How do you breath life into the withered lungs of a period piece that has been told time and time again? If you’re “Anna Karenina” director Joe Wright you honor Leo Tolstoy’s book while staging the story of deception, honor and love at the intersection where reality and fantasy cross.
Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s classic story of love, honor and deceit in 1974 Imperialist Russia begins with a family in tatters because of marital transgression. St. Petersburg aristocrat and socialite Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) travels to Moscow to visit her womanizing brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) and his long-suffering wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). Her council saves their marriage but the trip proves to be the undoing of hers. She becomes smitten with the affluent Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a handsome military man and begins a torrid affair. Soon, however, she discovers that her indiscretion isn’t as easily dismissed as her brother’s.
The story itself is rather simple and has been told many times, what distinguishes this version, aside from the cast (more on that later), is the sumptuous staging. Every frame of the film drips with beauty, from the sets to the clothes to Knightley’s cheekbones. But that’s to be expected from a big retelling of the story. What really captures the eye–and the mind–is the unconventional way Wright has chosen to tell the tale.
The film opens on what appears to be a stage production of “Anna Karenina.” We see musicians, dancing and backstage activity. To further blur the line between reality and illusory we see Anna, Oblonsky and others going about their day. Imagine watching the “Anna Karenina” opera and you get the idea.
It is a brilliant piece of staging for a story that has enough passion and tragedy for two operas. More importantly the style doesn’t overwhelm the substance. The baroque tone established early on sets the stage, literally, for screenwriter Tom Stoppard’s sweeping story of betrayal, forgiveness and death. It is an epic but human story about the best and worst of behavior.
Leading the cast Knightley proves a natural for period pieces. She has a face meant to be framed by fur hats and veils but apart from looking the part she carefully modulates Anna’s descent from socialite to outcast with grace and dignity while allowing notes of frustration and misery to seep through.
Knightley has the showiest role but Jude Law also makes an impression despite showing considerable restraint in his take on Anna’s beleaguered husband Alexei Karenin.
Decked out in blonde curly hair Aaron Taylor-Johnson is almost unrecognizable from his best known role, playing John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy,” but as Count Vronsky he convincingly plays a confident man who allows self-gratification to ruin his life and Anna’s.
A lighter note is supplied by Matthew Macfadyen, whose élan and rakish charm turns the womanizing Oblonsky into one of the film’s high spots.
“Anna Karenina” is a grand film, both in story and style.
On the surface New York hedge-fund king Robert Miller (Richard Gere) is the model of success. At sixty years old and married to Ellen (Susan Sarandon) he’s preparing to hand over his empire to his Chief Investment Manager, who also happens to be his daughter Brooke (Brit Marling). He’s so rich he doesn’t even know what an Applebees is. Cracks appear in the façade, however, when an accident involving his mistress, French art-dealer Julie Côte (Laetitia Casta), threatens to uncover the dark side of his life, including a $400 million fraud.
“Arbitrage” has already earned Richard Gere a Golden Globe nomination and may be the role that finally lands him an Oscar nod. He’s terrific as the morally ambiguous banker (is there any other kind in the movies?), a cold—so chilly you want to put a scarf on when he’s in the room—calculating but charismatic wheeler-dealer whose motives are not always immediately clear. It’s a complex performance that shows the balance Miller has over his lives as a business-person versus family man.
His two powerhouse scenes are intimate ones, there’s nothing flashy about them, they simply moments of reckoning for a man between his wife and father with daughter. They are quiet, powerful passages in a sophisticated movie about deceit and flawed characters.
It’s a twisty, turny plot kept interesting by the uniformly strong performances. Tim Roth’s Det. Michael Bryer, the street-savvy cop trying to get to the bottom of Miller’s complex web of lies, is Columbo-esque, but he manages to make it his own.
Sarandon and Marling (who has a bachelor’s in economics in real life and becomes the movie’s conscious) shine, but it is Nate Parker as the Jimmy Grant, the son of one of Miller’s friends, who almost steals the show from Gere. He’s the only character with a developed sense of right and wrong, and it almost lands him in trouble.
“Arbitrage” is an intricate, gripping crime drama populated by relatable, although not very likable, characters.
“30 Rock,” the beloved but low rated comedy is gone now, having passed on to the great boob tube in the sky, but Tina Fey fans can get their fix of her trademarked brand of witty and wise humor in “Admission,” a “mom com” co-starring Paul Rudd.
Fey is Portia Nathan, a mildly compulsive Princeton admissions officer—they jokingly call her their “golden retriever” because of her record of recruiting a-plus students—who leads a quiet, ordered life with professor Mark (Michael Sheen). They share a love of poetry, hatred of kids and not much else. Her well ordered life is thrown into disarray when John Pressman (Rudd), a free-spirited former classmate and now teacher at an alternative school, introduces her to Jeremiah Balakian (Nat Wolff), a brilliant young man who may be the child she gave up for adoption seventeen years ago.
Fey didn’t write “Admission,” but it is firmly in her wheelhouse. Like “30 Rock” before it, “Admission” takes a recognizable style and subverts it with smarts. It’s a female driven romantic comedy, but there isn’t a rom com clichés in sight. Instead there are René Descartes jokes and Bella Abzug sight gags, but what else, exactly, did you expect in a movie set at Princeton?
But it also more than that. It’s a big studio comedy—the first half-hour is hysterical and then it evens out, although Lily Tomlin as Portia’s militant mom is hilarious throughout—that has all the laughs but none of the vulgarity (unless you’re offended by the line, “You’re not the only one who smells of cow placenta”) of the recent Hollywood amusements.
Fey fans will remember “Baby Mama” and the late season “30 Rock” motherhood storyline, so Portia’s maternal development completes the trilogy of motherhood movies, except, that like in those other stories, not everything works out exactly as planned.
As a recruiter Portia uses the line, “What’s the secret to getting in? I can’t tell you—you have to find out for yourself,” in her pitch to students. Those words also echo her character arc—she must find independence to find herself. That’s a heady concept for a rom com and pretty much the opposite of every romantic comedy plotline every written.
There she goes again subverting the genre.
“Admission” is familiar enough to not jar the sensibilities of undemanding rom com fans, but there is more here than immediately meets the eye.
Who knew there was so much intrigue in the seed business? “At Any Price,” the new film starring Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron as father and son, features infidelity, shady dealings and even murder, all set against a bucolic Iowa background.
Henry Whipple (Quaid) is a second-generation farmer and seed salesman. His father built up the land and the business, and now Henry is trying to take it into the next level by buying more land and selling genetically modified seeds. His youngest son Dean (Efron) is more interested in racing cars than growing corn, but when the family business is threatened the clan reluctantly pulls together despite their personal differences and a dark secret.
As the title suggests, this is a story about the price of winning at any cost. To drive the point home director Ramin Bahrani clutters the story with unnecessary story shards that don’t add much to the movie except for length. At just an hour and forty-five minutes it still feels long, as though the core idea—a powerful tale of fathers and sons and the pressure to succeed—is stretched to fill the time, rather than serving the story.
Quaid and Efron rise above the contrived story elements to hand in good, if sometimes melodramatic, performances and it’s so full of atmosphere you can almost taste the corn—it’s just too bad that the corny stuff in this movie isn’t limited to the fields
After narrowly escaping jail, Scottish hell-raiser Robbie (Paul Brannigan) tries to create an honest life for his new family. Filmed and set in Glasgow, the first hour has a natural vibe; a rawness and realism that almost feel like a documentary but it switches in the latter half to a grimly funny caper film. It’s an unlikely feel good movie with good performances and loads of lyrical Scottish accents. The standout here is Brannigan who is so charismatic in his debut performance it’s hard to believe he’s never acted before stepping in front of ’s camera.
What do you call a Will Smith movie that’s not really a Will Smith movie?
A screening of his new film, the sci fi actioner directed by M. Night Shyamalan provides the answer. “After Earth” sounds like a great Smith vehicle—he not only acts in it, but produces and has a story credit as well—but it fails to take advantage of his greatest asset—his star power.
Big Willie is Cypher Raige, a highly respected general in the intergalactic peacekeeping organization Ranger Corps, based on the planet Nova Prime. He rose through the ranks fighting the Ursa, genetically engineered beasties who can literally smell human fear. They are POed because they consider the planet their home and the humans interlopers. By learning to overcome his fear—a technique known as “ghosting”— Cypher became invisible to them.
Unfortunately his son Kitai (played by his real life son Jaden Smith) is invisible to him. To try and mend family fences he takes the youngster on a mission to deliver an Ursa specimen for use in training ghost warriors wannabes.
But after Cypher breaks his leg in a crash landing on Earth, a planet uninhabited for a millennium, Kitai must navigate the unfamiliar landscape and battle the escaped Ursa and overgrown Earth organisms—everything on the planet has evolved to kill humans!— to retrieve an emergency beacon.
Herein lies the big problem with “After Earth.” Will Smith—one of the most charismatic movie stars of the day—may have his name above the title on the poster, but he’s the star in billing only. For most of the film he lays back, motionless and bleeding, allowing the light to shine brightly on his son Jaden.
It’s too bad, the listless “After Earth” needs the elder Smith driving the film, not taking the backseat over enunciating motivational lines like, “Recognize your power: This will be your creation.”
Jaden isn’t a strong enough actor to hold the center of a massive CGI movie. He’s charismatic like his dad but here he appears to have only a handful of facial expressions and rotates between anger, surprise, fear and some serious eyebrow acting for most of the film’s scant 90 minute (including credits) running time.
Shyamalan, whose forte is not helming big summer tentpole movies, doesn’t bring much to the screen visually. The look of the movie is generic sci fi, and for every cool scene—Kitai soaring through the air in a wing suit, chased by a giant eagle—there are obvious soundstage scenes and cheesy costumes. Then there are the accents—apparently all future people sound like Rolf Harris. And don’t even get me started on the logic leaps—how do flora and fauna survive on a planet that falls into a deep freeze every night, for instance.
On the plus side it does have a pretty great last line, and at least it isn’t in 3D. But at the end of the day “After Earth’s” main crime is placing Will on the sidelines, robbing it of a star that might have been able to make this journey interesting.
Josh Hartnett should be ashamed of himself. If he weren’t so damn cute this stupid story about a young man who gives up sex for lent would stop his career dead in its tracks. 40 Days and 40 Nights is puerile, insulting and at 96 minutes about 93 minutes too long – I liked the music in the first three minutes of the opening credit sequence.
28 Days Later begins with a great horror movie premise. A group of British activists free infected animals from their cages, unleashing a deadly “rage” virus on the human population. Twenty-eight days after the virus took hold of the city, a bicycle courier named Jim awakens from a coma, unaware of the devastation. In one of the year’s best cinematic sequences, horror or otherwise, Jim leaves the hospital to find a deserted London. Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave) infuses the shots of the empty streets with a sense of dread. As Jim wanders through the vacant Piccadilly Circus the feeling of foreboding grows as he realizes that something catastrophic has happened here. And that’s just the first ten minutes. (The scenes of London’s deserted streets were shot just after dawn on weekdays. Because of the traffic, they could only shoot for a couple of minutes each day. Crewmembers frequently had to stop and ask clubbers not to walk into shots.)
Boyle deftly juggles two distinct ideas in 28 Days Later. It is a full blown Halloween flick, complete with drooling angry zombies, (although hard-core gore fans will be disappointed, most of the horror here is psychological) but at its core it is also a compelling study of human nature and the will to survive. Each character is fully rounded, and none are superfluous in this tough drama.
Selena (Naomie Harris), for example, isn’t a damsel in distress, nor is she simply a hard-nosed zombie killer. She is a layered character, a normal person who is placed in an unimaginable circumstance and is dealing with it on an instinctual level. She isn’t a killer, but she’ll kill to survive. “Staying alive is as good as it gets,” she says grimly.
Boyle (and screenwriter Alex Garland) give a wide berth to the stereotypical character traits found in horror movies – the screaming girlfriend, the witless teen, the gung-ho monster slayer – and instead concentrate on developing believable characters and situations in an unbelievable scenario.
In addition to believable characters 28 Days Later also re-invents the cinematic zombie. Gone are the lumbering, “We’re coming to get you,” living dead from years past. Boyle’s ghouls move with frightening speed, hissing at the scent of human flesh, and attacking at random. These are the zombies that nightmares are made of.
Shooting on digital video this time out, Boyle has left behind the visual showiness of Trainspotting and the austere picture-postcard look of The Beach, trading those in for a grainy, almost documentary feel. The jagged feel of the video gives the movie a sense of urgency and energy which seems appropriate for the subject matter. Unlike Soderbergh’s Full Frontal this material actually benefits from the use of video.
28 Days Later runs out of steam as the third act winds down, but up until its closing minutes it is as good as speculative fiction gets.
In recent years I have found Spike Lee movies to be very frustrating. Fifty percent of each movie I really like, but then there’s the remaining fifty percent that just infuriates me. It’s not bad filmmaking; it’s just unnecessary filmmaking. There is a lot of stuff in these films that doesn’t further the story, that is preachy, and simply doesn’t belong there. But the stuff that’s good is really, really good, and I found The 25th Hour to be another example of that.
plays small-time drug dealer Montgomery Brogan, who, after being arrested by the DEA, reevaluates his life in his last 24 hours before beginning a seven-year jail term. Interesting premise. Why then muddy it up with a commentary on September 11th that seems out of place, and kind of badly chosen? Exploring the relationship between Brogan and his two best friends, Jacob and Frank (Phillip Seymour-Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and how their friendship will change once Montgomery goes to jail would have been a great character drama.
Instead Lee adds a September 11th angle that feels tacked on and doesn’t add to the movie. Don’t get me wrong, it probably comes from a very sincere place. Spike Lee makes incredible movies about New York and is passionate about the city and probably felt like he had to find a way to tell this story, but he ties the September 11th angle to Montgomery’s story, and in the context of the whole movie I didn’t really understand the connection. If we are supposed to infer that the life New York was changed by the terrorist attacks just as the life of Edward Norton’s character was changed by getting arrested I think it is a weak comparison, and frankly, inappropriate. The dynamic between the three friends is great. I wanted more of that. Loose the September 11th stuff, some of the peripheral story lines and just tell me that story and it would have been a better movie.
25th Hour is classic Spike Lee – brilliant, fearless but at the same time troublesome.
