Brief reviews of current movies:
"The Hottest State" -- Ethan Hawke takes a turn behind the camera, and it's not even the best directing job by a star of "Before Sunrise" THIS YEAR (that honor belongs to Julie Delpy (see below). He's not bad, he just needs better source material. Did I mention he's directing his adaptation of his own novel?? The pace is brisk, the young actors engaging (to a point), but the whole thing is so much twentysomething navel-gazing. Sheesh!
"2 Days in Paris" -- now THIS is a self-assured directing debut! Julie Delpy wrote the script and stars, too (Richard Linklater should be proud of his proteges). She owes a great debt to Woody Allen, but she brings her own irreverent, opinionated, and sexually frank perspective to relationships and modern life. And she's not afraid to take on the French people's own prejudices and hang-ups, which strikes me as courageous. Oh, and it is very, very funny!
"The Kingdom" -- I was uncomfortable throughout this movie, and for a self-proclaimed piece of action-entertainment, that is not a good thing. It may be a question of timing, but I hope I can say it will never be appropriate to take such brutal incidents as suicide bombings and videotaped beheadings, and use them for nail-biting action sequences in big-budget Hollywood movies. I continue to have a great deal of respect for director Peter Berg (who created the marvelous "Friday Night Lights") but his skills should be put to better use than in this bit of terrorist revenge fantasy.
SPOILER ALERT: The ultimate insult, however, comes when after all this feel-good, blow away the bad guys, he tries to make a 'statement' about how all this tit-for-tat violence just leads to another generation of hatred and death.
GIVE ME A BREAK! You have no right to lecture us about that, after using that same violence as a back-drop to your movie, Mr. Berg!
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
"Becoming Jane"
"The Jane Austen Book Club"
"Gone Baby Gone"
"Lars & the Real Girl"
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