February | 2010 | Movie reviews | Lisa Schwarzbaum | Owen Gleiberman | The Movie Critics

The Movie Critics Movie reviews | Lisa Schwarzbaum | Owen Gleiberman

Archive: February 2010 (1-10 of 16)

Feb 28 2010 02:37 PM ET

'A Prophet': A great prison drama you've got to see

Categories: A Prophet, Cannes Film Festival, Cesar Awards, Cop Out, Goodfellas, Movies, Oscars, Shutter Island, prison dramas

a-prophet Image Credit: Roger ArpajouThe magnificent French prison drama A Prophet swept France’s Cesar Awards last night, winning prizes for best picture, director, actor, original screenplay, and cinematography, among other categories. And if this news doesn’t quite rank up there with a box office report on the opening of Cop Out or the second weekend of Shutter Island, well, it’s still news I jump on to say more about the very best, most exciting movie not yet at most theaters near you. Oh, I can’t wait until it is at a theater near you — maybe after it wins an Oscar on March 7, in my perfect world? (The movie also won the Grand Prize last year at Cannes.)

Then you and I can discuss how engrossing and how thrilling filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s unconventionally “conventional” jailhouse saga is. (Here’s my EW review.) Then you and I can compare and contrast A Prophet to Goodfellas (props to Scorsese when he’s not wasting his talents on hooey like Shutter Island). We can discuss movies about convicts who come of age behind bars. We can discuss prison dramas in which ethnic antagonisms reflect the bigger world outside. We can talk about Audiard’s precise choice of casting a skinny French-Arab unknown in the crucial lead role, and how now-lauded actor Tahar Rahim’s then-anonymity became the character’s strength. And we can analyze the daring screenplay decision to include an actual jailhouse ghost in the plot.

We can do that, but only once you get to see the beaut. And since A Prophet is in French (and Arabic and Corsican) and since it comes with subtitles, the roll-out is necessarily (I suppose) slower. Which kills me, since I guarantee you it’s also way, way more exciting than anything else new you saw this past weekend. So listen: If you were lucky enough to see it this weekend, tell us what you thought. And if you didn’t, while you’re waiting, maybe you can answer me this: What’s your favorite prison movie and why?

Feb 27 2010 12:47 PM ET

'Shutter Island': Did you see the twist ending coming?

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Dennis Lehane, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island twist ending

shutter-island Image Credit: Andrew CooperNot to be a spoiler, but let me cut right to the jaw-dropping, totally unexpected twist ending of this blog post: If you read it all the way to the last word — or, more accurately, if you do that and then read the message board comments — you’re going to find out the big “Whoa!” surprise ending of Shutter Island. So if you don’t want to know what happens at the shivery climax of Martin Scorsese’s stately, foreboding gothic asylum thriller, I hope you know just what to do: Stop reading! Now! And, please, don’t say that you weren’t warned.

Okay, good, now I assume that we’re all among “spoiled” friends. Actually, I don’t plan to reveal the twist ending. In truth, I’m going to leave that to all of you. I leave it to you to reveal it, debate it, deconstruct it, and analyze the movie through the lens of it. Has anyone gone back a second time to see how the first two hours of Shutter Island play — stormy rocky-island vistas, creepy asylum inmates, creepier shrinks, Holocaust flashbacks, dead-wife flashbacks, conspiracies, blink and you’ll miss the discussion of the ethics of psychotropic drugs — when you already know what’s coming?

Or maybe you already did know what was coming. Personally, I had no idea. That’s right, I want to stand up right now and declare, with full confessional fervor: My name is Owen, and I watched Shutter Island without ever once suspecting how it was going to end.

The reason I make a point of that is that it seems to me, in various discussions of the film that I’ve had, that whether or not you were able to figure out the ending has become something of a savvier-than-thou, you-can’t-put-one-over-on-me! film-snob issue. If you’re really, you know, smart, if you really know your cinema, then you had it all pegged, maybe even pretty early on. If you’re thick, dumb, or maybe just haven’t seen enough old movies, then you didn’t get it. (Read full post)

Feb 24 2010 10:47 AM ET

Johnny Depp, on '48 Hours Mystery,' will go to bat for a convicted killer -- but before this case attracted a movie star, it was already a great movie

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: 48 Hours Mystery, Damien Echols, Johnny Depp, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, The West Memphis Three

johnny-depp-48hours Image Credit: CBSYou may or may not have heard about Johnny Depp’s crusade. He has long been the most private of movie stars, but this Saturday night, he will break character when he appears on the CBS investigative news show 48 Hours Mystery to defend the West Memphis Three, who as teenagers were found guilty of the hideous 1993 murder of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Depp joins a handful of other entertainers — Eddie Vedder, Winona Ryder, the Dixie Chicks — who claim that the convicted killers are innocent, and that they were railroaded for the crime because of their associations with heavy-metal music, goth fashion, and the occult. One of the three, Damien Echols, is now on death row. (The other two, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, received life sentences.)

The reason that Damien became the focus of the case is that he was portrayed in court as a teenage satanist, which inflamed the community. Actually, he was a follower of Wicca — which may, in a place like West Memphis, seem interchangeable with “satanism.” Even so, that hardly makes him guilty.

I’m as skeptical as anyone when celebrities like Sean Penn pick and choose a cause to flaunt and lecture us about. It isn’t hard, though, to see why Johnny Depp has fastened onto Damien Echols and the West Memphis Three. There have always been innocents on death row, but the issue of people falsely incriminated by their association with subversive pop culture obviously touched a deep nerve in Depp. (As a comrade of Keith Richards, he’s had his own associations with devilish rockers, even if they are in their sixties.) In 17 years, there has never been forensic evidence linking Damien Echols, or any of the West Memphis Three, to this crime. What interests me about Depp’s appearance on 48 Hours is that it marks the re-opening of a case that has already been the subject of a memorable and disturbing movie: Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s great 1996 documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. You have never seen anything quite like it. (Read full post)

Feb 23 2010 03:37 PM ET

'The Ghost Writer': A cool thriller inspires cool performances. And Kim Cattrall finally gets to ditch the ghost of SATC's Samantha.

by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Categories: Ewan McGregor, Kim Cattrall, Movies, Pierce Brosnan, Roman Polanski, Shutter Island, The Ghost Writer, political thrillers

Shutter Island got all the ink last weekend. So I’m here to remind you not to forget about The Ghost Writer, which opened in limited release around the country on February 19. In my review I called it a “well-made, sleekly retaliatory, pleasurably paranoid tale” — which goes along with my old colleague Peter Travers’ declaration that the movie “ties you up in knots of tension.” Much of that tension has to do with the fraught intersection of political power, covert agendas and operations, and capitalism: Ewan McGregor plays a journalist hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of Pierce Brosnan as a former British Prime Minister. (The PM’s name is Adam Lang, but (Read full post)

Feb 22 2010 10:47 AM ET

'Shutter Island': A release date change proves a stroke of marketing magic

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island, movie release dates

Nine times out of ten, when a movie gets its release date changed at the last minute, it’s a sign of trouble, an indication that someone at the studio didn’t have enough confidence in it. But then there’s that one time out of ten when changing a movie’s release date isn’t glorified damage control — when it’s an ingenious act of repositioning, a marketing correction that allows a hit to happen where it might not have otherwise.

That’s the way it went down in 1992, when Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, originally set to be a major summer release, was pushed back to the fall. It looked, momentarily, as if the film’s studio, Twentieth Century Fox, had lost confidence in it. Actually, Fox figured out that if Mohicans opened during the summer, then Mann’s one-of-a-kind movie — a dazzling historical adventure that was also as artful a period piece as any Merchant-Ivory teacup-rattler — would just seem like one more action-film-of-the-week, and a rather tricky one to characterize (and advertise) at that. Whereas in the fall, it could own the action market; at the same time, it could draw serious adult audiences attracted to its literary pedigree and to Daniel Day-Lewis’s latest feat of Method immersion. It worked like a charm: The Last of the Mohicans was the big hit of the season.

Cut to last fall, when it was announced that Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island was getting its release date bumped from Oct. 2, 2009, to Feb. 19, 2010. That was a very tough move to spin. The studio, Paramount Pictures, claimed that it simply couldn’t afford to market the film as it desired amid the launch of the holiday awards season rush. And maybe that’s true. But deliberately, pointedly moving a Martin Scorsese movie out of awards season? There’s no way that sounded promising. (Read full post)

Feb 19 2010 05:08 PM ET

With news of a Kurt Cobain movie heating up, here's the rock biopic I'd really like to see

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Kurt Cobain biopic, Lou Reed, Oren Moverman, The Velvet Underground

Rock biopics are the “Next year in Jerusalem” of movie genres. They get talked about forever and, too often, never come to pass. This week, though, there was genuine news on the Kurt Cobain front: It was announced that Oren Moverman, the gifted screenwriter-turned-director who is suddenly hot after his homefront Iraq-war drama The Messenger got three Oscar nominations, has now attached himself to the Cobain project that has been kicking around Hollywood since 2006. Moverman would be an inspired choice to bring the life of the tormented, sensitive, suicidally disaffected shaggy-slack grunge rocker to the big screen. The filmmaker has rock & roll in his blood (he co-wrote Todd Haynes’ marvelous Dylan fantasia I’m Not There), and as The Messenger proved, he has the talent to stage scenes that are present tense and alive — an essential skill when you’re trying to rediscover a subject as layered in James-Dean-in-flannel generational mythology as Kurt Cobain.

The moment I read the news, I flashed onto the handful of rock biopics that have been kicking around forever, and also the ones that I personally always dream about seeing get made. Remember when Renée Zellweger was going to play Janis Joplin? I never thought that was a very good idea (they’re both from Texas — and that’s about where the similarity ends), but with the right star a Joplin film could be electrifying; Pink was once chattered about to play her, and she could probably bring it off. Then again, it seems as if a lot of these quintessential ’60s boomer-rock-star ideas may finally be reaching their expiration date. At this point, do we really want to see some up-and-coming young actor mime the apocalyptic slither of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar mastery? A part of me would like to — and another part of me cringes at the thought. In truth, I’d much rather see a biopic of Queen’s Freddie Mercury, with his snaggle-toothed glam bravura — another movie that’s been talked about in recent years, though there are thorny music-rights issues involved. (With rock biopics, it’s always something.)

That said, maybe it’s time that we got past dreaming of film biographies of rock stars who are already so iconic that there’s no way an actor could fully compete with the real thing. (Read full post)

Feb 18 2010 03:38 PM ET

An 'Inglourious' victory? The real reason Quentin Tarantino's film is getting its Oscar hype moment

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Avatar, Harvey Weinstein, Inglourious Basterds, Oscars, Quentin Tarantino, The Hurt Locker

Take a look at the image on the right. That’s Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind — but it might just as well be yours truly trying to figure out the new Academy Awards balloting system, which makes a little less sense to me each time I hear it explained. Okay, I sort of get it: The voters will rank the 10 nominated films in order of preference, which means that to secure a victory, a movie will need to garner a sizable number of second and third place votes on the ballots that didn’t pick it as number one. To me, that would seem to favor The Hurt Locker, a movie that, while “small,” is almost universally admired. The Hurt Locker doesn’t appear to have many detractors; it hasn’t been divisive. Yet according to the Oscar buzz of the week, the new preferential voting system may actually favor…Inglourious Basterds.

That scenario has now been floated, if not flogged, by a healthy handful of entertainment journalists, most relentlessly by Tom O’Neil, who has been pushing his prediction of an Inglourious Basterds triumph for well over a month. (He actually called me out on my “goof” of not including Inglourious on a roster of possible Best Picture winners.) Well, time will tell if O’Neil’s prediction was ahead of the curve, or just bent. What has brought the Inglourious buzz machine to life this week is Harvey Weinstein, who basically decided to go public with the fact that he’s been funneling the movie through one of his legendary if-it-feels-good-it’s-not-overkill Academy Award campaigns. Only a fool would write off a Harvey Weinstein Oscar blitzkrieg. Back in 1998/1999, when he snatched a Shakespeare in Love victory from the jaws of a Saving Private Ryan defeat, it was clear that he’d honed the politics of all this to a new level of Jedi mind-trick effectiveness. (Read full post)

Feb 16 2010 01:28 PM ET

Does the off-screen behavior of Roman Polanski and Mel Gibson influence whether you'll see their movies?

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Celebrity Rehab, Edge of Darkness, Mel Gibson, Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer, Tom Sizemore

Is there a point at which a celebrity’s off-screen behavior is repellent enough to sour you to his on-screen art? For anyone, say, who suddenly finds him or herself a lot less eager to seek out a new film by Roman Polanski, the answer is an obvious, and unqualified, yes. For others, and that might include those who (like me) have a high threshold of voyeuristic fascination, the answer is a lot more complicated. It may be closer to, “No. When a Hollywood star, or director, acts badly in life, it may bring out the closet moralist in us, but it may also, in some ways, reinforce what we found so arresting about that person as an artist or star in the first place.” In other words, morality and art are a combustible combination. They don’t always mix well.

I thought of this recently, since over the past few weeks I’ve been enjoying the hell out of watching Tom Sizemore on Celebrity Rehab — if “enjoy” is the right word to apply to the sight of a greasy-coiffed, homeless, three-days-past-sleep, perpetually crooked-grinned celebrity crystal meth head as he lies, cajoles, and confesses his way through recovery. The fascination, of course, is almost entirely voyeuristic, as Sizemore and his former lover, Heidi Fleiss (what an inspired stroke of showbiz — I mean, compassionate act of therapy — it was to toss these two into the same rehabilitation group), appear to be competing for the title of “Former Tabloid Icon Who Now Most Resembles Human Roadkill.” I’m tempted to say that the winner is Fleiss by a (fixed) nose. Actually, though, it’s Sizemore, who skulks through Celebrity Rehab like the king of the losers, his rumpled sleaziness so fugly-captivating that he might almost be playing…a Tom Sizemore character. (Read full post)

Feb 15 2010 12:56 PM ET

Valentine's Day: Does big box office equal love?

by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Categories: Bad Movies, Casablanca, Chick Flicks, Commentary, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba, Mothers Day, Romantic Comedy, Taylor Lautner, Taylor Swift, That's Entertainment!, Valentine's Day

Hey, how was your Valentine’s Day? Did it make you feel like $52.4 million bucks? That’s this morning’s estimated box-office tally for the movie Valentine’s Day, and that’s before adding in the romantics who plan to buy tickets on Presidents’ Day. Before the weekend, I asked you if you, too, were planning a date with Ashton, Topher, and the Jessicas Alba and Biel.T wrote, “It’s the movies, it’s Valentine’s Day, and sap is practically mandatory.” Kim said, “When it comes to rom-coms, I just assume every reviewer will pan them.” Angie reported, “I loved the movie and so did my husband! What I like the most is the scenes show things that could happen in real life.” Carlisle predicted, “I expect it to be light, breezy, cheesy, and schmaltzy.” And bedc01 announced, “The girlfriend and I will avoid this trite, dumb, Hollywood ‘romantic’ movie and will rather stay home and watch the greatest modern-day romantic comedy ever: Shaun of the Dead!

Wow, bedc01, I like your style. Me, I channel-surfed my way onto Casablanca on TCM, watched it for the 43rd time, wept and swooned for the 43rd time, and felt love for the whole wide world, even for Major Strasser and Peter Lorre’s Signor (“just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust”) Ugarte.

But I’m still thinking about Valentine’s Day because I’m guessing that, given its commercial success, Hollywood is about to develop a big 2010 crush on this reliable, recyclable format, the celebrity-ensemble-novelty-act movie. That’s entertainment! Already, plans have been announced for a similar whoop-di-doo pegged to New Year’s Eve. I’d recommend Independence Day, Mother’s Day, Income Tax Day, and the autumnal Jewish harvest festival of Succoth (during which observant Jews eat meals outdoors in little, roofless huts) as equally strong marketing opportunities.

What I don’t recommend, though, is relying on our collective audience goodwill for too long. We the people are able to recognize the difference between pleasurable familiarity of format and lazy cliche. And we demand more from our entertainment dollars than Taylor Swift making out with Taylor Lautner. The best romantic comedies give us what we expect and give it to us fresh — you know, like really good chocolate. Or Taylor Swift on SNL. And we can tell the difference, right? Right?

So here’s your chance: Pick a holiday and a dream ensemble cast, and let’s talk about what you want to see when Garry Marshall directs College Acceptance-Letter Day, Driver’s License Renewal Day, or Thanksgiving 90210.

Image credit: Ron Batzdorff

Feb 12 2010 11:54 AM ET

'Valentine's Day': Big box office predicted for bad movie. Who's going? Are you?

by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Categories: Box Office, Chick Flicks, Jessica Alba, Movie Critics, Movies, Romantic Comedy, Taylor Lautner, Taylor Swift, The Tailor of Panama, Valentine's Day

I don’t exactly shower Valentine’s Day with roses today in my review. That’s because it’s Crap, Actually! But I’m not alone: Check out Rotten Tomatoes before you accuse me of overdosing on cranky pills. Meanwhile, my EW colleague Nicole Sperling declares right here on this site that she predicts opening-weekend ticket receipts to reach into the trillions!–or at $50 million! So I’d like to spend this romantic weekend discussing the following with all of you, my dearest Valentines: Are you planning to go see Valentine’s Day? And if so, why? Is it Taylor Lautner, Taylor Swift, Ashton Kutcher, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, or Hector Elizondo who draws you like a bee to honey? Is it the urging of your own dearest Valentine?

Other topics for conversation between pauses to eat more chocolate: Do critics’ reviews influence you about this particular movie? Have you decided to go or not to go because of something you’ve read? In spite of something you read? Because of the trailer? In spite of the trailer? Are you choosing between Valentine’s Day and another title at the movie theater, and if so, which? Are you waiting to hear what your friends say? Do you think that if I, Lisa, hate it, it’s a good bet that you’ll like it, because I gave Twilight: New Moon a B+, so I must be crazy? Be specific — and as you always are (hah!) be nice. I’ll be checking in over the weekend, and will write more about critic-proof crowd-pleasers on Monday.

Love,

Lisa

Image credit: Ron Batzdorff