Movie Reviews – October 2008

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

Shine a Light

This is the third Martin Scorcese “rockumentory” we’ve seen. It’s about a Rolling Stones concert in New York City. Except for some flashbacks to their early career the whole movie centers around this one concert. It is filmed beautifully and has quite a few of their songs, played in their entirety. For me, the most fun was the old stuff. I didn’t recognise many of the newer tunes. An old clip features a smoothe-faced, baby Mick Jagger saying he thought they had at least another year left in their careers. Another later clip shows him saying he thought he would still be doing this when he is 60. How true. He’s already 65. The best thing about the movie is Jagger prancing around the stage which he does from beginning to end. How he does it, I don’t know. Even back in about 1978 Dick Cavett comments he must lose about 10 pounds every show and here it is 30 years later. We also saw Scorcese films about the Band and Bob Dylan. Not that this one is bad, but I thought the others were better. They were more biographies with musical footage as a part of it. This was basically just one concert with some bio stuff thrown in to make it more interesting. This was released in IMAX format and we almost drove down to Davenport to see it on the giant screen.
Netflix – 3 stars

There Will Be Blood

Daniel Plainview is a silver miner who has a small strike. While stepping up his operation, he inadvertently strikes oil and that changes the course of his life. After achieving a certain amount of success he is visited by a boy who tells him there is oil on the family farm and gives him the location of the farm for $500. When Plainview arrives he bargains for the lease rights. The rest of the movie is about that well and the problems of making even bigger profits by building a pipeline. A lot of time is spent on the interactions of the main characters. The focus of the film, Plainview, is thoroughly unlikable. I think Daniel Day Lewis got the Oscar for this part because they didn’t give it to him for the better performance portraying Bill Cutting in Gangs of New York. The movie is muddled, boring, and progresses at a snail’s pace. Even cutting an hour out of it would make it still too long.
Netflix – 2 stars

Gangs of New York

When we ordered There Will Be Blood it made me remember this movie so I put it in my queue too. The movie tells the story of Amsterdam, the son of “Priest” Vallon, head of the Dead Rabbits gang. The opening is set in the slums of New York City in 1846. The priest is killed by Bill “The Butcher” Cutting, played by Daniel Day Lewis. The son is sent away to reform school. He’s released in 1862, just as the US is about to conduct its first military draft. Bill’s gang has pretty taken over and has allied itself with Boss Tweed. Amsterdam, now a man and unrecognised, joins Bill’s gang and quickly rises to the top. He hopes to kill Bill one day to avenge his father. After he is betrayed and wounded by Bill, he re-establishes the outlawed Dead Rabbits and the stage is set for a show down. During the gang battle, riots have broken out and the navy starts shelling New York City to break them up. Who ever heard of that in history class? Everything about this movie was so superior to There Will Be Blood you can hardly compare them.
Netflix – 4 stars

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

We like to take our granddaughter Rachel to the movies and this was our current choice. Chloe, a pampered white Chihuahua owned by a Beverly Hills celebrity gets left in the charge of the celebrity’s niece. The niece isn’t happy about it and when she gets invited to go to Puerto Villarta with her friends, she jumps at the chance. She packs Chloe into a carrying bag and heads off for sunny Mexico. In the evening when the girls are out partying, Chloe follows and promptly gets dog napped. She is sent off to Mexico City where she is destined to be torn apart in a dogfight. Her would-be killer is El Diablo. A well-meaning German Shepherd comes to her rescue and sets all the captive dogs free. He sticks by Chloe and agrees to try and help her get home. The niece, the sexy landscape architect, and his dog, a Chihuahua named Poppy are in hot pursuit. So is the villain helped by El Diablo. Most of the rest of the movie is the adventure of how Chloe gets home. Chloe runs into a con man who steals her diamond collar. In some of the best computer animation that I have ever seen, the con man, a rat voiced by Cheech Marin and his sidekick a colorful iguana, dog their steps too. In the end everything resolves itself happily, surprise, surprise. The first part of the movie was pretty slow especially for a kids feature. But the pace picked up towards the end.
Theater – 3 stars

Son of Rambow

A religious mother forbids her school age son to watch TV or movies so he gets to cool his heels in the school hallway while the class watches an instructional video. While there, he is confronted and intimidated by the school bully and forced into helping the bully with a video he is making. The religious boy agrees to star as the son of Rambo and as the project progresses, more and more people are drawn into it, among which is a pompous French exchange student who fancies himself as God’s gift to schoolgirls. The whole thing finally gets out of hand and ends up with our hero and the bully being injured. This was not that good a movie. It only had slightly better production values than the actors’ own production. I can usually tell if a movie is bad by checking the number of times I look at the counter to see how soon it is going to be over.
Netflix – 2 stars

Body of Lies

This is a middle eastern spy yarn. An undercover CIA operative is involved in various operations in Iraq, but gets reassigned to Amman, Jordan. They become aware of a safe house. He replaces the current bureau chief who seems obstructive to progress and becomes friends with his Jordanian counterpart. Someone jeopardizes the surveilance and during a chase of one of the suspects, our hero gets bitten by some dogs. He goes to the clinic where he meets and is attracted to an Iranian nurse who he keeps trying to befriend for the rest of the movie. All through the movie they are in pursuit of a terrorist mastermind whose signature is not taking credit for his bombings. There are various plans to get him. They are all more or less compromised by the agent’s Washington boss. In the end the nurse gets abducted and the agent offers himself in a trade. There is a lot of excitement at the end. There is a lot of graphic violence and cruelty in this show, be advised. In these spy movies you never know who will die and who will survive. I’ll leave you to see it to find out. This is a very high 3, possibly sliding up to a 4.
Netflix – 3 stars

Archangel

I put this on my list several months ago. By the time it arrived this week, I noticed it was broadcast on TV the next night. A scholar of Stalin-era Russia is in Moscow giving a lecture when an old man tells him he knows nothing about Stalin. He says he was one of Stalin’s military guards and when Stalin was on his death bed, Security chief Beria said they had to find a key. The soldier retrieves it from Stalin’s pocket. It opens a safe that holds a secret notebook. Beria and the soldier go to Beria’s estate and bury the notebook in an old tool box. In weeks Beria is dead and the notebook is forgotten. When the scholar leaves the room for a minute, the old soldier dissappears. From clues in their conversation the scholar tracks down the soldier’s daughter and then the soldier. He arrives at his apartment only to find him murdered. Together, he and the girl discover the notebook in the soldier’s remote storage shed. What’s in the notebook starts a chase that takes them to the remote city of Archangel. All the time they are being pursued by the police, a journalist, spies, and God knows who else, but people are dropping around them like flies. The riddle is solved at a snowy wooded dacha, but there is one more scene to be played out.
Netflix – 3 stars