Author results: Mel Campbell
Brothers
"Sounds Biblical," was my initial summary of this domestic melodrama. Kinda - its characters are more like figures in a parable than individual human beings. But Jim Sheridan's powerful, intimate remake of the 2004 Danish original offers little salvation. Bleak, uncertain, Brothers is a fable that's lost its moral.
The Men Who Stare At Goats
This shaggy comedy is very loosely based on an incredible true story: the US Army's secret elite squad of Jedi-like psychic warriors. It's pretty much an excuse for Oscar-nominated actors to clown about like doofuses. Actually, I've always preferred George Clooney's wild-eyed slapstick (Burn After Reading, O Brother Where Art Thou?) to his suave or serious roles.
A Single Man
Fashion designer Tom Ford's directorial debut is high modernism at its most mannered and hallucinatory. Perhaps Ford means to express the increasingly unreal quality of life for a man who's decided to die. But secretly, I think he's just wallowing in aesthetics. That scene with the topless tennis players is a bit much.
The Hurt Locker
Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) is the kind of maverick that war movies so often ask us to admire: fearless, resourceful, wisecracking and soft-hearted with kids. But screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow slowly reveal the devastating truth: James is totally fucked in the head... and he likes it that way.
Crazy Heart
Crazy Heart feels a little like The Big Lebowski meets The Wrestler. Like Darren Aronofsky's film, it quietly, impressionistically follows a broken-down former star: country singer-songwriter Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges). Alcoholic and estranged from his family, he's scraping a living touring dismal dives, ducking out mid-song for a spew.
The Wolfman
This year, Valentine's Day falls on a new moon. But you'd still better watch out for the signs you may be dating a werewolf. Has your Valentine ever been into ripping villagers to shreds? Does he or she do a really good Chewbacca impression? If you look up a book called Lycanthropy and flip to chapter two, "Ancient Gypsy Lore", do you see a woodcut of your Valentine with a furry head and no pants?
The Wolfman is Universal's homage to its own classic 1941 monster flick.
Precious
Watching Precious is emotionally gruelling. This isn't a date movie or a Friday-night escapist flick. But it does that rare thing: introducing a character whose journey is hard but whose victories are small. Director Lee Daniels finds a compelling poetry in hyperrealistic close-ups, jump-cuts and R&B musical montages, although I was unimpressed by the heavy-handed fantasy sequences.
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