STAR — AND FIRE — POWER: Helen Mirren and John Malkovich in Red
Page 3 of 6
INCEPTION Christopher Nolan's first film since the eye-popping success of The Dark Knight is a moviegoing marvel with the ability to get cineastes intoxicated on the pure pleasure and the pure possibility of the medium of film. Offering any sort of synopsis is a risky business, since this is one of those pretzel-shaped pictures that rewards the unaware. Suffice it to say that it's set in what appears to be the near future, when it will be possible to enter other people's dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the best in the business of creeping into targets' minds and extracting valuable secrets for which others will pay a hefty price. But his latest assignment doesn't go exactly as planned. Tackling such prominent themes as (to borrow from dream expert Salvador Dali) the persistence of memory, Nolan has created a head-scratching one-of-a-kind that's both knotty enough and ambiguous enough to lead to conflicting opinions down the years. Nolan also slyly borrows from the classics of yesteryear, with particularly obvious nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Citizen Kane and select Hitchcock titles. It all adds up to a superb motion picture, one with the ability to infiltrate both our dream state and our waking life. ****
IT'S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY Art (or entertainment) doesn't exist in a vacuum, which makes It's Kind of a Funny Story appear even more puny upon continuous reflection. Screened before the recent spate of teen suicides, the film (based on Ned Vizzini's novel) seems even more trivial and pretentious in their wake, a fuzzy drama about a privileged New York teen (inert Keir Gilchrist) who checks himself into a mental health ward. Why, you ask? Because he thinks about jumping off a bridge due to — well, there's this cute girl, you see, and, oh, yeah, the world situation is pretty bad, and, uh, homework sucks. But all it takes to set him right is a grotesque fantasy sequence set to "Under Pressure" (David Bowie should sue), a dour mentor (The Hangover's Zach Galifianakis) dealing with his own issues, and all the sitcom-ready patients parading around the hospital corridors. Where's Nurse Ratched when you really need her? *1/2
LET ME IN The world needed an immediate remake of Sweden's 2008 Let the Right One In about as much as it needed another vampire flick, yet the good news is that Let Me In can hardly be construed as a shoddy, cash-in-quick product. Crafted with extreme care by writer-director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield), this is that rare retelling that pays the utmost respect to its predecessor — I'd be hard-pressed to single out even one frame that cheapens the memory of the original. As before, the setting is an apartment complex in a frozen environment (here, Los Alamos, NM), where lonely young Owen (The Road's Kodi Smit-McPhee) notices he has a new neighbor in the form of Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz of Kick-Ass). Picked on by bullies and exhibiting some disturbing character traits himself, Owen is happy to become friends with this strange girl who doesn't like candy and can only hang out with him at night. Reeves largely sticks close to the look and tone of the first film, but not in the annoying manner of Gus Van Sant's atrocious Psycho remake. While his slight altercations result in a picture not quite as powerful as its predecessor (particularly during the climax, a mesmerizing piece of filmmaking in the '08 take), he's to be commended for creating a film that ably stands on its own. ***
NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS Considering that 2005's Nanny McPhee hasn't exactly established itself on this side of the Atlantic as a family classic, there's nothing about the title Nanny McPhee Returns to suggest that this sequel will fare any better. Perhaps Universal Pictures would have been wise to keep the film's original British moniker, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, in the hopes that a few ill-informed folks stateside would mistake it for a softcore romp and hand over their hard-earned dollars. Certainly, this children's tale could use more bang for the filmgoer's buck, relating an occasionally clever but often daft yarn about the efforts of the title character (again played by Emma Thompson) to help a struggling mother (Maggie Gyllenhaal, affecting a fine English accent) with her brood while her husband's off fighting in World War II. The children are all well-cast, but this overdoses on the saccharine: Watching CGI critters do supposedly cute things (a bird constantly belching, pigs engaging in synchronized swimming) isn't exactly my cup of tea — English Breakfast, English Afternoon, or otherwise. **
Mobile
