Look! Look! – Movies

Like Crazy

Presented at Milwaukee Film Festival 2011
Like Crazy, 2011
Drake Doremus, Director 

The young director’s most successful film features well-known Anton Yelchin (Charlie Bartlett, Star Trek) and Felicity Jones (The Worst Witch, Cemetery Junction), who play a star-crossed pair embodying a new spin on history’s most classic love story. After Romeo and Juliet, Titanic and Aida, the problem of college couple Jacob (American) and Anna (British) being separated by Anna’s visa violation does not seem that weighty. Though this story lacks a great social clash or vengeful slaying, it does portray, with startling accuracy, the quiet death of love itself, and all the tortured complexities along the way.

Doremus built the couple’s story with very smooth and intelligent time-lapse choices. Viewers experience multiple-years of Anna and Jacob’s relationship, which do include the joys of finding a first love and the recurring joys that punctuate their ups and downs. In between their long separations while they wait for Anna’s visa violation to be revoked, Jennifer Lawrence (2011 Oscar nominee for Winter’s Bone) appears as a symbol for the love that can arise even when you think you’ve found your match.

likecrazy.com

Make Believe

Presented at Milwaukee Film Festival 2011
Make Believe, 2011
Documentary
J. Clay Tweel, Director (feature debut)

 

These children are not simply competing against the world’s most talented young magicians, for a panel of the most important people in the business—they are trying to discover a sense of self-worth, and they are trying to make something new.

Make Believe invites us into the lives of six international teenagers, ages 14-19, who are all prodigious in the field of magic tricks and stage illusions. They harness their talent not as a hobby, but as an identity. “You can suddenly do something no one else can,” said Bill Koch, 19, from Chicago, “[Magic] made people want to talk to me.”

This beautifully paced documentary not only reveals its subjects, but also climactically builds to the winning of the competition. The six featured teen magicians are all finalists in Las Vegas’ World Magic Seminar, and for most of them, second place is not an option.

Supplementary to the race for first prize is the drama naturally present in the faces of teenagers who are judging themselves. They are already exceeding the achievements of their peers, who they often feel estranged from, but their commitment and determination is what set them apart in the first place. For 14-year–old Derek McKee, magic is what pushed him away from adolescent shyness. Luckily, these kids have each other to relate to. “It’s a little world of oddballs,” said mother of Krystyn Lambert, a 17-year-old rising star who is involved with the exclusive Los Angeles Magic Castle.

This film is endearing, funny, and includes astounding acts of illusion. It also provides glimpses into how magic is practiced and perceived around the world, offering audiences a series of coming of age stories unlike any other.

makebelievefilm.com

 

Becoming Santa

Presented at Milwaukee Film Festival 2011
Becoming Santa, 2010
Jack Myers, Director
Jack Sanderson, Screenwriter 

Every year, the Milwaukee Film Festival offers at least one whimsical, offbeat documentary that ultimately peels away its eccentricities to reveal very empathetic, human moments and themes. Becoming Santa, this year’s choice, follows Jack Sanderson as he transcends the role of your typical department store Santa.

Director Jeff Myers alludes to Sanderson’s father, who once dressed as Santa for a family affair, as the catalyst for the journey. However, the significance of this motivation is not portrayed with enough weight to justify the sacrifices on Jack’s part.  His time at Santa school in Las Vegas is delightful and heartwarming, as is each interaction with a small child, but a lot of his work is strenuous and unpaid.

The story is punctuated with beautiful moments of discovery and catharsis, but the lack of believable motivation is a head-scratcher.

Becoming Santa was a risky choice for a film festival staged in September and October, but for those whose autumnal Christmas curiosity brought them to the screenings, they could not have been disappointed. Though it is initially displacing to hear a score of Christmas music in early autumn, the film carries through with typical documentary sensibility.

Jack’s story is interwoven with facts about the surprisingly controversial origin story surrounding the character Americans now accept as mainstream Santa Claus (hint: it has a lot to do with Coca Cola). Entertaining and evoking both laughter and heartfelt tears, this is a film to hunt down for the holiday season.

The stylistic highlight was the unique and tasteful, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Los Angeles indie rock band The 88. Among the plethora of season-specific songs, this original composition shined not only as a new Christmas classic, but a song you want to listen to all year round. (It is available for download on iTunes.)

becomingsantathemovie.com

 

 

Green; it’s not breezy

Presented at Milwaukee Film Festival 2011
Green, 2011
Written, Directed, and Edited by Sophia Takal

If someone sets up the beginning of Green for you, you might think it’s got all the fixings of a chick lit romp: an unlikely friendship between two young women; one bookish city, the other down-home country.

Instead, Green depicts the perverse machinations of a female psyche derailed by jealous paranoia and portending betrayal.

Genevieve and boyfriend Sebastian leave Brooklyn and their literary milieu to embark on a yearlong sabbatical in a big old house in a forest of rural Virginia, where journalist Sebastian has been assigned to document agrarian life. He will grow his own food and write about it.

Sebastian and Genevieve’s interaction signals a new relationship. It is tenuous, still exploratory. They are not perfectly comfortable in their new skin. Takal discloses the lopsidedness of their partnership in the film’s first scene. Sitting on a couch at a party with, one guesses, lit majors, Sebastian asserts that Philip Roth is a better writer than Proust, challenging Genevieve to agree. Not persuaded, she tentatively utters her quiet opinion, which confident Sebastian airily dismisses.

Genevieve’s acquiescence seems borne of subordination, although it is not clear whether her submission is founded on a lack of confidence in her intellect or a lack of appetite for conflict.

In Virginia, the couple’s rural idyll is interrupted the morning after their arrival when Genevieve finds a woman, Robin, passed out on their front lawn.

Robin is a native who lives and waits tables in a nearby village. She’s gregarious, talkative, keenly observant, pragmatic—the antithesis of the neurasthenic, inward Genevieve.

The disquiet in the New Yorkers’ relationship is further revealed through Sebastian who is barely able to disguise his impatience with Genevieve’s sexual reticence and inhibition. Genevieve seems a little lost in her new geography and milieu. She reads, walks, makes trips to the grocery store—desultory, in stark contrast to her lover, the goal-oriented Sebastian, who is exuberantly occupied with tools, establishing a garden, his writing, and Sebastian.

Robin wends her way into the narrative with quiet determination. She is determined to engage the exotic newcomers. Despite Genevieve’s initial resistance to Robin’s overtures, the two women soon become friends and share feminine confidences.

Except their relationship isn’t buoyant enough to protect Genevieve. She is soon beset by paranoid fantasies of sexual liaisons between her lover and new friend. Takal lays disturbing music under these sequences, music that connotes a dagger-wielding maniac on the other side of a shower curtain.

Takal’s Genevieve is very much like a heroine of a Virginia Woolf story. She’s fragile, neurotic, and her fine intelligence fails to protect her from her perverse imagination.

In an interview with Amarelle Wenkert, Takal said she wrote Green “literally overnight,” shot it in two weeks, and edited it in her living room.

Takal confessed that she struggles with real and challenging jealousy in her own personality. It is therefore fascinating to learn that Takal plays Robin in her film and that Sebastian is played by her real life fiancée Lawrence Michael Levine. And Genevieve, played by Kate Lyn Sheil, is the couple’s real life roommate.

Takal told Wenkert that her demon vanished while making the film, even during the sex scenes she directed between Levine and Sheil, but it came right back when she completed the film.

Green’s cinematography, the work of Nandan Rao, is deft and sensual and inscribes Takal’s no nonsense shots with honesty and allegory. However the long, contemplative stationery shots of the viridian forest that Takal quilts between major scenes prove not to be an allegory of nature’s power to soothe and heal but instead a metaphor of a psyche corrupted by a pernicious and insistent emerald-eyed demon.

themoviegreen.com

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

Presented at Milwaukee Film Festival 2011
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, 2010
Joann Sfar, Director

This year, the Milwaukee Film Festival chose, for their French Spotlight feature, the amorous life of celebrated 1960’s lounge composer (singer/song-writer, actor and director, painter) Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991). Conjured through a thick haze of cigarette smoke, this bio-pic glides from Nazi-era France of Gainsborg’s childhood to 1980’s Jamaica, where he produced two reggae albums and recorded one of his own songs. Comic book artist Joann Sfar wrote and directed this film, combining his personal drawing style with Gainsbourg’s forceful visionary spirit.

Sfar’s personal drawing style guides is employed to illustrate Gainsbourg’s love of women and form. Whether through music or art, Sfar show us a young artist who paired up with women to collaborate. He loved them, shaped them, and set them free. Perhaps his most vaunted lover, French bombshell Brigitte Bardot, was portrayed by Laetitia Casta, flawless in both form and spirit. Each rendezvous, whether musical or romantic (though there was absolutely no distinction between the two) fit Gainsbourg’s own aesthetic standards as a subject of affection and interest, “diaphonous beauty with the despair of a tragic character.” Not until his relationship English actress Jane Birkin does Gainsbourg appreciate the will of a woman who has the power to, instead, shape him.

The film combines the true legacy of Gainsbourg’s mystifying, velvety talent with dream sequences and puppetry. Professor Flipus, the fictional drawing of Gainsbourg’s youthful hand, springs to life every time his impulsive, maniacal self takes over. Allusions to his childlike impulses and discoveries are made when Sfar transports us to a concrete dreamland—a beautiful beach where ocean meets sand, cars bound over dunes, and babies are held in the translucent safety of a belle’s arms.

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life richly showcases the skillful compositions, innovative conquests, and hazy impulses of a hero as tragic as his subjects.

 

Looking for Eric

Looking for Eric, directed by Ken Loach, is a selection at the Milwaukee Film Festival.  The last showing of the film at the festival will be on October 2, 2010 at 6:30 p.m., Ridge Cinema.

Eric’s coworkers and supervisors at a Manchester, UK post office can see Eric’s stooped shoulders and sense danger in his alienated eyes. They secretly conspire to combat his listless apathy.  With the help of a psychological self-help manual, Eric’s post office supervisor makes an endearingly ridiculous and sincere attempt to set Eric on the road to spiritual recovery. In Eric’s chaotic living room, which has years of undelivered mail spilling out of the bookcases, Eric’s supervisor conducts a therapy-for-laymen group session straight out of the self-help book. The supervisor asks the affable postmen to imagine a loving father figure.  Eric emerges from the therapy session with an imaginary sage to look after him.  Eric’s guru takes the form of his youthful hero, soccer superstar Eric Cantona.  Cantona, who most surely has very big balls and deep French wisdom, can see right through the real man trapped inside Eric’s broken spirit.  A highly imaginative madcap plot unfolds (one which may be too loopy for some) and Eric eventually reclaims his dignity and purpose after much travail.  Steve Evets as Eric Bishop and Eric Cantona as himself are brilliant. The supporting cast is wonderful as well. Paul Laverty’s script is robust and refreshingly unrepressed.  One word of caution: a willing suspension of disbelief is necessary for ye who enter here.  If you buy in, you will take a wild ride through the tough streets of working-class Manchester, share in the grim reality of Eric’s home life and take a magic carpet ride with Eric every time he lights a joint before his frequent tête à têtes with Cantona, the Jean-Paul Sartre of the soccer world.  You might not expect such a tender hearted film filled with magic and charm to emerge from such harsh, goofy and improbable premises but here you have it.

Get Low

Humorous, nuanced, moving, Schneider’s Get Low likely award nominee

Larry: Get Low is based on a true story of Felix “Bush” Breazeale, who received national media coverage in 1938 by announcing that before he died, he wanted to throw a “funeral party” for himself. He had an ingenious way of getting people to come, and when they did, he hoped that people would tell one of the many horrific—yet ultimately untruthful—stories about him. The film is directed by Aaron Schneider, who previously won an Academy Award for Two Soldiers, a short based on a Faulkner story.

The movie is humorous by turns but seriously explores a man’s never-ending burden because his actions indirectly led to the death of the only woman he ever loved. The Bush character (Robert Duvall), has been a hermit for more than 40 years. At the party, he hopes he can explain to people why he isolated himself and earn forgiveness.

Funeral director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray), who is desperate for money after a dearth of funerals, is funny in how he tries in a deadpanned way to set up and promote the party. A radio interview of Bush asking people to come to the party also is a riot.

Bush is a sympathetic character. Early on, he is shown taking good care of his oldest friend, Gracie, a mule. Despite his eccentricities and bad reputation, you instinctively know that he cannot be all bad.

When we saw the movie, some 20 people stayed in their seats until the credits were finished and seemed to be sorting through their feelings about the movie. Mary cried.

Mary: It was well acted and Duvall, Murray, and Sissy Spacek as Mattie Darrow, Bush’s old confidant, along with the other supporting actors, delivered convincing and nuanced performances. The story unfolded with good pace and plenty of suspense and surprise. There was richness in the costuming and the recreation of the Depression era in rural Tennessee. The music was terrific, too.

The movie made me think about how in endings there are beginnings. How in every life there are actions, reactions, and complications. And how, especially in young lives, one misstep can trigger a chain of unforeseen events that trap people into living a life they never intended.

Get Low is wise and redemptive. It gently shines a light on the moral ambiguities which inform and entangle a life.

Larry: Not until the end does the movie explain the reasons for Bush’s self-imposed isolation. The viewer never learns if the authorities ever cleared him of any criminal wrongdoing. But even if they did, Bush still believes that his actions caused his lover’s death. The movie does a good job showing how fear often leads people to wrongly damn an individual.

Mary: Yes, the tension between Bush’s bad reputation and his desire to get the truth out drives the movie. Get Low has sweeping power (and weeping power, as I found out). I suspect it will get a few nominations for film awards.

Larry: As I get older, films about a person’s desire to leave a favorable legacy become more relevant. I would recommend Get Low to older friends.

Larry: 3.5 stars

Mary: 4 stars

Psycho mama’s boy is nemesis to listless divorcé in Cyrus

Mary: Cyrus, written and directed by Mark and Jay Duplass, is a welcome bit of far-fetched summer wackiness. John C. Reilly steals the show as John, a self-described “Shrek in the forest,” who is slouching along in middle-aged life unable to muster enough courage—or maybe even lust—to emerge from his lonely and self-involved post-divorce morass.

As his ex-wife Jamie (Catherine Keener) is about to remarry, she mothers her hapless reject husband, encouraging John to attend a party where he might meet someone to love him in his shrektitude. Molly (Marisa Tomei) seems enchanted by his neediness and amused by his drunken antics at the party. Apparently, Molly sees right through the aberrant behavior, looks fearlessly into his tortured self to find John’s heart of gold. But that is only the beginning. Lovely, kind, and sexy Molly has a deep dark secret of her own: Cyrus.

Molly’s 21-year-old son Cyrus has touch of genius and is also more than a bit touched. He was raised fatherless by Molly and homeschooled no less. The fire burns bright between Molly and John, but Cyrus will have none of it. The plot pits John, the needy/seedy intruding suitor, against Cyrus, the psycho mama’s boy. There are lots of laughs, fun surprises, and even tenderness in the film.

Larry: I liked Cyrus because John and Cyrus clearly understand each other’s desires and deviousness. The movie is a series of fights between them over who will win Molly’s affection. It’s a fair fight. I squirmed at the way Molly protected her clinging son, and many men would see their dependent relationship as nothing but trouble and get the hell away from her. Not John. In his own way, he is just as needy as Cyrus. Molly’s affinity for her son also is way out of line. She carries protectiveness to extremes. Nonetheless, I cared about the love needs of John and Molly and wanted John to squash the fat Cyrus.

The Duplass brothers use hand-held cameras for many close-ups of all the characters. I got to see John’s shaving scars. Somehow, seeing the characters this close made them more endearing and believable. Their acting did not wilt under this close scrutiny.

Mary: I was on the side of the lovers also. Cyrus is a menacing and formidable antagonist. But I didn’t really hate him. He’s a little scary sometimes and you wonder what he will do next. You don’t know for sure if he will really change. He’s a good foil for John who is so close but so far away from Molly. Molly is weak and needy herself, and is so tied into satisfying Cyrus’ needs that she is helpless to force Cyrus to separate from her. I’m not sure that John actually succeeds in forcing Cyrus to grow up. But I think John comes around when he stands up for himself and opposes Cyrus. He goes from being self-loathing and apathetic to being gutsy, feisty, and self-respecting. Without Cyrus, he would never have been tested.

Larry: To me, Cyrus was a conniving jerk, and I did hate him. The movie strongly hinted that this young manipulator, Oedipus the nemesis, won’t ever stop trying to thwart John’s love for Molly.

The movie had Molly juggling her love of John with her overly protective love for Cyrus. The familiarity she had with Cyrus was troubling. She took a shower while Cyrus was in the bathroom. Yuck. The movie has some funny scenes, but it also explores an uncomfortable mother-son relationship. You leave the movie thinking about inappropriate types of love.

Mary: The Cyrus-Mom relationship was troubling. I noted it but the John-Molly relationship was in the foreground for me. The movie explores how hard it is to love despite a deep human longing and need for it. As close as it sometimes may get, sometimes it seems almost impossible for love to conquer all.

Mary ***
Larry ***

Discuss the film with the Sussmans: hesaidshesaid@bayviewcompass.com.

Clever writing and lovable characters in City Island

Mary Vuk Sussman: City Island is a suspenseful and fun movie. I can understand why it has become a “word-of-mouth” hit. It made me laugh, shriek, and kick my feet. Directed by Raymond De Felitta, the movie takes more than a few unexpected twists and turns.

Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia), a tough-talking prison guard, is the patriarch of an Italian family and a third-generation City Islander. City Island, formerly a fishing village, is a residential community offshore from New York’s Bronx, with a small-town feel and great views of the Manhattan skyline. Both towns are showcased nicely.

Vince’s decision to try to fulfill a long-denied desire to be an actor and secretly take acting classes in Manhattan gets the story off and running. The action careens hilariously out of control, and even flirts with tragedy at times. All of the characters have secret lives which eventually get out of the closet and into play. Garcia turns in a very good performance as Vince. Julianna Margulies, who plays Vince’s wife, Joyce, and Emily Mortimer as Molly Charlesworth, Vince’s classmate and confidante, are vibrant and convincing in their roles. Alan Arkin is perfect as Vince’s crusty old drama teacher.

Larry Sussman: You want to hug this movie because it is filled with nutty, yet believable characters who I found myself talking about two days after I saw the movie. You care about them and don’t want to nitpick about their wacko quirks. You believe that prison guard Vince, a hard-ass on the job, would hide a cowardly past secret from his wife. You watch the family yell at one another during dinner over minor problems knowing that the shouting is used to hide far more destructive skeletons.

You are so wrapped up in the characters and laughing so hard at their faults that you willingly suspend disbelief. That’s good writing. It takes a clever author to write a movie based on a guard meeting a new prisoner and realizing that this is the son he fathered and abandoned some 25 years earlier. Vince also sees in his bastard son, Tony (Steven Strait), acting abilities that Vince realizes he has as well.

MVS: I liked hard-boiled Vince’s soft side. I liked tough, bitchy Joyce better when she became vulnerable and showed how much she cared. All the characters got turned inside out so you saw their hurts and insecurities. There was danger in all of that, especially when they all “came clean” in the same scene, which was scary and funny at the same time. The movie is all about outward appearances falling away or in some cases being put on for purposes of acting.

LS: My favorite character was Molly, Vince’s confidante in acting school, who sees possibilities and depth in Vince that his wife could not possibly imagine. What an ego boost for a man in his forties meeting a beautiful younger woman who tells him about his potential and is not conning him. She inspires him to act and create memorable characters. The notion that a guard could use his experience to become an actor is great movie escapism.

MVS: Molly was a wonderful character, a good foil for Vince’s insecurities even though she proved to be more complex and enigmatic at the end than we first realized. But I think that she is a con artist even though she gives Vince a good steer. We never really get to understand her whole story. Vince was my favorite character. I felt for him as he faced up to two sarcastic teenage children with plenty of adolescent troubles and a bored and suspicious wife, and his own doubts and insecurities about himself. There was nobility in Vince when he took Tony home with him from the prison, even though Vince doesn’t have the guts to reveal to Tony his true paternity. There was courage in Vince when he decided to take the acting classes, and cowardice when he said instead he was playing poker. His foibles made me laugh a lot, but I really felt for him.

LS: Vinnie, the son (Ezra Miller), also gives men who lust after zaftig women a funny role model. De Felitta has his characters smoking, which in most modern movies would tell the audience that these are bad guys. Here, it’s just another example of people’s faults.

This movie, finally, is about second chances. We always will need prison guards; we can do without actors. Vince wasn’t around for Tony for the first 25 years of Tony’s life. But Vince still has something to offer the son he never knew. That’s a stay-at-home lesson that should give second thoughts to many hit-and-run fathers today.

MVS: I don’t know that this movie actually provides that lesson, but I did think it was funny and very lively.

Mary and Larry Sussman are married. The couple will deliver future film review dialogues.

No sympathy for Greenberg

Larry Sussman: The movie Greenberg explores the agony of returning to the path not taken, but failing to resurrect your life. Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is a 40-year-old carpenter from New York City who goes back to Los Angeles after a nervous breakdown and tries to right his past mistakes. I believe that Greenberg falls flat, and so does the movie.

Mary Vuk Sussman: I agree that Greenberg has failed to grow up. He doesn’t really progress or even regress as a character. He does seem to learn a few things, but it’s hard to believe that he is a changed man at the movie’s end. I don’t think the movie is a total failure. But like a lot of satire, it sort of leaves you cold. from afar. It’s a good movie for cynics.

LS: Noah Baumbach, the movie’s director and main writer, seems to think that audiences will empathize with Greenberg when he tries to re-examine important life decisions with his former band mate, Ivan Schrank (Rhys Ifans), and his old girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Yet both have moved on with their lives and do not give a hoot about Greenberg’s longings. Many close-ups of an anguished Greenberg do not make the audience care for this basically boy-like, selfish character. His moral reawakening comes too late.

MVS: I agree, he is somewhat thickheaded, and he is a slow learner, like so many of us. You start to wonder if he has a brain, especially when the lost, lovely, and kind Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig) falls for him, and he doesn’t have the good sense to love her. But yes, Greenberg’s attempts to reconnect with his rich high school friends are dismal failures. Yet there was something interesting when Ivan spoke about reconciling himself to the life he never planned, but Baumbach never really unpacked or explored it. I never understood why Roger left the California good life to live in New York. I was never clear on why Roger settled in Bushwick, a very poor section of Brooklyn, and chose to make a living as a carpenter. Why did he have a breakdown and what landed him in a mental hospital? Why would he want to go back to Hollywood to house- and dog-sit for his wealthy brother, Phillip? The movie starts to make some sense when Florence, a paid personal assistant to Phillip, enters the scene. She is a floundering college graduate who is as lost as Greenberg. There are some nice moments when their lives entwine over Mahler, a large brown German Shepherd Dog. But I had more sympathy for Florence (and Mahler) than for Greenberg.

LS: I also cared somewhat more for Florence, an aspiring singer, who is a sexy bed hopper. I felt far more for Mahler, when he becomes ill. Greenberg, on the other hand, is less lovable, and an unsympathetic hero is a fatal flaw. The movie also tries to explore deeper sentiments with characters mouthing forgettable lines, such as “Hurt people hurt people,” and “Life is wasted on people.” Regrettably, the Los Angeles/Hollywood setting, including an all-night drug party, didn’t resonate with me. I kept on thinking, “When is this movie, which is an hour and forty-seven minutes long, going to end?”

MVS: I agree that Greenberg doesn’t do much to warm the heart. I did like the “Life is wasted on people” line and have repeated it a couple of times since. The line was a throwaway, good for a laugh, but Baumbach never really ran with it. For me, the movie worked as satire. I laughed at the characters’ ineptness and emptiness as they muddled their way through it all. Greenberg doesn’t do much to make us feel better about the human race or even ourselves. It goes to extremes and exposes the troubles of selfish, immature, and alienated people and throws in a culture of wealth and privilege as a backdrop. Though the movie is set in or near the Hollywood epicenter of film culture, it is about every person who buys into this culture even from afar. It’s a good movie for cynics.

LS: If I want to feel cynical, I’ll watch when U.S. senators criticize the president’s upcoming U.S. Supreme Court nomination. I go to movies to escape, to root for made-up heroes.

MVS: Movies get controversial when they start to imitate life too closely.

LS: But sometimes they just get stupid.

Mary and Larry Sussman are married. The couple will deliver future film review dialogues.

Film: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer

Mary and Larry Sussman are married. The couple plans to deliver future His/Hers film reviews, though the format may change.

Her Take: A knot of terrible truths

By Mary Vuk Sussman

Intrigue and terror whip through The Ghost Writer like a howling nor’easter that threatens to swallow up the nameless ghostwriter played convincingly by Ewan McGregor. The Ghost’s curiosity, innocence, and desire to make a buck make him a believable character.

The Ghost signs on to finish the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) after his predecessor ghostwriter dies mysteriously on the job. The Ghost quickly trades the inner sanctum of the London publishing world for the rarefied air inside Lang’s island retreat on the U.S. eastern seaboard. Inside the stark modern beach house, we see picture-perfect views of the seacoast that blur the distinction between art and life.

The Ghost is immediately thrust into the former prime minister’s fishbowl world in which Lang is being accused of war crimes for his role in handing over terrorists to the CIA for torture. The Ghost unties a knot of terrible truths while panting in fear.

Kim Cattrall turns in a commanding performance as the former prime minister’s wily and beautiful personal assistant and mistress, Amelia. Olivia Williams is by turns pathetic and sinister as Lang’s cunning wife, Ruth. The haunting music by Alexandre Desplat is as relentless as the political storm engulfing the characters. The movie is based on a 2007 book by Robert Harris, formerly a British political editor. Roman Polanski directed the film and completed part of it while under house arrest in Switzerland.

His Take: Engrossing political thriller

By Larry Sussman

The Ghost Writer is a movie for people fascinated by political intrigue who desire to learn more about a country’s foreign misadventures and to see political leaders, who normally can hide their blemishes, exposed. Many political reality movies have been filmed, but to the credit of director Roman Polanski, this film’s contemporary storyline and seemingly respectable villains keep the audience engrossed.

The viewer becomes an investigative reporter following GPS directions, doing Google searches, and uncovering “oh-my-gosh” political revelations. The rhythmic music is enveloping and scary. The movie also has several laugh-out-loud funny scenes, such as when the ghostwriter, overwhelmed with the messy manuscript assignment, says, “The words are all there. They’re just not in the correct order.”

The story initially involves a tight publishing deadline to complete an autobiography of an embattled ex-English prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Lang offers to pay $250,000 to an English ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) to finish the rewrite in four weeks. The original ghostwriter died of an apparent suicide. But when the rewrite starts, the International Court of Justice begins a criminal investigation of the Lang administration’s earlier counterterrorism actions. The new ghostwriter also finds evidence suggesting that Lang was more loyal to the CIA than to Britain.

The movie reminds the viewer of the current British scrutiny involving former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to ally Great Britain with the United States in the second Iraqi war.

Mesmerized by Avatar

I admit to having been a holdout. I didn’t want to see Avatar because I am neither a science fiction/science fantasy buff nor a dedicated follower of the latest in film technology. But I saw it anyway, not so long ago, in a nearly deserted theater on Super Bowl Sunday (dare I admit to that, too?), donning my 3D specs with a bit of Missourian show-me defiance. And, yes, I was mesmerized and mystified and had little difficulty buying into this fabulously sensual and beautiful film directed by James Cameron.

Former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair. Sully regains use of his legs, and then some, when he agrees to participate in a bizarre experiment in which his DNA is mixed with alien Na’vi DNA and steps into his hybrid avatar body. The avatar body is controlled remotely by Jake’s human self but the avatar looks like a Na’vi, the indigenous species of Pandora, a distant moon. The hybrid can survive in the rare Pandoran atmosphere that is toxic to humans. When the human “controller” “sleeps” in what looks like a tanning bed, his avatar is active in Pandora.

Pandora is home to a rare mineral, unobtanium, coveted by the humans, who are prepared to destroy the Na’vi, kill the fauna, and defoliate the flora of Pandora to realize their avaricious ends. It is strict scorched-Pandora policy. Greedy humans are rubbing their hands together while waiting in the wings to claim the spoils. Paraplegic Sully is supposed to be a pawn in their game. He is a gung-ho ex-Marine who will be brave and loyal and serve as a good infiltrator in his avatar body, helping the fanatical corporate/militarist/nihilists realize their nefarious goals.

The animation is stupendous and seamless. The landscape is eye-poppingly dramatic and the viewer goes flying on a breathtaking and exhilarating visual adventure.

Pandora is a lush land of forests and floating mountains, filled with Na’vi and the most amazing wild animals ever seen. We learn to love the Na’vi and their Edenic forest primeval as Sully adopts their ways while under the tutelage of Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), a beautiful Na’vi woman tasked with making a proper Na’vi man out of avatar Jake, who acts like an oafish and ignorant human at the outset.

The cultural and sentimental education of Jake eventually gives way to an epic battle between the forces of good and evil, which tug and pull on Jake’s human/avatar selves, forcing him to make ethical choices.

The blue Na’vi beguile with beauty, sincerity, and sensitivity. They also exude a wholesome sensuality and have Herculean strength. The over-civilized and over-armed earthlings have hearts of stone and seem to have more bombs than brains.

The movie explores a number of high-minded themes, sometimes without much nuance. Such criticism, however, does not count for much because once you enter the world of this extravagantly imaginative film you are engulfed by its tsunamic power and a willing suspension of disbelief overrides such objections.

It is not surprising that a few vocabulary words acquired during the recent Iraq war enter the script. The war is on our minds and director Cameron’s as well. No surprise either that Avatar has been nominated for nine Oscars. It’s just one of those movies that will be praised, remembered, and re-viewed often. The Oscars ceremony is March 7.