Conviction

Posted on February 1, 2011 at 8:00 am

Sam Rockwell gives one of the best performances of the year as Kenny Waters, a man wrongly convicted of murder for eighteen years until his sister was able to prove that he was innocent and get him released. Betty Ann (Hillary Swank) and Kenny were two of nine children from seven fathers raised in a succession of foster homes. She was a high school dropout and new mother when he went to prison. She went back to school, graduated from college and law school, passed the bar, and with the help of Cardozo Law School’s Innocence Project, was able to prove through DNA evidence that the blood found at the crime scene was not his.

Rockwell is mesmerizing as a man whose kind heart and family loyalty sometimes suffer from his impulsively confrontational behavior. He conveys at every stage the weight of his experience in prison as we see him over the 18-year period. His frustration, longing, despair, his fear of hoping too much mingled with his unquenchable pride in his sister are all heartbreakingly evident. He shows us why he was one of the local police department’s favorite “usual suspects” but he also shows us why someone would spend her life working on his behalf, even after everyone tells her to move on.

Director Tony Goldwyn and screenwriter Pamela Gray do a fine job of shaping the material, giving us a sense of the characters’ past experiences, the strength of their connection, and the press of time. The cast includes the reliable support of Minnie Driver as Betty Ann’s law school classmate and loyal friend and Juliette Lewis, outstanding as a recanting witness.

Swank, who co-produced, is sincere and dedicated if not ideal casting for this role. She has gravitated lately to a series of heroic characters, though her best work has been in more damaged or fragile roles. A high school dropout in real life, she is drawn to characters who exemplify education and achievement. But she gives us no sense of school as anything but an obstacle course. Her learning is not tied in any way to expanded understanding; she seems to have no curiosity about the law and no passion for anything but freeing her brother. We see the impact of her single-mindedness on her husband and sons but not how their reactions affect her. The story is one of triumph that cannot help but move us, but as a real-life character who gives everything, Swank does not give us enough.

Takers

Posted on January 24, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Why make a movie with so many first-rate performers and give central roles to people who cannot act and have no star power on screen? For the answer, read the credits. Rap star T.I. and R&B star Chris Brown are producers. And they have produced the movie they thought would be fun to star in rather than the movie that would be fun to watch. They were smart enough to surround themselves with top talent but not smart enough to learn from them.

This is the second low-grade armored car robbery film in months and every part of it feels overused, sketched in, or glossed over. The most important element of a heist film is to make it clear whose side we are supposed to be on. The second most important element is to make it clear what the challenge of the heist is and let us see as the problems are solved. This movie fails at both.

It opens with a bank robbery, expertly executed by a group of characters whose backgrounds, motives, and expertise are not considered worth exploring. “The degree of difficulty’s off the charts,” a detective says almost admiringly. We know they’re supposed to be cool because they move in slow motion with a bit of jazz in the score.

Matt Dillon is the cop who picks up on details everyone else ignores, but risks losing his family. There is a goofy scene that has him following a suspect with his little daughter in the car, as she gets sadder and sadder about his broken promise. He has a partner, played by the always-likable Jay Hernandez. We could easily be rooting for them, but the movie seems to want us to be on the side of the robbers without giving us any reason to do so. They seem to be doing it just for the high of getting away with something. “Ten percent to the usual charities,” they tell their money manager, followed by a brisk discussion of basis points and the relative benefits of the Cayman Islands versus the Dutch Antilles for offshore money storage.

They are a careful crew who insist on a year between jobs until something comes up that is so juicy they cannot resist. Or is it a trap?

There’s a showy chase scene that gives Chris Brown and director John Luessenhop a chance to demonstrate some panache, but it goes on too long. A big shoot-out scene in slow motion with mournful music on the soundtrack is copied from much better movies. And there are elements taken from bad movies as well, like the cop who for no reason at all fails to call for back-up.

T.I. is not up to the pivotal role of “Ghost,” the member of the group who has just been released from prison and feels twice-wronged. Every time he takes center stage, the movie sags and his brief attempt at flamboyance — a quote from Genghis Khan — is just silly. His flat affect is intended to be cool and mysterious, but next to arresting performers like Idris Elba (getting a chance to use his real accent for once) and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, he seems to fade away. The only thing these takers really steal is your time.

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Crime Drama

Secretariat

Posted on January 24, 2011 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating:	PG for brief mild language
Profanity:	Brief mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense scenes, family conflicts, sad death
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 8, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	January 25, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B004DK5CW4

This is the story of two champions. One is the most celebrated horse of the 20th century, the only non-human athlete to be included on Sport’s Illustrated’s 1999 list of the top 100 athletes of the last hundred years for achieving one of the most sought-after titles in sports, the racing triple crown, with records unbroken decades later.

The other was the housewife who won him by being on the losing side of a coin toss.

Secretariat, called “Red” by everyone but the officials and record-keepers, was a winner from his very first moments, when he astonished the small group who observed his birth by standing up more quickly than any foal they had ever seen.

His owner was a bit more of a long shot. Penny Chenery Tweedy was a housewife and full-time mother when she took over what she and her family thought of as temporary management of her ailing father’s farm. The farm was in trouble. Its one asset was the upcoming coin toss to determine which of two foals about to be born would remain with the farm, and which would go to the owner of the stud horse. Penny (Diane Lane) lost the coin toss but won the horse she wanted, bred for both speed and stamina. She called him Red.

Director Randall Wallace knows how to make an audience cheer (he wrote “Braveheart” and wrote and directed “We Were Soldiers”). By focusing on the least likely character to succeed and the challenges she faced, he adds some tension to the story. We know Secretariat is going to win, but do not know whether Penny will be able to keep him, or how her decision to take over the farm will affect her family. And he introduces us to Secretariat’s team, played by a superb supporting cast. John Malkcovich adds flair as Quebecois trainer Lucien Laurin, who “dresses like Superfly and is trying to retire.” Senator/”Law & Order” star Fred Dalton Thompson plays mentor Bull Hancock with just the right avuncular rumble. Margo Martindale, one of those know-her-face-but-don’t-know-her-name character actors, delivers the perfect combination of asperity and loyalty as the devoted assistant who came up with the name Secretariat. Newcomer Otto Thorwarth shows us why the right jockey matters so much, and “True Blood’s” Nelsan Ellis is enormously moving as the man who spent more time with the triple-crown-winner than anyone else. And what a pleasure, as always, to see the exquisite Diane Lane, at last in a role worthy of her talent and beauty. In this movie, she is the champion who gets to run the race she was born for.

The Company Men

Posted on January 20, 2011 at 6:04 pm

Remember all those executives George Clooney fired last year in Up in the Air? Here is their story.

Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, and Tommy Lee Jones play characters who work at an enormous conglomerate and feel confident in their value to the organization and not at all the kind of people who get laid off. That might have been true in past recessions. But they come from the heavy building side of the company. That might have been how the company started, but in the post-meltdown world it is the past, not the future. CEO James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson) explains that the future of the company is in health care, infrastructure, and power generation.

And so, “difficult decisions had to be made in situations where redundancies surfaced.” And therefore euphemisms had to used, the passive voice employed — so often the case when everyone else is pretty much unemployed.

The first to go is Bobby Walker (Affleck), a top salesman who has the bad luck to be selling something that is not health care, infrastructure, or power generation. He walks into the office bragging about his 86 at the golf course before work, and shortly after is walking out with everything in a cardboard box. Phil Woodward (Cooper), a factory guy who made it to the executive suite — and who has a daughter very excited about the senior class trip to Italy — doesn’t last much longer. And finally, the head of the division, Gene McLary (Jones), the CEO’s oldest friend, is riding the euphemism and cardboard box express, too.

It turns out that people who are fired go through the same Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages that we experience in facing death, though not exactly in the same order. In these cases, it seems to be anger first, and then denial. They may skip bargaining and go straight to depression. And not everyone makes it to acceptance. Bobby goes from “I can’t let anyone know I lost my job” to “I need to look successful” to “We can’t leave our home,” to accepting the sequential blows of his wife’s return to work, moving back to his parents’ home, and asking the brother-in-law who always needles him about the big shot life for a job helping to put up drywall.

Writer/director John Wells (television’s “ER”) has a good feel for the corporate world — the analyst meetings in hotel ballrooms, the Wall Street jargon, the CEO pay packages. And he has a television writer’s economy for evoking the range of situations and emotions. While he also has a television writer’s feel for structure, he seems locked in to television drama’s three-part storyline, just too conventional, predictable, and neat, especially in the last half hour. It comes down too hard on the facts we all know too well, the imperial CEOs (with pay 700 times that of the average worker), the difference between what is legal and what is ethical, the difference between building something other than figures on a balance sheet, the “real people” honor and generosity of the people who get their hands dirty literally rather than metaphorically.

It’s the small details and moments that work best in this film. The layoffs come to people with busy lives predicated on keeping jobs they once thought depended only on ability and integrity. Everyone has an event to attend; everyone has a lovely house to pay for. Gene comes home to the gleaming surfaces of his gracious home and peeks at the five-figure price tag on his wife’s new table. Phil is told by a cheery but frank “outplacement” counselor that he should remove “ancient” references like service in Vietnam from his resume and dye his hair. There’s an understated moment where the brother-in-law (a fine Kevin Costner) shows that a real leader puts his workers first. Rosemary DeWitt can convey more about her understanding and support in putting lotion on her legs than most actresses can do with a page of dialogue. And the movie delivers the message that the workforce is not all that gets downsized; so do dreams, hopes, plans, pride.

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Drama Inspired by a true story

Alpha and Omega

Posted on January 11, 2011 at 8:00 am

Two young Canadian wolves representing the extremes of the social scale join forces in the animated “Alpha and Omega,” which keeps them stuck in the bland middle. Though the visuals are in 3D, the film barely manages to register in one. “Alpha and Omega” gives us an episodic story with an uneasy mix of slapstick and peril that drains the momentum, along with lackluster art direction that saps the visual interest.

Kate (the voice of Hayden Panettiere) was born to be an alpha wolf, daughter of the pack leader and trained to hunt caribou. Humphrey (Justin Long) is the happy-go-lucky omega.

Caribou are getting scarce, and the uneasy truce between the wolves led by Tony (Dennis Hopper, in his penultimate role) and the wolves led by Kate’s father, Winston (Danny Glover), is fraying. There’s also some nattering about eastern vs. western wolves that makes them sound like rival college football teams or gangsta rappers.

Tony proposes that the packs join forces, with a marriage between Kate and his jock-like son to bring the two groups together. But American forest rangers capture Kate and Humphrey and carry them off to Idaho, hoping they will repopulate the area.

With some guidance from a golf-playing goose (even the wildly funny Larry Miller can’t give that character any vitality) Kate and Humphrey (an “African Queen” reference?) start for home. Their adventures on the way back include being shot at by a man who thinks Humphrey has rabies and being chased by bears who mistake Humphrey’s playful snowball for an attack on their cub.

Tony threatens war unless Kate shows up in time to marry his son and unite the packs. But Kate is not the only one to discover that alphas and omegas can make a good team.

Kate is an appealing heroine, and so it’s a relief to see an all-ages movie that does not require the responsible, capable character to “loosen up” and get in touch with her silly side or the fun-loving character to become serious to find love and happiness. But the script fails to give Kate and Humphrey some other purpose to propel the story forward. Despite a perilous road trip and an imminent feud between wolf factions, we do not see Kate and Humphrey learn or change in any way that seems to matter. The result is a story with all of the dramatic tension of a dial tone.

The movie depends on the difference between the two kinds of wolves, but it is oddly reluctant to decide what that means. The alphas act like, well, alphas: strong, brave, smart and kind of bossy. They are not unkind to the omegas but they are dismissive and condescending. There’s a half-hearted attempt to make the contribution of the omegas appear equivalent because they remind everyone to have fun and “keep the peace.” It seems forced and insincere, especially when the genuine contributions made by Humphrey come from being brave and smart, not funny and playful.

The background animation has some lovely touches but the character design is poor. It’s not accurate enough to make the wolves seem like animals and not expressive enough to make them seem like characters we can care about. The characters’ expressions during vertiginous drops on a hollow log sledding down a mountain are so flat that the 3-D effects just don’t matter.

We’ve been spoiled this year by two top-quality 3-D animated films, “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Despicable Me,” and one that qualifies as a masterpiece, “Toy Story 3.” Those films are the alphas that make this one seem like a Saturday morning cartoon show.