Holiday Movies: Blood, Gore, Charm, Yawns
Sunday Morning movie reviewer David Edelstein takes a look at the big films that the industry is rolling out this season. Some are shocking. Some are sweet. Some just don't live up to the hype.
I'd love to send you to movies this season that spread good cheer, but here's the rub: In December, the studios bring out their prestige pictures, which are always super-serious. Also, even Hollywood this year is beginning to reflect Americans' anxiety about our place in the world. Homelessness, infertility, fascism, genocide — and that's the comedies. No, not really: I was making a funny. 'Cause there's not much else to laugh at.
Two amazingly brutal studio movies, "Blood Diamond" and "Apocalypto," opened Friday, both beginning with the savaging of tribal villages.
"Apocalypto," demonstrates two things: that Mel Gibson is a hell of a filmmaker, and that his inner world borders on the Neanderthal. It unfolds in a pre-Christian Mexico, before the conquistadors came, and features our Mayan hero's buddies being turned into human sacrifices. Then it becomes the best "Rambo" movie ever. The worrisome part is Gibson doesn't think he's making a boneheaded action picture. For him, torture and vengeance are the way of the world — Gibsonian metaphysics.
Edward Zwick's "Blood Diamond" has a more liberal agenda. Leonard Di Caprio is terrific as a cynical smuggler in Sierra Leone who has his conscience awakened by the slaughter of innocents — and by Jennifer Connelly as an idealistic journalist.
And they'll know because the movie shows a hand getting whacked off by a machete, in close-up. If "Blood Diamond" racks up nominations, let's see how many girls at the Oscars act like diamonds are still their best friends.
My favorite December movie is a surprise: "The Pursuit of Happyness." It looks like a heartwarmer, but it's actually scary and relentless, an economic cliffhanger about a man, superbly played by Will Smith, trying desperately to grab hold of a career as a stockbroker while sliding with his young son into homelessness. So you have the American dream and the American nightmare with nothing in between: stuff that in your stocking.
The most excitement is around "Dreamgirls," with Beyoncé, Jamie Foxx and Eddie Murphy in a serious comeback role — a musical inspired by Motown and the long-delayed breakthrough of African-Americans into American popular culture. I know I'm going to bring down the room but I thought it was just okay. The music is second-rate and in some cases like light FM sludge, and the dancing is all chopped up. But there's a nuclear debut by Jennifer Hudson as the girl-group vocalist passed over. Hudson has pipes so great she just smokes those high notes.
Let's pass quickly over Steven Soderbergh's "The Good German," an ambitious miss, set in post-war Berlin that tries to be the anti-"Casablanca," in the style of "Casablanca." Soderbergh wants to build tension between the '40s-movie romanticism and the harsh reality of what everyone did to survive; but the style keeps you at arm's length from the characters. It's beautiful, high-minded, and remote.
The Mexican directors — and close friends — Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo Del Toro turn out two shatteringly violent films about fascism. Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" weaves fairy-tale imagery through the period tale of a girl at the mercy of a sadistic military stepfather. Cuaron's "Children of Men," with Clive Owen and Julianne Moore, is set in England in a future where refugees are rounded up and women have become inexplicably sterile. This must be the most ferociously depressing one-two punch in movie history.
You want uplift? Old Sylvester Stallone tries to prove he's still vital by making a movie about old Rocky trying to prove he's still vital. "Rocky Balboa" is one cornball go-for-it cliché piled on top of another, but here's the thing: If you close your eyes and try to halve your IQ — aim for something between a baboon and a lemur — you'll have a great time.
Also on the docket, there's a live-action retelling of E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web;" and a strange and half-successful mix of pathos and zaniness called "We Are Marshall," with a very eccentric Matthew McConaughey as a new coach trying to boost a school's morale after its football team is killed in a plane crash. It's based on a true story, alas.
Finally, there's "Letters from Fwo Jima," Clint Eastwood's bloody companion piece to his wrenching "Flags of Our Fathers," which tells the Iwo Jima story from the Japanese perspective. I can't show you clips because the studio doesn't have them: They rushed the movie out to improve the chances of "Flags" for awards. And because, you know, they were worried we were getting too complacent with all those cheerful popcorn movies.
