Reviews

I don’t really care about the Oscars anymore, thanks to Forrest Gump. However, I’m still capable of getting curious about the winners, and if Best Foreign Picture didn’t go to Pan’s Labyrinth, a small part of me wants to know why. In this case, The Lives of Others just happened to be a better movie. Not by a huge margin, but I have no complaints about the Academy’s decision in this case. It’s about two intertwining lives; that of Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent, and that of Georg Dreyman, a playwright. One watches the other; the other performs, unknowingly, for the one. The third actor in the drama, Christa-Maria Sieland, is a pivot point for everyone else in the movie. Her choices create the context in which the others… ...

Pan’s Labyrinth is not so much a children’s movie. It’s about children, but that’s not really the same thing. Easy mistake, since it’s called a fairy tale and that has certain cultural references for us, but think the original Grimm’s stories. Which were, admittedly, cautionary. I guess you could take your kid to Pan’s Labyrinth as a cautionary measure against him or her becoming a fascist military officer, but there may be better ways to accomplish that. ...

I’m mildly addicted to Hard Case Crime books. (Parenthetical trivia: Charles Ardai, the editor and founder of Hard Case Crime, is married to Naomi Novik, who writes the Temeraire series. Fantasy Napoleonic dragons vs. noir thrillers. Small world.) Anyway, mildly addicted. The new books are in the style of the old books, and the old books are a fun read. Slick, completely stuck in the preconceptions and prejudice of their day, but fun. Tough guys slouch around dealing with rotten people in seedy situations, and there’s a bad idea for every gin mill and a gin mill for every chapter. There’s something charming about a milieu in which the world isn’t measured by the time it takes for an email to get to you – I suspect that one of the key dividing lines of modern fiction is the point at which cell phones became so common that you had to assume them. It’s a fundamental change in the difficulty of interactions. ...

Questions came first. Is it a pale shadow of Infernal Affairs? Will Scorsese have the guts to sail to the wind and let the bleakness blow through him? Will Nicholson be too much? Will DiCaprio be enough? Can Scorsese make it tight enough for us to feel the pain? Is it Boston? Yeah, it’s Boston. The original was a tense, restrained exercise in suspense and pain. It was good, or better than good. The Departed takes the plot — the same lines, in places — and spills it out on a canvas made of Boston’s racial tensions and class divisions. It’s an equal to its predecessor through an alchemical transformation of mood, theme, and locale. William Monahan is from Boston. He was born ten years before me, which means he grew up watching South Boston riot when black kids showed up at their schools. That’s where the movie opens; that’s where it’s from. ...

If you look around a little on the Internet, you can find copies of the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin’s new one hour TV drama. It’s about a weekly sketch comedy show unsurprisingly like Saturday Night Live, with the expected Sorkin-load of interpersonal drama and principles and so on. No Joshua Malina yet, although I expect him to show up in the second season as the remarkably bright yet socially slightly inept wunderkind. (It’s a fair prediction. Come on.) ...

Shane Black wrote Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. That’s a pretty good pedigree. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is his first directorial effort, and it’s sorta Last Action Hero as an semi-indie crime flick. (Warner Brothers distributed it, so not really indie, but you know.) It’s packed precisely full enough with metasnark. Any more snarkiness, and the schtick would be tiresome. Any less snark, and we might notice that the plot is about as thin as they get. (Which, in all fairness, is no doubt intentional — the whole movie is a deliberate self-referential homage to bad pulp detective novels.) The meta, the breaking of the fourth wall, works because it serves characterization: Robert Downey Jr.’s voice over is not constantly present, and it’s a device to bring his personality to the forefront, so that’s all right. ...

As Neo-Victorian morality dramas go, the superheroics were pretty good. The intrepid examiner of social mores as viewed through the lens of Hollywood blockbusters might wish to keep a running tally of the number of times females are depicted as safer without their powers. The plot was thin, the acting was fairly vaporous (except for Pyro, who was suitably adolescent), the love triangles were unconvincing, and the ethical dilemmas… Professor Xavier displayed little angst over his hard decision, Wolverine was completely willing to use a weapon he’d been horrified by as soon as an opportunity presented itself, and Iceman was just a jerk. Power’s there to be used, apparently. ...

Brick was really good. I have to admit I went in expecting a cute gimmick movie — well, not cute. A noir gimmick, but you know what I mean. A movie that existed for the sake of the gimmick: noir high school. This was not what I got. Yes, it’s a noir flick set at a high school. Strip away the high school and there’s nothing really new here. It’s pitch perfect; Rian Johnson gets the noir thing. The dialogue is tough, the characterizations are good, the fractured spinning loyalties are good. The subtle implications of perversity are good. If you grew the kids up and stuck the thing in Chicago or New York or LA, you’d have a competent but not surprising noir which would eventually show up in some classic noir boxed set or other, and people would say “Hey, it’s nice to see that one on DVD.” ...

This here is Spike Lee making the best caper flick he can make with a superb cast, which is pretty good on all fronts. And actually, the cast is a notch better than you’d think, for the following reasons: Denzel Washington does not play Denzel Washington, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is a great actor even if you don’t know who he is. I guess if you do know who he is already, the cast is only half a notch better than you’d think. ...

Compare and contrast: Peshawar Lancers and Shanghai Knights. We’ll do the movie first so you have time to skip it in the theaters. OK, that’s a little harsh, but it was really pretty uninspired. Good martial arts from Jackie, good comedy from Owen Wilson, rather lackluster script. I’m a sucker for Victorian pulp adventure, but this was really by the numbers without anything to distinguish it conceptually. I think moving the setting was a mistake. Leave the duo in the Old West where they’re working against our Western tropes, don’t move them to London and run them through the same dull paces every pair of Victorian pulp adventurers goes through. ...