Half-Assed Movie Reviews

January 13, 2010:  The Young Victoria

I saw The Young Victoria during the lead-up to Oscar season, getting it out of the way because it seemed a likely nominee for costume design.  I wasn’t mentally prepared to see it this night, but had fallen victim to the continuing box office success of Avatar and was forced to make alternate plans.  What I got was a fun little movie which greatly exceeded my expectations, although it doesn’t come anywhere close to the category of “must-see”.

I wasn’t sure exactly what time period would be defined as that of the “young” Victoria.  We begin the story during the lead-up to her 18th birthday, as the sitting King is in poor health and Victoria happens to be first in line for the throne due to a curious lack of male heirs through the royal family.  Various parties including her own mother are engaged in a power struggle over her Regency in case she becomes the monarch prior to age 18, since she will not yet be permitted to rule, and everybody wants to be her proxy.  She realizes roughly what is going on but has been heavily sheltered for her entire life by her mother so as not to jeopardize her mother’s seizure of power from the innocent girl, her mother being manipulated by her partner, Sir John Conroy.  When Victoria meets Prince Albert, a potential suitor from one of the territories which would eventually become Germany, there is an immediate bond as he sees that she is smart and warns her not to get caught in any of the traps which surround her.

The manipulative plots fail, and The King does indeed live past Victoria’s 18th birthday.  When she eventually ascends to the throne, Victoria does things her own way and makes some mistakes as she goes along, as many people continue to try to manipulate her.  Her relationship with Albert grows even as he is unsure of whether she’s interested in him at all, but she comes to realize that he is the only person in her life courageous enough to intellectually challenge her without an ulterior motive.  And so they marry.  They struggle with how to deal with the power structure in their relationship and how involved Albert is to be in royal affairs, and what we see are the trials and misfires of a couple trying to discover how they best work together.  The film comes to a close shortly after the birth of Victoria’s first child.

I thought the pacing was handled very well, all things considered, because The Young Victoria wishes to explore a specific portion of the monarch’s life.  There is just enough back story to start, followed by some title cards at the end to summarize her impressive reign which continued for 50+ years following the close of this story.  There’s no need for this film to bite off more than it can chew, and as a result, we have a rich experience of a particular time in Victoria’s life.

I don’t necessarily seek out costume dramas.  There are elements that I like – that careful formal manner of speaking is fascinating, and the period details in the costumes and architecture and decorations are impressive.  I do prefer it when, as in this case, the drama concerns real and large-scale people and events, rather than fictional or minor characters (as in The Duchess last year).

Emily Blunt, as Victoria, has a challenging role, and while I don’t think she necessarily lets herself quite disappear into it, she manages well enough for what this movie is.  She has Americanized herself nicely in her recent films, but I suppose she must still feel the need to prove herself in classy British work, to remain flexible alongside the likes of Kate Winslet or Keira Knightley.  I’ve enjoyed watching her grow through The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and Sunshine Cleaning (2008), and I’ll continue to watch.  I was shocked to find Paul Bettany in a movie which doesn’t involve Ron Howard, and while he’s an actor with limitations, his portrayal of the smarmy and underhanded some-time Prime Minister in The Young Victoria is well within his range.  Jim Broadbent is marvellous as the aging and dying King who has no qualms about calling things as he sees them, to the horror of his etiquette-addled court.  And it’s good to see Mark Strong playing a sad, pathetic loser as the man (Conroy) manipulating Victoria’s mother into betraying her own daughter.  This is how he’s always come across to me, even when Guy Ritchie cast him as a smart and ruthless thug in Rocknrolla (2008), so he’s perfect for this role as a cowardly man trying to take advantage of a child.

I sure wouldn’t want to have people standing outside my bedroom door all the time, waiting to serve my every whim but also listening to all the sounds of my life.  But that’s how the wealthy, and particularly royalty, have always lived.  The Young Victoria brings us a taste of that time, anchored by a character who is too often portrayed as the prim and proper older woman rather than the very real young woman whose experiences gave her the wisdom to rule Britain for over 60 years.  Emily Blunt brings elements of herself to the role, for better or for worse, but the result is engaging and entertaining.

Costume drama stands a notch above.

January 7, 2010:  The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

I’ve always considered myself a fan of Terry Gilliam’s movies, although I have the impression that I haven’t seen many of them.  However, when I start to go through the (non-Monty Python) list – Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Fisher King (1991), Twelve Monkeys (1995) – I realize that I’ve seen about half of his output, which seems fair.  Not having seen The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) always comes back to bite me in conversations about him, though, and it appears that I haven’t seen anything he’s done in the past 15 years.  Well, tonight I put myself on the road to fixing all of that.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus continues Gilliam’s legendarily troubled history of filmmaking.  In this case, one of his lead actors, Heath Ledger, died during filming.  Left with the prospect of another movie dashed on the rocks of cold reality, Gilliam was able to rejig the story a bit and appease the money people by filling in the remaining bits of Ledger’s role with three other A-list actors.  How did he do this?  Well, as anyone who is familiar with Gilliam’s oeuvre will know, fantastical sequences are part and parcel of the way he works, and it just so happens that there is a dream world in the brain of Doctor Parnassus.  So really, does it matter if Ledger appears as three different people when he’s in this dream world?  Actually it doesn’t, and in fact a solid argument could be made that it adds another welcome element of strangeness to the movie, despite the performance from Jude Law which is about as dull as I can imagine him actually being in person.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is about a travelling theatrical/puppet show, which operates in the present day out of a rickety old horse-drawn wagon reminiscent of something from the 19th century.  They group is ostensibly putting on little shows, but really trying to lure people into the mind of Parnassus, in order to claim their souls as part of a deal the good Doctor made with the devil.  When this travelling show happens upon the homeless and amnesiac Ledger, who turns out to be a natural showman and promoter, their business improves dramatically, but the devil is there in a flash, to up the ante on his deal.  I won’t spoil the story and tell you whether or not the devil wins in the end, and only with a Gilliam movie does this leave the reader still wondering.

I don’t always appreciate Gilliam’s sumptuous visuals, as I tend to much prefer cleaner production design so that I’m not stressing myself out over the work people had to do to bring the vision to the screen.  But that wagon, with the fold-out stage and all the boxes and bundles hanging off it, is quite the sight, and the fantasy land inside the head of Doctor Parnassus is classic Gilliam in a modernized setting and is really very well suited to today’s computer graphic effects techniques.  It stands in contrast with, but with a clear relation to, the overblown practical set design elements in Brazil.  I can only imagine what this director would have done with today’s technology back when he was making the Monty Python animated-cardboard bumpers between scenes in their shows and movies.

The story is simple, the journey is the point, and the visuals are rich and rewarding.  The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has its weaknesses in story and character elements, but that doesn’t much matter.  If you’re considering seeing it, you’ll probably like it.

Gilliam remains strong when facing adversity.

January 5, 2010:  (500) Days of Summer

I was almost scared to see (500) Days of Summer, because it had reviewed fairly well and I like both Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and I’m a bit of a sucker for “consciously indie” films (Deschanel was also present the last time I rolled out that controversial term) and like many others, I seek the perfect romantic comedy.  That’s a lot of weight for a film to carry, and I tried not to build up my expectations too much.

Well, it’s probably good that I tempered my expectations since this is certainly not a perfect film, but it was indeed among the best I’ve seen this year.  Deliberately and successfully surreal, but with real things to say about relationships and delightful ways of saying them, it did still suffer from some thin supporting characters, occasional awkward dialogue (the gag about college nicknames was funny but completely out of place), and a too-convenient ending.  Despite the occasional stumble, this remains a funny, touching and perceptive film, with some great writing making it a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination for its original screenplay.  It also doesn’t take the predictable easy way out at the end, which is worth a lot.

(500) Days of Summer is about a boy who meets a girl.  Over the space of 500 days, he goes through the usual range of obsessing over her, trying to woo her, sort of succeeding, eventually encountering rough times, and trying to pick up the pieces and salvage the relationship.  Tom believes in the concept of “The One”, that there is one right person for everybody, and Summer disagrees.  Eventually she comes to agree with Tom.  The story is told in sequences of varying length, always labeled with the particular day (out of 500) on which the scene happened.  This hopping timeline is exactly the way someone might relive the heartache of an up-and-down relationship after the fact, shifting abruptly from good memories to bad, trying to figure out whether the signs of trouble were obvious and simply ignored.

What I like is how these emotional journeys are handled.  The two main characters are fairly young, but they are mature.  They have clearly thought about what they are looking for in life, yet they accept that life won’t play out exactly as they hope it will.  This film perfectly captures the way women drive men crazy without really trying to and without it actually being their fault, and at the same time a common perspective of women is depicted, when they are happy to be in a relationship but not necessarily wanting to fall into the trap of labelling what they have.  Gender roles are of course reversed in real life sometimes – the film doesn’t take the position that all men are alike and all women are alike and they are always pitted against one another in some battle with an eventual winner and loser.  The conversation at the end of the movie is refreshingly honest.  I wish more people could be that honest more often, even when it’s painful, because it would save a lot of misunderstanding and resentment.

I’ve been a Zooey Deschanel fan since she played the stewardess sister of the main character in Almost Famous (2000) – I feel I can use the term “stewardess” since the film was set in the early 1970s.  I have since enjoyed her work in Elf (2003), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) and Gigantic (2008) among other films.  She’s associated with quirky characters, and she doesn’t break that habit here.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt was more or less unknown to me until a few years ago.  I vaguely knew of him from the TV show 3rd Rock From the Sun, but didn’t take any serious note of his acting until Brick (2005) and The Lookout (2005), both of which were tour-de-force performances in flawed but ambitious films which are both well worth seeing.  He proves here that he can still play a more conventional leading man, bringing humanity to the role, which isn’t always easy in what is essentially a romantic comedy.  (500) Days of Summer is pretty much a two-person show, and these two pull it off.

An interesting point I’d like to note is that this film was set in Los Angeles, not that it’s immediately obvious.  The events take place almost entirely in the core of the city, with skyscrapers in the background and urban parks in the landscape and people walking around.  People tend to associate the movie version of Los Angeles with the luxurious Hollywood hills, the exclusive beach communities, or the rough inner-city suburbs, but it’s often forgotten that there’s a whole downtown district presumably populated by a bunch of people who don’t live in their cars 24×7.  Some of the significant if not particularly well-known architecture is featured, which is important to the plot since Tom is an aspiring (and trained) architect.  It’s neat to see this other angle on a city which I have visited but have never really come to appreciate.

This is an easy film to recommend, although I’d also suggest keeping expectations in check.  It’s no magical genre-transcending generation-defining film, despite what you’ll hear from some critics, but unless you hate the mere mention of romantic comedies, it shouldn’t disappoint.

Deeper than a typical genre entry.

January 3, 2010:  The Cove

The Cove is a documentary which has received a fair bit of attention, about the annual dolphin slaughter in Japan which continues despite worldwide disapproval.  Activists try to bring the horrors to light, and it is kept in the dark by fishermen on a small scale and governments on a large scale.

In the small town of Taiji, Japan, dolphins are herded into a small cove day-to-day for several months of the year.  Animal trainers from SeaWorld-type resorts worldwide take their pick of dolphins to buy and keep in captivity to train for tourist shows.  The rest are slaughtered for meat, and this is done to the tune of 23,000 dolphins each year.  There are a few problems with this.  First, the practice is not sustainable because each and every dolphin which can be killed is killed, as there is no quota.  Second, the dolphin meat is not suitable for consumption due to the high mercury content since dolphins are quite high up in the food chain, so to sell the meat throughout Japan requires mislabelling it as other meat, resulting in mercury poisoning of consumers.  So how can this continue, when the International Whaling Commission meets regularly and controls the killing of cetaceans?  Well, as it turns out, dolphins are among the smaller cetaceans and apparently not worth the commission wasting their time with, besides which, Japan pays off smaller nations in order to gain official support at the Commission for their practices.

The emotional core of this story is found in Ric O’Barry.  He leads the charge to expose what is going on in the cove, coordinating an effort to sneak hidden cameras and microphones into the heavily guarded area where the dolphins are slaughtered.  It turns out that he was a part of the original US TV series Flipper back in the mid-1960s, and he was the one who originally caught the dolphins who played Flipper.  At the time, there was no particular concern for the animals, and he was making good money and living a good life, but as captive dolphin parks became more popular around the world, he became less comfortable with what they were doing and he had a crisis of conscience in the 1970s.  As he points out, he spent 10 years making this happen, and has now spent 35 years trying to make it stop.  His experience as a dolphin trainer on the TV show taught him that the animals were very intelligent and would get depressed in captivity.

The triumphant ending of the film has O’Barry crashing a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, displaying the footage he finally captured with his hidden cameras.  It’s heartbreaking stuff, and hopefully that activism and this film will bring this to light and bring about change.

The Cove didn’t strike me as being quite as brilliant as I’d heard it is.  It was a bit disjointed and the pacing was confusing, with long stretches focused on less relevant details and only a very short time devoted to the footage and its presentation at the end.  I found myself thinking that it’s only 10 minutes until the credits roll, and we still don’t know whether he even gets his footage, much less whether he actually lets us see any of it.  I suppose this was a conscious decision to emphasize the journey towards getting the evidence rather than bludgeoning us with much of the evidence itself.  By devoting the majority of the voice to the activists, it was also a very one-sided film.  Again, that’s the filmmakers’ right, but it comes across as unbalanced.  Admittedly, they give Japanese officials many chances to explain their side and there are plenty of videos of interviews which end with silence or refusals to answer questions, so there’s not much more they can do, but it leads to a demonization of Japan and its motives, going so far as to conclude that Japan is more or less doing this just to piss off the west.

Still, this is good information and publicity to have out there, if only to bring to light the mercury poisoning of Japanese citizens without their knowledge, and changes have already been made based on that information.  The Cove is an accessible documentary, just maybe a bit too one-sided to illustrate a balanced point.

A popular documentary about controversial behaviour.

December 31, 2009:  Open Water

I saw Open Water in the theatre, which puts me in quite the exclusive club.  Was it necessary to see it there?  Possibly not, but it generated a fair bit of critical buzz at the time and as an enthusiastic sometime scuba diver, I was interested.  This is a simple and straightforward film, shot in pseudo-documentary style, about a couple on a diving retreat weekend who, through a snafu on the dive boat, end up being abandoned out in the ocean.

I was impressed by the realism of the dive boat sequences, particularly the crew and the passengers and the prep details as everyone readies their equipment for the dive.  It is very much representative of the experience, with most people being helpful and friendly and emphasizing safety above all else, but with the occasional belligerent customer or apathetic employee.  Once abandoned, the main characters go through escalating stages of panic and fear as they become hungry and tired, and second-guess themselves and what they might have done wrong, although the mistake was actually on the part of the dive boat operators.  This emotional arc is entirely believable, since we live in such a well-controlled little world so much of the time that it’s a rude shock to realize just how helpless we are when the system breaks down.

Open Water has definite low-budget production values, but that helps with this chosen style of gritty realism.  It is fairly short, no longer than it needs to be, which is refreshing.  If you’re not a diver, this movie obviously will not make you like the idea, and if you are a diver, you may pick apart the events as unlikely but would have to admit that it’s a realistic portrayal of plausible events.

Compelling presentation of a scary situation.