Movie Review: High Plains Drifter (1973)

A mystical western aching to create a Sergio Leone vibe, High Plains Drifter is successful but only in patches.

A Stranger (Clint Eastwood) rides into the isolated mining town of Lago, and before long he shoots dead three abrasive gunmen and rapes the local whore, catching the attention of the town leaders. It turns out that Lago is a town on edge, anticipating the return of Stacy Bridges and the Carlin brothers, who are about to be released from prison. Bridges and the Carlins are expected to seek revenge on Lago for letting them rot in jail after they had done the town's dirty work by whipping to death Marshal Jim Duncan. Lago's businessmen and politicians wanted Duncan dead after he discovered that the town's mine actually sits on federal land.

Desperate for protection, Lago's leaders plead with the Stranger to protect them from the returning killers. He agrees after they offer him anything that he wants in return. The Stranger proceeds to insult, demean and humiliate everyone in the town, culminating in painting every building in Lago blood red and re-naming the place Hell. He easily dispatches Bridges and the Carlins when they finally arrive, and rides off as mysteriously as he arrived, leaving the town behind him in tatters. The more perceptive residents finally realize that the Stranger was the vengeful spirit of Jim Duncan.

High Plains Drifter is Eastwood's second movie as director and his first western. The Leone influences are most obvious in the long sequences without dialogue, The Strangers' extremely limited aptitude for talking and love for cigarillos, the levels of violence, and in portraying the main character as barely more tolerable than the evil-doers. The early rape scene is a departure from what is expected in most westerns, Spaghetti or otherwise, but establishes the lack of pure characters anywhere in Eastwood's canvass.

High Plains Drifter suffers from a weak supporting cast, the likes of Verna Bloom, Marianna Hill and the dwarf Billy Curtis not adding much depth to the town's characters. The music score by Dee Barton is unmemorable and adds little to the experience.

Much like The Stranger, High Plains Drifter rides in, makes some noise and leaves some memories, but then rides out again, and there is no clamouring for any kind of return performance.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Julie and Julia (2009)

Two sweet stories that struggle to engage are thrown together in a lightweight souffle, inoffensive to the taste but rather quickly forgotten.

Julie and Julia intercuts the stories of Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and Julia Child (Meryl Street), both based on true events. In the late 1940s, Julia Child arrives in Paris with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci). She is quickly enamored with French cuisine and takes lessons at a prestigious cooking school. Eventually she befriends two French women who are also fans of cooking, and after years of effort, they publish Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. The book becomes a bestseller and establishes Child as the guardian cooking godmother of American housewives.

In 2002, Julie Powell moves to Queens, New York with her husband (Chris Messina). Julie is turning 30 and a once-promising career as a writer appears to be passing her by. To break out of a psychological funk, she starts a blog and commits to cooking her way through Child's entire book within 365 days. She establishes a mythical connection with Child, and her blog chronicling her cooking experiences gains a wide following. Powell gets through her year of cooking, and writes a successful book about the experience.

Julie and Julia is shallow as the white of a single egg spread out in the frying pan. The script, by director Nora Ephron, tries desperately to inject some drama into the proceedings, so the squabbles of Julie with her husband, the pressure of Julia's husband changing jobs, an overcooked meal, and a missed dinner appointment become large storms in a small teacup.

The film is saved by the two central performances, Streep holding nothing back in portraying Julia Child as a larger than life and never deflated character, while Adams has the more difficult task of creating a likable character out of the modern-day Julie, who essentially does very little other than cook for the entire movie. Both actresses are eminently watchable, and they almost succeed in covering up the almost complete lack of substance elsewhere in the movie.

Julie and Julia is a modest appetizer at a restaurant that serves no other course.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Braveheart (1995)

An epic of medieval brutality, political intrigue, passionate love, and the high price of freedom, in Braveheart director and star Mel Gibson floods the screen with unbridled nationalism, thousands of extras, gallons of gore, and numerous chopped-off limbs to tell the tale of Scottish rebellion against the evil English.

Late in the 13th century, a power vacuum takes hold in Scotland. Rather than leading their country, squabbling local noblemen are more interested in currying favour with England's King Edward (Patrick McGoohan). Nicknamed Longshanks, Edward takes full advantage to increase his influence by appointing English Lords over Scottish territory, and gives them the legal right to insult and demean the locals by sleeping with newlywed Scottish brides on their wedding night.

As a young Scottish farm boy, William Wallace (Gibson) witnessed the brutality of the English in his homeland, and lost his father and older brother in skirmishes against the English army. Wallace is raised and well educated by his Uncle, and he grows into a man seeking a peaceful existence as a farmer. But when his wife (Catherine McCormack) is assaulted and killed by English soldiers, he seeks a revenge that starts out as a personal matter but quickly escalates in to a national rebellion. A brutal savage on the battlefield as well as a master battle tactician, Wallace rallies the nation to fight against the English oppressors, and with the help of childhood friend Hamish (Brendan Gleeson) and other loyal followers, inspires some impressive and gory battlefield victories.

Wallace's army invades northern England and brazenly sacks the English garrison in York, finally getting the attention of Longshanks. He also gets the attention of Princess Isabelle (Sophie Marceau), the thoughtful French daughter of Longshanks' weakling of a son. Longshanks wants Wallace dead; Isabelle wants him in her bed.

Despite his impressive victories, Wallace never gains the support of Scotland's nobility, who see his rebellion as a threat to their long-term interests. Wallace repeatedly attempts to recruit the influential Robert, Earl of Bruce (Angus Macfadyen) to his cause, but his efforts are in vain: Robert's ailing father (Ian Brennan) is plotting to have his son appointed as King of Scotland, and this means that Wallace needs to be neutralized. Too many interests eventually line up against Wallace, and his campaign comes to a painful end, but not before inspiring a national awakening.

Clocking in at almost exactly three hours, Braveheart is an impressive spectacle. The events portrayed are almost wholly historically inaccurate, but this matters little: Braveheart is a historically-inspired work of fiction, and as such, succeeds in shining the spotlight on a rarely explored period in Britain's long-ago past.

Gibson neatly divides the film into three parts, with the first hour setting the context, the middle portion chronicling Wallace's battlefield exploits, and the final part dealing with the personal and political fallout. The early scenes are slow, but once Braveheart hits its stride, it rarely pauses to take a breath, and the end result makes for compelling viewing.

Gibson creates medieval Britain in all its grime, depression, poverty, brutality and overwhelming sense of despair. The leaders of society are portrayed as power-hungry, self-serving, corrupt, and depraved while their people suffer. The barbarous battle scenes, featuring thousands of extras charging at each other, raise the bar for camerawork in the midst of chaos, with the blood from the frequently hacked limbs and impaled torsos literally spraying onto the lens.

The film's central message of freedom at all costs is of course simplistically hokey, and Gibson does cruise through some scenes relying on boyish charm and a mischievous glint in his eye. But with James Horner providing a suitably evocative soundtrack, Braveheart achieves its purpose of delivering a rousing epic, old-fashioned in its grandness of scale but modern in its lack of flinching from the savagery of war.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Risky Business (1983)

Edgy, sleek and sexy, Risky Business ventured into rarely-explored territory and made Tom Cruise a star.

Teen-oriented comedies are supposed to follow a template of harmless if raunchy fun. Risky Business dares to go into much darker corners, with blatant profanity, steamy sex, prostitutes that are too attractive and even more likeable, dangerous pimps, and an ad-hoc brothel business designed to corrupt rich teenagers and separate them from their parents' money.

Add a Porsche that ends up in Lake Michigan, Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear, and Rebecca De Mornay as every teenagers' fantasy woman come true, and Risky Business threatens to sizzle right off the screen.

Joel Goodson (Cruise) is, naturally, a good son, a predictable, trusted teenager in suburban Illinois, hoping to get into Princeton upon graduation from high school. His parents go on vacation and leave him in charge of the large family house. Goaded by his friend Miles to take a more WTF (literally, the film is the spiritual godfather of the phrase) attitude to life, Joel is soon calling up prostitutes who do house calls. The first call girl to arrive is a guy; the second is Lana (De Mornay), and Joel soon owes her a lot of money. Lana takes off with a precious glass egg that is the pride of Joel's mom.

It's not long before Joel is tangling with Lana's pimp; and shortly thereafter Lana and her friends are setting up a thriving business in Joel's house. Meanwhile, Joel is getting himself into bigger trouble by dunking his dad's Porsche into the murky lake waters, sinking him deeper in debt. And he still needs to find a way to make a good impression on the Princeton recruiter coming to interview him.

The mess is both the end of Joel's old life and the beginning of his adulthood, and Risky Business works as parable for what it means to be a stereotypical adult male: simultaneously juggling trouble with women, trouble with cars, and trouble with money.

Paul Brickman directed his own script, and played up all his aces. Cruise is placed in the middle of the movie and allowed to transform on-camera from the hesitant teenager to the sharp business man, a perfect mirror for his life. De Mornay is a woman that can lead any teenager towards delightful moral ruin. And Brickman bathes the movie in an attractive outdoor darkness that promotes edgy but promising mystery.

Risky Business was a daring movie, but the handsome outcome meant that the risk paid off for audiences in terms of entertainment and for Cruise in terms of superstardom.

All Ace Black Movie Reviews are here.

 

Movie Review: Three Kings (1999)

Faced with the choice to get rich or do the right thing, it takes strength and genuine courage to sacrifice wealth and help others. Three Kings presents this choice, with strong geopolitical consequences, in a fictional story inspired by the war to liberate Kuwait in the early 1990s.

The 1991 war to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait has started and ended with lighting speed: most of the American soldiers stationed in the desert saw little action. Restless and looking for adventure, Gates (George Clooney), Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Elgin (Ice Cube) and Vig (Spike Jonze) stumble on a map revealing the location of hidden gold bullion that the Iraqi Army stole from Kuwait.

Setting out on their own, the four soldiers plot a quick smash and grab operation to locate, seize and keep the gold for themselves. Nothing goes as planned and they are soon embroiled in the middle of the Iraqi civil war that broke out in the shadow of the US military action: rebel forces are trying to oust the government of Saddam Hussein; the revolutionary guards are brutally suppressing the uprising; and the gold-seeking American soldiers are caught in the middle, AWOL with no back-up and no orders to interfere in the unfolding drama.

Barlow is taken prisoner, Gates connects with the rebels, and soon what was a treasure hunt turns into an international incident, with three surviving American soldiers choosing a side in the internal Iraqi conflict, against the orders of their government and commanders.

Hollywood re-imaginings of wars to correct the wrongs of history are common, and here director David O. Russell, filming his own script, goes back to the first war with Iraq to correct the travesty of the United States encouraging the overthrow of Hussein after the liberation of Kuwait, and then leaving the rebels to get slaughtered by the helicopters of the brutal regime. In Three Kings, Gates and his three co-conspirators refuse to abandon the rebels and their families, and pay a high price in lives and treasure lost in order to uphold the principle of loyalty.

Three Kings is also a strong anti-war statement, with Russell humanizing Iraqi rank-and-file soldiers, demonstrating their suffering and family losses as victims of American aerial bombing.

In story, style and comic elements, Three Kings borrows heavily from Clint Eastwood's Kelly's Heroes (1970), the fictional World War Two adventure also about a small group of soldiers attempting to steal gold and triggering much bigger events. Russell directs with an entertaining irreverence that captures the absurdity of war, and allows stars Clooney and Wahlberg to shine brighter than the stark desert sun.

Three Kings delivers its message with an eccentric and sometimes uneven combination of bluntness and humour: even the greediest and most jaded soldiers can see their way to doing the right thing. Perhaps it takes being there, near the battle, to distinguish right from wrong, and that's why the political puppet masters invariably get it wrong.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Lover (1992)

Based on the memoirs of author Marguerite Duras, The Lover chronicles an illicit affair between a teenaged French schoolgirl and a wealthy older Chinese man in 1920s Vietnam. The film is lyrical and alluring, but emotionally rather limited.

The characters do not have names. The Young Girl (Jane March) is from a poor family, her father dead, her mother struggling to run a school in rural Vietnam, her older brother abusive and drug-addicted, and her younger brother weak and submissive. On one of her trips to Saigon to attend boarding school, the Young Girl meets The Chinese Man (Tony Leung), a rich son of a business tycoon. He gives her a ride in his chauffeur-driven luxury car, she lies about her age, and soon they are having an affair. They meet regularly in his bachelor's apartment in a poor part of Saigon, making love all afternoon and sometimes all night.

The affair takes over the Girl's life, disrupting her school attendance and worsening the rift with her family. Her brother and mother are horrified that the Girl is the mistress of a Chinese man, but even more annoyed that she is not getting paid for it. The Chinese Man meanwhile is heading towards an arranged marriage, and the affair comes to an end when he gets married and the Girl heads back to France.

The Lover is a simple story with a couple of points of interest. The Young Girl is from the colonialist French theoretically attempting to dominate south east Asia, yet she plays the submissive role in the relationship with the wealthy Chinese Man, himself not in his native country. The Young Girl's dysfunctional family background helps her to throw herself into the illicit relationship, since what she is getting herself into hardly jeopardizes a happy existence.

Jean-Jacques Annaud makes the most of the Vietnam locations, capturing a lush sun-drenched country, bustling streets, ferries at over-capacity, colonialist architecture, rickshaws everywhere, and extremes of wealth and poverty. His other focus is on the endless scenes of lovemaking in the bachelor's apartment, The Lover drifting into soft-core territory and courting controversy with Jane March having just turned 18 during filming, and rumours that some of the scenes were unsimulated.

March and Leung are not required to do much emotional acting, their characters stunted by the limits of a relationship that was never going to be about much of anything other than sex. The gaps in social class, age, and ethnicity only serve to ensure that the inevitable ending is hastened. The narration, by Jeanne Moreau, attempts to inject layers of affection and love into the affair, but it is difficult to believe that any depth existed outside the imagination of a young girl, alone and far away in a foreign land.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Book Of Eli (2010)

A post-apocalyptic survival movie, The Book Of Eli creates and sustains a foreboding mood of hostility, as desperate survivors start the process of scratching out new ways of living on a destroyed planet.

In unexplained circumstances that appear to be the result of a nuclear holocaust, the world has been destroyed. The sun is too bright, there is a shortage of clean water, money has been replaced by bartering, and the landscape is littered with crushed infrastructure. Eli (Denzel Washington) is a well-armed survivor and combat expert, and possesses the last remaining copy of the Bible. He is determined to walk west to an undefined destination, fighting off marauders who threaten him along the way.

Eli arrives at a small settlement being run by Carnegie (Gary Oldman). Vicious enforcers and biker patrols do Carnegie's dirty work, while he keeps the blind Claudia (Jennifer Beals) and her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis) as his slaves. Carnegie is desperate to get his hands on Eli's Bible, to expand his influence. Eli is equally sure that Carnegie is not deserving of the book. Carnegie unleashes his thugs at Eli, who has to find a way to survive and continue his mysterious journey westwards.

Borrowing heavily from the stunning look of the Fallout 3 video game and reviving many elements from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), The Book Of Eli succeeds in portraying a post-civilized world, where the few survivors have defaulted to animalistic behaviour, and the rebooting of civilization at rudimentary settlements does not look pretty.

Washington gives Eli enough humanity to provide hope for a better future, but this optimism is countered by Oldman's portrayal of Carnegie, who leaves no doubt that humans, given the opportunity, will indeed repeat all the same major mistakes that lead to the path of utter destruction.

The Hughes brothers Albert and Allen direct with considerable panache, and as they steer The Book Of Eli towards its clever final twist, they seize opportunities for entertaining showboating, always finding the most engaging camera angles. In one sequence, Eli and Solara are inside a house besieged by Carnegie's men: the ensuing shootout features mesmerizing camerawork, a smooth ballet of captivating lens movement. There is undoubted Sergio Leone influence at play, and the soundtrack hints at it with the subtle whistling of Ennio Morricone music.

The Book Of Eli is an artistically rich imagining of a bleak future. Humans may be heading towards mutually assured destruction, but they are determined to create good entertainment along the way.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Shutter Island (2010)

A psychological drama set in a mental hospital on an isolated island off the coast of Boston, Shutter Island mixes a few too many ingredients. The meal is good, but spices compete for attention before the emergence of a dominant flavour.

It's 1954, and US Marshals Edward Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) travel to an island prison facility for severely disturbed mental patients to search for an escaped convict: Rachel Solando is convicted of drowning her three children, and was living in an alternate reality until she vanished. The prison is run by Dr. John Cawley (Ben Kingsley), who is experimenting with new treatment techniques and drugs that are more respectful than the brutal, traditional methods of dealing with mental patients.

Edward and Chuck get the uneasy sense that Dr. Cawley and his team are being less than straightforward with their investigation of Solando's disappearance. Edward starts to experience headaches, and his health is not helped by flashbacks to his war experiences and the agony of his wife's death in a car crash. As a violent storm isolates the island, Edward has to try and separate truth from fiction in a dangerous environment where little is as it seems.

Shutter Island is one of director Martin Scorsese's less focused efforts, but still provides several moments of compelling drama. Especially in its first half, Shutter Island bounces around several themes. It spends time as a criminal drama: Edward and Chuck looking for an escaped convict. Then the film probes controversial science: is Dr. Cawley doing more good or more harm with his unconventional methods. It takes a turn into Edward's head, as his past World War Two experiences and personal family tragedy intrude on his focus. Undertones of escaped Nazi scientists continuing their evil deeds on US soil are introduced. And horror elements creep in, as Edward explores the island cemetery and the mysterious wing where the most violent mental patients are locked-up, and ghoulish characters jump out of the shadows.

Despite the meandering, Shutter Island maintains the attention thanks to DiCaprio's intense, tortured magnetism and Scorsese succeeding in creating a canvass of ominous doom on the storm-battered island. After the movie's central twist becomes evident at the start of the second half, Shutter Island settles down to a more straightforward psychological drama, with the focus shifting to Edward's struggle against a wide range of demons from his past and present.

It does not quite hit its intended targets, but Shutter Island is a worthwhile destination.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Mask (1994)

The perfect star vehicle for Jim Carrey, The Mask is a hyperactive, hysterically funny movie, joyously traveling at breakneck speed around blind corners.

Bland and lonely banker Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey) is drifting through a boring life, with his dog Milo as his only friend, when he finds a mystical, ancient mask. When he puts it on, Ipkiss is transformed into The Mask, a green-headed, ultra-confident, cool, heroic and suave character capable of amazing death-and-gravity defying tricks usually reserved for cartoon characters.

The bank that Ipkiss works for is targeted for a robbery by the gang of Dorian Tyrell, including his dame Tina Carlyle (Cameron Diaz). Ipkiss is attracted to Tina as she pretends to be a bank customer, but as The Mask he is soon causing havoc with the robbery plans, attracting the attentions of the police, and invading the nightclub operated by Tyrell for a final showdown. As events spiral ever out of control, both Tyrell and, hilariously, Milo, get turns to experience the powers of putting on the mask before sanity is somewhat restored.

Good as it is in a madcap way, the plot really doesn't matter one bit. The Mask is all about giving Jim Carrey the best possible role to showcase his manic talent, and showcase he does. The scenes with Carrey as The Mask are an out of control riot, with what is essentially a cartoon character invading the screen with unbridled energy and operating at ten times the intensity of everyone else. The laughs and jokes are never ending and often hit the mark, Carrey's delivery is over-the-top brilliant, and his athleticism and physical talent immense.

Former model Cameron Diaz gets a most memorable big screen debut, and more specifically a spectacularly memorable first scene as she enters the target bank with no intentions except to distract by sucking all attention and eyeballs towards her considerable charms. Total distraction is achieved with unqualified success. Among the major characters, Tina is the only one not to get to wear the mask, but that is because her character is already outlandishly sexy in appearance and behaviour, a real-life Jessica Rabbit.

Chuck Russell, directing his first film since the humdrum The Blob in 1988, creates the perfect canvass for the antics of The Mask. The movie is all about vivid colours, song-and-dance numbers exploding out of nothing, vibrantly decorated sets, and flashy costumes, all just to match the kinetic energy that Carrey brings to the role.

The Mask is creative, inspired entertainment, capturing a comic star at his peak performing in the perfect movie to suit his unique talents.




All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: White Palace (1990)

Two souls with nothing in common except the deep lingering sorrow from the devastating loss of a loved one develop an unlikely relationship.

Max (James Spader), a twentysomething marketing manager in St. Louis, is still coming to terms with the loss of his wife in a car accident. Withdrawing from the lives of his friends, he leads a lonely, somber existence, until he meets Nora (Susan Sarandon), a fortysomething working class cashier at a greasy fast food restaurant. Nora, in addition to being a fan of Marilyn Monroe, is also suffering from the loss of her 14 year old son.

Nora smokes a lot, drinks a lot and has a messy house. Max is a neatness freak and lives in a spotless apartment. But the sex is terrific, and soon Max and Nora are spending a lot of time together. She doubts that he will ever fully let her into his middle-class life, and he doubts that he has any sort of a life to let her into. While the age gap is wide, the class divide is sharper, and both Max and Nora will need to confront their own lives to give their relationship any kind of hope.

A two-person character study, White Palace works thanks to Sarandon. Playing a subtle variation on the character that would make her a legend in 1991's Thelma and Louise, Sarandon is magnetic as Nora, hiding her loss and disappointment behind obvious brassiness. Spader suffers in comparison, his lack of emotion and nuance attempting to pass as a trait of a young, naive and hurting character, but is much more likely due to limited acting ability.

A colourful secondary cast is somewhat underused, as director Luis Mandoki keeps the focus tight on Max and Nora. Kathy Bates is Max's Mom, and we mostly just hear her voice on his answering machine. Eileen Brennan is Nora's clairvoyant sister, and basically gets two scenes. Jason Alexander, before becoming famous as George in television's Seinfeld, is the most prominent of Max's friends.

St. Louis is a refreshing change from typical movie locations, and Mandoki resists the urge to overplay the city's tourist destinations.

White Palace does not overreach, and delivers on its premise: sometimes the challenges in a relationship are not the obvious and visible disparities, but the hidden and unspoken truths.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Maiden Heist (2009)

Three security guards at a New York City art gallery are infatuated with the pieces that they are entrusted to protect. Roger (Christopher Walken), nearing retirement, is mesmerized by The Lonely Maiden, a French painting of a melancholy woman on the beach. Charles (Morgan Freeman), old and lonely, is equally enthralled by the painting of a woman with cats. George, a strung-out former Marine proud of his involvement in the Grenada invasion, is obsessed with a bronze statue of a naked warrior -- so much so that George strips naked and mimics the statue's pose when he thinks no one is watching.

When the gallery decides to ship all three pieces to Copenhagen as part of a revamping of the collection, the three men decide to steal the artwork, keeping their favourites for their own enjoyment and shipping fakes to Denmark. Not much goes according to plan, and most of what goes wrong is thanks to unwitting interference by Roger's wife Rose (Marcia Gay Harden), who just wants Roger to take her on a Florida vacation.

The Maiden Heist has the definite feel of a small movie pulled together by three veteran actors and one veteran actress, coming together to create an amiable film almost for their own enjoyment. Director Peter Hewitt, whose other credits are lightweight titles like Garfield (2004), stays far out of the way and allows his stars to have fun. Freeman and Walken emphasize the understated elegance of wisdom, Macy and Harden emphasize the overacting, and the quartet manage to create a reasonable balance.

The Maiden Heist clocks in at exactly 90 minutes including the credits, and while the brisk length has its advantages in terms of pacing, it also means that all the characters are drawn with the broadest of brush strokes.

The catchy music score by Rupert Gregson-Williams has a definite French film tinge to it, playing off the heritage of The Lonely Maiden and Roger's obsession with French art.

The Maiden Heist is enjoyable for the work of Freeman and Walken, two old heads capable of enriching a simple story with entertaining layers of satisfying charm.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Away We Go (2009)

A movie with its heart in the right place, Away We Go is operating with material so thin it ultimately floats away in the sweet breeze, barely noticeable among all the other happy bugs and crisp leaves.

Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski) are a couple in their early thirties, still relatively unsettled and not established in any city or clear careers. They discover that Maya is pregnant, and six months into the pregnancy, Burt's quirky parents, the only family nearby, announce that they are leaving town to resettle in Belgium. With nothing tying Verona and Burt down, they decide to visit various friends and family members across the US, in the hope of finding a place to call home.

They visit Verona's flaky old boss (Allison Janney) in Phoenix; Verona's unmarried sister (Carmen Ejogo) in Tucson; Burt's highly irritating college friend (Maggie Gyllenhaal), now a married and condescendingly perfect mother, in Madison; other college friends (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey) with many adopted kids in Montreal; and Burt's married but just-dumped brother (Paul Schneider) in Miami. None of these locales or people resonate with Verona and Burt, but the visits bring them closer to each other and eventually Verona reveals a sad piece of family history, through which they discover where they belong.

A road trip movie with not much of a road and an undefined destination, the only thing Away We Go has going for it is a relatively convincing strong central relationship between Burt and a very pregnant Verona, with Maya Randolph and John Krasinski appearing pleasingly effortless in portraying a deep and sturdy love.

Otherwise, the script by David Eggers and Vandela Vida provides little for director Sam Mendes to work with. The humour is either fake or forced, the secondary characters are conventional visitors from other movies, and the attempts at pathos with the whole seemingly hastily appended story of Verona's parents smacks of desperation.

Away We Go departs quickly, its light weight leaving barely any impression.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Incendies (2010)

A dramatic story of the agony that lies behind the lives of immigrants, Incendies reveals the suffering that usually simmers within those who survive the brutality of war and begin another life in a new country.

Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), a Canadian immigrant from a war torn Arab country (Lebanon, although it is not named), dies in Montreal. Her notary and long-time employer Jean Lebel (Remy Girard) unveils Nawal's will to her twin children Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), who are in their 20s. Nawal's will reveals life-changing news: Jeanne and Simon have a brother and a father, both of whom they have never met. Nawal entrusts Jeanne to find and deliver a sealed letter to the father; and similarly requests that Simon deliver another sealed letter to their brother.

Simon is not interested, leaving Jeanne alone to undertake a journey to Lebanon, where she re-traces her mother's steps from 35 years ago. Nawal, as a young woman living in a mountain village, had an illicit affair, which brought shame to her family and resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son. But that was only the beginning of her doomed journey, which finds her getting deeply embroiled in the sectarian violence of the vicious Lebanese civil war.

As Jeanne uncovers her mother's history, she learns more than she had ever bargained for, and the revelations finally prompt Simon and Lebel to join Jeanne in Lebanon. The twins assemble all the pieces of their mother's devastating past, including the identity and history of their father and brother. Nawal's trail unexpectedly leads them back to Montreal for a final confrontation with the ghosts of war.

Lubna Azabal as Nawal and Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin as her daughter Jeanne are the spiritual centre of Incendies, forming a mother - daughter continuum across two generations. Azabal portrays Nawal as headstrong and rebellious; the stubbornness in the face of adversity persists with Desormeaux-Poulin, but she also gives Jeanne the softer, rounder edges that a Canadian upbringing provides.

Director Denis Villenueve, who also co-wrote the script, allows the people, places and events to infuse the story with enormous power. Rather than staged set-pieces, Incendies draws it's strength from the overwhelming drama of a tumultuous history revealing itself gradually but with excruciating pain. Like a band-aid being slowly removed, once the process starts it cannot be reversed, and the agony just gets worse.

Villenueve captures the horror of the Lebanese civil war in broad strokes. The locations, details and dates are not meant to mimic history, but the sum of what Incendies presents perfectly grasps the essence of a de-humanizing dirty little conflict filled with ethnic and religious strife, extreme violence and mass reprisals. That the Lebanese people have never faced up to their past in a truth and reconciliation process is the hidden message of Incendies -- failure to confront history means that the present will never escape the long shadow of the past, and the future just wobbles on rotten foundations.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.