Short Takes: "One Day" and "The Debt".

Even if it never makes justice to the book it's based on (the eponymous novel written by David Nicholls), One Day is an often delightful romance powered by pure star wattage and a great - albeit slightly gimmicky - concept. The film follows the relationship between Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) over the course of two decades, but does so by showing what they do on the exact date they met. We see them grow from awkward college graduates to decently rounded adults; they survive destructive relationships, family tragedies, divorces, career and country changes etc. and the one thing that remains constant throughout is their love for one another.

Perhaps the novel's reach is a bit too ample to turn it into a small romantic comedy (it certainly would've been wonderful as a miniseries that took longer to flesh out Em and Dex better) because as it is, we often have a hard time knowing why the characters do what they do. Even if they never become mere archetypes - he of the fun-loving lothario and she of the obsessive control freak - we feel cheated, like we could've benefited more from knowing what they do on the dates we don't get to see.

Directed with a precise hand by Lone Scherfig (who follows the joyful style she used in An Education) the film has moments of marvel as well as scenes that seem to drag forever. Fortunately most flaws can be overlooked because of the performers. Sturgess is unusually passive, almost lacking in the exuberance needed to turn Dexter into a character we could hate and then fall in love with, however his quiet performance reveals that Dexter is a man who never knows himself fully (his scenes with Patricia Clarkson, who plays his mom, are violently delicate).

Hathaway - who sadly never mastered the required British accent - is all smiles and wide eyed contempt as Emma. As usual, Hathaway grabs a simple character and layers it with the kind of star quality few performers can add (only Julia Roberts lights up the screen with the same ease) while keeping a deep humanity that reaches to you beyond the screen. The film is by no means perfect (although the ending might just leave you weeping) but it works because of its utter sincerity. Few films nowadays are so straightforward about breaking your heart.

You gotta give it to John Madden: he's one versatile filmmaker! His constant traveling of genre to genre (he directed Shakespeare in Love and Proof) have turned him into the equivalent of a studio era director, who worked under producers and got little input to create his own authorial signature. With that said, he doesn't hit the mark in his espionage thriller The Debt, a decade spanning film that follows the lives of three former Mossad agents from their first big mission, to the fame it eventually brings them.
The spies are played by Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas and Sam Worthington as young agents trying to catch a deranged Nazi surgeon in the 1970s. Their mature versions are played by Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciarán Hinds respectively (in a quite good casting decision). They all come together in their old age to settle a secret they've been living with for decades, the film then uses flashbacks to show us what marked and bonded them forever.
The main issue with the film is how Madden tries to trick us, only to then reveal how entire scenes are nothing but lies. This never works because in the film's context - which most certainly isn't an artistic exercise a la Antonioni - all the scenes seem to be fact based. His idea of toying with perception is indeed respectable but the execution is sloppy and often causes confusion (did we see right or were we dozing off mid-screening?).
Mirren is fantastic as usual but the best in show honor goes to Chastain who plays her character with an angsty vitality one would only attribute to someone like, well, Mirren. She conveys such a damaged past that we only have to see in her eyes to understand where she's coming from and why she's doing what she does. Few performances are this magnetic and exciting, anyone looking for a new action heroine, take note.

Grades:
One Day ***
The Debt **½

Short Take: Three Horror Movies.

The scariest thing about the Paranormal Activity movies is still how popular they are. How this brand of cheaply done and cheaply looking films can manage to outgross much better projects is a sad reminder that today's audiences are victim of cattle thinking. Once they get used to a "series", they don't care how many times they are told the same story. These movies prove that audiences enjoy the act of not thinking. The third installment in the series, goes back to the very beginning and explores why numbers 1 and 2 happened. To say the reasons are preposterous would be nothing compared to the way in which the filmmakers rely on facile trickery and obvious techniques to try and scare us. The effects have been getting consistently better, something which can't be said about the acting and plot devices. This one, set in the 80s, has us wondering how did these progressive people guess that everything should've been filmed in case a movie was made about them decades later. The film doesn't rely try to adjust itself to the settings and to the spirit of the era, it goes straight for the established process that's worked for them in the past, the only thing they've changed is the medium by which we see the demonic activities. One must wonder, by the time they get to Paranormal Activity 45 will the stories be displayed using cave paintings? Grade *

The only good thing that came out of Dream House must've been Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz getting married. The rest is an outrageously bad attempt at mating Shutter Island, Memento and any Stephen King novel involving snow and houses. If you've seen the trailer, you don't need to bother with the rest of the movie. What remains mysterious is why people like Sheridan, Watts and pretty much everyone else involved in the production (the underrated Elias Koteas for example) saw in the lazy screenplay and the redundant characters.  Grade *

The Change-Up tries to invent the wheel by taking Freaky Friday and adding curse words, boobs and poop jokes. Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds play bets buds who go through a body exchange situation after peeing in a magical fountain. One's a control freak lawyer, the other's a slacker. You don't need to try hard to guess which one plays which; one of the many reasons why you wonder why was this movie even made. Everything about it has been done before and in much better ways. Props to Leslie Mann for always adding a very human layer to her characters. Grade *

Alice in Wonderland ***

Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter,
Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry
Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman, Marton Csokas, Timothy Spall

Lewis Carroll's books of Alice in Wonderland have been adapted into movie form since the medium began. From silent versions to the subversive animation of 1950's Disney to Jan Svankmajer; Alice's story has always fascinated artists who tend to explore the horror that lies in the innocent.
It makes sense that Tim Burton would want to do his own version, and even if it's not the definitive take fans of the filmmaker were expecting it to be, it's a lovely ride and one of Burton's most mature films to date.
Taking Carroll's text for a spin, he makes Alice (Wasikowska) a nineteen year old girl about to be married to a man she barely knows.
Encouraged by her deceased father (Csokas) to use her imagination and spoiled by the dreams she's had all her life about strange characters and a mysterious land, she follows a white rabbit (voiced by Sheen) on the day of her engagement.
She falls inside an all too familiar hole in the ground where she finds the door to Underland, a place populated by weird characters who insist she's come to fulfill a prophecy.
Soon she learns that not only she has been there before (creating an interest dilemma between what reality is in dreams while giving Disney the opportunity to make endless sequels relying on this concept) but this time in particular she's set to end the reign of the evil Red Queen (Carter) and hand the crown to her sister the benevolent White Queen (Hathaway).
Alice teams up with Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Lucas), the Cheshire cat (Fry), the blue caterpillar Ebsolem (Rickman) and the Mad Hatter (Depp), among more famous characters, as she explores this wonderland and learns lessons for her own life.
Obviously stuck somewhere between the director's vision and the studio's demands Alice in Wonderland is uneven in narrative terms as it struggles between the edge of Burton and Carroll, with the status quo preserving by way of forced naivete Disney specializes in (it's surprising but the animated version is much darker than this).
Therefore we see how Burton inserts his dark humor and macabre nature by way of the art direction, concealed symbols and unexpected character quirks.
In this way Hathaway's, Nigela Lawson-inspired, White Queen takes an aim at social terms of perfection with a lunatic side (watch as the actress deliciously travels from Barbie to Chucky in seconds), Carter indulges in the oddity of her character's construction (her giant head and blood red lips are almost iconic), while Depp surprisingly underacts his way out of the Hatter's madness, creating a character that moves more than it disturbs (his character's post traumatic stress disorder might be a bit too facile but also allows Burton to take a subtle aim at the effects of war).
Perhaps it served Burton to tone down his darkness because the film achieves a calm and sense of equilibrium that allows both opposing visions to co-exist and deliver entertainment that's clever and simple.
In many ways the film is more shaped after The Wizard of Oz than any previous incarnation of the Alice story and in the same way frames the protagonist's adventure against unconscious manifestations.
At first Burton stresses too much what "real life" character will inspire each Wonderland inhabitant but soon this becomes an opportunity to decipher if Burton finally found a way to comment on the power of dreams.
The fact that this Alice often wonders out loud if she's inside a dream doesn't make her smarter than Oz's Dorothy, but serves as a well meant, if underwritten, attempt to encompass female liberation and the Industrial Revolution overthrowing Victorianism.
For all the flaws in Alice in Wonderland we are rewarded with lush scenery, extremely thought out character design and a filmmaker surprisingly finding marvels under restraint.
Like his heroine, Burton enters a land that thrives with the promise of unknown terror but his ability to refresh his aesthetics despite compromise is the real wonder.