The Beach (2000): adapted by John Hodge from the novel by Alex Garland; directed by Danny Boyle; starring Leonardo di Caprio (Richard), Virginie Ledoyen (Francoise), Guillaume Canet (Etienne), Paterson Joseph (Keaty), Tilda Swinton (Sal), and Robert Carlyle (Daffy): Promising riff on Lord of the Flies, if Lord of the Flies were gene-spliced with Club Med, sputters out in the last 30 minutes.
A bunch of almost universally white pleasure seekers travel to a hidden spot on an isolated island to enjoy the titular beach, located in the interior of the island around a hidden cove or possibly lagoon somewhere near Thailand. Leo di Caprio, a disaffected young America, narrates his search for something interesting, which he finds on the beach, travelling there with two French tourists, one of whom, Francoise, he has a crush on.
Because this movie is at least somewhat about White People's Problems, the beach colony is led by Tilda Swinton, the whitest woman in the world. Things eventually start to go badly. But not that badly. Timeless' Paterson Joseph plays the only black guy on the island. Spoiler alert: he doesn't get killed!
The whole thing is very watchable, but seems pretty weak tea given the credentials of director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) and Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), whose novel is adapted here by John Hodge. Lightly recommended.
The Odd Couple (1968): adapted by Neil Simon from his own play; directed by Gene Saks; starring Jack Lemmon (Felix Unger), Walter Matthau (Oscar Madison), Monica Evans (Cecily Pigeon), and Carole Shelley (Gwendolyn Pigeon): Neil Simon's funniest play still holds up remarkably well in its initial film version. The direction is straightforward without seeming unduly stagey.
It's Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau who elevate this farce to the level of comedy classic. Lemmon is twitchy and OCD as the fastidious Felix Unger, prototype of the new sensitive man who was just coming down the pike in 1968. Matthau's character, uber-slob Oscar Madison, is a nuanced slob, regretting his divorce. The supporting cast all do fine work while actually looking like real people. The Pigeon Sisters are a special hoot.
The apartment Felix and Oscar share is like the prototype of every improbable Manhattan apartment to come in sitcoms and movies. It seems to have the square footage of a mansion. There's a refreshing darkness to the film that didn't necessarily translate to later TV incarnations -- it opens with Felix bungling his attempt to commit suicide, after all. Highly recommended.
Rachel Getting Married (2008): written by Jenny Lumet; directed by Jonathan Demme; starring Anne Hathaway (Kym), Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel), Bill Irwin (Paul), Anna Deavere Smith (Carol), and Debra Winger (Abby): Searing family drama nabbed Anne Hathaway her first Best Acting Oscar nomination. She does fine work, as do the rest of the cast. We're in the upper-upper Middle Class here as Hathaway's Kym gets out of court-mandated rehab for a weekend to attend her sister's wedding.
Things don't go well, especially at first. Sydney Lumet's daughter Jenny delivered a fine and nuanced script that sometimes plays like a J.D. Salinger short story as rewritten by a perceptive woman. Jonathan Demme's direction makes the hand-held cameras work throughout. Alternately funny and horrifying, there isn't a false note here. Highly recommended.
Ex Machina (2015): written and directed by Alex Garland; starring Domhnall Gleason (Caleb), Oscar Isaac (Nathan), Alicia Vikander (Ava), and Sonoya Mizuno (Kyoko): Critically acclaimed science-fiction film written and directed by the screenwriter of the underappreciated Dredd and the much-appreciated 28 Days Later. This is a nuanced, often creepy walk through Frankenstein territory, with a few nods to The Island of Dr. Moreau. But we're in the present day, in a world where building an Artificial Intelligence involves educating it with social media. Is it any wonder things could go wrong? Or perhaps 'worng'?
The three principals are all very good. Domhnall Gleason is the young programmer brought to his tech mega-billionaire boss' gigantic Northern estate to help test whether or not the machine-intelligence Ava is truly self-aware. Oscar Isaac is the charismatic, mercurial, manipulative tech giant; Alicia Vikander is the the charming, inquisitive, and seemingly innocent robotic Ava. Weird things start to happen, all of them playing out in counter-pointed sterile interiors and Sublime exteriors filmed in Norway in glacier country. Hey, Garland actually seems to know the connection between Frankenstein and the Sublime! Ex Machina is very good science fiction and leaves one wanting more of its middle sections, in which ideas are debated and sometimes yelled about. Highly recommended.
Dredd: written by Alex Garland based on the character created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra; directed by Pete Travis; starring Karl Urban (Judge Dredd), Olivia Thirlby (Judge Anderson), and Lena Headey (Ma-Ma) (2012): This faithful adaptation of the venerable British action-satire comic-book series Judge Dredd would have been a big hit in the early 1980's. It's old-school action, a somewhat low-key day-in-the-life movie in the vein of John Carpenter's Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13.
In the post-apocalyptic urban sprawl of MegaCity One (population 800 million), which occupies much of America's East Coast and stands above a countryside devastated by war and pollution (The Cursed Earth), police officers are judges, juries, and executioners if need be. Judge Dredd is the best of them.
With a new drug on the streets and Lena Headey's psychotic crime boss in control of an entire residential block/building, Judge Dredd and trainee Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) walk into a killing zone. And for about 70 minutes, they try to fight their way out of it.
Karl Urban is solid as Dredd, a character who never removes his helmet. Thirlby is also good as the psychic Anderson, who gets some great on-the-job training here as everyone tries to kill the two Judges. The movie does a nice job of capturing the odd action-satire of its original: Dredd is both a Dirty-Harry-style badass and a pointed commentary on Dirty-Harry-style badasses.
It's too bad this bombed, as I'd have liked to see the film-makers' take on the whole Judge Death saga. But at least this helped wash the memory of the horrible, horrible, horrible 1990's Judge Dredd, starring Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider, out of my head, though obviously not completely. Easy the Ferg! Recommended.
