Some might want to spew that this film has taken gay rights back at least two decades, and when first watching the trailer I thought that was surely the case, which in light of Adam Sandler being a gay rights campaigner over the years, was kind of a shock. After watching the film though, I must say it does absolutely nothing for gay rights. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Nothing at all.

In fact all this movie does is fall somewhere in the cracks of mediocrity that befalls so many of today's Hollywood films. Never good enough to be taken seriously, yet never quite bad enough to make a person angry. This is the case in about 90% of Hollywood moviemaking and it is certainly the case here with the provocation-hoping titled I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Pure middle-of-the-road movie making. In fact even now, just days after seeing the film, I recall almost nothing from the experience. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Nothing at all.

Sure, I suppose in the end, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is a pro-gay rights film, showing (rather idealistically though) how even the most homophobic jackass can come to understand the plight of the homosexual in today's society, but even that refreshing take on things doesn't excuse it from being a most forgettable film. [07/31/07]

With more than just subtle hints of Woody Allen (complete with black & white jazz-overlayed credits), the debut feature by stand-up comic and Second City alum Jeff Garlin is no less than the most hilariously droll treatise on loneliness this critic has ever seen.

The somewhat askewly, and quite grammatically incorrect to boot, titled I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is the story of James, a lonely Second City comic barely making it in the Chicago entertainment scene and still living with his mother at 39, who waylays his loneliness into late-night junk food eating binges while sitting in a convenience store parking lot nestled in the shadow of Wrigley Field. Garlin, best known for his work on Arrested Developement and Curb Your Enthusiasm, has taken his one man show on the road so to speak, with this mostly autobiographical film about being fat, jobless and alone.

Now obviously being on one of the most critically acclaimed shows currently on television, Garlin is far from the teetering near-failure he plays here, and weight-conscience society be damned, Garlin is way to genuinely funny and charming to be so brusquely cast aside by the fairer sex as much as he claims, but he plays his "character" with such oblivious confidence that one must question the very inherent loneliness in us all. Perhaps it's not quite that heavy (or is it now?), but it may very well be the smartest look at loneliness since Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, a film in which James is obsessed with, Garlin takes a more urbanely comic approach to the situation, pumping his film up with many Curb and Second City buddies like Bonnie Hunt, Amy Sedaris, Richard Kind and David Pasquesi, and adding the appropriately caustic carping of Sarah Silverman as a rather mean-spirited love interest, and it works like a charm.

The only critical downside is that one might say the film comes off as quite sit-commish, with its episodic bits and parts, but if it does come off this way, it is certainly less in the manner of your typical sit-com and more in the manner of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which ain't half bad a pedigree to have. [10/12/07]

Fresh without seeming smug, this obvious ode to the brothers Dardenne (and yes, director So Yong Kim recalls the Belgian brothers as big influences on her little film), about Aimie, a painfully shy teenage Korean girl displaced in an unnamed North American city (perhaps Toronto?) with her aloof, recently husband-ditched mother, and a lone (boy)friend as her only companions, plays out its drama in a neo-grunge world that reminds one of awkward first love trepidatiously slinking through a Tarkovskian landscape of snow and rain and not-so-hidden metaphor all with the sudden (and seemingly random) jerks of Kim's queerly effervescent camera. Kim uses naturalistic (almost claustrophobic) cinematography to bring us into a virtual state of (unwanted?) intimacy with her young fragile heroine. We can almost feel the fuzzy inards of Aimie's dreamscape. Her desires. Her fears. Her inarticulate passions.

Aimie (played by discovered-in-a-soda-shop newcomer Jiseon Kim, with a wonderous neophytic lethargy that would make even Rosetta proud) goes about her days in unrequited love of Tran, her only companion, who asks for handjobs and cops sleeping feels without ever reciprocating anything more than a passing buddy-like comradery. Playing at mind games, both teens become lost in a world that is indifferent to their plights and both teens (but especially Aimie) lose what can never be replaced. In many ways, not only a descendant of the Dardenne's heroine, but of those of Bresson as well. Ethnicity aside, the young actress, with her rosy chubby cheeks and downward glances, even resemble both Rosetta and Mouchette.

Ugly and desperate (but in the most humanistic way), this inbetween world has no pat happing ending. No answers. No solutions. No closure. No future. We watch as Aimie is swallowed up in its maw. The pain of relationships. The pain of assimilation. The pain of everyday life and the pain of everything in between. Yet, none of this is to say there is no hope in site, for this is the story of nearly every teenager's life (Director Kim says it stems from her own youth). The heartbreak of loves lost. The angst of love never gained. The pain of abandonment (both of a lover and of a father) is constantly afoot in Kim's film, yet distant hope manages to speckle-light the reality of it all, and then we know the end is not really the end. Perhaps she is not Mouchette after all. [07/02/07]

At face value, it may seem quite the disappointment that one of the most controversially erotic novels of all-time was turned into a quite tame, almost underwhelming film such as this, but at the same time, once one looks deeper into the dragon, one can surely see how beautifully this film is arranged. With Lawrence's reputation, you may think it, but indeed there is no need for über-eroticism for the film to be sexy - and the film certainly is that.

Marina Hands, in the title role, may very well be pure sex, even during her most timid moments, and Jean-Louis Coullo'ch as her lover may very well be a brute of a man, yet he too exudes a soft passionate brusqueness. Her near wanton behavior, his surprising delicacy come together in an explosive consumation of choked-back emotions and long-dormant desires. Like Adam and Eve, they frolic naked in the rain, hiding away in their own private Eden, temporarily at least, unaware of the bitter world awaiting them just beyond the trees.

Without any of the cliche's of many another Chatterley rendition, this latest adaptation (actually taken from Lawrence's penultimate draft of his eventual novel), even though it may leave quite a bit of the book on the proverbial cutting room floor, is easily the most living breathing exploration of these two extremely lonely lost souls ever put on film. A supposedly unfilmable novel, yet pulled off in the most charming manner possible. Almost Bressonian in his style, Pascale Ferran gives us a quiet - sometimes wordless - interpretation of Lawrence's great unwashed incendiary masterpiece, without pretension, without assumption, without charade. Simply, plainly, sublimely. Here it is. [08/05/07]

There is no doubt in my mind (and there should be no doubt in your minds either) that Ryan Gosling is a tremedous actor. The best of his generation I would even say, no matter how cliche'd that may sound. So, with Gosling's thespianic abilities and a seemingly brilliant premise (the loneliest of men buys an anotomically correct love doll and parades her about as if a real human being) as well as the always adroit and always adorable Emily Mortimer as Lars' over-helpful sister-in-law, one would fully expect to enjoy Lars and the Real Girl from start to finish. Why then did I not?

Mainly I suppose, it must have been the cutsie-pie Mayberry like coating that was thickly layered over the entire film that left a bad taste in my mouth. The wholesome, never mean-spirited film certainly has its touches, and I in no way mean to state that every film sorely needs a rough edge to capture my attention (the sentimentalist in me has thoroughly enjoyed many a heart-warming nicety in my day) but noentheless, there it is. There was such an aching for an acerbic wit to be placed into this film, perhaps to counteract the sugary sweetness and give the whole concoction a flavourful twist, but alas, it was just not meant to be. Oh well, at least we still have the best actor of his geneartion to fall back on and I guess I did warm up to the film enough to not thoroughly toss it off. Wow, what a back-handed compliment that was. [11/18/07]

With an eerie feel that may be the arctic circle setting or may be the claustrophobic interiors or may be Larry Fessenden's camera style, The Last Winter, the story of a team of oil assessors and eco-scientists "trapped" in the tundra that may or may not be haunted with some sort of angry ghost/monster/alien, may have a foothold in The Thing From Another Planet but is pure 2001: A Space Odyssey when looked at from a psychological point of view.

The American oil company KIC Corporation is building an ice road to explore the remote Northern Artic National Wildlife Refuge (and to plunder it forthwith) and those hired to do the job, as well as those hired to make sure it is done with the least amount of ecological destruction (or at least those hired to think that is what they are doing) are systematically killed off a la slasher film etiquette with an unseen "slasher" somewhere in the icy blue wind.

Psychologically draining, Fessenden's film (a follow-up to his similarly monsterous Wendigo) is a buzzing nest of unseen terror for its first 90 minutes or so, but is nearly derailed by the unveiling of the monster behind the proverbial curtain. It would have been a much better ending to never know who or what was doing the killing. This ending though is superseeded by a much better ending in the final shot of the film as the movie's lone survivor walks out of some sort of military-like hospital and into what may very well be a strange new world, telling us all that this was indeed the last winter of mankind. [10/15/07]

Methodical in its approach, The Lives of Others (the most recent Oscar winner for best foreign-language film) approaches the subject of voyeurism with a simultaneous attack from polar opposite fronts. Showing it as both a sense of duty for one's government and a revolutionary affront toward one's own freedom of existence.

Ulrich Mühe, most recently seen in Costa-Gavras' mostly overlooked 2002 film Amen., is Hauptmann Wiesler, the perfect party man. A Stasi agent in Soviet-bloc East Germany in 1984, when the Berlin Wall seemed an ever-standing monument to an all-too-real Orwellian nightmare socio-political landscape, he has been assigned to "watch over" Georg Dreyman (played with a near goofy resistence by Sebastian Koch, last seen as the SS officer with a heart of gold in Paul Veerhoven's Black Book), an artist and a particularly dangerous man. Of course to be dangerous in cold war Europe one need only be open-minded and outspoken.

At first cold and calculating, Wiesler becomes more and more obsessed with Dreyman's life, actually rooting for him by the end. With allusions to Rear Window and Peeping Tom, von Donnersmarck's feature debut is fraught with Freudian pyschology (real or not) and delves deeper into the idea of voyeurism than mere cold war politics can account for. Wiesler changes, becomes a totally different person while all the while staying exactly the same. A brilliant feat of acting by Mühe which will go down as one of his final works, as stomach cancer took its final toll just recently. [07/27/07]

It certainly is amazing how a story with such an overwhelming combination of sentimental drip and sensationalist makaka, not to mention a whole hell of a lot of illogical hooey, can be almost (almost) saved by a single performance, no matter how cliche'd the characterization happens to be. That is indeed the case with The Lookout and its intrepid star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

This was certainly the case with another recent Gordon-Levitt film, the overly melodramtic drivel-ridden (and inexplicably) acclaimed Mysterious Skin, wherein Gordon-Levitt far outshines his commissioned material, and it is certainly the case in this rather trite trapdoor film. The story of a young man struggling with a brain injury who gets caught up in a bank robbery which goes horribly astray. Stretching for plausibility, the story itself is rather a lame duck scenario, but as an acting vehicle for this rising star-cum-art cinema wouldbe icon, it is applaudable indeed.

Unfortunately, Gordon-Levitt cannot hold the strings of this crumbling apron long enough for its hokey set-up, and even hokier finale, to get a grip on any sort of ground. Toss in the up-and-down Jeff Daniels as the requisite tough-spirited but with a heart-of-gold blind guy (we can all overcome adversity ya know) and you have yourself one wonderfully acted mediocrity of cinema. Was that almost a compliment or nearly an insult? Oh well, cheesebally or not, the kid's got spunk - but go rent Brick instead. [04/18/07]