Time to give a brief description of the plotline. Glenn Close’s character has had a terribly difficult time of it as a youth and young woman. In 19th Century Dublin, in order to get a job as a waiter in a hotel and support herself, she disguises herself as a man, renames herself, and lives that way for many years. Nobbs is withdrawn emotionally and has relatively little dialogue. Things are enlivened by a couple of events. One is the entrance of Janet McTeer, who also is posing as a man, Hubert Page. Page comes to the hotel and finds himself sharing a room with Hobbs. I have loved Janet McTeer since her turn as a Southern single mom in Tumbleweeds. Here she brings some life to the story, and richly deserves her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. The other point of interest is Nobbs’ relationship with a much younger female hotel worker, played quite well by Mia Wasikowska. Parts of Nobbs come to life as this relationship develops, but Nobbs hadn’t earned my sympathy earlier in the movie, and so it wasn’t quite enough.

About Rodrigo Garcia: He has done an outstanding job directing contemporary female ensemble pieces like Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, Nine Lives, and, most recently, Mother and Child. He has also directed quite a few television shows like Six Feet Under, Carnivale, and In Treatment – no small feat. I think that he just didn’t match up well with the genre of Albert Nobbs.

Anyway, a second opinion — I chatted with Will briefly about this film, and he said he liked it a lot more than he thought he would. So for viewers who enjoy period pieces, appreciate the costuming, the art direction, and the particular kind of dialogue that the best of these offers, maybe give Albert Nobbs a shot. Also, if you are curious about Glenn Close’s turn as a man and care about the scope of her filmography, roles in movies as diverse as The Big Chill, Fatal Attraction, and The Chumscrubber, check out what she’s up to as Nobbs. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 5/15/12

Based on a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, who co-wrote the screenplay with Carnahan, it has Neeson playing yet another tough guy, albeit one contemplating suicide who works in Alaska killing wolves that threaten a team of oil workers. When the plane they all take home crashes, Neeson and six other survivors struggle against not only the elements, but a pack of grey wolves stalking them.

Neeson, unsurprisingly, is the film’s bright spot. His size alone makes him a commanding presence, someone you’re convinced could survive such a brutal ordeal. But he has a touching soft side, too. You hear the defeat in his voice in the opening scenes as he narrates a letter, and feel his compassion as, in the film’s best scene, he helps a survivor face his impending death.

To his credit, Carnahan (The A-Team) manages to wring some decent tension out of the wolf attacks themselves, and for the most part eschews explicit gore, staging the attacks at night or showing them from a distance. As well he does a solid job with the soundtrack, effectively creating brief moments of terror as wolves howl into the night or growl threateningly at the weary men.

The main problem is that, when the wolves aren’t attacking, the film attempts weightiness, which Carnahan doesn’t know how to pace. Scenes of the survivors discussing religion while sitting around a fire, or of an injured character quietly claiming he can’t continue, drag on and on and practically ground the film to a halt. The weak writing in these scenes only compounds the issue.

What’s more, the survivors (including Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts) are poorly defined, save, naturally, for Neeson, making it hard to care what befalls any of them. They’re basically just types. Roberts is the one with humanity, Joe Anderson the freaked-out chatterbox and Frank Grillo the aggressive challenger (and the only supporting survivor with any kind of depth).

Beyond that, the script creates too obvious a parallel to the wolf-pack mentality, there’s a little too much shaky cam for my taste, and, save for a couple shots, Carnahan fails to do much with the obviously breathtaking Alberta locale. What burned me the most, though, is how Carnahan ends the thing. I wanted to see Neeson punch a wolf in the throat. I had to imagine he did instead. – [DVD]

Action/Adventure/Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 5/15/12

Dreamed up by Max Landis and director Josh Trank, it follows a trio of Seattle high school seniors—outcast Andrew (Dane DeHaan), his cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and popular kid Steve (Michael B. Jordan)—via Andrew’s camera (and, later, other camera vantage points) as they acquire telekinesis, and other abilities, after touching what we assume is an alien artifact.

The film is at its most fun as the boys use their powers for mischief—blowing up a girl’s skirt, scaring people in a toy store, shoving a BMW across a parking lot, skipping rocks. It turns downright exhilarating when they learn they can fly, soaring, and even playing football, among the clouds. Their teenage exuberance at this discovery is contagious.

But the dangers of having these abilities start to become apparent after Andrew playfully shoves a car off the road and into a river. Where Matt and Steve are well-adjusted teens, Andrew is angry, dealing with bullies, an alcoholic father (Michael Kelly) and a sick mother, and so his abilities cleverly reflect his bottled up hostility toward the world. Watch as he unleashes a roar of rage at one point close to the end, shattering windows and making the ground tremble.

So the film descends into ever darker territory, though remains completely compelling, as Andrew spins out of control, killing neighborhood thugs, ripping out a bully’s teeth, inadvertently blowing up a gas station and blowing a hospital room to pieces. It all culminates in a fantastic finale, a super duper showdown between Andrew and Matt that involves, among other things, the Space Needle, a city bus and an exploding helicopter.

Dialogue isn’t the film’s strong suit, to be sure, but it more than makes up for it in other ways, especially in how Landis and Trank are constantly able to have us see Andrew, who’s almost always with camera, via mirrors, the camera of a cute blonde girl (Anna Wood) Matt likes, hospital security footage and the like. Their most ingenious method, though, is having Andrew use his abilities to make his camera float above the action. (The bloody-nose-something-is-wrong conceit is also neat.)

Not to dilute the contributions of Russell and Jordan, who are solid, nor Trank’s skill at inserting convincing effects amid all the handheld mayhem, but none of this would have worked without DeHaan. Resembling nothing less than a young Leonardo DiCaprio, the 26-year-old perfectly and beautifully embodies bullied-teen misery. The only difference is that, when this teen becomes enraged, he can crush a car simply by closing his fist. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama/Sci-Fi/Thriller

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 5/15/12

After Freaks and Geeks ended its brief but glorious run, in 2000, the three “freaks” went on to visibly successful and multi-hyphenated careers, as actors, writers, and directors. Briefly:
James Franco – Spider-Man 2 and 3, Pineapple Express, Milk, Howl, 127 Hours, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and 11 more films currently in some phase of production, not to mention PhD’s, teaching gigs, and soap operas.
Seth Rogen – 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, Step Brothers, Pineapple Express, Paul, and 50/50.
Jason Segel – Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I Love You Man, The Muppets, and the upcoming Five-Year Engagement.

Those are all great success stories, and well-deserved, but I always thought Cardellini was the cog of the wheel, the one with the greatest acting chops, the one capable of moving us. Maybe, as one of my compatriots here has suggested, it’s the comedy writing (avec the Judd Apatow imprimatur) that seems to achieve the quickest success in Hollywood, or at least has for the three above named.

At any rate, the film is quite good as it delineates the return from Iraq of a soldier (Cardellini) who finds that her life back home is a jigsaw puzzle for which she can’t quite find all the pieces. Her husband (Shannon) only seems to need her on his own terms, and may be hiding an affair; she can’t commit completely to her young daughter, nor to her job. Cardellini conveys all of this with great tact and understatement, keeping her explosions small and contained. I only hope that serves to propel her career in the right direction.

Also: if you also love Mad Men, there is a moment between Cardellini and John Slattery (Roger in Mad Men) that will leave you agog. - [DVD]

Drama

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 4/24/12

I stopped reading… did you stop reading?

Poetry on the page we may equate with a case of rickets, but in a date night movie gives us passion, a life in letters and lace bodices.

Shakespeare in Love, we thank you.

In Young Goethe in Love, enamored of poetry and having failed his law doctorate, Johann Goethe (Alexander Fehling) is sent by his father to the town of Wetzlar, Germany to clerk in the local prosecutor’s office. He proves competent at this dreary work, finds a friend in fellow drone Wilhelm (Volker Bruch), wonders what life holds for him, then meets Charlotte Buff (Miriam Stein) at a dance. Wine is spilled, quips are exchanged and ardor commences. Her mother has died and Charlotte, affectionately called Lotte by her family, runs her father’s house, though they have little money and may lose their property. An arranged marriage with none other than Goethe’s superior Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu) will provide for her family, but she wants Johann who can offer her only his words.

It’s all pleasant and diverting with Fehling boyish enough and Stein playing earthy and warm, but the film never fans any real swooning, romantic flames as it gently traipses through its yearning motions. Some rejection letters, bare skin among the ferns and the Sturm und Drang movement is born.

An accomplished artist, poet, biologist and theoretical physicist, Goethe is a household name in Germany and, perhaps like the recent French film Gainsbourg, we’re not as invested in other countries’ icons, so we’d like a little re-preaching for the unconverted. It’d be expecting too much of director Philipp Stölzl, who made the fine North Face (2008), to pull off something as refreshing as Amadeus (1984), but a touch of Bright Star’s (2009) grace and subtlety could have gone a long way.

Yet, Goethe was young once, we were all young once, so this film is fine for a stolen kiss in the rain, but let a cooler head prevail and don’t put pen to paper afterward. – [DVD]

Drama/Romance

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 4/24/12

Mark Wahlberg

Based on the 2008 Icelandic flick Reykjavik-Rotterdam, in which director Baltasar Kormakur acted, it casts Wahlberg as a reformed smuggler who returns to his old ways to pay back a mobster (Giovanni Ribisi) for a job botched by Wahlberg’s brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones).

Kormakur (The Sea) moves the film along at a smooth, brisk pace, supplies gritty atmosphere and every once in a while shows off with an artfully composed shot or two. He also proves capable choreographing the small amount of actual action here, turning the main setpiece, an armored car robbery instigated by a Panamanian drug lord (Diego Luna), into a reasonably exciting thing.

Yet as a whole it just feels too standard issue, with a little too much going on, and lunkhead Wahlberg’s lack of charisma, middling acting skills and constantly dumbfounded expression don’t help. For a brief moment, as he greets his pals on board a cargo ship, Wahlberg does kind of come alive. But generally, like when he informs a bad guy he’s coming for him, he’s Mr. Monotone.

As well Kate Beckinsale, as Wahlberg’s wife, is a little too beautiful to be believable as a blue-collar character, and Ben Foster is underused as Wahlberg’s buddy. He would’ve been great in Ribisi’s role, but admittedly has played more than his share of psychos. As it is, Ribisi, all beard, slicked back hair and nasally whine, is adequately nasty, if not a tad cartoonish.

J.K. Simmons (Juno, The Music Never Stopped) makes the best impression, I think. As the cargo ship captain, he affects an Orleans accent and adopts a wonderfully brusque, unfriendly and somewhat amusing attitude toward Wahlberg. Alas, his screen time is all too brief, and we’re left with Marky Mark in a not nearly funky enough action movie. [DVD]

Action/Crime/Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 4/24/12

Shame is his second pairing with artist-turned-director Steve McQueen, after the compelling Hunger, a brief look at the life of Irish political firebrand Bobby Sands during his stay in prison. In Shame, Fassbender again plays a man in prison, but one of his own making, a seemingly successful New York businessman in torment for reasons never made wholly clear. Sexual gameplaying is his release, albeit one without a hint of pleasure. Whether meeting women for one-night stands, or indifferently viewing pornography, he is consumed by carnality that is utterly joyless, but a compulsion that he has no interest in altering.

When his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) arrives to clutter his apartment, and his life, things only get worse. Alternately loving and hostile, their relationship is closely bonded in a manner that he seems to resent. His refusal of intimacy, whether via conquests with strangers or simple familial affection, rises closer to the surface, and when Sissy (a wounded soul in her own right, with the scars to prove it) takes up with his boss, a married man with a constant wandering eye, his icy demeanor towards her leads to troubling consequences.

The story of sexual aberrance as a substitute for real emotional bonds is not particularly new (at times, the film reminds us of Last Tango in Paris), but McQueen is able to dodge the usual Freudian landmines (remember, Fassbender played Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method) and craft a compellingly obscure portrait of a man unable to love. The cast is uniformly excellent, not only the two leads, but James Badge Dale as the lascivious boss and Nicole Beharie as a co-worker who Fassbender seduces, then abandons. The sexuality is fairly graphic but again, like Last Tango, never ‘erotic’ because it is an exercise wholly without a hint of passion. It is an activity, something to be done, and nothing more.

There are hints as to why Fassbender behaves the way he does, but it’s gratefully never spelled out. To do so would be to simplify it, and that’s insulting to the human in all of us. We all have our releases, our reactions to reactions. It’s just that some of us choose macramé instead. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama

Rated NC-17

DVD Release Date: 4/17/12

Oh, yeah, and the movie. It was decent I guess. Quite a lot of it was spent watching “present day” Margaret Thatcher puttering around and talking to her dead husband (Jim Broadbent). Which would be compelling enough, I suppose, if it offered any specific insight into the life of Britain’s first (and thus far only) female Prime Minister. But it doesn’t.

What insight there is comes in flashbacks, which tell the story of how a shy grocer’s daughter decided, with vaguely sketched out eggings-on from her father and future husband, to become ambitious and political. Could she go all the way to the top? To pull it off, she’s gonna need a montage (cue the music): start with some elocution lessons (King’s Speech? Check!), then let’s have some ominous scenes depicting wavering support from the British public (The Queen/King’s Speech? Check, check!), ending with a triumphant theatrical arrival at No. 10 Downing Street (The Queen/Love Actually/Into the Storm? Check, check, and check!).

The Iron Lady is the latest in a series of breezy films about Modern British Political Life (see above examples). So breezy, in fact, that it seems to swoosh past any real examination of Margaret Thatcher’s actual political decisions and focus largely on her abstract ambition and steadfastness in the face of (mostly offscreen) criticism. We do get some great scenes in Parliament, which, having spent some time sitting listlessly in front of C-SPAN, I can say is much more fun to watch in session than Congress.

Somewhere, someone mentions how she got the moniker “Iron Lady” from the Soviets, and how she was instrumental along with Ronald Reagan in ending the Cold War. But virtually no time at all is spent on what she did to earn the nickname or how she KO’d the USSR. The only crisis examined in any detail is her decision to escalate the Falklands War in 1982, which apparently all came down to the fate of a single Argentine warship. “Sink her!” Thatcher growls. Rah-rah-rah, and Britannia rules the waves once more. Beyond a few of such scenes, I’d go so far as to say this movie scarcely educates at all on the subject of Margaret Thatcher’s life and career, beyond answering the idle question, “where is she now?”

But yeah, Meryl Streep really nailed it. She earned that third Oscar for sure. Too bad about the timid writing. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama/Biography

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 4/10/12

When Winston Churchill wrote those words in the years after World War I, he was certainly in part lamenting the passing into history of the war horse, the millennia-old instrument of warfare who was conditioned (as was the man on its back) to put aside survival and rush headlong into the sharpest glinting points human ingenuity could contrive. Churchill himself participated in what is considered the last “successful” cavalry charge in history, in Sudan at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. With the coming of the “War to End All Wars” in 1914, the British Army still believed that men with swords on horseback could ride against the enemy and hack them to death. But reality put an end to this brutal 19th Century romance–there could surely be no worse place for a horse in all of history than on the mechanized battlefields of the Great War.

Adapted from a 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse seeks to tell the story of the First World War from the horse’s perspective. Beginning in a spectacularly idyllic pre-War Devon countryside, we follow one horse–named Joey–right from the moment of his birth. He has the look of a thoroughbred racehorse, but he is nevertheless purchased at auction by a struggling farmer (Peter Mullan) whose son Albert (Jeremy Irvine), having already fallen in love with the animal, is tasked with training him. These initial scenes strongly evoke classic countryside family films like National Velvet or The Yearling, relishing early-20th Century British farming life with surprising and endearing patience and humor. Yet when the war rears its ugly head and Joey is sold to the army as a cavalry horse, the setting of the film grows progressively darker.

The narrative structure of War Horse was not at all what I expected. The basic plot summary I envisioned was thus: boy raises horse, horse goes to war, boy lies about his age to join the army, boy searches for horse and rescues him from near-certain death. Instead, the film follows an episodic pattern, much like the excellent multi-period historical drama Red Violin, which followed a single musical instrument from its creation in 17th Century Italy across the centuries to present-day Montreal. After Joey is sold, Albert entrusts his care to the kind-hearted cavalry officer who will ride him (Tom Hiddleston). Things predictably go badly for the mounted soldiers under the leadership of their obsolete gentleman-soldier commander (Benedict Cumberbatch), and Joey is captured by the Germans. From there, he passes through the care of a pair of young deserting soldiers, a Dutch farm girl and her grandfather, and a beleaguered German artillery support grunt. The film’s best scene occurs in No Man’s Land, where Joey’s troubles unexpectedly inspire a momentary truce.

I was much more impressed by War Horse than I imagined I would be. Spielberg always shoots his movies beautifully and stages epic war scenes with great skill, but I appreciated that he curtailed his own predilection for breathless expository dialogue and pointedly ironic imagery (to a large degree, at least). The early scenes in Devon were so likably old-fashioned, I might have mistaken them for the work of Martin Scorsese. When it comes to depicting the infamous squalor of the war, he offers a somewhat wider landscape than the usual claustrophobic march through the endless trenches, which have become so symbolic of the conflict that many might come to dismiss World War I as a single monotonous, nightmarish image that inconceivably spanned four years of history. I might not attach the word “masterpiece” to War Horse, but it’s a worthwhile opportunity to dwell for a while in those four years, and remind ourselves that humanity did not die in the mud and barbed wire. It just began to awake from a dream of the beauty and romance of war. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama/History/War

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 4/3/12

Can this motley crew and the untrained owner get the zoo in shape for its inspection? It’s a plot that seems like an over-budget episode of Full House (especially given the casting of Thomas Haden Church as Damon’s brother). There’s a happy soundtrack, honest if not overly revealing human conversation, and sickeningly adorable children. It’s so full of schmaltz, the box should smell like cotton candy.

However.

This movie made me cry like a small child who had hurt himself and was surprised by it. It’s not something I’ll often admit, the end of Armageddon not withstanding, but good grief. Like my mom watching a long distance commercial in the 80′s, I was so emotionally wrapped in this seemingly vapid story, I kept looking to the door expecting someone to walk in and expose my shame.

How was I so tricked by this sham of a movie?

Well… it’s actually pretty good.

Damon’s character is a good-natured, pleasant boy scout who’s been kicked in the groin by life a couple times. But he still keeps doing the right things for the right reasons. Johansson is not out of place at all, which I feel she often is, and is a very “low key” good as the zookeeper. The kids are cute, the comic relief is timely and well done.

The biggest attribute that We Bought a Zoo has is Cameron Crowe. He’s a guy who knows how to make a story come to life, and maybe he’s stumbled a couple of times, but he’s still a great storyteller.

So to recap:
I cry at stuff because I’m a big wussy, but sometimes that wussy stuff is pretty good too.
It’s not Shakespeare, it’s not high art, it’s straight-up storytelling with a good cast. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Comedy/Drama/Family

Rated PG

DVD Release Date: 4/3/12