Reviews

Actor Brad Sullivan's turn in Prince of Tides as the despicable father Henry Wingo (seen only in flashbacks) may have been brief but it is superb and ... critical. Nick Nolte's and Melinda Dillon's brother and sister characters Tom and Savannah Wingo were traumatized by their abusive dad, both are also superb as is Barbra Streisand's therapist character Susan Lowenstein. The late Brad Sullivan was their equal in playing a role that needed to generate believable disgust. Perhaps that's why he is seldom mentioned in reviews here and elsewhere. The cinema photography, editing and James Newton Howard's score emotionally amplifies the emotions, montages and quiet moments of this finely directed Hollywood movie.

The final episode of Portlandia is also one of its best as it courses along with municipal government, Oregon's flavor of "Minnesota Nice," self-involved emotional control freaks, marathon runners, fads, condo-based urban renewal and the digital gadget phase of American civilization. Writers Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein, Jonathan Krisel, Karey Dornetto, Megan Neuringer, Phoebe Robinson, Graham Wagner and the post-production editors have shaped this last one with love, vinegar and fresh, unexpected surprises. It is clear they know Portland. But we also know that Portland represents a brunch buffet of coast-to-coast, communities populated by folks with a lot of free time. Kyle MacLachlan, Cherry Jones, Tessa Thompson and Dolly Wells are superb in their featured supporting roles among a very strong cast directed by top shelf director Bill Benz. Armisen and Brownstein have delivered the most creative "sitcom"(?) series since, oh say, "I Married Joan."

I recently sceened Five Flights Up last night on HBO Now. Direcot Richard Loncraine and screen writer Charlie Peters have crafted a humorous, occasionally satirical, sly and fun procedural of an older married couple's attempt to sell their apartment home in this decade's over-heated real estate New York market. It is based on a book by Jill Ciment. Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman are damn believable ... their acting chops are perfect; we see a loving, smart, mixed race couple who have been around the block some, know people in their neighborhood by their first names and been up and down their building's stairs thousands of times. Korey Jackson and Claire van der Boom, in nicely placed and crafted flashbacks, are the younger versions of Freemon's Alex and Keaton's Ruth. Cynthia Nixon plays their Realtor. As a former New Yorker, I know these crazed open house directors, orchestraters and self-appointed counselors. When the bidding for an average flat with "wonderful light" begins around $800 K, real life gets absurd. Nixon is great. So to are all extras. Watching Five Flights Up was like being at home with good friends as well as the human carnival of upward bound New Yorkers (from the City and other parts of our sorry world) who have enough green to play the expensive game of claiming a space. Its not easy for the very grounded Alex (an artist) and the very grounded Ruth to play in the real estate madness. I like this film a lot.

I worked in New York television, just outside the professional circle loosely defined by Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and the City's great newspapers and journalists of the 1980s. I did move through the worlds they each covered and read their columns. Like most New Yorkers, I appreciated their service to humankind. "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists" is a top shelf production that weaves archival images, TV appearances and recent interviews and some of Jimmy's and Pete's best copy. The film's pulse and temperature matches its two different journalists, their respective sets of colleagues, and the poetry of their reporting and living style. We hear from Breslin's living sons; his surviving second wife and from Hamill's wife, co-workers and media pundits. Much of this is emotionally moving and fact-based and worth a watch - two or three times.

I've never seen a movie propelled by break dancing until this afternoon. I saw it in a large suburban mall multiplex anchored in the corn belt way west of the Hudson River and 5 miles from the closest Fred Astaire Dance School. Wow! Step Up 3D (3D version) is visually kinetic, great fun and spirited as it follows an iconic, time-tested and, to some, tired formulaic story.

Like Astaire's song and dance movies from the 1930's through the 1950's, one knows that everything will turn out well before the end credits but in Astaire's movies and this Jon Chu film, its really about traveling - about the trip not the destination - as the film un spools scenes with very appealing actors, spectacular dancing, savvy camera work, smart editing and a corny script. But its cathartic corn, at least to those of us who wouldn't ordinarily see a street dance flick. When co-leads Alyson Stoner and Adam Savani's dweeb characters relate to one another as NYU frosh, they are believable even in the silliness of the plot structure. So too with the characters played by other co-leads Rick Malambi and Sharni Vinson.

The 3D treatment provides Step Up 3D with distorted visual energy and I dug it, I dug it a lot over and over again. Even as the spectacular end credits seem to be winding down, Chu gives us a single guy on a small part of a wide screen with lots of hand choreography. The camera slowly trucks towards him as the credits scroll up on the right side. His hand and head moves and the 3D camera work are mesmerizing in a "less is more" kind of way.

I saw this movie on a perfectly beautiful Sunday afternoon because film reviewers Michael Phillips and A.0. Scott told viewers to see it on what is the very last edition of syndicated television's "At the Movies". Thumbs up to you boys, and to Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Richard Roeper and the guest critics. Your always engaging show, too, was about the journey.

Ana's Playground was screened earlier tonight at the Minneapolis Film Festival with an array of wonderful short films. Ana's Playground stunned the sold out auditorium. Writer/Director Eric D. Howell has created and crafted a riveting story about children and war. Ana's Playground looks right, sounds right and plays shockingly right in its urban war zone setting - one of those pockets of rubble, shredded flesh and monochromatic color that exist in Gaza, Baghdad, Rwanda, Bosnia, Dresden and Detroit in the mid-1960's. Only 16 minutes long, the film succeeds at the highest levels of the short story form by making its point dramatically, believably and quickly. It does so while generating untempered tension. I rank it with "Grave of the Fireflies" (Japan), "The Road" (U.S.) and "Turtles Can Fly" (Iran/Iraq) in its honest portrayal of a child's point of view regarding the terrible worlds that grown-ups have had no-business foisting on them.

Given the hyped-up nominees for the best motion pictures released in 2009, "The Road" demonstrates the need for an award category that is shielded from the bullying of millions of vote promoting dollars for mainstream films.

"The Road" IS the best of last year's lot and few will have seen it. This filmic essay of a hope-driven journey of a father and son through a horrific, dying world cuts very close to the fiber of real-life, survival ordeals in Darfur, Rwanda, the Balkans, Katrina/New Orleans, Indonesia, Gaza and Haiti. For millions now dead, there was horror and surely hope, but no way out. That is the sobering, monochromatic dilemma for the man and boy in "The Road" - a theme that does not sell tickets and in the real world is trivialized through the filters of CNN and celebrity reportage and reaction.

The writing, directing, production and sound design, casting, acting, editing, music, costuming, makeup artistry, on-location staging, lighting, CG effects and cinema photography exhibit the highest level of collaborative, book-inspired, auteur-directed achievement. The gift is a realistic, relentlessly suspenseful, cathartic and profound allegory; a knowing alert that this IS what happens when society is broken.

The black and white photography, camera angles and editing of Battle Circus are top rate adding verisimilitude to an unusual story about medics during the Korean War.

The dialog between Bogie and June is hard-boiled and cheesy and quite wonderful. It is entertaining to see a big-hearted 1950's female character (Allyson) deflecting an in-your-face, unapologetic wolf (Bogart) without need of feminist presumption, sexual harassment law and political correctness cops.

With their distinct, defining and appealing faces and voices, both leads make the film's romance seem some what logical within the logic of 1950's Hollywood. It sure is fun watching them.

And so too is a terrific Keenan Wynn and the mechanics and team work required to set up MASH units in a war zone. In the film, the tented hospitals were set up, taken down and hauled off and set up again by men and women who were clearly experienced in the service.

The surgery tents and medical sequences in Battle Circus are sanitized compared to what one sees on television these days and what was depicted in the TV series M.A.S.H! Back then, the entertainment world respected the privacy of someone's innards particularly when their guts were spilling out of a body ripped by shrapnel.

I saw this film for the first time on Turner Classic Movies tonight

A comedy set in England with this quartet of leads - Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak, Fred Astaire, Lionel Jeffries - a London cab full of great character actors, crisp and fully-toned black and white photography and a script from Larry Gelbert and Blake Edwards could not have been more pleasant. Gershwin's "A Foggy Day in London Town," washed it in additional wonderfulness. The sequences near the end of the film at a seaside resort in Penzance is wickedly choreographed with actors, camera moves and scoring for big laughs to a live band shell performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty. Everything is spot on, silly to smart.

Approximately nine years after seeing The Sixth Sense, I recently viewed it at home via DVD and a high-resolution, wide-angle monitor. I turned the chroma off to watch it in black and white. I've never forgotten the poignant twist at the film's conclusion, but The Sixth Sense remained frightening and revealed itself to be far richer, emotional and satisfying than I had remembered.

The quiet nuance, the performances, the directing, the photography, the timing, the editing, the looming fear and the humanity of the story took my breath away. Wow! This is a horror movie that compels one to get it right while alive and to listen closely to those who may or may not be in touch with the pain of souls who may or may not be.

"Miracle at St. Anna" is a very moving film. I was thoroughly engaged by the branches of the story, the fifth business, the time given to build the story, the direction, the acting and the photography. I have encountered in real life most of the stereotypes with which Spike Lee still finds resonance. For those of us who have had to suffer from these kinds of people, they still have the kind of validity that the scar left by a molten branding iron has. This is a movie, a cinematic yarn, but I found it poignant and smart and even though it flies with angelic, Christian mysticism, it is anchored to folks like myself - to that nobody who sells stamps at the post office; to that fellow or gal you forget about the second you walk away as if they'd born no pain or have no significance and texture.

If you are a frequent movie goer or a sophisticated student of film, don't go to "Mircacle of St. Anna." Instead, trust the jaded and sour comments here posted for this film and buy a ticket for "Pineapple Express."

"Hennesey" kept my teen-aged interests high week after week because of the chemistry of all of the elements described so fondly by other posters. I doubt that an analysis of IMDb- listed TV series would turn up another with as many positive and well thought out comments.

Well-turned programs like "Hennesey" entertain because they invite viewers to join the compelling mind-set of the creative team that put the program together. With the "Hennesey" package, that participation (even for we passive couch potatoes) was never boring and always intriguing. Similarly, about a decade later, the short-lived James Garner revisionist western series "Nichols" accomplished the same in a hardscrable southwest during the World War I era.

Although both series are stylistically different, each was blessed with a team of writers, producers and actors who told themselves: "We CAN do it this way" and "Millions WILL love it." Luckily, for a while, enough network suits agreed. And back then each series succeeded without injections of robotic laff tracks, gratuitous sex, violence and cadavers and, with all due respect, to Larry David, profanity.

As a kid, I predicted that the adult world would be filled with the kinds of characters populating "Hennesey," "The Tonight Show With "Jack Paar" and "Omnibus." My high school steady looked not unlike Abby Dalton but none of my dentists over the past half century could match the one on "Hennesey" invented by Mr. Komack.

The acting in The Visitor is invisible and full of quiet poignancy. Director Thomas McCarthy and his cast have provided us with real characters, a realistic, seldom told kind of story and scores of small moments that say more than words or special effects or an overloaded soundtrack ever could.

Collectively, the small moments in "The Visitor" are nearly as important as the dialog; both support one another in building an emotionally satisfying film. My favorites involve a dismissed teacher, a Queens coffee shop, a subway platform, a monochromatic Queens intersection, New York sidewalk vendors, an apartment building's stairway and the on-camera, think time that the director and editor have permitted the cast. This small masterpiece's larger scenes are perceptive and respectively exciting, profound and joyous. The film's characters - Arab Americans, African immigrants, a buttoned-down academic and an attorney are not formed from the cultural stereotypes that have dominated post 911 America and which Hollywood exploits. This may be the best film of the year.

This wonderful movie is very much worth a full viewing every year. Like the other Holiday Season classic from the 1980's "A Christmas Story" (based on humorist Jean Shepherd's memoirs), "Planes Trains and Automobiles" captures the essence of the monochromatic Midwest winter with the snow, the slush, the gray landscapes and the people alternately maddening, sad, lonely, guarded and warm and fuzzy.

The comedy flows naturally from the aches of both Steve Martin's and John Candy's characters. We know these kinds of decent but unremarkable seeming guys, but we don't know why they are like they are. Thanks to the hapless duo's misadventure, which caused me some masculine tears and gut aching laughs, I found out. Martin and Candy and Hughes reportedly labored mightly on this film -- it is superb craftsmanship.

"The Happening" is an enjoyable "B" movie with fine performances by Mark Wallberg, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley, Frank Collison and others counterpointed by performances that could be homages to the wooden and over-ripe acting in the "B" movies of yesteryear. This adds to the interest and fun of the film.

There are no real smart characters - no one to hang onto as a role model or fantasy figure - in "The Happening." Like the original "Night of the Living Dead," "The Happening" benefits (in this instance intentionally) from scenes that seem poorly acted or seem poorly directed. For example a television newscast, the huddle of train conductors in the small town and the alarmed soldier on a country road can be interpreted as over-ripe but do add to the enjoyment of the film if one is aware of what's afoot.

Wallberg's big scene in which he tries to think of the right course of action to take and direction to run is not unlike how an average person like myself would react in the face of fast approaching, horrifying death with no apparent way out.

I appreciated one of the story's premises that holds that safety is not always to be found in joining larger groups, especially for hermits.

"The Happening" is a cleverly layered film that will find a place on our cultural list of must talk about films for respectable reasons. This film will survive the reviews and would be critics who over the next five years will download the film or rent its DVD version for a second look. "The Happening" will be remembered longer and more fondly than, say, "The Dark Knight" that for those of us who are older than 20 is a been there - done that kind of film going experience.

This wide screen version of Monty Python's early sketches, animation and bodily sounds is a DVD delight. The humour is very much intact in better lit interiors and more expansive, textured and colorful exteriors than the TV series. I and my teenage son (we're Minneapolis Lutherans) watched it together. His delight last night, matched mine some 37 years ago. For him, it had the kind of appeal that Mad Magazine had for me a half century ago. Go Gilliam -- subversive silliness has younger champions in the land of lakes and corn.

Terry Jone's bare-assed organist continues to alert me to the dangers of naturism while still prompting me to shout "Bravo!" when ever the character appears. The Upper Class Twit sketch is among the funniest and best performed sketch to have ever been lensed.

Thirty some years after its release, it is now clear that The Eagle Has Landed was a plucked raptor when it fell out of Sturgis' respectable aerie into 1970s theaters. Almost every character is unbelievable, even more so because they're fleshed out by major star shtick working with a script and direction that hugged any cliché within reach but with out the swagger, fun or poignancy of, say, "The Great Escape" or "Von Ryan's Express." So too with the plot contrivances, Thomas Kinkade settings and the clumsy battle sequences. After seeing this expensive movie on TCM last night, it occurred to me why Treat Williams in the film "Hair" (as George Berger) marched with so much anxiety onto the troop transport plane headed for Viet Nam. He was probably remembering what had happened three years earlier to his Captain Clark character in "The Eagle Has Landed" -- defeated by hoakum even as he assumes command after Larry Hagman (doing a Yank version of a Pythonesque/John Cleese kind of military idiot) gets a slug in the head by a tea and bisquit matron. Too bad the gun wasn't fired by Terry Jones in drag.

Law and Order: Criminal Intent: "End Game" is as good as television cop drama gets. Roy Scheider, Vincent D'Onofrio and Rita Moreno infuse their characters with compelling, believable and disturbing nuance in this intelligent and efficient telling of the unveiling of personal and painful tragedy as evil is revealed one move at a time. I was unaware that Miss Moreno was playing Detective Goren's mother until I subsequently checked the cast member list on IMDb -- she is totally convincing. Mr. Scheider distinguishes himself again in what turns out to be one of his last and, arguably, one of his best performances. Mr. D'Onofrio deserves major kudos for this particular episode; so does the directing and writing team.

My pre-teen kids loved the DVD edition of "The Master of Disguise." I also laughed out loud during a number of scenes. Dana Carvey's Turtle Man disguise and performance is as good as any Peter Sellars turn; his homage to Robert Shaw's Captain Quint in "Jaws" should have been given a fuller platform; his invention of a high end, antique auction matron vis-a-vis Kate Hepburn and Hermoine Gingold and his send up of a David Niven espionage operative were spectacularly funny.

A linear story with believable main characters and situations are not always a requirement for children but would have carried Carvey's talent in a much more enteraining fashion.

That said, Harold Gould, James Brolin and Jennifer Esposito deserve, if one exists, the Screen Actors Guild version pf a Purple Heart. Each performed bravely and beautifully in an amiable and harmless mess which probably wounded their careers but was not of their making.

I hope Mr. Carvey is forgiven and gets another shot at a full movie.