This is a movie about polish hit man, Ben Kingsley, who screws up a hit and relocates to California (against his will) in order to sober up and rejoin the family business. Along the way he falls in love with oddball Tea Leoni, who is just as screwed up as he is, and the pair do an odd little mating dance within the fallout of their copious emotional baggage. What this tale boils down to is a sad love story. Each character has several interesting, albeit often very twisted, triumphs along the way that make you root for the characters. The unflinching look at their ugly humanity compels you to really want to know how it all works out in the end. The movie is often amusing, particularly because of the bluntness of Kingsley's character, but don't think I'd really call the "funny" on the whole. It's more of a (sometimes) light-hearted drama where addiction and emotional distance play central roles in the characters' development. It's certainly an interesting film, focusing on very real human drama in a completely unrealistic set of circumstances that allows for a certain amount of playfulness that would otherwise have felt a little brash. Worth a watch.
Movie to See #2: Alien vs. Ninja
This is a bad movie - for obvious reasons. The quality is more akin to a home movie, complete with 1950's Godzilla-esq monsters, rather than modern cinematic filming, which gives it a light backyard feel. The writing is along a similar vein, relying on a more linear western story line rather than the circuitous 'decompression' style that generally marks good Eastern story telling. Most of the time the movie is gory for the sake of gore and is completely unrealistic in each and every respect. Yet, despite all of that, or perhaps even because of it, it was a surprisingly fun movie. It is so completely stupid, yet still hilarious. Not everyone is going to enjoy this movie because you have to appreciate it for its absurdity in order to take anything away from it. But if you can suspend disbelief just enough to appreciate its silliness, it's actually a decent way to waste a little time.
Do you suppose that not liking a movie about armed resistance by Jews during a Nazi occupation automatically make you an anti-Semite? Surely not, although I still feel at least a little guilty for disliking this movie. You see, while I find the background of this story interesting - kind of - the characters are just so hard to love. It's not that we don't like them, we just don't know enough about most of them to care what happens to them. My take on it is that being a Jew during WWII doesn't mean we should automatically find your story compelling; we still need to connect on a human level in order to have anything more than 'historical sympathy' for the characters. We can "care," just like you can "care" about the historical suffering of any people that have found themselves the victims of cruelty. But we won't buy into the story just because of the setting alone. Unfortunately for Defiance, the filmmakers did choose to rely on historical sympathy for just about everyone in the story. Can you honestly think of anything more lame than relying on historic guilt to provide all of the tension to a story?
The problem here is that we don't know the refugees' back stories, what they have seen, or any of the suffering they have experienced beyond the inevitable hunger that comes of being stuck in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter. With regard to the bigger setting that should be more closely enshrouding this entire tale, we get nothing but (practically) off-handed references to what was going on in the cities around the forests. It just doesn't work.
The problem here is that we don't know the refugees' back stories, what they have seen, or any of the suffering they have experienced beyond the inevitable hunger that comes of being stuck in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter. With regard to the bigger setting that should be more closely enshrouding this entire tale, we get nothing but (practically) off-handed references to what was going on in the cities around the forests. It just doesn't work.
Unfortunately, most of the tension in this movie, aside from the whole Nazi backdrop (which I'm not dismissing), came from the social implosion of the idiots at the camp itself. The capacity of human beings to turn upon one another when a greater threat looms above them is both fascinating and hopelessly stupid (kind of like the absurd notion in American politics that there are only Republicans and Democrats; that one side is necessarily evil while the other must be good, and that there is no real choice but one or the other... but I digress). This movie shows us that even when being hunted for the purposes of elongated horrific torture and death, people can be so damn petty. No, that's probably not the point of the story, but that's what I took out of it the second time watching it. I really wanted to identify with these characters. I wanted to connect with them and their plight. I wanted to buy into their circumstances because of the atrocities that were occurring so very close to the refugee camp in this film. And I'll admit that knowledge of the certain fate that awaited all of the people in this film should they be discovered did add to the overall tension of this movie... but that idea was so distant from the petty concerns of those at the camp that I, inexplicably, started to forget about the horrors looming in the shadows around them. Was it almost 'refreshing' to explore another aspect of the role of Jews during WWII? Absolutely. But this story was just far too under developed given the 300lb gorilla trying to hide behind the sofa.
I wanted this story to be compelling in and of itself. Think of Amistad. That was a very compelling movie. Yes, there was a sort of 'historic guilt' that loomed over the film. And yes there was a backdrop of the slave trade that necessitated the action in this film. But it was the horrors that these characters had experienced, it was the actions that these characters undertook that drove the heart and soul of that much better film that made it compelling. Defiance, on the other hand, gave us a backdrop, but then failed to give me the human connection that I desperately wanted to have. The story was a complete failure, but it should have been compelling.
The short-comings of the story aside, there were other problems. Chiefly, the acting in this movie is very hit/miss. Some of it is extremely well done; but some of it is merely passable. That disparity in quality created an uncomfortable jolt in my ability to suspend disbelief resulting in an unintentional emotional distance from some of the characters that this story really didn't need.
I want to feel like I'm on the fence on this one, but if I'm being honest with myself, I have to put this in the category of a 'miss.'
Movie to Skip #2: Agora
As I was watching this movie, all I could think of was a series of questions: is this a commentary on the historic (or possibly current) violence of Christianity? Is it honestly about the fall of Roman society due to rising Christian influence? Is it the death of science due to the rise of religion? Something else? Are these truly real people? Were any of them truly worth saving?
But the biggest question I had when I watched this movie was: is this a made for TV miniseries? And I'm not talking about an HBO or Showtime series, I mean Lifetime or some other marginalized network. Whatever the case, it most certainly wasn't coming on after the 700 Club, because this story was not complimentary to Christianity in the slightest. In fact, if you were to substitute the word "Christian" (and its many derivations) and simply insert "Islam" and/or "Muslim" within the context of the story, I think you would see a movie that mirrors exactly how most Americans view our 'friends' in the middle east. You know: over-the-top violence, the destruction of human life without consideration of its worth, using religion as a sledgehammer rather than a method of teaching the masses, etc. Need I go on?
Unfortunately, everyone in this movie is a caricature... even Rachel Weisz, which was incredibly disappointing. The "depth" of the characters is so superficial that it looks more like an afterthought rather than an honest look at the forces involved in the removal of the Roman Empire from Alexandria. I mean, it isn't a terrible movie, and I'll watch anything with Weisz, but it's a tough one to forgive its shortcomings. I recommend skipping it.
