skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Review
Depending on what you think of "Cars," Pixar makes it either 9½ out of 10 or 10 for 10 with "Up," a captivating odd-couple adventure that becomes funnier and more exciting as it flies along. Tale of an unlikely journey to uncharted geographic and emotional territory by an old codger and a young explorer could easily have been cloying, but instead proves disarming in its deep reserves of narrative imagination and surprise, as well as its poignant thematic balance of dreams deferred and dreams fulfilled. Lack of overtly fantastical elements might endow "Up" with a somewhat lower initial must-see factor than some summer releases. But like all of Pixar's features, this one will enjoy a rewardingly long ride in all venues and formats. Pete Docter's picture has the privilege of being the first animated film to open the Cannes Film Festival, on May 13.
The two leading men are 78 and 8 years old, and the age range of those who will appreciate the picture is even a bit wider than that. Like previous classic films about escape from the mundane, from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Wall-E" and many in between, "Up" is universal in its appeal. At the same time, it may be the most subtle Pixar production to date in its use of color schemes, shapes, proportions, scale, contrast and balance, factors highlighted by the application of 3-D, which will be available at many initial engagements.
The ghost of Chaplin hovered over "Wall-E," and although "Up" is a more talkative film, it also delves back into earlier eras for inspiration. The first thing on view is a mock '30s-style black-and-white Movietone newsreel documenting the exploits of maverick explorer Charles Muntz, who heads back to South America to redeem himself after a giant bird skeleton he presents in the U.S. is denounced as a fraud.
Not long after comes an exquisite interlude that, in less than five minutes, encapsulates the life-long love affair between Carl Fredericksen and his wife Ellie in a manner worthy of even the most poetic of silent-film directors. The two were brought together by their mutual enthusiasm for Muntz, and it remained Ellie's lifelong dream to emulate the adventurer and travel to Paradise Falls in South America.
But life has other plans, and Ellie must settle for a happy life with balloon-seller Carl (voiced by Ed Asner). When she dies, she leaves behind a scrapbook as well as a very grumpy widower, who retreats into self-enforced exile. With heavy-rimmed black glasses, thick white hair and eyebrows, bulbous nose, square jaw and a scrunched body that looks like it's been through a compactor, old Carl resembles a cross between Spencer Tracy and Walter Matthau at the ends of their careers. He wants no company, content to live out his days in the house he shared with Ellie, which becomes surrounded by giant construction projects.
Finally faced with eviction, Carl concocts a plan. In a surprising and brilliantly visual sequence, thousands of colored balloons hatch from behind the house, prying it from its foundation and carrying it skyward; Carl intends to fly it to South America, fulfilling Ellie's dream.
However, he's got an unplanned passenger in the form of Russell (Jordan Nagai), a roly-poly, eager-beaver Junior Wilderness Explorer who's previously tried to enlist the old goat's help to win him a badge. The trip goes uneventfully — no time wasted on navigational challenges — the better to quickly achieve the destination. The arrival is stunningly portrayed, with thick fog clearing to reveal bizarre rock formations atop a mesa adjacent to the falls (designs were inspired by Angel Falls, the world's highest, and the actual tepui mountains around the juncture of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana — the location of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World"). Carl and Russell quickly come upon the very sort of rare bird Muntz went back to find decades before, a brilliantly plumed, gawky 13-footer they name Kevin.
Kevin's antics throughout are so humorous and beautifully animated they would be at home in a "Looney Tunes" highlights reel, as would a breed of attack dogs commanded by Muntz himself (Christopher Plummer), who sends the canines in search of the elusive bird.
At just 89 minutes, "Up" is unusually short for a Pixar film, and the action climax comes on rapidly. One setpiece features the two old-timers, Carl and the swashbuckling Muntz, going mano a mano aboard the latter's spectacular, zeppelin-like flying ship, and numerous vertigo-producing shots show characters clinging for dear life.
Although the cliffhanger effects are augmented by 3-D projection, never do Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") and co-director Bob Peterson shove anything in the viewer's face just because of its 3-D potential. In fact, the film's overall loveliness presents a conceivable argument in favor of seeing it in 2-D: Even with the strongest possible projector bulbs, the 3-D glasses reduce the image's brightness by 20%. At the very least, the incentive for seeing "Up" in 3-D would seem less powerful than it is for other films.
Despite the sheer volume of incident and action required of any film that includes young kids as a major portion of its target audience, "Up" is an exceptionally refined picture; unlike so many animated films, it's not all about sensory bombardment and volume. As Pixar's process is increasingly analyzed, the more one appreciates the care that goes into the writing. The underlying carpentry here is so strong, it seems it would be hard to go too far wrong in the execution.
Unsurprisingly, no one puts a foot wrong here. Vocal performances, most importantly from Asner, Plummer and nonpro Nagai, exude a warm enthusiasm, and tech specifications could not be better. Michael Giacchino's full-bodied, traditional score is superlative, developing beautiful themes as it sweeps the action along on emotional waves.
Camera (Technicolor and Deluxe prints, 3-D), Patrick Lin; lighting, Jean-Claude Kalache; editor, Kevin Nolting; music, Michael Giacchino; production designer, Ricky Nierva; story supervisor, Ronnie Del Carmen; supervising technical director, Steve May; supervising animator, Scott Clark; sound designer (Dolby Digital/SDDS/DTS), Tom Myers; supervising sound editors, Michael Silvers, Myers; re-recording mixers, Michael Semanick, Myers; associate producer, Denise Ream; casting, Kevin Reher, Natalie Lyon. Reviewed at Disney Studios, Burbank, May 6, 2009. (In Cannes Film Festival — opener.) MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 89 MIN.
Description
If a one-eyed gypsy with very bad teeth asks you for anything, and really, I cannot emphasize this enough, say yes. Don't waver, don't bargain; anything short of yes could put you on a fast track to damnation as surely as a broken mirror will bring you seven years of bad luck.
Look at what happens to Christine, a very good egg boiled to perfection by circumstance and a lot of good work by Alison Lohman. One bad decision and suddenly director Sam Raimi throws her under the bus of his terrific new horror film, "Drag Me to Hell."
If you've been worried that Raimi's decade spent spinning the "Spider-Man" web might have caused him to go soft, well stop. The director who gave us the "Evil Dead" trilogy is back with a vengeance that rivals the one-eyed gypsy I warned you about.
With that fire in his belly, Raimi's "Drag Me to Hell" does everything we want a horror film to do: It is fearsomely scary, wickedly funny and diabolically gross, three stomach-churning states that argue for taking a pass on the $10 box of popcorn. Which also makes the movie an excellent economic investment in these tough times.
I mention the economy because Raimi has made it an issue at the heart of "Drag Me to Hell," in the spirit of campy cultural commentary that good horror can do so well. The director and his brother Ivan began the script 10 years ago before Peter Parker's many tribulations in Spidey tights sidelined it. If the Raimis really are as prescient as "Drag Me" would suggest, I'd like to put in a good word for them to be added to the Obama economic recovery team.
You see, Christine is a lending agent at a bank and ambition has made her desperate for a promotion. The gypsy is old Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), who just wants a little of the candy on Christine's desk and another extension on her home loan. Sounds reasonable to me. And it did to Christine too until her boss (David Paymer) hints that if she is serious about that promotion . . .
So good, decent Christine goes against her better judgment and denies Mrs. Ganush's request. Bad choice, Christine. Before she can begin what will be a long string of "I'm sorrys," that become "How dare yous," there's a curse on her head and the nightmare begins. Not too many scenes later you may find yourself wondering if the title was meant to refer to Christine or the rest of us.
Against all the craziness that any decent ghost story conjures up, there has to be the rational voice. In "Drag Me," it comes from the Mac guy, Justin Long, who I'm sure will one day have a role that will turn his Apple ad stint into nothing more than a footnote, but this won't be it.
As the very proper professor Clay Dalton, Long is torn between what he knows is reality and his increasingly delusional girlfriend's belief that she's got just a few days to fend off the devil who's nipping at her heels. Clay doesn't have what it takes to fight off demons anyway, assuming he even believed in them, but he's a good boyfriend, willing to humor Christine even when he thinks she's completely lost her mind.
In Mrs. Ganush, Raimi and Raver have created a horrific otherworldly fiend that can hold her own against the best of the Freddy Kruegers of the world. This is one woman who can roar (still, I do worry that given the slimy dentures, projectile vomiting and that really bad temper, Raver won't be doing lunch in town any time soon). Other evil forces are churned up by that angry curse and rise too; the particularly deadly dark spirit called Lamia is the one to worry about.
Though the film has echoes of Raimi's earlier and much loved "Evil Dead" series -- especially what he does with mischief-making, chill-inducing wind -- "Drag Me to Hell" should not be dismissed as yet another horror flick just for teens. The filmmakers have given us a 10-story winding staircase of psychological tension that is making very small circles near the end. Though Christine is technically the one doing the climbing, it's nearly impossible not to feel like she's dragging us right along with her, which is after all the point.
There are all manner of grisly things that Christine must deal with before it is finished, but it's really grisly-lite, nothing like the torture-porn of the "Hostel" series or the bodies-on-meat-hooks style of sadomasochism you find in "Hellraiser."
When Raimi says Lohman is in virtually every scene except the opening historical note, he's not exaggerating. In broad strokes, because you should experience the fear and loathing of the specifics for yourself, she must decide exactly how far she is willing to go to stay alive. There is one point that risks having sympathy turn to antipathy, and I'm betting that a contingent of the audience won't be able to get past it, but Lohman, with her strange blend of apple pie sweetness and business school pragmatism, is the right one for the job, making sure most of us stay on Christine's side.
From the stuff that is driven into and through bodies to the stuff that comes out of them and all the other strange things that go bump in the night, the look of the film is a studied balance between over-the-top camp and believable enough moments that, taken together, might give you a few sleepless nights. A certain grave-site scene demonstrates both nicely, so a special shout-out to the vast teams that handled the stunts, the effects, the makeup and the rest of it.
Horror might not be your thing, but if you can push through the fear, stomach the gross and just let yourself go with it, the payoff is experiencing a filmmaker totally in his element. Raimi is having the time of his life -- he knows exactly what he's doing with every scene and every scream. He's confident, he's smiling. If he has us squirming in our seats, then so much the better.
Review
Most of the events in Yojiro Takita’s “Departures” flow from a comical misunderstanding. After a Tokyo orchestra is disbanded, an earnest young cellist, Daigo, seeks a new line of work in the provinces, spots a help-wanted ad for a company that deals in departures and assumes it to be some sort of travel agency. In fact, the company is a one-man operation that deals in encoffination—the ceremonial preparation of corpses for cremation—and the owner wants to hire an assistant. Still, Daigo’s assumption isn’t completely off the mark. The job takes him and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) on a guided tour to the far country of death and dying, with frequent stops for beguiling comedy along the road.
Here’s to humor in all its manifestations, whether as the glint in the jaundiced eye of a horror flick or as the indispensable leavening of this gorgeous drama, which won an Oscar earlier this year as the best foreign language film of 2008. Daigo is, at the outset, a chronic screw-up who can’t bring himself to tell his wife what he does in his new position, can’t even get a grip on a cake of soap in a public bath. (He’s there to expunge the chemical smell of his trade.) Slowly, though, in a film that’s mostly slow-paced, the self-doubting boy comes into manhood under the tutelage of his boss, a consummate professional who can advertise his services with a huckster’s flair, yet consider them with a philosopher’s gravity. (He’s played by the wonderfully taciturn Tsutomu Yamazaki, who was the trucker, Goro, in “Tampopo.”)
Occasionally the story turns manipulative, or self-conscious: I could have done without the hero playing his cello in picturesque fields near snow-capped mountains, though his musical yearnings perfectly complement the movie’s main theme of spiritual growth. (Joe Hisaishi did the splendid score.) But the rituals that Daigo learns to perform are literally spellbinding. While the family and friends of the deceased watch silently, the encoffiner uses elaborate gestures that might be those of a magician or a sommelier to wash and dress the body, yet does it all with exquisite tenderness. In one of the movie’s most beautiful moments, Mika comes to understand Daigo’s quiet professionalism, and to love the soulful man her young husband has become. But beautiful moments abound. In “Departures,” the contemplation of death prepares the way for an appreciation of life.
Review
Since "Angels & Demons" depends on a split-second schedule and a ticking time bomb that could destroy the Vatican, it's a little distracting when the Camerlengo, a priest entrusted with the pope's duties between papacies, breaks into the locked enclave of the College of Cardinals and lectures them on centuries of church history.
These men, many of them elderly, may face death in minutes, which the Camerlengo knows. The Commander of the Swiss Guard thinks he can evacuate the Vatican and the hundreds of thousands of faithful waiting in St. Peter's Square in 15 minutes before an explosion vaporizes "a big chunk of Rome," but frankly we in the audience think a lot of monsignors back home are going to receive promotions real soon.
Since very few plot details in the film are remotely plausible, including its desperate chase across Rome, the history lesson is excusable. Having been told about the long war between the church and the Illuminati, and religion and science, we are grateful for the briefing, even if the cardinals already know most of the history. This kind of film requires us to be very forgiving, and if we are, it promises to entertain. "Angels & Demons" succeeds.
It's based on a novel that came before The DaVinci Code in Dan Brown's oeuvre, but is set afterward. Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is back at Harvard when
he is summoned from a swimming pool by an emissary from the Vatican and flown to Rome to face a crisis. Earlier, we learned, a rare, sealed vial of anti-matter was stolen from the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and a note taking credit comes from the Illuminati, a secret society that has long hated the Catholic Church because of the days when it persecuted Galileo and other scientists.
A "popular and progressive" pope has just died. The cardinals have been summoned to elect his successor. Four of them, the preferati, the favorites to be next pope, have been kidnapped. They will be executed in succession at 8, 9, 10 and 11 p.m., until the battery on the anti-matter vial runs out of juice at midnight and the faithful will see more than a puff of white smoke above the Vatican. I don't recall if the Illuminati had any demands. Maybe it just wants revenge.
In that case, why hide the vial at the end of a trail that can only be followed by clues discovered or intuited by Professor Langdon? Why not just blow up the place? What is the purpose of the scavenger hunt? Has it all been laboriously constructed as a test of Langdon's awesome knowledge? Are the Illuminati trying to get even after Langdon foiled Opus Dei, another secret society, in "The DaVinci Code"?
I don't know, and, reader, there is no time to care. Langdon uses his knowledge of Illuminati symbols to follow the trail though four Rome churches. He has uncanny luck. He spots and correctly identifies every clue, even though they're very well-hidden. Just as well, because one dungeon overlooked or one statue pointing the wrong way, and he loses. For his companion, Langdon has the beautiful and brilliant Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) from CERN. Her father was murdered in the anti-matter theft. Her purpose is (a) to explain that the battery will indeed run down, (b) request her father's secret journals from Geneva, although they are never read, and (c) run along everywhere with Tom Hanks, to provide him with urgent conversation.
Meanwhile, there is intrigue within the Vatican and lots of red herrings among all the red hats. The young Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor), the adopted son of the late pontiff, joins the professor's desperate quest, as does the commander (Stellan Skarsgard) of the pope's protectors, the Swiss Guard. Inside the conclave, Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is in charge of the election. Because of his sinister mien (I love the phrase sinister mien), German accent and absolutist views on church tradition, he seems set up to be a suspect, since the progressive pope's death may have been an inside job. (I forgot to mention that there has also been time to exhume the pontiff's remains and discover evidence of poisoning.)
All of this happens at breakneck speed, with little subtlety, but with fabulous production values. The interiors of the Sistine Chapel, the Pantheon, churches, tombs and crypts are rendered dramatically, the College of Cardinals looks both (a) very impressive, and (b) like a collection of elderly extras from Cinecitta.
The film by no means tilts the conflict between science and religion one way or the other. The professor is not religious, indeed seems agnostic, but the church, however, is not portrayed as anti-science. Galileo would be happy that there is now a Vatican Observatory. If the Illuminati are indeed scientists, they would better employ themselves not avenging ancient deeds, but attacking modern fundamentalist cults.
The professor has a fascinating exchange with the Camerlengo, who asks him if he believes in God. He believes, he says, that the existence is God is beyond his mind to determine. "And your heart?" asks the priest. "My heart is not worthy." Agnostics and believers can both find something to agree with there; director Ron Howard does an even-handed job of balancing the scales.
So good, indeed, that even after Howard accused the church of refusing him access to Vatican locations, and although the dependable William Donohue of the Catholic League has attacked his film, "Angels & Demons" received a favorable review from the official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, which wrote it is a "harmless entertainment which hardly affects the genius and mystery of Christianity."
And come on, Ron: Would you expect the church to let you shoot a Dan Brown thriller in the Sistine Chapel? Get real.
Review
The jaunty, energetic first 10 minutes of ” The Brothers Bloom” are easily the best first 10 minutes of any film I’ve seen this year. And while the succeeding hour and 43 minutes doesn’t hold up to the movie’s opening scenes, the whole endeavor is still an awfully good time.
Writer/director Rian Johnson pitched “Brothers” after the surprise success of his freshman effort, “Brick,” which was the cinematic equivalent of rapidly downing 25 espresso shots. With “Brothers,” Johnson has eased back considerably, combining his trademark energetic patter with moments of genuine pathos. He has ample help from the Dream Cast, which includes Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody as the titular brothers and Rachel Weisz as the putative love interest-slash-mark. Weisz and Johnson, among others, will be on the red carpet tonight for the opener of the Chicago International Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 29.
Abandoned and unloved as children, Stephen Bloom and his younger brother bounce from town to town, and foster home to foster home, perfecting card tricks and dreaming up ways to separate their classmates from their allowances. As the boys drift, they each hone a Big Dream. Stephen, brains and brawn of the operation, fantasizes about the Ultimate Con, while his angst-filled brother’s deepest desire is more elemental: to Truly Know Himself beyond the confines of Stephen’s meticulous schemes.
Twenty-five years later, the brothers have matured into world-class confidence men, with a global network of accomplices, co-conspirators and, naturally, enemies. Shadowed by The Curator (Robbie Coltrane, channeling Peter Sellers) and accompanied by Bang Bang, a laconic pyrotechnician (“Babel’s” Rinko Kikuchi), they travel the world in search of great marks. When the game is up, they throw super-awesome post-con wrap parties.
One day, the brothers meet Penelope (Weisz), and from the carefully orchestrated moment she drives her canary-yellow Lamborghini into Brody’s bicycle, their cons take on new meaning. (I’ll abandon the synopsis here for fear of undermining anyone’s enjoyment of the movie’s who’s-conning-whom plot twists.
Ruffalo reportedly had to be convinced he was the right actor for the role of Stephen Bloom, which requires a Clooney-esque rakishness—not something we generally get from the low-key Ruffalo. He needn’t have worried; his performance is great fun to watch. Brody, who might as well put a trademark on his Super Soulful Gaze (used to great effect on Weisz’s Penelope), plays the younger Bloom as a watchful follower slowly coming into himself. And Weisz—much like her compatriot Kate Winslet—combines a luminous screen presence with a muscular, confident acting style.
Johnson, whose light hand belies his unusual attention to comic detail, deserves kudos for delivering a genuinely funny, sharply observed, emotionally resonant crime caper—one that lapses only occasionally into preciousness. His characters, despite their eccentric lives, wrestle with the same mundane questions that keep the rest of us up at night: Whom can I trust? What does love mean? How much C-4 explosive does it take to blow up an entire castle?
Johnson cites “The Sting” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” as influences on his film, but he may owe a much greater debt to Wes Anderson: “Brothers’ ” blend of quirky realism and fantastical touches is highly reminiscent of “The Royal Tenenbaums” and, to a lesser extent, “The Darjeeling Express.”
In either case, of course, “Brothers Bloom” is in very good company.
Review
Sometimes casting has everything to do with a movie. In the usual course of events, a high-powered company sales executive wouldn't have much to do with Mike, the hapless loser who works and lives at the Arizona motel where she plans to spend one night. But cast Steve Zahn as the loser, and it becomes thinkable.
In "Management," the sales rep is Sue (Jennifer Aniston), who is upward-bound, successful, sharply dressed and reduced to spending her evenings in remote motels, playing games on her laptop. Sue is every woman he ever wanted but has never had, which is easy, because he wants all women and has never had any. Mike is a nice guy, often stoned, under the thumb of his parents who own the motel. He looks at her with the lovestruck eyes of a wet puppy.
Why and how they end up in the laundry room doing the rumpy-pumpy on a dryer is something "Management" takes for granted. Sometimes, apparently, high-powered Manhattan career women swoon in the presence of a guy who looks like he should be pumping their gas. His courtship technique is cute: He checks her in, carries her bags, brings her flowers, knocks again with the "customary" house bottle of champagne, uncorks it, gets two plastic-wrapped glasses from the bathroom and struggles to say several coherent words in a row.
We can more or less predict where all of this will lead. Mike is obviously the fish out of water, so he must travel to New York to dramatize his unsuitability. Then Sue must travel to Washington, where she sees Jango (Woody Harrelson), who is a former punk rocker who has become a yogurt millionaire (for Harrelson, this is typecasting). Then Mike must follow her there.
He's not a stalker, you understand. He only wants to lick her hand, curl up at her feet and be thrown a Milk-Bone when he's been a good boy. It is Aniston's task to make us believe Sue might be won over by this task and because she succeeds, "Management" works as a sweet rom-com with some fairly big laughs.
What's nice is to see Zahn playing a guy who's not the dimmest bulb in the chandelier. For some reason, he's often typecast as a stoner dimwit, maybe because he was so good at playing such roles early in his career. Here he's smart enough, just extremely socially challenged. Watch Aniston play off him with her pert intelligence; she could demolish him, but is touched by his lack of defenses.
Fred Ward has a good role here as Mike's father, a perfectionist stuck with a slacker as an heir. Eventually he, too, is touched. That only leaves one question, which first time writer-director Stephen Belber wisely doesn't mine for a subplot: Why did Sue's office travel manager book her into this motel?
Review
Odd Horten (Bard Owe) knows who he is and what he does. He's a driver for the train, and has spent so many years on the same route that he knows it instinctively; he has his work, he has his life. But in Bent Hamer's O' Horten, which played in the Un Certain Regard selection this year at Cannes (and has since been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics), Horten has to face the fact that his life, as he knows it, is changing; he's hit retirement age, and he simply has no clue what to do next.
Hamer's earlier films had a finely-tuned capacity for observation, perhaps best demonstrated in Eggs (1995) and Kitchen Stories (2003); Hamer's English-language debut, Factotum (2005), took the boozy, woozy prose of Charles Bukowski and put a little air and space in it, turning the alcohol-fueled anger of Bukowski's words which, on the page, hit like a shot of cheap whiskey and turning them into something smoother and finer with the smooth burn of regret going down. In O'Horten, Hamer's back in Norway, and still crafting careful, considered portraits of day to day life, but ones which nonetheless have a deadpan comedy to them, a careful and humane sense of the absurd.
Much like fellow Scandanavian Aki Kaurismaki, Hamer's got a perfectly straight-faced, slow-burn comedic sensibility; unlike Kaurismaki, Hamer keeps things real. When Horten's farewell dinner concludes in a salute from his fellow engineers -- complete with "Choo-Choo" noises and arm motions -- we're smiling, not sneering, because it's as sincere as it is silly. And later, as Horten goes out into the Norwegian night to walk about -- for lack of anything better to do -- his adventures and encounters are funny and warm and human and possible, which makes them all the more funny.
Hamer also has a secret weapon in his leading man; Owe has a warm demeanor; you can tell he smiles easily just looking at him, but he also has a capacity for double-takes so meticulously executed you suspect he has some external mechanism, calibrated in thousandths of a millimeter, controlling his eyebrows. Odd Horten is courtly; he's polite; he's a gentleman. He's also a little sad, and a little lost. In other words, like we are a lot of the time. And Owe makes us believe in him, through a combination of silent-comedy styled timing and physical execution coupled with understated line readings where you can hear the play of many emotions in just a few syllables.
Much of O'Horten feels universal -- regrets, embarrassments, coincidences, unexpected pleasures -- but it also feels very Norwegian; it's wintertime, and we get a sense of Oslo's public spaces and private places. O'Horten doesn't have much of a plot, but then again, if you asked most people for the three-act structure of the day they're having (or the life they're living) I doubt they'd give you much of an answer. O'Horten is a smaller film, a slice of life, but it's so well-done -- so generous and smart and funny and sympathetic -- that it completely wins you over
Summary
The film tells the story of Senn (Justin Long) and Mala (Evan Rachel Wood), two rebellious alien teens living on the beautiful planet Terra, a place that promotes peace and tolerance, having long ago rejected war and weapons of mass destruction. But when Terra is invaded by human beings fleeing a civil war and environmental catastrophe, the planet is plunged into chaos. During the upheaval, Mala befriends an injured human pilot (Luke Wilson) and each learns the two races are not so different from one another. Together they must face the terrifying realization that in a world of limited resources, only one of the races is likely to survive.
Summary
Celebrity photographer Connor Mead loves freedom, fun and women...in that order. A committed bachelor who thinks nothing of breaking up with multiple women on a conference call, Connor's mockery of romance proves a real buzz-kill for his kid brother, Paul, and a houseful of well wishers on the eve of Paul's wedding. Just when it looks like Connor may single-handedly ruin the wedding, he is visited by the ghosts of his former jilted girlfriends, who take him on a revealing and hilarious odyssey through his failed relationships--past, present and future. Together they attempt to find out what turned Connor into such an insensitive jerk and whether there is still hope for him to find true love...or if he really is the lost cause everyone thinks he is.
IMDB RANK = Not ranked yet
Summary
A mysterious loner attempts to successfully complete his criminal mission while operating outside of the law in contemporary Spain. His objectives shrouded in secrecy, the untrusting lone wolf (Isaach de BankolĂ©) sets out on his latest assignment knowing that the law is never too far behind. Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and Gael GarcĂa Bernal co-star in a crime drama from acclaimed indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (Mystery Train, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai)
