Hanna Review

Saoirse Ronan, a stunning sixteen-year-old performer, anchors Joe Wright’s latest entry, “Hanna,” a marked diversion from his more intellectual “Atonement,” which also starred Ms. Ronan.  Her name, pronounced SEERsha, meaning “freedom” in the Irish language, is a fitting one for  Hanna, in that she races across the screen more times and perhaps  even more quickly than Franka Potente, the title character in Tom Tykwer’s “Run Lola Run.”  The blue-eyed beauty, well toned from months of preparation both in diet and in martial arts techniques to develop into a lass with almost superhuman strength, holds the screen as a model of female empowerment—if liberation has anything to do with the ability to knock small armies of men on their butts or dispatch a reindeer with bow and arrow in the frosty wilderness of Northern Finland. “Hanna” is pure movie, an incredibly strong action thriller which features heavy action making up grandly for a deficiency of both character development and clear motivation.   Both story and screenplay, written largely by Seth Lochhead when he was a twenty-four-year old film student, are transcribed onto the screen by Joe Wright, revving up his muscles after having contributed such delicate dramas on celluloid as “Pride and Prejudice” and “The Soloist.”  With energy pulsing almost throughout the picture, with a terrific soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers featuring songs and music from classical gypsy flamenco to contemporary techno, “Hanna” is favored by great supporting performances from Cate Blanchett, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, “Tamara Drewe”’s Jessica Barden, and especially by Eric Bana.  If you want to convince anyone that movies are not theater or literature, “Hanna” would not be a bad place to start.  The fight scenes come across as choreographed dance with considerable violence looking realistic, though some suffer from the usual dilemma of too-quick editing.  Saorise Ronan, born in New York but raised since early childhood and home-schooled in Ireland, performs in the title role as a home-school kid, lessons from her dad including memorizing the encyclopedia, gaining fluency in Arabic, Spanish, Iralian and English, and absorbing the wonders of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  Indeed production designer Sarah Greenwood ably converts a dilapidated German amusement park into a fairy-tale adventure-land, all the better for positioning Cate Blanchett’s Marissa as the Wicked Witch of the West.  Alwin Küchler films in the icy, thirty-three degrees below zero wilderness of Northern Finland, in the one hundred twenty-two degrees’ heat of southern Morocco, and in places between including Bavaria, Berlin, Hamburg, the UK.    “Hanna” opens with exuberant energy in Finland where Ronan’s character receives schooling in self-defense and geography but fails to develop a normal life with others of her age.  She is also the world’s only teenager who has never heard music.  It’s no wonder that she’s eager to leave her dad, marvelous teacher though he may be, to see what the outside world is like.  What she does see when she departs her cave  both enraptures (she is picked up by a traveling family and makes friends with her coeval Sophie [Jessica Barden] and fearful (she is chased by Marissa, as dedicated a U.S. CIA-operative as you’ll ever find).  What emerges is a view of Hanna that’s complex: she’s both a killing machine and a heroine, but we’re left with a gap in understanding the reasons that Marissa wants both her and her dad killed. We do learn, in time, why Hanna has been trained as an assassin, which seems logical enough, but why her dad, an ex-CIA operative is considered a threat to U.S. security and why his teen girl is deemed likewise dangerous is anybody’s guess.  During the film, a comical Tom Hollander exercising his métier as both an assassin himself and the operator in Hamburg’s Red Light district.  But forget about these other actors:  If you succeed in taking your eyes for a moment away from Ms. Ronan, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Arthur Review

Let’s start with a fact. The 1981 film “Arthur” is a middling piece of studio comedy, buoyed (in the first half) by an unexpectedly effervescent performance by Dudley Moore and delightfully dour deadpan turn by Sir John Gielgud as his butler.

But it’s hardly a classic (unless you saw it when you were 13 and found it to be the height of sophistication).

Gielgud won an Oscar for the film (a case where Oscar repaid an actor for an entire career) and the glutinous theme song by Christopher Cross took the award for best song. It’s still a tune that can send a certain generation of people leaping to change the radio station when it turns up – even if you’re the type that listens to gloopy soft-rock stations. (And, no doubt, I’m dating myself by even assuming anyone still actually listens to music on a car radio.)

But to get back to my point: The original “Arthur” was a mediocre film with a few laughs.

Not a classic.

And yet it looks like the model of wit compared to the remake that waddles into theaters this week. What is this movie’s reason for being? None are obvious.

If anything, this movie should put a nail in the coffin of Russell Brand’s career as a movie comic because, well, the guy’s just not that funny. Particularly not when he assays an entire role in that high, whiny, little-boy voice that he uses here. I’ve seen him do stand-up and that didn’t make me laugh. He’s really only amusing in small doses, as in the scattered skits in which he appeared when he hosted “Saturday Night Live” or in a smaller supporting role in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”

This reworking of the original “Arthur” tries to inoculate itself against charges of insensitivity right off the bat, despite its depiction of a drunk billionaire who burns through money frivolously. How? By having him give some of it away early on, after being asked about whether his brand of conspicuous waste is in bad taste during a recession. And, unlike the first film, his drinking eventually leads him to a 12-step program. Again, it feels like a sop, rather than a sincere concern about being accused of making a movie that portrays drunkenness as a giddy, feel-good state of being (which the original film did – and really, when was the last time you saw a movie about a lovable alcoholic?).

This film also takes his true love – a girl from Queens named Naomi – and transforms her from the kleptomaniac Liza Minnelli played in the original film into a would-be children’s author. Her transgression? She conducts unlicensed tours of Grand Central Terminal. Blah blah blah.

This film even takes the butler Hobson and turns him into a nanny, played by Oscar-winner Helen Mirren. She has the film’s few funny lines – and boy does she have to work to wring the humor out of the bland writing of Peter Baynham. But then there’s the whole icky mommy vibe between Hobson and Arthur and the neediness that Brand brings to the role. Again, not funny.

It’s always disheartening when Hollywood takes a great comedy and remakes it poorly. It’s even worse when it takes a mediocre movie and remakes it into something dispiritingly witless like “Arthur.”

It’s enough to make me reconsider my review of that last Ashton Kutcher-Natalie Portman fiasco, which looks brilliant in comparison.

Super Review

Riding a wave of acclaim following its midnight premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, I stepped into a screening of James Gunn's Super four days later with cautious anticipation. Superis the story of yet another everyman taking to the streets as a superhero along the same lines as the recent Kick-Ass and Defendor. The selling point here is over-the-top violence peppered with a few solid one-liners, but most important, a commitment to its subject matter that brings the packaged together. Little else could be expected from the writer/director of the highly entertaining, yet ignored 2006 sci-fi horror Slither.


Following the overlong title sequence, that admittedly has a very funny conclusion, we're introduced to Frank (Rainn Wilson), a burger flipper whose one-time junkie of a wife (Liv Tyler) has just left him for Jacques (Kevin Bacon), a local drug dealer whose name Frank comically believes to be spelled "Jock". Not having the wherewithal to stand up to Jacques as Frank, he quite literally believes he's been touched by the finger of God (voiced by Rob Zombie) and has been chosen to stand up to not only Jacques, but all crime as The Crimson Bolt. As a result, Frank fashions a uniform out of whatever he can find and decides "Shut up crime!" will serve as his motto and a giant pipe wrench will serve as his weapon. And you better believe he isn't carrying that pipe for show.

Beating drug dealers into bloody heaps and bludgeoning a couple that tries to cut in line at the movies — "No butting in line!" — The Crimson Bolt becomes a news sensation, drawing the attention of a local comic book store psychopath played with perfect comedic timing by Ellen Page (Juno). Adopting the role of The Crimson Bolt's sidekick, Page adds the boost Super needs about midway through and helps bring the film home.
While the story sounds dramatically familiar, Super's commitment to its content is where it stands above other films like it. Super keeps to its slightly heightened-reality with only a flair for the violent. Gunn doesn't turn to overly fancy gadgetry such as jet packs and ridiculous kung-fu as much as his characters take to the Internet and the local gun outlet for their elaborate weaponry ideas and still find they aren't indestructible.
Considering all the positives, walking into a film like this with the adoration of the midnight masses in my head, Super didn't appeal to me in the same way. I respect the comedy, such as Page's delivery of one line that is just as inappropriate as it is hysterical, and the over-the-top violence does well to service the characters' frustrations. However, too many dull moments in-between caused me to fade in and out of the story.
We're not talking about a narrative filled with complex turns in plot, but instead a straight-forward vigilante story that follows its established path. I imagine had I been in a theater filled with the film's target audience I would have enjoyed my time a bit more, but you can't always get a large group of comic book fans together at just the right moment and we can't control our theatrical viewing environment as much as we'd like.
As such, I can't second the sentiments of the panting horde that carried Super on their shoulders coming out of the Toronto midnight screening, but I can definitely say I enjoyed it.

GRADE: B

Insidious Review

Oh, sure, "Insidious" gets a little hokey. It leans on the jump scares more often than it should. Dialogue is not its strong suit. Some of the details, rather than contributing to a cohesive whole, are simply random. I will grant you all of this.

But I will also grant you the chills -- actual, literal chills -- that I felt at a few of the creepier moments, and the general sense of terror and unease that permeates most of the movie. Whatever flaws it may have, "Insidious" scared the hell out of me.

It was written by Leigh Whannell and directed by James Wan, who previously collaborated on "Saw" and one of its sequels, though I don't feel like that's a selling point. People who despised those movies (or refused to see them based on descriptions of their content) would find that "Insidious" is a different animal altogether. There's no torture or gore here, just good old-fashioned nightmares!

Suburban couple Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) have just moved, with their three young children, into a charming old house that would seem to be a perfect fit except that it has a drafty attic infested with sound effects. (That's the sort of thing you really ought to catch during the walk-through. "We love the house, but we're concerned about the creepy sound effects. Have you called anyone about that?") Josh is a loving and faithful husband, but somewhat oblivious about his tendency to leave the unpacking and child-rearing to Renai, who's frazzled.

Contributing to Renai's befrazzlement -- or perhaps manifesting because of it? -- is a series of events belonging to the category of Creepy Weird Stuff That Happens in Old Houses in Movies. Most of this is standard: doors that swing shut, mysterious creaking, unexplained sounds picked up by the baby monitor, glimpses of ghostly images. Wan isn't the first pianist to play this tune, of course, but he pounds it out well enough.

Much of this eeriness is subjective, possibly hallucinatory. There's no disputing the other unusual event, though, which is that Josh and Renai's son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) falls into a coma and cannot be awakened. Whether this is connected to the other incidents is for you to find out. (Or you could just guess. You'd probably be right.) Josh's mother (Barbara Hershey) worries about her grandchildren, and a friend of hers, Elise (Lin Shaye, intensely committed), arrives to offer assistance.

From there ... well, let's just say things get worse for this family before they get better. Part of the fun is not knowing what type of scariness we're dealing with here, whether it's supernatural, human-caused, imaginary, or something else altogether. There's an admirably chaotic seance sequence that's about five different kinds of terrifying.

Whannell's screenplay does indulge in a few gimmicks that are creepy but meaningless in the bigger picture. That isn't as satisfying as a film where all the details prove relevant in the end, where the answer to "Why did so-and-so do such-and-such?" isn't just "Because it looked spooky." Then again, it's hard to argue details when your eyes are bugged out and you're clutching the armrest of your chair.

Grade: B+

Rated PG-13, moderate profanity, one F-word, brief violent images, a lot of intensity and scariness

1 hr., 41 min.

In a Better World Review

In a Better World triumphed against strong competition to win this year’s Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film. Now that it’s opening theatrically in the U.S. you can see why. I became a fan and booster of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier when I saw her breathtakingBrothers (which is far superior to its Hollywood remake). Her films have a rare feeling of intimacy; there is no distance between us and the characters on screen. We almost feel as if we’re experiencing the story in their shoes.

Bier and her screenwriting partner Anders Thomas Jensen create tapestries with multiple story threads, and In A Better World is no exception. It may take a while to see where the film is headed, but it takes no time at all to—

—become deeply involved. The picture opens at a medical clinic in Africa, where Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) performs life-saving surgery, heals the sick, and tries to steer clear of local politics. When he returns home to Denmark, he is less successful dealing with his resentful wife, from whom he is separated, and his older son, who is repeatedly bullied at school. The son makes a new friend who has just moved to Denmark from London following the death of his mother. This boy has a deep well of anger inside him, which his father (Ulrich Thomsen) cannot overcome. It can only lead to trouble.

Who couldn’t relate to a boy being pitilessly bullied, or a widowed father who can’t seem to get through to his resentful son? How this troubled family intertwines with the doctor and his broken home is the crux of In A Better World.

Bier’s films aren’t preachy or pedantic, but she and Jensen are sending a message all the same about our uncivil world, and the potential for chaos that churns just underneath the surface of everyday life. As always, her actors don’t seem to be acting at all. They achieve a level of naturalism that other filmmakers can only aspire to. (At the same time, she has pulled back a bit from the starkness of the Dogma school, to which she subscribed early on.)

In A Better World is the kind of film that leaves you with food for thought…and the sincere hope that Susanne Bier will continue making provocative, adult movies for many years to come.

Source Code Review

Source Code

Plot
US military helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Gyllenhaal) is drafted as a test subject for a scientific process which can project his consciousness into the past (and another person’s body) for a limited time. Suspicious of his handler Captain Goodwin (Farmiga) and the programme’s director (Wright), Stevens repeatedly lives through the last eight minutes of the life of a passenger on a commuter train which has just been destroyed by a terrorist bomb.

Review
If anything holds back science-fiction as a film genre, it’s the tendency of big-studio thinking to use the genre as a disguise for other kinds of movie. Even classics of science-fiction cinema turn out to be Westerns, horror films or swashbuckling fantasy adventure dressed up with rayguns, spaceships and aliens. The theory goes that audiences don’t want to think too much, and science-fiction is a literature of ideas — so do a cop shoot-out on an abandoned asteroid or a mismatched partner romcom with a neurotic single chick and a handsome robot rather than risk something head-scratching. Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, for all their influence in the genre, have surprisingly little interest in science-fiction – though James Cameron does. You can tell the difference because filmmakers who just want to pretend say “sci-fi”, while those who mainline the pure product say “s-f”.

With Moon, Duncan Jones established himself as a potential great hope of s-f cinema, a director who actually wants to make science-fiction science-fiction movies. With Source Code he is back on Earth, and tackling a sub-genre which has plenty of recent precedents. Scripted by Ben Ripley, who has a track record in sci-fi thanks to a couple of direct-to-the-dungeon sequels to Species, this time-tripping, mind-warping exercise evokes everything from Groundhog Day to Déjà Vu. A lovely, generous piece of cameo voice-casting in a key offscreen role even pays homage to a specific television show, and justifies entirely an otherwise by-the-numbers tipping-in of the estranged-father-and-son angle which is almost obligatory in a Hollywood movie (do all screenwriters have baseball coach dads who disapproved of them staying indoors and typing?).

Otherwise, it’s brilliantly constructed, going over an eight-minute cycle again and again with variations, each time advancing the plot — it may be that stories like these were inconceivable before choose-your-own-adventure books or computer games — but also bringing out the tragedy of a doom we are told is inescapable as the time-hopper makes different, deepening connections with the girl sitting next to him.

Yes, it’s clever enough to make you break out a pad and pencil to work out how the jumble of timelines intermesh — raising the question of whether this slice of the past (the source code of the title) is a ‘read-only file’ or can be affected by the actions of a time-traveller who yearns for a happier outcome. But it’s also warm enough to make you care what happens, especially to the girl who repeatedly gets blown to pieces just as she’s on the point of changing her life. Source Code is cannily cast with folks who’ve more than demonstrated their abilities, but have yet to attain the star status they deserve. Michelle Monaghan (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Eagle Eye) and Vera Farmiga (Orphan, Henry’s Crime) have been brilliant in enough mid-list pictures to get noticed (and Farmiga a bit more in Up In The Air), but haven’t yet landed the top drawer material that would make them proper movie stars and put them in line for serious awards. Here, the women shine in good, secondary roles: Farmiga makes so much of her trim-uniformed part, which is mostly plot set-up and the glint of a tear in an icy eye, that you wonder what she might not be able to do if allowed to cut loose, while Monaghan is fresh and appealing in a way which sells the concept that someone might fall so deeply in love with her that he resolves to challenge the fundamental laws of the universe inside eight minutes.

However, the solipsistic nature of the head-trip, subjective-reality sub-genre means everyone aside from the hero has to hold back something, and all the pressure is on the leading man. Jake Gyllenhaal builds on his curious, committed time-tripper act from Donnie Darko and his wide-eyed-yet-gung-ho military hero bit from Jarhead. Indeed, as he runs through the moebius loop paradoxes of the plot, he’s even returning to the resourceful-acrobat-tampering-with-the-laws-of-time gambit of Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time, the big-budget flop he needs to bounce back from with this less costly, more rewarding vehicle to save his own immediate future. Gyllenhaal shows immense range as he bounces around a train carriage and a group of significant bit-parts while playing the same set-up for film noir neurosis (there’s an early feint about amnesia), cracked comedy (when he snarls, “Are you a comedian or something?” at an angry wiseass, it turns out the guy actually is), action-man intensity (there’s a gun to be got out of a secure locker), tragic angst (Stevens is progressively sidetracked by his own MIA circumstances) and cerebral detection (so, where’s the suspect device?). There are minor puzzles and red herrings within the basic who-is-the-mad-bomber? premise (several suspicious passengers get their moments), but the gimmick gradually settles down as the film latches instead onto the hero’s argument with the laws of quantum physics as to whether ‘source code’ is immutable.

Jeffrey Wright’s limping, rasping Evil Physicist Genius imports a necessary broad stroke of melodrama (and thickly sliced ham), and a few relatively newminted clichés (like the nervous Muslim commuter who is everyone’s first-choice terror suspect and therefore bound to be an innocent — or is he?) set up short-cuts which keep the complex story moving. A race-against-the-clock element, with downtown Chicago threatened with irradiation, limits the number of times Stevens can be sent back to try again (like the number of lives in a computer game), but also justifies the way his superiors keep vital, distressing information back to keep him on track (where is the capsule-like pod, with its dodgy wiring and problem heating unit, to which the hero returns between his trips to the immediate past?). This is the sort of clever-clever picture which requires multiple viewings to put all the pieces together, though it’s also got enough action (the same explosion, several times) and heart (courtesy of Monaghan and Farmiga) to make it as affecting as it is ingenious. It plays fairer than the very comparable Déjà Vu, and delays its final decision about the precise resolution of its hero’s quandary ’til the last moments — which, moreover, satisfy without copping out.

Verdict
An exciting, intellectually stimulating science-fiction thriller which also connects emotionally. Everyone involved earns a promotion to the premiership.

Hop Review

Three out of Five stars
Running time: 95 mins

Impressively animated, nicely written and gently amusing family comedy, enlivened by a terrific central performance from James Marsden and a weirdly note-perfect vocal effort from Russell Brand.

What's it all about?
Directed by Tim Hill (who made Alvin and the Chipmunks, so he has form for this sort of thing), Hop stars James Marsden as Fred O'Hare, a slacker whose parents (Gary Cole and Elizabeth Perkins) and sisters (Kaley Cuoco and Tiffany Espensen as Sam and Alex) are desperate for him to move out of the house and find a job. Sam finds Fred a mansion to house-sit but on his way there, his life is turned upside down when he nearly hits talking rabbit EB (Russell Brand) with his car and EB decides to join him in the mansion.

Having seen the Easter Bunny as a child, Fred is delighted to discover that EB is actually the Easter Bunny-in-waiting, only he's actually running away from his destiny and has come to Hollywood to become a rock drummer. Meanwhile, back on Easter Island, disgruntled work chick Carlos (Hank Azaria) is planning to oust EB's Easter Bunny father (Hugh Laurie) in a coup d'etat.

The Good
Marsden is excellent as Fred, delivering a likeable comic performance without resorting to mugging or over doing it. Similarly, though it might sound like a terrible idea on paper, Russell Brand turns out to be weirdly perfect for EB (essentially playing him exactly like his own comic persona) and even earns himself an actual onscreen cameo for his efforts.

The script is gently amusing throughout and at least has an interesting twist on the Santa Clause plot, in that Fred is actually thrilled at the thought of becoming the Easter Bunny rather than learning Important Life Lessons by having it forced upon him. Brand's dialogue is also frequently funny, to the point where you suspect he was allowed to ad-lib quite a bit and there's strong comic support from Cuoco, Azaria and Laurie as well as a crowd-pleasing (well, Hasselhoff-fan pleasing) cameo from David Hasselhoff as himself.

The Equally Good
The animation is extremely well done throughout too, both in terms of interaction and realism – there's not a single dodgy-looking CGI moment, for example. If anything, the film's only problem is that it skimps a bit on inventive action sequences, such as introducing The Pink Berets (a team of crack soldier bunnies) and then not doing anything interesting with them.

Worth seeing?
Hop is an enjoyable family comedy that should appeal to kids and pleasantly surprise any dragged-along adults. Worth seeing.