"Saving Mr. Banks" (2013)

The image Disney projects as a company is sold primarily through its films, and if we take those as any measure of what the company wishes us to believe than they are the cheeriest, merriest, most whimsical do-gooders the world-over. But that's simply not true. The company has a darker side and one it's all too keen to sweep under the rug. Saving Mr. Banks, a film about Walt's efforts to obtain the rights to P.L. Traver's Mary Poppins, re-writes some of the historical truth in its story. Travers was never completely won over by the charm and grace of Disney, and she ultimately gave up the rights do to being strong-armed by Disney and also desperately requiring money.

Saving Mr. Banks sugarcoats this history. It turns Disney into a sage old fella who loves Travers property, wants to do right by it, and also wishes to help her come to terms with her past. The capitalist interests in Travers' book largely play out in the background.

Though marketing has attempted to sell the film as a battle of wills between Travers (Emma Thompson) and Disney (Tom Hanks), the film is less about their relationship than it is Travers being haunted by the personal history that informed the book. Much of the film focuses on flashbacks to Travers troubled childhood where her free-wheeling father (Colin Farrell) turns life into a series of imaginative tall-tales to cover up an awful reality of financial insecurity and domestic strife. The film makes a series of one-to-one pop-Freudian psychological suggestions as to why Travers is the stubborn, prickly individual she is and why the story of Mary Poppins matters so deeply to her.

Though some of this feels under-baked and woefully sentimental, the film is ably supported by some strong performances, particularly Thompson. Travers is purposely a hard character to like but Thompson earns our sympathy, turning her self-righteous wisecracking into a cynic's weary defense. And there may be no one better suited to play the Disney of myth than the charming every man of Hanks. Notable among supporting roles is a pleasingly upbeat Paul Giammati as a unfailingly hopeful limo driver who drives Travers around and slowly garners her trust. Annie Rose Buckley gives one of the best performances by a child actor in a while as the young Travers, wonderfully conveying the unblinkering rose-colored idealization of a child and the earnest confusion of someone witnessing things beyond her years.

Saving Mr. Banks plays its hand far too neatly with its conscious PR-efforts. But it's still a pleasant film -- in a way Disney movies irresistibly, sometimes cloyingly, are -- though perhaps too pleasant considering some of its darker moments it too often attempts to soften. The film breezes by with the cheer that a spoonful of sugar offers. But then again that sugar comes with some bitter medicine the film wishes for us to ignore.

Grade: ★★

"Universal Soldier: Regeneration" (2009)

Universal Soldier: Regeneration is a lean, unpretentious action film. It's so single-minded in its goals and so direct and too the point that it can be easy to overlook the surprising elegance of its action. Plot matters little in this direct-to-video film about Russian terrorists holding hostage the children of the Russian prime minister inside a Chernobyl jury-rigged with bombs to release its pent up radiation (try saying that ten times fast). The film doesn't dwell on what's taking place, constantly pushing forward to the next action beat, all formally controlled and well-choreographed. Action heavies like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, and new underground action star Scott Adkins are given opportunities to show off their capability as fantastically muscular brutes able to withstand blow after blow. As Regeneration proves, action movies don't need to be showy in order to show off.

Grade: ★★ 

"Stories We Tell" (2013)

There are directors twice Sarah Polley's age who don't come anywhere close to how perceptive and sensitive her films are. Her debut Away From Her, a beautiful story dealing will Alzheimer's, displays the skill of someone far beyond their years. While her second film Take This Waltz felt a little too trifling for its own good, it was a warm and compassionate film dealing with relationships and the complicated history of those relationships. Polley's latest film Stories We Tell is possibly her most accomplished film to date.

Polley delves into her family's history after discovering the father who raised her is not her birth parent. She interviews many members of her family and friends of her mother to try to understand what happened. Polley's mother, a vivacious woman stifled by her second marriage, is alleged to have had an affair which led to the conception of Sarah. However, since her mother passed away, it is difficult to really know what exactly happened.

While telling the story, and Polley sees it foremost as a story, Polley begins to investigate the limitations of film as medium to grasp the truth. Her main interest is in acknowledging the distortive power of documentary film. As a recognition of this, Polley purposely chooses not to remove herself as the documentarian, leaving in talking heads and pointing to her role as the arbitrator of what got left on the cutting room floor.

Though Polley wants to give equal weight to all voices affected by the events surrounding the infidelity, she also notes the impossibility for a complete picture of what took place to be revealed. Memory, opinions and gaps in information will cause an inability to fully realize what really took place.

Polley makes too fine of a point on her themes and her intents towards the films end, but this lack of subtly serves a purpose. Polley, like the film's title implies, believes that in telling stories we will into existence "truth", crafting the perceived reality of events. In this regard, Polley is the ultimate storyteller and determined the "truth" we see in the film.

Speaking of the film in these terms makes it all sound like a playful exercise in structure, but Polley is also an affectionate filmmaker. She likes listening to her subjects. She enjoys hearing a good story told and she enlists many people to lovingly recount their version of what took place. She's sympathetic to all of them, and she grasps as hard as she can to figure out the mysterious woman who was her mother. In the end, Polley uses her filmmaking as an act of coping, of working through her feelings about her discoveries.

Grade: ★★★★

"Sullivan's Travels" (1941)

As I watched writer-director Preston Sturges comedy classic Sullivan's Travels, I was struck by how brilliantly the film skewers class privilege. It's a film about a man, film director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), who has been so insulated from the struggles of working class Americans that he thinks it's an ingenious idea to set out on a roadtrip to find out how the other half lives. Anyone who has even had the tiniest taste of money-problems knows that it's not anything someone wants to willingly have to deal with. Yet Sullivan dives into the journey with the enthusiastic brio someone taking a trip to the Bahamas might express. He starts the journey unable to escape his publicist, producers and other members of his entourage, but even when he convinces them to let him do the trip on his own he keeps winding up right back in their company -- like some great cosmic joke on his silly and ultimately self-serving scheme. In time, Sullivan does learn a great deal about those less fortunate than himself, and suffers through terrible ordeals which finally cause him to wind up as a prisoner on a work-gang. The ending finds him crawling back into the cocoon of his privilege. His great lesson in all of it is not to make a drama based on his experiences but to scrap his knowledge in favor of making comedies to give the poor an nice escape from their difficult lives. It's a funny tail-end Depression Era film with Sullivan constantly out of his depth, or believing himself to be but really obliviously not. Though it tries to expose the trying-poverty of the working class, the film is so broad in its criticism that it hardly says anything other than "man, it sucks to be poor". The film is really better at the flipside of its engagement, revealing the limitations of those who have the money to affect large scale social change. They're really too ignorant of the situation they wish to fix to actually create meaningful change and reform.

Grade: ★★★

"It's a Disaster" (2013)

 

You're dating this person and things are going well, well enough that they want to introduce you to their closest friends. So they take you to small get-together, a couples' brunch, and suddenly you're thrown into the middle of all their drama and history. It's a Disaster understands how nerve-racking and strange, but all-too-familiar, this type of situation is, and uses David Cross' excellent straight-man act as a gateway into the souring group dynamics of old friends harboring bitter resentments and secrets. For the first third of its run-time, the film plays like a well-scripted stage drama, like a Neil Simon farce. People exit in and out of rooms, and talk past one another sharing important information in an Altman-esque fashion. Things go nuclear with affairs, divorce plans and other terrible truths revealed.

And then things literally go nuclear, and the film's title takes on duel meanings. Dirty bombs destroy every major city in the United States, and, at first, the characters don't even pick up on it, they're so caught up in their drama that it doesn't even register. They scramble to make the house sustainable against nuclear fall-out. But even as they make the house hospitable, they can't stop bickering, fighting and sticking their nose into everyone's business. The apocalyptic circumstances serve to heighten the drama and forces them to face up to their problems.

The film's strength derives from letting apocalypse simply play out in the background while the relationships take precedence. The film doesn't aim for high concept. Everything is suggested off-screen, never actually shown and it rarely upstages the characters, acting as catalyst to watch the characters expose the anger and irritation hiding behind barely sustained facades. It's a Disaster is aided by uniformly great performances for well-written and distinguished characters. Every character reacts to civilization's downfall in different ways which are granted their craziness by the equally crazy circumstances. People begin exposing all manner of hidden tics and inner states, demonstrating the dysfunctional nature of these individuals and their relationships but also oddly reaffirming their codependency. 

Grade: ★★★

"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968)

Sergio Leone's films were really little more than exercises in style, but they looked so different from the westerns that had come before them that it became impossible to ignore what they were doing. Plus, Leone's style is self-consciously splashy to the point of causing it to almost transcend mere style. It's often style as substance with Leone utilizing the languorous build-ups, obtuse cuts and sensuous close-ups in order to ratchet up tension and craft long stretches that act like mood pieces. There's also more at stake in Leone's films than just style for stye's sake as seen in Once Upon a Time in the West. Through the story of multiple individuals vying for control of invaluable land cut-through by future railroad tracks, Leone tells a tale of ever-changing alliances, double-crosses and fights for power, revenge and dignity. It's never just a story of good and evil, but a complex investigation of honor and the meaning of honor in a place only just starting to come to terms with being law-abiding. It also features a great cast, including Henry Fonda getting to be atypically villainous, Charles Bronson taking an excellent stab at the "Man With No Name" archetype, and Claudia Cardinale taking on the rich role of a resilient, recently widowed woman who refuses to succumb to the viciousness of the world around her.

Grade: ★★★

"Wes Craven's New Nightmare" (1994)

Wes Craven's New Nightmare could so easily have been an exercise in meta, and to an extent is that. But it also keenly taps into what has always made the Nightmare on Elm Street series so playful and truly frightening: the inability to differentiate between reality and dreams (and also fiction and reality). On the most basic level, bringing back the actors from the original film, particularly Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund, in order to play themselves is part of what makes the film self-aware fun, and really altogether work. But it also cuts out almost all expectations. There are no longer any of the pre-established rules the franchise had crafted over the course of its six film run, and that breathes new life into a very tired and well-worn premise, leading to some surprisingly tense and scary moments amidst the meta-ness. But the self-awareness of the film also posits some interesting questions about how actors deal with the real world success and popularity of films they're associated with, and how storytelling can become an act of myth making. And Langenkamp and Englund never seem to be merely pulling in an easy paycheck. They bring a real sense of weariness over the ways the franchise has come to consume their professional and personal lives.

Grade: ★★★