Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

There’s a lot of talking about money, which is not so cinematic. So Oliver Stone plays with visuals. Stock tickers stream through the air, numbers fly in and out of frame, phone calls bloom into split-screens, all to make a movie in which people talk about money more interesting. For the most part he succeeds. The cast, especially Frank Langella, is solid. (Who knew Eli Wallach was still alive?) And the moral of the story, considering it’s from Oliver Stone, is neither radical nor cynical: money matters, but personal relationships matter more.

The Town

It’s a terrible title, but I’ll be damned if it’s not a good movie. Ben Affleck is strikingly, scarily adept as a director. He makes a better Micheal Mann movie than Michael Mann can. The cast is all superb. I’ve never seen Blake Lively in anything but SNL. She looks like she got run over by a Legal Sea Foods truck and she was great. The plot’s not all that original, a typical heist yarn, but the execution by Affleck and company is positively first-rate. I was very impressed by Gone Baby Gone. Here, Affleck shows off his actors, moves the camera and builds suspense better than most seasoned pros. To put it another way... It was a hell of a lot better than Public Enemy.

Easy A

Emma Stone is a 25-year-old who smokes 2 packs a day who has a 30-year-old friend and they are, for some reason, still in high school. She’s really funny and attractive, she has the coolest, funniest parents in the world, she’s extremely talented and well-adjusted, but for purposes here and for the sake of a major suspension of disbelief, she can’t get a date. And then, for some reason, Lisa Kudrow gets dropped into the movie like a bomb. Ahh, I’m being nit picky. Easy A is more or less a harmless and enjoyable high school farce painstakingly paying tribute to John Hughes, so much so that he and his movies are referenced numerous times. Stone holds the screen well, but the supporting cast could’ve used a little jolt. It’s a pleasant enough of a movie, but it’s not world-rocking.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Unfortunately, there’s not enough zombie killing here. There’s a lot of talk about finding paradise and escaping the hell-hole they’re in (Los Angeles) and… NOT enough violence! I’m not sure why the Resident Evil movies make me think they should have more sex and violence, but they do and they should.

American: The Bill Hicks Story

A sad but very well-made doc about comedian Bill Hicks. Most impressive was the Ken Burns style photo animation, ramped up to a Monty Python level of intensity. Interesting, too, because it avoids the usual star-power interviews about celebrity, etc.

The American

A slow and pretty dull spy thriller. Not that bad, or so terribly made, but a lot of this was like watching paint dry. Clooney helps hold this together, with a little help from the oft-nude European woman, Violante Placido. But I was about ten seconds ahead of the plot the whole time, so there were few surprises.

Mesrine: Part 1

Not necessarily a badly made film, but very clichéd. Many of the same crime drama episodes that we’ve seen a hundred times before are here again, but this time they’re in French. It wants to be Peckinpah. It wants to be Tarantino. It succeeds in imitating what it intends to.

Machete

Funny, but could have been funnier. It’s no Black Dynamite.