In Jason Reitman‘s smart, racy and delightful film, penned by Diablo Cody, Juno (Ellen Page) is a scrappy but sensitive teen girl who initiates sex with her male chum Paulie (Michael Cera) and afterwards gets big with child. She can’t bring herself to have an abortion but is too young to parent, so adoption is the only alternative.
Category: Movies Page 47 of 48
I got tired long ago of movies that focus on immoral, abusive police officers. There are too many of them. Clint Eastwood‘s “Changeling” does that, too, but I can take a small amount of comfort in the fact that ITS police officers exist numerous decades ago in the late 1920s.
Cover of Changeling
And in the fact that there’s a brutal, psychopathic killer in the film whom the police don’t try to protect.
Ah, but what about all the snake-pit balderdash at the mental hospital to which poor Angelina Jolie is consigned?
“Changeling” is more intriguing than successful. Joe Morgenstern of the “Wall Street Journal” correctly points out that
a) folks in the Twenties didn’t jabber about self-esteem and
b) the woman played by Jolie and the preacher played by John Malkovich are together a lot “but don’t really interact.”
They should, but they don’t.
Eastwood’s film handles some grisly subject matter with an ineptitude so many of his other movies have been marked with as well.
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Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie is certainly not a comedy. It has the elements of tragedy, but whereas something like “Macbeth” offers plot simplicity, “Knight” is a complex mediocrity which I found hard to follow.
What I was able to follow–time and again–made no sense.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
The film’s gravity packs a punch, but with action sequences which fail to satisfy. Christian Bale is no big deal as Batman/Bruce Wayne, while Maggie Gyllenhaal, nifty as usual, has an easy part to play. Aaron Eckhart is sophisticatedly true as a district attorney,
Heath Ledger terrifying and magisterial as the Joker–one of the best acting jobs of the year.
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- Cover of Synecdoche New York
The brooding, ailing hero of “Synecdoche, New York,” written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, admires the pretty legs of his fetching psychotherapist (Hope Davis), which nevertheless extend to at least one foot that is blistered and bruised. Even THIS he has to put up with! It’s a nice touch in an otherwise spurious film–Spurious because it is excessively dark, wholeheartedly pessimistic.
Cover via Amazon
Sergei Bodrov of Russia has a penchant for making pictures concerning distinctly important, as well as interesting, matters. His “Prisoner of the Mountains” (1996), for example, deals with friendship and survival in the war between Russia and Chechnya. “Mongol” (with English subtitles) deals with Genghis Khan’s ascent to power in the thirteenth century, i.e. an arduous climb. Khan’s name is Temudgin; the words “Genghis Khan” mean “universal ruler.”