Movie reviews | Lisa Schwarzbaum | Owen Gleiberman | The Movie Critics

The Movie Critics Movie reviews | Lisa Schwarzbaum | Owen Gleiberman

Jan 25 2010 08:47 PM ET

Sundance: 'Douchebag' is a low-budget twentysomething slacker comedy with a difference...It's good!

Categories: Douchebag, Sundance Film Festival 2010

What sort of background do you need to be an actor? These days, it’s not exactly required that you graduate from the Actors Studio (or from anywhere else), but when I look up the credits of even the lamest supporting actors in bad Hollywood comedies, they tend to come with a long string of professional experience (“After a four-year run on the popular Nickelodeon series, Allegra made her big-screen debut in She’s All That and went on to co-star in…”). As for indie-film actors, they often bounce back and forth between no-paycheck Sundance movies and big-paycheck schlock. So I was surprised when I got back to my room after seeing Douchebag, a bubblingly sharp and fresh and dark and winning comedy about a major, major a—hole, and learned that the movie’s mesmerizing lead actor, Andrew Dickler, started out as a film editor (he was an apprentice on Pulp Fiction) and since then has been…a film editor. Period. He has never acted before.

The thing is, he looks like a film editor, which grounds the movie, from its first funny moments, in a kicky, downbeat reality. The title dickwad, Sam Nussbaum, is about to get hitched to the very sweet and beautiful Steph (Marguerite Moreau). They live in Los Angeles, but Sam still favors the style of Seattle: He wears oversize grunge shirts, and he’s got one of those bushy postmodern hippie beards I think of as early-Spin-Doctors-meets-Zack-Galifianakis. (Read full post)

Jan 25 2010 12:44 AM ET

Sundance: Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning rock out in 'The Runaways,' but the movie itself is no knockout

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Dakota Fanning, Kristen Stewart, Sundance Film Festival 2010, The Runaways

From the moment I arrived at Sundance, the movie that more or less everyone, including me, wanted to see most was The Runaways — and not just because it offered the chance to see whether Kristen Stewart, as Joan Jett, could leave her swoony Twilight mopiness behind her and play a rock & roll princess with down-and-dirty spunk. (Verdict: She can.) It’s also because the Runaways, a packaged group of choppy-haired teen-glam feline punkettes from L.A. who, in 1976, did for girls playing power chords what the Sex Pistols did for beer-spewing anarchy, may seem cooler now than they did then. In hindsight, they blazed quite a trail, but they didn’t have many good songs — and even their best one, “Cherry Bomb,” never quite broke free of their jailbait novelty-act image.

The most entertaining thing about the movie is that its writer-director, music-video veteran Floria Sigismondi (making her feature debut), has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were an image first and a rock & roll band second. (Read full post)

Jan 24 2010 04:47 PM ET

Sundance docs: A riveting look at the man who sold Washington, plus the Picasso of paparazzi and combat shock

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Restrepo, Smash His Camera, Sundance Film Festival 2010, Sundance documentaries

The director Alex Gibney now sets the gold standard for documentary muckraking. His movies, like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), are electrifying investigations that probe deep beneath the surface of contemporary events; after you’ve seen one, you feel you know something essential about what’s happened in America that you didn’t grasp before. When Gibney got up at Sundance to introduce his powerful new movie, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, he noted that the recent Supreme Court decision knocking down any and all restrictions on campaign finance had made the film “rivetingly relevant.” He wasn’t being egotistical.

The movie is a look at the corrupt culture spawned by Jack Abramoff, the king of the lobbyists who took influence peddling in Washington to new heights (or depths). I don’t know about you, but the moment I hear the word “lobbyist,” my brain glazes over. Casino Jack woke my brain, and my outrage, right up. (Read full post)

Jan 23 2010 03:13 PM ET

Sundance: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper are superb in 'The Company Men,' a juicy drama of downsized executives

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Ben Affleck, John Wells, Sundance Film Festival 2010, The Company Men

You know that feeling you had watching the downsizing sequences in Up in the Air — the dread mixed with empathy mixed with outrage mixed with the chilling sensation that anyone could be next, including you? That’s the feeling that extends through every minute of The Company Men, a shrewd, juicy, timely, and terrifically engrossing big-cast Sundance drama that marks the feature directorial debut of John Wells (best known as the executive producer and head writer of ER). Unlike Up in the Air, however, this movie doesn’t offer a glimpse into the plight of tossed-aside middle managers. It is, rather, about the high-rolling executives who’ve pigged out on the capitalist gravy train — the men swimming in stock options and country-club memberships and $500 lunches.

Why, you may ask, should we give a damn if they lose their jobs? Have no fear: That skeptical class resentment is built right into the movie. The Company Men draws on our innate compassion for anyone in trouble, yet at the same time the movie is cannily and intimately aware that the smugly gilded corporate aristocrats it’s about are the very sorts of self-invested, short-term-profit players who helped to get this country in such trouble in the first place. As they watch their jobs disappear, we watch their suddenly traumatized lives with an arresting mixture of sympathy and Schadenfreude. The message of the movie might be: Greedy, scum-sucking executive parasites are people too. (Read full post)

Jan 22 2010 06:07 PM ET

Sundance's rebel yell: 'Howl' and 'Nowhere Boy' salute the fascinating early days of Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Allen Ginsberg, Howl, John Lennon, Nowhere Boy, Sundance Film Festival 2010

If I were a cynic (and sometimes I am), I’d say that the surest thing you could say these days about the word rebel is that anyone who uses it to describe themselves definitely isn’t one. But Sundance this year has cast itself as a celebration of rebels. Before each movie, the screen blinks and glows with a screen saver-style light show of tiny electric dots on which the following slogans appear: “This is cinematic rebellion,” “This is the renewed rebellion,” and (my favorite) “This is the recharged fight against the establishment of the expected.” (They should try using that one for Toyota.)

All in all, corny but effective. Especially on opening night, when the light show preceded the premiere of Howl — a deliberate attempt by the programmers to offer up Allen Ginsberg, in his formative mid-’50s prime, as a noble ancestor of the make-what-you-feel spirit of independent film. It worked. Written and directed by the team of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Celluloid Closet), Howl is just an okay movie, but it’s got a canny, outsider-art infectiousness. It’s less about Ginsberg the man than about the work that made him famous: his bebop, agony-of-the-ecstasy stream-of-consciousness poem “Howl” (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”), a declaration of linguistic and erotic liberation that kicked its way into being when one strait-laced, horn-rimmed, secretly gay nice Jewish boy allowed himself to follow his bliss. (Read full post)

Jan 21 2010 11:16 PM ET

Sundance 2010: Change you can believe in?

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Geoffrey Gilmore, John Cooper, Sundance Film Festival 2010

In the world of independent film, as in the world of politics, the buzzword, more than ever, is “change.” If you’re not about change, goes the mantra, then you’re yesterday’s news — or yesterday’s candidate, or yesterday’s world-class American independent film festival. Change is adaptation, and adaptation is survival. But after 20 years of hipster cachet, of deals and headlines and celebrity starlets in fur-collared parkas, of fabled career launches (Kevin Smith! Parker Posey! Darren Aronofsky! Gabourey Sidibe!) and game-changing, paradigm-shifting influence in Hollywood, is the Sundance Film Festival ready to change its own game? Or, more to the point, is it capable of doing so? Or maybe even more to the point, does it truly, deep down want to? (Read full post)

Jan 18 2010 04:28 PM ET

Golden Globes: I love awards-show montages, and last night's Martin Scorsese tribute was one of the best

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Golden Globe Awards, Martin Scorsese

The greatest-hits-of-Hollywood movie montages that have long been a staple of awards shows tend to get a bad rap these days. They’re blamed, with some justification, for stretching Academy Awards night into the weary wee hours, and yes, they’re sometimes hung on pretty thin concepts (like “Celebrity” — a real Oscar low point). But I confess that I can never get enough of them. These memory-lane mini-reels may be little more than flashcard redundancies in the perpetual nostalgia culture of YouTube and VH1, yet when they’re well produced, they’re candy for movie buffs. And it’s worth noting that they were once actually offered up as prestige epiphanies. In 1972, it was showcased as a Really Big Deal that the honorary tribute reel to Charlie Chaplin at the 44th Academy Awards ceremony — a nearly poetic evocation of Chaplin’s genius — was assembled and edited by Peter Bogdanovich, then one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. Last night’s Martin Scorsese tribute at the Golden Globes achieved that same level of instant cinematic bliss-out. More than just mesmerizing to watch, it was executed with a thrilling love and understanding of Scorsese’s films — the sort of montage that made you think, half a dozen times in the space of four minutes, “Oh, man, I’ve got to see that movie again right now!” (Read full post)

Jan 15 2010 03:22 PM ET

Movies starring real people vs. movies starring pixel people: the eyes have it

by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Categories: Avatar, Commentary, Movie Critics, Movies, Where the Wild Things Are

I haven’t written anything on this site about Avatar, for good reasons For one thing, I second everything Owen said in his fine review. And for another, I think that between Entertainment Weekly and ew.com, EW forces have pretty well covered every mile from Earth to Pandora, don’t you? But looking at this week’s pretty blue cover, I realize now that the main reason I haven’t jumped in to add to the discussion is because, as visually beautiful as Avatar is, and as snazzy, and as technologically innovative, the movie just doesn’t engage me emotionally as much as a movie about humans does.

You might say, well, what about hobbits and Wild Things and Wall-E and blockheaded Carl in Up? They’re not real people, either, and you’ve written about how much you love them. And I answer yes, I do. But I invest my heart differently when a character is human. I don’t care who’s fictional, who’s actual, and who’s just vaguely based-on-real-life. I do care that we share common traits of heart and soul. I know myself well enough to know that I particularly crave knowledge of how others of my species maneuver their ways in the world. And with all props to Neytiri, her ways are from another planet.

For me, the absence of human identification keeps me at a distance. As I say, for me. How about for you?

Jan 14 2010 07:07 PM ET

'The Book of Eli': Who knew that videogame writers were...writers? Plus, a thought on Eric Rohmer

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Eric Rohmer, The Book of Eli

It came as no surprise when I learned that Gary Whitta, who wrote the screenplay — and I use the term generously — for the Hughes brothers’ postapocalyptic dud The Book of Eli, has a background in videogames. An Englishman, born in 1972, Whitta was one of the founders of PC Gamer magazine and also served as its editor-in-chief. In addition to writing scripts for shows like Star Trek: Voyager, he has been a consultant on numerous game franchises and, according to his Wikipedia entry, is best known as a writer on games like Duke Nukem Forever, Prey, and Gears of War. I guess I understand why videogames need “writers.” In fact, I have no doubt that whatever creative input Whitta contributed to those games, it may well exceed the level of artistry at work in his script for The Book of Eli, which is basically a videogame concept — lone warrior in sunglasses wanders futuristic wasteland recycled from a zillion other films, fighting off stick-figure hooligans along the way — that never really springs to life on screen.

What I had no idea of, until a press release that literally arrived an hour ago, is that videogame writing has now attained such prominence and prestige that it merits its own award…from the Writers Guild! The WGA nominations for Best Videogame Writing have just been announced: They include Assassin’s Creed I (story by Corey May; script by May, Joshua Rubin, and Jeffry Yohalem), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (script by Marc Guggenheim), and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (written by Amy Henning). This might be an easy thing to mock, except that it really does make sense. Why shouldn’t we honor the creators of videogame stories as writers in an entertainment universe where more and more credible Hollywood screenwriters are drawing their aesthetic inspiration from those very same games? And, of course, the standards are shifting even as we speak. Evaluated as a traditional Hollywood screenplay, Avatar, as I have argued on several occasions, is thin, derivative, serviceable, and vaporous. But taken in a different context, as a glorified act of videogame creation, it might well seem downright visionary. (Read full post)

Jan 14 2010 04:27 PM ET

Haiti through a different lens: 'Heading South'

by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Categories: Charlotte Rampling, Haiti, Heading South, Movies, movies about Haiti

There’s no escaping the gnawing sadness brought on by the images of horrific destruction and misery coming out of Haiti. There is, though, brief visual respite in revisiting the intelligent, perceptive, sorrowfully angry 2005 movie Heading South. Laurent Cantet’s unnerving drama about single women who head south for sex tourism is set in a Haiti, circa 1979, that’s as politically and economically wretched as ever, a time when strongman Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and his thugs terrorized the country. But at least all the little houses still stood, in a landscape of deceptive, beachy beauty.

Cantet — whose great schoolroom study The Class was one of the very best films of 2008 — establishes his uncompromising, adult-minded drama in an era in Haiti’s recent history that drove desperately poor mothers to prostitute their daughters and inspired young black Haitian men to prowl the beaches, offering themselves, and their pleasures, for purchase by visiting middle-aged white ladies, cougars before the term was a pop cultural trend. Queen bee among the hungry women is Charlotte Rampling as Ellen, a single, 55-year-old college literature professor who has staked out her territory as the wise, experienced veteran. She enjoys her proprietary relationship with a handsome 18-year-old local named Legba (Menothy Cesar, with Rampling, left), and is none too pleased when the arrival of Brenda (Karen Young), a slightly younger, less jaded American tourist, upsets the dynamics of Ellen’s haughty reign.

The women in Heading South only see what they want to about the troubled country whose sunshine warms their aging skin; in their competition for Legba’s attention, Ellen and Brenda think they understand their young plaything far better than they do. In fact, the gulf between native son and tourist lady in the Haiti of Heading South is a socioeconomic chasm as big as the physical destruction we’re now witnessing, aghast, in a Haiti ripped by nature as well as by man-made misery. Make a contribution to a reputable relief organization on behalf of the Haitian earthquake disaster. And see this movie.

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