Re-setting my clock

This is the end of my first weekend following a full five-day work week in over a year.  Five days of normal hours, with a bit of a cold coming on, and I accomplished only what was absolutely necessary these past two days.  Must learn to manage my time better.  Note, I was doing some things on my weekend that could have been accomplished, piece by piece, weeknights after work.  Really must learn to manage my time better.

Today, while I was working on some things around the house (and "house" is a misnomer -- it's a just a 1-bedroom apartment; how anyone maintains a whole house while working full time is beyond my ken), I had the television on, tuned to AMC.  I don't know why.  It just happened that way.  Perhaps it was fate.  So I saw today most of the first season of the series "The Walking Dead." 

It's violent.  It's distressing.  It's depressing.  It's exciting.  It's thrilling.  It's damned riveting.  The series is well written, really well structured, spiffy cliffhangers that don't let you down at the opening of the next episode, and the casting and acting are terrific.  This is a horror series that's scary as all get out. Watching the Season 1 Marathon forced me into lots of gasps, lots of covering of my eyes, clutching my kitties to me until they squirmed away. 

When I went outside -- outside! -- to the store in the twilight (I know, what was I thinking!), I wondered if people in Queens had always walked slightly off kilter, with that shuffle.  To and from the store I kept my eyes open, and my walk brisk. 

I'm at the beginning of Season Two and I'm gasping and jumping and talking to and gesticulating at the characters onscreen.  Oh yes.  I'm scared. And I'm hooked.

~ Molly Matera, thinking I'll keep some lights on tonight.....

"Moneyball" is a Story of Faith

During the first half of the first decade of the 21^st century, I watched a lot of baseball, mostly Yankees, mostly -- OK, practically all -- in bars, and once or twice at the old Yankee Stadium.  There was even a point when, after working late every night (at some point, of course, one must acknowledge that those are the hours, it’s no longer “working late” if you do it every day), I would walk into a bar where far too many people knew my name, and if the Yankees were losing, they’d turn it around and win.  If I went home and didn’t watch the game, the Yankees would lose.  Clearly the deciding factor was me-- if the Yankees lost, it was my fault.  Just ask my friend Dave.

Baseball can do that to you.  It’s a very superstitious game.  Ask Billy Beane.

The second post-season game between the New York Yankees and the Detroit Tigers crackled on my car radio Sunday, the Connecticut station’s signal straining to reach the south shore of Long Island.  When I arrived at my destination, I searched for the game on television.  I was on vacation, and I needed a walk along the shore I’d driven more than two hours to reach.  But it’s impossible to turn away, since the Yankees might do what they indeed did:  They galvanized, too late, in the 9^th, so we believed we could win it. 

Here in the post-season, “Moneyball” tackles difficult questions about the game of baseball.  Is the way to pick your team to go one by one and find the best individuals out there, potential stars; or is it the time of the computer and math nerds who will use statistical analysis to pick a group of players who will function as a quirky sort of whole, without stars?  I am not an aficionado of baseball (or any other sport), so I’ll not pontificate on that subject.

(c) 2011 Sony Pictures

However, “Moneyball” is a movie, a sports movie, an end-of summer movie.  Like the game of baseball itself, the film moves along at a leisurely pace in its beginning — in 2001, the rich teams poach the stars from the poor Oakland Athletics (NY took Giambi, Boston Johnny Damon, St. Louis took Isringhausen) and we watch General Manager Billy Beane, a former player himself, try to rebuild a new team.  Like this hot-weather game, the film’s rhythms start off lazy, gradually warm, and move forward in the summer breeze, speeding up until the audience is ready to leap out of their seats, as if they were at a neck-and-neck play-off game.  Rather like the last inning of the Yankees/Detroit post-season game 2.

Brad Pitt eases into the role of Billy Beane, his fit body showing an athlete’s grace despite Billy’s 44 years -- that’s practically proof that his time as a professional athlete was limited.  He appears in no way crippled.  One of Billy's stops looking for new blood for his depleted team is Cleveland, where Reed Diamond plays some guy who mispronounces Shapiro (his name is pronounced with a long I unlike any Shapiro I've ever known).  Diamond is smug as the mean-spirited alpha guy in a roomful of mean-spirited man-boy sports types.  It looks rather like the Sopranos in pinstripes.  The roomful of aging jocks are as one in their deprecation of Billy, who handles it all with aplomb.

Jonah Hill as "Peter Brand"  (c) 2011 SonyPictures

The most important thing that happened in Cleveland was that Billy was smart enough to spot an anomaly, a young guy in his father’s suit that all those ex-jocks -- guys who would have pushed that math nerd fat boy's head into the toilet in high school -- actually listen to the young man’s whispered counsel.  This is Yale-educated economics geek Peter Brand, quietly played by Jonah Hill.  This is the subtlest performance I’ve seen Hill give, and I like it. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman is slow, pugnacious, and really obnoxious as Coach Art Howe, who ignores and belittles Billy’s plans for his odd new hires, until his hand is forced.  I assume Howe happily took the credit for the wins generated by Billy and Pete’s non-traditional, outlandish team-building plan.  Hoffman is brilliant as Howe without pulling focus from the story.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Coach Howe

Women don’t play much of a role in this world.  The traditional scouts judged a ball player not only on his own prowess and appearance, but on the prettiness of his wife.  If she’s merely average or less, they say, the player lacks confidence, so he’s in the discard pile.  I’m stating this politely, which they did not.

In terms of this story, Robin Wright is on the mark yet wasted as Sharon, Billy’s ex-wife; Kerry Dorsey is sweet as his daughter Casey, with an even sweeter singing voice and a 21^st century style.  A female sports reporter is a total bitch when she’s in the enemy territory of the clubhouse -- the testosterone presumably nauseated her.  Yes, it’s a boys’ club.  Nevertheless, though Billy’s secretary has little to do, Takayo Fischer does it with the fullness of a life story behind her character.

Does anyone care about the rotten attitude toward women in this story, or do we just expect and accept this petrified belief system from jocks?  Does high school never end? 

Not that this antipathy toward the female of the species diverts from the story.  It sneaks up on you, “Moneyball” does, just like baseball.  I had the advantage of not remembering the 2001-2002 baseball season.  For me, the suspense and excitement of “Moneyball” built as the crew of guys without star power but rather oddball qualities, metamorphosed into the amazing team that won twenty games in a row.  Cheers of joy flutter through the NY audience at the magical possibilities of baseball.  Who could ask for more?  Billy Beane, that’s who, because he knows that, no matter how brilliant the season, if you lose the last game, the season is forgotten.

Luckily for baseball fans and moviegoers, Michael Lewis didn’t let that happen when he wrote his book, Moneyball:  The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin translated into a screenplay (based on a story idea by Stan Ghervin) for a very satisfying baseball film.  The underdog wins, at least for a while.  That’s baseball.  That’s America.  Creating a team of oddball castoff players, using math and computers and modern economic theories was an incredibly ballsy move — if you’ll forgive the pun — for Billy Beane and Peter Brand (that’s the character name, not the real guy’s name) that should keep them in the record books for a good long time.

Director Bennett Miller does a fine job, keeping even the leisurely parts of the story moving swiftly.  Attention never flags.  Pitt’s Billy Beane is cute and charming and passionate and superstitious and totally believable.  We are with him all the way as he drives this film, and Jonah Hill is a quiet but rock-solid co-pilot. 

Pitt and Hill

Stephen Bishop gives a standout performance as David Justice, an angry 30-something traded from the Yankees to the badlands of Oakland.  Chris Pratt does sensitive work as Scott Hatteburg, a young yet washed-up catcher Billy wants on first base.

Arliss Howard gives a quirky performance as John Henry, the new owner of the 2002 Boston Red Sox.  His is one of two particularly odd but utterly believable performances in this film — Howard as a part of baseball, and Spike Jonze as the rather effete current husband of Billy’s ex-wife, whose tentative kindness shows a complete lack of understanding of baseball, or any other sport. 

“Moneyball” is a film that makes people applaud.  Baseball is still the great American pastime, and early autumn does not diminish our love for the boys of summer.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to go watch some kids play -- I hear the crack of a ball on a wooden bat…

Debt Paid

“The Debt” is an unglamorous thriller that’s not about car chases or gunfights, or unlikely leaps from one building to another.  There are guns, there’s a van, and there’s an attempt to escape from East Berlin, but “The Debt” goes deeper into its characters, imprisoning the four main characters inside an East Berlin apartment and inside their own tortured lives. 

The prey:  In the winter of 1965-66, three Mossad agents are under cover in East Berlin to extract a Nazi war criminal, the “Surgeon of Birkenau,” and return him to Israel for trial.  The Nazi doctor is now “Dr. Bernhardt,” a kindly old obstetrician with a practice in East Berlin.  Jesper Christensen gives a chilling performance as the Nazi monster who can appear benevolent, charming, and lethal inside seconds. 

Jesper Christensen as the Surgeon of Birkenau

 The searchers:

• Stephan Gold (played by Marton Csokas in 1966, then Tom Wilkinson in 1997), to put it very simply, wants revenge and glory.  He is a political animal, and an angry one.  His rage is barely contained in his younger days, and well-directed by experience as he ages.  Stephan’s furious piano playing in the East Berlin apartment was particularly frightening.  Csokas is the only one of the primary actors with whom I’m unfamiliar, and while I cannot yet pronounce his name, I won’t forget it. 
• David Peretz (Sam Worthington in 1966, Ciaran Hinds in 1997) wants justice, and he wants it publicly:  The world must know.  His sole purpose is the mission.  He seems to live on despair as if he was doomed from birth just for surviving. Worthington’s face is bland, childlike, often immobile.  David keeps a mask in place as long as he can.  Only two things break through his discipline — the Surgeon of Birkenau and Rachel Singer. 
• Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain in 1966, Helen Mirren in 1997) may just want to be worthy of having survived.  She had been a translator, and the East Berlin mission is her first time in the field.  She is determined, but not yet as hardened as Stephan and not as fiercely stoic as David.  Soon after the mission, her life revolves around keeping the truth of the mission a secret, perhaps to protect herself, Stephan, and David as much as daughter Sara.

Chastain, Csokas, Worthington as Rachel, Stephan, and David in 1966.

The film goes back and forth between the mission in 1965-66 and its aftermath thirty years later.  The symmetries between Tom Wilkinson and Martin Csokas as Stephan as well as Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain as Rachel are remarkable. 

The older Stephan is as well written and acted as the younger — an angry young man grown up, ambitious, arrogant, manipulative, not one to deny himself the objects of his lust or to restrain his fury.  Mirren’s Rachel is Chastain grown much stronger after thirty years of building a persona for the world to see.  Accustomed to being in the public eye, only David can force Rachel to reflect.  Worthington’s David is less clear, and Ciaran Hinds as David thirty years later seems to be out of sync with the other actors.  He has enormous sad eyes, but his character’s actions speak much louder than his words.  The character David travels far in his quest for redemption, leaving Rachel to follow his path to its end.  I know this, yet it seems to me David was more effective offscreen than either Worthington or Hinds were onscreen.  In the 1997 story, David reappears like a revenant, unfulfilled in his mission for the world to know the truth, both about the Surgeon of Birkenau, and about 1966.

Excellent lighting helps to differentiate the locations and times of the film:  1966 East Berlin was dingy, wet and cold.  More rain entered the apartment than light.  Once back in Israel, Tel Aviv was bright, wide open, hot with a fresh wind.  The film makes powerful use of repetition in small details of scenes; in its lighting design ranging from grays to blacks to bright whites; in sudden changes from what we’d seen before and therefore anticipated. 

Helen Mirren as Rachel in 1997.

“The Debt” is based on an Israeli film, “Ha-Hov” written by Assaf Bernstein and Ido Rosenblum, directed by the former. 

Matthew Vaughn & Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan have crafted a screenplay for “The Debt” that is taut and disturbing.  Director John Madden does a fabulous job, filling the film with strained nerves, gasps, sharp turns, yet still providing food for thought.  Thomas Newman’s score adds to the suspense, as does Alexander Berner’s editing and Ben Davis’ cinematography.  Excellent fight choreography by Peter Pedrero presents very real people sweating, grunting, panting with the extraordinary effort to kill, capture, or just survive. 

“The Debt” has many white-knuckle scenes which do not dissipate like mist after the movie ends.  This is an intelligent thriller, its violence intimate and terrifying, its humanity sadly fragile.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, but not shutting off the light.  The world is far too scary for that.

No need to be afraid of the dark

The theatre was so dark that prior to start time we could barely see to find our seats.  There was nothing on the screen — no commercials, no trailers.  The theatre seemed almost foggy.  I took off my glasses and cleaned them.

I was there to see “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” because I’ve enjoyed the frisson of fear Guillermo del Toro knows how to provide.  He’s not the director, but he’s a producer and a screenwriter for this outing.  Alas, the director Troy Nixey, and screenwriters Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins thwarted my anticipation.

Some opening scenes in the past (a time of buggies) tell too much.  Then, a child intensely draws rings on a paper as she travels alone on an airplane.  Her father picks her up at the airport, and the lack of familiarity between them is apparent.  Just as clear is the child’s knowledge that her mother has sent her packing not for a vacation, but for good.  You don’t pack all a child’s belongings if she’s coming back.

The father is bringing an old house back to life. The wood is dark, as are the wallpaper and upholstery.  The paneling is opulently sculpted, the hallways are confusing, the beds are overly ornate with carving that would scare anyone in dim light, whether the house is haunted or not.  The head- and footboard designs of twisted curlicues create imaginary monsters in filtered light.  The set-up is in place for a lonely child to fantasize inhabitants the adults cannot see. 

Unfortunately, that’s not what happens in this movie.

It starts early, the too-much-showing.  Guillermo del Toro is generally good at creating genuinely creepy critters, but the main problem with this film is that we see the critters.  Early on.  There’s no mystery or suspense, except which of these people (meaning, the actors we recognize) is going to die.  In my mind, with del Toro in the mix, everyone’s fair game for death and dismemberment, including the child.

Our choices for sacrifice to the evil primordial creatures sort of “haunting” this beautiful old Rhode Island mansion are:

-         Alex, played by Guy Pearce.  He’s the divorced dad, architect or some such refurbishing the neglected ruin to its former splendor and opulence.  He’s put every penny he’s got into this house. Of course. Apparently he never looked at blueprints which might have shown him there’s a basement.

-         Kim, played by Katie Holmes, is his design partner and girlfriend, forced into the uncomfortable position of wicked stepmother without benefit of marriage.  Kim, though, is not wicked; she shares artistic talent with her boyfriend’s daughter and pays more beneficent attention to her than either of her real parents. 

-         Sally, Alex’s daughter, is played by Bailee Madison. Her mother Joanne has shipped her east from L.A., where apparently Sally is interfering in her mother’s lifestyle.  Sally seems well behaved, a pretty ordinary kid considering her circumstances, and yet her mother has her on Adderall, which I looked up.  There’s no evidence whatsoever that this kid has any ADHD issues.  She focuses just fine when drawing, she is capable of analysis and conversation, she occupies herself, and if anything is too quiet for her age.  She’s been made to grow up too fast, and the administration of Adderall makes her parents culpable for anything that ever goes wrong with this kid.

-         Mr. Harris, played by Jack Thompson, is the grizzled old local guy who’s the contractor working on the house and grounds.  Mr. Harris’ father worked at the house before him, and told him a few things those city slickers would never believe or understand.  His father was right.

-         Finally there’s the kindly housekeeper, Mrs.Underhill, very well played by Julia Blake.  We really hope she isn’t taken.

-         The Critters.  Do we really care who they are?  The screenplay gives us information about old pre-Christian faeries, but not the pretty kind. They don’t like the light, which is supposedly why a Polaroid flash camera is used throughout.  A digital camera would have served as well, since you can see the pix immediately and the cameras do flash.  I have to believe this is a hangover from the 1970s teleplay on which the screenplay was based.  This viewer saw way too much of the creepy critters in light and dark.

Nasty-looking little beasties do nasty things, for which the child Sally is blamed.  The beasties talk to her, trying to make friends.  Sally is so miserable, unloved, and lonely, that she’s ready to accept the whispering things if they hadn’t been so danged destructive and mean.

The standard character list in place, the locale, the monsters, everything’s ready.  So, scary movie?  No.  While it tries for atmospheric yet realistic lighting, it succeeds at neither.  It was creepier in the theatre before the film came on, what with some of the house lights not working.  “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” is predictable, it lingers over shots of clattering little feet, on bright eyes in the corners, nooks, and crannies.  For suspense to be accomplished, we ought not see these things, until very near the end, so the camera’s supposed to cut away from them.  Put together all the elements and what the filmmakers wrought was an hour-and-a-half-long movie that felt like it ran over two hours.

I’m proclaiming bad writing and bad directing.  The actors all do their jobs reasonably well.  Mrs. Underhill was my favorite, but I also liked the librarian’s brief appearance (James Mackay) and the always reliable Alan Dale as the prospective purchaser of the overdone house. 

~ Molly Matera, signing off with a sigh of disappointment.  Thinking I’ll watch Robert Wise’s “The Haunting” from 1960 for some intelligent frights. Or maybe I'll just read.

Ghostly Follies

After years of listening to the extraordinary score of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” on various albums and PBS programs, I have finally seen a full production.  This production of “Follies” directed by Eric Schaeffer was presented earlier this year at Kennedy Center and is now running at the Marriott Marquis on Broadway. 

All that listening, and certain songs never seemed to fit.  Now at last I’ve seen the flow of the story, in the present, in the past, and in the actual “Follies” sections of the second act, and I get it.  

Mind you, that second act was theoretical the night I saw it.  On entering the theatre we were told that, despite the printed program proclaiming one fifteen-minute intermission, the play would run two hours and twenty minutes with no intermission.  Artistically this is a valid choice.  However, it does make concentration on the second half of the show more difficult for many people in the audience.  Producers will have to weigh their choices — if they continue the run without intermission, send a forewarning:  "At your pre-theatre dinner, eat light, drink less!" 

 The story — this old theatre, the Weismann, is being torn down to make way for a parking lot, its former showgirl stars are coming together for a reunion, and among them are Sally and Phyllis, who were wooed, bedded, and wedded, in various orders, by Buddy and Ben.  In the intervening thirty years, these couples, like the other former “Weismann Girls,” have had full lives, but reunions have been known to shatter the status quo.  What memories are accurate, which romanticized, who were they then, who are they now?  One might expect a different story from book writer James Goldman and Sondheim, and yet…. many a simple, if tangled, storyline of primary romance, secondary romance, and comedic romance have occasioned some great, great show tunes in the past.  The “Follies” score does not disappoint.

The show is a bit too long, but most of the performances are top notch.  The house is hung in a funereal manner and blends into the stage set by Derek McLane.  “Follies girls” from 30, 40, and 50 years before return in 1971, dressed to the nines (mostly) with their spouses (mostly).  The women, ranging in age from 49 to 79, make their entrances down a staircase wearing beauty pageant banners proclaiming the year of their reign:  1919, 1926, 1931, all the way into the early 1940s.  They are shadowed by their ghosts…. beautiful young women dressed as “Ziegfeld girls” (or in this case, “Weismann”) moving as they did in the past, accompanying the women’s entrances, songs, dances….The present day women are aging, but clearly some still dance, as evidenced in my favorite song-and-dance number, “Who’s That Woman” (which I think of as “Mirror, Mirror”) led by a joyously boisterous Terri White as Stella.

A stunning use of the ghost girls was “One More Kiss,” a very old-fashioned operetta number sung by Heidi (opera singer Rosalind Elias) and the ghost of the girl she was (Leah Horowitz) in an absolutely fabulous dress (one of many perfect outfits by costume designer Gregg Barnes).  It was a beautiful duet from another time, or two.

One of the most famous songs from the show, “Broadway Baby,” sung elsewhere by everyone from Betty Garrett to Elaine Stritch, is here sung by Jayne Houdyshell.  Ms. Houdyshell doesn’t quite have the pipes for it, but she’s got the acting chops, so it works.

“Could I Leave You” is a show stopper in this show full of numbers that can bring down any house. I’ve heard it sung by men and by women, and Jan Maxwell wins. 

Jan Maxwell as Phyllis Rogers Stone owns this show.  It’s not just that she’s tall and sleek and has a fabulous dress.  She is a goddess, she sings, she dances, and her acting notes are perfection.  She has emotional responses to people, she’s relating to them while she’s singing and dancing.  And she’s having a helluva good time. 

Elaine Paige is just fabulous as Carlotta — having listened to her for years, I’m happy to finally see her in action.  She most certainly is “still here,” as she sells “I’m Still Here” with emotion, cynicism, and a still solid voice breaking through any limitations of time and space. 

Alas, Bernadette Peters is not at the top of her game as Sally.  She’s overacting here and there, and her upper register was not serving her in the performance I saw.  Bernadette was too turned into herself, her Sally.  She telegraphed her frantic emotions from the moment Sally entered.  I was in the back of the house, how false must that have appeared to those in the front?  Then in her most important song, “Losing My Mind” in Sally’s Folly, she internalized too much.  She not only didn’t move left or right, she didn’t move us, either.

I’ve barely mentioned the men.  Well, while the women performed functions of plot, they were also fully fleshed out.  This is not just the actors, this is Sondheim and Goldman.  The men, on the other hand, could be traded in for other men in similar stories — the sincere second choice guy, the one you rely upon but don’t love; the ambitious insincere guy that women fall for blindly or with clear vision.  While Danny Burstein as Buddy Plummer (the sincere guy, Sally’s husband) and Ron Raines (the insincere guy, Phyllis’s husband Benjamin Stone) did their jobs more than adequately, still those guys are not memorable or distinct from characters in countless black-and-white movies seen in my (and probably Sondheim’s and Goldman’s!) youth. 

The section of the show I least understood aurally was delightful onstage, the outlandish Follies.  Throughout the play, the younger versions of Ben (Nick Verina), Sally (Lora Lee Gayer), Phyllis (Kirsten Scott), and Buddy (Christian Delcroix) had shown us what really happened in the past.  Finally they have their own folly, “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow.”  As the “Folly of Youth,” it’s sweet and hopeful, leading in to the Follies of the same people thirty years later, which are neither. 

I particularly enjoyed Buddy’s Folly (“The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues”), which was much better than his earlier number (“The Right Girl,” which was one long note no matter how athletic the choreography), and Phyllis’ Folly, the quirky “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.”  These numbers were significant to the characters’ problems, but neither self-indulgent nor maudlin.  On the other hand, Sally’s number was dull and Ben’s went on much too long. 

James Moore’s musical direction of the show is just marvelous, the music gorgeously grand and lush with a full orchestra in the pit.  It’s one of the traditions of Broadway musicals that should be revived more often.  Visually the show gave us the remains of old show business, including those gorgeous ghosts …. showgirls dressed in impossibly high headdresses, high heels and scanties, moved slowly along the catwalks, steep staircases, sometimes in tandem with the modern women, sometimes drawing attention from the center stage action.  This production is very well done, just not perfect.  But what is?  The play’s last moments were lovely — a lone “ghost” reaches toward the last living beings to leave the theatre, leaving us to wonder what happens to all those graceful ghosts when the parking lot paves over the theatre.

And then I start thinking of Joni Mitchell…..

~ Molly Matera, signing off to sing and dance to an old recording…..

He Protects and Defends

“The Guard” stars three of my favorite modern actors: Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, and Mark Strong.  Imagine my dismay, then, when the first six or seven minutes of the film left me uninspired by the initial actions of the odd character Gleeson plays. It’s only later that the reasoning behind them — and there is reasoning — becomes clear. By fifteen minutes in, the language and attitudes that are initially so appalling become funnier and funnier as we get to know Sergeant Gerry Boyle of the Garda, a.k.a. the police force of western Ireland. 

“The Guard” is an odd mix of cops and drug traffickers, social drama, and a little family drama that cooks up to a hilarious and filling brew.  It’s quirky, it’s crass, and it’s a blast.

(c) 2011 Sony Pictures Classic

The acting is just terrific throughout, so the best way to tell you a little something about the film is to tell you about the characters these wonderful actors play:

Brendan Gleeson as Sergeant Gerry Boyle uses his sad-sack face to hide all the emotions roiling inside, his humor and caustic comments a guard in themselves.  Gleeson’s Boyle is an endearing everyman, tired, disappointed, but unswervingly honest — perhaps too much so for his own good. Don Cheadle as visiting FBI agent Wendell Everett does fine work as Gleeson’s straight man, shocked by the blatant racism and cynicism, yet alert enough to what lies beneath the surface to find some connection.  He has some hilarious scenes with Gaelic speaking natives, and sweet scenes of doing what comes naturally in Ireland — drinking with Sergeant Boyle.

The trio of criminals, two Irish and one English, are sharp and stupid at the same time, international drug dealers, looking for an easy life, and failing miserably.  Liam Cunningham plays the seeming leader, Francis Sheehy, who is snarky, funny, and thinks he’s smart. Cunningham gives a wonderfully sleazy performance.  David Wilmot plays Liam O'Leary, who understands he’s a sociopath, not a psychopath, but can’t quite recall the difference.  As the unwelcome Englishman of the team, Mark Strong is tough and witty as Clive Cornell, his distaste for his colleagues displayed by his acid comments.  He is also, as usual, luscious. There’s terrific chemistry between these three, with a healthy mix of animosity and rapport. 

There’s also a pair of call girls come to town for Sergeant Boyle’s rare day off, dressed as police women in a hooker kind of way. This Mutt and Jeff team are sassy and very funny.  Dominique McElligott is charming and disarming as the tall blonde hooker, Aoife, in a witty visual contrast to Sarah Green, who is adorable as the smaller and softer Sinead.

Rory Keenan is intense and sincere as Garda Aidan McBride.  He’s as appalled as I was at Sergeant Boyle’s cavalier attitudes toward police work.  He’s right and wrong, smart and naïve.  He's got the disadvantage, of course, of being a newbie in town -- a "foreigner" from Dublin.

Fionnula Flanagan’s Eileen. Boyle gives us our first intimate look at Gerry, showing his softer side. As Gerry's ailing mother, she reveals a relationship that makes us even more curious about him.  Their scenes together are just delightful.  As the wife of the rookie Garda Aidan McBride, Katarina Cas does deep quiet work.  Her Gabriela McBride is sensitive and interesting, and we, along with Gerry, would like to know her better.

There are good cops and there are bad cops, and a totally realistic, seemingly inept, Garda Inspector Gerry Stanton is well played by Gary Lydon.

Quirky characters of the neighborhood include the town chronicler, a young man who shows up and photographs crime scenes and everything else. Laurence Kinlan is eager and enthusiastic as the photographer who appears to like gore, but also shows us that he knows the people of his town quite well.  And of course, there’s a boy and his dog (and bicycle) who’s everywhere he oughtn’t be.  Eugene Moloney is a cheeky child with very odd speech patterns, and is delightfully portrayed by Michael Og Lane.

John Michael McDonagh directed his own script, in which inconsequential bits and pieces eventually gel subtly into plot points.  The criminal plot is interwoven with personal plots and attempts at relationships in a sadly amusing manner.  In addition to the humor and human connections, he even throws in some gunplay and explosions exactly where they belong.  There’s also a sweet scene between Cheadle and a white horse that made me think of “Into the West,” doubtless as intended. I like this movie quite a lot, and will keep an eye and ear out for other work by this McDonagh. 

“The Guard” catches you off guard, goes where you don’t expect, and leaves you wondering — in a good way.  Recommended at a theatre near you.  It’s a limited release so far, but look out for it.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer but not the light.  So much reading to do….

Go Ape for "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"

Before I saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” I thought its problem was that the entire plot of the movie was told in the trailers.  And of course, our collective memory knows all the earlier movies from 1968 on, so why go see this prequel when we know how it ends?

(c) 2011 Twentieth Century Fox Films

I was so wrong.  Director Rupert Wyatt keeps this story running and bouncing and leaping, and we eagerly follow along.  The incredible visual effects team made a lot of actors into apes, chimps, orangutans — they are real.  Of course, the visual effects team has already won Oscars for creating the extraordinary worlds of Avatar and Lord of the Rings.  “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is filled with terrific stunts and effects by a very long list of people, as well as moving music by Patrick Doyle.

The film opens on an idyllic scene, mountains, forests, green everywhere.  Chimps and apes travel through the tall trees, perfectly happy as they were, where they were.  Once rounded up by humans, they become prisoners and victims.  We see the frightened eyes of one peering through a hole in a crate as she looks back at her friends and family in the forest.  Thus the film begins, from the apes’ point of view.

These particular humans were so irresponsible and inept that they didn’t know “Bright Eyes” was pregnant and proceeded to do drug experimentation on her.  Her brown eyes take on green specks as the miracle drug, ALZ112, is administered to her.  Everything goes from sparkling success to woefully wrong, and Bright Eyes is killed just as the board of the evil pharmaceutical company was being convinced by the passionate young scientist Will Rodman that ALZ112 is the cure for Alzheimer’s.  The murder of the chimp leaves her baby an orphan, and Will Rodman (James Franco) brings the baby home where he and his father, an Alzheimer's victim, care for it and teach it as they would a human child.  While not Rodman’s first mistake, this is a big one.  This is Caesar.

John Lithgow and baby Caesar

Caesar is a brilliant invention of screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, brought to magical life by Andy Serkis (previously not-exactly-seen as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy) and top-notch makeup and CGI artists.  This is what all that special effects technology is for, to aid in the story-telling so as to become inseparable from the narrative of an exciting and terribly sad tale of how human kind sets itself up for destruction.  Even the seemingly nice human, Franco’s Will Rodman, is a monster.  Those arrogant humans keep trying to excuse animal experimentation by making it about curing something terrifying like Alzheimer’s (think “Deep Blue Sea” with its super smart sharks), as if that far-off dream makes the torture of blatantly sentient beings acceptable.  There is an overwhelming sadness in this film, some of it quite unexpected.  Eventually betrayal and broken hearts make for the inevitable rebellion that arrogant humans do not expect.  Humankind’s hubris will be our own destruction.

I won’t spell out the plot points because I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment of this ride.  Despite my assumption from the trailers that I knew everything that would happen in the film, I did not.  This was much more fun than I expected since all I really “knew” was quite a long way into the future of our planet and species.  Our stupid species.  It seems that the moral of the story is, “What god hath wrought, let no man screw around with.” 

While I liked all the actors playing humans, the real kudos go to the hidden actors:  those playing apes in jumpsuits, the actors’ body language, eyes, facial expressions somehow magically transformed by make-up and CGI artists into totally real apes, orangutans, and chimpanzees. 

Andy Serkis is deep inside there as Caesar.

Andy Serkis is nothing short of brilliant as Caesar, from adolescent to adult, from adored to abandoned.  He is so hurt at his treatment by humans, even the man who called himself his “father,” that he must, when finally surrounded by his own kind, become the Alpha that the humans made him.  Karin Konoval becomes Maurice, the retired circus orangutan (perhaps named for Maurice Evans in the original film) who signs with Caesar in ape prison and has a funny “line” that gives Caesar, the son of Bright Eyes, a bright idea.  Terry Notary creates two separate chimps, Rocket and Bright Eyes; Richard Ridings plays the great ape Buck with fury and sensitivity; and Christopher Gordon is achingly menacing as Koba, a much abused and scarred lab ape who’s way smarter than humans can comprehend even before he’s given any drugs. 

As for those pesky humans,

John Lithgow is wonderful as Will Rodman’s father, an Alzheimer victim.  Clearly once a fine pianist, the disease stole that from him, until his son experiments on him.  Then the music pours out of him, for a while.  Lithgow does beautiful work with Franco and Serkis.

James Franco’s Will Rodman is sweet and loving, but ultimately Rodman does not take responsibility for his actions, and thus begins a series of events that leads to disaster.  It’s impossible to not like Will, especially with Franco’s warm eyes, filled with pain, longing, and love.  But even at the end, he has no idea what he’s done, nor does he regret it.

Caesar with James Franco as Will Rodman in the Redwoods.

Freida Pinto is very good as the intelligent, compassionate, practical, realistic veterinarian Caroline Aran.  Too bad Will doesn’t learn from her.

David Oyelowo seemed a bit young for his role as Steven Jacobs, CEO of the evil pharmaceuticals company, Gen-Sys, but he was suitably charming, smarmy, and cold-hearted.

Tyler Labine does good work as the primate handler in the Gen-Sys labs who becomes the accidental human experiment of the next generation of Will Rodman’s potential cure for Alzheimer’s — and then Patient Zero.

David Hewlett, an actor who plays whiny roles very well, is the Rodman’s neighbor Hunsiker, an airline pilot.  It’s not that he’s a bad man, he responds to his unconventional neighbors in a quite understandable manner throughout the film.  It’s just that he’s not a very good neighbor, and whatever he does turns out wrong. 

Brian Cox runs a prison deceptively called a “primate center” and hires rotten people to look after the apes, including his own nasty son.  Cox gives the easily caricatured John Landon dimensions, creating a less than conventional “villain” in this minor role.

Bad boy Tom.

And who do we get to hate as the lowest lowlife of the humans?  While there’s more than one qualified candidate for that status, a standout is Dodge Landon as played by Tom Felton, formerly that bad boy Draco Malfoy.  Landon is a grown-up scumbag we can only hope is torn to pieces by apes.  That was not a spoiler, not to worry.  Sweet revenge on Landon is much cleverer than such crude violence.

Some things never change:  We always root for the apes.  Who wasn’t on the side of King Kong or Mighty Joe Young, huge apes abused by humans while fighting for their loves and their lives?  It was only in the original “Planet of the Apes,” where the apes, orangutans and chimpanzees all behaved like nasty humans, that we could fear or despise them as the villains of a story.  The apes are only just beginning to rise here, and we’re still on their side.  Go Apes! 

For its entire two hours, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is engrossing, then thrilling, filling viewers like me with dread.  The ending leaves us with hope for some characters, despair for others, and a really nice-set up of spreading a virus in a visually clever way that is also believable in terms of plot.  Fans of the original 1968 film, fear not — it is referenced with reverence. 

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer to hang out among some trees.