Director Alex Gibney is the Energizer Bunny
of non-fiction filmmaking. He has made a dozen feature-length films in just the
last three years. Biographical portraits
of Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson, topical investigations into the Catholic
church pedophilia scandals and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, profiles of the
downfallen politicos Eliot Spitzer and Jack Abramoff. He’s got another movie in post-production on
Lance Armstrong. Obviously, the guy
likes to be first in, first out. But
just like that wind-up bunny, his films tend to jump around erratically and
repeat the same ideas before running out of steam. His latest, We Steal Secrets:The Story of WikiLeaks, is a perfect
example of this.
Stories We Tell: Fact? Fiction? Or an uncomfortable place in-between?
In the documentary Stories We Tell, director Sarah Polley invites us into her
cinematic scrapbook of home movies and family interviews with a playful, warm
embrace. The film is both a memoir about her mother and a meta-commentary on
the process of making a movie about memory.
Beginning with a disarming montage of relatives settling down on chairs
and couches for interviews, admitting their shyness and asking Polley if anyone
really should care about their family history, the movie immediately
establishes a non-threatening atmosphere of trust and familiarity. The story
being told here may be unremarkable, but Polley’s deft command of structure,
film formats and dramatic layering is polished enough to invite our
intimacy. Her honesty is so genuine that
when a third act revelation comes along, a revelation not in the story being
told but in the method used to tell the story, it
has the potential to destroy nearly all the goodwill the film has accumulated
up to that point.
Mud: The film gets stuck in it
The southern end of
the Mississippi River is both setting and central metaphor of Mud, the new film from writer-director Jeff Nichols. Wide
and deep, freighted with history and sensual possibilities, the river moves
deliberately and patiently towards a predictable destination. Rather than make excuses for the literal connections, Nichols embraces the slow linearity of the Mississippi to
tell a straightforward yet ungainly tale of two boys navigating the treacherous
courses of love, trust, and betrayal.
Star Trek Into Darkness: Never count this crew out
The crew of the
U.S.S. Enterprise re-unites for Star Trek Into Darkness, the
umpteenth reiteration of the immortal juggernaut, a never-say-die franchise
lucky enough to be rebooted four years ago in this age of the continually
recycled blockbuster. Think 2012’s The Amazing Spider Man or
the upcoming Man of Steel. No fresh ideas? No problem. Just wait for the next crop of
10-year old boys to come along and start all over again. A decade from now the current cast of actors
in Star Trek Into Darkness will almost certainly
be reprising their roles in cameos for a brand new take on the original 1966 TV
series which, let us all remember, ran for a brief three years. Funny thing is though, the characters
established by creator Gene Roddenberry and embodied by Shatner, Nimoy, et al.
a half century ago, now in the capable, careful hands of director J.J. Abrams
(born the year the series debuted), still pulse with the same inimitable esprit
de corps. Even for the laziest of Trekkies, there is an irresistible chemistry to this band of principled,
prickly space pioneers that manually overrides any computer-generated
apocalypse standing in their way.
The Great Gatsby: Great Scott! Not so great Baz.
Baz Luhrmann’s
version of The Great Gatsby might be the answer to
every high school teacher’s annual dilemma of how to keep a sleep-deprived
sophomore awake long enough to make it to the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic:
require
them to read it aloud at the top of their lungs while listening to rapper Jay-Z
at full volume, trade the classroom in for an amusement park Tilt-a-Whirl,
allow them to binge on martinis and, for that 3-D effect, throw copies of the novel
in their faces. This, at least, is Luhrmann’s strategy for the first forty
minutes of the film, to fire a dizzying arsenal of computer-generated tricks at
you–a multi-layered assault of superimpositions, rocketing pans and tilts and
dolly shots, an editing scheme delivered via machine gun–that leaves you
breathless, distracted, and uneasy. But
just when you’re thinking of fleeing the google-plex to go home and curl up
with the dog-eared comforts of the printed “Gatsby,” something unexpected
happens. Jay visits Nick in his garden, the
cacophony is silenced, at least intermittently, and gradually Fitzgerald’s
unerring ear and eye for the crushed and sodden dreams of the lost generation are
given their due, thanks in part to Baz Luhrmann’s faithful, fan-boy love of the
material.
Something in the Air: Olivier Assayas and the age of innocence
The idea that youth
is wasted on the young appears not to have crossed director Olivier Assayas’
mind in his latest film, Something in the Air,
a tender-hearted autobiography centered around a group of teenagers in 1971
Paris who fully embrace the independence and unapologetic idealism their
innocence and privilege affords them. They would like to be revolutionaries,
but beyond spray-painting the walls of their high school, throwing rocks at
police, and printing flyers in underground collectives, their passion for
anarchy is muted by the competing desires of art, sex, travel and the need to
earn money. In other words, they are so busy being young and carefree, drifting
from experience to experience, they have no time for the demands of rebellion.
The Company You Keep: Robert Redford revisits old friends
Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep is as sturdy and comfortable as an old
favorite pair of slippers, the ones you’ll wear around the house but not in
public. The movie is a bit
old-fashioned, a little slow, somewhat pointless and mildly entertaining. In other words, it’s hard to recommend
without including a string of qualifiers, but that doesn’t mean you should
avoid it. Redford may be past his ability
to make a film as fine-tuned and centered as his great Quiz Show,
one of the signature films of the ‘90s, or as tightly wound as his 1980 debut, Ordinary People, but as with those two pictures, The Company You Keep is consistently professional. It also features a roster of actors only an
icon such as Redford could gather together for one film.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)