Review of the film The Secret World of Arrietty

            It takes so much to be brave in this world—to realize who and what is worth fighting for—especially when one is young. You haven't survived a lot yet. You aren't sure how to go about navigating those situations where courage is all you have. You're small and inexperienced and look to the adults for guidance.

            But what happens when the adults can't offer any guidance? What do you lay yourself on the line for? How do you do it? What if it's only you who is there to be brave and fight for what is truly important? How do you know what to do?

            The wonderful animated film The Secret World of Arrietty may not answer those questions for every child in this world, but it does answer them for its spunky 13-year-old heroine. Arrietty is a borrower; one of a dwindling race of tiny people who live in the shadowed folds and crevasses under our homes. As is their custom and need, they borrow small amounts of our goods, too little to even notice most of the time—a single tissue, a short piece of tape, a solitary sugar cube—to furnish their lives. They live quietly and happily just beneath the floorboards in homes that mirror our own in the most minute detail. These borrowers avoid us bigger humans, or “Beans,” at all costs for lack of trust for what we would do if we discovered their existence. What would happen to Arrietty and her sweet and nervous parents if someone did discover them...even if that person wanted nothing more than to befriend them? What if that person were a child, a lonely and sad child, inexperienced with secrets and caution and bravery?

            The story of the films winds through this premise beautifully and with a nuance that most animated movies lack. It's gorgeous to look at, luscious and so well crafted by the legendary Studio Ghibli that also turned out other cinematic wonders like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Arrietty and her parents, despite their obvious fictitious-animated nature, feel like real people with real desires and courage. Their story snares you with its adventurous and lived in feelings of true human behavior. And its story reflects something back at viewers that they may have glimpsed in themselves at moments throughout their lives.

            

Review of the film Take Shelter

            There are an infinite number of ways for devastation to strike. We are bombarded with the ideas and images of them from all angles—books, movies, television and print news—and it becomes difficult to discern what is true and what is made up in others' imaginations. The line between the two is so often unclear. When the question of what is real and what is imagined becomes blurred in one single mind, then that person and those around him begin to question his sanity.

            In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon plays a young family man, Curtis, who questions the visions of devastation that plague his nights. He dreams of a catastrophic and toxic storm that provokes insidious behavior in people and animals. Behind his small Ohio ranch house, he begins to build out and heavily fortify the tiny underground storm shelter. His wife, played by Jessica Chastain, is increasingly distressed as his erratic actions and speech intensify. His hearing-impaired daughter needs a costly operation that they cannot afford without his health insurance from his manual labor job, but his continued employment is questionable. The tenuous hold he has on reality seems to be slipping. And he and his wife are aware that Curtis's mother was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia when she was his present age. Curtis cannot determine if what he is dreaming of is from true premonition or psychosis.

            Director Jeff Nichols has made a quietly terrifying film. The story moves slowly, building tension as Curtis vacillates between his belief in and his suspicion of the terrifying visions' accuracy. And Shannon's performance is mesmerizing in its sincerity as he is assaulted with the growing realization that an apocalyptic storm or a severe mental illness have the same devastating ability to tear his family a part.

            

Review of the film The Grey

            There are experiences that leave a person unable or unfit for the world as most of us live in it. If these encounters are survived, the survivor is never the person that he or she was before—now unable to step rightly back into the life once led.

            In The Grey, Liam Neeson stars as a man pit against a pack of wolves like none other ever recorded in the existence of man. These wolves are as big as small horses and ruthless hunters of full-grown male humans. They travel long distances and over great obstacles unexplained. These creatures can blend in with the dark and attack from out of nowhere. They are the baddest wolves that have ever lived.

            The later-in-life action star Neeson plays someone we've seen living on the screen before—the dark and lethal man of past mysteries that the actor been racking up lately in tawdry thrillers like Taken and Unknown.  These two elements, the wolves and the loner, together make up what one would expect is a by the numbers adventure thriller. And to some degree it is, but in this adventure thriller there are also some moments of intense emotion that feel as if they could be real.

            In this story, a ragtag handful of men are stranded in the foreboding Alaskan wilderness by a violent plane crash. They are pursued by the aforementioned numberless pack of wolves as they attempt to survive and find help. When it comes right down to the survival aspects of the story, there are some elements and images that many fear—the ice cold wind and snow that form a blinding, stinging blizzard, the dark creatures that may hunt us in the night, the horror of being pinned underwater just out of reach of the surface—and here they are illustrated before you on the screen. Their nature may be rendered in a heightened manner by the magic of big movie production, but they are the some of what each of us dreams of, the nightmares that plague and pull at our imaginations.

Review of the film The Tree of Life

            Our lives begin long before our births. This idea could be seen as spiritual, but I like to think of it as simply physical—the matter of the cells that make up our beings has been in existence for millennia. That is something that cannot be denied when thought out rationally. We begin in the cells and, therefore, the genes, of our ancestors. The people who become our great grandparents, grandparents and parents, their matter, contains the same stuff that will be that which makes us up as well. 

            The Tree of Life is a film that explores the makings of life on this planet as well as the workings of a small family living in East Texas during the 1950s. It may seem a far reach to relate the story of a few interconnected lives to the beginnings of the world and humanity, but Director Terrence Malick makes an often-moving and beautiful attempt. He starts as far in the past as a life begins—as far back as those interconnected lives deserve in order to frame them truthfully.

            In this small family, Mother and Father behave as drastically far a part in nature as the two poles of the Earth. Mother exudes and behaves with grace and mercy towards her three young sons. Father lives by the strict savagery of nature—he is a disciplinarian and deeply troubled, and his oldest son, Jack, feels the brunt of his anger and frustration. There are memories of love and hurt, beauty and rage that the adult Jack flashes back to as he lives a seemingly empty existence in the present day. He seems to be reaching for something in his past to help him make sense of who he is now. But the pictures are a jumble within his mind that cannot be teased out from the emotions they provoke in him. Jack fights again the battles of his childhood, hears echoes of profound words spoken in his youth, relives moments beyond simple explanation or comprehension. The sun of summer flashes through the leaves of the tree in the front yard and the sprinkler water sparkles between fingers and toes stretched forth.

            Epic and deeply autobiographical, this film searches to tell the simplest and most complex of narratives. The scenes produced by the filmmakers feel so real and also a few degrees heightened above reality. It is a gorgeous and flawed film. Its scope encompasses more than a three-hour movie can relate, but it tries sincerely and with the ambition this story, anyone's story, deserves. 

Review of the film Moneyball

            General Manager Billy Beane can't watch the baseball games he has laid so much time and energy into winning.  Instead, he drives around the city turning on and off the radio to catch bursts of commentary and updates. He can't be there to witness his team's performance; there's too much riding on this, he's put too much of his life into it and risked his family and livelihood. He is the general manager for the Oakland A's in the 2002 baseball season and his team hasn't had a winning record in many years. Beane has overhauled the team and put faith in the art of statistics. It doesn't sound like the makings of a rousing film, but I was genuinely surprised by how invested in Moneyball I became due to the great performances and snappy, witty dialogue and ideas.

            Director Bennett Miller (Capote) adapts the best-selling book with the help of screenwriters Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and Steven Zaillian (Gangs of New York). I didn't understand all of the game being described and I've never been good with statistics, but there was more than numbers being discussed in this film. At one time, Beane had been a hot prospect in the baseball world. He was young and well-built, handsome and intelligent, with a mighty swing. But his major league career proved a bust, he literally choked at the opportunity, and the memories of potential never fulfilled have stayed with him into his general managing. Beane, played by Brad Pitt, knows firsthand what those scouts and other managers he constantly argues with still haven't gotten: that the Billy Beanes of the world have little place in the modern baseball stadium. It takes more than a good jawline and a strong stance to win in a league where the Yankees annual budget is three times that of the Oakland A's. Beane hires a young, brilliant statistician named Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill,  with a knack for crunching player numbers and a deep affection for the game. Then Beane goes about the opening of the 2002 season looking for undervalued but statistically successful players that fit into the team's budget instead of big ticket names that would suck the payroll dry.

            After a lot of firing and hiring, the A's are back in playoff position with a 20 game winning streak. It's a great achievement and has roused the Oakland baseball fans out of their languor with a big league record. It seems that Beane's statistically savvy angle on the game rings true. However, one could say that this streak is a statistical anomaly that should be thrown out with the bath water along with all the other baseball superstitions. But there's a true sense of enjoyment to be had in the A's underdog triumph. Even stats fans can love the game when played well.  The statistics explain only so much, and I could see that as I watched the actors who peopled Moneyball with their nuanced portrayals. It's in the eyes and the spaces around the whip smart words. Math can only explain so much.

Review of the film Haywire

            So Haywire, the Stephen Soderbergh action flick, is a very good movie. I know that it's not just me saying this:  Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 80% fresh score. That's definitely a positive rating from a poll of hundreds of critics from around the country and world. The esteemed Roger Ebert spends most of his review analyzing why young males in this country respond so positively to stories centering on attractive female heroines kicking ass and pummeling the opposition, mostly male, physically and mentally. Maybe it's a pleasure of some sort for these young males—a hidden masochist fantasy playing out before them—that drives so many of these men to seek out these images and tales.  I have to say that most of these heroine driven ass-kicking stories are fashioned and constructed by men, and it could speak to why they are so well-received by a male audience.

            So why am I, as a female, responding so strongly to the images before me in Haywire—of a razor-intelligent and capable woman outwitting and outfighting numbers of strong and smart men--a tale written by a man and directed by a man seemingly for those male audience members I love to hate? I can't fully explain why I loved this movie. There was the angle that this film took, a bit turned or altered from that of most of the action movies I've been previously disparaging.

            Perhaps it’s the masochist in me. But there is something smarter and less condescending about this film’s depiction of a female action star. Suppose we were watching an action film starring a man; we wouldn’t be putting as much emphasis on his acting performance and line readings. We’d be focused on his ability to bear the weight of the action driving the film.

            Former MMA champion Gina Carano stars in the film Haywire. The story is centered around skilled operative Mallory Kane, now retiring from a highly secretive government security contractor. Unfortunately, that last job she performs before retirement is also a set-up. It has been designed to frame and kill her. Instead of becoming a blacklisted corpse, Kane survives and becomes a fugitive from the law. Someone close has double-crossed her, and Kane's life depends upon finding out who and why.

            The majority of the film is action-based, structured and angled around Gina Carano's particular physical skills and abilities. The sequences left me breathless. Her action talent is unmistakable; her agility and presence of mind are there in her every movement throughout the film. Perhaps she isn't the best line reader or dramatic actress; she is up against a formidable cast of distinguished male actors, but there is no doubt that Carano has a future in film with the best of them. Let's just hope it is well-written and directed action thrillers instead of the kinda sad Underworld films.