Brian's Thoughts on Movies

Skyfall teaser The teaser for the James Bond film Skyfall was released this week and I have a few thoughts about it.  First of all, as anyone who knows me is well aware, I am an enormous Bond fan and have especially liked the character based approach the films have taken since Daniel Craig first played the part in 2006. Bond is such a rich character that when the films focus more on his story than on plans to conquer the world the audience experience is more profound.  Skyfall was delayed for about a year due to MGM’s bankruptcy issues and the extra time seems to have given the principals time to polish the script, in much the way the four year wait between Die Another Day and Casino Royale benefited the latter. In 2009 the seventh season of 24 debuted a year late due to the writer’s strike of late 2007-2008 and the result was one of the best seasons ever. As a true Bond fan I value quality over quantity and I would far rather see a superb Bond film every four years, a...

Blackthorn One of my favorite films is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The film to me is nearly flawless, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford perfect in the first real buddy picture, a film that starts out light and funny and gradually grows darker as reality catches up with these two characters, based on the real life outlaws of the early 20th century. At the end of the film (Spoiler Alert-skip the rest of the paragraph if you haven’t seen it) the two, who have been hiding in South America for eight years, are surrounded by Bolivian Army and charge them, (the screen freezes mid charge but the shots are heard implicating they were shot down. This was a dramatization of the true event, which was a shootout in 1908 in a house but included no charge. Blackthorn assumes that Butch somehow survived that shootout due to a case of mistaken identity, and in 1927 is in his sixties living under the name “James Blackthorn” raising horses in another part of Bolivia. Sam Shepard plays Ca...

Crazy Heart (2009) Crazy Heart is a very moving character study, even though repeat viewings have revealed some flaws in the final act. The lead performances are stellar. Jeff Bridges so completely inhabits Bad Blake, an over the hill country music singer from Texas whose best days are far behind him, it feels like Bridges has been playing Blake his whole career. He often wears a cowboy hat, like a lot of Texans from that generation and Bridges relates the character’s backstory as a weathered man without sentimentality.  Bad Blake is the kind of guy anyone would love to hang out with but for much of the film you would not want to attach yourself to him too much or you will be hurt. The beauty of the film is that the viewer sees the cyclical nature of how much Blake has lost with his drinking and how he unsuccessfully hides from his pain by going to the bottle. The film clearly establishes how talented Blake is. He loves country music and writes appealing and occasionally soulful...

Inglourious Basterds-spoilers included Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is one of the most fun films I’ve ever seen and my vote for best film of 2009. As soon as it was over I could not wait to see it again, which is not something I often feel after spending two and a half hours in the cinema. Tarantino may have topped himself with the daring innovation of this film and I hope we do not have to wait five or six years until his next film. One of the unique features of the film is that it is not to be taken very seriously. It is a fantasy version of events. Specifically, what if the Jews had the opportunity to kill Hitler and all of his closest advisors? I have yet to hear someone complain about the fantasy version of history. People accept Tarantino’s fantasy as being what it is and are having a great time going along for the ride. For more than 10 years I read that Tarantino was working on a WWII film about a group of guys on a mission a la Guns of Navarone. I saw ...

A warning, the content below does contain spoilers. I saw the film Hurt Locker last night, one I had been hoping to get to for awhile. I remember first reading something about it when it was released back in the summer of 09 and thinking it would be an interesting film. The pedigree of Kathryn Bigelow, a very bold director who did a film I really liked called K-19, and the story focusing on an elite bomb squad during the last six weeks of their tour in Iraq was plenty to attract me. It received such a small release I decided to wait until DVD. Now I have finally gotten to it. For starters, let me say I have never been in combat nor would I likely have much to offer if I were in it. That being said, from a cinematic sense, if Platoon is the definitive film on the Vietnam War from the soldier's perspective, Hurt Locker will likely receive a similar distinction on the Iraq War. Many of the real threats in this war come from the bombs that outnumbered insurgents leave out, th...

I saw Up in the Air and was pretty impressed with it.  It had a similarity to director Jason Reitman’s Juno in that it a looks at an issue through the eyes of a fairly normal person during a period in his life that holds some extra drama which causes him to reevaluate some parts of it.  However (minor spoiler alert) his life does not change dramatically throughout the film, though his perspective does. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a road warrior who flies to different cities around the country doing the incredibly unenviable job of firing people.  He handles it as well as can be by having genuine empathy for the people and giving them as positive a perspective on it as possible.  Reitman makes these scenes, which I feared would be very uncomfortable to watch, bearable because of the humanity, yet directness that Clooney brings to it.  He loves his job, nonetheless, in large part because it keeps him on the road.  He has a high frequent flier stat...

For my first blog entry I have chosen the film Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron, the auteur behind Pirana 2, not to mention Terminators 1 and 2, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic .  For years I have heard about him planning a big sci-fi film about an interaction between aliens and humans on their planet.  But it seemed he was biding his time as Titanic came out 12 years ago.  In the meantime I saw his documentary Ghosts of the Abyss (and wondered, after making Titanic why he felt he had to do more on the subject?) and hoped at one time he would return to direct a feature again.  Cameron is known for being an egomaniac and a tyrant on the set, mostly due to his perfectionism.  Cameron's last four features have all been the most expensive films ever made at the time.  But his films deliver usually by having a fair amount of creative spectacle and suspense with well drawn characters, especially female ones.  His characters always have to strive ...