REVIEWS
Film Reviews
Chicago
Everybody loves Chicago. The big critics, the little critics: everybody. It's being hailed as the savior to the movie musical. Hooray. But then, so was Moulin Rouge, and I hated Moulin Rouge. So going into Chicago I was understandably skeptical.
Now, I like musicals. Good musicals, that is. Ones that give you some breathing room between songs that all sound fairly different from one another (and don't have any stirring renditions about eating toast). Chicago delivered on that note -- the pacing was handled very well, nothing seemed rushed, and the songs made the movie meatier without relying on the usual sprinklings of Sweet 'N Low.
Another gripe I continually have about musicals comes up when a big name actor winks at the audience and telepathically says, "Hee, hee -- now I get to sing. Watch this!" Very annoying. In Chicago though, the fact that the characters are singing is addressed in a clean, classy way that still takes the singing seriously. This movie knows it's trying to entertain, but instead of giving you a party hat and a Dixie cup full of Kool-Aid it hands you a rum and coke and pushes you back on the couch. The songs come up, they're sung (and sung well, in all cases), and then things move along. Nothing feels forced or tacked on for the hell of it -- everything meshes, and the villagers rejoice.
This is a fun movie. Yes, it addresses the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality of the media. Yes, it talks about how court cases that aren't sensational get swept out of public sight. I didn't leave the theater deep in thought about those things, though. Such themes simply give the movie an edge that keeps the story from becoming vapid. They also make you feel slightly guilty for enjoying it so much. But hell, I go to art school. "Handling Guilt 101" is practically a freshman course. I can take it.
Gangs of New York
If you haven't gone to see Martin Scorsese's new film Gangs of New York, don't! In this movie Scorsese recreates 1840s New York, when Irish gang members clashed with other immigrants. A young man (Leonardo DiCaprio) tries to avenge his father's death at the hands of a gang leader (Daniel Day-Lewis).
Apparently Scorsese spent 10 years or so researching this film and it shows. The costumes and sets are immaculate. The problem with so much research is that Scorsese must have been too attached to all of it. Running almost three hours long, too many different plot lines were in the movie and to the detriment of each other. He couldn't devote a significant amount of time to any single plot line to develop it completely. It ended up a flawed and jumbled mess.
DiCaprio's acting was mediocre at best but Day-Lewis was the only real redeeming part of the movie. He stole the scene whenever he was on screen. Whenever he was absent, I found myself hoping he was in the next scene.
My only wish is that a present day gang from New York could go kick Scorsese's ass, all the while asking, "What the hell were you thinking?"
The Hours
When I first found out that Michael Cunningham's excellent novel The Hours was going to be made into a movie, I wondered how the director was going to mash the three parallel stories that get equal attention in the book into two hours without losing the magic of Cunningham's story. Indeed, the book is much better than the movie. However, the movie does succeed in fully delivering the three characters' plots to full term (with the partial exception of Juliane Moore's 1950s dissatisfied housewife character).
Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Virginia Woolf is the most remarkable of the performances; the audience really understands Woolf's nervous energy, mood swings, and feelings of isolation. Meryl Streep makes a great Clarissa, but is constantly surrounded by other characters and does not have much room to breathe. Juliane Moore's housewife is lacking the most, but through no fault of her own. The script devoted to her story does not allow for the character development given to her two counterparts.
The movie has its share of purposefully anticlimactic moments; one of the first scenes is Woolf's peaceful, quiet suicide. Moore's character abandons her family but we never see it happen. But so is the nature of the hours; time passes and we must trudge onwards. But as well done as the film The Hours is, the movie theater audience can't indulge in the luster of Cunningham's language as they would if they'd pick up his book.
The Lord of the Rings:
The Two Towers
I was worried about seeing the highly anticipated Two Towers, the second movie in the trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, based on the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Usually, sequels are never as good as the first effort, and in a trilogy it is often the middle section, as with mattresses, where the story begins to sag.
Despite my doubts, I found myself enraptured once again in the storyline. The battle scenes were amazing and done with enough technical skill to make you wonder which soldiers were real and which were computer generated. The Ents were not quite as I'd pictured them, but their battle scene with Saruman gave them their due as a force to be reckoned with. My ultimate favorite was Gollum. Andy Serkis portrays Gollum with the right level of creepiness, but with enough humanity to make Gollum seem not only complex, but also sympathetic. Technically, through the use of rotoscoping and motion capture, the special effects team puts to shame other recent block-buster attempts to create characters who do not exist.
Some purists may not like the changes Jackson made to the story, but the main thing that interfered with my viewing pleasure was Frodo. In the books, he seems weakened and diminished by the ring, but his obstacles seem only to contribute to his courage and his trudge ever onward. In the movie, he seems merely whiny and annoying, rather than heroic. This is a casting complaint against Elijah Wood, but it's a little too late. However much I may not personally like him, we're already two-thirds of the way through the story and stuck with him until the end. No matter, everything else makes Middle Earth an enticing place to visit for three hours.
Bowling for Columbine
To label Michael Moore's new film a "documentary" would be like calling a newspaper editorial "investigative journalism." Sure, Michael Moore covers his bases and talks to many different perspectives regarding gun violence in America. But his narration is definitely skewed towards the left (not that I'm complaining), and he occasionally employs tactics that I'm not so sure about.
For example, towards the end of the film Moore engages in a very surreal interview with NRA president Charlton Heston. Moore enters his home on the pretense that he is an NRA member making a documentary about guns, but a few minutes into the interview Moore uses sensationalism to get his point across.
Despite its overtly editorial moments, Bowling for Columbine is a very provocative look at not only gun violence in America, but also the demonization of the black male. There were parts of the film that made me nauseous, such as the montage of film clips of U.S.-sponsored violence (Pinochet, Nicaragua, Vietnam) set to the tune of "What a Wonderful World," but there were as many parts that made me laugh out loud. The most effective aspect of Moore's film is his use of humor to make the big bad problems of gun violence and racial discrimination accessible to the average viewer.