Half-Assed Movie Reviews

February 26, 2010:  The Secret of Kells

The Secret of Kells is a perfect example of the kind of minor treasure I discover during my annual Oscar push.  An animated film but not at all in the lush Disney style, it uses the medium of the animated canvas to its fullest to tell a story which is simple but powerful.

I watched this with my family, since it was suitable for a general audience and so few films are these days.  We are introduced to a religious Irish community inside a walled city, with invasion by the mysterious “Northmen” a constant threat.  A young boy, Brendan, who has no parents but whose uncle runs the Abbey and effectively rules the small village, gets into the usual amount of mischief for young children trying to discover the world for themselves and defying the rules set out for them by adults.

When a long-absent elder returns to the abbey, bearing a legendary book for which he is an illuminator (the guy who draws the fancy swirls and animals and such in the margins of ancient books), Brendan takes an immediate interest in the man, the book, and the prospect of becoming an illuminator.  Against his uncle’s wishes and without his knowledge, Brendan learns the techniques of illumination and even ventures out where he is forbidden to go, into a forest to find raw materials for some raw materials for ink pigment.  There, he meets a wolf in the form of a young girl and the two of them, through their first and subsequent visits, teach each other about the worlds they don’t know.  Ultimately, the search for a “glass eye” (which turns out to be an illuminator’s tool) takes Brendan through an encounter with a monster which appears to represent his own demons.  Invasion by the Northmen and the scattering of the village inhabitants, including Brendan and his uncle, leads to a coda decades later where we learn what has happened in the meantime.

The film is fairly short, and the story is lean.  The visuals are the real draw here, with great graphics and a boldly styled manner of drawing people and things, not coincidentally mirroring the style of these ancient illuminated books.  The characters are almost afterthoughts, buoying the legends both grand and intimate, and seemingly existing at times only to highlight the brilliance of these drawings.  An example which “illustrates” this approach is how Brendan’s struggle with the demon to get the glass eye, which could have been a huge character-building turning point of the film, seemed almost too easy, as if to suggest that of course Brendan will overcome his demons, and we needn’t worry about that little detail.  I might not recommend that anyone put The Secret of Kells high on their viewing priority lists, but Irish folklore, imaginative visuals and a clean if spare story make this one worth a look if it sounds interesting.

Treading new animated ground for me.

February 24, 2010:  The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

I am always surprised when I come across some apparently huge historical news story that I have no real knowledge about.  It’s not that I believe I’m particularly well-read, but as often as not, when I see a documentary, the story is painted as a world-changing moment and yet nobody bothered to tell me about it before now.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a documentary which tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, a former US soldier who did top-secret intelligence work at the Pentagon in the 1960s, and ended up being the first to break the silence on the real political story behind the Vietnam war.  A loyal military man, almost to a fault, he acted in favour of the war for several years even in the face of its great unpopularity, until he came across a report which explained the greater context and put some real data behind the case that it was a losing battle.  It was clear that a succession of presidents from both major parties had decided to continue the war rather than lose face over accepting the loss.  Ellsberg’s unauthorized release of this perhaps obvious information was what led Richard Nixon to dub him the most dangerous man in America.

The particulars of the leak of the report are fascinating in and of themselves, due to its size (imagine how much room there is in a 1960s car’s trunk – that’s how they needed to transport it).  It was distributed to different news organizations, but they had no way of making it available to the public in its entirety, so the big picture viewpoint Ellsberg hoped to achieve was not really possible in the available nightly news airtime.  It’s a sobering contrast with the current day, when such a report could at least be made available on the Internet and downloaded by anyone who wanted a complete copy, even if most people never intended to read the whole thing.  The broadcast of the contents of the report also sparked debate about whether there was a legal restriction on releasing this information to the public, so the news outlets were sued by the government.

Current-day interviews with Ellsberg, coupled with broadcast and private footage and photos collected through the decades, paint a picture of a man who came to a point where jail time was a risk he accepted in order to stick to his principles.  Wrapped up in legal tangles for several years, he ended up not serving any time at all.  We could all learn a lesson from Ellsberg about strength of character and how it is indeed possible to change and to redeem oneself based on new information.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is an engrossing documentary, boiling down a lot of information in a digestible way.  It got a well-deserved Oscar nomination in the documentary feature category, and was in fact my pick for the award, which instead went to the lesser but more heartstring-tugging The Cove.

Classic footage enhances the documentary form.

February 16, 2010:  Coco avant Chanel (Coco Before Chanel)

Coco avant Chanel brings us a look at the life of the famed designer before fame, fortune and recognition came her way.  As I presume is typically the case with such passionate and successful people, their particular passion is evident from a young age, and a strong personality causes a fair bit of tension and trouble but ultimately results in the big break which leads to their success.

I didn’t know much about her life, except that she was a designer/fashionista through the middle part of the 20th century.  Here she is portrayed as having a keen interest in fashion from a young age, but not even considering the possibility that this could lead to a career.  Growing up in France and scraping out a living with her sister on nightclub stages in 1920s Paris, she ran away from wealth and privilege more or less because she felt abandoned by her family in that world.  She eventually meets up with a rich guy and thinks he’ll marry her, but status and class are still very important factors in marriage at the time and he never intends to let her get any closer than a mistress on the side.  She does go to live with him, taking the hit to her pride, and meets a nice young man who eventually turns out to have the exact same reservations about being with her.  Coco stands her ground, and in fact ends up never marrying.

Coco avant Chanel wasn’t really my cup of tea, so I can’t say that I was fully engaged with this film.  It is nominated for an Oscar for costume design, which makes perfect sense since it’s about a clothing designer, and I can only assume that the costumes are competently made.  Audrey Tautou brings her usual sparkling energy to the title role.  But this was pretty much a throwaway experience for me.

The Oscar push wears me out.

February 14, 2010:  A Single Man

Hollywood is perhaps inadvertently confusing the idle moviegoer, as it has been known to do in the past, by putting out two very different movies with similar titles around the same time.  I have previously reviewed A Serious Man, the latest from the Coen brothers and a quirky 1960s-set film about a guy.  A Single Man, on the other hand, is a stylish 1960s-set film about a guy.

The directorial debut of clothing designer Tom Ford, A Single Man looks at the hidden pain of a Los Angeles man in the early 1960s whose partner of 16 years has recently died in a car crash.  That era being what it was, and his partner having been a man, George (played by Colin Firth) is not permitted to attend the “family-only” funeral service, he cannot express his grief or even the fact that anything is wrong to anyone aside from his one close friend, and he is perilously close to taking his own life.  It’s hard to go on after the death of your life partner, and even harder to try to heal when you aren’t allowed to admit that you’re hurt.  Great stuff for Valentine’s Day.

George is a college professor lecturing in literature, and makes veiled allusions to persecution and invisible minorities, to the discomfort of some of his students.  However, his comments resonate with one popular young student, who makes an effort to get to know the secretive professor, and having someone to which he can open up helps George to come down off the precipice.

The core story here is a powerful one, and it’s well-told in bold strokes by first-time director Ford.  But on top of that, this movie has style to spare, with brilliant imagery and strong manipulation of colours to control the mood.  Ford is not afraid to bring homosexual love and even lust to the forefront, reveling in sensual imagery which is almost jarringly intimate as the camera hugs the curves of a man swimming underwater or young men playing tennis outside.  It was striking for me to realize that this is exactly the same treatment that women get on film all the time.  I was not uncomfortable, but I was much more aware than I normally am, of this sexualization of the human form.

A Single Man is a powerful film and one which is painted brightly on a broad canvas, on the scale of the emotion George feels but is not allowed to express.  See it for Firth’s Oscar-nominated intensity, Ford’s effortless style, and the fascinating (if a bit in-your-face) 1962 period design details.

Compelling tale of love and loss.

February 10, 2010:  The Last Station

How many freebies do I get during Oscar season?  What I mean is, for how many decent movies do I get to go totally half-assed with my reviews, in order to save my time and sanity, when I’m 20 reviews behind?  It’s hard enough to see 2-3 movies a day, much less write them up, while holding down a full-time job and actually having a family and a life and all that as well.  It makes for some short nights.

The Last Station is a film which covers the final months in the life of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer and icon.  I haven’t read anything he’s done, and I knew nothing about his life and his followers, but the film was nominated for two acting awards – Christopher Plummer for Best Supporting Actor as Tolstoy himself, and Helen Mirren as Best Actress for portraying his wife.  They battle over whether to keep or give away his money and copyrights, as they are pulled in all directions by the inhabitants of their compound, including Paul Giamatti who remains convinced that Mirren is insane, and James McAvoy who’s not so sure that it isn’t Giamatti who is the crazy one.  Is Mirren over the edge, or is she the only sane one?  It’s hard to tell.

And that’s about all there is to it.  See it if you like.  When I saw it, there were projection issues, including a big out-of-focus spot in the top left-hand-side area of the screen, and the aperture plate wasn’t placed correctly so the corner of the frame could be seen in the top right, and it was slightly out of focus througout.  Still, the overwhelmingly green and white colour palette came across nicely, with a lot of white clothing and time spent outside at the estate which was either lush green or wintry white.  The characters as depicted mostly had British accents, I suppose for simplicity, with written words appearing in the expected cyrillic characters.  I’ll leave a deeper analysis to someone who knows the literature.  The nominated performances were solid, but alas, they are in categories which are already all but locked up.

Maybe I should do some reading.