Awful. Lots of explosions, with Aaron Sorkinesque snap-patter, minus Sorkin’s talent (which is spotty, at best), passing for dialogue. Unintelligible.
Iron Man 2 – 0 stars
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Rating
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World – 4 stars
A swift comic book brought to life. Michael Cera, bassist for a Canadian band, dreams of his love, finds her and then learns he must defeat her evil ex-boyfriends to have her. And by defeat, he must slay them in fights that resemble video game challenges. The fight scenes are ingenious and the script is consistently hip and funny. A gas.
The Other Guys – 2.5 stars
Will Ferrell’s antics have a shelf life. There were a few good gags, but Mark Wahlberg steps on a lot of them with his clod-like turn as straight man (he substitutes volume for timing). But we do get a political tract on Ponzi schemes from director Adam McKay during the credits, so, there’s that.
Red Riding – 5 stars
A British television production released theatrically in the U.S., the story is set against a backdrop of serial murders in the north of England, including the Yorkshire Ripper case. The investigation is covered in three installments: 1974, 1980 and 1983. Though the murders are the central focus, this is really a rich and gritty story about police corruption and the strain of the cases on the police and the community. I liken it to David Fincher’s masterpiece Zodiac. Brilliant.
Greenberg and Cyrus – 1 star/2 stars
Similar films about dysfunctional and barely interesting people. In Cyrus, poor John C. Reilly has the good fortune to start dating Marisa Tomei. Unfortunately, Jonah Hill (Cyrus) is Tomei’s babied adult boy and what ensues is a muted power struggle played a little too seriously when there were more laughs to be had.
Greenberg is another filmic form of torture from Noah Baumbach, who has made quite a career of making movies about unpleasant, self-centered wretches (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney in The Squid and the Whale; Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding). The sad center of Greenberg is Ben Stiller, a just-out-of-the asylum condescending dick who is house-sitting for his brother in L.A. Thankfully, unlike the prior films, Baumbach doesn’t put children front and center for the abuse he finds so illuminating.
To give credit where it is due, both Hill and Stiller do well with their appointed tasks, which is to squeeze a little humanity out of such creepy, crappy characters. And while Cyrus ends up unconvincingly sweet, Greenberg is coyly ambivalent.
But really, do we care whether an ass like Stiller may find love at the end of the day?
We do not.
Hot Tub Time Machine – 2 stars
A bro-mance that is actually a menage-a-trois. John Cusack, Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry go back to the ski lodge of their youth, are transported to 1986, and proceed to do unfunny and boring stuff (often involving their bodily fluids) in the hopes of getting back to the future. Cusack looks like a hostage.
Shutter Island – 1 star
Relentless, way too slick and patently absurd. The film gave me a vicious headache and I soon felt like the rat (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the maze of the insane asylum.
Martin Scorsese begs us to ask – is DiCaprio crazy or isn’t he?
You won’t care. You’ll do most anything to make it stop.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – 1 star
Scary and interesting only up and until three things happen: you see the CGI little gnomes who are causing the trouble (they look ridiculous); Katie Holmes bashes your sensibilities into submission with her leaden acting; and you realize there is no adequate backstory for why the house is haunted by CGI gnomes. It just is.
I confess, I got punked. I saw Guillermo del Toro’s name associated with the picture. He directed The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos , which were spooky, atmospheric and rich.
Alas, the movie says Guillermo del Toro presents, not Guillermo del Toro directs.
50/50 – 2.5 Stars
Joseph Gordon Levitt gets a grim cancer diagnosis and is supported by Seth Rogen, who plays the standard best friend role (much as he did in Funny People), only now, he’s a stoner trying to get his friend to use the cancer to get women. Rogen can be funny but he better branch out. He’s got one persona and it is wearing very thin.
There is also a love connection with his cancer support therapist Anna Kendrick that is all too paint-by-numbers with its concerns about the ethics of falling in love with a patient and the inevitable breakthrough. And there is an overbearing mom played with little imagination by Angelica Huston.
What is memorable about the picture is Gordon Levitt, who manages to convey the loneliness, confusion and other-worldliness of a possible premature death sentence with force and subtlety. He’s almost worth the watch alone.
Margin Call – 5 Stars
J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year) gives us a taut, intelligent, crisp story of one NY investment house which realizes (credibly, at least for movie purposes) that the economic crash/conflagration of 2008 is not only going to happen, but it is happening, however subtly. As a result, we get to see the reaction of and impact upon the firm’s silky Gordon Gekko-like chairman (Jeremy Irons); the executives who sold him on the mortgage-based investment policy that brought the firm to the brink of ruin (a harsh looking Demi Moore, made all the more brittle by her counterpart, the Dorian Grayish Simon Baker); the traders (Kevin Spacey, who I would say steals this movie except for the fact that Paul Bettany as his no. 2 is every bit as good); and the lower-level young risk analysts (Zachary Quinto and Penn Badgley) who reveal the threat and then serve as wide-eyed witnesses to the first rumblings of the financial earthquake. The film never misses a beat as it propels the story (which unfolds in a 24 hour period) while offering great characters in an ensemble piece loaded with dialogue that is thoughtfully cynical but never showy.
Chandor’s byzantine world of finance is neither sexy or diabolical, and the cogs are just performing their jobs in a system whose caprice they often fail to understand. As the trading floor manager, and the closest thing the film comes to a moral voice, Spacey sees the inevitability of the resolution but he cannot resist it; the system won’t let him. There are no villains, and thankfully, no simplistic Oliver Stone-esque sermons. The characters are the audience, and they, like us, do not lash themselves to the wheel as the ship goes down. They survive, take stock and move on.
By far the best film of 2011.
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