New reviews from The Movie Snob — a troika of mediocrities

proof (C+). This new film stars Anthony Hopkins as a once-brilliant, later-insane mathematician, and Gwyneth Paltrow as his perhaps-also-brilliant, perhaps-also-tending-towards-insanity daughter Catherine. After Hokpins’s character passes away, Catherine slips into a deep funk, and her mood is not improved when her older sister Claire (Hope Davis) comes to Chicago for the funeral with a gradually-revealed agenda of her own. Meanwhile young mathematician Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal) further unsettles things by showing a keen interest in the deceased professor’s unpublished notebooks and in his younger daughter as well. It’s not a bad movie, but I just didn’t find any of it particularly compelling. I should add that my cousin Diane, whose field is social work, liked the movie much more than I did and would have given it a B+.

Wall (C). Not to be confused with the Pink Floyd rock opera of similar name, this is a documentary about the massive security fence/wall that the Israelis built to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out. Going into the theater, I picked up a flyer that contained a review calling this movie "exceptionally evenhanded." I, however, found the movie exceptionally anti-wall and basically pro-Palestinian. According to the Dallas Morning News, the filmmaker Simone Bitton considers herself an "Arab Jew," and almost everyone she interviews in this movie is highly critical of the wall. The films includes virtually no context or history, no maps to explain what we’re seeing, and certainly no report on the broader impact of the wall beyond the people who live right along it. Thus, although we are quickly told that the wall costs $2 million per kilometer, we are given absolutely no information on whether the wall has been effective at diminishing terrorism and other crimes in Israel. Although we are told that the wall encroaches on Palestinian territory as demarcated by the "Green Line," we are not told what the Green Line is or why it should be controlling. In all, a very unsatisfying film. The grade is relatively high only because the visuals of the wall and of the Holy Land are interesting, even striking.

Mata Hari (1932) (C-). Continuing my exploration of Greta Garbo’s oeuvre on DVD, I watched this early effort the other night. The tale is that of Mata Hari, an exotic dancer in World War I Paris who was executed by a firing squad after being convicted of spying for the Germans. In this telling, her downfall resulted from her falling in love with a passionate young Russian lieutenant and thereby arousing the jealousy of an old Russian general with whom she had previously kept company. Although Garbo largely conquers her penchant for overacting seen in Anna Christie, she still mugs fairly shamelessly in a few scenes. Overall, it’s just not a very good movie.