“Star Trek”: Champagne Supernova

A week after the dismal “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” dragged its sad carcass to the top of the box office heap, the much-anticipated, hyper-publicized “Star Trek” soars to the pinnacle of the charts as a massively entertaining, triumphant spectacle.

J.J. Abrams is no stranger to a rabid fanbase. Yet even the zeal of the “Alias” and “Lost“ devotees wouldn‘t have prepared the director for the onslaught from Trekkies if he‘d gotten it wrong. Trouble with Tribbles, indeed. And because the franchise is considered such a niche, the average filmgoer would have given a new underwhelming flick in the series no more than a passing glance. But Abrams has allayed any fears. He has crafted a film which will captivate a wide swath of folks, from the neophyte — say someone who only knows Avery Brooks from “Spencer for Hire” — to the fluent Klingon linguist.

Abrams has executed a dexterous balancing act. There is a respectful nod to the past, with a wink at times, but the film is clearly modern. The tone found between instances of humor and drama feels right and the pace clicks along briskly. The detailed backstory is understandable as much of the film intercuts across time, locations, and story arcs as the young crew meet and train at Starfleet Academy while an impeding Romulan menace gathers. Ultimately, the forces of the USS Enterprise and the Narada engage in a final, pulsating confrontation. (There’s quite a bit more happening than that but it’s not fair to play the spoiler.) The script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman straddles the lighter moments and the instances of pathos with alacrity.

It doesn’t take long to decipher that “Star Trek“ is a confident prologue to the Star Trek saga. An enthralling opening sequence set on the doomed USS Kelvin which reveals the circumstances of Kirk’s birth and the fate of his father is tight, stirring and heartrending.

Technically, the special effects are stupendous, especially the intricate ships and palpitating space battles. The cinematography from Dan Mindel is equally strong in space and on the ground. And a fight sequence with the newly graduated Kirk and Sulu skydiving onto a floating laser drill is riveting and highlights the stellar editing by Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey. Costume designer Michael Kaplan creates costumes that are familiar but subtlety updated.

While the film has serious sci-fi chops and dire situations, “Star Trek” doesn’t overlook the comedy inherent in the original inspiration. So along with breezy, witty banter, we find Kirk macking with a green-skinned lady, an exasperated Bones punctuating almost every declaration with “Dammit” and Scotty declaring that he can’t hold it much longer. (It also discloses an unexpected romance.)

With a cast of newcomers and familiar faces, characters are given fresh, valid interpretations. Chris Pine is a blast as the brash James T. Kirk. Zachary Quinto is well known as Sylar on “Heroes,” and he completely nails the part of Spock, which must have been one of the more intimidating attempts in recent years. Quinto’s assured portrayal of the taciturn Vulcan-Human is highlighted in his scenes with Leonard Nimoy, who makes an admirable cameo. Zoe Saldana struts beguilingly as Nyota Uhura while Karl Urban convincingly pouts as Dr. ‘Bones’ McCoy. Once aboard the revamped Enterprise, both John Cho of “Harold and Kumar” fame as Hikaru Sulu and Anton Yelchin as Pavel Chekov deliver strong personas. The winsome Simon Pegg clearly has the time of his life as Scotty. An almost unrecognizable Eric Bana erupts as the vengeful rogue Romulan, Nero. (It’s a nice touch that an ancillary role like Ayel, Nero’s second in command, is cast with the talented Clifton Collins, Jr.)

“Star Trek” is an impressive feat. It has vanquished all doubts and raised expectations for the next chapter. And it might be difficult to lure Abrams back to a deserted South Pacific island when he can explore strange new worlds across the galaxies.

“Tricks” & “Cherry Blossoms”: Late Bloomers

On a family trip in the mid 1980‘s, we took the London to Edinburgh line and met a young Swedish couple. While the woman in her early 20s was attractive, she was routinely so, but in the post Borg age, when Edbergs, Wilanders, and Jarryds made such a racket, it was her companion with his preposterously perfect feathered hair, flawless English and effortless friendliness who my teenaged self and younger sister engaged in casual, convivial conversation as he poured Smarties into our hands.

The pretty pair departed the train before we crossed the border, and my sister recalls that it was in the “middle of nowhere,” so perhaps, we’ve surmised, they got off at York or Darlington to hike the Yorkshire Dales. We’ve always imagined that the intrepid Scandinavians were thrust into a wondrous adventure after they disembarked.

Hinging on a boy’s obsession with the comings and goings of a man he believes to be his estranged father at his local train station, the Polish film “Tricks” is an attractive effort with many commendable elements which is somewhat foiled, one feels, by a vague central theme of parental abandonment. There’s a gnawing sense that, like an interrupted train journey, there is vitally more to the handsomely illustrated story than director and screenwriter Andrzej Jakimowski was willing to tell.

Stefek (Damian Ul) is a young boy of eightish who spends his summer days hanging out at the train station in his country town. He discovers that one of the men who regularly travels to the station in a suit and carrying a briefcase is his father who left the family, started another, and has since chosen to cut off contact with Stefek and his older sister. Stefek watches him from afar, and they interact on the platform with only passing glances. One must deduce that the father (Tomasz Sapryk) left when Stefek was no older than a baby because he doesn’t appear to readily recognize his child, even though he travels through the town ostensibly on business on a daily basis and a boy of his abandoned son’s age is lurking at the station.

Stefek begins to karmically conjure a reunion with his father. He uses borrowed carrier pigeons and strategically placed toy soldiers and sticks for his quest in scenes that are some of “Tricks” most delightfully delivered. His eighteen-year-old sister Elsa, played by the photogenic Ewelina Walendziak, is the film’s most well-developed character and while she doesn’t dissuade her younger brother from his desire, she’s not terribly interested herself in retracing a relationship with her father. Stefek’s mother is a benevolently peripheral character who spends most of the film off camera running a modest corner shop.

On one particularly sun-dappled summer day Stefek shadows the suited businessman as he strolls through the town after missing a train, buying street fruit, wading in a bucolic stream, visiting with old chums and running into former acquaintances. During the walk, the father appears to spot in a window a photo of the three he left behind in their Sunday finery. As the sun begins to set, Stefek and Elsa watch from a recessed doorway as their father purchases a modest bunch of flowers, walks to the door of their mother’s humble shop, pauses, then turns away. In the film’s final scene when Stefek finally strikes up a conversation at the end of the day with this man at the station, the film concludes a crucial moment as his the dad utters, “I’m sitting on the platform but not waiting for a train.” And then the credits begin to crawl, the film abruptly ending at a departure, one which could be the crux of a movie.

Jakimowski has a knack for shooting fetching scenes. The film moves effortlessly through charming, winding narrow old-world streets shrouded by modern concrete apartment blocks. Vignettes of swooping carrier pigeons captured in the breaks between buildings and Stefek walking the train tracks around the town leaving toy soldiers on the railroad ties are filmed expressively by cinematographer Adam Bajerski. If the film had simply wished to unfold as a verdant narrative of a summer in a young boy’s life, it contains scenes like these in abundance, with further simple, sweet moments such as a picnic in the woods, walks across a looming bridge and a carefree motorcycle ride through the town.

Stefek perpetually carries a fretful countenance, habitually chewing the inside of his lip, but as a child observer, he isn’t provided with a view into the insights necessary to illuminate the audience to a greater understanding of the father‘s reasoning. Elsa’s escapades illustrates a story which doesn’t need to be enhanced by the father’s choices, or even his presence. She struggles in a plucky way with a hectic schedule filled with a mundane dishwashing job, studying Italian lessons as she attempts to secure a job with an Italian company, and just trying to enjoy the last summer of her youth with her likable, mechanic boyfriend, all the while serving as a surrogate mother to Stefek. Most puzzling for a film apparently so immersed in a theme of family bonds is the decision to make Stefek and Elsa’s mother (Iwona Fornalczyk) such a perplexingly undeveloped character.

If the attractive “Tricks“ suffers from a paucity that suggests it’s a prologue, then “Cherry Blossoms,” the latest film from German director Doris Dorrie, is essentially two excellent, fully-formed shorter films which coalesce into a satisfying whole.

Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) learns that her husband, Rudi (Elmar Wepper), a nearing-retirement-age, unassuming bureaucrat she dotes upon, is terminally ill. They depart upon her insistence for a number of trips while she believes Rudi can still travel. They visit the mountains, journey to Berlin to see two of their children, and embark to the Baltic for a beach holiday. They are a kindly but not saccharine couple who their children barely tolerate and their grandchildren consider a distraction and it’s a deft touch by Dorrie that the person who shows the couple the most simple kindness in Berlin is their daughter’s girlfriend (Nadja Uhl), who accompanies Trudi to a Butoh performance which is so clearly important to her. After these European travels, she has the intention of taking Rudi to Japan, a country which has always fascinated, enamored and moved her. But on a still morning in their Baltic hotel, Trudi has passed away and we have at her death the conclusion of the first half of the film which, upon reflection, is a completely contained, emotionally poignant 45 minutes.

Slowly in the second portion, Rudi, an instinctually unadventurous man, begins to understand that perhaps he was too accommodating to Trudi’s role as an at-home supplicant in their relationship and even though she gained great heart from her decades of nurturing he recognizes that as the person receiving this devotion, he should have been more aware of her sacrifice and that he should have been insistent that Trudi not subsume her desires and dreams for his contentment. As he rummages through her belongings, Rudi finds postcards of Mount Fuji and long ago photos of a face-painted Trudi in Butoh poses and realizes he was both overly influential and silently complicit in her self denial. So he decides to make a pilgrimage to Japan, to take her trip of a lifetime. The journey is complicated because their third child works in finance in Tokyo, and like his siblings in Berlin, he, sadly, finds his father‘s presence an imposition and uses the rigors of his work schedule as a convenient excuse for his absences and distant manner. As Rudi begins to investigate Tokyo on his own, he befriends Yu (Aya Irizuki), an 18-year-old Butoh street dancer. They develop a friendship and a connection which will help both of them confront and then embrace grief and loss.

Dorrie, who also wrote the script, has crafted a film laden with achingly emotional scenes but at 127 minutes “Cherry Blossoms” takes the time to develop the legitimacy of these tear-jerking wallops, especially with the characterizations of Trudi and Rudi, so that the weepy moments are not manipulative. The film ends with the married couple magically intertwined with Mount Fuji looming in the background, the journey of these two people and the two mini films both meaningfully and movingly merged.

(“Tricks” and “Cherry Blossoms” screened at the Portland International Film Festival earlier this month. “Cherry Blossoms” will be released to theaters in the United States by Strand Releasing.)

“Twilight” & “Let the Right One In”: The Kids Are All Fright

The infobahn is atwitter with “Twilight.” While the North American box office nears $200 million and the world-wide figures double that return, and stories abound of behind-the-scenes intrigue with machinations so rabid that the director has been excised from the sequel and a third film has already been marked on calendars for 2010, the clamor can’t conceal that this vampire movie is a trifle, an unremarkable film so slight that random episodes of “Buffy” bustle with more humor, charm, wonderment, and, most importantly, verve. Catherine Hardwicke has directed a film without magic or vitality, fatal exclusions for a fantasy flick.

The story of Bella, an Arizona teenager who shuttles herself off to small-town Washington state to live with her police chief father and subsequently becomes enraptured by a relationship with a dashing vampire, is told stiltingly, with too many scenes of high schoolers staring longingly at each other across the school cafeteria. (It suggests, as much as anything, that they are unimpressed by the tater tots and wiener wraps.) The voiceover from Bella adds very little to character understanding and fails to enhance the narrative. From a vampire flick perspective there‘s precious little pep so by the time anyone is Columbia Gorged, the attenuated “Twilight” offers nothing fresh in its execution with uninspiring special effects and meager action sequences, especially in a baseball game sequence which is equally hokey and undeveloped. The final battle in a hall of mirrors feels both forced and small — a fair reflection of the preceding story.

Exacerbating a tepidly told tale is the casting of Bella, a character of no particular individual spark in the first place, with Kristen Stewart, an actress so wooden it was difficult to distinguish the old growth forest from her tease. She delivers almost every line in an uninspired hushed rush, a breakneck breathless monotone that doesn’t evoke teenaged awkwardness as much as suggests laconic boredom.

As Edward, the perpetually 17-year-old vampire, Robert Pattinson exhibits some nice acting chops as Bella‘s paramour. He conveys Edward’s brooding intensity, conflicted impulses, and self-conscious sweetness with style. To compound Bella’s somnolence, the ancillary roles of her new, eager schoolmates (whom she appears to be find tedious) are played by an energetic and funny lot.

“Twilight” is a franchise in search of fangs and is devoured by “Let the Right One In,“ the Swedish masterwork, which despite currently earning less than $2 million on this continent and just over $5 million across the globe, is an enriching experience which deserves massive message board devotion and an audience more substantial than one delivered by midnight movie cult status. Director Tomas Alfredson redefines the vampire flick with a film that, while respecting the elements of the genre with beautifully choreographed genuine scares and unsightly frights replete with swirls of cats and bleeding eyes, is infused with intelligence, grace and humanity.

Based on the 2004 novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted his work for the screen, it tells the tale of 12-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a latch key kid bullied at school, who befriends a new arrival to his apartment block, a fellow 12-year-old, Eli (Lina Leandersson), who is actually a centuries old vampire. Oskar is adrift — not saddled with loneliness as much as that inexorable pre-teen sense of awkwardness and uncertainty that even the most self-assured youth is pursued by — and finds a quietly receptive partner to his unassuming desire to bond in Eli. She is alone, immersed in a secret life, and Oskar is a trustworthy ally with an affection that is more than a crush but not yet carnal. Alfredson does a remarkable job of building this burgeoning friendship, illustrating the tender uneasy steps of the pre-teens, and nurturing pitch-perfect performances from the pair as well.

But what makes “Let the Right One In“ so exceptional is the way Alfredson and his crew handles the ever-changing moods so deftly with the quieter, more evocative moments and the grisly sequences delivered with equal aplomb. The switching back between the differing tones is expertly mastered by co-editors Alfredson and Daniel Jonsater (and filmed compellingly by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema) so that the gentle moments never feel ingratiating and the eerie scenes are thoroughly dense and chilling. Nothing feels stop gap; every is integral. Similarly, the soundtrack by Johan Soderqvist is wonderfully adept at enhancing the variation, producing sweeping orchestration for the thrilling scenes but also very melodic, spare musical interludes during the softer, more introspective instances.

By the time “Let the Right One In” culminates in a brilliantly realized swimming pool sequence which submerges the film in an act of devotional vigilantism, it is clear that this is a superlative work, one of the finest films of the last year, whose quality is not hinged to any niche and which has no need for a sequel to embolden its legacy.

“Taken”: Schindler’s Pissed

When Liam Neeson lays siege on Paris, he transforms the capital into “The City of Lights Out.”

Before his turbulent arrival in the French capital, Bryan Mills (Neeson), is a retired operative for an unnamed US agency, previously stealthily deployed for years in the world’s hot spots as an ambiguously menacing “Preventer.” Suffering from a papa’s guilt of abandonment, he has moved to Los Angeles to be closer to Kim (Maggie Grace), his just turned 17-year-old daughter, who lives in opulent splendor with her mother (Famke Janssen, sporting almost Vulcan eyebrows) and a wealthy, obliging step-father (the dependable, bearded Xander Berkeley, whose name has always evoked the Ziegfeld Follies). Neeson smartly plays these California scenes with a halting and awkward undercurrent, his fussy remonstrating about Kim’s impending European vacation with a friend smacking of overcompensation. He’s well-meaning but still smothering, and Neeson adroitly transmits Bryan’s parental rustiness.

After Kim and her buddy unpack in the friend’s family’s spacious Parisian digs which the two teens have all to themselves, she takes a call from her anxious dad in LA and the movie alights powerfully with a well-constructed sequence by director Pierre Morel where, while Mills is on the line, she views the abduction of her friend by several men across the courtyard of the horseshoe-shaped apartment. His spy muscle memory kicks in as he advises his frantic daughter with specific instructions. The editing cuts and thrusts between the two cities until, as he predicted to her, she is kidnapped, drug from the beneath a bed, the cell phone left on the floor per his orders so that he can record every detail.

And then once he lands at Charles de Gaulle, the film tears along with his furious search, rarely dallying as Mills lays waste to swarthy contingents of criminal continentals (a demographic not overly vilified by the filmmakers but, still, perhaps they could have thrown in a puffin-eating Icelander). With martial arts expertise and Grand Prix driving skills, Mills erupts in full vigilante mode — he even wounds a main character’s wife with a bullet; this is clearly a dad in a hurry to make up for lost time.

For this brogue warrior, every clue is dissected instantaneously, every scenario scanned swiftly, and every contingency deciphered immediately so that when he happens upon a table of Albanians at meal time, he knows exactly where the butter knife goes. I thought it was on the top left, resting on the bread plate; apparently it’s the larynx.

Neeson, who turns 57 this year, is an uncomplicated and dependable actor, with a bit of Burt Lancaster‘s sturdiness about him, if not his magnetism. Clearly fit and energetic, Neeson executes the countless martial arts scenes with vitality. (As a point of comparison, the craggy William Holden was 58 when “Network” premiered.) He completes the transition from put-upon dad to rugged snoop quite nicely.

Morel, who helmed the frenetic “District B13,” oversees a taut, gristle-free thriller. He’s ably assisted by cinematographer Michel Abramowicz and editor Frederic Thoraval. “Taken” is co-written and produced by Luc Besson, who has found in Morel a worthy protégé.

“I’ve Loved You So Long” & “Rachel Getting Married”: Sister Act

“I’ve Loved You So Long” unfolds patiently but not sluggishly as the textured tale of Juliette Fontaine (Kristin Scott Thomas), an intensely private and haunted woman reuniting with the world after her release from a fifteen year prison sentence for killing her own son.

Juliette moves in with the family of her younger sister, Lea (Elsa Zylberstein), who desperately wishes to reconnect with her phlegmatic sibling. As she enters the home Lea shares in Nancy, France with her husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), two adopted young children and a mute father-in-law, only Lea and Luc are privy in their circle to not only the fact that Juliette was incarcerated but that the crime was infanticide. The film by Philippe Claudel is parceled out intelligently and gracefully; inside the home it’s expressed through the sisters’ hesitant reunion, their emerging yet tentative relationship after 15 years adrift, the contradictorily understandable and irrational reservations of Lea’s husband, Luc, and the natural curiosity of an inquisitive 8-year-old niece. Outside the home, it’s reflected by Juliette’s hampered job prospects, the melancholy of a plaintively loquacious parole officer, a tipsy crepes-in-the-country dinner party, a visit to their mother suffering from Alzheimer’s and a burgeoning, tentative romance with a professorial colleague of Lea‘s. Bit by bit, these moments gradually reveal not only a sense of the secretive Juliette but the well-developed supporting characters as well until the film explodes in the sincere, honest and tragic revelation shared between the sisters.

With lines rigidly creased between her brows, a pinched smoker’s mouth, and an ashen translucence to her pallor, Scott Thomas physically inhabits Juliette. But it’s a performance more laudable for what lies beneath the mask as this is an assured, unaffected rendering permeated by expert emotional nuance. Her talent is prodigiously bilingual; she’s getting so many good, strong roles in the French language, I’m not sure we’ll hear her in English anytime soon. As the devoted younger sister, Zylberstein gives a performance of terrific striations, straining between her desire to repair wounds with her sister by providing a salve to her psyche while balancing the concerns of her husband and the welfare of her children.

Life is terminal, like a slowly encroaching sunset shadow with a sickle, and can be so cruel that we wonder whether the wonderful moments make up for the tragic, and with this foreboding sense Juliette is hounded by a guilt more incarcerating than any penal system, more strident than any rule of law, and more permanent than any criminal record. Still, despite the onus of despair, the sisters share a moment of self atonement in the film‘s final life-affirming moments, and in this culmination “I’ve Loved You So Long” is a movie that pierces the essence of filial dynamics.

As much as “I’ve Loved You So Long” is a delicate, patient exploration of family relationships, “Rachel Getting Married,” a story which also hinges on the return of a damaged sister, this one arriving from rehab on the cusp of her sister‘s wedding weekend, is an overwrought, Mewl Age copper kitchen-sink drama.

Anne Hathaway plays Kym, the sister as welcome to the bride as a raccoon corpse in the crawl space, in a performance engineered for the Academy. She chain smokes, wears a goth fringe, circles her eyes with dark eyeliner, and tosses quips with sassy abandon, so that almost every bon mot reeks with sarcasm. Director Jonathan Demme seems to have encouraged her; a jovial rehearsal dinner of unrehearsed, naturalistically nervy speeches is punctuated by an all-too-obvious soliloquy which hollers “This is Anne Hathaway’s Oscar Moment,” where a sober Kym is the last to speak and delivers a rambling, spiteful and awkward diatribe. I half expected Kym to turn to the camera and purr “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Demme.”

The festivities are held in Kym and Rachel’s father’s rambling home of innumerable rooms; the square footage seems to have confined the film to big statements instead of small discoveries. The groom, Sidney, is a musician, and to underscore this point, Demme posts musicians in every nook. With so many mandolins and violins being strummed and plucked, the grounds resemble a Bluegrass Festival.

Rachel, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, is a hipster soccer mom type with a psychology degree and a hackneyed script, which makes her a tad unbearable, at times. Bill Irwin, a mime by trade, plays the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” soppy father. Debra Winger pops by as Kym and Rachel’s distant, divorced mother, and executes a massively emotive scene with Hathaway, one where a great deal happens but which culminates in no ramifications. There‘s a whole bunch of teeth gnashing and raised voices as feelings are expressed in this film but very little insight. Yet “Rachel Getting Married” is so earnest it was probably made on recycled film stock.

It’s supposed to feel like an ensemble piece as the frenetic energy of the jarring cinematography from an unsteady cam darts around the home, but several of the more interesting and promising roles are woefully underdeveloped. Sidney, played by Tunde Adebimpe, the lead singer of TV on the Radio, is a likable, amiable bloke given too little to say. He generally reacts to the sisters’ pantomime. Mather Zickel, in the role of the groomsman, Kieran, provides a deft display and, unlike Kym, shows that addicts clearly can be people with wrenching dependency issues who can still connect to those close to them or, at the very least, can be civil. Other members of Sidney’s family and entourage are shown in cursory glimpses when more expanded, more rewarding roles were deserving. There’s another, superior movie here: Sidney Getting Married.

“Slumdog Millionaire”: My Life as a Slumdog

“Slumdog Millionaire,” the new film from Danny Boyle, is captivating but much like his last work, the commendable sci-fi mystery thriller “Sunshine,” it’s a movie compromised by a conventional, tonally unbalanced final reel.

In a baker’s dozen worth of years, Danny Boyle has emerged as one of the most terrific storytellers in world cinema. The brilliance of “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting” were followed by wayward efforts at the cusp of the millennium in “A Life Less Ordinary” and “The Beach,” before he righted himself with a string of four, and counting, superior productions. “28 Days Later” is an apocalyptic zombie flick of the highest order, while the magical “Millions” is a sincere and heartfelt children’s story which never resorts to soppiness. It’s the catalogue of an admirable, conscientious filmmaker. Despite his varying success, the mercurial Boyle is an unignorable talent.

In “Slumdog Millionaire,” Boyle tells the tale of Jamal (Dev Patel), a lower class young man in Mumbai toiling as a call center dogsbody who is unexpectedly on the verge of life-altering success on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Told predominantly in flashback, the film begins with a present-day police station interrogation of Jamal where he begins to ruminate on his life, starting with his earliest memories of surviving a stark childhood with his older brother Salim, and Latika, a young girl from the neighborhood who would become his heart’s lifelong muse.

The lives of the self-described “Three Musketeers” are shown in three distinct stages, and the first segment surges with the most energy. In their youngest incarnation, when they are no more than three and five, Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) and Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail) are mischievous, nomadic orphans who survive on pluck and guile. They befriend fellow orphan Latika (Rubiana Ali), but she loses touch with the boys when they embark on a daring escape from a nefarious orphanage.

Especially in this first section, “Slumdog Millionaire” is filmed majestically by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle but not beatifically, so that Mantle, Boyle and co-director Loveleen Tandan remove the reverential tone, never succumbing to falling back on stereotype, which would have been fashioned by patronizing slow pans across rivers of wading supplicants. Instead, the first solid hour of “Slumdog” reverberates as vibrant, luminous, human and genuine. A scene in which the precocious toddler Jamal meets an Indian film legend who swoops by helicopter into a crowd in his impoverished community is visceral, mucky, and redolent. At the conclusion of the first segment, Boyle constructs a scintillating set piece as the lads perch on top of a moving train, Jamal dangling over the car’s side by his feet in the grip of his brother, his tiny hands pawing through a window for steaming bread laying enticingly on a tray. They are discovered, a tussle ensues and they fall from the train, emerging from the grass as pre-teens. It’s a wonderfully accomplished transition.

This second segment shows them as prepubescents living as financial foragers, Jamal (Tanay Chheda) happy to dupe tourists at the Taj Mahal, while Salim (Asutosh Lobo Gatiwala), perhaps drowning his vulnerability, submerges into himself into vice and crime. When the now estranged boys reach adulthood and the film becomes a quest for requited love, it becomes less thrilling.

Dev Patel is nicely cast as the adult Jamal. Most well known for his role as the goofy Anwar on the television series “Skins,” Patel brings believable earnestness to his ardor for Latika and likable humility to his “Millionaire” scenes, especially in comparison to the oily charm of the show’s host, Prem Kumar, played with obvious relish by Anil Kapoor. Underscoring his diversity as an actor, Patel possesses viable presence and lends gravity to his interrogation and torture scenes.

Latika, though, is a very surface role in adulthood, with no depth or context, and very little to say. She is lovely, but the beauty of actress Freida Pinto cannot arrest the idea that her Latika, as a grown woman, is simply a character in new clothes. A scene later in the film where Jamal rediscovers Latika, then tricks his way into her mobster boyfriend’s compound to plead for her to leave the lair feels forced and is shot unconvincingly. The magical has become the mundane.

The same dilemma bewitched Boyle’s “Sunshine” which was enveloped in trippy spookiness until it resorted to slasher mode in the final moments. There’s a disconnect in the mood between the body of the films and the resolution in both movies. Yet Boyle is undoubtedly an important filmmaker; viewers should continue to be infatuated with his search for the transcendent.

“Transporter 3”: We Like the Cars That Go Boom

If the producers of “Transporter 3” had wished to add a bit more zest to their franchise and enliven the series with oodles of oomph, they should have hired the “Top Gear” gang as creative consultants.  That way, while whirling around the continent, Frank Martin, the titular Marseilles-based driver, could have outgunned jet-packed kayaks on Icelandic fjords, or transformed his sports car into a stretch limousine, or ditched his rather mundane, pedestrian looking Audi for something a bit mad, such as the ferociously fast Koenigsegg, or even evaded swarms of priapic hot rods in an entirely inappropriate set of wheels: we’ve had Mini and Bug chase scenes.  Why not a Smart car?

Disappointingly, especially for a movie helmed by the born-to-be-an-action-flick director Olivier Megaton, the film, particularly the car stunts, too often feels dumbed down, lackadaisical and uninspired.  But this isn’t entirely surprising when a film chooses a central plot device which forces the occupants of his auto, by pain of death, to remain ensconced in the car.  “Sommes nous la’ encore?”  While Martin’s behind the wheel, the movie feels staunchly hemmed in, strangely claustrophobic, and akin to a derivative scavenger hunt.  The moments in the car with Frank carting his quarry-in-arms, a diplomat’s party-hardy daughter by the name of Valentina, across Europe are notably strained and clunky.  Freckles and sparkles framing raccooned, club-bleary eyes, Valentina is played by Natalya Rudakova as a spoiled, unlikable minx. This is Rudakova’s first film; she already feels typecast.

The irony is that outside the confines of the car, the hand-to-hand combat scenes crackle.  As Martin, Jason Statham, owner of an Easter Island mug and an 8-pack verging on 10, unleashes brackish, bare knuckle fury on the dozens of pipe, chain and knife wielders sent to the slaughter, seemingly, by the EU’s Ministry of Scowls.  These martial arts sequences, overseen by noted stunt coordinator Corey Yuen, provide the film’s humor and panache: a running joke appears to suggest that Statham is so encumbered by his immaculate sartorial sense that he must disrobe during these exhaustive onslaughts, utilizing his jacket, shirt and silk ties as weapons.  A bike scene scampering along cobbled streets and through shop windows is similarly well executed and clever.

 

While he embodied the cool, cheeky chappy in “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch,” and bulked up to a certain rugged, leading man quality in “The Bank Job” earlier this year, Statham, who sounds like he perpetually needs a lozenge, has never been asked to deliver much dialogue in the “Transporter” films.  He undoubtedly possesses a brooding presence which is compelling.  So perhaps the producers should have dropped the pretense of a relationship and simply allowed him to tear across Europe with abandon, fleeing from foes, skirting the law, this time in a caravan.

“Synecdoche, New York”: Charles in Charge

“Synecdoche, New York” always promised to require resolute viewing.

The first film directed by Charlie Kaufman — the screenwriter of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Adaptation,” and “Being John Malkovich” — “Synecdoche” returns to his favored themes examining identity, fantasticism and circumvented concepts of time.  

The tale of Caden Cotard, a hypochondriac, depressive director at a modest theater company unfolds absorbingly in the beginning, ably buffered by a wonderful performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose hangdog expression and neurotic befuddlement enhance the anxiety he feels for his impending, experimental production of “Death of a Salesman” and withering marriage to a world-famous artist, Adele Lack (Catherine Keener).  

The film, though, veers toward tedium as Caden is increasingly more bewildered and more desperate to find meaning and self awareness in his unsettled existence.  It becomes redundant once Caden wins a MacArthur Fellowship.  The grant funds his obsessive, quixotic quest to make a play about his own life. The division between his actual life and the staged production is removed as he purchases a cavernous theater, builds sets duplicating his homes, and imposes on an ever-increasing cast as the rehearsals pass from weeks to months to years.  A shade over two hours, “Synecdoche,” like those rehearsals, becomes wearing. Caden’s self-indulgence begins to feel like Kaufman‘s, or is it vice versa? The film could have been culled by a judicious thirty to forty minutes and would not have rid itself of the vital conundrums.

While the story spirals into tedious narcissism, the cast is phenomenal throughout.  Kaufman has gathered a stunning ensemble of actresses who serve as Caden’s inspirations, foils and loves, much like the feminine ensemble surrounding Marcello Mastroianni’s director in Fellini‘s “8 ½.”  Samantha Morton brings a warm, sassy confidence to Hazel, the box office ticket lady who becomes his muse.  Hope Davis is bespectacled, hair-in-a-bun fun as Caden‘s self-help psychiatrist.  Genuine and fetching, Michelle Williams provides a natural emotional quality as his second wife, actress Claire Keen, which suggest that she‘s on the verge of becoming one of America’s most important actors.  One looks forward to seeing her in the soon-to-be-released, tiny budgeted “Wendy and Lucy.”  Not for the first time this year, Keener seems too well-suited to play the disinterested, sarcastic wife and Jennifer Jason Leigh prowls the screen as her best friend. As actors in Caden’s cast, both Dianne Wiest and Emily Watson are enjoyable presences who could have been augmented with slightly more developed characters.  The performances are a welcome superlative in a promising film which becomes a bit of a slog.

“Quantum of Solace”: Skanking, Not Stirred

In 1965, saxophonist Rolando Alphonso, late of The Skatalites, rounded up several of his former bandmates in the recording den of Studio One in Kingston as The Soul Brothers to record their version of the “James Bond Theme.” Braced by Bryan Atkinson’s filthy bass, Lloyd Knibb’s whiplash drums and Lynn Taitt’s slinky guitar and accentuated with the steady piano beat of Jackie Mittoo and the infectious vocal percussion of ‘King Sporty,’ the song explodes with the brash, urgent, almost abrasive, horn section of Alphonso, ‘Dizzy’ Moore and Rupert Dillon.  The Soul Brothers pay homage to the brilliant, original tune while taking it from the quicksand of the bandstand to the sound systems of street level in the baddest cover of the tune to date.

Two years ago, a reverential Daniel Craig revived a turgid series as the retro Bond, and while he didn’t usurp the irreproducible Sean Connery, he brought back a wanton muskiness to the role that in comparison made Roger Moore harbor all the threat of Fred Grandy.  “Quantum of Solace” finds Craig even more menacing, chiseled and strapped.  It’s James Bond as Rude Boy.

Director Marc Forster matches Craig’s intensity with an earthy, gritty film which, befitting the shortest Bond film in history, spans three continents in a whirl of visceral action sequences interrupted with a modicum of extraneous dialogue and ludicrous gadgets.  Opening with a thrilling car chase through a central Italian quarry which leads into a thumpy little dirge of a theme song, and reemerging after the credits in a rapid-fire roof-top pursuit nicely juxtaposed with the Palio di Siena, “Quantum of Solace” from the offset mocks its title with an energetic, globe-trotting pace that is anything but soporific.

Quickly switching locales to Port-au-Prince, “Quantum”  unleashes fisticuffs evocative of the Bourne series, but that doesn’t make the sequences derivative, less thrilling or less astutely executed.  And the taint of Q couldn’t be further removed as instead of a yacht with a physics-defying propulsion system, Bond improvises on the Gulf of Gonave, jarringly maneuvering from power boated danger on a glorified, motorized dug out.

But the film doesn’t forsake the grand moments.  A superb set piece is fashioned during a modern adaptation of Tosca on the Seebuhne, the massive floating stage on Lake Constance in Bregenz, Austria.  Forster constructs a terrific juxtaposition between the escalating drama of the opera and the unfolding fortuitous discovery Bond makes in the 7,000 seat concert hall.  There is very little acute action in the scene, but through concise editing and clever sound technique, the tension is explicit. It’s exhilarating pomp amongst the happenstance.

Mathieu Amalric, whose expressive eyes were so integral to the compelling “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” plays villainous government puppeteer Dominic Greene, with understated menace, almost bemusement, in a performance reminiscent of Klaus Maria Brandauer’s in “Never Say Never Again.”

Judy Dench, a spunky, vital 73-years-old, has molded “M” into a formidable presence and has formed a complicated relationship with Bond which was lacking during the many years Bernard Lee claimed the role. While Dench is offered a part of ample opportunity, Jeffrey Wright, frustratingly one of America’s most underutilized acting talents, returns, slighted, as Felix Leiter, and while the character has always been an ancillary one in the series, the creative team should have expanded the role for his talent.  

Forster (“Monster’s Ball,” “Finding Neverland,” “Stranger than Fiction“) doesn‘t possess a resume which suggests a propensity to helm a venerable spy series, but he‘s an emboldened choice.  He ably meshes the action with a story of vengeance while adding an underpinning of pathos. In a nod to the Bond legacy, he even throws in a dark reference to “Goldfinger.“ 

Like Christopher Nolan earlier this year with “The Dark Knight,” Forster’s film works quite well in the quieter moments and more intimate battles but a few of the larger action sequences feel jumbled and disjointed.  An air battle is overlong and slightly cumbersome.  And the camera work by Roberto Schaefer — who has not only shot all of Forster’s films but is a frequent collaborator of Christopher Guest’s — is at times too tightly pressed up on the frenzy, and perhaps could have been improved by retreating from the action for a wider view.

But in an episode which highlights their success at capturing reflective moments, Forster and Schaefer present one of the more evocative sequences in the Bond canon.  As Bond and his comrade-in-harm, Camille (Olga Kurylenko), stride defiantly in the desolate Bolivian desert, the scene cuts to the townspeople of an impoverished village, who are clearly not professional actors, walking to wells run dry by Greene’s scheme, and then, for just a moment, the scene goes back to the grim pair in the desert before returning to the villagers staring at a spigot with just a single, mocking, lamentable drop falling into a bucket, the mesmerizing visuals bristling with the atmosphere of a party political broadcast from Evo Morales.

As the film concludes in Russia with a contemplation of the consequences of revenge, “Quantum of Solace” is a  film with no baccarat, nor Bacharach, nor excruciating banter, but instead is a testament to a franchise invigorated and a Bond with an attitude.

“Transsiberian”: Ticket to Writhe

From Vladivostok, along the desolate Siberian railway line, through the scrutiny of the protagonists most personal turmoil, the engrossing thriller “Transsiberian” reveals its secrets like a matryoshka doll. A gripping mystery which ratchets up the suspense while exposing the intricate, introspective consequences, “Transsiberian” is a police drama with brains and brawn.

Upon completing a church mission in Beijing, a married, middle-class Iowa couple — Jessie (Emily Mortimer) and Roy (Woody Harrelson) — begins a sightseeing train journey to Moscow.  However, they aren’t drawn as Midwestern stereotypes because director Brad Anderson and co-writer Will Conroy infuse the characters with quirky individuality and plausible personality traits.  

Jessie is a thirty-something, adrift, agnostic, and ambivalent.  She does not despise the bourgeois lifestyle she could be slipping into; it just doesn’t feel quite right.  Jessie’s become a victim of her own expectation of herself.  And as a recovering addict, she not only confronts her alcoholism but the shame of her clear longing for the intoxicating allure of her partying days, the undeniable buzz of that lifestyle.  Jessie could be from Iowa, or Seattle, or Charleston, for that matter, and she’d still thirst for that time in her life when nihilism was just another way to say “make mine a double.”  In yet another nuanced performance, Mortimer emotes fragility but always girded with her doe eyes steely fixed.  

At first blush, Roy  may seem a bit of a sop, with a golly-gee wonderment at every small detail of railway life, but Harrelson doesn’t oversell the earnestness of the jocular, religious hardware store owner.  He is goofy, like the sort of guy who would mow his yard in black socks, yet he’s genuine, and he’s hardly the cuckold that you initially think he will become.  As a couple, they possess a clear fondness for each other, but their fundamental differences validate the choices the story has bestowed on them.

The relative ordinariness of their trip is usurped when they are joined as cabin mates by an enigmatically itinerant couple, the menacingly charming rascal Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and his recalcitrant girlfriend Abby (Kate Mara).  Both Noriega and Mara embody their characters solidly, but the toothy Noriega, especially, chews the scenery with a wonderfully cheeky performance.  As Grinko, a sagacious yet still inquisitive cop, Ben Kingsley is similarly and fascinatingly multi-layered.  

Anderson is the director of indie features such as “Next Stop Wonderland” and “The Machinist” but he’s also helmed episodes of several of America’s most recently revered television police dramas, including “Homicide” and “The Wire.” And that TV experience of commingling gumshoe whodunit with insight into the peccadilloes and worse of intriguing characters is expertly manifested in several scenes where casual conversations subtly morph into an illuminating view into the characters’ psyches.

He also suffuses the railway journey with visceral earthiness and authenticity, from the claustrophobic sleeping compartments to the crowded and convivial proletariat dining cars choked with cigarette smoke, and crammed with hearty and craggy faces clinking shot glasses.

Like Scott Frank’s unjustly overlooked “The Lookout” from last year — a smart and absorbing crime flick that also centers on an equivocal Midwestern hero — “Transsiberian” unfurls a serpentine plot which, though carved with sinister switchbacks, retains a genuine attentiveness for the plight of the personal odyssey.  It’s noir, with a soul.