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| Films I Neglected To Review: A Few Close Shaves |
by Peter Sobczynski
Lies, treachery, deceit, murder, corruption, betrayal and scrotum-shaving--these are just a few of the sordid thing on display in this round-up of short reviews of current films that, for various reasons, I was unable to examine at length.
If I told you that “The Art of the Steal” was a film about an art heist involving the works of many of the world’s most renowned painters (including 181 Renoirs and 46 Picassos for starters), you would probably assume that it was a slick and highly commercial thriller in the vein of “The Thomas Crown Affair” or “Ocean’s Eleven.” In fact, it is a documentary but the story it tells is so twisty, bizarre and utterly unlikely that if someone proposed it as a fiction film, it would likely be rejected for being too good to possibly be true. After amassing a massive personal fortune from developing a treatment for VD, Philadelphian Albert Barnes developed one of the largest private art collections of all time, built a personal museum for their permanent housing outside of the city where serious students of art could study them in a non-commercial environment and created a foundation to ensure that this arrangement would continue after his death (which came in 1951). Of course, with a collection that valuable, commerce has a tendency to rear its ugly head and a couple of years ago, the city made a series of quasi-legal moves to condemn Barnes’ museum and shift the collection to a new commercial institution in express violation of his wishes. While the film as a whole may not exactly reinvent the documentary format and director Don Argott’s attempts to seem shocked by the idea of people regarding artwork strictly in commercial terms is about as convincing as Captain Renault’s horror at discovering that there was gambling going on at Rick’s, the story it tells is so compelling that few are likely to notice.
Walking out of “Green Zone,” a politically-minded action thriller in which Matt Damon plays an Army officer in Iraq just after the 2003 invasion trying to get to the bottom of why all the intel regarding alleged stashes of chemical weapons have turned up nothing and crossing paths with a smarmy government official (Greg Kinnear), a duped journalist (Amy Ryan) and a shadowy CIA operative who knows what is really going on (Brendan Gleeson), I felt more divided in my reactions than with any other movie in recent memory. On the one hand, I found myself resenting the ways in which screenwriter Brian Helgeland, in adapting Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s best-selling non-fiction book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” takes a fascinating and complex true story and reduces it into an overly simplified and fictionalized tale in which no real names or countries are indicted for their misdeeds and all the blame for the entire Iraq War is calmly and cooly placed on the shoulders of Greg Kinnear. On the other, while his film may be fairly bankrupt and rather cowardly from an intellectual and historical perspective, director Paul Greengrass more than delivers the goods in terms of sheer visceral filmmaking. As he demonstrated with the last two Jason Bourne films, he knows how to shoot long, involved and highly detailed action set-pieces that provide any number of eye-popping thrills and “how’d-they-do-that?” moments without going too far over the top into ridiculous excess and, for the most part, without plunging viewers into complete confusion and, with the exception of a climactic firefight that is a little too chaotic at times for its own good, he does it again here, thanks in no small part to Damon’s physically convincing performance and the powerful cinematography from Barry Ackroyd (who just won the Oscar for “The Hurt Locker”). In many ways, “Green Zone” is a lot like a left-wing version of “Rambo”--the story is nonsense and borderline insulting to any who care about the issues that it is dealing with but the action is so strong and involving that if you can somehow manage to push its narrative failings to the side and simply accept it as a top-notch action film, you are likely to enjoy it a lot more than if you attempt to take any of it seriously.
Originally produced for British television and based on a quartet of novels from author David Peace, the “Red Riding” trilogy is a highly impressive and always engrossing trio of overlapping films that tells a sprawling tale, inspired by real-life events, of murder and corruption in Yorkshire over the course of a decade. Julian Jarrold’s “1974” follows an ambitious young journalist (Andrew Garfield) whose investigation into the disappearance of a little girl uncovers some shocking connections between a local businessman (Sean Bean) and some local police that involve big development plans and a string of other girls who have vanished as well. James Marsh’s “1980” features Paddy Considine as a detective who is sent to town to investigate the local police for their inability to capture the infamous Yorkshire Ripper and who finds himself in danger when he uncovers more sinister than mere laziness and incompetence. Finally, Anand Tucker’s “1983” concludes the trilogy when a new child murder similar in style to the ones from nine years earlier inspire a veteran Yorkshire cop to come to terms with his past and come clean about the activities perpetrated by himself and his cohorts. Despite the presence of three different filmmakers and shooting styles, everything blends together beautifully and while it is possible to watch and enjoy each portion as a separate entity (“1980” being the strongest of the bunch in my opinion), viewers are advised to try to see it all in one giant gulp in order to get the full impact. Of course, carving out that amount of time to see it in a theater may prove to be a bit difficult but happily, all three parts are currently available on video-on-demand and since it was originally produced for television, it doesn’t lose too much on the small screen. Regardless of the venue, this is still one of the most engrossing crime dramas to come along in a while and is well worth the time and effort it takes to see it.
A couple of weeks ago, much to the consternation of colleagues and readers alike, I offered a mild recommendation to the romantic comedy “Valentine’s Day.” I did this not because I am a sucker for anything featuring the presence of Anne Hathaway (as anyone who made it through my “Alice in Wonderland” review can attest), but because it featured a reasonably charming cast (okay, maybe she had a little to do with it), a few nice laughs here and there and, most importantly, it was nowhere near as stupid, hateful or disagreeable to the strongest constitutions as many of the other films that have besmirched the genre’s good name in recent months. To those naysayers, and absolutely no one else, I recommend that you immediately rush out and see “She’s Out of My League” so that they can see for themselves what a truly rotten romantic comedy really looks like. Essentially a low-grade knock-off of a lesser Judd Apatow production, the film stars Jay Baruchel as a gawky nebbish who somehow attracts the romantic attentions of a gorgeous party planner (Alice Eve), much to the confusion of his family (who are so cruel and crudely drawn that they make the mom in “Precious” seem restrained and dignified by comparison) and his buddies (the usual gang of slack-jawed idiots) who can’t figure out why someone as beautiful as her would want to date someone as goofy-looking as him. Of course, the annals of cinema history are filled with movies in which uber-babes inexplicably succumb to the charms of schmucky dolts--the big-screen careers of Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and David Spade have largely depended on this conceit, to name only a couple of examples--but the people behind this monstrosity (newbie director Jim Field Smith and the screenwriters behind the deathless “Sex Drive”) seem to think that they have hit upon some undiscovered vein of comedic gold but the combination of zero laughs and zero chemistry between Baruchel (who was infinitely better in a similar role in the late, lamented “Undeclared”) and Eve (who is at least pretty enough to almost distract you from the ugliness around her) quickly proves otherwise. At that point, the film reverts into failed frat-boy farce with standard-issue jokes based on homophobia (the girl’s studly old boyfriend assumes that our hero is a gay best pal--ho, ho!), misogyny (our hero’s old girlfriend is a monstrous bitch who winds up getting repeatedly smacked around during the final scenes, hee-hee!) and sexual humiliation (one especially labored bit involves premature ejaculation, an overly inquisitive dog and the surprise arrival of parental units, hardee-har!) and culminates with a gag-inducing (the closest thing to an actual gag on display here) sequence involving scrotum-shaving that goes on for so long and with so few laughs that it feels as if Bela Tarr took over the direction. Granted, if you recognize the Bela Tarr reference, you are obviously far too cultured and intelligent to sit through this monstrosity. Then again, if you have actually read and comprehended these words, you are way out of this film’s league.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2996
originally posted: 03/12/10 12:04:55
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