The Soloist

There's a certain amount of ambivalence produced by the lyrical strains of The Soloist. If you're a fan of director Joe Wright, and who wouldn't be after Atonement, you'll marvel at his sense of visual elan. One sequence that reminds of his touch for visual splendor has a high angle tracking shot looking down at vagrant squalor. We pass over port-o-let after port-o-let each one filled with human debris sleeping in rags or smoking crack. It's not the tracking scene from Weekend but then again it's adventurous in a way not usually seen in American films.
Another brilliant scene has a mentally ill man hearing music and having the sound turn to light as he listens to the L.A. Philharmonic play at structural marvel Disney Hall (designed by Frank Geary). Indeed apart from the awesome visual flourishes the music score matches Wright's daring mise-en-scene by incorporating percussive sounds into the solo, chamber and symphonic instrumentation.
Then there's the rest of the film. At times preachy The Soloist almost grabs you by the lapels with a story that wavers between the world of journalism, the public eye and care of the homeless The Soloist keeps you glued to the screen through the intense performances of Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx as a L.A. Times reporter and a schizophrenic street musician. It's what surround these two that never engages the audience. An ex-wife (and boss) prone to sarcasm, raccoons that appear with the sole intention of messing with Downey, Foxx throwing fits of rage at the very moment he's being proactively helped to reintegrate into society. For every step The Soloist take forward as cinema it takes two steps backward as an entertaining movie.

State of Play

State of Play benefits greatly from people not knowing how newspapers really operate. In other words it would really be skidding to a halt if in the middle of being chased by killers and surreptitiously documenting a conspiracy reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) had to pause to do a spellcheck.
Director Kevin McDonald makes award winning documentaries like One Day in September, the docudrama Touching the Void, and there's also the practically unseen My Enemy's Enemy (Klaus Barbie docu). Because of deft direction his fiction films work well but tend to come apart under scrutiny. Last King of Scotland stitched several characters and incidents into one protagonist yet had no trouble seeming credible. Likewise State of Play (based on a six-hour British miniseries) keeps you so wound up in intrigue you overlook basic newspaper film cliches like the editor (Helen Mirren) complaining about low circulation and harping about what the owners want or cub reporter (Rachel McAdams) being groomed by vet reporter Crowe in the particulars of running a sting operation on an interview subject, and especially Crowe being the college friend of Congressman Collins (Ben Affleck) and yet still being allowed by his superiors to do a story on him. It's called conflict of interest and while that conflict is never questioned on websites and small tabloids it would never pass muster on a big city newspaper like The Washington Globe, State of Play's fictional news source.
State of Play exists as a newspaper film and belongs on the shelf with The Paper, --30-, While the City Sleeps, Between the Lines, His Girl Friday, and of course the top dog All the President's Men. (I'm ignoring second tier newsprint genre films like I Love Trouble, et al.) For instance even though it's set in newspaper land (L.A. Times) and has a reporter as the lead character The Soloist isn't a newspaper film. For the end credit roll McDonald offers a mini-documentary on how the paper is printed: the robotic and electronic conversion of date onto giant paper rolls, the presses running, being cut and then bundled for delivery.
A mysterious murder kicks starts McAffrey into an investigation that suggests high level government and military involvement in a scheme to privatize homeland security. The trail leads to a soldier of fortune company and with a stake of hundreds of billions of dollars the death toll starts to mount. McDonald wavers the action from swank soirees to gritty street operations. The acting supports the story with solid performances in the smallest roles (Viola Davis or Josh Mostel) and the medium roles (Jason Bateman, Harry Lennix, Robin Wright Penn) right up to the main supporting cast (McAdams, Affleck, Mirren). Crowe as usual has no problem slipping into a believable character that holds the movie's spine in check. Locations of Washington, D.C. are cleverly integrated into the story.

Berg as Captain Kirk

Berg as Spock

earth

earth opens on Earth Day and will in fact become a series of sorts with Disney premiering the ecological twin Oceans on Earth Day 2010. The title is spelled lower case, not because it's a poem by e. e. cummings so much as to give it a uniqueness that it deserves.
earth comes from DisneyNature a division of the Mouse House that recalls their effort towards a series of nature films in the 1950s. The first one The Living Desert won the first Academy Award for Best Documentary. (Previous to that a documentary could've won an AA but as a honorary award rather than a specific category; for instance Rashomon won an AA but it wasn't for Best Foreign Film but for Academy Honorary Award.)
You have to make an impact with nature docus because there are so many of them. While I wouldn't put earth on the same level as Microcosmos or Winged Migration (my personal favorite) it certainly ranks with March of the Penguins and flies above the bevy of titles a person can't even remember. The hook in earth revolves around the cycle of life.
There are three animal deaths in earth although they edit right at the instant of the death bite. Technically four if you count a male polar bear who's starving and his attack on a crowd of walruses repulsed, but we don't see him die. The fact is on a studio or union movie set there are rules where any animal handling is done by professionals and no harm ever comes to animals right down to goldfish in a bowl. In the case of an antelope hunted by a hyena in earth the motion is super slow to where it was so hauntingly beautiful I couldn't look away if I wanted. (I don't know if it was shot at around 100 fps or if the effect was a digital slowing down of the film rate.) There's a herd of elephants that are stalked by a pride of lions. The nighttime footage is shot in infrared and instead of the green tinge it's grainy black-and-white. This sequence may be one reason the film may not be suitable for an adult or a child suseptable to nightmares. Kids understand what happens when a pet get hit by a car and the eternal return seen in earth only makes the film compelling and interesting for after movie discussion.
earth is narrated by James Earl Jones in that deep bass Vader/CNN voice. Jones also narrates an IMAX film Africa: The Serengeti (1994, partially funded by the local HMNS). I can never watch any animal documentary without hearing Jones from the film stating: "And on the plains of the Serengeti life is more powerful than death."

DVD - What Doesn't Kill You

What Doesn't Kill You easily falls into a couple of categories. One would be the Boston crime drama genre that includes everything from Mystic River and The Departed to Gone Baby Gone.
What Doesn't Kill You, which comes out on DVD next week from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, was given the pink slip after a brief run in a couple of cities last winter. Along with the feature Nothing But the Truth (street date April 28, also from SPHE) What Doesn't Kill You fell the victim to its production entity Yari Company filing bankruptcy. Both of these films contain excellent performances, gripping narratives and were denied a worthy theatrical run due to circumstances beyond their control.
WDKY follows two brothers, Brian (Mark Ruffalo) and Paulie (Ethan Hawke), who grow up surrounded by petty crime in South Boston. After some character establishing scenes where they're played by younger actors as kids we witness how their adult lives are still mired in illicit behavior. Many scenes play with Boston crime landmarks we've come to recognize like the local bar where the mob boss holds court or the domestic agony Brian's wife (Amanda Peet) must go through when he doesn't come home at night.
The film pits the brothers against one another, not in a battle sense, but in the manner in which they each embrace their felonious background. It's obvious that Paulie's the tiger who will never lose his stripes as he continues embezzling local merchants and hijacking truckloads of cigarettes. Brian seems made of sterner stuff so it's a surprise when he becomes addicted to crack, a habit that threatens to tear apart his family. The film traces the effect of crime on their families and personal lives along with their eventual redemption.
Most surprising was the director's commentary (writer/director Brian Goodman and co-writer Donnie Wahlberg) where we find out that the tale is Goodman's thinly disguised autobiography.

Tokyo!

Tokyo! offer an omnibus of multiple independent-minded foreign directors delivering striking views of life in Tokyo. Michel Gondry (Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) will be the most familiar with domestic auds but helmers Leos Carax (Lovers on the Bridge) and Bong Joon-ho (The Host, how can you not like a guy named Bong?) provide the more vivid segments. Even though none of the directors are Japanese most of the roles are performed by Japanese thesps and the architecture of Tokyo combines to give the various tales a kind of unity.
Gondry's piece comes first and posits that a plague of endless rain has turned people part-fish. Through a surreal bit of cinematic indulgence we see a woman become a piece of furniture first by showing quick shots of her wooden hand and then watching her walk into a bus stop naked only for the camera to turn the corner and reveal a wooden chair.
Bong's story comes last and deals with a lonely man who has not had eye contact with another human in over ten years. The mise-en-scene comes alive as Bong stages a very believable earthquake by merely shaking the camera, showing crouching people in medium close-ups and slowly panning down a street full of people who are too afraid to move.
The Carax tale involves a strange person who lives underneath Tokyo in the sewer system. Whenever he pops onto the street he randomly kills people, either with grenades he found in his underground lair or, frankly, by scaring them to death with his horrific countenance. Turns out this misfit speaks a language only spoken by two other people on Earth, one of whom is a French lawyer who comes to the man's defense. Their common language is made up of whistles, gibberish and slapping one's face.
The payoff to Tokyo! exists in a realm of existential coolness. There's a little food for though, but for the most part we're just swallowing a midnight snack.