Byron called mid-afternoon and asked if we were interested in seeing the much talked-about Nicholson flick. Sure, what the heck, it was either this or the Tennessee-Maryland matchup in the Peach Bowl. And as I walk in the door, the score is 27-3 Terps, so who cares about missing that. Thursday, with my Trojans up against Iowa, that will not be missed.

About Schmidt is a terrific movie and if Jack Nicholson doesn’t win the Oscar, some people made a big mistake. Using the Golden Globe nominees as a proxy, one is hardpressed to see him lose to this competition. His decision to take this role follows a recent trend for big name actors to play against type (Robin Williams, Tom Hanks) and, as with those two, Schmidt shows just how good an actor Nicholson truly is. As my buddy point, a very layered acting job where much of the communication comes through subtle body language.

I would also give kudos to writer/director Alexander Payne (Election, Citizen Ruth) for an outstanding job; this movie is very real, so very un-Hollywood, and most filmmakers wouldn’t be able to make a gripping movie about real life. Plus, the trailer for the film doesn’t give away all the best lines or really give away the point like so many others do. Very deliberate choices in shot selection and visual composition, very calm and deliberate pacing. And one aspect which I took to be just a plot device to enable exposition turned out to be crucial to the final twist and resolution.

A Must See

A sweet coming of age story, the 1990 Australian film Flirting features Noah Taylor and Thandie Newton (her movie big role) as two naive yet brainy teenagers (think good looking brainiacs) at prep school who fall in love but are torn apart by events larger than they understand in middle of nowhere, Australia, in 1965. The pair think that reading Camus and Sartre mean they understand the world, that everything they do is so serious and fraught with meaning, only to learn that 16 is truly a very young age.

Taylor (most recently he was Lara Croft’s computer geek) and Newton (Mission: Impossible 2 and The Truth About Charlie), close enough in age to their characters, easily convey the missteps and emotions that clutter young love. Nicole Kidman is the older girl who at first is mean to Newton but in the end softens when she sees her own past reflected and Naomi Watts has a small part as one of Newton’s close friends. Newton’s character is from Uganda and her father is a political activist who goes home when Idi Amin’s coup happens; she’s soon forced to follow and before she leaves the couple find a way to say goodbye that neither will forget.

Flirting is a very sweet movie until writer/director John Duigan (Sirens) pushes past the point of good taste to teach his children their lesson. Before that, one can see that Duigan is a stylist, using fantasy and photographs to connect this little pair of schools to the larger world, having one of Taylor’s classmates laugh incessantly, appropriate or not, to bring some relief to the barely relieved seriousness. This is film as literature, a movie that would never be understood in Hollywood, and a good example of why I’m glad Tivo believes I like Australian films.

Recommended

For a cheap date, we went to see Friday After Next last night at the CinemaSaver over in Milpitas, $3 a ticket. Not a bad movie for the price but being stoned would have probably made it a lot funnier. Ice Cube and Mike Epps are back as the cousins, complaining about lack of money and a lack of honeys, and their dads are back, complete with bathroom jokes, partnered in a BBQ joint (”The food is so good you’ll slap your momma” is their slogan).

Good for HBO

A John Williams composition that sounds more like Henry Mancini and a cartoonish title animation that’s heavily reminiscent of the Pink Panther’s set a breezy tone for Steven Spielberg’s Christmas Candy confection, Catch Me if You Can. They’ve even recreated the old game show What’s My Line? with our boy as the mystery guest. But unlike the candy, this film is not just sweet empty calories but a terrific entertainment; quite a surprise since most recent movies based on true stories, as this one is, are terrible.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr., an extremely smart 16 year old from the New York City suburbs who freaks out when his parents (Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye) split up. Instead of choosing a parent to live with, Frank runs away. He begins to impersonate almost anyone, starting with airline pilots, and to forge checks and other useful documentation. Smart or not, one bit that shouldn’t have been left out is how someone his age learned how to do this.

After awhile–long enough for the boy to scam enough to buy his bankrupt dad a new Cadillac–he attracts the attention of Carl Hanratty of the FBI’s Bank Fraud squad. This is a very interesting role for Tom Hanks, quite opposite the killer of Road to Pertition. Hanratty is the quintessential workaholic, he’s left his (since remarried) wife and young daughter behind, and is even in the office when Abagnale calls him on Christmas. 15 years ago Hanks made a Dragnet movie and he, without going over the top, almost takes Dan Ackroyd’s Joe Friday as his model for this role.

The con, and the pursuit, go on, with the capture almost made time after time. What drives Hanratty the most seems to be his inability to outwit a teenager. Spielberg emphasizes this by coming back, again and again, as Hanratty asks Abagnale how he cheated to pass the bar exam in Louisiana; this just doesn’t seem to be something that the boy could talk his way through. After his stint as a co-pilot who never actually takes the controls, our hero decides to settle down for awhile as a doctor in Georgia–he talks his way into a supervisory position that doesn’t require him to put hands on a patient.

While there he meets and falls for a lovely blonde (Brenda, played by Amy Adams) and, although the audience never sees this, presumably senses that his time is running short. He asks Brenda to marry him, she is all over the idea, and they’re off to visit her parents. Daddy’s (Martin Sheen) a district attorney in New Orleans, so Abagnale mentions he has a law degree in addition to his M.D. and sure enough the next month he’s working as an assistant DA.

But all good things, the vision of familial love he so desires and sees in the Strongs, are illusory to an 18 year old. Hanratty has tracked him down to the huge engagement party the Strongs put on and he has to run. He wants to take the girl with him but she’s too weak and he flees to Europe in the company of eight comely young wanna-be stewardesses. The chase needs to conclude and so we aren’t shown the escapades on the Continent, just told that there is more than enough to get Hanratty on a plane to France for a final confrontation.

Interspersed through the film have been short scenes of Abagnale’s French prison and flight back to America courtesy of Uncle Sam. Arriving at LaGuardia Airport, he makes one more escape only to find that the reason for all of his efforts the past three years have been for nothing, and just like with Humpty Dumpty, the pieces couldn’t be put back together again. To be honest, I would have ended the movie right there, with DiCaprio running on the tarmac, but the story continues as we see imprisonment and eventual redemption by using his understanding of bank fraud as an employee of the FBI.

Another change I would have made, to cut Catch Me from 140 minutes to 100: The movie opens with over 30 minutes of buildup to his departure, which does give us a very solid grounding in our protagonist and his motivation, but one thinks a director as skilled as Spielberg could have cut this act in half without sacrificing any clarity. Certainly, one can’t hold the screenwriter, Jeff Nathanson too accountable–this is his first serious production, since I would barely count Rush Hour 2 and Speed 2 not at all.

One observation: DiCaprio is great as Abagnale but I wonder just how long he’ll be able to get away with playing teenage roles. His next part, not yet in production is the title character in Baz Luhrman’s Alexander the Great. Much of the meat of the story takes place before the Macedonian king’s 21 birthday.

Definitely recommended

Sometimes I can be a very generous soul. More often when I’m employed than not, but even I can’t skip the holiday season completely. So Vivian and I gave a good buddy this film on DVD today and after lunch we watched it together.

Reservoir Dogs was Quentin Tarantino’s debut as a writer and director, released ten years ago, and boy what a blast it is. Five career criminals who only know each other by color nicknames (Mr. White, Mr. Brown, and so forth) given to them by the old crime boss who’s planned the job and brought them together.

The acting is terrific and for awhile I wondered how Tarantino scored such recognizable names for his small movie but then I realized that anyone reading the script would understand the quality and want to be in it. Harvery Keitel (Mr. White) and Tim Roth (Mr. Orange) have the biggest roles but Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink and don’t think he didn’t chafe at that assignment), Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde), Lawrence Tierney as the old hand who organizes the smash and grab, and Chris Penn as Tierney’s son Nice Guy Eddie all hit their marks.

One thing that most people (certainly me) on realize after repeated watchings, and then go “damn that was so obvious but so smart,” is that even though this film is all about the events leading up to and after a jewelry store robbery, the robbery itself (and the inside of the jewelry store too) is never shown. This is such a smart, and unHollywood-like choice, but really characterizes the kind of movie Tarantino made. Why show the job? It would hardly add anything to the film except time, be expensive, and this way the dialog can create visions of mystery and violence in the viewer’s mind. Another scene uses a similar technique on a smaller scale: when Madsen’s Blonde is left alone with the beat cop he’s kidnapped, the camera focuses away from the gruesome act itself but we hear the actors instead. The DVD shows two alternate takes where the explicit action was filmed but in editing they realized that nothing onscreen could match what would be generated in the mind.

Tarantino also plays serious games in sequencing the scenes and the flow of time, much as he would in Pulp Fiction. The first scene is the whole crew talking over breakfast before the job and the second is an abrupt jump to Roth and Keitel driving away from the robbery, Roth bleeding from a bullet in his belly all over the back seat, screaming and crying, Keitel trying to calm him down. We aren’t shown until much later, nearly at the end, how Roth was shot. We get to see how some of the characters (Madsen, Keitel, Roth) are brought into the job but not the others and these scenes are also scattered, in a manner almost random yet clearly calculated.

Bloody but amazing. Still my favorite QT movie. And I did like Jackie Brown even though almost everyone else didn’t.

Highly recommended but not for those who shun violence and blood

I sort of liked this movie but two major factors keep me from making a wholehearted endorsement. First, Kevin Spacey is a very good actor but he’s settled too much into playing the same character in movie after movie; where is the successor to Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects or John Doe from Se7en? Second, Lasse Hallstrom’s direction seems heavy handed here, as if he instructed the cast to mirror the wintry torpor in their movements and emotions.

The Shipping News is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx and set, mainly, during a few winter months in a small coastal town in Nova Scotia. Spacey plays R.G. Quoyle (though throughout the film he is always called Quoyle by the others and I only got the R.G. from IMDB), a hapless loser, hated by his father, used and then abandoned by his amazingly slutty wife, and generally so picked on by life that he’s meeker than a mouse. Perhaps, then, a more extreme example but essentially the same character he played in American Beauty, Pay It Forward, and K-PAX. Spacey does a fine job, as one would expect, but has gone to this well at least once too often: man goes through a mid-life crisis that’s closer to a coming of age trial twenty years later than he should have.

Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Cider House Rules, Chocolat) does have a mastery of lush winterscapes and small town life. Where he found pockets of passion and energy in Chocolat and a truly naife-to-man transformation in Cider House, Shipping News loses too much of what was probably much more subtle and sophisticated inner growth in Proulx’s novel. I just didn’t see sufficient action on the screen to justify Quoyle’s growth. Tobey Maguire had Michael Caine as both mentor and antagonist and Juliette Binoche had true magic, her daughter, and the charming antagonism of Alfred Molina. Robert Nelson Jacobs’ script gives us the older reporter Billy Pretty as somewhat of a mentor and Cate Blanchett as the treacherous wife, yet neither goes far enough, while Julianne Moore as Spacey’s true love is simply not significantly passionate, and this all adds up to not enough spark.

Yet Spacey is still Spacey, one of the top actors of this generation–Gregory Peck to Tom Hank’s Jimmy Stewart–so he makes the most of the script. Hallstrom, a Swede, has the ability to bring the winter landscape to life, a participant in the movie. Scott Glenn is terrific as the newspaper publisher and Blanchett is just…hot as the thong wearing slut.

Semi-recommended

Keeping up a 23 year tradition, I saw the tenth Star Trek movie (”A generation’s final journey”) on Friday night. Since we were on vacation in New York, I was fortunate that Vivian’s best friend, who we were meeting for dinner that night, suggested the movie since her husband is as big into Trek as me. We had a totally non-Atkins, totally delicious all you can eat Sushi dinner beforehand.

Star Trek Nemesis is a very strong movie, probably the series’ best since Generations though my favorite is still number six, The Undiscovered Country. Getting John Logan to follow up such major films as Gladiator and On Any Sunday with a Trek flick was a great choice and possibly a good omen for the future as people like Logan (and myself) who grew up on the Federation stories become adults. Logan’s next scripts are for Tom Cruise and then Martin Scorsese, so for him to say he wants to write Trek XI is yet another coup. After seeing Nemesis, I’m sure every Trekkie, Trekker, and Trekonista out there would love to have him back.

Director Stuart Baird, while not as well known as Logan, was another solid choice. Baird has done more work as an editor than director, specializing in action films, not science fiction, and that shows up on screen in scenes such as the Jeffries tube fight between Riker and Ron Perlman’s Reman Viceroy and the initial face to face confrontation between Picard and Shinzon. TrekWeb has a nice interview with the director.

These two selections, bringing in new creative forces to the Trek franchise, were very important. The men weren’t steeped in ‘how Star Trek is done’ or wrapped in personal relationships with the actors and crew (other than Logan’s frienship with Brent Spiner which got him involved in the first place); I’d actually be very interested, in a good way, to learn how Stuart Baird got the gig. But their situations allowed them to push for the best story and film rather than worry so much about feelings. Worf, Crusher, and even Riker are barely factors in the film but since the story doesn’t particuarly need them this is a good thing.

The story itself revolves around two opposing pairs: Picard and Shinzon, Data and B-4, and the confrontations between them. Patrick Stewart is a masterful, Shakespearean actor who coolly handles the news that the Romulans created Shinzon, a clone of himself, then cast the clone adrift as politics changed the prevailing winds. Tom Hardy is surprisingly strong in his major acting job, easily creating the image of a young Picard, a Picard that might have been given similar circumstances. Meanwhile Spiner plays both androids (B-4 is a not before known prototype from Data’s creater Dr. Soong), with a similar contrast: B-4 does not have the same level of internal complexity as his ‘younger brother’ and therefore cannot quite comprehend Data’s quest to be human, to be more than he is. He does have the same yellow eyes, though. Spiner does well, not needing the sort of goofiness he is made to use in other roles (Master of Disguise, Independence Day); the audience is familiar enough with the Next Generation’s main supporting character that he can add subtle depths even to B-4.

The ending includes several surprises and while you might read these spoilers elsewhere, you won’t here. I think they are reasonable and open possibilities for future films. Should they be made. I thought going in that a good opening weekend (which generally predicts the final box office) would be anything over $14-15 million, and that this would assure another film in less than the four years since Insurrection. So at first I was happy with the nearly $19 million that was taken in. Until I checked the franchise history over at Box Office Mojo and saw that this was the lowest opening weekend since Undiscovered Country. Only time will tell but I would be interested to see another Logan/Baird collaboration, to see how they would push the series forward after all the changes that occur by the end of the film.

Absolutely recommended