Charlie Wilson's War (Universal)Charlie Wilson’s War is a rare thing—a funny political film, a sexy history lesson. Director Mike Nichols brings a light comic touch to the story of the Democratic Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks) with a thing for the ladies and a soft spot for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Julia Roberts plays the wealthy conservative socialite who convinces Wilson to orchestrate the covert diversion of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Afghan rebels in the years following the Soviet invasion in 1979. Neither Hanks nor Roberts is particularly convincing as a Texas politico, but that’s OK. The film crackles whenever Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing CIA agent Gust Avrakotos, comes on screen, ripping mischievously through his sardonic dialogue and bringing everyone else’s game up a notch. Adapted from a book by the late George Crile, Aaron Sorkin's screenplay strongly suggests that the Congressional failure to help rebuild Afghanistan’s decimated post-war infrastructure helped make that country an eventual hotbed of terrorist activity. But what sticks is the criticism of U.S. politics as essentially a popularity contest, driven by friendships, favors, and fickle public opinion—a system prone to leave jobs unfinished as they become unfashionable. Originally published in the White Plains Times.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Charlie Wilson's War (Widescreen)
Easy Living (Universal)
Preston Sturges began his career at Paramount in 1937 by writing this Depression-era-New-York comedy about a wealthy industrialist (Edward Arnold) known as The Bull of Broad Street, his unhappy son (Ray Milland) who leaves home to work as a busboy at an automat, and working girl Mary Smith (Jean Arthur), whose life changes after a crazy-expensive fur coat chucked off the roof of a Manhattan apartment building lands on her head. (She turns around, angrily, and demands, "What's the big deal anyway?" The turbaned dude behind her responds, deadpan, "Kismet." It's that kind of screenplay.) Turns out the coat is a powerful status symbol, and Mary soon learns that nothing attracts wealth as powerfully as, well, more wealth. The no-frills slapstick of director Mitchell Leisen (an accomplished art director and costume designer) is no substitute for the elegance that Sturges would later develop helming his own material, but it's fairly well-tuned for this sophisticated, breezily entertaining farce of misunderstood identities. And Jean Arthur is terrific. I'm not sure how good the DVD looks, but it's got to be better than my VHS copy, which was recorded from Showtime almost 20 years ago.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Easy Living (Universal Cinema Classics)
The Orphanage (Picturehouse)
After the surprise success of Pan’s Labyrinth last year, Picturehouse took a chance by floating this creepy Spanish ghost story to mainstream U.S. audiences. It’s worth a look. The first section is paced so slowly that it’s almost sleep-inducing, with a cute kid mugging for the camera in every other scene. After the young boy abruptly disappears—kidnapped, perhaps, by the invisible friends he has found in the former orphanage owned by his adoptive parents?—the film slowly comes to life. Director Juan Antonio Bayona takes a mostly restrained approach, opting to create atmosphere instead of manufacturing thrills. He does stage a single scene of grisly violence at about the halfway mark that’s startling enough to keep audiences on edge for the duration, as mother Laura (Belén Rueda in a tense, wiry performance), becomes more and more consumed with the search for her vanished son. Haunted-house tropes and other genre clichés abound, but The Orphanage is actually refreshing, in part because it avoids the kind of self-conscious twist endings popularized by recent horror movies. In some ways it’s a very old-fashioned piece of entertainment—it’s not particularly gory, but it’s spooky, scary and satisfying. A version of this review was originally published in the White Plains Times.
Buy it from Amazon.com: The Orphanage or The Orphanage [Blu-ray]
The Savages (Fox)
I missed this year-end prestige picture, a critical darling in 2007. Time to catch up.
Buy it from Amazon.com: The Savages
Cloverfield (Paramount)
Presented as a first-person narrative captured Blair Witch-style through the lens of some young New Yorker’s Handycam, Cloverfield depicts a rampage through Manhattan by a humongous creature that shambles out of New York Harbor, overturning an oil tanker and decapitating the Statue of Liberty on its way to wreaking havoc downtown. In its best passages, the film’s documentary-style depiction of serious monster-movie carnage is absolutely arresting, and occasionally frightening. But the movie is weighed down by its human baggage
—a group of uninteresting characters whose behavior is driven by a tedious backstory about who’s sleeping with who. What’s worse, we can never get away from these kids because one of them’s carrying the camera. The video-camera gimmick gets old quick, partly because by limiting the scope of the story it reveals the shallowness of the film’s concept. Great horror movies tend to have rich subtexts—think of Japan’s post-nuclear Godzilla, or George Romero’s satirical zombies—but if Cloverfield has anything much on its mind beyond exploiting New Yorkers’ fears of skyscraper-toppling terror attacks, I missed it. Cloverfield may be the most “realistic” big-budget monster movie ever. But as movies go, realism is an overrated virtue. (This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.)
Buy it from Amazon.com: Cloverfield or Cloverfield [Blu-ray] (Coming soon. Presumably.)
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