2.5 stars (out of 4)
Released 2008
Essentially a character study of a cheerful, single, British schoolteacher as she encounters various situations/characters which test her mettle. Not a whole lot happens in this movie, but the main character does have an interesting and unique take on life. Directed by Mike Leigh.
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Released 2010
I actually watched this movie about a year ago, but recently re-watched it and thought I would post a rating on it since my recent reviews have been so uniformly negative.
Emma Stone is winning and full of personality in this perfect vehicle for her talents. Excellent, witty script where even the minor characters (her parents, her best friend) are interesting.
2 stars (out of 4)
Released 2011
I knew I wouldn’t like this movie, based on a scathing review I read when it was first released, but, hey, it was on Netflix, and I was curious to see how bad it could be, given its all-star cast (Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, and John C. Reilly) and director (Roman Polanski).
Well, I finished watching it, but only just barely – I thought about turning it off several times mid-movie. The story was adapted from a play and is about two couples whose meeting over a fight between their sons quickly descends from stilted courtesy to yelling and hysterics. The whole thing unfolds in the living room of one of the couples, mainly because at every reasonable opportunity to end the increasingly useless meeting, the characters decide to keep talking. I might have forgiven that narrative device, if the dialogue had felt more real and if there were more interesting revelations about the characters.
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Released 2011
This is an independent film which made a splash at the Sundance Festival and won accolades for its star, Elizabeth Olsen (sister of the famous twins).
A young woman, Martha (Olsen), escapes from a cult and is taken in by her estranged older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson). As Lucy tries to understand the strange behaviour and haunted manner of her uncommunicative sister, the story is told in flashbacks to Martha’s time with the cult, cutting back to her awkward adjustment to Lucy’s upper-middle-class lifestyle.
I thought the film did a good job of first showing some unsavory aspects of the cult (living in poverty, women being totally subservient to the men) and then showing why it might have appealed to a lost soul like Martha. Elizabeth Olsen is a very natural actor, but I wasn’t blown away, since haunted/crazy isn’t generally that hard to do.
This movie was building up to a 3-star rating, until it suddenly ended without any kind of resolution. When stories end like that, it always makes me suspect that the writer could not figure out a good ending and so decided to leave it up to the audience to figure one out for themselves. There are rare instances when the story is actually better served by an ambiguous ending, but most of the time (as in this one) it just feels like laziness.
2 stars (out of 4)
Released 2011
Charlize Theron stars as Mavis, a former high school mean-girl who goes back to her hometown with the misguided plan to “free” her high-school flame from his current wife and baby.
The film presents Mavis as the ultimate loser in her adult life – ashamed of her job as a ghost-writer, divorced, lacking real friends, slovenly, emotionally immature, and yet still wanting everyone to be envious of her. It also sets her up as an object of ridicule, instead of trying to explain or explore why she turned out this way. Even her parents are presented as nice people who are taken aback and saddened by her bad behaviour.
The whole film felt like rather gratuitous wish-fulfillment made for (and by?) people wanting revenge on their high school tormentors.
2 stars (out of 4)
(Released 2012)
This TIFF entry is a French-language animated 3-D musical comedy based on a French manga (IIRC). The story is about a family that runs a shop specializing in poisons, nooses, weapons and other means of committing suicide, and about what happens when a boy with an incongruously sunny disposition is born into the family.
The film was made with obvious love and attention to detail (the English subtitles for the songs were done in rhyme), but the story is ultimately too thin and predictable to provide enough interest. The black humour was essentially one joke told over and over (a customer matter-of-factly choosing suicide and a shopkeeper helpfully providing him with the means).
3.5 stars out of 4
(released 2010)
Starring Jennifer Lawrence in a break-out, Oscar-nominated performance, this well-paced, hyper-realistic film follows Ree, a teenager left in charge of her impoverished family, as she tries desperately to find her drug-dealing father.
This film was adapted from a novel and its depiction of hard-scrabble life in the Ozarks feels real. Ree is tough and shrewd, but she’s still young and not sure of the rules that the other characters play by, which makes each encounter suspenseful. As a viewer, I really felt that I had been immersed into a foreign world.
Jennifer Lawrence, as Ree, appears in virtually every frame and is riveting. You can see why the producers of The Hunger Games saw Katniss in her – actually the characters have a lot of similarities – but this performance is the one that really shows off her talent.
2 stars (out of 4)
Midnight’s Children is based on a celebrated book (which I have not read) by Salman Rushdie, who also adapted the story for the screen. The story is about a group of children, born at the stroke of midnight on the eve of India’s independence, who possess magical powers, and whose lives parallel that of the fledging nation. Apparently, the book has famously been considered too difficult to adapt to the screen, and now I know why.
The movie suffers from a surfeit of story threads, so many that there is simply no time to fully develop or finish any one. Ruthless editing at the screenplay level would have benefited this film immensely. For example, some characters (even entire generations) could have been eliminated or at least amalgamated with the same narrative effect. Better movie editing would have helped too, as some gaps and disjointedness in the storyline could have been easily remedied if the filmmakers had tried. It’s odd that some scenes are shot with such charm and attention to detail and yet some storylines are just left hanging. I do wonder if budget or time constraints forced this movie to be released before it was really ready for an audience.
You could see the potential for a good movie (at least a 3 star movie) in there, but, as it is, it felt unfinished and unsatisfying.
–Reviewed by Bini, July 27, 2012
***1/2
(Spoilers within)
This was a good movie in general, but suffered by comparison with its superior predecessor, The Dark Knight. The acting was solid throughout, esp. by Michael Caine, and there were no glaring holes in the storyline. There were nice bits of humour, mainly in the first half of the movie. I thought the villain, Bane, was appropriately menacing and I even thought his strange accent added to his menace (and I recall thinking that he didn’t seem to be a very scary villain when I saw the trailer).
I had some difficulty following the plot toward the end because I couldn’t make out what the characters were saying during several crucial moments (also may have been because I was sleep-deprived). I thought the final assault by the good guys seemed somewhat uninspired – the police officers just seemed to charge into battle without any apparent strategy. Also, Blake’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) argument with the guard at the bridge seemed anti-climactic (esp. when intercut with the police officers being mown down in battle).
While I was watching the movie, I had trouble figuring out what the bad guys’ plan was – it just seemed weird that they would put enormous resources into keeping Gotham under siege for 3 months, when their ultimate goal is just to nuke it in the end. I guess the whole purpose of the siege was to torture Batman? And for 3 months they fed all the police officers trapped underground? Even if they didn’t feed them (let’s say food was snuck to them by good guys), why wouldn’t they kill them?
I need to go back and watch the first movie because I can’t remember why Ducard (Liam Neeson) wants to destroy Gotham. Wasn’t it because the city had been overrun with Mafia and corruption? But at the beginning of this movie, those problems had largely been dealt with successfully… Anyway, I’m willing to suspend disbelief on this one and chalk it up to madness on the part of the bad guys.
All in all, these were relatively minor quibbles in a creative storyline (especially for a super-hero movie). I liked the references to the French Revolution and the statement Christopher Nolan makes by comparing current day America to pre-Revolutionary France (I certainly didn’t expect biting social commentary in a super-hero movie). I will definitely miss the dream team of Christian Bale, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman in the inevitable future Batman reboots.