The animated penguins and the new James Bond give two different audiences everything they could want. Elsewhere, Heath Ledger battles drug addiction in "Candy." And "Babel" hits plenty of false notes.
Welcome to Cyber Monday, everyone. No shopping around these parts, though – just movies movies movies.
The Departed (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Between the rampant swearing and slapdash gunplay, it may be hard to recognize just how monstrously entertaining this Martin Scorsese picture is – probably the most instantly pleasurable flick of his career, unless you count the documentary he made about the Band almost 30 years ago. His devoted fans may complain that this doesn’t have the "moral weight" of his earlier films, but I have two counter-arguments to that. The first is that, you know what, I always thought the earlier films were tied down by his heavy-browed "meanings" – it’s as if, this time out, Scorsese and his characters already knew how sinful their lives were and didn’t have the time to worry about whether or not they were doomed to Hell. The second is that the moral weight is there anyway. Scorsese has always understood a certain type of man – macho as a way of life, profane instead of vulnerable – but never before has he let them simply be, allowing their own compromises and failings to be fitting punishments. Like Spike Lee earlier this year with Inside Man, here Scorsese relaxes his legacy and decides to let fly. Ironically, there’s more art here than in 20 Aviators because while many people can make a biopic, very very few can make a crime thriller so richly drawn, so grippingly real. As for the performances, all that needs to be said is that Jack Nicholson is wonderfully understated (for him, anyway) and that the rest vary from merely great to the new peaks DiCaprio and Damon have established for themselves.
Casino Royale (MGM/Columbia Pictures)
It’s really not that hard. You take a recognizable but flagging franchise and you start from scratch. You take away the excess; you emphasize realism and characters. And so what’s worked for Batman Begins and Battlestar Galactica now works for Casino Royale, the intelligent, thrilling reinvention of the James Bond series. Just don’t call it hip – Casino Royale never ever winks at the audience; it’s too busy getting down to business for such nonsense. For two impressive acts, the Daniel Craig-led film is a stunner, reminding adults who still harbor a passion for their moviegoing youth why we went to the theater in the first place – because it was exciting and sexy and wonderful and so much better than real life. Perhaps we should forget about Casino Royale’s last act, then, when too much is required of an unconvincing love story. But before then, a treat, a marvel, a hell of a lot of fun. Attention adult audiences: This is the thriller you’ve said you’ve been waiting for.
Happy Feet (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Beyond its visual wonders, of which there are many, the most spectacular element to Happy Feet is the fascinating internal struggle between director George Miller’s darker instincts and the cutesy requirements of a holiday-season animated kids entertainment. And so you get adorable little penguins occasionally rapping, but you also get some genuinely disturbing moments in a zoo and out in the wild. Pixar’s best films do the mixture of youthful whimsy and intelligent sophistication better than anyone – a movie like Finding Nemo works just as well for kids and adults without ever alienating either group. Happy Feet comes close at times, and its emotional complexity is even more dazzling than Cars’. But it makes me wish that Miller next time out will attempt such an epic outside the studio system.
Iraq in Fragments (Typecast Pictures/HBO Documentary Films)
There hasn't been a bad documentary yet about the Iraq War, but I have yet to see a really brilliant one. That creates a bit of a fatigue – they're all good but their messages are equally bleak and angry, and I can sometimes forget which interview subjects, which telling details, were in which film. Iraq in Fragments is probably the best, but I don't think we'll know until we have a few years' perspective on this period. What's clear now, though, is that it's the best shot – Iraq has never looked so beautiful, like a country worth admiring by the West for more than its oil reserves. Like a more modest Darwin's Nightmare, director James Longley’s film puts us into the center of a world, dividing its too-short running time into three distinct segments of different areas and mindsets within the country. In its own way, the movie quietly evokes Amores Perros' sense of interconnection – except that the subjects on screen are linked by their similar circumstances, not by coincidence. You'll be angry at our foreign policy only in passing – Longley wants us to consider the Iraqis first and foremost, those who were there before we got there and the ones who will be left when we finally pull out.
Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks)
A very effecting cliché, Clint Eastwood’s latest does what all his films do: tell you what you already know very efficiently. If you think we don’t need another war film that deduces that war is hell, well, I’m right there with you – and still I found myself moved and engaged by Eastwood’s wary observations on the end of World War II and, by extension, on the way history is not remembered just by the victors but by everyone who wants to use it to his own advantage. Even if Spielberg got there first with Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers is the best-looking film Eastwood (and his D.P. Tom Stern) has ever shot, capturing a mythologized American past he subverts at every turn. But, right, at its core this is a movie about how war is hell, nobody is really a hero, and so on and so forth. I still say he gets more credit for his sentimentality than any comparable "major" filmmaker. But I also say that the more I denigrate his good name, the more I am reluctantly impressed with what he can do with overly familiar material.
Candy (ThinkFilm)
On paper, another "two junkies in love" cautionary drama – you can guess the ending. Except you can’t – and you’ll also probably be surprised that director Neil Armfield gives more screen time to the love story than the drug addiction. Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish play the lovers, and one of the best things about their performances is that for most of the film you’re not quite sure if you even like these people. They have aspirations they can barely articulate; they’re like so many young people who have plenty of hopes but can’t pin anything down. That’s where the drugs come in – they create a perpetual sense of hope when the outside world tells these lovebirds that life’s not going to work out for them. If none of this is really groundbreaking, per se, note that almost every scene finds its own small kernel of originality or insight. And then get ready for the ending, which is as stubbornly ornery and unpredictable as everything that preceded it.
The Last King of Scotland (Fox Searchlight)
Forest Whitaker’s performance justifies the film. Director Kevin Macdonald’s foray into fiction filmmaking after delivering two of the best documentaries of recent years (One Day in September, Touching the Void) starts out as a nice little warning about privileged whites going to underdeveloped countries for adventure and desires to "make a difference." But once the callow youth learns his lesson, the only thing to hold on to is Whitaker, who makes Idi Amin a ham, a charmer, an irrational paranoid, a needy little kid. But while I give Whitaker an immense amount of credit for never showboating a potentially scene-chewing portrayal, I wouldn’t give him an Oscar – a great performance needs a great movie around it.
For Your Consideration (Warner Independent Pictures)
You don’t go to Christopher Guest’s films to marvel at his accuracy for recreating the worlds he’s satirizing – in fact, the less you know about the folk community, the better you’ll like A Mighty Wind. Nonetheless, the reason why For Your Consideration never rises above the lightly amusing is that its stabs at Hollywood, the art house and the Oscars aren’t just tame but are also not very observant. This is a community which has been solidly skewered from The Larry Sanders Show all the way through Extras – a simple romp that limply targets films that don’t even get nominated for Oscars and seems wholly unaware how award-season buzz works doesn’t just feel off but also a little lazy.
Babel (Paramount Vantage)
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films aren’t getting any less stunning, but they’re also growing increasingly problematic. Babel has the trappings of Art – it’s an emotionally grueling work populated with difficult characters who are tangentially involved in the same narrative, even if they don’t realize it. But what worked magnificently in Amores Perros and pretty well in 21 Grams is a disaster here – the unknown connections between disparate individuals are uninteresting, and the stacked-deck moralizing is a turn-off. Almost rising to the level of Crash in terms of ludicrous character motivations, Babel consistently doles out terrible events for the sole purpose of, well, what exactly? To remind us that we Americans should never leave the country? To suggest that the world is an even worse place than we imagined? To guilt people who object to the cinematic cruelty into thinking they’re not sophisticated enough to "get it"?
Sweet Land (Forward Entertainment)
The Days of Heaven comparison you probably have already heard. So here's a new one: Think of a benign Dogville, a political allegory so sweetly inoffensive that its message is obvious and its dramatic pull minimal. This is a nice movie, but it's also pretty eh – and it's packed with every small-town/small-film cliché you can think of. I can't summon up much energy to dislike it – the love story does get to you – but it would take even more energy to pretend to explain what's so special about it.
Consumables is a regular overview of popular culture.
