Balcony Blues

Dumbfoundingly similar in its finale to the recent Oscar-nominated Palestinian film, Omar, the Israeli Bethlehem mines equivalent emotional turf. Devoid of explanatory context, Bethlehem, via credible and interesting characters, lays out a sad premise: both sides are inhumane, lying and vengeful to a mortal fault. As in Omar, what proceeds as a suspenseful action yarn contains layers of penetrating observation that may lie beneath the surface, but produce a nod of painful recognition.

What keeps Bethlehem from sinking to a low of foregone melodrama is its ability to keep us glued to its character’s plight as a real struggle of compelling, conflicting forces. Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i), still a teenager, lives in the shadow of his older brother Ibrahim (Hisha, Sulman) a leader in the militant al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Sanfur chooses to protect his father at the expense of any personal cost. His dealings with Shin Bet secret service agent Razi (Tsahi Omari) have a father-son tone of their own. Razi himself bucks his superiors while perhaps getting too emotionally involved with Sanfur.

Here again, as in Omar, a largely nonprofessional cast give sharply defined performances. First-time director Yuval Adler, an Israeli, collaborates with Palestinian screenwriter Ali Waked in giving a finely wrought glimpse into the familial and tribal tensions surrounding the most dastardly act: collaboration with the enemy. Sanfur may feel he had no choice in crossing that highly dangerous line but Bethlehem chooses to explore his decision’s dangerous repercussions rather than give us even a flashback into the turmoil that must have gone into making the decision. We know he felt there was no other choice but we don’t get to feel what must have been an incredibly harrowing process.

Although the film portrays the tensions between al-Aqsa , Hamas, and The Palestinain Authority, it’s scattershot style makes no bones about doing so in an overtly blame free manner. Hatred and revenge transcend ideology, and ultimately, blur distinctions between not only the warring factions on the Palestinian side, but also between their collective lot and Israeli itself. In a conflict with no solution in sight, a weary cynicism ends up beating righteousness into a pulp.

3. 5 Youthful Martyrs (out of 5 stars)

Wes Anderson prefers not to enter himself into a particular time and place unless he’s able to twist and turn his subject until it’s ready to fit into HIS world. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, his eighth and best feature, his enchanting stylization rises to a level of obsessiveness that bodes well for the adventurous filmgoer. Anderson pulls all the stops in production values in taking on the vanished elegance of Old World Europe between the World Wars. His stock company, now enlarged by an even wider swath of familiar actors (no fewer than 17 this time) is here bolstered by a zany, bravura performance by Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes plays Gustave H., a genteel and dapper yet manic and profane hotel concierge who has a way with words and with ladies of a certain advanced age. He controls the Grand Budapest Hotel with a courtly whip.

Anderson may create his archly meticulous world with a glittering attention to detail but it is Fiennes who brings it to life with marvelous assurance. Any lesser hand in the lead role could easily have tipped the delicate balance between wacky whimsy and weary affectation that is present in all of Anderson’s work. When he’s on his game (Moonrise Kingdom, Rushmore) Anderson demonstrates that a deliberate, elaborately heightened style, rather than risk overcoming substance, can actually become the very substance of a film. His less than successful ventures (The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic…) erred on the side of precocious quirkiness. Neither had a savior like Fiennes to rein itself in.

Real places and real events are absent from The Grand Budapest Hotel. It takes place in a fictitious Central European country, Zubrowka (incidentally the name of a real-life Polish vodka). It deals with jackbooted secret police but never actually names their brand of fascism. In fact Gustave seems bothered more than anything by their rude intrusion on his orderly world of civility. Madame D. (Tilda Swinton, convincingly made up to be in her 80s) could be any rich, glitzy socialite of the day. Her greedy, heavy-handed son, Dmitri (Adrien Brody), means to make life difficult for Gustave, who after Madame D.’s untimely death, has surprisingly been named the heir to her valuable painting. A strange Jeff Goldblum presides as the executor of her will. Soon Dmitri and family henchman Jopling (Willem Dafoe) are pursuing Gustave and a lad named Zero (Tony Revolori), who is Gustave’s constant companion and lobby boy apprentice. An adult Zero (F. Murray Abraham) is actually telling the whole story-within-a-story from the framework of a flashback from the Communist-era setting in the 1980s, where he now owns the seen-better-days hotel.

Anderson uses 1930s film references and creative old-school stunts, miniatures, and nifty camera work to create an Old Hollywood suspense vibe. To great effect, he brazenly uses different film ratios and film stocks for each of his three time periods. His use of bold colors render his hand-painted backdrops particularly vivid. His sets encompass prison camps, railway cars, ski lifts, and of course, hotel lobbies. Elegant glamour with a light touch pervades.

Yet underneath the caper-movie front is an undercurrent of seriousness. Inspired by the writings of exiled Austrian Jew Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in 1942, the rapid-fire The Grand Budapest Hotel leaves a lingering chill. Anderson may be presenting the impending horrors about to soon take over Europe in a manner entirely on his own terms, but the film’s final effect is as profound as it is madcap. You don’t miss the grace until it is gone.

4.5 Exceptionally Wild and Funny With Serious Afterglow (Out of 5)

Stephen Colbert voices the surly character Paul Peterson in Mr. Peabody and Sherman, the new animated reworking of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show characters. Invited to the dog and his adopted human son’s home for dinner, Peterson is having none of this erudite mutt’s shenanigans. Peterson’s s daughter Penny bullied Sherman into actually biting her in school after she unconscionably called him, too, a dog. Sherman no more looks like a dog than Gomer Pyle and Penny’s as evil as Ted Cruz, but Peterson’s got a point in raising suspicions over this Peabody character. He’s all bark and way too bright.

No matter the impossible situation or the physical peril, Peabody has an algorithm, a formula, or a recalculation to fix things. Since this is a movie about time travel, his fix-its involve pharaohs in ancient Egypt, Agamemnon of Trojan Horse fame, Marie Antoinette and Leonardo DaVinci. Just in case modern figures feel left out, Bill Clinton makes an appearance and there’s a Monica Lewinsky joke. While the joke fits in with the rest of the film’s puns and quips, my 8-year-old charge was thankfully clueless on that one. The little guy did enjoy all the scatological stuff, though. Juxtaposed with an inordinate emphasis on derrières, director Rob Minkoff (Stuart Little) and screenwriter Craig Wright (Six Feet Under) are also caught up in spouting Family Issue Statements–a breach from the strictly-for-laughs original TV series. Peabody shrinks from using the word “love” when expressing his emotions to Sherman, preferring the chilly “have a high regard for.” While Peabody’s learning his lessons on affection, Sherman deals with his repressed resentments…Then it’s time for a fart joke.

Peabody must defend his right to keep possession of Sherman when outlandish schoolmarm-from-hell-Muss Grunion (Allison Janney) starts proceedings to take Sherman away. Since it’s probably not a spoiler to divulge that a children’s movie ends happily, she not only doesn’t succeed but she ends up strange bedfellows with of all people, the earthy enforcer, Agamemnon, who has a nasty case of B. O. A curious pairing but not any stranger than Peabody and Sherman themselves.

Sherman learns the lessons of true parental love but it’s almost an afterthought amidst the piling on of the incessant in-jokes and wisecracks, many of which fall to the ground rather than stick. Similarly 3D action sequences steal away from the more emotional moments, none of which occurred in the original Mr Peabody series anyway. In short, the film’s mishmash tone overrides its occasionally amusing scenes.

Naturally, my 8-year-old strongly disagrees. He’ll have to wait a couple of years for me to impress him with About Time, a far more satisfying time travel film. He’s already hip to the best “mad science” series of all-time: Beakman’s World. Next to Beakman, Peabody’s a smug know-it-all.

2.5 A Dog and His Boy Grow Closer Through Time Travel

Content to portray the daydreams, everyday life and sturdy determination of a nerdy kid turned genius aeronautical engineer, Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki has some observers ticked off at him. Based on the life of Jiro Horikashi, the designer of the Zero fighter plane used in Pearl Harbor, The Wind Rises exhibits the usual amazing virtuosity of Miyazaki. I didn’t find the film a glamorizing or glorifying look-the-other-way treatise on a committed yet self-deluded eventual possible war criminal. Unfortunately, stretches of the film suffered from a different malady usually absent in Miyazaki’s work: dullness. More on that later.

Much like an inverted The Act of Killing, The Wind Rises holds up a mirror to the creators of the war machine. In The Act of Killing the perpetrators of a near-genocide level of killings of suspected Communists in 1960s Indonesia are still alive, and freakily get to make their own movie within a movie. Their harshness, still intact more than 40 years later, is strangely celebratory, and a lack of remorse hangs over every frame. In The Wind Rises, it’s practically the opposite. Jiro (Joseph Girdon-Levitt) goes about his business as calmly and as oblivious to its eventual effect as if he were designing medical instruments. Miyazaki, whose father ran a munitions factory in Japan during World War II, may very well be subtly providing an even greater critique of Jiro’s passivity than if he were to have jumped up and down with more obvious agitprop.

Jiro’s innocence is further softened by a sub-plot where a commitment to his tubercular lover is as persistent as his lifelong obsession to build the lightest and fastest warplane. Here Miyazaki inserts Tatsuo Hori’s The Wind Has Risen as his text for the scenes between Jiro and Nohoko (Emily Blunt). Although the scenes where they first meet, during a sublimely evoked Kanto earthquake of 1923, may be the most compelling work Miyazaki has done, the film bogs down a bit from the repeated sentiments of their difficult relationship. The two different stories don’t always mesh well. Further, although Jiro’s dream sequences (most of them with his hero, Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caroni, voiced by Stanley Tucci) are refreshing at first, they, too, become repetitive. Perhaps Miyazaki, now 73, and proclaiming retirement, is such an unassailable figure in Japan that editing him is a near-impossible chore.

So much for nitpicking. While The Wind Rises may not be at the top of Miyazaki’s canon (a spot reserved for Spirited Away, in my view), the film is still head and shoulders above the digital doodads and CGI glop posing for animation these days. Watch the hand-drawn brilliance of this master filmmaker and literally enter another world. You may be haunted by that earthquake for some time but you’ll thank yourself for watching.

3.5 World’s Best Animator’s Final Film Soars and Stalls (out of 5)

Omar’s got a problem: how to balance staying the good street soldier in the West Bank Palestinian liberation movement while remaining on course to settle down with the sister of his comrade-in-arms. We are introduced to Omar (Adam Bakri) as he scales a wall more than 20 feet high in the Occupied Territories in order to pull off a routine visit to his beloved. Shots soon ring out, reminding us of the level of precariousness that everyday interactions entail in these parts. Ratchet up the danger when Omar and two fellow Palestinian freedom fighters (or terrorists, depending on your point of view) are militant defenders of their perceived injustices, and we’ve got a potential powder-keg of a film.

Omar’s love interest, Nadja (Leem Lubany), reminds one of an Arab version of a character straight out of Little House On The Prairie or The Patty Duke Show. Omar is as nice to her as he is nasty to anyone who gets in his way. His better self served by such a contrasting romantic energy, it’s no wonder he strives to undo himself from political and legal entanglements as best he can without losing face. End the occupation but begin a life anew. Problem is, loyalties in this particular world engender a fluidity all their own. The Israeli police, as avid toward their goals as Omar and his pals are to theirs. know how to manipulate and maneuver their power to divide and conquer. When Omar decides to pretend to co-operate in order to be released from prison, it becomes a game of who’s conning who.

Directed by Hany Abu-Assad Omar was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Academy Award. Although this Oscar category may be an arcane, logic-defying process where near-universally acclaimed films like The Past and Blue Is The Warmest Color go ignored, Omar deserves the recognition. It strives to marry a
>> riveting action yarn with a damn compelling character study and mostly succeeds. In a perfect world where foreign language films would stand a shot at snagging acting nominations, Walter F. Zuaiter, as an Israeli police agent who speaks perfect Arabic, would also be recognized. In a great scene where he takes a phone call in Hebrew only to get berated by a henpecking wife, we are left guessing whether Omar, who is within earshot, is being conned by a fake phone call.

The film at first glance seems like it may suffer from one too many twists. It forces you to go deeper and realize the twists perfectly set up the film’s dramatic fadeout finale, which not only works on a symbolic level but seems an inevitable outcome. This movie doesn’t play around. The performances by the cast of mostly non-professional actors sizzle. Omar’s customs, sharply portrayed, both enrich his character and stymie his growth. The two sides almost appear to be reaching an understanding, then quickly default into the status quo. An impossible situation remains exactly that.

4 Middle East Maneuvers and Mayhem (out of 5)

Luc Besson, the most provocative of guilty pleasures when he’s on his game, wrote 3 Days To Kill’s story, co-wrote its screenplay, and produced. The film’s campy violence marks a return to form for Besson while it also heralds a continuation of a renaissance in the acting career of Kevin Costner begun with the TV series Hatfields and McCoys. This equal-parts preposterous and impressive new film may not exactly be Besson’s La Femme Nikita or Costner’s Bull Durham, but as entertainment for this winter doldrums period goes, it’s not shabby.

Secure within its framework of cartoonish action film, 3 Days To Kill pours it on heavy. Just when it seems to get into trouble with yet another cliche or still another manipulation, the savvy delivery of its schmaltz spoofs its own conformity, acknowledges its own buffoonery. No overkill is too over the top here. Waiting for things to get more ridiculous? It’s just around the corner. As you get ready to roll your eyes, your raised eyebrows prevent it.

Costner, often too sick to stay on his feet, keeps mowing down villains. The trailer says he’s a spy. Don’t let that fool you. He’s Ethan Renner, a dying CIA assassin whose unknowing and unforgiving estranged teenage daughter, Zooey, sets his ringtone announcing her calls to the “I Don’t Care” chorus from Icona Pop’s “I Love It.” Violence-interruptus becomes a running theme, as Costner pauses to talk to Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit) while in mid-torture of an informant or when approaching the hideaway of his target, The Wolf, a nasty terrorist.

Like the best action movie heroes Ethan stays so calm that, like his ringtone, he really doesn’t care either. He seems downright bored right up until he puts a villain’s head in a hot waffle maker, rips a guy’s body hair off with duct tape, or plants a bullet into the foot of a security guard who won’t let him into a nightclub to check on his daughter’s safety. He’s got three months to live after a tough medical diagnosis and promises his estranged wife (Connie Neilsen) he’ll quit working in order to spend his remaining time with his daughter. Then he gets lured back into killing by foxy young agent Vivi Delay (Amber Heard, complete with stiletto heels and long eyelashes) who draws him with an “experimental cancer therapy,” which she herself injects into him with a foot-long needle. There are illogical gun battles, exaggerated jokes about “albinos,” mindless send-ups of the French, riding lessons on Montmartre, and a silly family of Sudanese squatters inhabiting Ethan’s long-vacant Paris apartment. You may find it all dull and ludicrous for all I know. Myself, I mostly laughed my ass off.

3.0 Dances With The Wolf (out of 5)

Like Father, Like Son tells how two families deal with the bombshell revelation that their six-year-old sons were switched at birth. Director Hirokazo Kore-da, whose marvelous ouevre continues its focus on children facing unusual predicaments, leads us through an impossibly heartwrenching situation without a touch of melodrama. Some of this is a wry mirror held up to the class contrast between the two families. But you get an impression that both families have, in their different ways of expressing it, an underlying compassion for doing the right thing. That is, of course, once they first tackle the enormous hurdle of determining how to proceed.

There is the temptation to toss aside beginning anew with a relative stranger and cling to the child that has become part of your very soul after six years. The sensitive Midori (Machiko Ono) feels this dilemma and a further one, of guilt. “Why didn’t I see it?” she asks herself. Her son Keita (Keita Ninomiya) will soon be shuffled to play dates with his real parents, the Saikis. Their son, Ryusei (Shogun Hwang) has two siblings and is part of tight-knit, loose and fun loving blue collar family. They actually bathe together and seem to have a lot of laughs.

Conversely, Keita’s dad, Ryota (Masahor Fukyama) is a no-nonsense, far more authoritative father. He could stand to be more loving with his only-child son, and Like Father, Like Son will present him with an ample chance to do so. As usual Kore-da is incredible with his children actors, similar to his films Nobody Knows, where two kids separated by divorce seek to reunite, and Nobody Knows, where four kids live on their own without a parent or guardian.

Like Father, Like Son presents a bewildering struggle. On the one hand, one’s loved ones remain precisely that regardless of genes. On the other hand, recognizing the necessity of letting go, and adhering to custom and law. At one point Midori wonders, “Is there a manual for this situation?” Of course there isn’t, but Kore-da approaches the devastatingly difficult with a tender, knowing eye that cuts to the core of the dilemma

4.5 Switched At Births With Kites and Communal Baths (out of 5)

Like a Saturday Night Live skit spun out of control and barely keeping itself together, this impossibly imbecilic film somehow prevails to its end shot, stellar cast in tow. Since A Winter’ s Tale professes to be a serious film, this is something of a feat.

Russell Crowe, Colin Farrell, Jennifer Connelly, Will Smith and William Hurt don’t exactly wink their way through a morass of a muddled script, but if you look closely enough, you might perceive a puffy and glowering Crowe slyly acknowledging he has no idea what the hell is happening here. His evil character, spanning a century of chasing his protege-gone-rogue Farrell, holds court a couple of times with a nondescript Will Smith as none other than Lucifer himself (is there anything duller than a dull devil?)

Farrell, a mere mortal, has no business finding himself suddenly in present-day New York not aged whatsoever after a bad time of it back in 1915. Despite a serious case of amnesia, he somehow finds his way to Eva Marie Saint in 2014, after encountering her as a young girl in 1915. The film makes no attempt to account for its bad math, since that would make her around 110 years old. The talented Saint, who is 89 and old enough to have starred in the 1954 classic On The Waterfront, doesn’t look a day over 80.

Would that a math error were A Winter’s Tale’s biggest problem. A movie that promotes romance, second chances, and miracles, could hardly be more staid, nonsensical, and arbitrary. This is somewhat surprising coming from veteran screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, who has A Beautiful Mind among his credits. Based on a fairly highly regarded 1983 novel by Mark Helprin, the film might very well sufffer from Cloud Atlas Syndrome: the novel that’s impossible to adapt to film that sorrily gets filmed anyway.

Some films have sticky points and some are just plain stuck. A super-serious yet lackadaisical William Hurt guards his eager yet consumptive daughter (a requisitely beautiful Jessica Brown Findlay of Downton Abbey fame) like a hawk, yet sneaks in a lame joke that tries to rhyme filet with claret. A white horse keeps appearing and it’s not because The Ringling Brothers Circus is in town. The horse is just called “Horse” by the unimaginative Farrell. This gives a proper indication of Farrell’s character’s depth through through the rest of the film. It’s a shame “Horse” also flies at will, which prolongs the movie since Crowe has Farrell cornered numerous times, only to have “Horse” fly him to safety. I felt equally stymied in my seat at the screening with no metaphorical white horse available to get me out of this film any sooner than its laborious two hours-and-nine minutes running time.

1.5 Cupid’ s Bad Joke of a Valentines Day Film (out of 5)

A deceitfully overwrought premise, bargain-basement plot, and paint-by-numbers characters add up to a Valentine’s Day film disaster. The lipstick on this donkey is provided by a bunch of photogenic, fairly talented actors. Yet even Brando and Hepburn couldn’t do much with this concoction that seems like it was stillborn in a Five and Under store.

Jason (Zac Ephron), Daniel (Miles Teller) and Mikey (Michael B Jordan) are three self-appointed studs who vow to “stay single” and not indulge their “rosters” of hookup partners with more than twice a week conjugal visits. “Dating”–who needs it? Jason points out there also comes a time, usually right after coitus, when a gal will begin a conversation with “So…” as in “so where is this going?” and at that time, continues Jason, it’s time to call it off and head for the hills.

Things get testy when Jason meets Ellie (Imogen Potts) and Daniel grows fonder and fonder of his sex-pal Chelsea (Mackenzie Davis). So they sneak their increasingly relationship-oriented behavior from each other, as does Mikey, who sneaks trysts with his estranged wife. The comedy lies in their trying to hide all this commitment stuff from each other. Got that?

Since it’s obviously not enough to hold together a film, we’re also inundated with numerous “hooker” jokes, smelly bathroom barbs, our dudes bursting in on each other while having sex, a stolen key to Grammercy Park, and a sight gag involving an incongruous sex toy. Then, in the spirit of meticulously avoiding an appearance of a relationship with Ellie, Jason decides to skip her dad’s funeral because it would clearly spell “girlfriend.” This creates the need for a crybaby scene of rapprochement, one of any in the film, none believable in the slightest, all of them offensive to intelligence. The girls here forgive at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason. Further annoying is all the smutty verbal references are accompanied by curiously chaste sex scenes. Better hold up on any nudity or people may get the wrong idea, director Tom Gormican seems to be saying.

Teller, in between a fine performance in The Spectacular Now, and another in the forthcoming Sundance winner, Whiplash, seems to be overqualified here. Nonetheless, he seems to be enjoying himself playing opposite the intriguing Davis, who demonstrates a vivid screen presence. What do I make of the cast seeming to have so much fun?…So?

2.0 Hookups Gone Haywire (out of 5)

Not since American Pie has the all-American baked classic received this much attention in a film. In Labor Day, pastry dominates the vacuum created by a movie that wears its heart on its sleeve and ought to hide its melodramatic script in a drawer.

When he’s not Mr Fix-it-up-er or mopping their hardwood floor, escaped convict Josh Brolin is old-fashioned kidnapping Kate Winslet and her young-teenage son (Gattlin Griffith) after abducting them in a supermarket. Winslet hardly seems the type to talk to strangers, mind you. In fact she hardly seems the type to talk to practically anyone about much of anything. So when Brolin conjures up a wicked-looking chili out if kitchen scraps and a pot of coffee, we know where this is heading. By the time he roll up his sleeves and shows off his peach pie pedigree, Winslet is hooked. A few neighbors roll by checking in on Winslet and the boy but they come up empty in the Sherlock Holmes department. J. K. Simmons, biding his time here until his turn in the forthcoming Sundance winner, Whiplash, plays a concerned neighbor who might have played a larger role in this if director Jason Reitman wasn’t taking a day off from the superior screenplays he directed in Up In The Air and Juno.

By the time anyone figures out there’s something amis in the Winslet household, Brolin’s already schmoozed Winslet into waking out of her neurotic funk and personifying the Stockholm Syndrome. Some of his shaking her into experiencing genuine feelings for apparently the first time in ages seems believable. With two actors this good, Labor Day intermittently comes close to convincing. Then, just as quickly, like gnawing background noise, the screenplay’s overriding conceit comes right back to the fore. There’s just no getting over the soap opera quotient that is always bubbling under the surface. Sure, Brolin convinces that he’s quite a nice guy who must have had a good reason to commit the murder that gets him locked in the slammer for more than a decade. Furthermore, the always solid Winslet has no trouble throwing down enough emotionally troubled vibes that make it easy to grasp her vulnerability. When they perform a sensual dance together it sure is tempting to root for them.

Maybe at the very least Winslet can do conjugal visits in Labor Day 2 after Brolin gets thrown back into jail. Then after she bakes him a few pies, Brolin can pull a Jeckyl/Hyde and transform into his character in Old Boy. As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s no more ludicrous than the dollops of sentimentality that pervade Labor Day like a pie in the face.

3 Peachy Crushes (out of 5)