Kinematoscope

Some more mini-reviews of films I’ve seen this year. If I keep doing this from time to time, it should be much simpler to quantify my top ten once the end of the year rolls around, since I’ll have an on-the-record star-rating to work with (note: I reserve the right to capriciously change my mind at any moment, about anything).

The Hurt Locker



What I Liked: Man oh man, where to begin? This film grabs your chest and squeezes, right from the start. Pulse-pounding, teeth-clenching. A brutally simple story of three soldiers in Iraq in an Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, meaning a bomb squad. And that’s pretty much it: they wake up, they go disarm Intentional Explosive Devices, they die or they don’t die. In between the scenes of the various ways that they try to unwind the untenable tension each assignment brings, we get quietly chaotic moments of the squad doing a dangerous job in an already dangerous place.

There’s a scene with an anticlimactically realistic sniper-battle that emphasizes what an awful place for a war a desert is (not that there’s a great place for it. Maybe it emphasizes what an awful place a desert is to wear full combat gear). In the third act, a tank explodes in the dead of night, and as the team rushes to investigate why I realized I had forgotten about night-time! The day scenes were already harrowing, it didn’t occur to me that it could get worse.

What I Didn’t Like: Not very much. The scenes with leading man Jeremy Renner’s wife and child seemed a bit out of tone, but that’s sort of the point, I think.

The Verdict: Another Four Star movie! Quite the busy pre-September we’ve been having, at least for me personally.

(500) Days Of Summer



What I Liked: A bright, summery film if there ever was one, buoyed by some fun greeting-card gags and commendably twee performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. It’s pretty inconsequential, as it turns out, but oddly hard to fault for it. I don’t mean this in an entirely bad way, but it felt like an extended commercial for something, at least in design and visual presentation. A commercial for ‘love’? Who knows? Plus there’s a scene with karaoke, which is awesome.

What I Didn’t Like: It was, in the end, more forgettable than we all hoped back when we heard that indie-poster-people Levitt and Deschanel were involved. Deschanel is a Manic Pixie Dream-Girl to beat all the others, with no ambitions and very little background of her own. There’s also an annoyingly mature younger sister, and good old reliable Wacky But Pathetic Best Friend.

The Verdict: Two Stars- I’m torn between two and two and a half. But it’s really just Eternal Sunshine-light.

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Moon



What I Liked: Sam Rockwell! He played two distinctly different Sam Rockwells, which was great! Also the plot sort of straightforwardly goes where it says it’s going, which is both refreshing in a way, but also kind of anticlimactic. Hard to say, really. The film looks great, and the score (by Klint Mansell) is one of my favorites of the year). Plus: Sam Rockwell!

What I Didn’t Like: There were a couple of plot holes (or questions, rather) that sort of gnawed at me afterwards, not to get into spoilers or anything. It was a bit…stagey, I guess. I hoped for a little more expressionism from a touted ‘psychological thriller,’ but there’s something to be said for straightforwardness.

The Verdict: Three Stars! (One of these stars is brought to you solely by Sam Rockwell)

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: I’ll get into this when I cover this movie for an upcoming feature. It’ll take a few weeks to get there, though (it’s the sixth installment said feature. Can’t imagine why…)

The Verdict: Three and a Half Stars!

Public Enemies



What I Liked: Johnny Depp was pretty slick as John Dillinger, and the cast was littered with ringers in nearly wordless parts (Stephen Dorff? David Wenham? What?) Christian Bale was pretty badass, and his accent was hilarious (as I have often visited South Carolina (where Melvin Purvis was from) and it was not very accurate). Mann’s orange-lit documentary style lends itself well to historical movies- it’s like he’s been emulating the poor lighting quality of footage from the thirties all along.

What I Didn’t Like: There’s a gun battle in the middle of the film that must last twenty minutes, and unlike in Heat, the real-life inspiration was a skirmish that lasted all of three minutes. I then read Bryan Burrough’s fascinatingly detailed book of the same name, and was just left asking why certain historical events were changed for the film, even beyond timeframe and narrative reasons.

The Verdict: Two And A Half Stars.

Bruno



What I Liked: Plenty of laughs from an extended tv show in the theaters: he gets Paula Abdul to talk about how helping people is very important to her while sitting on a Mexican worker in place of a chair- he interviews parents who whore out their babies for photo-shoots about the various hazards they have no problems exposing them to. He gets a lot of mileage out of homophobes of various types, culminating in a hilariously over the top finale.

What I Didn’t Like: Some of it was a bit far (poor Ron Paul), but really, I knew what to expect.

The Verdict: Two Stars- didn’t impress, didn’t do less than I expect either.

Milwaukee is very rarely the site of movie premieres and red carpets, despite being the proud home of the Oriental Theatre, an authentic 1927 movie palace filled with the kind of ornate minaret towers and stained-glass chandeliers that remind us of the glamour Hollywood is convinced it still hasn’t lost.

Public Enemies, the new Michael Mann thriller starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, chose to have its premiere in Chicago, the home of the larger part of Dillinger’s exploits and time on the lam, but that didn’t stop Wisconsin from claiming its chare of ownership over the film. The Wisconsin Historical Society (which itself doubled as a bank vault in the movie) hosted a preview screening and gala auction last Tuesday.

The Oriental also had a to-do on July 1st for the first day of Public Enemies’ official release, with four old-fashioned cars proudly parked in front of the marquee on Farwell Ave (one of which had an official “certificate of involvement” with the film), and a trophy case of Dillinger memorabilia next to the concession stand.

The Landmark Theatres’ website encouraged attendees of opening night to wear their best thirties duds, and this writer participated, as did this writer’s girlfriend- Below, we stand near one of the antique cars (she wears a thrift-store dress, I wear just a suit I have with a Value Village vest. Nonetheless one on-looker asked us where we found the “old-timey” clothes).



While the cars were as antiquated as they could be, the memorabilia certainly intriguing enough (including a wooden gun Dillinger carved and painted to stage a jailbreak, a “death mask” made of his face, and a replica of the last gun he carried in his pocket), it wasn’t exactly cordoned ropes in front of Graumann’s in L. A.

But the people came- there were at least three dozen or so other people in period dress, and a healthy crowd (for the Oriental’s massive main theater) for the 7:00 P. M. showing.

It made me wish there were more Milwaukee movie events. The Milwaukee International Film Festival is certainly well-publicized, but screenings are expensive enough to exclude the majority of movie fans from attending. The Rosebud and Times make an admirable effort to bring in short films and put on midnight showings, but attendance lags and ownership changes have made them undependable and irregular.

It will probably be a while before there’s another film that we feel a particular attachment to as well- Public Enemies was filmed in Columbus, Beaver Dam, Oshkosh, Madison, and Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin. But the crowds at The Oriental’s record-setting Rocky Horror Picture Show tradition confirm that there’s at least some audience for event movies in parts of our town.

Or that some of us just love dressing up.