Jul 12 2009
Watch Report: Public Enemies, Slings & Arrows, Friday Night Lights and more…
It’s been entirely too long since my last update here. There are several reasons for this, but they’re all pretty lame and uninteresting. So, in my return to the world of my personal blog (I have been blogging regularly at Time Out Chicago) I decided to introduce a regular series that I’ve been intending to begin for awhile. Allow me to welcome you to the inaugural “Watch Report,” in which I’ll speak a little about the various movies and TV shows I’ve watched this week. I’m definitely starting big, as looking back, I noticed that I’ve watched a LOT of stuff this week.
Public Enemies – I always love seeing my hometown onscreen (I even saw a movie at The Biograph before it was closed down and remade into a stage theater) and thanks to this and The Dark Knight, it’s been two summers in a row that I’ve gotten this treat. (I’ll even brag that Kurt Naebig, who plays one of Christian Bale’s right-hand men, guest taught an acting class of mine a few years back.) I have a lot of respect for Michael Mann as a filmmaker, but I always have found him to be terribly long-winded and this film was no exception. It’s not a great film and feels like it could have better, but in the end, it’s overly long, while at the same time, a little thin in the plot and character department. While it’s framed as a face-off between Bale and Johnny Depp, the later is the only one that really has a character to work with. Bale’s Purvis is quite thin. The same can be said of Marion Cotilliard’s Billie Frechette. What’s really disturbing is that it seems like several interesting real-life elements of this story were left out of the film and thus, I can’t help but feel a little bit cheated with the final product. It’s a fine film, but nothing to get really excited about.
Netflix It
Slings & Arrows – Not a lot of Canadian television comes south for our consumption here in the states, so I was curious when I heard people talking about this one. As someone who’s done time in the theater and whose something of a Shakespeare geek, I was really destined to fall in love with this show. At a trim six episodes per season, Slings & Arrows follows the restructuring of the New Burbage Theater Festival, a once revered and now a bit overly commercial Shakespeare company in Canada. The show is very funny and whimsical and demonstrates a great respect for the stage and the Bard and I highly recommend it. It’s also worth noting that new Hollywood it girl Rachel McAdams is a major player in the first season (though it seems she’s only in one more episode after it). I’ll definitely be checking the second season as the first was great fun.
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The Lives of Others – It’s been on my watch list since it picked up the Oscar nomination (and subsequent win) for Best Foreign Film a few years ago but I finally got around to watching it and I was not disappointed. Taking place in East Berlin a few years before the wall came down, the film follows an SS officer who is tasked with monitoring a playwright and his actress girlfriend. He discovers that he’s only been given this job because a superior officer is in love with the actress and hopes to find reason to lock up the playwright so he can have her all for himself. Feeling sympathy for the couple, the SS man begins covering up suspicious actions to protect him, risking his own career. The film is remarkably poignant, with the plot taking many unexpected turns. The ending dragged on a bit long, but did offer a very moving conclusion for the protagonists.
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Friday Night Lights – I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about checking out Friday Night Lights. I’m not a football person at all. I’ve tried watching the game on several occasions and I just can’t get into it, it’s not my sport. Additionally, being a choir/theater nerd in high school, the idea of teen drama focusing on characters that never would have spoken to me when I was kid seemed like it would be really difficult to relate to. However, Netflix and several TV critics with similar taste have recommending the show to me for awhile, and with it sitting in my Watch Instantly queue, I just had to give it a shot. Boy, was I ever wrong. It took a few episodes for me to really get hooked, but in the past three days I’ve plowed through the entire first season of the show. I LOVE these characters. This show is, by and a large, about real, good people dealing with stresses and drama of everyday life. The football is certainly very present in all of their lives, but it is, by no means, overwhelming to the plot, especially later in the season. More than anything, Friday Night Lights reminds me of the authentic teen drama of My So-Called Life, without the overuse of the word “like” and with a far more likable matriarch than Angela’s terribly grating mother (Connie Britton is an absolute dream). I can’t recommend it enough and I’m already diving head-first into season two. (Side note: As a big fan of Murderball, I was so happy with the inclusion of quad rugby in this show.)
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Ordinary People – This film has been on my watch list for awhile, largely due to the performance of Timothy Hutton, who I’ve been a big fan of since the underrated Beautiful Girls. The best I can say is that I’m glad to have checked it off my “to watch” list. There are good performances in it, but I found the film to be wholly unmemorable and Mary Tyler Moore’s character to be so unbelievably infuriating. For me, one of the most amusing things in the film was seeing a very young Adam Baldwin as one of Hutton’s fellow swim team members.
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Elegy – I am not a Penelope Cruz fan, so I was a little concerned about a film that seemed built on idealizing her as the ultimate love interest, but the trailer did look really interesting to me and I heard a lot of good things about Ben Kingsley’s performance. Kingsley is, indeed, quite fantastic in this film. In addition, I was also very impressed by Dennis Hopper. I even dug Cruz a bit, especially towards the end of the film. I feel like the aging Don Juan finding love and meaning in his life storyline has been getting done quite a bit in the past few years, but this is still a really solid entry into that narrow sub-genre, if only due to its solid cast, which also includes supporting turns by the always solid Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard.
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Dead Again – I was so very disappointed with this movie. Kenneth Branagh starring and directing, Emma Thompson, the description referring to it as a “gumshoe thriller;” all of these things sounded like something that would be right up my alley. Sadly, this thing was just a big old mess. Branagh plays a private detective in modern day L.A. who is tasked with helping a woman with memory loss (Thompson) rediscover her identity. In the course of the investigation they visit a hypnotherapist who helps unearth memories from a past life about a couple (also played by Branagh and Thompson) whose marriage ended tragically when the woman was murdered and the husband executed for her death. The film is loaded with black and white flashback of the deceased couple that are peppered with red herrings about who killed Thompson’s alter-ego and why. I couldn’t help but feel that the movie was to clever for even itself, leaving several questions unanswered and presenting numerous coincidences that seemed entirely too convenient. Branagh should really stick with Shakespeare, because this things was just a train wreck.
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Dog Day Afternoon – Sometimes catching up on those “I-can’t-believe-I-haven’t-seen-that-movie-yet” movies can be disappointing (see my previous blurb on Ordinary People), but sometimes there are cases like this where I feel like a total idiot for not having moved it to the top of my priority list. One major concern I often have about seeing older films for the first time is that the endings and twists will have been spoiled long ago. I’m actually pretty certain that I knew about many, if not all, of the revelatory moments in Dog Day Afternoon long ago, I even remember an girl doing the monologue that Sonny’s wife gives to the police in a high school class of mine. Fortunately, Dog Day Afternoon is pretty spoiler-proof. I mean, if you can’t tell how this movie’s going to end five minutes into it, you’re pretty naïve. I am happy that I managed to forget the reasoning behind the bank robbery, knowing it doesn’t really ruin the film, but I’m still glad it was fresh for me. Al Pacino’s acting career has taken such a disappointing dip in recent years that it was really nice to see him back in top form. If you’re like me and haven’t managed to get around to seeing this movie yet, you should definitely make the time (especially if you’re a Netflix user, as it’s available on Watch Instantly).
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Standard Operating Procedure – This documentary does an incredible job of telling the story of events that lead to those brutal and graphic photos we all saw of the incidents that took place at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq. What really wowed me about this film, though, was its incredible visual style. Like many documentaries of this style, there’s a fair share of talking heads (including one of the most infamous figures surrounding the incidents: Lindy England), but in between, director Errol Morris utilizes the photos to construct timelines and recreates the incidents with some stunning photography. It’s the first time I can recall being really floored by the way a documentary looked, not just by its subject matter.
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Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy – I was mostly interested in checking this film out because of its cast, which features Timothy Olyphant and Zac Braff in the pre Deadwood and Scrubs days, respectively. The movie follow a group of gay friends living in West Hollywood and looking for love. There isn’t a straight character in the entire movie and only two female characters. It’s not a perfect film, but I found myself totally charmed by it. Olyphant’s a personal favorite of mine and he works really well as the lovelorn lead, Braff’s bleached blonde hair is distracting, but amusing and John Mahoney is adorable as the groups den mother boss. The movie was written and directed by the creator of Eli Stone and keen-eyed Joss Whedon will notice small appearances from Owen (Buffy season 1), Ben (Buffy season 5) and Lindsay (Angel).
