Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Reviews: The Whistleblower, One Day, Salvation Boulevard, Crime After Crime, The Future, Point Blank
The Whistleblower is a movie that feels necessary and overdue.
The summer harvest, mid-August — we reap what we can:
Movie
Whistleblower ***
Rachel Weisz is again the credible center of a movie not likely to find a wide audience (a plex-packer this isn’t). In Larysa Kondracki’s urgent film, Weisz plays a U.N. peace force recruit who brings direct, Nebraskan integrity to a rotten situation in Bosnia. Many of her new comrades sell and use terrified girls as sex slaves. Some males are so vile that castration seems in order, but Weisz is never a crusading poser. She’s a woman trying to do a difficult job against cruel odds (alas, based on reality). We may feel despair, yet her effort is rousing. With Vanessa Redgrave, David Strathairn, and many Balkan creeps.
Rachel Weisz was excellent in Agora, one of the few movies to deal smartly with the cultural collapse of classical antiquity. Not many Americans paid attention. She was the best thing in The Lovely Bones, but the film was foolish. Now Weisz is the moral force and focus of The Whistleblower — what are the chances that many viewers will care to absorb its grim message?
Canadian director Larysa Kondracki’s first feature provides a vividly rough, upsetting sense of what it means to be a betrayed girl in Bosnia, huddled with other exploited victims in wretched rooms, enduring punitive torture and sex slavery. The capper is that most of the swaggering, criminal males are officers of a U.N. peace force, along with some corporate contractors (one sneers, “We work in the real world”).
The lonely crusader exposing them is a new recruit, Kathryn Bolkovac (Weisz). Divorced and far from home, the trained Nebraska cop is shocked but brave. Though reality-rooted and less pulpy than Trade, the Kevin Kline film about sex-sold kids, this movie cuts a few corners. And it has so many odious men that almost the whole gender seems condemned (most of these villains had diplomatic immunity from prosecution).
Kathryn presses ahead, not striking martyr poses, never pulling a gun. Weisz is always deeply genuine. The fierce care in her face is not a slapped-on logo of empathy (her main advisor, acted by Vanessa Redgrave, is like the noble ghost of a dead U.N.). The movie feels necessary and overdue. Over two million victims are mired in sexual slavery. For the vast majority the U.N. is not responsible, but in a cruel world it also has meager resources to help them.
Movie
One Day *
Anne Hathaway hath a way with us, once she’s done with the “bookish” tight hair and glasses. She turns radiant but remains a moody, patronizing twerp with the masochistic guy (Jim Sturgess) who dotes on her. He is shallow (appears on bad TV), she is deep (reads Milan Kundera). For obscure reasons, they meet every July 15, which becomes like bad dinner theater, then like a sour Bastille Day hangover. The whimsies are flat, sexual chemistry is meager, and director Lone Scherfig never finds with Hathaway the feminine magic she got from Carey Mulligan in <em>An Education. </em>There is a small, touching performance by Rafe Spall, son of Timothy.
Anne Hathaway poses as an intellectual in One Day, tying her hair back and wearing glasses. The effect was no more convincing when Dorothy Malone did it as a prim bookshop clerk in The Big Sleep (1946), but for Malone it set up a sharp sex gag. Bookishness is meant to define Hathaway’s Emma, who snootily keeps putting down the man she supposedly desires.
Soon the glasses are gone, the hair is free, and Hathaway glows. Though she hath a way with us, she is often snide with Dexter (Jim Sturgess). She likes subtitled films, Dex likes (even appears in) trashy TV. She reads Milan Kundera, he leafs through magazines. They cool their initial fever by avoiding sex, and then reunite every July 15. After many meet-cutes, she is keen to be impregnated and he is game to oblige, although by now he’s a married and doting dad. Their teased-along “friendship” seems like an experiment in dim-witted desire.
It echoes the dinner-theater charms of Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year, which also used the once-a-year gambit. The 1978 film lacked this one’s lush views of Edinburgh, London, and Paris, but Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn zipped it along expertly. Here we suffer an episodic mishmash. Ever-boyish Dex keeps meeting the dream woman who makes him feel unworthy yet still dotes on him sentimentally.
Hathaway achieves a paradox: irritating adorableness. Having pre-tested her okay English accent in past films, she still tends to swallow or rush her lines. Emma not only strings along Dex but also dithers with a love-smitten comedian who isn’t funny (yet is quite engaging — Rafe Spall is the son of the great Timothy Spall). Emma remains an opaque figure, and director Lone Scherfig never finds with Hathaway the gold of Carey Mulligan in An Education. The July 15 episodes start to seem like Bastille Day hangovers.
Movie
Salvation Boulevard ***
A spoof, not of religion but of the bloated excesses of religion in a media-driven, mega-church era. Pierce Brosnan is a suave fundamentalist fool, the Rev. Day. He runs afoul of a righteous aetheist (Ed Harris), thrills a suburban fan (Jennifer Connelly), and bewilders her doofy husband (Greg Kinnear). The gags in George Ratliff’s movie are <em>Mad</em>-magazine level, but our chuckles are frequent, expertly encouraged by Marisa Tomei as a stoner and Ciarán Hinds as a dumb ox of manliness. Brosnan might be the funniest preacher since Dick Van Dyke in <em>Cold Turkey</em>.
Pierce Brosnan hustles suavely as Rev. Dan Day, whose pictures of himself dwarf those of Christ in his mega-church office. He must be the first film pastor to pray in a luxury shower stall. In Salvation Boulevard, Day is worshipped by groupies such as Gwen (Jennifer Connelly), whose husband (Greg Kinnear) is puzzled by Day’s swaggering holiness. And then a professor (Ed Harris), the local Christopher Hitchens of righteous atheism, debates Day into a rather devilish situation.
George Ratliff’s satire from Larry Beinhart’s novel is not an attack on religion but a Mad-like lampoon of the travesties of religion. Brosnan never challenges Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry, Robert Duvall’s evangelist in The Apostle, or Brad Dourif’s Bible-howler in Wise Blood, but he might be the funniest preacher since Dick Van Dyke in Cold Turkey. Expertly amusing help includes Marisa Tomei as a Grateful Dead freak turned security guard and Ciarán Hinds as an ex-military plank of manly wood. Among the fine touches is Rev. Day’s cell phone, lighting up in satanic red. I chuckled often but not loudly.
Movie
Crime After Crime ***
A rending, talky documentary by Yoav Potash about Deborah Peagler, an L.A. black woman abused by the “dreamboat” husband who pimped her. Her effort to escape with her kids led to his death and won her an absurdly stretched sentence, though she was a model prisoner and suffered cancer. Pro bono lawyers Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa became her angels during a stream of Kafka-maze appeals and cruel denials. D.A. Steve Cooley comes off as a stone-cold nightmare. The film tactics plod, but Peagler is humanly gripping and ultimately a hero.
Justice rides rough in Crime After Crime. Yoav Potash’s documentary is about Deborah Peagler, an L.A. woman who met her dreamboat in 1975. The smooth egotist married, impregnated, abused, and pimped Deborah, who was finally driven to using Crips gang thugs to scare him away. They overdid it, and Peagler went to prison on a 25-to-life ticket, thanks to a lazy lawyer, hard laws, and a mean district attorney.
Peagler’s many legal appeals were often futile. Committed pro-bono attorneys Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran costar engagingly with Peagler, a devoutly religious model prisoner. With Potash serving as legal videographer, the talking closeups are endless. But the story grabs. Is there a villain more perfectly self-cast than repellent D.A. Steve Cooley? Or anyone more movingly mired in Kafka limbo than Peagler? Despite its plodding tactics, the movie is an alarming witness.
Interview: Former La Jollan Yoav Potash, Director of Crime After Crime
Movie
Future *
A stylized pipsqueak comedy from performance artist, director, and deadpan conceptualist Miranda July. Her spaced husband (Hamish Linklater) talks to the moon, and July speaks in a wee voice as her sick cat. The film floats as a bubble of whimsy, like Pee-wee Herman and David Lynch conversing underwater in a medicated dream. There is some fine night imagery, yet this seems to be the back end of a vanguard that has come and gone.
Miranda July wrote, directed, and stars as Sophie in The Future. She also does the scratchy voice of her sick cat, sharing its tiny thoughts with us. Sophie’s normal, drained, deadpan voice matches her spaced husband (Hamish Linklater), a quirky guy who can “stop time.” He also hears the moon talking to him. The script seems to be on meds and often has the aura of Pee-wee Herman having a weird little party with David Lynch.
Despite some amusingly drab lust in Tarzana, July’s fey and feline charms coagulate into a glum paste of abstract anxieties about aging, death, infidelity, and ecology. It might work better as performance art in a loft, though some night images are excellent. If July keeps going in this direction, she will become the next-most aggravating woman in movies, right after low-budget vanity star Tanna Frederick.
Movie
Point Blank *
Stealing its title from the great 1967 Lee Marvin film, this Euro-trash thriller directed by Fred Cavayé stars Gilles Lellouche as a mild Parisian nurse who becomes a Real Man by reclaiming his pregnant wife from drug gangsters. One of them, played by Roschdy Zem, has some of the old Marvin potency of cold, efficient menace, but this is a spree of exhausted action clichés, hyped suspense, and painful stereotypes.
The first point against Point Blank is that it steals a great movie’s title. Not the 1998 Mickey Rourke dodo, but John Boorman’s 1967 Point Blank, a brilliant thriller starring Lee Marvin’s definitive performance as a monolithic menace. By contrast, Fred Cavayé’s new film is slick and slippery Euro-trash. As in 2008’s Everything for Her, Cavayé uses a husband trying to save his wife from a French justice system prone to fascism (the Nazis got a lot of police cooperation in France).
Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) is a hospital nurse whose wife (Elena Anaya) is in late pregnancy. Talk about trimester blues: she is abducted and hauled to a grim refrigeration plant by thugs who are into deep merde with corrupt Parisian cops. As Samuel becomes a Real Man (no mere male nurse!) by looking for his wife, we pinball along with the many clichés: chases, ambushes, subway violence, shady Gypsies, Mafia hoods (sauced, as usual, by an opera aria). Roschdy Zem is a Marvin-like hard case, clipped and lethal. Marvin famously shot holes in a bed. Zem plugs a mattress through the flesh of a fat, decadent gangster. So much for progress.
Reviewed in the movie listings: Final Destination 5 and Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Reviews: The Whistleblower, One Day, Salvation Boulevard, Crime After Crime, The Future, Point Blank
Reviews: The Whistleblower, One Day, Salvation Boulevard, Crime After Crime, The Future, Point Blank
The Whistleblower is a movie that feels necessary and overdue.
The summer harvest, mid-August — we reap what we can:
Movie
Whistleblower ***
Rachel Weisz is again the credible center of a movie not likely to find a wide audience (a plex-packer this isn’t). In Larysa Kondracki’s urgent film, Weisz plays a U.N. peace force recruit who brings direct, Nebraskan integrity to a rotten situation in Bosnia. Many of her new comrades sell and use terrified girls as sex slaves. Some males are so vile that castration seems in order, but Weisz is never a crusading poser. She’s a woman trying to do a difficult job against cruel odds (alas, based on reality). We may feel despair, yet her effort is rousing. With Vanessa Redgrave, David Strathairn, and many Balkan creeps.
Rachel Weisz was excellent in Agora, one of the few movies to deal smartly with the cultural collapse of classical antiquity. Not many Americans paid attention. She was the best thing in The Lovely Bones, but the film was foolish. Now Weisz is the moral force and focus of The Whistleblower — what are the chances that many viewers will care to absorb its grim message?
Canadian director Larysa Kondracki’s first feature provides a vividly rough, upsetting sense of what it means to be a betrayed girl in Bosnia, huddled with other exploited victims in wretched rooms, enduring punitive torture and sex slavery. The capper is that most of the swaggering, criminal males are officers of a U.N. peace force, along with some corporate contractors (one sneers, “We work in the real world”).
The lonely crusader exposing them is a new recruit, Kathryn Bolkovac (Weisz). Divorced and far from home, the trained Nebraska cop is shocked but brave. Though reality-rooted and less pulpy than Trade, the Kevin Kline film about sex-sold kids, this movie cuts a few corners. And it has so many odious men that almost the whole gender seems condemned (most of these villains had diplomatic immunity from prosecution).
Kathryn presses ahead, not striking martyr poses, never pulling a gun. Weisz is always deeply genuine. The fierce care in her face is not a slapped-on logo of empathy (her main advisor, acted by Vanessa Redgrave, is like the noble ghost of a dead U.N.). The movie feels necessary and overdue. Over two million victims are mired in sexual slavery. For the vast majority the U.N. is not responsible, but in a cruel world it also has meager resources to help them.
Movie
One Day *
Anne Hathaway hath a way with us, once she’s done with the “bookish” tight hair and glasses. She turns radiant but remains a moody, patronizing twerp with the masochistic guy (Jim Sturgess) who dotes on her. He is shallow (appears on bad TV), she is deep (reads Milan Kundera). For obscure reasons, they meet every July 15, which becomes like bad dinner theater, then like a sour Bastille Day hangover. The whimsies are flat, sexual chemistry is meager, and director Lone Scherfig never finds with Hathaway the feminine magic she got from Carey Mulligan in <em>An Education. </em>There is a small, touching performance by Rafe Spall, son of Timothy.
Anne Hathaway poses as an intellectual in One Day, tying her hair back and wearing glasses. The effect was no more convincing when Dorothy Malone did it as a prim bookshop clerk in The Big Sleep (1946), but for Malone it set up a sharp sex gag. Bookishness is meant to define Hathaway’s Emma, who snootily keeps putting down the man she supposedly desires.
Soon the glasses are gone, the hair is free, and Hathaway glows. Though she hath a way with us, she is often snide with Dexter (Jim Sturgess). She likes subtitled films, Dex likes (even appears in) trashy TV. She reads Milan Kundera, he leafs through magazines. They cool their initial fever by avoiding sex, and then reunite every July 15. After many meet-cutes, she is keen to be impregnated and he is game to oblige, although by now he’s a married and doting dad. Their teased-along “friendship” seems like an experiment in dim-witted desire.
It echoes the dinner-theater charms of Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year, which also used the once-a-year gambit. The 1978 film lacked this one’s lush views of Edinburgh, London, and Paris, but Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn zipped it along expertly. Here we suffer an episodic mishmash. Ever-boyish Dex keeps meeting the dream woman who makes him feel unworthy yet still dotes on him sentimentally.
Hathaway achieves a paradox: irritating adorableness. Having pre-tested her okay English accent in past films, she still tends to swallow or rush her lines. Emma not only strings along Dex but also dithers with a love-smitten comedian who isn’t funny (yet is quite engaging — Rafe Spall is the son of the great Timothy Spall). Emma remains an opaque figure, and director Lone Scherfig never finds with Hathaway the gold of Carey Mulligan in An Education. The July 15 episodes start to seem like Bastille Day hangovers.
Movie
Salvation Boulevard ***
A spoof, not of religion but of the bloated excesses of religion in a media-driven, mega-church era. Pierce Brosnan is a suave fundamentalist fool, the Rev. Day. He runs afoul of a righteous aetheist (Ed Harris), thrills a suburban fan (Jennifer Connelly), and bewilders her doofy husband (Greg Kinnear). The gags in George Ratliff’s movie are <em>Mad</em>-magazine level, but our chuckles are frequent, expertly encouraged by Marisa Tomei as a stoner and Ciarán Hinds as a dumb ox of manliness. Brosnan might be the funniest preacher since Dick Van Dyke in <em>Cold Turkey</em>.
Pierce Brosnan hustles suavely as Rev. Dan Day, whose pictures of himself dwarf those of Christ in his mega-church office. He must be the first film pastor to pray in a luxury shower stall. In Salvation Boulevard, Day is worshipped by groupies such as Gwen (Jennifer Connelly), whose husband (Greg Kinnear) is puzzled by Day’s swaggering holiness. And then a professor (Ed Harris), the local Christopher Hitchens of righteous atheism, debates Day into a rather devilish situation.
George Ratliff’s satire from Larry Beinhart’s novel is not an attack on religion but a Mad-like lampoon of the travesties of religion. Brosnan never challenges Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry, Robert Duvall’s evangelist in The Apostle, or Brad Dourif’s Bible-howler in Wise Blood, but he might be the funniest preacher since Dick Van Dyke in Cold Turkey. Expertly amusing help includes Marisa Tomei as a Grateful Dead freak turned security guard and Ciarán Hinds as an ex-military plank of manly wood. Among the fine touches is Rev. Day’s cell phone, lighting up in satanic red. I chuckled often but not loudly.
Movie
Crime After Crime ***
A rending, talky documentary by Yoav Potash about Deborah Peagler, an L.A. black woman abused by the “dreamboat” husband who pimped her. Her effort to escape with her kids led to his death and won her an absurdly stretched sentence, though she was a model prisoner and suffered cancer. Pro bono lawyers Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa became her angels during a stream of Kafka-maze appeals and cruel denials. D.A. Steve Cooley comes off as a stone-cold nightmare. The film tactics plod, but Peagler is humanly gripping and ultimately a hero.
Justice rides rough in Crime After Crime. Yoav Potash’s documentary is about Deborah Peagler, an L.A. woman who met her dreamboat in 1975. The smooth egotist married, impregnated, abused, and pimped Deborah, who was finally driven to using Crips gang thugs to scare him away. They overdid it, and Peagler went to prison on a 25-to-life ticket, thanks to a lazy lawyer, hard laws, and a mean district attorney.
Peagler’s many legal appeals were often futile. Committed pro-bono attorneys Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran costar engagingly with Peagler, a devoutly religious model prisoner. With Potash serving as legal videographer, the talking closeups are endless. But the story grabs. Is there a villain more perfectly self-cast than repellent D.A. Steve Cooley? Or anyone more movingly mired in Kafka limbo than Peagler? Despite its plodding tactics, the movie is an alarming witness.
Interview: Former La Jollan Yoav Potash, Director of Crime After Crime
Movie
Future *
A stylized pipsqueak comedy from performance artist, director, and deadpan conceptualist Miranda July. Her spaced husband (Hamish Linklater) talks to the moon, and July speaks in a wee voice as her sick cat. The film floats as a bubble of whimsy, like Pee-wee Herman and David Lynch conversing underwater in a medicated dream. There is some fine night imagery, yet this seems to be the back end of a vanguard that has come and gone.
Miranda July wrote, directed, and stars as Sophie in The Future. She also does the scratchy voice of her sick cat, sharing its tiny thoughts with us. Sophie’s normal, drained, deadpan voice matches her spaced husband (Hamish Linklater), a quirky guy who can “stop time.” He also hears the moon talking to him. The script seems to be on meds and often has the aura of Pee-wee Herman having a weird little party with David Lynch.
Despite some amusingly drab lust in Tarzana, July’s fey and feline charms coagulate into a glum paste of abstract anxieties about aging, death, infidelity, and ecology. It might work better as performance art in a loft, though some night images are excellent. If July keeps going in this direction, she will become the next-most aggravating woman in movies, right after low-budget vanity star Tanna Frederick.
Movie
Point Blank *
Stealing its title from the great 1967 Lee Marvin film, this Euro-trash thriller directed by Fred Cavayé stars Gilles Lellouche as a mild Parisian nurse who becomes a Real Man by reclaiming his pregnant wife from drug gangsters. One of them, played by Roschdy Zem, has some of the old Marvin potency of cold, efficient menace, but this is a spree of exhausted action clichés, hyped suspense, and painful stereotypes.
The first point against Point Blank is that it steals a great movie’s title. Not the 1998 Mickey Rourke dodo, but John Boorman’s 1967 Point Blank, a brilliant thriller starring Lee Marvin’s definitive performance as a monolithic menace. By contrast, Fred Cavayé’s new film is slick and slippery Euro-trash. As in 2008’s Everything for Her, Cavayé uses a husband trying to save his wife from a French justice system prone to fascism (the Nazis got a lot of police cooperation in France).
Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) is a hospital nurse whose wife (Elena Anaya) is in late pregnancy. Talk about trimester blues: she is abducted and hauled to a grim refrigeration plant by thugs who are into deep merde with corrupt Parisian cops. As Samuel becomes a Real Man (no mere male nurse!) by looking for his wife, we pinball along with the many clichés: chases, ambushes, subway violence, shady Gypsies, Mafia hoods (sauced, as usual, by an opera aria). Roschdy Zem is a Marvin-like hard case, clipped and lethal. Marvin famously shot holes in a bed. Zem plugs a mattress through the flesh of a fat, decadent gangster. So much for progress.
Reviewed in the movie listings: Final Destination 5 and Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie.
Comments