SECRETARIAT

Review: Secretariat
2.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Oscar Wilde wrote something to the effect of, “what was good enough for our fathers isn't good enough for us.” It's a line I've been thinking about a lot lately, and it's as good a place as any to start when discussing the problems with “Secretariat,” a beautifully made movie that's unfortunately so precious and archaic it leaves you feeling like you're floating on a cloud of mothballs. At first glance, the film, directed by Randall Wallace and written by Mike Rich, looks like “Seabiscuit” meets “The Blind Side,” and that's about right. Featuring Brady-Bunch family dynamics, broad comic tics, Magical Negroes and religious elements that creep up like Jehovah's Witnesses at your doorstep, it's the sort of bizarrely conservative entertainment that may still have an audience, but feels unwelcomely transplanted from the youth of our fathers, or even our grandfathers.

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WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN' and FREAKONOMICS

Reviews: Waiting for 'Superman' and Freakonomics
3.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Quite possibly the most talked-about documentary in a year overflowing with them, the manifoldly educational “Waiting for Superman” is prime Oscar bait. The worst thing about it is it's fully aware of that. The notion that more effort has gone into the marketing of this standard-structure doc than the actual filmmaking persists like a devil on your shoulder, as does the feeling that the film itself is being plugged more than the issue it represents: the dire state of American public schools. Directed by “Inconvenient Truth”-helmer Davis Guggenheim and backed by Bill Gates and Microsoft, “Superman” (named for the send-us-a-hero desperation felt by many underprivileged students) presumably has enough money behind it to start a new chain of the charter schools it champions, let alone clinch a promotional appearance on every major news show in the country. Armed with subject matter that's about as Oprah-friendly as it gets (the talk-show giant, herself a major Oscar-influencer, has already devoted at least one full episode to it), the movie is one that's so outwardly admirable that few would dare stand against it, or notice that, compared with the many jewels of its genre, it's quite underwhelming.

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THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Review: The Social Network
5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

If there's a downside to “The Social Network,” it's the very real likelihood that every movie you'll see for some time after will pale in comparison. Disappointing films, like “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and “It's Kind of a Funny Story,” will seem much worse. Even fine, important films, like the change-the-public-school-systems documentary “Waiting for 'Superman,'” will register as second-rate. On top of being so many wonderful things, “The Social Network,” or, “the Facebook movie,” as many are calling it, is a movie-ruiner. It's that good.

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WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
2 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

A funny – make that infuriating – thing happens during the course of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” Oliver Stone's 23-years-later sequel that's as strained and cumbersome as its title. At first, it seems Stone is terribly guilty of what so many other franchise-helmers have been: putting far too much starry-eyed stock in his big, iconic character. When master-of-greed Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) gathers his tacky '80s effects while leaving a lengthy prison stint, and when he later appears on television to promote his new book, his name is enunciated with such holy emphasis you'd think Stone expected every finance guru on Earth to get tingly at the pulpy, alliterated sound of it. (Gekko is a legend, yes, but there's an icky feeling he's nowhere more a legend than in Stone's own mind.) Soon, however, matters take a turn for the even worse as it grows clearer and clearer that neither Stone nor screenwriters Stephen Schiff and Allan Loeb have any interest in retaining the nasty spirit of the slick-haired villain that landed Douglas an Oscar. The new Gekko is a de-fanged bore whose actions are both contrived and incongruous, and the whole movie follows in his wavering footsteps.

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THE TOWN

Review: The Town
5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Watching “The Town,” it's practically impossible to process that it was made by Ben Affleck. It's not that Affleck's movie-star slump was ever bad enough to obliterate the possibility of seeing him as an artist, or that the other film he directed, “Gone Baby Gone,” wasn't a solid (if disjointed and overpraised) debut feature; it's that nothing this man has ever created has suggested he had the capacity to create something like this – the best heist-heavy urban crime saga since “The Dark Knight” and one of the best movies of the year.

Co-written by Affleck (with Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard) and starring him as well, “The Town,” based on the novel “Prince of Thieves” by Chuck Hogan, could have very well wound up a desperate, self-important vanity project. But it never feels like that, even with Affleck's main character, Doug MacRay, getting all the ponderous monologues, lingering close-ups and criminal-with-a-conscience glory. Most startling is how this Hollywood picture is so minimally compromised, and how, from the dynamic character interactions to the arresting street shoot-outs, it bears the inner-city grit and richness of a fierce filmmaker who's been at it for years. You will think: Michael Mann. Martin Scorsese.

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MESRINE

Review: Mesrine
4 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

“All films are part fiction,” disclaims a pre-credit scroll at the start of “Mesrine,” director Jean-François Richet's epic French-language biopic. “No film can recreate all the complexity of a human life,” it continues. Fair enough. But if the real Jacques Mesrine, the John Dillinger of France, did even a fraction of what actor Vincent Cassel does in this two-part saga about the gangster's crime spree in the '60s and '70s, it'd still make one hell of a motion picture experience, exciting and quite complex indeed.

Now playing at arthouse venues, parts one (“Mesrine: Killer Instinct”) and two (“Mesrine: Public Enemy #1”) were both released in France in 2008, where they were nominated for multiple César Awards and won three (Best Actor, Best Director and Best Sound). It would be easy to say the first part shows the rise of Mesrine and the second part shows the fall, but only the former would be true, as the man we see never really falls; he's just finally knocked down. Like Dillinger, Mesrine didn't suffer some devastating downward spiral, and given the chance, he would have surely kept on living the felonious life, smiling all the way.

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MACHETE

Review: Machete

3.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Although the basis for “Machete” is in fact an idea concocted by writer/director Robert Rodriguez in the early 1990s, one could say this Tex-Mex tale of bloody vigilantism is the first movie based on a phony trailer. And if it's not, it's surely the most popular. The public got its first taste of “Machete” in 2007, when it debuted as one of the soaringly over-the-top intermission attractions of “Grindhouse,” Rodriguez's and Quentin Tarantino's hyper-stylized, cigarette-burned, midnight-madness double feature. The three-minute clip became a sensation, and it was only a matter of time before the title character, an illegal immigrant and former Mexican Federale out for vengeance and justice, finally got his own full-length película. Starring 66-year-old Danny Trejo, the career tough guy with the bullet-ridden complexion who's played countless supporting roles and appeared in many Rodriguez productions, the expanded “Machete” offers oodles of the tongue-in-cheek, blade-in-belly excess its core audience expects, but some key things have been lost in the stretching, adequate control being one of them.

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