Movies In Brief

I guess I'm in a period of watching a fair amount of dvds/blu-rays lately, catching up on some things I didn't see in the theater.

Defiance - in terms of lives saved, a story on par with Schindler's List, but Ed Zwick is no Spielberg. It's a well-made film with decent performances from Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber (here playing almost the same type of sibling rivalry beats as he did in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, funnily enough), but quite predictable. Aside from a stylish scene with Schreiber invading a Nazi-captured police station in order to get medicine for his people in the forest, there isn't a lot of bravura filmmaking here. The bonus feature on the real brothers through interviews with children and grandchildren is only about half an hour and more interesting than the actual film.

My Best Friend's Girl - the first film I've seen with Dane Cook in it. His motorboat vulgarity is repellent at first but it turns out he's not a bad actor and can become more likeable as the script demands. He's probably a little more natural than Jason Biggs, all nerdy tics in the friend role. Kate Hudson, I have to say, is effortlessly charming. The most enjoyable part of the movie is where Cook is trying to offend her and she sees right through it and is just amused. Alec Baldwin has fun as Cook's fat, womanizing dad.

Role Models - Kind of a sleeper film that should have done a little better. My guess is that part of the reason for that is that, A) the Paul Rudd audience is different than the Seann William Scott audience, or at least the presence of one creates different expectations than the presence of the other, or B) it was advertised as a new, raunchy guy's movie but is instead a lot closer to Meatballs, except with two guys and two boys. I saw the "unrated" version but there wasn't anything special there, maybe more swearing? Elizabeth Banks is good in a small role, and Jane Lynch is always funny. Rudd, who had something to do with the story, is another variation on his uptight, cynical character, while Scott is the frat boy you would expect. It's actually pretty sweet. Lots of outtakes, bloopers and extended scenes, including a couple with Rashida Jones as a Chuck E Cheese-type employee in a chipmunk suit. I can see why the scenes were cut but I always like seeing her.

Quantum of Solace - as much as I liked Licence to Kill, not-great reviews of this one kept me from seeing it in the theater, and they're right. A slick, professional job, with some very good action scenes, but the main villain (a seeming ecologist/philanthropist named GREENE who secretly helps overturn governments with the help of secret organization Quantum and wants to take over the water supply of Bolivia, or something) is just a nerd who somehow gives Bond a good fight at the end. Craig is fine, Olga Kurylenko is stunning, but director Marc Forster doesn't do much to convince us Quantum is as pervasive and scary a threat as he should, nor do even the actors seem very worried about either Greene or that Bond has apparently gone rogue in his quest for revenge. Nice idea to have him still hurting over Vesper Lynd's death in Licence, but they don't really bring that idea, or any ideas, to life.

Wanted - a much more entertaining action film, based on the Mark Millar/J.G. Jones graphic novel, but done a little better. James McAvoy is well-cast--slight and able to portray frail but then tough as the story progresses. Angelina Jolie is bigger than life and well-cast as part of the sexbait to get McAvoy into The Fraternity of Assassins, though it seemed like they should have fucked at some point. After seeing Wolverine, I'm thinking they should have cast some bigger actors as the other assassins, but whatever. They kept a lot of the humor of the comic, even some of the narration, but come up with some great action sequences (including the preposterous but fun bullet-bending) to make it surpass the book.

The Reader - wow, I was really disappointed. High pedigree talent in Winslet, director Daldry, cinematographer Deakins, screenwriter Hare, but I just was not pulled into this one. I found Winslet's character really repulsive even before the revelation that she was a Nazi. Prior to that, she was an unfeeling bitch using the young man sexually, but casting such a spell over him (being his first love) that he later tries to help save her during a war crime trial. Hinging her fate on the plot device that she never learned to read seemed pretty thin to me, actually, especially as not much was really made of why she wanted this young man to read to her in the first place. Also, I frankly thought Daldry had Winslet nude when it often wasn't necessary. I actually found the movie gratuitous, tedious and the feel of it was so concerned with being an important, controversial film that to me it just exposed how shallow it really was.