New Movie Releases for the Weekend of February 13th, 2009

1) Confessions of a Shopaholic

- This is the story of a young woman living in NY played by Isla Fisher who is an out of control spendaholic on all things fashion and who somehow finds herself an overnight success when she becomes a advice columnist for a fashion magazine. Will her spending habits ruin her career, and will she meet a rich man who can afford her? I’m pretty sure this will take what actually is a terrible problem plunging countless marriages and families into debt, and glamorizing it much like Pretty Woman did with prostitution (become a street walker, end up the wife of a multi-millionaire). This one is based on a hugely popular series of books, and I wonder with this out, and He’s Just Not That Into You, will chicks heads explode for having another chick flick to choose from?

2) The International

- I don’t really know what to make of this movie. This one stars Clive Owen as an Interpol agent who teams up with an Assistant DA, played by Naomi Watts in order to bring down an international arms dealer who’s financed by a high profile bank. Personally I think the plot sounds ridiculous, but it could be good. Here we get a what-if scenario. For those that don’t know, before Daniel Craig was chosen as the new Bond, everyone thought it was going to go to Clive Owen. Well here we can see what it would have been like if Owen got the Bond role. The one thing that has me most excited, is that it’s the American directorial debut of Tom Tykwer, the fantastic director behind 1998’s Run, Lola Run. So yeah seeing him direct a bug budget American film for the first time should be interesting.

3) Friday the 13^th

- Here on Friday the 13^th comes the remake of the first film in Friday the 13^th franchise, which was last seen in 2001’s Jason X. Just as he did with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake in 2003, director Marcus Nispel will try to mine from the remake well twice. This one’s about a bunch of teens who discover a boarded up summer camp called Lake Crystal, decide to play, swim, and have sex, eventually meeting Jason Voorhees, who if he's anything like in the other Jason films, doesn’t like sex or nubile teens. I have to admit, this does look interesting, although I have the feeling that the trailers have already ruined much of this film showing numerous ways the teens get killed off. Still, I’m a fan of the Friday the 13^th series, so I’m interested in seeing the new take of the horror icon. Jason runs now!

4) Two lovers

- Possibly Joaquin Phoenix’s last acting performance, Bye! Good. Here he reunites with director James Gray (they teamed up for We Own the Night), and stars Phoenix as a man who returns to his family’s home in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and falls for two very different women, the kind hearted family friend his family wishes him to marry and the new beautiful and crazy neighbor played by Gwyneth Paltrow. I’ve been actually really looking forward to seeing this ever since I first say the trailer and am a big fan of volatile indie romances. However the true kicker for me is that director James Gray has stated that Two Lovers is based on Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Notes from the Underground. Color me sold. So yeah, check this out in limited release.

5) Gommorah

- We finally get to see this critically lauded Italian film that was snubbed by the academy. This is based on the bestselling book (the author now lives in constant 24 hour protection for fear of retaliation) that’s shows the true life behind the most notorious of all the organized crime families in Italy. This interconnects five stories to show you the average daily life of a crime family where reaching the age of 40 is a miracle. I’ve been waiting months to talk about this and now Penny can finally join in my joy for this film. This is getting a very limited release this week in NY and LA.

And that’s it for the new movie releases for the weekend of 2.13.09. A romantic comedy, an action flick, a horror flick and two limited releases for this Valentine’s Day weekend. Should be fun.

The Reader

This 2008 Academy award nominated drama is based on the 1995 German book of the same name and is directed by Stephen Daldry (he of Billy Elliot and The Hours fame, which is frankly one of the most boring movies ever made). The Reader stars Ralph Fiennes, Kate Winslet and David Kross in a sweeping story of love, regret and consequence. Here’s the synopsis: The Reader tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a teenager in the late 1950s had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past, a secret that may cost her at the trial.

I’m going to come right out and say it, the “secret” that she believes is worse than her nazi past is the worst plot device I’ve seen in a long time. I mean it’s so bad that when it occurs you’ll say to yourself, “that was a secret?” And then the movie shoves an awful montage down your throat that says, “hey we know modern movie goers have zero attention span, so here’s a bunch of moments that have already occurred if you’ve forgotten them.” I turned to my friend after seeing the montage as was like, “um, so the secret was the thing we talked about 5 minutes into the movie, and the director felt like perhaps nobody noticed and had to do a montage?” I’m sorry, but seriously, this “secret” totally discredits the movie, making it nearly unwatchable. No wonder most critics have given this movie a negative rating.

The movie is roughly 123 minutes, but it feels much longer. As with most movies, The Reader is broken into a three act structure with a traditional denouement. The first act of the movie is with the young Michael Berg played by David Kross and his burgeoning affair with Kate Winslet’s Hanna. The second act is the trial, when Michael, now a law student, happens on the trial of Hanna and 5 other former female SS guards in their complicity with events pertaining to the holocaust. The third act, is after the trial, Ralph Fiennes ties up events, and then the end. However, these 3 acts feel like an eternity because the movie just doesn’t unfold slowly, it unfolds painfully slowly. Especially the third act with an older Fiennes is just awful screenwriting. It seems like the screenwriters were like, “how can we express how much regret Fiennes has from his youth? How about he tells his story to someone who he has no reason to tell and who doesn’t care? Now we just need to find a former holocaust survivor.” It’s frankly lazy screenwriting, like one of those scenes where the character basically says everything that’s going on during the scene. And that’s basically how this whole movie felt for me, really lazy and poorly constructed. It’s plain awful, boring as hell, insulting as shit, and well, I just can’t see how this film is nominated for anything.

Kate Winslet is nominated for Best Actress for this film, rather than for Revolutionary Road. While I frankly love her, she really doesn’t do much here since she’s really not the focus, the story is Michael Berg’s story and his love and regret for her, and I didn’t think her performance was all that great as well. However the part that really bothers me is the use of 2 actors to play the character of Michael Berg. In the first place David Kross plays Michael from the age of 15-26. When he’s 15 he looks way too old and then when he’s 26 he looks way to young. I was like, “this looks ridiculous, you should just have Ralph Fiennes play the character.” But yeah that would look ridiculous too. Then enter Ralph who plays the character 10 years later, and I was like damn, “Michael looks like a totally different person in 10 years.” All this adds to the feeling of displacement that permeates this film.

This movie is just ridiculous in every aspect, and even worse, it treats the viewer as if they have the intelligence of a 5 year-old. So yeah, I give this a sneak out/I want my money back rating. Sadly, out of all the films that have been nominated besides Ben Button and Slumdog, I was looking forward to seeing The Reader the most, and not only was this the worst out of the bunch, it’s not even close. No hard hitting message, no epic questions considered, no moral heart, totally forgettable. Terrible waste of time, and truly shows you that the Academy has their head up their asses by giving anything with a Holocaust storyline awards regardless if they’re good or not. Congrats Stephen Daldry, you made a by the numbers movie and still didn’t make it particularly good, seems like The Hours wasn’t a fluke. And seriously this isn’t even really a holocaust movie but rather a poorly made love story.

Coraline 3D

This 2009 stop motion animated gothic horror film, is based on the Neil Gaimen novella of the same name. Neil Gaimen is a prolific comic and novel writer and it’s always nice to see his works adapted into film, all the more better is that he usually writes the screen plays. Anyway, Coraline is directed by Henry Selick (who is just one of my favorite directors working today, directing, The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach films) and is the story of a young girl named Coraline Jones who finds a door into an alternate world where more positive and fun versions of her parents exist, where her wildest imaginations come true, and where she finally feels appreciated. However, darker things lurk behind the happy façade, and in the end Coraline must find her way home before she is lost forever and becomes another lost child.

Coraline is playing in 2000 theaters, 1000 in 3D, and 1000 in 2D, and is a movie with a lot of firsts. Coraline is the first stop-motion animated feature ever to be entirely shot in 3D and is also the longest stop-motion picture ever released, at 101 minutes. It’s also the first animated film to be distributed by Focus Features. Let’s hope Focus releases many similar pictures like this. They’re following up this release with the beautiful animated dark sci-fi film 9, so yeah, I have high hopes for the future of animation to come out from Focus Features. It looks like they’re going all in with this endeavor.

Coraline is the perfect picture for adults and children. The screening I attended was full of 6-8 year olds and they were all loving it, and their parents were laughing and enjoying themselves too. It makes a perfect balance of simple imagination for the children and complex dreamlike beauty for the adults. What makes this picture even more fascinating is that I can see children loving it for how magical it makes them feel, how whimsical the story is, and then coming back 15 years later to the film, and seeing it in a whole new light and enjoying it for numerous other reasons. It transcends age limits, and that’s a really hard thing to do, in effect, making Coraline a near perfect movie. However I will say this, it can be a bit dark at times, and the ending is pretty intense, but I still feel that it is an all-ages film, and I don’t think kids will get too scared by it.

Let’s talk about the animation. I was just floored. I’ve always stated that I think clay-animated films are just some of the most technical and beautiful films to look at. Coraline, takes things up a notch, melding the beauty of stop-motion with the flair of cgi. Going from dream world to dream world, carnival to opera, it just all looks amazing. My favorite parts were where the parallel world starts to unravel, and it literally looks like string unraveling, you see the threads come undone, fading to emptiness- to white. It was, wow, it just looked amazing. This film took more than 3 years to make and you really see all the care and love that went into the making of this film.

Coraline is an American kids film with a European feel that is more interested in moving from one fantastic dreamscape to the next rather than having a traditional narrative story. If I had to liken it to anything, I would say Coraline is the closest an American made film has come to capturing the feel of a Miyazaki film. This felt like Spirited Away without the mythos, the simple magic of My Neighbor Totoro.

It also hits all the high-notes of an all ages films, with a character that uses courage, resourcefulness, and determination to achieve her goals and save all that she holds dear. It’s a moral tale on the ease of accepting things that seem too good to be true, a kind of Alice in Wonderland tale, if Alice came to a world where everything seemingly revolved around her, the ideal of every children’s fantasy, and yet the harsh reality of an unforgiving and chaotic world.

People unfamiliar with Gaimen’s work may not know this, but much of his work consists of the darker sides of the reality we know, and how easy it is for people to become lost, fall through the cracks and become forgotten. What I’ve always found fascinating about Gaimen is that he is able to take such dark themes, frightening concepts, and write books for children and young adults.

Like I said before, this is one of the most visually beautiful animated films to come out in a long time. Director Henry Selick creates another movie that I truly believe is timeless, like his Nightmare Before Christmas. I saw it in 3D, and while I don’t think it’ll detract from your enjoyment by seeing it in 2D, I do feel that the 3D aspects really add to the overall feel of the story. The 3D is incredibly immersive, never feeling intrusive, more a technique than a gimmick. So I give Coraline, a “bring your lunch from home because you do not want to miss this one.” Definitely see it, it’s amazing, and try to see it in 3D if you can. This film is a work of art, period.

Notorious movie review

Not to be confused with the 1946 Alfred Hitchcock directed movie of the same name starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, seriously I would love to know if anyone paid for this movie going, “wow, I can finally see Hitchcock’s Notorious on the big screen.” Anyway, this Notorious is the 2009 biopic about the life of hip-hop artist Christopher Wallace, or as he’s better known to the world, the Notorious B.I.G. Biggie Smalls. The film traces his rise in the NY streets as a hustler to his eventual reign as the East Coast king of hip hop, helping create Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy’s Records music label, and untimely murder at the hands of unknown assailants.

I have always loved biopics, and I have to admit, I was very interested in seeing this film, seeing NY back in the 90’s and hearing all the music I evidently missed out on while growing up. I have to say, damn is this not a good movie. Everything works, first time actor Jamal Woolard embodies Biggie so well, and while not as great as Langella in Frost/Nixon, he personifies his real life counterpart so well. The story is also nicely told. Biggies growth from tough drug hustler to rap icon is done really well, hitting all the important points while still remaining fresh, never overly glamorizing the character and still showing the bad choices he made during his life, his infidelity, his dead beat-dadness, his warts and flaws all. There is also a nice balance of music with the story, and best of all in the end, you feel the weight of this larger than life character and what his life has meant to the music world. What I liked so much about the film is that it was more interested on who he was rather than why he created the music he did. It tells its story without trying to answer some of its mysteries which many biopics fail to do. So yeah, surprisingly this movie is quite good, a biopic where you don’t need to be a fan of the icon in order to enjoy the message.

That’s not to say this film didn’t have its faults. The ending is to neatly tied up, and I’m not talking about his death but the events leading up to his death. This felt like a true abridged version of the facts, like these events played out over time, but the writers felt the need to shoe-horn everything into happening during one day. And the beyond the grave narration throughout the entire film sometimes felt odd and out of place. Also, while true to life, the cast was too large, with many characters coming and going with little reference or notice to who they were. And that lead to the major problem I had with this film. Not being a hip-hop fan of the 90’s, I’m not familiar with many of the events surrounding the rap scene during that time, and this movie takes for granted that the viewers will have some surface level knowledge of the music scene of that time. Now I know I’m not the target audience of this film. Obviously, the target audience is fans who love Biggie or knew Biggie and the whole music scene at that time, but that doesn’t give the movie the right, to take its viewers background knowledge for granted. A great movie would subtly hint and write those scenes in for viewers unfamiliar with the story. So, while I enjoyed the film, for a movie, it had some pretty shoddy moments and showed some true lazy screenwriting.

However, after saying all of that, it honestly doesn’t ruin the overall enjoyment of the film. Yeah sometimes you might feel lost, but the story keeps moving forward, carrying you forward, that you’ll eventually forget that you had questions and are enjoying the new plot developments. What I’ve always found is that a truly good music biopic makes you feel like you know the icon, makes you want to hear more of their music, and Notorious does all of that and more. It’s a movie about lasting legacies and how even a tremendous amount of talent can’t protect you from a world and culture of violence. How rap artists glamorize people’s perceptions of street life, hiding the filth and tragedy behind its glossy venire.

My favorite line in this movie is when Biggie is a little kid and a girl walks up to him and says, “you’re too fat, too black and too ugly”, and it’s that line that permeates the whole first half of the movie and it’s all the more rewarding to see him make it and grow into the Notorious B.I.G. I think this movie should be seen because after such a weak January of movies, Notorious is a welcome treat. It may feel cold and distant sometimes, but it’s still very entertaining. Anyway, so yeah, for the first time for a movie released this year, I give Notorious the “bring your lunch from home, because you do not want to miss this one.”

Taken movie review

This 2008 film has just been released this week in the States but it was first released in France on 2/27/08 and in the UK on 9/26/08. What took 20^th Century Fox so long to finally release it here? I have no idea. Anyway, this 2008 action thriller is directed by French director Pierre Morel (he directed the criminally unrated District B13 film) and stars Liam Neeson as an ex CIA spy who after years of neglecting his family is divorced and alone. Now retired, he decides to move to the same city his wife (now remarried to a wealthy businessman) and his 17 year old daughter live in order to be closer to her. Hesitant to allow his daughter to vacation to Paris alone with a friend (because she just doesn’t know how the world works!), he relents and things just go downhill from there. She and her friend are targeted by sex traffickers and are taken as Liam Neeson listens to the cries of his daughter over the phone. He has 96 hours to find the sex traffickers, take down Paris, and save his daughter before she becomes just another nameless statistic.

I’m in a fortunate case here. Rarely when we review new movie releases can I review a movie I’ve seen twice. Having the perspective of reviewing a movie I’ve already seen adds to the overall consensus of my analysis, does it still hold up with a second viewing, does it get better or worse and do the problems stand out as much as before or less? Now for months after I first saw this film, I kept saying to Penny, you have to see this film Taken starring Liam Neeson. I don’t know why it doesn’t have an American release date yet but it’s essentially Liam FTW, F the world, and the world loses. Taken is just a rollercoaster of pain, as Liam races through France, karate chopping everyone. I can honestly say, that upon a second viewing, I liked Taken even more than the first time. I mean, after the first 30 minutes, there’s no rest, we as the viewer remain just as out of breath as Liam as he chases one bad guy after another. He doesn’t follow the “shoot first ask questions later” mantra that so many action heroes’ follow, but rather the mantra, shoot while asking the question. “Arm, arm, leg, leg, ready to talk?” I found myself cheering, clapping and generally smiling throughout the whole movie. The plot is nonsensical and entirely unrealistic, but it’s just so much fun that you’ll find that you don’t care.

There are some huge flaws with this film. For one, like I’ve said before, the plot is ridiculous. Somehow Liam has free reign to kill a bunch of people and never really have to worry about the police. Secondly, it’s terribly offensive making it seem like everyone in Europe wants to have sex with heroin addicted young women forced into prostitution and that men will go crazy, spending 500 thousand dollars on American virgins. Oddly, for a film written and directed by Frenchmen, this movie doesn’t have a high opinion of the country. The police are corrupt, all the immigrants are in the sex trade bussiness, all Algerians sell women and all Arabs buy virgins, and only a lone American in evil gay Paris can save the day. However, if you can look past the ludicrousness of it all, this film is a real treat to watch. Think Bourne if he was older and had no morals.

I mean I enjoyed Taken so much because it shattered all the clichés other films have. For instance I always wondered why the good spy never killed all the bad guys, instead knocking them out so then can come back later. No worries here since Liam kills everyone. I also always wondered why the good spy spent so long trying to extract, i.e. torture, information out of suspects. No worries here, he only has 96 hours and Liam means business. One of my favorite scenes is that after he finds out someone betrayed him, he goes over the guys house, shoots the guys wife in the arm, who’s totally innocent and doesn’t know the shadiness of her husband, and then yells, “she’ll get another between the eyes if you don’t talk.” About time someone goes that extra bit farther to save the day.

So to wrap things up, I’ll say this, Taken has one of the baddest hero’s in recent memory in Liam. This is not a terribly good film (it’s been getting slammed by critics, yet regular moviegoers seem to really like it). And sure it’s a Jason Bourne rip-off (I mean how many times have we referenced Bourne in this review), but come on people, its Liam Neeson. So yeah, for action, for some thrills, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more engaging and kick-ass film. So I give this a, bring your lunch from home because you do not want to miss this one. Sure it’s all be done before her, but rarely so well and so gratifying.

Cinema Cafe Podcast

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