NPR: David Edelstein

'Into Darkness,' Boldly And With A Few Twists

NPR: David Edelstein — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:26:00 +0000

Before I tell you about J.J. Abrams' second Star Trek film, with its youngish new Starship Enterprise crew, let me say that just because I've seen every episode of the original Star Trek and of The Next Generation, and most of the spinoff series, and every movie, I'm not a Trekkie — meaning someone who goes to conventions or speaks Klingon or greets people with a Vulcan salute.

But hey, even President Obama can give the Vulcan salute; it's mainstream. We live — thanks to the Internet — in a fan culture. We can all get up to speed on anything quickly.

'Iron Man 3': Tony Stark As Homebrew Hero

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:41:00 +0000

The third time might be the charm for some things, but the number three after a movie title is typically shorthand for a deal with the devil.

The studio thinks there's more money to be squeezed from a particular property, and voila: Spider-Man 3, Superman III, The Godfather — God help us — Part III. OK, The Godfather's a special case. Most other threes, though, are what happens when a too-thin plot meets a too-fat budget.

Iron Man 3 conquers the curse of the 3 in a novel way: It pretty much takes Iron Man out of the equation.

Two Indie Directors Go Confidently Mainstream

NPR: David Edelstein — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:42:00 +0000

Studios are putting most of their eggs in $100 million baskets these days, even as American independent filmmakers go hungry from lack of mainstream attention. But two of my favorite American indie writer-directors, Jeff Nichols and Ramin Bahrani, have new films with bigger stars than they've had before — films they hope will break through to wider audiences. The results, at least artistically, are impressive.

Nichols' first feature, Shotgun Stories, was a small masterpiece, the story of a blood feud between half-brothers that turns tragic.

Tom Cruise's Latest Headed For 'Oblivion'

NPR: David Edelstein — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:03:00 +0000

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

In December, Tom Cruise starred as the title character in the film "Jack Reacher." In "Oblivion," which opened on Friday, he plays another Jack, one of few humans left on an Earth devastated by an alien invasion. "Oblivion" is based on a graphic novel co-written by Joseph Kosinski, who went on to direct the film, and it costars Morgan Freeman and Melissa Leo.

Terrence Malick And Every Man's Journey 'To The Wonder'

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:48:00 +0000

The voiceovers from Terrence Malick's To the Wonder, which has a lot of them, are intoned on the soundtrack while the characters stare into sunrises or sunsets — whenever the light is right, what cinematographers call, "the magic hour." This film and Malick's last, The Tree of Life, suggest that he's evolved into a blend of director and Christian minister: These are psalms writ on film.

Going 'Mental' And Enjoying The Ride

NPR: David Edelstein — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:57:00 +0000

Mental is madder than madcap. I heard one critic sniff, "It's kind of broad" — and, Your Honor, the defense agrees! But if broad means "unsubtle," it doesn't have to mean "unreal." Mental makes most other movies seem boringly, misleadingly sane.

Why "misleadingly"? Because writer-director P.J. Hogan aims for a tone that's more concentrated in its craziness — and thereby serves up more concentrated truths about human nature.

With Vengeance And Violence, 'Olympus Has Fallen' Flat

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:59:00 +0000

What surprises me about the ongoing discussion of violence in cinema and whether it influences violence in the real world is how people fail to engage with the male fantasy behind these films. There's a template for them, a theme; it hinges on violation and vengeance. A seminal action picture of the last 50 years is 1988's Die Hard, in which a lone male cop operates behind the scenes after an ingeniously orchestrated foreign attack on American soil. He's symbolically emasculated — he has no gun or even shoes, his wife is now going by her maiden name.

Three New Films Examine What It Means When Girls Act Out

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:52:00 +0000

In the '60s, some fervent rock groupies formed a band called the GTOs — short for "Girls Together Outrageously" — and while it didn't last, the name captures the impulse behind stories in which women chafe against the male-centric society that pulls their strings.

'Oz': Neither Great Nor Powerful

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:04:00 +0000

Oz the Great and Powerful. Say that name aloud and you will smile, I guarantee you: It will conjure up so many images, characters, actors, songs.

A Disappointing Thriller Channels Hitchcock And Bram 'Stoker'

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:26:00 +0000

Stoker has a ripely decadent, creepy-crawly feel that would have gotten under my skin if the tone weren't so arch and the people so ghoulishly remote. It's like a bad Strindberg play with added splatter. But director Park Chan-wook certainly works to make you uncomfortable. Take the early shot in which the teenage girl protagonist, India Stoker, played by Mia Wasikowska, sits in a meadow and muses in voiceover on the subject of free will versus destiny. She says, "Just as a flower doesn't choose its color, so we don't choose what we are going to be" — while draining a blister.

'Caesar' Comes Alive In An Italian Prison

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:09:00 +0000

In the early '80s, Italy's Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, made one of the true modern masterpieces, The Night of the Shooting Stars. Set in the last days of World War II, when Germans laid mines all over Tuscan villages and Fascists loyal to Mussolini killed their own countrymen, it was a very cruel film.

But unlike, say, the more recent Pan's Labyrinth — where I found the violence bludgeoning — the movie was leavened by scenes of erotic passion, of farce, of transcendence that gestured to a world beyond the atrocities.

'Gatekeepers' Let Us Inside Israeli Security

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:20:00 +0000

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Gatekeepers centers on Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but from an unusual vantage — not the Palestinians or Israelis on the ground, but six men at the pinnacle of the country's security apparatus: the former heads of the security agency Shin Bet.

The opening scroll of The Gatekeepers identifies the Shin Bet as the agency charged with defending Israel against terrorism, espionage and the release of state secrets and asserts that its heads have never been interviewed about their work.

'Mama': A Good Old-Fashioned Horror Movie

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:06:00 +0000

I was weaned on horror movies and love them inordinately, but the genre has gone to the dogs — and to the muscle-bound werewolves, hormonal vampires, flesh-eating zombies, machete-wielding psychos, etc. It's also depressing how most modern horror pictures have unhappy nihilist endings in which everyone dies and the demons pop back up, unvanquished — partly because studios think happy endings are too soft, but mostly because they need their monsters for so-called franchises.

But Mama is an entertaining step in the right, which is to say backward, direction.

A Boy, A Boat, A Tiger: Reflecting On 'Life Of Pi'

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 17:28:00 +0000

Director Ang Lee has a surprising affinity for the Indian hero of Life of Pi — that's his name, Pi, and he's seen at several ages but principally as a 17-year-old boy adrift on a lifeboat in the South Pacific. He's the lone survivor of a shipwreck that killed the crew, his family and a variety of zoo animals his father was transporting to North America for sale.

Actually, Pi is the lone human survivor. He shares his boat and its dwindling food supplies with a man-eating Bengal tiger.

Lee is a director whose works I've admired more than loved.

In 'Silver Linings Playbook,' Lawrence Is Golden

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:33:00 +0000

The best thing about David O. Russell is that he cultivates his disequilibrium. In Silver Linings Playbook, his hero is disturbed and his heroine possibly more so, and his other characters have a grip on reality that is only marginally more secure. Russell might have made them seem the dreaded "q" word — quirky — and OK, he does, a bit, at the end, which broadly conforms to the rom-com template.

Historical, Fictional Icons, Take To The Big Screen

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:53:00 +0000

Two icons, Abraham Lincoln and James Bond, make triumphant appearances this week in movies with more in common than you'd expect. True, Lincoln is a titan of history, liberator of slaves, and as such an adversary of Western colonialism, while 007 is an outlandish stereotype embodying white male Western authoritarian power.

'Cloud Atlas': You're Better Off Reading The Book

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 18:43:00 +0000

First I need to talk about the book, because it's not as if Cloud Atlas the movie came from nowhere — and if you think it's only the movie you want to know about, I think you need a context for what's onscreen.

Author David Mitchell writes exquisite pastiches, and Cloud Atlas is in the form of six distinct and enthralling novellas set in six different eras with six different literary styles.

First comes the journal of a 19th century lawyer for a slave-trading company, then a series of early 20th ce

'The Sessions': Sex, Comedy And Something More

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:51:00 +0000

In 1983, Berkeley poet and journalist Mark O'Brien wrote an article about sexual surrogates — women and men trained to help people with disabilities learn to use their bodies to give themselves and others erotic pleasure.

For O'Brien, the subject wasn't academic. After a bout of childhood polio, he had spent much of his life in an iron lung. He could talk, and tap out words on a typewriter holding a stick in his mouth. He could feel things below the neck.

'Argo': Too Good To Be True, Because It Isn't

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:38:00 +0000

Ben Affleck's Argo is two-two-TWO movies in one, and while neither is especially original, by merging them Affleck pulls off a coup. First, he gives you espionage with the You Are There zing of a documentary. Then he serves up broad showbiz satire. For his final feat, he blends the two into a pulse-pounding nail-biter of a climax. And this all really happened. Most of it. Except for that climax.

The prologue is newsreel-style. A female narrator recounts the U.S.

At College, A 'Pitch Perfect' Musical Comedy

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:10:00 +0000

Critic David Edelstein reviews a film that may sound a lot like a campus-bound version of Glee, but has more to it than that label might suggest.

'Looper': Time-Travel Nonsense, Winningly Played

NPR: David Edelstein — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:12:00 +0000

I adore time-travel pictures like Looper no matter how idiotic, especially when they feature a Love That Transcends Time. I love Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, The Time Traveler's Wife, even The Lake House with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in different years sending letters through a magic mailbox. So terrible. So good. See, everyone wants to correct mistakes in hindsight, and it's the one thing we cannot do.

The Art Of Preserving A High School 'Wallflower'

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:34:00 +0000

The hero of both the novel and the film The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a high school freshman loner named Charlie whose best friend committed suicide the previous spring. He's on psychiatric meds, lots of them, and still has blackouts and mysterious visions of a doting aunt who died when he was 7.

At school, he's shoved by bullies and jeered at by girls, and he's literally counting the days until he graduates.

'The Master': Filling A Void By Finding A Family

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 17:10:00 +0000

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master is both feverish and glacial. The vibe is chilly, but the central character is an unholy mess — and his rage saturates every frame. He's a World War II South Pacific vet named Freddie Quell, played by Joaquin Phoenix to the hilt — the hilt above the hilt. We meet him at war's end on a tropical beach where he and other soldiers seek sexual relief atop the figure of a woman made out of sand.

No, it's not your father's war — at least, the war portrayed in most sagas of the so-called Greatest Generation.

'Bachelorette' Sounds Dark Comedic Depths

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:21:00 +0000

Long before Bridesmaids convinced studio executives that a raunchy, female-centric comedy could find a huge audience, Leslye Headland was busy adapting her play Bachelorette into a movie. So this isn't a copycat rom-com, but the themes do overlap. Each film turns on a female rivalry: In Bridesmaids, it's between the maid of honor, Kristen Wiig, and the bride's rich friend, played by Rose Byrne. In Bachelorette, the rivalry is more complicated, more ... ugly.

Sixty And Sexless, But 'Hope Springs' Eternal

NPR: David Edelstein — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:03:00 +0000

The last time my 14-year-old daughter saw me and my wife being affectionate, she said, "Ewwww, old people kissing." Now, I'm not so old — barely half a century. But let's be frank. My daughter's no different from many people whose objects of fantasy are young and freakishly fit. So even a mild, cutesy little comedy like Hope Springs about two sexagenarians trying to have sex can seem shocking, even transgressive.

Boy is it vanilla.

Two Films Shoot Past Realism To Weirder Territory

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:06:00 +0000

Amid the slapstick comedies, sequels and superhero movies that have come to define summer moviegoing, two films opening today center on disturbed and disturbing romantic ties. Ruby Sparks and Killer Joe aren't fantasy or horror pictures, but they're within screaming distance — close enough to remind you how much deeper artists go when they barrel past realism into weirder areas of the psyche.

Ruby Sparks is a parable about men and what they project on women. It's written by actress Zoe Kazan, and stars her and her boyfriend, Paul Dano.

As Class Warfare Brews, A 'Dark Knight Rises'

NPR: David Edelstein — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 21:55:00 +0000

The canvas is epic, the themes are profound, the execution is ... clunky. Welcome to Christopher Nolan's third and allegedly final Batman picture, The Dark Knight Rises — that so-called rising taking hours, by the way. No Batman film ever had less Batman.

It opens with Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne a recluse, hobbling around his mansion, in mourning for a lost love, his superhero persona dormant for eight years. The Caped Crusader is a fugitive now.

'Margaret': The Tortured Journey Of A Girl, On Screen

NPR: David Edelstein — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 21:03:00 +0000

"A fiasco with a great first half" is what I called Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret when it was dumped in one New York theater last fall, five years after it was shot, amid a legal battle between Lonergan and a producer.

I'm a huge fan of Lonergan's plays and his first film, You Can Count on Me, but Margaret's second half was so disjointed I couldn't get behind it. But a handful of other critics did, and fans started a Twitter campaign — a small but significant groundswell enabling Lonergan to make a three-hour cut for DVD.

'Savages:' A Violent, Drug-Induced High

NPR: David Edelstein — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 15:06:00 +0000

Often I'm asked, "What's the worst movie ever made?" and I say, "I don't know, but my own least favorite is Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers." The early script by Quentin Tarantino was heavily revised, and the final film became a celebration of serial killers, now existential heroes with absolute freedom.

'Beasts': Taking Southern Folklore To The Next Level

NPR: David Edelstein — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 21:03:00 +0000

The parents of director Benh Zeitlin are folklorists, which is as good a way as any to account for the ambitions of his first feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild. The film is a mythic odyssey laced with modern ecological anxieties, captured in a free-form, image-driven narrative that recalls Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.