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By Cole Smithey

‘Vantage Point’

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Director Pete Travis (“Omagh”) has turned debut screenwriter Barry Levy’s Rashomon-inspired script about an assassination attempt against a U.S. president on a visit to Salamanca into a dizzyingly complex puzzle that sits comfortably next to such great political thrillers as “In the Line of Fire.”

The ever-impressive Dennis Quaid raises his leading man status as Thomas Barnes, a Secret Service bodyguard returning to duty for the first time since taking a bullet for President Ashton (William Hurt) a year earlier. There’s more than a little relevance in the story’s Spanish setting where the president has arrived for a summit on the global war on terror. At noon, rifle shots penetrate the president’s chest as he takes the podium in a public square where an American news team captures the shocking scene. Seconds later, a bomb blast reduces the area to bodies and rubble. The clock returns to noon at 10-minute intervals that allow us to see, in chunks, the circumstances from the various viewpoints of a suspect, an American tourist, a terrorist and the president, before splitting off into an energized climax that links the pieces together with fast twitch precision.

We’re introduced to the characters’ varying intensities in the context of the two sudden eruptions of violence. The president goes down, Barnes sees a man run on stage and stops him with a football tackle that flattens the suspect. Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker), a lone American tourist, searches the scene with a video camera that captures a more subjective version than the one being blasted across the airwaves by TV news producer Rex Brooks (Sigourney Weaver) from the relative comfort of her trailer. Barnes and his partner Kent (Matthew Fox) go back a long way together, and the way they interact throughout becomes a homing beacon for the film’s chiaroscuro study of internal motivation versus external attempts at fulfilling allegiances of duty.

Everything about “Vantage Point” is unexpected. The way the film indirectly yet directly addresses terrorism, betrayal and politics is unconventional. Plenty is left to the imagination. When the camera shifts from ground level close-up views to distant aerial positions, we’re drawn to the place and characters in a personal contemplative way. And there are chase sequences, not just any chase scenes, but chases that invade your heart and your throat. Before becoming a filmmaker, the Manchester-born Travis worked his way through film school as a motorcycle courier, and you can see his low and fast perspective in these scenes.

What Travis has done is nothing short of creating a new kind of American action film that feels European in the same way that William Friedkin’s “French Connection” did. Travis makes the all-inclusive association between cultures without stressing the issue. All agendas are personal, and every character commits with utter devotion. The movie sweats out its story, and we gravitate to Quaid’s character to cuss and fight on our behalf. “Vantage Point” is the first great action thriller of the year, and the first great political thriller in a long while. CV

‘Definitely, Maybe’

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For a romantic comedy “Definitely, Maybe” hits all the right notes of commitment, honesty and maturity that go into a young father’s explanation to his daughter about the women he dated before she was conceived. Ryan Reynolds plays Gen X politico upstart turned advertising executive Will Hayes whose bumbling ’90s era dating life forms the story’s backbone. Hayes’s precocious daughter Maya is perfectly played by Abigail Breslin, but it’s Isla Fisher who keeps the romantic tension bubbling.

Hayes is in the midst of a divorce with Emily (Elizabeth Banks) just as their curious 10-year-old daughter is grasping to understand adult relationships. Sex education classes at Maya’s Manhattan school have her asking questions that burn her dad’s ears. It’s in this pressurized atmosphere that Maya commands her dad to spill the beans on his sordid past for an epic bedtime story. He concedes, but changes the names to throw Maya off the scent of which liaison became her mom. It’s a wobbly narrative device at best, but good enough to validate the film’s flashback-forward-motion.

At college in 1992 Hayes preens in a mirror where he fancies himself worthy of presidential status. The brief bit speaks volumes about how he sees himself. He’s off to New York City for a two-month stint working for Bill Clinton’s campaign, and leaves behind his girlfriend Emily, that his gnarly roommate has threatened to bed while he’s away. New York’s intoxicating effect eclipses Hayes’s toilet paper gathering job at the Clinton headquarters where he meets April (Fisher), a determinedly apolitical spirit destined to become his platonic soul mate, if not actual love interest.       
 
Writer/director Adam Brooks (“Wimbledon”) baits the story with a diary sent from Emily, that Hayes is dispatched to deliver to Emily’s ex-girlfriend Summer (Rachel Weisz), now residing in Manhattan as an ambitious journalism student. Naturally, Hayes can’t resist reading the journal, which is filled with reflections on Emily’s and Summer’s lesbian encounters. All the better to fire Hayes’s subconscious when he goes to deliver the manuscript only to discover Summer’s older college professor/political analyst/lover (Kevin Kline) holding court in her apartment with a cocktail in hand. Kline’s uncredited role adds several layers of meaning that resonate across the arc of the story.

So it’s in this heady sexually and politically charged landscape that Hayes and Summer strike up a picture-perfect romance that allows the movie to momentarily open up as a full on romance picture before sliding down a series of trap doors that coincide with Clinton’s fall from grace.

The significant thing about the characters is that we recognize and empathize with them in a transparent way because the director drops so many great clues-there’s a certain lost book of April’s that strikes a dominant chord. These are people who desire love with a passion that makes them attractive, not just as pretty people-which all of these actors clearly are-but as versions of folks we know or have known. The ever-capable Weisz seems pleased to play a departure from her trademark dramatic fare and Summer introduces Hayes to an ethical question in a way that shows fiber beneath the fur. However, it’s Fisher who rightfully connects the film’s shifting tone with a comic timing that pulses. The camera loves Fisher and her romantic sensibilities are spot-on for their combination of shyness and eagerness. For her part, Breslin is effortless and a welcome replacement to the Dakota Fanning era.   

“Definitely, Maybe” is a multi-layered romantic movie that builds from four crosscurrent female directions. Emily, Summer, April, and Maya are forces of nature that bewitch a guy with the world on a string, except that he doesn’t know what he has, much less what to do with it. Hayes needs the help that he gets from Maya to prioritize his romantic focus, and it says a lot about her character that she is so able to do so. And yes, your girlfriend, wife, lover, mother or friend will cry more than once. CV

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