DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS

Upright and involving for a broad comedy, Dinner for Schmucks never strays away from the focus of the material nor does it neglects its own guests. But in simple terms, it’s just damn funny – about business sharks who invite remarkably stupid people to dinner to show-off and humiliate (don’t worry schmucks lovers, the humiliation is tamed). You will experience laughter and chortles, but very few yuks, and no bad yuks if that. How many comedies these days lose faith in their own appeal and decide to throw in something disgusting to get your attention? Many do, but not this one.

If there’s nothing disgusting in the movie than there’s something at least annoying. But Steve Carell is supposed to be annoying in a socially unaccustomed way, and Paul Rudd is the navy blue suit professional who has to endure this pest – the odd couple both get girl trouble, too. Carell (last shined in “Date Night”) is worth the millions he gets paid, he is one of the last movie stars who is not vain, and he takes risks to look lame. Rudd (last shined in “I Love You, Man”) for awhile looked like he had limited appeal, but he keeps surprising with his likeable everyman range.

Speaking of shining, Jemaine Clement (“Flight of the Concords”), Ron Livingston (“Office Space”) and Zach Galifianakis (“The Hangover”) are among the co-stars who milk laughs in the spotlight. Of those three, only one of them is a climax guest schmuck. There’s also an English actor named David Walliams (yes with an “A,” not an “I” in the last name spelling), who plays a Swiss tycoon built like a skier with a Caribbean tan, who is also a natural magnet to comedy. There is no logical math in the business of film criticism, but if you add all these guys up you have about a hundred laughs.

The film is a tad cutesy with Carell as a mouse taxidermist, but then again, the dead mice get fabulous diorama sets as playgrounds (but has this ignorant dweeb really ever heard of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream?”). And Rudd has the cute girlfriend, an artist type played by Stephanie Szotstak (“The Devil Wears Prada”, who is easily susceptible to jealousy. Can she accept an apology without running away first? She’s cute in a luxurious French dessert way, and Rudd and her together look like they could squeeze some hugs together, but are they really the prototype for a modern American couple? You have to root for them to reconcile in a facile, kidding way.

As the rich arrogant mastermind, Bruce Greenwood (“Star Trek,” as Christopher Pike) brings the right amount of high society evil – he dislikes well-read people who think and respond too thoughtfully. Rudd is the guy who plays along in gale in the hope to get a promotion. His better conscience is telling him to play but play fair – let Carell attend but escape with dignity. Lucy Punch is also another whacked character, a daffy stalker blonde in tall platform heels, who gets in the way of both Rudd’s relationship with his girlfriend and with the signing of the Swiss tycoon as a client.

What you may be wondering about is the dinner. Well, the movie takes awhile building up to it but keeps you entertained before the main course. Slow patches are subjective to the viewer, but I didn’t feel one until about the one hour mark. Until then, director Jay Roach (“Meet the Parent”) creates one amok and social faux pas after another. We are occupied, the whole movie is an unceasing parade of dweeb behavior that is embarrassingly funny, so much that it could inspire furious (frustrated at these idiots) laughter.

Go to the official site at http://www.dinnerforschmucks.com/

Grade: B

GET LOW

You don’t need to take a leap of faith to know that Robert Duvall is still as good as ever after all these years. He is not one of those fading icons like DeNiro or Hoffman that has thrown in the towel for a hefty paycheck. But with Get Low, in particular, it is his most complicated role he has been given in quite some time. He plays a 1930’s character named Felix Bush, a backwoods recluse who has stayed away from folks for decades but now wants to throw a funeral – while he’s still alive – so he can hear what attendees really have to say about him.


Supposedly this is based on a true story of a man and his “living funeral,” although the drama has been embellished (almost to a fault). Felix is a hard man submerged in the squalor of his cabin in the woods before he comes to town with a shotgun and a bundle of saved cash, but he is not a stupid man. His case gets mileage out of the local funeral director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) and his apprentice Buddy Robinson (Lucas Black) who think in 1930’s “modern” terms how they can spruce up and promote this unorthodox funeral and turn it into something of a festival. Sissy Spacek as widow Maddie Darrow, and Bill Cobbs as preacher Charlie Jackson, play the other key Southern characters.

Duvall is Duvall, the fine-tempered crazy genius with just enough articulate composure that makes him less the crazy type and more the genius type. When has this acting icon ever disappointed? He hasn’t, although this is surely his richest gruff and growl performance since the western “Open Range” (2003). From the roster of supporting characters, Bill Murray nevertheless stands out more than anyone else, because you think, there must have been loosey-goosey guys like Murray that existed somewhere back then in the 1930’s. Murray’s specialty has become bringing comedy to dramatic roles, as proved with “Lost in Translation” (2003) and “Broken Flowers” (2005). Here his character is a huckster who operates on half sincerity, one with a salesman smile.

The details of how the radio and poster ads are configured to publicize Felix’s funeral becomes a focal interest. Until a dramatic “secret” begins to make the narrative drag, bypassing whimsy and folksiness for the sake of creating faux mystery in Felix’s character, a secret that he has been harboring for decades. When Felix is let down by his associates, he wants to call the whole thing off, this sends Frank into panic over this unusually high-priced funeral arrangement that he has sunk all business cash into. Also trouble is that with Felix’s passing there was a promised raffle for his property, but after pulling out, he hardly cares that he has inconvenienced everyone.

Do you think that his ensemble of new friends will coax him to attend his own “living funeral” as promised? The secret itself, not revealed until the end, is nothing that will shatter the soul, but Duvall gets a grandstanding, if beautifully modulated delivery, out of a monologue that says all. “Get Low,” as you can tell, has beautiful acting from top to bottom. The story, wrapping around the mysterious secret, only passes for mustard only because it is in the context of the 1930’s period setting where obsession about God and Devil, and of the sin of adultery, could have only taken place so dogmatically then.

Go to the official site at http://www.sonyclassics.com/getlow/

Grade: B

THE CONCERT

Ever see a Euro comedy that doesn’t rouse you but at least sedates you into a pleasantly mild and agreeable state? The Concert has at least two characters you care about in its large ensemble – they are undeclared father and daughter, whoa! – but with a splash of Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major music and that might be enough to flutter your heart.

Thirty years after the dark days of Communism stole his profession, Andrei Filipov (Aleksei Guskov), a once renowned conductor of the Bolshoi orchestra, is now a lowly janitor at the Russia opera. Intercepting a fax, he decides impromptu to reassemble his lost orchestra and storm Paris to perform at the Chatelat Theater. If this isn’t reckless enough, Andrei and his friends turn this into an epic ersatz voyage (it’s been a long time since outside Russia!) But the French are more than ready to be hospitable, but they cut corners, too.

What we have here is a comedy of Russian slobs, with musical talent, invading the French. The real Bolshoi head department cannot find out, not unless a premiere documentary hits the cable waves, one supposes. It is restaurant, hotel and trips on the Seine river that fill out the demands of this fake motley crew. But Andrei has the more intimate request of having a French violinist virtuoso join their orchestra for the special event. Now isn’t Melanie Laurent (“Inglorious Basterds”), as violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet, easily one of the most beautiful and sublime women on the planet?

The second half of the movie is less funny. Perhaps because the obvious jokes are played out at length, and because the storyline gets schmaltzy. Lots of amusing scenes, however. Laurent radiates in her every scene whether she goes for drama or comedy. You are grateful for her scenes. Your heart is warmed by her presence, not because she inflects any great human insight in her slightly written character but because, she’s just damn beautiful. Her eyes are obsessive, her lips are mysterious, her poise is classy. The concert finale is a certifiable triumph that celebrates anything and everything that matters, even family matters of father and daughter sharing a united moment. Not truly believed, but nice.

Go to the official site at http://www.weinsteinco.com/#/film/the_concert
 
Grade: B-

SALT

Angelina Jolie is considered gorgeous and desirable among the male crowd but there is at least one guy that hasn’t been susceptible to her beauty. There has always been something a little non-human about her, and the obvious put-down of her is to say that she lacks softness – but not even does that exactly turn-off guys at large, so this indeed is a minority complaint. But that very non-human, efficient and beautiful machine-quality makes her the perfect actress to star as Salt, an action programmer that sprinkles a dash of espionage ingredients before it goes into non-stop chase mode. Overall this works as a superficially enjoyable action yarn.

When you say programmer, it means that it is a recycled female version of “The Bourne Identity,” going for all the fast pans and think-fast ingredients, not to mention handiness at making a rocket launcher out of a swivel chair and a fire extinguisher. Matt Damon, as Jason Bourne, was also good at creating cocktail weaponry. But Evelyn Salt (Jolie, as limber as she was in “Wanted”) nevertheless can’t run in heels like Bourne, and in the early scenes, has to run in barefoot which she does well, on-camera. Salt is depicted as an invincible character that can withstand endless whacks and falls, but it is Jolie who must be no stranger to painful foot blisters.

Before all the chasing begins, Salt is established as a CIA agent. She is assigned to interview a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski), who has a tall tale: Since the Cold War and the Russian-blooded makeover of Lee Harvey Oswald, a secret agency has been programming an army of assassins. Salt was born to American parents but raised in Moscow, and those golden blonde braids of hers screams Russian descent (!), so when Orlov announces to Salt that she is one of them then the CIA panics and demands immediate apprehension. It is never explained why Salt is afraid of the interview, so a few Jason Bourne moves later dispatching guards, she is on a nonstop run, and additionally, the hysterical camera rattling by the film’s director Philip Noyce (“Clear and Present Danger”) also never subsides.

Chase after chase, Salt goes for astonishing leaps often across traffic and from the hoods of various tanker trucks, and at one point, aerobically jumps down one lower wall to the next in an elevator shaft without fail. Most of the dialogue occurs from her pursuers Agent Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Agent Winter (Liev Schreiber), two characters who are known for wary elusiveness. But for the most part this is an action film short on motivated characters. The movie circumnavigates over assassination plots of both the Russian president and the President of the United States (who in the audience will believe we should root for the death of our own president?), and injuring but falling short of fatality of the targets is one of the film’s preposterous gambits.

In the heat of all this plot contraption we are supposed to be guessing which side Salt really is on, the American or Russian side. A surprising death takes place of someone who is close to Salt at one point, and the very cold spy-machine face of Jolie adds to the ambiguity, or at least wants to add to the ambiguity. Salt only appears fleetingly as if she is thinking of herself and nothing but. The film gives her character an agenda, and her choices will impact on whether or not there will be a nuclear Holocaust, one that not only entwines the United States and Russia, but other parts of the world as well. Salt is not a superspy, despite all the action chicanery, but at the end the fate of the world rests on her shoulders.

Somebody at the end of the movie should announce to Salt that with all her physical perfection she is ready for superspy stature. The CIA conspiracy stuff is not as beholding as anything with Jason Bourne, and the film lacks the romantic grandeur of a James Bond adventure. The film remains as alluring as a supercomputer machine. But that’s it. But it moves fast and sleek, and Angelina Jolie’s body is mechanically flawless.

Go to the official site at http://whoissalt.com/

Grade: C+

INCEPTION

Dreams wrapped inside dreams, riddles wrapped inside riddles. Inception is the brainiest blockbuster in many a moon, selecting to confuse and bewilder its audience deliberately, not because it doesn’t know what it’s doing but because it’s a Pandora’s Box that keeps you guessing. Director Christopher Nolan (the extraordinary talent behind “Memento,” “The Dark Knight”) doesn’t just want to keep you guessing, he wants you to keep deconstructing the intersecting puzzles he has created for the screen – the brainteaser work never rests. Nolan presents multiple threads of reality, or dream stories, toppling over each other, ripples linking to each other, throttling the narrative forward and explaining little. The film is as aggravating as it is enthralling.

The futuristic technology is not fully explained and the multi-national corporations are faceless, but Leonardo DiCaprio is a virtual dreamcatcher named Cobb, hired to steal ideas from competitors by infiltrating their minds. His target in the first chapter is Saito (Ken Watanabe), but his mind has a defense safeguard, and near impossible to purge. Saito now hires Cobb to work for him, this time to not extract but to plant ideas inside the head of rival corporate raider Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy), heir to his dying father, to surrender his financial empire. “Ideas grow on the mind like cancer,” Cobb says.

Other espionage members, all on the legit, include Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Eames (Tom Hardy), Yusuf (Dileep Rao), and new collegiate analyst Ariadne (Ellen Page) – all specialists in the art of deception and brain pathology. You also need these characters to spout quick philosophical and theoretical references, but their most valuable commodity is to explain the subconscious to the audience. As a final staple, you have Michael Caine as a professor, and as you might know, Caine shows up in every Nolan film, acting with restraint and bearing himself as perhaps keymaster to the mystery.

As a rule, five minutes of sleeping equals one hour in the dreamworld. When Cobb hacks into other people’s minds, he can spend an hour navigating the mind within. Other people within the dreamworld are “projections” and if a person dies within their dream than they can awaken in the real world. When Fischer, or any other mark, become aware that it is just a dream they try to make themselves dead, pointing guns at their own skulls, and Cobb within the dream does what he can to thwart suicide. Guys like Fischer, by the way, experience eternal threats within their subconscious.

While inside Fischer’s paranoid and violent-addicted head, this leads to permeating violence within the four interlinking dream stories in the final third (a proposed explanation: to keep the illusion consistent to Fischer all the dreams toppling each other have to inflect each other). Nolan circumnavigates between a white truck falling into the bay, a swank hotel room that turns into zero gravity exploits for Arthur who attempts to simulate free-falling for other sleepers, a snow summit stock with machinegun soldiers on skis and a secret vault, and a row of personal history architecture in a decimated fantasy city.

All of these bits hinge on each other in exploitive complexity, but it is Nolan cranking up the filmmaking wizardry: the slow-motion on the white truck, the allusions to “2001: Space Odyssey” in the hotel corridors and elevator, the snow summit choreographed like a James Bond invasion and more allusions to “2001” once inside the vault, and imaginary row of ersatz architecture built on subconscious projections that feels out of the Alex Proyas’ film “Dark City.”

Nolan also uses the symbolic object of a thimble in the same way that Ridley Scott used a unicorn in “Blade Runner,” and when Nolan nods the camera on the object in the final shot he is telling his audience more than he is telling his own character what his surroundings signify. But if we back step a moment and fall into a criticism, the action at the snow summit feels rather gratuitous after awhile. We know it is part of Fischer’s subconscious (or whatever) to crop up violent projection characters, but these dreams feel more belonging to a 21st century Warner Bros. action picture than it does from a character.

The music score by Hans Zimmer is pulsating and throbbing in the same spectacular way that “The Dark Knight” was, and the production design by Guy Dyas is so good that he would have been worthy to have been on the production team of “2001” or “Blade Runner” had he a career that went back that far (Dyas helmed the production design on the last Indiana Jones picture), the particular highlight, is the origami city of a new re-imagining of Paris, France. There is hardly a second that goes by that isn’t memorably traced to Zimmer or Dyas’ touch on this production.

An emotional backbone supports all this eye candy with the inclusion of Marion Cotillard (she was Billie Frechette in “Public Enemies”) as Mal, the former wife to Cobb who supposedly at one point could not tell the difference between dreams and reality following what one could describe mildly as, she had a deep sleep. Now she permeates through all of Cobb’s dreams, and then whenever infiltrates and shares dreams with others. Coincidentally, the character of the fallen wife is similar to that in “Shutter Island,” also with DiCaprio haunted twice now by recent past withered love. This is not a case of DiCaprio forcing motifs in all of his pictures. DiCaprio just merely selects good scripts, or gets lucky by good scripts, and gets chosen by top-notch directors like Nolan and Martin Scorsese, whom themselves are not trying to compete with each other.

Some movies require a bottle of wine (if it’s a chick flick), some action movies require a six-pack of beer shared between friends, and “Inception” is a rare movie that requires four cups of coffee. Maybe not just for the morning after, but four cups a day for a week, consulting your friends at Starbucks and together going over what you think you know about “Inception.” A $160 million Warner Bros. picture that’s adventure and mindbender has been made, a super rarity if there ever was one, and you might as well have something to talk about for the rest of the summer. Aggravating it may well be, but there won’t be another movie this layered to talk about for a very long time.

Go to the official site at http://inceptionmovie.warnerbros.com/

Grade: A-

PREDATORS

Predators is the most entertaining action picture in many a moon, and perhaps if this movie and hopefully the upcoming “The Expendables” teaches Hollywood anything it is that old school action pictures are far more enduring and exciting than chaos-heavy spectacles (“The A-Team” and “Jonah Hex” are among the jerkiest currently). The imaginative script idea is by Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”) who places a band of anti-hero humans back in the jungle, which is as inescapable as a Rubik’s cube is solvable. Nimrod Antal (“Kontroll,” “Vacancy”) directs.

Beginning with a crash landing out of the sky, Royce (Adrien Brody, “King Kong”) just barely manages to put the pieces together while seven other strangers around him drop in – a toss-up of mercenaries, an African warlord, a death row inmate, a Japanese Yakuza, the unmistakable presence of Dannny Trejo, an Israeli markswoman and a baby-faced doctor (that would be Topher Grace). It’s like “Survivor” with high stakes, but moreover, the script has Joseph Conrad’s classic story “The Most Dangerous Game,” also an entertaining and enduring 1932 movie as well as the inspiration for two dozen and a half movies over a hundred years, is written all over this sequel.

Yes, it’s perhaps the fourth sequel if anyone’s counting but good enough that it should be considered the first worthy continuation since Arnold Schwarzenegger fought the Stan Winston creation of alien-prawn / jungle-warrior back in the 1987 “Predator.” (You had the “Alien vs. Predator” films that wandered between the monotonous attacks.) The strong female heroine of this film is Isabel (Alice Braga, “I Am Legend”), the former Israeli markswoman, and she is a sharp-shooter as well as a girl with heart and active compass of loyalty. Isabel makes resounding efforts to raise morale amongst the troop.

Instead of an insistent mash-up of action scenes, the movie develops suspense as well as geography, allowing the characters time to discover their surroundings as well as the details of their circumstances. As an addition to this installment, there are rabid Predator dogs that rush the humans this time, six of them armed and ready to shoot these creatures in the eyes. The dogs are deliberately rushed out, and it becomes apparent to Royce that there is a game preserve strategy attempted by the villain Predators. These encounters are photographed in a fluid and comprehensive manner that lends the film its potency. The first noticeable CGI shot, a wide-angle reveal over innumerable humps of mountains, happens to be an awesome shot.

Popping in unannounced halfway in is a surprise actor appearance, a thirty-year veteran of movies, whom should not be mentioned other to say it momentarily feels like an Alec Guinness or Michael Caine role. Except that the encounter is a little more spooked out than you would hope for or would anticipate. From that point on, the action is very unremitting, the Predators attacking in ones or twos, the humans running for cover. In the film’s most amusing one-on-one encounter, the Yakuza engages in a swordfight with a Predator.

Enough background story becomes available about the Predators this time out, but it never convinces that these creatures are sophisticated enough to develop their own machinery and artillery. It’s possible to overlook this if you are able to acknowledge that the Predators have confiscated machinery and war ammunition from humans and other species from over the galaxy, and have adaptively learned how to use the technology competently. The primary interest of the filmmakers is to provide whippy sci-fi and hard and fast action, and they do all of this well and with a good sense of photography and editing composition.

If the film is not an entire orbital success it is that the film disappoints in a variety of small details. I never believed, for instance, in one of the human’s sudden shift of behavior in the final act. Somebody out there in the audience will find a large gaping hole in the plot, surely there is somebody, but perhaps you can suspend your disbelief long enough to not find it until after the movie is over. Until then, terrific action is back, in a film that is an echo to the ’80’s – when action choreography made relative sense.

Go to the official site at http://www.predators-movie.com/

Grade: B

THE LAST AIRBENDER

It would have been fair to have reviewed The Last Airbender in a 2D format rather than 3D, since it was difficult to see the thing half the time. Imagine seeing a normal movie ten years ago with sunglasses inside the theater – this is what retrofit 3D add-on has done to the movies. Yet this gimmicky add-on enforced in the post-“Avatar” era is the worst 3D job yet.

Only those who have seen the Nickolodeon series will have a strong fastened idea of what is happening in the film. Back then it was called “Avatar: The Last Airbender” but the beginning prefix of the title had to be chopped off once James Cameron got the big-screen rights to it. With “Airbender,” the diminishing talent of M. Night Shyamalan, whose career went from “The Sixth Sense” high to “The Happening” low, gets another whack, although this time, he’s a director-for-hire.

Ditching kitchen-sink suspense for panoramic spectacle, M. Night Shyamalan gets to work with a story that takes place in a land far, far away. How many centuries back (or what planet? Did I miss something) is a mystery, but if there is one thing Shyamalan actually does well here it is composing action scenes with unbroken steadicam shots that move in and out of martial arts and magic powers pizzazz. While the film is immersed in cold Himalayas kind of temperatures, the action choreography warmed my heart nevertheless – an antidote to “A-Team” kinetic nonsense.

What kills the film, more than anything else, is the casting. Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz, as brother and sister Sokka and Katara, are awkward white kids in an Asian setting speaking in Beverly Hills or Malibu, California dialect, while other Indian actors are mixed in randomly, and other whites given shades of make-up and lighting effects to help look Asian. Huh? Yes, this is recipe for disaster, isn’t it?

The little hero is Aang (Noah Ringer, white not Asian) who may be the Avatar that can overwhelm the dark side, in this case, the Fire Nations. Aang is the Chosen One, as big-budget sagas now require, and the character – he’s like a little shaved-head monk with Buddhist tattoos lining his forehead – is only persuasive in this exotic Asian setting when it’s a wide angle shot and he doesn’t have to talk. Dev Patel (“Slumdog Millionaire”) is, hold your breath for this compliment, a nice-looking guy. Can’t wait to see him get another role so he can have a continuing career. Because as Prince Zuko, he sucks. Ooh, I didn’t mean to say that. I mean, I can’t figure out what he’s trying to do with his character except that he’s flexing his eyebrows in order to invoke petulance.

The actors would have been better off not talking, and Shyamalan would have been better off not writing the TV-to-screen adaptation. But – you can loosen up the clench in your face right now – for there is a saving grace as Aang passes the learning stages. In addition, to airbending little thwarting tornadoes, there is firebending (blah in 3D), and then finally its best resource: water-bending – in gulpy round goblets – which leads to enjoyable scenes watching Aang hurling strands of water energy at bad guys whom as a result get swathed in human size totems of ice blocks. Humorously, the bad guys wriggle inside helplessly.

Too often the picture quality is dreary and monotone. Some critics have complained already that “Airbender” is as turgid as “Lady in the Water,” which I’d qualify as a candidate as one of the five worst films of the last ten years. But it just can’t be fair to Shyamalan, whose work was compromised by studio casting pressures, and whose work was hi-jacked with a gratuitous 3D job. Don’t worry people, when 3D is done well again, like “Avatar,” which was shot with 3D camera equipment, I’ll tell you about it. But the usage of 3D has not been merited too often and its demonstration has been a part of Hollywood brainwashing on the American public. Shall we tell theater chains to start tossing out those hunks of junk, those 3D projectors soon?

Go to the official site at http://www.thelastairbendermovie.com/main.html#home
 
Grade: C-

RESTREPO

The term “apolitical war documentary” has a particular dishonesty to it because it is hard to believe that a feature containing real deaths doesn’t have some kind of agenda to it. Restrepo, a real deal guerilla documentary, isn’t obscenely graphic in presenting the deaths but it is as vicarious in combat as you can get – that level of intimacy can be riveting. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger are the credited directors, and cinematographers, who were not only there but risked their necks out in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.

Documentary cameras arrive on location along with the platoon, with an attack on the very first day. They build their own outpost, named after Restrepo, a medic who became the first casualty, and the shaggy construction is as ragtag as the battle company. The outpost rests on a hillside that is exposed to everyday fire. Interspersed interviews inform us that “It was considered one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S. military.” The soldiers will spend a year there, some admitting nakedly that they didn’t read too much into the area before their arrival but now are afraid that they will die there before the end of their tour of duty.

There is not an interview subject that isn’t interesting, but even though their reminisces are supplied post-combat, you feel their existential distress. The film is allowed stretches of no-combat oxygen with the young men jollily horse-playing and singing guitar songs. But the film knows its business of why they are there and with an elongated green valley difficult to scale and travel sideways, it results in long range gun battles. The soldiers, and the cameramen, actually get themselves ambushed from all angles at high elevation at one particularly scary, intense segment.

This is very hairy, as an action film would say. If you had seen a documentary like “Gunner Palace” than you would have seen a war documentary that leaves out the war – it’s a doc in Iraq that hardly gave you a sense that there were any battles, nor danger (the result, no reason to watch). “Restrepo” is a rare work of courage, first and foremost, for actually being there during its hairy moments, and for showing you a part of Afghanistan and its insurgents that you had probably not seen or considered previously. The film has a lack of commentary at times, but you do witness pathetic attempts at diplomacy between infantrymen and Afghanis.

Yet for all its rawness the film suffers for not having an organized narrative structure or sturdy timeline. That’s the tradeoff supposedly, skimping on the implications of world history for the sake of personal soldier history. The camerawork and editing meets first-rate standards especially for a guerilla piece. This leaves us OK for not having more. But even though its apolitical for its lack of words, lack of speeches, it is hard to not find this anti-war when you witness soldiers bawling right on camera. And what did the boys accomplish for the U.S. military in their year on duty? Hmm, that question might even puzzle them.

Go to the official site at http://restrepothemovie.com/

Grade: B