Quick Review - The Impossible

Inspired by a true story, J.A. Bayon's The Impossible dramatizes the harrowing ordeal of the Bennett family, who were separated by the catastrophic tsunami that rocked southeast Asia on Boxing Day 2004. It's a fairly “Hollywoodized” version of the truth (although the production is predominantly Mexican), but there's no reason for that to be a dismissive description. Bayona heightens the visceral experience of this real life horror story by leaning on, naturally, horror movie tropes. The gripping sound design, cringe-inducing makeup, and waivering string music all contribute to Bayona's innovative real-life-as-horror approach.

Stars Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, and Tom Holland also do excellent work at embodying the fear that Bayona is going for. While one can be justified in criticizing the film for narrowing its dramatic eye on the wealthy tourists while brushing the devastated Thai people under the rug, I wonder if rectifying that would really have benefited the focused script all that much.

*** out of ****

Review - Zero Dark Thirty

At 12:30 a.m. on May 2^nd 2011, Black Ops raided a compound in Pakistan and shot dead the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden. It was the culmination of a long, tiring search by the CIA which inspired Kathryn Bigelow's clinical new thriller Zero Dark Thirty.

As fictionalized by writer Mark Boal, the CIA men and women who worked for years to track down the reviled terrorist are amalgamated and personified by the character of Maya (Jessica Chastain), but that's about as fictional as his screenplay gets. The vast majority of it is a straight-laced, doggedly researched piece of cine-journalism, which condenses several firsthand accounts into a tightly-wound docudrama.

Review - A Snow White double feature

A pair of Costume Design nominees which bowed earlier in the year forced me to go back and play a bit of catch-up.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the most superfluous Snow White recreation of them all? Trick question. Turns out it's both of them. With fairy tale revisionism dominating studio slates recently – either because audiences are really clamouring for it or because it's cheaper than paying licensing fees for anything written in the last hundred years – 2012 ended up yielding not one, but two new takes on the girl with skin as white as snow and hair as black as night. Occupying opposite ends of the tonal spectrum, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman make a peculiar, if not a high quality, double feature.

Mirror Mirror is the incarnation that tries to preserve the lightheartedness we often associate with fairy tales. Lily Collins plays the raven-haired beauty who joins up with a septet of pint-sized bandits after her vampish diva of a step mother (Julia Roberts) had ordered her be taken to the woods and slain. From thence on, they both compete for the love of a dashing but comically inept prince (Armie Hammer).

Review - Amour

Finally got to see this recently, and despite having to endure months of hype from critics and privileged festival-goers, the film more than met expectations. Michael Haneke has never made a more moving and emotionally honest picture than this celebrated Palme d'Or winner; a heartrending study of what love really means.

Set almost entirely in the apartment of George and Anne, an elderly couple whose life together requires significant readjustment when Anne suffers a mild stroke, Amour effectively imposes a sensation of being trapped by a hopeless situation; a revelant thematic undercurrent to the piece. Haneke's often static camera rarely cuts to different angles within a single scene, allowing us to fully absorb his actors' unbroken performances, and yet it never feels like a play put on film. Using efficient vignettes to evoke the gradual decline of Anne's condition keeps the film's stillness from boring the viewer, and with a pair of such soulful performances on display, it's hard to look away.

Emmanuelle Riva is getting the most notice from awards bodies for her incredibly nuanced embodiment of a woman becoming increasingly trapped by her own body, exhibiting remarkable control over her physicality throughout. Jean-Louis Trintignant is equally refined in his ability to tap into deep emotions through quiet gestures and minimalist expression. As the couple's frustrated daughter, Isabelle Huppert conveys in just a handful of scenes all the pain and anguish of being truly powerless over the inevitable.

**** out of ****

Review - Django Unchained

In Quentin Tarantino's latest revenge fantasy Django Unchained, Jamie Foxx plays the titular slave who is freed from bondage by the eccentric Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to become his partner in bounty hunting. As much as Django likes his new job of “killing white folks for money”, his bigger yen is to rescue his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the plantation where she serves the childlike but intangibly dangerous Calvin Candi (Leonardo DiCaprio).

While a great deal of Django Unchained is very enjoyable, it is self-indulgent to a fault. I understand that criticizing a Tarantino film for being indulgent is like criticizing the sky for being blue, but the excesses of this movie really makes you feel the length of it. At 165 minutes, it's a picture as badly in need of a trim as our unshackled, unshaven ex-slave is at the beginning of it.

Review - Les Miserables

27 years after taking the world by storm, the international musical hit Les Miserables finally gets the Hollywood treatment its diehard fans have been waiting for, but not everyone will sing its praises as loudly as them. We've already heard the critics singing the song of angry men, while audience reactions seem to be as contentious as the student rebellion around which the melodrama unfolds. Detractors have trained their muskets squarely at the film's in-your-face emotive style, the very appeal of which defenders have made their barricade against such criticisms. It begs the question: Is Les Mis the sort of movie that makes necessary – or for that matter, even makes possible – an objective review? I know I struggle to extract my opinion of the film from my opinion of the source material. Where does my love of the show end and my love of the movie begin?

Despite a butt-punishing 2-hour and 38-minute run time, Les Mis is a fairly streamlined distillation of Victor Hugo's 19th century novel, in which ex-con Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) spends the better part of his life on the run from the law and in search of redemption. Across the years he eludes capture by the overly dedicated Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe), raises the daughter of the ill-fated Fantine (Anne Hathaway), fights in the Paris rebellion of 1832, and basically puts up with all kinds of crap (literally, in one instance!) to ensure the future happiness and security of his adopted daughter (Amanda Seyfried). Hugo spins an elaborate web of connections between these and many other characters – including the dashing Marius (Eddie Redmayne), the scheming Thenardiers (Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter), and their lovelorn daughter Eponine (Samantha Barks) – through a series of outlandish coincidences that would vex Dickens.

Review - The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The unbearably long gap between the November Oscar releases and the Christmas Oscar releases has driven me all the back to last September in the hunt for something decent to watch. My quarry: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Based on his own novel of the same name, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower may appear to be nothing more than a fairly typical high school movie, and the reason for that appearance is because... well, it is. But just because something isn't remarkable or revelatory, that doesn't mean it can't still move and captivate. This particular youth-oriented drama is a graceful montage of a year-in-the-life, steeped in all the agony and ecstasy that one year can bring, but told with the utmost tenderness.

Review - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

“That seems a bit excessive, doesn't it?” Bilbo Baggins mentions to a particularly rotund dwarf carrying several large wheels of cheese through a snug hobbit hole. It's a throwaway sight gag that plays for a quick chuckle in the first third of the first third (not a typo) of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, but this insignificant moment perfectly sums up my thoughts on the matter: a 2-hour and fifty-minute movie just for the first 100 pages of a childrens novel? Doesn't this whole enterprise seem a bit excessive?

Preceding the Middle Earth events depicted in Jackson's gargantuan Lord of the Rings trilogy by a good sixty years, The Hobbit takes its excruciating time in setting us up for the adventures of young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman, excellent in a mostly passive role), a quiet hobbit with no desire to stray from the cozy confines of his beloved Shire. When the meddling but unquestionably good wizard Gandalf the Grey (commanded once again by Sir Ian McKellan) signs Bilbo up to join a company of raucous dwarfs on their quest to recapture their home from a marauding dragon, he is naturally reluctant. But he is finally persuaded, and the unexpected journey begins (a good forty minutes into the film, mind you).

Review - Silver Linings Playbook

Like the bipolar protagonist at its centre, David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook is prone to wild mood swings at the drop of a hat. Fluctuating between wry humour, dramatic pathos, and earnest romance, it may not bring you any closer to understanding mental illness, but it makes for a surprisingly fun and satisfying picture.

In fact, the film actually downplays the severity of mental illness insomuch as it suggests that everybody is, to an extent, “crazy”. Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) – an undiagnosed bipolar having just completed his stay at a psychiatric hospital following a particularly violent episode – may be the character whose mental issues are addressed most directly, but we come to see how he's less strange when surrounded by his unstable family and friends. Be it his OCD father (Robert De Niro) who superstitiously insists on very specific conditions in order to win money on NFL games, his marriage-smothered best friend (John Ortiz), his mental ward cohort (Chris Tucker), or even his well-meaning but stifling mother (Jackie Weaver), everyone in his life exhibits some degree of “crazy”.

2012 Capsule Reviews

As the season revs up I tend to spend less time on full reviews, but often deposit a paragraph or two for new films (or old ones I've just caught up with) in one post throughout the winter.

Review - Anna Karenina

With numerous adaptations of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina already dotting the cinematic timeline, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard can at least be considered justified in wanting to stir the pot with this newest rendition of the titular adulteress' tragic fall from grace. Yet in attempting to strip the romance down to its emotional essence, their bold experiment misses the mark; a dazzling yet seemingly arbitrary exercise in stylization.

In 1870s tzarist Russia, Anna (Keira Knightley) is afforded all the luxuries and status that her marriage to Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) allows. That means lavish balls, dinners, theatre outings, the works. But when her eye catches the dashing regiment officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), her hidden desires prove too tempting to ignore. We watch as she destroys herself for forbidden love, spiraling from envied socialite to reviled pariah.

Review - Life of Pi

Shipwreck survivor Pi Patel has a harrowing story which an interviewer has been told “will make him believe in God”. Ang Lee's bold translation of the Yann Martel bestseller Life of Pi may not quite be able to do that, although it certainly gets you to thinking about such things as religious philosophy. For some, the film could inspire epiphanies about one's own beliefs. For others, not so much. If nothing else, at least it'll make you believe the craftspeople of this high-seas odyssey are gods for creating such divine imagery.

Pi (short for Piscine) is moving from India with his family and the zoo animals they own, intent on selling the creatures and starting a new life in Canada. When a deafening storm sinks the ship and everybody else on board, Pi is left stranded on a lifeboat with no company besides a lame zebra, an excitable orangutan, a hungry hyena, and a ferocious Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The bulk of the film presents Pi's fight for survival; a test not only of his physical and mental ingenuity, but of his faith as well.

Review - Lincoln

In a fashion uncharacteristic of his famously dazzling aesthetic, Steven Spielberg has produced one of the finest films of his career in Lincoln; a densely worded but deftly handled political drama that illuminates the man behind the myth as he fought to enact the 13^th amendment.

In the waning days the American Civil War, the two-term president (Daniel Day-Lewis) stares down the horns of a dilemma as put to him by his Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn): Either he can entertain negotiations from Confederate delegates to bring about an end to the conflict now in its fourth year, or he can push for the abolition of slavery, dangling it as a carrot before the divided House of Representatives as a quicker alternative to peace. Opting for the latter, “Honest” Abe is forced into some decidedly manipulative politicking. As behind-the-scenes history plays out, we see how freedom for the slaves was not so much won on the floors of Congress as it was craftily massaged into being from the smoky drawing rooms of Washington.

Review - Flight

Denzel Washington owns the screen in Robert Zemeckis' Flight, a “sobering” portrait of alcoholism and the agonizing journey towards making that all-important first step towards recovery: Admitting there's a problem.

Airline pilot 'Whip' Whitaker has such a drinking problem. We first meet him downing beers and snorting cocaine the morning of a passenger flight to Georgia. A mechanical malfunction (a frequently alluded to “act of God”) causes the jet to nosedive into the much talked about crash sequence that whitens knuckles and stretches physics. Even though he's bombed on vodka and cocaine, Whip manages – in a gambit only an intoxicated man would dare attempt – to invert the plane and glide it upside-down in order to restabilize in time for a crash landing. For the time being, Whip is a hero for saving 96 of the 102 souls on board, but when toxicology reports emerge indicating his drunk condition at the time of the crash, he becomes the subject of a criminal negligence investigation that drives him even further to the bottle.

Review - Skyfall

It's iterated often in Skyfall that the old fashioned ways are sometimes the best. It's a persistent theme that permeates both the literal narrative and the conceptual approach to the 23rd entry in the storied James Bond franchise. While the story debates the virtue of antiquity in a modern world, the film adheres to Bond tradition as seen through a filter of contemporary dramatic substance for present-day audiences to appreciate. The Bond is old-school (rustically so at times), but the treatment he gets is fresh.

With the theatrically-minded Sam Mendes at the helm, Skyfall indulges us in a sense of detail to character that is uncommon to Bond films. None of the previous 22 have dared plumb the depths of 007's traumatic past and haunted present that this one attempts to – with some success, as well. Nor have any of them explored the practically maternal relationship between Bond (Daniel Craig's third outing) and his MI6 shot-caller M (reprised once again here by Judi Dench). Skyfall puts their connection front and centre as one of the main driving forces of the plot.

Review - The Sessions

Afflicted with polio from a young age, Berkeley scholar and poet/journalist Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes) spent most of his life in an iron lung, which entombed him like a big metal coffin for the barely living. As he feels the weight of his own mortality weighing down on him, not unlike the pressurized air in the iron lung, he yearns to finally know carnal pleasure. But finding a willing partner has proven a challenge. Even his writterly way with words and decent character unable to overshadow his bodily disorder. With few alternatives, he hires sex therapist Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt) – an educated professional who'll make you understand that she's no prostitute – to help Mark reconnect with his bodily sensations and at long last put a notch on his proverbial bedpost.

And so Ben Lewin's The Sessions takes us on Mark's mission to discover the joy of sex, or rather, as it turns out, the joy of the journey that is love. Despite Cheryl's insistence that the relationship between her and Mark must remain strictly a professional one, Mark inevitably develops feelings for his therapist. Even though she can't reciprocate, we can tell that she wishes she could, as the sex surrogacy sessions they embark upon together become liberating for both of them. He finds release from the confines of his own crippled person, and she finds escape from her not entirely satisfying home life.

Review - Wreck-It Ralph

Spinning off of an imaginative, Monsters, Inc-like concept about a community of video game characters living within the same arcade, Wreck-It Ralph may seem at a distance to be little more than a nostalgia trip for parents and a seizure-inducing distraction for their kids, but the marketing is a mirage. While it starts out merely as a clever homage to the arcade culture of the eighties, it transitions into something more substantial and compelling before its ingenious but admittedly thin premise has the opportunity to wear out its welcome. You need not be a gamer in order to relate to this beautifully spun tale about seeking acceptance and discovering self-worth, which is frankly the best movie Walt Disney Studios has given us since its 1990s heyday. It's like the Pixar movie we never got last year (what is this Cars 2 of which you speak?).

We all know what it's like to be in a rut; that feeling of desperation that comes from going through the motions of a dissatisfying routine, the frustration of being doomed to your “lot in life” when you desire so much more. Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) understands it all too well. He, the villain of an antiquated arcade game called “Fix-It Felix Jr.”, has been performing the same Sisyphean grind for 30 years. Ralph wrecks the building, Felix (John McBrayer) fixes the building. Felix is rewarded with medals and admiration from the tenants, Ralph is tossed in the mud and made to sleep on a heap of discarded bricks all by himself. Sunrise, sunset.

Review - Cloud Atlas

Combining arthouse ambition with studio production value, Cloud Atlas is an existentialist Rubik's cube with commercial sensibilities; a beguiling tale of reborn souls meeting over again across time and space, spun into a sprawling tapestry about what connects us as human beings... or, you know, something like that.

In 1849 a young aristocrat returns home from an expedition to the slave colonies in the Pacific rim. In 1936 a young music writer keeps correspondence with his gay lover as he helps an aging composer put his melodies to sheet. In 1973 an investigative journalist uncovers a nefarious conspiracy between big oil and nuclear power. In 2012 a book editor seeks refuge from Irish thugs only to be committed to a rest home. In 2044 a genetically engineered servant in the dystopic Neo Seoul becomes the key face of an underground revolution. In the distant post-apocalyptic future, warring tribes fight for survival as a more technologically advanced visitor comes with a mysterious mission.

Review - Argo

As though his first two features Gone, Baby, Gone and The Town weren't proof enough, Argo provides further evidence of Ben Affleck's continued maturation as a skillful, no-nonsense director. Falling into the unimpeachable category of “a good story, well told”, Argo is a near perfect Hollywood dramatization of a true story, deftly balancing tight thrills, human drama, and comic relief within a hugely entertaining and satisfying picture.

Starting off with a very brief history of Iran's political turmoil in the mid-to-late 70s, Affleck proceeds to drop us into a riveting opening sequence of a civilian mob storming the American embassy, brilliantly splicing together archived news footage with meticulously recreated shots (this scene alone is enough to justify William Goldenberg walking away with next year's Oscar for Best Film Editing). Intent on taking hostages so that the U.S. will relinquish the detested Shah who is being harboured stateside, the revolutionaries capture all but six embassy employees, who slip out the back and seek shelter at the house of the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber). To prevent the unaccounted-for six from being hunted down and executed as spies, the CIA rushes to enact and escape plan. Dissatisfied with his colleagues' suggestions, special agent Tony Mendez (Affleck) comes up with an unlikely strategy to smuggle out the fugitives; as a Canadian film crew on a location scout for a sci-fi movie.

Review - Frankenweenie

Not since Edward Scissorhands has Tim Burton made a film as personal as his latest stop-mo animated feature Frankenweenie, and after a string of less than stellar efforts in recent years, one can understand how fans of the singular filmmaker would wish it to be an unqualified success. Unfortunately, the success here is hardly unqualified, although it at least marks an improvement over duds like Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows.

Based on Burton's own short from 1984, the first half briskly lays out the world of young Victor Frankenstein, whose canine friend Sparky stars in his homemade monster movies. There's not much else that interests him in his quiet town of New Holland, which was no doubt chosen as the setting so that they could stick a windmill on the hill. He shies away from his neighbors and classmates, most of whom represent broad caricatures of legendary horror actors and characters. When sparky is felled by an untimely car, the grieving Victor decides to try out a little science experiment, figuring that enough electricity can revitalize his dead dog's nervous system and bring him back to life. This portion is when the movie is at its best, serving up an even blend of horror pastiche, macabre humour, but ultimately pathos (as Danny Elfman's mournful violins make perfectly clear). It also avoids needless dialogue, often allowing Burton's black-and-white compositions to tell the story, especially effective in the critical reanimation scene.