Oh, the holidays. They’re always so dratted busy and I never
get anything done that I’d like. For example, I’ve seen five new movies in the
past few weeks and haven’t written a word about them. However, it’s better to
be late than never or whatever, so here is one word about each of those movies
I saw: Killing Them Softly, Life of Pi,
Lincoln, Red Dawn and Rise of the Guardians.
The best of these, or at the very least the most popular, is
Ang Lee’s adaptation of the ever-popular piece of literature Life of Pi. It is mostly the story of a
family moving from India to America, whose ship sinks leaving the young man Pi
as the sole survivor. He lives on a lifeboat and raft, which he dangerously
shares with a vicious tiger, for an extended period, and he narrates the film
as a middle-aged man telling his story to a reporter. I hate to say it, since
the film will most likely be considered one of the best of the year, but I didn’t
enjoy it as much as I assumed I would. I found myself losing interest during
large chunks of the story, as much as I tried not to. The trouble stems from
the somewhat unnecessary length of the mid-ocean isolation scenes, which suffer
from a lack of any emotional or visceral interest. The film is a success
regardless, mostly because Lee is a great storyteller and his movies never fail
to be visual treats. Despite my personal reservations, it is still an easy
recommendation.
Next, my favorite of the five, is Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, a film which has garnered
considerable discontent for being exactly what it sounds like. People like to
be entertained and Spielberg remains one of the greatest cinematic entertainers
still active in the industry. It shouldn’t matter that he also enjoys giving
history lessons. This Lincoln movie doesn’t cover any new territory, touching
on questions of politics, slavery, war, etc. But it does so with a surprising
bluntness not usually seen in pictures about immensely respected figures of
Americana. People don’t want to hear that a great president only accomplished
great things by bending the rules, even if it’s the truth. This Abraham
Lincoln, as played by Daniel Day-Lewis with a brilliant and controversial
aloofness, is not portrayed as a flawless saint, but as an imperfect man just
trying to do what’s right. This is one of the most potentially accurate
historical depictions I’ve ever seen in a film, and that makes it fresh enough
to be considered great.
Being the only holiday movie released this year, and a darn
good one at that, Rise of the Guardians
gets a high recommendation for family viewing this season. Based on a series of
popular children’s books, it tells the story of how a group of the most
legendary figures in young people’s myths, Santa , Jack Frost, the Easter
Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman, join together and ward off the
Boogeyman who wants to turn the world into a giant nightmare. As silly as it
may sound, the movie is anything but. Told with a refreshing sincerity and
whimsy, this is the sort of movie that is so bright and creative that it
deserves to become tradition. The movie offers nothing more than fluid computer
animation and a good time, but if a kid’s movie isn’t going to teach anything,
it should at least make an effort to unlock the true imagination parts of the
brain. Rise of the Guardians is
imaginative and then some.
Killing Them Softly
is the new gangster drama that just opened a few days ago. It stars Brad Pitt
as a man hired to kill the men who robbed other men of their gambling money. That’s
all that happens, which is likely to disappoint the film’s target audience who
want action and plenty of it. This movie has extremely graphic violence, but
focuses its attention more on the people than on anything, and there’s lots of
talking. That would normally be a good thing, but the talking in this movie is
just talking. Nothing that is said is very profound, memorable, or informative
and none of the characters are particularly interesting. I saw the movie, which
was written and directed by Andrew Dominik, as something like a student film
with a budget. Pitt is joined by Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini and other
great character actors who perform admirably, but just don’t have anything to
do in a movie that has plenty of style and no drive. Its biggest success is in
the fascinating sound editing, which nobody will probably notice.
Finally, we come to the atrocious remake of Red Dawn, which all of my faithful readers
have already guessed I’d hate well before they read this sentence. It is the
very example of the type of film I truly loathe. It is wholly unnecessary as a
rehash of a movie only twenty years old and not very good to begin with. It
exists for extended scenes of running, shouting, shooting and blowing things
up. In case there are any of the producers who have money to burn on these
things reading this, here is the opinion of this average viewer: I DON’T CARE!!! I am never, no matter
how snazzy the production values, going to like a movie where action trumps
story, where glaring and screaming take the place of acting, or where the best
the writers can do is, “Let’s drop this mother f-bomb.” That is an actual
quote. Please go see Lincoln.
