The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2008

Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Jason Flemyng, Mahershalahasgbaz Ali

Director: David Fincher

Runtime: 165 Minutes

Distributor: Paramount

Rating: PG-13

            A screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzferald’s celebrated 1922 short story about a boy born in his eighties who throughout his life endures a process of reverse aging has been on the table for sometime. However, getting it off the table and into production proved something of a mammoth undertaking as a series of seemingly insurmountable hurdles presented themselves.

            First technology needed to catch up so you could use a single actor for the role instead of eight different actors, and thanks to the likes of Peter Jackson and his work with Golem we can consider that one hurdled. Then you needed a director with both the interest and experience in cutting edge digital technology – step forward David Fincher. Next you needed a star with a big enough draw to justify the $150 million and up budget. That would be Brad Pitt then. Finally you need a scripter with enough smarts to cram one mans wildly colorful life story into a single, coherent movie. For that you turn of course to Eric Roth, whose last attempt at doing just that, Forest Gump, bagged him an Oscar.

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Seven Pounds

2008
Starring: Will Smith, Rosario Dawson, Woody Harrelson, Michael Ealy, Barry Pepper, Joe Nunez
Director: Gabriele Muccino
Runtime: 120 Minutes
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Rating: PG-13

In what just might be the most depressing film of 2008, which is an impressive feat in and of itself when you pick over the festive line-up of assassination pictures and holocaust dramas, Will smith reunites with his Pursuit of Happyness director Gabriele Muccino. While Happyness exists in the same realm of a somber tug in the heartstrings the two pictures are a world apart, and in fact Seven Pounds has more in common with Smith’s post-apocalyptic savior from I am Legend.

Like Robert Neville eking out a meager existence in self-imposed exile on Manhattan, as IRS agent Ben Thomas Smith again delivers another earnest portrayal of a tortured soul desperate to atone. A former aeronautical engineer consumed by guilt over a dark secret from his past Ben sleepwalks through his life inviting punishment. Whether berating a neglectful administrator in a nursing home or caustically mocking a blind, mild-mannered telesales operative (Woody Harrelson making the most of a small but meaty role) over his condition, Ben challenges people to judge him.

Click here to read the full review at WiFly Radio.

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The Wrestler

2008
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Runtime: 109 Minutes
Rating: R
Distributor: Fox Searchlight

Say what you like about Darren Aronofsky, the guy takes big risks. Whether it be a story about obsessive mathematician, or pluming the deepest, darkest depths of drug-addled squalor, or even a bald Hugh Jackman floating through space in a bubble, it’s pretty obvious that when choosing a project, commercial viability is not exactly his first consideration.

So after briefly flirting with The Batman franchise his decision to make a serious drama about the pro-wrestling circuit starring Mickey Rourke, an actor no major financers wanted to touch, is really just par for the course. Shot mostly handheld (to save money) and without the benefit of on set playback (to save time and therefore more money), this is a really organic, free flowing movie that time and again just takes you places you don’t expect the subject matter ever could.

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Doubt

2008
Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Joseph Foster
Director: John Patrick Shanley
Runtime: 105 Minutes
Distributor: Mirimax
Rating: Pg-13

As a stage production this intelligent, studied tale of suspicion and, well, doubt, in an early 1960’s catholic school ran to great acclaim, scooping multiple awards including a Tony for its creator John Patrick Shanley. This screen adaptation both scripted and directed by Shanley is perhaps unsurprisingly light on cinematic verve, but is carried over by some powerhouse performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep.

What immediately strikes you with Doubt is its stark simplicity. The issue of a potentially inappropriate relationship between a priest and an alter boy is raised and a simple question asked – did he or didn’t he? From there a whole world is torn apart and an entire institution is thoroughly examined with both its values questioned and its continued struggle for relevance put to the test.

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Open Water 2: Adrift

2006
Starring: Susan May Pratt, Richard Speight, Niklaus Lange, Ali Hillis, Cameron Richardson, Eric Dane
Director: Hans Horn
Runtime: 95 Minutes
Distributor: Summit Entertainment
Rating: R

This rather derivative sequel to the 2003 sleeper Open Water was a small film that had been floating around the European market under the title Adrift to little or no avail until it was picked up and re-titled as Open Water 2. Hoping to cash in on the runaway success of the bleak and disturbing thriller telling of a young couple left floating in the ocean after their scuba diving party accidentally leaves them behind, Adrift was tagged with the same “based on actual events” byline and unleashed on US audiences.

As it stands the byline is about all the original film and this painful alternative have in common. Despite being essentially a film about two people floating in ocean, Open Water was a real home run, and not at all undeserved. A brave, well-acted exercise in minimalist storytelling, with a truly terrifying premise that left a genuinely nasty aftertaste that was hard to rinse away. This prepackaged follow on does little other than accentuate just what a good, simple film Open Water was and how easily the idea could have all gone so very wrong, as it quickly does here.

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Milk

2008
Starring: Sean Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, Diego Luna
Director: Gus Van Sant
Runtime: 128 Minutes
Distributor: Focus Features
Rating: R

Director Gus Van Sant flirted with this project, with Sean Penn as the lead, way back in 1993 when Oliver Stone was looking to produce, but passed citing script problems. Now the inimitably divisive auteur returns to this studied biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office, with a script from HBO scribe Dustin Lance Black. Lifting his story from actual testimony recorded by a then fearful and paranoid Milk, Van Sant charts Milk’s rise to national prominence and ultimate assassination at the hands of a disturbed political rival.

An aging, dissatisfied New Yorker, Milk is the kind of quietly assertive queen that would be lynched the minute he set a foot below the Mason-Dixon line. One night he meets fellow nice boy Scott (James Franco) on the subway and whisks him off to San Francisco to live happily ever after. Setting up a small camera store in the fashionable gay quarter dubbed ‘The Castro’ Milk encounters stiff prejudice from the large Irish Catholic community surrounding the tiny district that are none too pleased with the growing number of new arrivals.

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United 93

2006
Starring: J.J Johnson, Polly Adams, Jamie Harding, John Moraitis, Gregg Henry, James Fox, Michael Bencal
Director: Paul Greengrass
Runtime: 111 Minutes
Distributor: Universal
Rating: R

United 93 has the distinction of being the first mainstream Hollywood film to take its story directly from the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks. British writer/director Paul Greengrass unfolds the infamous events and lays them out in a real time narrative that takes us inside the FAA, the Boston and Cleveland control centers, and SAC NORAD to show what apparently happened as authorities tried to come to terms with the events of that day along with how and why they were ultimately unable to do anything to stop them.

Given the extensive and lengthy investigative process that followed the attacks in attempt to find who if anyone was culpable, Greengrass had an unprecedented amount of data to research and draw from when writing United 93. Every single person remotely connected to that day has given lengthy depositions as to what they did, what they saw, what they weren’t able to do and why they weren’t able to do it. Aside from a little creative license at the climax (recordings strongly indicate that the passengers on board United Airlines flight 93 did indeed revolt, but whether they actually made it inside the cockpit is still a matter of much debate), we can pretty much take the film at its word that this is as definitive a version of events, at least on the ground, as we are ever likely to get.

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Killer Movie

Having suffered the indignity of being made to run around after Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie while they showcased their “talent” on TV’s The Simple Life, unit producer Jeff Fisher conceived a story telling of a pampered LA rich bitch who winds up in a backwater Dakota town and is pursued by a vicious serial killer. Amazing how ideas sometimes just come to you.

Click here to read the full review at Suite101.com.

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Quantum of Solace

2008
Starring: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Gemma Arterton, Jeffery Wright, Giancarlo Giannini
Director: Marc Forster
Runtime: 106 Minutes
Distributor: MGM
Rating: PG-13

After the meaty origin story that was Casino Royale was greeted with almost universal acclaim for its back to basics bravado it would seem the honeymoon really is over for this latest incarnation of cinema’s longest running franchise. Looking to build on the goodwill accrued refining the bloated Bond into something efficient enough to shed the anachronistic shackles, first time Bond director Marc Foster and scripter Paul Haggis have trimmed so much off the top as to render the series virtually emaciated and delivered a film as confounding as its nonsensical title.

Picking up right where Royale left off, Quantum opens hard and fast with Daniel Craig as Bond weaving his bullet riddled Aston Martin in an out of traffic on a winding Sienna cliff road duly dispatching the customary bad guys in hot pursuit to deliver Mr. White for interrogation. It’s an interrogation that’s short-lived as an assassin is only to happy to illustrate just what White means when he says “we have people everywhere.”

Click here to read the full review at WiflyRadio.com.

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JCVD

Broke, depressed, and exhausted, down on his luck eighties icon Jean Claude Van Damme returns home in search of sanctuary and a little privacy. Instead he finds himself embroiled in an international media circus when the local police mistakenly believe he is the mastermind behind a botched armed robbery turned siege at a local post office.

Click here to read the full review at Suite101.com.

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