Quarantine is a movie testament to craftsmanship and commitment.
The best Blair Witch knockoff of them all is basically a zombie movie seen through the viewfinder of a TV news camera — the “found footage” conceit of Blair Witch.
But think about what it takes to make that come off — the camera blocking and staging, the choreography that gets the actors, the lights, the mikes and camera from one perfect spot to capture what’s happening to the next perfect spot, with enough jarring, jumpy bumps in the Steadicam to make it all so nauseatingly real.
And the actors are working in long takes. That means pages of script at a time, with no lazy short edits to cover blown lines or players dropping out of character. Jennifer Carpenter — playing the too-thin, too-young, too-flirty TV reporter whose “ride-along” with firefighters turns into a zombie-virus nightmare — gives a performance that harks back to the golden age of Jamie Lee Curtis. Yeah, she’s that good.
No, the script isn’t anything special, and the novelty long ago wore off in this style of moviemaking. But the execution in the film from John Erick Dowdle is amazing; the camerawork and cutting are perfect.
Quarantine is a remake of a Spanish horror thriller about a reporter and cameraman who get more than they bargained for when they do a story on the night shift at a fire station.
An ambulance call takes them to an old apartment building. An old woman is sick, foaming at the mouth and covered in blood. Before they can get her out, she bites others, and the building is quickly sealed off, with SWAT snipers preventing anybody from leaving. One by one, the residents and first responders are picked off.
As Angela, Carpenter (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) avoids shallow, vapid news-babe cliches. She’s just a young woman fighting back hysteria by doing her job and yelling, “Film everything!”
Quarantine is the first clone to rip off Blair Witch without embarrassing those doing the ripping off.
” Body of Lies” is a riddle wrapped in an enigma served with a side of mystery meat. It’s very watchable, with some entertaining action beats, kind of a Syriania as scripted by Tom Clancy, a “The Kingdom” with a little less “CSI” — heavy on the tech, snappy in the dialogue.
But the showy dialogue — and a scenery-chewing turn by Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead — forces Ridley Scott’s latest foray into the morass of the Middle East to straddle that line between “not bad” and “not all that, either.”
DiCaprio is Roger Ferris, an Arabic-speaking C.I.A. field agent, at home in Iraq or Turkey, the United Arab Emirates or Amman, Jordan. He’s chasing this phantom terrorist Al-Saleem. He’s constantly on the phone with his portly, desk-jockey boss, the D.C.-based field chief, played with a cagey drawl by Russell Crowe. Ferris goes undercover, works agents, tries to “turn” terrorists, always with Ed Hoffman (Crowe) watching in, by spy plane, listening in by phone.
They have shouting matches, disagreements over strategy, largely over issues of trust or control. And maybe cell phone bills.
“You’ve gotta decide which side’a the cross you’re on,” drawls Ed. “I need nailers. Not hangers.”
Ed’s interference, his running of “side operations” behind Roger’s back, is dangerous. But it turns deadly when he puts Ferris in bed with the deadly-efficient Jordanian secret police, led by the dapper, scary-intense Hani. Mark Strong does a silky, menacing Armand Assante impersonation in playing this master counter-terrorist, a man who insists on human assets, not high-tech, and man who demands that you never, ever, ever lie to him.
The bad guys are fighting, as Hoffman lectures, “men from the future” — that is, us. And by going low-tech, not using computers or cell phones to communicate, for instance, they are staying one step ahead of the C.I.A. But Ferris, despite his differences with Hoffman, envisions a trap.
You’ve guessed that there’s going to be a betrayal, a “side operation,” and a lie. You’ve guessed that since it’s a Leo movie, there’ll be a love interest, here an Iranian-Jordanian nurse (Golshifteh Farahan). And if you’ve noticed that the script was by William “The Departed” Monahan, you know that all this lip service about men from the past avoiding cell phones is just that, lip service. Monahan is Mr. Cell-Phone-as-Plot-Device. They’re a constant here, used to set up meets, set off bombs, bicker with bosses and badger divorce lawyers in the middle of an anti-terror operation.
It’s not exactly a lazy prop, though you would hope Monahan is getting some sort of Sprint kickback for all the cell-plugging he’s doing in his scripts.
DiCaprio’s performance is amped-up in the extreme here, lots of yelling into a phone, chewing out subordinates, bobbing his head or worse, raising his eyebrows with each line. Scott’s choppy editing style means that every shot is a repeat performance, with little flow between cuts. Leo works himself into a tizzy, then “ACTION,” and that’s what we see.
“Body of Lies,” adapted from a David Ignatius novel, plays like a beach book, a decent genre page-turner. We liked “Syriana” and “The Kingdom,” right? We stay with this sand-caked beach novel even if we pretty much know what’s on that last page half-way through.
George Orwell’s preposterous declaration in 1984 has come true: Big Brother is watching me and you and everyone we know, documenting us on surveillance cameras, capturing our cell phone, Internet, and AT M activity, and tracking our whereabouts as we drive hybrid vehicles outfitted with satellite guidance systems. So Eagle Eye, a brain-squandering thriller starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, and cell phones they insist upon answering, is onto something with its future-is-now premise of ordinary citizens blackmailed by infernal technology. But the movie (which began as a byte of an idea from exec producer Steven Spielberg) is so hysterical in its terrorist subplot and its seizure-inducing action sequences that a pummeled viewer can be excused for texting WTF? to a friend in the middle of the chaos. Especially when the commands come from an unseen female mastermind with the voice of a GPS console reciting driving directions. (Sometimes she flashes additional info via electronic signage — like Steve Martin did for laffs in L.A. Story.)
LaBeouf and Monaghan grimace and run fast as ordinary citizens snared (by ludicrous circumstances) into abetting the enemy; Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson evince similar mood swings as FBI agents. But none is charismatic enough to override the prattlings of Eagle Eye herself, or to jolt us into realizing that this movie actually means to say serious stuff: We can run but we can’t hide.
IGN has reviewed the film version of Max Payne, Hollywood’s latest attempt at making a good videogame-based movie. While the flick has its moments, there aren’t enough of them to keep it from scoring a lackluster 5/10:
While Max Payne definitely culls several plot elements and characters from the videogame, gamers will no doubt be disappointed at how humdrum the film’s action scenes are when compared to the game. There are no memorable kills here, save for the one that actually happens off-screen near the end of Act One. The gunfights — the few there are — offer nothing we haven’t seen in other action flicks, especially those that inspired the game. For a movie about a guy named Payne, this film could have used a lot more pain to help rouse it to life. As it is, Max Payne simply lies there on-screen, drab and lifeless.
As a revenge flick, Max Payne simply offers nothing new or exciting; Death Sentence and even the Tom Jane Punisher were better revenge films with more notable action set-pieces. While director John Moore deserves kudos for crafting some cool visual sequences, they’re merely window dressing adorning an empty structure. Sorry, gamers, but you’ll have to keep waiting for that definitive game-to-film adaptation.
Adapted by Gina Prince-Bythewood from the best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, “The Secret Life of Bees” unfolds in a sentimental, honey-glazed land that vaguely resembles South Carolina in 1964. It would be wrong to say that the troubles of that time and place have been wished away — on the contrary, the movie begins with a scene of horrific domestic violence and includes child abuse, a racially motivated beating, suicide and the threat of a lynching — but from the opening voice-over to the final credits, every terror and sorrow is swaddled in warm, therapeutic comfort.
The film insists so strenuously on its themes of redemption, tolerance, love and healing that it winds up defeating itself, and robbing Ms. Kidd’s already maudlin tale of its melodramatic heat. At first there is a jolt of pure Southern Gothic, as Dakota Fanning matter-of-factly tells us that when she was 4, she shot her mother dead. Ms. Fanning plays Lily, who, at the age of 14, when the story takes place, lives with her mean-drunk peach farmer dad, T. Ray (Paul Bettany). He tells her that her mother never loved her and makes her kneel on grits when she misbehaves.
One night Lily, who dreams of being a writer and keeps a box of keepsakes buried in the orchard behind her house, runs away with Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), a black employee of T. Ray’s who has been beaten and jailed for trying to register to vote. The two of them find their way to an upcountry town called Tiburon, where they are taken in by three beekeeping sisters named August (Queen Latifah), June (Alicia Keys) and May (Sophie Okonedo).
May, who seems a little simple-minded, is also so deeply empathetic that her sisters have built a “wailing wall,” where she can go to cry when the world’s grief overwhelms her, which is often. June, who plays the cello, is also a political activist (or at least a collector of N.A.A.C.P. T-shirts), and, as such, is a bit leery of the white girl who comes around in need of mothering. But August is a person of such boundless maternal wisdom and generosity that neither June nor Lily nor any of the million bees in August’s care need worry.
Even as terrible things insist on happening, and the bigotry and suspicion of the era take their toll, worries are no match for matriarchal folk religion and the wisdom of the beehive. In its fuzzy linking of female power with insect life, “The Secret Life of Bees” shows a curious kinship with Neil LaBute’s ill-starred remake of “The Wicker Man,” but with nurturing African-American women in place of murderous white ones.
In case they didn’t have enough problems of their own, August and her sisters also have Lily to deal with, and the film seems to struggle with an awkward and unstated tension. You can almost feel how badly it wants to be about the lives, not of bees, but of black women at a pivotal moment in the recent past.
Despite Ms. Prince-Bythewood’s best efforts to retain a sense of history, and Queen Latifah’s shrewd refusal to play her character according to stereotype, the film becomes a familiar and tired fable of black selflessness, in which African-Americans take time out from their struggle against oppression to lift the battered self-esteem of white people who have the good sense not to be snarling bigots. Even Ms. Fanning, weeping on cue and looking uncomfortable otherwise, seems a little abashed that the movie, in the end, has to be all about her.
“The Secret Life of Bees” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has violence and some profanity.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood; written by Ms. Prince-Bythewood, based on the novel by Sue Monk Kidd; director of photography, Rogier Stoffers; edited by Terilyn A. Shropshire; music by Mark Isham; production designer, Warren Alan Young; produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, James Lassiter, Will Smith and Joe Pichirallo; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
WITH: Queen Latifah (August Boatwright), Dakota Fanning (Lily Owens), Jennifer Hudson (Rosaleen Daise), Alicia Keys (June Boatwright), Sophie Okonedo (May Boatwright), Nate Parker (Neil), Tristan Wilds (Zach Taylor), Hilarie Burton (Deborah Owens) and Paul Bettany (T. Ray Owens).
