An intimate epic
By Roger Moore
FILM: The Impossible
CAST: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, Tom Holland
DIRECTION: Juan Antonio Bayona
It begins with a disaster, a huge one witnessed not from a distance, not via the safety of a TV news report, but up close and personal.
The horror of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 is made intimate, so awful that you recoil from the screen, ducking as tree limbs and shards of debris are hurled at you and the onscreen victims in The Impossible. The effect is akin to being stuffed into a washing machine filled with brown water and about 400 things that can poke, puncture, slice and lacerate you.
While you don’t drown.
Then, stripped, battered, injured and doomed to infection, you try to save yourself and then others. You look for help. You find yourself depending on the kindness of strangers, people who don’t speak your language who are suffering and lost, too, for your very survival. And having children in your care, you try to cling to your humanity as you all cling — barely — to life.
The Impossible is a vivid recreation of a disaster made moving by a stellar cast, a gripping, “How will this end?” script and all-too-real special effects and sets. You’ll feel you’re in that oceanic washing machine with Naomi Watts, grieve for her chances of survival and cry over the life lessons she struggles to pass on to her son (Tom Holland).
A Christmas vacation in Khao Lak, Thailand, turns terribly wrong for a family of five, headed by Maria (Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) - English teachers living in Japan, enjoying the sun and surf until that December morning when the world was turned upside down and washed away within minutes.
Miraculously, they survive the tidal wave. But they’re separated - dad with two small boys of 5 and 7 years, mom with 12-year-old Lucas. We follow their stories, separately, each looking for and despairing of finding the other, each facing the awful reality that they may be the last members of their family.
For Maria, that takes on extra urgency as the film unfolds. She’s badly hurt, and the struggle to get Lucas and a small boy they rescue along the way to safety becomes the thing that drives her even as we see her pallour change, her own death become imminent.
Lucas, a frightened, confused and rebellious kid, has staggering responsibilities thrust on him. Mom’s “I’m scared too” is hardly consolation. He might be all alone in the world at any minute, with no way of reaching even distant relations in the aftermath of this cataclysm.
Meanwhile, Henry frantically searches for Maria and Lucas, struggles to keep his boys with him even as evacuations threaten to pull them all out of the area and remove any hope he has of finding his wife and missing son.
The genius of Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s approach is the myopia here. Bayona (The Orphange) lets us see only what the victims see. The chaos of the aftermath, First-World survivors hurled into the Third-World abyss with everybody else there, is stark and alarming. What they don’t know, not being able to get information, to find loved ones, to let relatives know they’re alive, is maddening.
Bayona spares us little in the detail of the injuries, the ocean that victims vomit up days later.
And Watts, in the best performance in an already illustrious career, makes us feel it all. Maria is never so stricken that she cannot see past her own misery, never more heroic than when she distracts her son by charging him to “Go help people, you’re good at it”. Fading in and out of consciousness, fully aware of her own fate, she’s determined to leave Lucas, if she has to leave him, with that one last life lesson.
The effects make The Impossible, based on the true story of a Spanish family caught in the tsunami, wholly credible and real. But Watts and young Holland make us feel it, and make this the most moving and the very best film of 2012.- MCT
A mixed bag of mixed messages
FILM: Standing Ovation
CAST: Alanna Palombo, Najee Wilson, Devon Jordan, Pilar Martin, Erika Corvette
DIRECTION: Stewart Raffill
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Off the wall? Friend, you don’t know off the wall until you’ve seen five 12-year-old girls cover Tina Turner/Phil Spector epic River Deep, Mountain High, complete with Tina blond wig-flips, in the kiddie dance comedy, Standing Ovation.
This no-budget Jersey Shore musical has it all — a chorus line of firefighters (with no rhythm), a tough Italian-American tween wisegirl named Joei, and a wacky wig impresario named Mr Wiggs, played by one-time casting director Sal Dupree as if he’s irked he had to quit the drag act.
It’s a bubble-gum mess, lacking structure, coherence and any sense of drama. But it manages moments of daft fun, sometimes in spite of itself. In Atlantic City, all the kids “gotta dance”. Mr Wiggs’ girls, The Wiggies, are queens of the hop. High schoolers in the “Grease” sense, they chirp “Shimmy shimmy I’m so hot” and sabotage anybody who stands in their way.
The tweens of The Five Ovations, led by Brittany (Kayla Jackson, a skinnier, younger and curlier Taylor Swift) are determined to take them down. To do that, they’ll need a manager, played by Miss Joei DeCarlo. And they’ll need to keep the insufferable tyke Alanna Wannbe (Alanna Palombo), an 8-year-old hoofer who expects to bully-cute her way through life, off the stage.
A TV dance contest could help Brittany’s gambling-addict Irish grandpa (P Brendan Mulvey) make the rent and make her songwriter brother famous. Or it could be another chance for the Ovations to bow down before those mean girls, The Wiggies.
There’s amateurism to the “wannabe a star” kid cast, which doesn’t hurt. The same can’t be said of the script, which seems an afterthought. Director Stewart Raffill (The New Swiss Family Robinson) is an old pro who at least makes the laughs work. The songs are a pleasantly forgettable mix of original bubble gum and vintage bubble gum.
But for a children’s movie, Standing Ovation is a mixed bag of mixed messages. The dancing is often too suggestive for tweens. Gambling’s bad - unless the horse race is fixed. The girls are a refreshing blend of body types - only a few beanpoles. It has Italian stereotypes, Irish stereotypes, and every performing group has to have a black singer-dancer. It’s “I won’t give up, even after I’ve lost, fair and square” or “Just because you want something doesn’t mean you’re going to get it”. — By Roger Moore, The Orlando Sentinel/MCT
A fractured film
By Colin Covert
FILM: Broken City
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Russell Crowe
Director: Allen Hughes
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The political suspenser Broken City stars Mark Wahlberg as ex-cop turned private eye Billy Taggart, whose investigative talents are not exactly of Sherlock proportions.
He takes a window-peeping assignment for incumbent mayor Nicholas Hostetler (Russell Crowe), who is suspicious of his wife Cathleen (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is vanishing for clandestine meetings with a confidante.
Hostetler, a glad-handing, phony-folksy bigwig with a dangerous side, says he suspects infidelity. Taggart can’t ever quite get his telephoto lens in the right place to verify it. He snaps pictures of activities that seem incriminating, but the images are blurry, awkwardly framed and inconclusive. Much like the poorly focused film itself, which peters out following a promising start. Where most movies have a dramatic arc, this has a squiggle.
It’s easy to lose your way as you trip over the story’s multiple red herrings.
Taggart has an old revenge-killing rap hanging over his head, with residual guilt that threatens his sobriety and his relationship with his actress girlfriend. Someone conspires to use illegally concealed evidence to extort his co-operation in a shifty scheme, but does not reveal this leverage to Taggart until near the finale.
If you don’t let your blackmail victim know you’ve got the goods on him, you have no hold on him, so what’s the point of being secretive about it?
Taggart finds himself in a situation mirroring the mayor’s as he begins to obsess over his own lover’s trustworthiness. The situation boils over with her film debut, which includes an explicit lovemaking scene with her costar.
Taggart responds with his knuckles, diminishing the moral distance between himself and the obviously untrustworthy mayor. Wahlberg’s character needs a more active conscience to function as a dramatic foil for Crowe. If the script was building a thematic parallel between the antihero and villain, it shouldn’t have suspended construction so suddenly.
As the egocentric Hostetler, Crowe acquits himself well. He deploys a vast wardrobe of scowls and bogus smiles that slither across his face. Wahlberg repeats his typical macho primitivism. He’s an appealing actor in the hands of the right director — remember how he glowed onscreen in The Fighter — but Allen Hughes, working for the first time apart from his brother/filmmaking partner Albert, can’t sharpen him up.
Hughes’s emphatic style pounds home the story’s easy ironies and shapes the scenes so poorly we’re not sure if they’ve made their point before they’re gone. Zeta-Jones looks the part of a mature, glamorous wife, which is all that’s required of her. As for the mechanics of the big swindle at the heart of the story, any cub reporter with a day pass to the hall of records could have discovered it.
Broken City is a fractured movie. — Star Tribune/MCT
(DVDs courtesy: Kings Electronics, Doha)