Super 8 (2011)

Starring Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning and Kyle Chandler

The story here is pretty generic - involving a military conspiracy and aliens. There isn't a lot that we haven't seen before, and it is a testament to the child actors and the characters they are able to create that the film is still very good in spite of this. I didn't grow up in the 70's, but I got a real sense of what the time was like and felt a childhood nostalgia while watching the group of adolescents in the film.

A group of kids lead by Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) are shooting a zombie movie. They sneak out at night to film a particular scene at a railroad crossing. During the shoot the train is derailed and a mysterious force escapes. The ensuing sequences of military intervention and the attempts by Joe's father - a deputy sheriff in town - to get to the root of the strange occurrences that begin to take place (animals fleeing, townspeople disappearing and unexplained electromagnetic events) are thrilling and well executed.

The kids are the key to this film. They are like a more mature version of the Goonies dropped into an interesting sci-fi mystery/thriller. Their dialogue and actions show a real knowledge on the filmmaker's part of how kids think and behave. These aren't your standard movie middle schoolers. They are smart, funny and resourceful. Hollywood tends to underestimate the intelligence of children, but not so here.

Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney are very good in their roles. They display an uncommon maturity and have a relationship that never seems forced or over the top. They play their mutual crush effectively and endearingly, and there is never a moment where you roll your eyes at their dialogue or presence.

The 2nd half devolves into a pretty generic action/sci fi picture, but the focus on the group of kids never waivers. They are the heroes of Super 8 - the adults are secondary characters. It's refreshing to see a film break away from traditional cliches in this way. The plot may fall into that trap, but the plucky and bright group of middle schoolers never do. They rise above the film and make it highly watchable popcorn entertainment.

3/4 stars

Shame (2011)

Starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan

I haven't had many movie experiences more intense than when I saw Shame, The latest from director Steve McQueen. It changed how I view the issue of sex addiction and addiction in general. It stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon, a wealthy New Yorker who works at a generic and sterile software company, and suffers from a crippling need to get to his next sexual gratification. He hoards pornography on his work computer, retires to his office bathroom for furious masturbation sessions and hires prostitutes when he arrives home to continue his cycle of sexual gratification. At no point do any of these moments appear pleasurable. He sulks through his days in a masturbatory haze, and is in a great deal of pain for the duration.

His routine is disrupted when his sister Sissy (played by Carey Mulligan) takes residence in his apartment after being thrown out by her abusive boyfriend. She is a free spirit who, like Brandon, has been damaged deeply. A reference is made to their childhood, which implies a deep scarring, but no specific details are conveyed. She has responded to this trauma by acting out, Brandon has collapsed in on himself in a downward spiral. The scenes of Brandon's rejection of her attempts at love and acceptance are searingly painful.

There isn't a complicated plot to be dissected, only two people's pain. Shame is one of the best films I have ever seen at showing this. It does so by giving us just enough of a glimpse into these characters to feel their suffering, but it does not go deeper. It's focus is on the aftermath of tortured lives. I've read some negative reviews of the film complaining that we didn't get to know the Brandon character deeply enough. I feel this misses the point. What McQueen is trying to convey is a person immersed in a hopeless battle to control his compulsions. A deeper analysis of the character would have distracted from that.

I never took sex addiction very seriously as a disorder, but after seeing Shame, my perspective has been altered. If the primal urges in a person can drive them to act the way Brandon does, there must be some deeper cause that simply enjoying sex. On the contrary, it very clearly causes him great pain.

There is a scene late in the film where Brandon visits two prostitutes and a detailed shot of their session follows. The look on his face as he is climaxing is not one of joy, but one of embarrassment and torture. He hates what he is and there is nothing he can do to change it.

The film got an unfair NC-17 rating. I speculate that this stems from the MPAA's ridiculous paranoia of sex in films. Have all the violence you want, but a few sex scenes that show a little too much of the human anatomy and that's apparently going to far. It would be sad if the rating prompts the Academy not to nominate Fassbender for an Oscar. You won't find a better performance all year, and it is one of the greatest I have ever seen in a film.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I'll confess that I walked into this movie saying to myself, "Well Mike, this is 2 hours of your life that you won't be getting back," which is something a Film Critic should never do. But since I am an unqualified one, it's ok. I was shocked by how innacurrate my prejudice was. This is easily the best film in the Apes series since the original 1968 classic starring Charlton Heston.

James Franco plays a brilliant young scientist named Will Rodman, who is working on a drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's (with extra motivation due to the fact that his father, played by John Lithgow, has the illness). Rodman has made a breakthrough with the drug and has been testing it on Chimpanzees with marked success. The drug repairs and makes new neural connections in the brains of patients.

One of the chimps that has been treated with the drug is set to be put on exhibition for a group of clients in order to clear it for further testing. It is uncooperative, attacks a guard, runs amok in the testing center and has to be shot. The source of the panic was the protection of the chimp's young, which was unknown to the staff. After this setback, all the test chimps are ordered to be euthanized and research suspended. Out of guilt, Rodman secretly rescues the dead chimps son, names him Caesar and raises him as his own.

Caesar's brain is far more advanced due to the fact that he was developing in his mother while she was being given her course of drug treatments. Soon Caesar is doing puzzles, learning sign language, and understanding some English. Despite all this, he is alone and yearns to be with human children. This cannot be, and he doesn't understand why. There is real poignancy in these scenes, and the construction of the screenplay makes an emotional connection to the audience.

The film views the home life and experiences of Caesar through a lens that evokes sympathy and a feeling of humanity, despite the fact that there is a great deal of CGI involved. CGI can be spectacular if it is done well, but that is rare. In this film it is done expertly. Much of this credit needs to go to Andy Serkis. He is able to embody non human computer generated characters with his movements and subtleties in ways that make an audience really care about what happens to them. Gollum in LOTR, King Kong in Peter Jackson's 2005 remake, and now Caesar - he is the key to the entire film.

A series of unfortunate events lands Caesar in a primate rescue facility that turns out to be more of a prison. While there, he interacts with other primates and gains their trust as a leader in the face of the sadistic staff. My main issue with the film is the character of the lead prison guard. He overacts in such a way that makes him unrealistic. A more quiet and cold evil would have been more effective - but I did enjoy the fact that in a movie filled with genetically altered CGI chimps, the only character I didn't buy was human.

I'll leave the events that lead to this to come as a surprise, but there is a thrilling climax that takes place on the Golden Gate Bridge between chimps and humans. The reason this works is not only the well executed CGI, but more importantly the care and effort the filmakers took in making us empathize with these animals. I wish Hollywood would realize that sequences high in drama or action work much better if the audience is invested in the characters. We care what happens to Caesar and his chimp friends, and we should - we share 99% of our genes with
them.

3 out of 4 stars

Reader's Choice - The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island

First of all, I'd like to "thank" Matt Conroy for being the first to vote on my new feature where readers can pick which movie I view and write about. His selection was the 1997 animated family film "The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island"

The movie opens with a shot of the solar system for some reason, with planets that would be put to shame by a pre-school art class. We then hear a voice-over describing the story of a band of dinosaurs who live in "The Great Valley," where they co-exist in peace. There is a group of young dinosaurs who are led by Little Foot, a child brontosaurus (apparently baby dinosaurs were the size of small cats according to the animators - but no matter).

The Great Valley is decimated by a swarm of locusts that reign down and feast on all the edible plant life. It took them an awfully long time to get to The Great Valley, but they did, and now Littlefoot and the gang (including several older dinosaurs that behave like your standard movie parents) must venture out in search of new land with fresh vegetation. Apparently the locusts either got lazy or ate too much to follow them.

Littlefoot and the other Triassic tikes decide to strike out on their own without their parent's permission in order to find a suitable living place. They conveniently end up finding a paved land path that takes them to an island, that lo and behold has all the leaves they can eat! But their joy is short lived when the path is flooded and they cannot return. There is a young pterodactyl with them (that George Lucas must have used as an influence for the awful Jar-Jar Binks) that could easily fly back and get help, but he is afraid to fly over the "Big Water." In any decently run dinosaur society he would have either been forced to go or eaten for being a complete pansy-ass.

They run into an old friend on the island - a baby T-Rex named Chomper or something, and his family (island not as mysterious as advertised). I assume he was in the preceding 4 movies, but alas, have not seen them. There is a battle with a great white shark, who must have traveled back millions of years of evolution just to feast on poor little dinosaurs. They obviously make it out alive, amidst a series of 4 horrendous songs (3 of which I fast forwarded through) and are eventually saved totally at random by a giant finned dinosaur - that has a British accent for some reason. End of Movie.

Well played Matt Conroy, well played

1 out of 4 stars

Favorite Movie Series - "The Sweet Hereafter"

“The Sweet Hereafter” – 1997
Directed by Atom Egoyan
Starring: Sarah Polley, Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood

The best films are ones that tell a simple story in an elegant and complex way. Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” is about a tragic accident and its effect on a small Alaskan town. A school bus crash leaves many of the town children dead, and a struggling lawyer flies into town hoping to exploit the families’ grief by suing the school bus company. The lawyer, played by Ian Holm, has his own tragic background – his daughter is a runaway and drug addict who calls him infrequently only to ask for more money to buy drugs. She never tells her father this, but it is obvious to him.

I have never experienced the loss of a child, but I have heard comments and read quotes from people who have. The way it is best understood, if it can ever be, is a loss so deep and so out of the natural order of things that recovery is impossible. The cycle of life is disrupted when a parent outlives a child, and the parent carries this loss with them until they die. It is important to consider this when watching the film. The town is in a perpetual numbness. The volume of young, innocent lives lost has left a surreal and emotionally vacant shell.

A young teen, played by Sarah Polley, who was a leader to the young children, survives the crash. She is paralyzed from the waist down. There is a subtext to the film that draws parallels to the children’s story “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” She reads the story while babysitting early in the film. In it, the Pied Piper leads the town children into a cave and away forever by playing music to get them to follow him. One lame child is left behind because he could not keep up. He laments that the town is lonely since his friends have gone. The children and the heart and future of the community have been snuffed out, just as in her town after her friends are killed.

The lawyer, late in the film, tells a story to an acquaintance about a time when his daughter was very young and his wife was still alive. They lay in bed together as a family, and his daughter suffers a medical emergency. The doctor he calls instructs him on how to perform an emergency tracheotomy if they cannot get his little girl to the hospital in time. He reflects that he was fully prepared to do this as he stared at his daughter’s young face. He would do anything for her. This is a beautiful memory for him. It was a time when he had the power to save the person he loved most in the world, a power he no longer has.

This is a film about the loss of innocence and the bleakness of life without it. The small town goes on, but only through the motions. The vibrancy and life died with those children on the school bus. The lawyer continues on in a similar way. All he has left are memories of the simple and pure moments in his life that the reality of the world has now destroyed.

Favorite Movie Series - "Fail Safe"

"Fail-Safe"
Directed by Sidney Lumet
Starring: Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau and Larry Hagman

Fail-Safe was directed by the great Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon) in 1964. Here Lumet expands on the technique he himself perfected in 12 Angry Men. He uses facial close-ups as the climax of the film approaches to build tension and emotion. Lumet was famous for his focus on the face, and here he uses that to perfection.

The film has a straightforward plot: The military is running drills for hypothetical nuclear escalation with The Soviet Union. The fighter planes, armed with nuclear warheads, will fly to "Fail-Safe" points around the globe. They are to remain there until they receive the instruction that it is only a drill and fly back to their respective bases. If they hear nothing they are to assume the United States has been attacked, open sealed instructions, and bomb whatever Soviet location listed. The message to return to base is received by all but one fighter squadron due to a technical error. The remainder of the film consists of U.S. officials frantically trying to reach the squadron and prevent nuclear holocaust. This will not be easy - The fighters are trained very specifically to ignore any communication beyond the Fail-Safe point as it could be Soviet manipulation.

The way Lumet constructs the events that have to take place for this to occur is disturbing in its deliberate march toward its conclusion. So many things happen that bring us to the climax and aftermath, and each is entirely plausible within the realm of the militarized and paranoid world that existed in 1964.

At the heart of the film is man's reliance on technology and the pitfalls and disasters that can result when the human element is removed from the equation. The communication to the fighter planes fails, and the fighters themselves have been so de-humanized and programmed through their training that reason will not affect them. The march toward their mission is on auto-pilot - both in the cockpit and in the minds of the men operating it.

This film came out the same year as another Cold War classic: Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. When you put the two films side by side, it is stunning how similar yet different they are. The plot and even many of the characters are eerily the same. The only difference is the treatment of the material. Strangelove is pure satire, Fail-Safe is deadly serious. Both work exquisitely.

Lumet was a master film maker, and this is equal to the best work he has ever done. It is tortuously suspenseful, reflective, and sobering. The conclusion is stark and almost unbelievable. The fact that it is not fully incomprehensible is terrifying.