Shutter Island

Jacob's Ladder with too big of a budget. There were some nice performances and I think the look of the film was really slick. But the story and the experience of watching the movie was painful. It's a movie that hangs on a "surprise", but it telegraphs the surprise over and OVER and OVER again. And once the surprise comes around it explains it OVER AND OVER AND OVER.

Law Abiding Citizen

This is a solid thriller that fizzled out of control in the final act. Gerard Butler is a grieving husband and father seeking vengenance on the killers who slaughtered his family and the flawed system that let one of them go free. The focus of his vengenance and the glaring weak link in the film is Jamie Foxx who was particularly awful in this one... even by his standards. Butler's character manages to carry on his vendetta even from solitary confinement in prison. There are huge gaps in logic about why Jamie Foxx had so much interaction with Butler after he confesses to multiple murders, but I was along for the ride. At a certain point, however, the revenge plot gets even bigger than the thin connection to credibility this film has could support. Butler was very good playing a complex character. F. Gary Gray builds some exciting set pieces and manages to find some tension in Butler & Foxx's face offs even thought Foxx was too smug and smooth to really work.

Gamer

I turned this one off. I think I was about an hour and ten into it... so not much left to do. It is a disaster from start to finish. The direction is non-existent and the horrendous editing makes the cheesey production values even worse. The story is best told in the trailer (which is what suckered me into checking this out). Once the characters start talking about it (and they do talk, there's at least twenty minutes of exposition before this movie starts in earnest) it just falls apart. A hateful waste of time.

A Single Man

I walked into this one (yes, I actually saw it in a theater) expecting to be underwhelmed. Instead it really knocked me out. Colin Firth is getting all of the attention for this film. He gives an extraordinary performance of a character at the end of his rope, but managing to remain charming and fun instead of brooding and dark. I really think the movie is getting shortchanged, however. This is quite simply a beautiful movie. I mean in the physical sense. Tom Ford's eye for images is startling. It was as if every frame of this movie was intended for a coffee table book. But it never felt staged or forced or limiting. The space was still there for the actors to give tremendous performances (Julianne Moore was good, although it felt like she was doing a Madonna impression more than a British accent). I think the lighting was some of the most impressive I've ever seen on film. Every set, every costume, ever detail was perfect, but not enough to distract from the story. And the story itself is simple and not all that appealing. But it's told with such intimacy and power that I found it hypnotic. This is a fantastic movie.

Streets of Fire

This is the first time that I re-watched a film that I'd already seen. But I saw this film when it first came out in 1984 and didn't remember much more than the soundtrack. I saw it in the theater because it was the second film ever given a PG-13 rating and at the time I was committed to seeing every PG-13 film that ever came out. This movie convinced me to give up that dream. It's a terrible movie. Just awful. All the characters talk in sarcastic, condescending scowls. Only Rick Moranis comes close to making that attitude feel real. I think Willem Dafoe and Diane Lane should be reminded that they made this film at every opportunity. There is a lot of awfulness to go around, but the thing that really stood out is how bad the clothes were. From Diane Lane's space hooker get up, to Willem Dafoe walking around in vinyl waders to Michael Pare in corduroys and suspenders like he's a grown up Spanky from "The Little Rascals." It's worth pointing out that Michael Pare is the worst actor ever to be cast in the lead in a major studio feature film.

Moon

I really liked this one. Sam Rockwell plays a man on a three year contract to mine on the dark side of the moon all by himself. The beginning was slow and played like a light comic version of "The Shining", but as the story unfolded I realized all of the boredom was there to set up later developments. So he gets injured and then he gets rescued by the robot running the place (Kevin Spacey doing a creepy, but more humanistic HAL). But it turns out this is not the first Sam. This is a clone. And he rescues the original Sam. But each one thinks the other is Sam. Eventually it dawns on them that it is more likely that they are both clones. They are genetically designed to live for a three year contract and then they are euthanized. They have synthetic memories about a woman who is long dead that they believe is their wife. And they are driven by the belief that they are going home one day. Rockwell is simply magnificent in the dual role. The film explores a lot of interesting themes - what is self, how do we deal with the inevitability of death, what are memories, what does it mean to go home. And a lot of this is done in subtle, very nuanced scenes where what is really going on isn't discussed, but the pace of the film leaves time to ponder these concepts. I also thought it was masterfully done to have Rockwell in a dual role without it ever feeling "Patty Duke"-esque. It's a spartan production that really packs a wallop. My only quibble is that it felt as if the evil corporation had gone to a lot of work to set up this cloning thing, but it wasn't entirely clear what they needed a human out there for at all. But once I let that go, I thought it was a great film.

Temple Grandin

An interesting bio film on HBO. TG is an autistic woman who has helped to redesign slaughter yards for the cattle industry because of her unique empathy of cows. Claire Danes's performance reminded me a little bit of Jodie Foster's "Nell". It was mannered and hammy. Julia Ormand on the other hand was really fucking good. It's not a terribly interesting story, but I found it really entertaining. That's particularly impressive given the fact that the lead actress was annoying the fuck out of me in every scene. The finale was beyond overwrought, but up until that point I thought it was a well-executed film about a simple story.

Sugar

A film about a young Dominican Republic ball player that gets a chance to come to the States and play in the minor leagues. I really liked this film. The acting was amateurish, but it gave the film I kind of documentary feel. I thought the direction was excellent. They took great pains to make the baseball feel realistic, while at the same time transmitting the emotion the character was experiencing on the field. This is as much about the immigrant experience as it is about baseball. He eventually leaves the team and goes to New York to find work. It's a bleak, yet somehow uplifting film. I thought it was stylistically very interesting and although the pace was slow, it had a nice rhythm.

The Outrage

This 1964 movie is a "remake" of Roshomon. They call it a remake, but the onscreen credit saying that it is based on the film is so tiny it's almost illegible. They transplanted the story to the American west. The film is notable for two reasons. Number one is that Paul Newman plays a Mexican bandito. Complete with brown face and Speedy Gonzales accent. It's distracting at first, but once I got used to it, I found it to be a (not suprisingly) tremendous performance. Because of the literary conceit, he played the same scene four different ways. Each time more compelling. The second reason it's noteworthy is that William Shatner is in it. Shatner - Newman. Do I have to say anything else? They share very little screen time and never really interact with one another. It's a surprisingly understated performance from Kirk. I struggled to grasp the original, so I suppose this is a perfect version for me. It's dumbed down and because the cultural symbolism is easier for me to reference I was able to follow it a lot better. One annoying aspect is that the director seemed to feel it was necessary to match Kurosawa's visual flair. So there's a lot of "dutch" angles and "signficant" transition shots. Much of that was just distracting and some of the moving camera shots during the fight scenes were actually in the way of the story. Overall, however, it's worth seeing for the acting and the use of the Roshomon techinique

12 Rounds

Don't get me wrong, this is a dumb, dumb, dumb action movie. Complete with terrible performances and an director trying waaaay too hard to make it look like a lot of money was spent on this film. That being said, it kinda works. Aidan Gillen is a decent sneering kind of villan. John Cena is a block of wood, but he can run and fight well on camera. The story is thin at best, but it does a good job of moving from action sequence to action sequence. There are sections where it is painfully obvious that corners were cut in the comission of this picture. But that adds a campy element that made kinda fun. Again, this is a dumb movie, but it played the shitty hand it was dealt extremely well.