“You’re making me angry,” says Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) before transforming into the muscle bound Hulk. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.” Oh yes we will Bruce. In fact, we like you lot more when you’re angry. Director Ang Lee has taken the comic book bully’s story and added touches of intelligence, style and grace, everything in fact, except personality. Bana (whose Ken doll hair I found very distracting) plays Banner as an emotionally detached zombie, draining him of any spark.
Recent Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly doesn’t fare much better. Her Betty Ross is a pretty picture – beautiful to look at, but lacking in any dimension. It is amazing that a movie which expects the audience to buy a wild chemical explanation as to why Banner blows up into his hulking alter ego can have so little chemistry between its two lead actors. There is barely a glimmer when they are on-screen together.
Not so when the big guy enters the picture. The CGI creation is part King Kong, part Frankenstein and all Harryhausen, but yet seems like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Like Frankie and Kong before him, he capable of mindless violence and mass destruction, also has a gentle, compassionate side. In one scene that seems to echo King Kong, Hulk picks up Betty in his massive fist before gently placing her on the roof of a car so he car get a better look at her. Here we see the marvels of the CGI and the Hulk’s wonderfully expressive face. This collection of pixels and binary code ironically brings the movie to life. Of course the Hulk on a rampage is more fun, but Lee paces the action carefully, barely giving us a glimpse of the main attraction until almost an hour into the film, and then uses him sparingly.
People expecting to see an action movie will be sorely disappointed. Hulk (the movies drops “the”) has its moments – the battle with the killer mutant dogs is exciting and violent while Hulk’s desert show-down with the army has the makings of a classic in the superhero oeuvre – but favours the cerebral over the physical. Most of the action here takes place inside Bruce Banner’s mind as he battles with his fate. Hulk historians will note that stylistically Lee has crafted a film using crazy jump-cuts, dissolves and split screens that emulates the wild design of the original comic books.
The supporting cast fares much better than the above the title actors. Josh Lucas hands in a one-note performance as the fleabag military weapons contractor turned Hulk’s punching bag, but seems to be having a good time while doing it. Sam Elliott plays Ross, an army muckety-muck who is bent on destroying the green blowtop. In the hands of a lesser actor this would have been a stereotypical turn as the paranoid, untrusting military man. Instead Elliot gives us the stiff façade of a career warrior, but reveals a softer core – someone who is tormented by the unpleasant choices he has to make.
But it is Nick Nolte’s scene chewing that steals the movie. With his hair standing on end (think of the famous mug shot from last September) and wild eyes blazing Nolte is an organic visual effect that rivals his CGI co-star. As David Banner, the scientist father of the Hulk, he experimented with his own DNA and passed the genetic flaw on to his son. The elder Banner is only playing with only 44 cards in the deck, and Nolte’s over-the-top performance makes his a riveting character.
Hulk may have its flaws, but Ang Lee has done something really interesting here. He’s taken the hoary old superhero genre and freshened it up visually while adding a level of thoughtfulness and context that is missing from other movies of its kind.
Reservation Road opens with every parent’s nightmare. At a rest stop, while the mom and dad gas up the car, little Josh wanders away and is killed by a hit-and-run-driver along a rural Connecticut road. What follows is meant to be an examination of grief and the repercussions of loss, but is in fact, little more than a revenge drama tarted-up with an a-list cast
Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly play Ethan and Grace, parents of the young boy. Behind the wheel of the deadly vehicle is Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo), a lawyer and father of Lucas, who he lost in a custody battle with his ex-wife Ruth (Mira Sorvino) and now only sees on the weekends.
Try as they might to cope with the death of their son, Ethan and Grace fray at the edges. Grace tries to move on, but Ethan, consumed with thoughts of revenge and retribution becomes obsessed with finding his son’s killer in lieu of finding inner peace. In the kind of twist that only happens in Hollywood movies Ethan hires Dwight to help him with his case.
A guilt-ridden Dwight—a recovering something—rage-a-holic, alcoholic—struggles with doing the right thing and turning himself in, but he knows that as soon as he speaks to the police he will likely never see his son again.
Reservation Road can boast good performances all round. Phoenix and Ruffalo hand in the kind of work that has made them both award magnets in the last few years, but for my money it is the quiet portrayal of a grieving mother from Jennifer Connelly that wins the movie. As Grace she seems to actually experience the steps of grief and work through her pain, and in doing so becomes a much more rounded character than Ethan, who simply retreats into a miasma of hate and revenge.
Based on the novel by John Burnham Schwartz Reservation Road is a serious minded, glum film for adults—a la 21 Grams or In the Bedroom—which may pick up a couple of nominations for acting, but despite its heartrending subject, falls flat. Perhaps a different director could have tightened up the pacing and really developed an emotional connection with the audience, but as it is this story of loss is missing something.
No one has spent as much on screen time jumping from dimension to dimension as Keanu Reeves. All the way back to Bill and Ted’s excellent time traveling adventures through to Neo in the Matrix and Constantine his characters have tripped the light fantastic, jumping from one plane to the another. His latest film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, a reinvention of the 1951 classic, sees him once again careening from outer space to the more mortal plane of Earth.
Reeves is Klaatu, an alien messenger in human form who comes to Earth to rescue the planet, but not necessarily its inhabitants. “If the Earth dies, you die,” he says. “If you die, the Earth survives.” When his attempts to communicate and reason with the leaders of Earth fail, he goes ahead with his plan to eliminate all humans. Humankind’s only chance of survival is in the hands of Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) and stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith) who work to convince Klaatu that humans are worth saving, that given the chance they will mend their wasteful ways and save the planet. Can they convince the strange visitor to spare them before his coconspirator GORT, a giant biological robot hell bent to complete his mission, finishes the job?
The Day the Earth Stood Still updates the original’s Cold War themes of the dangers of nuclear warfare to the more contemporary hot button issues of the environment, global warming and man’s systematic destruction of the planet. It’s a good message wrapped up in an average, listless movie.
The film gets off to a s-l-o-w start when, without any explanation, Reeves is seen chipping away at a mysterious orb on a mountain top in India in 1928. Cut to eighty years later the orb lands in Central Park and expels the human now wrapped in gelatinous goop. The sequence takes forever and sets the tone for the rest of the languidly paced story.
Reeves’s take on Klaatu doesn’t help matters any. As the intellectually gifted alien housed in human form he is even more deadpan and monotone than usual. It is, I suppose, an attempt to portray Klaatu’s otherworldliness but Keanu’s low-energy performance as he drones on about the environment makes staid enviro-warrior Al Gore look like the easily excitable Richard Simmons by comparison.
Ditto for John Hamm. His work as Don Draper on Mad Men is so detailed and interesting it’s a shame to see him reduced to bland second-leading man here.
The film doesn’t limit itself to the environmental situation; it also takes jabs at America’s current political climate. When Benson asks why she has been summoned by the government she’s told simply and vaguely, “It’s a matter of national security.”
“Well, that could mean whatever you want it to mean,” she says.
That’s a clever and insightful exchange. It’s just too bad it’s one of the few moments in the film that gives off sparks.
The Day the Earth Stood Still is a big budget but unnecessary remake of a sci-fi classic; a movie that doesn’t improve on its source material despite its best intentions.
Dark Water is a psychological drama based on a short story by Koji Suzuki—the Stephen King of Japanese horror and the author of Ringu—which simmers, but never comes to a boil. The story is simple: Daphne (Jennifer Connelly) is going through a messy divorce and custody battle for her five-year-old daughter. To earn full custody Daphne needs to present a stable living environment and rents a cheap, rundown old apartment near a good school. They have a home but something feels off about the apartment—plus a large water stain on the bedroom ceiling gradually weakens Daphne’s already fragile mental state. Dark Water moves so slowly that often it feels more like a movie about bad plumbing than a study of urban dread, but there is something hypnotic about the smoggy yellow color pallet of the film that breeds an uneasiness in the viewer. Too bad this atmospheric thriller is so long on atmosphere and so short on thrills.
Great chefs know that the best food is usually created using a minimum of ingredients. Even if the ingredients are of the highest quality too many flavors confuses the palate and ruins the meal. So it is in movies. Director Ed Zwick has taken top-flight ingredients—a cast that includes Oscar nominees Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou with Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly, beautiful African locations and a worthy story—but he’s too heavy-handed with the spices, and almost ruins the stew.
In the last couple of years there have been many films about Africa’s troubled recent history. We’ve seen Hotel Rwanda, Catch a Fire, The Last King of Scotland even the documentary Shake Hands with the Devil, but none have touched on the trade in conflict diamonds. Set in 1999 Blood Diamond takes us inside the trade of western African in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a South African soldier of fortune that has turned to the lucrative but dangerous job of diamond smuggling between Sierra Leone and Liberia. Busted by border guards and thrown into jail he comes into contact with Solomon Vandy (Hounsou), a fisherman who was enslaved by the radical RUF to work in their illegal mining camps sifting for “blood diamonds” which would then be sold to legitimate sources to raise money for arms. While working at the camp Solomon managed to find and secret away a rare pink diamond the size of a bird’s egg. Archer sees this valuable diamond as his ticket out of war torn Africa. Along the way an American journalist played by Connolly and his growing friendship with Solomon raises his awareness to his part in the horror. It makes for an odd mix of straight out action and social commentary.
Zwick tries to take on the ills of the region—trade in blood diamonds, the use of children in the infantry—coupled with commentary on the West’s exploitation of the continent’s mineral resources, the responsibility of consumers understand the human cost of their purchases as well as the monetary and the personal stories of each of the characters. Throw in an almost love story and you have spoiled the broth with too many ingredients.
Each of the lead actors does good work here—although Jennifer Connolly’s war correspondent must to have an unseen hairdresser traveling with her—and several of the action sequences are spectacular, but in regard to the social and political comment of the film, Zwick seems to have bitten off more than he could chew.
John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematics prodigy won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. He was also a troubled bisexual who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The true story of his life is hard hitting stuff, too bad barely any of the nitty gritty made it to the screen in Ron Howard’s puffy bio pic. A Beautiful Mind cleans ups Nash’s story, softening the edges and failing to provide any insight into the inner workings of this complex man. By the time we get to the third act things have degenerated into true Ron Howard hooey. The saving grace of this movie are the performances of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. They share real chemistry, and make for convincing viewing. It is hard to believe that this is the same actor who last year was brandishing a sword and fighting tigers in Gladiator. As for Connelly, well, she’s not only uncommonly beautiful, but is also capable of delivering an intelligent polished performance.
