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

In Michael, a pinched faced nebbish of a man goes about his day. He does errands, cleans his house and yard and when he smokes he does so outside. His job at an insurance company is the most “lonely guy” of clichés and our initial impression is of a closed-off individual. This set, bland, routine to his life is very necessary when the viewer is shown the boy, Wolfgang, who this man, Michael, keeps prisoner in his basement.

In a bright room with toys, books and a kettle to heat water for soup, Wolfgang spends his day. This is why the shutters on the windows that close at a precise time every evening are industrial grade and a battering ram would be needed to break down the door to Wolfgang’s. Michael has methodically prepared for keeping this young man captive. Nothing unspeakable is ever really shown, just chilling implications.

Early in the film, Michael takes the boy on an outing and you wonder why Wolfgang doesn’t just bolt. What unfolds is a study of almost masterful mind control. Michael constantly takes steps to keep the boy in line, but also placated. They do chores, eat upstairs at the table, work a puzzle, throw snowballs. Michael seems in these moments like an overly dour father. It’s when he’s alone, laughing at a horror film as he lays on his couch or in awkward explanations with his family that he seems his most monstrous. We squirm at the massive disconnect and lack of conscience he needs to maintain this subterfuge. The boy’s room is always stocked with supplies, especially when Michael takes a days long ski trip, but he also prepares for any eventuality as when scouting the woods for a grave.

We’re never taken far into Michael’s psyche. There are no hints of abuse or trauma that led him to this. He just wants to have this boy. When an interview with a doctor about pedophilia comes on the television, Michael frantically shuts off the power to Wolfgang’s room. He isn’t upset that a mirror has been held up to his actions, but more that there could be a break in his mind control.

Michael is the first time directing for Markus Schleinzer who’s been a casting director for films like The Robber and The Counterfeiters, but also for director Michael Haneke and whose dark work this film bears the most resemblance to in its style and choice of subject matter.

The comedian Louis C.K. made an observation that if child molestation were more socially acceptable, there’d be fewer child murders. Nobody believes or wants this, and we’re conflicted about putting a sympathetic or “human face” on this most heinous of crimes, but put Michael alongside L.I.E., The Woodsman, and M as proof we’re long past the easy boogeyman in film.

A dance of memory and devotion set in 1960’s Japan, we see debts owed from love and friendship in Norwegian Wood. In spare narration, the film’s main protagonist Watanabe (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) tells the story of himself and his friends, the sweethearts Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) and Kizuki (Kengo Kora).  Kizuki and Naoko have known each other since they were very young and being together, along with Watanabe’s friendship, make life perfect until Kizuki commits suicide. The tragedy makes it seem that nothing can ever be right again.

Watanabe is attending college when Naoko, now twenty and fragile, tenderly reaches out to him, reveals a secret about her and Kizuki’s love, then disappears.  As Watanabe works two jobs, and the student unrest of the day passes him by, he meets and is quietly enamored of Midori (Kiko Mizuhara). Then Naoko contacts him from a sanitarium where she’s recovering from a breakdown and Watanabe tries to pull her back to him.

In film, young love can be an obsessive, one-note theme. An obsessive wants the object of that obsession to never change. The passion of young love must be an all consuming flame always. Both make for the shallowest melodrama because tempering either of these with ruminations gets away from the formula of romance. Perfectly composed with a rich palette of colors, and capturing the era with clothing crisp and bright and furnishings completely of the time, Norwegian Wood could be slagged off initially as foreign film young-people-in-mope with a lot of surface and no substance.

But the film quietly, elegantly goes about its business. Change is in the air, mainly between the sexes and Watanabe’s character battles against himself over his devotion to Naoko, his attraction to Midori and, let’s face it, how a young man steeped in his culture should handle himself. He does want Naoko. Not as she was, in their honeyed younger days of only a short while before, but he wants here well and he wants to understand what’s happened and he also wants his life to move on. There’s frankness and a lyricism to the dialogue (yes, we’ll just have to trust the subtitles, but that doesn’t take away from it) and when heartbreak happens to the characters (as with Naoko, her back is to us, yards away on a hillside) the restraint used draws us more into the moment then any Oscar-bait movie in recent memory. A tryst with Reiko (Reika Kirishima), a music teacher and fellow patient of Naoko’s, is not opportunistic sex for Watanabe, it’s closure for them both and her first step back into the world.

In the end this is what we do. You take time to remember. Effect what repairs you can on your heart. Then you go on. – [DVD]

Michael: Drama, Unrated, Austria

Norwegian Wood: Drama/Romance, Unrated, Japan

DVD Release Date: 5/15/12

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (note the official title uses a dash to avoid the awkwardness of two colons) is, arguably, the best of the four Tom Cruise-led films based on the classic 1966-1973 TV series. This has a lot to do with the hiring of director Brad Bird, who heretofore had only directed animated films, and excellent ones at that (The Iron Giant, Ratatouille). His live-action debut benefits most from his experience making the superhero satire The Incredibles at Pixar, which I consider to be among the best action films in decades. Though ostensibly a family-friendly comedy adventure, Incredibles had cracking energy and staging in its action setpieces, and with its James Bond-esque villain and clever gadgets, had a lot of spy movie style of its own.

There are other major ingredients that make this latest M:I so successful. For one, it feels a lot closer in spirit to the original series’ style, which emphasized a more team-oriented operation instead of following a lone operative the whole way through. This time we have a team, consisting of Ethan Hunt (Cruise), hacker and gadgeteer Benji (Simon Pegg), Carter (Paula Patton), and a suspiciously formidable analyst, Brandt (Jeremy Renner). From beginning to end, these four are all involved on each mission, though Cruise remains in the star forward position. I should point out that while Tom Cruise the actual human being still weirds me out, I did enjoy watching him do the whole Ethan Hunt thing again, and his costars are well-chosen to conceal his diminutive stature.

Another hallmark of the Mission:Impossible franchise, both on the small screen and large, was the application of all manner of gadgetry and clever subterfuge, and this is where Ghost Protocol really shines. While even the James Bond films of late have either largely abandoned the mechanical wizardry or trotted out a bland parade of smartphone product placement, the gadgets in this movie impress not only with their ingenuity but with their unreliability. Nearly every single tool and/or scheme that the good guys employ somehow manages to fail in some way, necessitating a lot of improvisation and what could euphemistically be called “operational compromises.” For my money, this is where most of the fun comes from.

I can’t really say that Ghost Protocol surpasses its predecessors on every front–both the villain and his evil plot are pretty generic, leftovers from Cold War nuclear gamesmanship, and the final scene does a little too good a job letting the audience come down from its adrenaline rush. But the action setpieces are great fun, the mix of humor and drama is spot-on, and the locations are dramatic (especially the prominently showcased Burj Khalifa in Dubai, by far the tallest building in the world). Bottom line: this is an extremely entertaining action crowd-pleaser, something we’ve been missing for at least a month or two. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Adventure/Thriller

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 4/17/12

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

It was originally an episode in the four part television mini-series Werner Herzog directed called On Death Row airing on Discovery I.D. channel.

It feels very much like something you would see on an investigative report. Through interviews with Michael Perry (scheduled to be executed within eight days of his appearance), Jason Burkett, various family members and investigators, Herzog paints a picture of the events leading up to their convictions.

Werner Herzog lets his feelings be known during the beginning of his interview with Michael Perry when he says “I get the feeling that destiny in a way has dealt you a really bad deck of cards. It doesn’t exonerate you, and when I talk to you it does not necessarily mean I have to like you, but I respect you and you are a human being, and I think human beings should not be executed. It is as simple as that.”

However it is really not the main focus of the documentary, he really lets all those involved speak for themselves whether they agree or disagree.

There were two really powerful moments of this documentary where I thought to myself, if were to have to decide someone’s fate, or strap them down so they could take their last breath, could I do it?

The answer is no. Sadly there are people who do, and how heavy must their hearts be. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Documentary/Crime

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

The Hedgehog

The rest of her family, mother, father, and sister, are played spot-on, but the real pleasure is in watching the janitor of her apartment building, Renée Michel, an overweight, somewhat frumpy, 54-year-old widow. Renée is a curmudgeon, but Paloma discovers that there’s more to her than vacuuming. Josiane Balasko is wonderful as an intellect trapped in a janitor’s body.

Enter Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa), a new tenant, a widower who is erudite and soft-spoken. The connection between Kakuro and Renée is… Well, you’ll see.

The Hedgehog is the French equivalent of a really really good American indie film, only a little more sophisticated, and possibly restrained. The movie is inspired by the best-selling book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. It’s fun, well-acted, has a good storyline, and will appeal to a large viewing population. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated PG

DVD Release Date: 3/27/12

Anyhow…

Sometimes, though, remakes really work. They add something that gives it just enough spin, just enough of a difference you can view it as an entirely different film. The Departed, A Fistful of Dollars, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, even The Toy, all films based on previous foreign language films, all tweaked appropriately for American audiences. It can be done.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), is not one of these exceptions.

The story of a disgraced journalist hired to solve a 30 year old murder, aided by a damaged gothy investigator, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) is a carbon copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009). Sure it’s got a Trent Reznor score, and sure it’s always nice to see Christopher Plummer, but it’s the same movie. They all speak English. It’s still set in Sweden, they’re all supposed to be Swedish, but English they doth speak. I suppose that if The Hunt for Red October taught us anything, it is that as long as someone has some sort of accent, we can believe they’re from anywhere.

There are slight differences between the two, and some have said the 2011 version is closer to the book. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t tell you for certain, but it can’t be much closer, because they are 99 percent the same movie. Director David Fincher did a couple of visually interesting things that weren’t done in the 2009 version, but the rest of the film is so straight forward, they almost feel out of place.

All of my sourness aside, since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) is such an amazing film, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) is essentially the same movie, that means it too is really good. And as much as I didn’t think it needed to be made, and I don’t feel they made any improvements over the original, it’s still an awesome thriller.
So if you didn’t see the original because it was subtitled, or if you, like my mom and most people with eyes, think Daniel Craig is dreamy, I would definitely recommend seeing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Crime/Drama/Mystery

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 3/20/12

Gary Oldman, whose career seemed to fly off the rails nearly 20 years ago after an initial impression on the screen which predicted nothing but stardom, gives one of the best, and easily the most unique, performances of his career as ‘retired’ British agent George Smiley. Oldman has, for far too long, been getting by on screen by a reliance on over-acting that would make even holiday hams like Pacino and Hopkins wince, spitting and shouting when simple recitations were in order. Here, playing a role originally played by Alec Guiness in the BBC version of the story, he has abandoned everything that had begun to define him, and offers an impeccable performance of calm, muted observation that, in its inexpressiveness, expresses much more than his history of shouting ever could. It’s the best performance of his career since playing Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears nearly 25 years ago, and well worthy of the Oscar nomination it brought him.

This same praise can go to the entirety of the cast, one of the most impressive collections of talent brought together for a film in many a year, which features Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, John Hurt and Ciaran Hinds as disparate members of British Intelligence who are working undercover to combat the Russians in the early 1970s. One of these men is also, as we discover early on, working as a mole inside the service for the Russians. The question is, who is it, and why? It’s up to Smiley to find out. I could explain more, but it’s all too tangled in the tentacles of the narrative for me to adequately explain. There’s a lot to take in.

One of the criticisms of the film, and it has its merits, is that, due to the necessity of paring the story down from a grand sprawl to a tidy 120 minutes, it can all get a bit muddled. Because there is a need for so much exposition, and a large number of the story is told in flashbacks, it can be hard to always follow the narrative. This, generally, is a problem with these sorts of espionage tales, so it’s not a worrisome issue, but it is important to pay close attention to the tiniest details. One of the strengths of the film is it eschews all ‘flashing lights’; there are no ham-fisted moments where the director decides to telegraph the story for you. This is an engrossing story, so be engrossed.

The director, himself, is another strength of the film. Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson, who made such an impact on viewers with his previous film, the masterful and brooding vampire story Let the Right One In, continues apace with a visually and stylistically restrained effort. It is a tone that matches its protagonist, the reserved Smiley, and its subject matter. Silver and cold, the measured look and pace of the film allows the story to unfold in the way that it should, minus any action set pieces or rapid fire cuts. The star of the film is the narrative; the actors, no matter how brilliant, are there to present the words. It takes an exceptional director to recognize this, and make it come to life. He does so in a way very few of his contemporaries would have even tried. The score, by Alberto Iglesias, also merits special attention, as it aids in establishing mood and tone and is never obtrusive, or attempting to manipulate emotions which don’t exist. Which, in many ways, is the lesson of the espionage game; don’t get too close to anyone. They’ll betray you. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama/Mystery/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 3/20/12