SALT

Written by Kurt Wimmer

Directed by Philip Noyce

Starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Evelyn Salt: I'm not who you think I am.

The tagline for SALT poses the question, “Who is Salt?” and after sitting through the incredibly fast-paced spy thriller, I can honestly say that I have no idea who this Salt chick is really.  I can say that the movie that is named for her is riddled with plot holes but when the heroine is as hot and adept at avoiding those holes as Angelina Jolie is, I don’t think it really matters.

When I see a Jolie action film, I’m not looking for anything particularly challenging in terms of depth.  This bodes well for SALT as what little depth director Philip Noyce tries to infuse into the film is shaky at best.  Jolie is Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative who has done incredible things for her country in her time with the agency.  As to what country’s interests she actually serves, well, her loyalties are a little gray there.  When a Russian defector walks into the CIA building and announces that a Russian operative named Evelyn Salt is going to kill the Russian president, her credibility is shot despite her achievements.  She couldn’t possibly be a Russian spy, right?  Wrong.  She could actually be part of a decades-old Russian project that trained spies as children and then implanted them into the United States to lie dormant until the time came years later for them to do what they were always programmed to do.  Like I said earlier, as long as Jolie is running around, being her bad-ass, awesome self and narrowly avoiding defeat while she jumps from one moving vehicle to the next, I can accept a plot as insipid as this one.

Jolie makes SALT.  She doesn’t make it into any sort of masterpiece but her commitment to the character, from the numerous stunts she is reported to carry out herself to her intoxicating Russian accent, elevates what would have certainly been a tired rehash of the Bourne films into a similar franchise for the ladies.

TAKING WOODSTOCK

Written by James Schamus
Directed by Ang Lee
Starring Demetri Martin, Imelda Staunton, Emile Hirsch, Live Schreiber and Eugene Levy


Max Yasgur: What do you think of the mess we’re making? Wonderful isn’t it?

Forty years have passed since the little town of Bethel, New York, took in over 500,000 hopped up hippies and, after three crazy days, became the definitive music festival known informally today as Woodstock. TAKING WOODSTOCK is the new film by two-time Academy-Award winner, Ang Lee. “Making Woodstock” would have been a much better title as essentially this is what Lee treats us to - an occasionally quirky but mostly uneventful backstage look at one of the biggest events in rock and roll history.

Down on his luck interior decorator, Elliot Teichberg (Comedy Central’s Demetri Martin in his first lead film role), was just spending another boring summer at his parents’ motel in the Catskills when his annual music festival suddenly went from records being played on the lawn with a few people on blankets to half a million people rolling around in the mud. Martin’s earnest face is pleasing enough to carry the film, his expressions going from wide-eyed and naïve to determined and brave, but James Schamus’s script reduces him to little more than a tour guide for the audience to tag along with from one expected obstacle to the next. Progressive theatre troupes run around naked while local citizens complain that their town has been taken over by degenerates. There was apparently very little insight to be found amongst all the drug-addled ramblings.


Lee attempts to weave equal parts peace and equal parts commodity into the Woodstock equation but he leaves out one of the most important parts, the music. At the time, the kids who never made it to the show just tripped out all weekend and had a plenty good time regardless. With no single concert scene to be seen though, Lee got me there but he left me cold sober and shivering in the mud.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE

Written by David Benioff and Skip Woods
Directed by Gavin Hood
Starring Hugh Jackman, Live Schreiber, Ryan Reynolds, Lynn Collins and Danny Huston


Kayla Silverfox: You’re not an animal, Logan. What you have is a gift?
Logan/Wolverine: A gift? You can return a gift.

I guess I got caught up in wanting it all to get started. I was treated to an unseasonal bout of good weather after a particularly tepid spring at the movies and I wanted to watch things get blown up already. I can’t come up with any other reason why I would have been suddenly excited to see X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, the summer’s first major event picture. Well, I’m sure staring at Hugh Jackman’s arms had something to do with it too but I’m not usually that easily coaxed by rugged beauty into seeing potential schlock. Yet, there I was, popcorn in hand, for a big, bad popcorn movie. Pitched as a prequel to the X-Men films, director Gavin Hood, was set to show us how a little boy born in the North West Territories in 1845 turned out to be the Wolverine, arguably Marvel Comic’s most popular X-Man. Instead, what he did was put together a giant showcase for Jackman’s brawn and little else.


I’ve never quite understood why Wolverine is as loved as he is by so many men out there. Is it because he is rugged and brooding? Because he keeps to himself and doesn’t exhbit any emotions no matter what the situation is? Or is it because he is genetically designed to beat the crap out of people? Unfortunately, the story of his origins did little to make it all any clearer to me. If anything, I would think that this film would actually take away from some of the mystery behind the man-beast. To clarify, what the concept of the X-Men Origin series is designed to do is to show who these icons were before they joined the X-Men, not to show how they became to be mutants to begin with. Before he became Wolverine, James Logan was a lumberjack up in the Canadian Rockies. He set himself up there for a peaceful existence after spending decades of his life (he doesn’t age all that fast) fighting other people’s battles in war after war. Aside from chopping down trees and enjoying the scenery half naked in the morning, he also falls in love there, with a beautiful woman by the name of Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). I may be wrong here but why would a man who is revered for living by his animal instincts need to be shown searching for inner peace and sharing his heart with someone?


Of course, the honeymoon doesn’t last and Wolverine must take on an army man named, Stryker (Danny Huston), who is kidnapping mutants so that he can harness their power to make one great super mutant that will then, in turn, be able to kill all of the world’s actual mutants, while engaging in a long time death match with his brother, Victor (Liev Schreiber). Screenwriters, David Benioff and Skip Woods, must be confusing me with someone who gives a shit. No, I’m not being flippant; I am merely quoting some of the banalities they pass off as intense dialogue throughout the film. WOLVERINE’s weakest element is certainly its screenplay. Taking on Hood (TSOTSI, RENDITION) as director, was supposed to bring a darker tone to the film, which would have been brilliantly appropriate considering the inherently dark nature of the character. Unfortunately, the script Hood had to work with never allowed for an exploration of the scary corners of Wolverine’s mind; it was always torn between potentially going there and making certain the tone stays summertime light.


Jackman has a lot at stake with X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE. Not only is he the face of the film but he is also a producer on the project. Success here, which is essentially inevitable no matter what is said about it, will determine just how many more films in the origin series get made. More importantly, Jackman needs to demonstrate that he can carry a major action film all by himself. Fortunately for him, he has no problems doing that whatsoever. Unfortunately for the film though, focusing on Jackman alone left very little else of note to cut through to the surface.



(ps. I would have graded slightly lower but any film that allows Jackman to run around naked for ten minutes has to get bonus points.)

DEFIANCE

Written by Clayton Frohman and Edward Zwick
Directed by Edward Zwick
Starring Daniel Craig, Live Schreiber and Jamie Bell


Viktor Panchenko: But Jews do not fight.
Tuvia Bielski: These Jews do.

DEFIANCE opens with what felt to me like an unintentional act of its own defiance. Black and white footage made to look archival, graces the screen in a harrowing montage. There are the screams of children being pulled away from their parents; there are the images of Nazis senselessly putting guns to the backs of people’s heads and pulling the triggers. There is even a score driven by the violin work of Joshua Bell that sounds an awful lot like the one in that Spielberg movie with the girl in the red coat. Director, Edward Zwick’s message is clear. He doesn’t want to talk about the holocaust. Why should he? We all already know the story there. In case we don’t, he is sure to throw in a few facts up on screen between the quick and horrible imagery. The holocaust is not the story he wants to tell. However, reducing the holocaust to a montage so that the audience is brought up to speed is such an offensive trivialization of a mind-blowing tragedy that it is a miracle that DEFIANCE ever manages to recover from its first few moments.


The story that Zwick is in such a rush to get to is actually well worth telling, just not worth the steps he took to get there. Daniel Craig, Live Schreiber and Jamie Bell are the Bielski brothers. The SS has killed their parents and most other siblings and they have sought refuge in a nearby forest. Before long, they run into a number of other people who have found themselves in the same situation. The numbers grow into a community and even though they barely have shelter to keep themselves warm through the winter and rarely get to eat more than a bowl of potato soup, they have something far more valuable; they have their freedom. As DEFIANCE is quite pleased to boast, the Bielski’s beautiful acts and the thousands of lives that were saved by these acts are the untold holocaust story. Unfortunately, the story itself isn’t told all that genuinely. Instead, Zwick, along with co-writer, Clayton Frohman, chooses to highlight conventional devices like brotherly alpha male conflicts instead of focusing on the gripping reality around them.


Like Zwick’s last offering, BLOOD DIAMOND, DEFIANCE is set in a dire situation to make the conventional plot points seem that much more horrific. It is the kind of movie that makes me wish it would have been better than it was as the story itself is quite moving. Somewhere in the middle of the lengthy stay in the forest, DEFIANCE finally finds its footing and allows the true bravery of the Bielski’s to shine. I only wish Zwick’s sense of satisfaction in being the first to show the Jews taking a stand and fighting back didn’t taint the whole thing. Oh, and I think someone should tell him that Spielberg beat him to that punch too.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

Written and Directed by Liev Schreiber

When a movie is called “Everything Is Illuminated”, does this mean that the film is well lit? If that’s the case, then I guess everything actually is illuminated in actor-turned-director Liev Schreiber’s first film. However, if the intent was to refer to some mental or spiritual illumination, I would say “Everything” is a vast exaggeration.

Quirky characters do not automatically translate into funny ones. Three men make up the main characters on this road trip. They are Alex (Eugene Hutz), a young Russian, gangsta breakdancer who helps his father out by assisting author Jonathan Saffron Foer (Elijah Wood) on a tour to find a woman who can connect him to his grandfather during the second World War. They are driven around on this tour by Alex’s grandfather (Boris Leskin) who played his own sordid part in the war. Alex’s grandfather does not speak English and is the designated driver despite being legally blind. The assumption is he fakes it. Meanwhile, as the author of the book this film is based upon, Elijah Wood has white, pasty skin, a slick, geeky haircut and thick, dark-rimmed glasses. As a collector, he picks up little reminders here and there and places them in tiny plastic baggies. The image is comical but more caricature than character. Consequently, by the time anything meaningful or painful happens in these characters’ journey, you feel nothing as they were never real people to begin with.