Australia

First Hit: Long, some beautiful scenes put together but very little about how Australia came to be.

To be clear I like Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. However as Lady Sarah and Drover respectively they don’t combine only adequate acting to make a good film.

The scenes, at times are luscious and at other times the background mattes are too obvious. Kidman plays Sarah as a prudish hard nosed woman from England tolerating her husband’s fancy to have a cow ranch in Australia. She gets word that it is in trouble and her husband is dead. She goes to sell the land, take her money and go home.

But her compassionate nature arises through a “creamie”, a mixed aboriginal and white child, who continues to hide from the people who enforce the government’s policy of taking these kids away from their families and training them to be respectable citizens. She wants to help this child as she has none of her own.

As Drover, Jackman plays an unattached cattle driver who had an aboriginal wife who died so everyone else treats him badly. But because he is a competent cattle driver (hence the name) he is tolerated and respected at some level.

Of course these two personalities don’t hit it off at the beginning of the film but grow to love each other in the end.

Baz Luhrmann adds the complexity of the Japanese invasion of Australia hoping to drive epic compilations into this film and folks we’ve got a lot of story to tell and all 177 minutes are felt. The reality is that all the other stuff hides that this is a love story of two strong personalities. It isn’t about Australia it just takes place in Australia. Kidman is ok but it isn’t her best stuff. Jackman is easy and fun to watch from a rough and ready cowboy perspective. The boy is charming and there are some bright spots, but Luhrmann got in the way of making a film about Australia or there was never an intention of showcasing this wonderful country and its people.

Overall: This film is a fancy version of the John Wayne film The Cowboys with some added stuff about the Japanese invasion.

Twilight

First Hit: The young teen girls in the theater cheered and swooned, the rest of us watched a mediocre story that was generally poorly acted.

Stephanie Myers wrote a book about a young girl falling in love with a vampire whose family only drinks animal blood (the vegetarians of vampires), not the blood of humans.

Kristen Stewart plays Bella the young girl having to move from Arizona to a small town in Washington State where her father lives. She is the new girl in school and becomes immediately attracted to one particular boy who is very pale and doesn’t come to school on sunny days.

The boy, Edward (played by Robert Patterson), hangs out with his family. His relatives all go to school together. They look and act a lot older than the rest of the high school kids which is mostly because they’ve been stuck at approximately age 17 for hundreds of years.

Edward is confused by and attracted to Bella because she is the only person whose mind he cannot read. She is fascinated by his shy reluctance, cute paleness, and brooding nature.

The film is about their trials and tribulations of becoming an accepted couple by their families and the community. Just as things start going well, a renegade trio of human blood sucking vampires come across Bella and would like to suck her blood. This, of course, leads to a fierce battle between two vampire types.

Stewart plays her character reasonably well as does Billy Burke who plays her quiet introverted policeman father. I didn’t think Patterson did much with his character except to look sullen, needy and wanting to be saved from his destiny. The story seemed haphazard and all over the place with filler stories trying to make this whole thing plausible. Catherine Hardwicke, who directed a very good Lords of Dogtown, did well to keep this thing on a track. I just don’t know if it was a poor story or a poor translation of the book.

Overall: There must be something about young girls wanting to save or fall in love with a vampire because the girls in the theater got off on this film. I think that a more interesting story would have been to explore the local Indians who made a deal with the vampires centuries ago. This was only briefly touched on a few times during the film.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

First Hit: This is a strong, powerful, and sad film. The view of the world from a boy’s point of view is accurate and relevant.

Mark Herman, the director, brings the right touch and level from which he wants you to view this film in the opening sequence.

It is of Bruno (played by Asa Butterfield) and three of his companions running through the streets of a German city with their arms out as if they were airplanes shooting down other airplanes or on bombing runs.

The powerful innocence of boys playing out this fantasy during war time is a reminder about how we teach children through our actions. Bruno learns that evening that they must move because his dad, a German officer played by David Thewlis, is being transferred.

The boy is sad at leaving his friends and the next morning the boys come over to say goodbye and they spend their time pretending to shoot and kill each other. The transfer takes him to the country where his father is the head of a prison charged with holding and exterminating Jews.

The boy stumbles upon the prison one day and meets Shmuel (played by Jack Scanlon) an 8 year old boy himself. What Bruno doesn’t get is why Shmuel wears striped pajamas and can’t leave the fenced community to come play with him.

The friendship grows and so does Bruno’s understanding of what is really going on.

For me Scanlon gave an incredible performance and the moment he was on the screen I was hooked. Butterfield was very strong as the main character and the intensity of his eyes, especially the first time he gazes out his window at “the farm” shows you his depth. Vera Farmiga was perfect as Butterfield’s mother as we watch her move from being a supportive wife to one who slowly wakes up to the madness her husband is creating inside the camp.

Overall: This is an extremely well crafted film and catches a boy’s point of view with clarity, crispness, and intelligence.

Synecdoche, New York

First Hit: This was a very odd and different type film which makes an attempt to answer the big question: What am I doing here? But it was too long and was overly complicated and lost its zip somewhere in the middle.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard a local theater director who attempts to do something different; in this case he casts his version of “Death of a Salesman” with only young people.

His wife Adele Lack (played by Catherine Keener) is a painter who paints portraits very small (one inch) canvases. Their relationship is strained from not communicating. She heads off to Germany with their daughter to do a show and doesn’t return.

Caden wins a MacArthur Grant and decides to stage a play that is meaningful to him. He rents out a building that appears larger than a blimp hangar and starts to cast people as people in his life. To make this more real to him he builds a smaller replica of New York and the buildings which house the people in his life inside the hanger.

From here the film begins to lose its track, focus and bogs down in too much detail and replayed scenes. But the irony is that this is Caden’s problem anyway and eventually casts someone to play himself directing this ensemble while he is directing the ensemble. Sound odd?

It is but there are valid points made throughout this film, including how much time people spend waiting for the right thing to come along so that they can begin their lives instead of living it.

Charlie Kaufman wrote and directed this film and Hoffman is about the only actor I can think of who could make this film work at all. The cast is huge and pits some of our best actors in some different, odd, and challenging roles.

Overall: It is a long film, more than two hours, and requires patience and an open mind to sit through. Although I wouldn’t see it again, I’m glad I did.

I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime)

First Hit: What an amazing and mesmerizing performance by Kristen Scott Thomas.

I’ve had a lengthy and long distance love affair with Kristen and in this film; I was reawakened to it, yet again. Kristen plays Juliette Fontaine a woman steeped in sorrow and void of expressions.

The story begins as she sits in a train station waiting for someone to pick her up. Her sister Lea arrives and there are minimal pleasantries shared. Lea, played by Elsa Zylberstein, is much younger than Juliette and her adoration for her older sister is prevalent from the beginning. We learn that Juliette has just got out of prison where she spent 15 years for murder.

Slowly, very slowly during the film we learn whom she has killed and from where the depth of her sorrow emanates. In the true fashion of a French film the story and characters are given room to develop over time and the fullness of how all the characters develop only adds to the depth and beauty of this film.

Philippe Claudel both wrote and directed this film. Although, he has written a few prior films this was his first attempt at directing a full feature film and it is very well done. Scenes are given breadth and handled in a way that allows the characters to grow into full and believable roles. His handling of Lea’s oldest daughter is wonderful because we fully see the wonder of a child being introduced to her Auntie for the first time. Kristen’s acting in this film is beyond words and is the best performance by a woman I’ve seen all year by leaps and bounds. Elsa is superb as her much younger sister aching to be supportive of her sister and wanting to recreate the closeness they lost when Juliette went to prison. Elsa showing Juliette her daily calendar with Juliette’s name on the top of every page was a wonderful little scene of love.

Overall: I was deeply touched by this film and thought the slow unfolding of Juliette as portrayed by Kristen was extraordinary.