Movie Reviews #3…
[I might seem remiss with my lack of movie reviews, but 2013 wasn’t all that memorable for great movies beyond those already reviewed, in spite of the hype from Hollywood. My attendance has diminished to, due to bad movies, ticket prices, too many trailers, and commercials from TV that have kept me away. But here are a few reviews.]
#6: Blue Jasmine. Blanchett seemed all too real in this flick while she was two-dimensional and boring in the next. The rest of the acting is boring, the plot is boring, and the dialogue is stilted and boring. In other words, the screenplay should be used to paper the bottom of your birdcage. If you go to the movies to be depressed, though, this is your movie. Otherwise, forget about it. Unlike Dallas Buyers’ Club, there are no real lessons to be learned here—well, maybe that Woody Allen likes to beat us over the head with his New York City angst. The comedic Woody of the old days was much better. I can only recommend this one to the masochists among you.
#7: The Monuments Men. I’m a sucker for WWII books and also movies, even when Hollywood warps history. Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle and Jeffery Deaver’s Garden of Beasts are already classics from my point of view, and they should be held up as a model for what a good movie in the genre should be. The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape, for example, are movies I’ve seen several times. Even Von Ryan’s Express was fun, but I only saw that once. More recent war movies didn’t resonate as much—somehow the heroic qualities and adventure have disappeared. Saving Private Ryan (I’m always tempted to add a Von to that title) had great moments during the Normandy invasion, but the rest was a showcase for Matt Damon and a disaster for Tom Hanks. Inglourious Basterds matched the first word in the title, for example—of course, this was complete fiction (and the beginning of the downward slide for Brad Pitt?).
The Monuments Men was released at an interesting time for me. The next Chen and Castilblanco book (The Collector, C & C #5) has as one theme the illegal art trade and mentions how the Nazis looted both private and public collections all over Europe. As might be expected, I was doing what’s often incorrectly called research work for the book (more like digging up background facts—hardly creative, like true research) and came across the National Geographic article about the events surrounding the movie. Like my character Castilblanco, I found the real history more interesting, but the movie is worth a visit—big names, but not great acting. You could save it for NetFlix. (An excerpt from the The Collector—dare I call it a preview?—can be found in my new release Aristocrats and Assassins.)
#8: Non-Stop. My genre, but…. This is certainly not a movie to watch before boarding a plane. Of course, after Malaysia 370, you’re probably already having qualms about that, including about whether your air marshal is in an AA program. The action and suspense from the movie were non-stop flights of fancy too, but the plot had too many holes in it for my tastes. Better than your usual Hollywood thriller/action/suspense fare (no racy sex in this one), I recommend it if only to see Liam Neeson give another stellar performance as the flawed hero as he makes a bad script shine (I avoided the more popular but gross description about polishing). Don’t look for logic here, though. If you’re not a Neeson fan (I definitely am, and he likes NYC carriage horses!), watch one of the Bourne movie reruns…or, read one of my thrillers instead.
#9: Cosmos. Well, not exactly a movie…more like a bad soap opera, and this host can’t compare to the original. Moreover, putting it on Fox or some cable channel (I forget which one) takes about 20% of the hour away in commercials, a feature that the original, shown on PBS, didn’t have. If version 2.0 were an improvement, I wouldn’t mind, but it isn’t. A lot of whiz-bang graphics and strutting ego and techno-babble from the host, but no explanations for the interested lay person. For example, metaverse. Some viewers might think that’s Keats or Shelley spoken by robots. Isaac Asimov, the greatest writer to popularize science, is rolling over in his grave (and his robots were more articulate than the new Cosmos host)…not to mention Carl Sagan. I disagree with Hank Stuever of the Washington Post and other reviewers. This series is terrible if the first episode is any indication. Not recommended.
#10: The Grand Budapest Hotel. A grand Moliere-style farce with some tragedy amidst the comedy, this is probably the best new movie out there at this moment. Based on the writings of Stefan Zweig (yeah, I had to look him up too), this pokes fun at European aristocracy, a bit of continental Downton Abbey, as it were, including a delightful old prune who’s bent on “being happy in life” by sticking it to her heirs (you thought I was going to say something else about sticking?) There are elements of mystery and thriller here too. The acting is superb, beginning with Fiennes, who took much too long to die in The English Patient (which movie wins the bladder-buster contest, that one or Titanic?). There are other familiar faces here too (Harvey Keitel is great, for example) and the settings are marvelous. But I suppose this movie won’t have the resonance it should. Crowds nowadays flock to action flicks with very little plot, lots of violence, and raw sex—they have to have more stuff than cable TV, after all. However, my theater was overcrowded to the point of discomfort, so who knows? Maybe quality will become popular even in the Twitter age?
And so it goes….
