LUCIDMEDIA

An aging movie star wanders around an opulent, yet alienating hotel. Trapped in a prison of fame, drugs, and hangers-on, the actor suffers from the kind of existential angst that only exists in portentous art films, but finds salvation through his relationship with a young girl. That’s the basic plot of Somewhere, but back in 2003 Sophia Coppola called the movie Lost In Translation. It was a remarkable calling card that established her career and reinforced that she was a filmmaker of unique talent and vision.

Now it’s 7 years later and she’s made two more movies about the pain of wealth and privilege. The limitations of returning to that well started to show in Marie Antoinette and in Somewhere, it’s starting to look like Sophia’s running out of ideas only four movies into her career. That’s not to say that Somewhere is devoid of interest or that Coppola lacks talent. Not at all, in fact there are individual scenes and moments in the movie that rival everything that she’s made in their simplicity and haunting beauty. The problem is just that thematically there’s nothing in the movie that she hasn’t done before and self-plagiarism this early into a career is a bad sign.

Stephen Dorff plays an A-list movie star living in the Chateau Marmont, a famous Hollywood hotel that houses visiting movie stars and the sex n’ drugs parties that come along with the package (think The Eagles’ Hotel California). Dorff is so bored with his movie star life that he wanders through parties like a ghost and is prone to passing out with his head buried deep in a lovely lady’s lap. After sleepwalking through the press junket for his latest blockbuster stinker, Dorff’s 11-year-old daughter arrives. We never learn why the parents split, but it’s pretty clear that she’s become the adult in the relationship, preparing meals for her father and leering at him when he brings a groupie to breakfast. It seems like Dorff might find salvation in this brief moment of domestic bliss, but she leaves just as quickly as she arrives. This isn’t a movie about change, just about the protagonist realizing that he’s stuck in a hamster wheel. And just in case we don’t pick up on that, Coppola bookends the movie with the image of Dorff driving in circles around a racetrack and walking down a long lonely highway. Sophia shares both her father’s love of symbolism and his lack of subtlety.

Scarlett Johansson’s character in Lost In Translation was pretty nakedly based on Coppola playing hanger-on to her then director husband Spike Jonze and here the relationship between daughter and father is pretty clearly influenced by a childhood spent with Francis Ford Coppola. The story and themes of Somewhere aren’t without merit, they’re just embarrassingly similar to Lost In Translation. Stephen Dorff steps into Bill Murray’s role, which means the comedy is dialed down about 95% and is replaced by gratuitous shirtlessness. He’s actually quite good in the role, but without Murray’s deadpan comedic genius and decades’ worth of audience good will, it’s incredibly hard to care about the problems of such a spoiled character (maybe it really is difficult to be absurdly wealthy and have every woman in the world throw themselves at you, but I can’t really identify).

Elle Fanning is absolutely incredible as Dorff’s daughter and their relationship gives the movie a much-needed heart. Unfortunately, not much really happens between them and when Fanning finally has her long-delayed emotional meltdown nothing comes of it and the movie just stops. In fact, the biggest problem with the entire film is that nothing happens. Coppola just wanders through the proceedings in the listless daze of her protagonist, hoping we’ll find the lack of action incredibly deep and meaningful.

Even with all of the problems, Somewhere is not a total write off. As always, Coppola gets incredible work out of her cast and creates beautiful images that will stick in your mind long after the movie is over. The hauntingly vivid and resonant image of Dorff sitting alone in a special effects house with his face covered in plaster is one of the most intriguing cinematic moments of the year. Coppola has a handful of other scenes that work just as well and it’s clear that she is a strong director. However, as a writer she’s starting to show her limitations. Maybe it’s time to drop the writing half of her filmmaking hyphenate or go through the emotional growth that she denies her characters. Either way, she’s going to have to change if she wants to have a long career. You can only be a promising newcomer for so long.

After decades of languishing in development hell, The Green Hornet is finally back on the big screen. It’s hard to tell if anyone exists even in the hardcore geek community who still cares about the original franchise outside of Bruce Lee nostalgia. But, if those people are out there, chances are they won’t be thrilled by this blockbuster adaptation of their favorite hero. The film does feature the iconic masks, cars, sidekick, and several characters from the original Green Hornet mythology, but it is in no way a conventional superhero adaptation. Instead the film is more of an opportunity for Seth Rogen and longtime co-writer Evan Goldberg to play around with superhero conventions, while also giving director Michel Gondry a chance to bring his patented visual pyrotechnics to a grand scale and letting Christoph Waltz mug for camera in the afterglow of his Inglourious Basterds Oscar glory. The fact that the movie has all those things going for it elevates it just slightly above standard Hollywood superhero fair, but it’s also a blessing and a curse.

Seth Rogen stars as the slacker rich kid Britt Reid, whose life dedicated to booze and women always disappointed his ethical media empire-owning father. When daddy dies, Rogen is put in charge of the family business with no idea of what to do. He soon befriends his father’s genius mechanic/assistant/martial arts expert named Kato who shows Reid all the weird self-defense equipment that he developed for the company. Reid suggests they use the technology to become superheroes, but never he really fits the bill. He screws up nearly every crime-fighting attempt and Kato always comes in to save the day. Jealously inevitably ensues. It’s a pretty clever twist on the hero/sidekick relationship that Rogen and Goldberg milk for a lot of laughs. The Green Hornet is an undeniably funny anti-superhero movie that works when the comedy takes the forefront and falters whenever there’s a half-hearted attempt at drama. Had the writers made the movie a pure a sarcastic pisstake, it could have reached the giddy entertainment heights Kick Ass. Sadly, it pales in comparison to last summer’s genre classic, most likely due to the studio interference that the Kick Ass filmmakers avoided by producing their movie independently.

The Green Hornet that finally made it to screens is undoubtedly better than the unmade George Clooney edition that was much hyped in the 90s. It’s a rare instance where talented people with left-of-center ideas got a chance to be creative with $100 million of house money. Seriously, who could have predicted that a pair of character comedy specialists and the French art house director behind Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind would get an action movie franchise? But as much as those diverse talents make the film unique, they also harm the final product. There’s much more going on in The Green Hornet than should be expected from a film of this type, but as a result it lacks focus.

When The Green Hornet works, it’s fantastic. Gondry’s thankfully CGI-free action sequences are pure eye-candy and one ridiculously ambitious split screen sequence that he designed is every bit as remarkable as his mind-bending music videos. Christoph Watlz proves he’s no one trick pony with his hysterically deranged performance and will hopefully stick around American films for years to come. And of course, Rogen is his usual hilarious slacker self and has some great chemistry with co-star Jay Chou (who might struggle a little with English, but certainly doesn’t struggle with charisma or ass-kicking). However, these three elements often slot in awkwardly together, occasionally feeling like 3 different movies. Even worse are the obviously studio mandated subplots like a dramatic story arc about Reid’s awkward relationship with his father and newspaper that must have been included as fan service for a franchise that no one remembers. The same can be said about Cameron Diaz’s love interest who might get a few laughs, but her character mostly just drags down the already overlong and convoluted screenplay.

It might sound like I’m being harsh on The Green Hornet, but that’s just because it’s clear that with a few tweeks, this could have been an amazing genre movie. As it stands, the flick is filled with flashes of brilliance and certainly works overall, but just isn’t quite what it could have been. Whether or not the film becomes the hit that Sony desperately wants remains to be seen. Seth Rogen and superhero fatigue have certainly set in with many audiences and that might be enough to keep them away from the theater (much like how the general distaste for Michael Cera killed the box office potential of the superior Scott Pilgrim last August). The Green Hornet is definitely worth seeing for two thirds that work, but be prepared for that missing third. Oh, and the movie clearly wasn’t designed for 3D. That was added in post to try and boost the box office. Save $5 and find one of those old fashion 2D screenings if you can.

Audiences searching for subtlety and a strict adherence to realism will want to stay far away from Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. The film is a melodrama and like most of the director’s work revels in themes, emotions, and images that are both evocative and gloriously larger than life. In many ways the movie represents a synthesis of everything the filmmaker done to date combining the bombastic style, psychological collapse, and shock tactics of Pi and Requiem For A Dream with the existential quandaries of The Fountain, as well as the backstage drama and subjective character study of The Wrestler. It also has to be considered Aronofsky’s finest work to date even if it suffers somewhat from the overwrought storytelling and occasionally cardboard characterizations that has plagued the filmmaker from the beginning of his career.

Natalie Portman stars as a long-suffering ballet dancer plucked from the sidelines to play the lead in a new production of Swan Lake. Like many ballet dancers, Portman’s character has sacrificed a great deal of her physical and emotional growth for her craft and perhaps much more than any healthy adult should. Her mother (a never-better Barbara Hershey) was a ballerina in her youth and seems to have infantilized her daughter so that her long lost dancing dreams can be fulfilled. Portman is trapped in a perpetual adolescence and her fragile emotional state is stretched to the breaking point by the pressures associated with the lead role, the advances of her sleazy director (Vincent Cassel), and a sudden unexpected sexual attraction to a new dancer (Mila Kunis). Her mind starts slipping from the first scene and when stress and haunting hallucinations combine forces a happy ending seems all but impossible.

The film is a fairly classical melodrama brilliantly intertwined and mirrored with the narrative of the Swan Lake ballet at its the centre. Natalie Portman spent 10 months training for the role and delivers what is sure to be the performance of her career. Portman’s often cold porcelain exterior has hindered her credibility in many roles (ahem, Star Wars?), but suits this character perfectly. She’s required to embody an intense emotional state for the bulk of the running time as well as master complicated choreography. She manages both masterfully and should deservingly win a few Best Actress awards this year. The rest of the cast provides strong support from Hershey’s creepily passive-aggressive mother, to Cassel’s charismatically creepy director, Kunis’ manipulatively sexual rival, and Winona Ryder’s wounded former star. Aronofsky has a gift for casting (no one else would have thought Marlon Wayans could actually act in Requiem For A Dream) and surrounds Portman’s towering central performance well.

Black Swan is undeniably a strange movie that somehow manages to be a lurid psychological horror movie in the David Cronenberg mold, a backstage expose of the physically painful and draining craft of ballet, and a balls out hanky-holding melodrama simultaneously. There is perhaps a little too much going on at once and that combined with an intense dramatic score by Clint Mansell and vividly expressive cinematography by Matthew Libatique can often feel like too much of a good thing. But it says a great deal about Darren Aronofsky’s overreaching talent that he’s able to keep all the balls he’s juggling in the air for most of the running time. Perhaps the most logical point of comparison is Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes, to which The Black Swan owes a great debt in it’s depiction of a warped and occasionally torturous relationship between a ballerina, her director, and their creation. Black Swan plays like a sped up, sexed up, and intensified modernization of The Red Shoes that’s only failing lies in the fact that the heightened and lovingly melodramatic style of storytelling it employs is just slightly out of date.

But while Darren Aronofsky may have stretched his ambitions just a little too far with this film, it doesn’t mean that the final product is a muddled mess. Quite the contrary, Black Swan is one of the most exhilarating and intense cinematic experiences of 2010. This is a film to experience, examine, and debate regardless of whether or not all the pieces fit together. This type of movie can only be made by a filmmaker trying to push all of his acquired skills to a higher level and even if the results aren’t perfect, it’s always fascinating to watch him try.

Down Terrace can be a tough movie to pin down. At times it’s a hilariously subtle character comedy, but it’s never more than a few minutes away from being a violent crime thriller or bittersweet drama. This schizophrenic tone makes first time director Ben Wheatley’s film quite unpredictable for a story that on paper should be a standard crime melodrama. While Wheatley doesn’t shy away from the bloody theatrics that makes that genre so thrilling, he isn’t telling a story about Mexican drug lords sleeping on mountains of cocaine. His films is about the domestic life of a family of British drug dealers and the attention to detail as well as the awkward comedy that defines their boring lives makes the project unique in the genre.

The film opens with a father and son being released from a brief stay in prison (played by the director’s long time friends and real father/son team Robert and Robin Hill). They return to their middle class home with plans to uncover who sent them to jail. A parade of weird local grotesques walk through their doors including a pathetic club owner, an over-the-hill toughie, and a hitman with a toddler, all possible suspects. The son’s girlfriend then shows up pregnant, further complicating things since the family is still run as if he is still an adolescent. Bickering and casual drug use seem to make up their days until suspicions get the better of every body and the bloody last act devolves into a series of double crosses and murders.

If there’s a problem with the movie it’s the violent finale. Though inevitable, it feels like Wheatley and his co-writer/editor Robin Hill simply killed off all of their characters in favor of having to come up with a conclusion for their story. The violence is quite shocking at first, but quickly becomes routine once every character gets a shot at a death scene. Admittedly it does clash with the character comedy created up until that point in an interesting way, but there’s a shame more of the comedy wasn’t worked into the last 20 minutes. Wheatley and Hill have created an incredibly entertaining, relatable, and pathetic collection of characters. These aren’t idealized crime lords, but local thugs trying to raise families and have a semblance of normal life when they aren’t kicking the shit out of each other. Wheatley genuinely makes us care about the characters and watching them bicker over their pathetic lives is hilarious and infinitely more entertaining than anything that happens once the violence comes into play.

Shot in a raw documentary style, the Down Terrace was put together over a ridiculous 8-day shooting schedule. The fact that they ended up with anything watchable let alone something as funny and intriguing as this is quite an achievement. The British crime movie has been in a bit of a rut as of late and this odd concoction of influences ranging from Ken Loach to The Sopranos feels like a breath of fresh air. It too low key of a movie to change the world or even have much of an impact on the genre, but it is a pleasant surprise that establishes Ben Wheatley as a filmmaker of incredible promise. Who would have guessed that watching middle aged burnouts threaten each other over tea and biscuits could be so riveting?

When The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo—the first chapter in the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy—hit screens last spring it was a dirty, pleasant surprise for audiences. Here was a thriller with refreshingly few clichés (hackers really shouldn’t be heroes in movies anymore) that offered genuine excitement, intriguingly complex characters, and a hard-R rated edge that could even catch seasoned horror movie veterans off guard. The movie was masterfully directed by Dane Niels Arden Oplev, quickly secured a Hollywood remake at the hands of David Fincher (Se7en), and left viewers anxious for more. Sadly the sequels have only offered diminishing returns. With Oplev mysteriously absent from the director’s chair, Daniel Alfredson took over to give the sequels a personality-less TV movie visual style and ludicrous sub-James Bond action movie theatrics.

The first sequel The Girl Who Played With Fire was bad, ditching the harsh if heightened realism from the first movie in favor of a silly conspiracy plot with a scarred supervillain and his hulking sidekick. That was a depressing drop off in quality, but at least it was still exciting. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest clears up all of the holes left open in the ongoing story, but little else. Our hero Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) is relegated to a hospital bed and a courtroom for most of the film. Renegade magazine editor Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) is still out hunting down bad guys, but since most of them were either killed in the last movie or in the opening minutes of this one, he doesn’t have much left to do. Instead the film is primarily dedicated to characters sitting in chairs and explaining the plot to the audience. It’s about as boring as it sounds and with a 2.5 hour running time will test your patience and your bladder.

Wrapping up any mystery/thriller is a challenge. The hunt is always more exciting than the destination, so the filmmakers had a tough job ahead of them. Unfortunately all the answers were either spelled out or intimated by the end of the last movie, so now all that could be done was connect the dots and punish the bad guys. It’s pretty tedious, convoluted stuff and since all the villains are elderly it doesn’t exactly build to exciting chase and capture sequences. Lead actors Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist are still strong and have deservedly achieved international notoriety for these roles, but sadly just don’t have much to do this time out. The whole movie feels like an epilogue with the cast and crew simply going through the motions to give the audience a conclusion. Even when Lisbeth finally dons her full punk/goth outfit in what should be an exciting character climax, the costume is so over the top and outdated that it will only provoke laughter.

It’s a shame that this series has ended with a wimper instead of a bang. But as disappointing as the sequels turned out to be, they don’t tarnish the effectiveness of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. They simply confirm that the film was little more than a well-executed piece of trashy entertainment and not the start of an epic saga as the marketing suggested. Hopefully David Fincher will be smart enough to only adapt the first film for Hollywood. It feels complete unto itself and doesn’t need these drawn out sequels. Perhaps the books are better, but somehow I doubt it. The plot is the worst thing about the sequels and their jagged uncinematic story structure suggests that they slavishly follow the original novels as fan service. See The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and pretend the story ends there. It’s not worth the pain of slogging through these unnecessary additions.

What movie do you make when you can make absolutely anything you want? That’s the question director Danny Boyle faced following the insane success of Slumdog Millionaire. After years of cranking out cult hits like Trainspotting (still his finest hour) and 28 Days Later in Britain and on the fringes of Hollywood, Boyle won the Best Director Oscar and scored a $377 million worldwide hit with Slumdog. Suddenly the guy could do practically whatever he wanted and have Hollywood flip the bill. His surprising choice? Making a film about Aron Ralston, a 27-year-old hiker who was trapped in an isolated canyon in Utah for five days and had to cut off his own arm to escape. The story caused a media sensation in 2003 and Boyle instantly wanted to make a movie. Unfortunately, Ralston was set on having a documentary made about his story at that time, but 5 short years later he was more than happy to give his story over to a recent Academy Award winner and even appears onscreen in the touching conclusion.

Simply put, 127 Hours is easily one of Danny Boyle’s finest films to date. Rather than take a cushy job to celebrate his success, Boyle gave himself a major challenge as a filmmaker: how do you make a film about a man stuck in one location interesting for 90 minutes? Boyle is known for his hyper-kinetic pop-art directorial style that combines the pacing and excess of music videos with the intellectual design of an art film. His movies are amongst the most stylish in the theaters, but always with a purpose. Here Boyle using every trick he’s assembled over the years to put the audience inside the head of Aron Ralston and make them experience his terrible ordeal along with him. The screen is filled with a barrage of split screens, fast edits, and screwed camera angles, but all for a reason. When Boyle shows the point of view of water being sucked up a straw it’s not simply done as a show off shot, but to establish Ralston’s quickly depleting water supply as a character in the movie.

Unlike the recent Buried which refused to cut away from its protagonist trapped in a coffin for a second, Boyle indulges in flashbacks and hallucinations throughout the film. However, this is done simply to show Ralston’s deteriorating mental state and build to a nice message about the importance of connecting with the outside world using Ralston’s predicament as a metaphor for social isolation. It’s a nice statement, but more than anything else it’s a way off allowing the audience to enter Ralston’s altered state of reality (something Boyle mastered in the remarkable Trainspotting). The way the director makes the audience feel every moment of pain an emotion is incredibly raw and visceral. Yes the amputation scene is hard to watch and as it should be (several faintings were reported at festival screenings), but by the time he finishes the task the overriding emotion is elation rather than disgust. The audience is so geared into Ralston’s mental state by that point that you’ll be cheering for him to cut it off, even if you watch the scene through shielding fingers.

But of course, with a one-man-show like this the director can only do so much. 127 Hours is a film that is dependent entirely on its central performance and fortunately James Franco was the perfect choice. The actor has been doing a great deal of stunt casting lately from his hilarious stoner in Pineapple Express to his campy cameo on General Hospital. Starring in a one-man movie is a bit of a stunt as well, but one that shows just how good of an actor Franco truly is. The guy has never been given a meaty dramatic role to dig into before and he vividly recreates every moment of pain, shock, worry, depression, exhaustion, and finally elation that Ralston experienced. It’s an amazing performance that should put him to the front of the pack for awards consideration this year and deservingly so.

Danny Boyle also has a shot of grabbing another Oscar himself for 127 Hours, which is every bit as inspirational as his previous movie if more difficult to watch for obvious reasons. It’s also far more complex and interesting than the drippy sentimentalism of Slumdog Millionaire and while that might scare off some viewers, anyone with an interest in the craft of filmmaking simply must see the movie. It’s a very impressive piece of work combining the talents of an actor and a director working at the top of their game. All that and you get to see someone cut their own arm off. What more could you possibly want from a movie.