HANK'S PICS
HANK'S RECOMMENDATIONS, 03/16/10:
 UP IN THE AIR – While I didn’t think this film had the gravitas
or innovation to be a contender for the Best Picture Oscar, it was, for
me, the most satisfying movie I’d seen all year. The issues in the film
were subtle - about being a contemporary person, and, in particular, a
contemporary working person, in America today. The movie was
intelligent, clever, humorous, pathetic and tragic, with a few
well-placed surprises punctuating a story that had no special effects,
CGI, or intrusive and needlessly telegraphic music. I enjoyed every
moment of it. And it proved, once and for all, that George Clooney
could act. He plays a “hired gun,” a kind of highly successful
soft-sell “Terminator,” who spends his life flying around the country
firing people on behalf of their corporations. He’s smooth, gentle,
even philosophic in his glib “transitioning” of people whose own lives
are likewise tied up in their own jobs. He offers a lot of wisdom about
moving on and setting new goals; his own goal is to collect three
million frequent flyer miles to cap an endless loop of avoiding
relationships and commitments on the ground. But he doesn’t really need
a life; he’s happily fulfilled living “up in the air.” Until, that is,
he meets Vera Farmiga (nominated for Best Actress), who, in falling for
his charms, tries to convince him there’s a whole “grounded” life he’s
missing out on. This is an unusual story about things all too familiar
in today’s benighted economy. It wears its issues lightly but pointedly
and, above all, entertainingly. There’s nothing at all about this film
that left me up in the air.
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS
– Lately I’ve been watching my share (perhaps more than my share) of
the latest 3-D animation features, cast with the voices of leading
actors, with my three-year-old granddaughter. Horton Hears a Who was my favorite until this weekend, when my viewing horizon was suddenly filled by Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
Even more than the Dr. Seuss books, the book from which “Cloudy…” was
adapted was, perhaps, the very favorite of my two children growing up.
Great liberties, and lengthening, of course, are taken with the fairly
short book, but the film is visually and literarily clever to the end.
A boy inventor attempts to invent a machine that would save his
economically depressed town, replacing its sardine economy with one
based on over-sized fast foods like cheeseburgers. Of course the
machine succeeds too well, turning a blessing into a splendiferous
world-threatening curse. This film is a delight for young kids and
young-thinking adults, whether or not the latter have grandkids or ever
read the book with their own kids. My forecast for either group: good,
fun viewing with a persistent sprinkling of wit.
 THE BEACHES OF AGNES
– Lauded director Agnes Varda uses the clever device of multiple
mirrors at a French beach where she grew up to look back on her
childhood and subsequent life. Wearing props and costumes and visiting
the locations of her seventy year journey, she gives us, also, a slice
of both French and film history - touching on Feminism, the Black
Panthers, films of her husband Jacques Demy, and, on the occasion of
her own first film screening, Jacques Ledoux – the director of the
theater who paid her bill and who later starred in Chris Marker’s La Jetee. Varda’s own films, including The Gleaners and I and Cleo from 5 to 7,
contain many thinly veiled autobiographical scenes, some of which are
interspersed throughout this movie, showing where film and life merge.
One detail from her recapitulative Beaches:
On a visit to her childhood home, now occupied by a middle aged doctor
and his wife, married just two years prior, the doctor takes up most of
the visit showing Varda his extensive toy train collection; “worth two
million Euros,” he says. “Why don’t you sell one train car and buy her
a diamond ring?” asks Varda. “He’s starting to sell them,” states the
wife. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen any of Varda’s other
films. After this one, you will.nces.” Detective: “We meet a
lot of people under unpleasant circumstances.”) But make no mistake,
this is a full blown movie with a suspenseful pace leading to an
intensely spectacular climax that’s decidedly contemporary.
HANK'S RECOMMENDATIONS, 03/09/10:
 COLD SOULS
– In this gentle and often funny parable, an actor finds himself
suffering from a overwhelming and painful surfeit of feeling during
rehearsals for Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Happening to read in the New Yorker
of a facility that extracts and stores souls, he undergoes extraction
in a machine that looks like an MRI. After his soul is removed, he
finds himself relieved of his emotional burden, but, alas, also of his
art. When he returns to reclaim his soul, he finds it’s been stolen -
siphoned through the Russian black market into the body of a shallow
actress looking for the soul of Al Pacino. What follows is an
allegorical espionage tale of an actor desperately seeking to regain
his soul in the land Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. None of the
above is a spoiler (do not, yourself, worry, dear reader), but only
indicates what’s in store, for the film has many surprises, and rests
on the wonderfully precise emoting of Paul Giamatti and the delicate
pace of a quietly compelling story wherein Faust meets Woody Allen.
HACHI: A DOG'S TALE – From Lasse Hallstrom, director of Academy Award-winner My Life as a Dog,
comes this tale about the life of a dog – and its owner. In this
remarkable true-life story, transplanted to contemporary Rhode Island
from its real-life origin in Japan in the 1920’ and ‘30’s, Richard Gere
plays a college professor whose path is crossed by a mistakenly
abandoned puppy in a suburban commuting train station. Taking the puppy
home with full intentions of restoring it to its owner, college prof
and canine bond and what ensues is the tale of their lives together,
and, in particular, that of the dog’s. Anything else I can say about
the plot, leading to its amazing denoument, would indeed be a spoiler,
but suffice to say that this G-rated film successfully (for me) skirted
sentimentality to deliver a story that was a welcome relief from the
overheated Oscar season. Expertly directed (sometimes from the dog’s
point of view) and certainly ripe with feeling, this tale (also
starring Joan Allen and Jason Alexander) offers one dog’s steadfast
loyalty, independence, and prescience as a signpost toward deepening
our humanity.
THE LINEUP – Last week I talked about, for me, the ingrained and endless appeal of film noir
(it’s how I got into film). Here, in this gritty, honest and stylized
movie, written by Stirling Silliphant and directed by Don Siegal, is
what I mean. Following a breakneck opening scene at the San Francisco
waterfront that almost defies description, police efficiently put
together a plot of heroin smuggling that relies on using innocent
tourists as “mules.” Soon detectives are racing against the clock to
capture two couriers, a psychopathic hitman (convincingly played by Eli
Wallach) and his equally sociopathic handler. Tautly pace amid
authentic San Francisco locales, this film is a good example of Noir’s
hard-boiled pulp origins looking toward the clipped dialogue and pseudo
documentary style of Dragnet.
(Example: “Well,” says a cooperating witness, “it’s unfortunate we have
to meet under these unpleasant circumstances.” Detective: “We meet a
lot of people under unpleasant circumstances.”) But make no mistake,
this is a full blown movie with a suspenseful pace leading to an
intensely spectacular climax that’s decidedly contemporary.
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