Quickie: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)–*** Quickie Review Jean-Dominque Bauby, editor of Elle magazine, suffers a stroke, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down and without the ability to speak. With the help of a speech therapist, he learns to communicate by blinking his left eye and dictates a book chronicling his “locked-in” life. A surreal, emotional experience, Schnabel adaptation of Bauby’s memoir is inspired even if it doesn’t reach the dramatic peaks it shoots for. Bauby’s still sharp sense of humor despite his condition (likely pulled directly from his memoir) maintains the film, while Max von Sydow’s performance as Bauby’s father achieves the highest level of sincerity. Also starring Mathieu Amalric as...
Read MoreMovie Review: Romance & Cigarettes
Romance & Cigarettes (2007)–**** It’s easy to see why John Turturro’s long-shelved movie musical Romance & Cigarettes never got a major theatrical release. This working-class battle of the sexes doesn’t even bother to sugarcoat the relationships between characters when they break into pop songs from the ’60s and ’70s. Sex, love and sad, funny truths come together in one of the most unique musical experiences I’ve ever had. James Gandolfini stars as Nick Murder, a married bridge builder from Queens who deals with his midlife crisis by getting a little on the side. His wife (Susan Sarandon) finds one of the raunchy poems Nick wrote to his lingerie-selling mistress (Kate Winslet), sparking some serious introspection on the part of the married couple. What is love after so many years of marriage? Thankfully, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Connie Francis, and...
Read MoreHoliday Recap: Juno, Charlie Wilson’s War, I Am Legend, Sweeney Todd
The best Christmas presents I received this year were from Aaron Sorkin and Diablo Cody. From those two screenwriters came two screenplays. From the screenplays came two of the year’s smartest, most entertaining films. Charlie Wilson’s War, a film about a Texas congressman who decides to wage a covert war against the Soviets by supplying the Afghans with weapons in 1980, is a lesson in geopolitics, probably a 400-level class. It’s not nearly as inspiring as either The American President or The West Wing, but Sorkin here has created three of the best characters he’s ever written. In the hands of Julia Roberts, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Hanks (as Charlie Wilson), Charlie Wilson’s War is an ensemble comedy so smart and so fast you’d swear it came out in the 1930s. Juno is not a 1930s comedy, though....
Read MoreMovie Review: Atonement
Atonement (2007)–*1/2 Ugh. There’s really no other way to start a review of Atonement, director Joe Wright’s dutifully dour attempt at adapting Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name. Ugh. As rapturous as a perfume commercial and as romantic as an Old Navy ad, Atonement rarely touches an audience’s romantic spirit or its emotional sensibilities. There’s a reason for that, mostly because it is told from the perspective of someone who never ever really knows love. I can only assume that there is no love in the sad eyes of an elderly Briony Tallis (played as an old woman by Vanessa Redgrave). When she sits down for an interview in the last moments of the film she explains her culpability in the lost love life of the film’s main protagonists, Celia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy). She wrote...
Read MoreMovie Review: The Golden Compass
The Golden Compass (2007)–*** It’s a great feeling to walk in to a theater skeptical of the movie you are about to watch only to have that skepticism wash away. The Golden Compass, the latest fantasy film released in a market awash in ho-hum genre releases, is the first film outside of The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter that lives up to its promised spectacle. Of course, part of the spectacle are the warrior polar bears known in The Golden Compass as Ice Bears. Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) dreams of meeting a real Ice Bear and of other spectacular adventures while living and learning at a stuffy formal university. The young girl is stuck there because her scientist uncle Asriel (Daniel Craig) is out doing his own adventuring, traveling to the arctic north to prove the existence...
Read MoreMovie Review: No Country for Old Men
No Country for Old Men (2007)–**** I’m writing this review about 20 minutes after watching No Country for Old Men because it’s a film that deserves to be written about when I still don’t have my bearings. I don’t know when I’ll get them back, but I don’t think it will be soon. No Country for Old Men has that severe an effect on the audience. The characters in this film face something so incomprehensible that the immediate reaction is to call it insane. They are unable to process the horror and its the collateral damage. We the audience are lucky enough to have Ethan and Joel Coen co-direct No Country for Old Men, because these filmmakers, today worthy of being called veterans and masters, don’t make it easy for us to process either. What are we trying to...
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