Resigned to Their Fates.

I know it’s becoming a habit ’round here to kick off movie reviews by apologizing for their lateness. But — sorry, y’all — this one’s running a few weeks behind also. (Suffice to say, work’s been busy of late, and will likely remain so until election day.) Nonetheless, since I’ve now got five recently-seen movies kicking around in the to-be-reviewed hopper…

I haven’t read the original novel — which was chosen as one of TIME’s top 100 books of (most of) the 20th century — but I’m guessing that Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishigoro’s Never Let Me Go is probably pretty faithful to its source material. A sparing, muted, and low-key affair throughout, this is basically a Merchant Ivory science-fiction film, and, much like the butler in Ishigoro’s The Remains of the Day, the movie is a model of delicate — some might even say pained — restraint. That, ultimately, is its strength and its weakness.

To be honest, I found Never Let Me Go rather slow-moving for its first two-thirds, and I have some issues with the basic storytelling here — Much like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I suspect the book may just be “top-shelf” sci-fi for artsy lit-crit types who think regular genre sci-fi is for dweebs. (I could very well be wrong, of course — Like I said, I haven’t read it.) Still, I wouldn’t go far as to call it haunting, but Romanek’s film has burbled back into mind several times in the weeks since I saw it (and not just because I’ve already seen Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield in separate outings since.)

Set in an alternate England not too dissimilar in dystopic drabness from the one in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, Never Let Me Go begins amid the halls and fields of Hailsham, a country boarding school headed by the always-striking presence of Charlotte Rampling (recently of Life during Wartime.) The name of the school, like Rampling’s character, is reminiscent of Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, and there’s certainly a Dickensian feel to this first third of the story, where events are set in motion that will redound over the course of our protagonists’ lifetimes. (I’m probably overthinking things, tho’. Hailsham is also just the name of the town.)

In any case, although possessing none of the colorful antics or magickal je-ne-sais-quoi of Hogwarts, Hailsham too is a school for very special children. Here, a young girl named Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small), her friend and rival Ruth (Ella Purnell), and Tommy (Charlie Rowe), the strange, vaguely feral lad they both take a shining to, come of age. Wearing wrist monitors wherever they go and deeply fearful of leaving the school grounds, the children are nonetheless heavily trained in the etiquette of the outside world. They are also encouraged to create art — art which is closely monitored by the powers-that-be. But for what, exactly? What is going on with these kids? Only when one of the younger teachers (Sally Hawkins) experiences a twinge of conscience over her students are we clued in to the real goings-on.

Cut to several years later, and our trio — now fully cognizant of their special purpose –has grown into Carey Mulligan (good, but, as in An Education and Wall Street 2, doing the world-weary-with-dimples thing that’s fast becoming her trademark), Keira Knightley (actually kinda terrible — as in The Jacket, she just twitches and twitters to signify emotion — it’s very possible she just can’t act), and Andrew Garfield (with Parnassus, Red Riding, and The Social Network, having a breakout year, but the part is unfortunately a bit Rain Man-y. He does have one amazing scene with Rampling late in the film, tho.)

I can’t say anymore really without giving away the game, other than that the earlier-established love triangle dominates the second part of Never Let Me Go, and the inevitable implications of this trio’s special-ness comes to the fore in the third and most satisfying section of the film. But this final forty minutes or so, while no doubt the best part of the flick, poses problems for the movie as a whole.

The minor, more quibble-ly concern, and one I’m willing to concede for the sake of the overarching theme — we are mortal, and death ineluctable, so use your time well — is that the characters all seem rather resigned to their fates here. Granted this is a civilization accustomed to queueing, that some here do attempt one gambit to buy some time, and that we don’t really need an Americanized action movie version of this story anyway — Bayhem already made it. Still, the fact that a Logan’s Run-type alternative isn’t even suggested at any point highlights some of the overall story flaws here. (In fact, the whole idea of the school doesn’t really make sense, when you get down to it.)

But, you know, in any sci-fi story, you have to take certain basic premises for granted, so I can run with that. The bigger problem here is that a full two-thirds of the movie are spent tracing out a love triangle that barely reaches soap opera levels of sophistication, and one that only holds together at all because two of the parties are as passive as Stevens the Butler about the way they feel. Yes, the ending is haunting in its own way (if a bit overwritten; The final monologue pretty much tries to punch you in the face with the subtext, just in case you missed it.) But why did we have to sit through an hour of Knightley biting her lip or Mulligan third-wheeling it to get to this point?

I don’t want to sound too harsh about this movie, because, overall, I’d say it’s worth seeing, and it has some moments of quiet power. (Like I said, there’s a scene with Rampling, Garfield, and Mulligan over tea near the end that’s a showstopper.) But, partly because the characters in this world are so clipped and distant, and mainly because the love story here is never as interesting as the world it takes place in, I didn’t find Never Let Me Go as gripping in the end as either the hype or the title would imply.

After Happiness, Regret.

“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco. This ain’t no fooling around. No time for dancing, or lovey dovey — I ain’t got time for that now.” Ten years after 9/11, and twelve years after we last followed their…exploits, the collection of lost souls and tragic deviants that populated the pitch-black comedy Happiness have returned, sadder and wiser, in Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, an episodic, intermittently successful meditation on guilt and forgiveness. And, if nothing else, it’s safe to say the decade since we saw them last has not been kind to them, or their respective quests for contentment.

For all its bleakness, misanthropy, and inordinately dicey subject matter — pedophiles, obscene phone callers, suicides, and whatnot —Happiness, I am sure some of my fellow social misfits out there will agree, was a very, very funny film. It’s sort of a high-wire suspension act over a moral and existential abyss, and all the more hilarious because it constantly flirts with disaster. (If you haven’t seen it, the entire movie is on Youtube for some reason.) Alas, somewhere along the way — probably 9/11, it seems — the bottom seems to have finally dropped out of Solondz’s world. And now, rather than just trying to be happy, the damaged, compromised characters of the first film are sifting through the wreckage of their lives, trying to either pick up the pieces or bury them somewhere they can’t be found.

As a result, Life During Wartime is a subtler and more muted affair, and one that, unfortunately, is nowhere near as viscerally engaging as its predecessor. If the first film made the case that everybody, even the sick and twisted among us, are looking for happiness in their own way, Wartime suggests that everybody, no matter how reprehensible, also needs forgiveness, and finds forgiveness equally hard to grant. Arguably, Solondz is making the same argument as last time — In both films, basic human needs trump moral and political considerations. (In the end, terrorists, like pedophiles, are people too.) But Wartime has neither the manic good cheer nor the jet-black satirical zest of the first installment, and the laughs are definitely fewer and farther-between. I appreciated the film by the end, but it’s also overly didactic at times and, at times, quite frankly, a bit of a slog.

If you do decide to see Life During Wartime, I would highly recommend watching Happiness again beforehand. Having not seen the first film in a decade or so, I only realized after the fact — like, when writing this review — that the opening scene in Wartime deliberately echoes the pre-title vignette from the earlier movie. Except now, Jon Lovitz’s character is dead (but returns here nonetheless as Paul Reubens), Jane Adams’ Joy has become even more ethereal and bird-like in the guise of Shirley Henderson, and she’s somehow ended up with Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s obscene phone caller, Allen — now recombinated as Michael Kenneth Williams (Yep, Omar comin’) — whom she met as part of her job rehabilitating criminals. (Much like how she ended up with Jared Harris’ sketchy Russian emigre in the first film.)

Things, we soon discover, are not well between Joy and Allen on the domestic front, prompting the former to go visit her older sister Trish (once Cynthia Stevenson, now Allison Janney) in Florida. But Trish has her own problems: Trying to get back into the dating scene — she just wants to find a nice, normal Jewish guy, not unlike her new beau Harvey (Michael Lerner) — Trish finds that her younger children are starting to ask uncomfortable questions about the deeds of their dead father (once Dylan Baker)…who is not really dead, physically-speaking.

Rather, he’s been serving a decade-long stint for rape and pedophilia, during which he’s filled out and been weighed down by guilt enough to transmogrify into the consistently haunted Ciaran Hinds. Free once more, Bill wants to reconnect with the son (Chris Marquette) he sinned against all those years ago. But, as you might expect, that might make for a rather touchy father-and-son reunion…

In following the various characters from Happiness as they interrogate or shrink away from their ghosts, Life during Wartime hangs together less well than the original movie, and feels much more choppy and episodic. At one point, Joy goes out to California to see her other sister Helen (Once Lara Flynn Boyle, now Ally Sheedy), and, while it’s not a bad scene per se, it sorta feels thrown in just so the middle sister didn’t get entirely neglected. (Spoiler: She ended up with Keanu, who honestly doesn’t seem too happy either.) Then again, episodic can be good too — In a brief turn as a self-proclaimed “monster” in need of a good-time-man at the local watering hole, the inimitable Charlotte Rampling just about walks away with the movie.

Still, while I appreciated elements of Life During Wartime, I never really felt fully engaged by the movie, and can’t really recommend it, overall. As the miserable folks on-screen kept circling back to the same questions of guilt and forgiveness, the movie came to seem less like a cinematic experience and more just a filmmaker’s position statement, a dry academic treatise of sorts. And while there are moments of humor here and there — Lerner’s grown son (Rich Pecci) gets in a few good laughs in particular — none really compare to the often absurd, occasionally stunning shenanigans of the first film.

Life During Wartime‘s biggest draw in the end is that it allows us, a la The Godfather III or Before Sunset, to catch up with memorable characters we shared some moments with a long while ago. And, given that they inhabit a world created by Todd Solondz, I guess it’s no surprise that, in the end, living only left them sad.

Age and its Discontents.

Another slew of new arrivals in the summer trailer bin:

With a little help from his friends (Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Mary-Louise Parker), Bruce Willis eases out of retirement from the Company in the trailer for Robert Schwentke’s Red (formerly a Warren Ellis comic, apparently), also with Julian Glover and Karl Urban. Eh, could be fun.

Todd Solondz offers up another misanthropic and probably-funny smorgasbord of quirky, highly damaged people in the trailer for his Life During Wartime, with Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, Ciaran Hinds, Paul Reubens, Michael K. Williams, Ally Sheedy, and Charlotte Rampling.

For the sake of completion, the trailer for Paul Weitz’s Little Fockers, a.k.a. Meet the Parents 3, with Ben Stiller, Teri Polo, Robert DeNiro, Blythe Danner, Barbara Streisand, Jessica Alba, Laura Dern, and Harvey Keitel. Didn’t see the last one, won’t be seeing this one…particularly after that hard-to-watch Sustengo lameness.

Forever is our Today.

In the trailer bin: Schoolmates Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley learn to cope with the outside world and rage against the dying of the light in the trailer for Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishigoro’s Never Let Me Go, also with Sally Hawkins. (I know the basic premise, but haven’t read the book.) With this, The Time-Traveler’s Wife, and The Adjustment Bureau, it seems like we’re seeing a mini-boom of romances with a sci-fi twist.

Death, Revenge, Love, and Slyders.

Some short thoughts on recent DVDs witnessed…

Dead Man: Many cinephiles whose opinions I trust have told me to check out Jim Jarmusch’s stuff, so I figured a good place to start would be this black-and-white western featuring Johnny Depp and a slew of my favorite character actors. Alas, I found Dead Man to be slow, scattershot, and for the most part uninvolving. Depp is William Blake, a fellow who is forced to flee the frontier town run by an industrialist strongman (the late, great Robert Mitchum) after an unfortunate love-triangle mix-up, and who, despite being unrelated to the English poet and mystic of the same name, nevertheless encounters enough shamanist mysticism in the wilderness to make even Oliver Stone blush. Blake’s tour guide on his increasingly bizarre escapades outside “civilization” is an Indian named Nobody (Gary Fisher), who speaks in riddle-like profundities (and, occasionally, passages from Blake) in the manner of filmed Native Americans since time immemorial.

Basically, I thought Dead Man was kinda goofy. It never established much of a rhythm or a narrative, and as an episodic travelogue, it’s hit and miss. Billy Bob Thornton as a lonely trapper and Alfred Molina as a priest peddling smallpox blankets probably make the most indelible impressions, but other quality actors (particularly John Hurt and Gabriel Byrne) needed more to do. Frankly, I just don’t think I got it. Why does long-winded, cold-blooded killer Michael Wincott sleep with a teddy bear? Why is frontiersman Iggy Pop dressed like a Willa Cather heroine? (Presumably, the answer for Jarmusch fans is “Why Not?” I suppose I could just as easily question David Lynch’s dwarves or the Coens’ similar non-sequiturs.) Perhaps I went in with abnormal expectations, but I found Dead Man‘s “funny” parts stiff and the “profound” parts stilted. I’ll definitely get around to the rest of Jarmusch’s oeuvre, but, sadly, this counts as a strike against him.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: Mike Hodges’ reinvention of Get Carter was also a disappointment. It strives mightily to be a somber, Unforgiven-like tale of unfulfilling revenge and redemption denied, but turns out instead as a slow, plodding affair that feels a bit like Eyes Wide Shut, in that a great director’s once-pioneering vision now sadly comes off as somewhat stale and antiquated.

The movie throws you in in media res, with pretty-boy n’er-do-well Davy Graham (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) dealing to and scamming the London glitterati while his brother Will (Owen) seems to have taken a page from Matt Foley and is now, literally, living in a van down by the river. Very shortly, horrible, droogie-like things are done to Davy by none other than Malcolm McDowell, resulting in the former’s suicide, and lean, mean wildman Will blows back into town to settle the score. The rest of the film consists of Owen slowly seething (to impressive effect) while his former mates and enemies cringe, cower, and — like us — await the inevitable denouement. It eventually happens, but lordy does it take awhile to get there. Jamie Foreman (soon to be Bill Sykes in Polanski’s Oliver Twist) deserves marks as the Graham boys’ flawed and frantic lieutenant, but otherwise there’s not much to go on here. If you want to see Hodges direct Owen, rent Croupier instead.

Love Actually: Oof, where do I start? Ok, I knew going in that this probably wasn’t going to be my cup of tea. But a good friend of mine had it sitting on his TV, he recommended it as “like Sliding Doors” (which, much like Next Stop Wonderland, was a romantic comedy that I really enjoyed), and it had a bunch of actors I like (Liam Neeson, Keira Knightley, Emma Thompson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and much of Team Hitchhikers: Martin Freeman, Alan Rickman, and Bill Nighy.) But, as many of you probably already know, Love Actually is, actually, godawful dreck, a schmaltzfest of grotesque proportions. I was complaining about the occasionally saccharine taste of In Good Company only yesterday, but Love Actually makes that film look like Requiem for a Dream.

The film follows multiple couples in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and is set in an alternate universe where no love goes unrequited (among the beautiful, of course), at least without a wink and a kiss. In fact, in this Fairie-England, where Hugh Grant (doing his pre-About a Boy faux-self-effacing schtick) is the new Prime Minister, it’s even considered somehow romantic to make an unabashed play at your best friend’s wife. Look, I know I’m a cynical sort, but my heart warms to certain well-made fare. But this…um, not so much. From a wholly implausible joint press conference (Billy Bob Thornton cameos as a prez who combines the worst of Clinton and Dubya), to Grant cavorting around 10 Downing Street a la Risky Business, to Liam Neeson constantly interacting-cute with his Padawan stepson, to Colin Firth venturing to 19th century Portugal, to the, um, musical numbers, this film all too often made me want to claw my eyes out. Most of the time, I was hoping I’d see more of Bill Nighy, the movie’s saving grace, as an aging rocker trying to make one, last improbable comeback with a sellout remix of The Troggs’ “Love is All Around.” But, by the end, even that storyline gets smothered in sugary sweetness. For the love, actually, of Pete, stay away from this lousy film.

Harold & Kumar go to White Castle: White Castle…hmmm, those are some fine little burgers, particularly in quantity. I haven’t had a 12-pack of Slyders in a dog’s age. In fact, I think there’s a Castle a couple of blocks over at 125th and 7th. Man, how awesome would that be right now? I…I, uh…oh yeah, Harold & Kumar, right. Yeah, that was pretty a funny movie.

Admittedly, Harold & Kumar is for the most part a check-your-brain-at-the-door kinda film. For all of its clever 21st century savvy about 80’s-movies racial tropes, H & K is still ultimately a lowest-common-denominator college comedy. Yet, while some of the vignettes definitely fall flat, I found Harold & Kumar just enough of a variation on the age-old After Hours road-trip formula to be really amusing. John Cho and Kal Penn are both charismatic and engaging as our wayward, famished, and thoroughly stoned protagonists, and Neil Patrick Harris earns special plaudits for showing up as himself (albeit more-than-slightly tweaked) and just going for it. All in all, I highly doubt H & K is everybody’s bag, but — despite the gross-out gags and retro thinking — it is at times a rather intelligent dumb movie.