Tag Archives: Cambridge Day

Inside: Llewyn Davis

26 Dec

‘Inside Llewyn Davis’: An impassioned troubadour with real couch jumping skills

By Tom Meek
December 20, 2013

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If there’s one thing about a Coen brothers movie, it’s never boring and usually a fresh spin on something that’s been dogeared and begging for a makeover. Sure, they’ve had some arguable miscues (”The Ladykillers” and “The Hudsucker Proxy”), but you have to admire the brothers for their panache, appetite and diversity. Their southwest thriller, “No Country for Old Men,” exceeded the vision of Cormack McCarthy’s laconic prose, “The Big Lebowski” become an instant cult staple and “Blood Simple” was a perfect Hitchcock homage without egregiously lifting. And of course there’s “Fargo,” perhaps the crowning jewel of the duo’s quirky repertoire. If the brothers Coen decided to step in and helm the next chapter of “The Expendables” franchise, even if addled by a script by series star Sylvester Stallone, I’d be the first in line to buy a ticket. You can’t go wrong. Whatever they do, it might not be your cup of tea, but it will stir your gray matter.

122013i Inside Llewyn DavisFor their latest, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” Joel and Ethan have wound back the clock to bohemian New York circa 1960, as doo-wop fades, mixes with the passion of the beats and folds in with the rising folk rock movement. It’s a time of discovery preceding Vietnam, counterculture rebellion and free love, yet still rooted loosely in post-World War II morality. The film’s titular hero, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), is an idealist and a self-absorbed asshole who’s intermittently sympathetic. By trade he’s a merchant marine shipping out with a gunny sack for long hauls, but he’s also an impassioned troubadour, plucking gentle, heartfelt ballads about daily misery and eternal yearning.  Llewyn takes himself quite seriously, and he’s also quick to take a handout and has no qualms about bitting the hand that feeds.  Continue reading →

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Walking with Dinosaurs

18 Dec

Published at 1:38 PM on December 17, 2013

BY TOM MEEK

<i>Walking with Dinosaurs</i>

Walking with Dinosaurs yields an alluring mashup of divergent facets, a cinematic Frankenstein that engrosses with vigor as it repels with inanity. Even the project itself is a hodgepodge of odds and ends. Produced by the BBC Earth team that created the similarly named documentary series that aired on U.S. educational outlets like NatGeo and the Discovery Channel, the film, which cost north of eighty million, almost didn’t get made as studio problems threatened to kill the funding, but aggressive ticket pre-sales carried it through. How great is that, a film that has paid for itself before even hitting theaters? And that’s probably why we’ve been seeing the trailers for it since mid-summer. 

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Nebraska

13 Dec

This road trip’s payoff doesn’t come from the Publishers Clearing House

In his films, Alexander Payne has shown a strong predilection for men somewhere north of their prime, still adrift and looking for grounding. The roots of which took hold with “About Schmidt” (2002), got whacky and whiney with “Sideways” (2004) and then moved out onto the island of Hawaii with a more dour tone in “The Descendants” (2011). Payne’s latest, “Nebraska” may be the ultimate in mature male malfunction and, in a sweet elegiacal way, ties back to “Schmidt” as its protagonist, Woody Grant, played by a game Bruce Dern now nearing eighty, has a dry, fly-away comb-over reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s hair-challenged Schmidt and ironically, in both films, those men’s wives were played by the same actress, June Squibb, who practically upends and nearly steals “Nebraska” as it sails into the third act.   Continue reading →

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The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

12 Dec

The Hobbit‘s second installment is better than the first

An Unexpected Improvement

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Here's hoping the latest Hobbit doesn't look like a giant video game

One might think Peter Jackson is a man obsessed with trilogies. Out of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, he fairly spun three sweeping epics — one per book. Now circling back to Tolkien’s seminal The Hobbit, he’s gone and protracted that single volume into a three-part movie miniseries. There’s something inherently anti-climactic about serving up Lord of the Rings backstory after the heft of those movies themselves, but Jackson and his team of writers, including Pacific Rim director Guillermo del Toro and Jackson’s wife Fran Walsh, seem bent on creating mayhem out of what is actually a simple quest story. It slowly took root in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and now with The Desolation of Smaug they’ve loosened the strings and opened up the throttle. Jackson too, behind the camera and at the cutting board, seems more assured. The result is bolstered by enthralling thrills and timely whimsy and is a marked step up from An Unexpected Journey.   Continue reading →

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

23 Nov

‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’: It hooks you, but Lawrence is still MVP

By Tom Meek
November 22, 2013

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The second time may be a charm, but hey, it’s all relative. The first “Hunger Games,” written and directed by Gary Ross (“Seabiscuit” and “Pleasantville”), felt paunchy, disingenuously deep and retro flimsy given the state of computer-enhanced filmmaking these days. That cinematic first chapter of Suzanne Collins’ runaway YA hit was a tad muddled, but then again it had the burden of informing newbies what they needed to know about the austere future world of Panem and its kid-against-kid death matches without boring the stuffing out of its loyal readership’s attention-challenged minds.

112213i The Hunger Games- Catching Fire

What made the first “Hunger Games” adaptation smolder, beyond its kinetic plot and high kitsch, was star Jennifer Lawrence, already revered for her work in “Winter’s Bone” and subsequently rewarded with an Oscar for her performance in “Silver Linings Playbook.” The actress, who possesses a wide, luminous face, aptly brought to the fore the deep disdain and skepticism imbedded in her can-do heroine, Katniss Everdeen. But living under the tyranny of a fattened plutocracy obsessed with power, control and hedonism while the masses slave and starve tends to do that to anyone possessing the faint embers of freedom and righteousness in their bellies.  Continue reading →

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The Book Thief

23 Nov

‘The Book Thief’: Stars and cinematography overcome cheapening of Holocaust setting

By Tom Meek
November 22, 2013

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Call me a curmudgeon about all these flimsy, quick-read books hitting on one or two hot issues and built around a slightly-more-than two-dimensional hero or heroine that become template fodder for profitable spins into film. “Twilight” may be the most egregious example, but “Fifty Shades of Grey,” itself notoriously birthed from the “Twilight” franchise, is in the making. Then there’s the “Hunger Games.”

112213i The Book Thief

Why is a book about the Holocaust lumped in with this phenomenon? Because Markus Zusak’s novel, which the movie “The Book Thief” is based on, is little more than a safe, PG-rated watering down of the horrific events that took place in Germany leading up to and during World War II. It’s more young adult than dramatic literature or historical record. And, as a matter of fact, it’s not history at all, but historical fiction, a genre that like YA is fertile ground for studio execs seeking a ready-made and willing-to-pay audience.  Continue reading →

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Blue is the Warmest Color

5 Nov

‘Blue is the Warmest Color’: Tantalizing and très French in its sensual complication

By Tom Meek
November 4, 2013

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Abdellatif Kechiche’s beguiling portrait of passion and betrayal received much ado at Cannes, where it won the top prize and garnered an NC-17 rating as it came ashore here in the states. At three hours in length, the French film, originally and more simply titled “The Life of Adèle,” is just that: the tale of a young woman coming of age and her sexual awakening. The big brouhaha whipped up is over Adèle’s true love being another woman. For the middle third of the film as their relationship blossoms, the girls, one in high school and one in college, have torrid couplings under the noses of their parents. It’s pretty graphic, with lip-to-labia contact, contorted scissoring and deep-tissue rump massages.

110413i Blue Is the Warmest Color

The first of these protracted scenes feels apt and genuine, as it’s fueled by ardor and emotion, but the following ones feel staged and exploitive by comparison. Still, it’s how the two women, Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux), meet and their journey that drives the film, not the over-the-top sexcapades. Adèle, fairly popular at school, has a quick, trivial interlude with a male classmate who, after achieving the conquest, becomes cold and aloof. Then, out at a gay club with male friends, Adèle wanders into the abutting lesbian meat-market where she’s instantaneous shark bait. Across the bar, she and the blue-haired Emma (perhaps the impetus for the American title – that and the fact Adèle is almost always wearing a blue dress or like-hued attire) lock eyes repeatedly. The sharks circle closer and take their exploratory nips. That’s when Emma steps in and pulls Adele from a persistent plier, offering a sprig of earnest camaraderie without pander or expectation. But clearly there’s desire.  Continue reading →

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Free Birds

1 Nov

‘Free Birds’: Taste of this Thanksgiving item is a bit off, even if you like it dark

By Tom Meek
November 1, 2013

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Poultry and tradition, that’s what’s on the menu in this animated butterball about America’s family holiday and the secret lives of turkeys. You can’t argue with the film’s angle about the big birds wanting to live – after all, how would you feel if all you did was gorge out on death row and pray that your number doesn’t get called as the calendar flips from October to November each year? But rescripting history and featuring death and violence prominently in nearly every frame, that’s a fairly big miscalculation for a kiddie flick.

110113i Free Birds

Not that “Free Birds” is all stuffing and no trimmings. The 3-D animation is crisp and vivid and there are some quirky touches wittily infused into the script by writer/director Jimmy Haywood (”Horton Hears a Who” and “Jonah Hex”), the most cheeky and rewarding of which is the inclusion of Facebook humor sensation and former Enterprise crew member George (Sulu) Takei as the voice of S.T.E.V.E., the Space Time Exploration Vehicle Envoy, a top-secret military time machine. Adding to the fun is the presidential first daughter as a willful and rambunctious tyke who suffers bouts of narcolepsy.  Continue reading →

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12 Years a Slave

27 Oct

‘12 Years a Slave’: Our shame gets visceral telling in the history of betrayed free man

By Tom Meek
October 25, 2013

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The stain of slavery on American history has seen many renderings on celluloid, from the misguided pro-South, silent 1915 masterpiece by D.W. Griffith, “Birth of a Nation” that embosses Klansmen in a heroic light, to Quentin Tarantino’s recent revisionist fantasy, “Django Unchained,” in which the Klan are little more than Keystone cops in hoodies and an emboldened slave, freed of shackles and armed, rains down wrath on skin-trading vermin. Both are cinematic achievements in their own right, but neither gets fully at the foul plight of rooting day-to-day under the duress of an overseer’s whip. Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” came close, but that sweeping epic took place centuries ago, long before the pilgrims hit the shores of Massachusetts and our European forefathers began an unwritten policy of treating people of nonwhite pigmentation like pests and livestock.

102513i 12 Years a Slave

The good (or grim, as it may be) news is that director Steve McQueen, who is black, British and an auteur of recent reckoning, goes at the matter in “12 Years a Slave” in a fashion that gets under the viewer’s skin in unexpected ways. It’s uncomfortable and telling. What McQueen achieves is a visceral experience that, while not a history lesson in the factual sense, becomes the de facto moral rendering of an era that should be recalled only with remorse and shame.  Continue reading →

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The Counselor

27 Oct

‘The Counselor’: Good, grimy fun going over same ground of McCarthy ‘Country’

By Tom Meek
October 26, 2013

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Not so long ago the Coen brothers deviated from their usual quirky fare for a hardboiled yarn about lawmen and criminals playing it loose and lethal as they pursued an elusive satchel of money back and forth across the Southwest border. The basis for that masterpiece came from the laconic and acerbic prose of the Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country for Old Men.” And in an odd and intriguing first-time move, the scribe has delivered an original screenplay for iconic director Ridley Scott (”Alien” and “Blade Runner”). The result is full of pointed soliloquies, diatribes imbued with philosophy and poetry and even daubs of philosophy regarding poetry, but the mainstay, of course, are protracted dissertations on death and destiny, followed invariably by death.

102613i The Counselor

Just as in “No Country,” the plot is driven by an accidental anti-hero ensnared in a macabre web of underworld misdoings. In short, McCathy has cooked up an assured rearrangement of “No Country.” It’s not on par by any means, but it is entertaining. And if you haven’t gotten enough of him lately, Michael Fassbender tackles the eponymous role (“the counselor” is all he’s ever called), as a square-jawed, fashionably stoic defender, who, while very dapper and upper crust, has a long list of unsavory clients. One, an imprisoned mama kingpin (Rosie Perez, putting a lot of pizazz into a brief role), asks him to pay a fine for her son who’s in jail for a traffic violation (going over 200 mph). He complies reluctantly, but doesn’t know that the kid is involved in a scheme to highjack a $20 million drug shipment – which doesn’t matter, because by sheer association he’s now considered one of the brains behind the ever-expanding plot.  Continue reading →

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