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Movies
Mini Movie Reviews • “Contraband” — Yes, this follows the tried-andtrue One Last Job formula. Yes, Mark Wahlberg is nestled deep within his comfort zone as a former master criminal who’s lived a dangerous life and gone straight. Still, this is a solid genre picture that knows exactly what it is, has no delusions of grandeur and carries out its task in entertaining and occasionally even suspenseful fashion. Based on the 2008 Icelandic film “Reykjavik-Rotterdam” and directed by that movie’s star, Baltasar Kormakur, “Contraband” features Wahlberg as Chris Farraday, a onetime expert smuggler who’s now living a quiet life as a security consultant in the New Orleans suburbs with his hairstylist wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale), and their two young sons. When Kate’s younger brother (Caleb Landry Jones) botches a run for a volatile local drug dealer (Giovanni Ribisi, tatted, high-pitched and squirrelly) while pulling into the Port of New Orleans, Chris must come out of retirement to make up the loss to this madman. His scheme involves shipping down to Panama City to bring back millions in counterfeit bills; not only does this not go according to plan, it spins wildly out of control. Meanwhile, back in the bayou, Kate and the kids increasingly become targets of the drug dealer’s wrath. Kormakur relies too heavily on shaky-cam tricks and quick, needless zooms to pump up the tension, but some of his set pieces do play out in visceral fashion. HH1/2 • “Joyful Noise” — If some incarnation of “Glee” were to be developed for the Christian Broadcasting Network, it would probably look a lot like this. You’ve got your squeaky-clean reworkings of pop tunes from various decades, which are intended to please viewers of all ages; some romance, although nothing too hot and heavy; and a large dollop of prayer, as the
characters struggle to find answers with the Lord’s help. It’s really rather canny the way writer-director Todd Graff’s film caters to these large, wholesome audiences — ones that are largely underserved in mainstream multiplex fare — all at once. But that doesn’t mean it’s effective as entertainment. Especially during the musical numbers — which theoretically should serve as the most rousing source of emotion, since the film is about a gospel choir — there’s a weird disconnect, a sense that the songs are simultaneously overproduced and hollow, and repeated cutaways to reaction shots of singers nodding and smiling further undermine their cohesion. Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton co-star as longtime enemies battling for control over a small-town Georgia church choir. Keke Palmer and Jeremy Jordan play teens sharing a forbidden love ... through song. Graff jumps around awkwardly among catfights, performances and surreptitious snuggle sessions between the two young stars. H1/2 • “We Need to Talk About Kevin” — For Lynne Ramsay, motives are vague, sometimes unknowable things. In the Scottish director’s films — “Ratcatcher,” ‘’Morvern Callar” and this one — characters act out awkwardly and unpredictably, baffled and nullified by deadly predicaments that are, in some measure, their own making. “Kevin,” Ramsay’s first film in nearly 10 years, is about a woman wracked by the trauma of having mothered a mass-murdering teenage son. Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) is a suburban wife to a cheerful, oblivious husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), whose waking nightmare is enforced by constant flashbacks, mulling over her mothering of Kevin (as a teen, played by Ezra Miller) from infancy and up until the fateful high school massacre. It is, to be sure, a
parent’s horror story. The origin of this real-life demon is traced back to birth and even earlier, a pondering of the arrival of a bad seed and his subsequent nurturing. The script by Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear, adapting Lionel Shriver’s acclaimed novel, artfully blends these two timelines evoking Eva’s interior consciousness, where every moment recalls a precursor to the tragedy, and a debate of her role in it. But the film fails to grasp the “why.” Perhaps this is as it should be: The formation of such a monster can only be a mystery. But this thoroughly well-crafted if rigidly conceived film could use a little more talking — or at least some therapy — about Kevin. HH1/2 • “Pariah” — Writer-director Dee Rees’ feature debut achieves a difficult, intriguing balance. It’s at once raw and dreamlike, specific to a particular, personal rite of passage yet relatable in its message of being true to oneself. Adepero Oduye gives a subtly natural performance as Alike (pronounced ah-lee-kay), a 17year-old Brooklyn girl who’s struggling to come out as a lesbian. Each day at school, she dresses the way that makes her feel comfortable in baggy T-shirts and baseball caps, and she pals around with her brash best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), who’s already happily out. But on the bus ride home, she must transform herself into the young lady her mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), approves of and loves. Audrey hopes arranging a new friendship with a colleague’s daughter, Bina (Aasha Davis), will set Alike down a traditionally straight, female path, but this budding relationship only complicates matters further. Simultaneously, Alike’s home life is deteriorating, as her police officer father (Charles Parnell) begins keeping suspiciously late hours; it’s a subplot that bogs things down and feels like a distraction from Alike’s journey,
a device to add tension. But Alike’s story is inspiring to see: Oduye is both melancholy and radiant in the role, and she makes you long for her character to finally find peace. And Bradford Young’s award-winning cinematography gives “Pariah” the gauzy, gorgeous feel of an urban fairy tale. HHH • “A Separation” — The title is an apt encapsulation of the film as a whole: It may sound simple, but its results are devastating. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s tale begins as a domestic disagreement in contemporary Iran and morphs into a legal thriller, one that will have you questioning the characters — and your own perception of them — again and again. This transformation occurs intimately, organically and seemingly so effortlessly that you may not recognize it right before your eyes. But the lasting effect will linger; while this story is incredibly detailed in the specificity of its setting, its themes resonate universally. Farhadi sets the tense tone right off the top with a long, single take in which middle-class husband and wife Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) sit before a judge to explain their dispute. She wants the family to leave Tehran to provide their studious daughter, Termeh (the director’s daughter, Sarina Farhadi), with better educational opportunities. He wants to stay and care for his aging father, who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. When Simin’s divorce request is rejected, she moves out; while the daughter stays, Nader still needs help watching his father. This leads to one fateful decision, and then another and another, until finally, serious criminal charges are at stake. “A Separation” honestly addresses the notions of trust and respect, loyalty and religious devotion. HHH1/2 — Associated Press
Open Stage puts on “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
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Movies • Continued from D10
D12 — The Sentinel, Carlisle, Pa. Thursday, January 19, 2012
of those directors who can get just about anybody he that (1) Carano can hold her wants to act in his movies. own, and (2) like Woody I call the plot nonsense. Allen, Soderbergh is one Ask yourself this: How
Books
• Continued from D8
than consuming it in fire. The Beast is dead, but so is Alice and one other student. Quentin lapses into unconsciousness, from which he awakens only six months later, now fully healed from his injuries sustained while fighting with the others. He makes his way back to earth, forswears magic,
gets a boring desk job that doesn’t actually require any real work, and swears he doesn’t miss the magic. The novel concludes with his friends — who had escaped Fillory, leaving him behind because the centaurs told them he was unlikely to live — finding him and asking him to come back to Fillory with them to take the fourth throne and be king alongside them. Of course
could any organization or “contractor” survive for long with the death rate we see here? At the end of a year no one would be left
alive except a few mail room clerks. Soderbergh seems to be amusing himself with the variety of his locations; we visit Barcelona,
Dublin, New Mexico, New York State and executive offices in unnamed cities. A film like “Haywire” has no lasting significance, but
it’s a pleasure to see an Alist director taking the care to make a first-rare genre thriller. HHH
he does.
behind in Fillory. Quentin thinks that he wants to be Martin, that living in this magical enchanted kingdom will solve all his problems. He finds, though, that having stayed in Fillory when he wasn’t wanted has corrupted Martin and pushed him over to the dark side (though, again, the sides of light and dark aren’t at all well-defined in Grossman’s novel). Once he
meets Martin, Quentin realizes he doesn’t really want that after all. There was enormous potential for Grossman to develop that line of thought, which he just wasted. There was potential for him to develop something one of the residents of Fillory said — “We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler” — and
he wastes that, too. The benefit of coming after Lewis and Rowling would be to take the parts of their novels that were successful and add his own twist to it. What Mr. Grossman has done is to take their original plots, mash them together, add sex, drugs and alcohol, and call it original, when it is sadly merely a poor man’s version of either.
Concepts Although blatantly lifted from other, better, works, Grossman raises one interesting concept in his 402pages of otherwise uninspired prose. For the whole of the book, Quentin envies Martin Chatwin, the one sibling in the Fillory novels by Plover who manages to stay
2012 film preview first steps
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D TheSection Sentinel ‘Hunger Games,’ ‘Dark Knight’ and ‘Hobbit’ are all highly anticipated movies January 19, 2012
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CPYB’s student choreographers to present work