Edge of Darkness

Posted on January 28, 2010 at 8:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong bloody violence and language
Profanity:	Some vary strong language (mostly f-words)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Some drinking, cigar
Violence/ Scariness:	Very graphic and brutal violence including scary surprises, guns, a knife, cars as weapons, dead bodies
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 29, 2010

As he continues to work through personal issues that seem to require expiation through his characters on screen, Mel Gibson, plays a Tom Craven, a Boston cop out for more than justice after his daughter is murdered. His face deeply lined, his hairline receding, just about all of his movie star glamour etched away, he is no more the larger-than-life hero of “Braveheart” and “Mad Max.” He is not a big man; we often see him standing next to bigger ones, contributing to the movie’s claustrophobic feeling. He does not have a big life. He is still in the house he has lived in for decades, with one bottle of good booze covered with dust and one person he cares about, his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic). He’s not much good at talking or for interacting with the complexities and ambiguities of the world. Emma teases him, perhaps a bit ruefully, that he doesn’t even know what her job is. But she knows he is safe. And so when she needs help, she comes home.

A couple of hours later, she is killed in a drive-by. The logical conclusion is that the culprit is someone who was after Tom, some bad guy he put away. But the use of logic is the first of many assumptions Tom will have to relinquish to understand what trouble Emma had gotten into and what he must do about it.

The movie is based on a Thatcher/Reagan-era British miniseries, itself perhaps inspired by the 1970’s American cinema of paranoia, lone individual against grand conspiracy movies like “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.” This version reverses the nationalities; Yorkshire becomes Boston and the American with a shady past as a spook played by Joe Don Baker becomes a Brit with a cockney accent played by Ray Winstone as Jedburgh, the most compelling character in the film because we do know know why he seems to know everything, whose side he is on, or what he does. “I’m usually the guy who stops you connecting A and B,” he says.

Connecting A and B is what we look for in movies, at least studio movies with big stars, but we are perfectly happy to spend two hours figuring out what that connection is. If the murky intersections of various categories of bad guys makes that connection not entirely unexpected, there are a few good twists along the way. Director Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale” and the upcoming “Green Hornet” as well as the original BBC version of this story) keeps the tension taut and the action compelling. There are fine details, a too-smooth executive rolling his gold wedding band through his fingers as he pretends to be concerned, Tom off duty reaching instinctively for a gun that isn’t there. The build-up of Tom’s sense of urgency and the directness of his instincts counterposed with the murkiness of other characters’ motivations works well, too. He literally smashes through walls as he psychically smashes through the boundaries of his profession, of law, and even of rationality itself, ultimately acting on the purest of instinct, as he says, a man with nothing left to lose.

Both Tom and the man who plays him seem intent on expiating some transgression. Gibson is often drawn to roles that involve physical abuse and exposure down to the bone. Here that works well up to the very last scene, where Gibson the man seems to break away from the character with a final image that tells us more about the struggles of the Hollywood actor than the Boston cop and would take us out of the movie if it wasn’t already over.

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Youth in Revolt

Posted on January 7, 2010 at 9:28 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexual content, language and drug use
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, and drug use by teens and adults, people given drugs unknowingly
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril and violence, car crashes and explosions
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, some anti-Christian humor
Date Released to Theaters:	January 8, 2010

Those who want to see the Michael Cera they know and love and those who want to see him do something else can both find what they are looking for in “Youth in Revolt,” based on the popular epistolary novels by C.D. Payne. Cera plays Nick Twisp, the typical adolescent hero — his parents are insensitive mess-ups with love lives that embarrass Nick and make him even more acutely aware of how alone he is and how unlikely it seems that he will ever find a girlfriend.
And at first this is the typical Michael Cera role — a sensitive teenager who is not sure of himself but whose hesitant delivery produces makes the surprisingly barbed coherence of his comments particularly winning. But then, when Nick meets Sheeni (appealing newcomer Portia Doubleday) and realizes that faint heart never won fair lady and nice guys finish last, etc. etc., he realizes he needs to up his game. And so, like the Dark Knight, Dr. Jekyll, and The Nutty Professor, he takes on another persona, one that manifests his darker impulses. Nick becomes Francois Dillinger, named for the fantasy Frenchman Sheeni says she hopes to marry and, well, you know. Francois has a mustache, he smokes, and he wears slim, European white pants. He gets Nick into a lot of trouble, but he coolly keeps pushing him forward. The two Michael Ceras interact like “The Parent Trap” on crack.

The exceptionally strong supporting cast includes the Mary Kay Place and M. Emmett Walsh as Sheeni’s very strict Christian parents and Fred Willard as a soft-hearted liberal neighbor. Jean Smart plays Nick’s perpetually-unlucky-in-love mother (her suitors are Zach Galifianakis and Ray Liotta) and Steve Buscemi is his BMW-loving father. The episodic nature of the story seems to drift toward an end that seems hasty and contrived. But Director Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Chuck and Buck”) maintains a darkly comic tone, twisted but buoyant, that will feel authentic to anyone who has survived — or hopes to survive — adolescence.

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Sherlock Holmes

Posted on December 24, 2009 at 5:01 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some startling images and a scene of suggestive material
Profanity:	Some mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, sedation
Violence/ Scariness:	Action violence, hanging, martial arts, guns, poison gas, and various Victorian weapons, explosions, some grotesque and grisly images including corpses
Diversity Issues:	Strong, independent, capable (if criminal) woman
Date Released to Theaters:	December 25, 2009

Perhaps even the great detective himself could not solve the mystery of why Sherlock Holmes holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for having been portrayed on screen than any other fictional character, with more than 75 actors in more than 200 movies. And it would be hard to find any movie and television detective who does not draw something from Holmes’ mastery of the power of observation (“Lie to Me,” “The Mentalist”). There is something endlessly fascinating about the idea that someone could look at us and see what others are hiding from us, and even about the idea that he could see what we are hiding, too.

So here we are again with another Sherlock Holmes, this one from Robert Downey, Jr. and director Guy Ritchie. And that means an edgier, grubbier, somewhat younger Holmes. While stage and screen versions of the stories have generally focused on Holmes as a sort of hyper-controlled super-brain with little emotion or physicality, this version expands on a reference in the original Arthur Conan Doyle texts to Holmes’ being adept at “baritsu,” a form of martial arts and has a two-fisted Holmes who fights bad guys and even mixes it up just for fun. It also focuses on the books’ notion that Holmes was good at detection because he was bad at everything else and that unless he was completely involved in a case he considered worth his attention he does not have any other way to interact with the world.

Dr. Watson, portrayed as a bit stuffy and more of a biographer than a partner for Holmes, in this version is played by the not-at-all-stuffy Jude Law as someone who struggles with his own demons (a gambling problem) and loves the adrenaline rush as well as the sense of justice and the fun of fighting along side his talented friend. But things are changing. He has met a woman he wants to marry and that means moving out of the flat on Baker Street he shares with Holmes and less time for crime-fighting.

Downey is always at his considerable best with a character who has some boundary issues and his Holmes is as taut as the violin strings he plucks between cases. His eyes are the most expressive on screen since Al Pacino, large, liquid, knowing. Downey conveys the almost compulsive, almost Aspergers aspects of the Holmes character. In one scene, he waits for Watson at a restaurant, unable to stop noticing the dark, the sad, the painful at the tables around him. He seems to drink it all in through his eyes, ears, and pores on his skin. And his need to understand and conquer the worst of humanity outside him seems connected to a struggle within himself — and between him and Irene Adler, for Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote, “the woman.” Here she is deliciously played by Rachel McAdams, suiting his description of Irene as having “the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men,” and fetching in bustle and boy-clothes.

Production designer Sarah Greenwood has done a magnificent job of creating Victorian London and part of the fun is seeing some of the now-iconic structures still under construction — always a handy place for a fight scene, too. Ritchie’s kinetic camerawork lends a muscular energy that keeps the story from feeling antique. And getting used to a young, energetic Holmes who can throw a punch is not as difficult as you might think.

But other parts of the movie do not work as well. Ritchie, whose best films celebrate the gritty underworld of big and small-time crooks, seems to be more comfortable for some of the mid-level thieves, arsonists, and hoodlums Holmes and Watson run into, and every time they leave the scene a little bit of the life of the film goes with them. Mark Strong is not given nearly enough to do as the villain (titled, of course) and the mystery is not clever enough to make the resolution satisfying. You don’t have to be a super-sleuth to see the holes in the plot. Downey is better detecting than he is trading odd couple banter with Law, but so would anyone. Who could have imagined that in a Sherlock Holmes movie the fight scenes replacing the deductions would ring truer than the dialogue replacing “Elementary, my dear Watson?”

A Single Man

Posted on December 10, 2009 at 3:22 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some disturbing images and nudity/sexual content
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drunkenness
Violence/ Scariness:	Attempted suicide, aftermath of car crash with bloody body, themes of grief and loss
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 11, 2009

Designer Tom Ford has exquisite taste, and his first movie is an exquisite movie. Based on a story by Christopher Isherwood, as adapted by Ford, it is the story of one day in the life of a British literature professor in Los Angeles, shortly after the loss of his male lover in a car crash. It is November 30, 1962. And so the awful isolation of grief is multiplied by his inability to acknowledge what they were to each other and who he really is.

Ford’s images are so meticulously arranged they feel like a perfume commercial. There is a remote quality that distances us from what is going on. But there are moments, as when we see a flashback of the professor (Colin Firth) getting the news from a sympathetic relative who has to deliver the message that the funeral is “family only” where the grief and the pain of holding it in is raw and real and devastating.

Firth is revelatory as the professor who feels that his truest self and his deepest emotions are invisible in a world in which being gay is still “the love that dare not speak its name.” We see in memory the man he loved (the always-enticing Matthew Goode) and in the present his encounters with a curiously attentive but respectful student (Nicholas Hoult, all grown up since “About a Boy”). And he spends the evening with his closest friend, a boozy fellow British expatriate (Julianne Moore) with whom he believes he can be almost completely honest, but who still sees him as she wishes he was. There is a hint that all of what happens on this last day could be in his mind; I suspect that it is, but either way, we are caught up in his emotions and his story.

Old Dogs

Posted on November 24, 2009 at 8:08 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some mild rude humor
Profanity:	Some mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Characters drink to deal with stress and get drunk, accidental misuse of pharmaceuticals with severe side effects
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril and slapstick violence, many crotch hits, confrontation with a gorilla, no one badly hurt
Diversity Issues:	Some homophobic humor.
Date Released to Theaters:	November 25, 2009

At one point in this endlessly, excruciatingly un-funny non-comedy, Dan (Robin Williams) and Charlie (John Travolta) are at a camp-out with Dan’s seven-year-old twins. Everyone agrees that it’s all about the kids. And of course there’s nothing more fun for kids than sitting on the sidelines while the grown-ups play all the games, right? So, we get to watch the kids watching the grown-ups. They have to look like they’re having fun. We, sitting there in the dark, do not have to pretend.

That’s about all the good news there is. Disney has doubled the same idea that worked surprisingly well in “Game Plan” — sports guy finds out that several years ago he became a father when the progeny get dumped on him for a visit and he has to learn how to be a father very quickly. It may have twice the fathers and twice the kids, but it has half the jokes and none of the heart. Instead of The Rock as a football player, we have Williams (the boring numbers guy who never does anything fun) and Travolta (the funny story-telling man who hits on women all the time) as long time best friends and business partners in a sports marketing firm who are (duh) just about to close the big, big deal when Vicki (Kelly Preston) shows up with the twins to explain that even though they were only married for one drunken night, she became pregnant and now that she is going to jail(!) for two weeks for trespassing in a protest against environmental damage, she needs him to take care of them. This is after the person she originally had to take care of them, her best friend the hand model (Rita Wilson), was hospitalized after Dan smashed her hands by closing a car trunk on them. Funny!

We then have a series of painful set-pieces featuring many members of the Travolta family (Preston is his wife, his daughter plays one of the twins, other members play extras) as Dan fails to be a good father and Charlie fails to be a good human. This happens being in many different locations, where they run into many different actors who all share a “how did I get here?” look. Matt Dillon and Justin Long show up at the camp ground. As soon as Dillon tells us how much he treasures his grandfather’s memorial statue, we know it won’t be around much longer. Dax Shepard and Luis Guzman are inept child-proofers. Guzman’s shtick is that he eats everything in the apartment! Un-hilarious! Amy Sederis flips out when Dan tries to bring the twins to the adults-only condo building! Un-comedic! Ann-Margret(!!) flips out when Charlie spoils a meeting of the bereavement group by eating the special pie made by a woman who died and by having a bad reaction to some medicine that gives him a grotesque facial rictus that makes him smile like the Joker! Plus many, crotch hits and poop jokes! And many jokes about how Dan and Charlie are mistaken for the kids’ grandfathers! And two separate episodes about the hallucinogenic and other bad side effects of the medications the men take for their age-related problems. Double plus un-good!

And I have not even mentioned how not funny it is when Dan’s son types a scatological term into the conference call with the big client, or when the same term comes up with reference to the bear scat Dan and Charlie wipe under their eyes before the game at the camp-out. Or how sad it is to see the wonderful Bernie Mac in the movie’s only bright spot as a children’s entertainer who helps out by giving Charlie a suit that will control every one of Dan’s movements to help him learn how to play tea party with his daughter. It reminds us how much we miss Bernie Mac. The rest of the time the movie just reminds us of how much we miss the days when Travolta and Williams were fun to watch. These old dogs need some new tricks.

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