REVIEW: The Fighter

The Fighter (2010): Dir. David O. Russell. Written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson. Story by Keith Dorrington, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson. Starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo. Rated R (language throughout, drug content, some violence and sexuality). Running time: 115 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

Boxing dramas often tell the story of one man’s path to redemption. In The Fighter, we get two. The film is based on the life story of half-brothers Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund, and follows Micky’s struggle earn a name for himself in the shadow of his older brother and trainer.

Thirteen years earlier, Dicky (played by Christian Bale) beat Sugar Ray Leonard and he hasn’t stopped talking about it since. He’s known as “The Pride of Lowell” (his hometown in Massachusetts) and watching him mingle and greet local faces on the street, it’s easy see how he became a town hero. Following him around is an HBO film crew that Dicky explains to his family is shooting a documentary about his comeback. That comeback seems unlikely, though. Whatever talent he had years earlier looks to have left him. His current life is in shambles and his frequent visits to a local crack house make him absent for much of Micky’s training.

Micky (Mark Wahlberg), meanwhile, shows great promise in the here and now but can’t seem to get the fights he needs. His mother and manager (Melissa Leo) is too hung up on Dicky’s former glory to recognize this, and so Micky gets pulverized by guys outside his weight class just so his family can get paid for the match. He’s ready to quit the sport entirely when he meets Charlene (Amy Adams), a bartender who encourages Micky keep fighting, but without his family bringing him down.

The movie has an odd structure that shifts focus back and forth between its two main characters, leaving the viewer a little unsure of who the protagonist is meant to be. Dicky’s exuberant personality dominates the early scenes and draws attention away from the more stoic Micky, a dynamic that no doubt mimics their real-life relationship. Once Dicky hits rock bottom though, the middle third of the film consists of Micky’s training and rise to success.

This being a boxing movie, the story is a fairly familiar one. The Fighter’s surprises, however, do not necessarily come from the outcomes of the fights but from the source of the film’s emotional payoff. In the final leg of the film, the brothers’ relationship comes front and center. Dicky’s search for redemption is inextricably tied to his brother’s efforts to succeed in the game, and this balance of storylines ends the film on a very strong note.

This is also a movie filled with strong performances. Christian Bale leads the pack with a career best as Dicky, whose charismatic energy is a far cry from the stone-faced heroes the actor is asked to play in action movies. Once again, Bale has lost weight to play the role but his performance goes beyond a physical transformation or imitation (a clip of the real-life Dicky in the closing credits though shows that Bale’s acting is spot on). Dicky is a tragic figure who doesn’t have much to hold onto. Even his one proud accomplishment is believed by some to have been a fluke (“Sugar Ray tripped,” says a few of the locals). He projects a charming persona but is consumed by inner shame and Bale is thrilling to watch as a man careening through this complex set of emotions.

Mark Wahlberg gives a effective and restrained performance, though next to Bale he might be mistaken for underacting. The long-suffering Micky isn’t as dynamic to watch as his brother, but Wahlberg is a strong leading actor and can more than carry his scenes without Bale. Melissa Leo shines in a supporting role as their mother, a manipulative woman whose love for her eldest son comes through even during her fervent denial of his drug addiction. Amy Adams gets the opportunity to play against type as the feisty and sexy love interest and she’s a joy to watch in the role. Also noteworthy is Mickey O’Keefe playing himself, the upstanding cop who trains Micky in Dicky’s absence. Despite having no prior acting experience, O’Keefe holds his own amongst A-listers and gives a memorable performance.

Mark Wahlberg worked very hard to get The Fighter made and though the project shifted hands numerous times between different writers and directors, the final product shows no mark of its long road to theaters. Director David O. Russell’s past features have included stylized fare such as Three Kings and I ♥ Huckabees, but his work here bears the restraint of one who treads more carefully when handling another’s story. His presence is still felt though and the movie is wonderfully shot, particularly in the ring. The matches are faithfully recreated and easy to follow (even to a boxing novice such as myself).

The Fighter at first seems more like a pair of character studies than a plot-centric story, but builds over the course of its two-hour running time, slowly drawing you in. By the end, one can’t help but get swept up in the stakes of these two brothers. The final match is a requisite scene in any boxing drama, but it works so well here because the characters and story have earned our emotional investment.

- Steve Avigliano, 1/15/11

REVIEW: True Grit

True Grit (2010): Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Charles Portis. Starring: Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Barry Pepper. Rated PG-13 (some intense scenes of western violence including disturbing images). Running time: 110 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

For the Coen brothers’ version of True Grit, who better to fill the shoes of John Wayne than Jeff Bridges? Though this neo-western isn’t as much a remake of its 1969 predecessor as it is a second adaptation of the original novel, a comparison to the film that won John Wayne his only Oscar is certainly warranted. Fresh off his own Best Actor award for last year’s Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges reunites with the Coens for the first (and only) time since The Big Lebowski. Bridges proves to be just as triumphant as Wayne playing the one-eyed, whiskey drinking U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, and his performance is arguably even better because of its placement in a more confident and focused film.

Though Bridges receives top billing, the story belongs to Mattie Ross, played with restraint and poise by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. While the original film was more of a John Wayne vehicle than anything else, the Coens stay closer to the source material by centering their film on Mattie, the 14-year-old girl who seeks vengeance on a drunken criminal named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) who has murdered her father. The determined young girl takes a train into town to see that her father’s body is returned her family’s home in the countryside. While in town, she has “some business” to take care of. That business includes hiring Rooster Cogburn to help her track down Tom Chaney and bring him back to town to be hanged for the murder of her father.

Though the sheriff recommends other men for the job, Mattie Ross is drawn to Cogburn. We first see him in a courtroom, fending off questions for a questionable shooting. The prosecutor tries to get him to admit that he shot an unarmed man, but Cogburn has no patience for such legal technicalities. He shot a man because the man was an outlaw, simple as that. Any discussion that belabors the point is time that could be better spent drinking. When Mattie approaches him after the hearing and offers him fifty dollars to catch Chaney, he dismisses her. He’ll believe her tall tales when he sees the money in front of him. And so she promptly wakes him up the following morning, cash in hand.

Throughout the film, Mattie Ross says that if no one will help her, she’ll shoot and kill Chaney herself. We believe she means it not because she’s a cold-blooded killer but because she speaks with unflinching sincerity. Her vocabulary exceeds that of everyone she comes across and she threatens to make use of her lawyer more often than Cogburn brandishes his pistol. The Coens place a lot of a trust in Steinfeld – who was only thirteen when the movie was filmed – and their faith in the young actress is rewarded. She gets a number of extended close-ups, a choice that might have betrayed a lack of experience in a lesser actress, but Steinfeld rises to the challenge. Her performance is every bit as resolute as her character.

In addition to Bridges, Steinfeld shares screen time with several seasoned veterans. Matt Damon is good as LaBeouf, a Texas Ranger who’s after Chaney for the murder of a Senator. He’s awfully proud of his badge and the film plays for laughs LaBeouf’s failed attempts to act slick. Josh Brolin gets a few scenes’ worth of snarling and looking mean, and the indispensable Barry Pepper appears as the gaunt, almost skeletal outlaw leader “Lucky” Ned Pepper (a role played in the original by Robert Duvall). As is the case in all Coen Bros. films, not a single actor is wasted. Even the briefest of roles deserves some attention, and the film is filled with colorful supporting performances.

When compared to the original, the Coens’ True Grit is paradoxically darker and also funnier than its predecessor. The original has its moments, but mostly suffers from tonal issues. The original True Grit was released in 1969, well after the Golden Age of westerns and despite telling a rather gritty (pardon the pun) story of revenge, the film’s Technicolor landscapes and jubilant score from Elmer Bernstein hark back to that earlier era. Visually, the Coen brothers' take on the story is considerably darker, and they also allow for a little more violence, some of which is even played for darkly humorous effects.

This is also an exceptionally talky western. Bridges garners laughs in some of Cogburn’s more bumbling, drunken moments, but the film’s humor is mostly rooted in its snappy dialogue. The Coen brothers are a remarkably assured team of writer/directors. They’ve carved out their own stylistic niche (Barton Fink, Fargo, and A Serious Man are a few that come to mind as more traditional Coen fare), but they are more than capable of handling a genre flick like this one without losing their distinctive voice.

True Grit is an enthralling execution in an age-old cinematic genre. The western has changed a bit since John Wayne’s days but the genre has proved itself to be an enduring one. In recent years, we’ve seen a handful of westerns make their way to the big screen and while I can’t see a flood of them arriving anytime soon, accomplished features like True Grit show that a one-eyed cowboy and a six-shooter still make for some fine entertainment.

Note: I found it interesting that this violent revenge story, which at one point shows a pair of fingers get chopped off a hand, received a PG-13 rating while The King’s Speech (also in theaters now) got an R rating for an innocent scene that features a brief string of f-bombs. There is nothing particularly offensive in either film, but the disparity reveals just how morally backward those supposed protectors of decency, the MPAA, are.

- Steve Avigliano, 1/07/11

REVIEW: The King's Speech

The King's Speech (2010): Dir. Tom Hooper. Written by: David Seidler. Starring: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon and Guy Pearce. Rated R (some language). Running time: 111 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

Prince Albert of York (played by Colin Firth) has a problem. As the second son to King George V, he is called upon to make the occasional public speech, but a crippling stammer leaves him silent behind the microphone, struggling to get his words out. The recent invention of radio allows his public speaking failures to be broadcast to an entire nation. At one point in The King’s Speech, George V remarks how earlier kings had it easy. All they had to do was stand still and look good for their portrait. In 1925 (when the film begins), however, radio was a revolutionary modern invention that forced politicians and royalty alike into a new realm of public attention.

The King’s Speech captures a society that is still adjusting to its newfound modernity. Coming into the 20^th Century, the British monarchy had more symbolic power than it did political. Britain’s kings were expected to simply give voice to the nation’s people, leaving the actual politicking to the Prime Minister. Such expectations are understandably daunting for Prince Albert considering his speech impediment. The film dramatizes Albert’s ascension to King (when he becomes known as George VI) and focuses on his struggle to overcome his stammer.

King George V (Michael Gambon) has no patience for his son’s disability and though he knows Albert is the more capable of his two sons, he fails to understand what holds him back. The rightful heir is David (Guy Pearce), but the firstborn’s cavalier attitude and infamous womanizing make him a less than ideal candidate for the throne. This puts pressure on Albert to be ready should his brother step down from the responsibility.

A king with a stammer, however, is no king at all and so Albert’s wife (Helena Bonham Carter) takes him to a number of correctional doctors, all of who are unable to help. Then she discovers the Australian speech specialist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who takes a more Freudian approach to Albert’s condition by treating it as a mental impediment. Logue’s unconventional treatment is met at first with resistance, but a friendship and an understanding soon forms between the two men.
In some ways, the film is reminiscent of the excellent 2006 film The Queen, which also examined a brief period in the life of a British monarch. Both films touch on larger themes of leadership and British nationalism by focusing on a ruler’s struggle with their public persona.

As in The Queen (whose star Helen Mirren won a deserved Oscar), at the center of The King’s Speech is an excellent peformance. Two, actually. Colin Firth gives a superb performance as the soon-to-be King by humanizing him. His recreation of the stammer is entirely convincing, but his performance goes deeper than this. The stammer is a key to the character’s emotional life. Watch how he not only shuts down in public speeches, but in private conversations with his father and older brother too. We see how he is a good man at heart capable of great leadership if only he can overcome his anxieties.

Geoffrey Rush is wonderful as well and his playful take on Lionel gives the film much of its lighthearted tone. The scenes between Albert and Lionel are a joy to watch and director Tom Hooper wisely gives the two actors the time and space to stretch out and develop their characters’ relationship. In one scene, Lionel pushes Albert and asks him to vent his anger. The slew of profanities that fly out of Albert's mouth make for one of the film’s funniest and surprisingly touching moments.

Also good is Helena Bonham Carter, whose performance may get overshadowed by those of her co-stars. In the role of Albert’s supportive wife, she lends a tender, warm-hearted performance to the film and while her scenes with Firth are not as noteworthy as those between him and Rush, they give the film an emotional core.

Shot largely on location, The King’s Speech is also beautiful to look at. The spacious, luxurious halls of castles and cathedrals fill the screen and cinematographer Danny Cohen shoots the film’s regal locales with their awe-inspiring size and grandeur in mind. Hooper uses these settings to heighten the pressures put on Albert, who is more at home in smaller, cozier rooms. We can understand how the pressure put on him must feel when he’s positioned at the bottom of a frame that captures a vast and expansive ballroom.

The King’s Speech questions what it means to be a leader and brings up historical themes of British nationalism but never pushes these larger ideas too hard. This is an enjoyable, often humorous character-driven film that, like all good biographical films, transcends the facts and tells a human story, an exceedingly charming one at that.

- Steve Avigliano, 1/02/11

REVIEW: Black Swan

Black Swan (2010): Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Written by: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlin. Story by: Andres Heinz. Starring: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Rated R (strong sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use). Running time: 108 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is being billed as a “psychological thriller.” The term certainly fits the film though it might mislead some to believe that Aronofsky has crafted a genre film. Black Swan is a haunting and often disturbing film, but its thrills come from within the mind. This is a horror film founded on ideas and atmosphere. Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a ballet dancer who might be losing her mind. Strange marks are appearing on her body only to disappear a moment later. She’s having hallucinations. Or are they really there? Once reality is questioned, the floor drops out from underneath her and the audience follows her on a quest to understand the unknowable and invisible forces affecting her.

Nina dances for a company in New York. Thomas, the company’s director (Vincent Cassel) has promised to feature her more this season and she has an outside chance of being cast in the starring role of Swan Lake after the company's previous star (Winona Ryder) announces her retirement. The part is a double role – the White Swan and the Black Swan. Thomas explains to her that while she’s the best dancer in the company and an easy choice to play the graceful and fragile White Swan, she lacks the Black Swan’s passion and sexuality. He has a reputation, however, for being romantically involved with his dancers and Nina knows how to play her cards. After some ethically questionable casting practices, she lands the part.

Nina’s mother (Barbara Hershey) is delighted by the news. She gave up dancing when she had Nina and has been living vicariously through her daughter’s career. She pampers Nina and we see why Nina finds the Black Swan such a challenge. Her bedroom is filled with her childhood stuffed animals and her mother still tucks her in at night. Between Thomas’s sexual advances and the stress of the role, her sheltered life is slowly crumbling.

Expediting that process is Lily (Mila Kunis), a dancer who has just flown in from California. She embodies everything about the Black Swan that Nina doesn’t – she’s flirtatious, passionate, relaxed – and soon has a strange hold over Nina. Why did she suddenly appear now, on the verge of Nina’s newfound success? Whether her arrival is a coincidence or a conspiracy, she becomes to Nina a professional and sexual competitor.

In a way, Black Swan has much in common with Aronofsky’s previous effort, The Wrestler. Both films follow a performer’s struggle to live up to expectations they’ve set for themselves and in both cases their performances are destroying them. Where The Wrestler was marked by a gritty realism, however, Black Swan indulges in surreal fantasy, a testament to Aronofsky’s versatility as a director. He casts a hypnotic atmosphere over the film, drawing the viewer in and maintaining its trance over the audience through the film’s final moments.

In Aronofsky’s hands, a small New York apartment becomes a claustrophobic cell for Nina. Lily briefly draws her out of her shell and takes her to a dance club that, after a few drinks and a pill, becomes a hallucinatory nightmare. This scene, one of the film’s best, is one of several mesmerizing sequences that draw the viewer into Nina’s perspective. We see and experience her distorted reality, unable to distinguish the real from the imagined. How much of what we see is a fantasy? A dream? Delusions? Real life? Would making such distinctions really matter anyways?

With this film and his earlier work, Aronofsky has proved himself to be a skilled stylist, making it easy to forget how much of an actor’s director he is. His past films have featured performances of the highest caliber (Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler) and Black Swan is no exception. Natalie Portman carries the film as Nina, balancing the character’s fearful anxieties with sudden dark turns. She also succeeds in the difficult task of acting while dancing. When Thomas criticizes Nina for being too tense and controlled as the Black Swan, we can see in Portman's face what he is talking about.

Also excellent is Kunis, who has found her breakout role here. She brings to the film much of the charm that marked her performances in lighter fare such as “That 70’s Show” and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and finds use for it in considerably darker material. Her Lily is seductive and cavalier, and makes for a compelling foil to Portman’s Nina. Barbara Hershey is chilling as the controlling mother, and Vincent Cassel brings the right amount of sleaze and menace to his character.

Nina’s surreal experience could be taken as a metaphor for the craft of acting. As her unusual transformation takes hold of her, parallels begin to develop between the play and her life. Aronofsky does not limit the film to this one interpretation, however. He deftly moves back and forth between fantasy and reality so that the viewer is not trapped into a guessing game of what is real and what is not. The only reality is that onscreen and we accept the disturbing power of the film’s imagery.

Black Swan is a relentless film and is so absorbing that one needs a few minutes to readjust after the closing credits roll. Each scene flows into the next to make for a nightmarish whole. There are brief moments of reprieve (the film occasionally has a bizarre sense of humor), but even these maintain the film's grasp on the viewer. Black Swan is indeed a thriller, one that explores the tenuous nature of identity and reveals how fragile the mind’s hold on that identity can be.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/26/10

REVIEW: The Tourist

The Tourist (2010): Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Written by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Christopher McQuarrie, Julian Fellowes, based on a French film Anthony Zimmer (written by Jérôme Salle). Starring: Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany, Timothy Dalton, Steven Berkoff. Rated PG-13 (violence and brief strong language). Running time: 103 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

Frank Tupelo (played by Johnny Depp) is an American tourist who reads spy novels. A good adventure story excites him and, like any of us, he is eager to believe an unbelievable story if it means getting caught up in some excitement for at least a little while. So when the beautiful Elise (Angelina Jolie) sits across from him on a train ride through the France, it doesn’t take long for him to get caught up in some international intrigue. By the end of the film, he becomes absorbed in the action but forgets to bring his like-minded adventure-seekers – us, the audience – with him. We sit there, willing to believe the preposterous story unfolding onscreen but the film takes advantage of our tolerance and goes from being merely unbelievable to nearly unbearable.

The film begins with Elise, a beautiful woman with a high-profile boyfriend, Alexander Pearce, who is being hunted on two fronts. The British government wants him for stealing millions and a mobster (Steven Berkoff) wants him for stealing billions. A letter from Pearce instructs Elise to find a man on a train with a similar body type to his. The Brits, led by a determined agent (Paul Bettany), know that Pearce has undergone constructive surgery and can be easily thrown off the trail with a decoy.

The decoy is Frank and from here the film becomes a Hitchcockian story of mistaken identity. The problem, however, is that the entry point into that story is all wrong. Hitchcock understood that a mysterious story on its own isn’t enough to hook the audience. We have to be lured into it. By introducing us first to Elise rather than Frank, the film takes the wind out of a good premise by letting the audience in on too much too quickly.

Awful writing doesn’t help the film either. The screenplay is rushed, banking on the film’s star power to generate interest in its thinly sketched characters. For what it’s worth though, Johnny Depp works hard to make Frank’s naïve, wet behind the ears tourist a likable character. Even when Depp is delivering the clumsiest of lines, we believe his face while we cringe at the words he’s been asked to say. Depp’s performance is an honest one that reminds us why he’s a movie star. Angelina Jolie’s lips, on the other hand, remind us why she is. Her character is a stiff, uninteresting spy film stock character, the kind of bland femme fatale that the hero usually passes over for the more homely but charming heroine. No such character exists in The Tourist.

The rest of the cast fills out their roles well enough. Bettany is good as an agent desperate to crack the case and look good to his boss (played by former Bond, Timothy Dalton) and Berkoff makes a fine villain. Were the rest of the film better, their performances might have been colorful exercises in spy movie side characters. As the film is though, they only serve to take screen time away from our protagonists, who we don’t very much care about anyway.

Strange that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck helms this film, a German director whose native-language debut The Lives of Others won him a deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Film. That film, a thoughtful meditation on the nature voyeurism and surveillance, presented Donnersmarck as an exciting new voice. Why he chose such a lackluster spy flick as its follow-up is beyond me, though maybe this will take some of the pressures and expectations off him when crafting his next feature.

One can’t help though but put much of the blame here on Donnersmarck. He seems uncomfortable directing the material and he either wasn’t allowed to make many of the creative decisions or simply deferred the responsibility to studio heads. The oddly trite musical score by James Newton Howard, for example, is a disaster. It alternates between thumping techno in the action scenes and sappy strings in the would-be romantic ones, successfully undermining every scene in the film.

The pacing is off too. The film takes a long time to get started and doesn’t do much once it does. When we finally reach the absurd ending, we barely care that it makes no logical sense. Fortunately for Donnersmarck, the rest of the film is bad enough that no one would want to go back for a second viewing to find all the plot holes.

A good spy film needn’t be realistic, but there is a difference between the unbelievable and the unbelievably contrived. The Tourist straddles that line and jumps head first onto the wrong side.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/17/10

REVIEW: 127 Hours

127 Hours (2010): Dir. Danny Boyle. Written by Simon Beaufoy and Danny Boyle, based on the memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston. Starring James Franco. Rated R (language and some disturbing violent content/bloody images). Running time: 95 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

In reviewing Conviction a few weeks ago, I wrote that “some great stories just aren’t cinematic stories.” 127 Hours argues quite convincingly, however, that in the hands of a skilled enough director, any story can become cinematic. At first, the story of Aron Ralston (played in the film by James Franco) would seem to be as inherently un-cinematic as they come. Trapped for 127 hours in the crevice of a Utah canyon with a rock crushing his arm, Ralston fought the elements to survive and wrestled with his personal demons during his isolation. Director Danny Boyle, fresh off an Oscar win for Slumdog Millionaire, takes up the difficult task of transforming this material into something visually interesting and the result is exhilarating.

Following Slumdog, audiences should be familiar with the director’s kinetic style. His films are fueled by an inexhaustible energy, incorporating handheld camerawork, split screens and any other device at Boyle’s disposal. One would think that being confined to such a physically small space as he is here would limit his style, but Boyle makes the most of the canyon crevice’s spatial limitations. His camera takes the viewer to the bottom of Ralston’s water bottle, miles up into the sky to provide a literal bird’s-eye view, and even inside the very muscles of Ralston’s injured arm.

Boyle’s stylistic flourishes are not self-indulgent though, but essential to bringing out the humanity of the story. The film visualizes the internal struggle of an isolated man with nothing to listen to but his own thoughts. As Ralston’s mind races, the viewer dives in and out of memories and fantasies. Here we get snippets of backstory. Ralston is confident to the point of arrogant and has pushed away the most important people in his life – his girlfriend, his parents. He’s so cocky that he doesn’t even need to tell anyone where he’s going or what he’s doing the day of the accident. From the bottom of a crevice in the middle of nowhere he replays the accident in his mind and cannot help but see his current situation as the inevitable result of his egotism.

Much credit must also be given here to James Franco, whose performance is a career-best. When presented with a story such as Ralston’s, we often wonder: What would we do if faced with the same situation? Franco understands this and brings us even deeper into the film by making his performance relatable. We see his initial bewilderment and feel his frustration and eventual despair. By the end of the film, Franco has taken us through every step of an emotional catharsis and the experience is a draining one.

Fortunately, that experience is brief and editor Jon Harris keeps the film at a manageable 95 minutes. As editor, Harris maintains complete control over the film’s chaotic style. The combination of handheld cameras and fast-paced editing can often have nauseating results, but Harris knows how to use these techniques to elicit a response from the audience. We only feel claustrophobic or dizzy when he wants us to. And despite the quick cuts in cramped quarters, the audience is always fully aware of what is happening.

Perhaps this is the film’s greatest strength. Danny Boyle has not only succeeded in making a seemingly unfilmable movie, but he somehow made it accessible too. There are a few scenes in 127 Hours not for the feint of heart (Boyle doesn’t shy away from some of the more gruesome moments in Ralston’s story), but the film does a wonderful job of taking an extraordinary experience and putting it into terms we can all understand. More so than Slumdog, 127 Hours puts Danny Boyle on the map of today’s best directors and shows that films can tell any story as long as the filmmakers are up to the challenge.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/07/10

REVIEW: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010): Dir. David Yates and Ben Hibon (animated sequence). Written by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling. Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman. Rated PG-13 (some sequences of intense action violence, frightening images and brief sensuality). Running time: 146 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

The Harry Potter franchise has always faced a catch-22. The first film was released while J.K. Rowling was only halfway through writing the series, so for many fans, the books and movies are intertwined in a way unlike any other book-to-movie adaptation. During a summer when we were bombarded with simultaneous ads for the final novel and the fifth movie, how could one read The Deathly Hallows without picturing Daniel Radcliffe as Harry or imagining how certain scenes would eventually play out onscreen? The movies changed the way we pictured the world and characters of the novels. Similarly, it is difficult watch the films without making constant mental comparisons to the books still fresh in our minds.

This presents a problem for the filmmakers. Ideally, a film adaptation should be free to make whatever adjustments are necessary make the story work in movie form. For the Harry Potter films, however, the filmmakers feel extra pressure to remain faithful to the books. Change or condense too much and you upset the fans. Each installment in the series has handled this issue to varying degrees of success. The third, Prisoner of Azkaban took the greatest liberties with its source material but in some ways stayed most true to the tone of the novel. On the other hand, the fifth film, Order of the Phoenix, excised so many subplots that the pacing was thrown off. The movie moved too fast to tell such a complex story. Then again, maybe that was just the Potter fan in me disappointed to see my favorite book (a whopping 800+ pages long) condensed to a lean two hours.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a different sort of beast for a few reasons. The filmmakers elected to divide the book into two movies and release them eight months apart, a decision that has its benefits and its drawbacks. By splitting the story down the middle, the viewer is left with the anticlimactic feeling of having only seen half a movie. Part 1 also ends on a pretty limp cliffhanger that fails to excite because we don’t yet understand how it fits into the larger picture.

Yet in spite of this unnatural division, the additional running time afforded by the two-part release plan gives the film a chance to breathe, something the last three films rarely got a chance to do.

The film opens with Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) hissing his plan to his Death Eater disciples (as if they didn’t already know): to kill Harry Potter. Here, Fiennes finally gets the opportunity to delve into the nastiness of Voldemort and his performance reminds us why the character is such a great villain.

Meanwhile, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) are on the search to find Voldemort’s missing horcruxes – objects that contain fragments of the Dark Lord’s soul. In order to kill You Know Who, they must first destroy the hidden horcruxes. This quest leads our young heroes away from Hogwarts, which means considerably less screen time for most of the supporting characters. Series favorites such as Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) and Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) only get a handful of scenes, but will no doubt return for Part 2.

The relaxed pacing of TDH Part 1 also allows for some wonderful scenes that might not have made it into a more condensed script. The best of these is an animated sequence that tells the mythical fable of “The Three Brothers,” which plays an important role in the story. The scene, directed by animator Ben Hibon, is one of the film’s most visually inventive moments and its inclusion enriches the mythology of Rowling’s universe.

The film also strikes a balance between the bleak tone of the later films and the ever-present whimsy of Rowling’s world. There’s even room for a few laughs when the gang infiltrates the Ministry of Magic disguised as wizarding adults.

The Deathly Hallows Part 1 is one of the strongest installments of the series and will hopefully become even better when taken into consideration with Part 2. Could the two films have been condensed into one longer film? Perhaps, but at the cost of which scenes? There may be no perfect way to adapt the books, but this may be as close as the films come to delivering a satisfying and faithful Harry Potter film.

- Steve Avigliano, 12/02/10

REVIEW: Conviction

Conviction (2010): Dir. Tony Goldwyn. Written by Pamela Gray, based on real events. Starring Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver and Peter Gallagher. Rated R (language and some violent images). Running time: 107 minutes.

2 ½ stars (out of four)

** Note: This review freely discusses elements of the plot, which is based on a widely publicized true story. There’s little in my review that the trailer doesn’t also reveal.

The real-life achievement of Betty Anne Waters (played here by Hilary Swank) is without a doubt impressive. After her brother (played by Sam Rockwell) was wrongly convicted of murder, Waters got her GED, went to college and eventually passed the bar to become his lawyer. She did all this while supporting her two sons and working part-time at a local bar, knowing there was only a slim chance of reopening the case and exonerating her brother. Waters’s story is motivational to be sure, but the awe it inspires comes from her patience and dedication over an 18-year period, and to condense her accomplishment into a film less than two hours long is to reduce that power. There may not be a way to reasonably recreate what was no doubt a long, laborious process, but this limitation keeps the film from achieving anything more than Lifetime movie-quality drama.

The film is structured with these limitations in mind, spending minimal time on the early years of her story (in other words, the dull years that involved a lot of reading and studying for exams). We are introduced to Waters already in law school amongst students half her age. Her only friend there is fellow middle-aged law student Abra (Minnie Driver). Abra sympathizes with Waters’s cause and lends her help and good humor to the case whenever possible.

We learn from flashbacks that Waters’s brother Kenny is a reckless man prone to bar fights. The police in town all know him by name and he’s a natural first suspect for the murder having broken into the victim’s home as a child. This incident led to a troubled childhood and separation from his sister. Sam Rockwell does a wonderful job of making a believable character out of Kenny. Rockwell brings his usual humor and charisma to the role but adds emotional depth in the later scenes. Kenny is grateful for everything his sister does for him, but it pains him to see her wasting her life on what may end up a futile cause.

Hilary Swank lends a great deal of credibility to her role, making Waters a woman of faith and, yes, conviction. Her performance, along with Rockwell’s, elevates the film above made-for-TV-movie quality. Swank has played roles like this before, but she’s very good at them. Just reading Waters’s story in a newspaper, one might ask, “How could someone remain so dedicated for so long?” Swank, however, makes this dedication real, never overacting. We believe Waters’s love for her brother and so we believe her unflagging hope in his eventual release.

Despite the effective human story, the film has the inevitable structural problems that come from making a movie out of a real-life case. The legal system is inherently un-dramatic and the film loses steam near the end when Waters is a given a few extra legal hoops to jump through. The founder of the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher), joins the cause late in the film and a few legal technicalities regarding DNA testing drags the film out another twenty minutes beyond what seems to be its natural endpoint.

There is also the sense that screenwriter Pamela Gray is picking and choosing what aspects of the original story to include. Waters’s husband, for example, drops out of the film entirely about halfway through following their divorce. Apparently examining the damaging effects that the case had on Waters’s marriage would have dampened the film’s inspirational tone. Additionally, a very interesting piece of information about a dirty cop comes up late in the film and is largely dismissed.

Before the end credits role, we’re treated to a photograph of the real Betty Anne and Kenny Waters. This trend of showing a picture of the real people is one that comes up in a lot of biopics, but why? What are we supposed to take away from seeing the real people after watching actors portray them? Is it meant as proof that the story really happened? Regardless, the photo functions as a way of reminding audiences that in spite of earnest efforts, some great stories just aren’t cinematic stories, and that the film version of Betty Anne Waters has nothing on the real one.

- Steve Avigliano, 11/09/10

REVIEW: The Town

The Town (2010): Dir. Ben Affleck. Written by Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, based off the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan. Starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite and Chris Cooper. Rated R (strong violence, pervasive language, some sexuality and drug use). Running time: 123 minutes

2 stars (out of four)

There is a conversation in The Town where Doug MacRay (played by Ben Affleck, who also co-writes and directs the film) tells the beautiful bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) everything he knows about police investigations. As the leader of a highly successful team of bank robbers, he knows a good deal. When Claire questions how he became such an expert, he’s quick to respond – he just watches a lot of CSI, he says. That line, which gets a laugh and is one of the film’s few authentic moments, suggests that director Affleck is at least aware of the crime genre’s recent ubiquity in TV and film. Strange, then, that he would willingly throw his film into that exhaustive sea of material without offering anything new. The Town makes an effort to be a lot of different things – a heist film, a redemption story, a straight-up action flick, The Departed – but never develops its ideas enough and ends up a rather underwhelming affair.

The titular town is Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston the opening text informs us is home to more bank robbers than anywhere else in the country. The film opens with one of those robbers, MacRay, about to embark on his latest job. With him is his childhood friend Jem (The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner) and two more buddies of theirs who are more or less interchangeable and forgettable throughout the film. The job is a familiar one (for both them and us), involving rubber masks, automatic rifles and a safe. Things go as planned, but to ensure their getaway they take the aforementioned Claire hostage and dump her off blindfolded once they’ve made their getaway.

All this happens before the opening title, leaving the rest of the film to explore the aftermath of the opening heist. MacRay may be becoming interested in Claire, Jem is anxious to score again despite the threat of an FBI investigator (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) on their tail, and a local kingpin (Pete Postlethwaite) tempts the team with a dangerous job. Each of these storylines has dramatic potential, but a script full of stock characters and familiar situations keeps the film from realizing that potential.

Viewed as a heist film, The Town doesn’t involve us enough in the robberies (of which the film gives us three) and Affleck makes little effort to breathe new life into familiar scenes. The crimes themselves are of course not the film’s main focus, but the action scenes fail to raise the dramatic stakes or add anything more than a generic car chase or a shootout.

The Town would like to present itself as a story of redemption, one where our hero MacRay tries to bring himself up from circumstances beyond his control and get out of Charlestown. We never get a sense, however, that his life of crime is one that he’s been forced into. There may be socio-economic conditions forcing young men like him to rob banks but the film neglects to present them. MacRay gets even harder to sympathize with the more he becomes involved with Claire. Rebecca Hall, who was wonderful in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is wasted here playing the attractive woman who’s only allowed to react to the men of the film, never act of her own accord. Claire is lied to and manipulated, and makes some choices late in the film that are hard to believe anyone would make considering all that has happened to her.

Meanwhile, the very reasonable FBI detective Adam Frawley is trying to catch the bad guys. The film perhaps wants to paint him as the antagonist but mistakenly casts the likable Jon Hamm in the role making it unclear where our allegiance is supposed to lie. MacRay isn’t enough of an underdog to root for, Frawley isn’t mean enough to root against, and there is not enough interplay between the two to create some good cat-and-mouse tension.

As MacRay’s best friend, the trigger-happy Jem causes a lot of trouble for no reason. Jeremy Renner does fine with a one-dimensional character but following a much more complex depiction of masculinity in The Hurt Locker, the role doesn’t ask much of him. Blake Lively (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) steps out of her tween-film comfort zone and is strong as MacRay’s drug-addicted former flame. Rounding out the cast is Chris Cooper in a brief appearance as MacRay’s father. Cooper establishes a tenuous father-son relationship in his one, brief scene but his role here is a minor one.

The Town runs off stock characters and familiar themes, never digging deep enough to develop its ideas of family, community or the social trappings of crime. The film passes us by, going through the motions so that we forget it faster than a witness struggling to identify her attacker in a lineup.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/15/10

REVIEW: The Social Network

The Social Network (2010): Dir. David Fincher. Written by Aaron Sorkin based off the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Rooney Mara, Armie Hammer and Max Minghella. Rated PG-13 (sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language). Running time: 121 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

In the opening scene of The Social Network, Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) explains to his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) how gaining membership into one of the school’s prestigious final clubs will inevitably lead to a better life. The parties are great. You meet rich, influential people. You even have a better chance of one day becoming the President of the United States. When he gets into one, he promises, he’ll bring her along for the ride. After his girlfriend stands up, insulted, and breaks up with him on the spot, Zuckerberg seems surprised. She assures him though that the break-up is not because he’s a nerd, but because he’s an egotistical jerk.

Similarly, the story that follows, which dramatizes the creation of the now multi-billion dollar social networking website Facebook, is not about computers but rather the personalities behind them. Zuckerberg’s problems do not come from writing endless lines of programming, which he could do in his sleep, but from his interactions with other people.

The film begins with Zuckerberg’s first seed of an idea. Following the bitter breakup, he seeks revenge on the girls of Harvard by drunkenly creating Face Mash, a site that allows students to rank pictures of female students. Heavy traffic on the site causes Harvard’s network to crash and Zuckerberg finds himself invoking the ire of both school administrators and the female student body. The site’s initial success, however, draws the attention of fellow computer programmers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) who want to recruit Zuckerberg to help create a social networking site exclusive to Harvard called ConnectU. Almost as soon as he accepts their offer, he begins work on a site of his own with help from his roommate and best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who has the money to finance the project.

Zuckerberg’s partnership with Saverin begins to sour, however, when Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of the file-sharing network Napster, enters the picture. Parker, who has accrued millions of dollars through his involvement in several web companies, lives life like a rock star. He knows a thing or two about getting rich quick in the Internet Age and even more about how to spend the subsequent wealth. Seduced by Parker’s life of luxury, Zuckerberg moves out to Silicon Valley and begins to gradually cut Saverin out of the site’s development. We know the end result of Zuckerberg’s actions through scenes of two separate lawsuits against him: the disgruntled ConnectU founders who claim Zuckerberg stole their idea and the betrayed Saverin who feels his friend has robbed him of his fair share of the company.

The scenes of the hearings might have been dull in lesser hands, but screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing) transforms them into engrossing drama. He manages to make dialogue about computer programming and copyright laws (and there’s a lot of both) easily understood, and keeps his focus on the characters. Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg is a thoroughly unlikable individual but Sorkin’s script allows the performance to become a character study. Eisenberg had already proven himself capable of creating likable personas in comedies such as Adventureland and Zombieland, but he broadens his range here. Though he spends much of the film sitting and typing behind a desktop, he develops a subtle and fascinating character.

The rest of the cast is filled out with talented young actors. Andrew Garfield, who was recently tapped to be the new Spider-Man, makes Saverin the most relatable face in the film, and Armie Hammer steals a number of scenes talking to himself as the buff crew team twins who seek financial retribution. Justin Timberlake is well (and perhaps ironically) cast as the young man who effectively ruined the music industry. Some questioned Timberlake’s acting potential a few years back, but he’s wonderful here as the cocky hotshot, giving Parker a layer of vulnerability late in the film.

Holding the film’s many excellent parts together is the emerging style of director David Fincher. Fincher’s underrated Zodiac was one of the decade’s best and though his follow-up, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was less exceptional it still bore the mark of a talented director. As with those films (and earlier works such as Seven and Fight Club), Fincher’s style uses muted colors and claustrophobic angles to bring a dark edge to the material. In Fincher’s hands, Zuckerberg’s success story is filled with images of isolation and detachment. There are also a few stylistic flourishes that you can’t help but just sit back and enjoy. One sequence involving the Winklevoss twins’ close loss at crew match is a virtuosic moment of style that also showcases the exceptional work of editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall.

Fincher and Sorkin craft a story with themes of betrayal and victory worthy of a Greek tragedy, but while the film succeeds in broader terms, it falls just short of making a definitive statement about life in the Internet Age. Fincher presents honest and cynical portrayals of young entrepreneurs who want to get rich quick with the Next Big Idea, but the film never quite confronts the moral implications of what sites like Facebook introduce into the culture. The full disclosure and lack of privacy that are necessarily a part of social networking are occasionally brought up but the film never truly deals with them.

As it is, The Social Network is a fascinating portrait of the world’s youngest billionaire and what he did to get there. There is some debate regarding the film’s accuracy – which is reasonable considering Saverin was a consultant for the source material and no doubt had a biased take on the events – but this comes with the territory of a fictionalized account of real life events. The film is ultimately not about who did what and when, but rather why they did it. The who and what involve computers and a lot of dates and facts, while the why opens up a world of motivations that include sex, friendship, fame and prestige. Factually, this is murky territory to be sure, but it makes for an engrossing human story.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/6/10