Lovely and melancholy, poignant and chilling, “Never Let Me Go” is an old school sci-fi dystopia with lovely, wistful performances that never quite overcome the fatalism that hangs over the whole affair.
Music video director Mark Romanek’s film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is an arid take on an alternate reality where disease, death and dying have been beaten back by a medical and moral breakthrough. Organ transplants were perfected in the 1950s. Life is better, longer. So why is no one smiling?
Two very good looking people play two offbeat and abrasively charming lovers in “Love
& Other Drugs.” And when your screen romance is as sexual as this one, it helps if your stars are about as good looking with their clothes off as human beings get.
The mismatched “Brokeback Mountain” couple Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal re-couple here — on the floor, the bed, back alleys. It’s a movie on the make about a guy on the make who meets a woman who isn’t above using and tossing aside guys the way he discards women. And it’s about what happens after all that mating, when things get serious.
Gyllenhaal is Jamie, a med school drop-out who rattles through assorted sales jobs, getting by on his flirty sales pitch. Thenl he stumbles into pharmaceuticals. Director and co-writer Ed Zwick (“Glory,” “Defiance,” and more tellingly “About Last Night…”) plops Jamie into Pfizer just as Zoloft and then Viagra take off. Some of the most interesting stuff in the movie concerns the tricks drug reps use to get doctors to prescribe their medications and the little bribes doctors take that grease the wheels, the subject of a major ProPublica news expose just this fall.
Jamie quickly masters the trade, taking the advice of his boss (Oliver Platt), getting in good with a “thought leader” doctor (Hank Azaria) whose influence will cause others to prescribe his drugs. But then Jamie meets a patient, one with a wicked wit a wicked temper and a funny attitude about her health. Maggie (Hathaway) is “not too bummed about having a major degenerative disorder at 26.” And she’s not interested in Jamie’s mating games.
Cards on the table, tumble on the bed. Just don’t call her “girlfriend” or it’s over.
Mom, or grandmom, is a real piece of work. She presides over a family of low-rent thugs — armed robbers, guys with guns, no ambition and very bad tempers.
As played by Jacki Weaver, she is the lioness who rules “Animal Kingdom,” a Darwinian experiment playing out in an Australian family where violence is a norm.
Not that she’s obvious about it. She doesn’t call the shots. Janine simply exerts a creepy psycho-sexual hold over her lads in this Australian thriller, a hold that makes us fear for the grandson (James Frecheville) forced to live under her roof.
A chilling coming-0f-age story with a backdrop of horrific violence, nightmarish choices in the present and the prospect of a bleak future, “Animal Kingdom” is a genre picture designed to get under your skin and in your head, a thriller that repulses even as it draws you in.
Kevin Kline’s post-Academy Award career hasn’t been the most glorious. The performances were often there, but the acclaim and box office rewards, not so much.
But every so often, a piece comes along tailor made for the man, and “The Extra Man,” which didn’t earn wide release, is such a film. Kline plays something of a gigolo.
“Don’t be disgusting. I’m an extra man — essential. There’s always a need for an extra man at the table.”
A dapper, down-on-the-heels college professor who uses his erudite manners and fading good looks to ingratiate himself with the elderly members of the Manhattan/The Hamptons/Palm Beach set, Henry Harrison is determined to be a mentor to young would-be writer Louis Ives (Paul Dano, wonderfully weird).
But Young Louis, whose tale this ostensibly is (the plummy voiced narrator services Louis’ story), as new to the Big City as he is, is no unsophisticated bumpkin. He’s just lost a position with an exclusive boarding school, at least partly for his penchant for ladies’ undergarments. He fancies himself a latter day F. Scott Fitzgerald, he lies to and crushes on the cruelly cute environmentalist (Katie Holmes, good) at his new employer, an environmental magazine.
And Louis shares a flat with Henry, whose academic career is merely a front for thwarted playwriting fame.
And Henry is nothing if not theatrical. He regales Louis of his feuds, his swearing off of sex and love and the requisite skills one must have to come off as a perfect gentleman.
“Men of any worth sit across from women,” he insists, explaining his reasoning for taking up two booths rather than share one with Louis at his favorite diner.
Patti D’Arbanville plays a prostitute who aids Louis in his sexual awakening — lingerie and heterosexual sex. And John C. Reilly is the high-voiced bearded bear of a reclusive, asexual neighbor who sings opera and occasionally fixes Henry’s ancient Electra 225.
Co-adapters/co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robertr Pulcini, working from a Jonathan Ames novel, wring wit, warmth and weird out of this occasionally laugh-out-loud farce. Dano, Reilly and Holmes don affected voices to play their roles, and give sparkling support. Celia Weston is charming as one of the female circle mooching off these other old women with money. Dan Hedaya is only somewhat less effective as a Russian “extra man.”
But it is Kline who carries this, a Fitzgerald fan conjuring up a cruel twist on a Fitzgerald (or Maugham) anti-hero, too good for what he does, too mean to do it that well.
New to DVD, it’s his tour de force, a performance “of uncommon joie de vivre.”
As to why it didn’t reach a bigger audience in theaters, how would you sell a movie who’s tagline might be Henry’s catch phrase — “So there we are. Where are we?”
Paul Haggis is back to his tricky script tricks with the thoroughly engrossing prison break thriller”The Next Three Days.” He foreshadows, hides details, delays his “reveals” and does a pretty good job of keeping us guessing, even if we remember the 2003 French film he adapted for this Hollywood project.
Others heard the story of rock climber Aron Ralston’s days-long ordeal, trapped by a boulder that pinned his arm, and winced. Danny Boyle saw a tale of endurance and triumph, a spiritual journey in which a young man comes to terms with the phrase — “No man is an island.”
“127 Hours” is the remarkable film the director of “Slumdog Millionaire” and his “Slumdog” screenwriter (Simon Beaufoy) conjured out of that excruciating tale. It’s a tribute to Boyle’s filmic flair and the humanity he wears on his sleeve that we can recall how Ralston’s 127 hour saga ends and still be stunned, moved and thrilled by the finale.
James Franco carries this gorgeous picture, giving us a Ralston as grinning Extreme Sports cliche. He works in a mountaineering equipment shop and takes off on solo weekend trips, hurtling across buttes on his mountain bike, exulting in nature and even in the spills he takes along the way. The film’s opening minutes, with Ralston narrating his gonzo adventures on his personal camcorder, show us just how long it takes him to get to the middle of nowhere and how psyched he is to reach his fortress of solitude.
On the day of his accident, he stumbles into a couple of cute coed hikers (Kate Mara, Amber Tamblyn) and disarmingly offers to show them the Blue John Canyon that only he knows. Ralston’s open faced grin advertises a big, open heart, and Franco effortlessly conveys the guy’s innocence, and his lust for life.
The girls move on, after an adventurous side trip (videotaped) to a water hole, and not before Aron has promised to come to their party tonight. Then he dashes up a hill and out of sight. By the time he takes his big tumble, there is nobody within miles of him. He’s going to miss that party.
Rapunzel, the girl locked in a tower with only her long, golden locks for company, gets a sassy, spirited screen treatment from Disney with “Tangled,” an animated fairytale musical from Not Pixar corner of the company.
Disney has turned her into a missing princess — naturally — and it’s not a prince who waits below and calls out “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.” Her hair has magical powers of healing in this version, but only if she doesn’t cut it. Otherwise, they play the story pretty much straight out of the Brothers Grimm.
With “The Illusionist,” fans of the late, great and generally silent French comic Jacques Tati have what is, in essence, his final film. It’s an animated farce in the Tati style , based on a Tati (“Mon Oncle,” Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday”) script.
The lead character, a tall unflappable Frenchman of few words, looks like Tati. And since Tati rarely spoke, director Sylvain Chomet (“The Triplets of Belleville”) has license to basically resurrect him for this quiet, clever and adorably whimsical cartoon comedy.
In the late 1950s, a veteran magician struggles to make a living in an entertainment world that has passed him by. What with rock’n roll bands such as The Britoons, and television, “The Illusionist” can’t hold an audience with his quiet and gentle tricks. It doesn’t matter that he’s a master at his trade. Nobody wants to see a cranky bunny dragged out of a hat anymore.
Two broken souls meet and try to connect in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s screen directing debut, “Jack Goes Boating.” Hoffman, working from the Bob Glaudini play which he also starred in, conjures up a modern day “Marty” about fragile, damaged people who might somehow complete one another if they can just surpass the obstacles that this potential romance drops in their way.
Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, is the smartest guy in the room. He used to be the smartest “kid” in the room, though he aged out of that. Kind of.
But the questions posited by David Fincher’s brilliant film, “The Social Network,” scripted by the brilliant Aaron Sorkin, is why anyone would want to be that smart, and just what Zuckerberg’s brand of brilliance gets him.
