We had a movie binge weekend. In addition to watching Doctor Who (about which more later) and a Graham Norton rerun we saw:
- True Grit. I’ve never seen the original, not being a huge John Wayne fan. It’s hard to imagine the Duke being anywhere near half as gritty, grungy and gruff as Jeff Bridges was in this version. I’m sure everyone knows the story: a precocious young girl hires Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn a besotted US Marshal to track down the man who “killed my pa” and then escaped into Indian territory (Oklahoma), beyond the reach of regular law enforcement. The killer, Tom Chaney, is played by Josh Brolin as sort of an amiable simpleton when we finally meet him. Matt Damon has a minor role a Texas Ranger who is after the same man for killing a judge in his home state, a role played by Glen Campbell in the original. The girl doesn’t want Chaney taken back to Texas, even if he would be executed there. She wants to see justice doled out to him in person. A fine western with some good shootouts and a snake. I absolutely did not recognize Barry Pepper as Lucky Ned.
- Bitter/Sweet. From Josh Brolin we moved on to James Brolin, who owns a huge coffee business located in Seattle. He’s not the star of the movie, though he plays an important part at the end. He dispatches one of his minions, Brian Chandler, whose fiancée is pressuring him to help plan their $250,000 wedding, to Thailand to inspect a remote village’s coffee plantation for possible purchase of their product. The village is suffering financially because their regular buyer has been dropping the price every year. When they find out about the American buyer, they pull out all the stops to convince him to recommend their product to his boss. He is escorted by a rowdy Austrian ex-pat and his girlfriend, who is best friends with a former village girl who now works in Bangkok for a big PR firm. Her parents beg her to come back to the village to help win Chandler over. Romance ensues. It’s a cute movie, harmless romance. The writer pushes a little too hard to have the smitten couple have the same thoughts at the same time, one in Thai the other in English, but we enjoyed it. The Austrian, Werner, makes for good comic relief.
- Super 8. I’ve been dying to see this one ever since the first teaser trailer showed something pounding to get out of a derailed train car. This is Stand By Me meets E.T. and Close Encounters. A bunch of kids are out at midnight in a small Ohio town helping one of their friends make a movie to enter into a film festival when a military train derails mere feet from where they’re filming. They capture something on film, though that plays a less important part in the movie than you might expect. It begins with a very effective scene of a factory working changing the sign that says how many days it’s been since the last accident from 700-something to 1. The accident victim is Joe Lamb’s mother. His father is a town cop. Their individual griefs over this loss is the heart of the movie. His dad wants to send him off to basketball camp so he doesn’t have to look after him, and Joe needs to stay in town to help with the movie, especially since Alice (Elle Fanning) has joined the production. Fanning is amazing in this movie. When her character starts to act, the boys all stand around in stunned amazement, and her real-life performance is equally as impressive. I love the scene where one of the boys is tasked with talking on a pay phone to create background action and he just stands there with his mouth open staring at Alice when she acts. The obligatory bad military cover-up takes place, and there are some great special effects, but it’s all about these kids and the way they operate under the adult radar. They’re always talking at cross purposes, with three or four conversations going on among them simultaneously. One kid is a pyro who loves to blow things up. The director is mister bossy, the overweight kid who hasn’t yet “leaned out.” Joe is cool and calm, though not in any way a leader at first. Fun, fun, fun.
- Midnight in Paris. Let me preface this by saying I’m not a Woody Allen fan. I find most of his films boring, whiny and self-indulgent. One of the best things about the new film is that Allen isn’t in it. Except he is, in the form of Owen Wilson, who plays the neurotic, diffident character. He’s in Paris on vacation with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her snooty parents. How he ever got hooked up with this bunch defies explanation. It’s obvious to viewers from the first scene that they aren’t suited to each other. He is Gil Pender, a very successful screenwriter who wants to write a novel and believes he will find inspiration in Paris. His protagonist runs a “nostalgia shop,” and Gil believes that Paris in the 1920s would be the ideal place and time to live. Then he gets transported there each night at the stroke of midnight and gets to hang out with Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Dali, T.S. Eliot and many others, who give him advice and help him find his novel. He also meets Picasso’s latest flame, Adriana, who longs for her own golden era in the late 1880s, with Lautrec and others of that era, who in turn think their period is boring and long for the Renaissance. Everyone, it seems, finds their own era boring and imagine that another age must have been better. It’s a charming film and Owen Wilson is very good as the romantic young man who is totally in love with Paris, and it’s great to see all the old artists come to life, played by people like Kathy Bates, Corey Stall (Law & Order: Los Angeles) and Adrian Brody.
- Love and Other Drugs. We expected a light comedy to finish off our weekend but this one actually has some teeth. The fact that Anne Hathaway’s character has a degenerative disease is totally absent from the promotional material and that’s really what the film is all about: how she pushes people away from her so they won’t feel obliged to stick around when she gets worse and how Jake Gyllenhaal’s roguish character is taken by her. I could have done without his younger brother’s character, played by Josh Gad, altogether. He was a reject from the Hangover movies and didn’t fit the tone of this film. Lots of Viagra humor later in the film, and some useful supporting bits by Oliver Platt and Hank Azaria, but this is totally Gyllenhaal and Hatheway’s film and they deliver.
