Weekly round-up

>> Cocky congressmen, ranting
Romanians and parking lot predators

by JASON BOGDANERIS,
MATTHEW HAYS and
MARK SLUTSKY

Lions for Lambs

BRAZEN BICKERING: Lions for Lambs

In his first directorial effort in seven years, Robert Redford helms his most political film ever.

He plays a well-meaning professor who dresses down a student for skipping class and not taking his schoolwork seriously enough. In two other subplots (the three are connected), two former students of Redford’s struggle in combat in Afghanistan, while a cocky young Republican congressman (Tom Cruise) leaks a story about a new military initiative to a jaded journalist (Meryl Streep). There are some good moments here, and along with The Kingdom, Rendition and Redacted, form part of the Hollywood response to the bungled war in Iraq.

And there are some good moments, in particular the scenes between Cruise and Streep, who bicker over how disastrous American foreign policy has become and how citizens can no longer trust the government over weapons-of-mass-destruction claims that turned up nothing. In a bit of brazen didacticism, Redford despairs over cynicism among the college-age generation, arguing that the worst have won when people don’t bother to vote or engage politically.

Sadly, though, none of this feels terrifically fresh. The debates that Streep and Cruise hash out have been thoroughly discussed already in the media, and while Redford’s intentions are clearly laudable, there is very little that’s surprising or jarring here. Parts of Lions for Lambs are good—in particular the performances of Streep and Cruise—but the overall effect is nowhere near great. (MH)

12:08 East of Bucharest

FUNNY AND MELANCHOLY: 12:08 East of Bucharest

What a strange and funny film. Sixteen years after the uprising that deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the inhabitants of a small Romanian city debate whether their town was part of the revolution or not. Specifically, three men and some phone-in callers debate the issue on an extremely low-budget local TV talk show, in a scene that takes up at least a third of the movie’s running time and is a small masterpiece of comic timing and melancholy.

First-time filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu, who won the Camera d’Or at Cannes this year for this film, has a way with understated detail. The town’s shabbiness seems to hang over the characters like it’s part of their personality; they rifle through Communist-era bookcases and sip from cheap bottles of booze. Life after a dictatorship is the film’s real subject, and Porumboiu does an excellent job at portraying the residents’ conflicted feelings at never getting the future they were promised, as well as the tension of living peaceably among people who once perhaps spied for the secret police.

That said, 12:08 East of Bucharest is depressing and funny in a truly Eastern European way. It has no pretensions to coming to any sort of conclusion, thematically or dramatically, but that makes the film no less satisfying. (MS)

Darfur Now

MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION: Darfur Now

It’s a valiant effort. Take a seriously horrifying situation half way around the world, and try to show us how people are managing to make a difference. In this case, it’s the ongoing genocide in Darfur, and the world’s apparent indifference to the plight of thousands of innocent people.

In Darfur Now, we see celebrities like Don Cheadle and George Clooney use their star power to attempt to shed light on the situation and shame politicians into action. But the film also shows us Adam Sterling—arguably the film’s most inspiring soul—a student and waiter who tirelessly leaflets to raise awareness, and even manages to lobby for legislation leading to divestment from Sudan. This doc mixes it up, showing us the celebs and the little people, all doing their best to make a difference. At times, this feels a bit incongruous; are we supposed to be happy that someone in Hollywood is on this case, or happy that Joe Average has managed to shake things up?

Rather than rely on the depressing aura films of this sort often have hanging around them, director Theodore Braun is clearly trying to hand us something uplifting, despite the unbelievably sad subject. But another odd strain of sadness sets in: I really, really appreciate that Cheadle, Clooney et al. are actually trying to do something positive via their status, but it’s quite depressing to think that the only way issues like this can be brought to the public’s attention is through name branding. (MH)

P2

A girl, a psycho, a parking garage. Named after the underground parking level that’s the setting for most of the film, P2 is the work of first-time director Franck Khalfoun, and its premise is pretty good: on Christmas Eve, a pretty young exec (Rachel Nichols) is held hostage by an obsessive security guard (Wes Bentley). It’s like Die Hard with a lady and only one bad guy.

Khalfoun definitely delivers a few good moments of tension, as well as one death gruesome enough to elicit yelps of disgust, and an elevator scene that plays like an homage to The Shining. Those are the good things about P2, but otherwise the movie doesn’t really grab you.

Maybe it’s Bentley, who’s been off the radar since he was the next big thing in American Beauty, and who seems to have lost some of that smouldering intensity; he doesn’t seem all there, and a scene where he dances along to an Elvis tune is just kind of awful. Or maybe it’s the plot twist given away in the first, teaser-ish scene, which defuses a lot of the later tension. At any rate, I wouldn’t really be looking forward to P3. (MS)

Music Within

Unfailingly earnest, Music Within is the kind of film that seems oblivious to the last 20 years of film history. And that’s no compliment. Take its use of the song “Stuck in the Middle With You.” Repurposed by Quentin Tarantino to such devastating effect in Reservoir Dogs (remember the ear-cutting scene?), here it reappears during a scene where the lead character is “stuck in the middle” of a love triangle.

The film is based on the life of Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston), the man responsible for changing the way Americans look at people with disabilities. Pimentel escapes his troubled home and nutty mom by becoming a gifted public speaker. He nonetheless fails to get into the college of his dreams and decides that his next best career choice is Vietnam.

When a battlefield injury leads to almost complete hearing loss, he joins the subculture of the disabled. His almost obsessive efforts to have those he encounters made a part of functioning society climaxes with the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, but destroys his marriage.

Livingston is engaging but not horribly convincing as a deaf man. His partner in reform is Art, a cerebral palsy victim he befriends, who inevitably has a foul mouth and tells tasteless jokes about blowjobs, lest we pity him too much.

What saves the film from being a total write-off is the compelling real life story that pokes its head through occasionally. When it’s not shamelessly raiding the baby boomer music canon, the film does manage to elicit empathy for the struggle of its well-meaning protagonists. The big problem is that the characterizations presented here never suggest real people, but rather a screenwriter’s shorthand for them. (JB)

All films open
this Friday, Nov. 9

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