Noah

Not sure I would have seen Noah otherwise, but there was a preview screening at the Museum of the Moving Image.

It's an interesting movie, in a better way than when your spouse is saying your banana bread is interesting, but I'm still not sure it's actually a good movie.

But interesting.

The first interesting thing is the complete lack of sugar coating.  We can spend so much time with bible stories growing up, the idealized kinds of stories suitable for children of all ages, that we can forget that most of the people in those stories are kind of crazy.  Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Noah certainly.  And the director Darren Aronofsky doesn't let us forget that about Noah.  Nor does the portrayal by Russell Crowe.  There isn't a thing about the movie that lets us forget that you have to be a certain kind of crazy to build an ark because God tells you to, and to do most of the things that Noah goes around doing in the classic bible story of Noah.  It's an interesting choice, and I respect it.  I'm so tired of heroes in cinema that I was kind of delighted here when Noah forces his son Ham to abandon his girlfriend, who doesn't fare well in the immediate aftermath.  Not what we're supposed to do, not what we're used to seeing, not what we like to think of when we think of God and doing God's work and being Godly.  But it's actually true to the nature of the Old Testament, where bad things happen to people.

It's interesting to see the use of classic elements of sf/fantasy to provide the presence of God in the movie.  You need the hand of God to make the story of Noah work.  To make it rain for those 40 days. To get Noah to build the ark.  To keep the ark from being attacked and destroyed by the saner people in Noah's universe.  So if you've got to have a supernatural entity casting its gaze and spirit over the movie, why not have it be a cross between Tolkien/Peter Jackson's ents and Brandon Sanderson's koloss.

The movie has a bad guy, and the bad guy isn't the strength of the movie in cinematic story terms.  But in the bibliical sense, the character makes for some itneresting parallels with the story of Adam and Eve, providing temptation which mankind has to either embrace or resist.  The decision on what to do in Noah is much more interesting than asking what card you have in your wallet.

I dozed off only briefly, and I could easily have gotten sleepy-eyed for a lot more of the movie than this.  It's an interesting movie.  I'm hesitant to give it a recommendation, but I wouldn't warn anyone against.

Broken Effects

A few weeks ago I finally caught up with Broken City, this year's MLK Weekend film from Mark Wahlberg, and was a little quicker to see Side Effects, the new movie from director Steven Soderbergh.

There's a lot I can say about Broken City, not much of it good.  Wahlberg is a cop who's on trial for killing a teen in a housing project without just cause, he's found not guilty but there's some evidence we don't see that comes into the possession of the mayor played by Russell Crowe.  Several years later, Wahlberg isn't making ends meet as the head of a private detective agency, he's happy to get a call from the Mayor offering a lot of money to find out whom his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is sleeping with.  This is happening in the midst of the Mayor's re-election campaign, and we find out that the chief aide to the Mayor's opponent seems to be Catherine Zeta-Jones's paramour.  All of this ends up tying in to some possible scandal with the sale of a public housing project to a private developer.  And all of it's a mess.  Let's start with the script, which is too convoluted to follow without the script in hand and not really worth following.  It's a script that has the candidate running against Crowe doing debate prep right in front of the windows of a storefront campaign headquarters instead of in an actual private place.  It's a script that has the mayor's wife and his opponent's chief of staff heading off to Montauk in the days immediately ahead of the election for a rendezvous, as if neither of them would have other engagements or better things to do or not be missed or have their absences questioned at this crucial point in the campaign when they disappear for what would pretty much be a full day to get out to Montauk and back.  It's a script where the climax depends on Mark Wahlberg making a decision about whether it's worth his going to jail for the murder he was acquitted of if it will mean the bad guy will go to jail as well, ignoring common sense (I don't think I'd go to jail in order to send somebody else to jail) and the legal principle known as double jeopardy under which Wahlberg's character could maybe face a civil suit but probably not be re-tried for a crime he was acquitted of.  It's a movie filled with people who are either wrong for their parts or not directed well enough to fit into them.  The mayoral candidate played by Barry Pepper just seems off, Crowe seems off as the Mayor, I don't often see a movie where so many parts seem filled by people who just aren't quite right.  It's a movie where the main revelation involves finding somebody's name on papers that aren't secret and which almost certainly would have been uncovered well before they are in the real world no matter how few newspapers are around to look at old papers like these.  It's a movie where people buy tickets in Grand Central Terminal then go to an above-ground platform to board the LIRR to Montauk when the LIRR doesn't stop at Grand Central, which doesn't have any above-ground platforms.  This will take a place next to Tony Scott's remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 as how not to do a New York movie.  The director of this mess is Allen Hughes.  

Side Effects was better, but weird.  Rooney Mara (Dragon Tattoo) is depressed even though her hubby (Channing Tatum) is just out of jail after an insider trading conviction.  She's given a drug by psychologist Jude Law to help her deal with her depression.  It doesn't help much, there are side effects, she sleepwalks.  During one such incident she stabs Channing Tatum quite nicely in the gut and ignores him as he bleeds to death in their apartment.  Jude Law is castigated for prescribing the drug, he is convinced he's the last person to blame, and he sets out to find the real story, going all kinds of Moby Dick and Captain Ahab in the process.  I was entertained by the movie, this is a good cast with people who work well, Steven Soderbergh always directs with panache and vision and style.  It's hard to talk too much about this movie without spilling things that shouldn't be spilled, at the same time I'm uncomfortable putting the movie in a spoiler free zone because I was certainly offput by some of the kinkier directions the script took.  There are all sorts of things worth seeing in the film, and yet I hesitate to give it a recommendation.

And to comment briefly on one other movie, because I want to try and blog on as many reviews as I can this year...  Molly's Theory of Relativity is an indie movie that opens in New York this week, and I walked out of a preview screening.  The script doesn't sound like real dialogue people will say, it's acted by people who are not good actors or just not able to act out the words in this script, it's not visually interesting.  Odds are it won't come to a theatre near you.  If it does, feel free to skip it.

British Cinema

I saw 3 movies while I was over for London Book Fair in April.

In The Loop (Sat. evening Apr. 18, 2009, Odeon Kensington #4, 1.5 slithy toads) was a British movie that had gotten some decent reviews.  I decided to go in part because I'd walked by the Odeon Kensington on every trip to London without ever actually seeing a movie there, and I decided it was high time.  In that regard, I was able to peek in to the big screen (#3) and see that it is a very nice and very big balcony theatre that will be worth keeping in mind for the future.  I wasn't sure I should go because this was a late show on the same day as my castle walk, and I was tired.  And in that regard, In The Loop did not help keep me awake.  It's a political satire spun off from a British TV show.  A cabinet minister puts his foot in mouth about the war in Iraq.  The media minister scolds him.  Efforts to improve situation only make it worse.  Minister is exiled to DC to a study committee on the war.  Only makes things worse.  The media minister curses up a storm wherever he goes, he's modeled after some minister in the Tony Blair cabinet but maybe for us in the US think of a minister who's Dick Cheney talking about Pat Leahy or Rahm Emanuel with his famous temper and then taken not just to 11 but to 18 on the dial.  Most of the laughs (and not just to me but also the handful of other people in the audience) are from this one character's abundantly foul language.  Otherwise, I don't want to say it's bad, but it's not very good either.  It's just a little flat, the occasional chuckle or wry observation but badly in need of something more.

I've had good luck seeing movies at the Odeon Covent Garden, what used to be the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue.  In fact, I believe the very first movie I ever saw in London was the delightful comedy East is East in 1999 at this theatre, and Arlington Road is another film I quite liked which I saw here.  So let's add The Damned United (Sun afternoon. Apr. 19, Odeon Covent Garden, Aud. #1, 3 slithy toads) to that list.  This is a sports movie with an excellent pedigree that is unlike any sports movie you might have seen in the US in the past 30 years.  Michael Sheen, who plays David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Tony Blair in The Queen, here plays Brian Clough, a British football (i.e., soccer) coach who gets his dream job taking over the Leeds  United team from his arch-rival, well-played by Colm Meaney.  The script is by Peter Morgan (also Frost/Nixon, also The Queen) and director Tom Hooper did the highly regarded John Adams mini-series for  HBO.  So as I said, good pedigree, and I should also single out Timothy Spall who adds wonderful supporting work as Clough's right-hand man and Jim Broadbent is in the cast as well.  So we all know this script, new coach takes over from arch-rival and it leads up to the big game where the new coach goes up against the old coach and wins dramatically.  And since I wasn't familiar with Clough's real-life story (and this movie is adapted from a novel based on Clough's story by David Peace, said novel all over bookstores in the UK), I kept waiting eagerly for the movie to tick off all of the sports movie cliches I am so fond of and so used to.  The big moment when the new coach goes up against the inherited players and makes the team his own.  But you know what, that's not what happens.  Clough fails miserably, the holdover players mutiny, management sides with the players, and several weeks into the season Clough is booted off the job and forced to beg his right-hand man whom he'd abandoned to take his dream job to re-up on their pairing.  It's not really a sports movie at all but rather a fascinating character study of a man in need, who has to have someone or something to balance his insatiable drive and lacking that drives himself off a cliff.  It's an excellent movie.  I don't know if it will come to these shores, but if it does you should seek it out.

My final UK movie would be a treat no matter how the movie was because it was playing on the main screen at the Empire Leicester Square.  This is one of the nicest movie theatres in the world, I feel safe in saying.  It's a somewhat small scale version of Radio City, with a huge huge screen and wonderful sightlines and excellent sound.  There are multi-colored lights in the auditorium that cycle thru so you can just admire that while you wait for the movie, and then as the film is about to begin the lights in the auditorim give way to a twinkling firmament above the screen.  I love going to this theatre.  It is a true Cinema Treasure.  The movie was State of Play (Wed. eve. April 22, 2009, 2.5 slithy toads).  This is a well-acted and well-made thriller with a frisson of old-time All The President's Men excitement and lots of appeal to a newspaper sentimentalist such as myself.  The ending starts to tie itself up in a few knots too many.  But Russell Crowe good, and Ben Affleck, and Helen Mirren, and Rachel McAdams, and Jeff Daniels.  I could find quibbles, and I'm giving this only a moderately favorable rating instead of a very favorable one, but bottom line is that it is well-acted, it does entertain, and I would say to see this when it comes out on video.

If I were in London today, my ambivalence about seeing Terminator Salvation would resolve, because any movie you have even the tiniest desire to see, when  you can do it on the big screen at the Empire you want to do it because the evening will be a special occasion regardless.  I love the Empire.