world and a hyperlink network of characters, then perhaps the movie would have been better if it weren’t a movie. Two hours is not long enough to tell this story the way they want to tell it.  It should have been a 10-hour HBO mini-series.

The fact that the movie has such a huge scope but is only two hours long gives the story a sense of being in fast-forward most of the time. The vaccine apparently takes several months to create and distribute in the movie, but has a screen time of about 15 minutes. The great heroine of the story, Jennifer Ehle, is barely in the movie at all. Character back-story and motivation is hinted at but never developed in a satisfying way. Most of the problems set out are solved off-screen or dissipate in large jumps in time. Weirdly enough, the most dramatic conflict in the storyline is not the virus at all. It deals with the sensationalist blogger played by Jude Law who I think was selling a fake cure online. He gets arrested at the end, or maybe not. I’m not sure what was going on there in that park or even who he was talking to. It all happened so fast.

We’ve all seen catastrophe movies before. Well, remember that scene where the people are running wild in the streets and the looters raid the supermarket. That scene is in this movie too. Now, I’m sure that such a situation can be told in a realistic way that is just as exciting and dramatic as these scenes are in the best of zombie movies. But when a movie does not add anything to the set up the scene will not escape cliche. Time and details are needed for a realistic movies to be exciting. Otherwise they lack credibility. Now they obviously were pressed for time in this case, but whittling away those details makes what is left rather humdrum. Without the credibility the scene actually comes off worse than the same scene would be in a not so serious movie. You take the supermarket scene in a movie like “Zombieland.” Not only do they raid the supermarket, but they also kill zombies. Here they just raid the supermarket. It's boring.  

Having said all this, the movie is well put together considering that it is telling a story about a worldwide catastrophe in such a short running time. The director is none other than Steven Soderbergh, who was the Oscar winning director of one of the best hyperlink movies ever made, Traffic. But, really, you can just sense all the talent in the direction and the cast here going to waste. One wonders why Soderbergh decided to make this movie at all. The man is capable of great things. Why is he wasting his time with mediocre projects? Actually you can say this about Soderbergh’s career in general. Did we really need an Ocean’s 13? Come on Steven, you’re better than this.

Midnight in Paris (5/5 Stars)

How to be an intellectual without being annoying about it.

There are two men in this movie that know an awful lot about Paris. One is, Paul, played by Michael Sheen. He’s the type of guy who would interrupt a tour guide, played here by 1^st lady Carla Bruni of France, with the words, “If I’m not mistaken, Rodin’s the Thinker was influenced more by his mistress than his wife.” First of all, he does not think he is mistaken and so is already disingenuous. Second, he is a jerk for upstaging the tour guide just in order to show off. I don’t know who influenced Rodin, but if Paul is right than he needlessly embarrassed the tour guide by making such a scene. If he is wrong than he needlessly made a complete fool of himself. All present should be annoyed. Than there is Gil Pender, played by Owen Wilson. He too is an intellectual, but his smarts show not by self-aggrandizing posturing but by a knowing wonder for the town. He keeps on bugging everyone to walk with him in the rain because as he says, “Paris is so beautiful in the rain!” The great thing about Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” is that it understands so well the difference between these two ways of being a know-it-all. There is a difference between an intellectual who goes, “Wow! I can’t believe we’re in the same bar that Hemingway drank at! Hemingway was so cool and he drank so much! We’re going to have an awesome time here drinking and talking about Hemingway!” As opposed to an intellectual who lectures, “If I’m not mistaken, this is where Hemingway drank. His “Farewell to Arms” was okay but I felt in “A Moveable Feast” he was not as sure of himself. Also he drank way too much. That’s why he killed himself. You people should revere me because I am so knowledgeable about where we are.” “Midnight in Paris,” shows a vast familiarity with the 1920’s Lost Generation of Paris. It name drops excessively both from the well-known and not so well known people and places of the time and even includes quite a bit of French and Spanish, none of it in subtitles. But the movie never feels or seems pretentious. This isn’t an Honors English lecture. It is an inclusive party with old friends and one of the most enjoyable movies of the year. 

Gil Pender is a Hollywood hack screenwriter. It is good money but spiritually unfulfilling. He has a dream of moving to Paris and working on his novel because, well, all his literary heroes hung out in Paris and wrote novels. He visits Paris with his materialistic fiancé Inez, played by Rachel McAdams. There they bump into her parents on a business trip. The father refuses to enjoy Paris for political reasons. They also meet the pseudo-intellectual, Paul, who likes to label everything as romantic/surrealists/pre-new wave/etc/etc. One night, Gil chooses to leave the group and walk around Paris for no real reason but to do it. At midnight, a 1920’s car filled to the brim with flappers from the Rolling Twenties pulls up next to him. Before he knows it, Gil finds himself at a party where Cole Porter is playing the piano. A woman named Zelda starts a conversation with him. She is the wife of a guy named Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda asks Gil what he thinks of the party. The bewildered/excited out of his mind/awestruck Gil doesn’t know what to say. “I know,” Zelda says, “this place is boring. We’re going to a better party. Want to come with us?”

What a trip! Not only is Gil meeting all his heroes, but also all his heroes are exactly as he thought they would be. Even better, they like him and are interested in the novel he is working on. Ernest Hemingway won’t read it himself because he is of the firm belief that a writer will either hate another's work or be envious of it and hate it all the more. But Hemingway will show Gil the manuscript to the only editor he trusts, one Gertrude Stein, played by Kathy Bates. As Gil enters the studio of Gertrude Stein she is critiquing one of Picasso’s new paintings with Picasso present and adamantly defending himself. “Gil,” Stein asks, “what do you think of Pablo’s new work?” Imagine that. Being asked to critique Picasso to his face. Having Stein read your novel. Drinking with Hemingway. Gil Pender spends a majority of the movie in a state of ecstasy. Owen Wilson, perfectly cast even at 40 years old, conveys a perfect sense of child-like wonder. There is a great shot with Gil back in the 21^st century, wide-awake in his bed and whispering to nobody, “I saw Hemingway. Gertrude Stein is reading my novel. I’m Gil Pender. I’m from Pasadena.” What is really amazing is that this is a Woody Allen movie. Allen has done over forty movies now and there has been such a consistent strain of pessimism and nihilism in his work. That has completely evaporated here and in its stead is gorgeous scenery, great larger-than-life characters, sharp and clever dialogue, and a protagonist who couldn’t possibly be enjoying himself more than he already is.

Standing at about 90 minutes, this movie is also a great example of story efficiency. It takes about two minutes to introduce all the real-life people and their different attitudes towards Paris. It takes another five to introduce the idea of nostalgia and the cynical view that it is an erroneous romanticization of the past to assume that it was a better time than it is now (This theme comes up again ironically when one of the 1920’s artists suggests that the real golden age of Paris was in the 1890s.) The literary figures show up at all the right places in all the right times. I especially liked who Gil explains his perplexing situation as a man who spends the night in the 1920s and wakes up in 2010. He says this to some 1920s surrealists and they see nothing strange about his situation. Salvador Dali, played nicely by Adrien Brody, seems far more interested with his new favorite word “Rhinocerous!” There is also room for a budding romance between Gil and one of the art groupies named Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard. Overall the movie, like all good comedies, is not too long but contains quite a lot. It moves fast, is consistently funny, and very romantic. And don’t forget Paris. It looks as good as ever. 

Inception (5/5 Stars) July 20, 2010

A movie of immense ambition perfectly realized

I recall a scene from Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Being John Malkovich’ where the title character starts crawling into the portal that will lead into his own head. Another character looks on and remarks, “What happens when a man goes through his own portal?” It was a very good question, particularly because at that point in movie history it had never happened before. There was no genre outline for what was supposed to happen. The movie had defied genre and boldly stepped into the realm of the truly original. I remember the sense of suspense and wonder that came from watching that particular scene. Where will this movie go? What will I see? What is going to happen next!? Now take the suspense and wonder from that one scene in ‘Being John Malkovich’ and prolong it for an entire movie and you will get a sense of what it feels like to watch “Inception,” the new movie by Director Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo Dicaprio. It is an experience that must have accompanied the people who first saw such movies as “Apocalypse Now” or “Citizen Kane.” It is an experience that occurs only when a movie reaches for that zenith of Ambition and realizes it perfectly. I don’t have to see any more movies this year to say that “Inception” will be the best one. It is quite possibly one of the best movies ever made. 

Now let me think, what was the movie about? It was very vivid when I first watched it. It would be best if I saw it twice but I will take a crack at describing it anyway. Right now there is a unique form of Corporate Espionage called ‘Extraction.’ A group of specialized corporate thieves drug a person, invade his subconscious through his dreams, and steal an idea. It’s a bit complicated. One person, usually the architect, is the actual dreamer. They create and control the dream world. The others involved in the heist and the actual victim are voyeurs in the dream and their subconscious fill in the blanks and details of the dreamer’s world. There are several dream rules that you may remember from your own experiences. Some of them include: You can never remember how a dream started. The dream is especially realistic because when a dreamer is dreaming they can’t tell that they are in a dream. You can escape the dream by dying or falling but ordinary pain won’t wake you up. The time in a dream is prolonged because of the amount of brainpower you exert. For example, ten seconds in the real world is a minute in a dream. Most interesting is the concept of a dream within a dream where all the previous rules apply but even more so.

But alas there is just too much to explain for a dinky little review. I can only say this: that the enormous amount of exposition was always exceedingly interesting to learn and exhilarating to watch. Most importantly, it made sense. Writer/Director Christopher is a master storyteller in that sense. Recall what he taught us in “Memento,” about memory and what he taught us in “The Prestige,” about magic. Both had convoluted plots but we always understood what was going on and why. In this movie he teaches us with the same skill about Dreams. But that’s not all. In this movie, the intellectual exercise is just half the equation. Let’s not forget that Christopher Nolan is also the man who gave us “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight.” Those were both great big summer blockbusters with incredible action sequences. “Inception” is the successful combination of Nolan’s two disparate talents: Intellectualism and Spectacle. Oh and what a powerful fusion of imagination it is! The thing about Dreams you know is that they are bound only by imagination. Thus huge special effects sequences fit right into the story seamlessly. They never feel forced. In fact, these action sequences will make you think even more about what is happening. This is best combination of smarts and physicality since “The Matrix.” It’s like Charlie Kaufman wrote a James Bond script. One of the best scenes has Joseph Gordon Levitt involved in a fistfight in a hotel lobby where the laws of gravity keep on shifting. Wow! No, I don’t have the space to explain why, but it was awesome! If Christopher Nolan doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Director this year then the Academy has a hole in its head. 

Wait, I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning. Leonardo Dicaprio is the leader of the group also known as the Extractor. His long time associate is played by Joseph Gordan Levitt (3rd Rock from the Sun, (500) Days of Summer). He is the Point Man. These two are approached by a very powerful corporate man played by Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai). He is the Tourist. Watanabe wants Dicaprio not to steal an idea from a corporate rival played by Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later, Batman Begins) but to give that man an idea. This is known as “Inception.” If you thought Extraction, something that you had never heard of before was hard to pull off, Inception is twice as tough to accomplish. Too succeed in this mission Dicaprio hires Dileep Rao (Avatar, Drag Me to Hell). He is the Chemist and will provide the hardcore sedatives to lull everyone into a 10-hour deep sleep on a plane flight across the Pacific. Dicaprio also hires Tom Hardy, a man who specializes in shape-shifting. Within dreams he can impersonate friends, enemies, and beautiful women. He is the Shade. Then Dicaprio visits his father, played by Michael Caine, and asks for his most brilliant student. This turns out to be Ellen Page (Juno). She is the Architect. The Chemist will drug everyone. The Architect will design the Dream Space. The Shade will trick the corporate rival. The Tourist will provide backup. The Point Man gets to beat up bad guys in gravity changing hallways. The Extractor will plant the idea. 

I should also mention that the Extractor has something dark buried in his subconscious. It is the vision of his wife who used to be a part of his team. She is played by Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose). Since the Extractor’s relationship with his wife ended somewhat violently, his vision of her in his subconscious is quite a dangerous thing. Let’s just say she tries very hard to wake everybody up (i.e. she has a habit of killing people). 

By the way, I have only described the setup to the heist itself. So everything I just told you about is exposition. When we get into the heist, which plays out on several levels of dreams within dreams, then it gets really really interesting. I won’t give any spoilers because you wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. It would be impossible to understand what happens in the second hour until you have actually watched the first. There is no way to jump into the middle here. Every single minute of the 2 hours and 40 minute movie is important. (By the way, those two hours and forty minutes seemed like a half hour watching this movie. I couldn’t have been more entranced.)

I think it is fair to say that Leonardo Dicaprio has the best agent in the world. He has done nothing but superior movies for about a decade now. (Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road, The Departed, Blood Diamond, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Catch Me if you Can). When you think about it, he also has an odd habit of picking roles that involve doomed romances. For instance have you noticed how many times his love interest has died/gone crazy (Inception, Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road) or that he’s died/gone crazy (Titanic, The Aviator, The Departed) or they both have died/gone crazy (Romeo & Juliet, Shutter Island). Then there are also instances where he just dies (The Quick and the Dead, Blood Diamond) or the love simply goes unrequited (Catch Me if You Can, Body of Lies, This Boy’s Life). I think his most successful romance was with Cameron Diaz in Gangs of New York and I can’t really even remember if that relationship was ever consummated. He plays J. Edgar Hoover in his next movie, a closeted homosexual who openly despised gay people. Hoover did have a long-term relationship with another FBI man though. It seems hard to believe that a story about Hoover just might be Dicaprio’s most successful romance, but it might have that potential. With Dicaprio’s fine performances in two movies this year I believe he should be a front-runner for a Best Actor Oscar. If I had to choose which movie to nominate him for, it would be Shutter Island, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t also do a great job here. 

If I had to choose a performance I thought looked like the most fun though it would have to be Joseph Gordan Levitt’s. His fight in the hallway was just ridiculous. Also I had a blast in the scene where Ellen Page realizes an entire city landscape is at the whim of her imagination and starts rearranging the physics of it. What can I say, this movie is special. A freight train runs through a city street without the aid of railroad tracks. Yes it makes sense. Go ahead and take a leap of faith with a master storyteller.

A final note on the ending of the movie, which I believe was about one second to short. I believe that it would have toppled. I say this because I would be extraordinarily confused if it didn't. Right now, I am certain that it was wrong of Nolan to end the movie on an ambiguous note at all. To think he diligently led us all that way only to cut us off at the last moment is decidedly uncool. Of course, I remember being underwhelmed by the endings of both "Memento" and "The Prestige" when I first saw them also. But After watching both those movies again, I became much more accepting of what Nolan was trying to teach me. That's normal. When a movie introduces a new way of thinking about something (whether it be memory, magic, or dreams) it is hard to accept the new thought process right away. I know it is quite possible that "Inception" will be an even better movie the second time around. I'll add to this review my thoughts about the ending as soon as I get to see it a second time.

A Good Year 01/16/07

resh: Ridley Scott's new movie is about a successful London stock exchange man, Russel Crowe, who inherits his uncle's French vineyard. He at first wants to sell it but after a good deal of nostalgia he decides to not only keep it but to move there leaving behind his old life.
This might seem like a cliche movie and it is, but the way that Ridley Scott tells it makes it feel like new. There's so many techniques he uses in the beginning part of the story that speeds up the story. Why? Because Max is a stock trader and is life is supercharged all the time. But as he spends more time at the estate the movie itself slows down. Most movies start slow and end fast. This one starts fast and ends slow. It's a very smart way to tell the story and it makes this movie worth seeing. It isn't a must see of any kind. But its a short, clean, and complete movie. Very good.
Of course another good reason to see this movie is the kid Freddie Highmore. He plays the young max and shares many a good scene with the really old Albert Finney. It was kinda cool to see the kid had grown since the last time I saw him in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." I hope someday someone puts that kid in a movie with Dakota Fanning. I think that would be positively righteous.