"Alice in Wonderland"
Richard's Review: 3 stars
I wonder if Tim Burton has a monkey butler at home. I ask this because I think anyone who can come up with the kind of flights of fancy he puts on screen probably has a monkey butler and other strange and wonderful things kicking around the house to feed his imagination. His latest film, a retelling of "Alice in Wonderland," benefits from his rich visual style.
Using the original Lewis Carroll stories as a stepping stone, in this reimagined version of the classic tale Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska) is 19 years old. She's a dreamer in a world of pragmatists who, on the advice of her late father, tries to imagine six impossible things before breakfast each day. This sets her at odds with almost everyone, including her family who think marrying her off to the churlish and haughty Lord Hamish will settle her down. At their engagement party she flees his very public proposal, disappearing into the garden and falling down a rabbit hole into Underland. It's her second trip to the place she calls Wonderland. Ten years previous she been there but has no memory of it. On this visit she meets an odd assortment of characters including the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), Absolem, the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the strangest one of all, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). They convince her she needs to help them overthrow the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) by slaying the terrifying Jabberwock (Christopher Lee).
Burton has always made films about outsiders—think Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood Jr. and Willy Wonka—and in Alice he has found another one to focus his camera on. As a headstrong young woman who doesn't quite fit the mold of Victorian England she a perfect character for Burton. Like his most famous characters she lives in a world of dreams but unlike his best realized characters she isn't nearly as interesting. As a result, despite the beautiful visuals and the eye popping 3-D, "Alice in Wonderland" is a bit of a flat line.
Sadly much of the problem lies with Wasikowska. She is delicately beautiful in a way that would very likely leave Lewis Carroll weak in the knees and after her stint on the television show "In Treatment," we know she can act, but she rarely looks really engaged with the character. Perhaps it is that she spent the entire time acting against a green screen and didn't get to actually interact with her co-stars very often, but she's a little too low key to be at the center of a large, fanciful film.
It's not a complete wash, however. Burton overloads the screen with eccentric and interesting visuals and has succeeded in creating a dream-like version of "Alice in Wonderland." Unfortunately, like most dreams, when it's over it's quickly forgotten.
"The Ghost Writer"
Richard's Review: 4 stars
Given director Roman Polanski's recent legal troubles it's hard not to infer some deeper meaning into the plight of "The Ghost Writer's" ex-Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) accused of war crimes. In a moment of art imitating life Adam Lang's lawyer says, "I strongly advise you not to travel to any country with extradition policies." If Polanski had listened to that advice he might not have had to finish editing this movie from a jail in Switzerland.
Within Lang there are echoes of Tony Blair. He's a popular, if controversial ex-Prime Minister—"He wasn't a politician," says the ghost writer, "he was a craze."—with a ten million dollar book deal and a dead co-writer. The late journalist was found washed up on shore near Lang's remote Cape Cod beach house under very mysterious circumstances. Pitch hitting for the late writer is Ewan McGregor's character—he doesn't have a name in the film—a professional ghost writer whose biggest hit was a biography of a magician called "He Came, He Sawed, He Conquered." His job is to turn "incoherent rambling into a book." Soon, however, his job is complicated when Lang is accused of war crimes by a former colleague. Untangling facts that may (or may not) place his own life in danger he turns from writer-for-hire to investigative journalist.
There is so much to like in "The Ghost Writer" that the few lapses in credulity are easy to forgive. I mean, are we really to believe that a massive conspiracy could be figured out using google? What's next? Sherlock Holmes using Ask Jeeves? Apart from that bit of silliness Polanski has crafted a film that can comfortably sit beside "Three Days of the Condor" and "The Parallax View" for political intrigue.
The pacing is deliberate, not slow, but deliberate. Clues are doled out carefully, keeping red herrings to a minimum and allowing suspense to build with each new nugget of information. Tension and paranoia build with every scene. This is the man who made "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby," so he knows how to make the mundane sinister. Ringing phones and loud raps on doors create an ominous atmosphere where danger is around every corner.
Add to that some interesting work to show the futility of the writer's job. Watch in the background, the director places a gardener endlessly sweeping up dead leaves from the compound's many patios, only to have them blow out of his wheel barrel every time he makes any progress. It's a clever metaphor for the writer's Sisyphean search for the truth. As he gets in over his head, trying to unravel years of twisted political strategy, I wanted to paraphrase Polanski's most famous movie, "Chinatown." "Forget it, writer. It's politics."
McGregor, who has played a writer twice before in "Moulin Rouge," later in "The Men Who Stare at Goats," is convincing but really shines when he is working opposite Pierce Brosnan. I'm willing to overlook his recent turn as a half man / half horse in "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" when he can be this good. He looks like a politician, like he was made for photo ops in front of private jets, waving to his constituents, but it is in the cat-and-mouse dialogue between Lang and the writer that he does his best work.
"The Ghost Writer" is Polanski's first film in five years, and for those willing to judge the art, not the artist, it is as satisfying a thriller as we'll see this year.
"Brooklyn's Finest"
Richard's Review: 2 stars
As soon as I saw the name of director Antoine Fuqua in the opening credits I sensed that "Brooklyn's Finest" probably wasn't going to celebrate the up side of policing in the NY borough. The "Training Day" director is a specialist when it comes to portraying dirty cops on screen, and here he showcases the "finest" policemen in Brooklyn's 65th precinct, that is, if by "finest" you mean alcoholic, angsty, murderous and suicidal.
Mixing three stories Fuqua introduces Sal (Ethan Hawke), Eddie (Richard Gere) and Tango (Don Cheadle), three cops at different stages of their careers. The only thing that connects them is a station house in the 65th Precinct and severe dysfunction. Sal is a narco cop, tormented by the things he must do to support his growing family. Eddie is a burn out who clearly hasn't taken his own advice of "not taking the job home" after work and Tango is an undercover cop who is close to being consumed by the job. The three struggle both personally and professionally until a fateful night when they end up in the same apartment block.
The bad cop drama became popular in the seventies and with only a few tweaks story wise has persevered to this day. Fuqua focuses on three characters straight out of Central Casting—the cop with nothing to live for, who is just days away from retirement, the policeman who turns bad to make extra money to help his family and the undercover officer who gets too close to the criminals he is supposed to arrest.
Clichés one and all, but the bad cop genre is one big gun toting cliché, and like romantic comedies, another formula based species, the trick is to make the characters as interesting as possible to disguise the banalities of their story arcs. On this score "Brooklyn's Finest" is two thirds successful.
First, the good. Don Cheadle takes a hackneyed character—the angry street cop—and gives him some fire; a cliché, yes, but an unpredictable one. Cheadle deserves better material than this but he makes the best of it.
Ditto Ethan Hawke who can do desperate on-screen as well as any actor working today.
The weakest of the three is Gere's Eddie. Gere isn't an exactly magnetic actor at the best of times but here he simply isn't believable as a man who wakes up, has a shot of scotch with a gun barrel chaser. The early morning drinking and pseudo suicide attempts are meant to give us insight into the character but come off as tired images recycled from better movies.
"Brooklyn's Finest" is not a return to form for Fuqua after the career high of "Training Day" nine years ago and the professional sink hole he's been in ever since.
