The Never-ending Story

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

Raise your hand if you rolled your eyes when Warner Bros. announced that the seventh Harry Potter book would be split in two. By the end of the franchise, I will have shelled out around sixty dollars for eight matinees, adjusting for inflation and omitting repeat visits. Imagine those paychecks. But as A.O. Scott noted, the Harry Potter film series has also been good to the audience.

If the movies aren't J.K. Rowling's originals, we have much to be thankful for. Chief among them is the studio's commitment. Despite a revolving door of directors, the actors were able to inhabit their characters across eight films, with the late Richard Harris the lone exception. Released over a ten-year period, the films mostly allowed Hogwarts students to age with their characters. 

Just think of the mediocrity of other recent franchises; the Narnia films come to mind. The Potter success came at the same time as the books (and the midnight releases, costume parties, collegiate Quidditch...). After the first Harry Potter film, the rest never felt overwhelmed by CGI and special-effects wizardry. Warner Bros. was smart not to convert the seventh film to 3-D. 

Good choice: Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is a quieter adventure. It makes its emotional impact by placing the three young heroes in the real Muggle world for large stretches. Stripped of constant reliance on magic, this movie lets itself be morose and even unexpected. Harry and Hermione burst into spontaneous dance to the radio, their only window to the world in their isolation. A London coffee shop shootout, with eerie silence exploding into Tarantino-sudden violence, and the Ministry of Magic infiltration show the films at their best.

Some of my generosity may be rescinded with the eighth installment. The final fifty pages do not quite live up to all that comes before. But for now, I'll enjoy this intermediate film, a film of anticipation, which satisfies (oddly enough) by continuing.

Someone Tell Me, When Is It My Turn?

Review: Black Swan

When was the last time we witnessed a truly magnificent horror film? The kind that makes you squirm in your seat, bite your nails, and grip the armrest? Darron Aronofsky's Black Swan, a thriller that elevates ballet to Grand Guignol intensity, offers one of the most exhilarating visions of sustain terror in recent memory. Given Aronofsky's emphasis on fingernails, you might not want to chew yours.

His protege is Natalie Portman, who has rarely been given the chance to play a full-fledged woman before. Over the course of a strenuous performance, she breaks free from her girlish cocoon. She plays Nina, a ballerina of technical excellence who is hired for Swan Lake in a dual role: the demure White Swan, a natural fit, and the seductive Black Swan. The company's director (a sinuous Vincent Cassel) pushes her toward letting go of her rigidity. But in her drive for perfection, she slowly transforms from controlled and disciplined to violently reckless.

Beyond her unquenched lust for the role of the Black Swan, two women propel her toward paranoia. Mila Kunis plays her nemesis Lily, a fellow ballerina who seems to befriend Nina only to steal her part. Kunis meets the challenge of a character whose every enticing smile might be imagined. While Nina battles to keep her role, she also lives with her controlling mother (an excellent Barbra Hershey), who was once a dancer herself.

Aronofsky flirts dangerously close with parody, seeing just how far he can push the horror-genre elements. Shadows give way to lurkers; doors slam and wounds bleed. As Lily adopts the movements of the Black Swan, her offstage life is overwhelmed with hallucinations and self-harm. Even though it fulfills the horror-movie quotient for jump scenes, the film locates the emotional horror of unceasing dedication to an artistic ideal. Lily becomes consumed; the script mirrors with heavy doses of manipulation.

But these gimmicks speak to the glitz and the grittiness of the ballet world. Members of the industry toil for the opportunity to exhaust themselves physically and mentally. The scariest moments are visceral; danger lurks behind every curtain naturally, but we squirm most at mutilation to hands and toes. Black Swan is a real talent showcase for Aronofsky and Portman, as well as a splashy, riveting exercise in genre.

500 Million People Like This

Review: The Social Network

I remember friends coercing me into joining this Facebook website my first month of college. It was fall 2004, and the gimmick was that you could compare your interests (say, that The Godfather Part II was your favorite movie) with other users. But instead of spawning campus-wide movie nights, Facebook has grown into a grimly indispensable social sphere. Now, in a truly poetic turn of fate, Facebook users will be supplementing their profiles with The Social Network, a savvy modern thriller of wits and web-smarts rather than bank heists or shoot-outs.

When the project was announced, it was hard to foresee The Social Network as more than a marketing gizmo, a movie-of-the-week. But this prognosis underestimated the team of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher, as well as a top-notch cast led by Jesse Eisenberg. Sorkin is an answer to calls of why don't they write pictures like that anymore?, a holdover from the screwball days tossing off fast-paced, scalpel-sharp dialogue that illuminates the Harvard hauteur and incisiveness.

Mark Zuckerberg and his allies (soon to be enemies) inhabit the dingy dormitories and social aspirations of this Harvard community, and all are in their own way moved by the exclusivity and their entitlement of Bacchanalian fantasies like "finals clubs." Everything's vying not for connection but for betterment. Soon Zuckerberg, along with co-founder and CFO Eduardo Saverin, has launched his own website for the who's who: Harvard e-mail addresses only for the first run of Facebook. But as with successful business ventures, the end game is expansion; Facebook moves from college to college at dizzying speed, thanks to marketing guru and infamous Napster founder Sean Parker (played by eternal frat-boy Justin Timberlake).

Fincher's directoral hand is felt most in the eerie social atmosphere--the physical, non-web-based, one. The camera spies on cheerless finals club meetings, back-alley tete a tetes, and Parker's seductive Facebook parties with menace. Though the Harvard students manage to create a phenomenon and become billionaires, the film reminds us that they haven't escaped the non-stop collegian parties they longed to join. The only character who sees past the Facebook zeitgeist is Saverin, the co-founder who is ousted when Parker proves better at securing investment capital. The film doesn't try to take sides--business is business. But thanks to Andrew Garfield's earnest performance, it's hard not to feel for Saverin, betrayed by flesh-and-blood friends for online ones.

The film is not just social commentary. The ironies of Facebook friending are well-noted already. And claims of misogyny, though intentional, aren't entirely forgivable: a female second-year law associate comes across much more naively than she should. The Social Network works primarily as intrigue, showing how they got there and how tenuous the climb was. Eisenberg doesn't try to cull favor as Zuckerberg. He projects his superiority with a grimace, a permanent non-smile that hints at the insecurity beneath. What was it all for? Sorkin's supposition that it was a girl all along feels superfluous, yet it's great to see Zuckerberg longing for connection at the end. Even as the creator of the world's largest social network, he still wants to be included.

You Make (Us) Feel Like A Natural Woman

Review: The Kids Are All Right

The opening credits to The Kids Are All Right scroll around the screen like graffiti while skateboarders cruise the California streets, over grainy indie film stock and a Vampire Weekend song. Does the movie already intend to be ironic, or is there secret joy in being part of this hip vegan eco-crunch neighborhood? It's the land of opportunity, where a scruffy motorcycle man makes enough income from his organic restaurant to afford a sprawling, self-consciously indigenous garden in his backyard. It's also the land of normalcy, where two women can share the same over-represented suburban paradise/malaise as everyone else.

Director Lisa Cholokendo straddles this line of parody and sincerity as she navigates the problems of this upper-middle-family, headed by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. The two moms bicker over hers and hers sinks about their daughter off to college, and their son who isn't realizing his potential. Of course Bening's character Nic imposes too much, and can't please her wife Jules (Moore) emotionally or sexually. Nor does she support Jules' wandering ambition, now manifested in her new startup landscaping business.

It's harder to feel for Nic through all this. She's unfailingly uptight, while Jules' free-spirited (and somewhat free-loving) impulses befit her lackadaisical California lifestyle so well. But Cholokendo has created a comedy that finds humor in common relationship and parenting moments, such as two parents' simultaneous eagerness and reservation over the possibility their son is sleeping with his best friend. It's appropriate for a story about gay marriage that isn't really about being gay at all.


Cholokendo knows how to assemble a top-notch cast, with an especially luminous and relaxed Julianne Moore. Mark Ruffalo's leather jacket and five-o-clock shadow fit the sweet but impossibly naive sperm donor of the couple's son. His interaction with the family, over a few bottles of wine and a few more rolls in the hay, is an engaging comic premise--one laced ultimately, and realistically, with emptiness. The traditional family structure is what lasts.

This film shares some aspects of that other female-driven summer comedy, Eat Pray Love. That movie feels constantly like it's driving toward the inevitable romantic outcome; of course this independent woman will find a man. Yet the narrative wanders to get there. Maybe because the movie comes from a real-life quest for life and love, which seems manufactured but really happened as authentically as a writer with a book deal can proclaim. And though the makeup and wardrobe (not to mention culinary) budgets are many times the size of Cholokendo's, Julia Roberts has such a natural charm and radiance, we know everything's all right. Her men need her more than she needs them.

Dream a Little Dream of Me

Review: Inception

When Alfred Hitchcock directed Vertigo in 1958, he and his cameramen invented a new camera move, tracking back with the camera while zooming in, to capture Jimmy Stewart's acrophobia. The Vertigo effect was the wonder of its day. In many ways, Christopher Nolan's summer film Inception shares the bitter romance and disorientation of Hitchcock's movie. But special effects have advanced greatly in the last fifty years, and Nolan takes full advantage of twisting, turning CGI-scapes that would tickle M.C. Escher.

Though not as profilic, Nolan has proven himself to be a sort of modern Hitchcockian. From The Dark Knight and The Prestige to his best work, Memento, Nolan has played the showman with tricks up his sleeve, who gleefully manipulates the audience then reminds us it's just a movie. The wonder of Vertigo is that it uses the same tricks as Hitchcock's usual crowdpleasers but sinks deeper as it unfolds. Nolan goes the opposite route with Inception, trying to force profundity upon a fun popcorn flick.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a single father in exile, gifted at extracting information from entering people's dreams. He is called upon by a Japanese industrialist to enter his competitor's dreams not to remove an idea but to add one, a process known as inception. Within the running of the film, though, the rationale behind this entry into dreams becomes the MacGuffin, glossed over in the sea of exposition that makes up the first hour. Nolan's rules for inception are complex, and slogging through them at first feels turgid because the script doesn't allow its characters to breathe. Nor does Hans Zimmer's oppressive score, which overstates with crashing timpani and wailing brass.

Just when I was wishing the whole thing would lighten up, the actual inception begins. Suddenly we're watching a different movie--an elaborate bank heist that wows more as it goes along. The inception team enters dreams within dreams, and watching these overlapping worlds line up is the real fun. Joseph Gordon-Levitt even gets a moment or two of levity, not to mention a thrilling levitation stunt in a hotel lobby and elevator. Ultimately, the scales tip in favor of Inception: all the rules that were explained pay off in the final act. But I do wish Nolan had found more ways to humanize his film.

Marion Cotillard is his secret weapon. She looks ravishing as Cobb's deceased wife, whom he recalls by revisiting his memory-box of dreams, and ironically feels the most flesh-and-blood of the cast. Everyone else is subservient to Nolan's mind games except for Cotillard. Her eyes, cruel and agonizingly sad, are something out of a nightmare. In a movie of dazzling plot twists and shifting city streets, her performance is the stuff dreams are made of.

¡Buzz Lightyear al rescate!

Review: Toy Story 3

Books and TV shows depend upon the series. The bottomless pit of plots and whodunit this time have a history in serialized Dickens novels, radio shows, and Keystone-cop nickelodeons. When the summer movie season rolls around, though, we bemoan the dearth of originality. The barrage of numerals after titles can make a ticket buyer feel he's trapped in some sort of time warp: a radio station stuck in the nineties.

The trilogy has become the most stable form of movie sequel-dom, if you're in the superhero or science fiction business. Properties like the original Star Wars films, Indiana Jones, and more recently The Lord of the Rings have fused in our cultural psyche into one entity. The Ewok battle may not be a cinematic high-point, but that third installment rounds out the series efficiently. After The Empire Strikes Back, all moviegoers and filmmakers surely could hope was that the third didn't sabotage the rest. Remember the dwindling cultural opinion of The Matrix.

All of this build-up is my way of giving Pixar credit where it's due. Toy Story 3, presumably the final chapter in the Woody-Buzz Lightyear saga, doesn't try to aim for infinity and beyond. The film is content to remind us how much we'd missed those gosh-darn-lovable toys. The first film hit theaters in 1995, when I was still in single digits. In the time since, we've been at war, waited in line for iEverything, started blogs, forgotten about Tim Allen... and gone to college.

Though Andy (the kid who owns these toys, now a college student) is moving on, the movie remains deliberately old-fashioned. Sure, there's the 3-D version, for those who want to shell out next week's lunch money. But Pixar's great innovation even at the dawn of computer-animated movies was its storytelling. No matter the voice casting, no other animation studio has churned out a film as great as Toy Story yet, with the possible exception of the first Shrek.

Toy Story 3 works well as part of a package. If I hadn't grown up with these characters, I might have wanted more of a character arc. Wall-E and Up may best it for the audacity of their imagined worlds, sure, but Toy Story 3 is a delightful piece of familiarity. And who would have imagined such an emotional ending to the saga fifteen years ago? Like Andy, we've grown up since the first film, and all it heralded for movies. Sit back and watch as Pixar passes on its patented brand of wonder to a new generation.

Holding Out for a Superhero

Review: Iron Man 2

The ending of the first chapter used a smart segue to the impending sequel: Tony Stark confesses he's Iron Man at a press conference; fade to black. As is the way with Part Twos, when we fade back in, everything's pumped up a few notches. Crowds have increased; explosions have tripled. Villains and sidekicks who command high salaries have sprouted like weeds. Imagine the catering bills.

But while some sequels add superfluous subtitles, grow bored with their leads, or ship their characters off to Abu Dhabi, Iron Man 2 has the good sense to understand its strongest ingredient: Robert Downey, Jr. The film series (a third Iron Man is in the works) charts Downey's real-life near-biblical fall from Hollywood grace and re-establishment as a newly risen hero to the masses. While the actor keeps his high profile in check these days, Iron Man 2 presents Tony Stark as an uncomfortable hero, thwarted by his own self-destructive tendencies. Villains are inside us, too.

Nevertheless, externalized baddies are requisite to the comic book genre. Mickey Rourke swings electrified nunchucks like they've been in his arsenal for years. He's a comeback king like Downey, praised for his recent work in The Wrestler. But while Downey maintains a persona of a healed man, a team player, Rourke still plays out in left field, master of the inappropriate award-show outburst. It's fun to see their real-life personalities reversed in the film. Rourke's diabolical Russian engineer is cool and collected, not one for smalltalk, while Tony Stark throws million-dollar temper tantrums.

Iron Man and its sequel obey the classical rules of comic-book films, with a touch of witty repartee a la Nick and Nora Charles. Don't expect too much out-of-the-box from these ventures. Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, and Samuel L. Jackson have been hired as the archetypal damsel in distress, sexpot, and one-eyed badass. Much of the sequel feels like filler story, dangling new threads that will wow (pow! zam!) us in future installments. After the poor taste of Transformers II last summer, though, this franchise earns cred for letting its oddball actors hog the spotlight. They're the real heroes.

Bridges and Bullock at the Bat

Review: The Blind Side + Crazy Heart

It's their turn, common wisdom says. Jeff Bridges has attended the Oscars four times before. Sandra Bullock's running on the Whaddaya-Know card. Tonight, they will likely take home statuettes for their 2009 work. At least for part of it; Bullock just picked up a Razzie for her other film last year, All About Steve.

Sandra Bullock hocks DVDs of All About Steve in person at the 2010 Razzies.

Be reassured: both are fine in their nominated performances. If commerce and marketing had less pull over the Oscars, Michael Stuhlbarg or Jeremy Renner would take Best Actor, and Meryl Streep or Carey Mulligan Best Actress. But I won't denigrate the gravy train they're riding. Bullock, in particular, is the saving grace of her film: an inspirational but inert "true story."

The Blind Side sticks closely to the journey of rags-to-Ravens football star Michael Oher; sometimes life works better as life than art. Actual reported dialogue, as seen in this excerpt from Michael Lewis's book, makes it onto the screen, but every line, lifted or invented, comes across with the manufactured sugar of a Fruit Roll-Up. "You're changing that boy's life," says a sweet, suspicious Memphis wife. "No," Bullock responds. "He's changing mine."

Country singer Tim McGraw has screen presence to spare, and Bullock musters up enough spit-and-vinegar to ride through the saccharine. Taking in over $200 million at the box office, The Blind Side has become the highest-ranking sports movie yet. So why doesn't a compelling life story translate better to film? We never see Michael as a character, for starters. The great biopics manipulate true-life events in search of subtext, of a person's inner workings. Michael has all his decisions made for him by rich white restaurant-chain owners: the suburban Christian elite. His path seems entirely based on the kindness of strangers, not any passions or emotions of his own.

In Crazy Heart, Bad Blake's passions are more immediate: booze, broads, and ballads. Cue every down-and-out wunderkind film of the last twenty years. The Wrestler comes to mind; with all due respect to Mickey Rourke, we expect great work from Jeff Bridges. Crazy Heart, which fought for a distributor, has gained everything from awards season; and good for it. Best of all is T-Bone Burnett's surefire score, and the actors corralled into singing (Bridges, Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall).

Crazy Heart feels more indie, less Hallmark, than The Blind Side, though both were made on tight budgets. But you can check off the familiar landmarks the film drives by: Washed-up musician. Scruffy motel room. Music journalist in lust. That one song that paves the way to recovery. Sunrise, sunset. The women in these male comeback sagas never get much to work with (Walk the Line being one recent exception), but Maggie Gyllenhaal does her darnedest. Bridges and company find a gentle rhythm and don't tug too hard on the heartstrings. It's a movie we've all seen before, but hey, it's Jeff Bridges's turn. Unlike Bad Blake, he's still in his prime.

Born to Be Wild

Review: The Hurt Locker

Thirty-eight days left in Bravo Company, and the explosives men are cracking wise. But when the bomb they set off takes out one of their own, in steps Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), a renegade with 873 diffused bombs to his credit. He stores parts from memorable explosives under his bed, one from the U.N., another that almost killed him. Right away, his recklessness gets on Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who plays by the book.

Nerves run high enough in Iraq after the 2004 invasion; director Kathryn Bigelow wisely does not turn The Hurt Locker into a maverick-versus-status quo narrative. She and screenwriter Mark Boal realize that a great war film targets no enemies beyond that inevitable, any-day-now feeling. For Sgt. James, war is adrenaline, the only way to experience life. Diffusing an explosive-laden car, he removes his safety gear ("If I die, I want to die comfortable."), striking with the bomb an intimacy he knows nowhere else.

A few cameos, some foreshortened, keep the stakes high. For James, the journey is less about endurance than addiction; he can't love his family back home in the same way. Despite the day-to-day responsibility as an insurgent, Sanborn envies his partner's risk-taking. Mackie offers strong support in the film, notably in his quiet desperation at the end: "I'm done. I want a son. I want a little boy, Will."

The Hurt Locker rides on Renner's shoulders, and he swings between wild and sedate with ease. As James ebbs in and out of paranoia, his inner turmoil flares up and recedes quickly, like bits of shrapnel piercing his surface cool. Lest I make this sound too serious, it's really a knuckle-biting action movie. Bigelow captures the electricity of each new bomb, within the grim streets of invaded Baghdad. The film can be a disjointed series of episodes; rather than building to one singular climax, it takes a near-documentary approach to the humor and anxiety with which these men pass each hour. The threat of death looms, but never as heavily as the fear of survival.

We Know That There's Always Tomorrow

Review: Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire

All the hype, the Sundance cred, the Oprah-Tyler Perry stigma. Precious may be based on a novel, as noted by the insistent subtitle, but it’s a visceral movie experience. Ten minutes in, during the first of many eviscerating verbal beat-downs by Precious’s mother Mary (a devastating performance by Mo'Nique), I worried I wouldn't be able to watch more.

Lee Daniels deserves credit for imbuing the grimmest of urban tragedies with occasional flashes of an exterior world. Precious, sixteen and pregnant again by her father, steps away—or maybe toward—into a fantasy world: swashes of parties, red carpets, autograph signings, the latest couture. The film charts a course of transformation via Precious's imagination. When more and more weighs her down (and believe me, the heaviness never lets up): through writing, her teacher and nurse (Paula Patton and Lenny Kravitz, both on their game), the birth of her son.

I don't know if Gabourey Sidibe will sustain a career in acting, but she's very affecting here. Her taciturn face and mumbled speech form a blank slate on which she registers every hardship with tenacity. In the final scene, a tremulous showdown between Mo'Nique and Sidibe, each actress holds her own without lapsing into sentimentality.

Precious invokes many emotions, but is never maudlin. Some musical cues (gospel ballads at the end of a fight, for example) feel shoe-horned in, as if Daniels needed all the levity he could muster. It's amazing how this film has taken off since its Sundance premiere; though it's easy to blister at the horrors within, there's more than urban welfare critique. Precious, like the title character, feeds off a strain of possibility, just below the surface, that almost proves redemptive for character and audience.

One Is the Loneliest Number

Review: A Single Man

British writer Christopher Isherwood, known best for The Berlin Stories that spawned the stage and film musical Cabaret, was one of the first authors to take up the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. His 1964 novel A Single Man was largely autobiographical, chronicling one day in the life of a British professor in California. The invented George Falconer, however, mourns the death of his longtime partner, while Isherwood remained with his partner until he died much later.

Fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford floods the novel with fluid sound and imagery, carefully sculpted cinematography, and meticulous period detail. His directorial hand is omnipresent but never tacky or kitsch. His images cascade across the screen like the waters that George floats in, echoing how he sinks further into grief. It's easy to take a film like this at surface value. Colin Firth seems to play that Englishman we've seen before; yet his lack of showiness allows us to see the restless aching underneath. He appears sedate, but early on intimates that that he plans to commit suicide that night.

One feels Mad Men-inspired sixties-mania on display (aided by Jon Hamm's voiceover cameo). And the undulating music and delicate lyricism owe homage to The Hours, not to mention Julianne Moore's participation. Even she resists playing up the camp side of George's close friend Charley, who cloaks her anguish in stingers and swing. As a single woman, she tries to hide her feelings for George as much as he hides how he's lost his will to live. Ford's film feeds off the retro craze but foregrounds the alienation at its core with honesty and familiarity.