Movie Review: Shutter Island (2010)

Directed by Martin Scorsese, 2010, 138 minutes, Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Ted Levine, Max von Sydow, Jackie Earle Hayley.



Shutter Island is the work of a maestro, an energetic, frantic romp through the noir and psychological horror genres by one of the best directors working today. Martin Scorsese took what could have been a good film and turned it into a nearly great one, exercising no restraint in creating a completely engrossing and engaging genre film.

The film begins with the screen veiled in white, as a boat draws closer towards the camera. Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a U.S. Marshall, headed along with his partner (Mark Ruffalo) to Shutter Island, where there lies an institution for the criminally insane. As a storm quickly approaches, Teddy and his partner are both asked to relinquish their weapons, and are introduced to the islands medical director (Ben Kingsley). A patient (Emily Mortimer), who had previous killed her three children, has escaped from her room, barefoot, into the night of the islands terrain, Teddy having been called to find her; but things on the island are not as simple as they seem, and neither is Teddy, previous traumas in life having shaped him into one who is not quite as he seems.

Scorsese creates characters out of the films setting, the island and old building Civil War buildings, the weather, entirely bleak and merciless as a hurricane brings itself down upon the island, and the music, forever pounding and pulsating in your ears. His film has a direct effect on the senses; you are uncomfortable yet completely enthralled, to the point where a simple gun shot makes you wince and jump. Few films are able to make something out of a gun shot, it has become gratuitous and simple, when a gun blows off in one of the summer’s action flicks, you could care less, but here when a gun is shot it packs a punch. So few directors and so few films even try to accomplish this feat anymore.

I’ll warn you now on spoilers in the following few sentences, I highly recommend you wait to read this paragraph until you have seen the film. There are times when Teddy’s descent into madness is highly reminiscent of Jack Torrance’s in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Where what is real and not to Teddy becomes intertwined, his world becoming an almost dream like hallucination. The way Scorsese accomplishes this is inspired; if the film had been released last year, he might have had a chance at running for Best Director.

Shutter Island represents further proof of Martin Scorsese’s mastery of his element. It creates a mood and tone, engulfs you in its style and setting, its place and time. Few directors have crafted as diverse a repertoire of films, ranging from gritty crime films to horror to psychological thrillers, like this one. Martin Scorsese is a master filmmaker, and his Shutter Island digs deep down into its main characters mind, crafting a dark psychological thriller that demands your absolute attention, right down to its haunting final image.

*** ½ out of ****

Movie Review: A Serious Man (2009, Joel & Ethan Coen)

Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2009, 104 minutes, Starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick, Amy Landecker.



A Serious Man is a mix of the Coen Brothers masterpiece Fargo (1996) and the magnificent No Country for Old Men, taking the tone and feel for time and setting of Fargo and interlacing it with No Country’s distance from characters and open ended questions about life and the nature of man and his condition. While the film is not quite as good as either of those, A Serious Man is nevertheless a worthy entry into the Coen Brothers already considerable film canon.

Larry Gopnik’s life is taking a turn for the worst of biblical proportions: his wife is leaving him for his best friend, a student has bribed him for a better grade in his physics class while simultaneously threatening to sue for defamation, someone is sending slanderous letters about him to the tenure committee, his kids are an absolute mystery to him, the neighbor on one side terrifies him and to an extent so does his neighbor on the other. Did I mention his socially awkward brother living on his couch?

Talk about a cluster fuck of a week. As Larry Gopnik, Michael Stuhlbarg is excellent, enacting a character similar to William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo, except without the piss-poor choices. Gopnik is not a sad-sack or a loser, simply a man who’s life is collapsing around him and, as in the films source material, the book of Job, the character can do nothing but question why. Maybe it had something to do with the films first scene, in which a couple invite a dybbuk into their home, a dybbuk being an undead man from Jewish folklore, doing so having cursed the family. Maybe God is angry at Larry, maybe he did something wrong. Maybe it has something to do with a message written in Hebrew on the back of a goy’s (gentile, non-Jewish) teeth.

The performances are excellent all around; particularly those of Stuhlbarg and Fred Melamed as Sy Ableman, who controls every scene he inhabits. Nearly every line Melamed speaks are tinged with sympathy, as if theres something to be sympathetic towards. The other notable is Amy Landecker as Larry’s next door neighbor, Mrs. Samsky, completely embodying her character from the first scene, we may not have heard her talk or know anything about her, but we feel like we’ve known her for a long time.

A Serious Man is one of the Coen Brothers most mature films, as well as their most personal. The ending is a work of art, the acting is at times inspired; the film is both intelligent and thoughtful. If it has a fault, it’s that it at times feels misanthropic. The Coen Brothers have never made a movie quite like the last, and this is no different; A Serious Man is at times funny, and others painful, but it is always thought provoking and engrossing.

*** ½ out of ****

Movie Review: Gamer (2009, Neveldine/Taylor)
Directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2009, 95 minutes, Starring Gerard Butler, Michael C Hall, Ludacris, Kyra Sedgwick.



There really is no way around it, but Gamer is quite simply, a bad movie. The film starts off with an interesting, albeit unoriginal, idea, before it tosses it in the dirt, kicks it, shoots it in the face and quickly leaves it for dead. In a subgenre of movies that ranges from the excellent Battle Royale (2000) and the terrible The Condemned (2007), Gamer unfortunately sits closer to The Condemned. It is uninspired and seems bored in its unoriginality, if not its plot, the rest of us are.

Kable (Gerard Butler) is an international sensation in Slayers, a game where the players can play a death row inmate in a series of battles via a chip implanted in the brain; if an inmate survives the course of thirty battles, then said inmate can go free, no strings attached, except for Kable is the only inmate to have ever come close to those thirty games, with three left to go. Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) is the billionaire who started Slayers (along with its “mother game”, Society, where instead of death row inmates and battles a player can control an everyday citizen who signed up for the game), but as it (unfortunately) turns out, Castle has more heinous attentions afoot. After Kable is able to escape from his last game, much mayhem insues.

The first and foremost problem with this film is its plot. The first forty minutes were actually fairly decent, the action was manic, the acting was half-assed but it was entertaining; if only the film had expanded that forty minutes and threw out the rest. Once Kable escapes Slayers, the film quickly descends into stupidity. The films tone suddenly changes from high octane action to boring chase to, well I don’t really know, the films switches around so much that by the end you don’t really care anymore. If you thought the film was rediculous before Kable left the game, you’ve seen nothing yet; you know it’s bad when during a crucial scene between Butler’s Kable and Hall’s Castle you think,

“So what are we going to do today Dexter?”
“The same thing we do everyday Spartan, try to take over the world.”

The acting is universally mundane. It makes no sense to me, Gerard Butler is a decent actor who has a great scene presence, yet here he looks as bored as we are. Nearly everyone in this movie takes the film was too seriously, the two notable exceptions being Segdwick and Hall, with only the latter coming out the better. Sedgwick looks more like she was picking up a decent sized check then trying, and Alison Lohman’s hair speaks more then she does, not in a good way.

Another of the films problems is the varying, clashing styles it presents. From the gritty greys of the Slayers game to the over-the-top, ludicrous, bright color scheme of the Society game to same odd mix of the two for the real world segments. The only one of these that really works is the grey Slayers game, the real world being rather boring and the Society world being grotesque and more then slightly stupid.

The film hits its low point with the ending, the plot finally twisting itself into oblivion and the film utterly collapsing in on itself. There were some laughs to be had, the scene where the morbidly obese gamer tosses a tray of waffles at his dozen or so television screens, classic. Also, is it sad when a straight laced Lionsgate action films best scene involves Michael C. Hall in an interpretive dance number?

* ½ out of ****