With so many films about the Iraq war come and gone, the arrival of The Messenger, a becalmed, observant drama about Casualty Notification Officers (those whose work it is to stoically inform next of kin of their loss) seems oddly appropriate, especially as it’s released at that moment when the public’s attention is being wrenched towards Afghanistan and the ongoing situation in Iraq drifts ever further from consciousness. Oren Moverman’s directorial debut is structured around absences—those who’ve died, actions taken elsewhere. His protagonists are largely obsessed with aftermaths, even as they works towards becoming actors in their own lives. From our vantage point in 2009, the film feels a period piece, some kind of elegy for those hazy pre-surge summers of 2005 or 2006 when casualties were at their height and the war promised to loom large over upcoming elections. Largely stripped of politics, aside from a generalized “war damages” sensibility, The Messenger is not here to serve as nagging Iraq War reminder. In fact, it’s in many ways not quite the movie you’d expect.
With the recent announcement that no less than 20 films were submitted for this year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar, 2009 can rightly be labeled something of a watershed year for the format. Of course, some of those entries are bland generic staples—the new Ice Age movie, the Chipmunks sequel, Battle for Terra, Monsters vs. Aliens—shiny, machine-tooled baubles designed to attract and pacify the youngest-audience quadrant for big studio profits. But considering entries like Coraline, 9, Ponyo, Up, the forthcoming A Town Called Panic, and Wes Anderson’s just-released Fantastic Mr. Fox, a strong case could be made for animation reemerging as not just a medium for displaying up-to-the minute technologies, but for personal artistic expression. This is no longer just a Pixar/Miyazaki world. Given that a director’s craft depends so fully on imagining the layout of a frame and then re-creating it before a camera, it’s surprising that more established directors haven’t tried their hands at animation—it’s a control freak’s paradise. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert’s review of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Richard Curtis, creator of Blackadder and Mr. Bean, is one of the most powerful people in British show business. His laudable and dedicated career-long work for the charity Comic Relief, which has gained a political dimension since his involvement with the pressure group Live 8, has given him one of the country’s most illustrious contact books; his forthcoming knighthood has almost certainly already been minted. Of course he has also written and/or directed a number of highly successful films destined for the U.S. market, among them Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually. As such, it is incumbent on us to take him seriously as an auteur of sorts, especially since the world he has created through his movies (Curtis’s Britain, with all the cracks papered over, like a tourist board video) is so vividly singular.
How ironic, then, that his latest offering, a nostalgic rock ‘n’ roll movie called Pirate Radio (original British title: The Boat That Rocked) might have been saved from shipwreck if only Curtis had gone back to his roots and written it as a sitcom instead. Click here to read the rest of Julien Allen’s review of Pirate Radio.
If there’s ever been a scene that requires no embellishment in the translation from page to screen, it’s Ebenezer Scrooge’s meeting with the melancholy crumble of bones that were once Jacob Marley. Yet in Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture update of A Christmas Carol, this most famous of narrative-inciting exchanges nearly bursts with overemphasis. Not content to merely moan and rattle his chains, this Marley is a veritable explosion of frights; when he tells Scrooge of the clanking irons invisibly wrapped around his own body and soul, wailing, “It is a ponderous chain,” the “p” is pronounced with such force that spittle and teeth fly out of Marley’s gaping mouth and directly into not only Scrooge’s face but also those of the audience members flinching behind their 3-D glasses. Then, when Marley retorts to Scrooge’s protestations that he was a good man of business with the heart-stirring speech, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business,” the words emanate from its gaping, cracked jaw, and though the image is borrowed from Dickens, here it only serves to make such gorgeous prose a nearly indecipherable, garbled hiss. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of A Christmas Carol.
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