Innocent Victim: A good documentary that could have been much better

I knew little about Aaron Swartz, the subject of the recent documentary The Internet's Own Boy, and learned a lot from the movie, enough to agree with the highly tendentious filmmaker that Swartz was without question a victim of the vindictive and self-aggrandizing acts of the Obama administration and in particular of a zealous prosecutor, that he was extremely smart and thoughtful, a rare combination of programming genius and brilliant articulation of socio-political beliefs, that his suicide was tragic and needless and caused by the relentless prosecution and not by some long-standing depression or other psychological imbalance. The message is valuable and should make all of us - especially supporters of the Obama administration, which I am - very wary and aware. Swartz's ends were noble if, in my view, in some cases misguided: the act that drew the criminal prosecution was his hacking into the system of a (nonprofit?) company that made published scholarly works including books and research papers available to libraries for a fee on subscription basis. I'm of two minds. I, myself, have published several scholarly articles for which I received zero compensation (and book for which I was paid modestly; also very minute compensation when my articles were picked up for an anthology). Mostly, we write these articles (could also maybe count short stories here, too) hoping for wide distribution - so if someone like Swartz came along and said I can make these available to millions, that would be great. That said, I'd want some way to protect my ownership of what I wrote and published; the "creative common" referenced in the film does that to a degree - writers allowing their works online for free but disallowing anyone from using these works for profit. So I think Swartz went over the line, but there's probably way to make more things available to all while assuring that the writers - not the intermediaries - get fair compensation, if any's to be had. (Magazines and distributors deserve a share as well, as long as the writers get what's due them.) That said, Swartz's act harmed nobody, the university (MIT) and the company hacked had no interest in pressing charges - he was simply targeted for his boldness and activism. I have to add, unfortunately, that as a film this documentary had significant problems, in my view. Yes, it's hard to do a doc about a deceased person - not like taking a camera into combat (Virunga) or speaking with the subject - essentially, this is a film composed of archival footage, most of it home movies and clips from TV news shows, and many, many talking heads. I know it's a huge problem for documentarians who've worked months or years on a project - but less is more, and you have to kill your darling - this film could easily have lost 20 minutes and been all the better. And I hate, hate, hate the uptempo music that so many docs use these days and the time lapse photography that shows clouds and traffic rushing by - maybe OK for opening credits (as in House of Cards) but not repeatedly.

Movie without Heroes: A Most Violent Year

A Most Violent Year kept me watching first shot to last, which says something - it's a well-paced picture about tough, competitive, corrupt guys in the heating-oil business in NYC in the early '80s. Funny to think of an 80s-set film as a period piece, but I guess it is, and director J.C. Chandor captures the look and feel of the era - not just oversized cars (a subtle comment on the cost of heating oil, in fact) but the derelict buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront, the graffiti everywhere, the very realistic re-creation of a 1980s graffiti-marked subway, a cool sequence in which a car chases a hijacked oil truck along train tracks and through abandoned tunnels. That said, there are many gaping holes in the story: Story involves suave and dapper heating-oil dealer Morales (Oscar Isaac) whose trucks are being hijacked and who's also being investigated by Brooklyn DA as part of review of corruption in the industry. The first third or more of the movie makes us think that Isaac is a corrupt gangster who's engaged in a territory war with rival dealers - the iconography, everything from his look, his straight-man lawyer, his platinum wife, his ugly new McMansion, and most of all the way he behaves when making a deal for some property he wants to buy - make him look and seem like a gangster. Gradually (spoilers coming) we learn that he's not corrupt, in fact he's the only honest guy in the industry, although his wife (Jessica Chastain) has been cooking the books and skimming, unbeknownst to him (or so he says - although it makes no sense that he helps her hide records from the DA). Similarly, it makes no sense that the whole story hinges on his refusal to arm his delivery drivers - I can see that he wouldn't want them to carry guns for self-defense but he certainly would have provided them some security. Also never clear why all the dealers in NYC are picking off only his trucks - do they want to drive him out of business? Why? That's not how it's done - just keep him out of their territory. Overall, the problem is that heating wars seems a pretty thin topic and, most of all, there's nobody for us to root for in this movie: not that the protagonist has to be a crusader for justice, although that might help, but we should like him and feel for him esp when his family's under attack and we just don't or I didn't. By the time the movie shifts gears and begins to show him as a hero fighting for justice, it was way too late. And by the way I don't think a bullet from a handgun would pierce an oil-storage tank, just saying.

Each unhappy punk-rock family unhappy in its own way

We Are the Best is a kinda cute Swedish film from 2014 but set in 1981, height of the punk music scene (apparently, who knew?), following three Swedish middle-school girls with, with no talent whatsoever (at least on the part of 2 of them) for a punk band; as w/ most let;s start a band/put on a play movies it builds toward the big night - the performance - but in a rather good twist their performance is not the grand triumph before a cheering crowd that we come to expect from the genre but a show before a tiny crowd that breaks down in chaos; perhaps that's a punk version of triumph. Each happy punk rocker family is alike, but each unhappy punk rocker family is unhappy in its own way - as this movie evinces: one girl has a more or less absent single mom busy in her own romantic/sexual life, one has a kind of nutty dad, one has a strict devout-Christian mom. They find one another through their avowedly terrible music. Like their music, the movie is rough around the edges, a little jumpy at times, perhaps striving for an amateur look w/ a lot of hand-held camera segments. The moment of crisis in the film involves the girls' pursuit of a boys' punk trio, which leaves one of the girls - the lead, really, Bobo - out in the cold as one of the boys didn't show. After some pouting and dramatics, the girls realize they're more important to one another and stay together as a band and as pals rather than break up over boy-troubles. The film's not plot-driven so much as mood-driven. I wouldn't be surprised if an American studio picks it up for a re-make in English, probably in a contemporary setting, probably with more plot twists, too. Hope they don't blow it.

Something rotten?: What's wrong with Copenhagen

I watched Copenhagen to get some views of the beautiful city that we recently visited and I wasn't disappointed - in the views. The movie was something else. To me, it seemed like a tepid attempt to capture some of the mood and esprit of Linklater's Before Sunrise series, perhaps mixed with a touch of Jules and Jim (threesomes never work out) - but in my view entirely devoid of the charm and wit that made those films such touchstones. In Copenhagen, two American guys in their late-20s are touring Europe, and the girlfriend of one accompanies them, leading to predictable if uninteresting tensions - doesn't take long for the solo guy to break off and head to C., which as we gradually learn was the purpose for this journey: he has a letter that his late and unbeloved father has written to his father (character's grandfather, whom character has never met or known) that needs to be delivered in person. Our guy meets a girl - cue up "cute meet" - as the waitress spills coffee in his lap - and soon guy and girl are off on a completely movie-like follow-the-clues hunt to track down grandfather. The catch, as guy learns about half-way through the movie but was obvious to me from the start, that the girl is only 14 years old. Ultimately, he shows some more chops by resisting her desire, and his, that he sleep with her, and movie ends with his visit to grandfather - let the old bastard know what a scum he is (he's an ex Nazi, just so you know), boy alone on beach where North Sea and the Atlantic meet - symbolism! - and girl in her middle-school class mooning over snapshots they'd taken on their jaunt. Do you see a sequel coming? All this would be a better movie if the protagonist were in any way likable, but he's scripted and played as the essence of the obnoxious American tourist and the hedonistic 20-something (we know absolutely nothing of his background or home life) who laces just about every sentence with obscenities or vulgarisms. Is that the only way a screenwriter can make his characters sound strong, authentic? Can't we have at least a moment of reflection, insight, wit, or original thought?

What's gone wrong with TV news: Nightcrawler

There are a bunch of things wrong with Dan Gilroy's but plenty right with it as well and on balance it's a very engaging, scary, and, sadly, accurate account of a deeply disturbed guy who finds his calling as a freelance videographer who sells crime and disaster footage to local LA TV media. We meet Lewis Bloom, played well by Jake Gyllenhaal in a real cast-against-type move, when he's a petty thief lifting scrap metal and manhole covers by night to sell illegally to a junk dealer. When he's caught in the act by a security cop at a freight yard, he punches out the guard and steals his watch - very, very hard to imagine Gyllenhaal doing this, but it sets him up as a crazy young man. The junk business isn't working too well, when by chance he comes across a fatal car accident and watches the crew filming the rescue attempt, and from that point on he builds up his own business - mostly by going way beyond the boundaries of ethics and personal safety to get the best footage (moving a dead body for a better angle, entering the house where there's a home invasion and filming the dead bodies, ultimately failing to disclose vital info he has about a murder in order to set up the arrest of the suspects in a police raid that he films exclusively). What's wrong about the film is how it pushes us way beyond credibility: first of all, who is this guy? He arises just ab ovo, with no back story whatsoever. Now if he's supposed to be an aspiring entrepreneur, no matter how crazy, what's he been doing all this time? It appears that this might be his first night stealing scrap metal - where has he been? Who is he? Second, for the key scenes to work in any conceivable way we have to imagine that somehow he always arrives at the crime or accident scene well before the police and rescue - which is impossible, as he hears about these events from the police scanner. (It can happen, once in a great while - happened to me as a reporter once in fact - but not routinely.) On the plus side, however, in part because he is cast against type and in part because he's a thinking guy and not just a thrill seeker out for kicks, Gyllenhaal's character is very creepy and suspicious - we suspect the worst from him at the outset and we're right. The night footage of LA is consistently beautiful and moody. Most of all, sad to say, the film is dead on about what's happened to TV news over the past 15 years. I'm a bit sick of movies bashing journalists, usually print journalists for that matter, but few if any have taken on this topic and it's very true at real: local TV news no longer covers the news in any serious manner - just death and carnage (if there's no local footage, they'll use national), which to me is one of the great maladies of our culture today - local TV coverage has literally encouraged people to think that world, in fact their community, is a dangerous place full of crime and mayhem and disaster, not a place where almost everyone lives and thinks and loves and aspires and just tries to get on with life. Despite its flaws, a film worth seeing, and even pondering.

It's too easy to overlook Mike Leigh as a major director

I have to believe that if Mike Leigh films were subtitled and set in Belgium or Rumania, he would be much more widely recognized and appreciated as a serious director of major works of art. Couldn't you take three of his works, about people in London and environs, most of them working class, struggling to get on with and make sense of their lives, and call them a trilogy, and wouldn't they be on a par with the work of the Dardennes brothers, for example? Why not Secrets and Lies, Happy-go-Lucky, and his more recent (2010) Another Year - what a great sequences these three would make, each with a recognizable style and look, but each with its own ethos and mood? Another Year is the darkest of the three for sure, but excellent none the less, and, like many great films (e.g., Rules of the Game), it grows on you and builds in power as it moves along: as if Leigh knows everything about his characters and we learn about the gradually, incrementally - and not through highly dramatic action but by observing their everyday lives, sometimes as they discuss trivia, as most people do, and sometimes in moments of high tension and crisis. Another Year, as title suggests, takes us through a year in the lives of a few people: a 60ish professional couple, Gerry and Tom of good sense and a happy marriage, their adult son who's kind and independent and a bit lonely at least at the outset, and Mary, one of Gerry's co-workers, who is attractive and lively but has a serious not-so-secret drinking problem. Mary's gradual decline over the course of the year is the main narrative thread of the film, and makes this film very sorrowful, right down to the final images when she faces a choice in her life and begins to gain some painful self-knowledge. Along the way, there are many scenes that strike me as very true and recognizable, and Leigh's great skill is to let these scenes just play out at a natural pace, with no flashy technique, no dogmatism, no phony heightened emotions or screaming: especially the excellent scenes late in the film of the funeral and wake in a drab working-class suburb, of the very awkward conversation between Mary and Tom's alcohol-ruined older brother. I think nobody is better than Leigh at getting characters to convey meaning from a glance or a gesture - astonishing how much can "happen" around a kitchen table even when the characters are saying little or speaking in banalities. (Renoir was great at this, too.) Leigh chooses to work w/ actors who are anything but glamorous - the complete opposite of the Hollywood ethos - but on the other hand his life's work is a mixture of these serious interior movies and more conventional period biopics, equally good but quite different (Topsy Turvey, the new Mr. Turner, which I haven't seen), all of which make him hard to categorize and, because of that perhaps, too easy to overlook as a major director.

Superbad?: The James Brown bio-pic

The James Brown bio-pic Get On Up is such a holy mess and that's such a shame because the music, almost all of it performed by James Brown (and dubbed - I guess that's how they do it - in expertly to Chadwick Boseman's lip synch) that you may want to watch the movie just for the soundtrack, which I did, but good luck trying to keep track of the numerous leaps across time and space, the mad jumping about among different eras in JB's life, for no apparent reason, Boseman's often unintelligible attempts to capture Brown's raspy speaking voice, the weird decision to open with a scene of JB at his lowest ebb and most bizarre public behavior, and ... I could go on but perhaps less said better said. For whatever misguided reason, the crew behind this production decided against a straightforward, chronological musical bio pic, a la the relatively recent Ray Charles of Johnny Cash films, and went for an "art" film approach, like the Bob Dylan disaster (albeit with great soundtrack) I'm Not There. Though the Dylan pic made no sense, at least you could follow it; this weirdly edited version w/ completely unhelpful inter-titles, will defy anyone to keep the eras, the characters, the trends in Brown's career, clear in mind. Boseman does his best, and he dances the part very well; the sidemen are interchangeable (maybe that's the point?) and I know for a fact that the guy playing Maseo Parker looks and sounds nothing like the actual sax player. The women are also interchangeable and expendable - again, maybe that's part of the point, but still - w/ the exception of Brown's estranged mother played well by Viola Davis; Dan Akroyd does his best as JB's manager, but is beset by some totally hackneyed screenwriting. It's frustrating because there was potentially great material in here about the rise to fame of a deeply flawed man, but the film does all that it can to keep the audience distanced from this material. The soundtrack makes it worth watching, or at least worth hearing.

A film to watch with sound on mute?

The fact that this is a nature movie that actually bored even M should be all I have to say about Expedition to the End of the World, but let me just add that this Danish documentary (2014) about a disparate group who set off on a replica tall ship to explore some of the northernmost fjords on Greenland, accessible by water for the first time, due to climate change, is a monument to missed opportunity. The film includes some beautiful footage, and it's incredibly interesting, at least for a while, to see this lonely landscape on which few if any people have set foot for hundreds of years - and of course to think that there used to be settlements here - but that source of interest wears thin after a short while as we wait for the film to develop some kind of narrative, structure, or tension - but, no, the 8 or so people on the ship are introduced to us only by their profession (The Captain, The Geologist, The Artist, etc.), as if they are Chaucerian pilgrims, and that's OK, if we actually got to see some relationships develop, some personality, some action, but no, there seems to be no chemistry at all among these people (and we learn absolutely nothing about what or whom brought them together), and for much of the film we listen in on their discussions with one another - they may be scientists and artists, but I found their conversations to be dull and self-conscious, strained. Maybe this is a film to watch with sound on mute.

Gone, and soon forgotten: Gone Girl

OK you can't believe the story for one minute, nor are you meant to, but the David Fincher/Gillian Flynn (who adapted her own novel for the screen - often an exercise in futility as writers are completely unable to cut their precious scenes or even words, but in this case one suspects that Flynn was thinking "screenplay" even as she was writing her novel) production of Gone Girl will keep you watching and wondering: who the hell are these people? It's well paced - even at its 2+ hour length (so it's hardly taut), well acted, a completely professional treatment of material that keeps you engaged until you stop one moment to think about it and realize the whole thing is completely ridiculous - unless you can swallow the premise: Amy (Rosamund Pike) was treated poorly by her parents, children's book authors who made her thru  the "Amazing Amy" book series into America's favorite little girl marries Ben Affleck and the two live unhappily ever after. One of the surprises is that we're thinking, or at least I was, that I'm supposed to like this rich, spoiled couple but they're both completely repulsive - and at some point you realize, yes, that's the point - they're supposed to be repulsive. But who's more repulsive? You know from the title that Pike takes off from the marriage - but has she run away, been abducted, or been murdered? For those who haven't read the book or seen the film, spoilers galore coming: It doesn't take too long before we learn that she is alive and has staged a fake abduction or murder scene, run away from her crappy marriage, making it appear that Affleck killed her, and that she does plan to kill herself as well. Who does this? Only in movies (or books destined to become movies)! Only in movies do all them crazy scheming plot elements come together perfectly, and only in movies do the characters live such isolated lives that nobody realizes they're gone off the rails. What makes this one a little bit above the rest is that Pike's plan does begin to unravel when, following her escape and while she's holed up in a crummy motel, she gets robbed - so she has to go to plan b, contacted on old boyfriend, who puts her up for a while, until she murders him and makes it look as if she's been raped - returning home bloody, resuming her marriage, the two of them entwined in each others'  lies and schemes. The media frenzy that follows this story is like a Greek chorus, very effective element; two of the minor characters - Affleck's sister (Carrie Coon) and the local detective (Kim Dickens) are very good. Does anyone else notice that there are more female detectives working in the movie industry than in the entire nation's police force combined, by the way? All told, a movie that will keep your interest but it's pretty preposterous and paper thin.

Boy to Man: Boyhood is a unique and totally memorable movie

Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a major accomplishment on any level - a truly fine movie about the growth from childhood to young-adulthood (roughly age 6 to 18) - something, I imagine, like portrait of the artist (film director and writer, in this case) as a young man - but what's most remarkable is that Linklater and his cast filmed this over the course of 12 years, so we watch the young man (Ellar Coltrane) and the others in his family - mother, father, sister - mature and grow, or age, as in no other movie ever filmed. The closest analogue is probably the incredible Up series, from England, filmed now over 49 years and counting. But Boyhood may be even more incredible, for a lot of reasons: first of all, it's about the course of a life, and it does include a few highly tense and dramatic scenes, but most of the scenes are significant not as mileposts or ceremonies (we don't see weddings, for example) but rather the kind of quiet moments that make up a life: serious conversations among friends, between father (Ethan Hawke) and children, boyfriend-girlfriend. In other words, it doesn't feel cinematic or orchestrated but rather, captured - much like Linklater's Before Sunrise series, in that regard, or like an American Eric Rohmer film, though far more lively and less abstract. Second, though it's about the boy of course it's also about those in his family: we watch Hawke evolve from a self-centered and immature dad who's more or less abandoned his wife and 2 kids into a rather dull, conventional family man (2nd marriage), symbolized by his selling his GTO and moving into a family van (one of the few "images" of change that the characters discuss directly); we see the mom, Patricia Arquette, go through two more bad marriages, but we don't dwell on the melodrama, life just passes before us, in cinema time as in real time, until, at the end, she's lonely and scared as her younger child moves off to college and into his own life. How fortunate, or skilled, Linklater is to have elicited such great, consistent, and credible performances from his team over a 12-year span! The look and feel of the movie is completely consistent, so you have no sense that it was filmed in a dozen or so segments; the story line unfolds cleanly and fluently - a unique, and totally memorable movie. Deserving of the awards it has won and will win.

A brief history of The Theory of Everything

James Marsh directed The Theory of Everything but in every way it's Eddie Redmayne's movie to make or break, and I think all will agree that he does an amazing job portraying Stephen Hawking as he matures, grows, and simultaneously breaks down physically over the course of his adult life. Redmayne's Hawking evolves from a gawky but sweet physics grad-student nerd (are there redundancies there?) but awkwardly pursues and wins the beautiful girl (Felicity Jones) just as he's diagnosed with fatal ALS. "Given" only 2 years to live, he aggressively develops his theories about black holes, winning renown and eventually fame (and wealth), as his physical condition deteriorates, not over two years but over about 50 years, and still counting. The movies is light on the physics - some may say, thankfully (if you're interested in a film that will convey contemporary physics in totally accessible and even fun way, see Particle Fever); the movie is really a personal story of a difficult marriage and of the struggle of a genius against his disabilities, similar in some ways to A Beautiful Mind. One of the great strengths of the film is the honesty w/ which it faces some of the most troubling issues of the marriage: sexual relations, the need both (especially his wife, Jane) feel for intimacy with others, the eventual breakdown of the marriage (there they may have glossed over some of the more troubling material - and of course the source from the screenplay is Jane Hawking's account of the relationship). The cinematography is especially beautiful, in particular some of the early night sequences in Cambridge, a few passages that show life from Hawking's POV, and an imaginative conclusion in which time is reversed. Redmayne is or should be a candidate for best-actor awards, though it's become almost a Hollywood cliche to grant awards to those who play people with disabilities (a particularly sensitive matter, as actors with disabilities feel marginalized in the acting community).

The only way to understand this film is to see it twice, but nobody will want to

There's a good reason why Thomas Pynchon's works have not until now been adapted for film and that reason is Inherent Vice; watch it, if you can, and you'll see exactly what's scared wiser directors away, and perhaps what drew Paul Thomas Anderson to rise to the challenge. So promising! Inherent Vice is possibly Pynchon's most accessible and "cinematic" novel, as it draws on the film noir tradition of detective stories (particularly, Chandler) but set in a stoner world of 1970s LA (Altman did the same thing, successfully, in Long Goodbye, I think). This material should, one might think, translate to film; but it's obvious here ten minutes in at most that this film is a train wreck occurring right before our eyes. Pynchon is famous for his sharp dialogue (the film can capture that) and for his baroque and at times surreal, elaborate, detailed, often confounding plots - and here's where this movie entirely fails. In a novel, we follow the plot at our own pace, and all Pynchon readers, I'm sure, occasionally step back, re-read, pause to think, and at other times rush forward headlong. In the film, we're stuck with the steady forward motion of the narrative, and the story just becomes increasingly confusing and, eventually, you give up, or at least I did. The only way to make sense of this film would be to see it twice, and nobody will want to. And that's because the pleasures are just not there the first time through - the characters are vague, flat, unappealing; the humor, which may work in a book, when made more physical, visceral, and literal in a film, just falls flat. J Phoenix gives it a valiant try and appears in virtually every scene, and PTA, thanks to his stature, can command a battalion of star actors stepping into bit parts, but there's no center to the movie and certainly no emotional engagement. Phoenix's character (Doc,  a PI) is so cool and stoned that he is oblivious to danger, and so we don't care much about him, either. A Chandler novel turned into film, w/ various voice-over narrations, develops not only plot but character; in this film, the narration is so frayed and fragmentary that we have no sense of the central character at all - nothing moves him, nothing drives him, he's just propelled along from scene to scene. The movie clocks in at 2.5 painful hours - far, far too long for this material. Throughout, I was hoping for a cameo from Pynchon and didn't spot one, though it's possible he appears as one of the men dressed in white at the sanatorium/rehab center that Doc visits well into the film. Not worth waiting for, however.

The best Wes Anderson film yet

To be honest I don't think I've ever liked a Wes Anderson film - all of them so cute and self-conscious, all those precocious children and narcissistic, eccentric families - and was pleasantly surprised to find myself very engaged with The Grand Budapest Hotel, which seems to me his best movie by far and the first time he's used his great talent to make a movie about anything other than his talent and quirkiness. The GBH is by no means a realistic movies; it's a comic romp, not believable for a minute, but nevertheless lots of fun, a fast moving plot, quirky but still quite likable characters, mainly driven by R. Fiennes as the concierege of the hotel in the 1930s and by a very likable new actor who plays the "lobby boy" under RF's tutelage, named Zero. The story is enclosed in several layers of time, and essentially narrated by a now elderly Zero (F M Abraham) to a young writer, in about 1980; the writer turns this narration into the eponymous novel; and the writer, now dead, is honored by devotees in his fictional E. European city (modeled on Stefan Zweig I learned from the credits - will have to read him): the point of all these layers is that we are not to take the events literally - they are a series of narrations, each with its own possibility for exaggeration, distortion, and invention - including Anderson's own invention. At what level - Zero's narration, the novelist's invention, Anderson's depiction - the story changes and evolves and becomes a fantasy rather than an adventure story, nobody can say and it doesn't really matter. Anderson does a great job re-creating the hotel and its milieu in two settings: one as a bustling and lively grand resort in the 30s, the other as a decayed, musty, nearly deserted "white elephant" in the 80s, the grandness lost to and to evolving taste. Although it's a bit of a bauble, without any great meaning or significance (nor does it pretend to be a deeply significant film; issues such as the rise of Nazism, the Soviet control over Eastern Europe, the fall of Communism are at hinted at, but the story is not about history and politics, it's about two several men - very male-dominated film, I have to say - and their star-crossed lives) it's totally fun to watch.

Pinned: The creepiness of Foxcatcher

If it weren't base, closely (I think), on fact, Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher would probably be just too weird and kinky to believe, but truth can be stranger than fiction, as the saying goes, so if you think of Foxcatcher as a re-enacted documentary of sorts it's pretty engaging and, at time, fascinating. Most of all, it's Steve Carell's movie, as he gives an incredibly nuanced and disturbing performance as John "Eagle" Dupont, a 50-something billionaire who is weirdly obsessed with wrestling and wrestlers and entices a team of Olympic hopefuls to his estate to train for competition - and imagines himself as their mentor, coach, and friend - when in fact he's their patron and they're his playthings. The relationship he develops with Olympian Mark Schulz (Channing Tatum) is the heart of the movie, as we watch the physical and emotional descent of Schulz over the course of the film, his humiliation and - though it's strongly hinted at but never shown directly - his sexual relationship with Dupont. In that sense, the movie is about the power of wealth and class, how Dupont, a weak and pathetic, lonesome figure, dominated by his austere, cold mother (Vanessa Redgrave, in a small part), can exert his will over these young men whom he, essentially, has entrapped and kept as his harem. I can't tell if Tatum's a good actor - he seems exactly the same in each of the films I've seen him in, understated and dull, but handsome and physically agile - but he's excellent at least for this role. Out of courtesy to the living Mark Schulz and his family, I suspect the film went easy on some aspects of his relationship with Dupont, but it's still a devastating portrait of ruined lives, with a few terrific scenes: Tatum forced to give a speech in honor of Dupont, Dupont trying to "coach" the wrestlers, the look on Carell's face when he "wins" an obviously rigged over-50 wrestling tournament. Depending on your tolerant for creepiness, worth seeing.

Too many chefs: Completely predictable, manipulative film but some good restaurant scenes

If it feels as if you've seen this movie before, you're right, you probably have, especially if you also saw Chef earlier this year or in fact if you've seen any movie about the restaurant biz or about an immigrant community faced with initial hostility but gradually winning love and friendship as the immigrants both learn the new culture and contribute their own special "flavor." This movie is The Hundred-Foot Journey, another feel-good film from Lasse Hallstrom that feels, well, too much like a film and very little like life (similar in mood to the likable but manipulative Marigold Hotel). After a clumsy beginning, we see that this film tells of a restaurant-owning family forced to leave native Mumbai after restaurant destroyed in a fire, wandering Europe and settling in rural France of all places when their van breaks down - and where they open an Indian restaurant across the street from (that's the 100-foot journey) a 1-star Michelin restaurant owned by a mean, automaton played by the ubiquitous Helen Mirren. Story line is mostly about the family patriarch - who of course builds a friendship and then a weirdly chaste romance with Mirren - and his son and protege, who over time falls in love with her sous chef, played by an adorable Charlotte La Bon. The story line is entirely predictable, much of the dialogue and many of the set pieces are so heavy-handed as to be laughable, every scene seems to be dripping with meaning and significance - and yet, the film does have its moments and its pleasures. First off, I enjoy watching just about any film that shows serious food preparation, though this doesn't come close to, say Eat Drink Man Woman, it's fun to watch a re-creation of a French country restaurant and the loving preparation of some Indian dishes as well. Second, I very much liked the scene in which Mirren (and later others) stand up against a right-wing anti-immigrant group in the town: though it's again heavy-handed this is a really important message for Americans (and Europeans) today and I'm glad Hallstrom didn't shy away from this topic. Also I have to say I like the look at the ultra-chic "3-star" Paris restaurant where the young chef tries to earn his chops (before he realizes, as every single viewer will predict, that his place is back in the village where he can create his own cuisine drawing on classic French technique and Indian spices - mais oui!) - the coldness and emptiness of the 3-star where the byword is "innovate" is really pretty funny and, pathetically, probably not too exaggerated (cauliflower ice cream!).