Currently Listening In the Midnight Hour By Wilson Pickett see related

Things I seen over the last few days:

Control **
Anton Corbijn's biopic of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis is beautifully made and features a brilliant performance from the always-reliable Samantha Morton, but Jesus Christ is it an irritating film to watch. It has a definite sense of time and place but little perspective about its leading character, who reveals himself as a whiny asshole during the film's first half and doesn't change, and then he commits suicide at 23 at the film's end. This is not to say that a film has to have a likable protagonist to work (witness Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Godfather II, etc., etc.), but Curtis isn't compelling or interesting, either; he made some decent music, complained a lot ("I give so much on stage"-- awww, poor baby) and then leaves his kid an orphan. It's kind of like watching a film about Kurt Cobain. But Corbijn's film doesn't make his story matter; we watch it uncomfortably for a couple of hours, and then we can go home.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut ***
Blade Runner is way overrated. Yep, I said it. The production design was clearly influential and it drips with style and atmosphere, but the story is no great shakes, the smoke-and-flashy lights cinematography gets old quick, and Vangelis' score has not aged well. At all. I saw the film once before, in its 1992 re-release (which was supposed to be the Director's Cut-- whatever), and remembered liking it more than now, which probably had less to do with any of the microscopic changes made to warrant this newest theatrical and DVD release and more to do with me being 16. I'm sure that this newest final cut will delight the film's fans--I'm just not one of them.

Rendition ****
There's much to admire in Gavin Hood's political drama, which tackles the thorny issue of "extreme rendition" (read: torture) of terror suspects at sites outside of the U.S. Hood and screenwriter Kelley Sane utilize a multi-story structure that isn't entirely successful, especially when a timeline wrench is thrown late in the film which takes the viewer out of the story at the precise moment when one should be most involved. That complain aside, there are sequences of tremendous power here, and several excellent performances-- particularly those of Peter Saarsgard and Meryl Streep, who effortlessly personifies Bush-era government arrogance.

Gone Baby Gone *****
Ben Affleck's feature directorial debut is an astonishingly confident and expertly crafted piece of genre filmmaking-- a procedural with a healthy dose of corruption and Catholic guilt thrown in for good measure. The script, culled from Dennis Lahane's novel, is tight and effecient, while Affleck's direction is lean and workmanlike and consistantly spot-on (particularly in a brutally effective set-piece around the hour mark that I literally had to catch my breath after). Terrific performances all around, particularly from the often-misused Ed Harris and Affleck's brother Casey, turning in his second great performance in as many months. First rate from end to end.

The End.