Mixed Bag of Movies

I have been on quite a run of seeing movies the past couple of weeks, and I know how much you depend on my recommendations, so here are a few thoughts in case you haven’t made your way in to see these yet:

Horton Hears a Who
***

A classic example of the difficulties of stretching a story that takes around 10 minutes to read into a feature length film. Ron Howard pulled it off with The Grinch, but the Horton story, and the attempts to fill in the empty space, just don’t work. There are some cute gags here and there and it picks up a bit toward the end, but all-in-all, not very satisfying as a movie. The voicings and animation are competent but Jim Carey doesn’t really come through and Steve Carell is just a voice.

Be Kind Rewind
****

I was surprised by this one—it was kind of a second choice after not being able so see something else. It’s definitely quirky and Jack Black is about as Jack Blacky as he can get. The premise is bizarre (all the tapes in a failing VHS video store are erased by a freak accident caused by paranoid Jack Black, and the video clerk and Jack recreate the stories by shooting their own shortened amateur versions of them), but the quirkiness pays off when combined with the social context of the neighborhood and city, producing a lovely non-preachy lesson about the importance of connecting with the people around us, no matter who they are or how bizarre they might seem to be.

Juno
*****

Unquestionably the best movie I’ve seen in a very long time. Juno is a 16-year-old who finds herself pregnant. Unable to go through with an abortion, she decides to carry through the pregnancy, arranging for an adoption along the way. The story is simple, the dialogue is incredibly well written, clever, and real, the casting absolutely perfect, and the finale heartwarming without being sappy. There’s not much more to say about this film because it is so simple and straightforward—and that produces an authenticity that is unusual and extraordinarily compelling.

Vantage Point
**

I hated it. Another example of a film that starts off with a really cool premise/hook/device, and fails to make it work. In this one, there is a big event at which the president is shot. The device is that we keep seeing the event over and over, each time from a different person’s perspective. After 10 minutes or so, there is a quick rewind and then it takes off again from someone else’s vantage point and moves forward through the shooting again, each time moving a little farther forward in time. Through this mechanism, the story, the mystery, and the resolution unfold to the viewer. Sound cools but after about the fourth rewind, I started getting sick of the device. Even worse, the dialogue was stilted and, at some points, just plain ludicrous and melodramatic. Some of the things that happened were beyond my ability to suspended disbelief. The excitement of a movie like this hinges in part on its realism—unfortunately, this one stumbles badly on that front.

The Bank Job
***

Another decent premise: A bunch of local hoods are manipulated into pulling a bank job by big shots in the government who are trying to capture a bunch of incriminating photos of the royals being used for blackmail by a fake Black revolutionary “Michael X.” The photos are in a safety deposit box in a bank and the heist targets these boxes with only one of the gang knowing that they’re after those pictures. The heist is successful, but of course, all hell breaks loose once they have everything in their possession because people put stuff in those safety deposit boxes they don’t want other people to see. The ensuing pandemonium is not pretty as people try to get their stuff back and get their secrets covered back up. Perfectly fine story—“inspired” by true events—although more inspiration (read:speculation) involved than truth, but the acting is only ok, the side stories about putting family and friends first, romance, and escaping from your past are pretty blasé and uninspiring.

The Spiderwick Chronicles
***

The magical/wizarding/fantasy genre has a lot to live up to after Harry Potter and the Lord of The Rings. The movies that have followed in their wake (Narnia, Golden Compass, etc.) seem to be having trouble breaking out of the mold that’s been established. Spiderwick is no exception. Even though it’s perfectly well done, one ends up feeling a bit bored by the whole thing. Perhaps I’m getting tired of seeing movies where I’ve already read the book (or books, as in this case and the Series of Unfortunate events), or perhaps I’m still fatigued from that LOTR marathon a year-and-a-half ago, but I really didn’t think this movie was anything to draw anyone’s attention to. There were a lot of deviations form the book, ones that my kids found unsettling. In the end, we walked away feeling about as good about the movie as we did the popcorn.

The Bucket List
*

What a waste. Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson ready to play off each other for a couple of hours. You’d think something good would come out of that, but nope. Some of the worst written dialogue you could imagine. No way to salvage that mess. These guys are supposed to only have a few months to live and proceed to try to do a bunch of things on their “bucket lists” before they die. They try it, and both fail in their own ways, and then redemption of sorts. It’s all a hackneyed mess that left me looking for a different kind of bucket.