- Directed by Akira Kurosawa
- Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji
- Yes, it’s a Kurosawa picture, but the incredibly slow pace and the hopeless reactions of the characters to nearly every obstacle they encounter led to the average grade.
- Directed by Stanley Kramer
- Starring Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters and countless others
- Awards: Won – Best Sound Effects. Nominated – Best Color Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Song, Best Original Score, Best Sound
- An endlessly spoofed treasure hunt comedy featuring pretty much every funny screen personality from the turn of the century to its release.
- Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Starring Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck, Folco Lulli
- An effortlessly and incredibly tense story of four downtrodden men tapped to drive unstable dynamite across treacherous terrain.
- Directed by Robert Rossen
- Starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George S. Scott
- Awards: Won – Best Black & White Set Decoration, Best Black & White Cinematography. Nominated – Best Actor (Newman), Best Supporting Actor (Gleason), Best Supporting Actor (Scott), Best Actress (Laurie), Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture
- A movie about a pool hustler that becomes much more than that due to four epic performances by the principals.
- Directed by Werner Herzog
- Starring Bruno S., Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz
- A Herzog classic that doesn’t star Klaus Kinski, and already one of my favorite films ever.
- Directed by Sylvester Stallone
- Starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Tarver, Milo Ventimiglia, Burt Young
- Much, much better than a sixth Rocky movie has any right to be.
- Directed by James D. Scurlock
- Featuring various talking heads
- A documentary that purports to inform us of predatory credit card practices and ends up telling us nothing we didn’t already know.
The American (2010)
Directed by Anton Corbijn
Starring George Clooney, Violante Placido, Irina Bjorklund
Here’s a film that’s too patient, too deliberate and perhaps too directionless for its own good. The material in The American screams for more action; for the film to shed its meticulousness and give us some sort of blow-off that never arrives. I’m a believer that one can make a good film about anything, and there is a good film to be made with this story. Unfortunately, that film will have to be made another time.
George Clooney plays an experienced assassin who takes into hiding in Italy shortly after the film begins. You see, the film opens with Clooney being nearly killed by assassins in Sweden, which causes him to go on the run. We are not told who the Swedes are or why they want to kill Clooney, but this actually becomes inconsequential as we continue. The American admittedly does a fine job of keeping Clooney’s encounters in Italy self-contained, so that we don’t need to know who is pursuing him to get the gist of what’s happening.
Though the film begins promisingly, it eventually feels like we just start following Clooney’s character around as he does different things. It doesn’t feel like a cohesive film. Things happen, and the camera films them, but it all feels empty and rather pointless. The American is so purposely esoteric that it eliminates most of the investment we have in its characters.
The American does have its merits. It looks fantastic. It is shot very sharply and very well. The Italian scenery is great to look at. It features a couple of incredibly beautiful women. Clooney does a nice job as the tired, lonely veteran assassin, who just wants to leave the killing business and settle down on a villa somewhere but realizes that’s probably not realistic for his line of work (which is itself a tired theme). The other actors and actresses perform admirably as well. It’s too bad there’s just not enough going on to care.
C-
The Town (2010)
Directed by Ben Affleck
Starring Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner
The Town is half blue-collar crime film and half romance film, with elements from each intersecting with each other in different ways. It’s a slick film with well-done action sequences, but its great flaw is its attempt to try to be more than it really is.
The Town concerns a group of bank robbers from the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, who are led by Ben Affleck. We start with a bank robbery in Harvard Square, where things go awry and the group takes a hostage (Hall). After the robbery, the gang finds that the hostage lives in Charlestown and Affleck sets off to intimidate her, but ends up falling for her instead. He then has to keep his bank robbing activity secret from her while continuing his illegal activities.
The film serves as a commercial for Boston, with great chase scenes taking place in the claustrophobic North End section and a final shootout occurring at Fenway Park. These and other action scenes in The Town provide the most enjoyable aspect of the film; back to basics police vs. bad guys car chases and gunfighting.
Storyline problems, however, haunt the film. Believability issues are a constant, glaring annoyance. Rebecca Hall’s character repeats that the hostage encounter was the worst experience of her life, but when she finds out that Affleck was one of the robbers (he was disguised during the heist), her fury dissipates almost immediately and she remains in love with him. The police, despite knowing that Affleck and his gang are responsible for the rash of bank robberies in the area but not having enough evidence to convict, somehow forget to tail them at the end of the film, allowing them to participate in the Fenway Park theft.
The acting helps us move beyond these problems. Affleck has played “young blue collar Boston bozo” more times than I care to remember, but he does it reliably well. His best friend and second-in-command Jeremy Renner is terrific as the psychotic muscle of the group. Jon Hamm, so great as Don Draper on Mad Men, is unfortunately saddled with a one-dimensional and thankless role as stock “threatening FBI agent”.
The Town should have stuck to its guns as an action-thriller. The love between Affleck and Hall is forced and unbelievable and barely affects the outcome of the film. The addition of cornball romance to the central story was used as a device to make the film seem like more than it really is when it would have been fine all along.
B-
John Lacey
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