Thanks almost entirely to the skillful writing of Paul Haggis, the eternal super spy James Bond has morphed into something bigger and better than we've ever known.
Yes, we're past the point when anything more needs to be said about the 84th Oscars, and yet I've seen no mention of the most wackily wonderful moment of the evening. It afforded a look inside Academy ritual, and an instance of late-blooming justice being done against considerable odds. So please indulge one last Oscar commentary.
The Duplass brothers (The Puffy Chair, Cyrus) are at it again, whipping up quirk and whimsy into a sweet, insubstantial meringue. There’s hardly a moment that Jeff, Who Lives at Homedoesn’t work hard to warm the cockles and charm us into rueful chuckles, yet a rising odor of twee contrivance taints the fun. Lonely, screwed-up souls flounder about in verging-on-sitcom silliness until magically rescued, redeemed, reunited. The kind of arch indie comedy that likes looking at itself, Jeff wears thin, all surface and not that much heart.
The moment when Tara O'Leary first realized something was going on with her mother, was over a game of UNO around Christmas time, now some 20 years ago.
Kathleen Murphy writes: What if some redblooded filmmaker had brought real passion and style to the adaptation of Suzanne Collins' megahit The Hunger Games? Then this hero's journey—starring a distaff warrior, for a change!—might have taken fire and captured our imaginations, signifying something beyond an industry jackpot. What we've got instead is a glossy entertainment sufficiently bland and sanitized that it will offend no one. Director Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) slavishly illustrates Collins' YA novel (she co-wrote the screenplay), turning the "pages" with such singleminded rapidity it's like cinematic speed-reading. ADD auds won't mind that there's no time to get to know anybody, or watch a relationship unfold, or ride the dramatic rise and swell of a compelling narrative. Let the games resume at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/the-hunger-games/#Review_0
Late last year—late afternoon on 2011's final day, in fact—I emailed the editors of the forthcoming book Film Noir: The Directors my essay on Fritz Lang. The book is now out. Details, plus a taste of my chapter, follow.
Framing Pictures is again upon us, 5-6:45 p.m. Friday, April 6, at Northwest Film Forum. The triad will assemble—that's Kathleen Murphy, Robert Horton, and I—to riff on various screen topics: weird patterns in the reviews for (rather than of) the movie of The Hunger Games, the spell cast by the Otto Preminger classic Laura (starting a week's run at NWFF that same evening), the bleakness of life after the abruptly aborted HBO series Luck. Admission is free and participation in the conversation is encouraged. Beer and wine will be available for purchase. NWFF is at 1515 12th Ave. (between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill). Pictured at left: Dennis Farina as Gus, John Ortiz as Escalante, in Luck. —RTJ
Kathleen Murphy writes: The Lady, Luc Besson's handsome biopic about Aung San Suu Kiy (Michelle Yeoh), may be largely a dramatic dud, but there are a couple compelling reasons to watch it. The saga of Burma's Joan of Arc (recently triumphant) transcends pedestrian filmmaking, and one is grateful for Besson's honorable, if undistinguished, effort to commemorate this Nobel Peace Prize winner's decades-long stand against her homeland's brutal military regime. What impact The Lady has comes mostly from the Zen-like beauty and radiance of Yeoh, and the dotty authenticity of David Thewlis, playing Suu Kiy's steadfast British husband Michael Aris. The movie opens with Suu Kiy's dad, who has just helped free his country from British rule, regaling his 3-year-old daughter with magical stories about the golden land that once was Burma, resplendent with tigers, elephants and sunshine. Then Aung San drives off to hammer out plans for democratizing the newly independent nation. When pistol-brandishing soldiers crash the party, Aung San closes his eyes and leans into his death, armored in a martyr's calm. Many years later, in a very similar crisis, his daughter will reprise that expression of unyielding tranquility. Tranquility continues at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/the-lady.1/
Kathleen Murphy writes: The Moth Diaries closets a clutch of Lolitas in an all-girls' boarding school, the only male within hailing distance a lit prof (Scott Speedman) who gets off on teaching vampire fiction—"sex, blood and death"—to his itchy charges. Then a new student, affectless, pale as a ghost, strangely lacking any appetite for institutional food, arrives to pour fuel on this hotbed. Seems like Mary Harron, ballsy helmer of American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page, ought to be the perfect chef for what could be a tasty stew of female libido, liberally sauced with the supernatural. Sadly, Diaries never really steams up the screen with any psychosexual hijinks, and it falls way short of successfully mining vampirism as fertile metaphor for Sapphic love, Oedipal attachment, menses and wrist-slitting suicide! Surprisingly, Harron seems indifferent to any potential ambiguities in Rachel Klein's YA vampire/teen awakening tale: Are we following the diary of sad-sack adolescent, obsessed vampire-hunter—or is our narrator a nutcase projecting her dark side onto a handy doppelganger? Truth be told, it's hard to care one way or another. Drained dry of tension and energy, erotic or otherwise, The Moth Diaries fails to frighten, titillate, or otherwise engage the imagination. Stay engaged at http://movies.msn.com/movies/movie-critic-reviews/the-moth-diaries/#Review_0
Kathleen Murphy invites you ...to savor some particularly tasty screen adaptations of Poe's fictions, including American and foreign fare, the oddball and the familiar, the cheesy and the chilling. We'll tour Poe's haunted castles and tombs, his dank cellars and dungeons, where ravens and black cats materialize at every turn and raving madmen act out twisted obsessions and monstrous acts of vengeance. On the prowl through hectic masquerades and premature burials will be doppelgangers, revenants and, most especially, exotic femme fatales with monikers like Morella, Lenore, Ligeia, and Annabel Lee. And have a care, for our path's littered with macabre debris, from "Berenice"'s perfect teeth to an old man's "vulture eye" to that viscous puddle that used to be M. Valdemar.Click for a longer taste of this MSN/Movies "Parallel Universe" feature.
Kathleen Murphy also got to review The Raven. Oh joy.Click to read the beginning.
Kathleen Murphy surveys the summer field for MSN.com. Click "Read More" to do just that. Gentleman at left is prepared to Rock your world in G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
Following a festival tradition, Orchestra Seattle and Seattle Chamber Singers will put on their annual holiday performances at the First Free Methodist Church on Queen Anne, on Dec. 7 and 22.
The Secondary Bilingual Orientation Center for foreign students should move from the Old John Hay School on Upper Queen Anne Hill to Meany Middle School on Capitol Hill, according to a Nov. 25 recommendation made by school superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson.
My turn to take a whack at summer moviewatching. "Bruce," at left, joins me in inviting you to click below and read the first section of a new feature at MSN.com/Movies.