I had the opportunity to watch The Brothers Bloom this weekend. It’s a film that Maria and I had wanted to see for a long time but just hadn’t got around to it. To be honest, after our extended Oscar-nominated film-watching marathon we’ve both been a little burnt out on the cinema. However, if we’d realized how great The Brothers Bloom was going to be, we certainly wouldn’t have waited this long to watch it.

Unbelievably, The Brothers Bloom is only the second major motion picture from writer/director Rian Johnson. His first was Brick, a 2005 high school thriller/mystery kind of film that absolutely blew Maria and I away when we first saw it. Cast in the setting of a high school, the film has this absolutely dark, eerie and violent undertone with dialogue that just blows your socks off. The Brothers Bloom, a good old caper film, is just as impressive as Brick, and that’s saying a lot.

After seeing the film, and thinking for a while, the best way I can describe The Brothers Bloom is like this: Every scene is absolutely loving crafted.

You can tell. The detail that goes into dressing every single set, the props, the character’s costumes, the make up, the special effects—and then, the dialogue, the writing, the acting. I can’t honestly recall a film that has been so carefully and lovingly created, and that shows it so clearly. You can feel and see all the love and care and attention that was put into making this film, and I think that’s amazing.

The film itself covers a portion of the lives of two con-men, brothers named Stephen and Bloom, played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody. Bloom, who always seems to want to leave the business, is tired of living a written life, existing only as characters written for him to play by his brother Stephen. The film centres largely around their one final con, a hefty one, which winds up in lots of hilarious twists and turns.

At its core, The Brothers Bloom is a lot like a Wes Anderson film. It’s full of stuff that’s at times barely believable and at other times believable, but wholly surreal. I like that. Johnson creates this really intriguing environment—this world—where his characters are free to explore and invent and gives himself, as the writer, a chance to explore the idea of the narrative, and the character, and provide us with one very entertaining film. Both directs write characters so well. In The Brothers Bloom, the casting of Brody and Ruffalo was genius. They both work so well in their roles. Rachel Weisz who plays the mark in their con—and a major role in the film—acts her role convincingly leaving us never entirely certain of what she knows.

The Brothers Bloom is a great film. It’s so well made. It’s funny. It’s engaging. It’s it has a lot of stuff that you won’t expect. It’s characters are quirky and endearing and I think, on the whole, it’s a film you’d be hard pressed not to enjoy immensely. To anyone who thinks that the American art of film-making is dead, this I offer up to you.

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This past weekend, Maria and I watched Yes Man, a film which we normally wouldn’t have rented if it were not free from the library. I’m going to summarize my thoughts on this film in three paragraphs. I think that’s all it will take. This paragraph does not count.

Yes Man is a predictable cookie-cutter romantic comedy. Jim Carrey plays a character who’s recently divorced but still not entirely over his ex-wife—who left him—and needs his life to be shaken up in order to get on with things. He receives that shaking when he bumps into an old friend who suggests and Carrey join him at a seminar about become a “Yes Man!” living by the philosophy of saying “Yes!” to everything. As you can predict, the results are at times hilarious and tragic.

Yes Man is the kind of movie you should see if you need something to see and have seen everything else there is to see. It’s funny. We laughed. But we could also predict every single twist and turn in the movie with the kind of precision usually reserved for the people who create synthetic DNA.  Carrey is an absolute master of physical comedy and he is well-cast as Carl Allen, the mid-level banker. Rhys Darby, who plays Murray on Flight of the Conchords, reprises nearly that exact same role as Norman, Carl’s boss. Darby’s character is hilarious and the chemistry between these two is pretty electric—I’d like to see them do more together.

I don’t fault this film for being predictable, that’s the nature of the genre, but this film does have a major stumbling block all things considered. Like Crazy Heart, Zooey Deschanel cast as Carrey’s love interest was an awful choice. He looks like he could be her father and for me, and Maria, the age gap was just too great to be believable. The love story, which is the root of the movie, was just too out there. It’s a deal breaker if you care about the plot. But, it’s a Jim Carrey film, so plot is secondary to having a good laugh. And we laughed.

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500 Days of Summer is one of those films that surprises you. I was surprised. When Maria mentioned that she wanted to watch it I was kind of skeptical. It looked like a chick flick, and even though I’ve been known not to mind a chick flick from time to time, I still approach them with some reserve. That said, 500 Days of Summer was really anything but a chick flick. Instead, it was an absolutely wonderful piece of film making that stretched and bent the edges of narrative story-telling, character and plot development, and imagination. It’s a must-see.

What’s great about 500 Days of Summer is that it felt so fresh. Not only did it have a young and charming cast, but the whole feel of the movie was young and charming without coming off as immature. I’m thinking here of the difference between this film, which was well-written, well-cast, and well-executed and a piece of absolute horseshit like Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Both films are ostensibly about the same thing, I think, but one is great while the other is not.

500 Days of Summer is intelligent. As a narrative about a boy and a girl it jumps from day to day throughout the 500 days of their relationship. For example, you might be on Day 200 in one scene and Day 3 in another. It’s smart that way, and I like how it plays with the narrative structure, telling the story in a completely non-linear fashion. It keeps you on your toes and reveals bits and pieces about our characters and their relationship in a really interesting way. For what it’s worth, it felt like Memento as a romantic comedy, and I liked that—a lot.

And it’s plays with you. It pushes the edges of imagination and memory. Without spoiling too much there are several scenes that are just fun and fit perfectly with the way the film is structured. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, at all.

Really, anyone that doesn’t like the film is either dead or a robot—or has terrible taste in movies.

500 Days of Summer is something new and fresh in film-making. That alone isn’t enough to make a good movie but coupled with a great cast, a great storyline, and the beautiful Boston backdrop and you’ve got a perfect film.

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I really didn’t expect a lot from Bobby. After all, it was written and directed by Emilio Estevez. Yes, that Emilio Estevez—the guy who played Coach Gordon in the highly-acclaimed Mighty Ducks series (tongue firmly planted in cheek). Really. So you can see why I didn’t go into this film expecting a whole lot, but Maria assured me that it was good and, as it turns out like in most all things, she was right.

Bobby follows the assassination of JFK’s brother, the U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. What’s interesting about this film is that it doesn’t center around the assassination but rather the people in the hotel, in the ball room that night, and the stories of their lives. It’s more a story of the hotel than the assassination, and that’s neat. Think of a movie like Crash and if you haven’t seen that film, well then drop everything. It’s neat, because you don’t even meet Bobby until, let’s say, the very end of the film. The real cast of characters is everyone from the Hotel Manager, brilliantly acted by William H. Macy, to a retired Hotel greeter grieving the death of his wife, to a pair of Kennedy campaign volunteers who spend their days skipping campaign work to dink around, to a washed-up alcoholic diva and her long-suffering husband.

Truly though, this film was a surprise hit. It’s so well done. The cast of characters is so interesting and diverse; their stories are truly intriguing and really pull you in. At times, you laugh your face off—particularly when the young and outrageously naive volunteer campaigners are roped into dropping acid—and at other times you’ll cry or wring your hands in frustration. There are so many interesting stories here. Eventually, the stories begin to intertwine and weave together and that too is done very expertly. You may say to yourself, like I said to myself, Emilio? I didn’t know he had it in him.

And if that wasn’t enough I have to give significant props to the cinematography. It’s brilliant. It’s unique, it’s different, and Estevez tries stuff that’s down right interesting with his cameras. Instead of standing still they move, they feel organic and very present in a film that’s supposed to be ramping up the excitement and the tension as the night drags on. I like it!

Oh, and if you’re wondering, Lindsay Lohan sucked but she doesn’t ruin the movie, I promise.

All in all, I was truly surprised, in the best possible way, by Bobby. It’s good, truly and deeply good and I can only say that I hope Emilio Estevez, our beloved Coach Gordon, keeps ‘em coming. This movie is a real winner. Gord, I’ll be watching.

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Over the weekend I had a man date with my friend Jason. Like all manly men do when they get together, we decided to watch a scary movie. We picked Paranormal Activity a movie we both wanted to see but hadn’t got around to yet because, in both our cases, we didn’t have anyone to watch it with—and this isn’t the kind of movie you want to watch alone!

Paranormal Activity holds the unique distinction of being the largest grossing movie of all time based on return on investment. In layman’s terms that means that based on the amount of money it cost to make it, it made back more than any other movie in history. That’s probably because it was shot on a unimaginably meager $15,000 budget. Can you say, “WOW”?

Once you see the film it’s easy to figure out how it could be shot on such a tight purse though. Paranormal Activity riffs on the concept that The Blair Witch Project made popular in the late nineties. It follows a young couple named Katie and Mika who buy a video camera to document some “paranormal activity” taking place in their house. Like Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity is shot exclusively through said video camera giving the film a perspective that trades between first-person, with Mika holding the camera and narrating and a third-person view when the camera is on a tripod. The film alternates between day and night with majority of the activity taking place at night and captured by the camera as it sits on a tripod filming the couple as they sleep.

One thing needs to be said of this film: it’s incredibly innovative. By that I mean it was filmed for only $15,000 and it’s good, relatively speaking. The effects are all incredible low tech. The suspense, the terror, and the frightening atmosphere of the movie have all been created on the cheap, but done with incredible effectiveness. A movie like Paranormal Activity goes to show that you can get your point across—in this case, you can scare the crap out of people—and not have to spend millions. I think it’s interesting that a movie with such a small budget had to use effects appropriately and conservatively but yet managed to do it so well. On the other hand, look at all the scores of movies that use effects because they have the budget to do so. I would much prefer to see a film constrained by a tiny budget use innovative effects to creep us out than see a Hollywood blockbuster that throws everything and the kitchen sink at us because it can. What do you think?

Now Paranormal Activity was a pretty scary movie, but it certainly could’ve been scarier. After all the talk and chatter across the internet about this viral sensation I honestly expected a bit more. The one element that I think could’ve made things more frightening is a touch bit more realism. As all the paranormal activity swirls around our big screen couple they seem to live their lives inside of a bubble. Their isolated inside their posh house with very little outside contact on camera. I kept thinking, while watching the film, that if this were me I would’ve made much different choices. Now of course with a film like this, and I think any horror film, you’re meant to put yourself in the shoes of the main characters. The “what would I do?” mentality is what makes it scary, no? If those characters then are making ridiculous choices that I can’t relate to then it takes away from the connection I have with them. On the other hand, a lot of the time it’s those exact same poor choices that make you feel helpless and stranded in a horror film. So, I don’t know. In some cases I couldn’t buy into the film because I couldn’t believe that I’d do the same thing, in the same situation.

All in all, Paranormal Activity, for what it’s meant to be, is a decent film. I appreciated, most of all, seeing what could be done on such a shoestring budget. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly as frightening as I imagined it being but this wasn’t on account of cheap effects but rather on not being able to relate entirely to the characters.  For the effects they employ, it’s pretty much incredible that it can scare as well as it can. Don’t get me wrong, it is scary after all.

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Alright, so for the sake of full disclosure Wes Anderson is probably my favourite writer/director working in Hollywood today. The others, because I know you were wondering, are M. Night Shyamalan and the Coen Brothers. That said, I’m reviewing The Fantastic Mr. Fox from a particular perspective, whether that’s a good or bad thing from Mr. Anderson in the end, you’ll have to read and find out.

Now I can remember, back after Life Aquatic was released, a lot of talk surrounding the idea of Wes Anderson doing an “animated” film. It was said that after filming the stop-motion puppet-animated portions of Life Aquatic, Anderson decided he’d like to do a full feature film in this style too. He loved working with puppets. So the idea for The Fantastic Mr. Fox was born.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox certainly feels like a Wes Anderson film. It’s quirky, full of life and interesting. It takes pieces of the mundane and makes them beautiful. It’s hilarious. It’s a wild ride and it’s characters are so full of life and unique. Adapted from a novel by an equally interesting an eccentric author, Roald Dahl, The Fantastic Mr. Fox follows the life of one family of foxes and they struggle to survive and come to terms with their personal identities. As you would expect from Anderson, we’re presented with an aging main character struggling to understand his place in the world as he grows older, a younger character on a similar journey of self-discovery and a motley crew of supporting characters. It’s standard Wes Anderson fair, with puppets.

But it’s good. The story is hilarious, its adaption is brilliant. The atmosphere itself, the puppets and all of that, is incredibly well done. The world that Anderson creates inside of this film is so interesting that you’ll certainly find yourself lost in all the tiny, little details as you watch. It engulfs you but, again, that’s Wes Anderson.

A couple of things though. The marketing surrounding The Fantastic Mr. Fox billed it as a superstar film with the voices of Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Owen Wilson, Jason Swartzman, et. al. In reality, the voices of the puppets could’ve been done by anyone, I think. The star power, in my opinion, didn’t make the film all that more interesting. It was neat, in a couple of cases, to hear the voices of actors and see which character they’d been given but aside from that, it could’ve been anyone doing those voices. At the same time, I would really love to see Anderson do a live action film with Clooney and Streep. What could possibly be better than that? Maybe if he cast Philip Seymour Hoffman and William H. Macy in supporting roles. You heard it here first.

My only other criticism of The Fanstastic Mr. Fox is that it was billed as a “family film”—says so right on the DVD cover—and it was no such animal. Maybe if your family is older but if you’re going into it expecting a film that will appeal to younger audiences I don’t think you’ll find it here. While a film like Up can genuinely appeal to both young and old audiences, Mr. Fox fails to hit that mark for at least one reason: language. There is a lot of swearing in this film only, instead of using the real swear words, the characters say “cuss”. How this is any different from saying “shit,” I don’t know. Kids are smart enough to pick up on this and realize what’s going on and I don’t think it’s really made any more appropriate because they aren’t actually saying a bad word. Any character that needs to say “cuss” every few sentences isn’t an appropriate character in a family flick. Is this a marketing thing? Probably, but it’s a thing nonetheless.

On the whole, The Fantastic Mr. Fox was a really good film. It’s quirky, unusual and highly entertaining like you’d expect from Wes Anderson. It’s interesting to look at, a real treat for the eyes, and it’s innovative. Given the medium he’s working on, Anderson has done a really good job. I’d be interesting in knowing what fans not familiar with Anderson’s other work think of this film but from my perspective, it’s a winner.

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The Stoning of Soraya M. is a movie akin to The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s 2004 magnum opus in more than one way. Like The Passion of the Christ, we know from the start that our main character, Soraya M., is going to be killed. We’re told this from the very start. Like The Passion, this movie is also unflinchingly graphic in its portrayal of the violence demonstrated against its main character. And like The Passion of the Christ, The Stoning of Soraya M. too gives us a heroic, messiah-like character who dies a seemingly unjust death at the hands of the law. The result, too, is not unlike Gibson’s film. The Stoning of Soraya M. will leave you breathless, in tears, and quite possibly traumatized for days.

The Stoning of Soraya M. is based on a true story. The characters are based on real people. The journalist, in the film, was a real person, a French-Iranian journalist who brought the story to the world in book form in the 90’s. The film is based on that book and follows the account of a young woman, Soraya, her husband Ghorban-Ali, and her aunt Zahra. The film begins in a very immediate way. When the French-Iranian journalist’s car breaks down in a tiny Iranian village you can already feel the tension. Then, when we woman begins to follow him, insisting she has an important story to tell, it heats up even further. Although she’s dismissed by the town’s elders, who tell the journalist that she’s only a crazy old woman, you know that something’s up. When the woman finally convinces the journalist to meet with her, and sneaks him to her house, she explains that only the day before her niece was stoned to death, the result of an injustice that she unwinds in the rest of the film.

Nearly everyone who would’ve seen Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ would go into theatres knowing how it ends. The Stoning of Soraya M. starts out, right at the beginning, by telling us that she’s dead because the film-makers wanted us to know. There’s no escaping that. And it’s that knowledge which gives the film such a heavy weight that it’s unbearable at times. As the scenes unfold which lead to Soraya’s death, as unjustice is heaped upon unjustice you know that there won’t be a turning point, that there’s no hope for her. She dies. That weight gives the whole film the feeling of a very long funeral. At times you find yourself cheering for Soraya, rooting for her, and hoping that she makes it through—you forget—and in that way, you ride the ups and downs like Soraya herself: knowing there’s no hope, no redemption, but praying against all odds that something will happen. It’s unreal, maybe surreal.

The violence, though, is real. Like The Passion of the Christ, this film is graphic beyond belief. Going in, you know it’s about a stoning, it’s in the title for goodness sake, but you can’t imagine how violent and climactic a stoning can be. That said, it’s worth something, possibly a lot of something, that a film-maker doesn’t shy away from really driving home their point. Just be prepared to close your eyes, a lot.

The last point of comparison is Soraya heself. Like Jesus, in Mel Gibon’s film, Soraya is portrayed as a victim, a blameless victim of the law. Surprisingly, Soraya isn’t necessarily as much of a main character as her aunt, Zahra. While we follow Soraya as she goes about her life, as she is persecuted, as she is killed, it’s her aunt who champions her cause, it’s her aunt who tells the story. It’s more her story than her that is important, it feels. Following her death, as her aunt Zahra explains, it’s her story that must get out. It’s her story that she died for. It’s the injustice that must speak.

Like any movie with a message, it’s difficult to criticize The Stoning of Soraya M. It’s hard to separate the message from the medium. On one hand, this is a exceptionally powerful film, an extraordinarily human criticize of the system of Sharia Law and the nation of Iran following the revolution. On the other hand, is it good film-making?

Well, for one, the cinematography is outstanding. The setting, a tiny seemingly decrepit village in Iran is a breath-taking backdrop all on its down. Couple this with excellent camera work and you’re really given a sense of the feeling of the vast emptiness, the loneliness, which drives the plot in many ways.

With the knowledge that Soraya is going to die, I would say some scenes are drawn out to the very limits. The preparations for her stoning and the hours surrounding her death are just way too long and that’s a criticism which I have against the film making itself. Now of course they were meant to be long. We know she’s going to die and the film-makers want us to marinate in that fact. But the tension is already ratcheted up as high as it’s going to go, and drawing out those scenes served no purpose, in my opinion. In addition, the whole framing of the movie, within the narrative of Soraya’s aunt felt a bit worn. When she sits the journalist down and tells him she has a story to tell and we fade into the past it feels like a very tired literary device, unnecessary even. I know this is how it happened but for the sake of the medium, it could’ve been presented in a more interesting way, I think. But, is it important that some aspects of this film may have been rough around the edges? I would say, no.

The Stoning of Soraya M. is such a powerful piece of storytelling that it stands up all on its own. Maybe it isn’t the best piece of film-making, maybe it’s a bit drawn out, but all of that doesn’t matter. The story is powerful, it’s gripping, it is so heart-wrenchingly hard to watch that everything else just disappears. Stripped down, here is a story about an injustice, about a small town in Iran, about people caught up in something terrible, about evil that just spirals out of control. The Stoning of Soraya M. is the kind of view of life that will make you want to drop everything you’re doing and dedicate the rest of your life to social action, immediately. And I think, since that was without a doubt the point of this film, it absolutely succeeds.

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The Blind Side is different than I expected. For starters, I don’t like sports movies, pretty much as a rule, because I don’t really like sports. But, like Invictus, which I reviewed earlier, The Blind Side isn’t so much about sports as it is about the human condition, hope, and faith. But, while it was different in that the sports aspect was pretty much glossed over, it wasn’t too different than everything else out there and what you ultimately have on your hands here is a feel-good movie. A feel-good movie done well, but a feel-good movie nonetheless.

The Blind Side is a film about a down-and-out black boy from the projects adopted and saved from a difficult life by an upper-class white suburban family. Although struggling academically, the boy is incredible at sports, namely football. The movie follows his struggles to fit in, to deal with his past, and to make important, life-changing decisions like where to go to college. At the same time, the family who’s adopted him has to wrestle with questions of their own: questioning their intentions and motivations, their values, and, of course, deconstructing prejudices and misplaced notions in the process.

But, ultimately, The Blind Side is another feel-good movie. It gives all of us who aren’t doing a thing for their fellow man, to sit down in front of the TV and feel like we’re doing something to change the world. We walk away from the movie feeling like, yeah, we’re great people. Or maybe—and hopefully this is more true than not—we’re inspired to actually do something.

I can’t be too scathing because, to be honest, I enjoyed The Blind Side. But it isn’t breaking new ground.

The highlight of this movie, to be sure, is Sandra Bullock’s performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy, matriarch of the family. She won Best Actress for this role at the Oscars and following her award most of the chatter surrounded the fact that she hadn’t won for this role, but merely been given an Oscar because it was her time. The Academy, it was said, was just waiting for a chance to give her something because of her contribution to cinema. The same with Jeff Bridges, they said. It was their time, regardless of their performances. So I was surprised, because Bullock’s performance in The Blind Side is truly Oscar worthy. As Mrs. Tuohy, Bullock acts her heart out. She’s a fiesty, fiery and fearless white soccer mom—and it works. I’ve never been a huge Bullock fan, although she was great in Crash, I get the impression that she really stepped out of herself for this role.

In the end, all I can say is take it for what it’s worth. The Blind Side is a well-done feel-good movie but maybe this is an indication of things: We watched the movie pretty late at night and as it dragged on, being able to predict every twist and turn, it left me wondering when it would just up and end.

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Truly, An Education wasn’t what I expected it would be going in.

To be fair, it was probably my fault. Concerned about sexual content, I looked it up on some family-oriented movie review sites. The kind of sites that warn parents about inappropriate material in films, and tell you which to stay far away from.

This particular website described An Education as pretty terrible. In not so many words, it said that the film was about a young girl being seduced by an older man who wanted to have sex with her. It said that the majority of the film surrounded this attempt, by the older man, to get the younger girl to have intercourse with him. It said that that was essentially the point of the film. I had my own reservations as well. Having recently seen Crazy Heart, I was still smarting from the classic Hollywood older man is swooned by much younger woman fantasy that that film let play out. An Education seemed like it would be much the same. But, as I’d find out, it wasn’t all about sex and it wasn’t just that same old Hollywood story.

Maria was insistent that we watch it, she was sure that it was going to be good, and so we did. It took about twenty minutes, but as my skepticism wore off what remained was an interest and an admiration for a film that was truly and deeply well-done. A film which, cleverly, isn’t merely an education for its young protagonist, but for all its characters, and again, for the viewer, too.

An Education is, indeed, a film about a young girl who falls in love with an older man, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a film about life and the choices that you make—it’s a kind of moral education. It wrestles with complicated issues of greed and money and the meaning of everything and does it with a truckload of class and charm and wit.

But the true cleverness of this film is in its enormous reach.

An Education has a sizeable cast of very different, and important characters representing specific moods and modes. In this way, there is a character for everyone to relate to. And as our main character goes through the twists and turns of life—and there are plenty of twists and turns—she brings everyone alongside her. Prejudices collapse, life lessons and positions are evaluated and re-evaluated, perceptions, hopes, dreams, wishes, ambitions shift and shift and shift again. And everyone is involved, and this is what I think is so clever. This isn’t the story of a young heroine learning her lessons, it’s about everyone, us included, learning too. As I watched the movie I found myself making certain moral judgments, rooting for and agreeing with certain characters, and then changing my mind altogether. And as I watched, I developed certain prejudices too, I made choices, and then re-evaluated them, I considered how I would act in a similar situation. I learned.

To be fair, I need to say something about the supporting cast. For her role as the main character, Carey Mulligan has received a lot of press, including some Best Actress nominations but her supporting cast shines as well. Nearly every supporting character acts their hearts out, and it shows.

An Education is exactly what it says it is, and I have a hard time finding fault. It’s a wonderful film. Well-written, well-acted, well-paced and full to the brim of both great comedy and gripping drama. Easily one of my favourite Best Picture picks for this year.

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The clip below, from a company called 13th Street is advertising a new kind of cinema, one in which the viewer can interact with the film and change the outcome. In this case, it’s done by phoning different viewers in the audience and changing the outcome of the film based on recognized voice commands. Is this the new step in immersive horror films or just another hokey Hollywood breakthrough?

What do you think? Leave a comment.

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