Invictus: The thirtieth feature film directed by San
Francisco born libertarian Clint Eastwood tests your knowledge of Nelson
Mandela, possibly the world’s most violent contact sport and a not-so-obscure
British poem that’s been quoted everywhere from an episode of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer to the final words of Okalahoma City terrorist bomber
Timothy McVeigh.
Screenwriter Anthony Peckham – as a
young man he left South Africa to avoid the apartheid military – avoids the
dreaded pitfalls of biopic by allowing us inside Mandela’s fledging government
as the seventy-five-year-old freshman politician discovers a most peculiar way
to unite his fervent followers with the bitter, now out of power Afrikaner
minority.
That symbol: a nearly lily white
rugby team with the almost comic book funny name Springbok allows Eastwood to
reacquaint us with his old pal Morgan Freeman’s low key charisma (as a slyly
pragmatic Mandela) along with a very buff Matt Damon (as the oddly heroic team
captain Francoise Pienaar). Based on John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy: the
Game That Changed a Nation, the filmmakers allow Mandela’s risky gamble to
integrate his security team – we see decades of homicidal animosity dissolve
into daily games of touch rugby – to dramatically parallel the unlikely
friendship that breaks out over tea between the grandfatherly black leader and
the taciturn athlete who will struggle to keep his teammates from quitting in
disgust.
A potential anti-climax: the brutal
1995 World Cup match between Springbok and a ferocious Maori led New Zealand
squad becomes a springboard for displaying the unprecedented moment when black
and white rugby fans find common cause. Eastwood crawls inside the frieze of
rugged men locked in the almost mortal combat stance of the rugby scrum –
hinting why the sport has gained a queer following – and in a moving,
underplayed moment shows a transfixed Damon standing quietly in Mandela’s
former Robben Island prison cell, where for decades he kept a scrap of paper
with William Ernest Henley’s muscular stanzas: “I am the master of my fate: I
am the captain of my soul.”
The Young Victoria: A conventional biopic with
an intriguing premise: can we find in the early years of a queen who would
reign for over six decades evidence that the young Victoria was in fact a
quasi-rebel against the very values the Victorian Age would come to embody.
Screenwriter Julian Fellowes’ thesis (executed by director Jean-Marc Vallee) focuses
on four years (1836-40) when the still teenage princess was being kept a
virtual prisoner by her envious mom, The Duchess of Kent, and mom’s
control-freak boyfriend, Sir John Conroy. Not allowed to even walk up and down
stairs without an adult escort, constantly under pressure to defer her ascent
to the throne to a regency made up of mom and her lover, Victoria (an agile
turn by Emily Blunt) throws tantrums, seeks outside counselors and finally gets
a power boost from a boyishly dapper Belgium prince (the young Albert is given
proper moxy by Rupert Friend). Fleshed out with seldom told tales of palace
intrigue – a highlight is Jim Broadbent’s gloriously loony rant as the dying
king – The Young Victoria is remarkably satisfying despite an abrupt
conclusion.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon: A love starved
girl starts to get into the sort of trouble normally reserved for hot blooded
boys because she finds her close encounters with calamity can incite a sort of
telepathic link to her now vanished vampire boyfriend. The second installment
of what might be labeled “the teen division” of our decade’s hard on for the
undead, kicks off with an adolescent birthday bash that nearly dissolves into
an orgy of blood feasting. Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) finger prick forces her on
a diet from human blood beau Edward (Robert Pattinson) to risk everything to
beat his blood seeking cute young brother off his gal. Edward’s decision to
break off from Bella leaves our headstrong human with the choice of wimpy nerd
boy dates or a the dangerously available Native boy/apprentice werewolf Jacob
(Taylor Lautner).
As much as one yearns to despise
this wildly hyped pop franchise, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (head writer of
Dexter) understands the mythic world of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels:
a roller coaster flow chart of hetero adolescent love/lust and angst with model
pretty vampire boys the perfect stand ins for the too available adolescent
sperm machines.
For an installment that is a place
holder before the ramped up drama of the third book, New Moon makes
arresting if silly fun use of its lost in
the forest primordial setting. The sight of half naked
Native boys cliff diving as they try out their new wolf identities segue-ways
neatly with Edward’s crazy journey to ask his vampire elders to expunge his
immortality, thereby solving his Bella problem.
Hypnotically filmed in an eco-topia
ocean cliff setting and largely free of mood breaking risible dialogue or
situations, New Moon is that rare science/fantasy movie that doesn’t
seem oxymoronically ghoulish as a holiday escape.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: Fans of Rebecca
Miller will be sorely disappointed by this ambitious but sadly disjointed
attempt to trace one woman’s emotional arc from adolescence to the dreaded post
menopausal blues. The best moments belong to Robin Penn Wright and Alan Arkin
as they wittily navigate a September/December marriage – a man who can’t shake
premonitions of his impending demise while his bored out of her mind younger
wife takes up with a tattooed convenience clerk (a miscast Kenau Reeves).
Miller is far too cute in her use of confusing flashbacks between Wright’s
older
Pippa and the little girl lost teen version played by Blake
Lively – a lesbian S/M porn scene is almost cringe inducing – and what genuine
drama exists is entirely back loaded. Skip it and rent Personal Velocity (for
the tender debut of Lou Pucci as a terrified teen hitchhiker) or The Ballad
of Jack and Rose (for the first pairing of Daniel Day-Lewis
and Paul Dano that would pay such incendiary dividends in There
Will be Blood).
The Road: My first viewing of No Country for Old
Men led me to practically inject Cormac McCarthy’s novel into my brain in a
single setting. Director John Hillcoat’s almost comically monotonous version of
McCarthy’s apocalyptic tale about a father (Vigo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee)
seeking to escape the aftereffects of an unnamed earthly calamity just made me
want to flee the screening and erase the memory.