What Are 3 Movies I Recently Watched?

Hugo (2011): adapted by John Logan from the novel by Brian Selznick; directed by Martin Scorsese; starring Ben Kingsley (George Melies), Sacha Baron Cohen (Station Inspector), Asa Butterfield (Hugo Cabret), Chloe Grace Moretz (Isabelle), Helen McCrory (Mama Jeanne), Christopher Lee (M. Labisse), Emily Mortimer (Lisette), Michael Stuhlbarg (Rene Tabard), and Jude Law (Mr. Cabret): Hugo pretty much swept the 2011 artistic and technical Academy Awards for sound, art direction, visual effects, and cinematography. It was Martin Scorsese's first foray into 3-D film-making AND Young-Adult-friendly narrative.

On the small, non-3-D screen, Hugo still boasts some impressive set and production design as it depicts a somewhat fanciful Paris c. 1932. Unbeknownst to the authorities as embodied in Station Inspector Sacha Baron Cohen, the orphaned Hugo Cabret keeps the clocks running in the film's central location, the main Paris train station. 

Hugo also works to repair an automaton rescued from museum storage by his late father. And unbeknownst to Hugo, the cranky toy-stall owner at the station is seminal French film director Georges Melies. Is that a spoiler?

Hugo is slow in its initial hour or so, and the supporting characters never seem to be drawn sharply or funnily enough. However, the movie looks great, and Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz make a charming pair of investigators. More time devoted to recreations of Melies' fanciful films would have been nice -- there's a little too much lead-foot in the movie's shoes when it comes to film's ability to transport a viewer to new, strange places. Scorsese may simply be too rooted in the quotidian, no matter the goodness of his intentions, and John Logan (Gladiator, Star Trek: Nemesis) is something of a literal-minded plodder when it comes to the fantastic. Nonetheless, recommended.

The Boy (2016): written by Stacey Menear; directed by William Brent Bell; starring Lauren Cohan (Greta), Rupert Evans (Malcolm), and Ben Robson (Cole): Who names their son Brahms? Oh, well. Lauren Cohan plays an American hired as a nanny/au pair by an elderly English couple. She's there to take care of their eight-year-old son while they go on vacation. The son is a life-sized doll. OK!

The Walking Dead's Cohan carries much of the film's best moments, as improbable as they often seem. And the movie plays fair until the epilogue, which one could argue is as much an imagined nightmare as the 'hand shots' that appear near the ends of Carrie and Deliverance. Rupert Evans brings a muted affability to the thankless role of New English Love Interest. The doll is pretty creepy. 

The director whiffs several times on disguising the fact that the movie was shot in and around Victoria, British Columbia rather than England. Either that or The Boy takes place in an alternate universe in which England has redwood trees. Lightly recommended.

Spider-man (2002): created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by David Koepp; directed by Sam Raimi; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/ Spider-man), Willem Dafoe (Norman Osborn/ Green Goblin), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborn), Cliff Robertson (Uncle Ben), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson): Still a mostly jolly, romantic romp, this Spider-man. Maybe a bit too romantic, but the doomed love affair of Mary Jane and Spider-man was a key factor in drawing in a better-than-average-female-audience (for superhero and/or action movies, that is). 

Raimi and company dumb Spider-man down, eliminating the comic-book wish-fulfillment genius that allowed him to create mechanical web-shooters and many other awesome Spidey gadgets, which is a shame -- organic web-shooters are gross, and suggest that Peter Parker must spend a lot of time eating high-protein foods after a particularly heavy bout of web-slinging. 

Still, the cast -- even James Franco as Parker pal Harry Osborn -- is a delight. Would that they had come up with a better rendition of the Green Goblin's comic-book costume, though, if only so that many scenes didn't look like Spider-man vs. the Green Mattel Chocobot. Recommended.

Twins

Cape Fear: adapted by James R. Webb from the novel The Executioners by John D. McDonald; directed by J. Lee Thompson; starring Greogry Peck (Sam Bowden), Robert Mitchum (Max Cady), Polly Bergen (Peggy Bowden), Lori Martin (Nancy Bowden), Martin Balsam (Chief Dutton), and Telly Savalas (Sievers) (1962): This 1962 thriller misses greatness by the gap between the competent direction of J. Lee Thompson and whatever a master like Alfred Hitchcock might have added to the mix. Cape Fear is well worth watching, but one can dream.

The title refers to a river in North Carolina where our protagonist (Gregory Peck) and his family have a cabin and a houseboat. And that's where the movie will climax, after Peck, as prosecuting attorney Sam Bowden, runs through every other gambit he can think of to get ex-convict Robert Mitchum, as Max Cady, to leave him and his family alone. Peck's testimony helped put Cady away years ago for a sexual assault and battery case. Now, Cady wants vengeance.

A strong supporting cast, led by Martin Balsam and Telly Savalas, helps keep things interesting. But it's Robert Mitchum's portrayal of the obsessed and monstrous Cady that makes the movie sing. Here as in the earlier The Night of the Hunter, Mitchum creates a classic movie villain. And he's utterly believeable even in some of the more overheated moments. Slow-moving, almost stately, Mitchum's a full-sized creep-out. He underplays Cady throughout, increasing the menace by decreasing the potential for melodramatic acting excess.

Peck, who produced the film, does that whole Gregory Peck thing in which he's a pillar of decency. A better director might have tightened up some of Peck's reactions to things in a few scenes -- at times Bowden seems a bit slow to react. And a couple of the scenes in which Bowden's or daughter get isolated with Cady around creak and groan with the weight of implausibility. They're saved by the fact that we accept that people whose lives have hitherto been undisturbed by the threat of violence may indeed not take a threat seriously for awhile, regardless of evidence.

The movie simmers and simmers before boiling over in its shadowy, desperate climax. There are other fine setpieces prior to the end (which makes me think of the then-nascent Viet Nam War), especially Cady's pursuit of Bowden's daughter through her school. Cape Fear frames the whole thing as a battle of wits, one in which Cady is surprisingly hypercompetent. He may be a beast, as we're told again and again, but he's a smart one. Recommended.

Cape Fear: adapted by Wesley Strick from the screenplay by James R. Webb that adapted the novel The Executioners by John D. McDonald; directed by Martin Scorsese; starring Robert De Niro (Max Cady), Nick Nolte (Sam Bowden), Jessica Lange (Leigh Bowden), Juliette Lewis (Dannielle Bowden), Joe Don Baker (Claude Kersek), Robert Mitchum (Lieutenant Elgart) and Gregory Peck (Lee Heller) (1991): Somewhere in some alternate universe, there's a remake of Cape Fear directed by Steven Spielberg that stars Harrison Ford as upright attorney Sam Bowden and Bill Murray as obsessive ex-con Max Cady. I'd love to see that movie.

This movie, director Scorsese's first real thriller, isn't quite so interesting. Where the original had Robert Mitchum underplaying as the menacing Cady, this one has Robert De Niro in full-blown cuckoo-banana mode. And eventually Scorsese and the writing join De Niro.

It's still an enjoyable movie. There are some genuine scares and thrills, especially in the first 75 minutes. But then the movie cooks up a lengthy set-piece in the Bowden house that acts as a false climax before taking us to the Cape Fear River, as the original did, for the final showdown. The false climax is excruciating, though not in a good way, and increasingly witless.

By the time a Hitchcock homage rolls around and Nolte starts slipping and sliding in a pool of blood, the thrills have been replaced by unintentional comedy. Five minutes later comes a revelation that caused the entire theatre I saw Cape Fear in when it came out to erupt into jeering laughter. And it is a ridiculous moment.

Scorsese doesn't seem to be invested one whit in making a believeably overwrought thriller, but it's De Niro who's the biggest saboteur of verisimilitude. He's a superhuman blabbermouth. Unlike Mitchum's mostly soft-spoken Cady, De Niro never shuts up, and a lot of his talk is pseudointellectual babble about philosophy and the Bible and great American writers.

Admittedly, it's not so much that he's an expert on Henry Miller or Thomas Wolfe that staggers the imagination -- it's that Bowden's 15-year-old daughter has been assigned Thomas Wolfe's gargantuan Look Homeward, Angel for her summer-school English class. Really? No wonder she's having problems in school. What's the next text assigned, James Joyce's Ulysses?

Because the entire movie exists within a frame narrative, one could argue that the most ridiculous aspects of the movie are embellishments of the narrator. Even then, the movie's sudden loss of conviction is damning.

It's fun to see Scorsese try and fail to make a conventional thriller, however, and the acting by Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, and Joe Don Baker is fine, though Nolte does seem miscast as Bowden. Indeed, Nolte's acting skill-set really suggests that he should have played Max Cady. That would have been really interesting. Still, by the time De Niro starts speaking in tongues, you really will wish he'd just shut up. Possibly because he sounds an awful lot like Porky Pig. Lightly recommended.

The Dark Brotherhood

Goodfellas: adapted by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese from Pileggi's non-fiction book Wiseguy; directed by Martin Scorsese; starring Ray Liotta (Henry Hill), Robert DeNiro (James Conway), Joe Pesci (Tommy DeVito), Lorraine Bracco (Karen Hill), and Paul Sorvino (Paul Cicero) (1990): One of Martin Scorsese's three or four masterpieces is also the last truly great film he directed, though he's remained interesting to watch and more accomplished than the vast majority of American directors. It's also far and away his most popular film, though that sometimes seems to be because some people respond to Goodfellas as if it were a light-hearted comedy despite the seemingly endless wave of brutal, unglamourous killings in the movie.

Goodfellas works as a groundlevel, non-romantic response to Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films. It's also clearly the father of The Sopranos: David Chase's great HBO gangster epic goes where Goodfellas went before, only with a lot more time and space to flesh out its often toxic but recognizably human characters.

For the most part based on a true story, Goodfellas follows the New York crime adventures of half-Sicilian, half-Irish Henry Hill from his childhood in the 1950's to his exit from the Mob life in the early 1980's. Ray Liotta is terrific as Hill, who acts as co-narrator of the movie along with his wife, played by a sharp and sympathetic Lorraine Bracco. The rest of the main cast gives us a focused Robert De Niro, an award-winning Joe Pesci, and a quiet and brooding Paul Sorvino as Hill's three main Mob connections.

Among all the supporting actors who would go on to roles in The Sopranos and later mob movies and TV shows is a young, skinny Samuel L. Jackson; Scorsese's mother also appears with a winning cameo as the doting Italian mother of Joe Pesci's monstrous but loving son.

Pesci's showy role steals a lot of scenes -- he's the world's most dangerous clown, a sociopathic chatterbox with almost no fuse at all. De Niro's role is quieter and trickier as the seemingly genial James Conway who, though valuable to this segment of the Mob, can never become a "made man" because, like Hill, he's not fully Sicilian. Joe Pesci can be made, though. Boy, can he be made.

Scorsese's camera swoops and dodges and sometimes comes to rest, unflinchingly, on the grotesque aftermaths of assorted murders. Popular hits of the times rise and fall on the soundtrack; different singers at the favourite hang-out mark the passage of time.

Scorsese even nods to a famous scene from his Taxi Driver which the censorship board required him to overlay with a red filter because the violence was deemed too bloody. Here, that overlay now comes from something within the film world -- the tail-lights of a parked car. And there's very little blood to be seen. That all comes without colour overlay in other scenes, without any masking of the ugliness.

One of Goodfellas' great accomplishments was to make the appeal of crime as visceral as its horrors, and then to up-end all the chummy associations as the movie comes to its climax. Henry Hill's love of organized crime may come from the camaraderie and the financial benefits, and from the way it makes him a man who can get into any show or any nightclub whenever he wants. But the movie strips all that away as things tighten up. In the end you're a man alone, with everyone gunning for you. The honour of thieves is an illusion born of good times.

Is this Scorsese's best film? I suppose my other candidates for that position would be Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Goodfellas offers a more expansively novelistic world than either of those movies, and it certainly offers a slightly lighter touch in many scenes. Really, it's a toss-up -- the films supply such markedly different experiences that it's almost impossible to judge them in relation to one another.  Highly recommended.

Out of the Past

Shutter Island, adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a novel by Dennis Lehane, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow (2009-2010): Scorsese's best film in a decade or more is a slightly overlong and a bit overbaked but still fascinating thriller.

The year is 1954, and DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal sent to a high-security psychiatric facility on the otherwise unpopulated Shutter Island to discover how a female patient managed to disappear from a locked room. Only a once-a-day ferry connects the island, 11 miles off the East Coast, to the mainland. Where did she go? And why is everything and everyone so gosh-darned sinister?

Scorsese has created a loving homage to the first cinematic wave of film noir, the murky post-WWII thrillers that eventually became their own sub-genre of movies. The psychological and physical damage of World War Two to returning American soldiers was a prime constituent of first-wave noir, and it is here as well. The liberation of Dachau marked then-soldier Daniels for life; the murder of his wife in a fire set by an arsonist further damaged his psyche. And now he's on an island of severely damaged men and women, and severely creepy doctors and nurses.

Even Daniels's partner Chuck (Ruffalo) is a mystery, having just joined Daniels for this assignment. The chief psychiatrists, played by Kingsley and Von Sydow, seem weirdly menacing and unhelpful. The warden sounds crazier than the inmates. A hugely destructive storm traps everyone on the island. What will happen next? And what does a cryptic note left by the vanished patient, referring to a "Rule of Four" and a "67", really mean?

Paranoia seeps into everything. The landscape and settings drip with Gothic menace even in broad daylight. Daniels begins to see a larger conspiracy at work, one that reaches to the top levels of government. And what's inside the heavily guarded lighthouse? I guessed the major plot twist half-an-hour into the film, but that only added to my enjoyment of the way the whole thing unfolds, and the other twists that come along. Highly recommended.