SHUTTER ISLAND

The discordant assembly of images in Shutter Island are haunting and distressing. At first sight you believe that the film will take place entirely on an island that lodges the criminally insane, circa 1954. What gradually creeps in are flashbacks of American G.I.’s liberating Jews from a Nazi concentration camp, as well as our hero’s nightmares of his former wife cremating to ashes before his eyes. While in the present, the weather is constantly harsh and unforgiving, lending to cracking and shattering of walls and windows.


Before the first images of the film even roll, movie lovers will be instantly turned on by the use of the same György Ligeti music that was used in “The Shining.” Director Martin Scorsese, with his first dramatic feature since his Oscar-winning “The Departed” (2006), prioritizes foremost in creating an ominous and foreboding atmosphere. He lets us know immediately, through visual and aural suggestion, that the island will be a trap where violence and hysteria will be difficult if not impossible for his protagonist to escape from.

This is the Scorsese that I’ve been wanting to see since “Cape Fear” (1991), the Scorsese that will put a hypnotic spin on a big, fat American genre piece – film noir and psychodramatic horror – something that he could inject with his trademark skill and blustery. Scorsese continues to raise his game in technical perfection with his inimitable use of vivid angles and severe lighting. His visuals are gestating with silhouette and shadow patterns that alter his audience’s perceptions – we are at the mercy of what we think is real and what is imagined, and also perplexed by what point of view the film is adopting. Forget James Cameron. Scorsese is arguably the Film Master of the World.

In preparation for this film, Scorsese said that he was inspired by the silent classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919) and the asylum melodrama “Shock Corridor” (1963). The former is a visually startling piece of German expressionism although dramatically limp by today’s standards, and Scorsese pretty much defuncts the value of the latter. What’s important here is that Scorsese draws from film history – the German expressionism of the 1920’s and the film noirs of the 1940’s primarily – and uses those techniques to make… a very frightening, bone-chilling thriller.

I will drop my explanation of Scorsese for a moment to talk about the actors. Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in “Revolutionary Road”) stars as the Federal Marshal Teddy Daniels who arrives at the island to investigate the disappearances of a schizophrenic murderess (Emily Mortimer, “Match Point,” provides the mug shots of the crazed woman). Teddy is accompanied by fellow marshal Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo, “Zodiac”) whose initial motivation appears to solely adhere to professional duty until perhaps, or perhaps not, be prompted to participate in conspiracies.

Teddy definitely has a number of agendas, including possible revenge on another inmate who may have been responsible for setting the fire that his wife died in years ago. Michelle Williams (“Wendy and Lucy”) plays Teddy’s dead wife, and her ghostly or dreamlike appearances loom steadily in his memory. Ben Kingsley (“House of Sand and Fog”) plays the seemingly benign chief doctor, Max von Sydow (“Minority Report”) plays an insidious-looking doctor who looks like a WWII descendent, and Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill of “The Silence of the Lambs”) plays the cruel warden whose verbal expressions seem to endlessly slant on sadism. Patricia Clarkson (“Vicky Christina Barcelona”) and Jackie Earle Haley (“Little Children”) are also featured in key roles in which the less said about them the better.

“Shutter Island” puts you in the thrall of gripping suspense, especially when you learn that missing patients might be guinea pigs in extreme experiments involving psychosurgery. Teddy, a probing detective who learns things that could be damaging to his livelihood, is reduced into a Kafka-esque rat in a maze. He gets various portentous messages “to run.”

Yet the film prospers less on traditional plot than it does on Scorsese creating a state of mind. Scorsese, the world master as he is, has self-criticized himself in interviews over the years that he is fundamentally a “narrative filmmaker.” This time he has created a mood piece, much like Stanley Kubrick did with “The Shining” or “Eyes Wide Shut” crossed with the claustrophobic dread of F.W. Murnau, the 1920’s pioneer of German expressionistic shadows and fog weirdness. Sample inspiration: While Kubrick created a scene of blood flooding from an elevator, Scorsese creates a nerve-rattling scene of rats scurrying from an island cove.

It hardly matters if you know these classic films or not. It matters that Scorsese knows what he is doing. He draws on German expressionism techniques to make it look better than it has ever looked before (at least with updating that style for a modern film). Just like Quentin Tarantino draws from classic films and manages to outdo the original source, Scorsese is doing the same but always with the sake of servicing the story.

Reality becomes fractured in this film, and we are left to question the sanity of the entire hospital staff and left to question the degrees of paranoia of our protagonist. As well as to if and why the hallucinations are being amplified (are they being triggered by unbeknownst inoculation of psychotropic drugs?). By the end, we are left questioning the schematics of the plot perhaps in justifiable terms, but if you are truly captivated then you will up to its last minutes questioning the malicious motivations of mid-20th century psychology and science. As well as guessing up to its last minute of whose projection of truth is reliable and which slate of characters are the true crazies.

The only thing I can’t be kind about is the penultimate final shot of the movie. It’s a panning shot that underlines a symbolic object that no longer holds any weight after its true significance has already been revealed. Scorsese is also best when he is at his most merciless, and I feel he gets a tad too sympathetic with the wrong character. The climactic construction puts you through a bait-and-switch that makes you identify with its central characters in a new way, so this new sympathetic clutch is treacle.

But quibbles. “Shutter Island” is mesmerizing for the most part, and if you come out of it disappointed, I’ll gladly point you in the direction of Big Momma’s House 3 when it comes around, or something else that proudly aspires to be meaningless fodder and nothing more. But for true believers, count on “Shutter Island” on being the most adventurous and head-spinning movie treat that you will see for the next several months ahead of you, and then some.

Go to official site at http://www.shutterisland.com/#/home

Grade: A

VALENTINE'S DAY

Right off the bat the problem with Valentine’s Day, other than there are too many characters than the film can handle, is that there seems to be more storylines of jilted love than there are stories of actual love running through its intersections. Talk about traffic overload. In a movie loaded with stars, you stop counting smooches and start counting how many limited minutes each actor has in the film.

For the guys, Ashton Kutcher seems to be running through most of the intersections – popping in and out of other member’s storylines – perhaps because he is the supreme florist of Los Angeles and on Valentine’s Day everybody needs flowers. If Kutcher is the coach, then the guys on the bench include Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Topher Grace, Taylor Lautner, and George Lopez. Watch out – one of these guys is an irredeemable slimeball (I guessed right within four and a half minutes into the film). And then one of these actors makes a surprise coming out announcement that he is gay. Somehow this kind of announcement is becoming obligatory in large-ensemble romantic comedies.

For the pink team, Kathy Bates never once gets a Valentine but she’s definitely a coach for at least two characters. On the bench the roster includes Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jennifer Garner, Anne Hathaway, Queen Latifah, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts and Taylor Swift as an airhead. I am not criticizing Swift in her acting debut, she’s really playing an airhead. That is not contestable. The rest of these girls are playing hopeless romantics, commitment-phobes or possess some kind of reputation-affecting secret – one of them for instance is an adult phone sex operator who speaks in lots of pseudo-sexy crooked accents.

There are no milestones in this rather cookie-cutter romantic comedy that just happens to be a bigger, puffier cookie made without any magical addicting ingredients. Except that one character must set a record for fastest roundtrip flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back again in order to spite a cheater in the nick of time. Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts must have both underwent Hollywood’s easiest film shoot with their participation, playing seatmates on an airplane. Then you have a competition as to whether any of the girls are more neurotic than Topher Grace. But I see here that this is no longer a discussion about milestones.

As if the standard generic story treatment for an all-star cast isn’t enough of a letdown, how about further lousy news that Los Angeles seems to have been photographed through a smog filter. Romantic comedies should be photographed in bright and glossy colors, and in not in such the muggy processed look that this film has been given.

Still the Cupid inside me wants to go out of the way to give out MVP honors to Jamie Foxx as the coolest dude in the cast this time playing a TV reporter, and Jennifer Garner as a Miss Old-Fashioned type looking very adorable as a grade school teacher. But let’s get to some generic and bland audience demographics. The girls will enjoy this film certainly more than the boys who will want to go off and watch sports somewhere. Let’s just not compare this to the ultimate Valentine-ensemble “Love Actually” (2003). That’s a movie for everybody.

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

Grade: C

THE WOLFMAN

After The Wolfman you would very much start to think that a full moon was every night, night after night, or that a screenplay can mandate sun and moon cycles as it pleases. But that is just one of many, many mistakes that this latest creature feature makes. It is far less crucial to its failure than its inability to make you concerned about its characters.

This is a movie where Benicio del Toro (“Traffic”) and Anthony Hopkins (“Meet Joe Black”) play father and son Talbot, both infected in one time or another, with… let’s just say a curse. They inhabit England in the late 1800’s, with dad the head of a castle manor that hasn’t been swept on the inside since the birth of mops and brooms. Somebody hire a professional leafblower.

But enough about housekeeping. How about the awful film editing? And I rarely say anything about film editing. The editing is so poorly arranged that in one scene I could not tell whether Hopkins was locking in or locking out del Toro from the perils of the night. The editing is so poorly punctuated that when del Toro has “visions” it is right out of a Japanese horror movie. The editing is so poorly executed that the final duel between beasts is a haphazard mess where we can’t tell who is shredding who.

In this sunless world that the movie portrays the one luminary is Emily Blunt who as the love interest is more astute at reading the torn behavioral cycles of del Toro than anyone else is. Blunt is one of these beauties that sees the inner beauty in others. The larger secondary cast are disposable and featureless personalities, with the exception of Hugo Weaving (“The Matrix”) as the detective who speaks his lines as if he knows he is the only one who could really be in charge.

Front and center, del Toro is a classic mumbler but that doesn’t begin to explain why he is so dull. The problem is with this leviathan actor is that he is only threatening when he plays an all-out madman with no soul (see “The Hunted”), but when he attempts pathos and sensitivity in a torn character he is not sterling nor compelling. Hopkins blabbers on with pseudo-intellectual diatribes, dispersing rhetoric with no rhythm or cadence, and the result is observing a thespian actor putting on a lazy performance.

Action and scares are inauthentic because we hear a manufactured ripping sound on the soundtrack while the wolfman raises his paws. That’s right, he mostly just lifts his paws up and down, and then you see blood squirt everywhere. You would think that his claws were made of buzzsaws. More story and technical hooey: When Hopkins’ manor catches on fire he appears non-chalant about it all as if he predicts the outcome within a couple of minutes won’t make the slightest difference.

The only thing that keeps this film from being a complete disaster is the fact that the photographic effects of shadows and fog, as implemented in scenes both of forest and city cobblestone, are rather nifty. That’s something, because the make-up effects (by Rick Baker no less) are not even that nifty. The Talbot transformation to wolfman is done well and more than adequately so, but come on, it’s nothing new.

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

Grade: D+

BEST & WORST FILMS OF 2009

It was a year when genre movies trumped “important” prestige films. The best “important” one is number #4 on my list, and it doesn’t conduct itself as a message-laden film – it thrills and exhilarates then respects you to extract the message. Certainly there are a few other important films that deserve a place in the canon of 2009 releases. How do I list these anyway? My method is, the closer you get to number #1, the more exhilarating the movie was to me. In some years the real important movies are the ones that entertain the hell out of you. These are the eternal classics:

BEST OF 2009

1. Paranormal Activity – If you think like I do then you will agree that “The Shining” and “The Exorcist” are on Tier One as the greatest horror films ever made. “Paranormal” can now take the lead at the top of Tier Two. Taking place entirely inside a San Diego home where one boyfriend records infinitely with his video camera toy and a girlfriend haunted by the unknown, the film slowly creeps on you until it builds to unrelieved terror. As a result, the loudest screams in a movie theater you’ve heard in years if you were lucky enough to see this in a packed house. The fact that the best film of the year was principally made for $11,000 goes to say that if you live long enough you will eventually find something to surprise you. Yet there certainly must be a reason why the film rattles your nervous system so effectively. It has a way of tapping into fears that you thought were long dormant, and then extrapolating them. In a word: Primal.

2. Inglorious Basterds – Quentin Tarantino, giving good name to agonizing suspense as well as to stylistic homage, compiled a perfect cast for an awesome assembly of characters in this boyhood fantasy of American G.I.’s kicking Nazi ass in a fictional WWII. The opening sequence between Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz, the best villain Q.T. has ever created) and the French farmer is the best written sequence this year or perhaps in many years. Never before has there been a movie character that has used ingratiating qualities to such powerful, ironically menacing effect.

3. Observe and Report – Black comedy comparable to Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” by some others compared to “Taxi Driver,” one of those films you can’t see its greatness until you’ve seen it two, three, maybe five or six times. As long as you believe that a comedy isn’t required to have likeable characters then you will be knocked punch-drunk by Seth Rogen’s bi-polar mall cop. Here’s a guy who honestly and truly believes that his anti-social behavior is social normalcy. Second endorsement: Tarantino praised it as one of his faves of the year.

4. The Hurt Locker – Authentically filmed in the shrapnel littered conditions of the Middle East, the mesmerizing Jeremy Renner is the leader of a bomb disposal team in Baghdad. The title is symbolic of Renner’s obsession with mementos of his past assignments, but the film digs deeper into his paradoxical compulsion to risk-take for the sake of risk-taking – he’s a field operative who thrives on the adrenaline. The most haunting final shot at the movies this year. Kathryn Bigelow will likely become the first woman to ever win the Best Director Oscar.

5. Bruno –Sacha Baron Cohen is the preeminent avante-garde performer of our time, battery-ramming his character into real world encounters and eliciting shocked reactions from onlookers. It’s not the plot that’s important, it’s the anything goes quasi-documentary method that is which here veers into what should be called borderline documentary. By turns outrageous and side-splitting, then fascinating and intolerable, this is perhaps the only comedy that could be seen as a puke-your-guts-out rollercoaster ride and ask for seconds.

6. Departures – This Japanese film touched my heart more than any other this year, containing scenes that I am forever grateful for. While it initially stirred me upon my first viewing, I had no idea how much I really loved it until I reviewed the similarly themed but vacuous “My Sister’s Keeper” two months later. Failed cellist Diago (Masahiro Motoki, gentle and superb) is a nokanshi, a man who performs ceremonial washing of corpses before their burial. It remains uplifting and spiriting even despite its cadaverous theme possibly because it honors and cherishes the memory of the dead, while soothing the hearts of the living.

7. Up in the Air – George Clooney as a termination specialist who travels nearly every day of the year, embracing his roaming lifestyle. He meets Vera Farmiga, also a woman of non-commitments. Jason Reitman (“Thank You for Smoking,” “Juno”) is once again the director of a smart, devious comedy that this time taking us all over the map, both literally and thematically.

8. Public Enemies – Underrated. Contains some of the most ironically beautiful and evocative cinematography of the year, while seducing you into the art deco texture of the 1930’s. Christian Bale is a stiff as the agent on pursuit, but Johnny Depp as John Dillinger is the embodiment of criminal cool, a bank robber who saw recklessness and exhilaration as one and the same.

9. Precious – For those few people out there who thought “Juno” was too insincere and irresponsible (I don’t know how you could, it’s only a comedy) here’s an honest heartbreaking reel: a portrait of an obese 16-year old Harlem girl who becomes a mother to two children. Gabourey Sidibe turns the title morose inward character into a revelation, but one of the year’s great performances belongs to Mo’Nique who channels short-fuse fury as the abusive, oppressive mother.

10. Invictus – A Nelson Mandela biopic could have existed without giving us the marketing hook of rugby, but still, the two have been honorably integrated. And Morgan Freeman delivers one of his great performances. But highest praise to director Clint Eastwood’s awe-inspiring location shooting.




Overlooked:

Julia – Is she the best living actress today? Tilda Swinton is a pitiless, self-absorbed alcoholic-cum-tramp who commits the hefty crime of kidnap-and-ransom which snowballs into multiple heftier crimes. The year’s best under-the-radar thriller, although it is more of a human wreckage character study. In a sane world she would win the Best Actress Oscar. Erick Zonca, the director, also deserves to be taken seriously. This film reminds one of the Coen's first film "Blood Simple."

Milestones:

Best Documentary: “Tyson”

Best Animated Film: “Fantastic Mr. Fox”

Best Actor and Supporting Actor: Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker” and Christoph Waltz in “Inglorious Basterds”

Best Actress and Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton in “Julia” and Mo’Nique in “Precious”

Best Cameo: Harrison Ford in “Bruno”

Most Surprising Robert DeNiro caliber classic performance: Seth Rogen in “Observe and Report”

Best Montage: “Observe and Report” exhibiting Rogen’s off-medication nihilism followed by the beatdown of hooligan skateboarders.

Best Artistic use of Black & White: The opening sequence in “Antichrist”

Best Musical Interlude: “(500) Days of Summer”

Best Love Scene: Drew Barrymore directed the underwater tableau in “Whip It”

Best Sex Scene: The Korean vampire movie “Thirst” by Chan-Wook Park

Twenty dick jokes too many: “Funny People”

Two Hundred Eyebrow Twitches too many: Kristen Stewart in “New Moon”

Worst Films of the Year:

1. Miss March – So smutty and juvenile it makes you almost wonder for a moment if Playboy has ever been sexy.

2. Flame & Citron – Danish film replete with the most idiotic WWII clichés in ages. A blockbuster in its native country, this marks proof that the Danish are capable of having just as much bad taste as Americans when it comes to overhyped and shallow action spectacle. Then it takes itself so damn seriously.

3. 17 Again – Pervasively stupid. Characters adamantly act without thinking. Characters react slow when introduced to new surroundings. Characters demonstrate absent memories outside of a two-minute time span. Zac Efron is a "star" but so what.
4. Management – Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn comedy that loses its sense of priority. To makes us laugh, to make insightful human observations.
5. Away We Go – John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are a couple with a baby on the way and obnoxious supporting characters along the way, against director Sam Mendes’ washed-out color palette. The most literate movie on this worst list, yet so dreary it’s soul-crushing.

SHERLOCK HOLMES

Sherlock Holmes plunges you into the plot without warming you up or seducing you into 1890’s London, slapping together shots incoherently until you don’t care what is happening. Instead of sleuthing and puzzle-solving, the audience is treated to a reckless action scene. The dialogue is also zippy and breathless (and incoherent), and Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role as Sherlock even mumbles his words in an early scene where he insults Jude Law’s female companion (Law plays Dr. John Watson). While actors certainly appear debonair they are nevertheless surrounded by a sloppy production.

Worth mentioning right away is that there are precisely four good scenes in the movie, and surprisingly, three of those are action scenes. Dame Irene (Rachel McAdams) is swinging from a meat hook on one scene in a charnel house and Sherlock Action Hero has to set her free in time before she gets shredded by blades. That was a highlight, and that is not to sound sarcastic. It really is a good scene.

Also good moments are a scene featuring a runaway boat sinking into the bay, and a climactic scene jousting on the rafters. If you haven’t figured it out by now, let’s make it clear that Sherlock Holmes has been made into an Action Hero for this generation leaving the cleverness of sleuthing to past adaptations. Certainly there is a little bit of sleuthing, and the finale where he puts the pieces together is exuberantly executed. But did we really need to see Holmes in a boxing match? The snap and crackle direction by Guy Ritchie (“Snatch”) predisposes that it must be so.

That’s really for the Ritchie fans that enjoy his overblown theatrics, but for keen viewers, the Ritchie overall style is frenetic and chaotic (the mere snap and crackle editing is saved for shots of bone-breaking). Ritchie doesn’t care if you brew over the mystery of the film, he just wants to smash excess at your senses. As for the mystery, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) has been executed by hanging but continues to terrorize London from beyond the grave. Death, you see, has only made him stronger. But Sherlock figures that Blackwood must have been getting help from somewhere other than from his gift of Black Magic.

But sometimes a superfast pace just makes time stand still. What’s lost is fresh Holmes and Watkins camaraderie. McAdams is adrift in randomly shuffled scenes. The Hans Zimmer score is endless lightning, it also never stops to breath. Although Zimmer does echo notes from Ennio Morricone’s score from “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Moreover, what is lost is any satisfying sense of cleverness.

In a production overrun with bombast, what you will nonetheless recognize is the set design of the film which is meticulous in detail. The film’s display of 1890’s London looks as real as the history books. It’s the actors who are contemporary, and the action and style that is ultra-modern. For those readers looking for nothing but sheer entertainment, why are you bothering to look anywhere else but “Avatar” for this holiday season?

Click Here to go to official Sherlock Holmes website

Grade: C