In the Loop, Armando Iannucci

A wickedly funny satire about the inner dysfunctions of government bureaucracies on both sides of the Atlantic, with shots at the UN thrown in for good measure, In the Loop takes no prisoners and leaves none of its targets unhit. For reasons we're never told--and assume are secondary to individual self-promotion running rampant in the corridors of apparent powerlessness--the British (NOT English) and American governments on rushing to war somewhere in the Middle East.  

My caveat: what happens on the movie screen should stay on the movie screen. Though we all have good reason to suspect such motives propel much decision making in Washington DC and London, the only way to remain sane after watching this movie is to forget about it.  

Highly recommend. 

Bruce Springsteen (Comcast Theater, Hartford, CT)

Great concert by one of the greatest.  

Highly recommend.

District Nine, Neill Blomkamp

An alien invasion with a twist: over a million starving aliens are rescued from their mothership and placed in a Johannesburg, South Africa, refuge camp, District 9. Twenty years later, their numbers having doubled and their ship continuing to hover over the city, the ominous MNU (MultiNational Unit) is charged with transferring them further from the city to District 10. The bumbling son-in-law of MNU's CEO--Wikus Van De Merwe (played by Sharlto Copley)--is put in charge. While rounding up aliens, he accidentally infects himself with a potent fluid with two important properties: besides allowing the lost command module to return to the mothership, it also infects Van De Merwe and gradually transforms him into an alien.  The ensuing chase and battle scenes center on who gets ahold of the fluid.  

Tonally, the film takes a bit getting used to.  Wikus is a South African Inspector Clouseau, and his human enemies are flat projections of evil.  The film incorporates elements of a documentary--sociologists, scientists, and family speculating on Van De Merwe's behavior, plus footage from surveillance cameras.  And though the humans and aliens can understand each other (but not speak the other's language), there is no backstory, or even a gesture towards a backstory, that is, not even the sociologists claims that she's been spending the past 20 years trying to learn as much as possible about the alien race.  Obviously, we're to understand that the humans have absolutely no interest in the aliens except as a source for a new level of weaponry.  

As an allegory on apartheid, it's a bit confused.

Recommend.

Funny People, Judd Apatow

To date, I've carefully avoided Judd Apatow films. The premises behind his films sounded juvenile and tedious, and any previews I saw confirmed my suspicions. And as I look over Adam Sandler's filmography, I realize that, except for seeing snippets of Billy Madison when the kids were watching the video, I've managed to avoid him, also.  Based on strong reviews, I decided to go against type and see Funny People.  As MS said: well, it wasn't a complete waste of time.

Sandler plays George Simmons--a successful comedian whose comic persona is very similar to Sandler's--who's been diagnosed with a terminal illness.  Alone, he snatches Ira Wright (played by Seth Rogen) from comedy club and grocery-store deli obscurity.  The reasons for this gesture are unclear, but I think we're supposed to think he's looking to buy a friend. Rather than the usual juvenile grossness shaping the film's primary narrative, the penis and fart jokes get sidelined in the comedy acts embedded within the buddy story of George and Ira.  

The movie's energy comes from this buddy narrative, as well as Ira's friendship with his roommates, Mark and Leo (played by Jason Schwartzman and Leo Koenig); however, the film crawls to a near halt when women (and the subsequent love interest) get introduced into the mix.  

So for now, I've had my Apatow and Sandler fix.  Doubt I'll need another injection any time soon.

Caveats.

(500) Days of Summer, Marc Webb

The opening scene of (500) Days of Summer made us laugh. Twice. And we didn't stop laughing.  That's pretty good.  

In fact, this very good romantic comedy hits just the right balance between romance and comedy.  The laughs don't come from absurd situations, but from recognizably familiar ones.  And the romance don't develop from sentimentally but from an ironic examination of the ways our culture cultivates romantic expectations.  

The film's ironic sensibility extends to its post-modern pastiche of genres and references.  Clearly set late in the twenty-first century's first decade, it incorporates Ikea, Wii, coffee shops, and cell phone conversations as normal aspects of our culture without making the plot depend upon them.   If any cultural phenomenon generate the narrative, it's references to film and music. In addition to the central reference to The Graduate, techniques borrowed from post-war European art film, Bollywood musicals, and documentaries are incorporated into the film.  Rather than making the movie self-important or pretentious, these meta-moments add to the film's self-mocking humor--and make it easy for the audience to accept the hero's enlightenment on day 500.

All in all, (500) is a delightful, clever film.

Highly recommend.

Revanche, Götz Spielmann

A fantastic film noir by Austrian director Gotz Spielmann, Revanche opens with a plot reminiscent of Fargo (1996) and A Simple Plan (1998): a brothel tough guy, Alex (played by Johannes Krisch), robs a bank in order to clear the debts his Ukrainian girlfriend, Tamara (played by Irina Potapenko), owes her pimp.  His simple, "infallible" plan goes wrong when a local village policeman, Robert (played by Andreas Lust), stumbles upon the getaway car.  

Though the film sprinkles several motifs from the other two movies--in particular, the scenes of Alex cutting and splitting firewood invoked the woodchipper in Fargo--it veers away from them with multiple ironic redemptions.  To list them here would reveal too much.  

In addition to the tightly plotted narrative, the film features great montage work and editing.  It merits a second viewing.

Highly recommended.

 

Departures, Yôjirô Takita

Departures is an elegant and small film about the most inelegant of big topics, death.  Daigo (played by Masahiro Motoki) is an unemployed cellist who returns with his young wife to live in his deceased mother's fishing-village home.  Desperate for work, he takes a job casketing, that is the ritual preparation of bodies before they are cremated.  Though lucrative, the job is held in low esteem by Daigo, his wife, and neighbors.  

As we learn from the film, casketing is a new profession, the result of families no longer performing the end-of-life rituals themselves.  Over the course of nearly a dozen casketing ceremonies, we watch as Daigo lends artistic beauty and dignity to the ritual, thereby providing comfort for the grieving families.  He learns not to force the families to keep their distance; he works, instead, to collapse that distance and bring them in physical contact with the corpse.  

Slow and somber--perhaps too slow in spots--the film ends with Daigo achieving his own reconciliation with his father (who had abandoned his wife and son thirty years earlier) when he steps outside the prescribed role of onlooking family member and gently cleanses his father's corpse.

Recommended.