The Next Best Films of 2014

I saw around 100 movies that opened in 2014, which is a pretty typical year for me.  Rarely less than 90, hard to see more than 120.

Of those 100 movies. Boyhood is the best.

Here are the next dozen or so movies that I consider to be my 90th percentile for the year:

2.  Whiplash

This is the one other film from 2014 that I've seen twice, though it's possible there are one or two others I'd try to see again.

JK Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the film also won Oscars for editing and for sound mixing.

Simmons is the leader of the top ensemble at a Juilliard-like performing arts school, and Miles Teller is a student who yearns to be playing drums in this ensemble.  And the two are both crazy.  Simmons might be an actual psychopath, or he might just take a little bit too seriously the idea that you've got to tear down in order to build up.  Which, just to say, is the entire premise behind boot camp for the US armed forces.  But what would drive Miles Teller's student to put up with this?  He's obsessed in his own way, firm in his belief in a youthful romanticism where it's clearly better to be famous and dead than a living nobody.  Which belief he'll happily advertise to his girlfriend, to family at a holiday dinner, to anyone -- though there are so few people who want to be around someone so obsessed that his world is defined entirely by the JK Simmons character.

Simmons is a long-time character actor who's done great work in films like Juno and who hits it out of the park here.  Teller is one of the best young actors around, who amazed in The Spectacular Now and amazes again here.

The film's technical excellence is key to its success.  We have to hear the music, the drums, the subtle change in tempo from one playing of the riff to the next.  And its edited to within an inch of its life, especially in the closing ten or fifteen minutes.

It's in those final minutes that we finally come to understand why these two characters are together. JK Simmons' entire life relies on Miles Teller for validation.  If Teller isn't a great drummer, then there's no mark left on this world for all of Simmons' teaching career.  And Teller can only survive if there's someone to appreciate the greatness he yearns to have.  They might hate one another forever and always, but they need one another as deeply as life itself.

3 & 4

American Sniper & Interstellar

Like Boyhood, Interstellar kept me going for some three hours without much looking at the watch.  The story may or may not make sense.  Belay that; like most time travel the story is a mess when you sit down and think about it.  But it's imaginative and different.  The acting might be better than the movie deserves.  The effects are well-done without ever feeling like video games.  Hans Zimmer provides good musical accompaniment.  I'd be interested to see how it holds up on a second viewing.

And American Sniper hasn't quite left my mind in the month since I've seen it.  If anything, its call seems to be getting louder as the days go by.  Bradley Cooper's performance as the Chris Kyle is sensational.  He submerges himself in the role.  There's no trace of the Bradley Cooper in Silver  Linings Playbook.  There's just this man in this role.  The direction by Clint Eastwood does good service to a script that manages to glorify the lead character's actions in Iraq while being unflinching in its depiction of the damage to the character and his marriage on the home front.  As such, it's pro-war and anti-war and can be read as one wishes.  It's quiet, powerful film-making, another demonstration of Clint Eastwood's stature as one of the leading directors of the past three decades.

And in no particular order:

The documentaries Citizen Four, Remote Area Medical, Elaine Stritch Shoot Me and Life Itself.

Citizen Four won the Oscar.  Set mostly in a single hotel in Hong Kong during the days when Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's spying programs were beginning to be reported.  It works on multiple levels.  Snowden is someone who understands in abstract and theory the risks of what he's doing who in a matter of days comes to understand the reality of it.

Remote Area Medical is a little-seen movie which depicts one weekend of free medicine at a NASCAR track by the Virginia/Tennessee border.  Who are the people who'll line up in the dead of night for the opportunity to have someone look at their teeth or their eyes?  Who are the people who'll give up a weekend to provide the necessary services?  The documentary never stops to score political points.  It lets the footage speak for itself.  I'm the kid who grew up fixated on the behind-the-scenes aspect of things, the secret corridors at Disneyworld or the secrets of putting up skyscrapers or bridges, or the secrets of making Kermit ride a bike.  The film appealed to the kid by spending lots of time on the logistics of the clinic while simultaneously appealing to the adult who's thinking about the policy issues of our health care system.

The Elaine Stritch movie is very narrowly tailored for people who like showtunes, and isn't quite on a league with the other two.  But the film is such a perfect embodiment of its subject that I feel it deserves mention.

Life Itself is the documentary about Roger Ebert that was overlooked entirely by the Oscars.  It's from the director of Hoop Dreams, another documentary that the Oscars overlooked which was fiercely advocated by Ebert.  In spite of, or perhaps because of, the level of trust between the subject and the filmmaker, it stays just shy of hagiography, taking pains to ask if not to fully tackle questions raised by Ebert's career (prime example, how close to the filmmakers he critiqued should Ebert be?).  Which is fine in the end, because there are people who are better than the rest of us, and Ebert was clearly one of them.

Fault in Our Stars and Edge of Tomorrow

If only every movie for teens could be as good as Fault in Our Stars, and every sf adventure as good as Edge of Tomorrow.

Fault in Our Stars has an excellent cast, in both the primary and supporting roles, holds some surprises to those who haven't read the book, and elicits tears without ever being too (or at least not too too) blatantly manipulative.  Edge of Tomorrow falters a bit in its final scene which is poorly set up, poorly blocked, and thus incoherent, but before then...  Tom Cruise gives a performance with surprisingly little ego, well-matched by Emily Blunt and by a script that is unusually intelligent for the sf action movie.

Locke.

So it's basically a guy talking in a car for 90 minutes.  And I don't think you'll ever find the concept done better than this.  Tom Hardy shows he's much more than Bane.

Nightcrawler

Fierce acting by Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo helps cover any ethical uncertainties in the script.  And from a co-writer of Freejack!

Gone Girl

Good performances, a surprisingly puckish sense of humor, Hollywood gloss at its best and most powerful.

Pride

Surprisingly good, based on a true story of gay & lesbian Londoners coming to the aid of striking miners during the Thatcher era.  Paint-by-numbers as based-on-true-story movies often are, but the quality of the performances and of the script put it well above average in the genre.

Me And My Movie

This fall season marks both my 50th birthday and the 20th anniversary of establishing JABberwocky Literary Agency.  To celebrate, I screened a film at the Museum of the Moving Image for a select group from virtually all phases of my life.  I didn't name the film in the invitation, though the invitations included references to enough of the catch phrases immortalized by the film that it wasn't exactly a state secret.

Here, slightly edited, are the program notes I prepared:

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When Jerry Maguire opened on Dec. 13, 1996, I sat down to see it projected (in 35mm, on part of the screen) on the Imax at the Loews Lincoln Square.

I was expecting to like it.

I didn’t realize that I was about as close to my autobiography as Hollywood is likely to get.

The “expecting to like” is easy; it was Tom Cruise in a Cameron Crowe movie, with a decent coming attraction.

Tom Cruise and I have very special relationship.  Top Gun is extra special to me.  That movie wasn't the first film I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, which was the best movie theatre in Manhattan.  But it was the first movie I saw at the Astor Plaza after starting at JABberwocky.  Before, I was visiting the Astor Plaza.  After, I was living there.  And over the thirteen years that separated Top Gun from Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise had a misfire or two (Days of Thunder, Interview with the Vampire), but for the most part, he was hitting it out of the park every time up to the plate.  Rain Man, The Color of Money, Born of the Fourth of July, The Firm, A Few Good Men, Mission: Impossible.  Even Cocktail and Far and Away -- if you think they worked (and I did, at least at the time I first saw), they worked because of Tom.  The films were generally hugely successful at the box office.  They were also more often than not hugely successful artistically.  The directors or screenwriters included the likes of Barry Levinson, Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Ron Howard, Oliver Stone, Tony Scott and Sydney Pollack.  All have made significant contributions to cinema.  And the co-stars?  Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Brad Pitt.  These movies garnered a lot of Oscar nominations for people besides Tom Cruise, whose artistic contributions to cinema over a long career are, I think, under-appreciated.

And then Cameron Crowe.  25 years later we still reference the classic scene in Say Anything of John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler holding up his boom box to woo his girlfriend.  And in 1996 when Jerry Maguire was open, that classic scene was much nearer in the past.  There was a frisson to a new Cameron Crowe film.  But Say Anything was good on many levels, including the overall quality of the performances.  Not just John Cusack's defining performance, but the best performance from John Mahoney.  Forget Frasier.  Has Mahoney ever been better than Lloyd Dobler’s nemesis, the father who doesn’t want Lloyd dating his daughter.

For both Cruise and Crowe, their movies were often my soundtrack.   Working with music supervisor Danny Bramson, Say Anything and Singles were full of great tunes.  Bramson's one of the best at this. He also helped pick the music for the very lyrical Bull Durham soundtrack.  Rain Man had one of Hans Zimmer’s best scores.  The Color of Money was full of great tunes.  There were the soaring trumpet solos in John Williams’ Fourth of July score, and the jazzy piano of Dave Grusin’s music for The Firm.

So Tom Cruise was going to be in a Cameron Crowe movie.

Which was not just my soundtrack, but my life.

Jerry Maguire and I -- it turned out we were both agents who’d come to have issues with our bosses.

I’d been working at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency.  Scott  Meredith died.  The people with the clients and the money walked out the door to start their own agency.  A rich guy purchased Scott Meredith and had lots and lots of bad ideas, and I made a very conscious decision that I wasn’t going to just agree with them all.  Working for Scott hadn’t been fun; I didn’t need to bend over backwards to work for another bad boss.  A year-and-some after the agency was sold, did I know the day I was fired, twenty years ago this month, that I was going to be fired?  No.  But when the office was being renovated in the summer of 1994, I wasn’t entirely joking when I told people I got a fax to have at home just in case the boss had other plans for me.

After Jerry wrote his mission statement, he knew there might be repercussions.  He knew just about the moment he hit “save.”  He didn’t know Sugar was taking him to lunch to fire him, but deep down, he wasn’t shocked by the news.

The phone jockeying that followed?  That was me, twenty years ago this month.  My boss, he didn’t care about my clients.  If he wanted my clients, he wouldn’t have fired me.  But boy, did I spend a lot of time on the phone in October 1994.  I had a $300+ phone bill that month.  Because even if I wasn’t competing with my boss, I was competing with the Scott Meredith guys that had broken off 18 months earlier, and any and every other option besides me that any of my clients might have had.  Jerry Maguire’s a movie.  In real life, I doubt there’d be the crying gymnast picking up the wrong line.  But in its essence, every moment Jerry spends on the phone that afternoon is entirely real.

I’m not sure if it’s me or Jerry who headed off to our own businesses with a bigger stock of naiveté. I talked to an accountant enough to understand I’d have self-employment tax weighing down on me whether I was actually making any money or not, but my “business plan” was a sheet of my Scott Meredith memo paper where I roughed out that I needed $24-25K in commission my first year, that I knew where half of it would come from, and that I would come up with the other half.  But honestly, I never thought much about doing anything else.  And while Jerry Maguire and I both settled into home offices, for me the home office was all I needed.  Jerry Maguire needed more. He had a much bigger income potential because he was representing big-time athletes, not a bunch of sf/fantasy authors that were little known outside their fields.  But he had champagne tastes.  He needed the fancy suits and the fancy cars and the ability to look rich and act rich and compete with Bob Sugar.  I was fine settling into my one bedroom and moving furniture around to make room for a desk (cheap do-it-yourself from Staples), a filing cabinet, and a hand-me-down copier from my parents.

So Jerry Maguire might have been nominated for five Academy Awards: Picture, Actor (Cruise), Supporting Actor (Gooding Jr. who won), Screenplay (Crowe) and Editing. It might have spawned a sea of catch phrases that are as or more enduring as Lloyd Dobler holding up his boom box in Say Anything.  That’s not why we’re here watching Jerry Maguire today.  There are other favorite films of mine that have probably aged better which are even more iconic.

Here is why we’re here:

When I sat in the Lincoln Square on that Friday night in 1994, having paid full tariff for a Manhattan ticket at a time when my first choice was always the Saturday bargain matineee in Queens, my story was unfolding in real time with Jerry’s.  I laughed a lot.  Too much; I earned some weird looks from people in the row behind me who couldn’t fully appreciate the jokes, because who else but me really could?  But I squirmed a little bit.  I wasn’t sure how the health insurance bills were going to be paid, or when or if I’d ever get a big offer coming across my fax machine.  I was two years into starting a business that spent five years working its way out of neutral.  I was still hoping to have Jerry Maguire’s happy ending.  And today, there’s no better way to say I had that happy ending than to be able to share Jerry Maguire with you.
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And what would I say after seeing Jerry Maguire again this weekend?

I own DVDs and BluRays, but I don't do them.  They're there for decoration.  I live in New York City, there are lots of movies to see, and I don't sit in my apartment to do them.

Which means there are films I love that I see over and over again because they're easy to see.  As an example, if I wanted to see The Shining, I could do that lots between Kubrick retrospectives or midnight showings or whatever.  Jerry Maguire isn't one of those films.  I haven't actually watched it in a while.

And in my notes above, I underestimated it.  The movie has aged pretty well, and is even more iconic than I remembered.  The number of little bits of dialogue in this film that have taken on a life of their own goes so far beyond just "show me the money" or "you complete me."  I don't know how many of them Crowe made up and how many he'd heard and used, but so much of the movie is in popular culture 18 years ago because it's in this movie.

In 1996, I could most appreciate the movie's tonal accuracy for the stuff at the beginning.  I was two years off from my own phone jockeying.  Which still feels accurate from a twenty-year remove.  But now I can appreciate it for so much more, especially at the end of the movie.  Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s Rod Tidwell has his big game and gets his big contract.  It's very Hollywood, with Tidwell taking a big hit and being knocked out and doing this whole dance and the terms of his contract are revealed as a surprise on an ESPN interview show.  But if you cut away all the Hollywood trappings, every emotional beat is right.  Jerry Maguire, walking around the stadium after Tidwell's big game, is pretty much feeling the exact same beats that I felt a year ago, watching Brandon Sanderson win the Hugo Award for "The Emperor's Soul," and then hanging out with Brandon that night going for a celebratory late night nosh.  It was so dead-on right that I found myself tearing up at the ending.  I hadn't expected that.

So Cameron Crowe's screenplay is a masterpiece.

It doesn't get the emotional beats of being an agent right just by chance.  It doesn't fill itself up with cultural references just by chance.  These perfect words don't write themselves.

The acting.  This I knew. Strangely enough, both Jay Mohr and John Mahoney have the same initials.  Both are better known for stuff on TV.  Both give their best performances in a movie directed by Cameron Crowe.  Ione Skye?  Renée Zellwegger?  Again, both probably have their iconic roles in a Cameron Crowe movie.  Cuba Gooding, Jr.  Same thing.  Lili Taylor is hiding out in Say Anything.  Donal Logue (Harvey Dent on Gotham) is hiding out in Jerry Maguire.  Cast long enough, any movie you do can have someone important doing an early role, but Crowe -- he seems to keep doing it.

What a darned good movie.

The Big Sit

So I saw five movies the weekend before Christmas, and am happy to say I didn't entirely like any of them.

First up was Barbara, a German movie which has been getting excellent reviews.  It isn't so excellent.  The eponymous lead character is a doctor in East Germany in the early 1980s who has been assigned to work at a new hospital.  We see her working at the hospital, getting attached to another doctor in a romantic way, and to a patient or two in an empathic way.  The German secret police come by every so often to her apartment and search it up and down, then have a female agent come in to search her up and down.  We see her biking all over town, sometimes to have a romantic tryst with a government official.  Well made, yes.  But sometimes I think critics are hampered in their judgment because they go to a movie with the press kit, or they go to a play and are given a copy of the play.  And this is one of those times.  Barbara is so suffused with subtlety that it's chock full all over of things that only make sense if you have somebody explaining them to you.  I didn't.  I couldn't figure out why, at least within the context of the actual movie on the screen, where the movie was set (well, OK, they were speaking German, so it was in Germany, and there were secret police, so it was probably Eastern Germany), or when it was set.  I only know it's in the early 1980s because a reviewer told me.  I didn't know why Barbara was where she was.  I didn't know why the police were on her case, someone I mentioned this to said "it's East Germany, the police were investigating everyone."  Point taken, but were they searching every apartment, and giving everyone regular strip searches?  I could figure she was sleeping with a government official, but not who or what or where or why, or if that relationship had anything to do with everything else or if it was just happenstance.  And the filmmaking itself stumbled over its wonderful gentleness and subtlety to the point of becoming, well, a little bit dull.  This was the official German entry into the Academy Award race for Best Foreign Language Film.  It didn't make the shortlist from which the nominees will be selected.  Nobody's being robbed.  This is a classic case of a movie made more for snobbish critics than people who actually go to watch movies.

I saw this at the Angelika Mosaic, a new movie theatre that's part of a major retail development in suburban DC, walkable from the Dunn Loring Metro station.  There are all kinds of housing and retail developments that have been going up in the neighborhood over the past five or ten years, turning suburban wasteland into a livable transit-oriented development.  The movie theatre is quite nice, but seemed quite quiet on a Friday night.

The next morning I headed out to the Landmark Bethesda Row to see Rust and Bone, a French movie.  The director, Jacques Audiard, is something of a US critic's darling.  The first film of his I saw was The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which was quite dreadful in my opinion.  His next film to get a major release in the US was A Prophet, which got great reviews and was in fact quite quite fantastic.  My review is in this post.  This also got excellent reviews, albeit with a couple significant dissenters.  I was a little wary, but I really did like A Prophet.  Not Rust and Bone.  It's a boring mess of a movie.  It's not well made in my opinion, as an example one of the most prominent scenes in the movie is of Marion Cotillard losing her legs in an accident at a French Sea World thing, and the blocking and shooting of the scene is done so poorly that I couldn't for the life of me explain how the accident happened or how the character's legs were lost.  We aren't given much about the character to care about her lost legs.  Her boyfriend?  We aren't given much reason to care about him, either.  The movie just drags on and on, improbability piled on improbability for the sake of -- I don't know what, honestly.  A dreary bad mess of movie.

This theatre is down the street from the Bethesda branch of Georgetown Cupcake, which is one of the best cupcake places around.  However, it's hard to buy their cupcakes in hot weather and not eat them right away, because the icing is so soft and fluffy that it ends up glopping itself off the top of the cupcake.  I found out on this trip that is' hard to buy their cupcakes in cold weather not not eat them right away.  Walking around a bit before eating the cupcakes, the good news was that the icing had hardened a bit and didn't glop all over.  But the icing had hardened a bit, even the edges of the cupcakes had frozen up some, and the flavor was frozen away.

I didn't have great expectations for my next movie, The Guilt Trip, which was playing at the Regal Bethesda, an '80s style sloped-floor multiplex that is still around and doing a decent business.  It wasn't a pleasant surprise, but it was at least as good or bad as I was expecting.  It was a good enough movie that Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand could make it seem a little better than maybe it was, and I was generally smiling during the movie if not often laughing.  But the bottom line is that I'd dozed a bit during Rust and Bone, usually if I doze in one movie I'm not going to doze in another because I'm well-rested.  And this one, I wasn't just resting my eyes but was actually dozing during Seth Rogen's pitch session at HSN.  Which I'm sure was the comic highlight of the movie, there must be one in there someplace, and I missed it entirely.

We then walked down Wisconsin Ave. a bit to the AMC Mazza Galleria.  Many years ago, there was a small Cineplex Odeon sloped floor triplex in the basement of this upscale mall.  As part of a mall redevelopment, that gave way to a much larger stadium seating AMC theatre on the upper level.  This was my first time seeing a movie there even though the new theatre has been open for several years, I was pleasantly surprised at the size of the screens and the overall comfort of the theatre, and I'm sure I will be back.

My first film there was This is 40.  I'm not the Judd Apatow fan club.  I walked out of 40 Year Old Virgin.  Knocked Up was kind of OK.  I regret not seeing Funny People.  I think he might be better as a Producer of movies by other people than a director of his own.  This particular movie has a lot of pitch perfect and telling moments.  It has a lot of laugh out loud moments.  There's plenty to recommend in the film.  Unfortunately, the film's also close to 2:15 in length, which is way way way too long, and I started to feel every second of the film's length and squirm and rest my eyes and otherwise find plenty to focus on other than the perceptiveness and occasional LoL funny in the movie. There's no way I should doze off in three straight movies, no way, when that happens, it's not me being tired but movies that are too easy to sleep during.

Which is ultimately why this blog post is titled "The Big Sit."  All of these are movies that make you focus heavily on the fact that you're sitting and sitting and sitting, which are not transporting you to another world, holding you rapt in their spell.

Across from the Mazza Galleria is the site of the former Borders #285.  Which was one of those underperforming stores that Borders had too many of, and which they spent too much money remodeling at least twice, when they really needed to find a way out from under the lease.  A DSW Shoe Warehouse has now opened.  At least here, I know where the Borders was.  Walking along Walnut St. in Philadelphia a couple days later, I was pained to realize that I could no longer to tell which store had held the original downtown Philadelphia Borders.

The final movie in this four-in-a-day marathon was Jack Reacher.  Which may not be -- no, let's be frank, it isn't -- a particularly good movie, but which by the standards of the other movies I'd seen was exceptionally good.  It was the only one that didn't drag, that didn't put me to sleep, that came close to delivering on the hopes or expectations that you might take with you into the theatre.  I haven't read the Lee Child novels, so I could just focus on the fact that Tom Cruise was in it, and as a general rule, most movies with Tom Cruise have something going for the, and Cruise usually makes decent decisions on what movies to be in.  I don't think he has many outright duds in his filmography, in part because he is in the movies.  There's a particularly good if small supporting turn by Robert Duvall.

Especially in the wake of the Newton CT shootings, Jack Reacher has taken a lot of heat because of its violence.  The opening scene is a sniper's eye view of shootings on the Pittsburgh waterfront as the gunman takes aim at a series of targets and kills what he's aiming at.  The thing I find odd about this is that Lee Child gets kind of a free ride.  It's as if the movie just decided all on its lonesome to be full of shootings and violence in a typical Hollywood kind of way, full of brutality toward all but especially toward women.  Nobody then wants to step back to do the "but," to acknowledge that the movie might be doing all of these things but that it does them in service of an adaptation of a published book, nobody analyzes if the film's treatment of these things does justice to or is independent on the book on which the movie is based.  Does Jack Reacher the movie take a kind and loving novel and turn it into the typical Hollywood gunfest?  Or does it take a book that has these qualities, and bring those qualities to the screen?  I guess I should be happy that I'm a literary agent who gets to work with the books that might get a free pass here because they're books which are literary and good.  But I'm not, I'm disappointed that there's so much verbiage about the film that ignores the source.  And of course since I haven't read the Lee Child novels I don't know the extent to which the tone and approach of the movie diverges from or stays true to that of the books, I only know that it's not good journalism or criticism or reviewing to take aim at the movie without putting it into the context of its source material.

True Romancing the Danger Zone

What do you say about Tony Scott?

Well, I don't think you'll be hearing this too many times in the obituaries and reminiscences that are going to be out and about in the wake of his tragic suicide, but I think I'd compare him most to Martin Scorcese. Yes, Martin Scorcese.

Because I think the experience of going to the movies isn't just about if a movie is good or bad but about the memories it creates. There are directors who don't create memories at all, I can't rouse myself to like or dislike a Betty Thomas film, let's say, Beverly Hillbillies wasn't good but I don't dwell on it. But at both his best and at his worst, Tony Scott created great memories.

There's Top Gun, which I'm now watching on Blu Ray. It was made 20 years before Blu Ray and yet if you're wondering if it's worth upgrading from a regular DVD, Top Gun could be the test reel. It wasn't the first movie I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, but it was the first I saw after I started working in New York City, a few months before I moved to NYC, the first movie when the Astor Plaza was my hometown theatre. Like the best Tony Scott, it's got great special effects and lively music and an OD of testosterone. Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, Christian Slater, Will Smith -- Tony Scott always loved his leading men. Many of the actors he worked with including Cruise, Denzel and Hackman, found the Tony Scott experience one worth repeating.

And there's the needless remake ot The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 which was memorably bad.

Scorcese has Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence, Tony Scott had Top Gun and The Taking of Pelham, and I'll give Tony Scott an advantage here because the bad Tony Scott films were never as excruciatingly dull and miserable to sit through as The Age of Innocence or The Last Temptation of Christ.

When I was in college, I saw a Scorcese movie I really really liked called After Hours, which I've never seen again.

That too has an almost analog in True Romance, which I saw in 1993 and didn't revisit for 18 years. It held up. I don't think I can call it a masterpiece, but it's full of charm and romance and spunk, it's fun. When I went to see Oliver Stone's Savages several weeks ago, with more recent memories of True Romance fresh in my mind, I sat through the movie thinking "wow, this is probably the best and funnest violent drug movie since True Romance." And the interesting thing was that the person I was seeing the movie with was thinking that exact same thing.

And then Tony Scott could come up with Man on Fire, a thoroughly entertaining and entirely reprehensible movie which tells us that all that is wrong in the world can be taken care of with a little bit of maiming and torture. Well, I did loathe and detest Man on Fire on multiple levels, but I'm never going to forget it.

There's the quintessential Tony Scott, movies like Crimson Tide and Enemy of the State that maybe aren't particularly memorable or particularly worth a repeat viewing but which were well done examples of everything Tony Scott could do well.

And when you have things that you can do well, you can sometimes make a movie that surpasses simply by being the best of all of your best qualities. I'd put Unstoppable in that category. It's just so unstoppably good at all of the good things it is. There's Denzel, again, no longer the young guy with a gleam in his eye but being oh so Denzel and sharing the stage with Chris Pine, who is everything the Tony Scott leading man could be. You can't help but think if Tony Scott were with us, probably someday he'd be back working with Chris Pine again. The special effects were quietly good, Tony Scott wasn't a Peter Jackson who can get lost in the joys of fake special effects. This is a train going down train tracks looking to make a real tight curve in a real midwest city. You can feel it rumbling down the tracks way more than you can feel anything that was going on in King Kong. Like a train slowly gaining speed, Unstoppable just chugs along and chugs along and then comes up with about as good a last 40 minutes as you can find in film, 40 minutes that won't have you looking at your watch or squirming in your seat or doing anything other than looking rapt at the screen until the final moment of release.

So ultimately, what I can say about Tony Scott is, that it would sure have been nice to have seen another Tony Scott film come along. I don't know if it would have been Top Gun or Man on Fire, but there's a darned good chance it would have created some kind of cinematic memory for me.

I mean, every time that Top Gun theme starts playing, Howard Faltermeyer's bah-da-da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum, I've got to look up at the TV and see what it's underscoring, and there's Tom Cruise beautifully lit and radiating the same kind of charisma that we'd get every single time from every single leading man in every single Tony Scott film being what movies and movie stars are all about.

As one Marvin Hamlisch song says "nobody does it better."

The Knight who Played with Day

On the evening of Sunday July 10 I made my way to the AMC Empire and saw Knight and Day (aud #25) and The Girl Who Played With Fire (aud #18). And enjoyed both.

Knight and Day took a critical reaming, but it seems to be getting some decent word of mouth and holding pretty decently at the box office, and deservedly so. No, it's not great art, but it's a lot of fun and a perfectly pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. There's totally nothing wrong with that. I've generally been happy as a clam the past 25 years to spend a little bit of time with Tom Cruise, and here he's on Cruise Control. Nothing serious about this, no Magnolia thing or Born on the 4th of July thing, totally Cocktail Tom here. He has me at "hello." And there's good chemistry between him and Cameron Diaz. A lot of the critics have made out as if this was some cheapo thing like The Bucket List where you could tell in every shot that Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson weren't travelling the world to make the movie. Did they see the same movie I did? Did some flack in the marketing office totally schmuck up the press kit and say something about the effects there that nobody would have noticed otherwise? To me, this looked like James Bond lite on the location side. I didn't actually believe that Tom and Cameron were filmed live in the middle of a bullfight but I did believe they were actually in Europe, there were some stunts that from the camera angles really did look like Cruise doing his own. On balance, the effects in this seemed a lot more real to me than some of the much more lavish and expensive things we've seen in the 2nd Narnia movie or in King Kong or in Transformers. Good, fun stuff here. See it, rent it, enjoy it. Totally one of those movies which makes me wonder if I'd become a film reviewer if I'd still review the movie the way I'm reviewing it or I'd have taken the Kool Aid with all the other critics and dumped on this.

The critical reception to The Girl Who Played With Fire has been good, but generally saying this second in the trilogy isn't as good as the film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, based on the trilogy by Stieg Larsson and the film version of Hornet's Nest already out in Sweden and coming here soon. I liked the second movie at least as much as the first, maybe even more, and perhaps for the very reason that some of the critics have been going the other way. Both are mysteries, but the lines of this one were a little more classical. Some computer stuff, hard not to have a mystery these days that doesn't have some of that, but also some more old-fashioned legwork. The villain in the first movie was a little Hannibal Lecter/serial killer-ish, while the story in this one has some more classical revenge motives. The bad guys aren't nice, but they're monstrous in a way where they aren't so much monsters in the what and why of things. The two lead characters don't get much together time in this movie. The girl is on the run from the police because she's been framed for a murder so she has to communicate remotely with the crusading journalist who is co-lead in the series. But, hey, people, why is this a problem? You might remember in Empire Strikes Back that Han and Luke spend most of the movie away from one another. And it's still very thoroughly the best of the Star Wars movies. We find ourselves wanting them to get back together, wishing hoping and thinking and chewing our nails on the edges of our collective seats. I haven't read the underlying books, but if they're as good as the movies I can understand why so many people have. I can promise you I'll be making tracks for the third movie immediately upon its release.

this little piggy went to the cinema

Wherein I will do a wrap on movies I've seen in recent months without blogging about.

Pinky:  Pride & Glory,  seen Saturday afternoon Nov. 8, 2008 at the AMC Courthouse 8, Aud. #7.  1.5 slithy toads.  This is the kind of movie I've been going to less as I cut back some from 5 or 10 years ago on the number of movies I make time to see.  It had gotten mediocre reviews, and it has been awaiting release for a year, but I decided I should nonetheless see it because (a) it stars Edward Norton, whose generally impressed from Primal Fear on thru and usually makes good choices in the movies he makes and if not good ones then interesting and (b) co-stars Colin Farrell, another actor who is often interesting in his choices if not always good.  Alas, this was not an interesting choice for either of them.  Raise your hands if you've seen as movie about corrupt cop, loving wife, conflicted family, father figure on force, etc. etc. etc.  This is that movie.  I'm not sure why these two actors were attracted to the script, and they're pretty much the only interesting things about.

Ring Finger:  Changeling, seen Saturday afternoon Nov. 8, 2008, at the AMC Courthouse 8, Aud. #8.  2.5 slithy toads.  This is the other Clint Eastwood movie, or the other Angelina Jolie movie, or the other John Malkovich movie, or something like that.  It's based on a true story from the earlier years of the century,  when the LAPD was under attack and was happy to have reunited a mother with her missing son.  The fact that the mother didn't think the boy she was given was hers was not welcome news.  Jolie's performance was described alternately as a tour de force by some critics and a monstrous bit of overacting or dis-acting or mis-acting by others.  The movie as a whole was brilliant or too long, best for its willingness to look at the large context of things or worst for spending a half hour after the resolution of the underlying mystery of the boy to the aftershocks of the case in LA.  And to me, I guess the biggest sin is that I just don't care about the debates. I liked the movie well enough, but I can't muster any passion for arguing any side of it.  It's a better movie than Eastwood's other 2008 release, Gran Turino, but at least Gran Turino inspires some passion in me for undercutting it, while the best I can do ith Changeling is give a giant ambivalent "meh" and a lukewarm recommendation.  It's not as good as the other Angelina Jolie movie of 2008, Wanted, which is a ton u fun.  I mentioned in that post how I left with a smile on my face, and I still have one.

Middle Finger:  Valkyrie.  Seen Saturday afternoon January 24, 2009 at the AMC Empire 25, Aud. #8.  2 Slithy Toad.  Like Changeling, this leaves me with deep ambivalence.  Changeling was flat in my heart but at least had a little life on the screen while Valkyrie is flat in both places and garners half a toad less.  I've always been a Tom Cruise fun, at least since Top Gun, and there's nothing wrong with his performance but also nothing exciting about it.  Or really much of anything else in the movie.  It was interesting to see the mechanics of the aborted coup in Berlin.  Meh.

Index Finger:  Defiance.  Seen Saturday evening January 24, 2009 at Clearview's Ziegfeld.  4 slithy toads.  I'd been kind of eager to see Valkyrie, being that I'm a big Tom Cruise fan and a real Xmas event release and etc., I'd even tried seeing it a couple weeks before I actually did but gave up because the line at the box office was just too too long.  I ended up not caring so much for it at all. I was terribly ambivalent about seeing Defiance, but I've decided to give it my highest rating.  I'm not totally sure it deserves, part of me wants to knock it down to a 3.5, but to be honest I can't think of a good reason for deducting any points.  Why the ambivalence about seeing it?  A lot of that has to do with Edward Zwick.  His Blood Diamond was a pleasant surprise, much livelier and interesting than the all-over-map reviews would have suggested, and Courage Under Fire was a delightful pleasant surprise to see when it was sneak previewing at the Uptown in DC, but as a rule I've found his movies like Glory and The Last Sumarai to be worthy but not necessarily good.  And it was playing at the Ziegfeld, which I love and resent because it outlasted the superior Loews Astor Plaza as the only single-screen movie-going palace in New York City.  But at the end of the day, I decided I should give the movie some Ziegfeld points and be sure if I was seeing it to see it there, and I did get kind of a buzz when I walked in to see that there were actually going to be 400 or maybe even 500 people in the theatre's 1100 seats instead of 20 or 60.  And once the movie begin, it caught me up in its spell.  It's based on the true story of 3 brothers, played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schrieber and Jamie Bell,  who managed to keep a community of Jews safe in the Belarussian forests for several years during World War II, ultimately saving over 1000 lives from the Holocaust.  It's full of many of the usual "based on true story" things where you're wondering just how much is true and how much Hollywood; did the Liev brother really come to the rescue like the calvary in a Western the way it's depicted here?  But since it isn't yet another sports movie or underdog tale I was willing to cut it a little more slack for helping to bring a different chapter of the WW2 story to wider prominence.  It's made with the zestiness of Blood Diamond instead of the worthiness of Last Samurai.  David Denby's otherwise very favorable review in The New Yorker singled out the James Newton Howard score for special oppobrium, but I didn't mind it at all.  Well, I did, but for personal reasons that the lushly orchestrated violin-focused score here was a little too reminiscent of his score for The Village, which was the last movie to play the Astor Plaza, so I'm sitting trying to enjoy this movie in the Ziegfeld and the score just keeps dragging me back to my sad memories of the last picture show at my beloved Astor Plaza.  It's very well acted by all three leads, and if maybe not so much by the supporting cast I'm willing to say it's not so much the acting as the Hollywood-ese of the scripting.  When you're caught up in something, a book or a film or a TV show or a whatever, when you're really really really caught up in it, you can overlook things.  And when you're not you can pick nits.  This is one of those movies that caught me up in its spell, that succeeded at doing what a movie like this is supposed to do, that's probably the best Holocaust movie since Schindler's List, that had be on the edge of my seat wondering how some of the events would play out and then leaning back teary-eyed, and it gets my highest rating.

Thumb:  Revolutionary Road, seen Sunday morning/afternoon January 25, 2009 at the AMC Empire 25, Aud. #13.  One slithy toad.  Pleasant surprise, that management moved some movies around overnight so this was playing on a bigger screen on Sunday than it had been when I was at the same theatre for Valkyrie the day before.  Not a surprise, that I didn't really like the movie, though my reasons for not liking it ended up being somewhat different than I had anticipated.  From the coming attraction, I'd had the idea that this was going to be another Douglas Sirk melodrama look-alike, totally superfluous for traveling in the tracks of any number of other movies like that such as the 2002 release Far From Heaven.  So the good news is that this was aiming much higher than that, but the bad news is that it's one of those serious movies that pretty much drowns in its own pompousness and silliness.  Kate Winslet getting a Golden Globe for this?  It's like giving Best Actor to John Lovitz's Master Thespian, only here it's a thespianette in high heels.  Conceptually, why do you want to take the two great lovers from the wonderful Titanic and then put them back together as miserable lovers in a marriage so completely and totally failed that you can't understand why they ever got married in the first place?  Why give the couple two children who are then so conspicuously absent or conveniently present throughout the entire movie to the point that I thought it was a laugh line when Leonardo diCaprio says how nice it is to have a day without the kids when I've spent half the movie thinking they sure do spend an awful lot of time playing with the next door neighbors or doing community service after school or hiding in the basement or something?  Why name the movie after the street but then never put the house on that street within the context of the street as a whole?  There's one scene when Leonardo storms off and we see Kate in the door of the house and I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for a long shot which would show Kate and the house and the street and tie it all up in a nice visual bow, but after all that waiting we finally get only a medium shot that shows Kate in the door of the house from a bit of a difference but still with the house in isolation.  It's pompous, it's unpleasant, it's a shame.  If I might be overrating Defiance it's possible I'm underrating this, but I don't think so.  Because there's so much talent in this misguided movie that the opportunity cost of the movie is much higher.

With these five reviews I think I've covered pretty much all of the remainder of the fall/winter crop to date.  And reviewed the lion's share of the movies I've seen since commencing the blog almost a year ago.  I'd still like to do a more detailed post on Towelhead, but I feel as if I've done enough of the spadework that I can think in the days ahead about talking some about my thoughts on the Oscar nominations and otherwise summing up the 2008 film year.

Heroin for a Night!

Tropic Thunder. Seen Saturday Night August 23, 2008 at Clearview's Ziegfeld. 4 Slithy Toads.

Transsiberan. Seen Saturday Night August 23, 2008 at the Paris Theatre. 1.5 Slithy Toads.

These 2 films offer an important message about the international trafficking in heroin, and it is particularly apt that I saw them both on the same night.

Tropic Thunder, the first of these films, is hilarious. I was laughing loud and hard for good chunks of the movie, I can't honestly remember when I've laughed as loud or as long or as heartily in a movie, and I am giving it my highest rating.

You're probably read a lot about this movie in lots of other places, so I don't need to say too much about it synopsis wise, I don't think. Starts out with 3 wonderful fake film trailers. If you're interested in Satan's Alley, then you might want to read some real novels, the Vampire Victor books VAMPIRE VOW, VAMPIRE THRALL and VAMPIRE TRANSGRESSION by Michael Schiefelbein. Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey, Jr., who star, have all been in their share of movies both very good and very bad, and can be very annoying to spend time with and great company for two hours. They're all on their best behavior here, and doing some of their best work. Nick Nolte is at his most grizzled wonderful best. Matthew McConaughey is another actor who's had a lot of up and down in his career, and recently been way down in a series of increasingly dismal romantic comedies, but here he shows all his charm and charisma in a brilliant performance as Ben Stiller's agent, though part of me wishes in homage to Jerry Maguire that Jay Mohr had been doing the agent thing. Tom Cruise, whom I almost always like or even love on screen (repeat, on screen), is doing the opposite of McConaughey, kind of submerging some of his charisma but yet at the same time letting it ooze out. The two play off of one another wonderfully in their scenes together.

Much like Jerry Springer The Opera, Tropic Thunder may not be for everyone. It is loud. It is raunchy. It is politically incorret, and not just because it dares talk about going "the full retard" when Robert Downey, Jr. quite nicely explains why you never go "the full retard." It is profane. But it is hilarious. It's one of those movies that offers plenty of room for favorite moments discussions, that will be perfect companionship on TV for many years and decades to come.

I can't say the same about Transsiberian, in which Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer (who was in the play Parlour Song) become involved with drug traffickers while taking a train ride across Asia from Beijing to Moscow. This is not a spoiler. The first scene of the movie shows us Ben Kingsley as a cop investigating the murder of a drug dealer, so we can safely assume that this is not in the movie accidentally. Because we can likely assume that Woody Harrelson is probably not himself a drug dealer in this particular movie and that his wife probably isn't either, we know from the moment they appear on screen that the young couple played by Eduardo Noriega and Kate Mara that join the nice Americans on the train do have some involvement with drug dealers, and if asked to pick we will probably pick the dark-haired and very rakish character played by Mr. Noriega over his much more charming wife.

If I were evaluating this as a manuscript, it would get quick demerits on the "bad prologue" front. If it weren't for the prologue, which forces us to realize that the nice American tourists will come to harm from the rakish backpacker, there would be no tension and no interest at all in the first half or two-thirds of the movie. Occasionally, rarely, a little bit maybe, some manuscript might find some way to compensate for that instant disqualifying flaw. The movie is able to do so a little bit more easily because Woody Harrelson tends to be likeable and to hold the screen no matter what he's in, and he's often been in movies that have little more going for them than that, and because you can get the gorgeous shots of the eponymous train traveling across Siberia with gorgeous sightseeing stops along the way. Considering how heavily the movie relies on that kind of old-fashioned charm, I think it's a serious turn-off to have it veer into showing the most sordid and violent aspects of the drug trade late in the game. Does the crowd that wants to see the choo choo train steaming across, the kind of crowd for whom Murder on the Orient Express was filmed 30 years ago, want to see this? The movie also (and I guess this may be a spoiler) creates considerable suspense by having the Woody Harrelson character disappear for a time right after showing the rakish bad guy walking in Harrelson's direction with a big piece of pipe, but having done so it owes us more and better in the way of an explanation than it actually provides.

I admire the movie for its attempt to recapture some of the old-fashioned charm of Orient Express or Death on the Nile, and I toyed with giving it a neutral 2 toad ranking, but ultimately I felt I had to come down a little bit more harshly on it than that. It comes down to the prologue thing; it relies so much on artifice that it almost certainly would be turned down quickly if it came to me in my professional life, so how kind should I be to it in my personal?

Sydney Pollack

In my day job, I usually find that the winning authors produce the goods consistently, book in and book out, year after year, and then sometimes come up with a novel that's truly and remarkably special, and every once in a while disappoint a tad, but by and large work with remarkable consistency.

Like many great film directors, Sydney Pollack represents a very different path that I have a hard time adjusting to. The one masterpiece. The many good films. The highly and wildly overpraised turd. And then so much that you have a hard time believing came from the same director who did everything else. If my clients were as up and down as a Sydney Pollack and a Martin Scorcese I'd be grayer and balder if I weren't already so much of both.

In Pollack's case, I consider Out of Africa to be Oscar bait, critics bait, the kind of turgid lugubrious epic that comes along every so often and which just isn't really very good. I don't think this one has stood the test of time. If it shows up all the time on cable, it must be some network I never watch. I can hardly remember a thing about the movie. I saw it at the Loews State, a glorious old theatre on the site of the Virgin store in Times Square. I don't think I rushed to see it. I have this idea I might have seen it some day after work at Scott Meredith in 1986, which would mean I might have waited even as long as three months. Or not.

But I should talk about his two masterpieces.

The first of them is Tootsie. That one I saw with my father and younger brother at the old twin in Chester, NY, with a very very full house that was enjoying itself quite thoroughly, and why not. Is there anyone who doesn't know the plot? Dustin Hoffman is a desperate actor rooming with Bill Murray. friends with Teri Garr, who decides to become an actress in order to get a job on a soap opera. There he falls in love with female lead Jessica Lange, captivates and then disappoints her father (Charles Durning) spurns the advances of the lecherous old male lead played by George Gaynes, and drives his agent played by Sydney Pollack himself to utter distraction in the Russian Tea Room. I'm not sure I'd call this the greatest comedy of all time as in this Boston Globe column from a few months ago, in part because I still don't appreciate some of the gushier romance stuff. But at its best it doesn't get better. II can still see 25 1/2 years later: Bill Murray at his deadpan best; Hoffman in drag coming to Pollack's table at the Tea Room; Pollack on the phone telling Hoffman why he's toast; the show-runner talking to Hoffman about his contract renewal; Hoffman slapping George Gaynes; the tender upstate interlude (didn't I just say I didn't like this part of the movie?); Hoffman's improvised monologue to explain how the nurse is really a he in the greatest soap opera traditions. Like many of Pollack's best movies, the film reflects an old studio era approach to casting in which the roles are filled from top to bottom with really good people who are invariably just right for what they are doing. Something which I thought Iron Man needed just a little bit more of.

Second, The Firm. No, I don't think too many other Sydney Pollack appreciations are going to single this out as his best work, but it's nice to go off on my own every once in a while. This is a great, great movie. As with Tootsie, it's cast top to bottom with a just right mix of stars and character actors and names who are all so perfectly right for their roles. Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Holly Hunter, Wilford Brimley, Ed Harris, David Straitharn, Hal Holbrook, Gary Busey, Paul Sorvino. What a cast. It improves on its source material. The Firm by John Grisham is a great novel because of its captivating beginning, but it has a bad bad ending. It drifts off to nowheresville without a good final confrontation between the good guys and the bad guys and with all the chess pieces somehow ending up on different boards. The screenplay by David Rabe, Robert Towne and David Rayfiel comes up with a much better ending that gives Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) a final scene with the villainous mafia bad guys that back Bendini, Lambert and Locke, the kind of good ending I wished to find in the book. Dave Grusin's jazzy piano score for the movie is fantastic and was a deserving Oscar nominee. There's nothing I value more than a movie that makes background music to the soundtrack of my life, that should always be turned on when it's on cable. This is one of those movies. And this one I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, which is one of my fondest moviegoing memories at this late lamented modern movie palace.

Three Days of the Condor forms with The Parallax View a wonderful diptych of political movies of its day. The Way We Were isn't really very good. There's good and bad to be said up and down his filmography. But these two movies put him in the pantheon, and his occasional supporting role as an actor (Tootsie, Eyes Wide Shut, Michael Clayton, more) is an icing on the cake.

Stop Loss

Seen at Clearview's Chelsea Cinema, Auditorium #4, Saturday afternoon March 29, 2008. 3.5 Slithy Toads.

This is the best movie of the year so far.

Unfortunately, it has been difficult to read a review, good or bad, that reviews the movie on its own terms, divorced from its place in history following a string of (generally inferior) movies dealing with the Iraq war that have been box office disappointments.

And also unfortunately, it seems to arrive at the moment when many critics have decided to drop grading these Iraq movies on a curve, giving plentiful extra points for worthy intentions, or even just for the bare bones of the subject matter, to things like In The Valley of Elah, which certainly had its share of negative reviews but also quite inexplicably managed to appear on many Top 10 lists.

It's a double whammy, in which this really good movie is being victimized on multiple levels by the Critical Consensus, getting worse reviews than it deserves to compensate for films that got better, and reviewed in such a way that audiences are given permission in advance for skipping it because it is now to be expected that they should.

In case you're not familiar with the term or haven't read another review of this movie, or seen a coming attraction. "stop loss" is the name given to a provision in US military enlistment agreements that allows the military to hold a soldier past the contractual end date of the enlistment. And in a nutshell, Stop Loss the movie is the story of an Army sergeant who returns home to Texas as a hero, goes ballistic at finding himself stop-lossed, goes AWOL, goes on a road trip, and leaves a friend and fellow GI to deal with some of the mess of post-conflict adjustments that the unit is dealing with.

In big ways and small, the movie reminds of other war movies. The lines in the title lettering are reminiscent of the titling used for the TV series M.A.S.H. I was reminded on many levels of the excellent film Born on the 4th of July, which to my puzzlement I haven't seen referenced in other reviews I've read of Stop-Loss. The welcoming parade for the troops has the same sensibility as the 4th of July parades in the Oliver Stone movie, complete with a John Lewis trumpet solo in the score that hearkens back to the masterful John Williams score for 4th of July. The whole tone of the movie is as if Ron Kovac's parents had gotten the happy return of their son that never was theirs, only to find it twisted into a nightmare of an entirely different sort. I hope Stop Loss will have a better long-term fate than 4th of July, which hasn't entered the mainstream movie consciousness as it should.

Sgt. King is played by Ryan Phillippe, an actor whom I've long admired beginning especially with Cruel Intentions (which wasn't the first movie of his I'd seen, but certainly the first to make an impression). His performance is a knock-out. He adjusts smoothly to every line in a delicately wrinkled role that has to take him from the very definition of the guy you want at your side to somebody far more complex as he meets his limits at the stop-loss and then tries to find just where his new boundaries lie when removed of every anchor, every mooring, he thought was his. Channing Tatum as King's bud Sgt. Shriver keeps up with Phillippe in every scene they share, and no more need be said in praise of his performance. The other stand-out was Victor Rasuk, a member of King's unit who is badly wounded. He's come into his own since the interesting if not entirely good indiepic Raising Victor Vargas. Ever since Witness, I've always been happy to see Josef Sommer in pretty much anything. But the best movie of the year so far doesn't get my top 4 Slithy Toad ranking in part because of some of the weaker links. What is Ciarin Hinds doing, cast as Ryan Phillippe's father? Joseph Gordon-Levitt was very good in The Lookout, but here I think he's been a tad overpraised and doesn't do much with a role that is admittedly less well written than those for Phillippe and Tatum. In his scenes with either, I found he was just a little off their excellence. And Timothy Olyphant as the CO for King and Shriver struck me as a constant off note.

On the big questions of story and direction, I was with the movie pretty much every step of the way where a lot of other critics have been quibbling. The opening scenes in Tikrit, Iraq are one of the best war sequences I've seen. I was a little bit bothered by just how beautiful every soldier in the squad was, but it is an MTV Films movie, so what should I expect. But this scene had some shades of Full Metal Jacket, it was more realistic than the overblown and similar finale in The Kingdom, and I felt it worked. When we get to Texas, King is deftly sketched as every bit the company man who does his job thoroughly and well and to the admiration of all, which is exactly why his decision to go AWOL worked for me. It takes a lot of energy to fill that role, to be that employee, to be the go-to guy, and most of us don't have that to give in unlimited quantity. It worked for me on every level when he snapped, when he looked at what he'd done, and what he was expecting to do, and what he was now going to be doing instead, and decided he was empty, had nothing to give, and wasn't going to give what he did not have. As I said, Phillippe gives an amazing performance. Some have criticized the road movie aspect. Huh? He stops to visit the parents of one of the soldiers killed in Tikrit. Tom Cruise did that in Born on the 4th of July. It's one of the things you do. He goes to visit a soldier who was badly injured in Tikrit. Even after he's gone AWOL, he somehow can't leave the job he's abandoned, and that contradiction works. With everything we've seen sequentially, the ending can't be anything else, anything other, than exactly what it is. Emotionally, I didn't like the ending. I wish it could have been something else. Except it couldn't have been. The character we saw in the post-return scenes in Texas, the character we saw visiting the parents or his injured comrade, there are places this person can't go.

There's one scene in the movie that I didn't like at all, which is so blatantly there to announce the imminent arrival of a bad thing which we so blatantly and artificially don't see on screen that there's no surprise at all when The Call comes to tell Sgt. King that which the experienced film viewer has already deduced. But that bad scene leads into a climactic scene between the King and Shriver characters that works on every level and held me rapt. So I'll forgive the one bad.

This is the second movie directed by Kimberly Peirce, who also co-wrote with Mark Richard, after the excellent Boys Don't Cry, which won an Oscar for Hilary Swank. It's way too early in the year to say Ryan Phillippe should be nominated for this, but not too early to say that Peirce has directed another excellent film with another excellent lead performance that deserves to be seen.