Cynical Cinema

I’m a big fan of Cillian Murphy’s.  Since the excellent 28 Days Later, he hasn’t made a single bad movie.  Lucy Liu, on the other hand, has starred in exactly two good movies in her life.  Shanghai Noon and Kill Bill.  Well, make that three good movies.  Because Watching The Detectives is pretty good.  Murphy and Liu have terrific chemistry together, and the script is clever and quick without being overly nerdy.  And this is the type of movie that could easily become terribly nerdy.  You see, it’s about a movie nerd.  And movies about movie nerds tend to be made BY movie nerds, and they become so self-referential and obscure that they can be enjoyed only by OTHER movie nerds.  But thankfully, Watching The Detectives manages to be accessible to regular people as well!

Watching The Detectives, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the works of Elvis Costello, is a song about a woman who, well, watches detectives.  She’s a femme fatale who enjoys messing with people, causing mayhem and then sitting back and watching the results.  “She’s filing her nails as they’re dragging the lake”.  We think at first that it is Cillian Murphy who is “watching the detectives” in this movie.  He is a movie nerd, running a local video store (much like the store in Be Kind Rewind, in that it specializes in hard-to find VHS tapes).  He is watching the world go by, without getting actually involved.  He spends all his time with movies.

Then Lucy Liu blows into his life, turning it upside down.  Her charismatic and on-the-edge craziness snap him out of his daydream of a life, and soon he finds himself breaking into other video stores, facing down the FBI in his back room, and getting into crazier and crazier adventures.  And after a while, we learn that it isn’t Murphy who’s “watching the detectives”, it’s actually Lucy Liu who is the character from the song.  And as Murphy falls for her more and more, and his life spirals more and more out of control, we begin to question her motives, much like we would if we were watching a film noir, like the type Murphy is so obviously into.  But as the movie gets sillier and sillier, it remains very watchable and interesting, thanks mostly to the performances of Murphy and Liu.  Watching The Detectives came out August 5th from Peace Arch Entertainment.

I was very surprised when I started watching Caroline In The City. That show was actually GOOD! Like, funny and witty and GOOD! Why did I remember it differently? Was it because my mom watched it, and I assumed everything my mom watched was lame? Perhaps. Although I think it is more likely that it was a romantic-comedy-TV show, and that in itself was enough to drive me nuts when I was eight and this show first hit the air. Eight year olds HATE romantic comedies. But the show was actually GOOD. It’s no classic, but it certainly exceeded my expectations.

Lea Thompson is Caroline, a cartoonist who writes a syndicated comic strip (Caroline In The City). For all intents and purposes, she is the Sarah Jessica Parker character from Sex And The City, only with a comic strip instead of a column. In fact, this show is virtually the same show. There are two main differences. One is that there are two women and two men in the central roles, instead of four women. And the other is that Caroline wasn’t as painfully self-satisfied as Sex. Where Sex seems to believe it is incredibly clever, and telegraphs it’s “smart” dialogue from miles away, Caroline seems a little less smug. Of course, Caroline is flawed, and obsessive, and neurotic and flaky. All the characteristics of…every central character in every sitcom ever.

The other characters are all played by good actors too - Eric Lutes as Del, her on-again-off-again boyfriend who is (like so many characters in so many sit-coms) obsessed with his hair. Amy Pietz as Annie, her across-the-hall neighbour (a common sit-com character) who is (like so many other sit-com characters) a total slut. In fact, the only character who doesn’t come across as though he came from a sit-com- character stencil kit is Richard, played by Malcolm Gets. Caroline’s colorist, he is the one person in this series that elevates it from totally run-of-the-mill to being actually good. The closest character I can think of to Richard in any other sitcom would be Matthew (Andy Dick) in Newsradio. But then, Richard is Matthew with a hard edge, a bitter personality, a caustic wit and a scathing vocabulary. OK, he’s nothing like Matthew. He just looks a little like Andy Dick in this series. (Sorry, Malcolm Gets).

Really, upon watching this show again, I realized it shouldn’t be good. It should be trite, painful and run-of-the-mill at best. But with Richard holding down the fort, and the better-than-average actors playing the other cliched parts, Caroline in the City is actually good. Seriously. The First Season comes out today, August 12th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

P.S. I Love You is out on DVD now.  My girlfriend watched it with her friends, then insisted that I absolutely had to watch it with her also.  And I get why.  I really do.  This movie is designed specifically with women in mind, and I think the people who made this decided to completely forego any audience they might receive with men and concentrate entirely on the female demographic.  So it’s the opposite of, say, Shoot ‘Em Up, a movie that didn’t care about a female audience at all.  And neither one is very good, for that reason.  When you decide to make a movie, and you decide to focus that movie entirely toward one group of people, the movie becomes very calculated.  You are designing a movie, moreso than creating one.  And P.S. I Love You is an incredibly calculated, contrived film.

It stars Gerard Butler and Hilary Swank as a married couple who are still hopelessly in love after twelve years of marriage.  Then he dies.  He has had this inoperable brain tumour, see, and he knew he was going to die.  But he knew that pretty young Hilary Swank was going to be devastated by his passing, and was going to lose her mind, so he decided to help her out.  And before he died, he created a series of notes and messages that would be delivered to her from beyond the grave.  Oooooh.  So, she gets these notes, and follows the instructions, and eventually gets over her crushing grief.  In the meantime, each note triggers a memory of Butler, so we get to see flashbacks of them in younger, happier times, being in love. 

And that’s all there is to this movie.  It’s basically two hours of people being in love.  And people loving each other for TWO hours is BORING.  And the love story is not the only thing that’s contrived here.  Hilary Swank goes to Ireland at one point.  While there, she meets a guy and tells him her whole story - my husband died, I’m here to see his country and family, blah blah blah…my name is Holly…then they sleep together.  Then, in the morning, she says her husband’s name.  And they both get a shock when they find out that they actually know each other!  He is her husband’s childhood best friend!  Well…wouldn’t he have put two and two together?  I have a best friend that recently died, he married a girl named Holly, there is an American woman in his home town named Holly, whose husband has recently died…and she looks exactly like the Holly I met when they got together…wait, that’s YOU?  It makes no sense, but lets us in on more tear-jerking moments and some “humour”.

But the most contrived thing about the movie is the constant preponderance of tear-jerking moments.  With a film like this - dead guy, grieving widow, there are many opportunites to throw maudlin, sappy, crying moments into it.  And this film does not miss a single opportunity to do so.  And so some women might enjoy this, because they want to cry throughout an entire movie.  But me, being a cynical guy, am screaming “come on, already!  That’s enough!”  But it isn’t enough.  They need to cram more of it in there.  And so we get two full hours of this, which is way too long.  This movie is a calculated, irritating string of moments designed to make people sad.  And there is really no story whatsoever.  It is two hours of two people being in love, and because one of those people is dead, we sob into our hankies and wipe our tears on the pillows on the couch and appreciate our loved ones around us.

 Or, we get uncomfortable, irritated, and we count the minutes until it is over.  Two hours of people being in love, even if those two people are as attractive and likeable and good as Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler, is not a movie.  Kathy Bates plays Swank’s mother, and she is given nothing at all to do.  Gina Gershon and Lisa Kudrow show up as her best friends, and they are fairly useless except to create contrived comedic scenes.  Like the one where their lifejackets all inflate.  Hilarious.  And Harry Connick Jr., while he is quite funny in the film, doesn’t seem to serve any purpose either, and Swank’s relationship with him is so briefly touched upon that when it comes to a head later in the film, we have absolutely no idea why.  If you are going to watch a movie designed by a focus group for women to make you cry, watch The Notebook.  At least that film had a story, and you just might enjoy it.  P.S. I Love You is just too calculated to be any good at all.

Christian Slater once made an excellent movie about a young couple on the run from thugs, called True Romance. It was an excellent movie for a few reasons - Christopher Walken’s amazing “eggplant” scene with Dennis Hopper, a cast that included Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rappaport, Tom Sizemore and Chris Penn, some great core performances by Slater and Patricia Arquette, a Sonny Chiba triple-bill at a movie theatre, and a screenplay written by Quentin Tarantino. Love Lies Bleeding is similar in two ways. It involves a young couple on the run from thugs, and it involves Christian Slater. Clearly attempting to cash in on the cult status of True Romance, Love Lies Bleeding stopped thinking after coming up with these two similarities.

Not that the two-lovers-on-the-run theme hasn’t already been done to death. Can you really beat Terrence Malick’s masterpiece “Badlands”? Or “Bonnie and Clyde”, or two Godard masterpieces, “Breathless” and “Pierrot Le Fou”? I will say no. Even True Romance was not in their league. (Although it could have been. I blame Tony “remember when I directed Top Gun” Scott.) And Love Lies Bleeding is considerably lower on the totem pole of lovers-on-the-lam. I’d say, right between that Drew Barrymore made-for-TV remake of “Guncrazy” and the dreadful early Renee Zellweger vehicle “Love and a .45″. The two young lovers in this case are played by Brian Geraghty, who is less than average, and Jenna Dewan, who is ridiculously hot but sub-par as well. She looks more cut out for a horror movie, and she may well have believed she was acting in one, with all the panting and the screaming and the running and the car that won’t start when you need it to start and the neck-stabbing.

I have researched Jenna Dewan. Because she is so hot. She was in some movies I have managed to avoid - Step Up and Take The Lead. Also some sit-coms I have managed to avoid - the Friends spin-off Joey, and something called Quintuplets. Apparently, her biggest moment of stardom came when she was rumoured to be involved romantically with fellow dancer Justin Timberlake. You see, she is a dancer. Not an actress. And dancers CAN make fine actors - Christopher Walken started out as a dancer (and is still awesome - see Hairspray, the Weapon of Choice video, or…True Romance). But Jenna Dewan is not yet one of them.

Anyway, these kids find a stack of money that isn’t theirs, it’s Christian Laettner’s. I mean Bale’s. I mean, Slater’s. And he comes after them. He is a DEA agent, you see, but a corrupt and mean one. Slater must have taken over-acting lessons from Gary Oldman in True Romance, because he plays just about the exact same character here. He relentlessly pursues this couple across the country, never explaining to his superiors where he is or why he’s there, and the young couple are continually avoiding the embarrassment of telling anyone about this maniac who’s after them. If they just turned to the cops and said “hey, I just saw a DEA agent murder a hotel porter”, they could have saved themselves a lot of grief. But they don’t, and they run, and they become more in love than ever, and eventually they confront Christian Slater and his henchman in what Roger Ebert refers to as a “smoke and fire factory”. One of those factory that’s all steel gradings and grids, and there is a lot of smoke and fire, but clearly nothing is being made there. If such a factory did exist in real life, and all that was going on inside, there would likely be a product coming out somewhere, and there would also be employees working inside.

But I digress. The point I am trying to make here is that this entire movie is a cheap ploy to get people to rent it simply based on the poster or the DVD case. Christian Slater? Young lovers on the run? I saw a movie like that once, and it was really good! Yes, you have. But this one isn’t. Leave it on the rental shelf, and pick up that other direct-to-DVD movie where Sam Neill appears to be riding a dinosaur.

Once is a film I watched yesterday, as my girlfriend lay around sick after she got home from work. I wanted to watch 12:08 East Of Bucharest, but she was not awake or feeling well enough to pay attention to subtitles. Which was fine. Once was in English. Only, once it began, I still needed to put on subtitles until I got used to the accents and the Irish brogue. Since most of the movie is music, the subtitles became fairly funny. There would be instrumental parts that still, apparently, needed subtitles, so the screen would say “note note”. Well, it would have little pictures of musical notes, but I can’t find that emoticon. I suppose this was for the hearing impaired who may watch the film. My advice here is that this film is NOT good for the hearing impaired. Most of it is music, and it’s the music that carries the movie. The main character is played by Glen Hansard, the vocalist and guitarist for the Irish rock group, The Flames.

The Flames must be very good, and I plan to pick up one of their albums to find out, because Hansard is fantastic in this movie. Not just as a musician and singer and songwriter, but as an actor as well. He is effortlessly charming, and totally believable as a man hurt by a former lover. His co-star, Marketa Irglova, is terrific also, and the chemistry between the two is palpable. Once is as simple as movies get. There is a connection between two people, they come together through music, and they do some stuff. That’s it. There really is nothing more to the film, and the songs aren’t Bob Dylan-earth-shattering material. But the songs are perfect for the film in that they are simple, they drive the story on their own, and the movie gives them plenty of time to be felt. Each of the songs in Once is very good, and each one is given it’s full three minutes of screen time, in what could easily have been cheesy Patrick-Swayze-on-the-beach-type 80s montages. But they aren’t. It’s the simplicity of the shots along with the simplicity of the music that works. There is one long tracking shot of Iglova walking down the street for four minutes while the song plays. And it really works.

The ending frustrated my girlfriend a bit, but then, so did the rest of the movie. I give her a pass on that one, she’s sick. The film is so full of goodwill, it’s so charming and heartwarming, that no healthy person could really hate it. For those of you who have seen Lost in Translation, Once is as close to that film in tone as any other. It is not as good, but few films are. It is funny, it’s sweet, and it’s immensely enjoyable without resorting to the big finale where they record an album and land a gig, and then the screen fades out as they play Wembley Stadium or anything pretentious like that. There is also none of that irritating will-they-or-won’t-they get together garbage that comes from sitcoms like Friends and such. It just is what it is, and what it is is terrific.

Becoming Jane is ostensibly the story of Jane Austen, considered by many to be the greatest female novelist of all time. Of course, we have to put the qualifier “female” in front of “novelist”, because it’s such a … well … novelty. Like “male stripper”. Never mind the fact that the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Margaret Laurence, Mary Shelley and Alice Walker have written some of the most enduring classics in literature, they are still “female authors”. And in Jane Austen’s time, being a “female author” was a pretty big deal. George Eliot clearly had to operate under a pseudonym (I actually have no idea what her real name was) because women couldn’t write stuff! Women cleaned and cooked and made babies! (It was a different time.) Now, as a big fan of Jane Austen and her novels, I know a good deal about her life. Enough to know how Becoming Jane ends. (I won’t tell you, in case you end up watching this film. And I hope you don’t.)

Becoming Jane, the DVD from Alliance Atlantis that comes out today, comes with a free coupon for Pennington’s. If you purchase 100 bucks worth of clothes, you get a 20 dollar credit - free! This should indicate something about the target audience for this film. Young women who just don’t know any better, apparently. Jane Austen, one of the towering literary figures in history, gets the Hollywood “bio-pic” treatment here. And like everything else in Hollywood, no great historical tale can possibly be told without cramming in a love story. No one in history was interesting unless they were in love with someone. Think Titanic, Pearl Harbor, and so forth. Jane Austen’s life was interesting only because of her love story, it turns out. You see, her family is trying to force her to marry a young, rich man so that they can have money and she’ll be happy, because marrying rich is a must, if it is possible. But Jane (played by Anne Hathaway here) has a MIND of her OWN, and SHE wants to marry for LOVE.

Wait…this is familiar. So Jane Austen had a life that almost perfectly mirrored that of several other movies I have seen? Movies like Titanic, The Notebook, The Princess Bride, My Man Godfrey, Van Wilder, Wedding Crashers, Sweet Home Alabama, Clerks II, and four hundred others I won’t bother listing? Of course she did! It’s a little known fact that Kevin Smith based his Dante character in Clerks II on the life of Jane Austen. OK, I made that up. All these movies have something in common. Or many things. The girl doesn’t want to be forced into a match, because she’s rebellious and independant and she has a mind of her own! The man she is being pressured to marry has money and property and wealth, but is either a complete jerk and cad no girl would ever like, or a simpering sissy no girl would ever want. Becoming Jane goes the “simpering sissy” route. The heroine then meets a lower-class, poor working man. Possibly a brutish sort who fights and drinks and doesn’t bathe or shave, but God help him he’s his OWN MAN! They hate each other straight away, but that hate quickly turns to love.

An aside - this is actually how I got together with my girlfriend. I didn’t bathe for weeks, I fought with everyone I met while in her presence, every time she saw me I was falling down drunk, and I called her many horrible names. I ran over her dog so we could start out on terms of “hate”, but I knew that that always leads to love, because I watch a lot of movies. Worked like a charm! At the end of most of these movies, the heroine of course marries for love. But we’re worried about her! How can she live so poor? She’s pretty, and pretty girls can’t be poor! So the guy usually ends up being incredibly rich, inheriting some money or winning the lottery or inventing a hilarious talking fish that proves to be lucrative. Now, she has the best of BOTH worlds! Thank God. She would really have regretted that whole “love” thing if she had to work for a living the rest of her days. She will be a princess after all.

These movies also suppose two things. First, that rich, high-class people are incapable of being fun and exciting without also being callous and evil. And poor people can never be intelligent and interesting unless they are also very good looking. In Becoming Jane, this interesting good-looking lower class peasant is played by James McEvoy (Last King of Scotland). The script wants us to know, constantly, that we are talking about JANE AUSTEN here, and so it makes Anne Hathaway into a rather irritating screen character. She speaks in gigantic words all the time, and is so condescending to everyone outside her immediate family that one takes an immediate disliking to her. It’s supposed to show her “rebellious, girl with a mind” nature, really it makes her officious and annoying. The seduction scenes between her and McEvoy are painful in their attempts to be dialogue-clever. I promis, Jane Austen did not talk like this in real life. And I wasn’t even there.

In the end, Becoming Jane is a movie every one of us has seen hundreds, maybe thousands of times (many of them with Anne Hathaway). It’s the oldest story in movies, and to pretend you’re talking about a real human being, a literary titan such as Jane Austen, is insulting to the viewer. And to Jane Austen. Are we to believe this romance shaped her entire life and gave us all her books? That she never existed outside the framework of this relationship? Remember - she’s a real person, we KNOW how this ends. Far more interesting would have been watching her attempt to become a writer! She is a woman, it’s 1795 - it’s going to be tough to get people to read her stuff, to publish her, to use her name, a female name, on the books! That would have been far more interesting than just taking the easiest story in Hollywood and trying to make a real person fit that story. Don’t watch this movie. Just read Persuasion and Mansfield Park and enjoy those.

As I am now speeding through the Frank Capra movie collection, I just watched It Happened One Night. Another classic, and another wonderful film. But since I watched it, I have been wracking my brain to figure out why I enjoyed it so much. And why it didn’t bother me. Had this film been made today, it would have starred Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, and it would have made me very angry. And it isn’t just that Clark Gable keeps his shirt on and Claudette Colbert is a better actress than Kate Hudson that makes the difference. Sure, Gable and Colbert are hundreds of times better than most modern actors, but there is little sense of realism in this old movie. It’s not like the dialogue is any more realistic than it is today, in fact it is less so. And by all rights, I should hate it, because it was an example of the beginning of the genre that plagues me most today - romantic comedies where the leads hate each other to start with, then end up falling in love and getting together at the end of the film. I hate that garbage!

But then, that’s kind of like hating Minor Threat just because they helped create emo. I just can’t do it. In fact, I loved this movie. I loved the dialogue. It isn’t realism this movie aims for, it’s entertainment, intelligent entertainment. The dialogue is whip-cracking fast, smart, and incredibly engaging. Clark Gable is effortlessly charming and clever, Colbert is innocently sweet and naive, with more to her under the surface. She plays a rich-kid girl who is running away from her father to marry the guy she believes she loves. Of course, she doesn’t really love him, because otherwise the movie would not make sense, and she would not end up riding a train with Clark Gable. He is a reporter who has been fired for drinking on the job, and he sees Colbert as his golden opportunity. A rich girl whose father is scouring the country for her, whose name and picture are in all the papers, and who has a $50,000.00 reward for her discovery. Now Gable has the story of a lifetime, and he means to see it through to the end. That means keeping Colbert hidden until she reaches her husband-to-be, and helping her through by stealing food and lodgings, bribing people, threatening those who mean to expose her and otherwise breaking the laws at every turn.

This romantic comedy is as “light” a comedy as it gets. It’s non-stop, whether it’s action as they run from one place to the next, or dialogue, as when Gable lights into Colbert as a stuck-up rich snobby brat, or humour. One of the funniest recurring bits in the film is the telegrams Gable keeps sending his old newspaper editor, the one who fired him. He keeps telling him that he has the runaway rich girl, that he’s onto the story of the century, and that this editor can’t have it. And he sends these telegrams collect. This film is so quick, so funny, so well-paced and so well acted that it really stands the test of time, despite the romantic comedies that followed it with so much less success.

At the time of the filming, Claudette Colbert really didn’t want to do the project, and when filming wrapped, she was quoted as saying it was going to be the worst movie of her career, and one of her worst performances ever. However, somehow, despite her, Capra was able to get the most out of her that he could. In fact, I would suspect the credit would have to go more to Clark Gable in this instance, since it seems he is drawing the very best out of Colbert in every scene simply by virtue of his magnetism and exuberance for the role. The movie succeeded despite her, and she excels despite herself. In the end, It Happened One Night became the first movie ever to sweep the five major Oscar categories - Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Deservedly so in all categories. The only other movies worth while in that year were The Thin Man (still a wonderful classic comedy/mystery) and Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra, also starring Claudette Colbert in the title role (no longer really remembered). But only one of those films endures to this day, and that is It Happened One Night. Seventy-four years later, it is still magnificent.

P.S. Most film critics and historians will mention It Happened One Night in conjuction with two other, seemingly undrelated movies. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence Of The Lambs. That is because to this day, they are the only three movies ever to win all five of the major Oscar awards. And in each case, those were the only five awards they picked up. Oh, and in the interests of accuracy, so I don’t get any angry emails, Clark Gable does in fact, at one point in the film, take off his shirt to reveal his bare torso, a very rare thing in movies at the time. All of which did indeed pave the way for Matthew McConaughey. But I still love this movie.

My girlfriend watched the trailers for “Silk” and was very excited to watch it. I thought it might be good too - I like Francois Girard, the director. He’s done some quality films, like The Red Violin and Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. (The representative Canadian film, in that it stars Colm Feore as a Canadian icon.) And as Girard is a Canadian director, and he used Canadian people in the production, this film qualifies (yay!) as “Canadian” in the arbitrary terms that make a film eligible for a Genie. And when a film qualifies as “Canadian”, yet has international stars and opens to a wide North American release, it has a leg up in terms of the Genies. There are always five nominations for “best picture”, and if we’re lucky, two of those films will have been recognized outside their own province. This year, Eastern Promises and Away From Her are the two movies that were bigger than “Canada” that got Genie nominations. And Silk was bigger than “Canada”. It stars Keira Knightley, it has a much bigger budget than your standard Canuck flick, and it received international distribution.

This should have been a red flag for me. A movie that was actually seen? AND it’s Canadian? It should be a lock for the Genies! And yet…nothing. I’ve checked - it is eligible. But for a film like this NOT to get nominated for the easiest awards in film to win - it must REALLY suck. And it does. It REALLY sucks. At first I thought it might just be my aversion to Keira Knightley. I really dislike Keira Knightley, thanks mostly to her incredible chemistry-free performances with Orlando Bloom in them Pirates flicks. But I have always blamed this on Orlando Bloom, who is an actor I dislike even more than Knightey. In watching Silk, and Knightley’s profound lack of chemistry with Michael Pitt, I realized it may be more her fault than Bloom’s. But in this case, I blame Francois Girard even more so. The movie opens with Michael Pitt saying “boy, I sure love this woman” or something like this. I paraphrase. And that is what we have to go on. We don’t really see them falling in love, or even really being in love, we are just supposed to take this at face value. They are in love. OK? Now, proceed with the movie.

And the movie does indeed proceed. Slowly, languidly, as though it is building to something. And then it never gets there. 57 minutes in, and we still haven’t seen the things that made the trailers so interesting for my girlfriend. You see, Michael Pitt needs to travel to Japan, because his small village is dependant on silk. And there is some kind of disease wiping out the silk worms. So he must go to Japan to collect silk worm eggs, bring them back, have them hatch, and then they can begin the work of spinning silk again. Now, I’m no biologist, but it seems to me that if you have thousands of untainted silk worm eggs, and those hatch silk worms, could those silk worms not breed, and create more eggs, and thus be self-sustaining? Why would Pitt need to leave his wife for six months at a time and go BACK to Japan for more eggs every year? This is not explained. But it doesn’t matter. Because the silk worms are not the story. The journey is the story. The journey to Japan, and then the journey back again.

And that journey is explored. Again and again. With long camera shots of the countryside and the scenery all over the world, which are great. And then with long shots of hands touching other hands, hands scooping water, and the back of guys’ heads. Those are not OK. They are boring. Especially since there are so many of them. And they last so long. I guess that Pitt takes a lover in Japan - we are to assume this, although any actual contact with any woman does not happen until the movie is more than an hour in. In the meantime, we are supposed to believe that Pitt has fallen madly and obsessively in love with a Japanese concubine because she…smiled at him over tea? So, he continues to return to Japan, searching desperately for this woman because…it was really good tea? If you’re going to spend hours filming hands and heads and scenery, why wouldn’t you spend at least three minutes showing WHY this man decided to have an affair? Or showing that he actually loves his wife? Three minutes, that’s all I ask. One less picture of a horse, and you’re there. Movie stays the same length, and we might actually care about someone.

There is no sense of connection between ANY of the characters in this movie. Every time we got to one of those long camera shot scenes, and we knew the actual plot wouldn’t begin again for seven minutes, we were on the fast forward button. Toward the end of the film, a little bit of stuff starts to happen. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it action, but at least it’s…stuff. There is a really painful reading of a “sexy” letter from Japan, Keira Knightley falls ill. And we yell at the movie - “just die already”! But everything is so drawn out and slow that it takes another half hour of our life. This movie is painful, irritating and completely inert. There is no reason to watch, and no reason to enjoy it.

Atonement is the story of love between a sock puppet and a stick figure. The sock puppet is played by James McEvoy, who has become the go-to guy when you need a young, attractive, possibly rough-around-the-edges but with a heart of gold guy to appear in a period piece. Keira Knightley plays the stick figure, the female love interest in this period piece, which tells a tale of a time when food did not exist, and what food there was, was kept away from Keira Knightley.

The film starts out in a familiar way, in that different people watching the same events perceive them differently. That difference in perception stems from the innate bias each character brings to the scene, and becomes a difference in truth as well. Specifically, a couple of scenes between McEvoy and Knightley that are observed by Knightley’s younger sister, played by Saoirse Ronan. Ronan is fantastic in the role that won her a nomination for best supporting actress at the Oscars this year. Her character, Briony Tallis, is actually played by three different actresses, including Vanessa Redgrave, who is terrific in her three minutes of screen time.

The first hour of the movie is fantastic, an hour that accentuates the distance between the characters by placing them all at great distances from each other in the country mansion in which they live and work. Briony Tallis intercepts a letter meant for her sister from McEvoy, and that begins a series of events that will destroy lives and crush romance. (By the way, this movie, and that letter, make the best use of the “c” word I have yet seen in a film.) The younger Tallis accuses McEvoy of a heinous act, one that we all know he did not commit. It remains unclear whether Briony knows, herself, that he didn’t, but we definitely know that she did not really see what she claims to have seen.

The second half of the movie becomes more conventional and boring in a period-piece sort of way, as McEvoy is released from prison directly into the army during World War II. There are some obligatory period-piece army scenes, and the lovers pine for each other from a distance as he gets evacuated from Dunkirk while she works as a nurse in a military hospital. This part of the movie (the second hour) sags immensely, and loses a lot of momentum. This part of Atonement could have been inserted in Becoming Jane, mid-way through, and no one would have blinked or realized it was a different movie. But the last three minutes redeem the movie almost entirely, as Vanessa Redgrave is magnificent as the older Briony, now a best-selling author, telling her tale and explaining the final result of her lie. Which the movie, with a running time of two hours and three minutes, is 51 percent excellent.

Atonement was nominated for best picture at the Oscars, and I think it was the least-deserving of the picks. Redgrave was more deserving of a best supporting actress nomination over Ronan, but Ronan is very good, and the new fresh face in Hollywood, so she will always get the nod over an elder Hollywood stateswoman. Atonement is good, but it is not Oscar-worthy. It’s just a well-done, well-written, well-acted period piece that will likely be forgotten in ten years. A far better choice for a nomination would have been either In The Valley Of Elah or Eastern Promises, two films that will likely have staying power and relevance far beyond what this one will manage.

Love In The Time Of Cholera is two and a half hours long. The tag line on the DVD box is “how long would you wait for love?” My answer is “not this long”. The movie is based on a novel of the same name by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it takes place in South America. I have always wondered this about period pieces. If the characters are in a time and a place where they would logically be speaking Spanish, why then do they speak English with Spanish accents? It makes more sense that the movie would be in Spanish with English subtitles, or in regular English. Why try to do half-and-half? At least in The Hunt For Red October and movies like that, the movie begins in another language with subtitles, and moves seamlessly into English so that we can watch the movie in that language. Either way, in any language, this movie blows.

Javier Bardem plays a man who is denied his true love (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) as a young boy, and waits 51 years for the woman’s husband to die so he can go after his dream girl once again. In the meantime, he becomes the ultimate ladies man and romantic, and sleeps with six hundred and twenty-two women. On the plus side, we get to see many of their boobs. On the downside, this is two and a half hours of…not much. Benjamin Bratt plays the husband, and somehow his Spanish accent is kind of laughable. Also, because the movie takes place over 55 years, the stars have to get made up to look older and older as the movie goes on. Which sometimes works seamlessly, as it does with Bardem, and at other times looks like…well, makeup and fake moustaches, like with Bratt.

Predictable, and occasionally silly, Love In The Time Of Cholera is occasionally fun, sometimes painful, but mostly boring and slow. Javier Bardem is great, but why watch this movie when No Country For Old Men is out there? Stay away from this one, and rent No Country For Old Men again.