The Messenger is about a soldier (Ben Foster) who was badly wounded in Iraq and with 3 months of service left is assigned to the Casualty Notification Office.  It becomes his job, along with his mentor/partner (Woody Harrelson) to inform soldiers next of kin as soon as possible after they are killed.  It’s directed by Oren Moverman and written by Moverman and Alessandro Camon.  Both are troubled men and while Harrelson’s character deals with alcoholism, Foster’s deals with the loss of his girlfriend (Jena Malone) and his feelings for a wife they notified about her husband’s death (Samantha Morton).

So first off most people searching for this movie are just looking for naked pictures of Jena Malone.  I do not blame you.  Besides being a terrific actress, she’s also very attractive.  So click the censored image to get a bigger uncensored version.

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This movie has received a ton of press and awards already so you probably know the plot but if you don’t here’s a simple summary: The Hurt Locker is about a military bomb squad unit in Iraq.  The squad gets a new leader who’s a rogue type.  The film follows the squad’s day to day operations during their deployment.

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Quite obviously you’ve probably read reviews of this show on other sites by now.  It’s aired 4 episodes.  But I held back my review based on my television review standards (read about them here).  I liked the pilot a lot. But I’m skipping ahead of myself.  Let’s start with what it’s about.

Life Unexpected is about an orphan named Lux (Brittany Robertson) who is trying to get emancipated on her 16th birthday because she hates life in foster care.  To be able to do this she needs to get signatures of her birth parents.  So she tracks them down.  The first one she is able to find is her father, Nate Bazile (Kristoffer Polaha), better known as Base, pronounced basil without the il.  He is running a local bar and had no idea he had a kid that was out there.  When Lux asks about her mother she discovers that she is actually a well known local radio host, Cate Cassidy (Shiri Appleby).  Base and Cate have not talked since High School and even then no one knew about the baby or the fact that Cate and Base even had sex.  Apparently Cate had it secretly and gave it up for adoption but Lux had a heart condition and needed a lot of surgeries which is why she was never adopted.  Anyway long story short both Cate and Base wind up with a bit of a connection to their spawn and also are both total opposites.  When the day of Lux’s hearing comes up the judge declares she cannot be emancipated but since she has 2 birth parents who can care for her they will have to take care of her.  So now Cate and her fiancee/co-host and Base must care for teenage Lux who they are just meeting.

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An Education is a true coming of age story set in 1960’s suburban England.  It’s about what happens when a 16 year old girl (Carey Mulligan) meets an older man (Peter Sarsgaard) who seems to be cultured, refined, and much more interesting than anything else in her life.  It’s based off of a single chapter of the memoir of Lynn Barber, a british journalist, with both the book and the chapter sharing the movie’s title.  The screenplay was written by novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) who has had several of his own books adapted for the screen and the film is directed by Lone Sherfig.  As of the time I am writing this An Education is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Carey Mulligan is nominated for Best Actress, and Nick Hornby is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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Big Fan is about a parking lot attendant (Patton Oswalt) who lives for the Giants.  He bases his whole life around this obsession, spending his time listening to sports radio call in shows and writing down speeches to make when he calls in himself.  He even goes to all the games…then sits out in the parking lot watching the game on tv.  One day he sees the star quarterback at a gas station and follows him first to a stop at a drug dealers then to a strip club.  All he wants to do is say hi to his hero but winds up getting beaten within an inch of his life by the man.  The rest of the movie is his struggle to deal with the aftermath.

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Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is John Krasinski’s (The Office) directorial debut based on the book
by David Foster Wallace (also available on Audible:
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men).  It’s about a woman (Julianne Nicholson) who after her boyfriend cheats on her sets out on a research project interviewing various men about sex.

It’s already played in limited release and now is playing at Sundance.  I was sort of excited for this movie.  The plot was intriguing.  I was hoping for something smart, clever, and funny.  But what I got was boring and pretentious.  The first thing is that for the most part the cinematography is horrible, but I think this comes from the directing.  Most of it is long takes on a static tripod.  It’s like watching a play almost.  Certainly not taking advantage of the medium.  Then the stories these various men tell in monologue fashion aren’t interesting in the least.  They’re incredibly boring.  As a man I found no insight into my psyche and don’t think women would learn anything either.  For a movie filled with great actors, the performances are mind numbingly dull.  And the whole thing is bathed in a level of pretension that’s hard to even imagine.

I cannot say a single good thing about this film.  I don’t recommend it to anyone.  Really just skip this film entirely.

Up In The Air is the new film from Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking and Juno) based on the book (also available from Audible) of the same name by Walter Kim.  It’s about Ryan Bingham (Clooney) who flies around the country to fire people for companies.  He’s at home in the air and the life that surrounds it, like hotels and rental cars.  He doesn’t carry much baggage, literally and figuratively and doesn’t feel comfortable when he’s not living this life.  One day he’s called back to the home office to learn that his company is starting in a new direction, where they won’t have people flying around but instead they’ll be doing the firing through video chats from the office.  This not only upsets Bingham because it means an end to his life in the air, but the thought of firing people in this manner offends him on a whole other level.  He shows the young girl who came up with the idea that firing someone is more complex than she thinks and his boss decides he should take her on the road and show her the ropes.  So reluctantly he heads off on what might be his final trip with the young Natalie (Anna Kendrick) by his side.

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Invictus is Clint Eastwood’s latest Oscar bait about Nelson Mandela and his unlikely bond with a Rugby team.  The movie is based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (which has now been re-named Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation), which is based on the true story of Mandela’s first term as president of South Africa.  He saw that his nation was deeply divided and if he was ever going to solve any of it’s problems he needed to heal that division first.  He saw his opportunity in the South African rugby team.  The team was a symbol of the old white regime and the blacks openly cheered for whoever they were playing against.  Mandela thought that getting his nation to unite around this team may be the answer he was looking for.  The film tells the story of their 1995 World Cup matches.

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Taking Woodstock is the latest from Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm).  It’s based on the true story of Elliot Tiber who helped bring Woodstock to Bethel, NY after both Woodstock and Wallkill had kicked the festival out of their towns.  But more than that it’s about the smaller story of Tiber and his parents and his trying to find who he was in the world.

It’s a long film, 2 hours theatrically with a much longer dvd version, but only once did I feel a scene didn’t really fit.  It’s an extremely thorough film that does try to show as much as possible, even though that’s an impossible task.  Lee did make the choice to not focus on the actual concert.  While this might upset anyone looking to see re-creations of some of those legendary sets, it’s actually really perfect for this film.  It’s ultimately about Elliot and not about the concert.  Another choice that was pretty interesting is the very stark use of music.  You’d think a movie like this would be filled with all sorts of classic rock goodness, but while there is some, a lot of the movie is very quiet in this respect, especially earlier on.  It’s clear that every single bit of this movie was deliberate and in the best way possible.

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