Steven M. Finkelstein

The title of this flick should have been Robert Duval Being Old and Crotchety: The Movie, because that’s what you’re getting here. Duval stars as the central figure of this fairly low-key tall tale, which is supposedly based at least partially on true events. He plays cranky old hermit Felix Bush, who lives in a run-down cabin in the woods sometime in the 20’s, or possibly 30’s; they never bother to tell us which, or in exactly what part of the country the action is taking place, for that matter. I use the term “action,” but there’s actually precious little of that going on. The plot runs something along these lines: Duval, who has been the subject of many rumors for the 40 years that he has been in self-imposed seclusion, enlists the aid of funeral director Bill Murray and his younger assistant so that he can have a funeral party for himself…only he wants it while he’s still alive! Craziness! Bet you didn’t see that coming! Murray is eager to do it, since his business is struggling, and, to ensure that hundreds of guests will come, Duval also advertises that he will raffle off his land. But the real reason that he wants the party is fairly obvious from the very beginning: there’s a dark secret in his past, that we get some rather heavy-handed hints about, even from the movie’s opening scene, and he wants to admit to the world what happened and clear his conscience before he dies. As the plot moves rather lazily along, Sissy Spacek shows up, and she and Duval amble along in the woods together exchanging harmless and slightly nauseating old people flirtation. Duval was involved with her sister, once upon a time, and his awful secret involves her in some way.

Here’s the main problem with this movie: it all builds up to the “big reveal,” that being Duval’s admittance of whatever it is that happened all those years ago, at his funeral party. But we aren’t invested enough in the character to care, or at least I wasn’t. We already have a pretty good idea, from all the clues, of what it was that happened. And since the reveal is supposed to be the most engrossing part of the movie, and it doesn’t really pay off, the rest of the time we took to get there doesn’t seem worth it, especially since the journey just wasn’t all that interesting. Spacek, Duval, and Murray are all great talents, but they seem to be phoning it in here just a bit. Murray is underutilized, and even though it’s a worthy performance from Duval, who gets plenty of screen time, I’ve liked him better elsewhere. This is sort of just an extension of the crazy old man type character he played in his cameo in The Road last year. I also felt like this played a little like a rehashing of the Clint Eastwood flick Gran Torino, where the central character just doesn’t like the changes he’s seeing in a world that has essentially passed him by. Eastwood at least was slightly more coherent; here we have to deal with Duval twitching and muttering to himself for a lot of the time. It gets tiresome, and there just wasn’t enough else going on to keep my interest. At the end of an hour and a half, it felt like the idea behind this movie was better than the actual execution, which is a shame, when you have as much talent available as appears here. It’s not all bad, by any means, but I think I could have gotten most of the same elderly angst by visiting any local old folks’ home. The only difference between that and this would have been the period costumes. Ultimately, I left with feelings of general bemusement and disappointment; a team-up between Duval and Murray should have been a goldmine, but this one never really panned out. My rating: 5/10.

Christopher Nolan has really been on a role the past few years. Since getting himself on the map with Momento, he singlehandedly relaunched the Batman series that Joel Schumacher did his absolute best to destroy, giving it credibility again, and now he comes at us with a thought provoking, inventive, clever thriller with Inception. Leonardo DiCaprio, for my money one of the best leading men in Hollywood, heads a great cast that includes Michael Caine, underutilized here, Ken Watanabi, and Cilian Murphy, who hasn’t been getting enough work lately. DiCaprio, along with a carefully selected team, are hired to penetrate the mind and dreams of a young industrialist who is about to inherit a business empire from his father. They are going to attempt an inception, the act of planting an idea in someone’s mind via their dreams. It’s a risky venture, as the mind has natural defenses against this, particularly one like Cilian Murphy (who plays the industrialist), who has had his mind fortified against this possibility. To plant the idea successfully, the team must delve deep into the subject’s mind, and if the mind defends against them, they can become trapped there; inside the mind, time is subjective, so what seems like a couple of hours in the real world can seem like several eternities within the mind. DiCaprio’s team brings along an “architect,” to shape the mind into what they want it to be for the purpose of planting the idea. The result is some really eye popping imagery, as within the mind, and in the framework of dreams, anything is possible. The trip becomes even more dangerous when it is revealed that DiCaprio’s character has what essentially amounts to the ghost of his ex-wife following him into other people’s minds. She wants him to be with her, and the only way to do that is to kill him inside the dream, thereby killing him in real life also.

Confused yet? I sure was, and I’m going to have to see this at least two or three times more, I think, to catch everything. Even then, I still might not. This is one of those movies that continually asks you what is real and what isn’t, right up until the end, and since we’re dealing with the mind, and dreams, they’re valid questions. What are dreams? We have theories, but we don’t really know. The examination of that question is part of what this movie is about, and since we don’t know all the answers, there’s no easy answer to what sort of movie this is either. On the surface, it’s part action movie, reminding me, at times, of the Matrix trilogy; the visuals are somewhat similar. It’s a drama, as we continue to learn the secrets about DiCaprio and his ex-wife’s death. It’s suspense, as we are left guessing, at every turn, how things are going to come out, and there are even some well-timed comedic elements, as some of the team member’s personalities clash, with good effect. This is a really masterful cast, from DiCaprio on down, and they play off each other well. I won’t reveal what happens in the end, and whether our heroes (antiheroes?), mission is successful, but suffice to say, Nolan accomplishes what he wants to here, making us think, and guess, and puzzle, for every moment we’re subjected to this phenomenal bit of storytelling. Often the best movies are the ones that won’t be categorized, and this is one of them. Nolan demands intelligence and sophistication from his audience, and the fact that he expects them, I think, is a nice complement. This is in every way worth seeing. It is compelling all the way down the line, from the concept itself, to the visuals, to the dialogue, to the acting. It’s all there, the stuff of classic cinema, and yet some of the stuff done here on screen could only have been done in the modern era…and with a $200 million budget. Since The Dark Knight did so well, Nolan had the money to throw around, but he’s going to make it back here, and then some. Bottom line? Run, don’t walk, to see this movie, one of the best of the year, so far. My rating: 7/10.

The newest sequel with the Predator theme, starring the dredlocked creatures that first appeared in the Schwarzenegger original, is exactly what was advertised: a bloody return to the series’ roots, with much of the same brooding menace that made the first one a success. People discount Predator 2 as being inferior to the original. I thought it was every bit as good, just…different. The unlikely substitution of Danny Glover for the musclebound Governator worked surprisingly well. Then came the Alien vs Predator and Alien vs Predator: Requiem films. They were watchable, but not great. I attribute it to two problems: one, they went with the PG-13 rating for the first one, which eliminated the possibility of most profanity and excessive gore, and pretty much killed it dead before they even got started. Even though the second was R rated, it was a fairly lifeless outing, with the plot seeming phoned in and no name actors to speak of. Two, there was such build-up over the years for the clash between these legendary movie monsters that anything less than Citizen Kane with Aliens and Predators was going to feel like a letdown, and both of these surely did. They were lackluster, and the box office gross reflected that. But this time around, Robert Rodriguez promised to do things right and recapture the spirit of the first installment, and I’ll give the guy credit where it’s due. I would have liked to see him direct, rather than Nimrod Antel, but hey, you can’t have everything.

This time around the hero is Royce (Adrian Brody), a mercenary stolen from Earth and airdropped onto a foreign planet, along with six other assorted combat vet/assassin types, plus That Seventies Show’s Topher Grace, presumably as Predator bait. The most recognizable of the other actors is Danny Trejo, who finally, after putting in twenty years as a Hollywood set piece, will get his long overdue starring role in Machete, due out soon. It doesn’t take long before Royce and the crew figure out that the planet is a game preserve, and they’re being hunted by interstellar baddies. They band together, but human nature being what it is, there’s tension among the group due to different priorities, mindsets, etc. It’s a bit formulaic, borrowing from “The Most Dangerous Game” short story and about two dozen other Hollywood action flicks roughly based on it from the past three decades. Still, what makes things work pretty well here, for the most part, is the sense of anticipation built up before the appearance of the first creatures (they don’t show up for close to an hour), fine cinematography, and the ability to avoid overly cheesy dialogue. Adrian Brody isn’t exactly miscast as Royce…everyone keeps saying he’s “playing against type” in this film, but does Brody really have a type? He’s a chameleon, and he tackled an action role successfully in King Kong, lest we forget. Still, having him growl into the camera and act like a tough guy feels a bit strained at times…I’d like to buy it but I just can’t…and having him take his shirt off in the last few minutes of the movie, presumably to show off his chiseled abs, wasn’t doing me any favors either. Sex symbol this man is not. But aside from these minor gripes, everything progresses swimmingly. There’s a Predator vs yakuza fight sequence that pretty much makes the movie, we get some new insight into Predator mythology, we’re introduced to their canine-like attack critters, and they’re packing some fun new technology. We even get a great cameo from Lawrence “Morpheus” Fishburn, who must not have had anything to do some weekend.

If you’re a fan of the action and sci-fi genres, bottom line, you’re probably going to like this. I felt like the last third of the movie probably suffers most (I especially thought the last twenty minutes could have used a good re-write), but there’s a lot more working here than isn’t. The sense of a human protagonist fighting something that is so alien to us and so frustratingly superior that dominated the Schwarzenegger classic is back again, and taking it back to the jungle, albeit on a different planet, was a wise decision. Is this high art? No, and it wasn’t meant to be. Let’s face it, if you go see a movie like this, you know what you’re getting yourself into. If you don’t think too much, and you’re looking for violent, testosterone-laced entertainment, this is the way to go. My rating: 6/10.

Although it had been eleven years since the release of Toy Story 2, it could be argued that Pixar really needed to do this one right. After all, this was the franchise they pretty much hung their hat on; the original pioneered the sort of animation that would become typical of the studio, and the follow up was just as successful as the first. With that in mind, it was necessary for the creative team to fight through the “franchise exhaustion” that often comes about at the end of a trilogy, making the third the weakest installment. It has happened with so many other trilogies, regardless of genre, and they also were faced with another challenge: coming up with a successful vehicle for Tim Allen, a man who hasn’t had a credible big screen endeavor in several years. But even with the deck stacked against them, Pixar came through. Toy Story 3 is a visually stimulating, thought provoking, and touching film that stays true to the spirit of the original two.

This time around, transition and the finding of one’s place in the world are the over-arching storylines; though these themes were touched on in the first two films also, it avoids feeling redundant. Andy, the owner of the principle toys, Buzz LightYear (Tim Allen) and Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks) is going off to college, and the toys are wondering what’s planned for them. Mistakenly sent to a daycare center when they were intended for the attic, they encounter a sinister toy conspiracy headed by a rotund pink Care Bear lookalike named Lotso. Lotso was lost by his owner years before, but feels that she abandoned him. Bringing some bullying lackeys around to his way of thinking, he uses them to control the daycare center with a fuzzy fist, forcing the new arrivals into playtime with the youngest child denizens, who batter and bash them mercilessly as toddlers are apt to do. Buzz and Woody launch a plan to escape, with help from Mr. Potato Head, Barbie, and the various other principles from the first two. It all leads to a trip to the town dump in the third act, where the wayward playthings come this close to toy purgatory, in a scene that is as frightening and emotionally disturbing as anything the adult “horror” genre has produced lately. This movie is really anything but lighthearted, and although the animation is as bright and shiny as everything Pixar produces, the themes remain as profoundly adult as those in Up and Wall-E. There are some harsh lessons to be taught here: abandonment is a very real possibility, even for innocent, trusting toys, a warped mind is sometimes simply beyond redemption, and sometimes the best of friends can outgrow you. But it all turns out alright in the end, and the rescued toys are given a good home, with a young girl whose sensibilities and creative spirit mimic Andy’s own.

The most important lesson to be learned from these movies is actually an inadvertent one, though. The lesson is, it’s a damn good thing that toys don’t have feelings, and souls, because if they did, then each and every one of us would be doomed to hell for abandoning them and breaking their hearts as we grew up. I found myself thinking longingly of toys long forgotten during the course of this movie, and even though there’s a happy ending, I was left feeling as saddened as I was nostalgic. The only real fault I can find with it is that at times it went just a little too far tugging at the ol’ heartstrings. Pixar is shamelessly manipulative; they even sort of mute the colors at the particularly sappy bits to cue you in on the parts where you’re supposed to be tearing up. But with that being said, this is in every way a successful venture, funny, frightening, and colorful: what every good playtime should be. Not as original as the first of the three, which still gets my nod as one of the better animated kids movies I’ve ever seen, but absolutely worth seeing on the big screen, whatever your age. It’s all the stronger because it comes in a summer that’s been largely devoid of legitimate blockbusters. Recommended. My rating 7/10.

In the age of big-budget Marvel movie releases, the pressure is always on to produce a hit. Some of them have been rousing successes, spawning yet bigger sequels that are then in turn expected to make even more money to justify their over-inflated budgets. Spiderman worked, and the second was better than the first, and then by the third installment they had suffered franchise exhaustion and it was God-awful, forcing the miscast Topher Grace into retirement for three years. The first two X-Men were great, and then they brought on Brett Ratner for the third one and it sucked my ass. Then you’ve got stand alone episodes from the Marvel Knights series that were doomed from the start: Ghost Rider, Daredevil, and both modern Punishers, and Hulks. The formula has been pretty predictable. The first one is good, the second one is better, and the third, which has the highest expectations, is the worst of the three; either that, or the first one is so bad that it doesn’t warrant a second. Where does Iron Man fit in? John Favreau seemed like an odd choice to direct, but the first Iron Man was really a breath of fresh air, due largely to the pithy performance of Robert Downey Jr., a perfect choice to play the wealthy, devil-may-care Tony Stark, and also Oscar winner Jeff Bridges as his nemesis. But with the first one being so unexpectedly excellent, how would the second match up, especially with the knowledge that a third (and possibly fourth) must inevitably follow?

Well, it’s good, but not great. This time around, the plot is a bit more convoluted, as Marvel tried to fit in as many tie-ins as possible. We get more of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, as the “Avenger’s initiative” picks up steam. We get more of the witty-banter-that-eventually-results-in-breathless-kisses between Stark and Pepper Potts. And then we get Stark’s daddy issues…a new villain in the form of Mickey Rourke as Whiplash…yet another generic would be despot in Sam Rockwell…the inclusion of Scarlet Johansen as Black Widow for nothing more or less than sexy window dressing…the emergence of War Machine…it’s all a lot to keep track of, especially crammed into two hours. It feels like a pizza with too many toppings slathered on it. Sooner or later it’s going to get weighed down by all that extra stuff, and lose it’s integrity. While I’m not saying that happened here, what I will say is that perhaps two of the “extra” story lines…the ones that didn’t really feel integral to the plot…could have been done away with, and I think the result would have been much crisper and cleaner. Personally, I would have nixed the Stark with Daddy issues storyline, and also the Pepper Potts romance angle, or at least pared it way down. It’s extraneous, and the “witty” banter between Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow felt really flat. The fact that they kept on saying their lines on top of each other so it was difficult to understand what they were saying didn’t help matters either.

There’s more good than bad here. The “franchise exhaustion” that doomed SpiderMan and X-Men isn’t in evidence yet, but I feel like it’s lurking, not too far from the surface. If there was any leading actor in Hollywood these days that I would have pinned a franchise tag on, it’s Robert Downey Jr. As a guy who’s come back from the brink in his personal life, plagued by very public drug struggles, there’s a kind of eerie sincerity to all his performances these days. He lends a much-needed vulnerability to Tony Stark, and I buy him as a reluctant superhero much more than Toby Mcguire, Nick Cage, Ed Norton, etc…and backup from Don Cheadle and another resurrected youth actor, Mickey Rourke, doesn’t hurt either. This episode (and it is difficult not to view it as an episode, rather than a stand alone film) feels a little cluttered at times, but the action sequences, when they come, are worth the price of admission, particularly the first run-in with Whiplash at the Grand Prix. The first Iron Man was better, but there’s enough energy to power this one too. We’ll see if the magic has died out by 2013 or so when the third one comes out, but in the meantime, I know that Avengers is in the process of casting, so we should have that to tide us over in the meantime…it’s sure to be bigger, longer, louder, and stuffed with five or six times as many heroes, villains, and explosions, in the mighty Marvel way. My rating: 6/10.

The idea with Kick Ass, as I understood it going in, was that it was based on a comic where the premise was something to the effect of “what would happen if a kid without any super powers tried being a superhero?” The protagonist, a nerdy high school type and comic book aficionado, orders a scuba suit and a couple of batons, and takes to the streets to fight crime. So far so good. In his first encounter with a couple of toughs, he is stabbed, then, bleeding profusely, wanders into an intersection where he is hit by a car that looks to be doing about fifty. Here’s where all the realism ends, and also where the movie loses just about all of its credibility for me. The kid recovers fully; in real life, if we are in fact going for “real life” as a premise for this comic and movie, he simply would have died. Instead, he’s basically fine. In fact, he thinks it’s a good idea to go back for more, and the next time he manages to fight off four muggers by himself, despite the fact that he’s supposedly never had any martial arts or combat training of any kind. A passerby takes camera footage, posts it online, and bingo, Kick Ass is born.

This is a movie that thinks it’s real, real clever. It’s passing itself off as kind of a “going against type” super-hero flick, but aside from the fact that the premise, after the first ten minutes or so, doesn’t hold water, a typical super-hero flick is exactly what it turns into. Kick Ass is recruited by a pair of real superheroes, ex-cop Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage) who looks like a cut-rate Batman, and Hit Girl, his foul-mouthed daughter who has no compunctions about shooting, stabbing and otherwise putting the hurt on thugs, all while swearing like a sailor. They’re waging a vendetta against the criminal syndicate responsible for the death of their wife and mother, respectively. Why do they sign up Kick Ass, seeing as he has no superpowers or abilities? Beats me. A bit later another wannabee hero is thrown into the mix, Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasey), who turns out to be the son of the mob boss upon whom Big Daddy and Hit Girl have sworn revenge.

My biggest problem with this movie I already mentioned; it’s the fact that it’s supposed to be banking on “realism;” the superheroes don’t have powers, and they fight crime with weapons and wits. But if this were really true to life, Kick Ass would have simply died after being stabbed and run over in the first few minutes. Then it’s supposed to be an anti-superhero movie, an alternative to the X-Men and Spidermen of the world…but then that’s exactly what it turns into when Big Daddy and Hit Girl show up. It becomes exactly what it’s trying to play off of. I don’t know if the comic book was the same, since I’ve never read it, but in any case…maybe I wouldn’t have had as much of a problem with these issues, were it not for the way the whole concept was being presented. I suppose I could just dismiss all of my earlier gripes, and enjoy this on a very much surface level, but I don’t think that approach would do much good either. Aside from everything I just mentioned, the movie is incredibly derivative. We get, just off the top of my head, a line from Scarface, one from Batman, the mangling of a line from Spiderman, and the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Oh, and three, count ‘em, three Pepsi product placements. Ugh. Over it all, we get narration from Kick Ass that gets tedious after about fifteen minutes. The action sequences are nothing that I haven’t see in, well, several other superhero movies. The only “novelty” is that some of the ass kicking is being done by Hit Girl, a twelve year old shooting up baddies while calling them cunts…is this supposed to be shocking? I’m sorry, but I’ve long since been desensitized to profanity and violence.

Bottom line, all of this has been done before. If they hadn’t tried so hard to make this so tongue-in-cheek, I think I would have had a much easier time swallowing it. As it is, this movie is mired in the very mediocrity of the average, ho-hum super-hero genre that it’s trying so hard to parody. It’s not awful, but you’d be a lot better off renting one of the “real super-hero” flicks Kick Ass ends up being in the end, despite its best efforts. My rating: 5/10

Wow. Holy God in heaven did this ever suck. Granted, I saw this atrocity on bootleg DVD rather than on the big screen, but you could have had a screen a mile wide and it couldn’t have saved a film with virtually no redeeming features. If you’ve seen the 1981 version of Clash you should have a general idea of what’s going on, but if you haven’t, fear not. The plot, such as there is of it, can be strung together in a few minutes of dialogue that alternates between campy and idiotic, and never comes close to achieving the level of epic it strives for. Perseus (Sam Worthington, also seen in Avatar and Terminator: Salvation) is thrown into the middle of a war between the Gods, featuring Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, and men, featuring a bunch of interchangeable idiots with spears and shields. If you’re looking for mythological accuracy, forget it. It’s sort of like all of the better Greek myths were thrown together into a Boggle cube and shaken up, then tossed out across an hour and forty minutes of screen time with the hope that something compelling would come of it. And a vain hope it is, because even the three or four major battle scenes, which, lets face it, are the only reason you’d go to see something like this, were better done in Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, or even Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. There’s so much that bothered me here I’d be up all night if I listed everything, so, in no particular order, here’s what boiled my brain inside my skull the most: Perseus starts out as a fisherman, unaware that Zeus is really his father, and then, after literally a one minute lesson in the use of a sword, masters the weapon to the point that he’s twirling it around like he’s been a soldier all his life. Fiennes and Neeson are appearing in their second movie together. The first? Schindler’s List. Why did these guys agree to sign on for this project? Was it the money? Whatever it might have been, I’d be ashamed to show my face around Hollywood ever again after being associated with this train wreck. Zeus decides at the end of the film to release the Kraken, the sea monster from Norse mythology that last appeared in the Pirates trilogy. Did they just decide to completely ignore the fact that the creature never had anything remotely to do with Greek legend, or did they just see it in Pirates and think, hey, you know what? That looks pretty cool, steal it!

Bottom line? This was a catastrophe of epic proportions. Sam Worthington I thought did a serviceable job in Terminator: Salvation. I thought he didn’t do anything wrong in Avatar, just didn’t add anything significant. Here, it’s just laughable when he delivers his lines with a scowl, trying to add some intensity to a film that was destined from the first five minutes to be on Mystery Science Theater 3000. This really wasn’t the next best step as he tries to firm up his standing as one of the new Hollywood action go-to guys. The action sequences and creatures are similar to what we’ve seen in multiple other films over the past few years, but so much better elsewhere. And the dialogue is so bad that, set against the heroic battle music in the background, I really have to search my memory for another film as unintentionally funny. Sometimes you just get a flick that’s doomed from the very beginning, and this was one of them. A movie this bad could have easily spelled the end of  Greek civilization, or any other. My rating: 2/10.

It’s unusual for Martin Scorcese to take a stab at a suspense film, and I’m not sure what prompted him to do it, but the results of his fourth pairing with leading man Leonardo Dicaprio, the dark, dreary Shutter Island, is atypical for a number of reasons. The precision camera work is still there, as always, as is the intensity of the actors that can be pretty well counted on, but there’s something that feels a little off here, as though the great director has decided not to follow his own vision and instead is being more influenced than usual by directors from the past. It feels almost like he’s trying to channel Hitchcock. This is film noire, certainly, reminding me, at times, of both The Birds and Psycho. At some moments there’s even hints of  Stanley Kubrick and The Shining. Leo is a federal Marshall, who, along with his partner, Mark Ruffalo, are heading to Shutter Island, a prison for the criminally insane, in the early 1950’s. When they arrive, they find themselves confronted with bureaucratic regulations that include the surrender of their firearms and the refusal of the doctor in charge (Ben Kingsley, excellent as always), to turn over personnel files of guards and orderlies. The pair is there to investigate the disappearance of a female prisoner, and it becomes rapidly apparent that nothing is as it seems. There is no conceivable way for the woman to have escaped the island, so it therefore follows that she must still be there somewhere. Leo begins to be beset by migraine headaches, and also dreams and images of his dead wife, along with flashback sequences of his liberation of Dachau when he was in the army a few years before. Scorsese is fully capable of turning up the creep factor, and he does, particularly with the concentration camp scenes that include the cold-blooded murder of Nazi guards by Leo and his platoon. The two lawmen start to explore the island, under the scrutiny of the good doctor and his guards, who seem to know a whole lot more than they’re letting on. A pounding, spine-tingling soundtrack follows the action, seemingly dogging our heroes just as much as the inevitable questions that begin to come about as Leo’s sanity seems to be unraveling. Can he trust Ruffalo, a partner with whom he has never been paired before? Has he been brought to the island for some other purpose than what was originally revealed? What secrets from his past tie into his present?

The longer it all went on, the more it reminded me of another “what the hell is going on around here” type of movie, the Nick Cage vehicle The Wicker Man from a few years ago. I didn’t like most of that movie while it was in progress, partly because of Cage’s hair plugs, and partly because there seemed to be too many dissident elements, and I didn’t think, in the end, that they would be able to come up for a satisfactory explanation for everything. In that case, they did, and I was pleasantly surprised. If you’re going to invest a couple of hours of trying to figure out, along with the protagonist, what’s going on, then when it’s finally revealed, it sure as hell better be worth your time, and that was the case here; the longer it went on, which was quite a while, the movie clocking in at just over two hours, I began to think it less and less likely. But like Wicker Man, I was satisfied when the conclusion came. It saved this film, and also, without revealing too much, made me think of the payoffs at the end of The Sixth Sense and A Beautiful Mind. When it’s all said and done, it does all tie together, almost when I had given this offering up for lost.

This is far from a perfect movie, and far from the best Scorsese. I think the legendary director went outside of his element here, and the thriller/horror genre might not be the best place for him. The movie is about twenty minutes too long, and it might be taking itself a touch too seriously. But there’s some good here, undeniably: a typically above average performance by Dicaprio, a surprisingly good turn by Mark Ruffalo, and Ben Kingsley rounding out the cast hasn’t hurt a movie yet. This will stand out as an anomaly in the Scorsese cannon, I think, a departure from his area of expertise. But there’s nothing wrong in experimenting, even at his age, and I still enjoyed this jaunt, even if it’s not Goodfellas or Raging Bull. My rating: 6/10.

It’s easy to forget how good of an actor Jeff Bridges actually is. It’s easy to forget a lot of things about him…that he’s the son of legendary actor Lloyd Bridges, that he’s made over 60 movies in his career, and that he’s worked with an entire laundry list of elite Hollywood actors and actresses in his life, the veritable creme de la creme of A-listers. But make no mistake, he can do it all, action, comedy, drama, and everything in between, and he’s capable of delivering as subtle and nuanced a performance as any of the greats that he’s shared a marquee with. What makes him all the more remarkable is how he slides so easily from star to co-star to bit part…he can do it all, but however much screen time he’s getting (and if a director is smart, they’re giving him plenty), he makes the most of it. That’s certainly the case with Crazy Heart, in which he delivers a Best Actor winning, Oscar caliber perfomance, his first. Bridges is Bad Blake, a fictional, over the hill but still soulful country singer, who has been reduced to playing honky tonks throughout the Southwestern United States. An overweight smoker/alcoholic, Blake is a musical cliche, and he knows it, but there’s nothing he can do about it. When a divorced reporter with a young son many years his junior (Maggie Gylenhall, in the best performance I’ve yet seen from her), falls for his boozy charms, he wants to become a significant part of her life; she wants it too, but she isn’t blind to the glaring faults of the man who wants to be known only by his self-given stage name, “Bad.” Against her better judgment, she lets him into her home, and that of her son, who is in need of a father figure, even an unreliable one.

Meanwhile, Bad is considering doing an album with a young protege, (Colin Ferral, who also is well cast), but he can’t decide how much animosity he really harbors toward the younger man, who is enjoying success and current “it” status. Ferral wants Bad to write him some songs and share in the royalties, but even that task is distasteful, not to mention almost impossible for a man who can’t get through a set without running offstage to empty his guts into the Arizona dust. You know where all of it is going…when his young squeeze leaves her son in Bad’s care, he promptly loses the child while drunk, and even though he is found, unharmed, Gylenhall knows that her man is too damaged for her to possibly stay with. What follows is Bad trying to get on the wagon, with the help of an old friend (Robert Duvall, who serves as executive producer, along with Bridges himself). The singer does so successfully, even using the fresh heartache from being abandoned by Gylenhall to write a song that he then sells to Ferral; naturally, it turns into a best seller. The movie ends leaving several critical questions: will Bad stay on the wagon? Is there a bright end to his story? Or will he succumb to his personal demons, as, realistically, the odds seem to be stacked against him? The movie makes the proper choice, which is to leave things open ended. Sometimes it is what you choose not to do with a character, and what you choose to leave out of a story, that make it more convincing, more poignent, less final.

Was Bridges’ performance the best by a male actor for 2009? I can’t really say for certain, having not seen all of the other nominees. But this is a fine, fine performance, make no mistake about that. Bridges is one of those guys where it doesn’t really look like he’s trying too hard to be as good as he is. He’s like an athlete that’s so naturally gifted that you begin to take his acrobatic slam dunks and circus catches for granted. But the Academy couldn’t take this performance for granted, and this award is, perhaps, overdue. How much of Bridges went into Bad Blake? How much can he relate to this character? I can only speculate, but there is no question that he owned it, and made it his. I was convinced, and touched. The emotion that he conjures up seems very real, and it’s easy to forget, at times, that Bridges is acting, which is the mark of one of the true greats. I guess when you’re one of the few that have acting in your blood, in your genes, maybe that’s one of your gifts. My rating: 7/10.

Well, regretfully, I have to say this was the worst Tim Burton movie I’ve ever seen. To begin with, instead of just relying on source material from the two books, Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Burton decided to go with a linear narrative. Now, it’s very rare that you’re going to hear me encouraging deviating from a linear narrative, as you take a good deal of risk when you do, but this is one of the rare occasions that I would actually endorse it. Part of the magic of the two books is that there isn’t really any cohesive plot to speak of. There’s a feeling of unreality; Alice is having adventures in a kind of dream world, so the only needed transitions are her running from encounter to encounter with the different animals and creatures. It worked in the books, and it would have worked here, but strangely, Burton decided to just take the characters and write his own story with them, combined with some back story and mythology that is only hinted at. The results are disastrous.

For a guy like Burton, who I’d commend as being one of the most creative directors I’ve ever encountered, Alice is surprisingly derivative. There were aspects that reminded me of several other films, among them the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Narnia movies (and books), along with some stripes of Neverending Story. The battle scene between Alice and the Jabberwock at the end reminded me very much of the claymation characters from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, one of the worst movies ever made, right up there with the live action Bewitched and Gigli. Awful. But the movie that Alice most resembles for me is actually one that might possibly be considered the biggest misstep for another great director, Stephen Spielberg. I’m referring to Hook. The similarities are many. Alice, like Peter, returns to a land of enchantment she’d known as a child, but as an adult. She finds that in her absence there have been unpleasant changes happening, and only by embracing the childlike quality that had allowed her to visit the “imaginary” locale in the first place-  Wonderland, or Neverland respectively- can she set things right again. Hook would have been redeemable had Spielberg just stuck to the book and not tried to rewrite a classic. Burton is guilty of the same crime.

There’s the additional problem of all of the characters seemingly going for different tones. Some of them seem to be there for comedic effect, some to ramp up the action, some are going for melodrama. It’s like Burton just told everyone to let their freak flag fly and do what they feel. The result is that there’s a real incongruence. If it was going to be straightforward action, then they should have stuck to that, the same for comedy. Since Burton couldn’t seem to make up his mind, we as an audience can’t either, and that’s never good. Then there are so many other, smaller things to potentially nitpick. Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter, is inexplicably Scottish; he goes into battle at the end of the movie in a kilt, yielding a claymore. Huh?! During the movie he laments that since darkness has fallen over Wonderland, (which the natives refer to as Underland, also inexplicably), there is a certain dance he no longer does. When the White Queen and her disciples win the battle at the end, he breaks into the dance, which looks like a juiced-up version of the Electric Slide. I read in a newspaper where the reviewer compared it to the Ewoks dancing at the end of Return of the Jedi, and I concur. It’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen Johnny Depp do on the big screen, again, simply awful. The Jabberwock talks, speaking not to Alice, but to the Vorpal Sword, with whom it apparently has some sort of shared history; since Burton just pulled this particular piece of clap-trap out of his ass and there’s no mention of it in the books, this is merely confusing. The same goes for an invented character, a bloodhound who is being forced to track Alice against his will because the Red Queen is holding his mate and puppies captive. Hey, Wonderland is pretty great, but you know what it needs? A C.G.I. bloodhound! Think how much that will add to the movie!

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The best I can say for this super-expensive disaster is that there are some pretty colors from time to time, but they don’t come close to saving this lifeless outing. I saw this movie in 2D, rather than pay the extra four dollars a ticket, and now I’m glad that I did. 2D, 3D, or 5D, nothing was going to save this movie; it was dead on arrival. I’ll just say this in closing. I don’t know how many of the choices I’ve been talking about, the decision to deviate from the source material, the addition of new characters, the baffling creation of a new mythology that is then inadequately explained, the making of the movie into a Lord of the Rings style quest that pits all the characters against each other on opposite sides of a central conflict, etc…I don’t know how many of those choices were Burton’s, or how many were the Disney execs telling him what to do to try to make it more appealing to the masses. For Burton’s sake, I really hope he was being leaned on heavily, because if  he had creative control and he did something like this, I’ve lost a lot of respect for the man. Everybody misfires every once in a while, creatively, and even a guy like Burton is allowed to do it. But if he was going to choose one time for a major misfire, he might have done so with another project besides one based on two of the most beloved children’s books of all time. On paper, it seemed like Alice was the movie that Burton was born to direct. I don’t know. Maybe the pressure got to him. My rating: 3/10.