Entries tagged with “Dramas”

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Roughly halfway into Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck's directorial debut, the movie is finished. The plot involving a kidnapped youth has been apparently, tragically resolved.

But the movie still has an hour left, a clockwatcher will tell you. And even if you're not a person regularly calculating how the anticipated remaining X plot will unfold in the remaining Y minutes, you know that there's plenty left to come. So what will it be? What will this movie be about, having dispensed with what appeared to be its primary story?

One of the great joys of cinema is a movie that genuinely surprises you — not with a twist ending but by being something different from what you expected or (even better) different from what you've previously experienced. (Surprise endings are so obligatory in thrillers nowadays that the only real surprise is their absence.)

So I was seriously jazzed about Gone Baby Gone at its midpoint, wondering where it would take me and excited that it seemed to be a nearly honest drama about missing children. It might actually substantively explore grief, responsibility, repercussion, community, and healing.

It didn't take long for it to disappoint me, for it to choose the false path I should have expected.

The only connection that I could quickly find between screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and novelist Paul Auster is that they had a public "conversation" earlier this year. (The promised subjects suggest at best a superficial relationship: "the art of filmmaking, writing, and — yes — Hollywood." How pedestrian.)

This is curious to me, because Arriaga's script for the Tommy Lee Jones-directed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is classic Auster.

And I don't mean that it bears a resemblance to Auster. If you've ever experienced The Music of Chance (either the book or the faithful film adaptation), Moon Palace, Mr. Vertigo, or any number of the author's other works, you could be forgiven for thinking that Auster was behind Three Burials, and perhaps was engaging in the ecologically sound but creatively deficient practice of recycling.

More than a half-century separates these two movies, and they obviously live in different parts of town. Tod Browning's horror classic Freaks was controversial upon its release in 1932 and hasn't lost much shock value, with its use of real sideshow performers and the uncomfortable mixture of exploitation and sympathy. Peter Weir's Witness is a mild drama about the Amish that masquerades as a cop thriller. (Or is a cop thriller disguised as an Amish drama?)

Yet the two have much in common.

Why is it that the skillfully made and human Babel doesn't resonate more, and feel more honest and rich?

Its blunt-instrument trailer aside, the movie from director/co-scenarist Alejandro González Iñárritu is sensitive and restrained, letting its four loosely related stories stand largely independent of each other and never forcing additional connections between them. The movie is never maudlin, its performances and individual plot strands are credible and involving, and the character of a deaf Japanese teenager is written and performed with an alarming authenticity as it moves toward literal and emotional nakedness.

Yet as well crafted as Babel is — a huge improvement over the director's unnecessarily convoluted 21 Grams — there's something off about it.

It's not hard to figure out why Robert Altman was the center of attention with last summer's A Prairie Home Companion — even though we didn't know at the time of its release that it would be his final movie.

Long before his honorary Oscar in March 2006, Altman was cool — a stubborn, renegade filmmaker whose biggest head-scratcher (Popeye) has somehow been transformed into an indicator of his unconventional greatness. His death in November merely gave Altman permanent ownership of A Prairie Home Companion, concerned as it is with passing, and the proper way to commemorate something that is gone.

But another reason that Altman was the focus — beyond film culture's oftentimes-ridiculous bias toward directors — was that the alternative would be to talk about quaint, old-fashioned, uncool-even-by-public-radio-standards Garrison Keillor, who wrote the script.

Marnie is narratively and technically artless — literal and obvious and shrill and nearly naked in its themes and concerns, a story clumsily built around Freudian repression. Its psychology is facile; its score is overbearingly dramatic; and director Alfred Hitchcock seems hostile toward even the most basic realism with his rear-projection drives and the mechanical horseback riding of the fevered climax. The technique of Marnie is downright standoffish, easily read as laziness or incompetence.

Yet Marnie is not the travesty many people think.

Much like the Boston Red Sox, the movie Game 6 hauls so much baggage that triumph seems nearly impossible. It's akin to being down three games to none to the Yankees in a best-of-seven series. Lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ong odds. But somehow ... .

Two movies live in Shopgirl. One is a creepy but strangely touching May-December romance between Claire Danes and Steve Martin. The other stars Danes and Jason Schwartzman in a screwball comedy, with an intrusive, superfluous voice-over. The first of these movies is surprisingly good; the second sucks. Plus: Silent Hill, another schizophrenic film.

The final two stops on the Culture Snob tour of 2005 Best Picture Oscar nominees are striking for their similarities. Both Brokeback Mountain and Munich are patient, well-made genre movies that strip most of the politics out of charged subjects. Sadly, both are also botches.

The handsome Good Night, and Good Luck is a joy to behold but short on ideas, drama, and humanity. It ends up being a dull film documenting the dull work of dull television journalists, when it really wants to be a sober but nostalgic reminder of heroic muckrakers bringing down the big bad bigot of the Red Scare. Perhaps most crucially, as a lesson for our times it's a deeply flawed comparison.

Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his performance in Capote, one I found a mite calculating. The film as a whole suffers from a similar malady: It seems to operate more cautiously than deliberately, a hint too restrained and with a trace of self-conscious uncertainty. Yet, fundamentally, the studied, low-key choices work.

In Palindromes, writer-director Todd Solondz has a wonderfully oddball conceit: Eight actors of widely disparate ages, races, body types, and dispositions — and even one boy — play 13-year-old Aviva Victor over the course of the movie. It's obviously meant as a jarring, difficult film, but it's curiously tame, the function of a concept in search of something to say.

The easy, conventional reading of Lars von Trier's Dogville casts it as an anti-American screed. Yet that interpretation exists almost completely outside of the movie itself. In other words, many of von Trier's critics are full of shit.

Spider Forest is at once lovely and brutal, delicate and hard, sympathetic and unforgiving. It has a feel both foreign and familiar, like the image in the movie of a girl whose body rises into the air feet-first, as if God's hand gently plucked her by the ankle and took her into the heavens.

There's nothing wrong with Ray that a little less hype couldn't fix. As biopics go, it's pretty good. Jamie Foxx is convincing as the iconic Ray Charles. Writer James L. White and writer-director Taylor Hackford employ a clumsily expository flashback structure that actually pays off beautifully at the end with a startling and unexpected moment of transcendence and vision. Two and a half hours clip by briskly. And there's plenty of Charles' music.

Birth is the perfect antidote for anybody who thinks reincarnation is a romantic notion, allowing for a reunion with the spirit of a loved one who has died. By mining the practicalities of the situation, the movie becomes a rare work that humanizes and seeks to understand the effects of reincarnation instead of merely employing it for cheap horror or cheesy romance.

Maria Full of Grace is a straightforward, clinical, nearly artless movie that starts out as a rote tract on the human cost of the drug trade and eventually builds itself into a story in which the audience has an emotional investment. In the end, it sits somewhere between the brilliant and razor-sharp British miniseries Traffik and its obvious, too-condensed American re-make Traffic (directed by Steven Soderbergh).

With Monster, writer-director Patty Jenkins has fashioned a story of insistent, persistent desperation that is so fully embodied by Charlize Theron that I had a hard time believing the movie's politics and psychology were so facile.

Here is a movie that so badly wants you to cry and to feel the heartbreak of emotionally stunted characters and to bask in their eventual breakthroughs that I did my damnedest to resist it. In America is one of the most shamelessly manipulative art-house movies you'll ever find. It works surprisingly well.

The highest compliment I can pay to Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void is that few people will notice how radical it is. It's a completely gripping, horrifying movie, and it's so good that it's easy to overlook what Macdonald has done: seriously undercut the idea that plot "spoilers" damage the experience one has with a movie.

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