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Review: 'A History of Violence'

By Dan Vinson

"Tell me the truth... what are you?" Edie Stall asks husband Tom about midway through director David Cronenberg's latest, most-complete effort yet. The Stalls (Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello) live in the quiet town of Millbrook, Ind., where everyone waves and watches out for each other. They have two nice kids, Jack (Ashton Holmes) and Sarah (Heidi Hayes), and a tiny restaurant. But some bad men are coming.

In the opening scene, these twisted killers (Stephen McHattie and Greg Bryk) have already committed grisly murders somewhere west, and when they arrive at Stall's Diner, they demand more than coffee. A coffee pot is swung, a gun grabbed and unloaded many times - with laser precision. Tom Stall looks around with the other patrons and staff at his mess. Two men are dead, and he seems to scarcely know how. As if flies on the walls, news crews immediately descend to glom onto this new American Hero and anybody remotely connected to him.

After Tom returns home from the hospital (his foot got stabbed), the family wants to move on (especially humble Tom). But Jack obliterates a bully at school, and shiny black cars keep hovering at their house and diner. Eventually, more men come to harass and goad Tom. Fogarty (Ed Harris), a facially scarred man, keeps calling him Joey - loudly - insisting that he knows him from Philadelphia. They leave, but Tom's afraid they'll come back. And they do. On a shopping trip with Sarah, Edie tells Fogarty off, but not before he plants the seeds of doubt. Could her husband really be crazy Joey Cusack from Philly?

At home, things start unraveling. Fogarty and friends visit and threaten. Tom strikes Jack during an argument. Edie feels betrayed. Fogarty comes back again, this time holding Jack (who ran off after the argument), and Tom quickly kills Fogarty's henchman - with the help of his son. By this time, it's clear that his family (and the audience) suspects that he's Joey, but it's not clear precisely why he deceived them. Without spoiling too much, Tom does go to Philadelphia to stop more men from haunting his life - if he still has one. But if he makes it home again, what can he expect? The final scene, though wordless, reveals enough.

Also revealing is longtime Cronenberg cohort Peter Suschitzky's beautifully composed cinematography, replete with close-to-medium shots that favor emotions and unease over scenery. Howard Shore, the director's longtime composer (this is his 11th score) supplies themes both heroic and unsettling. Among the uniformly outstanding performances here: the fearless Mortensen and Bello, the perfectly menacing Harris, and William Hurt, whose scene is unforgettable.

"A History of Violence," based loosely on the graphic novel of the same name, hearkens back to many cinematic styles from westerns generally to film noir (especially "The Killers" and "Out of the Past") to psychosexual family madness (like "Straw Dogs") to more recent works examining American families and violence ("Road to Perdition," based on another graphic novel - does this mean something?).

Spreading like an infection, the violence here is swift, shocking and unusually gruesome, and a large part of the film, identity mystery aside, is about the reactions to and repercussions of this violence. Edie is at once repelled and allured, and so is, to some extent, Jack. Suddenly, David Cronenberg (a Canadian) has fashioned a powerful social critique looking down the barrel at America's own history of violence. CV

Review: 'The Thing About My Folks'

By Erin Randolph

The thing about "The Thing About My Folks," is that it's the equivalent of a Hallmark card. It can be a bit funny, a bit sentimental and, in the process, a bit trite.

Ben Kleinman (Paul Reiser) is a bit befuddled by his father, Sam Kleinman (Peter Falk). Sam grows wiry body hair in weird, sporadic places, is honest to a point, has a weird obsession with talcum powder and is constantly amused by his own, seemingly uncontrollable flatulence. And on top of all that, Sam and Ben never really got to know each other in the clichèd father-son way: they never went camping, they never went on a road trip, etc. Sam was always too busy with work, trying to provide for his family, to spend the time at home that was necessary to really get to know his wife and kids.

After 50 years of marriage, Sam's wife Muriel (Olympia Dukakis) has left him. He shows up at Ben's door unannounced, which is out of character. And while Ben's sisters attempt to round up their missing-in-action mother, he takes his father on a day trip upstate to look at a farmhouse. When their plans go awry, their day trip becomes more of a road trip, as the two embark on a journey that will teach them not only about themselves, but also about each other. They also finally get to do all the things fathers and sons are allegedly supposed to do: fishing, attending a baseball game, drinking, hustling pool and, um, line dancing.

A little over midway through "The Thing About My Folks," the overall feel turns from a humorous father-son ill communication-type film to more of an aww-shucks romp that's perhaps a little too wet with sentimentality. While Falk adds a great comedic punch to "The Thing About My Folks," it never really graduates from the clichèd generational-gap misunderstandings that have already played out in other films of this ilk. That said, it's still a film worth seeing for anyone who doesn't understand their parents' quirks - and isn't that all of us? CV

Review: 'Into The Blue'

By Lexi Feinberg

After filming "Blue Crush," with its stunning underwater cinematography and hot twentysomethings in skimpy bathing suits, John Stockwell decided to challenge himself with some deeper material. And with "Into the Blue"... Oh wait, he actually decided to use the exact same vehicle as "Crush," with yet another eye-candy buffet and a ton of empty cinematic calories. Sure the scenery is fine. But without a coherent plot or anything in the way of a script, "Into the Blue" would have been better as a silent movie.

"Blue" deals with a group of people in the Bahamas searching for underwater treasure. And while diving down deep, Jared Cole (Paul Walker) and his girlfriend Sam (Jessica Alba) make a startling discovery - a centuries-old Zephyr ship, loaded with ancient jewels. There's just one catch. Next to the ship is a crashed plane, stuffed to its gills with more cocaine than a Kate Moss photo shoot. So the duo decides to pursue the new American Dream: looting money instead of earning it - and trying to steal the drugs to finance their quest to collect goods from the sunken ship.

Complicated? You bet, especially when the caper is in the hands of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit gang. And like that particular issue, "Blue" is nothing but a big tease. There could be something juicy there, but anything good is covered up with ignorant dialogue (Walker manages to say the word "gnarly" without so much as a grin) and a call for the suspension of disbelief (a number of the skin-diving scenes, i.e. no tanks, last up to a half an hour). Then again, when you're this good looking, who needs air?

In the end, Stockwell and "Blue" are all wet. Sure there is a nice action sequence and a shark attack, but no sex, all leading to a campy underwater fiasco - a leftover summer movie that sat on the shelves, and out in the sun, for too long. CV

Review: 'Flightplan'

By Dan Vinson

After "Red Eye," this year's other frenzied airplane movie is the newest Jodie Foster vehicle, structurally similar to her last, "Panic Room." Here, Foster's Kyle Pratt is trying to protect her 6-year-old daughter Julia (a superb Marlene Lawston) in a tight space,
albeit a larger, airborne one, when faster than you can say "panic plane," Julia disappears.

The story begins in Berlin, where Kyle says goodbye to her deceased husband before taking him back to the United States for burial. His sudden death, a "fall" from their apartment building's roof, was shocking, and Kyle's just barely keeping it together. Her reality seems to be a mixture of submerged grief and mysterious memories. Scared at night, or even walking to the taxi, Julia's not faring any better. They board the behemoth two-story plane that engineer Kyle helped design.

Also aboard are 463 other passengers and probably a dozen crewmembers, including Erika Christensen as a flight attendant and Sean Bean as Captain Rich. There are a few empty rows in back, so Kyle and Julia decide to go stretch out and catch a few winks. Unfortunately, Kyle is out for three hours, and when she wakes up, her daughter is gone. Within minutes, Kyle has frantically searched every aisle, lavatory, and overhead bin on both decks, making both the crew and passengers anxious and suspicious (of her sanity). You see, as the captain explains; in the presence of a summoned air marshal named Carson (Peter Sarsgaard), they have no record of Julia on the passenger manifest, or ever having boarded at all. In fact, nobody recalls even seeing the little girl.

Unconvinced, of course, Kyle continues searching the plane, demanding the captain follow post-9/11 protocols and get the crew involved. As she becomes increasingly despondent and belligerent, Kyle must have Carson with her everywhere. Her demeanor grows still wilder and she even accuses two Arab men of kidnapping. (She thinks she saw them spying across the street the night before. The fact that they're Arabs is incidental - though not to them.) Foster has never been less in control, which is great to watch. She at least knew where her daughter was in "Panic Room."

For messing with the plane's mechanics, Kyle gets handcuffed in her seat. Now she wonders if she really is delusional. Did Julia really did die, too - is she just hallucinating? But then she figures something out, and must escape to confirm.

Until a huge red herring is nonchalantly revealed at an odd moment, "Flightplan" works and is quite entertaining. This, however, drops the bottom out of the well-conceived suspense, and from there, the film digresses to familiar thriller territory and prompts many questions. (Why doesn't Kyle tout her engineering pedigree? Would everyone on board, crew included, be so forcibly apathetic? How did they find 400-plus Americans in Berlin for one flight home?)

Director Robert Schwentke, with only a couple of German features to his credit, has made an impressive, if uneven, start in Hollywood. Cinematographer Florian Ballhaus' (son of current Scorcese camera man Michael) camera is everywhere, roving throughout the amazing set. Bean, and especially the always-intense Sarsgaard are solid opposite Foster's insatiable energy, but Foster is in danger now of starting a cottage industry playing characters who do amazing things, but who you hardly get to know. "Flightplan" is being touted as Hitchcockian, but from its opening scenes, "Red Eye" truly deserves that compliment. CV

Review: 'Happily Ever After'

By Erin Randolph

Extramarital affairs are nothing new. And neither are movies broaching the subject. "Happily Ever After," a French film by Yvan Attal, does nothing to set itself apart from other films of that ilk, except that it offers no lessons or solutions. It merely is what it is: a film about wanting something you shouldn't have, mostly because you're not supposed to have it.

The film's main characters are Gabrielle (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her husband Vincent (Attal, Gainsbourg's real-life husband). While their marriage is pleasant and they have a healthy son, even antics mean to spice up their bedroom life do little to bring back the fire to their relationship. Then there's Georges (Alain Chanbat), who's miserable in his marriage to feminist Nathalie (Emmanuel Seigner), a woman he manages to love and despise all at the same time. Both Georges and Vincent are incredibly jealous of their playboy friend Fred, who beds a bevy of attractive women. Despite being the envy of his friends, however, Fred secretly longs for stability. So Vincent takes a mistress, Georges remains miserable yet faithful and Fred continues to sleep with as many women as he can until circumstances finally allow him a change of pace.

Perhaps the film's greatest triumphs occur during its pregnant silences. Like when Gabrielle shares an intimate moment with a stranger (Johnny Depp) in a Virgin Megastore. While the two don headphones and listen to the same Radiohead song, it's clear they have some unspoken sexual connection. What's infuriating on the part of the viewer, however, is that Gabrielle's daydreams about infidelity are presented as if they're somehow morally equivalent to her husband's fully realized infidelities.

Further confusing "Happily Ever After" are dream sequences that are thrown in without warning or introduction. They're merely offered up as any other sequence in the film, trusting the viewer to be intelligent enough to decipher the reality of them when the reality is, we probably could have done without another film about extramarital affairs. CV

Review: 'Corpse Bride'

By Jon Gaskell

In Tim Burton's world, it seems the darker the sentiment, the brighter the depiction. The stop-motion animated feature "Corpse Bride" is no exception.

Set in a 19th-century English village, "Corpse" - which is based on Russian folklore - involves the story of Victor (Johnny Depp), a young man who, after experiencing cold feet the night of his wedding rehearsal, leaves to get a breath of fresh air and fortuitously proposes to a corpse (Helena Bonham Carter) when he slips the ring, a sentiment he couldn't handle during the dry run, suavely onto what he thinks is a twig. He is whisked away to the brilliantly colored and exhilarating world of the dead, leaving behind the gray, strict world of the living and Victoria (Emily Watson), his supposed-to-be bride.

And as with 1993's "The Nightmare Before Christmas," Burton creates loads of ghoulish fun by forcing two worlds to collide. Victor, although desperate to get back to Victoria, has to decide whether to return "upstairs" to his one true love or make the ultimate sacrifice in order to give his corpse bride hers. Like Jack Skellington of "Nightmare," Victor becomes wrapped up in his bizarre new world - although the concept slightly escapes him - while yearning for the familiarity that is far from fantastic.

"Corpse," however, doesn't have, ahem, the pulse that "Nightmare" had - nor the wild musical ride or obvious appeal to children of all ages. This is, after all, about dying. And at 75 minutes, it feels somewhat drawn out, while wasting time laying down pun after pun (says a cadaver in a crowded bar, "The living are just dying to get down here").

Still, "Corpse" is Burton at some of his most beautiful best. Is "Corpse" a great ride? No. Is it incredible to look at? Without question. And in a year during which Hollywood got crushed for depending on every trick in the book - from stories to scripts to screen - there deserves some merit for someone simply painting a pretty picture. CV

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