A textbook case of telling not showing: Why J. Edgar is a failed movie

One would think that there's so much material in the life of J. Edgar Hoover that you could make not just one great film about the man but many: the rise of the FBI and its fight against crime, the delusions and paranoia that destroyed the old man at the end of his career, the Lindbergh kidnapping case that made the FBI a world-famous organization, the conflicts with great leaders such as JFK and MLK, the repressed or secret homosexual life of the director, and so on. All of these elements are in Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar," but you know what - it's a totally boring movie. It just goes on and on (2-plus hours, or course) with endless exposition, everything explained and laid out in dialog, a textbook case of telling not showing. There are very, very few actual dramatic scenes - and it's not that I need a movie to be full of action, but characters need to be doing something other than talking, unless we're watching an Eric Rohmer movie, which this is not. Yes, we see that Hoover was a complicated guy - that he was prescient in bringing modern crime-solving techniques to the bureau but that he was delusional and power-hungry and personally tortured. But it seems as if we're watching a textbook documentary, there's no life to this movie at all The most interesting part, for me, is Hoover's relationship with his partner, Toleson - their scenes together are the movie's best - but there's nothing developed. The movie takes no real stance on Hoover, it's cool and distant, most of it shot in dark interiors, the only really strong image is DiCaprio's ever-present face: he does well at portraying Hoover throughout his long career, the makeup artist did a great job on this, but we always feel DiCaprio is playing a part, not living it.

Adding one note re "Midnight in Paris": I'd forgotten that Carla Bruni was in this movie, and when I saw later that she played the sculpture-garden guide, it explained something to me: I wondered why Wilson didn't end up with the guide character (whom he revisits in order for her to translate a French diary for him), and my guess is that in the original script he did end up with the guide but when Woody Allen was able to stunt-cast Bruni in the part he had to rewrite - would have been too weird for Wilson to walk off into the rain with the First Lady of France, so Allen added the periperhal character of the flea-market sales girl, who in the end walks into the rain with Wilson. BTW, the lovers walking into the rain is I think a slight homage and reworking of the end of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, when the lead character walks off alone into the rain at the end.

Owen Wilson meets Ernest Hemingway - some of Woody Allen's best dialog ever

Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" is a throwback and a return to the form and sensibility of some of his best movies. We get the familiar enamored look at a beautiful city, the tortured relation between a young guy and the beautiful girl with whom he's obviously mismatched, and most of all the playful fascination and complete devotion to art, music, ideas, and literature, and withering (though funny) contempt for pseudo-intellectuals (as in the great McLuhan scene in Annie Hall or the literary-magazine party where W.A. sneaks off to watch a Knicks game on TV in - which film was it?) Allen always casts his movies well, and the choice of surfer-slacker Owen Wilson to play the would-be novelist, a character that Allen himself would have played a generation ago and that is so deeply imprinted with Allen's tone and voice and wit, is shrewd and surprising and effective. Wilson leaves his beautiful and shallow and vain fiancee behind to walk the streets of Paris at night, where he is transported into the 1920s and meets a # of his heroes, including FS Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates is hilarious) Luis Bunuel (Wilson suggests a movie plot to him - Exterminating Angel - and Bunuel is just puzzled: How come they can never leave the room? Why don't they just get up and leave?), and most amusingly Hemingway (some of Allen's funniest dialog ever). The film recalls the time-transports of Play It Again, Sam and, even more so, the great short story The Kugelmass Episode. Autobiographical elements aside (hero leaves rich and cold fiancee for a very young woman who at last seems to understand him and his romantic obsessions; I hate to think that Allen thinks of himself as a Hollywood hack with dreams of literary greatness, however), the timing and plotting is clever and well-paced and it's a totally fun movie to watch - a bauble at times, but also a tribute to the great writing and ideas and well-made plots and rich cultural life of a time long past.