Movies: September 2007 Archives

Into the Wild, Sean Penn's sprawling, stumbling, epic biopic adapted from Jon Krakauer's best-selling book, borrows heavily from the kind of American film that defined the idea of the road movie. It features zooms, split screens, jump cuts, and a song score by a growling Eddie Vedder that wouldn't feel at all out of place on 70s radio. (With backing vocals by Corin Tucker, he revives "Hard Sun," a 1989 anthem by Indio, a band too obscure to have even a Wikipedia entry or Allmusic biography, to great effect.) Cinematographer Eric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries, Clean, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) favors long lenses here, the kind that can isolate one subject twixt foreground and background and then, dramatically changing their plane of focus, seek out another. They emphasizes the distances involved in the open spaces where much of the film takes place, and their voyeuristic qualities echo the book's theme of observation across a temporal distance. Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) was found dead in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. It was Krakauer's job to figure out how an upper-middle-class kid ended up there; it's Penn's to imagine what the journey might have looked like.

Low-budget horror auteur Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) has a truly clever set-up for his latest shiverfest. Climate change is making life difficult for a group of blue-collar types (think Alien and especially The Thing) working to get oil out of the Alaskan wilderness by melting the ice roads and thawing the frozen tundra, making both unsafe for trucks. As the film progresses, the crew is slowly driven insane, either by "sour gas" being released out of the softening ground, or by some kind of vengeful earth-spirit that's been stirred up by exploitation of the area's natural resources. It's a global-warming horror movie.

If you're a filmmaker planning to juice up an FBI thriller by setting it in the contemporary Middle East and using visceral, highly charged images of suicide bombings and violent religious fundamentalism to drive the story, you'd best be on top of your game, brother. Director Peter Berg says his film about the bloody aftermath of several particularly lethal terror attacks in Saudi Arabia was inspired in part by a failed Saudi police investigation following a bombing near the Khobar Tower apartments in Riyadh. There is an interesting political story to be told here -- and, to be fair, the graphic précis of recent events in the oil-rich Saudi Kingdom that opens the film, covering everything from the discovery of oil in the 1930s to the 2001 attacks by al Qaeda under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden, is almost scarily effective -- but the screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan is little more than a blueprint for a spin-off TV series: C.S.I. Saudi Arabia.

The western isn't dead, exactly, but recent efforts in the genre have been self-conscious, driven either by an urge toward revisionism or an effort to recapture the epic sweep of the work of masters like John Ford or, for another generation, Sergio Leone. 3:10 to Yuma is refreshing because it doesn't seem to have a nostalgic agenda. It's an unflashy potboiler featuring stagecoaches and six-shooters, a wagonload of stolen gold, and a full complement of desperate men on both sides of the law. James Mangold is best known these days for directing Joachim Phoenix in Walk the Line, but 3:10 to Yuma has more in common with his earlier film Cop Land, which cast Sylvester Stallone as one good cop standing up to a whole bunch of bad ones. Christian Bale stars as Dan Evans, a destitute rancher who agrees to escort notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to a prison train in exchange for a desperately needed cash bounty. Hardly a shot-for-shot remake of the Glenn Ford original, the new movie spends more time on the journey and less at the destination. It's gritty and exciting, although the last action scene is outlandishly staged and Mangold can't quite sell the dynamic that develops between the two leads. You can see Crowe struggling throughout to summon the eccentricity that would make his character more credible, and while Bale has the easier job it's his smoldering, unwavering focus, played against Crowe's pointed taunts and wisecracks, that makes 3:10 a pleasure to watch. B

This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.

It wasn't until the end credits of Rob Zombie's head-banging Halloween remake that I had the chance to chuckle. Buried in that pile of scrolling text was a credit for an Alice Cooper song that I missed during the actual movie: "Only Women Bleed." Oh, indeed. I'd consider it a droll joke, bordering on self-deprecation, if only I felt confident that Zombie's film had the presence of mind for reflexivity, or even a sense of humor. I'm still not sure what to think of Zombie's (ironic? who can tell?) use of cheeseball power ballad "Love Hurts" to score a sad montage earlier in the film -- if it's meant to be hilarious, it's the only thing that is.

Here we have another movie in which Hollywood filmmakers celebrate the virtue of characters who reject the duplicity and perversity of California in favor of a quiet life in the sticks. In this case "the sticks" is Idaho, where Georgia (Jane Fonda) has agreed to take care of her problem granddaughter, Rachel (Lindsay Lohan), for a few months while mom Lilly (Felicity Huffman) frolics with stepdad Arnold (Cary Elwes) back in San Francisco. The film's first section is breezily entertaining, showing the hard-nosed Georgia's efforts to tame Rachel, who dresses Rodeo Drive for a walk down Main Street before putting the moves on the Mormon locals. As the subject matter becomes darker, director Garry Marshall keeps directing a comedy, with unbalanced, emotionally disconnected results. It all leads toward twin mother-daughter reconciliations, but as the storyline gets more involved, the situations become more contrived. Did screenwriter Mark Andrus really have to lean on that clichéd (and borderline sexist) stereotype of blaming a woman's promiscuous behavior on sexual abuse? And couldn't he have written a single slice-of-life scene that depicted the straight-edge religious population as something more than local yokels? The results feel phony, but Lohan is great fun to watch. C+

This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.