Joel Coen and Ethan Coen's True Grit is getting seen by more and more people these days, including an SAG screening on Saturday night, but with embargoes and the like in place until this Wednesday, December 1st, we'll have to go by short-burst reactions from Twitter.
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Steve Pond's 11.28 article covers the various knee-jerk reactions from around the blog-o-sphere and the consensus is that it's (unsurprisingly) pretty damn good. I know for a fact that Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells is seeing it tonight in a New York City media screening, so I would expect that anybody worth their salt on either coast will have an opinion on the matter by the end of the week - should be exciting.
I resentfully submitted myself to a post-Thanksgiving viewing of Ryan Murphy's Eat Pray Love and it was even more insipidly callow than I had imagined - a woe is me middle-aged tour of religious counseling and cultural identity - but more importantly - about delectable cuisine and sweeping far-world landscapes.
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It's bad enough that the film is languorously motivated and rigidly performed, but with the projection to the visual medium, Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir is eventually revealed to be both frivolous and selfish. [D]
What's most surprising about Ed Zwick's Love & Other Drugs is just how fatally bland it ends up being. I mean, the film is quite literally a disease and a few sex scenes away from starring Gerard Butler.
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The workmanlike Ed Zwick puts down his race-relations historical dramas for the time being, but Love & Other Drugs is nothing more than a sporadically amusing romantic comedy-turned-weeper that uses the guise of the mid-90's pharmaceutical sales revolution and the melodramatics of impending disability to conceal a film that's hopelessly middle-brow and restrictively platitudinous.
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Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway elevate the material as best as they can (plus Steven Fierberg's intentionally drab 90's lensing grants the film a period-appropriate visual identity) but ultimately there are just too many musty old hats in this bag (the token fat guy roomie, the climactic confessional speech) that the film quickly takes on the appearance of a conveniently-written piece of fluff.
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The irony here in a film that rather boldly and explicitly features its two stars without the benefit of clothing is that, in fact, the most shocking thing about Love & Other Drugs is just how utterly uninspiring it manages to be. [C-]
Where is the buzz on Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Tourist? I haven't heard a thing about it one way or the other and it's hitting theaters in twelve days hence.
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I never thought The Tourist looked like anything more than a classy, upscale Knight & Day, but with all of the talent involved, the lack of coverage is certainly a bit troubling.
George Tillman Jr.'s Faster is a sexy, alluring and sprightly-shot piece of junk - an unrelentingly messy and diffusive revenge thriller that's so fundamentally and structurally incompetent that it saps nearly all of the bite and snarl out of Dwayne Johnson and his mainline quest for brotherly vengeance.
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The script by brothers Tony Gayton and Joe Gayton, which seems to be stuck somewhere between bare-knuckled 80's vigilante thriller and 21st-century post-Tarantino pulp, relies heavily on all manner of senseless flashbacks, needless characters and foolhardy plot twists (including a true laugher in the final reel.)
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As the aptly named Driver (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) muscles through his first few hits on his neatly-typed list of names, he's pursued by the rugged, drug-addled Cop (Billy Bob Thornton) and the dapper, egomaniacal Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who, when he isn't shooting guns with his blushing bride (Maggie Grace) in the desert seems to be simply searching, gun in hand, for a reason for his character to exist.
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And as the hitlist shrinks, Driver's trigger-finger loosens and Faster takes a turn for the serious, a gross miscalculation in a film that begs to be to anything but. It's a sad state when a simple revenge-thriller can't even stay on task. [C-]
David Yates' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I is a drastically unique entry into the franchise with its narrow focus and steady, persistently moody atmospherics - yet ultimately, the decision to split the epic finale into two films leaves this initial installment feeling like a rather perfunctory, anticlimactic setting of the table.
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For what its worth, the rather meager and trifling first half of author J.K. Rowling's finale is somewhat miraculously transformed by screenwriter Steve Kloves into something resembling compelling drama - an almost motionless transition piece with a drastic emphasis on character moments that luckily (and surprisingly) carry the film through its many slack, fickle downturns.
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Of course the series still exudes the technical mastery and British class acting that we've come to expect, but this is perhaps David Yates' most composed and relaxed work to date and that includes the central performances from our three leads who do most of the heavy lifting. (On a side note, let's forget about that unfortunate "Three Brothers" animated sequence, which looked like a cut-scene from Okami.)
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In fact, the film's overriding emphasis on the transformation of Harry, Ron and Hermoine from Hogwarts troublemakers to real-life survivalists provides the stark backdrop for this beginning of the end, a transformation that not only occurs on paper but on the screen, as Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint show the same sudden maturity and resolve as their wizarding alter egos.
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But this sullen, grittier Harry Potter unfortunately has its drawbacks - chief among them that the magic of Hogwarts seems to have apparated from sight. I'd imagine that taken on the whole, this bisected cinematic experiment will turn favorably towards this initial installment, but as it stands, this is the rare Harry Potter entry that feels helplessly undernourished and glaringly irresolute. [B-]
If there's one film I've really soured upon over the last several months, it's been Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, the well-publicized smash-hit out of Sundance and a sure-fire lock for one of the ten Best Picture slots this January. I originally gave the film a B- back in July, but dare I say I might have been far too forgiving.
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Now the film is very sprightly amusing and masterfully acted by all involved - there's no denying that for the first 60-70 minutes or so that you're watching a top-shelf entertainment that's about relatable, fully-formed and authentic characters that each have their good and bad moments.
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But alas, I was absolutely appalled by the last ten-fifteen minutes or so in which, yes, Mark Ruffalo's earthy, vegetable-growing biological father is just kicked to the curb so that Choldoenko's timely, liberal-minded message can take center stage. (By the way, the film's politics are not the issue - I agree with them - it just seemed drastically short-sighted and self-indulgent in those final scenes.)
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That scene has been kicked around quite a bit around the blog-o-sphere since it's release over the summer, and I'm certainly not the only person who feels this way. Nominate the performances all you want, nominate Mark Ruffalo, please - but this is a lame duck.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen's True Grit is getting seen by more and more people these days, including an SAG screening on Saturday night, but with embargoes and the like in place until this Wednesday, December 1st, we'll have to go by short-burst reactions from Twitter.
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