Dark Passage

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Dark Passage (C-). I finished my viewing of the four films starring Humphrey Bogart (The Big Sleep) and Lauren Bacall (The Big Sleep) with this 1947 release. It's a strange film. A convicted murder named Vincent Parry (Bogart) escapes from prison, and the lovely Irene Jansen (Bacall) picks him up and takes him back to her swanky San Francisco apartment even though she seems to know who he is. A shady plastic surgeon alters Parry's face, but Parry's plan to hide at a friend's apartment until he heals is ruined when his friend is murdered that very night. The whole movie just has a weird sort of vibe to it, but it isn't terrible -- it just isn't very good.

Couples Retreat

New review from the desk of The Movie Snob

Couples Retreat (C-). I saw this comedy at the dollar theater, and the price was about right. Four couples go off to a fabulous island resort where relationship-building exercises will supposedly be optional. But when they get there, they are told that the exercises are most definitely mandatory, and hilarity is supposed to ensue when the goofy French relationship expert Marcel (Jean Reno, Ronin) puts the hapless couples through various zany, off-the-wall stunts. The hilarity is seldom in evidence, but there is a fair amount of crudeness and lameness to make up for it. I was amused at one scene in which the tyrannical Marcel orders the couples to line up facing each other and strip to their underwear; all four women have flawless Hollywood figures, while the men range from average to walrus-like. Although I did laugh a small handful of times, I am confident you can find something better to spend your entertainment dollars on.

The Big Sleep

DVD review from The Movie Snob

The Big Sleep (B). This 1946 release is based on a novel by Raymond Chandler. Humphrey Bogart (Key Largo) stars as hard-boiled L.A. private investigator Philip Marlowe. A wealthy widower hires him to handle what looks like a straightforward case of blackmail -- the widower's flightly younger daughter has run up some gambling debts. But the case turns out to be anything but straightforward as murders begin to pile up, and the widower's older daughter (played by Lauren Bacall, Kay Largo) turns Marlowe's head while concealing secrets of her own. It's an enjoyable film, even though I couldn't follow all the twists and turns of the plot. (Amusingly, the extra features on the DVD report that Chandler himself couldn't explain who killed one particular character or why.) Bogart and Bacall have chemistry, and there is some entertainingly snappy dialogue, such as between Marlowe and a cute female cab driver. There's even a scene in which Marlowe, needing to spy on a shady character from a bookstore across the street, smoothly seduces the bookstore's proprietress (who's quite attractive herself, once she takes off her glasses and lets her hair down). Fun stuff.

A Scanner Darkly (book review)

Book review from The Movie Snob

A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. This is the last selection in the Library of America volume Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s. This particular novel was first published in 1977, and it was made into a movie by Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused) in 2006. The sci-fi elements are really fairly limited. Basically, it's about an undercover narcotics police officer who is himself an addict. Sometimes he goes to HQ to report, in a high-tech disguise called a "scramble suit," so that even his superiors don't know which of the addicts he is reporting on he actually is. The book's strength is its depiction of drug addiction and the psychoses and paranoia experienced by the addicts. Apparently it is based on some of Dick's own personal experiences (an "author's note" at the end of the novel says so), which I suppose is why the novel comes across as so believable. Definitely worth a read.

Avatar

New review from The Movie Snob

Avatar (B). I recommend that you see this movie in its 3D incarnation, because the visual effects really make this movie. I mean really make it, in the sense that they are the only reason to see it. The plot is a ho-hum story about corporate malefactors and military crazies dealing out harm to a wholesome and spiritual indigenous people on a remote planet called Pandora. One soldier infiltrates the alien race by becoming one of them through an "avatar," or alien body that he mentally controls through some funky technology. (It works a lot like the mechanical surrogates did in the movie Surrogates.) The acting is nothing to write home about. And the movie is definitely too long at 162 minutes. But the special effects really are incredible. The aliens and alien monsters and the whole alien world are amazingly realistic, but so are the scenes involving military helicopters and other hardware. The melding of live actors and digitized aliens is flawless. And the 3D effects are exceptional as well. I call it a B, because it is definitely worth seeing, but a movie can't get an "A" on special effects alone in my book.

Key Largo

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Key Largo (C). I continued to work my way through the four-DVD set "Bogie & Bacall: The Signature Collection" with this 1948 release. I was prepared to love it because I am so fond of the awesome 80's tune it inspired. Alas, it is a pretty mediocre piece of entertainment. Humphrey Bogart (To Have and Have Not) plays a soldier back from WWII who's at loose ends and makes his way down to the Florida Keys to visit the father of a war buddy who got killed. He meets the father (Lionel Barrymore, Grand Hotel) and also the widow (Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not) at the hotel they run. But the hotel is shortly taken over by a bunch of gangsters led by Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson, Illegal), and Bogie will have to use all his street smarts to help the good guys survive the night. Oh, and there's a hurricane coming. The whole thing reminded me of Rawhide, which I reviewed in this space a while back. Anyhoo, nothing special about this one, even though Claire Trevor (Stagecoach) won a supporting-actress Oscar for it.

To Have and Have Not

DVD review from The Movie Snob

Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (B). The back of the DVD case bills this 1944 release as "The Movie That Brought Together Bogart and Bacall," and so it did. The 19-year-old Lauren Bacall (Dogville) co-starred opposite 44-year-old Humphrey Bogart (Casablanca), and apparently it was very nearly love at first sight for the two. The plot closely resembles that of Casablanca. Harry Morgan (Bogart) owns a small fishing boat he operates out of the Caribbean island of Martinique, where he tries to stay out of the struggle between the Vichy officials who control the island and the outlawed French Resistance. But when a beautiful but down-on-her-luck American (Bacall) crosses his path, he finds himself tempted to put neutrality aside in order to help her. A pretty good movie, but it's no Casablanca. And although Bacall is pretty enough, I wouldn't say she's as beautiful as some of the other stars of the day, like Ingrid Bergman (Casablanca) or Vivien Leigh (Gone With the Wind). There is a decent "making of" feature on the DVD that discusses the Bogart-Bacall love affair, and a horrific vintage Looney Tunes cartoon called Bacall to Arms.

Invictus

A new review from guest reviewer Sarah W.

Invictus (A). It is 1994 post-Apartheid South Africa, and President Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) is looking for a way to erase his country's past racism and unite the South African people. Mandela's answer to the struggle: rugby. Mandela saves the white-supported Springboks from black South Africans' attempts to dismantle the team and asks Springbok captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to lead the team to a World Cup Victory. This tale of the underdog has the potential to lose its credibility in a series of feel-good Disney scenes, but director Clint Eastwood keeps things grounded: the Springboks fight for a team victory, Freeman delivers some incredible Mandela speeches while keeping his character human, and a country is not so much united as it is united behind a sports team. The only real breaking down of barriers is seen among Mandela's secret service men who, initially apprehensive about working together, engage in a chummy rugby match on Mandela's lawn. Nonetheless, it is a great depiction of South Africans' post-Apartheid hope for the future of their country.

35 Up

DVD review from The Movie Snob

35 Up (B). To briefly recap, back in 1964 some British filmmakers took a gaggle of 7-year-olds from various social classes and interviewed them, planning to re-interview them every seven years to see how much of a role class still plays in British society. Thus, this installment came out around 1992. I thought it was not quite as interesting as the previous installments, probably because people just don't change as much between 28 and 35 as they do, say between 21 and 28. Most of these people were married with children, a few were divorced, a few were dealing with the death of a parent, but there were no real surprises. The sad case of the guy with mental illness continued to be a sad case. One of the more interesting kids, the poor mixed-race boy named Symon, did not participate in this installment but I hear he comes back in later ones. Rich kid John, who refused to participate in 28 Up, came back for this one. Just two more to go!

Planet 51

New review from The Movie Snob

Planet 51 (B-). Although nothing to write home about, this is a perfectly pleasant little animated feature that turns the tables on the usual alien-invasion story. In the early going, we meet the happy green humanoids of the titular planet. Their culture is very Eisenhower-America, right down to the music and the cheesy alien-invasion movies that are popular at the local cinema. A visit by a hapless astronaut (voiced by Dwayne Johnson, Escape to Witch Mountain) rocks their world, triggering a military lockdown a la The Day the Earth Stood Still. A plucky teenaged boy named Lem (Justin Long, Drag Me to Hell) helps the astronaut hide from the military, while the spaceman's Wall-E style probe Rover tries to help him get back to his lander before the mother ship in orbit returns to Earth. (I assumed Lem was named after Stanislaw Lem, the sci-fi author who wrote Solaris, but I've read an alternative theory that his name is a goof on the astronaut's lander, which looks like a Lunar Excursion Module.) Anyway, it's a harmless way to pass an hour and a half.

New Moon

From the desk of The Movie Snob

New Moon (D). Take my grade with a grain of salt, because I am clearly not the target demographic for this movie--that is, I am not and never have been a teenaged girl. This film continues the saga of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart, Zathura), a morose teenager who's in love with dashing vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, Twilight). Ed loves her back, but he and his vampire clan skip town and he tells Bella she'll never see him again. So she starts hanging out with a frequently-shirtless Native American guy named Jacob (Taylor Lautner, boyfriend to Taylor Swift), who has certain monstrous issues of his own. There is much fluttering of eyelids by Bella, and there are countless halting love speeches by the various members of this love triangle, but very little actually happens. In other words, it's a dull way to spend 130 minutes. A pretty vampire named Alice (Ashley Greene, Twilight) does provide a few moments of interest, though.

Everybody's Fine

A new review from The Movie Snob

Everybody's Fine (C). This dawdlin' and maudlin affair stars Robert De Niro (Stardust) as Frank Goode, a widower with four grown children scattered across the USA. When all four of his kids cancel a visit home, he decides to surprise them with visits (despite his doctor's warning that he really shouldn't try anything so strenuous). As he makes his slow way by train and bus, he and we soon realize that Frank is none too close to his children--he doesn't really know what's going on in their lives, and they have pretty much concealed all their sorrows, difficulties, and disappointments from him over the years. Somewhat similar to About Schmidt, which I think I liked much better, this is apparently a remake of an Italian movie almost 20 years old. Anyway, it didn't really draw me in. Oh, I still got a little misty over it, but that's no great feat.

Up in the Air

From The Movie Snob

Up in the Air (B+). This is another solid effort from director Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You for Smoking), and it is getting great reviews (current Metacritic.com score: 82). George Clooney (Leatherheads) stars as Ryan Bingham. Bingham has an unusual job: when a company needs to fire a bunch of employees, they hire Bingham's company, and Bingham comes out and performs the actual firings. He supplements his income by giving "motivational" speeches about how the best way to live life is with as few encumbrances as possible--and he counts both possessions and human relationships as encumbrances. Consequently, Bingham basically lives on the road, spending maybe 40 days a year in his desolate apartment in Omaha, Nebraska, and he is well on his way to achieving his single goal in life--accumulating 10 million frequent-flyer miles. But of course the real world won't let Bingham off that easily. At work, a young whippersnapper named Natalie (Anna Kendrick, Twilight) proposes to cut costs (and Bingham's travel budget) by doing the firings over the internet. Bingham's little sister is getting married, and he feels obliged to attend despite his espoused philosophy. And in the course of his travels he meets an alluring blond (Vera Farmiga, Orphan) who seems to travel as fast and light as he does. How does an avowed nihilist deal with the unavoidable fact that no man is an island?

I liked it. It's a thoughtful and thought-provoking movie--and though not a comedy, it has some very funny lines. A few flaws keep it out of "A" territory for me, but I definitely recommend it.

Disney's A Christmas Carol

From the desk of The Movie Snob

Disney's A Christmas Carol (B). This is Robert Zemeckis's latest foray into the new-fangled motion-capture animation that also went into Beowulf and The Polar Express. I saw the 3D version, and I recommend it because the visuals of this movie are easily its strongest point. Indeed, the ghost of Jacob Marley, the black steeds pulling the carriage of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, and the disintegration of the Ghost of Christmas Present are all sufficiently intense and frightening that this movie is not really appropriate for little kids. And I gather that the movie is more faithful to Dickens's story than some other adaptations have been, which is probably a good thing. And yet . . . the weird CGI-ness of the movie really kept me at arm's length throughout, and I didn't leave the theater with any warm Christmasy feelings--just a vague admiration for the technological proficiency behind the movie.

I will add that The Borg Queen started out watching the movie with me but left halfway through. She was getting motion sick from the swooping camera work (although personally I think the $5 package of Twizzlers she had before the movie also contributed to her ill health). And she generally disliked the movie as well, commenting as many people have on the unsettlingly dead appearance of the CGI characters. That flaw was really true of The Polar Express, in my opinion, and it is true of many of the characters in this movie too, especially Scrooge's nephew Fred and his employee Bob Cratchit. The Scrooge character is much more lifelike, but the unreal quality of the other characters definitely dampened my enthusiasm for the film.