In 2006, in the movie Lady in the Water, director M. Night Shyamalan asked us to believe in narfs. Narfs, also known as water nymphs or naiads are mythological female creatures that preside over water sources like springs and streams. In the movie Ondine, director Neil Jordan asks us to believe in selkies. Selkies are seal-like creatures that when they shed their sealskins are for all appearances human. They hide their sealskin until they are ready to return to the sea.
Selkies certainly are implausible, but just as implausible is the bizarre experience that happens to Syracuse (played by Colin Farrell), a commercial fisherman who accidentally hauls in a woman in his fishing net. Ondine, the lady in his net, is real enough and when he jostles her, she turns out to be not quite but nearly dead. Ondine, played by the beautiful Alicja Bachleda, certainly seems lost and confused and can barely walk. She has no memory of where she has been but seems inordinately concerned about staying hidden. Syracuse, a gruff looking but otherwise gentlemanly fisherman, cannot help but find a soft spot in his heart for this young woman, because he has been missing romance in his life for a long time. His ex-wife may have custody of his daughter Annie (played by Alison Barry), but it is clear that Syracuse is the better parent. At least Syracuse stays sober while his ex-wife Maura spends nights and weekends in the taverns.
Annie is a precocious child. Ondine is not long settled in to the abandoned house that used to belong to Syracuse’s departed grandmother before Annie discovers and befriends Ondine. It is Annie, who recently learned of the legend of selkies in school, who suspects that Ondine is one of these mythical creatures. What else could possibly explain her loss of memory, her paranoia and her strong and almost instant natural affection for the scruffy Syracuse? Selkies are supposed to bond with a human and spend up to seven years as their mate.
No other explanation seems to make any sense. The odds of picking up a woman from a fishing net are astronomical, so her being a selkie seems plausible, even to Syracuse. If Ondine is a selkie, she seems to have all the attributes of one including a compelling affection for the sea. Moreover, she gloms onto her people (Syracuse and Annie) with genuine love and affection. Annie checks out all the books at the local library on selkies. She stays spunky despite the fact that her kidneys are failing, she needs regular dialysis and the odds of her getting a donor kidney are very long. With her electric wheelchair, she moves effortlessly through their village, while trying to tune out her mother (Dervla Kirwan) and her annoying stepfather. She appears to be channeling Nancy Drew.
While having a selkie as a lover appeals very much to Syracuse, and Ondine seems happy to accept her situation, too much real life continues to creep into this fairy tale. A mysterious man in black is seen in the village. Ondine seems to sense his presence and spends much of the movie hiding, but after a while, she cannot help but be seen by others. When a scary accident by a rogue car nearly kills his ex-wife, Syracuse senses that Ondine brings danger to his family and they must part. Yet genuine ambiguity remains about Ondine’s selkie status, particularly when Ondine brings in record catches for Syracuse, including non-native salmon. Toward the end of the movies, she also wishes for Annie to be cured, and against all odds Annie gets a healthy donor kidney.
The movie is largely absent the suspense and brushes with otherworldliness that we expect in a Shyamalan movie. The story is told very simply. The camera rarely strays from Syracuse, Annie and Ondine. It is hard to escape the feeling that something more nefarious has been going on. Ondine cannot be quite what she seems, although she has all the attributes. Yet, what else could explain her mystery? To find out invest 111 minutes in this movie. See a little of the Irish seashore as well, and walk in the shoes of the fisherman Syracuse, whose life is otherwise utterly ordinary and unmemorable.
Ondine is certainly not a bad movie, but it should not be mistaken for a Shyamalan-type movie. While reasonably well executed and with decent actors, in the hands of a more skilled director, I might have rated this movie higher. Instead, it’s a good and reasonably engaging movie, but in the end nothing particularly memorable. 3.0 on my four-point scale.
Most of us have had the experience of working retail. And most of us have had similar impressions of the experience: yech! Most of us disliked retail so much that one retail job during a lifetime was plenty. Working in the land of cubicles like Dilbert is a real step up from ringing up retail merchandise all day or stocking shelves all night. When you work retail, your work is typically grinding, boring and endlessly repetitious. The customers are vacillating and annoying idiots that like to vent their frustrations on grossly underpaid retail workers. After work, you’d celebrate Miller Time except you are paid so little you probably cannot even afford to. When you work retail, you are probably still living at home or are sharing a room in a group home somewhere. Basically, you are living in poverty, just not drawing from the welfare state.
Kevin Smith’s 1994 movie Clerks though manages to make the ubiquitous retail job seem if not quite fun then at least bearable, given it’s weird cast of characters. Clerks was Kevin Smith’s first real film of note. It was scorned by many “serious” movie reviewers but apparently is something of a cult classic for those lucky enough to have seen it. Like all of Smith’s movies, it is crass, and chalk full of expletives and sexually explicit innuendos. Yet, to those of us who did retail and spent time rubbing shoulders with the bottom twenty percent of humanity it feels authentic. I know I sure related to Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran), one of the ubiquitous retail droids behind the counters of the 7 Elevens of the world, although in his case it is a Quick Stop in Leonardo, New Jersey. His job is shitty but surprisingly he cares a bit about it, even when he is expectedly working sixteen-hour days because his boss goes on an impromptu vacation. He feels some responsibility even when being treated so shabbily.
Dante is basically a nice early twenties something white guy who earns a very modest wage as the assistant manager of the Quick Stop. Next door is a video rental store with a spaced out dude named Randall behind its counter. Randall must not have much to do because he spends most of his time hanging out with Dante over at his store while various customers, most of the eccentric and loser variety, cycle in and out. Sometimes the place bustles but it is often empty. That’s when a young man’s fancy turns toward his girlfriend Veronica who seems suitably devoted to him but, we quickly learn, has had three dozen lovers. Most of these she says don’t count because (sort of like Bill Clinton) fellatio is not real sex. Veronica puts out for Dante. Meanwhile, Dante learns that his ex girlfriend Caitlin is engaged. This bums Dante out, who had real feelings for Caitlin and sees Veronica as something like a second-class girlfriend. Yet, surprise! Caitlin comes by to tell him that she is not as engaged as the story makes out, and she still loves him. They arrange to go on a date later to see if sparks still fly while Dante cannot summon the nerve to tell Veronica.
All sorts of strange things happen in this store. When business gets slow, Dante and Randall go to a funeral home to pay respects to the family of a girl they knew in high school. The trip ends disastrously and hysterically. Back at the store, Dante and Randall get very creative with finding ways to have fun on the job, particularly since no one is looking. They and some friends manage to have a soccer game on the roof of their building. And what happened to that guy who needed to use the bathroom and asks for a skin magazine and fresh rolls of toilet paper? Stay tuned.
Clerks was clearly made on a shoestring by (then) no name actors. Smith was also getting his directorial moorings with this film, because it suffers from a number of minor problems, including dialog that is often spoken so quickly that it is hard to process. Smith’s handprints are all over this movie that he wrote, produced, directed and even acts in (in the role of Silent Bob, a low level doper). Surprisingly, his approach works really well. You will remember Clerks because once you see it, it is absolutely unforgettable. Much like the movie Airplane!, you may find yourself quoting dialog from it weeks later. If you are like me, you will be laughing hysterically through much of the movie. In fact, it inhabits a spot among the top dozen funniest movies I have ever seen.
Smith has done a number of other movies that are similar in style, two of which are notable and I have seen. These include Dogma and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Having seen Clerks, I must now rent Clerks II made ten years later and hope it is as good. I may need to get my own DVD of the movie for my collection as well as see everything Kevin Smith wrote or directed, because his sense of humor is scarily similar to mine.
Clerks is as good as a low budget cheap humor movie can get. Rent it. 3.4 on my four-point scale.
Those of us of a certain age will remember the 1987 movie Wall Street and actor Michael Douglas’ notable portrayal of the Wall Street financier Gordon Gekko. Gekko uttered the immortal line, “Greed is good”. In Solitary Man, Gekko is back, sort of, except he changed his name to Ben Kalman but he is otherwise not that different in spirit from Gekko. Instead of working insider Wall Street deals, Ben owns a huge number of car dealerships that he made successful with many memorable car commercials and aggressive marketing practices. At least he did before he started cooking the books of his dealerships. Ben narrowly avoided prison, but managed to lose his fortune and estrange himself from virtually everyone who loves him.
Frankly, Solitary Man is a challenging film to watch because Ben is such an intensely unlikeable character. There are few things more pathetic than a sixty-something man wasting much of his energy trying to pick up women half or more his age. Ben is supposedly turning sixty, but the actor is actually sixty-five. Douglas may have some features of classic handsome gentlemen, but to me he simply looked old. When not trying to seduce women who could be his granddaughter, Ben is obsessed with resurrecting himself in the car dealership business. Unfortunately, he burned too many bridges and has become toxic.
Solitary Man is a compelling if hard to watch portrait of a big shot who became a has-been and who cannot accept the fact that he will never be a big shot again. Ben sees himself as the younger, suave and convincing car salesman that he used to be who can persuade pretty much anyone to do anything rather than the aging, graying and shamble of man that he is. The dichotomy causes a wrenching disconnect which means that every day he descends a bit lower into his own personal hell. It is painful to see a man Ben’s age repeatedly try to pick up young women, lie to people he should love, or to pass himself off as some sort of college kid when invited to a college mixer. Because he was tasked with escorting his stepdaughter to an interview, Ben ends up back at the college where he graduated and where the campus library, thanks to a generous endowment when he was successful, now bears his name. While back at his old Alma Mater with his nineteen-year-old stepdaughter, he figures, why not seduce her as well? After all, it worked with her mother and her daughter is much younger and thus far more desirable.
What Ben is really chasing is his own mortality. When he learns he has a heart condition, he prefers denial and almost immediately begins bed hopping. His one acknowledgment to his heart problem is downing an 81mg baby aspirin once a day. He wants to keep living the life he knew twenty years earlier, even though he now inhabits the body of an old man. While the wreckage is not pretty to watch, I must say Douglas does a remarkable job of convincingly portraying this mess of a man. Toward the end of the movie, his sole friends are an estranged buddy from his campus days Jimmy Merino (Danny DeVito) and maybe his ex-wife. It’s unclear why either of them would want anything to do with him. I sure wouldn’t. Send him to a Salvation Army shelter and make him listen to sermons for his supper. Yuck.
Expect a dispiriting movie but at least Michael Douglas still has “it”. He can play a creep quite convincingly. The whole cast is solid as well. It is unclear whom this movie appeals to and thus how the producers found the money to make it. It is definitely not a teen flick. For us middle aged adults, a story about someone our age chasing lost youth is a downer as well. Douglas is surrounded by a cast of mostly memorable supporting actors including Susan Sarandon as his ex-wife, DeVito, Jenna Fischer as his daughter and two ex-West Wingers: Richard Schiff and Mary-Louise Parker. I had forgotten just how stunningly feminine Mary-Louise Parker is. Speaking of middle-aged fantasies, she is my female fantasy of the moment. Sorry, Jewel Staite.
A subject this dispiriting but well done is not often portrayed in Hollywood, so you should not necessarily give the movie miss a miss if you have the opportunity to see it. You may feel the need to watch parts of it between your fingers, or shout at the screen, “You are being such a damned moron, Ben!” Being middle aged myself, I am not necessarily inoculated to the lure of a much younger woman either. However, seeing Solitary Man is something like marriage insurance. If I feel the need to make a fool of myself with younger women, perhaps I can remind myself that I might behave like Ben Kalman, or maybe worse.
If you have the stomach for this kind of movie, it’s well done. 3.3 on my 4-point scale.
Uh oh. I should have suspected trouble since this movie was directed by Garry Marshall, the famous producer of such popular but dubious TV shows as Laverne and Shirley and Mork & Mindy. Marshall has made a career of producing and sometimes directing not just TV shows but also movies that you can usually tell merely from the title will never end up on anyone’s A list. In fact, most won’t end up on anyone’s B list. In that sense, Valentine’s Day is true to form.
You don’t have to watch more than ten minutes of Valentine’s Day before you realize that Marshall is either deliberately or subconsciously imitating a much better multi-relationship love move, Love Actually. In Love Actually we have the frame of Heathrow Airport and one character that is tangentially related to all the other love relationships that the movie explores. In Valentine’s Day we have the frame of the Hallmark holiday and a florist named Reed Bennett (Ashton Kutcher) who because of the holiday is oh so frantically busy delivering flowers. At least thinks he is starting the day off right by proposing to his girlfriend Morley (Jessica Alba). Morley was apparently caught up in the moment because she accepts. However, she soon realizes (like her part in this movie) it was a mistake, but not before Reed has broadcast the news. This actually sets the tone rather well for the rest of the movie because neither Reed nor the various supposedly lovesick people he interacts with all day seem particularly lovesick. In fact there is a lot of bubble gum love in this movie but virtually nothing you would recognize as the real thing. Not surprisingly, since it was directed by a guy known for sitcoms, it feels like a 125 minute sitcom, which in fact it is, just minus the laugh track. Unfortunately, some got suckered into paying $10 or more per ticket to see this movie.
Marshall does attract some surprising talent, including Jamie Foxx, Queen Latifah and Julia Roberts, all cast in bit rolls in a movie rife with them. I have to wonder if Julia Roberts’ career has peaked given that she accepted a role in this mediocrity. Even Shirley MacLaine gets a part in his movie. In Love Actually it all somehow worked. Here it all falls flat and makes you feel kind of embarrassed even watching. In short, this movie will be an excellent candidate for the 2010 Razzies. Avoid it unless, like me, you are on a four hour flight and there is nothing else to do. However, trust me, you should still avoid it. Do the crossword puzzle in the in-flight magazine instead. It will be a better use of your time. Oh, and if you haven’t seen Love Actually, go rent it.
2.4 on my 4-point scale.
Robin Hood
There is a lot to like about Ridley’s Scott’s interpretation of Robin Hood. I am not necessarily talking about Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, both excellent actors. I am talking about how well Scott rendered the 12th century. It matches well with my understanding of the times. There is lots of grime, mud, horses, swords, halberds and armor. The ships look period. London looks like what it should look like in the 12th century: a shadow of its current self and probably not the sort of place you would want to visit. Nottingham is nothing special, just a village in arrears to King John with Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) the local nobleman, patron and something like a mayor.
What doesn’t work? Well, as usual in order to make the movie more marketable, a lot of history was rewritten or stretched. It is true that King John ascended to the throne upon the death of King Richard the Lionhearted, which is depicted early in the movie. Our understanding of history back then is necessarily fragmented. As for Robin Longstride, a.k.a. Robin Hood (played by Russell Crowe), he is mostly likely a myth. So perhaps it is okay to suggest that Robin Longstride became the adopted son of Sir Walter Loxley and he slipped unnoticed by the villagers into the role of Marion’s husband. (Marion is portrayed by Cate Blanchett.) To make the movie more interesting, Robin has to interact with King John personally and let him hear his populist heresy. In this movie, Robin becomes something of a personal thorn in King John’s side.
Are there problems with the movie? Yes, but they tend to be minor. Overall, the film is well cast, well realized and engaging. Russell Crowe is a great actor, but I am not sure he is the best fit for Robin Longstride. Being in their forties, given the times portrayed both he and Cate Blanchett seem old for their parts. Granted, people aged a lot more quickly back then. In 12th century England, famine, disease, poor nutrition and lack of dental hygiene killed most people before their forties. Also, the epic battle on the beach at the end of the movie is a bit too melodramatic, with an Eowyn-like scene right out of The Lord of the Rings. However, should Crowe and Blanchett wish to do more Robin Hood movies, the movie does set them up well, because we get only one scene of Robin and his merry men stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.
While Crowe may not be perfect for the movie, he is competent. It is Blanchett who, as usual, shines brilliantly and rescues Crowe and perhaps the movie altogether. In short, Robin Hood is a good movie to enjoy in spite of some minor flaws.
3.2 on my 4-point scale.
Children of Heaven (1997)
You probably won’t be able to see the obscure movie Children of Heaven unless you did what I did: rent it from Netflix. I would have never known or watched it had my sister not added it to her Netflix queue and gave it a thumbs up. Filmed in Iran, this makes it an exotic movie by American standards. No one bothered to create English voiceovers (although curiously there is a French voiceover), but at least there are English subtitles available.
I am not sure why it got a thumbs up from my sister. The story is very simple: a poor Iranian family living in what I assume is the working class area of Tehran are in arrears. They rent a small one room apartment. The mother is having a difficult pregnancy, which makes the father short tempered. They have two children, Ali (the older) and his sister Zahra, both in grade school. Zahra’s shoes are inadvertently lost by Ali. Since their father is abusive, Ali is too scared to tell him. Since they have no money to buy Zahra new shoes, they make do with a complex arrangement wherein she wears Ali’s sneakers to school in the morning, and he wears them in the afternoon when his school starts. This often makes Ali late for school.
Salvation is hoped for in the form of a race that Ali enters. The third place prize includes a new pair of sneakers. Feeling desperate, Ali doggedly decides that he will come in third despite by wearing his largely shot sneakers and hundreds of other contestants. I won’t tell you whether he succeeds or not. I will say that it is interesting as a depiction of Muslim life in Iran, where the religion and culture may be a lot different but the problems are largely the same as everywhere else.
As for why Ali and Zahra are called children of heaven, perhaps I need to consult a Muslim or an Iranian because I am clueless. They struck me as ordinary children. They certainly are obedient and for child actors both do better than most. If there is some larger message in the movie, it was lost on me. It is a very simple story with no larger meaning that I could discern. Since it is neither bad nor good, I will leave it unrated.
Perhaps this twenty-year-old plus movie could be more accurately called, “The Unbearable Duress of 151 Minutes of Watching This Film.”
Granted, if you do make it to the end there is a whole lot of terrific eye candy to help pass the time. For the ladies, there is Daniel Day-Lewis as Tomas, a brilliant Czech brain surgeon who you get to see mostly naked during his many, many lovemaking scenes. There is even better news for men, or anyone attracted to the female form. Because Tomas is very generous with his passion, and he enjoys getting to know as many attractive women in the biblical sense as possible, even after he is technically married. Two big loves of Tomas get plenty of screen time either partially or fully undressed and I must say both Sabina (Lena Olin) and Tereza (Juliette Binoche) are stunning in and out of their clothes. Who needs porn when you can drool over such exquisitely beautiful women? There is even a sort of lesbian scene between them near the end of the movie, which, I’m sorry, just does not work. However, I do like to see two women getting naked and seducing each other, I just expected it would more likely be on a porn site.
If The Unbearable Lightness of Being had been marketed as a movie about a satyr bedding as many women in the 9-10 scale as possible, perhaps I would have a higher opinion of the movie. Alas, no, this is a movie with pretensions. It begins in Czechoslovakia just before the Russian invasion in August of 1968. All is fine for Tomas, who is not only a brilliantly successful surgeon but has his choice of any woman he meets, who instantly fall for him. Then the Russian Army inconveniently invades his country and the movie is supposed to get all serious.
Only it doesn’t really get serious. The Russian occupation is something of a tangent to the main theme, which is Tomas’ bed hopping and infidelity. Can Tomas really get serious about any woman? Indeed, he can, just as long as she does not expect fidelity. This becomes a real problem for Tereza, a barkeep at a resort he visits who naturally falls madly in love with and convinces him to marry her. Nor can Sabina keep her body off his once he has a ring on his finger. Neither can any of the women, once he looks at them with his dark and sexy eyes. Whether his country is or is not being occupied, whether living under the yoke of oppression or in freedom in nearby Switzerland, Tomas simply has to keep poking women. That’s what he does. He just loves everything about women, except I guess respecting their feelings for fidelity. Oddly, though with all that messing around, he never makes anyone pregnant.
Perhaps in the hands of a better director (although Philip Kaufman does not usually turn out dreck) this movie could have worked. Unfortunately, casting Daniel Day-Lewis as Tomas was a really bad choice because while Day-Lewis can look stunningly handsome, when the part requires something other than a dazed, gosh aren’t I lucky to be bedding so many beautiful women look, he cannot deliver. All he can do is be an exceptional surgeon, bed beautiful women and keep a half sincere smile on his face, even when Russian tanks are rolling down his street. The film is supposed to show Tomas growing as a human being, but Day-Lewis never delivers. It is all implied, you just never see it or feel it. Instead, you realize Tomas is a very vapid human being, which I doubt is what comes out in the book. After a while you have to pity the women he seduces, for while they are under his spell any common sense they have goes right out the window.
So, if you watch this movie you may well find yourself reacting much like me, “What the hell?” What was the point of making this movie? Granted, spending nearly three hours seeing stunningly beautiful women either partially or fully naked is not a bad use of my time, I just got the impression that there was supposed to be more to this movie than eye candy.
Despite attempts to make us think there is more than this, there is not. The film would make great soft-core pornography. Leave the sex scenes in and take the rest out and both the men and the women would be happy. It’s all that other stuff in between the sex scenes simply does not work, like those odd scenes of his farmer friend who carries around a pet pig.
I have to assume that the book the movie is based on has a lot more merit than the film, so if given the choice read the book and skip the movie unless you find yourself alone and need to get off. If so there will be plenty of licentious behavior by extremely beautiful people to light your fire.
In America is by no means a bad movie. In fact, in some ways, it’s pretty good. It is definitely well directed, well acted, feels gritty and often leaves you feeling appalled. It begins innocuously enough with an Irish family crossing by car from Canada into the United States. They come to the USA not as tourists, but so that Johnny (Paddy Considine) can try to fulfill his ambition of being an actor in New York. Johnny and his wife Sarah (Samantha Morton) come with two precocious girls. The older, Christy (Sarah Bolger) carries a small early 80s video recorder and uses it to capture the intimacy of life with her family in the city. Her younger sister Ariel (Emma Bolger) specializes in being simply too cute for the world. Seriously! She is so achingly cute and lovely and it’s all you can do not to walk into the theater screen in order to give her a hug. For child actors, they are quite good.
The time is the early 1980s. After arriving in New York City, the family decides to call home the skiddiest of Manhattan’s skid rows. Moreover, because it is cheap, they end up in the ugliest tenement building in the city, which comes complete with drug addicts, losers, crazies and probable pedophiles. Their new apartment is so awful that pigeons fly in and out through the vacant skylights. The pad is Horrible with a capital H, so bad that most people on skid row don’t want to live there either. Yet, the girls don’t seem bothered by all the crime and filth. Moreover, for some bizarre reason, their parents aren’t nearly as paranoid as they should be monitoring their children in this exceptionally bad neighborhood.
Johnny has little luck finding an acting job. He spends most of his time going to auditions and acting out scripts in their ugly flat. Sarah helps the family scrape by working as a waitress. The girls seem generally inured to their bleak surroundings. And their lives become progressively more miserable. They suffer through a scorcher of a New York summer. They need cash so badly that they recycle bottles to collect five-cent deposits. They jostle pipes to try to get water out of them. A crazy neighbor a couple of floors down named Mateo (Djimon Hounsou) spends much of his time screaming and throwing things around.
Weeks, then months pass. The girls end up going to a local Catholic school. We learn that one of their children died falling down some stairs and the family is still crushed by the tragedy, each in their own way. When Halloween comes around, the girls are allowed to trick or treat their own crazy building, and end up knocking on Mateo’s door. Mateo looks crazy and you feel he is going to molest the girls for sure. Yet, he does not. In fact, Mateo is more than he looks and turns into the movie’s only interesting character. In the early 1980s, AIDS was just becoming visible. Mateo is ill and it is unclear what is killing him, but it is likely AIDS. He knows his time is short. Yet, through the girls he is introduced to their parents. A very unlikely friendship begins between this dying African American and this surreal Irish family planted in the midst of desperation.
Things continually go from bleak to bleaker. Sarah becomes pregnant and naturally, the pregnancy is a high risk one. When their situation gets more desperate and Sarah can no longer work, Johnny starts driving a cab at night. Also naturally, perhaps because she is Catholic, Sarah won’t consider an abortion, even though the doctor thinks her pregnancy will kill her and her baby.
I found myself frequently wanting to scream at these parents to get the hell out of New York and back to some place where the air is clean and crime is far away. Yet, they have lost all common sense. Little seems to matter except pandering to Johnny’s desire to be an actor, which seems ever elusive. Meanwhile, the pregnancy degrades, Mateo worsens as well, and all end up in the hospital together. Sarah tries to give birth and Mateo tries to die in a hospital bed. A baby is born, a man dies, Johnny finally lands an acting job and the movie ends.
Perhaps I gave too much away, but if you are renting the movie for a plot, that’s about it. Which for me raises the question: do all films have to have a message or at least a theme? Or can they just be a realistic portrayal of stuff happening? This movie falls into the latter category and is hardly unique, but it is somewhat unusual. The only other movie that immediately comes to mind in this genre is Dazed and Confused. Perhaps the movie is really about the family’s unlikely relationship with Mateo, and Hounsou does exceptionally well in his part. For most of us, the fact that not much meaningful happens is not a particularly compelling reason to see a movie. Still, it is a raw film so it will evoke feelings, and having those young girls around certainly makes the feelings more acute. I found myself appalled by the parents, impressed with the acting overall given the flimsy story, touched by Mateo’s transformation and in love with the two photogenic girls.
I really don’t know whether to praise or pan this film, so I will leave it unrated. IMDB viewers give it 7 out of 10 points, which means that most really liked it. It has a shot on video feel to it. However, given that there are so many other movies out there that have some meat to it, and this one just documents a mostly downer of an experience for a young family, I think you can find better ways to spend 105 minutes of your time.
Is it ever okay to lie to a kid? Apparently, most parents are okay fibbing about things like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Suppose the father beat his baby son so badly that he made him deaf for life? What’s a mother to do? That is Lizzie’s (Emily Mortimer) dilemma in Dear Frankie. In her case, she “solved” the issue by packing up her son and mother in the middle of the night and moving to Scotland. She then invented the lie that his father is a sailor constantly traveling on the HMR Accra. Her nine and a half year old son Frankie (Jack McElhone) frequently writes his absent “father”, which is actually his mother, who dutifully intercepts his letters at a post office box and replies as his “father”.
Lies though have a way of catching up with you, and fear of running into her ex-husband often has her moving from town to town. Her husband, or someone from her husband’s side of the family desperately wants to contact her, leaving classified ads in local papers. Lizzie’s chain smoking mother Nell (Mary Riggan) often acts as the vigilant family sentry. When the heat gets too visible, they move to a different town.
The boy in question, Frankie, may be deaf but is an excellent sight-reader and smarter than many hearing-students his age. His passion is geography, in part because he likes to track the progress of his father’s “ship”, the HMR Accra. The HMR Accra exists, and was chosen by Lizzie because she found it on a stamp, and Frankie is also an avid stamp collector. Shortly after moving to the Scottish seaside town of Greenock, the improbable happens. Through a classmate, Frankie learns that the real HMR Accra will soon pay a visit to Greenock. Will “father” and son connect at last? What excuse can Lizzie give now that Frankie would actually believe?
Desperate lies call for desperate measures. If Lizzie can find a substitute “father” from the HMR Accra to pretend to be her ex-husband, maybe the lie can last a lifetime. When an attempt proves futile, she confesses her dilemma to her friend Marie (Sharon Small), who employs her in her fish and chips shop. Marie finds a man willing to pretend to be his father Davey (Gerard Butler). Lizzie is looking for a man to be a father for a day, with no past or future.
The film is heartfelt but feels bleak and morose. Scotland has rarely looked drearier and uglier on film. Moreover, the characters are wholly plausible. The film has a feeling of grittiness and reality that is captured faithfully. Frankie is also something of a heartbreaker, desperately wanting to meet his father and be, for once, something like a normal boy. Lizzie is trying desperately to make her son happy and to protect him, which seems impossible.
Without giving too much away, when the substitute father shows up the film moves from dreariness to being interesting. Despite the original plan to spend just one day with the boy, this man finds himself drawn to be the father Frankie needs. Lizzie must work through her own feelings of shame to realize this stranger is really an ideal father to Frankie and a possible new love for herself. One problem is that this stranger really is a sailor on the HMS Accra and has to leave with his ship. Can their strange complex relationship be resolved before he leaves?
Find out by renting Dear Frankie. There are no special effects in this movie, just a well-acted and plausible story of the effects that shame and guilt can wreak on a family. Everyone seems destined to end up the victim, including Frankie’s real father who is dying in a nearby hospital and wants to reconnect with his son.
This is a hard film to watch at times, but worth your time and attention. 3.1 on my four-point scale.
When pressed for inspiration for a topic but lacking any, it helps to keep a queue of movie reviews. Here are two more for your consideration.
Greenfingers (2000)
It’s hard to believe, but a movie can make Clive Owen look not particularly attractive. Owen, who recently played opposite Julia Roberts in the less than stellar movie Duplicity (2009) also had the lead role in Greenfingers back in 2000. In Duplicity, Clive Owen is all super handsome and buff. Here he plays the prisoner Colin Briggs who while a teenager and in a fit of berserk rage accidentally killed his own brother. Of course, he was sent into the British penal system where he endured a hard life in a dreary gray prison, a prison he expected to die in. Since his violent episodes did not recur, Briggs showed the promise of full rehabilitation. Very unexpectedly, he finds himself transferred to HMP Leyhill, an experimental prison without walls in the English countryside. Ironically, at first he prefers the old prison. He had gotten used to it.
Now he has to get used to his roommate Fergus (David Kelly), a serene old man who very late in life has found peace within his soul. At first, Fergus’s happiness freaks Briggs out. Briggs is not in the “prison” long before he discovers that Fergus is not only old, he is slowly dying because he often spends weeks in the infirmary. That often leaves Briggs alone and staring at Fergus’s houseplant, which after a while he starts guiltily watering. The progressive governor at Leyhill (Warren Clarke) notices him taking care of the plant and decides he’s been cleaning toilets long enough. Briggs has a new task for him: to create and plant a prison garden. He is given some guides to gardening written by the British gardening maven Georgina Woodhouse (played by Helen Mirren). Briggs and a half dozen of his very burly and virile fellow prisoners halfheartedly begin their garden, with Fergus helping when he can.
It is hard to imagine a more unlikely group of gardeners. As you might suspect, against all odds Briggs develops a genius for gardening, in the process also absorbing every book Georgina Woodhouse ever wrote, who he sees as a role model. The garden eventually comes to the attention of Woodhouses’s daughter Primrose (Natasha Little). Her exposure to Briggs oddly leads to love and to meeting the famous Georgina Woodhouse. The prisoners’ brilliance in the prison garden leads to more exposure and finally to an exhibition at Great Britain’s premier garden exposition.
This movie is based on a true story. Greenfingers is a sincere and understated movie. Owen seems a bit miscast in the role, at least compared with much of his other work, including likely his best part ever in the amazing Children of Men. It is a strange and sweet movie of a set of wholly improbable events that slowly result in Brigg’s spiritual resurrection. If you like heartwarming movies, Greenfingers will fit the bill. While better than most movies, its gentle structure will not let it soar that high. 3.0 on my four-point scale.
Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton is rapidly becoming one of my favorite directors. Where there is a Burton directing, you know the odds are good that Johnny Depp will be one of the stars. The two go back two decades now to Depp’s breakout role with Burton in Edward Scissorhands. Since Helena Bonham Carter did such a fabulous job with both Burton and Depp in Sweeney Todd, she was also invited back. Alice though cannot possibly soar as high as the delightfully gruesome and brilliant Sweeney Todd. Still, both Depp and Carter give Alice in Wonderland their best, Depp playing the weird but harmless Mad Hatter and Carter playing the impulsive and largely empty-headed Red Queen. Playing Alice is Mia Wasikowska, who is very well cast for the part. In spite of Depp and Carter’s fine acting, I actually enjoyed Wasikowska’s more, who with Burton’s fine directing nails the young adult Alice to near perfection.
The title of the movie is really a misnomer, since this is actually really Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. In this telling, Alice is navigating her way into adulthood. She is expected to marry a foppish British Lord and live an ordinary upper crust life. Of course, her experiences in Wonderland serve to inform her that she cannot live that sort of life. She will have to break the mold and live a more adventurous one, one like her late father, who was a daring adventurer and entrepreneur.
I hope I didn’t give away too much but most likely you are already familiar with Alice and Through the Looking Glass. Like most movies these days, Burton depends on a lot of CGI and it is all woven together with live action so seamlessly that it is very well visualized, as you would expect. There is a lot to like about this version of Alice. There are really no off performances, but few that soar. I particularly liked Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with both parts performed by Matt Lucas. The ending was particularly well done, with Alice called to battle the Red Witch’s champion, the Jabberwocky. You know that Alice is going to win this battle somehow. Yet, it is hard not to shed a tear for her anyhow when she finally triumphs and applaud for her when she ends up back on Terra Firma and takes command of her life from her mother and host of relatives. Alice gets to grow up and Wonderland is her unlikely catalyst.
I have yet to see a bad Tim Burton movie, although I have not seen all he has done. Still, while no masterpiece, it is fun and engaging, at least to those of us who are only casually acquainted with Carroll’s books. 3.3 on my four-point scale.
Food, Inc., is actually a documentary that will tell you probably far more than you want to know about where our food comes from today. How food is grown today bears little resemblance to how our grandparents grew their food. In case you were not aware, the family farm is virtually gone and our food is grown by large cooperatives. Unlike a century ago, most of it here in the United States is corn. As we learn, corn is like money in that it is completely fungible. It can and is manufactured into almost anything you can imagine, including batteries. In addition, because our Congress can’t say no to farmers, we subsidize corn, which means it is surreally cheap. Yes, our tax dollars are going so we can eat food that will kill us at incredibly cheap prices.
So rather than have our cattle do what they did for generations and eat meadow grass, we confine them to feeding lots, fatten them up with endless supplies of cheap corn and slaughter them prematurely. The situation is hardly any better for our poultry, the vast majority of which also eat corn, live in stuffy Gulag-like chicken houses and never see the sun.
Because our meat comes from animals that are not eating what they should, and they live in close quarters, and because we give them plenty of antibiotics, there are lots of unhealthy and unintended consequences. If like me you knew most of this, Food, Inc. is still worth seeing because, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. What you learn about the Monsanto Corporation may also disturb you. The evidence of all the unhealthy processed food we are eating is all around us and for many Americans, it is also on their waists.
Ignore this documentary at your peril. If you know you need to eat more whole and organic foods, this movie will give you the motivation you need. It should scare the hell out of all reasonable people and have you driving past the plentiful roadside temptations designed to fatten you up for premature death and heart disease. I’d like to say this documentary is timely, but really, it was needed a couple decades back. Make a note of April 21st because if you haven’t seen it, and even if you have, it will be broadcast on PBS in celebration of Earth Day.
21 (2008)
What were you doing at age 21? Most likely, you weren’t looking for $300,000 to pay your way through Harvard Medical School. Ben (Jim Sturgess) is 21, completing his bachelor’s degree at MIT, happens to be both brilliant and mathematically gifted, yet still cannot get his scholarship into Harvard Medical School. Fortunately (or unfortunately) one of his professors, Professor Rosa (Kevin Spacey) recognizes his mathematical brilliance. Rosa quickly includes Ben in a private little club consisting of mathematically gifted students who develop amazing skills counting cards. Working as a team, they spend their weekends in Las Vegas playing blackjack using legal means, but which entails certain bodily risks if the loss prevention folks at the casinos figure out what you are up to. Rosa is a former card shark himself who stays in the game via the proxy of his students.
For a gifted but shy student like Ben, this peculiar weekend gig has some great bonuses beyond the surreal quantities of cash he quickly earns. This is because the cool kids he hangs out with include Jill (Kate Bosworth), the hottest (and one of the smartest) women on the MIT campus. Ben’s feelings for Jill begin with a hormone rush, which quickly turns into a serious crush, but he suspects he is too nerdy to become her lover. One might say the odds turn in his favor. As long as they can strictly obey their rules in the casino, it looks like easy money for having a natural talent at basic math. Plus those limos and shopping sprees at upscale stores on The Strip are fun too.
Naturally, their luck will run out as they begin to get sloppy and start earning money. Ben’s friends back at MIT begin to feel estranged and wonder where he is on weekends. Living a dual life takes a toll on Ben, but after a while, he enjoys being a card shark far more than being a student. However, face recognition technology is catching up with their surreptitious behavior. Staying ahead of the casino security teams gets chancier with each visit.
21 is far more engaging than it would appear to be, even though we have a pretty good idea on how it will play out. Having been to Las Vegas a few times myself, it almost makes me wistful for the place again. Like Vegas, 21 is quite an entertaining movie. Moreover, it is hard not to feel the suspense as these young adults navigate through the weird world of big money Las Vegas. Along the way, Ben and his team members learn some major life lessons, but at least learn them early. 3.2 on my four-point scale.
If The Ghost Writer, now playing in theaters, does not feel a little familiar then you are not paying attention to politics, particularly British politics. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely viewed within Great Britain as George W. Bush’s stooge and lackey. It seemed that whenever Bush said “jump”, Blair would respond with, “How high?” Great Britain was our firm ally after 9/11 and followed us into the debacle that became the Iraq War. There are all sorts of reports, some actually factual, that suggested darker and more sinister motives from 10 Downing Street.
The movie W. gave director Oliver Stone a chance to plumb the depths of George W. Bush’s soul. Based on my review, Stone portrayed Bush as even shallower than he let on in public. The Ghost Writer lets director Roman Polanski give Tony Blair the same treatment, just in transparently fictional setting. Polanski may be a convicted child molester here in the United States, but he clearly hasn’t lost the knack for directing. The Ghost Writer does turn out to be a whole lot more engaging than its transparent premise would suggest. It also is perhaps a window into Polanski’s own troubled soul. More on that later.
Pierce Brosnan plays Tony Blair, sorry, “Adam Lang” who superficially looks and sounds a lot like Tony Blair. In this movie, he is also George W. Bush’s lackey in TWOT (The War on Terror). By the time the movie starts, Lang has been put out to pasture. He seems to prefer to live in New England in retirement; however, he remains always the restless politician because he rarely stays at his estate for very long. He is apparently rich enough to retire to a very exclusive house on an island off the coast of New England. (They do not say which island it is, but I assumed it was Martha’s Vineyard). There he lives on a big estate surrounded by a very big fence with a number of toughs at the front gate. Protestors can often be found in front of the gate, as they are convinced that Blair, sorry, Lang ordered British forces to torture Islamic extremists.
The ghostwriter (Ewan McGreggor) gets to spend time at the estate for the obvious reason. He will earn a quick quarter of a million dollars if he can revise an earlier draft of the book within a month. As we learn from one of the opening scenes, the first ghostwriter met with an untimely fate and was found on a beach near the estate, dead from drowning after presumably slipping off the ferry to the island. Can you say, “foreshadowing”? I knew you could!
Lang’s retreat is a very odd and very cold (as in impersonal) place. It is clear within minutes of getting inside Lang’s little fortress that there are some major household tensions going on. To wit, Lang’s brilliant but distant wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) seems to be estranged from Adam, who seems to be more interested in bedding his long-time personal assistant Amelia Bly (Kim Catrall). There are many peculiar things going on at the Lang estate and much of the staff’s time is spent in the daunting business of image control. The maid is unusually cold and, moreover, there is a creepy guy who spends his day in the driveway obsessively raking away saw grass. Nor is Lang, when the ghostwriter finally meets him, terribly revealing about his past life. He refers to him as “guy”, but in fact, the ghostwriter is never named once in the movie.
The estate is as dark and confusing as the island it inhabits. It is February and it is unremittingly cold and grey, with frequent squalls of cold rain. The manuscript by the first ghostwriter is kept in a special vault under lock and key. The ghostwriter eventually finds himself trying to supplement the material by talking with others who knew Adam. Names in the first draft of the book and mysterious old photographs in the guest room of the house lead the writer on a chase that becomes increasingly darker and scarier. Meanwhile, we learn that the International Criminal Court wants Lang to stand trial for crimes against humanity for allegedly ordering torture.
So it is convenient that Lang is living in The United States, one of a handful of countries not to recognize the ICC. Lang can quickly escape to Washington into the bosom of his Bush friends, but can he escape from the creepy guy living outside his security fence who seems abnormally obsessed with him? And was the first ghostwriter’s death an accident or something more sinister?
You can probably correctly guess the latter. The allusion to the ICC though is somewhat funny, given that Polanski has been on the run from U.S. law for more than thirty years. He was recently detained in Switzerland and will likely return to the United States to serve his sentence for having sex with an underage minor back in the 1970s. Perhaps that’s what makes this otherwise rather predictable movie work so well: Polanski understands what it feels like to be hunted. It also helps to have some terrific actors. Brosnan’s performance is about what you would expect. McGreggor is a decent actor as always. Eli Wallach has a neat little bit part as well. The actor to really watch is Olivia Williams as Lang’s wife Ruth, who sort of befriends the writer while also pushing him away.
This was one of those rare movies where I figured out the ending, but from the gasps in the audience I gather most of them were like my wife. So there is actually quite a bit to enjoy in this weird, creepy world inhabited by Adam Lang and his cohorts. It’s something of a rarity today in our special effect laden theaters: a movie for adults on adult topics. It’s worth seeing.
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