Films Seen - October 2007

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

THE NAMESAKE (57) (dir., Mira Nair) Kal Penn, Irrfan Khan, Tabu "To our parents" reads the final dedication, and the tale of the parents - Indian emigrants to America - acts as a secret reproach, both in terms of narrative (since their role is implicitly to reproach the barbaric new customs, like WASPy blonde girlfriends who call them by their first names without being asked) and also on a more inadvertent level since it's way more interesting than the tale of the son (our nominal hero), caught between two cultures. Initially looks like it's going to be a small, delicate drama, a Satyajit Ray miniature of blossoming slow understanding between shy, reticent people - the father bookish and decent, the young mother dutiful but moody and hyper-sensitive, locking herself in her room when he gently chides her, terrified of driving fast on the slick American roads - but a seemingly intimate story turns into a big, generation-spanning story and the characters turn sketchy and obvious, Kal Penn as the bumptious young man, middle-aged Mom and Dad sharing declarations of love on the steps of the Taj Mahal. First half-hour sets strong foundations with some rich views of Calcutta - temple domes side-by-jowl with tenements - and of course the parents, too dignified to be reduced to markers in an Old vs. New dilemma (the film is predictably conservative, saving much of its scorn for the modern Indian girl with her fashionable friends and second-generation rootlessness); character detail generally trumps Nair's musings on capital-I Identity, incl. the whole Gogol business and recurring names motif - because of course your name (what it means, how you use it) is your identity, just like cultural identity - which is precious and over-elaborate and should probably have stayed in the original novel.  

NO RESERVATIONS (35) (dir., Scott Hicks) Catherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart, Abigail Breslin, Patricia Clarkson CZJ = sleek marble column, something upscale and unblemished and unyielding, a resemblance reinforced by the lighting which tends to give her skin a creamy glossy finish as she stands in the kitchen; also of course by her acting, which is inexpressive - she's the Charles Bronson of romantic comediennes, running the gamut from severely firm to firmly severe - except once towards the end when the kid runs away from her and she grimaces slightly (more a twitch of the mouth than an actual grimace). As in MOSTLY MARTHA, the lack of dramatic conflict is a problem - there's maybe one scene of mild confrontation between CZJ and her niece - filling the gaps with foodie snobbery (heroine's signature-dish is foie gras with truffles), though glossy style is a bigger problem, forever packaging emotion in tidy packages. Most affecting scene is potentially the one where the little girl watches videos of her late mother - but Hicks shoots her in close-up with a glycerine tear in each eye, catching the light as they perch on her eyelashes; the child's grief is reduced to these two little pinpricks of light, carefully arranged for maximum symmetry. It's quite artful, and totally dead.    

STEPHANIE DALEY (63) (dir., Hilary Brougher) Tilda Swinton, Amber Tamblyn, Timothy Hutton Kudos to Brougher for running the gauntlet of the Sundance Lab without falling prey to its over-neatness, making something tense and suggestive. As in STICKY FINGERS OF TIME, mundane co-exists with fantastical, in this case the hidden lurches of a troubled mind (actually two troubled minds, one eventually curing the other): too-quick editing and a twist in the usual shots of the football field - the camera's higher, so we get a menacing daub of dark clouds in a dusky sky as well as the players and fans - turns a high-school football game into something subtly doom-laden; the first suggestion of danger in Swinton's pregnancy - "probably nothing," says the doctor - gets a quick slippery cut to a dead animal by the side of the road, just as earlier a mysterious bit of business with a baby and a small amphibian (frog? toad?) added to the sense of something wrong (it's not irrelevant that the girl is a believer, scouring the world for evidence of God's cryptic "signs"). The whole is a tapestry of little jolts - best of all: the seduction scene, with murmured endearments giving way to the jolt of the act itself - like the hidden energy of synapses crackling and misfiring; "I killed her with my mind!". Tamblyn is compellingly distraught but the pale Swinton persona, with her sharky smile and button-eyed air of belligerence, is a taste I just can't seem to acquire. 

FALLING (54) (dir., Barbara Albert) Birgit Minichmayr, Gabriela Hegedus, Kathrin Resetarits Very BIG CHILL, blending nostalgia with lost idealism though it ends rather strangely, with a glimpse of the young (a new generation) still arguing, still politicised, while the thirtyish heroines get their "clearing" - the film's final image - a place in the woods where they once imagined their own made-up world and thought about building a treehouse. Is youthful idealism being equated with that kind of fanciful utopian naiveté (as the juxtaposition seems to imply), Albert in effect letting off her heroines for losing political faith, letting their fond memories and their bond of friendship be the true ideology ("The age of political ideologies is over")? Or is the film itself only 'political' in the lifestyle-accessory sense of e.g. THE EDUKATORS, dropping in hints of ideals and debates in the same surface way as it drops in a hint of crypto-lesbianism? (Not that THE BIG CHILL was truly political, but 60s idealism defined a generation much more than its 90s equivalent ever did.) Characters range from sharply observed to near-invisible, with one clanking caricature; style exists mostly in the photos which act as frontispieces, BREAKING THE WAVES-like, and grow increasingly abstract - the first one is explicitly explained (i.e. we see someone actually take the picture), the last one may not even be a real photo but a bit of wishful thinking, a fantasy, like that youthful treehouse. Note to self: Don't ever quote that line about a sudden silence in a group being a sign of "an angel passing by", except with really twee people.

REIGN OVER ME (44) (dir., Mike Binder) Don Cheadle, Adam Sandler, Liv Tyler, Saffron Burrows, Jada Pinkett Smith Is a therapy movie more palatable when at least it's not pretending to be anything else? Or does its status as post-9/11 movie muddle its credentials as therapy movie? (The upshot seems to be that 9/11 is too big a tragedy to be encompassed by America's therapy culture, but 9/11 survivors will find their own way out sooner or later.) Lots to admire, especially Sandler who plays it in some ways like a comedy role - rapping and riffing like a stand-up, using his banked hidden violence like he does in his comic persona - but also has the comic's gift for underplaying (comics appreciate the value of a straight face, esp. when speaking unspeakable lines like our hero musing he still sees the family dog - part of his pre-9/11 life - in the mutts he passes on the street: "I look at a German Shepherd and see a goddam poodle!"). Trouble is, each time it starts to become affecting or powerful it does something bone-headed, like the Mel Brooks all-nighter ("You need some Mel!") with concomitant guff about the mad being saner than the sane, the Big Speech with Springsteen (a recurring motif) rumbling low in the background, or the symbolic kitchen being endlessly, symbolically refurbished. Builds to a save-Adam-Sandler-from-being-committed courtroom climax, though I wasn't too worried once I saw the judge was being played by Donald Sutherland; he'd have been screwed if the judge were being played by Dylan Baker.

KNOCKED UP (55) (dir., Judd Apatow) Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann Might as well go with the "Cyprus Mail" review. Slightly longer than usual but I still couldn't work in the TV-network satire, which may be the best of it. I could happily have watched half an hour more of the network execs telling Heigl they can't legally ask her to lose weight but maybe she could get on the bathroom scales, subtract 20 pounds from her current weight and weigh whatever that number is, and half an hour less of Rogen's unfunny friends acting like 10-year-olds. In my opinion.  

THE SEEKER: THE DARK IS RISING (34) (dir., David L. Cunningham) Alexander Ludwig, Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane "The boy is more capable than I thought"; actually no, he's the same throughout, evincing no more coherent character arc than the arbitrary plotting - suddenly he finds a photo in the attic (why is he even in the attic?) and learns about his long-lost twin brother - and frankly daft premise wherein our ordinary-kid hero is suddenly informed he's the Seeker, has special Powers, and must find the Signs within five (5) days or the millennia-old conflict between Light and Dark will reach its endgame with Evil triumphant (at least Harry Potter got a couple of years to learn the ropes). Those Powers are of course analogous to the changes in his pubescent body, and learning to harness the former ties in with learning to comprehend the latter, etc - is it even worth trotting out that tired kidpic metaphor anymore? - and Walden Media values are evident in details like the webcam greeting from the older brother unironically fighting for freedom (presumably in Iraq) though the older-skewing target audience calls for a jazzier style than NARNIA, with shaky-cam, fast cuts and even what looks like bullet-time. Silliest detail: seeking more info on his mission, our hero Googles "the light and the dark" - without even using the scare-quotes!

PRIVATE PROPERTY (57) (dir., Joachim Lafosse) Isabelle Huppert, Jérémie Renier, Yannick Renier Dunno if it's actually "about" incest (per Michael Atkinson), but that certainly informs the big unspoken question at the heart of the drama, namely 'Is the Jérémie Renier character's rage against his mother - ostensibly over selling the house - irrational?'. Or is it a kind of sublimated jealousy over whatever went on between her and his brother back in the day? (Jérémie has always been closer to Dad; Yannick is closer to Mom.) That said, everyone seems unhealthily close in this household - Mom takes a shower (without drawing the curtain) while Jérémie is also in the bathroom, brushing his teeth; the brothers share a tub, shampooing each other's hair - making it hard to identify a precise who-did-what dynamic; tension still simmers over the long unbroken shots of the trio eating, bickering etc, but Lafosse's dry style ends up drying out his characters, who become less distinctive (Yannick's especially seems to fade away). Still a twisted little nugget, its opening dedication reflecting both its wit and slightly timid mindset: "To our limits". 

STARDUST (53) (dir., Matthew Vaughn) Charlie Cox, Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro I think of Neil Gaiman as a fantasy-flick encyclopaedist (polite word for geek), grazing contentedly in the broad spectrum of all things whimsical, surreal and psychotronic; MIRRORMASK ranged from "Alice in Wonderland" to Monty Python to Svankmajer, and this - based on a Gaiman book - also slaloms from the Tolkien-lite of a quest through a magical world (cloaks and frocks, narrator-storyteller, sweeping shots of mountains and meadows with lush bombastic score) to the pantomime horror of the witches cackling over animal entrails, to the TIME BANDITS knockabout of the pirate ship to the Ealing-like black comedy of the sibling princes bumping each other off. Various tones don't exactly mesh together but the strands do coalesce for an impressive climax, and at least it's funnier than RETURN OF THE KING - a boy discreetly checking out his newfound cleavage after being transformed into a girl, Danes confessing true love to a mouse, etc. Then there's the bit where De Niro as the "whoopsie" pirate chief pretends to throw our hero over the side (he mans a flying airship out of a Miyazaki cartoon) then drags Danes to his cabin, purportedly for a bit of rape and pillage, warning the crew not to bother him while he's plugging away or they'll get the same (i.e. chucked over the side); "You mean you'll...?" asks a shocked pirate. 

THIS IS ENGLAND (65) (dir., Shane Meadows) Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Joe Gilgun Meadows matures. Both ROMEO BRASS and DEAD MAN'S SHOES suffered from a queasy taste for psychotic violence - both their lead characters became less interesting as their violence was revealed, mostly because the films weren't willing/able to hide their fascination with it - but the (inevitable) violent climax here makes a sharp and compassionate point, viz. that it's never really about anyone's nationality or the colour of their skin, it's about unhappy people trying to ensure everyone else is as unhappy as they are (what sets off the skinhead's violence isn't conflict, it's contentment). Earlier, the racist thugs are made to look silly - "'Scuse me mate, is there a toilet here?" - and even the standard anti-Thatcher line isn't overdone; the Falklands War isn't blamed for creating the racism, more a question of pointing out how the nationalist virus can attach itself to young men's resentments once it's out in the open. It's not a judgmental film (whereas ROMEO BRASS was, and even ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS finally takes sides in its central conflict), doubtless because Meadows himself is partly our 12-year-old hero; everyone turns out to be subtly different - some of the skinheads want nothing to do with nationalism, one goes along with the spiel but balks at joining the National Front, another finally explodes in self-disgust, only the pathetic middle-aged racists seem truly lost. Melancholy spirit in the 80s settings, deserted buildings, "Maggie Is A Twat" graffiti, a beached boat and a beach at low tide - and a fatherless young boy wandering through it, torn PLATOON-style between good and bad father-figures (no idea if Meadows himself fits the profile, but it's hard to dispel the thought that young Turgoose apparently lost his mother just before filming); fertile ground for being in a gang, and Meadows is good both on lifelike teen detail - Michelle, nicknamed Smell ("'cos it rhymes", not 'cos she's smelly) - and the near-homoerotic tumble of boys together. Guess I need to check out TWENTYFOURSEVEN one of these days.  

THE ASTRONAUT FARMER (45) (dir., Michael Polish) Billy Bob Thornton, Virginia Madsen, Bruce Dern, Max Thieriot, J.K. Simmons What a disappointment! First two-thirds is a bittersweet rumination on the American Dream, Disappearance Of, the last gasp of individualism in a world of regulations, shrinks spouting psychobabble, Child Protection Services couching their threats in the positive language of "taking control", outer space itself colonised, parcelled out, regulated by the state bureaucracy. The vanishing Dream (the one where a person "can be anything I want to be") is the wide-open spirit of America - as in NORTHFORK, M. David Mullen does the cloudbanks and wide-screen vistas - while BBT's pointedly phallic rocket is the stubborn attempt to avoid emasculation. Looks like it's going to get even more bittersweet in the last half-hour, showing what happens when the Dream dies, even perhaps passing the torch to our hero's teenage son (just like hero himself fought against his father's failure, just like men always repeat their fathers' mistakes in striving to redeem them); instead it does nothing of the sort, avoiding any kind of painful comment and going for a climax that's feelgood, simplistic and totally retarded. Though it's probably what got it financed in the first place.

VACANCY (62) (dir., Nimrod Antal) Luke Wilson, Kate Beckinsale, Frank Whaley Credit the horror boom for creating a market in no-frills B-thrillers (though e.g. BREAKDOWN was mining this territory a decade ago); 80 minutes long, set over a single night, decked out almost entirely in brown and orange - best early shot: Kate's disembodied ghostly-pale face in the car's side-view mirror - and truly gripping as the premise is set up (greatest bit: the couple slowly realising the room in the videos is the same room they're sitting in). The big problem is small - i.e. small-time - villains, deflating the horror of the situation and making things too easy in the second half, plus of course the fashion for rug-pulling shock twists is lazy and despicable but some twists might've been a good idea. Plotting is a bit too generically B-movie, giving the title an unwelcome double meaning. Whaley hams it up, coming off as John Waters doing Johnny Depp doing Norman Bates.     

THE INVASION (46) (dir., Oliver Hirschbiegel) Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond You could drive a truck through the gap between this film's pretensions - its Big Idea - and its shoddiness as a thriller. Starts off wrong, already in nerve-jangling mode with the world gone mad and Kidman rummaging around in a pharmacy, trying to stay awake - this of all stories needs to be creepy, with a slowly-crumbling facade of normality - then it's one cheap idea after another, from the child in jeopardy to the hatchet-faced thug trying to break down Kidman's door in the middle of the night (why? that's not how the body snatchers operate) to a slimy-skinned pod scuttling away to a mega-misguided scene where our heroes talk about escape intercut with flash-forwards of them escaping (I assume the idea was to avoid getting bogged down in conventional escape-scene mechanics, but the effect is to short-circuit any interest in their plight); even the classic "My husband is not my husband" scene is cheapened by a lurid account of the non-husband killing the family dog. And meanwhile the Big Idea rumbles in the background, viz. that being placid, emotionless pod-people might be just what humanity needs, with all the violence on TV and Iraq and Darfur and etc (pods don't wage wars; for pods, "there is no Other"), which is risibly pretentious in this context but interesting insofar as every age seems to get the BODY SNATCHERS it deserves - in the 50s it was Cold War paranoia, the 70s remake was infused with the death of the counter-culture, this one connects with our unprecedented worry over violence (abuse, harassment, bullying, etc) and the dawn of the Age of Biology when we may (eventually) be able to dissect what it means to be human, and weed out violent impulses through genetic engineering (for the first time, we can be our own body snatchers). Hirschbiegel goes big on the Big Idea, slathering it over Act Three, and meanwhile the film gets increasingly shoddy and tired and hackneyed, with car chases and helicopter rescues. Is this Daniel Craig's worst performance? In a walk.   

AWAY FROM HER (56) (dir., Sarah Polley) Gordon Pinsent, Julie Christie, Olympia Dukakis A great subject, the onset of Alzheimer's; "I think I may be beginning to disappear". Another great subject later on, when the husband finds his now-institutionalized wife has attached herself to another patient, treating him (the husband) like a mere acquaintance - his look says it all, his obscure pride in sensing that her great love for him survives, smothered by the heartbreak in seeing that her fuddled mind has misdirected it to another man. None of this is well-served by Polley's boring style, and in fact many of her conceits are godawful - the play-by-play guy wandering the hospital corridors, the old lady saying "clusterfuck", the use of an actual house (its lights going off one by one) to illustrate someone's thesis that Alzheimer's is like circuit-breakers falling one by one in a large house, the world's nicest nurse with unlimited free time to share expository dialogue with patients' husbands, the moment of clarity when Iraq footage on TV prompts the senile wife to exclaim "How could they forget Vietnam?" (the liberal conscience is the last to go!); the ending is also weak - shying away from the sacrificial male-weepie conclusion to serve up "a little bit of grace" - but I'm assuming that was Alice Munro's conceit rather than Polley's. Still enough psychologically thorny or acute moments to make it worthwhile, Christie charismatic as the heroine who "had the spark of life" - she's a star, which is what the role requires - while Pinsent does most of the heavy lifting; a reminder that it was Jim Broadbent (not Judi Dench) who won the Oscar for IRIS.  

BLADES OF GLORY (55) (dir., Josh Gordon & Will Speck) Will Ferrell, Jon Heder, Will Arnett, Amy Poehler ANCHORMAN led with lunacy but this works within the interstices of its crowd-pleasing genre - underdog sports movie, with a splash of Chuck and Larry - esp. in the final stretch, when skating routines are spiced with decapitation (!) and the climactic chase takes place entirely on ice-skates: quarry and pursuer do elegant moves complete with final flourish to the crowd as they chase each other, hobble like spazzes when the chase moves from ice to dry land, stop altogether (and chat affably) when their blades get caught in the steps of an escalator. Elsewhere, "Cirque de So Lame" will make me sound cool someday, and "mind-bottling" may be the first eggcorn in a Hollywood movie (at least I can't think of the last one). Utterly predictable, but if you say that makes it worthless I will fight you.   

51 BIRCH STREET (58) (dir., Doug Block) What do you do when you discover your Dad never loved - maybe never even liked - his wife, by extension his family, by extension you? How does it feel to know two of the closest relationships in your life were based on lies? How does it feel to think of your parents as sexual beings? All this and more - quite a bit more, lurching around to examine e.g. Marriage as an institution (part of the point is that Block's folks reflect the social changes in America in the 50s and 60s) - but a slightly muted impact since the main dramatic arc has Dad going from villain to hero (Mom roughly vice versa) and he never really was much of a villain; indeed it's Block who seems a bit ungrateful at first sight, putting down Dad's well-meaning offer of a useful tool from his workshop ("If only there was something here I wanted...") and whining in V.O. about how little they have in common. The current trend for documentarians to appear in their movies raises questions (whether they know it or not), insofar as they're identification figures so they have to 'sell' themselves and be sympathetic, just as if they were actors - unlike their subjects, whom we take as we find them. Is that why Block starts the movie seemingly unsure of himself - fiddling with his camera, checking the focus, acting like a beginner - even though 5 minutes later he admits that "making documentaries is what [I] do"? Is he trying to ingratiate himself, turn himself into a character? And if so, is that Wrong, in the rigorous Griersonian view of documentary? Michael Moore, what hast thou wrought... 

LINDA LINDA LINDA (68) (dir., Nobuhiro Yamashita) Du-na Bae, Aki Maeda, Yu Kashii Maybe I was just in a receptive mood, since I also tried to watch this a month ago and gave up after 20 minutes; maybe I was tired the first time, maybe TIFF's sharpened my faculties in the interim - or maybe I wasn't prepared for the contemplative tone, not remotely 'difficult' but deliberately slowed-down, using silence and stillness, shot mostly in masters, designed to isolate - hence heighten - the teen experience, make it seem almost holy (see also the opening gambit that we're only "the real us" when we're kids, before we grow up). The girls giggle, talk about the band - they're rehearsing for a school concert - and each other, think about saying things then don't have the courage to say them (onstage by herself, the singer introduces bandmates with patter and jokes; faced with a full house, she can barely grunt a greeting); they're not very good, and in fact - as proved when the otherwise invisible Moe unpacks a formidable singing voice - they could've been immeasurably better. But the style gives them dignity and space while music operates like the secret magic of Youth, trickling out of the stately images - guitar rumble overheard in the distance as the girls practise, a line of song impulsively sung as they walk single-file in their school uniforms (adults are barely glimpsed, but the adult world's deadening influence is implied throughout) and of course "Linda Linda Linda" bursting forth in the climax, which is totally predictable and totally exhilarating. Feels like it ought to be about undulating daffodils on the slopes of Mt. Fuji, but high-school chicks singing Japanese punk will have to do.

1408 (49) (dir., Mikael Hafstrom) John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack You can so tell it's based on a short story - or perhaps a ghost story told round the campfire, with magnificently over-elaborate build-up; by the time our hero has been counselled, admonished, pleaded with for the umpteenth time to please don't - whatever you do, just don't - go into Room 1408 (one occupant slit his throat; others jumped out the window; a Salvadorean maid gouged her eyes out, laughing hysterically; "It's an evil fucking room!"), I was literally squirming with pleasure and wondering how the film could possibly live up to its own self-inflated expectations. It can't, of course, mostly because it turns out to be psychological drama - it's no spoiler to say the Room fucks with its occupants' minds, stirring up their already-existing demons - of the kind that may have worked on the printed page but fits badly with FX-driven mayhem, though also because Cusack's considerable charm can't disguise the fact that our hero's demons are rather generic (in the end he learns to Believe again - in ghosts, in God, in himself - so that's all right then). Great opening act, then increasingly stretched-out and (fatally) un-scary; a handful of eerie moments, plus a classic man-on-ledge scene for those of us whose nightmares regularly feature falls from high places - but when the Room taunts our man with songs on the bedside radio, or poltergeist-slams a window on his hand so he howls with pain, it's Stephen King at his silliest.

RUSH HOUR 3 (47) (dir., Brett Ratner) Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan, Hiroyuki Sanada, Yvan Attal, Max Von Sydow, Roman Polanski Rating should perhaps be slightly higher (not much, but slightly), were it not for the deeply depressing spectacle of Jackie Chan reduced to a shadow of his former self, slower and puffier (the outtakes used to be stunts gone wrong, but now they're mostly flubbed lines and staged comic business), retreating into a childlike-innocent persona as if to deny the now-undeniable fact of middle age. Even more depressing because he used to be the series' major grace-note, set off against Tucker's sexist blather and ugly-Americanisms; Tucker tries to pick up the slack, but a little of him goes a long way, getting all Bad Lieutenant with a couple of hotties or heading to the bedroom armed with "a bottle of honey and some Red Bull" - and Ratner, a fellow frat-boy, fails to bring a light touch to the Parisian cabbie who learns to stop worrying and love Hollywood violence (he needed more likeable detail, and the pay-off just seems ugly). Has its laughs, esp. in the first half, notably a nun doing French-to-English translation between a foul-mouthed thug and our heroes - "He used the N-word again, but this time he mentioned your grandmother" - and Chan does glimmer into life occasionally, in a scrap with a knife-throwing harpy or a bit with a French flag during the Eiffel Tower action climax, but he never does his thing of using random props in imaginative ways and has nothing to do with the film's best stunt - motorbike careens into a van's open trunk, followed seconds later by its driver crashing head-first through the windshield - or indeed its most useful factoid: "Did you know the average Frenchwoman spends 34% of her time naked?".     

THE LOOKOUT (60) (dir., Scott Frank) Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher Modest, even negative virtues. The fact that JGL doesn't do a whole Rain Man routine as our brain-damaged hero (just seems a little withdrawn and uncertain), to the extent that it might've been almost the same film - almost - without his condition. The fact that it's set in a smallish community where people remember each other from high-school. The fact that the plot chugs along without the need for some jaw-dropping twist (the set-up is fairly transparent). The fact that the visuals are clean and uncluttered - snow-banked streets, people's living-rooms and basements, functional spaces and the strong sense of farmland and prairie stretching out just-offscreen. Indie virtues, making for a satisfying small-scale thriller, though the cast is rather over-qualified; Isla Fisher may just be too intelligent an actress to play a character called Luvlee Lemmons, though her smokin'-hotness emerges unscathed. 

AFTER THE WEDDING (48) (dir., Susanne Bier) Mads Mikkelsen, Rolf Lassgard, Sidse Babett Knudsen Oh, these Nordics and their open societies! The secret's out and everyone knows the truth with over an hour still to go, so we get a lot of rather overheated quarrelling (She: "Stop trying to control everything in your sick head!"; He: "If you're bored get a hobby, instead of making my life hell!") and a rather contrived narrative spring-loaded with further twists - the main one tending to overbalance the whole movie, esp. since it's initially set up as a sympathy contest between the two protagonists (angry activist and complacent - yet likeable - rich guy). One assumes the little Indian orphans will play moral arbiter, but in fact they're almost forgotten - the ending tries for poignant irony, Mads losing touch with his Mumbai protégé precisely because of the money he raised to make the boy's life better, but in fact his problems seem small compared to the life-and-death stuff that's been going on back in Denmark. A lot of stuff seems wrong, Bier undermining her characters just like she breaks up the flow with her eye-catching, meretricious style (random jump-cuts, extreme close-ups of eyes, mouths, etc); some of it skews melodramatic - see e.g. the daughter's marriage, resolution of - some of it just seems inorganic; it's baffling when everyone's so baffled by the billionaire's generosity - it doesn't take an armchair psychologist to surmise he's feeling guilty, and trying to buy himself a clear conscience - but Bier knows what's coming next in the script, and is trying (it turns out) to set it up. Most annoying detail: the grandma, whose entire role consists of being besotted with online poker.  

RATATOUILLE (73) (dir., Brad Bird) with the voices of Patton Oswalt, Lou Romano, Ian Holm, Janeane Garofalo, Peter O'Toole It all fits together! Bird is an exceptionalist - already rare enough in our fiercely egalitarian age - which is why Remy the rat shouldn't have to join the rat-race, which is why the superheroes in THE INCREDIBLES shouldn't have been forced to conform, which is why Bird himself refuses to be hemmed into the ghetto of talking-animal cartoons with their fart jokes and musical numbers, taking the genre to undreamt-of heights of sophistication (you wonder how much further it can go and still hold on to its target audience - though friends with young kids inform me that their sprogs like RATATOUILLE because it's got "talking animals doing funny things", so maybe the real question is how much latent contempt Bird has for that target audience). How unlikely is it that a film about haute cuisine, the fine points of food connoisseurship and (above all) the alienation of the true Artist in a world of philistines should've been produced by a major studio in America - land of the corn-dog, as the film gleefully points out - and marketed, at least nominally, to children? How unlikely that a mere cartoon should express something deep and basic about Art, how it touches (some of) our lives at a tender age and how we then spend a lifetime debating and dissecting, trying to recapture that first magical feeling (see: Anton Ego transported by Remy's miraculous ratatouille)? The answer: About as unlikely as a rat becoming a master chef. "The key, my friend, is not to be picky," counsels Remy's boorish brother, and it's that undiscriminating attitude - also the attitude of the 00s consumer pigging out on media - that the film most critiques, tied to the social emphasis on demolition of hierarchies in the name of (deliberately) undiscriminating everyone-is-special-dom; Chef Gusteau's ambiguous "Anyone can cook" reflects the insidious way whereby America's bedrock meritocracy ('Genius can come from anywhere') has been corrupted to its exact opposite (anti-meritocracy, i.e. 'Anyone can be a genius'). Has a few problems in itself, Bird's characters aren't as likeable or detailed as those of his Pixar brethren - though Linguini the clumsy chef has some nice moments, wiping his face with his sleeve or going from stammering confusion to desperate eruptions, like the young Gene Wilder - and he doesn't set up very cleverly; the main device, Remy manipulating Linguini through involuntary spasms, is pretty arbitrary, albeit charmingly so (Bird's real forte are action scenes, which he does as well as anyone, see e.g. the waterfall escape or a floor-level Remy dodging feet and flames in the kitchen). Maybe he should think about a co-writer, someone with a flair for punchy plotting and cuddly detail - but he's probably too much the Artist for that. 

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM (70) (dir., Paul Greengrass) Matt Damon, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles Remarkable stuff, a cyber-thriller taking place not so much in real-time as click-time, the Internet cadence of disparate places joined by the click of a link (it's not just that it globe-trots, it's that it globe-trots so unthinkingly). Shots are matched according to rhythm, as when Bourne chases someone down a subway station and different shots with similar movement are layered to create a seamless physical music (it also goes in for a kind of 'sympathetic editing', e.g. Bourne looking at files intercut with Joan Allen looking at files somewhere else, or the double pursuit in Tangiers shuffling between the two chases); then there's 'Waterloo Station', weaving together various kinds of surveillance with bits of character-shading (Bourne's uncanny sixth sense about who's a watcher and who's just a bystander) and lightning-fast moments of violence; then there's the fight with the assassin, among the most visceral I've seen - one feels physically pummelled by the lurching, close-up bodies - and again everything flows, the snippets rhyme, it doesn't just feel like a bunch of shots strung together like the climax of TRANSFORMERS. Not a lot of heart perhaps, but a large part of the point is that the human element stubbornly survives: the CIA may be able to perform cross-checks in a matter of seconds, but it's still driven by human rivalry and intrigue - and of course Bourne himself still seeks to find his identity, as if to say technology can never be a cure for alienation from ourselves (there's even a tiny political angle, Allen sighing that "This isn't us" vis-a-vis the post-9/11 legislation). Also boasts the perfect final shot - except that it turns out to be the penultimate shot. Boo to crowd-pleasing over-explicitness in my opinion.