Day: December 28, 2010

I don’t have the energy to write a full review, and I’m guessing that this is one movie that will be watched by many on this blog, and they can do it more justice than I. Suffice it to say that the Coen brothers True Grit is completely engrossing. It is the funniest of their films that I can recall seeing. The humor is all in the dialogue.  I have not read the 1968 novel upon which both versions of the film are based, but I gather that the dialogue in the Coens’ version is taken much more directly from the book. It is uncannily like the archaic constructions of Deadwood, without all the “cocksuckers” thrown in. The dialogue makes every exchange a delight, whether it is Mattie’s negotiation with a horse dealer at the start of the movie, or the surprisingly tender discussion between Mattie and the outlaw Lucky Ned near the end.

Jeff Bridges as Rooster Coburn hams it up a little (OK, a lot), but he is generous enough  to yield the limelight to Mattie Ross (played by newcomer Hailee Steinfelt), and she grabs it and quietly dominates every scene she is in. It is a bravura performance.  The other star is the scenery. After so many films built around dark interiors, the Coens, in this film and in No Country for Old Men, have discovered the capacity of the open mountain ranges and forests of the American West to astonish.

This is a case where my expectations were a little too high so that, despite being a very fine film in many ways, I left the theater a little disappointed. The Fighter tells the story, based on real events in the early 1990s, of Micky Ward, an aspiring boxer, as he tries to clamber from obscurity to “be somebody.” As with most boxing movies, it is not so much about boxing as about some sort of personal struggle that stands in the way of success. The personal struggle for Micky, played by Mark Wahlberg, is his family in south Boston, and in particular, his brother, Dickie Eklund (different fathers), played by Christian Bale, and his mother played by Melissa Leo. Both put in extraordinary performances, Bale especially so. The first hour and fifteen minutes traces Micky’s efforts to get out from under Alice and Dicke’s thumbs; both are controlling,  with Alice favoring Dickie (who is hoping for a comeback fight), seeing Micky’s fights as a way to may some money for the family rather than advance his prospects, and Dickie succumbing to his crack addiction. Continue reading The Fighter

Restrepo is a documentary filmed by Sebastian Jungar and Tim Heatherington (there is also an accompanying book) about fifteen months in the life of a platoon of US soldiers deployed to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Restrepo is the name of one member of the platoon who is killed early on in the deployment, off-camera. We barely see him before his death but he hovers like a ghost over the rest of the film, remembered in flashbacks by his comrades. In his memory, they name a tiny outpost after Restrepo, and that outpost is credited (not very convincingly) by the commanding officer of the platoon with turning around operations in the valley. At the time of the initial deployment the Korengal Valley was considered the most dangerous part of Afghanistan for US forces, and the sense that we get of these soldiers in an utterly foreign land, with no sense whatsoever of who or what lives over the next hill, is overwhelming. Continue reading Restrepo