Kathryn Sockett's hugely popular, two-years-running, can't-escape-it bestseller The Help, centered around African American maids working in Jackson, Mississippi at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960's, has finally seen its way to the big screen in the form of Tate Taylor's friendly, weepy adaptation.
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At an elongated 146 minutes, The Help is a surprisingly brisk affair with its catty, contentious community gossiping, that is until it becomes a rudimentary race-relations drama and a four-hankie weeper, at that. So while the film goes down relatively easy (aside from those queasy, threatening upheavals), I do believe it is stuck somewhere between a soggy, inspirational civil rights drama and a cartoon.
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Emma Stone plays Skeeter, a bookish, frizzy (but more importantly, white) Ole Miss grad who yearns to write something substantial, something "she believes in". Enter Aibileen Clark, a weary, dogged African American maid played by the great Viola Davis, and Skeeter's increasingly racist bridge partner neighbors (led by a viciously snooty Bryce Dallas Howard as Miss Hilly Holbrook) and you have your socially relevant civil rights angle and a journalistic exposé ripe for the dramatic picking.
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Aibileen and Skeeter meet regularly to covertly assemble the piece that will inevitably make up Skeeter's novel, "The Help", but she also persuades the opinionated, fiery Minny Jackson (played by Octavio Spencer, who's simply a hoot) to step out and tell her story as she concurrently works for the wealthy, inadequate social outcast, Celia Foote, who's given a ditzy buoyancy by Jessica Chastain in some of the film's better moments.
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Landmark civil rights moments (like the shooting of activist Medgar Evers) provide the backdrop for the era and the urgency for the 'help' as they continue to struggle with their daily lives. Meanwhile, Skeeter and her slowly congealing novel rather curiously overwhelm the proceedings with a tedious mother-daughter relationship and a listless romance with a Senator's son.
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In the end, the film takes the novel's many loose strands of varying intrigue and rather clumsily attempts to tie them all up in a blitzkrieg of gushy, lachrymose confrontations. Perhaps the only conclusion lacking in all of this over-sweetened mush is that of Aibileen, whose given such a grieving, wounded aura of sympathy by Viola Davis that she can cause the viewer to well-up with just a wistful glance at a still photograph. She's the only truly extraordinary asset of this otherwise bright, cheery and terribly cloying film. [C]
While we're all keeping our eyes on Hurricane Irene, stories are floating around today about how this weekends box-office returns will likely be the lowest of the year, a meager $80 million, which of course, is partially due to exhibitors being forced to close about 1,000 theaters across the entire East Coast.
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But really, as Nikki Finke pointed out this morning, this whole hurricane business is a really nice excuse for one putrid release week, lets be honest. There's always a late August lull, and we're in it.
"THE MECHANIC" (2011)
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Slick with its gunplay and gleefully violent, Simon West's The Mechanic moves at warp speed, looks good doing it, but ultimately, it's a meat-headed, perverse little mess.
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Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is a hitman who takes in a reckless, impudent troublemaker (Ben Foster) after killing his father (Donald Sutherland) in the film's second of many mandated hits. Why Arthur would want to take him in is a question the film seems uninterested in answering.
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Nevertheless, gratuitous action scenes and climb-the-corporate-ladder vengeance is taken, all before the obligatory modern action film bait-and-switch conclusion. It's come to the point where now we can't even make a good revenge flick anymore, The Mechanic is simply too precarious to enjoy. [C-]
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"THE EAGLE" (2011)
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Although exquisitely produced and almost distractingly gorgeous, Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle is one listless, automated action-adventure film concerning the infamous disappearance of the Roman Ninth Legion. (A popular film subject of late, if you saw Neil Marshall's Centurion, released just last year.)
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Channing Tatum plays Marcus Aquila, a young Roman officer looking to restore his family name after his father led the Ninth to their apparent doom and inevitable shame in the eyes of Rome. Marcus plans to sneak in through Hadrian's Wall and retrieve the Eagle with the help of his newly adopted slave, Esca (Jamie Bell), a native of the Northern lands.
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The action scenes are chaotic and nearly unintelligible, but its the film's quieter moments that are even more inept, teetering on the testy, distrustful (and sexually ambiguous) relationship between two of the more colorless characters of recent memory. [C]
Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene is a searing post-traumatic recollection of a young girl's tattered, turbid psyche that burns and unsettles with a protracted, detached sense of dread.
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Utilizing an effective, seamless flashback structure, the film charts and recounts the cruel and peculiar events involving the inconclusive title character (Elizabeth Olsen) and her time spent with a grubby, ruthless farmhouse cult juxtaposed with her later attempt at re-entry with her married, affluent older sister (Sarah Paulson).
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Navigating potentially sleazy and exploitative material, the film's structure (after hints of tedium) quickly becomes elegant, its enumerated backwards glances ensconced and foreboding. (Props to Jody Lee Lipes' stunning, frightening lensing and Zachary Stuart-Pontier's seamless editing, which so deftly shifts between time that the effect is nearly negligible.)
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Olsen, the younger sister to those ever present pint-sized former child-star twins, has quite a coming out party in this her screen debut. As complex as her fleeting nicknames, her Martha is a vulnerable, lethargic-yet-raging soul, a seething ball of anguish that the camera can never seem to shake.
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As the film progresses, promise of past and present colliding makes for anxious, nervy paranoia that debut filmmaker Sean Durkin exploits into a perturbed, teasing conclusion. [A]
Last week, I went to see John Milius' original Conan the Barbarian (1982) at the Texas Theatre on a troublesome but still highly rewarding 35mm print.
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I had never seen it before (outside of a vague childhood remembrance), but the film is certainly an intriguing 80's sword-and-sorcery treasure, one of the few of its kind (alongside John Boorman's Excalibur) that has echoes and passages of a really cunning, illustrious piece of work.
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Obviously Conan was made with the intent of being one of these shamelessly burly muscle-bound action fantasies, like the Peblum films the Italians used to make in the 60's with Hercules and Maciste.
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Nevertheless, the film, with its quiet, wordless passages and a stirring, classical Dino De Laurentiis score, is somewhere wedged between schlocky, boorish fantasy and gruff, austere revenge saga. [B]
Gregory Burkhart's 8.12 Fearnet piece about the musical work of John Carpenter discusses at a medium-length the director's "Ten Best Film Scores". He talks about Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York, but he makes one glaring omission, in my mind, and that's Carpenter's bassy, progressive synth theme for Assault on Precinct 13.
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Essentially a zombie-action movie, Assault centers around a cop (Austin Stoker) and a prisoner (Darwin Joston) fighting off wave-after-wave of crazed South LA gangsters, who more or less act as self-sacrificing zombies who climb through windows, make a lot of noise and are seemingly unconcerned about the consequences of staring down the barrel of a shotgun.
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But it just simply amazes me that Burkhart could overlook that driving theme which is ingrained in the film's structure and mood. I remember watching the opening titles and hearing that score for the first time and thinking, "this is gonna be something special."
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Yet Burkhart, for whatever reason, excludes it from his list in favor of Vampires ('98) and Ghost of Mars ('01)???
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(I did a John Carpenter top ten list last August, almost to the day, and I put his Assault on Precinct 13 score #1.)
"RED RIDING HOOD" (2011)
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Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood is a loose, feeble feature-length adaptation of the classic folk tale, attempting to imbue the familiar story with a barrage of traditional elements each varyingly unsuccessful.
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Ineffectively marrying a hollow, passionless romance with supernatural horror elements, it's ultimately the latter which overwhelms the senses and underwhelms the intellect. [C-]
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"THE CONSPIRATOR" (2011)
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Dusty, musty historical drama is staged with care, but old-hat courtroom histrionics render this history lesson not only monotonous but obsolete.
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Robert Redford draws post-9/11 parallels with his guilt-by-association cautionary tale, but the film is so easily, lazily discernible, the lesson is over before it starts. [D+]
Michael Anderson's elongated, award-winning Around the World in 80 Days has the reputation of one of Oscar's great calamities, another example perhaps of the Academy's willingness to praise anything bright and shiny and more importantly, big.
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The film, however, is hardly a real catastrophe, in fact, it's quite pleasant at times. Truly, it's more successful as an exotic travelogue than a compelling drama and thus is pleasant in the way that kicking your feet up with a beverage on a cool, breezy day is.
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It truly is a matter of excess over substance, with master showman-producer Michael Todd sparing no expense, filming quite literally around the world and collecting an envious all-star assemblage of renowned international starpower, occasionally turning the film into a veritable "who's who?" when the adventures of Phileas Fogg and his companions catches a rut or two along the way.
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In this respect, Around the World in 80 Days becomes more about the "production" than the "film" and no one would bother to argue (including me) that this isn't at least the majority of where the appeal of the film stems from.
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And thus is where, I suspect, the film's stinking reputation comes from as a product of a time where movies were made to be huge and not necessarily good. Nevertheless, as long as we're not discussing a film's awards merits, I'd like to go back and watch those title credits again, if you don't mind. [B-]
I'll never understand why studios re-issuing classic films on Blu-ray insist on slapping together some hideous, balloon-headed digital artwork. Just look at this cover art for the December release of Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis ('44) - it's absolutely disgusting. It looks like a photoshop hairball.
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Rupert Wyatt's Rise of the Planet of the Apes certainly works, if only admissibly so. It works because at its center is a vivid, coherent emotional journey with a real payoff, yet it never ascends because the filmmaking, although technically flawless, is too cloddish, facile and jackhammer-subtle.
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It's also a film that constantly teeters between being genuinely moving and terribly cloying and is inevitably saved by the digitally enhanced-performance of Andy Serkis as Caesar, the genetically altered ape who goes on to lead the revolution.
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Performance-capture technology (initiated by Peter Jackson, intensified by James Cameron) takes another leap here, not only in the way that it achieves near photo-realistic chimps, but in the way that it brings real emotion and wordless expression to artificial characters. (The first few times you see an ape in the film, it will feel uneasy. After fifteen minutes, you won't even bat an eye.)
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This franchise (spawned with Franklin J. Schaffner's spooky, allegorical 1968 original) has already seen the ape revolution play out in the third sequel, the violent, straight-forward Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
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However, director Rupert Wyatt (who here puts together the fastest moving addition to the franchise, if nothing else) has stated that Rise is very much a new beginning to this unique Planet of the Apes series, a beginning that gives rise to these apes through the perils of animal testing and captivity.
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But you could hardly fault this new creative team for re-writing the genesis of the ape revolution, seeing as how befuddling the old time-loop was when it was introduced in Escape From the Planet of the Apes.
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In fact, you could say that one of the biggest problems with Rise, other than its aforementioned hokeyness, is its over-appreciation for the original, sprinkling in a distracting amount of callbacks and hints that do no favors for this new reboot. (Seeing the Icarus take-off on TV is great, but watching Tom Felton roll through every line of Charlton Heston dialogue is excruciating, unwarranted and frankly, tired.)
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Then again, given that this is a series that stretches five decades, six directors and seven films, perhaps the fact that Rise of the Planet of the Apes manages to ever so slightly resurrect the franchise - albeit fleetingly - is all the praise it needs. [C+]
"THE THREE MUSKETEERS" (1939)
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Alexandre Dumas fans stay away, this farcical, loosely-based adaptation takes great liberties with the source material in favor of some playful hi-jinks and merry melodies, turning the classic story into a 73-minute quasi-musical comedy.
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The results aren't entirely amiss, however, as the film's brisk, trim physique and Ritz brothers buffoonery provide enough of a good thing to justify this altered, dumbed-down version. Still, it doesn't measure up to the ultimately straight-faced, superior 1948 MGM mega-production. [B-]
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"DEVOTION" (1945)
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Hardly the blistering melodrama the poster would have you believe, this Warner Bros. period piece very loosely based on the lives of the Bronte sisters was famously released three years after production while an ongoing legal battle with star Olivia de Havilland resolved itself.
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Fatuously written with plenty of unsubtle hints as to the genesis of the sisters' renowned literary works to come, the film nevertheless has stretches of compelling love-on-the-moors histrionics. [C+]
More reputable for its box-office deficiencies than its song-and-dance numbers, Yolanda and the Thief, a high-gloss musical-fantasy production from the renowned Arthur Freed and Vincente Minnelli, was a massive flop upon its release in 1945, both critically derided and a mammoth black-eye to its two stars and previously infallible production team.
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It was such a catastrophe, it lost MGM over $1.5 million and derailed the career of its female lead (and Arthur Freed's present lover), Lucille Bremer while forcing Fred Astaire into a temporary fit of retirement.
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With all of this turmoil and controversy, one would expect that the film rarely works outside of some morbid curiosity for completionists only, yet to my surprise, Yolanda and the Thief is an artfully-rendered, dazzling Technicolor dreamscape that's closer to a career benchmark than a catastrophe.
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Unsparingly-staged and lustrously-designed, the film's fantastical setting sets the stage for elegant, surrealistic sets (some resembling the winding roads of Oz), glamorous palaces and stunning 16-minute ballet dream sequences.
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Astaire plays a desperate con man in Patria, a fictional Latin American country, looking to cash in with a young, attractive heiress (Bremer) by announcing himself as her guardian angel.
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It doesn't take much imagination to decipher where this story is going, but the film's quick-footed sense of humor, elaborate dance moves and its glistening, colorful design do plenty to make their mark. Yolanda and the Thief isn't merely an undervalued production, but a hidden gem and one of the highlights of the MGM/Arthur Freed/Vincente Minnelli partnership. [B+]
Alfred Hitchcock's formal, functional I Confess is an especially atypical entry into the portly director's oeuvre, not because it isn't any less fascinating or lacking in technical skill, but because this half-thriller, with its moral crisis through-line and overt Catholic symbolism, feels far removed from the kind of crafty, playful, bewildering suspense-thrillers that we're accustomed to.
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Perhaps another reason for its relative curiousness is the fact that it's the only Hitch film (in a career full of cozy, recognizable performers) featuring either Montgomery Clift or Anne Baxter. The director reportedly never got along with method actors, and it was no different with Monty, who nevertheless gives a strong, subdued performance.
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He plays Michael Logan, a young Catholic priest in lovely Quebec City (beautifully shot on location) who hears the confession of the rectory caretaker who has just committed murder. Unable to speak on the matter (which would break his vow of secrecy), Michael not only cannot help the investigators who question him, but cannot defend himself when he becomes the prime suspect.
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While on one hand, this feels like the typical Hitchcock "wrong man" template (seen routinely throughout his career), I Confess is more of a crisis of an ethical, moral and especially spiritual nature. Break the vow and pronounce your innocence or remain silent and implicate yourself to murder?
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It's also very much a Catholic film, and considering this isn't Martin Scorsese, it sure is a bit startling to see a director like Alfred Hitchcock compose a shot like the one where we see Michael walking across the street in the background with a large silhouette sculpture of Christ dragging the cross behind him in the foreground.
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And as the film assuredly rolls to its conclusion (and Father Logan's dilemma becomes more pressing), these images become more and more prevalent, especially during the climactic trial which precedes the film's final scene of absolution.
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No, it's certainly not one of the director's most artful, enthralling or beguiling works, nor is it one of his most identifiable, yet I Confess ends up being, in my estimation, nearly as successful for what it is - an astute, spiritual human drama. [B]
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