MOVIE REVIEW: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

The Other Half and I were feeling like watching something not too serious for the last weekend of the year and since Brad Bird is one of our favorite directors (The Incredibles, The Iron Giant) we decided to go see his lastest film, even if it is the 4th installment in the Mission Impossible movies starring Tom Cruise.

Also influencing our decision to see the film was the fact that it was sporting a surprisingly positive rating on rottentomatoes.com of 93%, pretty high for your typical mindless action flick. The third one (2006's Mission Impossible III) had been produced and directed by JJ Abrams and had (somewhat ineffectively, in my estimation) combined numerous action sequences with intricate, highly charged emotional scenes between Cruise and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

This fourth outing stars Cruise again (now 49 years old but astonishingly still able to maintain his credibility as male action hero) as well as Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), Paula Patton (Déjà Vu, Precious) and Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, The Town). (Spoiler alert! Tom Wilkinson has a literally short-lived cameo as the Secretary of Defense and Anil Kapoor (the TV host in Slumdog Millionaire) shows up late in the film as comically randy billionaire.) Looks like actor Josh Holloway (Sawyer on Lost) is starting to get some work in movies although his part is also pretty small.

I would talk about the plot of the movie but it is typically simultaneously indecipherable and non-sensical. What is most important in this kind of movie are the shooting locations, the fancy gadgets and the overall production values and on this level Mission Impossible IV does not disappoint.

The movie begins in Budapest, Hungary (the second film I have seen in little over a month to do so: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy also begins with a pivotal scene in this apparently gorgeous city) and then movies on to The Kremlin in Moscow, then the tallest building in the world (Burj Khalifa), located in the United Arab Emirates and then ends in Mumbai, India. It really is quite thrilling to get a close-up look at the interior an exterior of the Burj Khalifa, as well as the view from 130 stories.

There are all sorts of fanciful gadgets used by the "Impossible Mission Force," even the much-maligned, (frankly ridiculous) full-face masks introduced in the very first edition of the series which basically allows anyone's face to appear on anyone else's body (perfect facial impersonation). However, here the writer (or director) do themselves a favor by making fun of the face masks, while still deploying them in a way which forwards "the plot."

The production values are frankly top-notch throughout and though the film is well-over 2-hours it never seems to slow down and due to the penchant for killing characters played by major actors the viewer really does have a sense that perhaps this time the bad guys will actually win and that any member of the team can be killed at just about any moment.

Except for Tom of course. After all, there is the inevitable Mission Impossible V  to look forward to!

Title: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.
Director: Brad Bird.
Running Time: 2 hours, 13 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence.
Release Date: December 21, 2011.
Viewing Date: December 30, 2011.

 Plot: C.
Acting: A-.
Visuals: A.
Impact: A-.

Overall Grade: B+ (3.33/4.0).

FILM REVIEW: The Artist

The Artist is not like any other recent movie you have ever seen. The Other Half and I saw it at the Arclight Cinemas Pasadena in the week between Christmas and New Years. At Arclight they always have the usher come in before the film and make a little speech about the film and the theater. At this screening the usher mentioned that the film was in an "old school" format of 4:3 in addition to being in black and white and nearly silent (no spoken dialogue). He wanted to warn the audiences not to think that there were technical difficulties with the sound or the projection: the unusual look and lack of dialogue were artistic choices by the writer-director Michel Hazanavicius.

The movie cleverly begins by showing a movie within the movie which is a silent movie, letting the audience become acclimated to the black and white format and the lack of sound. Eventually the camera pans back and shows that the movie within a movie is occurring at a gala premiere and it is precisely at the moment in which the audience has to buy into the central conceit of the film: the action outside the screen is also in black and white and silent! It is a very fun idea, which even gets more "meta" when one realizes that The Artist is a silent black-and-white film about a silent black-and-white film star! The film star in question (who also starred in the movie within a movie) is named George Valentin (played by the debonair Jean Dujardin) and in the beginning is shown to be a wildly popular leading man, a sort of combination of Rudolf Valentino and Errol Flynn.

The main plot involves the change in Hollywood with the advent of "talkie" movies and we are shown the meteoric rise of Peppy Miller (played by the luminous Bérénice Bejo) and corresponding precipitous fall of Dujardin. Miller is introduced to the audience as just another fan who is besotted with Valentin, hoping to get an autograph when through an accident her picture gets put in the paper with Valentin and she is discovered by the head of the studio (played by John Goodman).

One of the highlights of the movie is Valentin's sidekick, a dog named Jack who is a very well-trained Jack Russell Terrier, who appears in almost every scene of the film that Valentin appears in. Another highlight of the film are the beautiful locations around Los Angeles around which the plot takes place, depicting a 1930s Hollywood (then called "Hollywoodland" of course).

Overall, the film is a delightful homage to the storied past of cinema, with filmic shoutouts to some of the highest regarded movies of all time, such as Singin' in the Rain, A Star is Born and even Citizen Kane.

One caveat is that for modern-day audiences used to the high impact look and feel of HDTVs and Blu-Rays,  The Artist is a demanding film to watch, requiring more concentration and attention, but it is worth the effort.

Title:  The Artist.
Director: Michel Hazanavicius.
Running Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for a disturbing image and a crude gesture.
Release Date: November 25, 2011.
Viewing Date: December 27, 2011.

 Plot: A-.
Acting: A.
Visuals: A-.
Impact: B+.

Overall Grade: (3.67/4.0).

MOVIE REVIEW: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Other Half and I saw David Fincher's follow-up to his Oscar-winning The Social Network, the English-language film adaptation of the blockbuster thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The books written by Swede Stieg Larsson have sold over 65 million, with this first entry in the Millenium trilogy having individually sold over 30 million copies itself.

Fincher's movie stars Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomqvist, the intrepid, independent reporter and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous Girl in the title and hacker/social misfit extraordinaire.

The script Fincher used to film this movie was written by acclaimed screenwriter Steve Zaillian (who won the Oscar for Schindler's List). The story follows the plot of the book quite closely, which is an excellent decision because the book is excellent (surely 30 million people can't be wrong!)

The movie is close to three hours long but never seems slow. There is so much story to pack into the running time. There are two main threads of the tale: the first, primary one involves the central mystery: a classic locked room mystery involving the disappearance of a 16-yer old girl 40-years ago. The second one involves learning about Lisbeth's background as she negotiates a horrible situation stemming from being an adult who is also a ward of the state and has  a court-appointed guardian.

Eventually the two threads intersect and the two (Lisbeth and Mikael) work together to solve the mystery. While they are trying to solve that mystery they stumble upon  a much larger, disturbing pattern of murders of young women. It seems like they must be hunting a misogynistic serial killer and it is this feature of the book which explains why it's original Swedish title translates to "Men Who Hate Women." The two, working together, do eventually solve both the mystery of the original disappearance they intended to solve as well as the one involving the serial killer that they discovered inadvertently.

The most important development involves the evolution of Lisbeth Salander. It is following her story which makes the audience interested in the sequels, despite the well-executed (and slightly modified) conclusion to the first installment.

Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Director: David Fincher.
Running Time: 2 hours, 38 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for brutal violent content including rape and torture, strong sexuality, graphic nudity, and language.
Release Date: December 21, 2011.
Viewing Date: December 23, 2011.

Plot: A.
Acting: A.
Visuals: B+.
Impact: B-.

Overall Grade: (3.5/4.0).

FILM REVIEW: Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy

I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy at the Landmark Theaters E-Street Cinema in Washington, D.C. with some co-workers. I had never read the John Le Carrré’s classic bestselling novel on which the film is based or seen the classic BBC adaptation starring the great Sir Alec Guinness but I had heard a radio interview with Gary Oldman  which intrigued me.

The basic outline of the story is about the search for a possible Russian double agent at the very top echelons of the British Intelligence Service (called M.I.-6) in the mid 1970s at the height of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Bloc. There are four main suspects, codenamed (you guessed it) "Tinker," "Tailor," "Soldier," and "Poor Man" with "Beggarman" being the codename given to the main protagonist portrayed by Oldman, whose character's name is George Smiley.

The movie is set in London in the 1970s and the filmmakers have taken their charge very seriously, meticulously re-creating a 1970s workplace with a striking lack of racial or ethnic diversity, ubiquitous smoking and inappropriate social situations. Watching the movie in 2011 one is also immediately struck by the lack of technology we take for granted: no computers, no cell phones (not even cordless phones!), no satellite/GPS technology.

The investigation into the mole involves a lot of examination of papers and starts off incredibly slowly. For the first ten minutes of the movie there is almost no dialogue and almost no action to speak of. I believe the film makers are trying to put the audience in the position of the characters where both groups are starting with no information and trying to piece together what is going on from various cues and small, disconnected bits of information.

In fact, communication and the movement of information (or intelligence) between individuals is a central theme of the film. Multiple times, a question is asked of one character to another and the director cuts to a different scene without explicitly depicting the answer to the question being given. The audience is required to infer the answer to the question from subsequent scenes and actions by the characters. This is similar to how Oldman's Smiley has to infer the answers to questions he has about the motivations behind the actions of his four "old friends" who are now his main suspects for betraying their country.

Oldman's Smiley is a quiet, horn-rimmed glasses and tweed-jacket wearing middle-aged British bloke. He looks more like an accountant than an international spy with a license to kill. Most of the "action" per se is in watching Oldman's reactions as he doggedly chases the truth and he sifts through the responses people are giving him to his questions. However, as the movie unspools the pace accelerates faster and faster, like a ball of twine rolling down hill. The audience has to pay more and closer attention to keep hold of the thread.

The rest of the cast is also stellar, featuring John Hurt, 2011 Best Actor Oscar-winner Colin Firth, Inception's Tom Hardy and PBS's Sherlock Ian Cumberbatch.

Title: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Director: Tomas Alfredson.
Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for violence, some sexuality/nudity and language.
Release Date: December 9, 2011.
Viewing Date: December 16, 2011.

 Plot: A.
Acting: A.
Visuals: B+.
Impact: B-.

Overall Grade: (3.5/4.0).

2012 Golden Globe Nominations Announced

The 2012 Oscar race heats up with the announcement of the nominations for the Golden Globes, the second-most watched awards show of the season. Of the Best Picture nominees, I have see n only Moneyball, The Help and Midnight in Paris.

Looks the tight race this year is going to be Best Actress, as predicted awhile back. Meryl Streep has two Oscars and Tilda Swinton has one. My sentimental favorite would have to be for Glenn Close, because I think she was robbed for Dangerous Liaisons all those years ago.


BEST PICTURE, DRAMA
The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
The Ides of March
Moneyball
War Horse 

BEST PICTURE, MUSICAL OR COMEDY
50/50
The Artist
Bridesmaids
Midnight in Paris
My Week with Marilyn 

BEST DIRECTOR
Woody Allen, Midnight In Paris
George Clooney, The Ides of March
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo 

BEST ACTOR, DRAMA
George Clooney, The Descendants
Leonardo DiCaprio, J Edgar
Michael Fassbender, Shame
Ryan Gosling, The Ides of March
Brad Pitt, Moneyball 

BEST ACTRESS, DRAMA
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin 

BEST ACTOR, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Brendan Gleeson, The Guard
Joseph Gordon Levitt, 50/50
Ryan Gosling, Crazy Stupid Love
Owen Wilson, Midnight in Paris 

BEST ACTRESS, COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Jodie Foster, Carnage
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids
Michelle WIlliams, My Week With Marilyn
Kate Winslet, Carnage 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Kenneth Branagh, My Week with Marilyn
Albert Brooks, Drive
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method
Christopher Plummer, Beginners 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain , The Help
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants 

BEST SCREENPLAY
Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen
The Ides of March, George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Beau Willimon
The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius
The Descendants, Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Moneyball, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
The Adventures of Tintin
Arthur Christmas
Cars 2
Puss in Boots
Rango

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
The Flowers of War
In The Land of Blood and Honey
The Kid WIth The Bike
A Separation
The Skin I Live In

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
The Artist, Ludovic Bource
W.E., Abel Korzeniowski
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
Hugo, Howard Shore
War Horse, John Williams

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
"Lay Your Head Down," Albert Nobbs
"Hello Hello," Gnomeo and Juliet
"The Living Proof," The Help
"The Keeper," Machine Gun Preacher
"Masterpiece," W.E.

Hat/tip to TowleRoad.

WATCH: 2011 in Movies In 6 Minutes!

MOVIE REVIEW: Moneyball

The day before Thanksgiving, the Other Half and I finally got around to seeing the critically acclaimed (95% on rottentomatoes.com) Moneyball. It is based on the best-selling book of the same name by Michael Lewis, which tells the story of  how the Oakland Athletics baseball team applied the mathematical principles of Bill James "Sabermetrics" to the apparently non-mathematical arena of professional baseball.

Moneyball as a movie is basically your typical sports movie, but with a twist. There's no doubt that it is the best movie about baseball since the classic Bull Durham starring a then-cute Kevin Costner and not-yet-married (or divorced) Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. Interestingly, it is also a movie which features the classic sporting movie cliché of the redemption of the losing under dog. This time, however, the underdog is the hapless geek in the form of Jonah Hill, who plays Peter Brand, a recent Economics graduate from Yale who is also a baseball statistics geek and devotee of Sabermetrics. The movie is carried by Brad Pitt, who plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who at the beginning of the movie has just lost his marquee players to the deep pockets of the hated New York Yankees after losing the decisive 5th game in a playoff series.

The movie really revolves around the relationship between Beane and Brand as Beane quickly adopts Sabermetrics and he and Brand go about trying to convince the old fogeys in the Oakland management, exemplified by Philip Seymour Hoffman's Art Howe, that they can't compete with the teams which have budgets 50-100% greater than theirs. The old fogeys are not happy and initial results are not promising.

Of course, this being a traditional sports movie you know the Oakland A's are going to start winning eventually, and that does happen. For the casual sports fan who does not know the basic details of what actually happens the story unfolds in a compelling fashion (proving again that truth can be more interesting than fiction).

The movie is generally engaging but as a mathematician I was somewhat disappointed with the handwaving way in which the director chooses to communicate the computational implementation of Sabermetrics (lots of glowing equations floating in mid-air and quick-cut shots of spreadsheets). This is a minor quibble and I understand that this was a choice made to make the movie as enjoyable to the widest spectrum of movie-goers. The decision is generally successful since I can tell lots of people would find the movie a lot of fun.

Title: Moneyball.
Director: Bennett Miller.
Running Time: 2 hours, 13 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for some strong language.
Release Date: September 23, 2011.
Viewing Date: November 23, 2011.


Plot: A-.
Acting: A-.
Visuals: B+.
Impact: B+.


Overall Grade: (3.5/4.0).

MOVIE REVIEW: J. Edgar

After a long break, I finally went and saw a movie. A group of co-workers planned an outing to see J. Edgar, the new movie directed and produced by Oscar-winner Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River) starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench and Armie Hammer. The film is a biography about the life of J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and was written by openly gay Oscar-winner Dustin Lance Black (Milk).
The movie has had a mixed reception by critics (rated 40% on rottentomatoes.com) and has been excoriated by some LGBT reviewers. I don't disagree with the disappointed reviews but I do disagree with the intensity of the vitriol that is being heaped on the film.
At its core, J. Edgar is a film about the 50-year-old relationship between two men, J. Edgar Hoover (played by Dicaprio) and Clyde Tolson (played by Hammer), one of whom happened to be the most powerful man in the United States. Black's screenplay jumps haphazardly between different decades, covering the major events in Hoover's (and thus the FBI's) career. The primary event in Hoover's career was his investigation of the so-called Crime of the Century, the kidnapping (and murder) of Charles Lindbergh's infant son. Hoover was obsessed with solving the crime and the movie does a good job of depicting his support and encouragement of forensic science.


Hoover also had some curious relationships with the two most important women in his life, his mother, Anne Marie Hoover (played with brio by Dame Judi Dench), and his longtime secretary and personal assistant Helen Gandy (a thankless role played by Oscar nominee Naomi Watts). There's an incredibly chilling scene where Judi Dench makes it crystal clear that she has no interest in seeing her longtime bachelor of a son ever come out of the closet. Another enlightening scene is between a very young Hoover and Gandy have just began dating and Hoover asks her to marry him. She must realize that Hoover really has no interest in a conjugal relationship with a woman and instead she is interested in having a more enduring (professional) relationship, as his executive secretary.


The performances are the best part of the film, Dench is particularly good, as is Dicaprio. Hammer is easy on the eyes and the depiction of these two single men spending decades together at the #1 and #2 positions at the internal national police force despite a parade of more than half a dozen Presidents is quite compelling.


However, there are some bad characteristic of the film and these flaws most definitely outweigh its strong points. The first that comes to mind is the make-up. Dicaprio looks quite amazing physically as Hoover, but as the film jumps decades into the future they are forced to slather huge amounts of make-up on Hammer and Dicaprio, making Hammer particularly look like some kind of zombie. It doesn't help matters when Tolson has a stroke and spends the last half-hour of the film shaking a leaf. Hammer does a decent portrayal of the physical effects and Hoover's self-centeredness and paranoia are revealed when he starts to turn on the man who has shared his life with him. Even though the relationship lasts 50 years it is completely chaste since neither party really ever acknowledges the love they have for each other, except for one badly written and overly histrionic scene in which the two get physical (violently and romantically). I can understand that some reviewers felt these aspects of the film make it a disappointing exercise, but I would argue that it is still worth seeing, but go in knowing that it is not a masterpiece, but simply an affecting film.


Title: J. Edgar.
Director: Clint Eastwood.
Running Time: 2 hours, 17 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for brief strong language.
Release Date: November 11, 2011.
Viewing Date: November 15, 2011.


Plot: B+.
Acting: B+.
Visuals: B-.
Impact: B+.


Overall Grade: (3.167/4.0).

Trailers for The Iron Lady and Albert Nobbs

Here at MadProfessah.com we have been covering the upcoming fight for the 2012 Best Actress Oscar between 2-time winner Meryl Streep and my favorite actress of all time, Glenn Close. Glenn is appearing in Albert Nobbs, where she plays a woman living as a man in 1800s Ireland. Meryl is appearing in The Iron Lady, a bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher. Meryl has made an amazing physical transformation to resemble the iconic British prime minister and what Glenn is doing in Albert Nobbs appears to be something which the word "acting" is too simple a word to describe.
Check out the competing trailers for Albert Nobbs versus The Iron Lady above. Which one do YOU think should win the Oscar?

MOVIE REVIEW: Midnight In Paris

I must admit that Woody Allen movies are not usually my thing although I have seen the classics (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Sleeper, Bullets over Broadway, Manhattan) and more recently viewed Match Point on Netflix but have never gotten around to seeing his latest triumph, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. However, lots of people recommended this summer's sleeper hit, Woody's Midnight in Paris,  which like most of his films has a stellar cast. This time that cast include Oscar-winners Marion Cotillard, Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates and Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams. Oscar-nominee Michael Sheen (The Queen, Frost vs. Nixon) has an amusing role. 

The movie is centered around an interesting question: Would you rather have been born in a different historical era? The question stems from a character who is unhappy with his life and thus wonders whether life was better in the past. The movie explores Paris in the 1930s when famous figures like Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzegerald, Salvador Dali and many others were all contemporaries.

The film is somewhat diverting but suffers from the historical equivalent of a movie shot in numerous picturesque locations without a compelling plot to maintain the attention of the audience. In other words it seems like something of a "travelogue" with various famous historical figures breezing in and out of the frame without the audience becoming fully engaged in the characters' dilemmas.

That being said, Midnight in Paris is a film which you will think about more than very many of the other entertainments served up by Hollywood (Thor, Captain America, X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern, just to name a few) which have an evanescent presence in one's memory almost immediately after leaving the theater.

Title: Midnight in Paris.
Director: Woody Allen.
Running Time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking.
Release Date: June 10, 2011.
Viewing Date: August 27, 2011.

Plot: B+.
Acting: B+.
Visuals: B+.
Impact: A-.


Overall Grade: (3.416/4.0).

MOVIE REVIEW: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

The Other Half and I have seen all of the Harry Potter movies, and I have read all the books. The final installment in the movie franchise is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, which was also released in 3-D. I wasn't that enamored with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 but since I had read the books I knew that more than 2/3rds of the action in the book was going to happen in Part 2. We decided to splurge for the 3-D since it was the last time we would be seeing a Harry Potter movie in the theaters plus it was garnering rave reviews from most critics (96% on Rottentomatoes.com). 

Surprisingly, the last movie in the Harry Potter series is also the shortest in the series, coming in at a zippy 130 minutes. Also, another surprise about this installment is that it is basically a war movie. There are two competing armies, a large one on behalf of the Death Eaters and Lord Voldemort and a small one on behalf of Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, called Dumbledore's Army. This movie is so different from the early Potter films which were filmed with the hijinks of school children and featured games of Quidditch.

For the last two movies we have been following the quest of Harry, Ron and Hermione as they chase down magical objects called Horcruxes, which contain the soul of Voldemort. If the horcruxes are destroyed, Voldemort will cease to exist. We think that there are six horcruxes, but one of my major quibbles with the the movie adaptation is that it doesn't really do a very good job of keeping the audience on track on how much progress is made on destroying all of the horcruxes.

Another aspect of the story is that when the audience discovers that Harry Potter must die (spoiler alert) we also see that he has the Resurrection Stone, but Harry drops the stone to the ground instead of carrying it with him to his death. It's unclear to the audience (or at least, me) why Harry couldn't just use the stone to die and then be resurrected and the movie doesn't do a good job of answering that question either.

There are several things that the film does do very well. I did think the 3-D effects were used sparingly but very effectively. Alan Rickman, as always, is excellent as Snape, although some have complained about the nature of his character's demise. My favorite character has always been Hermione, and Emma Watson plays her well. Daniel Radcliffe has most definitely grown into the leading role of Harry Potter. Rupert Grint has also grown, and is no longer cringe-worthy.

Overall, the final movie in the series works well as an action film and also has an excellent pay off for those of us who either read all the book or saw all the movies (or both). It is doubtful we will see a more successful adaptation of successful fantasy novels into successful fantasy films in my lifetime.

Title: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.
Director: David Yates.
Running Time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content.
Release Date: July 15, 2011.
Viewing Date: July 17, 2011.

Plot: A.
Acting: A-.
Visuals: A.
Impact: A+.

Overall Grade: (4.0/4.0)

MOVIE REVIEW: Beginners

Eschewing the appeal of spending two hours in the dark watching the pulchritudinous Ryan Reynolds in form-fitting costumes in Green Lantern, the Other Half and I decided to see the art-house film Beginners at the Laemmle's Playhouse 7 instead.

 Beginners is a very small film which has been getting quite good buzz (an 82% rating on rottentomatoes.com). It has a pretty acomplished cast, including Ewan MacGregor (Star Wars: The Phantom Menace), Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) and Christopher Plummer (The Sound of Music). Plummer plays Hal, who is the father of MacGregor's Oliver. After 44 years of marriage Hal, at 75 years old, tells his son that he is gay and no longer wants to be theoretically gay. When the movie begins Oliver is in mourning for Hal, who has died from liver cancer a few months before after having spent an unspecified amount of time dating Andy (Goran Visnijc from E.R.) and enjoying the "gay lifestyle" with a group of dozen or so senior gay men. This entails having a movie night (watching The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, dancing in clubs to loud house music, having fabulous dinner parties and various excusions around Los Angeles). Oliver meets Anna at the very first party he has been dragged out to by his friends since his dad's death and it happens to be a costume party. He goes as Sigmund Freud, complete with a wig and lots of tweed, while she appears to be a mime and allegedly has laryngitis and can only communicate through written notes on a pad. The first thing she writes is "Why are you so sad?" This is a very perceptive remark and marks the beginning of their relationship.

As an Angeleno, Beginners is a fun experience because it is shot all over the city and one can watch the movie trying to figure out exactly where they shot what. Besides the geographical hook, Beginners is anchored by a pretty affecting performance by Christopher Plummer, who is now over 80 years old and playing a younger man. Shockingly, Plummer has only been nominated for an Oscar once. I suspect he will be nominated and may even win for this role, depending on the competition, of course.

The best parts of the movie usually involve the presence of the Jack Russell dog Arthur, who actually gets subtitles detailing his thoughts about the actions of the humans around him. The plot is centered around three "love stories": Anna and Oliver, Hal and Andy and Hal and Oliver's mom.

The movie is quite affecting and well worth seeing.

Title: Beginners.
Director: Mike Mills.

Running Time: 1 hours, 44 minutes.

MPAA Rating: R for  language and some sexual content.

Release Date: June 3, 2010.

Viewing Date: June 18, 2011.

Plot: B-.

Acting: A-.

Visuals: A-.

Impact: A-.

Overall Grade: (3.5/4.0)

MOVIE REVIEW: Super 8

The Other Half and I saw J.J. Abrams' Super 8 last weekend. It was billed as his homage to the classic Steven Spielberg movies of the 1970s and 1980s such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. Interestingly, Spielberg is listed as the producer for this film.

The story is set in the 1970s and is centered around the lives of four young teenaged friends who live in Lillian, Ohio, a small. mid-Western town. The main protagonist of the film is Joe Lamb, a 13-year-old who lost his mother in an industrial accident and whose Dad is one of the deputy sheriffs of the town. His best friend is Charles who is trying to make a zombie movie with his Super 8 camera. While filming late at night the kids witness a horrific train derailment, which looks like it was caused intentionally by their biology  teacher. The military shows up to clean up the train wreck, which was apparently a military transport. The audience starts to see people around town disappear in strange circumstances, providing us brief glimpses of what could be some kind of alien creature.

The movie is very suspenseful, with some amazing set pieces (the train crash sequence is incredible) and there were moments when either myself or my husband literally screamed out loud in surprise. Abrams skillfully deploys the "children-in-danger" motif which occurs so often in Spielberg's films to great effect and combines it with a coming-of-age story. The later aspect of the plot was less interesting to me, and the resolution of the alien creature storyline is full of Death Star-sized plot holes but overall Super 8 is a very enjoyable theatrical experience.

Title: Super 8.
Running Time: 1 hours, 52 minutes.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and some drug use.
Release Date: June 10, 2010.
Viewing Date: June 12, 2011.

Plot: B-.
Acting: A-.
Visuals: A-.
Impact: A-.

Overall Grade: B+/A- (3.4167/4.0).

WATCH: Final Trailer for Final Harry Potter Movie!

The movie is released July 15, 2011, in 3D and 2D. It looks amazing (much better than Part 1, which was a bit disappointing), I may actually re-read the book before seeing the movie since it's been 4 years since the book came out.

MOVIE REVIEW: X-Men: First Class

The Other Half and I succumbed to summer movie marketing and went and saw X-Men: First Class in its opening weekend, at a matinée screening at the L.A. Live Regal Theaters. We had previously seen the earlier X-Men movies directed by openly gay Bryan Singer and we were curious to see how Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn would re-boot the franchise. I'm not as big a "Gay Geek" as Wonder Man (who is?) but I do remember collecting the X-Men comics briefly in the mid-1980s.

Overall, I was impressed with X-Men: First Class. The highlights for me were Michael Fassbender (Inglorious Basterds) as Magneto and the decision to set the film in the 1960s during the Cuban missile crisis. Fassbender is very easy on the eyes, and he's a good actor to boot. By placing most of the action in 1962, the director was able to distinguish this X-Men from the others and most recent super-hero films. Instead of the super-intelligent computers and futuristic gadgets that clutter most summer blockbusters this movie features retro styling and very un-sophisticated electronics. The heart of the film is in relationships, the three most notable are between Fassbender's Magneto and James McAvoy's Charles Xavier, Xavier and Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique and Magneto and Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw. Bacon makes an excellent villain, and it is a generally accepted principle that the strength of a superhero entertainment can be measured by how effective the main villain is portrayed. The ongoing metaphor of mutant powers and sexual orientation (i.e. both of these are traits that you discover when a teenager, you may not share the trait with parents and you can be ostracized from society for actualizing the trait) is an incisive hook for a gay viewer like myself.

There are problems with the movie, however. For example, who the heck are these mutants? The "first class" of mutants to be educated and trained by Professor X feature a few that I was familiar with (Mystique, Beast and Banshee) but many more that I had no clue about (Havok, Darwin, Emma Frost). Emma Frost was controversially (among fan boys) played by Jennifer Jones of Mad Men fame, and although she looks amazing, her performance is a bit wooden. But at least she has lines to deliver, which is more can be said for Dr. Shawn's sidekicks Azazel and Riptide who have awesome powers (teleportation and wind control) but puny agents, because they are literally speechless. I was somewhat disappointed with McAvoy's Xavier because I thought he (but I concede it may be due to the script) did not do as an effective job as Fassbender did of displaying his character's motivations. It is very, very clear why Magneto is suspicious of collective efforts and humanity, in particular. It is not very clear why Professor X is so sure that he can work within the system to allow humankind and mutantkind to live and work together towards a common future.

One negative outcome of setting the movie in the early 1960s is that issues of race and gender are generally downplayed, or worse crop up in ways which discomfit those of us familiar with the 21st century. (SPOILER ALERT) Of course the first mutant to die in the movie ends up being one of the few Black ones, and the other (multiracial) mutant ends up on the side of Magneto, the putative future villain in the X-verse. The gender issues are even more problematic, with most women in the movie being shown scantily clad, even when they are given impressive mutant powers (c.f. Emma Frost). There's a reason these films look like they are designed with the viewpoint of a straight (white) 13-year-old boy in mind,despite the audience being a whole lot more experienced and diverse than that.

It will be interesting to see if they are able to make a sequel to X-Men: First Class. There are many, many great stories set in the X-Men universe (Dark Phoenix, anyone?) and hopefully, Vaughn will bring his fresh eye, and Fassbender and McAvoy to future depictions of these stories.

Title: X-Men: First Class.
Running Time: 2 hours, 12 minutes.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence, some sexual content including brief partial nudity and language.
Release Date: June 3, 2010.
Viewing Date: June 6, 2011.

Plot: B-.
Acting: A-.
Visuals: A-.
Impact: B+.

Overall Grade: B+ (3.333/4.0).

MOVIE REVIEW: Incendies

For my birthday last year the Other Half and I saw the film that won the 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar, El Secreto de Sus Ojos, a suspenseful, mysterious drama set in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in Spanish with English subtitles. This year, I decided I wanted to see Incendies, which many thought should have won the 2011 Best Foreign Film Oscar (Denmark won for In a Better World),especially after hearing this review from Bob Mondello of NPR:

I can't recall seeing a film in which I have so often wondered, "My God, how must that feel?" We in the audience are meant to be as unsettled as the characters. I've heard complaints about the ending being over-the-top, but my background is live theater, and you won't hear them from me. The storytelling in Incendies strikes me as primal the way Greek tragedy is primal. Shattering. Cathartic. It is a breathtaking film.

So clearly Incendies is a suspenseful, mysterious drama in French (and Arabic) with English subtitles. It was Canada's entry into the Foreign Language Oscar competition, but most of the scenes occur in an unspecified Middle Eastern country (presumed to be Lebanon).

The story begins with the reading of the will of a mother named Nawal Marwan to her surviving twin children, a boy Simon and a girl Jeanne, in a somewhat depressing Montreal notary's office on a cold, wintry day. The notary delivers two letters from Nawal to her twins, one is to be delivered to their older brother and one is to be delivered to their father. The twins are amazed: as far as they know, their father is dead, and they have never been told that they have a brother! Her mother wishes to be buried in an unmarked grave, face down until they have completed her requests of communicating these letters to her twins' brother and father. The male twin reacts with anger and storms out of the office while the female twin sobs quietly. Thus the movie begins as a mystery about family secrets.

The scene shifts to Nawal as a young woman, and we see that her "immigrant" (Palestinian?) boyfriend get attacked and killed by her brother. However we find out that Nawal is pregnant, and she eventually has a baby boy who is immediately taken away within minutes of birth. This solves the mystery of the existence a brother to the twins.

There are many more mysteries to come, however, because Nawal leaves home to go to University in the big city and finds herself in the middle of war zone. The Christians and the Muslims are fighting a civil war "in the South" and the hostilities have spread throughout the city as well. Nawal is Christian and when she finds out that that orphanages are being attacked she travels to the South to find out if she can find her son she gave up who would now be a toddler. The movie turns into a war story as Nawal witnesses horrific atrocities committed by both sides first hand and ends up in prison.

The movie then shifts again into a "fish out of water" story as we follow Jeanne, Nawal's daughter from Canada as she attempts to retrace her mother's steps a generation removed in time in order to solve the mysteries surrounding her father and her brother and comply with her mother's dying wishes. Eventually Jeanne's twin brother Simon joins her, along with the notary who had employed their mother for decades and is insistent that they do all they can to fulfill her dying wishes.

Incendies is an incredibly haunting film. You will either hate or love the final twist at the end but you will not quickly forget it. Incredibly, they were able to get the rights to one of Radiohead's most psychedelic songs, "You and Whose Army?" which is deployed to devastating effect in the film's opening scene. I would strongly urge you to see the film in the theaters, but if you miss it there add it to your Netflix queue as soon as it is released on home video. It really should not be missed.


Title: Incendies.

Running Time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence and language.

Release Date: September 4, 2010.

Viewing Date: May 21, 2011.

Plot: A+.

Acting: A.

Visuals: A.

Impact: A+.

Overall Grade: A- (4.167/4.0).