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Take cover from the storm and see these movies this weekend
A critic's job is to say "Hey, look at this!"
A Cure for Wellness: So beautiful that the total lack of cell phone reception is almost tolerable. Pity about the eels, though.
There is no delight in being contrary for its own sake. It's as dishonest a critical move as quote-whore cheerleading. It cries out, "Hey, look at me!" when, of course, a critic's job is to say, "Hey, look at this other thing!" — in this case, movies. But there is something admittedly delicious in finding yourself genuinely happy with a film most folks didn't like — in this case, A Cure for Wellness.
Movie
Cure for Wellness ***
Director Gore Verbinski takes the campy dread of Hammer horror films (<em>Horror of Dracula, et alia</em>) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. Yes, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. But despite all that, it’s solidly built, masterful with mood, and just plain wonderful to look upon. Dane DeHaan (looking enough like Leo DiCaprio to recall 2010’s <em>Shutter Island</em>) plays an ambitious Young Turk sent to retrieve his boss from a wellness spa in the Swiss Alps. The big guy’s needed back at the office to make a merger go through, but his last letter home was an extended diatribe echoing the spa director’s thoughts on soul-sick modernity and its endless striving for money and power. (He’s not entirely wrong, of course, but then, the devil has been known to speak truth when it serves his purpose.) Once there, DeHaan finds it increasingly difficult to leave: there’s an accident, and there’s a girl, and something weird is going on, something involving eels... I’d say this big-budget B movie puts the “grand” back into “Grand Guignol,” if it weren’t for the earnest moral condemnation at its heart: that the real crime against nature is the use of the world’s wretched refuse to prop up a madman’s dream of civilization.
It starts with the sumptuous visuals, moves on to the pervasive mood and half-convincing condemnation of modernity, and finally bursts into gruesome, crazy (but not especially gory) violence. What's not to love? Plenty, apparently, but even the film's acknowledged flaws didn't cool my ardor.
Movie
Fist Fight **
Charlie Day is a nice-guy teacher (with a sweet kid and a pregnant wife) in a high school that demands educators who look like Ice Cube and talk with his brand of menace and authority. But even Mr. Cube is not immune to the degradations of Senior Prank Day, and neither is safe from the Administrative axe on this, the last day of school. When Day acts to save his own skin and so gets Cube fired, the fight is, as they say, on — though not for a long while. First, the movie wants you to watch Day sweat, squirm, scheme, and scream as he tries to escape his fate — and fails, and fails, and fails. He succeeds, however, at carrying the film, partly through sympathetic wretchedness and partly through sheer energy. (He also has help from a mostly well-used cast, including Tracy Morgan as a hapless coach, Dean Norris as an exasperated principal, and of course, his co-star, who both mocks and upholds his famed badassery.) The fight, when it arrives, is bonkers, brutal, and almost believable. The film, when it ends, is a little less so. Directed by Richie Keen.
As for the revisitation of Three O'Clock High that was Fist Fight, it's probably helped that I had a fun chat with director Richie Keen, and that I find star Charlie Day's particular way of freaking out amusing (if not laugh-out-loud funny). But most others disagreed.
Movie
Great Wall *
Director Zhang Yimou enlists the friendly All-American face of Matt Damon to entice multiplex audiences to embrace subtitles, the glories of Chinese civilization, and the coming wave of Chinese cinema. (Damon’s face, scowly and granitic, is up to the task, his slippery accent isn’t.) The story feels American as well; specifically; it feels like a low-budget Western in which a highly skilled ne’er-do-well gets roped by a spirited gal into defending the town against a horde of nasties, and learns a thing or two about love and doin’ right in the process. Something bland and familiar to make the keening wail of the (beautiful) funeral ceremony a little less foreign, and the brightly color-coded armor of the Great Wall’s defenders a little less outlandish. It’s a hard movie to defend: the script whiffs most of its attempts at humor, the beastly baddies are dull demon dogs, and the action yo-yos between the ridiculous and the sublime. But I found it a strangely easy movie to <em>enjoy</em>, so that’s something. It probably helps that the copious CGI is just wonky enough in places to suggest the gratifying solidity of practical effects.
And outrage magnet The Great Wall? I don't really get the outrage. Matt Damon plays a selfish Westerner who finds he has much to learn from the Chinese people he seeks to plunder, and while he helps to save the day, he's hardly a White Savior.
It's a better celebration of Chinese culture than it is a movie. They're the future of the industry, though, so I'm sure they'll improve as time goes by. (Yes, that's a joke; I'm well aware that there are already great films coming out of China. Just two examples: The same director's Coming Home was quietly heartbreaking, and his The Flowers of War did more interesting work with the helpful Westerner motif.)
Movie
Antarctica: Ice and Sky ***
82-year-old Claude Lorius was the first scientist to alert the world to the perils of global warming. His one regret in life is that history has proved him right. A biographical, cinematic corollary of Al Gore’s canned Learning Annex lecture, Luc Jacquet’s <em>Antarctica</em> condenses 22 polar missions — all told, they consumed ten years of Lorius’s life — into one visually breathtaking documentary. (It helps that Lorius and his crews were wise enough to pack a couple of 16mm cameras to record the various expeditions.) The narration — inspired selections from Lorius’s diary spoken by Michel Papineschi — complements the epical force of the images. For a time, it looked as if Jacquet (<em>March of the Penguins</em>) had every intention of letting the pictures do the talking. Sadly, the last ten minutes are squandered on spoon-feeding doom. And if ever a film cried out for a domed IMAX 3D presentation it’s this.
Scott Marks had a pretty good week, starting (alphabetically and otherwise) with Antarctica: Ice and Sky. ("No, really, kids — the whole continent used to be covered with ice and snow!") And while it's hard to imagine how any Banksy-themed film could improve on Exit Through the Gift Shop, it seems Saving Banksy managed to find an interesting new approach to the slippery street artist. So that's good.
Movie
Salesman <em>(Forushande)</em> ***
We open in mid-collapse: an Iranian couple, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), soon to star in a blue-penciled staging of <em>Death of a Salesman</em>, are forced to relocate when their tenement begins to crumble. Their new apartment — the former home of an in-demand prostitute and an ex-John who didn’t get the memo regarding her relocation — threatens to crumble the marriage as well. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s (<em>A Separation, About Elly</em>) restless camera dogs his characters like a bleak future — not a drop of false emotion leaks from this faultless cast. The faint, near-imperceptible style with which Farhadi “opens up” scenes from Miller’s play squarely melds the two storylines. For two-thirds of its running time, attention must be paid to an exquisitely realized suspense-thriller. It isn’t until Farhadi borrows a calculable cup of revenge from the <em>Death Wish</em> cookbook that his soufflé begins to flatten.
He also mostly liked (or liked most of) The Salesman, a wraparound remake of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. But he hauled out the dreaded black spot for the anime inaction of Ocean Waves. And after seeing this year's Oscar-nominated short animated films, I'm sort of inclined to agree with his take.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Take cover from the storm and see these movies this weekend
A critic's job is to say "Hey, look at this!"
Take cover from the storm and see these movies this weekend
A critic's job is to say "Hey, look at this!"
A Cure for Wellness: So beautiful that the total lack of cell phone reception is almost tolerable. Pity about the eels, though.
There is no delight in being contrary for its own sake. It's as dishonest a critical move as quote-whore cheerleading. It cries out, "Hey, look at me!" when, of course, a critic's job is to say, "Hey, look at this other thing!" — in this case, movies. But there is something admittedly delicious in finding yourself genuinely happy with a film most folks didn't like — in this case, A Cure for Wellness.
Movie
Cure for Wellness ***
Director Gore Verbinski takes the campy dread of Hammer horror films (<em>Horror of Dracula, et alia</em>) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. Yes, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. But despite all that, it’s solidly built, masterful with mood, and just plain wonderful to look upon. Dane DeHaan (looking enough like Leo DiCaprio to recall 2010’s <em>Shutter Island</em>) plays an ambitious Young Turk sent to retrieve his boss from a wellness spa in the Swiss Alps. The big guy’s needed back at the office to make a merger go through, but his last letter home was an extended diatribe echoing the spa director’s thoughts on soul-sick modernity and its endless striving for money and power. (He’s not entirely wrong, of course, but then, the devil has been known to speak truth when it serves his purpose.) Once there, DeHaan finds it increasingly difficult to leave: there’s an accident, and there’s a girl, and something weird is going on, something involving eels... I’d say this big-budget B movie puts the “grand” back into “Grand Guignol,” if it weren’t for the earnest moral condemnation at its heart: that the real crime against nature is the use of the world’s wretched refuse to prop up a madman’s dream of civilization.
It starts with the sumptuous visuals, moves on to the pervasive mood and half-convincing condemnation of modernity, and finally bursts into gruesome, crazy (but not especially gory) violence. What's not to love? Plenty, apparently, but even the film's acknowledged flaws didn't cool my ardor.
Movie
Fist Fight **
Charlie Day is a nice-guy teacher (with a sweet kid and a pregnant wife) in a high school that demands educators who look like Ice Cube and talk with his brand of menace and authority. But even Mr. Cube is not immune to the degradations of Senior Prank Day, and neither is safe from the Administrative axe on this, the last day of school. When Day acts to save his own skin and so gets Cube fired, the fight is, as they say, on — though not for a long while. First, the movie wants you to watch Day sweat, squirm, scheme, and scream as he tries to escape his fate — and fails, and fails, and fails. He succeeds, however, at carrying the film, partly through sympathetic wretchedness and partly through sheer energy. (He also has help from a mostly well-used cast, including Tracy Morgan as a hapless coach, Dean Norris as an exasperated principal, and of course, his co-star, who both mocks and upholds his famed badassery.) The fight, when it arrives, is bonkers, brutal, and almost believable. The film, when it ends, is a little less so. Directed by Richie Keen.
As for the revisitation of Three O'Clock High that was Fist Fight, it's probably helped that I had a fun chat with director Richie Keen, and that I find star Charlie Day's particular way of freaking out amusing (if not laugh-out-loud funny). But most others disagreed.
Movie
Great Wall *
Director Zhang Yimou enlists the friendly All-American face of Matt Damon to entice multiplex audiences to embrace subtitles, the glories of Chinese civilization, and the coming wave of Chinese cinema. (Damon’s face, scowly and granitic, is up to the task, his slippery accent isn’t.) The story feels American as well; specifically; it feels like a low-budget Western in which a highly skilled ne’er-do-well gets roped by a spirited gal into defending the town against a horde of nasties, and learns a thing or two about love and doin’ right in the process. Something bland and familiar to make the keening wail of the (beautiful) funeral ceremony a little less foreign, and the brightly color-coded armor of the Great Wall’s defenders a little less outlandish. It’s a hard movie to defend: the script whiffs most of its attempts at humor, the beastly baddies are dull demon dogs, and the action yo-yos between the ridiculous and the sublime. But I found it a strangely easy movie to <em>enjoy</em>, so that’s something. It probably helps that the copious CGI is just wonky enough in places to suggest the gratifying solidity of practical effects.
And outrage magnet The Great Wall? I don't really get the outrage. Matt Damon plays a selfish Westerner who finds he has much to learn from the Chinese people he seeks to plunder, and while he helps to save the day, he's hardly a White Savior.
It's a better celebration of Chinese culture than it is a movie. They're the future of the industry, though, so I'm sure they'll improve as time goes by. (Yes, that's a joke; I'm well aware that there are already great films coming out of China. Just two examples: The same director's Coming Home was quietly heartbreaking, and his The Flowers of War did more interesting work with the helpful Westerner motif.)
Movie
Antarctica: Ice and Sky ***
82-year-old Claude Lorius was the first scientist to alert the world to the perils of global warming. His one regret in life is that history has proved him right. A biographical, cinematic corollary of Al Gore’s canned Learning Annex lecture, Luc Jacquet’s <em>Antarctica</em> condenses 22 polar missions — all told, they consumed ten years of Lorius’s life — into one visually breathtaking documentary. (It helps that Lorius and his crews were wise enough to pack a couple of 16mm cameras to record the various expeditions.) The narration — inspired selections from Lorius’s diary spoken by Michel Papineschi — complements the epical force of the images. For a time, it looked as if Jacquet (<em>March of the Penguins</em>) had every intention of letting the pictures do the talking. Sadly, the last ten minutes are squandered on spoon-feeding doom. And if ever a film cried out for a domed IMAX 3D presentation it’s this.
Scott Marks had a pretty good week, starting (alphabetically and otherwise) with Antarctica: Ice and Sky. ("No, really, kids — the whole continent used to be covered with ice and snow!") And while it's hard to imagine how any Banksy-themed film could improve on Exit Through the Gift Shop, it seems Saving Banksy managed to find an interesting new approach to the slippery street artist. So that's good.
Movie
Salesman <em>(Forushande)</em> ***
We open in mid-collapse: an Iranian couple, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), soon to star in a blue-penciled staging of <em>Death of a Salesman</em>, are forced to relocate when their tenement begins to crumble. Their new apartment — the former home of an in-demand prostitute and an ex-John who didn’t get the memo regarding her relocation — threatens to crumble the marriage as well. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s (<em>A Separation, About Elly</em>) restless camera dogs his characters like a bleak future — not a drop of false emotion leaks from this faultless cast. The faint, near-imperceptible style with which Farhadi “opens up” scenes from Miller’s play squarely melds the two storylines. For two-thirds of its running time, attention must be paid to an exquisitely realized suspense-thriller. It isn’t until Farhadi borrows a calculable cup of revenge from the <em>Death Wish</em> cookbook that his soufflé begins to flatten.
He also mostly liked (or liked most of) The Salesman, a wraparound remake of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. But he hauled out the dreaded black spot for the anime inaction of Ocean Waves. And after seeing this year's Oscar-nominated short animated films, I'm sort of inclined to agree with his take.
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