Life happens.

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.