Kinky Boots

While trying to keep my huge collection of film DVDs (yes sir, I’m very proud of it; fruits of almost 10 years of labour), in order, now that I’m planning to shift, I chanced upon the copy of ‘Kinky Boots’, a British comedy, so quaint and so touching! It’s not a great movie by any standard, but it’s a riveting experience to watch this film, just for one person — Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Roger Ebert begins his review of ‘Kinky Boots’ with a profile on Ejiofor: One of the gifts of movies is the way they introduce us to new actors, turning them this way and that in the light of the screen, allowing us to see the fullness of their gifts. Consider Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose first leading role was in "Dirty Pretty Things" (2002), as a Nigerian doctor reduced in London to working in a mortuary. Then came a romantic role in "Love Actually" (2003), a South African activist in "Red Dust" (2004), a space opera villain in "Serenity" (2005), and a New York detective in Spike Lee's current "Inside Man" (2006). Along the way he has worked for Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen and John Singleton (a vicious mobster in "Four Brothers" in 2005) and has done Shakespeare and The Canterbury Tales for TV. Born in London in 1974, he works easily with British, American and Nigerian accents.

Now he plays a drag queen in "Kinky Boots." It is a performance all the more striking because he doesn't play any kind of drag queen I've ever seen in the movies. He plays the role not as a man pretending to be a woman, and not as a woman trapped in a man's body, and not as a parody of a woman, and not as a gay man, but as a drag queen, period: Lola, a tall, athletic performer in thigh-high red boots who rules the stage of a drag club as if she were born there, and is a pretty good singer, too. In preparing for the role, Ejiofor must have decided not to simper, not to preen, not to mince, but to belt out songs with great good humor that dares the audience to take exception. If "simper," "preen" and "mince" are stereotypical words, well, then, most drag queens, including Lola's backup dancers, are stereotypical performers. Not Lola.

And Ebert ends his review with a praise for Ejiofor: "Kinky Boots" has few surprises, unless you seriously expect the factory to go bankrupt. The climax comes at the annual shoe show in Milan, where last-minute developments unfold right on schedule; having provided us with Lola, the movie is conventional in all other departments. But Ejiofor's performance as Lola shows an actor doing what not every actor can do: Taking a character bundled with stereotypes, clearing them out of the way, and finding a direct line to who the character really is. Just in the way she walks in those kinky red boots, Lola makes an argument that no words could possibly improve upon.

Notes: It's pronounced Chew-i-tell Edge-o-for. "Kinky Boots" is based on a true story. Check it out at www.divine.co.uk/ (not safe for work).
More here.

As American President Abraham Lincoln, the very centre of the ideology of democracy, passed away following the bullet wound he had received at the playhouse, the then Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, had uttered the immortal line: “Now, he belongs to the ages.”

Now that Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray is cremated, which according to some, was the largest public funeral in the state since Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s, we can safely say, for better or for worse — “Now, he belongs to the ages.”

Following that immortal line, Stanton had also said, “There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen.” Now, I’m not sure we can repeat the words here. His is a complicated legacy; only time will tell — the ages to come...

Lincoln's Sexuality

I wanted to write about a very specific moment and I chose this moment and I don’t feel that there’s any evidence at this particular moment that Lincoln was having sex with anybody. He seems to have not slept and taken no time off and during this period I think he was beginning to feel ground to a pulp by the war and by the pressures of his job. I find it difficult to believe that Lincoln was banging anybody. Now maybe he was. I personally believe that there is some reason to speculate that Lincoln might have been bisexual or gay….

There are, unfortunately, no memoirs, no diaries, nothing to say for sure. I don’t say in the movie whether the Lincoln character that I wrote was gay or straight. You could ask Daniel (Day-Lewis) what he was playing, but it did not seem to me a thing to make a movie about now….

I absolutely believe that the Lincoln’s marriage was a real marriage. These two people loved each other…Whether he was gay or straight or bisexual, they had a real deep, meaningful relationship that was probably the most significant relationship in Lincoln’s life…

It wouldn’t be the first time that a gay man and a straight woman hooked up and had a great marriage. But I don’t know. I really don’t know. And I think that’s what we have to say about it. We keep the door open and people should talk about it. I don’t feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I’m a gay man.”

– Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner on why the Great Emancipator isn’t laying any logs in his cabin for the upcoming Steven Spielberg movie
Full story here:

Historical evidence is titillating. Much has been made about the fact that Lincoln slept in the same bed with his pal Joshua Speed for three years when they were young adults, but Kushner doesn't think that meant they were lovers. Back in those days, men frequently shared beds without their hands wandering under the sheets.

However, Lincoln's relationship with his bodyguard, Captain David Derickson, was much more suspect. During the early days of the war, in 1862 and 1863, they not only shared a bed frequently, but Lincoln once answered a knock at his bedroom door while wearing Derickson's nightshirt as the captain slumbered in his sack. Gossipmeisters buzzed about them. The wife of a navy aide wrote, "Oh, there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!"
More here.

In a particularly poignant moment in Lincoln [the Spielberg biopic], honest Abe spends a few moments with a handsome telegraph operator, played by a somewhat period-discordant Adam Driver. “Do we choose to be born? Are we fitted to the times we’re born into?” the Great Emancipator wonders aloud, gazing tenderly at the young man.

When considering the controversial matter of whether Abraham Lincoln was “gay,” that second question is the right one to ask. Some revisionist historians, over the past decade or so, have indeed argued that Lincoln was not fitted to his time, for while he married or was otherwise involved with at least three women over the course of his life (and had four children with Mary Todd), certain bits of evidence suggest that his true romantic desires were directed toward men. Other historians, of course, reject this claim as an activist imposition at worst, a wishful over-reading of a few vaguely suggestive nuggets at best. The truth? It all depends on how you read the clues—which is to say, we probably will never know it.

What’s clear is that the historical Lincoln maintained intimate friendships with men—especially Joshua Speed, with whom a young Lincoln shared a bed for four years following his move in 1837 to Springfield, Ill., and a lifelong correspondence thereafter. But was this relationship romantic and/or sexual, or something more commonplace in an age that was blessed with a more diverse range of male relationships than our modern, hypersensitive, “no homo” era? Based on the available evidence, most historians say we simply can’t be sure. Men in Lincoln’s time often shared beds for economic reasons, just as they share apartments now, and homosocial expressions of affection were completely acceptable, even encouraged.
More here.

But does it really matter if Lincoln was gay? What difference does it make if the man who reunited the country, ended slavery, wrote some of the most majestic speeches in the English language and died a martyr’s death desired — or actually had sex with — other men? According to Illinois state historian Tom Schwarz, it doesn’t make any difference: “It’s only important if he made conscious decisions based on his sexuality which then influenced his political behavior, public policy or his decisions on slavery. If not, its importance readily diminishes.”

Schwarz’s politic words, however, don’t take into account the enormous symbolic significance that will attend any reevaluation of the sexual orientation of America’s most beloved figure. Imagine if the Hemings-Jefferson love affair had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt (which, as scientists continue to remind us, still hasn’t happened) in the Jim Crow 1950s, when certain states still prosecuted miscegenation? Bigots would have had one less legendary leg to stand on. Similarly, if the man on our $5 bill was proven to be gay, right-wing politicians who invoke Lincoln in one breath and denounce the homosexual menace in the next would be forced to reexamine the deeper meaning of the phrase “With malice toward none; with charity for all.” Certainly, for queer theorists and gay scholars, the ability to claim the man who was arguably America’s greatest president as their own would arm gay battalions with a powerful new rhetorical weapon.

“Greatest” is the operative word here. When Kramer first announced at the Madison meeting that he was setting out to get gays their “first gay president,” he could have made his job easier by looking to Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan. The only bachelor to take office, Buchanan spent 15 years living with Sen. William King. The contemporary press ridiculed the men’s relationship mercilessly, and Andrew Jackson once called King “Miss Nancy.” The problem, of course, is that James Buchanan is not the guy to stake a modern civil rights movement on. Passive and ineffectual, he slowly but surely led the country into a bloody civil war. Despite the fact that it was “obvious” that Buchanan was gay, Paul Russell says he chose not to include him in “The Gay 100″ — he just wasn’t anything to be proud of.
More here.

THE INTIMATE WORLD OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
By C. A. Tripp.
Edited by Lewis Gannett.
343 pp. Free Press. $27.

THIS book is already getting noticed. In ''The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,'' C. A. Tripp contends that Lincoln had erotic attractions and attachments to men throughout his life, from his youth to his presidency. He further argues that Lincoln's relationships with women were either invented by biographers (his love of Ann Rutledge) or were desolate botches (his courtship of Mary Owens and his marriage to Mary Todd). Tripp is not the first to argue that Lincoln was homosexual -- earlier writers have parsed his friendship with Joshua Speed, the young store owner he lived with after moving to Springfield, Ill. -- but he assembles a mass of evidence and tries to make sense of it.

Tripp died in May 2003, after finishing the manuscript of this book, which means he never had a chance to fix its flaws. The prose is both jumpy and lifeless, like a body receiving electric shocks. Tripp alternates shrewd guesses and modest judgments with bluster and fantasy. He drags in references to Alfred Kinsey (with whom he once worked) to give his arguments a (spurious) scientific sheen. And he has an ax to grind. He is, most famously, the author of ''The Homosexual Matrix.'' Published in 1975, it was a document of gay liberation. Since the other president sometimes thought to have been gay is the wretched James Buchanan, what gay activist wouldn't want to trade up to Lincoln? Still, obsession can discover things that have been overlooked by less fevered minds.

Tripp surveys seven of Lincoln's relationships, four with men and three with women, as well as two episodes from his early life. The discussion of Lincoln's youth is worthless. Relying on Lincoln's law partner and earliest biographer, William Herndon, Tripp decides that Lincoln reached puberty when he was 9 years old. Since Kinsey concluded that early maturing boys tended to become witty masturbators with lots of homosexual experience, Tripp concludes the same of Lincoln. He claims even more for Lincoln's adolescence, including a source for his religious heterodoxy. ''Since Lincoln had already arrived on his own at the powerful pleasures of orgasm . . . one can be sure that like most precocious youngsters he was in no mood to give it all up for bookish or Bible reasons.'' One can be sure, if one is as credulous as Tripp.

Lincoln's story becomes interesting when Tripp discusses real people. In 1831, when he was 22, Lincoln moved to New Salem, an Illinois frontier town, where he met Billy Greene. Greene coached Lincoln in grammar and shared a narrow bed with him. ''When one turned over the other had to do likewise,'' Greene told Herndon. Bed-sharing was common enough in raw settlements, but Greene also had vivid memories of Lincoln's physique: ''His thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.'' Everyone saw that Lincoln was tall and strong, but this seems rather gushing.
More here.

But after 140 years of manipulation, can Lincoln's memory ever again find its true shape?

Abraham Lincoln died shortly after 7 a.m. on April 15, 1865. "Now he belongs to the ages," Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, said at the President's deathbed. It was a prescient thought, because it suggested not only the long cultural presence ahead for Lincoln but also the fact that generations would possess him.

From the start, his memory was molded to serve a purpose. When telegraph wires clicked with the news that Lincoln had been shot at Ford's Theatre, the nation was facing the monumental and confounding task of restoring peace after four years of broiling war. Lincoln had thought both North and South were complicit in the shame of slavery. He even suggested, in his second Inaugural Address, that God may have brought "this terrible war" to punish both regions, urging the nation to bind up its wounds "with malice towards none, with charity for all."

He wanted reconciliation, but his eulogists struck a different note. With a sentimental tip of the hat to the fallen leader, many Northern journalists, preachers and politicians actually tried to use Lincoln's death to stoke the fires of vengeance. "If the rebels can do a deed like this to the kind, good, generous, tender-hearted ruler, whose every thought was purity," exclaimed Benjamin Butler, a general in the war, to a crowd in New York City, "whose every desire a yearning for forgiveness and peace, what shall be done to them in high places who guided the assassin's knife?" The crowd began to chant, "Hang them! Hang them!" The assassination, Northern leaders saw, had a great political value. "His death," noted a caucus of Republican Congressmen, "is a godsend to our cause."
More here.

This Must Be The Place

Writes Roger Ebert: "This Must Be the Place" centers on another uncompromising character invention by Sean Penn, as an aging rock star who comes across like an arthritic bag lady and reveals without the slightest effort that he has a good heart and a quiet sense of humor. Few actors have played a wider variety of characters, and even fewer have done it without making it seem like a stunt.

Cheyenne (Penn) was a big star in the 1980s, but has done little to stay in the spotlight. He now lives in a mansion in Ireland with his wife, Jane (Frances McDormand), who works as a firefighter because that's in her nature. Unlike some foolish ancient rock stars who trifle with groupies, Cheyenne seems to have been long and contentedly married; although he has sort of a groupie named Mary (Eve Hewson), he's more of a kindly uncle to her.

What he's never done is change his look. The film opens with him touching up his bright red lipstick and reinforcing his eyeliner, which are displayed on a clown white face framed by stringy jet black hair. Some rock stars have better taste — such as David Byrne, who attended design school and has been inspired in his own redesign. He appears in the film, does the music for it, and is an instructive contrast to Cheyenne.
More here.

David Byrne (born May 14, 1952 in Dumbarton, Scotland) is a United States resident British musician and artist, best known as a founding member and principal songwriter of the American new wave band Talking Heads, which was active between 1975 and 1991. Since then, Byrne has released his own solo recordings and worked with various media including film, photography, opera, and non-fiction. He has received Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe awards and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
More here.

The Die Is Cast

Alea iacta est (Latin: "The die has been cast") is a Latin phrase attributed by Suetonius (as iacta alea est [ˈjakta ˈaːlea est]) to Julius Caesar on January 10, 49 BC as he led his army across the River Rubicon in Northern Italy. With this step, he entered Italy at the head of his army in defiance and began his long civil war against Pompey and the Optimates. The phrase is still used today to mean that events have passed a point of no return, that something inevitably will happen.
More here.

Total Recall

The best part of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster, ‘Total Recall’ was the trip to Mars, and its inhabitants, including the mutant-mastermind-prophet-figure, who resided on an another man’s belly (really!), as imagined by the very talented Paul Verhoeven.

Now, Colin Farrell replaces ‘Shivajinagar’ (as we call him here in Pune!), and the director, Len Wiseman, decides to skip the trip to Mars entirely. Not a wise decision! Wiseman did the wonderful ‘Underworld’ with his wife Kate Bekinsale, and the fourth ‘Die Hard’ film with Bruce Willis, both were technology-heavy, both in terms of the plot and in treatment; so a techo-thriller is not a new thing for Wiseman, but why ignore Mars? We’d have loved to see what Mars looks like in 2012.

>>>
Writes Roger Ebert about the new ‘Total Recall: The two biggest differences between this new "Total Recall" and the 1990 original are that no scenes are set on Mars, and it stars Colin Farrell instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mars we can do without, I suppose, although I loved the special effects creating the human outpost there. This movie has its own reason you can't go outside and breathe the air.

But Schwarzenegger, now, is another matter. He's replaced as the hero Quaid by Colin Farrell, who in point of fact is probably the better actor. But Schwarzenegger is more of a movie presence and better suited for the role of a wounded bull stumbling around in the china shop of his memories. The story involves a man who is involved without his knowledge (or recollection) in a conflict between a totalitarian regime and a resistance movement. Both films open with him happy and cluelessly married (to Sharon Stone in the first, Kate Beckinsale in this one). In both, he is discontented with his life. In both, he discovers that everything he thinks he knows about himself is fictitious, and all of his memories have been implanted.

The enormity of this discovery is better reflected by Schwarzenegger, who seems more wounded, more baffled, more betrayed — and therefore more desperate. In the Farrell performance, there's more of a sense that the character is being swept along with the events.

The ingenuity of the plot, inspired by a Philip K. Dick story, is handled well in this version, directed by Len Wiseman, and in Paul Verhoeven's 1990 version. In both, there are passages in which Quaid has no idea what to believe and must decide which of various characters can be trusted. Both films are top-heavy with non-stop action, but there's more humanity in the earlier one, and I think we care more about the hero. A film that really took this premise seriously would probably play more like Chris Nolan's "Memento," following a man adrift in his own timeline.
More here.

Writes Roger Ebert about the "old" ‘Total Recall: The movie is wall-to-wall with violence, much of it augmented by special effects. Even in this future world, people haven't been able to improve on the machine gun as a weapon of murder, even though you'd imagine that firearms of all kinds would be outlawed inside an airtight dome. There are indeed several sequences in which characters are sucked outside when the air seal if broken, but that doesn't stop the movie's villains from demonstrating the one inevitable fact of movie marksmanship: Bad guys never hit their target, and good guys never miss.

Not that it makes the slightest difference, but the science in this movie is laughable throughout. Much is made, for example, of a scene where characters finds themselves outside on Mars, and immediately begin to expand, their eyes popping and their faces swelling. As Arthur C. Clarke has written in an essay about his 2001, a man would not explode even in the total vacuum of deep space.

(What's even more unlikely is that after the alien reactors are started and quickly provide Mars with an atmosphere, the endangered characters are spared from explosion.) Such quibbles - and pages could be filled with them - are largely irrelevant to "Total Recall," which is a marriage between swashbuckling space opera and the ideas of the original Phillip Dick story. The movie was directed by Paul Verhoeven, whose credits range from "The Fourth Man" to "RoboCop," and he is skilled at creating sympathy for characters even within the overwhelming hardware of a story like this. That's where Schwarzenegger is such a help. He could have stalked and glowered through this movie and become a figure of fun, but instead, by allowing himself to seem confused and vulnerable, he provides a sympathetic center for all of the high-tech spectacle.
More here.

Total Recall is a 2012 American dystopian science fiction action film remake of the 1990 film of the same name, in turn loosely based on the 1966 short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick. Unlike the original film and short story, the plot does not include a trip to Mars and exhibits more political overtones. The film blends Western and Eastern influences, most notably in the settings and dominant populations of the two nation states in the story: the United Federation of Britain, and the Colony. Total Recall was directed by Len Wiseman, written by Mark Bomback, James Vanderbilt, and Kurt Wimmer, and stars Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, John Cho, and Bill Nighy. It was first announced in 2009 and was released in North America on August 3, 2012. The film was released to mixed to negative critical reception but yet received praise for certain aspects. The film underperformed at the box office, grossing $196 million against a budget of $125 million
More here.

The Iceman

Michael Shannon is chilling as America's most notorious hitman, but his cold heart must thaw to be more engaging as drama, says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: Zodiac meets Goodfellas in Ariel Vromen's movie about America's most notorious mob hitman: Richie Kuklinski, a stone-cold assassin who whacked more than 100 people during four decades. It's a grisly and unedifying tale in which a somewhat typecast Michael Shannon gives a stolid, unsmiling performance as the psycho killer himself – truly, the guy who put the "dead" in "deadpan".

Kuklinski emerges as a compulsive murderer who has found a way to get paid for his compulsion. He never develops or grows all that more interesting as the years go by. Basically he's a nasty piece of work – and watchable and well-crafted though this film is, you have to wonder if Vromen's next one is going to be about the lavatorial needs of bears or the religious convictions of the pope.

We see Kuklinski first in the 60s, when – apparently a shy but basically decent working guy – he goes on a date with Deborah (Winona Ryder), the woman who is to be his wife and the mother of his two daughters. He keeps his psychotic streak of violence a secret from her, and also his livelihood: he works in the porn industry, delivering reels of film, and his unblinking tough-guy persona impresses local wiseguy Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta) who puts him on the payroll along with his unreliable consigliere, Josh (David Schwimmer). Soon, Richie is whacking people – in partnership with Robert Pronge (Chris Evans), a deeply creepy semi-freelance killer who schools Richie in the art of freezing bodies and disposing of them days after the hit, so the cops can't get a time of death.
More here.

Richard Kuklinski worked as a contract killer for the mob for four decades. He claimed to have murdered at least 100 people and possibly more. He died in 2006 while serving out five consecutive life sentences in prison. He was characterized as brutal and unflinching and an outwardly emotionless man. He had a grisly penchant for chopping up his victims and freezing them before disposal hence the underworld moniker “The Iceman.”

Michael Shannon plays the terrifying title character with amazing control. His performance is an exercise in precision, showing us a coldly exacting killer boiling just under the surface. His tightly-controlled performance works so well because we see the character under incredible stress. Kuklinski may have been a hardened killer, but he was also a family man. He had a wife and children who knew absolutely nothing about his mob work. To them he was a devoted husband and father, perhaps a bit distant at times, but unequivocally a good man. Balancing this double life proves ample fodder for a fascinating film.
More here.

The Iceman is a drama thriller film based on the life of notorious Mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski. It is due to be released in 2012 at the Venice Film Festival and stars Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, Chris Evans and Ray Liotta. It will also screen at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. It also screened at the Telluride Film Festival in 2012.
More here.

Trouble With The Curve

Writes A. O. SCOTT in The New York Times: The trouble with baseball movies like “Trouble With the Curve” is that they tempt reviewers to reach for hackneyed sports metaphors. I’m only human, but I’m also not sure which comparison best suits this easygoing, unsurprising movie, directed by Robert Lorenz from a script by Randy Brown. Regrettably, it is not a home run or a perfect game, but it isn’t a wild throw, an errant bunt or a dropped fly ball either. “Trouble With the Curve” is either an off-speed pitch that just catches the edge of the strike zone or a bloop single lofted into right field. The runner is safe. The movie is too. Crack open a peanut and flag down the beer guy.

Clint Eastwood, muttering grumpily to himself — though not, this time, in the service of a political campaign — plays Gus Lobel, a longtime scout for the Atlanta Braves. Gus’s eyesight is failing, and his job is threatened by a younger front-office hotshot (Matthew Lillard) whose approach to baseball involves numbers and computers and all that newfangled nonsense. If this were “Moneyball,” last year’s autumnal baseball picture, the guy would be a hero, but “Trouble With the Curve” is the anti-“Moneyball.” The old-time scouts from that film, mocked for their superstitions about “intangibles” and “instincts,” get their revenge this time around, thanks to the greatest avenger of them all.
More here.

The Sessions

The Sessions (originally titled The Surrogate) is a 2012 American independent drama film written and directed by Ben Lewin. It is based on the true story of Mark O'Brien, a poet paralyzed from the neck down due to polio who hired a sex surrogate to lose his virginity. John Hawkes and Helen Hunt star as O'Brien and sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen Greene respectively. The film debuted at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award (U.S. Dramatic) and a U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Acting. Fox Searchlight Pictures acquired the film's distribution rights and will release the film in 2012.
More here.

One sure way to tell that "The Sessions" is bound to be an exceptional movie is that the subject of it sounds like nothing anyone would want to see. The story of a man in an iron lung who decides that he wants to experience sex could not have gotten funding on its premise alone. Obviously, there had to be something there, and there is. "The Sessions" is moving. At times, it's even erotic, which is unexpected, to say the least. It sends viewers out of the theater with a heightened sense of the physical and a real feeling for all the things that sex means in human life. "The Sessions" goes beyond what movies usually deal with when they talk about love - attraction, the mating dance, the happily-ever-after. It's about people's most basic need to connect, express and feel through sexuality. The film is raw and adult and, in the least somber way imaginable, unusually dignified.

Based on the real-life story of Mark O'Brien, a Bay Area poet and journalist who died in 1999, it dramatizes a period in the 1980s when, at 38, O'Brien hired a sex therapist. Among the ancillary revelations of "The Sessions," for those of us previously in ignorance, is that hands-on sex therapy is nothing like prostitution. Part therapist, part sex partner, part life coach, the therapist (Helen Hunt) ministers to a severely disabled patient and makes him feel as if he's part of the world. She helps bring him into the world. If anything, this is like missionary work. John Hawkes plays the entire role on his back. (You might find yourself turning your head sideways to get a look at his face.) As played by Hawkes, O'Brien is a sweet and witty person, who wants to get as much out of life as he can.
Read more:

The Perks of Being A Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a 2012 American comedy-drama film and is a film adaptation of the 1999 epistolary novel of the same name. The film stars Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, and Ezra Miller, and was directed by the novel's author, Stephen Chbosky. Filming in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, started on May 9 and ended on June 29, 2011.
More here.

Writes Roger Ebert: The movie confirms one of my convictions: If you are too popular in high school, you may become so fond of the feeling that you never find out who you really are. The film is based on Stephen Chbosky's best-selling young-adult novel, which was published in 1999 and is now on many shelves next to The Catcher in the Rye. It offers the rare pleasure of an author directing his own book, and doing it well. No one who loves the book will complain about the movie, and especially not about its near-ideal casting.

The story, set in the early 1990s, tells the story of Charlie (Logan Lerman), who begins it as a series of letters to a "friend." He enters high school tremulously and without confidence, and is faced on his first day by that great universal freshman crisis: Which table in the lunchroom will they let me sit at? Discouraged at several tables, he's welcomed by two smart and sympathetic seniors.

They are Sam and Patrick, played by Emma Watson in her own coming-of-age role after the "Harry Potter" movies, and Ezra Miller, who was remarkable as an alienated teenager in "We Need to Talk About Kevin." Charlie makes the mistake of assuming they are a couple, and Sam's laughter corrects him; actually, they're half-siblings. Charlie is on the edge of outgrowing his depression and dorkdom, and is eerily likable in his closed-off way. One of the key players in his life is the dead aunt (Melanie Lynskey) he often has imaginary meetings with.
More here.

Ezra Miller is given a disappointing role in this teen agony drama that has a strong flavour of phoniness, says Peter Bradshaw: Those who admired Ezra Miller's performance in Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin, and were eager to see what he did next, are going to be dismayed at the way he has been cast in this passive-aggressive teen agony drama with a strong flavour of phoniness. Miller gets to play the campy-witty gay best friend, who is simply a sacrificial figure; his function is to lend depth to the straight characters' stories. It is 1991, and Logan Lerman (who played the lead in the fantasy movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief) is Charlie, a sensitive, lonely boy who is just starting out in high school.
More here.

Bowie. The Smiths. Angst. "Perks of Being a Wallflower" captures its era perfectly, missing only Matthew Broderick, writes Andrew O'Hehir: Set long ago in a distant land of calf-length plaid skirts and high-waisted pleated jeans – approximately the George H.W. Bush administration – Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” which was first a best-selling novel and is now a film written and directed by the author, thrives on having little or no attitude. Its main characters are a group of high school misfits trying to be cool, an archetype of American culture if ever there was one, who are very far from being the subculture-savvy urban teens of the ‘60s and ‘70s or the ruthlessly plugged-in teens of the 2010s. Their rebellion against life in the middle-class suburbs of Pittsburgh is, in fact, both mild and vague: They’re into the Smiths and they go to midnight audience-participation screenings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”; when David Bowie’s “Heroes” comes on the radio they’re blown away, but none of them has ever heard it before or knows who the singer is.

Actually, the fact that reformed bad girl Sam (Emma Watson), her gay stepbrother Patrick (Ezra Miller) and their posse of friends aren’t painfully hip or terribly far from the mainstream – just a little bit alienated from their surroundings, and more than a little bit stranded between eras – is precisely the source of the power in Chbosky’s story. His novel was an immediate teen sensation when first published in 1999, and has reportedly sold close to a million copies. (Subsequently he was the driving force behind the short-lived but much-loved TV series “Jericho.”) It’s both fair and necessary to describe Chbosky’s book as a mashup of “Catcher in the Rye” and “The Great Gatsby” transmuted to 1990 suburbia, and indeed both of those novels figure large in the imagination of Charlie, his cryptic protagonist. I’m certainly not putting Chbosky on the same level as Salinger and Fitzgerald, but what he captures along with them is the terrible urgency of youth, those moments in anyone’s life when we begin to grasp that life is in fact happening to us too, and that there is no turning back the clock to childhood.
More here.

Taken 2

There’s something about Luc Besson, the French maverick filmmaker, known for some really stylist thrillers, such as ‘La Femme Nikita’, ‘The Professional’, and some not-so-grand adventures, like ‘The Fifth Element’. But, whatever he does, it’s worth a watch; to begin with, they look good (I loved his later supernatural comedy-romance ‘Angel-A’). Later, he turned producer and launched many a careers, and many a sequels, the well known among them is ‘The Transporter’; and last year’s not so impressive ‘Columbiana’, and trust me, there are a number of other films in between, in English and in French.

One of them was ‘Taken’, the 2008 fiesta that catapulted an ageing Liam Neeson, and a brilliant actor (he was Shindler in that Spielberg movie, before that he was Rob Roy, better still he was Michael Collins). ‘Taken’ made him an action hero and how! It wasn’t a fluke. In the next few years he starred in several such actioners, from the average ‘Unknown’ to the nihilistic ‘The Grey’. And filmmakers refuse to stop milking the actor’s aging action hero image.

Now comes a sequel to ‘Taken’, which apparently is a box office gold. But, not everyone is convinced...

>>>
Writes David Germain of Associated Press: Planning to pay out good money to see “Taken 2?? To paraphrase Liam Neeson, you’re about to be taken.... Whatever novelty there was watching Neeson go commando in 2008's “Taken” is gone in the sequel, a mix of third-rate action, dreary family melodrama, laughable bad guys and even more laughable plot devices. ... “Taken 2? is so bad it feels as though producer and co-writer Luc Besson swept up odds and ends cut from the first movie and slapped them together between a few new scenes shot with Neeson’s retired CIA guy Bryan Mills, his daughter (Maggie Grace) and ex-wife (Famke Janssen). ... The original was relentlessly paced and just flew by. The sequel is about the same length yet takes its good old time putting the villains and viewers out of their misery. ... Besson and director Olivier Megaton (“Transporter 3?) pad “Taken 2? with really awful reconciliation moments between Mills and his family, and once the action finally kicks in, it’s nothing but repetitive kill shots to the head, snapping of necks and poorly edited hand-to-hand fights.
More here.

Roger Ebert, however, is more generous: Poor Kim Mills. She doesn't even have her driver's license yet, and she's been kidnapped by sex traffickers in Paris and terrorists in Istanbul. This despite her having a father so protective that he implants a GPS app in her iPhone and bursts in on her making out with her sweet, polite boyfriend. ...
I suppose the second kidnapping was necessary in "Taken 2," which stars Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace and Famke Janssen in a pumped-up sequel to "Taken" (2008). They say that the family that's kidnapped together, stays together and a whole lotta bonding will go on after this one. You don't need to have seen the first film to follow this one, which opens with touching scenes between ex-CIA man Bryan Mills (Neeson) and his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen, who is seriously beautiful here). Lenore's new husband has proven to be a no-good rat, and some energy flows between her and Bryan, the father of their daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). Mills has been hired to be a sheik's bodyguard in Istanbul; when he wraps the job, he invites Kim and Lenore to join him for some R&R in Istanbul. ... Bad idea. He's only a stone's throw from Albania, where the film opens with a funeral of Mills' victims from the first "Taken." I have long complained that action pictures leave dozens of dead bodies behind and unaccounted for. Now we see that Mills killed so many bad guys in the first film that a transport plane is needed to airlift their bodies home, and a mass burial is required to dispose of them.
More here.

>>>>
Taken is a 2008 French thriller film produced by Luc Besson, starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace and Famke Janssen. The screenplay was written by Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, and directed by Pierre Morel. Neeson plays a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative who sets about tracking down his daughter after she is kidnapped by human traffickers while travelling in France. The sequel, Taken 2, was released on 3 October 2012. Despite receiving mixed reviews, Taken has generated a strong cult following since its 2008 release, and numerous media outlets have cited the film as a turning point in Neeson's career that redefined the actor as a successful action film star.
More here.

Sinister

Writes Ryan Lambie in Den of Geek: Widely billed as “From the producer of Paranormal Activity and Insidious”, supernatural horror Sinister bravely slams together two worn horror genre clichés: a struggling writer and a haunted house.

Ethan Hawke plays Ellison, a true crime author who’s struggling to recreate his earlier success. Ten years before the events of Sinister, his book Kentucky Blood was a bestseller, resolving a crime the police had been unable to figure out, and briefly making him a media celebrity. Now married to wife Tracy (Juliette Rylance) and with two kids to feed, he’s keen to get started on a book that will again establish him as a writer of merit.

“We didn’t just move two doors down from a crime scene, did we?” Tracy asks, as she and Ellison move boxes into their new small-town dwelling. “Of course we didn’t,” Ellison replies.

This isn’t a lie. In his quest for literary glory, Ellison’s selfishly moved his family into a house with a terrible past. The previous occupants (another white middle-class family) met a horrible death in the back garden, while the youngest child subsequently disappeared.

Ellison’s determined to make the murders the subject of his latest book, and despite the veiled threats of local sheriff (played by Fred Dalton Thompson), he’s willing to go to any lengths to get to the bottom of who killed them. Shortly after he moves in, the writer discovers an old box of 8mm film in the loft, which far from providing clues to his investigation, maddeningly deepen it. Who committed the crime? Who filmed it, and why? And how did the reels end up in the loft?
More here.

Simon & The Oaks

Writes Alison Willmore: Ponderous and heavy with its own importance, Simon And The Oaks is the kind of film that’s made for awards—it nabbed 13 nominations in Sweden’s equivalent of the Oscars last year. Adapted from a 1985 novel by Marianne Fredriksson and directed by Lisa Ohlin, the film spans the years during and after World War II, as two boys grow up in an idyllic setting during a dark era in history, and their families become entangled in ways both business and personal. With beautiful period trappings and picturesque backdrops, the film doesn’t skimp on visual details, though the resulting product is inert. The characters rarely seem like more than types as they navigate through the war and look toward the future.

The eponymous protagonist, played by Jonatan S. Wächter as a child and Bill Skarsgård (Stellan Skarsgård’s son) as a young man, grows up in the care of working-class couple Helen Sjöholm and Stefan Gödicke. They love him, but Gödicke is frequently frustrated with the fact that the boy has no interest in roughhousing with friends. Instead, he prefers to spend time reading in a perch built in his favorite tree. At school, Wächter befriends a Jewish boy whose wealthy family moved from Germany to Sweden, where they’re warily keeping track of the war’s development; his mother (Lena Nylén) is afraid to leave the house, while his father (Jan Josef Liefers) is more circumspect and hopeful about life after the conflict.
More Here. 

Savages

Samsara

Premium Rush

Liberal Arts

Red Hook Summer

Homeland

A Royal Affair

Stoker

Writes R Kurt Osenlund in Slant Magazine: Stoker, of course, marks Chan-wook's English-language debut, and his most buzzed-about work since Oldboy. Co-penned by Prison Break heartthrob Wentworth Miller, it explores the sordid secrets of one very dysfunctional family, whose fan-the-flames surname gives the film its title. The poster, it would seem, depicts a gnarled family tree, dressed with brooding glances, angry birds, and skeletons from closets. If the film's synopsis is any indication, the coffin at the image's base holds the body of Richard Stoker (Dermot Mulroney), father to India (Mia Wasikowska) and husband to Evelyn (Kidman). The film's events surround what happens after Richard's death, and thus this tree's branches sprout outward from his corpse, tangling themselves in what one can only surmise are details of the plot. Naturally, the shovel points to foul play, which seems to follow India's visiting uncle, Charlie (Matthew Goode), who's enigmatically relegated to a blink-and-miss limb at top left. Did Charlie kill Richard? Does his lack of prominence suggest he's not really a member of this family? His sunglass-covered gaze is nearly as menacing as that spider, which dangles just beside the shovel, and seems to be this movie's creeping motif of dread (the trailer sees it crawl within the frame repeatedly). The implications of the shoes, piano, gift, and cake are anyone's guess, but odds are there's much familial innocence and artifice being shattered, be it due to Charlie's danger, India's grief, or Evelyn's cruelty ("I can't wait to watch life tear you apart," Kidman memorably growls to Wasikowska in the trailer).
More here.

Written by Wentworth Miller (yes, the Prison Break guy) and starring Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode, everything we’ve seen of Stoker thus far looks incredible. Dark, creepy and atmospheric, the plot concerns a family torn apart when Nicole Kidman’s husband dies in a car accident, only for his mysterious brother to turn up and begin drawing Kidman to him and – more significantly – her daughter, as played by Mia Wasikowska. While the promo material has kept its cards close to its chest, it’s a fair bet that there’s more to Matthew Goode’s Uncle Charlie than meets the eye… Chan-wook Park is a great director, and it looks like the switch to the English language hasn’t tempered his creative flair (just witness that gorgeous transition from hair to grass in the trailer), and with a classy cast and what seems to be an effectively dark supernatural psych-drama of a plot from Miller, Stoker looks like it might be something of a surprise package come March 1st 2013, when it’s released.
More here.

Wentworth Miller wrote the screenplay for Stoker, as well as a prequel, Uncle Charlie. He used the pseudonym Ted Foulke, later explaining "I just wanted the scripts to sink or swim on their own." Miller's script was voted to the 2010 "Black List" of the 10 best unproduced screenplays making the rounds in Hollywood. Miller described it as a "horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller." Although influenced by Bram Stoker's Dracula, Miller clarified that Stoker was "not about vampires. It was never meant to be about vampires but it is a horror story. A stoker is one who stokes, which also ties in nicely with the narrative." Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt also influenced the film. Miller said: "The jumping off point is actually Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. So, that's where we begin, and then we take it in a very, very different direction."
More here.

The Trailer Here.

2 Days in New York

The Grandmasters

The Everlasting Secret Family

Synopsis for the 1988 Australian queer drama 'The Everlasting Secret Family' (1988): A beautiful, if ambitious and amoral, youth is tapped to become the lover of a powerful senator. The young man quickly realizes that he can hold this place, with all its perks, only as long as he is young. He has no other function than being young. With the help of an aged judge, the young man, referred to only as The Lover, contrives a plan to make a change in the way of the world, a plan that will take him years to realize. To succeed, he must manipulate, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the senator, his wife, the family chauffeur (who was, when young, a lover), and, by implication, the entire well-planned and controlling everlasting secret family.
More here.

The Everlasting Secret Family might just be one of the darkest queer movies of all time. A secret society of wealthy, closeted gay men recruits beautiful young men as its playthings. But one "plaything" wants to stay young forever. I love the way he gasps, "Experiment - on me!" in the above clip. This beautiful youth, who resembles a young David Bowie at times, manages to achieve his goal: He stays young and lovely for an extra 14 years. He's the lover of a powerful Australian minister. And he needs every iota of his gorgeousness to fend off challenges from the minister's chauffeur (who was employed as a "lover" when he was younger) and the minister's wife (who pretty much figures out that she's a beard.) More than that, though, our hero is trying to create a new role for himself, outside of the rigid strictures of the Everlasting Secret Family - neither lover nor servant, but something special. To this end, he becomes the lover of both the minister and his young son.
More here.

Sports day at an exclusive Australian boys' school. One of the gorgeous youths, watched by a sinister black-clad figure, is whisked off to a hotel room, divested of clothes and ravished. As he doesn't object, he's taken to a party and seduced by a Japanese gent who insists on doing things to him with a large live crab. Next he undergoes an initiation ceremony à la Knights Templar and joins 'the family', an ancient sex ring which wreaks terrible punishment on those who blab. From then on, it's a confused tale of the boy's attempt to flee, his search for eternal youth, and his burgeoning relationship with his master's son, with lots of male nudity and some fairly explicit sex. All the gay characters are 'elderly pervert' stereotypes, cruel, calculating and vampirish. Yet, for a film that takes so rigidly homophobic a stance, an awful lot of time is spent dwelling on youthful tanned muscles and taut buttocks. Revolting, ludicrous, infuriating and often (blush) very erotic, it's about nothing but self-hatred.
More here.

If the link is still working, watch the complete film here in Youtube.

Cloud Atlas

What’s great about the ambitious, sprawling, and almost audacious, ‘Cloud Atlas’ (2012), is that there are so many things happening that the same time that you are sure to dig some part of it, for sure, if not all. I loved the film; I saw it on the first day, and would want to see it again. Yet, I’d loath to recommend the film to anyone. You’ll have to decide if you want to experience this bold vision of filmmaking. But, I’d say this: ‘Cloud Atlas’ is more than worth the price of admission at the local multiplex.

A Late Quartet

Writes Roger Ebert: In the 25th year of their career together, a famous string quartet receives some devastating news. Peter, their cellist, has been diagnosed in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. This bombshell interrupts the steady pace of their work and exposes personal issues that have long remained latent.

"A Late Quartet" does one of the most interesting things any film can do. It shows how skilled professionals work. I knew about string quartets in general. Now I know more about them in practice, especially about how they require four talented individuals to form into one disciplined voice. I suspect any serious music lover will be convinced that Yaron Zilberman's film knows what it is talking about.

One of the pleasures here is to see familiar and gifted actors forming an ensemble of their own. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken and Catherine Keener join with a newer face, Mark Ivanir, to play the members of the Fugue String Quartet, a world-famous ensemble based in Manhattan. Walken is Peter Mitchell, the cellist, who is the wisest and most thoughtful member of the group. Hoffman and Keener are Robert and Juliette Gelbart, the second violin and viola, who are married. The first violin and youngest member of the group is Daniel Lerner (Ivanir).
More here.

Seven Psychopaths

Martin McDonagh channels Tarantino and Charlie Kaufman in this crazy-ambitious meta follow-up to "In Bruges", writes Andrew O'Hehir: I have contradictory things to say about playwright turned filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s “Seven Psychopaths,” which is pretty much in the spirit of the whole thing, since this movie is constantly rewriting itself and puncturing its own balloon. On one hand, McDonagh’s move into the American mainstream, and his follow-up to the Oscar-nominated international hit “In Bruges,” is admirably ambitious and brushes close to greatness at times. Both a movie about the movies and an L.A. crime thriller in the postmodern Tarantino tradition (forgive me for that phrase, if you can), “Seven Psychopaths” is loaded with scabrous, funny McDonagh dialogue and arguably overloaded with offbeat performances by terrific character actors: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson and a little shih tzu named Bonny.

But having seen the movie and quite enjoyed it, I can’t shake the feeling that I wish “Seven Psychopaths” were something more than it is, or, to be more precise, were a different kind of thing altogether. Already one of the most accomplished contemporary dramatists (his acclaimed plays include “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “The Pillowman”), McDonagh has taken on the movies with a passion, and here appears to be pursuing a Great White Whale I’m not sure is worth harpooning. This is a comic fable about an Irishman in Hollywood, written and directed by an Irishman who has evidently spent a good deal of time in Hollywood. (Although McDonagh was born and raised in England, he has always identified as an Irish writer.) It’s a self-regarding screenplay about screenwriting, more than a little bit influenced by Charlie Kaufman’s “Adaptation,” and it’s an attempt to create a classic American crime film and also to subvert the clichés of that genre to other purposes. Personally, I’m receptive to all those things, but “Seven Psychopaths” winds up getting snarled in its competing and overlapping agendas and falling over.
More here.

Writes Roger Ebert: Well, they have the title right. I don't know how these people found one another, but they certainly belong on the same list. They all have roles in a screenplay titled "Seven Psychopaths," which is under development by a writer named Marty Faranan, played by Colin Farrell. In Hollywood, "under development" means "all I have is the title."

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh ("In Bruges"), this is a delightfully goofy, self-aware movie that knows it is a movie. You've heard of a movie within a movie? I think this is a movie without a movie. Some of it happens to Marty, some of it happens in Marty's imagination, and some of it seems to happen in one category and then invades another.

Consider an opening sequence with Michael Stuhlbarg and Michael Pitt, who, on the basis of their conversation, are professional hit men. Or perhaps not very professional, because although they are in a wide-open space, they allow a man in a mask to walk right up and shoot them in the head.

Does this really happen? Figure it out for yourself. Marty's best friend is Billy Bickle (Sam Rockwell), and if his last name is the same as the hero in Marty Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," I leave that for you to puzzle out. Eager to help Marty escape from writer's block, Billy suggests a classified ad asking psychopaths to volunteer for interviews. Tom Waits knocks on the door and introduces himself as a serial killer who specializes in killing other serial killers. I forgot to mention that Los Angeles currently has an active serial killer named the Jack of Diamonds killer, who wipes out mobsters.
More here.

Middle of Nowhere

Writes Roger Ebert: The title "Middle of Nowhere" describes two of its main characters. Ruby, a nurse on the night shift, has put her life on hold to make four-hour round trips to Derek, her husband, who is serving an eight-year prison sentence. The title also describes Derek, who is not only in prison but lacking a moral compass. "I just got caught up in things," he tells Ruby, trying to apologize. He seems to think of himself as a passive victim.

Ruby is played in a star-making performance by Emayatzy Corinealdi, previously best known for the TV soap "The Young and the Restless." We learn that Ruby was in med school when she married Derek, and we're given some glimpses of their happiness (as in a standard scene of them cooking together). When Derek is sentenced to prison (for reasons that are withheld at first and then never fully explained), she drops out of school to devote herself to his life and morale. This is a decision sharply criticized by her mother, Ruth (Lorraine Toussaint). Her mother is correct.

This becomes clear during Derek's parole hearing, when Ruby learns disturbing things about his time in prison. Her lonely life, her long bus trips and her empty house have built up a sad weight that comes into play when she meets a kind of gentle bus driver named Brian (David Oyelowo). They slowly, tentatively start seeing each other.

"Middle of Nowhere" is the second film directed by Ava DuVernay, whose "I Will Follow" (2011) was the story, much admired by me, of a woman who packs up the belongings of her just-deceased aunt who was a mentor and inspiration. How many people, now dead, have you wanted to ask questions you should have asked when they were alive?
More here.

This gorgeous, sober drama about the human costs of prison deserves a broader audience than it's likely to get, writes Andrew O'Hehir: It’s already an extremely tough marketplace for small independent films that arrive without a lot of brand identity or star power, and it might be three times tougher when you’re talking about a movie like Ava DuVernay’s “Middle of Nowhere” – a beautiful, sober and even grave social drama with an entirely African-American cast. (OK, Sharon Lawrence has a dispensable bit part as a hard-ass white lawyer.) This is an issue guaranteed to make everyone feel uncomfortable, but it does no good to run away from it: There’s very little audience (black, white or otherwise) for black-oriented films that aren’t about gangsters or rappers, or that aren’t Tyler Perry–style moralistic melodramas. In fact, experience tells me it’ll be tough to get people to read this article, let alone see the film.

It’s a bit too easy to blame this reluctance on overt or covert racism; I’m in no position to make that judgment and I think it’s more complicated than that anyway. People of all backgrounds are leery of unknown movies or books or TV shows that they fear may be judgmental or lecture-y or otherwise spinach-infused. When one black movie a year — Lee Daniels’ “Precious” a couple of years ago, and Dee Rees’ terrific “Pariah” in 2011 — beats the odds and crosses over to a somewhat mainstream audience, it does so by overcoming those perceptions and riding a current of urgent, documentary-style realism. Movies that are more subjective, self-conscious and artfully crafted, like “Middle of Nowhere” or Tanya Hamilton’s neglected near-masterpiece “Night Catches Us,” are definitely tougher sells.

Mind you, both of those pictures absolutely have social-realist credentials, and tell stories that are central to the life of the African-American community. If “Night Catches Us” was about the unresolved legacy of 1960s-style black radicalism, “Middle of Nowhere” addresses a highly contemporary and explosive issue, the way that millions of ordinary black families have been torn apart by incarceration. DuVernay’s script and moody, elegant direction (which won her the best-director prize at Sundance this year) are tightly focused on the anguish of Ruby (the exquisite Emayatzy Corinealdi), a composed and ambitious medical student whose personal and professional ambitions are derailed when her husband is sent to a prison in California’s Central Valley, two hours by bus from their Los Angeles home.
More here.

Looper

Writes Roger Ebert: Rian Johnson's "Looper," a smart and tricky sci-fi story, sidesteps the paradoxes of time travel by embracing them. Most time travel movies run into trouble in the final scenes, when impossibilities pile up one upon another. This film leads to a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as if it never happened. You have to grin at the ingenuity of Johnson's screenplay.

The movie takes place in 2044 and 2074, both of which look like plausible variations of the American present, and then there are a few scenes set in a futuristic Shanghai. We learn that although time travel is declared illegal once it has been discovered, a crime syndicate cheats and uses it as a method for disposing of its enemies. Imagine this. A man with shotgun stands by himself in a field. A second man materializes out of thin air. The first man blasts a hole in him.

The thin-air guy, who was bound and hooded, is a man from the future who has been sent back in time to be assassinated. The shotgun guy is known as a "Looper." He has been sent back into time to be the trigger man. Eventually, when he grows old enough, he will be sent back in time to be killed by his own younger self. This is known as "closing the loop."
More here.

Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and an amazing cast bring history alive in Spielberg's moral masterpiece, writes Andrew O'Hehir:
Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” has a lot to live up to, even when you get past the fact that its subject is the greatest of all American presidents and one of history’s most mythologized characters. Its cast members have won at least five Oscars, with two apiece belonging to the odd but compelling couple at the center of the story, Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, his tormented and demanding co-strategist and life partner. The two best-known previous films about our 16th president were made by D.W. Griffith and John Ford, who represent exactly the kind of classic American cinema against which Spielberg measures himself. (In fairness, neither Griffith’s early talkie “Abraham Lincoln,” starring Walter Huston, nor Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln,” with Henry Fonda in the title role, is much watched these days.)

Then there’s the question of Spielberg’s up-and-down directing career, which includes three Oscars of his own, several of the biggest hits in movie history and a marked propensity for sentimental overreach when he tries to tackle serious drama. (I remain somewhat willing to defend both “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List,” for example, but both are great in parts rather than great as a whole.) Expectations for “Lincoln” could not possibly have been higher, and I’m inclined to think that Spielberg’s biggest challenge in making it lay in overcoming his own worst impulses. It could so easily have turned into sweeping oratory, montages of Civil War dead and a slow-motion assassination scene in Ford’s Theatre, all set to a keening John Williams violin score. (“Lincoln” does in fact have a score by Williams, but it’s effective and rarely obtrusive.)

There are a couple of brief but memorable Civil War scenes near the beginning and end of “Lincoln,” and a few snippets from his speeches, notably his second inaugural address a few weeks before his death. But we don’t see Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address, and the event you’ll be dreading as the story moves toward April of 1865 is handled with grace and delicacy. As I noted in an essay last weekend, John Wilkes Booth is never seen and never mentioned, which can only have been a deliberate choice. (I, for one, am grateful.) As for Spielberg, he has outdone Griffith and Ford and then some, crafting a thrilling, tragic and gripping moral tapestry of 19th-century American life, an experience that is at once emotional, visceral and intellectual. In a mesmerizing collaboration with a great actor (Day-Lewis) and a visionary writer (Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner), Spielberg has captured Lincoln as a shrewd political leader and a man of his time rather than a brooding philosopher-poet on a pedestal (although there’s some of that too).
More here.

Writes Roger Ebert: I've rarely been more aware than during Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" that Abraham Lincoln was a plain-spoken, practical, down-to-earth man from the farmlands of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. He had less than a year of formal education and taught himself through his hungry reading of great books. I still recall from a childhood book the image of him taking a piece of charcoal and working out mathematics by writing on the back of a shovel.

Lincoln lacked social polish but he had great intelligence and knowledge of human nature. The hallmark of the man, performed so powerfully by Daniel Day-Lewis in "Lincoln," is calm self-confidence, patience and a willingness to play politics in a realistic way. The film focuses on the final months of Lincoln's life, including the passage of the 13th Amendment ending slavery, the surrender of the Confederacy and his assassination. Rarely has a film attended more carefully to the details of politics.

Lincoln believed slavery was immoral, but he also considered the 13th Amendment a masterstroke in cutting away the financial foundations of the Confederacy. In the film, the passage of the amendment is guided by William Seward (David Strathairn), his secretary of state, and by Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), the most powerful abolitionist in the House. Neither these nor any other performances in the film depend on self-conscious histrionics; Jones in particular portrays a crafty codger with some secret hiding places in his heart.
More here.

Writes R. Kurt Osenlund in Slant Magazine: As probing as this film is in regard to the political landscape of the 1860s, it digs nearly as deep into Lincoln's personal life, which was stricken by tragedy and evidently ruled over by Mary Todd (Sally Field), a volatile conservative grieving the loss of young son Willie, who died at age 11 of typhoid fever. Letting the side effects of power and aristocracy spill into private rooms, Kushner pens gripping, guilt-ridden scenes between Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, all of them wonderfully played by Day-Lewis and a truly transcendent Field. The sacrifices of a political family are tinged with intimations of a loveless marriage and mental illness, and the mysterious influence of the woman behind the man manifests rivetingly, such as during a White House party that sees Mary Todd aim her fierce prowess and dissatisfaction at Thaddeus. True to his character, Day-Lewis is the steady hand to Field and Jones's impassioned personalities, and his largely subtle performance is one of world-weary dignity and soft spikes of intensity. There's humor in it, too, as Lincoln's penchant for labored philosophizing yields many spirited anecdotes, which exasperate his scrambling underlings, who think he's off-target. Along with a growing concern for his eldest son, Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who itches to disobey his parents and join the military, the affable quirk serves as an effective humanizer, while also conveying a president's vital charismatic side.

For Spielberg, Lincoln is a surprisingly un-showy affair, with a subdued palette to match its subject's disposition. Battlefields fill the screen in the first and third acts, but this is no usual Spielbergian spectacle, despite the recurrence of ethereal backlighting, and DP Janusz Kaminski's search for close-up facial reactions. John Williams's distinguished score rarely soars above the light caress of piano keys, as Spielberg shows little desire to pad the inherent drama of Kushner's dizzyingly well-researched and pristinely balanced script. Lincoln is overlong, and as it nears its inevitable end, with the commander in chief slain off camera, the director lets his film lurch before somewhat sputtering to a halt. But what the movie finally communicates is that which seems most fortunate about Lincoln's life: Though he died as a direct result of his tide-turning actions, the president seems to have been given just enough time in this world to change it.
More here.

Keep the Lights On

Writes Roger Ebert: Ira Sachs' "Keep the Lights On" follows a long-term relationship between two men who possibly shouldn't have started it. They're not well suited to each other, and although their sex life is successful in the physical sense, it begins to stray in emotional meaning. By dropping in on this couple from time to time for the kinds of moments one of them might remember, the film is more honest than its characters.

It is said to be autobiographical, the story of Sachs' own relationship. I can believe that, because it contains the sorts of resentments and pleasures that accumulate between people. They say you always remember the good times and the bad times, but not the in-between times when nothing much is happening. Those moments are tricky for Erik and Paul, because if it weren't for their romance, they might not find anything compellingly interesting about each other.
More here.

How to Survive a Plague

Writes Roger Ebert: The two years before the 1996 discovery of a more effective AIDS-fighting drug combination were, a survivor recalls, "a dark time." Nothing seemed to be working. After the disease was first identified in 1981, there were a few moments of hope, like the drug AZT, which had good results for a month and then stopped working. AIDS activists in ACT UP and other groups pressed for more urgent testing of promising drugs, but none seemed to be successful and some even caused blindness, as the disease continued its relentless and invariably fatal spread.

Then, miraculously, a cocktail of several drugs, including AZT, was tried along with protease inhibitors that prolonged its effectiveness. One of the survivors of that time recalls it in David France's documentary "How to Survive a Plague." Symptoms seemed to reverse themselves. Cancerous skin lesions disappeared. Patients began to gain weight. Within a month, blood counts were near normal, and health seemed to be restored. Many found it hard to believe, and still today feel some guilt that they are alive while millions around the world have died.

The documentary charts the rise of the AIDS crisis from its earliest days. It benefits enormously by a wealth of video footage taken by ACT UP and other groups, showing urgent meetings of victims, who demonstrated and even demanded arrest outside federal and municipal buildings and hospitals.
More here.

Holy Motors

Writes Roger Ebert: Monsieur Oscar has his work cut out for him, and it takes on ever so much variety because he seems to live entirely within the cinema. OK, I grant you that all movie characters live inside the cinema, but not many live inside 11 different scenarios during the same day, shuttling between one "appointment" and another in the back of a white stretch limousine.

We know he lives in movies because we literally find him in one. Leos Carax's much-debated "Holy Motors" begins with a man (Carax himself) asleep in bed, then waking and approaching a wall of the room that looks like a forest. Knowing just where to look among the trees, he unlocks a door using a key growing from his finger. Well, isn't that what artists do? Unlock doors with their fingers?

Now this man is inside a cinema, and we meet Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), who lives in a house that seems designed by the same architect employed in Jacques Tati's "Mon Oncle." He gets into the waiting limo, driven by a taciturn woman, and we see that the back of the limo, seemingly much larger inside than the outside, is a dressing room filled with costumes and props. When he gets out the first time, he has transformed himself into a wretched beggar woman. This will be the first of his many roles, or assignments, or embodiments. He performs in bizarre and mysterious ways, linked only by the desire of a mime or comedian to entertain and amaze us. His "appointments" take him into personas so diverse, it would be futile to try to link them, or find a thread of narrative or symbolism. If there is a message here, Walt Whitman once put it into words: "I am large. I contain multitudes."
More here.

Flight

Writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: At this point it’s a total cliché to describe Denzel Washington as one of our greatest screen actors. I’m not disputing the point, but the problem with Washington is in fact the atmosphere of Great-Actorliness around him, which sometimes ennobles his movies but can just as often diminish them. With his impressive physical presence, ladykilling charm and stern, sarcastic demeanor, Washington strikes me as a movie star from a different era, perhaps the age of Clark Gable and Laurence Olivier. That overlooks the obvious fact that a man of Washington’s background and color could never have been a major star in an earlier day, but that too – that sense of belonging both to the present and the past – is part of his appeal.

Washington often seems to be playing Shakespeare even when he isn’t, and in a great many of his movies one wishes he were. He’d clearly be a terrific Othello – and I know how that sounds, picking the only major African role in English drama – but he’d be outrageously good as Macbeth or Henry the Fifth as well, and he’s drawing close to the age when he could play Lear. Since I’m getting myself in hot water, I’ll go further: Washington might fit best projected some centuries into the future, into a universe of “post-racial” entertainment that none of us will ever see. As excited as I am to see Daniel Day-Lewis play Abraham Lincoln, for example, I think Washington would be even better. And not playing Lincoln as “black,” in some racially reversed alternate universe or whatever. Just playing Lincoln.

There are intimations of those distant possibilities throughout Washington’s career; in Robert Zemeckis’ alternately thrilling, tedious and moralistic “Flight,” as in many of his recent films, Washington plays a black man whose race is mentioned only indirectly and plays no major role in the plot. Capt. Whip Whitaker, Washington’s character, both is and is not based on Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in January 2009. That is, Whip faces a test at least as dire as Sully’s and passes it with flying colors, regaining control of an Orlando-Atlanta commuter flight that has gone into an uncontrolled dive and making an emergency landing in a pasture.
More here.