The Lie (2011)

A former free-spirit is having the spirit slowly crushed out of him by his tedious job with a horrible boss and his wife’s surprise decision to take a corporate job. In order to get a day to decompress, he tells his boss he can’t come in because his infant daughter is sick. When he wants even more time off, he escalates his excuse - without considering the consequences - to the lie that his daughter has died.

It’s a little too low-key and took a while to get going, but I ended up being on-board with both the message and the movie. I don’t think all corporate gigs are evil or anything, but I do believe that we’re happiest when we’re honest about our needs. I especially liked the denouement.

B

The Trespasser (1930)

Melodramatic to the max... secretary marries a rich boy, whose father wants to have it immediately annulled under the pretense that this way they'll have the chance to do the whole courtship thing right. Pride prevents the woman from staying when the rich boy sees his dad’s point but, wouldn’tcha know it, he knocked her up during that one night of marriage.  When the boy's three or so, the woman's involved in a scandal when her married boss leaves a chunk of cash to her in his will.  She calls on her former husband and, once again, his father sees an angle to work.

The story is kind of convoluted and too messy to ever be neatened up in real life, but they manage it anyway.

C+

Uncertainty (2009)

I don't know what the heck is up with this movie.

A couple flips a coin on a bridge, then run off in opposite directions and into two different realities for the same day -- both of which feature the couple. No explanation is ever given for this, although it seemed that they were discussing whether today was the day to do whatever this coin flip thing was about.  I might have been able to gloss over the weird beginning if either of the story lines were in the least bit compelling, but even though one reality concerns a found cell phone of blackmail and DEATH, somehow they weren't.

D-

Better Luck Tomorrow (2003)

Over-achieving Asian-American high school kids run a harmless gang that pulls small “scams” for cash, eventually escalating into drugs and bigger crimes, seemingly out of boredom. I liked it, for the most part. It felt like it was made on a micro-budget, which I think only added to its appeal.

B-

Tiny Furniture (2010)

I went from being annoyed with to kind of loving this movie, mostly on the strength of Dunham’s performance.  It took me a while to get on her character's wavelength -- I thought that she was just spoiled and lazy, but I eventually categorized her as unsure of who she is and where she fits (if anywhere).  Maybe it just played to my innate vanity as I recognized her as who I might have been if 1) I lived in an anonymous city and 2) I hadn't found Gary so young.

B+

I Love You Again (1940)

Very tame Loy & Powell romantic comedy.  It's supposed to be wacky, but it doesn't quite hit it -- instead we get some gentle silliness that made the proceedings feel as though they were lacking a planned laugh track.

I'm not sure why they’d bother with this when Powell & Loy were going strong in the pretty great Thin Man series.

C

Hawaii (1966)

Missionaries in the early 1800s head out to the wild islands of Hawaii. Once there, the humorless Rev. Hale shames the locals out of their marriage customs and scares them with hellfire. His only redeeming feature is that he arrived with his wife, played by the lovely Julie Andrews.

The movie does a great job of highlighting the beauty of the land and the rigidity of colonialism, but says it with about as much finesse as an old-fashioned sermon and takes about four times as long as one.

C-

Skyfall (2012)

A superb “James Bond” movie...and pretty decent movie-movie.

There are some truly fantastic sequences: fight on top of a train, a subway crashing down through its floor, an underwater/under-ice struggle, and a gorgeous title sequence. It did go on a tad long, but it's one of the better Bonds of the modern era.

B

Jindabyne (2007)

Guys on a fishing trip find a dead girl in the water, but wait a couple of days to report it so that they don’t have to cut their vacation short. There’s plenty of fallout from this act, both in the community and within their own families.

There’re a few things in this film that I simply didn’t get, a cultural undercurrent of Australian race relations that wasn’t fully explained, I think. The body wasn’t white and that became a thing -- there was something about the dead not being dead and an interrupted journey... I don’t know. In a pre-movie notice, there was a warning that said something about “for those in xx communities, there are images of deceased and they are named,” and during the movie a newscaster similarly warned before she uttered the name of the slain girl. I have no idea what’s going on there, but it would’ve been nice to have it explained for us ‘murcans.

As a whole, it felt rather disjointed. There were a lot of threads to this story and precious few of them were happy ones.

B-

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Nerdy girl and hot girl are BFFs, but one night the hot girl goes off with a smarmy indie band in their van and comes back evil. Well, eviler.

This is not a new riff on the teen horror movie, it’s just the same old stuff Diablo Codyfied. The science teacher has a hook hand for no apparent reason and there are a bunch of made-up words that we’re supposed to giggle at for their pop-culture cleverness. Yawn.

D

Robinson Crusoe (1954)

The progression of this movie is stiff → interesting → bizarre

Crusoe finds himself on a deserted island, the only survivor of a shipwreck. He’s able to rescue some supplies from the ship before it goes down for good, so he’s got oil and guns and grain and a Bible. He also winds up with the ship’s cat and dog (were dogs common on ships?). Although he was a privileged/useless guy when he arrived, over the next 18 years or so he gets it together as a survivalist.

Once Crusoe acquires a servant by rescuing him from his cannibal brethren, things get downright weird. He names the dark-skinned man “Friday” (after the day he found him...though we earlier heard him say he’d lost track of days when sick, so “whenever” might have been better) and tells Friday to call him “master.”

All in all, it's not bad, but our hero is so unlikable that it was pretty hard to root for him.

C+

North Face (2010)

Though climbers are forbidden from going up the north face of the Eiger due to the unpredictable weather and near impossibility of the task, it’s an open secret that the first ones to accomplish the ascent will be hailed as heroes. A Berlin newspaper learns that one of its junior employees was childhood friends with a German climbing team and decides to send her out to see if she can convince them to attempt the climb.

The first half is interesting and somehow sweet as we watch the team bicker about whether or not to climb, the junior employee (a female) rekindles an apparent romance with one of the climbers, and one of the assignment editors pares the drama of the climb down to its gauche readability (success or tragedy -- anything in between is boring). But the last half dragged on and on. They get in trouble, they try to climb down, and then there’s a lot of yelling over winds and waiting. It also suffered from a bit of Perfect Storm syndrome. Yes, it’s based on a true story...but without an eyewitness, many of the events are a good guess at best.

C

Mother and Child (2010)

First of all, the casting was extraordinary.  Just look at this girl they found to play a younger version of Annette Bening's character.  I was halfway surprised, when I checked out IMDb, that the two don't seem to be related.

Second, this is a truly moving film.  Karen (Bening) gives birth at age 14 and must immediately give her daughter up for adoption.  Karen has turned into a brittle, lonely woman living with her own mother. Meanwhile, her daughter is now about 37 and is also alone, but by apparent choice -- choosing to manipulate and use men rather than to actually choose one long term.  There's a third storyline about a couple trying to adopt a child and moving forward with a pregnant teenager who's got issues of her own.

Mother and Child was, perhaps, a little too "neat" when all was said and done, but the getting there was anything but.  This is a quality movie with some amazing acting and really worth a watch.

B+

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

There are two big problems with Safety Not Guaranteed:

1. Aubrey Plaza.  I think her schtick would probably come off alright if I didn't know it was her all-the-time schtick.  She's basically doing April from Parks & Rec and I found it incredibly distracting and almost lazy.
2. The very last image.  The final scene was beautiful -- the whole "she's taking a leap to show him she believes in him!" and the "won't it be cool if it works?" wonderment of the moment were great.  But moving from hope to a black & white answer hurt the story.  Or at least the answer they went with hurt the story.  I take it back...I think that regardless of which answer they chose, telling us for certain doesn't work.  Better to leave the resolution to our imaginations and hopes than to give an absolute that could never have a prayer of being satisfying.

I know it sounds like, at most, I'd give the movie a big ol' "meh," but that's not the case.  I fell under its spell.  I even liked the secondary story line of the journalist reconnecting with an old girlfriend.  There was something special here, which is probably why I'm so annoyed at the bits that worked against the magic.

A-

Goon (2012)

I don't like hockey at all, but I definitely liked this movie.

Seann William Scott transformed his body into that of a brute for his role as dumb muscle for an underdog team.  He was just about as charming as a guy with swollen knuckles and a split lip can get.  I bought that his innocent enthusiasm could inspire an entire team to care.

B