Lion - Movie Review

Starring Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman, Rooney Mara, David Wenham, Sunny Pawar, Abhishek Bharate and Priyanka Bose.
Written by Luke Davies.
Directed by Garth Davis.

★★★★

There was a really good Australian mini-series from 2013 called Top of the Lake (which is getting a season 2 later this year). Garth Davis, who directed half of its episodes (the others by Jane Campion), is now making his big-screen directorial debut, and it's an impressive one.

This is the true story of Saroo, a 4-year-old boy (Sunny Pawar) who gets lost in India and can't communicate well enough with adults to get back home. Eventually he's put in an orphanage and later adopted by a Tasmanian couple (Nicole Kidman, David Wenham).

As an adult (Dev Patel), Saroo has vague memories of his childhood home but has accepted his life. Then one day he's triggered by a memory, and he then feels the undeniable pull to find his mother and let them know he's still alive.

The first 40 minutes or so are carried by Pawar, and it's a terrific natural performance. Davis holds the camera at Pawar's level, and we see the great variety of India through his eyes. As the story shifts, Patel picks up the baton seemlessly. And maybe it's because we're adoptive parents but my wife cried for the last half-hour of this movie. Powerful stuff.

Side Effects - DVD Review

Starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Vinessa Shaw. Directed by Steven Soderbergh.

★★★½

No one is as crisp a filmmaker as Soderbergh.  I love that now that he's doing these less ambitious projects, they're still every bit as professionally done as any "prestige" pic he might want to work on.

The 50-year-old director has threatened retirement a few times, and I hope that's not the case.  He's working on a TV mini-series now starring Clive Owen as a doctor at a New York hopsital in the 1900's, but no more movies are on his plate.

This is a straightforward mystery and it plays like a novel.  A young woman (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Rooney Mara) with anxiety and depression issues is waiting for her husband (Channing Tatum) to get his release from prison.  He'd been in for insider trading, and they're ready to get their life back.

Mara goes to a doctor (Jude Law) and he prescribes a fairly new medicine on the market for her symptoms.  But the prescription has some severe side effects. And it goes from there.  It flows at a Hitchcockian pace, and there isn't a wasted scene anywhere.

Random Movie Stuff - 1/3/12

- Demi Moore will cameo as Gloria Steinem in Lovelace, the Linda Lovelace biopic starring Amanda Seyfried.

- Julianne Moore will star in The English Teacher, about a small-town teacher with no personal life who decides to help a former student put on his unproduced play at their high school.  Greg Kinnear, Lily Collins, Michael Angarano and Nathan Lane co-star.

- Sony is moving forward with plans to film The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second book in Steig Larsson's trilogy.  Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara will reprise their roles as Mikhael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is currently in theaters.

- Ben Lyons, who single-handedly destroyed all credibility for any film critic on TV anywhere again ever when he took over one of the seats on At the Movies, has been let go as a correspondent on E! channel.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Movie Review

★★★½

Starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Robin Wright, Steven Berkoff, Joely Richardson, Geraldine James and Goran Visnjic.  Directed by David Fincher.

I've read the book and seen the Swedish movie, and yet I was still enthralled by this version. David Fincher is a slick director, one of the most reliable working today, and he knows how to piece together a procedural. The dense story of Steig Larsson's murder mystery would need over three hours to not feel rushed, but Fincher managed to do it in two and a half.

Daniel Craig is Mikhael Blomkvist, disgraced editor of Millenium magazine, who resigns after losing a libel case. He gets a call from an eccentric millionaire Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, who's always great). Henrik's niece was murdered forty years ago, and he wants Blomkvist's help to solve it once and for all.

Blomkvist needs a research assistant and he gets one in Lisbeth Salander, one of the great recent female characters. Here she's embodied by Rooney Mara (The Social Network), and she makes the role her own.

I love the fact Fincher kept this in Swden and didn't try to Americanize it by putting in in New England. It's faithful to the source material and yet makes the right adjustments to streamline the storytelling aspects.  It was as satisfying to me as Fincher's Zodiac.

I'm saddened this isn't doing better at the box-office. It means we won't be able to see Fincher do the other two books.