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.)