You cannot get much bleaker than the post-apocalyptic winter of The Road, directed with an eye for barren landscapes and lost hope by John Hillcoat. His previous film The Proposition both established Hillcoat's name as a director to watch and also set the bar much to high for the gloomy The Road to match. A man (Viggo Mortensen) embarks with his boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) across the always overcast and mostly rainy desolation to an unspecified Coast. The disaster similarly never reveals its origins. Various incidents occur where man and boy must avoid roving marauders, discover hidden caches of food or confront other haggard denizens of the road. Occasional flashbacks show the breakup of the man's marriage as the woman (Charlize Theron) wanders off to commit suicide. Narratively the flashback's timeline is not clear but all those events must have taken place years ago, which makes man and boy's survival even more remarkable. The Road posits that the new garden of eden will contain no trees, snakes, apples or life but that Adam and Eve will merely persist. The Road will not create waves due to its dour atmosphere but more serious viewers, plus fans of the book on which it's based, will soak up its story with the perspective it demands. Particular locations at places like Mount St. Helens give the film the unique sense its vision requires.
All at once Fantastic Mr. Fox washes over the viewer like an instant classic of its kind. Both as animated adult fare and as a quirky Wes Anderson film FMF leaves audiences satisfied and beaming. Using a stop motion style that harkens to pre-computer assisted filmmaking (although there are no doubt some nice invisible digital touch ups) Anderson creates a unique world populated mainly by foxes and moles, a few bunnies, with a couple of bad humans and one nasty rat. The look of the film is decidedly low tech but high concept. There are more orange sunset hues in this film than any movie since Coppola's 1983 The Outsiders. Based on a book by Roald Dahl, FMF feels concern for the nature of the animals relationship and gazes deep into marital relations as well as parent child rearing. There are typical Anderson father-son conflicts. The lead protagonists makes a living as a chicken thief but when his wife balks he gets in journalism, specifically penning a newspaper column which Mr. Fox thinks nobody reads. Anderson was originally paired with Henry Selick who himself left FMF to make the year's other animated wonder Coraline. Vocal stylings were recorded in a forest or other inspirational locales rather than a studio per press notes. An exceptional cast includes George Clooney and Meryl Streep as the titular fox and his wife, but smaller turns from an array of talent (Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Anderson's bother Eric, Michael Gambon, Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson) also delight at every hopscotch step. Fantastic Mr. Fox is the kind of film that keeps the viewer enthralled without a moment's respite. FMF veers more into grown-up territory due to the way he handles mortality. There's a scene midway through where Fox ends the life of a Rat. We see red thread as blood on the rat's neck and Fox and Rat have a last conversation. The moment reminded me of the death scene between Brando and Nicholson in Missouri Breaks. Send the little sprites to see Planet 51 or some Disney confection and savor Fantastic Mr. Fox for its wealth of sophisticated entertainment.
Ninja Assassin almost had me going. The first part is pretty cool and the effects and gore are superlative. However by the third act the film has morphed into a routine actioner with guns versus martial arts. Frankly, I expect a little better from James McTeigue the director of one of my favorite films of the decade V For Vendetta. A ninja sect thousands of years old will accept a mission for 100 pounds of gold. With gold currently worth, say, $1169 an ounce that would make a pound of gold worth $18, 704. Multiply that by 100 and a contemporary ninja clan can rake in the dough. Ninja Assassin starts out interestingly enough with a Europol police division investigating a ninja connection to political killings. The genre conventions are used with a sense of skill, only once the film has painted itself into a corner there's nowhere to go but bullets and even more convention. There are some great set pieces like the mountaintop monastery where kidnapped orphans train for the ninjahood and the climatic ending takes place. Crunk bloody effects effects include ninja stars used to sever limbs and decapitate heads. Ninja Assassins is a slick film with a pro look but the movie will quickly reside along other nominal ninja titles and overall will never be counted in the Wachowski/McTeigue pantheon.
The Messenger centers on two soldiers whose daily mission consists of notifying wives and parents of their son's death in combat. While some may want to instantly group the film together with other films tangentially related to Iraq or the Gulf conflict, The Messenger has more in common with films that take on grief and achieve the emotional depth required to tell the story without condescension. "I wanted the moments to be honest as possible," writer/director Oren Moverman tells Free Press Houston in a phone interview. "We're alive thinking about people we've lost." Moverman explains how he didn't hide the theme of war yet the film doesn't revolve around that issue so much as the human contact aspect involved in daily military life. The Messenger stars Ben Foster as Staff Sergeant Montgomery with Woody Harrelson as his superior Captain Stone. Their relation mimics buddy movie relationships. They begrudgingly get along at first, even argue a bit but by the time they hit their stride they're hanging out together while crashing the wedding reception of Montgomery's former girlfriend. "I originally read Woody for a much smaller role, the Colonel at the beginning who gives Foster his assignment. But he wanted to be Captain Stone." Harrelson's turn in The Messenger reveals his "remarkable range." Even more impressive when you compare Harrelson's stern and serious soldier next to his broadly comic roles in recent films like 2012 or Zombieland. Foster matches Harrelson scene for scene, also exploring dark places of the heart without the histrionics that marked some of his more wide-eyed roles, such as 3:10 to Yuma. Samantha Morton plays a widow who Foster and Harrelson notify only for Foster to break their code of not getting personal with the NOK (next of kin). Moverman knew Morton from working on the screenplay of Jesus' Son. Other scripts Moverman worked on include I'm Not There. Originally it was conceived by Moverman and Todd Haynes as a stage version. " A way to create a Dylan experience." But another play fulfilled that function when Twyla Tharp did The Times They Are a Changin'. Still the story Moverman had come up with where Dylan's portrayed by different actors at different stages in his career was too good to pass up with the end result the tour de force film directed by Haynes. The Messenger is Moverman's directorial debut although he worked on the script under the aegis of three previous directors (Sydney Pollack, Ben Affleck and Roger Michell). The film moves from static sequences for scenes like Montgomery at home in his apartment to hand held shots when the duo are notifying relatives of the loss of their loved ones. I had read that Moverman didn't allow the actors to meet beforehand. "It's true," he replies. "I would prepare them separately with no rehearsal. They would meet for the first time when we shot the scenes. Then when we shot in one-take with no interruptions." There are actually several times in The Messenger when people are notified and to the film's credit each confrontation maintains its sincerity even as Montgomery and Stone are wading through the swamp of their own relation.
You know the trademark John Woo camera set-up where the guy shooting his gun empties the chamber and removes the clip. We see the clip falling out the bottom of the gun in slow motion from a low angle. For the massively entertaining Red Cliff Woo has another way of rearming. This 3rd century story of a civil war that ended the Hun Dynasty contains some of the most exciting battle sequences ever filmed. Woo uses a signature shot where we see a warrior impale another soldier with a spear, then said warrior gallops by, pulls the spear out of the soldier's back and proceeds to use it again as a weapon. Woo has spent years on this project and Red Cliff (Chi bi) was released as two films in Asia while the film playing domestically is a combined version lasting roughly two-and-a-half hours (or ten minutes less than 2012). Anyone familiar with Chinese history will recognize this story of the three kingdoms and the battle of Red Cliff, but if you're not familiar with the story you'll never forget it after seeing this amazing movie. Woo pulls out all the stops for action sequences. Whether we're witnessing a massive naval battle, or land warfare involving formations taken from nature (the turtle, the goose) we're drawn to the screen like glue. Red Cliff has such a compelling sense of its own story that it easily rates among the best action films of its kind, films like Seven Samurai or Das Boot. One sequence literally sends you flying over first the water and then the land in a single lengthy take seen from the point of view of a dove. The bird it turns out has a secret message attached to its limb and Woo reveals the person who retrieves the fowl as a spy. Woo spends time delineating ancient instruments of weather (barometer) or music (zither) and how they relate to the multitude of characters. Be they warlords, ex-pirates or generals, or their women, we have a sense of their personality through the way they practice art as well as their ability for strategic thinking. At one point the protracted strife inflicts casualties using germ warfare. That's in addition to a psychological standoff over a femme between two particular leaders. The large cast includes Tony Leung, familiar to American audiences for roles in everything from Hard Boiled to In the Mood For Love. Red Cliff is an amazing film experience that will no doubt be overshadowed by films spending more and playing wider. Red Cliff is currently unwinding exclusively at the Angelika.
