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Up
First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who,
with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a
series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a
dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons.
Such, of course, is the perception advanced by promotional materials,
which sell short the latest Pixar picture and can’t prepare you for the
emotional punch of its first few minutes, when it presents the most
heartfelt — the most sincere — love story in recent
memory: the love between a boy and a girl, who become a man and a
woman, who become a husband and a wife, who become a widower and a
memory that haunts the rest of what follows. Rest assured, it gets
funny. And thrilling too as the third act takes place almost entirely
in the sky, atop a mammoth zeppelin piloted by a hero turned villain.
But despite its title, Up is decidedly earthbound: The elderly
Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) spends almost the entire movie schlepping his
house across the South American landscape his wife had always hoped to
visit. Joined by a young boy (Jordan Nagai) in need of company too,
Carl’s literally tethered to a memory, an anchor with a garden hose
wrapped around his torso to keep his home from floating away. (Note: Do
not see Up in 3-D. It’s inessential to the story and altogether
distracting.) Robert Wilonsky
The Brothers Bloom
Writer/director Rian Johnson’s movies — first Brick in
2006, now The Brothers Bloom — are clever and soulful
confabulations. The filmmaker, whose screenplays read like novels,
serves up movies that could play like parodies: Brick was his
gumshoe-in-tennis-shoes noir about a slang-spouting baby Bogart on the
hunt for his lady friend’s killer. Now comes The Brothers Bloom,
a love story — two, actually — that flirts with the con-man
movie clichés with which Johnson ultimately can’t be bothered.
Which is just as well. The genre’s big game is played out, after all:
In a confidence film, everyone is exactly who they say they are, even
when they insist they’re not who you think they are, or something
— a-ha! Johnson dispenses with that phony device up-front;
he doesn’t have an endgame gotcha up his sleeve and isn’t interested in
making a puzzle to be solved. Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien
Brody) are, from first scene to last, precisely who we think they are:
lonely little fabulists who tell stories to find the joy that eludes
them in “the real world.” When they’re boys, Stephen spins his
profitable fictions to find his brother the perfect girl; as adults, he
does it to land Bloom the love of his life, Penelope (Rachel Weisz),
the Jersey heiress so wealthy and bored that she collects hobbies.
Clearly, Penelope’s in need of an adventure, which Johnson provides, in
a movie in which affectation gives way to affection till it steals,
well, only your heart. Robert Wilonsky
Lifelines
The poster for Lifelines slavishly imitates the Daniel Clowes
drawing used for Happiness, accurately telegraphing its
tabloid-level density of dysfunction (maybe not the wisest marketing
move, given Todd Solondz’s bankrupt rep). Though both films feature
punching-bag favorite Jane Adams, tyro filmmaker Rob Margolies at least
aims for redemption rather than post-P.C. button-pushing in this taxing
foray into psychopathological bookkeeping. A Saturday pile-on of
therapy sessions for the Bernstein family provides the bleeding heart
of the film as well as its numbing formula of root causes for its
characters’ mental makeup. Dad (Josh Pais) shuffles out of the closet,
teen Meghan (Dreama Walker) verbally disembowels Mom (Adams) whenever
possible, and stuttering eldest Michael (Robbie Sublett) recounts
witnessing his smart-mouthed kid brother, Spencer (Jacob Kogan, AKA
Joshua), endure the sine qua non experience of suburban-set
indies. Despite the switch-off response that this litany may trigger,
Pais and Sublett wrestle down a couple of the impossible-to-deliver
monologues, and there’s something to the flat, even bored exhaustion
behind the traumas. Nicolas Rapold
Tyson
Director James Toback’s documentary about former heavyweight boxing
champ Mike Tyson isn’t a traditional nonfiction portrait so much as a
feature-length interview in which the retired boxer remains front and
center for virtually the entire running time. The only talking head is
his own, albeit one that speaks in multiple, sometimes
self-contradictory voices. The movie covers a lot of ground: Even
boxing fans who think they know everything there is to know about Tyson
may be surprised by the bracing candor with which he dissects his
desire to fight, his penchant for overindulgence, his 1992 rape
conviction, and the infamous Evander Holyfield bout that ended with
part of Holyfield’s ear on the canvas. Toback, a fellow traveler on the
path of obsession and desire, wears down the calluses Tyson has built
up over decades spent as a mass-media punching bag, taking the
ex-fighter explicitly on his own terms, even if those terms are
constantly in flux. Much too smart to pretend to give us “the Mike
Tyson we never knew” or any similarly reductive postulation, Toback
doesn’t come to lionize or to demonize, to goad his subject into a
tearful breakdown (though Tyson does cry) or climactic
Frost/Nixon apologia. Instead, he gives us Iron Mike in all his
monolithic multitudes and allows us, for a brief moment, to peer
alongside him into the existential abyss. Scott Foundas