With 11 new films arriving all at once, all but one previewed, there’s lots to do and see today. Here’s the menu:
The Place Beyond the Pines: 4 stars
42: 3
The Sapphires: 3 ½
Trance: 3
Upstream Color: 3
Picture Day: 4
Becoming Redwood: 3
Revolution: 4 ½
Paris-Manhattan: 2 ½
Renoir: 3
Scary Movie 5: not previewed
THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES: Ryan Gosling does such a tremendous job creating a realistic working class character in part one, that some people are disappointed by the rest of the movie. Don’t give up on it though. In part two the focus shifts to a cop, played by Bradley Cooper, also effectively, and in part three, 15 years later, it shifts to their sons. The three parts together build a thoughtful essay on how everything we do inevitably affects others and how sons carry on much like their fathers.
Gosling is a stunt motorcycle rider in a travelling carnival, full of strut and then soul because he learns he’s a dad. He knocked up a local woman (Eva Mendes) the last time he was through Schenectady, the upstate New York city where the film is set. (The title is the old Indian name). He decides to stay, offers support and starts robbing banks to get the money. We get several tense sequences, a thrilling cop-car chase through a cemetery and a story switch to Cooper as the cop.
He’s frustrated with his job and destined for politics but is compromised by some crooked colleagues. Fifteen years later the two sons become friends and unaware carriers of their legacy. The film is 15-20 minutes too long but the smart story and precise direction (both by Derek Cianfrance, who also worked with Gosling in Blue Valentine) plus strong acting by everybody easily overcome that flaw. (The Park, Scotiabank and Suburban theatres) 4 out of 5
42: Just in time for Monday’s annual Jackie Robinson Day, here’s the story behind it. The film is accurate, well-intentioned but a little short of excitement, certainly when you consider the big struggles it depicts. Jackie was the first black to play Major League baseball in the U.S. (in modern times anyway) and it sparked a huge controversy when Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers brought him out of the Negro leagues. April 15 is the anniversary of his debut with the team.
Little known Chadwick Boseman plays him rather blandly. He looks like Tiger Woods at times and only once lets loose the temper Robinson was known for. There was certainly much to trigger it: nasty fans, pitchers aiming at his head, a petition within his own team and a stunning racist tirade right on the field from an opposing coach. Even though he was under orders not to react but let it go, I would have expected he’d have a lot to rant about in private. We don’t see it. We do get great attention to other details. Harrison Ford is perfect as Rickey. Baseball plays are shown correctly as is a famous hug by teammate Pee Wee Reese. An Alabama ball park, about the size of our Nat Bailey Stadium, stands in for three of these disappearing landmarks. Oddly, the film does not venture to Montreal where Robinson played before the call up to the Dodgers. The fans loved him there and he often talked of the inspiration he got from them but we only see that team when it visited American cities. It’s a good film that could have been more. (International Village and many suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
THE SAPPHIRES: “Do ya like good music? That sweet soul music.” No that song isn’t here in this Australian film but many others like it are as well as all the spunky spirit and fun. They’re belted out by three Aboriginal sisters and a cousin who spin their love of singing into a tour of Vietnam to entertain the troops. The result is a true crowd pleaser.
It’s a true story, written by the son of one of them and originally staged as a play. The girls enter a talent contest, lose (because they’re Aboriginals) but are discovered by a piano player portrayed by Chris O'Dowd. He switches their repertoire from country (too whiney) to soul (determined and striving). He tells the assertive leader (Deborah Mailman) to sing backup and let the one with the best voice (Jessica Mauboy) sing lead. She does an extra vibrant version of the old Stax hit “What a Man”. In Vietnam, the girls find romance and develop confidence. This is all played out against a backdrop of Australia’s official policies towards Aboriginals, the impact upon them of Martin Luther King’s assassination and, of course, the war which occasionally intrudes. A very enjoyable film. (5th Avenue Cinemas) 3 ½ out of 5
TRANCE: There comes a time in this new film from Danny Boyle that so many improbabilities have come along that you may not know what’s going on anymore. Add in what appear to be dreams, recaptured memories, or delusions flashing forward, or sometimes backward and you’re bound to feel lost. Don’t worry. The film will explain itself, not with anything too surprising but with enough to satisfy. Meanwhile just flow with the dazzling visual treats and mysterious atmosphere Boyle (of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting fame) trots out.
James McAvoy plays a London auction house employee who helps a thief (Vincent Cassel) steal a Goya painting (Witches in the Air, which actually hangs in The Prado in Spain) but gets bonked on the head and can’t remember where he hid it. Maybe a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) can dislodge the memory. She draws out vision after vision but which ones are real? He’s hit by a car. The woman driver shows up in a separate memory. Sometimes the hypnotist is the driver. On it goes. The hypnotist clues into what’s really going on and demands a share of the action, should she ever find it. It’s an entertaining puzzler. (International Village and a couple of suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
UPSTREAM COLOR: Here’s a puzzler that doesn’t explain itself at all. You’ll just have to find your way through the oddities, obscurities and ellipses and maybe discover the theme the writer-director intends to impart: how we’re nudged along by unseen forces. At the centre there’s a romance, between a woman (Amy Seimetz), who seems to work in an art dealership, and a man who chats her up on the subway. He’s played by Shane Carruth, the writer, director, producer, editor, composer and distributor of this perplexing film. She’s been infused with some kind of maggot that a gardener dug out of the soil and it may be a cure later when a pig farmer imparts some kind of transference of life elements with his animals. Or maybe not. The gardener also steals her money and the farmer also records sound effects and plays them like natural music. The film liberally quotes Thoreau’s spiritual insights from his book Walden. The dreamy tone and back and forth editing are often eerie and disorienting but also intriguing. Best not to try and figure it out but to just go along with it, and discuss it later. (Vancity Theatre) 3 out of 5
Playing in tandem with …
PICTURE DAY: Here’s a view of youth today that remarkable for two things. Hollywood rarely gets them both right. First is authenticity. The high schoolers in this story think and talk like real teenagers. Second, Tatiana Maslany’s performance as the defiant student Claire, sharp-tongued, ever sure she’s right, is astounding. No wonder she won the best actor award at Whistler and the film won the Borsos prize as best Canadian feature.
Claire, having to repeat her last year of high school, gets involved with both a 34-year-old rock musician (Steven McCarthy) and a kid just arrived in Grade 9 (Spencer Van Wyck) who she used to babysit. A sort of triangle develops as she makes it her mission to remake his nerdy image into a stud with blue hair and charisma but keeps on sleeping with the rocker. There’s disappointment on a road trip though and recurring conflicts with the school principal. And lots of great dialogue (ranging from warm and chatty to argumentative) with everybody. Director Kate Melville use to write for DeGrassi and has made a film that’s low on plot but high on believable characters. (VanCity) 4 out of 5
BECOMING REDWOOD: Hippies, draft-dodgers, extradition on a drug charge. Yes, a real B.C. story told with charm and whimsy, an upbeat mood and a bright widescreen look. Writer-director Jesse James Miller said at a screening this week that there’s much of his own story early on—he’s a son of draft dodgers—but it veered off into something fanciful.
A young boy, engagingly-played by Ryan Grantham, retreats from his problems into a fantasy about golf. (The director played professionally for a while). At the very moment his parents are splitting up (at the Canadian border) he hears a radio story about Jack Nicklaus. That stokes his imagination about beating him in a dramatic showdown at the Masters. (Co-incidentally, this year’s tournament is on right now). Circumstances send him back to California though, to live with his mother, her militaristic husband and two sons, and down in the basement, a crazy grandfather from whom he learns the real secret to golf. There are slow spots and a few too-cute scenes but generally the film is amiable, poignant and well-acted. Notice especially the good work by Scott Hylands as the old man. (International Village) 3 out of 5
REVOLUTION: Rob Stewart got awards and audiences for his 2006 documentary Sharkwater but also a challenging question. Why protect sharks when in a few decades all fish will be gone anyway? We see him fumbling for an answer in this new film and then setting out to find one. What he shows with spectacular underwater images and accounts by marine biologists is disturbing. The oceans are getting sick with acidification, the coral reefs are dying, large fish are giving way to jellyfish.
Then he goes further. It’s not just the oceans, it’s the whole planet that’s in trouble. He visits lemurs in Madgascar; lynx in the north, scenes of de-forestation and the Alberta tar sands for an urgent statement of how all life is connected and how climate change is threatening it. He brings in a stellar cast of experts including Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute and B.C. types Andrew Weaver, Tzeporah Berman and Patrick Moore. There are worrying references to the five mass extinctions that have already happened on this planet. More passionate than gloomy, it was voted the most popular environmental feature at the Vancouver film festival last fall. (International Village and suburban theatres) 4 ½ out of 5
PARIS-MANHATTAN: It’s not just Woody Allen and Hollywood who dream of Paris as a magical city of love and lights. Here’s a very similar vision from a French writer-director named Sophie Lellouche, making her first full-length film. It seems there’s a lot of herself in this story of a woman so taken by the films of Woody Allen that she hears his voice spouting well-known lines from a giant poster in her apartment and lets her life be guided by his comments. He later appears in a short cameo which makes this film important for Woody completists. Others will find it a meandering romantic comedy about her work as a pharmacist, the pressures put on her to find a husband and a relationship she is slow to acknowledge with a security system installer. Alice Taglioni and Patrick Bruel play the couple. The film isn’t fizzy enough; merely frothy. (5th Avenue) 2 ½ out of 5
RENOIR: A second French film this week (also at the 5th) has another popular trait of the national cinema: a love of sylvan glades, stippled by sunlight and flower petals floating through the warm air. In that setting we watch two generations of Renoirs and the woman who stirred them both.
Pierre-Auguste, played by film veteran Michel Bouquet, is the famous painter, crusty, demanding, suffering arthritic hands but still able to enjoy how the skin of his newest model ((Crista Theret) catches the light. We see a lot of her and she also manages to charm the painter’s son, Jean, the future film director played by Vincent Rottiers. He’s just returned from the war with an injury-the time is 1915-and agonizes whether he’s shirking his duty, all the while romancing her. Dad, a cold man most of the time, endorses, in his paintings at least, pleasant and cheerful feelings. And that’s about the level of thinking in this pleasant but flimsy film. The strongest drama is at the very end; an on-screen script tells us that when Jean went on to make movies, the model became his star and wife but was apparently dumped later on and poor and forgotten when she died. That sounds like a movie. (5th Avenue) 3 out of 5
Also now playing …
SCARY MOVIE 5: If you’re wondering why this series has chosen now to parody the Abnormal Activity films, it’s because this episode has been years in the making. The story has security cameras catching evidence of a demon menacing a sleeping baby. The main point of interest is that both Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, as well as Snoop Dogg and Mike Tyson, make an appearance in the film. How? Can’t tell. The studio didn’t show it to critics and only managed to get it into suburban theatres. Neither is a good sign.
NOTE: All images are movie stills provided by the studios. They are the exclusive property of their copyright owners.