for Summer 2006
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961, 115 min, NR) ***1/2 – Directed by Blake Edwards, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard.
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, 104 min, PG13) ** - Directed by Brett Ratner, starring Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellan, Halle Berry, and Patrick Stewart.
Inside Man (2006, 129 min, R) *** - Directed by Spike Lee, starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, and Willem Dafoe.
Derailed (2005, 112 min, R) **1/2 – Directed by Mikael Hafstrom, starring Clive Owen, Vincent Cassell, and Jennifer Aniston.
I preferred the inefficient but engrossing Spike Lee heist flick Inside Man (***), about a battle of wits between a hostage negotiator and a bank robber with a hidden agendum. They’re played, respectively, by Denzel Washington and Clive Owen, leading my wife to rename the movie “Battle of the Hotties.” By the end, “Inside Man” reveals itself to be something of an A-budget blaxploitation movie, in which an honest (and virile) black detective climbs up and down the social ladder to expose how a blue collar crime is actually the result of bad behavior in the ivory tower. The script has moments of being sloppy and simply too drawn-out, but it does feature one of the best exchanges of dialogue so far this year (“May I take your hat?” “No. Get your own.”). And middle age is just making Jodie Foster more of a fox.
(Christopher Plummer shows up, too, and I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what a hard-working 79-year-old he is. In the last decade he’s worked with Michael Mann (Oscar-nominee “The Insider”), Terence Malick and Colin Farrell (Oscar-nominee “The New World”), Oliver Stone and Colin Farrell (the under-appreciated camp epic “Alexander”), George Clooney and Stephen Gaghan (Oscar-winner “Syriana”), a slew of British character actors (Golden Globe-nominee “Nicholas Nickleby”), and now his second movie with Spike Lee (the first was “Malcolm X”). And let’s not forget his wacky turn in “Star Trek VI” in the mid-1990s.)
Speaking of Clive Owen, his neo-noir Derailed (**1/2), while not exactly a good movie, is the kind of antisocial confection you might appreciate after being subjected to too many Michael Medveds and Laura Mulveys, complaining about how movies attack family values or are counterrevolutionary or whatever. By making its anti-hero an upper-middle class white guy who is too weak-willed not to live beyond his means, “Derailed” abandons all pretense of victimhood or social conscience and simply shows a selfish jerk being fed up with his mundane problems, finally just blowing everyone away at the end. The way Clive surveys the destruction with a look of indifference just touched by glee is why we love him. The build-up isn’t consistently gripping, but Vincent Cassel makes a delightfully hateful villain, and the third act is one of those miraculous noir contraptions that unfolds perfectly. Woody Allen’s “Match Point” accomplishes the same things better. Like “Gothika” and “Flightplan,” “Derailed” is helmed by a commercial-oriented European director who gives the movie a cold, stinging atmosphere but not a personal touch.
Reviews in a Hurry for Summer 2006.
Still More Reviews in a Hurry for Summer 2006.
And I saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s (***1/2) for the second time, this time on the big screen, and I think I finally got it. On video, you can’t see all the great little things Audrey Hepburn is doing with her face. The movie itself is a sort of maudlin, uneven contraption inspired by the Truman Capote story; it has that annoying 1950s feel of alluding obliquely to topics that couldn’t get past the censors. But Hepburn is so wonderful outside of the movie, outside the demands of the performance—one never believes that she’s from Texas—that she creates an almost musical aura of loss and warm melancholy. I would have left the theater a little in love with her except she kind of looks like my mother-in-law.
Moving back to the present, I was not surprised to find X-Men: The Last Stand (**) a brainless and breathless deluge of CG effects. I almost admire the movie for maintaining its constant level of noise—really, if there isn’t soap opera “spell-it-out-for-the-audience” exposition or some sort of explosion, then at least the music is big enough to drain any thoughts out of our heads—except that I couldn’t think to what end it could be put. The screenwriters (including “Incident at Loch Ness’” crap merchant Zak Penn) seem paid by the word “mutant” and, as with the other “X-Men” movies, the enormous and ungainly cast seems intended to please fanboys who have to see “my guy” in action. Ian McKellan camps things up nicely and I like that, in classic pulp style, countless lives are sacrificed in the last battle simply because he wants to wait until the end to use his secret weapon.