The Green Zone

Posted on June 23, 2010 at 11:10 pm

The star and director of the last two “Bourne” movies are back and much is the same — the gritty, intimate, documentary feel, the sense of peril and dynamic staging of action, the able but conflicted leading man. But there is an important difference. “Bourne” is based on a series of novels, but “The Green Zone” is based on a non-fiction book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran, about the failed search for weapons of mass destruction in post-Mission Accomplished Iraq.

The “Bourne” movies were more than the usual slick spy story. Bourne was spying on his own past and what was revealed did not match real-life events but it resonated with them, giving the films some extra heft. “The Green Zone,” however, bases the story in recent events. It tweaks the names and some of the circumstances of the main characters, but not enough to establish a separate, consistent reality, just enough to be distracting. Audiences will look at the Wall Street Journal reporter played by Amy Ryan and stop to whisper, “Is she supposed to be Judy Miller? Is there a reason that a different character’s name is Miller? And who is that other guy supposed to be?” Those who are up on all of the details of the Iraqi war will be distracted by what is missing. Those who are not will be distracted by what is included.

As Damon and his men chase through crumbling buildings on blown-up streets, chasing and being chased, we see that all of their crack training and cutting-edge technology are no match for a situation that does not meet any previous military definitions or capacities. There are no foxholes or battle lines. Like the Light Brigade, they are expected to charge forward, “theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do & die.” But when a Chief Warrant Officer (Damon) finds that he is repeatedly risking his life to retrieve weapons of mass destruction that do not exist, he wants to find out why the intel is so consistently unreliable. And then, when no one else seems to care about that, he wants to find out why. Shock and Awe seems to have deteriorated quickly into a quagmire.

His quest takes him though a crumbling palace, chandeliers incongruously shoved aside, to an even more surreal location in the American compound, with girls lounging in bikinis by a pool, being served pizza and beer. He meets a local with a prosthetic leg (Khalid Abdalla, excellent as “Freddy”), who leads him to the man who is the Jack of Clubs in the war criminal deck of cards. But it turns out that his mission is not what he had thought. “Democracy is messy,” a Pentagon official (Greg Kinnear) tells him. “We’re here to do a job and get home safe,” another soldier says. “I thought we were all on the same side,” the Chief Warrant Officer tells the CIA representative (Brendan Gleeson). “Don’t be naive,” he responds. It turns out hardly anyone is on the same side as anyone else. Both sides have splintered into factions with shifting loyalties and murky motives. And the wall of the prison where Iraqis are being tortured says, “Honor Bound to Serve Freedom.”

But this script’s attempts to be intricate underscore how much it simplifies the reality, especially with a gesture at the end that is supposed to be cathartic but instead just makes us question the reliability of everything we’ve seen. Over-simplified and under-played, this movie wants to be more than the fictional Bourne series but ends up being less. I’m betting that this was a studio-imposed effort to make the film more marketable after a series of disappointing box office returns for Iraqi war movies. Some day, maybe, there will be a director’s cut that will recognize that like democracy, some movies need to be messy, too.

Fame

Posted on September 14, 2009 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	R
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense confrontations, brief peril
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	1980
Date Released to DVD:	2009
Amazon.com ASIN:	B002D0L0QS

Less a movie than a mosaic, this remake of the 1980 classic with the Oscar-winning title anthem about the high school for the performing arts has been re-imagined for the hyper-linked and just plain hyper 21st century. As in the original, we follow the stories of aspiring performers from their first audition through four years of high school. But this time, so many characters are thrown at us that we never connect with any of them. This film is as much an artifact of its era as the dancing-in-the-streets first one, perhaps in ways it did not intend. It is a revealing reflection of its target audience: kids used to keeping up to date via tweets and Facebook status lines, the generation that cannot see the line between access to information and understanding the information’s context and import.

It indicates more than it shows, not because it is subtle, but because it is frantic, trying to follow the lives of ten students over four years in less than two hours. Narrative is pushed to one side. Even the too-brief but excellent musical numbers are chopped up and intercut not so much as an artistic statement as a recognition that society as a whole now meets the clinical definition of ADD.

The talented cast passes by so quickly it is like watching a 107-minute trailer. Naturi Naughton makes a strong impression in vocal numbers that include “Out Here on My Own” from the 1980 film. Kay Panabaker has a sweet honesty that comes across well on screen and more than any of the others she shows us the difference in her character as she grows up and gains confidence. An exceptionally strong cast of adults adds some depth to the faculty roles, including “Will and Grace’s” Megan Mullally and “Frasier’s” Bebe Neuwirth and Kelsey Grammer along with movie and theater veteran Charles S. Dutton. If only they had been able to sit down writer Alison Burnett and director Kevin Tancharoen to give them the kind of stern pep talk about craft and discipline that they give to their students, this would have been a better movie.

Adventureland

Posted on August 25, 2009 at 8:00 am

We all have at least one, a summer when everything changes, when we first start to become the person we truly are. Every writer tries at least once to tell the story of one of these summers and the best of them connect us to our own stories as we laugh and cry along with them.

Director Greg Mottola’s last film was the box office smash “Superbad,” and like that, this is the story of young people at a turning point, told with sex, drugs, rock and roll and with some surprising sweetness. The mix is much more on the sweetness side in this frankly autobiographical film; don;t let the ad campaign mislead you that this is another wild and raunchy story.

For one thing, this movie’s lead is four years further along. James Brennan (“The Squid and the Whale’s Jesse Eisenberg) has just graduated from college and things are not going the way he planned. His parents have had some financial reversals. Not only is his planned trip to Europe with his friends canceled so he can stay home and get a job but there’s no money to pay his tuition at graduate school, and his parents seem disturbingly callous about how this affects him. He finds to his distress that an undergraduate degree in literature does not qualify him for pretty much anything, so he ends up getting a job for which no qualifications of any kind are necessary — working at a decrepit amusement park called Adventureland.

We know what to expect, of course. In just about every summer job, summer camp, and summer trip movie ever made there will be a girl of great sensitivity and insight and a girl of great hotness. There will be a bully or menace of some kind and a boss who is clueless or evil or both. But the humiliating lessons are more in the painful twinge than wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-20-years-later-in-a-cold-sweat category. The bosses (SNL’s very funny Bil Heder and Kristin Wiig) are not evil and not really clueless. They just have the requisite benign obtuseness that enables them to continue to run a business that (1) relies on children in unleashed frenzy mode as customers and (2) relies on teenagers in major hormonal crisis mode as staff. Mottola manages to avoid the cliches and create characters with warmth and specificity and — that rarest quality in movies of this genre — some grace.

Secret Ballot

Posted on June 28, 2009 at 3:58 pm

Those who are interested in the Iranian election and protests should see this superb Iranian film that is one of the finest explorations of freedom, elections, democracy, and the rule of law I have ever watched on screen.

It begins with a surreal image as a solitary soldier patrolling an Iranian island coast sees a box dropped by parachute from a plane. Soon after, a boat arrives and a woman disembarks. She informs the soldier that she is there to collect as many votes as possible before 5 pm and he is to accompany her. They travel the island debating the legitimacy of the voting process and the ability of the law to ensure fair treatment. The woman is a stickler for the letter of the law, even when the result is difficult to justify. That is, until they get stopped by a broken red light and she must decide whether to stop at the deserted intersection, missing her boat and invalidating the votes she has collected, or break the law by running the light. The film, made by Canadian-Iranian Babak Payami works brilliantly as allegory and as quasi-documentary. We never learn the names of the characters; they are just “the soldier” and “the girl.” But they and their predicament are immediately involving and distinctive. Highly recommended for high school and college civics classes and for anyone who appreciates superb film-making.

My Sister’s Keeper

Posted on June 25, 2009 at 6:32 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, some disturbing images, sensuality, language and brief teen drinking
Profanity:	Brief strong language (one f-word, a few other curse words)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Teen gets drunk
Violence/ Scariness:	A theme of the movie is cancer and there are characters who are very ill with explicit and graphic images of treatment and symptoms, sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	June 26, 2009

How far would you go to save your child’s life? How far should you go? Those are the questions posed — and largely ducked — in this film based on the best-selling book, My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult. The New York Times recently said that in Picoult’s books, which often focus on “terrible things” happening to children, “he assault on any individual family is typically mounted from angles multiple and unforeseen.”

The “terrible things” here are inspired by a real-life story. Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric), learn that no one in their family matched their daughter well enough to be able to donate bone marrow or blood cells she needs for cancer treatment. So, they decided to have another baby, one specifically genetically tweaked to be able to provide her sister with healthy cells, starting with the blood from her umbilical cord. As she says, most children arrive by accident, but she was designed to be born for spare parts. At age 11, having spent her entire life being pricked and prodded and now being asked to give up a kidney, Anna (Abigail Breslin) hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to sue for “medical emancipation,” to get permission to stop.

Solomon had to choose between two mothers who both claimed the same baby and he was not related to any of them. But Sara and Brian must choose between their daughters, and they are so desperate to save the one who is sick that they cannot admit to themselves the damage they are doing to the one who is well. The ones who are well — there is also a son who is so overlooked that he sneaks back into the house after being out all night only to find that no one noticed.

Director Nick Cassavetes (“The Notebook”) wisely changed the jarring ending in the novel and is very effective in conveying the matter-of-fact mastery of the details of the symptoms and treatments, a touch of authenticity that is in sharp contrast to the one-dimensionality of the characters. He overdoes the pop songs on the soundtrack, though, with so many montages it feels like a music video punctuated with brief scenes of family anguish. But Picolt insists on allotting tragedy to every character as though she is dealing cards. And she undermines the power of the story and its themes with a syrupy overlay that distorts the issues so that the result is more gooey than dramatic. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel composes exquisite images. But they add to the sense the film does exactly what it says it does not do and ties everything up in a mode that is just too neat and convenient instead of engaging in a forthright and honest way with the issues and the characters. That just rings hollow and ultimately disrespectful to the conflicts it purports to portray.

Patric, who should be in more movies, is outstanding as Brian. The look in his eyes as he watches his daughter go on a special date is heart-wrenching. Diaz, in her first role as a mother, is fine in the quieter moments but never reaches the ferocity that is at the heart of the story. As the sick girl, Sofia Vassilieva is luminious and wise. But the best moments on screen come from Joan Cusack as the judge. Every tiny gesture and look is searingly authentic, a bracing dose of reality in the midst of the gooey saints all around her.