Movie review catchup

Sometime this summer, either because of the lackluster quality of this year’s movies or because of my own feeling that they were superfluous, I quit writing movie reviews. I’ve realized lately that I enjoy writing them so here’s a bit of catch-up on a few things I’ve seen recently.

Closer

Although this film doesn’t open in the U.S. until Friday, December 3rd, I saw it as a sneak preview courtesy of Entertainment Weekly and Lifetime (Television for Women <rolls eyes>) last night at a nearly brand new set of movie theaters downtown. Closer is a hard film full of raw emotion and even rawer language but what else would you expect from a film that is about the complicated interweaving of emotion and sex and lack of judgement we call love?

Except, that’s too facile: this movie isn’t really about love as much as it is about what people do when they have convinced themselves they are in love and how the mixed spices of desire, fear, and self-delusion mingle together to turn you into someone that, in many ways, is a truer version of yourself than you ever show anyone at any other time.

Directed by Mike Nichols who also gave us The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, and The Birdcage, three movies that dealt with the various complications of coupling and uncoupling, Closer is a punishing two hours during which Nichols manages to draw absolutely stellar performances from his entire cast. Julia Roberts as Anna, a photographer drawn to taking photographs of strangers who are in the midst of dealing with some sort of emotional pain, manages to be both luminous and utterly damaged as a character who seems so afraid of life than when she does finally decide to participate instead of observe she chooses partners — Clive Owen, absolutely stunning as Larry, a doctor who has decidedly conflicted views about women and sex, and Jude Law as Dan, a writer of obituaries and failed novelist whose romanticism is a mask for a world view nearly as tentative as Anna’s — who are just as damaged as she is. The sun around which all these planets orbit is Alice, played by Natalie Portman who seems to not only grow more beautiful with each role but also seems to expand her range as an actress.

Alice is the catalyst that excites Dan’s latent impulsiveness into action. That impulsiveness later turns manipulative as Dan unwittingly does for Anna the same thing Alice did for him. Ultimately, Alice is the fulcrum on which the movie balances, her shifting sense of identity is what causes the other characters to reveal what may very well be their true selves.

Closer is probably the least erotic movie I have ever seen that deals with the side effects of sex as love. We don’t see the characters getting to enjoy the infidelities that are their downfalls, only the toxic waste of the aftermath. Nichols also doesn’t do the viewer any favors by ignoring the fact that film is an immediate medium and failing to give us any sense of the passage of time save characters mentioning it in actual dialogue. While this may be a relatively adult way to treat the audience I think there is a mean to be struck between no context clues at all and a lower third ID that reads “A year later…”

Definitely an intense, adult movie, I’d give closer three out of five popcorn boxes.

Sideways

Also a movie that deals with the ramifications of sex, love, and the fallout of dreams unrealized, Sideways differs from Closer in that it is a much more traditional narrative form tied to a specific time line, and that the people in this world are seem more real, and their conflicts seem more real, because of their ordinariness; they are not movie-star beautiful and their surroundings don’t look like something you’d find in a Pottery Barn catalogue.

When we first meet him, Miles (Paul Giamatti at his finest) is running horribly late to pick up his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) so they can embark a last-gasp bachelor fling of wine tasting and golf before Jack’s impending marriage. It becomes clear on the drive from Los Angeles to the Sonoma Valley that Jack’s expectations for the week don’t match Miles’ expectations: Miles plans for a quiet week of wine drinking, golf, and relaxing are cast by the way side in Jack’s quest for one last fling and his all purpose solution, get laid, to Miles’ depression over his divorce and his struggles to get his novel published.

Beautiful country photographed with love by Alexander Payne is made more beautiful as Jack and Miles hook up with “wine pour chick” Stephanie (Sandra Oh) and waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen). Each pair enters into their own dance of intimacy, or lack there of, as Jack proceeds to bed Stephanie, have second thoughts about his impending marriage, and decide what he really wants out of life is to give up everything, his fiance, his disintegrating acting career, and move north to open a winery with Miles. Miles, in the meantime, is trying to figure out how he can express his interest in an equally wary and wounded Maya.

In many ways, Sideways is the more adult of the two movies, grounded in a real world where the shitty things that people do to each other aren’t always about the big issues. Adapted by Rex Pickett and director Payne from Pickett’s novel of the same name, Sideways is less brutal than Closer but no less full of pain and all that much more intimate in the way it deals with the sadness of betrayal.

For this, the fact that it taught me a bit about wine, and for both Giamatti and Madsen’s stunning performances, I’m giving this four out of five popcorns.

National Treasure

Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney attempt to recapture the alchemy that gave them Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl but they’re missing a few elements namely, a believable story, a likeable hero, and any sort of narrative tension.

Nicholas Cage plays Benjamin Franklin Gates, the current generation of the Gates family treasure hunters attempting to find a vast and untold fortunate that was brought to the New World by the Free Masons to keep it out of the hands of the British. Gates’ great, great, great (I got bored counting) grandfather was entrusted with one clue to the secret location of the treasure, a clue that has been passed down from generation to generation.

As the movie opens, Ben Gates has managed to get financing to solve the mystery of the clue, which leads them to another clue. Eventually, someone steals the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives and takes it on a wild ride up the East Coast.

Bored yet? Yeah, me too. The problem with National Treasure is that there is no narrative tension, not even the small frission that most action movies provide where you think the hero just might not succeed, and Nicholas Cage is no Johnny Depp.

It is a testament to the power of Bruckheimer’s vision that I can’t even remember who directed this film but I can remember that he produced it. This is a great movie if you’re 10 years old, any older, and you’ll be bored. Enjoy the one popcorn out of five.