Just a mini-review tonight: It's late Wednesday and we have a date with a baby first thing in the morning. Austin Lugar is handling the main review over at The Film Yap, so tune in there for his more complete take.
Overall, "Let Me In" is a better adaptation of the Swedish film "Let the Right One In" than I had any reason to expect. Writer/director Matt Reeves kept the original's creepy atmospherics, although he did punch up the action beats, as one might expect.
I was surprised that they kept some of the more unseemly characteristics of Owen (a wonderful Kodi Smit-McPhee), a lonely bullied kid who befriends a girl vampire. An early sequence where he wears a horrifying mask and taunts his reflection in the mirror while holding a knife lets us know this isn't a sweet innocent.
I liked that about both movies -- the depiction of bullies and the bullied as suffering serious psychological impact as a result of their interaction. And, of course, the advice of young Nosferatu Abby: "Hit them harder than you dare. And then they'll stop."
Chloe Grace Moretz continues her impressive turn of performances, punctuated by "Kick-Ass" earlier this year. When I heard a remake of "Let the Right One In" was coming, I thought at least they picked the one young American actress who could pull it off.
The action is moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the dead of winter. The look is spare and frigid, though the oppressive cold isn't quite as convincing as Sweden, of course.
Richard Jenkins is solid in the rather smallish role of Abby's human protector, who ruthlessly kills to feed her ancient craving for blood. Interestingly, he's credited as "The Father," even though Abby herself explicitly states that he's not her real father.
Another interesting choice was to depict Owen's mother only obliquely, through a fuzzy lens or in the distant background. It helps emphasize the boy's isolation, both physical and emotional.
I'll say this: If there ever were a romance between a human and a vampire, it would not be the stylized, sanitized Gothic splendor of the "Twilight" series. It would be like this: Disturbing, smelly and increasingly unpleasant as time goes by.
I cannot tell you if "The Social Network" is an accurate account of the founding of Facebook, the Internet colossus the lets people project their identity -- even create one -- on the Web.
The book it was based on by Ben Mezrich has been accused of being a highly fictionalized, one-sided affair that paints a portrait of Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a brilliant but destructive genius who estranged anyone close to him.
The irony being, of course, that the wunderkind who helped connect 500 million friends doesn't have any of his own. The few people he hadn't turned off with his abrasive, domineering personality he drove away through his obsessive need to build the millennium's Next Cool Thing.
What I can say about this film directed by David Fincher from a script by Aaron Sorkin is that it's an altogether mesmerizing tale, filled with unexpected dark humor, that plucks a lot of resonant strings about the Digital Age. On the surface it's a legal drama, but the story underneath the story is how techno-savvy nerds are using computer code to rewrite the power structures that have endured for generations.
It's an extravaganza of greed, ambition, stupendous egos and cutthroat business deals. It is certainly one of the best movies of the year.
In a bravura performance brimming with nervous energy, Jesse Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg, a computer science sophomore at Harvard who is dumped by his girlfriend in the film's opening minutes. Angry and half-drunk, Mark rushes back to his dorm and performs the Internet equivalent of a drive-by shooting, creating a nasty site called Facesmash where male students can rate the attractiveness of their female peers side-by-side.
The stunt crashes the school's servers and earns Mark academic probation from Harvard, but also demonstrates the power of social connections transported online.
When a pair of blueblood twin upperclassmen, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, pitch him the idea of creating an exclusive social networking site for Harvard, Mark immediately walks it across the street to his best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who has an affinity for business and the cash to get them started.
The site goes live and is an immediate sensation, spreading to dozens of schools. The Winklevosses -- or Winklevi, as Mark dismissively dubs them -- try to use their old-money connections to shut Facebook down. When that fails, they sue.
The narrative unfolds as a series of flashbacks framed by depositions for the Winklevoss lawsuit ... and also, Eduardo's. As we learn early on, a massive split grew between the two co-founders, leading to Eduardo suing Mark for pushing him out of the company right as it was headed to the stratosphere.
The performances are universally terrific. Armie Hammer is a hoot playing both Winklevosses -- through the magic of CGI -- portraying basically decent young men trapped by the arrogance of the bubble of entitlement in which they've lived their whole lives.
And Justin Timberlake has a sly, scene-stealing turn as Sean Parker, the rogue entrepreneur behind music-sharing site Napster. Parker gloms onto Mark like a metrosexual Rasputin, coaxing him into moving the fledgling operation out to Silicon Valley and whispering sweet nothings in his ear about becoming billionaires.
Eduardo wants to play it conservative, building Facebook through conventional advertising, but Sean senses that Mark is more of a social outcast at heart, longing to flip his middle finger at the establishment -- encouraging stunts like showing up to an investor's meeting in a bathrobe, or printing business cards that say, "I'm CEO, Bitch."
The final, compelling shot of "The Social Network" shows Mark Zuckerberg sitting at his laptop on Facebook, hitting the refresh key in search of his Rosebud. It's an exquisite moment that reveals the character's interior better than any words could. What matters if it's true?
"Iron Man 2" was still fun, but just didn't have the polish of the 2008 summer hit. With only two years between films, the sequel was bound to feel slapdash and hurried-up.
Robert Downey Jr. returns as Tony Stark, brilliant billionaire owner of a multi-national corporation. Having outed himself as the man behind the Iron Man mask, Stark has been living it up, forcing evildoers into hiding and giving the high hat to congressional committees to boot.
But things are worrisome behind the glitzy veneer: The gizmo in Stark's chest that powers the super-suit and keeps his damaged heart pumping is slowly poisoning him. And Ivan Vanko, son of an old business partner of Stark's daddy, wants revenge for perceived injustices. Vanko builds his own super-suit complete with freaky power-whips, which he uses to nearly kill Stark.
Other players emerge from the periphery.
Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is still talking about putting a team of super-heroes together. He plants Scarlett Johansson as Stark's secretary, whose skills go beyond Excel spreadsheets. Right-hand woman Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) still yearns for Stark's affections, and old buddy James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) is raring to become his super-suited sidekick.
Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) is some sort of Steve Jobs-meets-war profiteer competitor of Stark's who soon partners up with Vanko.
Watching "Iron Man 2" feels obligatory, like getting off a roller-coaster and climbing right back on again: Now that you know where the loops and drops are, it's not quite as thrilling.
The film is available in a two-disc DVD set, or a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. Extras are good on DVD, moving to fabulous with the combo.
The DVD includes a digital copy -- all too rare these days; usually studios reserve that for the Blu-ray. There's a feature-length commentary by director Jon Favreau, four deleted scenes, two making-of featurettes, and a music video. The Blu-ray combo has all that, and tons more.
The first disc includes the "S.H.I.E.L.D. Data Vault" -- an interactive pop-up feature with behind-the-scenes goodies. There's also previsualization and animatics of the special effects.
Disc two includes an extensive making-of documentary, four more deleted scenes, four more featurettes, and a gallery of concept art.
"The Bicycle Thief" is the best-known of the Italian neorealism movement, which was characterized by non-professional actors, naturalistic light and shooting in real locations -- often with passersby serving as unwitting extras. It grew up out of necessity due to the lack of much filmmaking infrastructure following World War II, and soon became an ethos that influenced generations of movies.
The immediacy and unornamented sentimentalism of the pictures, which tended to focus on the plight of the underclass, gave these films a visceral heft that connected with audiences. "The Bicycle Thief" is often cited as one of the most emotional films ever made, particularly its depiction of the relationship between an itinerant worker and his son searching for the stolen bicycle that represents their very livelihood.
A bit of controversy over the title: The original Italian is "Ladri di biciclette," or "Bicycle Thieves." This is of course a reference to the film's tragic climax, where the father, desperate after a long search has come to naught, tries to steal a bicycle himself and is caught and humiliated. I for one am a proponent of retaining the English translation of foreign films, even if they are inaccurate.
Besides, one could argue that using the original title kind of gives away the ending. Otherwise newbies might watch the movie and be thinking: "They keep chasing that one kid who stole his bike ... who are these other thieves?"
Director Vittorio De Sica, who co-wrote the script along with five (!) others based on the novel by Luigi Bartolini, cast non-actors in the lead roles, to stupendous effect. Lamberto Maggiorani, with penetrating but soft eyes and flaring cheekbones, plays the father, Antonio Ricci. Maggiorani was just an ordinary factory worker when De Sica cast him.
Lianella Carell plays his loving wife Maria, who seeks guidance from a local mystic, which Antonio considers a waste of money. Still, her prophecy that he would find a job came true, and so he turns to the old woman to help find the bike. Sure enough, as soon as he exits her building, the thief (Vittorio Antonucci) walks by.
Enzo Staioli is an absolute revelation as their son Bruno. With a mop of irrepressible hair that even a downpour of rain cannot long suppress, Bruno is a 7-year-old fellow pilgrim and witness to the joyous and heartbreaking events -- the film's silent narrator.
After more than a year out of work, Antonio is blessed with a job putting up movie posters around Rome, on whose outskirts they live. But it comes with a condition: He must provide his own bicycle to get around with a ladder and supplies. No bicycle, no job.
Unfortunately, they hocked his bicycle to pay for food. Maria pawns the household's entire supply of bedsheets to get the money needed to reclaim the bike. There's a telling scene where Antonio watches the clerk climb a high storage wall to place their sheets amongst a mountain of others people have been forced to pawn. It reminded me of the last scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," where treasures great and small are entombed in a vast warehouse.
Antonio is thrilled about starting work, taking pride in his new uniform (which is basically just overalls and a cap) and gleefully tallies all the money he'll soon be bringing in -- 12,000 lire a month in wages, and at least 2,000 in overtime, plus a family allowance of 800 a day. They won't be rich by any stretch, but can put their days of hunger and worry behind them.
Alas, on his first day the bicycle is stolen while resting against the wall where Antonio is putting up a poster of Rita Hayworth. He chases the thief, a teen boy wearing a German-style hat, but he gets away.
The look on Antonio's face when he arrives by bus, instead of by bike, to pick up Bruno at his own job at a gas station is one of pure shame. He can't even stand to face Maria, so after dropping the boy off immediately goes looking for help. He enlists the aid of his friend Baiocco, an actor and sanitation worker. The next day he, Baiocco and his men, and Bruno set out to look for the bike, stopping at a huge outdoor venue devoted to nothing but bicycles. After hours of searching and one nasty, fruitless confrontation, they come up empty.
It's hard today to think about bicycles being such a huge enterprise, but in post-war Europe, they were the primary source of transportation.
After Baiocco bids adieu, Antonio and Bruno search night and day, knowing that failure means ruin for the entire family. They spot the thief on the bike talking to an old beggar. Failing to catch the boy, they follow the old man to a church, where a shave and soup are offered in exchange for attending service. When they lose the old man outside the church, Antonio loses patience with Bruno and slaps him sharply, and the betrayal in the lad's eyes is just wrenching.
To make it up to him, Antonio takes the boy to a restaurant -- an alien experience for young Bruno, who mimics the rich child at the next table theatrically pulling long strings of mozzarella away from his mouth.
In the end they find the thief, and Antonio is nearly killed by a mob from the boy's rough-and-tumble neighborhood. Bruno summons a policeman, but lacking any witnesses or evidence of the bike, Antonio is forced to decline to press charges.
The denouement is one of the most memorable in cinema. Outside a football arena, Antonio is taunted by thousands of bicycles left by the spectators. He settles for stealing a lone bike leaning against a wall, but of course its owner quickly emerges and begins chase. Ironically, the shouts of "Stop, thief!" that produced no reaction from the crowd when Antonio uttered them less than 48 hours earlier elicit an immediate reaction now, and in moments a dozen men are chasing him.
He is quickly caught, slapped around and frog-marched toward the police station. But the bicycle owner, seeing the bawling Bruno clutching at his father's coattails, takes pity and orders him released. The movie ends on the ambiguous note of father and son, humiliated and despondent, clutching hands and weeping as they walk away into the crowd toward home, their hopes of a new life dashed and their prospects bleak.
The musical score by Alessandro Cicognini, a sweeping breeze of strings and horns, pulls the audience along in its sorrowful journey. It was the music of the streets, set to a story about the people who live there, work there, and if they're lucky enough, ride past on a bicycle.
"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" starts out as a big-stakes film attempting a grand statement about the rift lines in the machine of American capitalism. It ends up going small-time, as a miserly story about people we do not understand behaving in ways we don't believe.
It has been 23 years since Oliver Stone solidified the image of the Decade of Greed in the pop culture zeitgeist, and the sequel wants to be an update of how things have changed -- for the worse. It's set in 2008, when our entire financial system nearly sputtered to a standstill, and instead of being the merchant of inside information, this time Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) has positioned himself as the oracle of fiscal sanity.
Or is he?
After spending eight years in prison for insider trading and other crimes, Gekko is out hocking his book, "Is Greed Good?" He gives speeches to rapt audiences talking about how the leveraged debt and other shady dealings carried on now put anything he did to shame.
"While I was away it seems greed got greedier, with a little bit of envy mixed in," he says.
His would-be protege this time is Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), a hungry young trader with a passion for green technology. He's also engaged to one Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan), the estranged daughter of Gordon. She won't speak to her dad, and runs an anti-Wall Street web site called Frozen Truth.
Now, think about that for a minute. Here's a principled young woman who despises her father, despises the abuses of the financial markets, and has centered her career around denigrating them both. And yet she would fall for a young shark like Jake who relishes making deals and cutting the throats of the competition? The sort of guy who buys her an engagement ring worth a house in the suburbs?
Winnie remains an unbelievable figure throughout. She's supposed to be smart, but a few words from Jake and she's ready to turn over the keys to her family legacy (amortizing in a Swiss bank) to him. A few words from Gordon and she's ready to forgive him, too.
Stone was never very good with centered, plausible female characters, and Winnie is just another in a long line of women who exist merely to further the plot.
The heavy is Bretton James (Josh Brolin), head of the powerful firm of Churchill-Schwartz. There's bad blood between him and Gekko, and Gordon's looking to use Jake to exact a little revenge -- some for himself, and some for sending Jake's company down the tubes, and his beloved mentor (Frank Langella) along with it.
But Bretton throws them a surprise, by offering Jake a job instead of crushing him. Soon the idealistic young Jake is inside the enemy's camp, carrying water for Gekko and keeping secrets from Winnie. At this point, a little more than halfway through, the movie has no more secrets that we haven't already guessed.
Stone displays his usual visual flair, sending his camera spinning around stock tickers and up and down the sleek walls of Wall Street, showing us the environment of steel dedicated to the hoarding of wealth for its own sake. "Money is a one-eyed bitch who lays in bed staring at you ... if you're not careful, in the morning she'll be gone," is how Gekko puts it.
The screenplay by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff is filled with zippy dialogue and crisp scenes. I especially liked one where Gekko, having dinner with Winnie and Jake at a swank Manhattan restaurant, greets one of the Wall Street titans and the guy blows him off, not even recognizing him. Douglas gives a terrific reaction that reveals his mortification -- not at the social faux pas, but at the fact it demonstrates he's not a player anymore.
I also loved when Gekko calls a bunch of college students the "Ninja generation": No income, no jobs or assets.
But despite these slick elements, the movie is a confused mix of personal story and indictment of the financial sector that never really tie together. The central dynamic seems to be whether Gekko has truly reformed or not, but he's really a secondary character who flits in and out of the background for most of the film, until he takes on a sudden importance close to the end.
The Bretton James angle holds no mystery -- the way Brolin snorts and glares, we know it's just a matter of time before he's buried under a mountain of his own arrogant missteps.
Fairly or not, "Wall Street" nailed the culture of avarice that undeniably existed in the 1980s ... but so it did in the '90s, '00s and every decade before (and will after). Stone's haphazard sequel reshuffles the deck, but relies on the same old cinematic card tricks.
I love the cast of "You Again." And I enjoyed the slapsticky humor, of which there is plenty. Pretty much everything else about this new Disney comedy is take it or leave it, though.
It's nice to see a movie that's not based on a book, comic strip, video game or another movie -- it was simply dreamed up out of screenwriter Moe Jelline's head, his first feature film. And if elements of the film seem familiar -- some have already dismissed it as "Mean Girls" for an older audience -- then at least the winning cast carries the material through the dry spots.
Kristen Bell plays Marni, a high-school ugly duckling who got her swan on in her 20s. Now a successful public relations executive, Marni uses the story of her loser days to inspire some eager new interns: 'Believe in yourself, face your problems, and you too can blah blah blah blah...'
Disaster strikes when Marni realizes the woman her big brother, Will (James Wolk), is marrying is none other then Joanna (Odette Yustman), the girl who tormented her back at Ridgefield High. Joanna was captain of the cheerleading squad, and ruled the school with a bitchy fist.
These flashback scenes are a hoot, due in large part to the convincing physical transformation of button-cute Bell into a nerd with droopy bangs, a face full of brace, and skin erupting with a bounty of zits. It's ironic that high-school movies often cast actresses the age of Yustman and Bell as 17-year-olds, and now we see how they get away with it.
Joanna acts as if she doesn't even remember Marni, and proceeds to subtly make her feel like dirt all over again. Marni, though, is determined to extract an apology for the many wrongs done her. If she doesn't get it, she's prepared to extract her revenge by sending the marriage down in flames.
This set-up would be sufficient for most comedies, but Jelline doubles down by replicating the dilemma one generation upward. Turns out Marni's mom Gail (Jamie Lee Curtis, in a hoot of a performance) had a very similar experience in her school days with Ramona (Sigourney Weaver), who is revealed as Joanna's aunt.
Now a fabulously wealthy hotel magnate, Ramona doesn't miss an opportunity to rub her success in Gail's face. Gail responds in kind, showing off some cheerleading moves and participating in an impromptu (and solo) drag race.
"High school was a horror movie. This weekend is the sequel," Marni laments.
Director Andy Fickman is an auteur of bland, family-friendly flicks -- "The Game Plan," "Race to Witch Mountain" -- and his ham-handedness is evident whenever the movie slows down for serious moments. Whenever the physical humor is front and center, though, it's an enjoyable romp.
The supporting cast is charming, top to bottom. Victor Garber plays Gail's pleasantly put-upon father, and Betty White pops up as Grandma Bunny, an octogenarian with a lusty streak. (Although, doesn't that describe all of White's TV and movie gags lately?)
Kristin Chenoweth plays Georgia, an impossibly spunky celebrity wedding planner, Billy Unger is Marni's wisecracking kid brother, and Sean Wing turns up as an old would-be flame of Marni's from school.
I especially liked Kyle Bornheimer as Tim, an old boyfriend of Joanna's who Marni invites to the wedding rehearsal to stir up the pot. Turns out Tim has some deeper-seated issues, which Bornheimer hilariously lets bubble to the surface.
No one is going to confuse "You Again" with great filmmaking. But if you can stand the slow stretches, you'll find an agreeably entertaining family-friendly comedy with a little bit of bite.
