The two big films this week are both disappointing. So look beyond, to a great performance by Christopher Plummer, a long-lost science fiction from Reiner Werner Fassbinder, a mammoth chunk of Chinese history and three more westerns with Jimmy Stewart.
Here’s the List:
Bad Teacher 2 stars
Cars 2 ---
Beginners 4
Beginning of the Great Revival: 3
Hot Docs/Conan O’Brien 3
World on a Wire ---
Jimmy Stewart westerns 4-1/2, 3-1/2 & 4
BAD TEACHER: I was expecting nothing more than a juvenile joke fest and I got … well … pretty well just that. It’s fairly funny at times because a few good gags somehow found their way in. They’re rare though. During most of its short running time, this film is cynical and unpleasant. Cameron Diaz plays a teacher with no redeeming qualities at all. She’s a schemer, a cheat, a drunk and more. She’s looking for a rich man to latch on to and targets, in a bizarre in-joke, a new substitute played by Justin Timberlake. He and Diaz used to be an item in real life.
They seem more than a little distant in this film, except for a dry humping scene which is just dreadful and some shared dialogue about a boob job she wants to get to better appeal to him. That brings in a bit of gratuitous nudity (not hers) and a lot of sleazy tone but still nothing of the exuberance of those two raunchy big hits, Bridesmaids and The Hangover Part II. It does make you think about the state of education, though. Not like the recent documentary Waiting for Superman, which gets two specific echoes in this film, but along these lines. It must be hard to be a teacher when pop culture keeps tossing such anti-education distractions at the students.
(Scotiabank and theatres all through the suburbs) 2 out of 5
CARS 2: Because of a scheduling conflict, I haven’t seen this yet, but I polled three friends who have and here’s my impression so far. You can pretty well see all the plusses and minuses in this one picture.
That red car on the left there is Lightning McQueen, four-time winner of the Piston Cup and well-known to millions of little boys who have the merchandise from the first movie. He’s voiced by Owen Wilson. But look there beside him. That’s Mater, the tow-truck, whose drawl and malapropisms are acted by Larry the Cable Guy. He’s now a bigger presence that Lightning, not a bit player anymore. Too much of him. And there’s that third car. That’s Finn McMissile, a secret agent along the lines of James Bond and voiced by Michael Caine. This becomes an international thriller when our boys go to races in Tokyo, Germany, Italy, France, and England and run into a plot involving big oil. The first film advocated getting out of the fast lane and enjoying life in Radiator Springs. That plane and fireball on the left in the picture shows the new reality. Too many story elements and little of the emotional connection Pixar films are famous four. But tremendous animated action and 3-D. (International Village, Oakridge, Dolphin and many suburban theatres)
BEGINNERS: Imagine if one day your father, aged 75 and a recent widower, told you he has really been gay all along. He only acted straight because society pressured him to and your mother felt she could correct him. And there’s more. Your dad now has found a boyfriend, through an internet site, and is hanging around with a bunch of gay friends, all cheerful, good-time guys. It happens to Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor, as father and son, in this new film, and is largely based on fact. Director Mike Mills is telling the story of his own father.
“I loved your mother but now I just want to explore,” Plummer explains. That includes late night phone calls from noisy clubs asking what kind of music is playing. (FYI: it’s House music). In another beginning, father and son now have reason to spend more time together. They hound bookstores and talk. A third beginning comes after the father dies, and McGregor tries to make sense of it all by starting a relationship with a French woman, played by French actress Mélanie Laurent. I’m not giving away the plot. The death has already happened when the film starts. The story flashes back and forth in time after that in an elegant balancing act. Juggling act might be a better term. The story elements, the character revelations, the shifting moods between sad and happy are kept moving smoothly and skillfully. I could have done without the dog talking in subtitles and some elements seem manufactured (Ewan at a costume party dressed as Sigmund Freud?) but that’s all minor. This is Christopher Plummer’s movie. He’s vibrant and charming (in flashback, of course). (5th Avenue Cinemas) 4 out of 5
BEGINNING OF THE GREAT REVIVAL: If you were in China, this would be pretty well your only choice at the movies right now. Theatre operators have been told to play it everywhere. Even the new Transformers movie will have to wait. Why? It’s an historical epic celebrating the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist party. The party wants it seen. (A companion film two years ago, about the party’s triumph in 1949, was a huge hit).
This is a very detailed history showing the ten years from the Wuchang Uprising in 1911, after which Dr. Sun Yat Sen returns to China and proclaims a republic, through various governments collapsing, splintering, reforming, a boy emperor restored to the throne, civil war, and other chaotic events up to the party proclamation signed on a secret boat cruise to elude government agents. It’s like a well-made pageant, with lots of period detail, battle scenes and in the exciting action of the student May 4th Movement, some possibly unintended reminders of Tiananmen Square. There’s a lot to absorb. A huge cast of historical characters appear on screen, identified in tiny script and played by some 150 known Chinese actors. Mao, Chou En Lai, Dr. Sun are familiar to most of us; many of the others are not. (Fans of Chinese movies will have a great time watching for the stars like Chow Yun-fat (as the tyrant Yuan Shikai, Andy Lau and Liu Ye as a rather reserved Mao Zedong.
Some will be able to spot the bit players like the comedians Feng Gong and Fan Wei or the Hong Kong supermodel Angelababy.) We get a big dose of ideological debate about the relevance of Marx and Lenin’s theories to China, but we get more about the humiliation China suffered during the colonial period and again during the peace talks that ended World War One. Ultimately the film credits the party with both freeing China and creating today’s wealth. Propaganda, sure, but there’s a solid history lesson lurking behind it. (International Village, Station Square, Coquitlam and Riverport) 3 out of 5
THE BEST OF HOT DOCS: This weekend, the Vancity Theatre is showing five of the best films from North America’s largest documentary festival. I’ve only seen one so far, but it’s bound to be popular. Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is for fans of the last-night TV comedian. They’ll get a bit of a glimpse into his backstage life, a stage show that feels a bit like TV itself, and maybe too much music as Coco belts out like 40 Days and I Want my Show Again (aka On the Road Again). He toured, even to here in Vancouver, after he lost his show and was legally barred from performing on TV or the internet. (3 out of 5)
Another highlight is Project Nim, which is building tremendous buzz at festivals. Not only is it the story of the chimp that was taught sign language and treated as a child in a famous experiment but it comes from the same people who made the compelling, and Oscar winning, Man on Wire.
A third film, I’m interested in, The Pirate Tapes, watches Somalian pirates with a hidden camera and apparently explains their actions. There’s information about all these films at www.viff.org.
WORLD ON A WIRE: Here's a must-see for fans of science fiction. This is a film Rainer Werner Fassbinder made for German TV back in 1973. It's showing in Vancouver for the first time. The New York Times says it's "bold vision is still ahead of its time." It anticipates Avatar, Blade Runner and even The Matrix with a story about a cybernetics corporation's that has created a miniature world of "identity units" that are unaware they are being control by forces above.
A researches stumbles across the paranoia-laced information that his world may not be real. Philip K. Dick, David Cronenberg, and in his own humorous way, Douglas Adams, have all dealt with themes like this. Fassbinder's film plays it out on two levels of reality. The film is also in two parts (and you'll have to pay a double feature price). Three days only, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. You can find more information at http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/world-on-a-wire
THIS IS TRUE GRIT, part 2: The Pacific Cinémathèque also has three more of those westerns Jimmy Stewart made with director Anthony Mann. This second batch includes the one I like the most, The Naked Spur, which has only five characters in a story of obsession and greed that’s easily as intense at The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Stewart, as a bounty hunter, is after Robert Ryan but needs help from an old timer and a dishonorably discharged cavalryman. Everybody feels the urge to turn on each other in this streamlined but complex adult western.
The Far Country is also about greed, this time in Canada, in the Klondike gold rush. Stewart tries to stay on the sidelines and not get involved in the lawless boomtown.
The last film, The Man From Laramie, is in beautiful Cinemascope, one of first western to get that widescreen treatment. Stewart is on an obsessive hunt for revenge for his brother’s death. (4 ½, 3 ½ and 4 out of 5, respectively)
NOTE: The images were supplied by the movie studios and are therefore the exclusive property of their copyright owners.