Under The Skin ** subjective stars
Beautifully shot on small, high end digital cameras, Under The Skin takes place in Glasgow and rural Scotland. That's the nominal location because this film takes place in mood, more than in space. Scarlett Johansson is an alien luring men to their deaths for sustenance, but if you're not into sci-fi don't let that meager, albeit creepy, plot line discourage you. What we're watching is life on Earth from the alien's point of view and Johansson does a nuanced job of making that real.
As she travels around in a van picking up men, the alien (and the viewer) are gradually immersed in the stunning beauty and strangeness of nature and humanity. My sister said the film was more of a poem than a film, by which she meant more experimental than narrative. That's partly due to the films slower pacing, more Euro than LA. Instead of plot turns, Under The Skin delivers story through a steady accretion of image and detail. Better known for the masterful gangster flick Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer chose to use unknown or non-actors in most of the subsidiary roles and often used hidden cameras to add to the film's documentary feel. Johansson and her victims appear in the nude, a handy marketing tool, but Glazer's focus is on physicality, not titillation. There's zero porn factor.
It's a visual poem about an alien's introduction to Earth. What stayed with me after the film was the beauty of the images and a feeling of wistfulness towards life on the planet.
The Hundred-Foot Journey 1 subjective star
*
What does this film have going for it beside the great Helen Mirren, the equally great though less famous Om Puri, idyllic French country locales, Indian and French cuisine, Bollywood music, light hearted comedy and romance?
An Indian patriarch, chased from home and restaurant by unnamed extremists takes to the European road in search of the perfect location for redemption. Family in tow, he finally settles in an abandoned villa opposite Helen Mirren's chic French eatery. Jealousy, cultural misunderstanding, loving omelets and beautiful scenery ensue.
To use a couple of tasteless phrases: It's a crowd pleaser and heart warmer.
I'd watch it again just for
the faces of Mirren and Puri.
Gone Girl
Although I briefly skimmed Gone Girl in the bookstore while it hovered at number one as best-seller, I forgot about it until the film came out. Then I avoided reviews because it was billed as a thriller and I didn't want to spoil the icicle-in-hell chance of actual thrills. For the first third of its considerable run time, Gone Girl does crackle along in a Hitchcockian vein of domestic bliss freezing over. Ben Affleck's is effective as an ethically challenged husband who may have staged his wife's disappearance.
Then the train jumps the track, the thriller ends and we drop into a weird battle of the sexes that feels spookily Reagan 80's. Without spoiling the surprises (you'll probably see the film on cable or a plane flight), I'll state the obvious: the plot beggars belief. Strangest to me in a best-selling contemporary novel is the shameless, ugly stereotyping of the female character. While the movie head fakes a he-said, she-said symmetry, Ben Affleck's clueless, philandering jerk is no dramatic match for Rosamund Pike's ice queen.
To the good, Gone Girl describes the living hell your life becomes if you are cursed enough to end up as tabloid fodder. The news vans descend and the vixen pundits of daytime TV start feeding on your entrails. The cast is sharp with especially well tuned performances from Tyler Perry as a celebrity lawyer and Neil Patrick Harris as a well heeled stalker.
I chuckled as the film bumbled along from on absurd plot twist to the next like some kind of psychotic vaudeville, but Gone Girl isn't canny or creative enough to be really twisted. And my chuckling was tempered by the realization that this book had been on the NYT best-seller list for months. I guess you can always put lipstick on a pig, if that pig is a beautiful controlling blond.
