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patgreene
Reviews
Road to Perdition (2002)
Frustratingly good
*Warning: possible spoilers (Sorry, I generally try to avoid spoilers, but I have to vent about this movie, and I don't think I can avoid it)
This is a good movie. It is frustrating because it could have been, should have been, a GREAT movie. It fails to move beyond mere goodness by the timidity with which the filmmaker approaches the ultimate destiny of its main characters. You could foretell the ending halfway through. Afterwards, a woman behind me in the theatre said "It ended the way it had to." She intended it as a compliment. I agreed with her, but I saw it as an indictment. Unlike "The Godfather", "The Road to Perdition" tidies everything up in a nice package. The filmmaker lacked the courage to allow moral ambiguity to remain, or for the characters to really change. At the end of the film, we are left with no questions remaining about the characters and their futures. There is no sense of "What happens next?" (This is in contrast to Mendes' "American Beauty," which really *was* a great movie.) Great themes (violence, honor, the relationship between fathers and sons, whether blood is thicker than water) are trotted out, examined, and neatly resolved.
So what makes this movie good? Great performances, stellar visuals. Tom Hanks can't really play completely despicable, but he comes pretty close a number of times in this movie. Paul Newman is terrific as an old man with no illusions. And Tyler Hoechlin, as the younger Michael Sullivan, turns in the best performance by a juvenile actor since Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense." Jude Law brings new meaning to the term creepy as a psychopathic crime photographer. (The makeup people deserve special kudos for making someone as classically handsome as Law so unpleasant to look at.)
The movie is an incredibly visual experience. The visual evocation of time and place -- a midwestern winter during the Depression -- is superlative. I only wish that were enough, but the predictability of the ending undermines the movie as a whole. I left the theatre grieving --not for the characters, but for the truly great movie that might have been.
Ice Age (2002)
Good, not great
I saw this film with five, eight, eleven and forty year old children. Between us, we've seen almost every animated film made in the last twelve years, in most cases multiple times. (We deliberately missed "The Emperor's New Groove" and "El Dorado" after reading early reviews.) The general consensus was that, while not up to the best of the computer-animated genre, it was entertaining and amusing. (I especially liked John Leguizamo's voice for Sid the Sloth.) We rated it as better than "Monster's Inc." but not as good as "Shrek" or either of the "Toy Story" films. Roughly equivalent to "Jimmy Neutron". Or as, my husband pointed out, he wouldn't pay to see it in a theater a second time, but he wouldn't be driven crazy by the kids playing it over and over once we got the DVD, either.
And the more players in the animation field, either traditional or computer-generated, the better, for those people like me who feel that animated films are generally underappreciated as an art form. (Personally, I think the fact that Disney no longer has a lock on quality animated features is all to the good.) I will keep an eye out for new features from this group.
Twilight: Los Angeles (2000)
Simply Amazing -- Breathtaking and Thought-Provoking
This work is breathtaking. The ability of Anna Deavere Smith to transform herself convincingly into a myriad of people who talk about their experience of the Los Angeles riots has to be seen to be believed. She makes us listen to and care about what people from a wide range of vantage points have to say. I defy anyone to watch this all the way through and not be moved and challenged. It should be required viewing for all high school and college students, as well as anyone who wants to better understand this tumultuous event in American history.