Mud Songs

Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fun movie if you don’t take it seriously. The first and third Indian Jones movies have stories that are fun and characters you can care about. The second movie doesn’t. This, the fourth in the series, has one interesting character (Indiana Jones), and a story that just barely pulls the action forward. But it does manage to make it over the finish line without thoroughly disappointing. There is some CGI, but it’s not distracting. There are no scary or super evil villains, but there is plenty of entertaining action. I had fun watching Harrison Ford play Indiana Jones one last time. Every other aspect of movie is forgettable.

Skip it. The first Narnia movie is excellent, one of the best family-friendly movies of 2005. The best thing I can say about The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is they’ve improved on the special effects. Not much happens for the first hour (which will bore most kids), and when the action does pick up, it’s just eye candy. Too much emphasis on meaningless battles sequences and not enough on character and story.

Brief Encounter is a 1946 film about two people who meet, have strong feelings for one another, toy with the idea of taking their brief encounter to another level and then… I won’t tell you want happens. My initial feelings were, “I’m not in the mood to watch some stiff British actors sit around a table with their cups of tea and say la-dee-da back and forth for an hour and a half,” but I’m glad I stuck it out. Over looking the film’s dated qualities is a small price to pay for a love story that rivals anything out of Casablanca. And what an ending!

I’m not sure what to say about A Mighty Heart, so I’m quoting the linked review from James Berardinelli: “Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and subsequent death at the hands of terrorists became a major media story during January and February 2002… A video leaked to the Internet showing Pearl’s decapitation magnified the tragedy. A Mighty Heart… examines events of that one month period from the perspective of those who sought Daniel’s release: his pregnant wife [played well by Angelina Jolie], his friends and colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, and the Pakistani security forces. The film is fascinating and at times disturbing, but Winterbottom’s arms-length style mutes any emotional impact.” I felt like I was looking at real events, not actors. And thankfully they don’t show the beheading.

Scarface is a silly, over-rated 1980s gangster movie that is so melodramatic and dated, it’s a joke. Cubans who hear Al Pacino’s Cuban accent must laugh the way Newfoundlanders laugh at the accents in The Shipping News. It may be fun to watch as a cheesy, over-the-top, violent, blood and guts B-movie, but an animé cartoon with the same two-dimensional characters would have been just as dramatic.

In a multiplex full of crappy Hollywood blockbusters, The Visitor is an unusual find. It may not be a great film (I’m being generous giving it 4 stars), but it’s a nice quiet night at the movies. It’s a simple story of a professor sleepwalking through his humdrum life until he finds some people living in his usually-vacant New York apartment. He becomes friends with them, and that’s all you need to know. It’s a story about finding friendship in the most unlikely places. There’s no flash or glitter or contrived twists and turns. It’s just a story about life, and it’s a good one.

Don’t read any reviews or watch any on-line trailers. They give away too much.

Directed by Sydney Lumet. If you think you have problems or that your family is messed up or that your life hasn’t turned out the way you hoped it would, watch Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead and you’ll be grateful for everything you’ve got. It’s difficult to talk about the plot without giving away the story, but it involves two brothers who plan a heist that goes all wrong. And that’s just the beginning of their troubles. It’s the kind of story that only exists in movies, but the people feel so real, their reactions to the extreme circumstances so genuine, that it works. It’s completely engaging. The entire cast — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney and even Ethan Hawke — couldn’t have given better performances. When you see acting on this level, you quickly realise how mediocre most actors are and what a challenging profession it really is. (Marisa Tomei has a major role, but they don’t give her much to do except take off her shirt.) It’s not a happy movie (though I had to laugh at the absurdity of it all from time to time), but it’s so over the top and compelling, it’s difficult to look away.

I enjoyed Iron Man more than any super hero movie that has come out in recent years. It’s well-acted and it tells a good story that doesn’t exist just to show off special effects. Had the producers gone heavy on the CGI, it could have easily slipped into mind-numbing territory like Transformers. Instead, it’s in a league of its own, presenting us with real characters and a compelling origin story that doesn’t feel childish or cartoonish but is still entertaining and full of really cool stuff.

Once is a unique film about a singer-songerwriter in Dubln who works at his dad’s vacuum repair shop and spends the rest of his time busking on a street corner with his guitar. He eventually meets a girl and tries to make more of his music, and that’s pretty much the whole story. The film has been described as a musical because whenever the guy sings a song, we hear the whole thing. If you like the music, the full songs will work for you. I’m not going to go out and buy the soundtrack, but I still got into everything about this movie because it looks and feels like a documentary with characters who seem like real people. The plot (if you want to call it that) doesn’t feel contrived. You meet these people, you like them and you want find out what happens to them. It’s a simple equation that works on a nice, quiet, genuine level. It’s not a visually spectacular movie, but it doesn’t need to be. Once — once it gets noticed — is likely to become a favourite of independent singer-songwriters everywhere.

David Cronenberg gets off on showing close-up shots of gruesome things like people getting their faces blown off with a shot-gun (re: A History of Violence). In a world where beheadings make the news at least every other month (and can be viewed online if you know where to look — which I have no intention of ever doing — and photos of which are sometimes published in national newspapers), showing two separate scenes of people getting their throats slit is unnecessary. That’s one aspect of Cronenberg’s style I could do without. If you don’t like that kind of thing, just close your eyes for the few seconds when it happens, because the rest of the movie is excellent and well-worth watching. Eastern Promises tells the story of a doctor, Naomi Watts, who delivers a baby from a woman who works in a brothel. The mother dies and the doctor tries to track down the baby’s family and subsequently gets tangled up with the Russian Mafia — and those guys don’t fool around. Viggo Mortensen, as one of the Russian henchmen, has sympathy for her and tells her to go home and forget about it. But she doesn’t. And from there on in it’s, Oh, jesus, what the hell’s going to happen now? I was surprised at the emotional and moral complexity of the film. I guess you could say it’s a thriller with a conscience, and the best I’ve seen from Cronenberg.

The sequel to the apocalyptic zombie thriller 28 Days Later. That movie, which fell a little short of being great, scared the crap out of me and is worth watching because it presents such a convincing last-man-on-earth scenario. 28 Weeks Later gives us all-new characters and then brings on “the infected” (or the zombies) in full force. It effectively re-creates the run-for-life elements of the original movie. The ending is stupid, but it’s passable, creepy entertainment.

Even with some occasionally impressive cinematography, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem is unwatchable for anyone with an IQ over zero. It’s not even passable as a B-movie. Thank gods for the fast-forward button.