Duplicity

Posted on August 26, 2009 at 8:01 am

What do Egyptian launch codes and a new frozen pizza topping have in common?

They’re both secrets that are of value to both those who know it and those who want to know it. Where there are secrets, there must be spies. Where there are spies, there must be counter-spies. And where there is conflict, there must be some sparks.

Writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) has produced another sharp, twisty, and very stylish thriller, this time with romance and a bit of stardust. The result is a top-notch date movie for grown-ups.

Julia Roberts plays Claire and her Closer co-star Clive Owens is Ray. They meet at an American embassy 4th of July party in Dubai and it is not clear whether their opening exchange is flirtation or something a little more professional. The same can be said of the subsequent encounter, leaving one of them triumphant and the other feeling used and embarrassed. As we go back and forth in time, pieces of the puzzle come together. Once spies for the CIA and MI6, Claire and Ray move on to the more-lucrative career of corporate espionage and perhaps the even-more lucrative career of working for themselves.

Gilroy gives the film a bit of a retro gloss, with a soundtrack that has a 70’s flavor and sleek camera effects with sliding boxes reminiscent of the original “Thomas Crown Affair.” Roberts makes a welcome return to the screen, looking less willowy and more curvy. Owen, most often seen in movies glowering or cynical, is more natural trying out a Tennessee accent than he is trying out a smile, but he has a sure sense of timing that makes the best of Gilroy’s clever banter. This movie sparkles with witty exchanges, and the back-and-forth time shifts in story-telling reveals just how much every word of that dialog matters. The stakes are not as dire as in “Michael Clayton,” but that is part of the fun, watching former top spies use all of the resources available to track down information about items sold in a grocery store. More fun is seeing how two people whose careers depend on not trusting and not being trustworthy test each other and themselves to see if they can build a lasting connection. “Duplicity” may refer to a double-cross, but this movie is double-entertaining.

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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.

Woodstock

Posted on August 24, 2009 at 8:00 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for drug content, nudity and language
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drug use, drug references
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	1970
Date Released to DVD:	August 25, 2009
Amazon.com ASIN:	B001NXDSLQ

Forty years ago, it seemed for one brief moment as though a disastrous, mud-soaked music festival that attracted so many people it had a larger population than all but one city in the state could be the beginning of a new world of peace and cooperation. That dream was quickly battered but still lives on in the magic that its name and its songs still evoke: Woodstock. This week, a new movie from Ang Lee covers the impact of the festival on the community that was its not-entirely-welcoming host. But the truly indispensible memento of the three days of peace and music is the award-winning original documentary from director Michael Wadleigh. A new 40th-anniversary edition is being released this week with additional footage from from Paul Butterfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter & Mountain and interviews from participants including Wadleigh and concert producer Michael Lang. Whether you remember the warning about the brown acid and the interview with the porta-john guy and the nun flashing the peace sign or whether you have yet to experience the “Fixin’ to Die” rag or Hendrix’s stunning “Star Spangled Banner,” this is a brilliant film about an extraordinary moment.

Legion: the Archangel Michael on Film

Posted on August 22, 2009 at 8:00 am

Paul Bettany plays the Archangel Michael in “Legion,” a new film opening in early 2010, also starring Dennis Quaid, Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson, and “Gray’s Anatomy’s” Kate Walsh. In the film, he fights on the side of humanity when God has given up on earth. Much of it takes place in a diner, where a pregnant waitress may be carrying a child who may have special qualities.
The Biblical Michael is a character (or more than one character) with many interpretations, and even appears in the Qu’ran as an angel bringing peace and plenty. The film version is sure to be provocative; I hope it will be thoughtful as well.

X Games 3D: The Movie

Posted on August 20, 2009 at 5:58 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for extreme sports action and accidents
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense sports action and accidents, reference to serious injuries
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 21, 2009

Kids, don’t try this at home.

3D is X-treme film-making and thus well suited to the X Games, hyper-intense, hyper-dangerous, hyper-what are they thinking? sports that are closer to stunts. Young men compete on skateboard, snowboard, and on dirt bikes and motocross to defy the laws of physics. One of them says he feels about gravity the way some people feel about evolution: “It’s just a theory.”

Adolescent testosterone-friendly sponsors like Play Station, Taco Bell, Red Bull, and the Navy have helped make the X Games into an enormous and high-stakes event. Some of its most stunning images are of the homes these young men have purchased with the money they make breaking their bones to do these tricks.

And X can also stand for something else. At one point, a selection of one competitor’s past x-rays of injuries flash on the screen.

The stunts are astonishing and the 3D effects are so intense that you will feel like wiping the dirt kicked up by the motocross bike off your face. But there is more to the film. It has some important lessons about passion, commitment, being willing to ask “what if it is possible?” and being willing to fail in order to achieve ultimate success. The climax of the film comes in a three-way competition that includes one man coming back from a wipe-out the year before and one who is badly injured early on and insists on continuing to compete. The respect and affection between the competitors is genuinely touching and the way they ride their boards back and forth to the medical facility to check on the injured athlete is affecting. They are barely aware of how organic their attachment to the boards has become.