Valkyrie

This Movie Made Me: Sufficiently Anxious

As the age-old saying goes: actions speak louder than words. That is particularly the case with Valkryie, Bryan Singer’s new thriller depicting the true story of a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. Perhaps it’s all for the best, since the actors spew out a hodgepodge of accents that hinder the film. And despite genuine thrills, a stiff Tom Cruise performance makes Valkyrie just another run-of-the-mill thriller.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) is stationed in Africa during the latter years of WWII. After an attack leaves him wounded and blind in one eye, von Stauffenberg returns to Germany. His animosity towards Hitler lands him in a group of high-ranking officials plotting to overthrow Hitler and start a new government. Von Stauffenberg presents Operation Valkyrie, meant to be used in case of a SS revolt, as the perfect means to assassinate Hitler and end his reign of terror.

Singer’s talent for making unbearably tense sequences is on full display here. Even though the ultimate end of the plot is obvious, the assassination attempt is an expertly crafted nail biter. Intricately detailed and as drawn out as possible, it is impossible not to be spellbound by the time von Stauffenberg has Hitler in his sights. This is filmmaking much more focused than his work in the X-Men series and in Superman Returns.

If only the rest of the film kept up with him. Cruise seems to be unable to emote properly with only one eye. Having the only American accent doesn’t help either. There are accents abound in Valkyrie – mostly British, and most of the actual German accents are reserved for the bad guys. While it may have saved Cruise the embarrassment of ridiculous accents, the eclectic mix takes away more from the film than it adds to it. It is a particular travesty that Carice van Houten (mesmerizing in Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book) has only a few precious minutes of screen time. As von Stauffenberg’s wife, her character seems almost an afterthought as written. But van Houten speaks volumes without saying a word. And in the end, it’s her we remember.

Valkyrie is a solid thriller – an accomplishment enough, given how obvious its ending will be. The detail constructed in the suspenseful sequences is top-notch and not to be missed. Whether or not it returns Tom Cruise to box office glory remains to be seen. But if Valkyrie does, it will be because of film power – not star power.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

This Movie Made Me: Bored

Keanu Reeves is learning. Not learning how to act, but learning how to use his lack of expressions effectively. His latest inexpressive character is Klaatu, the foreboding alien at the center of The Day the Earth Stood Still. This effects-laden remake is about as exciting as listening to Reeves reading a senate environmental bill.

A mysterious space object lands in Central Park. (Because anybody who’s anybody attacks New York first). But instead of an asteroid, scientists find a large glowing orb. Two beings emerge from it: a surprisingly retro robot/alien hybrid named Gort and an alien life form quickly reborn as Keanu Reeves. When the alien’s intentions become clear, the government tries to strengthen its hold on him and he takes off with a sympathetic scientist (Jennifer Connelly) and her son (Jaden Smith).

Sounds exciting, right? Not really. Aside from a few scenes that can best be described as “creepy,” the film is all talk. The scientists wonder what the alien could want, a government bigwig (in this case, Kathy Bates) feeling threatened, the alien escapes and then… they talk some more! It’s not that the film suffers from too much set-up and too little pay-off. The talking just moves around in circle and, despite all the talk of impending doom, no one ever actually seems worried. And when the apocalypse finally arrives, it can best be described as mind-numbing. Never before has the destruction of mankind been so boring.

And it’s not as if the film suffers from a lack of ambience. Director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) fills the film with appropriately eerie scenes of misty forests and sparse landscapes, all of which tie into the film’s unabashed green sensibilities. If only the script gave the filmmakers some thrills to work with. Reeves’ lack of versatility actually serves him well – let’s face it, no one seems more natural at being flat than him. Connelly, Jon Hamm and Kyle Chandler provide sufficient support, even if they all looks the same. It’s almost as if mankind already suffered an alien attack that obliterated everyone with brightly-colored hair.

Whether or not The Day the Earth Stood Still warranted a remake is beside the point. When the results are this mediocre, there’s no point in arguing for or against. It shows that the director can make pretty pictures, but not much else. And it shows that Keanu Reeves can convincingly play an unemotional alien. But we already knew that.

Australia

This movie made me: Entertained and Affected

If nothing else, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia will make you reminiscent of the films of yesteryear. Old-fashioned epic-ness is everywhere in Australia. The film never reaches these heights, of course, but it’s nice to get swept away by its unabashed romanticism and scope.

The film is a fairy tale that takes place in a faraway land called Oz. Just as WWII breaks out, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) finds herself transported from England to the outback when she inherits her husband’s sprawling ranch. It is not a match made in heaven; Sarah is so stiff and British she carries a riding crop with her most of the time. And the natives aren’t exactly welcoming – ranch hand Fletcher (David Wenham) is working with the major Australian power in cattle herding to force Sarah out of business, and the drover she hires to help her (Hugh Jackman) can’t stand the sight of her. But as they work together to save the ranch and its inhabitants and as the Japanese begin to invade, Sarah and the drover must fight to prove that love can conqueror all.

Like Luhrmann’s other films, Australia starts at a breakneck pace – but without the flashing lights. It’s an odd absence, but it works. The film is definitely epic – the sets, costumes and cinematography are not to be beat. But despite valiant efforts, Luhrmann cannot muster the same devastating resonance that made Moulin Rouge! so effective. The audience knows Sarah and the drover are meant for each other, so it’s almost as if the filmmakers figured there’s no point in creating truly compelling characters.

But thanks to strong performances, the film is deeply emotional. The Drover is an Australian Rhett Butler, and with his rugged adventurous personality and intense emotionality Jackman is more than qualified to fill Clark Gable’s shoes. Kidman moves from side-splittingly funny to desperately earnest with ease. She is never more compelling than in her scenes with newcomer Brandon Walters. As a mixed-blood Aborigine child, Walters gives the film its heart. With his wide, dark eyes and endless enthusiasm, it’s very difficult not to fall in love with him.

There’s an element of magic realism that sets it apart from other epics. Filled with musical references to “Over the Rainbow,” classical and Aboriginal music, the importance of music becomes an active part of the film – bringing this world to something other than reality. There’s no denying its pure entertainment. Australia is an experience unlike any other you’ll see this year.

Let the Right One In

This movie made me: Stunned

Vampire love in cinema is a bit of a hot topic right now… I don’t think I need to say why. But while a certain tween sensation invades movie theaters across the country, another take on the vampire genre is sneaking in. Swedish export Let the Right One In is both a chilling and complex variation of the classic vampire story and a heartbreaking melancholic study of doomed first love.

12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is a shy, bullied kid in a small snowy Swedish town. Unable to stand up to the bullies in school, Oskar takes a knife to trees outside his apartment at night. It is here he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), who’s just moved into the apartment next door. She tells him she can’t be his friend, but Oskar cannot stay away. As their friendship blossoms bodies begin to pile up around the town – all of them drained of blood. Eli is clearly not what she seems, but she and Oskar continue to watch their friendship grow.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Let the Right One In is how much of it is grounded in reality. For once, it’s actually plausible that the townspeople never guess there’s a vampire in their midst. Every bit of Eli’s story that stretches into mythic regions feels new. New questions are raised about vampires – their gender, the relationships they have with normal people. Young Leandersson is truly remarkable, showing more depth and subtleties in her film debut than many actors ever manage. She shows an astonishing understanding of Eli’s complexities – the extent of her relationship with Oskar, and whether it is one of benefit or of love.

Director Thomas Alfredson’s stark and unwavering style supports the film’s moments of horror and tenderness without changing anything. Alfredson doesn’t throw any tricks or gimmicks – everything is presented as straightforward and clearly as possible. He has the power to make an audience squirm or break their hearts on the turn of a dime. Each sequence rises to a new level of mastery of suspense and emotionality, culminating in a finale so shocking it’s bound to be left out of the inevitable American remake.

In the end, Let the Right One In is hardly just a vampire film. It’s a coming-of-age story, a story about first love, about the loneliness of a broken childhood and an examination of the positive and negatives of friendship. Emotionally devastating and chilling, Let the Right One In is a film that seeks to reinvent the vampire and actually succeeds in doing so.

Quantum of Solace

This movie made me: Moderately Excited

“Bond is running wild.” These four words, spoken midway through Quantum of Solace, perfectly describe the 22nd Bond adventure. Daniel Craig continues to reinvent Bond in new and thrilling ways, even if the film can’t keep up with him. Filled with frenetic action but not much else, Quantum of Solace is far from the greatest Bond adventure. But fans have suffered through much worse.

The action picks up only minutes after the conclusion of Casino Royale. In his effort to seek revenge against those responsible for the death of his love Vesper, Bond begins to uncover information about Quantum – a group so secret no one knows about it. His leads send him around the world and eventually into the presence of Dominic Greene (Matthieu Amalric), one of those sinister businessmen seeking to control the world. Bond soon crosses paths with Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a brazen beauty with her own revenge mission. It’s all very Licence to Kill, but leaner, meaner and without the Wayne Newton cameo.

Craig’s Bond has never been so determined, vicious and downright frightening – just as he should be. Anyone who still doubts him as Bond is in severe denial. But it suffers from the second-movie syndrome. At the film’s conclusion, there are more questions than answers – Quantum is just a name and a few faces. Instead we watch Bond tracking a Peter Lorre-esque middle man the entire time – the type of figure that would get killed off halfway through a typical Bond picture.

But it’s not that important, since what director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction) clearly wants us to notice how cool the actions scenes are. And there are plenty of them: Bond gets chased in a car, in a boat, on foot, in a plane, etc. Sometimes, he even does the chasing! The first meeting between hero and villain at an outdoor may is the most artistically ambitious set piece in the series. And the (literally) explosive finale in a desert hotel showcases some of the coolest Bond sets in 40 years.

Instead of concocting a two-hour romance between Bond and Kurylenko’s Camille, the filmmakers pair them as something much more complex and rewarding – two desperate people after the same thing. They are able to relate to each other because of the tragedies they’ve faced – they are the ideal match for each other. When Bond and Camille, dirty and exhausted, walk in silence through the Bolivian desert, they are united in their loneliness.

In the years to come, Quantum of Solace will probably be come to known as the arty James Bond movie. Director Forster adds a lot of little moments into the film – fancy fonts, soundless montages, etc. – that are interesting, but only occasionally succeed. Bond is still on a mission that will presumably be continued in the next film. But as far as 106 minute long set-ups go, this ain’t too bad.

Repo! The Genetic Opera

This movie made me: Confused

In the past, the phrase “and it’s a musical!” has often been used to make hypothetically ridiculous movies sound even more absurd. Now, at long last, people can use that phrase with complete honesty. Repo! The Genetic Opera takes place in the not-too-distant future where an epidemic of organ failure led to the creation of an organ lending system. People sign a contract with the all-powerful GeneCo, and are granted a new lease on life. But if any loaners miss a payment, the Repo Man appears and takes the product back in the most gruesome way possible… and it’s a musical!

With a premise such as this, director Darren Lynn Bousman (of Saw fame) should be expected to deliver something on the level of The Rocky Horror Picture Show by forgoing all sense of reason in favor of something bombastically bizarre and entertaining. Unfortunately, his pedestrian approach to the material only forgoes reason, with little of the bizarreness that the film desperately needs. It’s weird, all right, but for most of the film the characters simply sit and sing about their feelings, or about how the world sucks – hardly the kind of material that will make an audience go along with it.

The film follows Shiloh (Alexa Vega), a teenage girl with a blood disease so dangerous that her father Nathan (Anthony Stewart Head) keeps her locked up in her room. This is all the better for him, since it means he can hide his true identity from her – he is the vicious and unforgiving Repo Man, who stalks the streets to reclaim organs from unpaying customers. After a horrible accident that left Shiloh’s mother dead, Nathan found himself in debt to GeneCo’s president, Rotti Largo (a warbling Paul Sorvino), who has his hands full with his own children: dangerously violent Luigi (Bill Moseley), unhinged face-stealer Pavi (Orge), and spoiled surgery and drug-addicted Amber Sweet (Paris Hilton, obviously a stretch for her). But as Shiloh’s desire to know the outside world grows stronger, Nathan’s guilt over his horrendous actions grows with Largo’s need to find the new head of the company keeping the world alive.

To say Repo! isn’t scary is pointless, given the nature of the film. This is straight-up Victorian melodrama, from the complicated bickering families all the way to the blood-soaked finale (set, appropriately, in an opera house). But there must be something said for the lack of suspense the film creates. Most of the film has characters sitting (or occasionally pacing) and singing about what’s troubling them. It’s only a few times where people actually do something. And even when the Repo Man goes out to do his dirty work, the images are surprisingly subdued. Given that the director rose to fame as the helmer of the Saw sequels, one should certainly expect the deaths to be more gruesome than they are. It’s not that the film isn’t violent, but its violence is simple, and the effect watered down by the rambling inner monologues that follow and precede it.

The film actually works only a few times, and it’s probably not a coincidence that classical crossover singer Sarah Brightman (in her film debut) is present in all of them. As Blind Mag, GeneCo’s spokeswoman and opera star, Brightman’s wide eyes, crystal clear voice and Elvira-ish appearance is perfectly suited to what the film should be. Not to mention she is one of the few cast members who can actually sing, though Head displays a fine rock voice as well. Her duet with Vega, “Chase the Morning”, is exactly what the film should have been; it shows Bousman at his most inventive and is one of the few times where we completely understand what’s going on.

Shot in the kind of fuzzy light usually reserved nowadays for flashbacks, it comes as no surprise that when the flashbacks actually show up in Repo!, they’re rendered in comic book-style. We read and see pictures of the characters’ pasts, which is surely a case of the “show, don’t tell” rule that filmmakers are told to avoid in school. But that sums up the entirety of Repo! in a way. It tries to break the rules and redefine what a musical and a horror film can be, but ends up being an unexciting and confusing exercise in monotony. Filled with bland songs blandly performed by the cast (with one or two exceptions) Repo! should only be recommended for the curious who seriously don’t expect anything, because they’ll get exactly that.

Burn After Reading

After NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, I think we’d all appreciate something lighter from the Coen Brothers. Well, relatively speaking. Putting their darkly comic twist on the paranoid thriller, the Coens give us BURN AFTER READING, a film that raises questions and staunchly refuses to answer them. Featuring spirited performances by an energetic ensembles and flashes of genuine Coen genius, BURN AFTER READING may not be the new American classic, but we’re having too much fun to care.

The whole ordeal begins when CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is unceremoniously dismissed, with his superiors citing his drinking as the problem. In his malaise he decides to write his memoirs, much to the chagrin of his cold and detached wife Katie (Tilda Swinton). Meanwhile, some of Cox’s personal files end up in the possession of two gym workers. One is the dispirited Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), who is trying to finance some cosmetic surgeries. The other is bright, chipper and mostly clueless trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) who jumps at the sign of excitement. As they begin their mission to blackmail Cox, Linda becomes involved with womanizer Harry Pfaffer (George Clooney) who is also having an affair with Katie. And if you think this sounds convoluted, you’ve only cracked the surface.

The Coens have set out to create the most ridiculously complex plot they could, and they’ve succeeded with flying colors. Late in the film, when two agents muse how pointlessly confusing the whole thing is the audience is right there with them. The entire film is an hour and a half of pointless confusion, but it couldn’t be more hilarious. When events take the trademark dark Coen Brothers twist, the film becomes even more convoluted. It relentlessly parodies the look-over-your-shoulder paranoid thrillers and the every-word-has-a-hidden-meaning spy films that is purposely loses itself as it winds to a ludicrously messy finale.

Part of the reason the mess never gets tiring is because of its top-notch cast. Each gifted with characters a step above reality, the lead actors take their parts and run. Every performance is crafted to perfection. From Swinton’s icy wife who instantly sees the worst in everybody to Clooney’s ultra-paranoid bumbling fella who’s in over his head. But fine as these two actors are, they can’t compare to the film’s three leads. Coen Brothers vet McDormand puts in another classic performance that is a masterpiece of earnest lunacy. The audience simultaneously feels for Linda as she laments over her body image and roars with laughter as she bursts into each new twist with blind confidence and an apparent determination to mispronounce names. Malkovich is sways wildly from screaming matches to complete despair in the most exaggerated way possible. But the life of the film lies with Brad Pitt. Chad is a jock who forgot that he graduated from high school, more dedicated to his job and his bicycle than seems humanly possible. He completely shreds his cool-guy personality and still manages to be cool. With his almost giggly outbursts and his pumped dances, he may be the coolest idiot around.

Even if it’s relatively free of the visual inventiveness seen in their other films, BURN AFTER READING packs a punch with its smart script and freewheeling performances. Its jokes are sharp enough to forgive INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and reteaming with a few familiar faces has done wonders for the brothers’ sense of humor. It may not be the most thought-provoking film out there and you’d be hard-pressed to justify why it all happened. But when the results are this fun, who cares?

***/****