Monthly Archives: June 2012

Somewhere inside the full-tilt lovesick blur that is Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz is the kernel of a wildly uninteresting story. Woman in cozy relationship sans fireworks becomes attracted to new fella, with whom she has fireworks galore, but a dubious future. What to do: stay with husband or fly off with fling? Play the good wife or bad mistress? There’s a spinning galaxy of clichés for writer/director Polley to choose from here, but somehow she skips past them (well, almost all) and delivers a shimmering and raw ode to the ferocity of desire and the heartbreak that so often follows it…

Take This Waltz opened today in limited release. It’s only Polley’s second film as director but one that makes you hope for more, and soon. My full review is at Short Ends & Leader.

With a sterling roll call of British Isles vocal talent and some of the most lush and limpid animation to be found on screens this year, Pixar’s Brave is a feast for the eyes and ears, if not always the mind. Aimed more squarely at the younger set than many of their more adventurous fantasy outings like Wall-E, it’s a just-clever-enough take on an age-old and very classically Disney setup about a child and parent’s estrangement and rapprochement…

Brave is playing now in 2D and 3D and many other magical formats around the country. My full review is at Film Journal International.

More karaoke playlist than anything else, Rock of Ages offers glimpses of the casting genius that characterized Adam Shankman’s Hairspray. But the charismatic pros assembled here seem repeatedly constrained rather than unleashed. Russell Brand and Alec Baldwin are the picture of bewigged ludicrousness as Lonny and Dennis, who run the Bourbon Room, a Sunset Strip den of iniquity that’s more CBGBs than Whisky-a-Go-Go and has attracted the ire of the mayor’s bluestocking wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Brand and Baldwin vamp in their “rock and roll” togs like it’s all good fun while she snarls her way through her scenes, a villain in a fresh-pressed Talbots pantsuit… 

Rock of Ages is failing to rock in theaters all across America right now. My full review is at PopMatters.

If you feel confused at some point during The Intouchables, that may well be because you have the sensation of being in the wrong film. Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s film is ostensibly about a wealthy white Parisian quadriplegic being nursed by an untrained black man from the projects. This outline draws on some rather egregious race clichés, as well as conventions recalling a sports movie, in which the scrappy underdogs with more heart than skill band together to show up that team from the rich school. While this movie offers no sports, no big game, and very little structure at all, it still leaves the impression of the formula, in protagonists who repeatedly shock those who underestimate them and in tricky plot passages handled by the rousing musical montage. That it doesn’t all end in a tie-breaking three-point shot as the clock buzzes 00:00 makes for a potent disconnect… 

The Intouchables is playing in many cities now, expanding around the country later, likely to much acclaim. My full review is at PopMatters.

The thesis of Ami Horowitz and Matthew Groff’s attack documentary is sublimely simple: The United Nations is an incompetent shell of an organization barely able to manage its own personnel, much less live up to its mandate of protecting human rights and securing peace. It’s a shame that the filmmakers’ hyperactive style rushes viewers through a hasty slideshow of horrifying grievances instead of dwelling in any depth on more than a couple of them. It’s a double shame that Horowitz—who serves as the film’s nervy host/provocateur—gets in the way more often than not by trying to jam his half-Michael Moore, half-Sacha Baron Cohen persona into a film that would have been many times more powerful without it…

U.N. Me is playing now in way limited release. You can read my full review at Film Journal International.