Review: Catfish

Review: Catfish

Rating: ****

Nonna's Rating: $$$$

Rotten Tomatoes: 78%

Audience: 65%

Every once in a great while, a film pushes the current boundaries of the medium. Think Brazil and 12 Monkeys and The Big Lebowski and Kill Bill and Fight Club and Moulin Rouge. Catfish pushes those boundaries hard and couples itself to social media and virtual lives in a way that makes us sit back and say, "Where the hell are we headed?"

The movie is a documentary (maybe, probably not, but it doesn't matter) about Nev Schulman, a charming, engaging, naive young man who has fallen in love online with Megan, the sister of Abby, an 8-year-old girl who has asked Nev for permission to paint one of his photographs. Nev, in fact, falls in love with Megan's whole family.

He, his brother Ariel, and another friend, Henry, travel to the UP to meet Megan and her relatives. And now, like every other critic, I will refrain from going any further lest I spoil the story for you.

Suffice it to say that this movie will probably make you uncomfortable, but you won't want to stop watching it for a minute.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it

Review: Secretariat

Review: Secretariat

Rating: ***

Nonna's Rating: $$

Rotten Tomatoes: 67%

Audience: 78%

I've resisted going to see this movie for about a month. I could only imagine how horribly it would be Disneymogrified. (Never forget Hunchback of Notre Dame.) But I was pleasantly surprised. It is, first and foremost, a great story. (I'm a sucker for horse movies.) And even though I have a vivid memory of watching the jaw-dropping Belmont Stakes in 1973 on TV, the depiction of the race still sent chills running down my spine.

My only criticism is that Diane Lane is just a bit short of being the steel magnolia I would expect in Penny Chenery. Still, her performance is more than adequate. John Malkovich has been accused by some critics of overplaying the part of Lucien Laurin, Secretariat's trainer. Au contraire, he's truly "a character"; he only needs a few lessons in pronouncing French. My one quibble with the film is that the "Where are they now?" blurbs at the end of the movie were a bit Disneyfied in that, children that we are, we're not told that Chenery and her husband John Tweedy divorced in 1973, the year Secretariat won the Triple Crown. Even though I did not know this fact when I was watching the film, the conflict in the marriage was obvious in the movie. We're adults. We would have survived a bittersweet ending.

Note: The picture above is of the real "Big Red," not the very fine horse who played him in the film. Can't find his credit. Now, he deserves a best supporting actor nod!

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it

Review: RED

Review: RED

Rating: *

Nonna's Rating: $ (Maybe)

Rotten Tomatoes: 71%

Audience: 78%

Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Mary Louise Parker, John Malkovich, and, wait for it, Helen Mirren. Hard to imagine a cast more promising. And they do their best, but good actors aren't good unless they have a good script -- and that is sadly absent in this film. All that acting talent is wasted. And the action of this "action-sort of-comedy" can't save us from the boring stretches of inane dialog that come between firefights. I'm not wasting any more time on this one.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it

Review: Nowhere Boy

Review: Nowhere Boy

Rating: ***

Nonna's Rating: $$

Rotten Tomatoes: 82%

Audience: 70%

I admit I was predisposed to love this movie. It is, after all, about John Lennon. But then, my expectations were high too. I wasn't disappointed. The film focuses on Lennon's late teenage years: between being the bad boy 15-year-old at school and his sojourn with Paul and George to Hamburg from 1960-62. They are, needless to say, formative years -- years complicated by Lennon's discovery that his birth mother lived close to him and that she was alternately a free spirit and a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Lennon's adolescence is, in a word, troubled. He is recalcitrant, obnoxious, ungrateful, and arrogant. He is is also painfully insecure, desperate for his mother's love, and delightfully witty. The film does not present us with a teenage Beatle; instead it gives us glimpses and hints of the brilliant, creative man he would become. Kristin Scott-Thomas delivers a convincing performance as Lennon's Aunt/Mother Mimi, and Aaron Johnson as Lennon grows into the man Lennon would become in a subtle performance. Thomas Sangster (Liam Neeson's young blonde son in Love Actually) joins the film near the end as 15-year-old Paul McCartney. In contrast to Lennon, he projects solid confidence in his abiltities and self-assurance. I thought Paul could never have looked that young, but, at the end we see actual pictures from that time period and Sangster looks remarkably similar. Not a great movie, but definitely worth your time.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it

Review: Cairo Time

Review: Cairo Time

Rating: **1/2

Nonna's Rating: $$

Rotten Tomatoes Critics: 80%

Rotten Tomatoes Public: 58%

Cairo Time is a good movie. Not a great one. It misses the mark, seems a bit less than, but Patricia Clarkson's performance kept pulling me back into the film. As always, she is fascinating, delivering a subtle, complex performance.

Taking a cue from the film's title, I believe that Ruba Nadda, the director and writer, wanted to jolt our western sensibilities a bit, that she wanted to recreate the experience of suddenly being alone in a culture very different from our own. Clarkson's character, Juliette, has traveled to Cairo expecting to meet her husband, Mark, a U.N. official who works in refugee camps in Gaza. Developments in the camps prevent him from joining her for three weeks. Indeed, we come to understand that Mark's missing their rendezvous is typical of their relationship. The demands of his job are intense.

Nadda is successful at making us understand the experience of Juliette's anomie; it's somewhat frightening, but Juliette is more just a fish out of water than she is in any real danger. Her husband has asked his friend and former security officer, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), to keep an eye on Juliette. Their relationship unfolds ever so slowly. Too slowly. And that's the major problem with the movie. Nadda wants us to understand that time in Cairo is not western time, but, unfortunately, that translates into a slow-moving story.

Alexander Siddig could also have been better used. He's a fine

actor (Syriana and Deep Space Nine). His passivity and his

reticence are probably true to his character, but they don't

move the plot along very well.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it

Review: The Social Network

Review: The Social Network

Rating: ****

Nonna's Rating: $$$$

Rotten Tomatoes Critics: 97%

Rotten Tomatoes Public: 81%

Finally, a terrific movie for adults. It's Animal House for the second decade of the third millennium --Harvard-style with a boatload of entrepreneurship. All wrapped up in Aaron Sorkin's rapid-fire, deliriously delightful dialog. Who knew that transcripts of depositions could be the source of such material!

The Social Network tells the origin story of Facebook. It may or

may not be true, but that's not important because it approaches

the status of 21st century myth. It's truer than truth. Jesse

Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg, a wily young anti-Ulysses

bent on getting the girl and getting in the right final club. He

betrays everyone around him, tricking the tricksters, outsmarting

the Winklevi (twin brothers played by Armie Hammer, Jr.). He

falls prey to a modern Mephistopheles (Justin Timberlake as

Napster founder Sean Parker) and abandons his one friend

Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) who provided his moral

compass.

Lest I make this all sound too serious and too pretentious,

prepare to laugh. The scene in the office of Harvard's

president with the Winklevi, the President, and his

Assistant is nearly perfect. I felt as if I were listening to

the brilliant repartee of Howard Hawk's His Girl Friday.

Well, for once I don't end a review with "Go see this

classic movie instead: [fill in the blank with a great

movie]." No, go see this classic movie.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it

Review: The Town

Review: The Town

Rating: **1/2

Nonna's Rating: $$

Rotten Tomatoes Critics: 95%

Rotten Tomatoes Public: 89%

Here I go again, not liking a film that the critics love. Of course, now that Rotten Tomatoes is publishing how much the audience likes a film as well as the critics, I'm pretty far from that mark too.

So, forgive me. Yes, the film held my interest. Yes, Ben Affleck proved that he can act whenever he has a Boston accent. Yes, Jon Hamm was worth the price of admission. Yes, Jeremy Renner is one scary dude. But . . but . . . there are plot holes that accommodate trucks. Too much just didn't make sense.

Now, at my back I hear my brother, Tony, and my friend, Linda, telling me not to think so much, that this isn't the kind of movie I should over-analyze, that I should just sit back and go along with it all.

Well, I can't. But don't let me stop you from seeing the movie for yourself and delivering your own judgment. As you probably know, it's a bank robbery movie. Affleck (Doug MacRay) plays a man raised in the Charlestown area of Boston, an area which spawns and nurtures bank robbers, car thieves, and kidnappers. Doug's life becomes complicated when he decides to make his next robbery his last, and when he finds himself falling in love with a hostage from his last bank job who is unaware of who he is. Go see it and tell me what you think. Or rent Inside Man or The Bank Job, two really terrific bank robbery movies.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it

Review: The Concert

Review: The Concert

Rating: **

Nonna's Rating: $

Rotten Tomatoes: 58%

The Concert is the story of a former conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra, Andrey, who was fired during the Soviet regime for hiring Jewish and Roma musicians. All this occurred 30 years before the action of the film. In the post-Soviet Russia of the movie, he's the janitor of the Bolshoi. One day he intercepts a request from Paris inviting the orchestra to play there. Andrey decides to gather his former musicians and take them to Paris to give the concert. He also requests that Anne-Marie Jacquet, a stellar young musician whose star is on the rise, play a concerto with the orchestra.

Pulling this all together is easier said than done -- and that's exactly where my problem with this movie resides. There is an unevenness of tone in the film that is jarring. It is at times melodramatic, at times romantic, at times tragic, and at times like watching a Three Stooges short. The broad portrayal of hyper-emotional Russian stereotypes was distracting and unnecessary. Quite a few critics have noted that, as flawed as the film is, the emotionally satisfying ending makes up for all its sins. I wish I could agree. This movie just didn't work for me at all. I'm thinking about watching Ninotchka as an anecdote.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it