Filmcritic Reviews

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

2012-02-09T19:05:00Z

The Rock sings! The Rock runs! The Rock swims in the deepest waters around the fictional atoll in the title and manages to hold his breath for a very...long...time. Oh, and did we mention that he battles a massive lizard, a huge electric eel, and a glib Michael Caine along the way? In this weird mutant sequel of the Brendan Fraser-led Journey to the Center of the Earth, the wrestler formerly known for asking what's cooking is a stepdad trying to connect with his adventurer/Verne-ian (?) son Sean (a returning Josh Hutcherson). When the boy gets a message from his explorer grandpa (Caine), claiming to be from the mythic locale, it's up to the man of the hour to smirk, jump, and punch his way through another in a long, lumbering line of staid family films.

]]> Arriving in the South Seas nation of Palau, our duo hires bumbling pilot Gabato (Luis Guzman) and his hottie daughter Kailani (Vanessa Hudgens) to take them out into the middle of the ocean. Once they reach the proper coordinates, a massive hurricane throws them wildly off course. Eventually, they crash-land on a strange land mass populated by giant bees, tiny elephants, and a goofy old codger who is trying to solve the secrets of Atlantis and Captain Nemo's Nautilus -- aka Granddad. With a volcano preparing to erupt and a couple of illogical literary riddles to solve, our fivesome discovers their only way to safety may be to uncover the truth behind the island's origins -- including how three famous authors (Verne, Jonathan Swift, and Robert Louis Stevenson) all came to be part of the answer.

Geared directly at the gullible pre-teen audience member who devours this kind of slapstick spectacle like so much fruit leather, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island is a mindless matinee diversion. It's not bad so much as it is underwhelming. Director Brad Peyton, who turned many a tween mind to mush with his last cinematic outing -- the awful Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore - goes back to the days of K. Gordon Murray and Disney live action films like In Search of the Castaways for inspiration, and still manages to come up with pure post-modern mediocrity. There's no thrills here, no active sense of adventure. Instead, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson pumps his pecs, cocks his eyebrows, and shows off those bleached white teeth in an attempt to win us over.

For the pre-high school set, he more than succeeds. Whether it's making fun of Michael Caine's age (a running gag), riffing on Guzman's tendency toward getting into trouble (another constant source of 'comedy'), or helping Hutcherson land a kiss from Ms. High School Musical, Johnson jumpstarts even the stupidest one liner. Who else could pull off a weak-winded version of "What a Wonderful World," complete with lyrics that more or less comment on the film so far, and still have crowds clamoring for more? As he's done through dim bulb disasters such as Tooth Fairy and The Game Plan, Johnson proves he is a true mainstream star. He may never win an award, but he still seems to be consistently bankable.

As for the rest of the film, it's simplistic and straightforward. There are no plot twists or last act character conversions to contend with. Instead, we go on a quaint little quest with a boy and his beefy guardian, ethnic comic relief and girlfriend-fodder along for the ride. Then the curmudgeonly catalyst shows up and the jokes start flying. Soon, CG creatures fill the screen. In the end, it's all about the Rock and his ability to play hero. Everything that's good and bad about Journey 2 centers on his stunt appeal.

Safe House

2012-02-09T19:04:00Z

Few major movie stars are more consistent than Denzel Washington. Just as Will Smith usually plays the wisecracking charmer and Adam Sandler can be counted on to imitate his real-life wealth while wearing shorts, Washington has developed a repertoire of various cops, agents, and occasionally train operators. Sometimes he delivers a great performance as none of the above, like his work in Spike Lee's He Got Game, but for the better part of the last fifteen or twenty years, he's been doing mid-level thrillers, often with talented genre journeymen like Tony Scott or Carl Franklin.

He's maintained, perhaps even increased, his predilection for genre pulp since his Oscar win for Training Day, but Washington's showboating bad-guy performance in that movie also allowed some moral murkiness to set upon some of his subsequent characters. Maybe this, along with his inability to sleepwalk through rote parts, is why Washington's niche doesn't wear out as quickly as his movie-star peers'. Some stars become so accustomed to their established personae that they can only re-energize in roles that push against that familiarity and likability. Washington, on the other hand, has the old-fashioned star quality of always seeming alert and crafty, no matter the material. Even in a second-tier movie like Safe House, he burrows into his character and infuses the movie with charisma and confidence.

]]> Here, in service of said second-tier exercise, he plays Tobin Frost, a rogue CIA agent who turns himself in at the U.S. consulate in Capetown, South Africa, to get out of a jam in a hurry. The consulate ships him over to a sleepy safe house staffed by low-level agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), desperate for a ticket out of the minors, and maybe a transfer to Paris for his French girlfriend. Frost is wanted for selling agency secrets and renowned for his mind-game interrogation techniques, and when the safe house is attacked, Weston must flee with his eerily composed "houseguest" (safe house jargon uses a lot of ironic hospitality metaphors), who has his own shady international intrigue business to conduct.

Safe House itself is almost all business; Frost and Weston have a few tensely personal conversations, but only in the breaks between car chases, foot chases, shoot-outs, and punch-fights. Yet despite its efficiency in cutting to the chase (and then cutting up the chase), the movie still manages to feel belabored: the sudden gunshots remain predictable; the buttoned-up control-room panic back in Langley provides unimaginative exposition; CIA handlers played by Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga clash in ways you might expect; and everyone gets bent out of shape over one of those single digital files containing endless and unspecified incriminating evidence. The movie provides sensation in the moment, but any menace it works up is too generic for lasting thrills. For a preposterous action thriller, it's not much fun.

Tony Scott would have had fun with Safe House; in fact, the movie is eager to convince you that he did. Daniel Espinosa, a Swedish director making his U.S. feature debut, imitates the Scott style -- perhaps best described as music-video surveillance -- more or less wholesale. The grainy, blown-out colors; the wobbly handheld camera; the furious cutting; it's all here, minus Scott's trademark swirling-helicopter establishing shots -- and his bombastic but populist touch that makes a movie like Unstoppable such an improbable success. This imitation looks stylish when it's smashing up cars, buildings, and Reynolds, who in a gratifying scene participates in a knock-down drag-out fight that actually results in sustained injuries. But it's unmistakably a Brand X production, albeit a competent one.

Espinosa and screenwriter David Guggenheim have another Hollywood touchstone in mind, too: with the buzzing control room, untrustworthy government agents, and gritty fast-cut fight scenes, Safe House could have been called The Bourne Influence. But while the movie chased Scott and Bourne, I found myself thinking that another past Washington collaborator, Carl Franklin, could've made a more noirish, flavorful version of this material, one more dependent on characters and shading than the way cars look when they collide full-speed with other, bullet-riddled cars. As-is, Frost's personality never comes into focus, no matter what kind of motivations the screenplay tries to supply, and the movie gets stuck with the bland Matt Weston point of view.

As a simulation of a good Denzel Washington thriller, Safe House is, well, pretty good -- Washington may not make the most adventurous choices, but he rarely appears in outright junk. But the disadvantage to his consistency is that fans have plenty of better movies, like Inside Man, Deja Vu, and Out of Time, at their disposal. This one uses Washington, as so many of those vehicles do, to impart some extra gravity and charm. But this time, he doesn't get much in return. The filmmakers owe him a favor.

The Vow

2012-02-09T19:03:00Z

It's quite telling that I walked into The Vow with absolute certainty that the film was based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. The fact that it's actually not serves as a reminder to the ubiquity of the Sparks brand, which consists of interminable weepies about impossible love story scenarios that either hinge on or lead to a heartbreaking tragedy. The Vow fits flushly into that mold, but the fact that it isn't even tangentially associated with Sparks eliminates any possible excuse the filmmakers could lean on regarding the end product.

]]> Simply put, the film is a cross between Romantic Conflict for Dummies and Tepid Soup for the Soul. Its shameless pandering to a certain sect of the female moviegoing population is cruelly opportunistic and entirely false. It's reasonable to expect a young husband to suffer immense heartbreak when his wife emerges from a car accident with amnesia and doesn't remember who he is. It's less than reasonable to withstand the onslaught of level-one emo-brooding that ensues for the remainder of the film, in which the wife returns to her stuffy socialite family, reverts into a buttoned-up law student, and still harbors feelings for the jerk she left before meeting her current husband.

It's okay to be confused -- the poor amnesiac wife is, too. But we as audience members should be able to come together and see what she can't -- that this story is calculated to dictate our feelings from the first frame to the closing credits, striking us with tragedy and then infuriating us by withholding the obvious for 90 painful minutes of wheel-spinning.

Rachel McAdams plays the wife, Paige, who starts the film as an earthy, liberal artist struggling to succeed in Chicago. Channing Tatum plays the husband, Leo, who loves Paige so deeply that clearly the Cinema Gods wanted to see him suffer. After a car accident one treacherous winter night, Paige reverts into her "former self," the buttoned-up law student daughter of a conservative socialite family in suburban Illinois. She has no memories of Leo, nor the apparent turning point when she abandoned her high-society proclivities and transformed into someone who would vote for Barack Obama.

All this drama -- which hinges on watching Leo suffer interminably while Paige acts like a cheaply written movie socialite -- plays out with nary a shred of surprise or identifiable humanity. Every character is an extreme archetype; every word of the screenplay is punctuated with an exclamation mark. Paige's parents (played by Sam Neill and Jessica Lange, who look very sad) are essentially rich-bitch monsters who want to steal her from Leo. Her ex-fiance (Scott Speedman) is the classic mugging, two-faced prick. And the basic structure of the story, which pits rich vs. poor, conservative vs. liberal, and independent rebellion vs. blind loyalty, fits inside such a small square box that the intended range of viewer emotion can only shift from heartbroken to slightly more heartbroken.

McAdams and Tatum are charming and talented actors, but how this material was even remotely appealing to them -- outside of the quick and easy paycheck, of course -- is unfathomable. McAdams is particularly stranded in the quagmire, her doe-eyed confusion and broad personality shifts resulting in a performance that...well, it would only be at home in a movie as bad as this one. Tatum occasionally finds greater depths, but any amount of legitimate acting effort is wasted in a movie where the beefcake actor's most powerful single moment is a gratuitous ass shot.

No, The Vow is not based on a Nicholas Sparks book, but the fact that it unfolds just like one shows that young Hollywood is more interested in preying on the surface emotions of innocent moviegoers rather than dealing in reality. Not only is The Vow not a fictional adaptation, the opening scene actually says "inspired by true events." For the remainder of the film, I thought about how real amnesia is, how heart-wrenching and difficult an experience like this would really be, and just how cruel a bastardization of genuine human pain The Vow really is.

Scalene

2012-02-09T19:01:00Z

Telling a story in reverse has its own inherent pitfalls. Too much confusion can alienate an audience unnecessarily. Not enough plot or character revelation along the way can be anti-climactic -- especially since the climax is already out there. So what makes this storytelling approach work? Filmmaker Zack Parker knows, if his indie feature Scalene is any indication. With co-writer Brandon Owens, Parker manages his tricky, three-character exercise with poise and stability, not only realizing when a backward narrative should surprise us, but also confidently knowing when the story should change direction for maximum effect.

]]> It's what keeps each point of Scalene exciting, and sometimes thrilling. Parker keeps us slightly disoriented while developing his three lead roles beautifully, with prime performances coming from his trio of character actors. Margo Martindale (Orphan) plays Janice, a frumpy, troubled single mom dealing with Jacob (Adam Scarimbolo, Stake Land) her mute, mentally disabled adult son, and Paige (former kid actor Hanna Hall), the college-age care giver who's entered their lives. Their uncomfortable tale begins at the end, with Janice and Paige caught in a conflict that's surprisingly violent and humorously awkward. As with a film that's as purposefully out of time as Christopher Nolan's Memento, we can hardly wait to unravel the crazy events that have led us here.

Scalene doesn't have to rely on the chronology gimmick as heavily as Memento does, and the film doesn't disappoint. As a director, Parker lays on the suspense, heavily at times -- Hitchcock and Carpenter are clearly present and accounted for. (Visual nods toward Psycho and Vertigo are more playfully overdone than well done.) The script hides bits of information here, then adds a little more over there, and Parker is faithful to the only reason the backwards device should be used: The result is more satisfying than if it were told sequentially.

Part of that satisfaction is in realizing we're being fooled by our own first impressions, deceived by our natural perceptions of what we see on the screen. Martindale, reveling in her meaty role, creates a woman who's unhinged in one scene, loving in the next, sadly irresponsible in the one after. Parker realizes that we, as viewers, will make certain decisions about who Janice is, even informed by her age, gender and physical stature. And that's exactly when expectations of character and plot can be played with. It becomes apparent that each character is not what you assumed from the scene before (I mean, after). Parker then goes a step further, skillfully changing the film's point-of-view.

It keeps you on your toes and caught up in the action, as it should. Conversations that start in one tone flip into another realm. One-on-one talks extend beyond the average length of an onscreen discussion, adding more information, as well as discomfort. Parker's camera does a single-take 360 around the room during a tense accusation, but then does it again later (earlier) to show off an elegant time-lapse effect. (On a side note, the 360 shot is getting tiresome, and is done poorly in most films, but that's another conversation.)

As the true details behind the opening scenes become clear, Parker doesn't spring them on the audience, whipping the curtain quickly away. Instead, the pivotal scene unfolds slowly, Scarimbolo and Hall offering deeply emotional performances that help Scalene avoid potential tabloid-esque territory. The sequence doesn't just uncover the film's secrets; it also reveals a director's potential for unflinching, character-driven drama.

In Darkness

2012-02-09T19:00:00Z

In the dark days of World War II, who would have expected to find a source of illumination in the sewer of a Polish town?

Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz) is a relatively lucky man in Nazi-occupied Lvov, Poland, one of many cities with ghetto populations being annihilated by Hitler's Reich. In spite of his utterly cynical approach to life and survival, and his lowly occupation as a laborer and sewer worker, he enjoys a regular paycheck, a good if not excellent relationship with his wife Wanda (Kinga Preis), a political connection to an old friend who became a Nazi officer, and enough free time from his official duties for a side occupation as a scavenger and thief.

To him and faithful follower Szczepek (Krzysztof Skonieczny) the war is essentially a process that spawns abandoned apartments for looting -- the law and strict morality be damned.

]]> When he's approached by Ignacy and Pauline Chiger (Herbert Knaup, Maria Schrader), a wealthy Jewish couple, with a plea to hide them and a group of fellow ghetto escapees and see to their provisions, Socha sees zloty (dollar) signs and agrees. The Chigers and their motley bunch of Jews follow him down a manhole where he leads them to their subterranean hideout under the city. There are young and old, a couple of able-bodied men (notably Mundek Margulies played by Benno Fürmann, Farewell), at least as many women, and a pre-teen pair of children. It's of little consequence to them that they're living under a church while the Nazis and Polish churchgoers are hunting them for credit and rewards.

Director Agnieszka Holland (Copying Beethoven, Treme) knows well what the effect of putting us down in the dank, rat-infected, unlit sewer will be and she enhances the effect with cameraman Jolanta Dylewska's lighting by flashlight. After a little time down here, we feel relief when we return with Socha above ground where he buys so much food with the Jew's money as to arouse suspicion by the shopkeeper. The risk Socha is taking upon himself and his family is evident. Anxiety is constant.

But the situation isn't static. Ignacy eventually runs out of cash and directs Socha to a secret hiding place in the city where he will find valuable jewelry to sell. We begin to suspect something special about Socha when, remaining true to his mission and the trust placed in his better instincts, he indeed hands the bankroll to its owner, an act that tells us the petty thief has undergone a transition in his understanding of Jews as fellow human beings. They have become people like himself with a total dependence on him for life itself and his task has evolved into a determination to be their ultimate rescuer even as his Nazi "friend" Bortnik (Michal Zurawski) is developing some doubts about his old pal, the opportunist, who would never turn down a zloty. Is Leopold no longer interested in money? If not, just why is his Jew-count so low?

An even more conclusive measure of the man who might once have been described as heartless and unconcerned occurs when Ignacy informs the sewerman that the money has completely run out. Soon afterward, Socha hands the older man a roll of bills with the instruction that it be used to pay him on time and before the underground assemblage -- lest he be considered a sucker, a dope, a man who will work for free.

The film is an oppressive experience, made all the more so by Holland's insistence on making it lengthy and forcing the darkness, filth and deterioration on us for a stronger feel for what 14 months in such deprived and threatening circumstances might be like. She and debuting screenwriter David F. Shamoon choose activities and developments within the group which depicts humanity under a duress that includes moments of banter and petty conflict, romance and rejection, extreme fear and the everpresent hope for life against the imminence of discovery and death.

Holland's craft, though, is a little less than perfect. While we recognize character types, the episodic style combined with low budget realities seem to have caused haste, which shows up in somewhat careless sequencing and rough cutting. However, we're so engaged with the central character that these weaknesses don't do serious damage to a story with a charismatic, gutsy guy at its center. Wieckiewicz's performance has such a superb sense of character realization and smell of truth that he makes this a very worthwhile film to see. Furthermore, I expect it will merit him high praise and international attention.

The complexity of the human soul, as personalized by Socha, is documented in Robert Marshall's true account of this Holocaust feat of humanity that he published in 1991, In the Sewers of Lvov. It leaves us with the question: where does such an evolution -- from selfish opportunism to self endangerment for humanistic purposes -- come from?

Without providing a solution to the conundrum, the film leaves an appreciation for that phenomenon of human behavior. In Darkness has won a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2011 Academy Awards. Counting of the ballots awaits at the time of this writing but, whether it wins the category or not, it may be noted that the real Leopold Socha and his wife have been honored by Israel as two of "the Righteous Among the Nations" a rare designation that they share with other gentile harborers and rescuers. They've been living in Israel since 1957.

The Turin Horse

2012-02-09T19:00:00Z

If January and February remain something of a mythical "dumping ground" at the movies, littered with low-scale gambles, misguided embarrassments, and dime-a-dozen genre throwaways with little in the way of thrills, laughs, or any other brand of captivation, let alone genuine artistic oomph, I am moved to cry Apocrypha. Following a handful of early but nevertheless remarkable best-of-the-year contenders that dropped in January (Miss Bala, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Crazy Horse), February looks to match that with Jafar Panahi's This is Not a Film, Ti West's The Innkeepers and, most noteworthy, Bela Tarr's apocalyptic elegy, The Turin Horse, which may prove to be Tarr's last film, if his recent comments are to be taken seriously.

]]> Master of the long take and notoriously slow but devastatingly simple narratives, Tarr could have likely called it quits around the time his towering, seven-hour-plus opus Satantango secured his spot as Hungary's cinematic poet laureate. He has since produced just three films, only one of which (2007's The Man from London) could be considered as anything less than a masterpiece. The Turin Horse, if not nearly as bizarre as 2000's Werckmeister Harmonies, is still a work of tremendous beauty and undiluted personal philosophy, marking Tarr's fifth collaboration on scripting with the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai. And like their previous collaboration, their latest is at once apocalyptic and graceful, elemental and vaguely spiritual, thoroughly realistic and touched by the fantastic.

As the narrative involves little more than the quotidian tasks of an aging man (Janos Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bok, the troubled, tragic girl from Satantango) on the eve of the end of days, Tarr's remarkable expertise with the camera and his simply unparalleled use of, and ability to capture, motion is central to the film's triumph. The opening shot is deserving of the director's pantheon: a great, haunted steed faces violent gusts of wind throwing up whipping clouds of dust and debris as the horse returns its master (Derzsi) to his home. Tarr, working with German cinematographer Fred Kelemen, investigates every inch of movement that the scene allows, the camera floating and ducking around the horse and the carriage with seemingly effortless motion. We are in the realm of Sjostrom or even Murnau here, in terms of near-gothic aesthetic, but the form is unmistakably modern, the imagery unerringly invigorating.

Save for scattered narration, a few clipped utterances, some paltry exchanges and an end-times rant from a drunken neighbor, The Turin Horse is almost entirely devoid of dialogue or exposition, making the film's tangential ties to the story of Frederich Nietzsche and the titular mare all the more fascinating. Has Tarr crafted a eulogy for those creatures defined only by their work and plain existence? Is it pity, empathy, frustration or outright scorn that is being transmitted? The tone is that of dread but the characters are drawn sensitively by their very visages: the tired, weathered and mean bearded scowl of Derszi, the unhinged, cynical mug on the neighbor and, most crucial, the sad, transfixing gaze of Bok.

As bleak and minimalist as the story is, the film does offer a tug of societal intrigue in a central encounter, wherein a band of bawdy gypsies attempts to steal water from the father and daughter. The gypsies curse them to "drop dead", not long before the daughter rushes in and begins to read over bible verses. Catholicism and paganism, or belief in nothing, are held in equal weight when the well dries up and the lanterns refuse to be lit; it's not clear what exactly caused any of these fantastical occurences, other than, of course, the will of Tarr and co-director Agnes Hranitzky. And that is exactly what is so mesmerizing about Tarr's swan song: the wonder of it is in the basic tenants of filmmaking itself, with only hints and whiffs of perceived meaning wafting through its barren landscape.

AKA A Toronoi lo

Declaration of War

2012-02-09T19:00:00Z

The revelations are minor but forceful in Valerie Donzelli's exuberant melodrama Declaration of War, which casts the director as the mother of a two-year-old who is diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. The father of the child, the literal Romeo to her Juliette, is played by Jeremie Elkaim, Donzelli's co-scripter and the father of their son, Gabriel, whose struggles with terminal illness were the antecedent of the film's narrative core. The personal weight of the story is abundant but as the title infers, Donzelli's film is not an ode to anguished soul-searching in the face of that most blunt notice of mortality.

]]> Faith and its more popular mandates are of little matter in Donzelli and Elkaim's script, as are fiscal worries while coasting through France's universal health care system. This allows Donzelli to investigate the effects of tragedy, and the strengths and stresses of community, family, and partnership under these conditions, with a consistently inventive and yet remarkably clear-eyed and sober stylistic eye. Family and concerned community are of equal weight, indeed almost inseparable, in Romeo and Juliette's life. Few films in recent memory have approached such communities, which includes Romeo's lesbian mother (Brigitte Sy) and her partner, without even a hint of condescension or dull moral scrutiny.

The most fascinating figures in this gathering are Romeo and Juliette themselves, who are not married (neither are Elkaim and Donzelli) and yet share an emotionally rich and well-detailed partnership as the film progresses through a litany of specialists, nurses, diagnosticians, social workers, and surgeons. Donzelli catches the central couple in moments of cathartic partying and self-exploration (or indulgence?) in between hospital visits rather than scenes of repetitive sentimentality that attest to wholly unearned, thrift-store pride and survival of spirit. Indeed, one of the more refreshing things witnessed in Declaration of War is Romeo and Juliette's wanton youth, which is constantly unleashed and consistently humbled by the humanist work being done by the hospital workers and doctors; never is Juliette's maternal instinct held up as somehow more wise or right than the opinions of educated professionals.

This tendency towards ambiguity in terms of social habits and sexual preferences puts focus on the inner life of Romeo and Juliette, expressed with audacious style by Donzelli - a musical interlude, a make-out party, a fast-paced dash through the corridors of the hospital, stately narration. Through rushes of house and dubstep, careful, active framing and uniformly strong performers, including Frederic Pierrot, Anne Le Ny, Michelle Moretti and Philippe Laudenbach, Donzelli creates a lively aesthetic environment in which Juliette and Romeo's unique relationship becomes a truly personal matter, as it often is, and not a matter necessarily swayed or distinguished by trauma, social stigmas, or psychological quirks. In fact, the most public issue that Romeo and Juliette are tied to is the health of their child which, in what might seem like a socialist dystopia to some, is here portrayed as an axiom of public good and civility.

AKA La guerre est declaree

Lessons from the Success of "Chronicle"

2012-02-08T06:00:00Z

Chronicle, the science fiction film about teenagers getting superpowers somewhat ahead of the morality required to wield them responsibly, brought in $22 million over the Super Bowl weekend. This was good enough for a first-place finish at the box office, and the fourth-best Super Bowl weekend result ever. It did much better than anyone expected.

What can we learn from the film's surprising success?
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1. Cheap Is Not Bad

Chronicle cost about $12 million to make. To put that in perspective, Paramount paid about 30% of that to advertise The Avengers for 30 seconds during the Super Bowl itself. By bringing in $22 million its first weekend, the film has pretty much paid for itself right out of the box, even on one of the traditionally least-trafficked movie weekends of the year.

Bear in mind that cheap is not enough; lots of low-budget films sink below the waves and lose money for their backers. Chronicle benefited from being part of the "found footage" genre, which is not only popular (see: Paranormal Activity) but also hides a low budget by making the film intentionally look like amateur video. It also helped that, despite being a small-budget film, it had major-league distribution through 20th Century Fox, which put it into nearly 3,000 theaters.

2. Super Bowl Weekend Movies Aren't Just for Women/Horror Fans Anymore

Traditionally, Super Bowl weekends have been when studios punt films that appeal to the double-X chromosome set or horror fans. This is not an entirely stupid thing to do, as prior to this weekend, nine of the ten top Super Bowl weekend films were either women-oriented or horror (and those horror films most often with a female star toplining). The two most successful? Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour and Dear John. This gives you an idea of how Hollywood traditionally approaches this particular box-office frame.

But in 2009 Fox rather counterintuitively released Taken, the Liam Neeson-starring action thriller, on Super Bowl weekend. It gathered in $24 million on its way to $145 million domestically, signalling that not every non-horror-loving male in the U.S. was in a 72-hour trance when it came to the Super Bowl. And now Fox has proved it again; Chronicle skewed male (55% of the audience) and young, and apparently did not suffer for it at the Super Bowl weekend box office.

This isn't to suggest that Hollywood will now dump Super Bowl weekend as a place for its women-focused and horror films; The Woman in Black, which was both horror and skewed toward women (they were 60% of the audience, in no small part due to star Daniel Radcliffe), finished with $20.9 million for the weekend, only slightly behind Chronicle. It does mean that studio will now start reassessing the belief that men, as a class, aren't interested in movies on Super Bowl weekend.

3. Sometimes Two Days Is Enough for a Weekend. What is absolutely true about Super Bowl weekend is that the Sunday is a complete loss for move theaters. A typical weekend will see Sunday grosses down from Saturday by anywhere from a third to a half; on Super Bowl weekend, it's more like 60 to 75 percent. This was certainly true of both Chronicle and The Woman in Black, both of whose Sunday box office was off more than two thirds from the Saturday box office.

But with the right film this isn't a horrible thing, and the "right" film in this case, to go back to point one, is a film that didn't cost a lot to make. With a $12 million budget, Chronicle could afford to essentially skip most of a day's worth of grosses; so could The Woman in Black, which was reportedly made for $17 million (and which distributor CBS Films picked up for a fraction of that). Indeed, of the top ten films for Super Bowl weekends, only one had a production budget of more than $25 million: the Hannah Montana movie, which cost $35 million to make.

This isn't a coincidence. This year's Super Bowl had nearly 112 million viewers; if you were a studio executive and you put out an $80 million film on a weekend when a third of the country is watching the same show on TV, you'd get fired, and rightly so. But a $12 million film? That's not even an A-list star's salary. You can risk it.

What does this mean for the future? Just that if you see another cheap, young male-skewing science fiction-y flick out next Super Bowl weekend, you'll know the lessons of Chronicle were learned.

Kevin Smith's Best Comic Book Movie Moments

2012-02-07T06:00:00Z

Few filmmakers are as associated with comic books and geek culture in general than Kevin Smith. Pretty much every movie he's made is peppered with references to Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and more. (He even thanked comic book writers like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore in the credits for Dogma.)

In addition to Smith's work in print on characters like Daredevil and Batman, there's his unproduced screenplay for Green Hornet (which he later adapted to comics) and his stories about working with producer Jon Peters on an aborted Superman movie which have become the stuff of geek legend. (Peters wanted Smith to add scenes to the script where Superman fights polar bears and a giant mechanical spider.) And, of course, there's his comic-book store Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, the setting of AMC's new reality series Comic Book Men (premiering this Sunday at 10pm/9c).

There are so many comic book references in his movies, it's hard to pick just one. Let's take a look at a few of the best moments in Kevin Smith's geek-friendly filmography.

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Banky Is a "Tracer," Chasing Amy

A running joke throughout Chasing Amy involves everyone referring to Jason Lee's comic book artist character, Banky, as a "tracer." Banky is the inker of Holden (Ben Affleck)'s comics, but everyone assumes he just traces over the artwork. This is the source of much irritation for Banky, a feeling shared by many an inker in the comic book industry. Only Smith could pull off this sort of inside baseball joke. In fact, Chasing Amy may be the most accurate depiction of the comic book industry ever put on film. It's definitely the only flick that features a main character who wears a Madman T-shirt.

Brodie Meets Stan Lee, Mallrats

Comic-book geek Brodie (Lee again) achieves the ultimate nerd dream when he meets Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee at the mall comic-book store. And what does he do? Asks him about The Thing's, er, lil' Thing. Still, Stan does offer some fatherly advice on finding that special someone, in addition to boasting about how he's ahead of Mick Jagger in the love department. He also reveals how characters like The Hulk and Dr. Doom reflected his feelings over the girl who got away. (Turns out Stan's advice was actually a soliloquy from a Spider-Man comic.) A fun, heartfelt performance from Stan before his comic-book movie cameos got a bit out of hand.

Bluntman and Chronic The Movie, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Smith's comedic road opus finds Jay and Silent Bob traveling to Hollywood to put the kibosh on a movie version of the Bluntman and Chronic comic that Banky and Holden from Chasing Amy based on the hapless duo. The scenes of the Bluntman and Chronic flick give Smith a chance to riff on Joel Schumacher's rubber-nippled epic Batman & Robin and cast Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, as the villainous C--k Puncher. (James Van Der Beek and Jason Biggs are supposed to play Bluntman and Chronic, but Jay and Silent Bob take their place.) Riddled with pot jokes and bodily-function humor, the Bluntman and Chronic movie-within-the-movie is like Mystery Men meets Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. It's a wonder that Smith hasn't made a full-length version.

Silent Bob Flies Like Batman, Mallrats

Fans of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman got a kick out of seeing Silent Bob fly across the mall like The Dark Knight. (OK, maybe he more glided and then landed with a thud. Still, he got to wield a sweet Bat-grappling hook gun.) This is just one of the comic book references in Mallrats, many of which are dropped by funnybook nut Brodie (Lee). Beyond obsessed with superhero anatomy, Brodie expounds on his theory about how Lois Lane can't have Superman's baby in one memorably profane scene. Many a comic book nerd has pondered that conundrum.

Jay References X-Men 2, Clerks II

Jar Jar Binks and The Lord of the Rings are just two of the beloved geek institutions that get lampooned in Smith's continuation of his breakthrough film. Comic-book references abound as well, including Jay's line about the "hard plastic cage" that houses Magneto in X-Men 2. It's interesting how much comic-book movies have changed since 1994's Clerks. Back then, all Smith had to reference was a handful of Batman and Superman movies. There's so much now for his characters to poke fun at and dissect. What do you think Jay and Silent Bob would've made of Watchmen, a film which featured a naked blue dude for most of its running time?

Hooper X and Banky Debate Archie's Love Life, Chasing Amy

Since it's set in the world of indie comix, it's not surprising that Smith's third film features some of his best riffs on the world of capes and tights. In addition to the spot-on comic book convention scene, View Askewniverse fans love quoting the scene where Hooper X, the faux-militant African-American comic creator played by Dwight Ewell, and Banky debate the sexual proclivities of the Archie gang. Despite Hooper's well-reasoned argument about Archie and Jughead's close, uh, friendship (Holden points out that Archie never did settle on Betty or Veronica), Banky refuses to believe that his beloved Riverdale gang were engaging in tawdry affairs. The hilariously filthy scene rings true for anyone who's ever engaged in a geeky late-night bar debate.

For more on the filmography of Kevin Smith (and lots about zombies), check out his appearance on The Talking Dead -- and be sure to tune in to the return of The Walking Dead this Sunday at 9pm/8c!

Sundance Report: Empowered Women in "Smashed," "The Surrogate," and "Middle of Nowhere"

2012-02-06T18:00:00Z

Strong women were everywhere at Sundance last week -- and they flourished in three of the festival's standouts: Smashed, The Surrogate, and Middle of Nowhere. What's perhaps most interesting is that these women are in more traditional "caretaker" roles, not "I-am-woman-hear-me-roar" ones -- and yet they manage to prevail, to care not only for the men around them but also, ultimately, for themselves and their own narratives.

]]> The actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) comes into her own as manic pixie dreamgirl Kate, who gradually awakens to the realization that she is Smashed more often than not. It takes spewing in front of her hyper-aware first-grade class to realize that she's crossed the line from adorably to pathetically alcoholic. The party is over. Unfortunately, it's not quite over for her husband, played by Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) -- and Kate ultimately must gird herself to face this crisis, with or without him. This well-crafted character study couldn't be farther from the histrionic Leaving Las Vegas, although it has many moments of brutal honesty -- Kate awakens one school day under the freeway at a crack squat. Her crawl toward the twelve steps, and how that fractures her "storybook" marriage, makes for a compelling look at a real girl who finally puts herself first as an individual, and as the driver of the narrative.

In Middle of Nowhere, relative newcomer Emayatzy E. Corinealdi (she played a nurse on The Young and the Restless back in 2007, her biggest credit to date) gives an impressively still performance that should be a career game-changer. She plays Ruby, an African-American med student who drops out to care for her incarcerated husband after he's arrested and sentenced to eight years behind bars. Ruby is anything but a hysterical female. As she mounts the bus for double shifts as a nurse to fund her husband's lawyers, babysits her nephew, and spars with her upwardly mobile mother, she become a beautiful martyr nailed to her husband's cross. What gradually becomes clear to Ruby, and the audience, is that in her abandonment of her own pleasure, in her self-jailing while her husband is in prison, she embraces stasis. Ruby is gorgeous, hard-working, upright -- and stuck in the Middle of Nowhere, not only because of her husband's prison sentence, but because in enabling him she has lost herself. By journey's end, she realizes that, even if she can't envision her future, her only way out of her rut is to plant herself at the center of the frame of her own life and embrace life anew.

The Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt owns the title character in The Surrogate, but not the lead. Cheryl serves (services?) the main character, a sardonic poet in an iron lung (John Hawkes) who hires her as a sexual surrogate (not sex worker) to eradicate this little problem he has: his virginity. Like Winstead's schoolteacher and Corinealdi's nurse, Cheryl is in a care-taking profession, albeit an unconventional one -- she gets naked and climbs in bed with her clients. Hunt does that thing that attention-seeking actresses seem bound to do, namely stripping bare. It's both brave and, well, given the level of repetition, flashy. She plays many of her scenes with her breasts exposed above the sheets. Perhaps intentionally, that nudity becomes rote -- it's all in a day's work, both for the surrogate and the actress. What slowly becomes apparent is the lack of poetry in Cheryl's personal life. Yes, her client is crippled physically, but emotionally she could be in an iron lung. Her ability to act as a sexual surrogate for people with disabilities -- a profession where she controls the situation absolutely -- is also an escape from a marriage where she's stopped communicating with her spouse (Adam Arkin) and a marriage bed that lacks spark.

In all three movies, these women come to own their stories, or story lines. They are not simply girlfriend, mother, sister, slut. The Surrogate will probably hit theaters first -- the movie took the Sundance Audience Award and Fox Searchlight will release it domestically. Hunt's sexual surrogate, though critical, is the least central of the three because it's structurally a supporting character: Her purpose in the script is to move the lead male to his ultimate conclusion. Still, Cheryl's story echoes that of the schoolteacher and the nurse: "Enabler, enable thy self." What makes the Sundance Film Festival still relevant beyond the celebrity Mardi Gras of its opening weekend, is that it premieres works where women determine the narrative in their respective movies, a tradition that goes back to Gal Young 'Un, Working Girls, and True Love.

Chronicle

2012-02-02T19:06:00Z

When you hear that director Josh Trank and writer Max Landis (son of John) are out to reinvent the superhero origin story via Chronicle, their found footage sci-fi film effort, all kinds of warranted warning flags go up. After all, this is a genre that can't decide between making one anxious (via the whole 'you are there' narrative) or nauseous (thanks to all the shaky camera antics). Worse still, there's the nagging "why are you filming everything?" element that never seems to be addressed. Finally, many of these movies avoid big, lavish special effects in order to maintain a level of lo-fi "realism." Thankfully, Trank and Landis are prepared to address these concerns and then some. The result is one of the best uses of the filmmaking format since a trio of documentarians entered the Burkittsville Woods, looking for a certain witch.

]]> Confirmed class outsider Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) has just bought himself a new video camera. Why? Well, his mother is dying and his drunken dad likes to take out his frustrations on the boy's face. Apparently, our lead needs something to record the abuse. Picked on at school, his only friend seems to be his cautious cousin Matt (Alex Russell). One night, at a party, they catch up with school sports icon Steve Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan) and together, they discover a mysterious cave containing a bizarre alien artifact. A few weeks later, they each have become 'empowered' with certain abilities -- telekinesis, flight -- and are enjoying their newfound superhero skills. Then Andrew's rage at the world grows out of control and soon battle lines are drawn between the trio.

Chronicle is terrific. It argues for the effectiveness of the found footage gimmick while giving us the kind of comic book kick few films in the genre can even pretend to deliver. A lot like M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable in both tone and approach, it's as if Trank and Landis found a way to merge The Breakfast Club with the typical "birth of a hero/villain" plot to show what would really happen should adolescents, minds confused and hormones raging, become capable of almost anything. We get the fun of discovering the limits inherent in one's new abilities while never once going wholly overboard into raunchiness or ridiculousness. These guys don't try to destroy society or advance some personal perversion. Instead, they use their new gifts as a means of empowerment -- and in the case of Andrew, escape.

Indeed, this is Andrew's movie. He is the reason we get the camera footage, the reason the footage continues in a new and novel way (you have to love how Trank and Landis solve the inherent 'constant camera' complaint) and the organic way his path goes from halting to hurt to harmful. Like a flawless four frame epic, Andrew appears destined to be the damaged god who gives way to a supervillain, and who better to be his adversary than his reluctant champion cousin. All throughout Chronicle, we watch as things build to a head between the trio. Even better, the ending delivers the kind of rock 'em, sock 'em payoff the premise promises. Few films of this type even come close (we're looking at you, The Devil Inside).

But this is more than just a stunt well done. Chronicle will resonate with anyone who felt/feels high school is nothing more than a melting pot of socially mandated misery, where the populars pick on the nerds because...well, because it's somehow an acceptable part of the whole "growing up" ideal. In this case, however, Andrew and his friends learn that a little cosmic comeuppance can make homeroom a bit easier to handle -- until the pain becomes real. As entertaining as it is inventive, Chronicle is a minor masterwork.

Big Miracle

2012-02-02T19:05:00Z

Say this for director Ken Kwapis: he must know how to make actors comfortable. He's directed great episodes of some of the best TV shows ever made, including Freaks and Geeks, The Office, Parks and Recreation, and The Larry Sanders Show, while cultivating a side career making inferior big-screen vehicles for small-screen stars like Jason Alexander (Dunston Checks In), Fran Drescher (The Beautician and the Beast), and every young female on network TV in 2005 (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). Big Miracle is his second feature starring his Office-mate John Krasinski. That Krasinski came bounding back after their previous collaboration, License to Wed, which in addition to being terrible failed to boost the careers of anyone involved, must speak to Kwapis's professionalism, friendliness, and excellent work helming a dozen golden-age Office episodes, among other qualities that have little to do with License to Wed itself (again: just terrible).

To their credit, Big Miracle is a lot better than License to Wed; rather than waste its talented (and once again TV-heavy) cast's time, it merely kills it, honorably. Krasinski plays Adam Carlson, a local TV newsman out of Anchorage stuck doing human-interest stories in Point Barrow, Alaska, who stumbles across a family of California gray whales trapped underneath some ice. His report gets picked up nationally, and attracts the attention of Adam's ex-girlfriend Rachel (Drew Barrymore), a Greenpeace rep who flies in, determined to save the creatures.

]]> The movie is nominally about Adam and Rachel, but the most interesting thing about Big Miracle is how it shows disparate groups coming together to address the trapped-whale problem: Rachel represents the activists; Adam and the ambitious Jill Jerard (Kristen Bell) lead the many reporters; Ted Danson plays an oil magnate whose wife goads him into helping as a PR mission; Adam is friends with Nathan (Ahmaogak Sweeney), a native Alaskan boy; and eventually the National Guard is drawn in, led by Colonel Tom Carroll (Dermot Mulroney). The movie is surprisingly honest about the myriad motivations at play, and when it makes detours to fill in the smaller stories and processes within the larger rescue operation, it feels, however briefly, like a message-y, family-friendly version of a Robert Altman ensemble movie.

The rest of the time, it pretty much resembles a message-y family-friendly movie about saving some whales, which obviously isn't the worst thing in the world. For the most part, Big Miracle resists the obvious temptation to humanize the whales, save for a few teary speeches from Barrymore insisting that they're just like us due to their remarkably humanlike quality of needing help. Apart from those stretches, the movie wisely focuses more on the people who care for these creatures, engineering human-whale contact moments more for the awe factor than the awwww factor.

But despite the many human sides to this story, the actors don't have much to do; Krasinski just cleans up his low-key charmer act, which somewhat diminishes said charm without the deadpan sarcasm of his Office character. Barrymore's unsteady earnestness makes sense for an environmental activist, but Rachel is written to de-emphasize Barrymore's sunniness and good humor; frankly, she's a little whiny (not to mention ill-defined in terms of her place in Greenpeace). This makes the relationship between Adam and Rachel a bit of a slog; it's supposed to be a sweetly traditional arc of proverbial remarriage, but the movie doesn't offer much beyond making sure we know that they are both really, really nice people.

Frankly, Kristen Bell's Jill seems plenty nice, too; a little mercenary, perhaps, but less so than any number of real-life reporters. Bell's likability proves no match for the screenplay's demands, however, which dictate that Adam must be faced with a choice between rekindled good feelings for Rachel and his wretched, misguided attraction to Jill and the soulless professional success she represents. It's not played out so vehemently, of course, but it's present enough to count as underdeveloped.

Still, even the movie's offenses are on the light side. Given the gulf between the hilarious sitcom scripts Kwapis has directed for television and the paradoxically sitcommier fare he puts into movie theaters, it's probably fine that this story (from the screenwriting pair responsible for more big-screen sitcoms like The Prince & Me) requires nothing more than the mildest of faint amusement, and some empathy for those poor whales (not least because they must, as they did in real life, endure nicknames derived from The Flintstones). This is a good-hearted movie, even if it's not all that good.

W.E.

2012-02-02T19:01:00Z

Near the middle of Madonna's aloof period romance W.E., King Edward VII (James D'Arcy) encourages his lover, American socialite Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), to stand up before a gathered crowd and entertain with a dance. A crunchy Sex Pistols guitar riff fills the back beat - never mind (the bollocks) that the band recorded a full four decades after Edward and Wallis married - and Johnny Rotten passionately screams his way through the punk staple "Pretty Vacant." Ironically, both words describe Madonna's feature to a tee.

]]> Had Madonna chosen only to illustrate the Empire-shaking romance between King Edward VII and Simpson, W.E. might have been worth a damn. One can understand why a veritable icon like Madge - who has lived a full life underneath society's microscope - would be drawn to the scandalous story of Simpson, a Baltimore socialite who charmed a Royal, changed the course of history, and paid the price by sacrificing her private life for love.

But it's the Material Girl's woeful inability to identify with the characters in a modern-day subplot - you know, the ones who should be Madonna's contemporaries - that prevents this elegantly stiff romance from ever catching fire.

Decades after Edward abdicates his throne, Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) - a frustrated Manhattan research assistant who's struggling to conceive a child with her distant husband, William (Richard Coyle) - obsesses over the historical affair. She frequents Sotheby's ahead of an anticipated Windsor auction, engages in an unlikely affair with an intelligent security guard (Oscar Isaac), and flounders as Madonna struggles to make palpable connections between Wallis' past and Wally's present.

It's Wally who Madonna never quite understands, and the emotional bridges constructed between the movie's dueling decades are too tenuous (and disingenuous) to sustain W.E. despite a genuinely memorable performance by the passionate Riseborough. On her second attempt at feature film directing, Madonna does show an eye for posh visuals, which are gracefully photographed by cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski. Composer Abel Korzeniowski's score seems better suited for a jewelry shop commercial ("This Valentine's Day, Skatell her you love her..."), but the rest of Madonna's technical crew rises to the challenge.

Proficient production design only confirms my assessment, though, that W.E. behaves better as a museum piece that should be framed, hung and admired than as a moving piece of cinema that encourages you to embrace and interact with it.

Flash back to the Sex Pistols, who again capture the inherent problem of Madonna's effort. "We're so pretty, oh so pretty ... and we don't care."

The Woman in Black (2012)

2012-02-02T19:00:07Z

As far back as the earliest days of cinematic macabre, the haunted house has been a staple of the scary movie. From ghosts roaming a spooky manor to unexplained noises that are often much more than "bumps" in the night, these places are creepshow classics. Up until recently, few films have delivered the entire paranormal package -- atmosphere, acting, mythology and menace. Enter The Woman in Black. Adapted from the novel by Susan Hill (which was also turned into a stage play and a 1989 British TV movie), it stars Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe as a young lawyer sent to the outskirts of England to clean up the messy estate of a recently deceased client. There, he learns of the area's terrible curse and the title figure, who seems to be behind a rash of unexplained killings.

]]> Indeed, many of the local villagers believe that Eel Marsh House is possessed with the spirit of a diabolical dead woman whose sudden appearances portend the death of one (or more) of their children. No one, not town lawyer Mr. Jerome (Tim McMullan) or the local pub owners, has avoided her wrath. Even the area's wealthiest land owner, Sam Daily (Ciarán Hinds) and his wife (Janet McTeer) lost their son. So when the recently widowed Arthur Kripps (Radcliffe) shows up, he is immediately met with suspicion. While working in the dilapidated house, he hears and sees things that convince him the legends are true...and, indeed, more bodies begin to pile up. Eventually, Kripps discovers a shocking truth behind the specter's motives, and thinks he may have a solution to the senseless scourge affecting everyone.

Dark, foreboding, and very well balanced, The Woman in Black is a sensational slow burn to shock scarefest. It's not perfect, and it cannot compare to something as sensational as Insidious, but when it comes to Britain's storied Hammer Studios and its legacy of horror, this newest entry in the company's creative canon does the past proud. Everything here, from the careful direction by James Watkins to the solid script from Jane Goldman (who also worked on Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class) focuses on bringing old-fashioned fear factors back to unsuspecting audiences. As the mood darkens and the threat increases, an overall sense of dread drowns the viewer, sweeping them up in the unsuspecting horrors about to happen.

For his part, Radcliffe is the perfect audience entryway. Carrying his own baggage (his wife died in childbirth) and sporting routinely red-rimmed eyes (from crying...or perhaps, the hidden flask he keeps in his briefcase), he elicits our sympathy; we want to see him succeed. The pressure is on Kripps to deliver -- for his young son, for his company, for his career, and eventually, for the town. He's an accidental hero at best, but he takes on the role with a real sense of purpose. Equally effective is the rest of the cast, expertly playing the frightened populace of eccentrics that our hero must battle to win the day.

To a fright fanbase raised on torture porn and the latest examples of F/X gore, something subtle like The Woman in Black may appear underwhelming. However, this is the kind of movie that gets under your skin, that crawls across the back of your neck and sends shivers up your spine. In the end, the experience as a whole may not make much sense. For all his detective work, Kripps really never discovers a "cure," or a clear answer as to what really happened. Indeed, the main purpose here appears to be the creation of ambiance and an overall feeling of unease. In that regard, The Woman in Black succeeds.

Windfall

2012-02-02T19:00:00Z

The law of unintended consequences gets a gentle working-over in Laura Israel's good-natured but dismayingly thin documentary about a windfarm project that divides the small town of Meredith in upstate New York. The controversy will strike many as patently absurd: Who would have a problem with wind power? "I was naïve," says Frank Bachler, the town supervisor, who starts the film off talking about what a good idea it seemed like. Money for the town, clean energy, etc. That was before people started realizing that the windmills would be 40 stories tall and emit a near-constant drone. Then people started going on the Internet, and if the modern age has proven anything, it's that the online research will provide reasons to be terrified of anything.

]]> After giving token time to people like Bachler, and the much more acerbic John Hamilton (a dairy farmer looking to sign a contract with a windmill-leasing company), the film ducks quickly into safer territory: handing the small megaphone of a micro-targeted indie documentary to the local opposition. It's a genial enough group; with few exceptions, Israel couldn't have found a more likable bunch to serve as her happy band of malcontents. Not only that, the issues raised provide a solid stack of concerns, from noise and visual pollution to worry over one of the towering machines collapsing -- even if the film does scatter the points about like so much confetti. Trying to make some serious points are people like Keitha Capouya, a woman with a research background and an impressive desire to dig up the real data about the wind turbines, despite the thickets of nondisclosure agreements the industry surrounds itself in. (Some of her compatriots, though, seem willing to believe anything; a vivid illustration of how conspiracy theories sprout in the absence of honest research.)

Criticizing wind power -- or at least aspects of how it's generated -- does have that skunk at a dinner party stink; some would see it not as morally reprehensible as denying climate change, but hardly much better. But besides fighting against green-power advocates who see opposition to wind turbines as being NIMBYism at its worst (I would like to help the planet, as long as it doesn't inconvenience me in any way), the Meredith opposition has to also fight entrenched interests. The film charges that power companies, taking advantage of generous subsidies, are gouging a poor community like Meredith for all they can and pitting the locals against each other just like rapacious coal interests play divide-and-conquer in impoverished mining towns. Israel's camera captures the way in which a few strong interests can push an agenda in a small town. Unfortunately, she gives short shrift to the economic argument, and the belief that those opposed are mostly "downstaters" new to the community.

Windfall is a handsome film about ugly things happening in a gorgeous place. Having spent a lot of her career editing music videos, Israel makes most every second of this tightly-cut film count. The interviews are sharp and pointed, while the photography has a gleaming, summery sheen to it that underlines the mountainous beauty of Meredith. But inside this pretty package is a film that seems a little too close to its source, a shade too comfortable with one side of the issue. (Israel has a house in Meredith and, from her film at least, seems far more comfortable with those opposed to the wind project.) When the stakes are high enough that longtime friends and neighbors in Meredith are refusing to speak to each other, it does the issue a disservice to tip the scales so heavily.