Jane Eyre

Posted on March 24, 2011 at 10:03 pm

Why do film-makers keep coming back to Jane Eyre? Charlotte Bronte’s story has elements of horror, mystery, revenge, romance, and morality, but it is an internal narrative, Jane’s own clear-eyed but personal view of her story (“Reader, I married him.”) And yet, it is such a perennial favorite that this is at least the ninth (at least and so far) English-language cinematic visit to the wild moors and the wilder hearts of Jane Eyre. And that is not counting the many, many variations and spin-offs, including a book and movie that tell the same story from the perspective of another character.

Jane Eyre is an orphan, raised under the cruelest circumstances by her aunt (Sally Hawkins). Her spirit and integrity are such an affront to the aunt that she is sent away to a charity school called Lowood, where the girls are treated with contempt. She makes one true, loving friend, a girl named Helen, who ties of consumption in Jane’s arms. When she finishes at Lowood, Jane (Mia Wasikowska of “The Kids are All Right” and “In Treatment” in a performance that beautifully conveys both Jane’s emotional vulnerability and her strength of character) takes a job as a governess at a home called Thornfield. She is warmly welcomed by the housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax (Dame Judi Dench) and her charge, a little French girl, but it is some time before she meets her new employer, Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender, in a less broody, more desperately unhappy performance). When she first sees him, she is walking in the woods and his horse rears up and throws him. She must help him to the house and they walk slowly, him leaning on her heavily. The emotional upheaval and unexpected intimacy of this encounter are followed by mysterious disturbances in the house, by an anguished longing, an almost unimaginable romantic ecstasy, and then by betrayal, loss, a new start, unexpected independence, and then acknowledgment of a connection too strong to resist.

And it is that relationship, all smolder and repressed passion, that answers the question. The Eyre/Rochester romance has inspired happy sighs for 160 years and in these days, when so little is repressed that no one makes time for smolder, it still delivers.

Director Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) wisely used natural light and no make-up to give this version a rough, natural, intimate feel. Jane’s hair is a smooth loop over each ear with an intricate knot in the back, showing capability and determination. And perhaps some imagination as well. The way that the setting and events seem to embody the emotion the main characters cannot express, which is what makes an internally narrated story so compellingly cinematic.

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules

Posted on March 24, 2011 at 9:55 pm

This is the second movie based on the wildly popular series of Diary of a Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney. Last year, in Diary of a Wimpy Kid, we saw Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) begin the agonizing experience of middle school. This movie opens with Greg and his best friend Rowley (Robert Capron) starting their second year in middle school, convinced that everything is going to be different. They have learned from their experiences and torments of their first year, and now begin their second year all grown up and sophisticated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbqqYuG1TCM

It doesn’t take them long to discover that an entirely new catalog of horrors is awaiting them. They’re all here: the embarrassment in front of the pretty new girl in class, the embarrassment in the school cafeteria, the embarrassment at the hands of bullies after school at the skating rink, the embarrassment caused by that suspiciously located stain on your pants, the embarrassment from the over protective mother, the embarrassment from the intercepted note in class, the embarrassment from mistakenly walking into the wrong restroom…it’s hard to think of a single childhood humiliation that has been omitted from this comprehensive inventory. Many of these situations are divided by age group. Greg is hounded by his three-year-old brother who just wants to play with the bigger boys, while Greg in turn hounds his older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick) because Greg is curious about what goes on at “high school parties.” All of the kids in turn had situations with their parents, and a different set of issues with grandparents living at a home for seniors.

Halfway through this movie, Rodrick hisses to Greg, “You’re my brother, but you’ll never be my friend.” And yet, there is progress. Gradually, Greg forms alliances with family members. He and his brother protect each other. He and his mother reach understandings and enter into pacts. This is not just a repeat of the first year of middle school after all.

Kinney does a good job of remembering and portraying these childhood traumas. School children will laugh and groan in recognition of these misfortunes and will take heart from the fact that Greg somehow
manages to survive them all. Adults may cringe at some long dormant feelings, re-awakened by this movie, and feel more sympathy for the burdens of their school aged children.
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The Lincoln Lawyer

Posted on March 17, 2011 at 6:12 pm

That’s not Lincoln as in the rail-splitting President. It’s Lincoln as in car. Mick Haller (Matthew McConaughey) is a lawyer whose office is in his car, the better to maneuver between his court appearances and his clients. He’s a criminal defense attorney, and this is a nicely gritty portrayal of the criminal justice system. That means he has no illusions, either about his clients or about what we like to call the justice system. He has no illusions about happily ever after, either. He is mostly-amicably divorced from a prosecutor (the always-welcome Marisa Tomei), and shares custody of their daughter.

Mick rides around from court to court and client to client, driven by a former client working off his legal fees. He gets paid up front. He’s not above giving a kickback to a bail bondsman for a referral or giving a little sweetener to a clerk to get his case pushed to the head of the list. He’s used to dealing with, well, dealers and other low-lifes. So when he gets a chance to represent a murder suspect who is not only wealthy but claims to be innocent, this is a chance for Mick to do well by justice and himself.

But things are never so simple, and Mickey must find a way to both use and bend the rules after it appears that this case has complications that extend all the way back to a plea bargain he made on behalf of another murder suspect in a case with some disturbingly similar evidence.

McConaughey is well cast as Mick. He has the surface, slightly seedy charm of a trial lawyer. He easily conveys the struggle of someone with essential decency but a gift for shortcuts that makes him money but also makes him feel like he has to try harder. His scenes with Tomei bring out a warmth and essential decency that keeps us on Mick’s side as he tries to do the right thing.

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Based on a book Courtroom Crime Drama

Red Riding Hood

Posted on March 12, 2011 at 8:00 am

Oh, Grandmother, what a big, bad movie you have.

So, apparently what happened here is that for whatever reason director Catherine Hardwicke did not get to make the second and third “Twilight” movies, so she decided to make a different hot supernatural teenage romance triangle instead, even keeping one of the same actors in a similar role (Billy Burke as the girl’s father). Twilight may not be great literature but it sure feels like it next to this mess.

Hardwicke’s two great strengths are her background as a production designer and her skill in working with teenagers. Both desert her here. We’re in trouble right from the start, when we see the little village. Instead of evoking fairy tales or rustic, rough-hewn country construction, it looks over-produced and over-designed, like a Christmas ornament rejected by Thomas Kinkade.

The village has maintained an uneasy peace with a savage wolf. Each full moon, they leave out their choicest livestock for him, and the rest of the time he leaves them alone. But the fragile pact is broken when a girl in the village is killed. Valerie (doe-eyed Amanda Seyfried) is the younger sister of the girl who was killed. She is a spirited young woman who has been betrothed by her parents to Henry (Max Irons) but plans to run away with Peter (Shiloh Fernandez). With her sister gone and the town at risk, she is not sure about leaving her parents and grandmother (Julie Christie).

Henry’s father is killed in an expedition to kill the wolf, but the hunters bring back a wolf head and prepare to celebrate. But the local priest (Lukas Haas of “Witness”) has brought in an expert (Gary Oldman), who tells them that the animal they killed was an ordinary wolf. The creature they must kill is a werewolf. That means he or she is human by day. And that means that the killer they are looking for is one of them, someone who lives in the village. Suspicion and betrayal become as critical a threat to the village as the wolf itself.

But neither as as big a threat to the movie as the inability of Hardwicke and screenwriter David Johnson to maintain a consistent tone, with drippy voiceovers (“he always had a way of making me want to break the rules”), anachronistic howlers like “Get me outta here,” and a sort of 18th century rave dance-off. The fake-outs intended to be archetypal and creepy are simply silly, and by the time someone yells, “What happened to the rabbit, Valerie!” any connection to the power of the original story is gone for good.

Those of you who know what the Gothika rule is know what to do!

Mars Needs Moms

Posted on March 10, 2011 at 6:00 pm

There is one perfectly charming moment in “Mars Needs Moms,” but it does not come until the closing credits, when we get some live action glimpses of the voice actors. Their faces are covered with reference dots and they are strapped into contraptions so that computers can turn them into computerized 3D animation. We get to see them perform some scenes we have just watched with much more energy and life than anything in the movie. Important note: if you are going to make a film whose moral is that mechanical objects can never replace people (or Martians), you should try not to make exactly that mistake.

Based on the illustrated book by “Bloom County’s” Berkeley Breathed, it is the story of Milo (voice of Seth Dusky, movements of Seth Green), who must rescue his mother (voice of Joan Cusack) when she is captured by Martians.

Milo’s mother makes him take out the garbage and sends him to bed after dinner for lying about eating his broccoli. He angrily tells her, “My life would be so much better if I didn’t have a mom at all!” Feeling guilty when he can’t sleep, he gets up to apologize only to see her being carried off in a space ship.

He manages to stow away. All of the females on Mars are busy imposing order and marching around in armor, so the children have to be raised by super-strict “nannybots.” They want to use Milo’s mom and her memories to program the nannybots because their reconnaissance revealed that she did not spoil her son the way some of the other Earth mothers do.

On Mars, Milo meets up with another human, Gribble (voice of Dan Fogler), a pudgy tech-whiz who has been hiding out from the Martians for 25 years and is given to enthusiastic exclamations like “Gribble-tastic!” Milo wants to rescue his mother before sunrise, when the emptying out of her brain will destroy her. At first Gribble wants Milo to stay so he can have a companion beyond the hairy underground creatures who have been the only living beings he has seen. But both Gribble and Milo learn something about the responsibility and joy of taking care of someone else. So the rescue gets underway with help from Gribble’s nuts-and-bolts pet and a rebel solider who intercepted some US transmissions of a silly 60’s sitcom. She thinks being a hippie chick is groovy (Elisabeth Harnois as Ki) and wants to know more about that “crazy love thing.”

This is decidedly second-tier Disney with third-tier visuals. It makes sense to give the Martians a drab color palette to evoke their oppressive environment, but it makes the experience of watching dull as well. The rows of marching female soldiers in armor evoke many other, wittier, images from “Monsters vs. Aliens” to “Metropolis” and Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” video. And there’s something just creepy about imagining a world in which the females are all domineering and robotic and the males are all incompetent and ignorant. The vertiginous 3D effects work all right unless you move your head, causing the edges of the images to splinter. And the script is weak and predictable, even for children.

The biggest problem is what animators refer to as the “uncanny valley,” the feeling of disorientation and unease we get when we see a depiction of a human face that is close but not quite right.

Our brains are naturally wired to recognize and empathize with faces with the merest suggestion of eyes, nose, and mouth. As Pixar and Disney have shown us, we can happily feel affectionate toward fish, cars, mice, dogs sharing spaghetti, and even bugs as well as simplified human-ish faces that are intended to look like plastic, as with Buzz and Woody in the “Toy Story” movies.

“Mars Needs Moms” would have worked much better if the faces of Milo, his mother, and Gribble were more stylized and caricatured. Instead, based on reference dots and computer algorithms, they are at the same time too close and not close enough to make us feel that we are watching our own species. The Martians appear more familiar than the humans, as we are powerfully reminded with the live action shots at the end when it literally comes to life. That makes this movie only Gribble-so-so.