According to Colwell

This Argentinian film isn’t flashy in any way except for the clarity of the portrait of its characters. I saw this a couple of months ago, so this is just a quick note to say it should be seen. The movie takes place in two time frames. A prosecutor retires and reflects on an old unsolved murder case from his early days on the job. The movie explores both the criminal case and his own relationship with his colleagues, including a frustrated romantic interest in a partner who has later become a judge. It is funny, gripping, and romantic; smart, fast-paced, and well-written, beautifully acted, and tautly directed. We should have more movies like this one.

Only John C. Reilly could give the line: “Are you flirting with me? I’m Shrek. What are you doing out here in the forest with Shrek?”. As sad-sack divorce John, Reilly awkwardly stumbles into a relationship that is too good to be true with Molly (Marisa Tomei), a pretty, funny, and smart woman who finds John’s needy insecurities charmingly honest. Molly has it all, and John cannot believe his good fortune. So it does not take long before his search for trouble finds it in the form of Molly’s adult son Cyrus (Jonah Hill). Cyrus correctly recognizes John as a threat to his monopoly on the affection of his mother and is determined to undermine their relationship.

This is pretty easy for Cyrus because he is his mother’s one gigantic glaring fault. In her eyes, he can do no wrong. Since Cyrus is pretty weird, one wonders where Molly’s friends have been for the last 20 years. It’s hard to believe no one ever had a little heart to heart with her about her unhealthy relationship with her son. John, thankfully, eventually gets the chance to do just that. John has a strange relationship of his own: Catherine Keener plays his infinitely patient ex-wife whom John regularly hits up for emotional support. The movie is enjoyable. I would call it a character study, but the movie doesn’t give us much insight into the back stories of John, Cyrus, and Molly so that we can understand where the characters are coming from.

It’s not hard to understand why Dinner for Schmucks got a green light to be made. Based on a bitingly funny French movie and with Steve Carrell attached, even before seeing a script it must have destined to be a winner. Watching the movie is therefore a particularly frustrating experience. It keeps seeming like it should be funnier that it is. I found myself simultaneously admiring the comic timing and performances and not laughing. The script sounds like it would read like it would be funny to watch. But, with a few minor exceptions, it isn’t very funny to watch.

Paul Rudd plays a nice guy, Tim, with a very cute girlfriend, Julie. Tim is trying to make his move up to the seventh floor and the nice corner office at a high-powered corporate takeover firm, and Julie is about to make it big on the art scene as a curator and planner of shows. Or something like that. At any rate, they’re a sweet couple with everything going for them. But to impress his boss, Tim must find an idiot to bring to the boss’s monthly dinner party as entertainment for the rich folks. Everyone brings an idiot, and the biggest idiot wins.

Enter Steve Carrell as Barry, an IRS analyst who, in Carrell’s words wants to make people happy but inevitably makes them miserable instead. He’s a sweet idiot whose good intentions and idiotic actions start to unravel Tim’s life. Is it funny to watch people making fun of other people? Not really, but I don’t think that’s the problem with this movie, most of which takes place prior to the titular dinner. And in principle, it should be funny to see Tim try to deal with the walking path of good-natured idiotic destruction that is Barry. I’m not sure why it wasn’t very funny. The leads and supporting performances are all very good. Maybe it is the realization that Barry and the other idiots are not really inhabiting the same universe as Tim and Julie and the rest of us. So their struggles and triumphs feel disconnected from our own.

Jeff Daniels plays Richard Dunn, a frustrated writer who, despite have a truckload of unsold copies of his first novel apparently has a contract and deadline with his publisher for a second. He and his wife Claire (Lisa Kudrow) rent a house in a small New England town for Richard to have the peace and quiet to write his book while Claire spends the weeks in Manhattan as a prominent surgeon. But Richard is a writer who seems to loathe writing, or at least loathe himself. He feels useless and unimportant and incompetent. Enter his imaginary friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds). The Captain gives voice to Richard’s inner dialogue, but also gives him the occasional pep speech. “I am bolstered”, Richard says after one such speech.

Although shy (as one might expect of a middle-aged writer who can’t write and has an imaginary superhero friend) Richard strikes up a friendship with a disaffected high school student under the guise of hiring her to babysit his non-existent baby. Abby (Emma Stone) is able to share some of her problems with the less-mature-than-his-years Richard, and Richard finds in her someone he can talk to without pretense. He is painfully inept and uncomfortable in the world of successful professionals inhabited by his wife.

Paper Man is funny and affecting, though not terribly so in either sense. At times it seems to be trying too hard to be about quirky characters, such as when it forces Richard to ride a small girl’s bicycle into town. He doesn’t bother to raise the seat to more closely match his frame, or to borrow a bike from Abby, for that matter. And Claire’s character is short-changed a bit. She is a loving wife whose crime is to be be successful and uncomprehending of her husband’s incomprehensible behavior. Or at least incomprehensible to her. Unlike us, she does not get to see his dialog with Captain Excellent (nor does Richard share with Claire the doubts and feelings he shares with Abby). But both Richard and Abby are fully developed and interesting characters, and it is a pleasure to watch their relationship unfold.

Michael Douglas’s Ben Kalmen seems to have it all until, in Solitary Man’s opening scene, he learns that his doctor is not happy with his EKG. Fast forward 6 and a half years (a peculiarly non-round number) and he seems happier than ever. Kalmen, a big time BMW dealership owner in the New York area, has a pretty younger girlfriend (Jordan, played by Mary-Louise Parker), a swank Manhattan apartment, an endless supply of black button-down shirts, and a knack for picking up yet more younger women behind Jordan’s back. But we soon learn that those 6 (and a half) years were not so kind to Ben. Ignoring his doctor’s advice for tests on his heart, he instead decided to pursue his idea of living life to the fullest. Seizing the day for Ben meant seizing whatever young woman he could lure to his bed and seizing a lot of money through shady and illegal deals. Having paid his debt to society in the form of huge fines and his debt to his ex-wife (Susan Sarandon), it turns out that Ben is struggling to re-establish himself with his well-connected (and very wealthy) girlfriend, Jordan.

His daughter Susan (Jenna Fischer) and her husband and son provide the counterexample to Ben’s devil-may-care approach to life. Her family is safe, secure, and happy. Ben criticizes it for being too safe, even while trying to mooch some cash from them to stay afloat. His decisions inevitably isolate him, but of all the careless choices he makes, there is only one that really screws him. And it his not so much his womanizing behavior that costs him his family and friends, as it is his financial failings. Ironically, had one particular line not been spoken, his selfish approach to life would have been vindicated, at least in his own eyes. And even as it stands, it is not clear how he feels about his choices those past 6 (and a half) years. Ben seems to recognize that his behavior is inexcusable, and he neither makes excuses nor asks for forgiveness. This allows him to be a likable character even while he is a complete cad. One gets the feeling that Douglas likes him too.

Knight and Day is a surprisingly fun romp. Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz make for a surprisingly good comic-action pairing on screen. The surprising aspect is based, unfairly, on the reputation Cruise has earned as someone slightly outside the bounds of mainstream. Regardless of his well-publicized television antics, he remains quite good at what he does on the big screen. In Knight and Day, Cruise plays an American spy cut from the same cloth as James Bond (he’s too funny to be Jason Bourne), but whose loyalties (and equilibrium) are not entirely clear. Chance throws Cameron Diaz at him who becomes unwittingly embroiled in Cruise’s spy caper. The plot centers around a preposterous (to the extent that it violates the fundamental laws of physics) Macguffin that Cruise is trying to save from the bad guys (unless he is a bad guy), but the movie earns its points primarily on Cruise’s charm and a script that has more witty lines than groaners.

Russell Crowe is not the first actor to spring to mind when one thinks of Robin Hood. The new movie, directed by Ridley Scott, is an origin story of Robin Hood, but I wonder if we’re likely to see a sequel with this crew of merry men. While it’s a bit long, I enjoyed the epic battle scenes, it was interesting to see what is likely the most historically accurate depiction of this era and its politics in a Robin Hood movie.

Babies is a documentary with no narration and no dialogue. The only language that is heard, aside from the gurgling noises of infants, is the occasional background discussion of the parents of the four babies whose first year on Earth is chronicled in the movie. Frequently that discussion is cut off mid-sentence, and only in the case o of the San Francisco family is it in English. The other babies live in Tokyo, the plains of Mongolia, and the dirt of Namibia. The camera is concerned with the world as the babies see it. Frequently we see them left to their own devices, exploring the tiny space around them without adult interference.

To use the word “poor” to describe the Namibian family is to use the wrong vocabulary. They are so far beyond poor that money seems like it would be irrelevant. That little girl and a slightly older baby, perhaps her brother, spend their lives virtually naked and, like the women who care for them, on the bare red-sand ground. They have a small hut for shelter. The baby’s father, and for that matter any man, is never seen. Goats and dogs wander by, and the women frequently proffer their breasts to the babies. The little girl is adorable.

The American and Japanese babies, also girls, have fairly similar and familiar environs. The one bit of dialog that is deliberately left in the movie for comic relief shows the American girl and her parents in a group singing “The Earth is our mother”. The contrast, of course, between her life and the lives of the Namibian and Mangolian babies, who literally live off the land, makes it seem like they are actually on different planets. Their perceptions of the world start on very different tracks from day one. It’s a fun and fascinating look at the first year of life.

Iron Man 2 could be used in future screenwriting courses as an archetypal example of sequel syndrome. Now, I’m not at all familiar with the comic books that Iron Man is based on, so Iron Man 2 may be true and faithful to some original source material. But that does not excuse its underwhelming story and the loud and tiring sequel gimmick of simply taking everything in the first movie and multiplying by 10 or a thousand. Have a scary agent in The Matrix that can do superhuman things? Have 1000 copies of that scary agent in the sequel! See Iron Man defeat oversized evil Iron Jeff Bridges in the original, then see him go up against dozens of evil Iron Man robots in the sequel! How does he beat them? By doing the same things he did in the first movie, only more! And louder! And longer!

The first hour and a quarter of Iron Man 2 is a meandering series of scenes showing us that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is (a) dying and (b) a jerk, while Mickey Rourke (Mickey Rourke) is (a) a psychopath and (b) in need of major dental work. Stark’s friends Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Colonel Rhodes (who used to look like Terrence Howard but now looks like Don Cheadle) do their best to protect Tony from his self-destructive instincts, but this merely gives time for Rourke to join forces with a smarmy defense contractor played by Sam Rockwell to develop an army of Iron Men to defeat Iron Man in the movie’s climactic battle scene.

The first Iron Man was fun in part because Stark was clever and inventive. While the cast in Iron Man 2 is still outstanding, they are not given much of a story to work with. The only one being clever and inventive is Rourke as the big bad guy, and Stark and company win apparently just because they are the good guys.

Keeping up with the Joneses can be bad for your health, especially if The Joneses are a picture-perfect family with very expensive tastes and the financial resources of a large corporation. Spoiler Alert: the gimmick, revealed in the first act of the movie, is that the titular family is in fact a collection of unrelated individuals employed by an anonymous conglomerate to increase sales of various high-end products (think sports cars, diamond rings, and expensive golf clubs). Their sales technique consists of being beautiful while wielding whatever item they are selling. Their friends and neighbors feel compelled to keep up with the Joneses and go buy that item.

The wisdom and efficiency of this sales tactic is beside the point; instead it is a vehicle to carry a vague message about the dangers of rampant consumerism. It is also a commentary on the American family unit. David Duchovny plays Steve Jones, the most recent hire by Jones matriarch Kate (Demi Moore). A former car salesman, Steve takes the Jones job as a trial run at having a real family. It’s his test drive of family life, and he discovers that he likes it. Kate could not care less, however: she is all about the bottom line. Their two (nominally) teenage children, meanwhile, have their own problems that are papered over for the sake of moving product.

Steve’s attraction to family life is understandable enough, especially given the limitless bank account that supplies them with top-of-the-line everything, a beautiful house, and generally not a care in the world. And Demi Moore is naturally attractive and masquerading as Steve’s wife, so a certain attraction there is also understandable. But her relentless pursuit of the next sales target is wearying. Or at least it should be to Steve. He is smitten, but the script by writer-director Derrick Borte never gives us a peek beneath her professional armor to glimpse just what it is he sees in her.