tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

Starring: Benecio Del Toro, Franka Potente, Catalina Sandino Moreno
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Release Date: December 12, 2008 (Limited)
Running Time: 134 min
MPAA Rating: R
Distributor: IFC Films

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My God, to think how Che Guevara must be turning in his shallow grave, knowing the hipster-icon status he's achieved with the tragically hip 'emo' crowd.  At least Steven Soderbergh pays him proper tribute in his latest, and massive docudrama Che.  Che is so enormous, it's broken up into two movies, both running just over two hours long.  The first is Che: Part One - The Argentine.

This first part follows Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as goes from an Argentine doctor, to Cuban revolutionary in the mid-1950s.  Guevara played a huge part in overthrowing the tyrannical Batista regime, as well as making way for a new dictator: Fidel Castro.  Even though the film centers around Guevara, the film is almost more about Cuban geography and the art of guerrilla warfare (focusing on indoctrination, recruitment, training exercises, political posturing, etc., etc.).  As a period piece, it's terrific.  The look and feel of the movie is just right.  At least it feels just right to white, north westerner who's never participated in jungle warfare.

Starring: Emily Browning, Arielle Kebbel, Elizabeth Banks
Director: Thomas Guard, Charles Guard
Release Date: January 30, 2009
Running Time: 87 min
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Distributor: Dreamworks Pictures, Paramount Pictures

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No one should be surprised to see Elizabeth Banks in another film. In 2008, she was nearly ubiquitous, staring in huge films like Oliver Stone's W., and Kevin Smith's long anticipated Zack and Miri Make a Porno.  No one can really blame her for slumming it now with The Uninvited.  They can't all be hits, right?  But even for a teenage horror/thriller, this film doesn't deliver.  Even with three writers chipping away at the script that's based on another film, it's still unremarkable, and directors Charles and Thomas Guard (who happen to be brothers as well) turn to every cheap scare in the book to keep things mildly interesting.

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet
Director: Sam Mendes
Release Date: December 26, 2008 (Limited)
Running Time: 119 min
MPAA Rating: R
Distributor: Paramount Vantage

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Hollywood movies made in the 1950s tended to depict the alienated youth during that time as rebel-rousing bad boys and girls who objected the social norm in a moody and ignorant way to sooth their wants and temptations. It was a hit. We couldn’t get enough of the characters James Dean and Marlon Brando portrayed. The character’s parents on the other hand were more brawny and straight-edged, allowing their children to experiment with certain activities that were frowned upon by the majority of society. Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road focuses on a young married couple in Connecticut during the 1950s (lavishly decorated by Mendes direction), where suburbanisim is just beginning to flourish and take a grueling toll on those who aren’t willing to conform.

April and Frank, the Wheelers, a couple who don’t mold into the traditional couple that 1950s Hollywood liked to depict are the total opposite of authoritative parents; they’re cry babies wanting their way or the highway. Rather, Mendes, working with Richard Yates’ 1961 cult novel of the same name, condemns the Wheelers to be two fragile souls who let the outside world mess with their lives and shake to the core their foundation they walk upon. However, the movie, unlike the great novel, is so confined to this scheme that Mendes slowly puts his film in pursuit of masochism and sadism while it should be approaching sorrowfulness. The story offers nothing more than just two souls who continuously wound each other, deeper and deeper, with crude remarks that demoralize their ideas.

Starring: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Release Date: January 23, 2009
Running Time: 109 min
MPAA Rating: R
Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures

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Nothing about Randy "The Ram" Robinson or his job is genuine. He's beefed up on steroids, able to walk straight because of the numerous amounts of medication he constantly takes, obtains a perfectly even spray tan and is so loyal to his "fake" wrestling persona that he can't seem to function in reality. When the lights begin to dim, the ring begins to be taken apart and the screaming fans (most of the time a meager total) soon disintegrate into thin air, Randy is stripped of all exhilaration that he feels inside the ring and has to deal with the outside world that cares very little about him. It's here where he receives the deepest of scars.

This happens to be director Darren Aronofsky's effective formula in which he knows how to craft a great film out of. He preys on the feeble foundation on that of which souls build luscious and near impossible dreams. Like he did with his 2000 masterpiece Requiem for a Dream he does with The Wrestler; pitting ambitious humans against their personal demons. The human desire of breaking free from a personal wrath is a kind of picture that rattles the soul by creating a portrait of a man that wants to be alive in life but can't because of their setbacks. Reference films such as Brando's On the Waterfront" and even Raging Bull, both films that deal with men struggling to get a grip on their lives while outside their favorable habitat.

Starring: Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes
Director: Stephen Daldry
Release Date: December 10, 2008
Running Time: 124 min
MPAA Rating: R
Distributor: The Weinstein Company

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Freedom assassinated by egotism, a woman expressing her pride to the fullest extent so she does not become a conformist and abandoning all she wants to love because she desires safety of normality. All of that in which culminates into an interesting study of the human mind, spirit and the decisions we make that can lead to a life time of second guessing ourselves. Sounds, at first, like a Bertolucci film that wants to exploit political subjects and cause an upheaval amongst society. In fact the movie is made by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot), the man who's as lighthearted as he is profound with his latest feature film, The Reader. His approach to the Holocaust is to focus on two individuals' lives that were affected by the outcome of the heinous events that occurred in Germany during WWII. What Daldry is really after – which is the smaller topic in the movie – is how the generations after the Holocaust can't begin to understand why these atrocities committed by their elders ever happened.

Where the novel by Bernhard Schlink took the approach of telling its story with its narrator looking back in anguish at certain point of his life in a linear narrative, director Daldry sidesteps that and tells it in a nonlinear way. Too many flashbacks and flash-forwards take away from the emotional gratification that was so true in the novel. We first meet Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) in Berlin in 1995. He's living in a lavish apartment and drives his Mercedes Benz to the courthouse where he's a judge. Then a flashback scene occurs and we are taken back to the 1950s where Roger Deakins' cinematography captures a resurrecting Germany wanting to break away from their past and embrace a new future. Michael's now a high school student yearning to break free from his boring home and experience life to the fullest extent. Young Michael is played brilliantly and touchingly by David Kross who is able to distance himself from being just a sex object into a person who has deep feelings but is confounded on how to express them to other people. After school one day he begins to throw up. A woman is nice enough to engage herself in caring for him by bringing him up to her apartment. Either life after will ever be the same.

Starring: Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Kenneth Branagh
Director: Bryan Singer
Release Date: December 25, 2008
Running Time: 120 min
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Distributor: United Artists

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Fundamentally speaking, the appeal of Tom Cruise in the last few years doesn’t make any sense.  Just as soon as he took Katie Holmes hostage and started parading her and her ‘too scared for escape’ look around the world, people seem to have become disinterested in anything he has to do professionally; or so they say.  Sure he was great in Tropic Thunder, but I’m talking about the movies he has had to carry on his own.  Everyone seems to talk a big game but with the exception of last year’s Lions for Lambs, you have to go all the way back to Magnolia, almost a decade ago, to find a film he starred in that didn’t gross at least $100M domestically.  So much for disinterest.  Maybe he just has mind control over all of us too. 

Keep in mind; these aren’t secrets I am exposing for the first time, so why his pick for his latest project was a big budget WWII Hitler assassination movie is beyond comprehension.  For a man so caught up on selling his image, it stands to reason that there would be better ways to spend his time.  It ended up being much worse than it appeared on the surface.  The release date moved so much nobody cared when it was really coming out and as soon as the trailers came out the backlash was already in full effect.   

Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett
Director: David Fincher
Release Date: December 25, 2009
Running Time: 165 min
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Distributor: Paramount Pictures

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Every movie made employs the use of some sort of gimmick.  Some are smaller than others and they don’t always work but whether it is the cast, the special effects, or something else, every filmmaker uses some device that they hope will allow their movie to rise above their contemporaries.  In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the gimmick is the story.  A baby is born with the appearance and all of the physical limitations of an old man who ages backwards through life.  It’s really a fascinating premise that, beyond its initial intrigue, stirs a lot of questions.  How would one operate under the construction of backwards aging?  How would you let it shape your everyday life?  On a deeper level, how would you deal with the inevitability of loss in your life that would be compounded by that very construction?  It is in the films attempt to answer these questions that you will find its true appeal.

Starring: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen
Director: Ron Howard
Release Date: December 25, 2008
Running Time: 123 min
MPAA Rating: R
Distributor: Universal Studios

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In 1977, just a few years removed from the only resignation by a U.S. President in the history of our country, Richard Nixon agreed to be interviewed by a moderately successful British TV personality, David Frost.  Over the course of 28 hours of interviews Nixon eventually apologized for the scandals of his administration.  Not before or since has Nixon publicly addressed the issues surrounding Watergate. 

Take a second to let that sink in.  It’s only been 30 years since the interviews but the way we get our news today has changed so drastically that a news event like this would be impossible to achieve in today’s news environment.  The advent of the internet and the 24-hour cable news channel has completely changed the way we get our news.  But in 1977, when network anchors ruled the news on the Big Three, a foreign journalist against the odds scored what is still today considered the most important political interview ever. 

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang
Director: Clint Eastwood
Release Date: January 9, 2009
Running Time: 116 min
MPAA Rating: R
Distributor: Warner Bros.

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They don't make them like this anymore. No, we're not talking about the 1972 Ford Gran Torino but the movie itself that takes the name of the prized car. Hollywood doesn't make films anymore like Clint Eastwood's latest Gran Torino because no one could do what he does so naturally; he's mean and content with being that way. He stars in a role that he would have eaten up back in his hay day. Of course Hollywood doesn't produce any stars that could handle Eastwood's demeanor now. All of this is the answer to why films like this don't get made. Eastwood directing and starring gives the film a roughness and truthfulness to it that has only been seen by the likes of cinema greats and two times by Eastwood himself; Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven. His new film seems like it could well be his adieu to film, but we know it won't. He loves film too much and loves even more the gift he is able to give to viewers. Everything he ever preached and practiced is on display in Gran Torino.

It is as if Eastwood gathers all of his past acting personas and had them wrapped up to form an old, porch sitting man who has seen every obstacle life has to offer; both highs and lows. He's recently recovering his wife's death and his two sons don't give him the time of day nor do they have any faith in him. This is supposed to be his time where he lounges, works in his garage on his '72 Gran Torino and guzzles beer after beer trying to forget the Korean War he was involved in. But when life musters up one last hurrah to try and shake this old timers life up it reawakens a beast whose presence was absent within this man, the man with No Name, for quite some time.

Starring: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor
Director: Danny Boyle
Release Date: January 23, 2009
Running Time: 121 min
MPAA Rating: R
Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures

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Life and times are tough right now, well, at least for some. Director Danny Boyle realizes this and appoints himself commander in chief as he ventures out to satisfy and revitalize the crippled and worn hearts of America. Last year saw the likes of violent films with no redeeming qualities and they were received with awards (see: No Country for Old Men). Curiosity is brewing inside me if the Academy will reward this sincere crowd pleaser.

Though the film takes place in both old India and new, Bombay and Mumbai, there’s no questioning Boyle’s film is something of an international phenomenon. Not complacent with fixing the hearts of Americans, he creates a film that wants to embrace the entire world. When a film finds itself with a beating heart, like Slumdog Millionaire does, there isn’t any questioning involving its emotional magnificence.

Surviving what the slums of India heaves, hatred, poverty and desperation, is human hope, doing its best to prevail against forces that don’t want individuals to succeed.