Half-Assed Movie Reviews

January 24, 2009:  Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky is the latest from British auteur Mike Leigh.  He generally brings us poignant character studies, and frequently directs his cast to acting award nominations, if not necessarily wins.  Most recently he brought us Vera Drake four years ago, about a middle-aged British housewife performing illegal abortions.  A decade earlier, Secrets and Lies examined interracial family tensions.

Happy-Go-Lucky is much more, well, happy-go-lucky than either of those.  We meet Poppy (played by Sally Hawkins, somewhat surprisingly snubbed at the Oscars in favour of an Original Screenplay nomination for Mike Leigh), a twentysomething or I suppose more likely thirtysomething kindergarten teacher who brings a bright smile and friendly disposition to everyone she encounters, including random strangers in stores, her friends and family, her driving instructor, and the kids she teaches.  A couple of months go by, relationships change and people grow together and grow apart, and there are no major differences in Poppy’s life once we’re finished following this slice of it.

Poppy loves her job, and even works with a teacher friend on the weekends to develop and test out activities for her students, to make sure that the kids get the best possible schooling experience.  She parties with her friends on weekends as well, and while they don’t know exactly where they will end up in life, they know that they should enjoy what life brings them right now and not be overly worried about the future.  Poppy is always upbeat and outwardly happy, sometimes to the point of making others (friends, colleagues and strangers alike) feel awkward, but it’s clear that she’s struggling inside at times, maybe more than she or us would like to think.  Contrast this with her two sisters, one who is controlling and the other who is much more openly searching for her place in the world, and we see that maybe Poppy’s outgoing manner is really just a shell developed over the decades to deal with the endless tension which arose from having siblings she doesn’t understand or necessarily even respect.

The major subplot of the film (taking the general flow of Poppy’s life as being the main plot, such as it is) chronicles Poppy’s ongoing driving lessons.  Her instructor is a difficult man, with a short fuse and horrible teaching technique and ever-more-apparent racist tendencies, who causes some very real fear in Poppy as time goes on, although she refuses to simply shy away entirely from this man who clearly needs help.  When things eventually blow up between the two of them, her restraint is remarkable since we know she can hold her own and fight her fights when she needs to.  It’s clear that she believes in humans being good at heart, and knows that they need to connect with others, and that they deserve a second chance.

This is an odd film, but worth a look if the description appeals.  Oh, and there’s cool widescreen cinematography throughout from Bill Pope, including a really neat shot up a stairway, framed with the railing.

Engaging, if tense, slice of life.

January 21, 2009:  The Reader

It’s a good thing that I saw Revolutionary Road as the early show on this particular evening, and The Reader as the late show.  I thought Revolutionary Road was decent, and better than I expected (in retrospect, I realize I wasn’t expecting much), but The Reader blew it out of the water.  Mind you, this is not to say that The Reader was really so wonderful, but it was substantially better.

This is the story of a woman, Hanna Schmitz (played by Kate Winslet) who becomes involved with a teenaged boy in post-WWII Germany.  When not exploring their passionate sexual relationship, she has him read to her while they lie in bed.  He becomes obsessed with her and it’s clear that they are in love, but eventually she breaks off the relationship.  Later on, during a law school outing to view a court case, he sees her on trial for Nazi war crimes.  He struggles to reconcile the Hanna he knew with the Hanna heading towards jail time for going along with the Nazi atrocities during the war.  We jump around among settings from the late 1950s through the mid-1990s, in what I assume as usual to be a production design nightmare, and eventually come to some appropriately awkward closure with Hanna and our now middle-aged protagonist in the more-or-less present day.

The Reader seems to have reviewed well in general, although I don’t find myself looking at any passionately positive reviews of it.  This is a holocaust (survivor) movie, which is understood to be automatic awards bait, and indeed the film seems calculated in almost a spiteful way to garner those awards.  Kate Winslet finally won her Oscar for this performance, a fitting turnabout to her half-joking claim during her guest appearance several years ago on the cable TV series Extras that doing a holocaust movie is the way to win the awards.  Some time has now passed since I saw The Reader, and while I found it gripping on first viewing, I don’t feel that it would be as compelling a second time.

(New!  I will be providing a 6-word quick summary of each film at the very end of each review.)

Middling holocaust awards fodder, won awards.

January 18, 2009:  Gran Torino

Gran Torino was one of two offerings from Clint Eastwood last fall (the other being Changeling).  Both could reasonably be classified as Oscar bait, what with their intimate dramatic storylines hinting at a larger societal discord, lush production values, and occasional chewing of scenery which is carefully calculated to be perfect for trailers and awards show clips.  But for one reason or another, Clint didn’t see much awards action this year, with Gran Torino actually not receiving any Oscar nominations at all.

This is the present-day story of Walt Kowalski (played by Eastwood himself), a Korean War veteran and recent widower living in Detroit, who sees the changing nature of his neighbourhood as a serious problem.  There is a growing Korean population in the area, gang wars are sprouting up, people don’t maintain their property and their houses in the prim and proper way they once did, and Walt doesn’t really seem to fit into the world anymore.  This disconnect is further characterized in the battered old Ford pickup truck he drives around, and the classic Ford Gran Torino he lovingly houses in his garage.  Walt is a Ford guy, worked at the assembly plant nearby for decades, and doesn’t like the way the times have changed.

I could describe more of the plot progression…Walt comes to know the teenage kids next door a bit better through occasional dust-ups including a failed attempt to steal his car and some harassment by local thugs…Walt has some health problems which are brewing but about which we know very little other than that he coughs up blood now and again…Walt grows to understand some cultural differences despite remaining outwardly gruff and even racist in his language and behaviour…the local priest tries to connect with Walt as his wife had requested before her death…Walt’s spoiled granddaughter not-so-subtly suggests that she’d like him to leave her the Gran Torino when he dies.  The story isn’t as episodic as that description perhaps makes it sound.  The movie is well-constructed, to be sure, but it’s also definitely manipulative.  Now, I do realize that I’m watching a movie here and I don’t resent being manipulated as a rule, but in this case a lot of things which happen are just a little too convenient in their timing or their advancement of personal relationships.  And Eastwood’s portrayal of Walt as a gruff, racist old man has a certain novelty to it, but I think it goes over the top.  He actually literally growls to express his anger.  Give me a break.

Walt’s response to adversity is violence.  Maybe he comes around at the end to realizing that that is not the best approach.  I don’t want to spoil the ending but the impact of the movie’s climax and any change in his character is softened significantly by the lead-up, since we don’t know how convinced he really is of what he “has to do”.  Up to this point the movie is entertaining but manipulative, however, the ending has a serious cop-out feel even though it could have played out as a real character redemption.

And maybe I’m biased because I’m a Chrysler guy, but I have a hard time finding it believable when people in the movie characterize Walt’s Gran Torino as being a beautiful classic car, because it’s so butt ugly.

January 15, 2009:  Standard Operating Procedure

Standard Operating Procedure is a documentary about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses by the US Army in Iraq.  This story was very big a few years ago, with some embarrassing photos widely circulating on the Internet, and it kicked off the big discussions about whether the US was using torture for interrogation purposes.

The film was directed by Errol Morris, who had previously won a Best Documentary Feature Oscar about 5 years ago for The Fog of War, which took the form of a lengthy in-depth interview with former US Defense Secretary (under JFK) Robert McNamara.  It showed the human side of the decisions behind widely publicized world events, and that’s exactly what is done here again in Standard Operating Procedure.  Morris is also well known for The Thin Blue Line (1988), a documentary about a man wrongly convicted of murder, which resulted in reopening of the case as well as unusually strong box office performance for a documentary.  Both of these other works are well worth viewing.

Standard Operating Procedure contains extensive interview footage with almost all of the people directly involved with the scandal, including Lynndie England.  This in itself is a near-miracle, considering how the US military tends to hide such embarrassments.  Events are chronicled, backed up by re-enactments of certain events to smooth the story, and intercut with the actual uncensored versions of the photos with which the public is familiar.  The end effect is to create confusion about who was responsible for things going wrong overall, despite the proper military precision around any single procedural point.  We are left at the end with a pretty good sense of where things went wrong, but certainly convinced that it could never happen again.

This documentary was gripping, informative and well worth watching as long as the graphic pictures/video and subject matter don’t make this a total non-starter for the potential viewer.  The final kick (and reference to the title) comes at the end of the film, when the interviewed forensic expert (who has pieced together events based on timestamps from the digital cameras used to take the photos) goes through several of the pictures, which depict the progression of what appears to be various torture techniques, and classifies each as being either torture or “Standard Operating Procedure”.  The line is a fine one, and the justifications, while technically accurate, belie the overall intent of the “procedures”.  It’s a tricky world we live in, and it’s not comfortable when we’re forced to take a look at the things that happen behind closed doors all the time.

January 9, 2009:  Iron Man

I haven’t previously mentioned in my reviews that I’m not such a big fan of comic book movies.  This is what I claim, although picking a bit deeper, that claim does fall apart somewhat.  I didn’t grow up reading comic books so that means both that I’m not well attuned to the tone of that type of reading, and also that I’m not familiar with the more obscure characters and storylines.  But I’ve always liked (most of) the Superman movies and Spider-Man stuff, and sometimes even Batman, although I never quite understood why Batman was supposed to be so special, since all he did was run around with a bunch of gadgets on his belt and he had no real superpowers.  And I enjoyed Unbreakable, which was a cerebral examination of how comic book characters might be in the real world.

What I conclude is that I haven’t understood the deeper story behind most comic book characters, as they deal with dark events from their youth and that drives the way they choose to engage with the world, usually helping people but often walking a fine line between helping and hurting, both in their actions themselves as well as their perception by the public.  The superpowers are incidental to the core human (we’ll call them human for the sake of the argument – yes, I know they aren’t all actually earth-originating homo sapiens) stories.  I like the superpowers (hence my affinity for Superman but lower enthusiasm for Batman), and the whole concept of the epic battle between good and evil makes for some good action movies.

Iron Man comes to us as just another one of those movies based on a comic book I had never heard of, about a guy with no special powers.  The way such a movie is constructed, and the story arc it creates, are important in determining whether it’s a wild global success or merely a fanboy’s wet dream.  Iron Man achieves both, in a way that seems to have been the exclusive domain of the Spider-Man movies in recent years.

The story is about an outgoing and personable man named Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) with great business and technical skills, who has built a corporate empire supplying advanced weapons technology to the US government…and possibly other countries as well.  As I recall, he’s also subconsciously driven by wanting to impress his dead father, along the lines of what was found in pretty much every Tom Cruise movie between about 1986 and 1996.  After being captured in the middle east en route to a sales call, he builds a crude “Iron Man” suit in order to escape, and realizes that this would be a perfect new product to shop to the US military.  Corporate power struggles emerge in his own company, he works on his new prototype suit, and the world needs saving.  Oh, and there’s also a romantic interest.  It’s more complicated than that, but mostly in a good way.

This was better than I expected, and I would certainly recommend the film.  As an engineer and one who gets stuck on the feasibility of movie technology, I felt that I was forced to suspend my disbelief several times, but when I thought about it, I realized that it all really came down to one main suspension, and if I could come to terms with that, everything else flows smoothly.  That seems fair, for a movie which doesn’t claim any correspondence to reality.

Iron Man, along with Tropic Thunder, have recently brought Robert Downey, Jr’s career back from the brink.  It’s hard to correlate Downey in 2008 with the Downey of 20+ years ago acting in silly teen movies like Weird Science, and the Downey of 10 years ago struggling with drugs and apparently way over the edge.  I’ve always liked the energy he brings to the screen, with a perfect mix of smarminess and genuine charm, and it was disappointing not to see the critical buzz around Chaplin (1992) propel him further at that time.  Zodiac from a couple of years ago, and Good Night, and Good Luck. from a couple of years before that, have been reminders that he’s got serious potential and can lead (or steal) a movie anytime he wants to.

The CG effects in Iron Man are pretty good.  Some of the “guy flying in the suit” stuff is a bit too much for me, but I acknowledge that it’s really the only way to do this story justice, and I can accept it.  It was nominated for the Visual Effects Oscar but did not win.

The only serious quibble I have with this movie is that while I like the idea of super-geniuses, it’s not really a believable set of skills.  Here’s a guy who has detailed technical knowledge of several engineering disciplines, and tinkers in his home lab, but also somehow manages to hold down one of the top jobs at a large corporation, even though he relies on a personal assistant (a mostly wasted Gwyneth Paltrow) to keep track of such minor details as his Social Security number.  Mind you, I can deal with all of this if we take him to be a regular-guy superhero.  The problem is time.  It takes time to run a company or be a salesman or to build things.  I’ve built stuff.  I’ve done administrative tasks.  Business plans take days to draft and weeks to finalize.  It takes me an hour or two just to cut a bunch of pieces of wood and assemble something.  Tony Stark runs around as the the figurehead of his company, and at home he designs and builds an intricate and beautifully designed flying suit with myriad weapons and extras built in, and manages this in some short number of weeks.  I don’t care if you have all the best tools money can buy, it simply can’t be done.

I attempted to see this movie in the theatre on or around opening weekend and was forced to leave after less than 10 minutes because someone in the row behind us was reacting verbally to EVERYTHING that happened on screen, and it was clear that this was not going to stop.  Home video saves the day once again.  There’s a reason I prefer the Monday night late shows at the theatre rather than Saturday afternoons.

Iron Man is worth seeing, even if you’re on the fence superhero-wise.  This is accessible in the way the Superman and Spider-Man movies are.