Film Articles

Like that other quirky out-of-left-field indie hit with “Sunshine” in its title, “Sunshine Cleaning” is a film haunted by the spectre of suicide. A key difference is that where Steve Carell’s Proust scholar survives the attempt and is but one facet of his family’s loss of life direction, the past-tense suicide in “Sunshine Cleaning” is a scarring and defining event. But neither film is specifically preoccupied with the pathology of suicide, in the way “Revolutionary Road” or “The Hours” might be, although there are enough similarities between the two films to view “Sunshine Cleaning” as a thematic follow-up and extension of “Little Miss Sunshine.” Shared producers and Alan Arkin’s near-typecast part as a loveable but gruff father-figure are only the most obvious.

I have no objection, in principle, to adapting stories from one medium to another, and no particular prejudice towards source materials whether they’re comics, video games or amusement park rides. Although the empirical evidence is a bit on the rare side, good ideas are good ideas and different mediums can, in theory, offer different, equally valuable lenses through which story ideas can be explored.

Like a “Requiem for a Dream” for marital breakdowns, “Revolutionary Road” is relentlessly downward, inexorable and bleak. It’s an antidote, if a cure is actually needed, for all those romances in which a glance exchanged across a crowded room leads to wishful thinking and everlasting post-credit happiness.

Henry Selick’s role in ushering what may described as the modern age of stop-motion animation – counter-programming to the glut of CGI films – naturally sets up a certain kind of expectation for this latest dark fantasy tale of children in peril. Artistically, Selick delivers.

Bankers, bankers, everywhere. Tykwer brings the paranoid in this tightly-directed return to the old-school conspiracy thriller set amidst the stunning modern architecture of buildings by Zaha Hadid and Daniel Liebeskind, but is it really paranoia when the premise hews so close, “Law & Order” style, to the headlines?

The film adaptation of Cornelia Funke's “Inkheart” thrills with visuals, adventure, and superb casting, but also lacks the animating force that gives a story its heart.

Movies about World War II and the Holocaust tend to tack in one of several familiar directions – the somber “we shall never forget” elegy, the flower of hope from the ashes of horror tale of overcoming, the exploitative thriller with Nazis providing a ready shorthand for evil. (Here’s a fun storytelling trick: add an extra splash of evil to an archetypal villain by adding a “Nazi” prefix. If your zombies are too tame, make them Nazi zombies. Lycanthropes lacking bite? SS Werewolves! Scientist not mad enough? Nazi doctors!) But “The Reader,” based on the book by Bernhard Schlink, begins by assuming that we are already properly filled with historical acumen and moral outrage then shakes preconceived notions of responsibility, guilt and justice by deploying Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil filtered through the Stanford Prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s experiment in obedience. No heavy hand of history here; this is strictly character study material, beautifully delivered by director Stephen Daldry from a marvelously literate script by David Hare.

As far as portmanteau words go, the film’s title encapsulating the insular nature of the Persian community in L.A., “IRANgeles,” isn’t bad at all. It has just the sort of goofy charm that characterizes the film’s good humour and considerable appeal.

There’s always tension between a cinematic adaptation and its literary source, that discrepancy leading the faithful to gnash their teeth at deviations both textual and spiritual. But for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” it’s not tension, it’s an outright clash with only the title, character name, and chronology-defying premise preserved. The rest of the movie is the invention of screenwriter Eric Roth and his associates, who set aside the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pointed observation of aging in a society suspicious of difference in favour of a mushy romance that pushes all the usual heart buttons.

Sean Penn is the first to be showered with accolades for his work in “Milk”, and understandably so. He dissolves effortlessly into his role as Harvey Milk, the real-life gay rights activist and San Francisco City Supervisor who was tragically assassinated in 1978, without a residual “Penn-ness” to give away the role as a performance. But it would be unfair to single Penn out when there so many other cast members who deliver similarly un-self-conscious performances of equal strength and emotional power. James Franco, who first gained attention in the acclaimed but cruelly canceled TV series “Freaks and Geeks,” has the task of being the man behind the man, Milk’s lover Scott Smith, who is at once supportive and overwhelmed by Milk’s political activism. We’ve seen Franco offer nuance and depth of feeling, even in films like “Spider-man,” and it’s no different with “Milk,” although the stakes, perhaps, are higher given the film’s biographical nature. Also notable is, of course, Josh Brolin who leaves behind the tormented cowboy persona of “No Country for Old Men” and takes on the tragic, ambiguous, tortured person of Dan White, the City Supervisor who assassinated Milk and Mayor George Moscone (played in the film by Victor Garber). Brolin is fast becoming – isn’t he already there? – one of those strong actors, like a Redford or a Kingsley, who dazzle not with flashy performances, but deep psychologies that roil beneath the surface of their roles. And of the supporting cast, take your pick: Diego Luna as the loving but disturbed Jack Lira, or Allison Pill as Anne Kronenberg, or Emile Hersh as Cleve Jones, or someone else. Any of them merits more than just a pat on the head for a job well done, stepping up to the documentary task set up by director Gus Van Sant.