'Noah' didn't totally float my boat

Darren Aronofsky makes an intermittently arresting Bible movie.

Early on, director Darren Aronofsky's Noah looks as if the director of movies such as The Black Swan, The Wrestler and The Fountain wants to turn a familiar Bible story into a bit of second-rate sci-fi.

What else to think when watching Aronofsky reprise the Genesis story in bite-sized visual chunks. If that weren't enough, Aronofsky later introduces giant rock creatures called Nephillim, fallen angels who stomp about the Earth like refugees from a Michael Bay movie.

Part spectacle, part attempt to wrestle with Big Questions (capital letters intentional) and part the story of a family in crisis, Noah provides Aronofsky's take on a tale in which God -- always called The Creator in the movie -- decided that mankind was too corrupt to preserve.

You pretty much know the story. Noah (Russell Crowe) is the last good man in a rotten world. Here, he's presented as a kind of proto-environmentalist who suspects that the world is doomed. Noah doesn't speak directly to God, but he reads signs and omens -- flowers that sprout magically in an instant, for example.

Understandably troubled by the prospect of global annihilation, Noah gathers his family, and sets out to visit his great-grandfather Methuselah, Anthony Hopkins as a kind of Old Testament Yoda. Perhaps Methuselah will know what to do.

Noah's accompanied on his journey by his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and this three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth (Douglas Booth, Logan Lerman and Leo McHugh Carroll).

En route, the family picks up a young woman whose life Noah saves, Emma Watson's Ila.

Religion aside, the movie gods must be served. Perhaps that's why we're only about 10 minutes into the movie when Noah finds himself wielding a cudgel against barbaric bad guys.

Noah, we learn, is a descendant of Seth, Adam and Eve's third son: The murderous Cain, a better-known son of the first couple, also produced offspring, a group of carnivorous, self-serving louts led by Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone).

Needless to say, Noah pours on the special effects when it comes to the flood (death by CGI) and the arrival of the animals that Noah has been charged with saving.

The creatures show up on their own, proving that Noah was the first to understand the now-popular bromide: Build it, and they will come.

Aronofsky is at his most daring when dealing with the post-flood Noah.
Motivated by his faith, Noah goes off the deep end, turning into a zealot who (like most zealots) goes too far.

Noah thinks God has appointed him as the man responsible for wiping out all humanity and restoring the universe to its original purity; i.e., a place with no people.

Other themes rise with the flood waters: The movie pits humanity's boundless hubris against a vegetarian Noah's deeper understanding of man's more humble place in the universe.

In an attempt to bring this already obvious conflict into even sharper focus, Aronofsky's speculative screenplay -- written with Ari Handel -- finds Tubal-Cain stowing away on the ark, and trying to involve Noah's resentful son Ham in a mutinous plot.

Tubal-Cain functions as the proponent of the dark side: The Creator has abandoned the world. He and man no longer are on speaking terms. Man, therefore, is justified in grabbing anything he can. It's not the heavens that rule the world, but man's will.

Noah, on the other hand, understands that man can't despoil the planet without consequences, and at one point, he even wanders through what look like the ruins of an industrialized society, demonstrating that Noah is not taking place in what we might commonly call "the real world."

Those who have seen The Fountain shouldn't be surprised that Aronofosky frequently attempts to operate in full visionary mode. He shows us Noah's prophetic dreams, the snake that tempted Eve and even summarizes the evolution of humanity in a segment that seems a heady mixture of Cosmos and the Bible.

The movie does attempt to answer several nagging questions:

Q: How did Noah care for all those animals?
A: He put them to sleep by waving incense-like smoke over them.

Q: How did humanity continue if Noah had only three sons?
A: Enter Watson's character, who has a romance with Shem. (In the biblical account, Noah's three sons all were married and took their wives on the ark.)

Q: How did Noah build the massive ark, which looks like a giant floating shoe box?
A: Those massive rock creatures helped.

We know from the outset that a message awaits: The movie finally pronounces that mercy and love are important balancing virtues to justice. A dejected Noah finds renewed hope.

The acting doesn't amount to much. An increasingly grizzled Crowe does what he can with Noah. He's playing a character who must read the divine tea leaves. Noah finds himself in a frenzy as he approaches a pivotal incident that seems to have been inspired by the story of the sacrifice of Isaac.

A little Bible story here? A little Bible story there? What's the difference?

Oddly, the only character who seems to operate with palpable conviction is Winstone's Tubal-Cain. But he's also mildly extraneous. With God wiping out almost all of humanity, did we need a big-screen bad guy for added melodrama?

I get the problem, though. Without a little something extra what would Noah and his family do once the Earth -- made as bleak and forbidding as possible -- is flooded? Play canasta and wait for the waters to subside?

Overall, Noah stands as a decidedly mixed achievement, less a compelling story than an attempt by Aronofsky and cohorts to illustrate cosmic ideas.

And sometimes, even Aronofsky's considerable visual skills fail him, as when he references The Creator by tilting his camera skyward.

Oh well, this strange mishmash of a movie considerately shortens the purported 40 days and nights of rain, and certainly doesn't feel like any other Bible movie. Maybe I'd have felt better about the whole thing had it begun with these words, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

Cesar Chavez unionizes farm workers

Cesar Chavez, a truncated bio-pic about one of the country's most famous labor organizers, offers a step-by-step look at the hard work of winning decent working conditions and reasonable wages for migrant laborers in California.

Director Diego Luna, who starred in Y Tu Mama Tambien and who previously directed a small movie called Abel, does a solid job of refreshing memories about Chavez's landmark efforts during the 1960s.

Working from a script credited to Keir Pearson and Timothy J. Sexton, Luna concentrates on the five years in which Chavez (Michael Pena) helped organize the workers who picked grapes for California wine growers.

After deciding he needed to be closer to the workers he was trying to help, Chavez moved his family to the agricultural town of Delano, Ca., and began the arduous work that resulted in the formation of the Farmer Workers Union.

Chavez and coworker Delores Huerta (Rosario Dawson) ultimately found themselves leading a lengthy strike, which the workers ultimately won.

The rest of the supporting cast doesn't make much of an impression. A grower named Bogdanovitch (John Malkovich ) becomes the movie's main bad guy. Wes Bentley makes a brief appearance as a lawyer who helps Chavez. We also see Robert Kennedy (Jack Holmes), who turned up to support Chavez during a 25-day hunger strike that he staged.

Please, a moratorium on actors playing Kennedys. It almost always a distraction.

Chavez's wife Helen (America Ferrera) proves a woman of independent spirit, and, at times, Chavez's devotion to the farm workers causes him to spend less time with his oldest son than he'd like.

Pena portrays Chavez as a regular guy who believed in non-violence and who had no doubt that the farm workers were being exploited. His convictions seem almost inbred, an inseparable part of his being.

At times, Cesar Chavez can feel too routine, and the use of news footage doesn't do much to expand the movie's reach. We don't learn much about Chavez's eight children, and if Chavez had deep personal failings, the movie isn't interested in finding them.

Still, Cesar Chavez is represented as a tireless leader who wrought major changes and whose story deserves to be told. Viewed as an expansion of the voices represented in American movies, I'd call it a start. Let's hope it's not the finish.

An eerie drama about look-alikes

Jake Gyllenhaal teams with Canadian director Denis Villeneuve for Enemy, an atmospheric look at troubling issues involving identity.

Gyllenhaal, who worked with Villeneuve on last year's Prisoners, plays two roles: He’s Adam, a psychologically repressed history professor, and Anthony, an actor with a big personality. The professor seems disconnected from things; the actor is more outgoing.

The movie kicks off in earnest when Adam rents a movie called Where There's a Will, There's a Way. While watching this minor cinematic effort, he notices a background character who looks exactly like he does.

Adam then begins an obsessive search to find and meet his doppelganger.

Both men are involved in relationships. Adam occasionally sees a girlfriend (Melanie Laurent). Anthony’s wife (Sarah Gordon) is pregnant.

The movie invites us to play a mind game. Are we really looking at separate lives or at different aspects of the same life?

Did I mention the spiders? Images of spiders crop up throughout, seriously augmenting the movie’s creepiness.

Gyllenhaal handles both roles effectively, and Villeneuve and cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc get plenty of mileage out of the movie’s well-selected Toronto locations: Faceless apartments suggest an alien landscape in which anonymity borders on estrangement.

Enemy sustains interest, but never seems quite trippy enough to be entirely satisfying. Imagine the same material in the hands of a director such as David Cronenberg, and you’ll know what I mean.

As befits such a purposefully ambiguous effort, Villeneuve’s surprising final shot is open to interpretation — perhaps too much so.*
*Enemy has been available on VOD, where I saw it, and is now beginning a theatrical at the Sie FilmCenter.

A trip to Cambodia's killing fields

In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, and the years of the killing fields began. Filmmaker Rithy Panh deals with the rise of Pol Pot and his murderous cohorts in a way that, at first blush, seems a total mismatch of style and subject. To make The Missing Picture, Panh mixes news footage, photographs and most surprisingly, dioramas made with clay figures carved by Sarith Mang. Mang's crude but tender mini-sculptures illustrate the fate of those who suffered and died under Pol Pot -- among them, Panh's family. Panh was 13 when his family was expelled from Phnom Penh. Panh's mixed-media approach works to heighten the sense of loss that prevades the movie. A narration -- delivered by Randal Douc and written by Christophe Bataille, who also co-wrote Panh's memoir -- further personalizes the story. Panh, who now lives in France, uses immobile clay figures to create scenes of happiness that quickly dissolve into horror as his family is sent to a labor camp. Panh's father ultimately chose starvation over submission to his tormentors, something the movie's narration calls an exercise of "free will." The Missing Picture carries us on a journey that not only contributes to a redefinition of the word "documentary," but takes us to the wounded heart of a genocide that never should be forgotten.

'Divergent' has a derivative feel

Latest young adult sci-fi has limited payoff.

If we hadn't seen any of The Hunger Games movies, Divergent might have felt fresher, less like a medium-grade helping of dystopian sci-fi built around a young female character who learns to kick butt.

The fact that we have seen The Hunger Games may explain why Shailene Woodley, as the star of Divergent, sometimes seems to be standing in for Jennifer Lawrence, star of The Hunger Games.

It also may help us understand why a test that divides 16-year-olds into factions based on personality seems to be substituting for the lottery in Hunger Games.

You get the idea. It's difficult to watch Divergent, an adaptation of a 2011 novel by Veronica Roth, without making comparisons to The Hunger Games, the big-screen version of Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel.

Both books involve a rigidly divided society, a strong female main character and an oppressive social order. The stories, of course, are different, but on screen, Divergent has trouble staking out new turf.

To make matters worse, this first adaptation of Roth's trilogy of novels takes a long time reaching what feels like too paltry a payoff.
Set in a dystopian Chicago of the future, Divergent focuses on Beatrice Prior (Woodley), a young woman who has reached the age at which she must decide which of five factions she wants to join.

Youngsters are asked to choose one of five factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless or Erudite, depending on whether they're judged to be self-sacrificing, friendly, honest, brave or smart.

A rare case, Beatrice doesn't fit into any category. That classifies her as a Divergent, someone who doesn't belong.

Instead of turning her in, Beatrice's tester (Maggie Q) tells her to pick a faction and do her best to fake it. Beatrice opts for Dauntless, the warrior faction that serves as the city's army and police force.

Beatrice's choice surprises her parents (Tony Goldwyn and Ashley Judd), well-meaning folks who are part of Abnegation. Once part of Dauntless, Beatrice takes the name Tris.

Beatrice's brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) also raises eyebrows. He chooses Erudite, a faction that the Prior parents suspect is plotting to take over the city, all that's left after a war that devastated the rest of the country.

The Erudite faction is led by Jeanine Matthews (a blonde and icy Kate Winslet). Matthews tells young people to choose freely, but is so obviously authoritarian that there's little suspense about her character. We know from the start that she's to no damn good.

The movie focuses primarily on Beatrice's training to become a full-fledged member of Dauntless. She does this under the tutelage of the handsome Four (Theo James) and the mean-spirited Eric (Jai Courtney).

Setting all this up requires a fair amount of less-than-thrilling exposition. Although the early training sequences can be exciting, the three-stage development of Dauntless recruits doesn't generate enough episode-to-episode tension.

Most of the training seems to involve throwing recruits into sink-or-swim situations. We seldom see anyone receiving anything resembling instruction. The point may be to create a survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere, but it hardly seems the best way to develop future combatants.

Those who wash out of the Dauntless program, by the way, are relegated to living in the streets, part of the mass of folks who are factionless and, therefore, excluded from society's largess.

Woodley ably hints at Beatrice's delight in discovering her new aggressiveness and physicality, but isn't entirely convincing when she swings into action. James's character tends to be a trifle bland.

A prolonged finale is compromised by obvious dialogue about individual freedom and conformity that restates points director Neil Burger (Limitless) already has made.

Now that Divergent has broken the ground with this two-hour and 19-minute version, it's possible that the big-screen adaptations of the next two installments will be fleeter and deeper. Let's hope.

An Indian romance -- with great food

A story built around a contrivance -- but one that works.

The Lunchbox -- a first feature from Indian director Ritesh Batra -- may well leave you an appetite for two things: home-cooked Indian food and the possibility of bridging the loneliness gap.

Batra, who also wrote the screenplay, builds his movie around deliverymen who bicycle their way through Mumbai, some of them delivering hot lunches to a regular clientele. Some of these lunches are prepared by restaurants and some by spouses.

Nimrat Kaur) is one such wife, a woman who makes lunches for her mostly unappreciative husband (Nakul Vaid).

Ila wants to recapture the heart of a husband who has grown indifferent. With advice from an upstairs neighbor who yells instructions out her window, Ila begins putting special effort into preparing her husband's lunches.

Given the complexity of Mumbai's delivery system -- depicted by Batra in near-documentary style -- it's a wonder that anything arrives at the right place at the right time.

The story hinges on the fact that mistakes do happen. Thanks to a mix-up, Ila's delicious lunches wind up awakening the wrong palate. The recipient of Ila's culinary efforts is Saajan (Irrfan Khan), an older widower who works as an accountant and who is on the verge of retiring.

At first reluctantly and then with a bit more enthusiasm, Saajan begins to train his replacement (Nawazuddin Siddiqui).

When Ila learns that it's not her husband who's receiving the lunches, she begins enclosing small notes in the lunch boxes that are returned to her after each meal.

Saajan responds to the notes, and we become ensnared by the movie's big question: Will the two ever meet?

Beautiful and warm, Kaur is perfectly cast as Ila, and Khan projects a calm and steady presence. He's playing the kind of character we don't often see in films, a really good guy.

There's another refreshing thing about The Lunchbox. Like many movies, it's built around a contrivance. This time, though, the contrivance works to challenge the characters rather than to simply kick the story forward.

Batra seems to understand that a bustling, vital city either can revivify the spirit or drown it in loneliness. He has found an engaging way to spin a tale about two burdened hearts longing for fulfillment.

Lars Von Trier's sexual odyssey

Part I of a two-part film prompts a mixed reaction.

An older man discovers a woman lying in an alley. She's been badly beaten. He takes her home, puts her in his bed and begins nursing her back to some semblance of health and stability. She, in turn, tells him her story.

The set-up is nothing if not conventional, but when you know that I'm describing the opening of director Lars Van Trier's Nymphomaniac: Volume I, you'll understand that the movie has no intention of following a familiar arc.

As best as can be gleaned from Volume I -- reviewers have not yet had access to Volume II -- Von Trier has decided to explore female sexuality by pushing one woman's story to nymphomaniacal extremes.

We soon learn that Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the bruised woman from the alley, has taken an aggressively pro-active approach to sex, taking up with what seems a never-ending stream of men. Joe's relationships are brought to us in a variety of flashbacks in which Stacy Martin plays Joe as a young woman.

This being Volume I, we're left to surmise what might have brought Joe to her moment of degradation in that damp back alley.

The screenplay makes Joe her harshest critic; her rescuer (Stellan Skarsgard) seems a man of infinite patience. He steadfastly refuses to judge Joe. Instead, he gives her quasi-philosophical pep talks as they sit around his monkishly spare apartment.

Skarsgard's Seligman rambles on about fishing and other matters. He loves Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, and tries to connect fly fishing to Joe's story.

This gives Von Trier an opportunity to create some beautiful fishing and stream imagery, which adds a sense of mystery, but doesn't exactly prove revelatory in terms of our understanding.

Principal among Joe's relationships is her intermittent connection with Jerome (Shia LaBeouf). As a girl, Joe asks Jerome to take her virginity. He obliges. She then runs into him at various times during the story.

Some of the movie has a near-comical tone. At one point, Joe and a girlfriend take a train ride. They compete over who can score the most conquests on the train.

Given her rampant sexual activities, it's hardly surprising that Joe becomes something of an expert on penises. Perhaps that's why Von Trier includes a series of shots of penises of varying types and description.

Is he suggesting that, for Joe, men have been reduced to this essential bit of equipment? Is he mocking male genitalia by calling attention to their strangeness when abstracted from the rest of the body?

We also learn about Joe's upbringing as the movie progresses. She tells us her mother was emotionally frigid. Her father (Christian Slater) seems to have been an understanding fellow who introduced his daughter to the wonders of nature. Von Trier punishes his apparent decency with a cruel death scene.

Von Trier also makes room for an appearance by Uma Thurman, who plays the wife of a misguided husband who believes that Joe's in love with him. Thurman's character arrives at Joe's apartment moments after her fleeing husband, who thinks he's about to move in.

To make matters even more bizarre, Thurman's character -- named in the credits as Mrs. H -- brings her two sons on her journey of revenge. How else to complete the humiliation of this poor sap, a man who apparently has misread everything about Joe?

Did Volume I leave me as eager for Volume II as I was for the next episode of Breaking Bad? Hardly. I'll certainly watch Part II, but I can't say I'd feel deprived if I didn't.

The movie's provocative title, its occasional obtuseness and its artful visual gestures may well create a mixed reaction for those who aren't entirely put off by the excessive nudity, sex and blunt language.

For me, though, the most shocking thing about Nymphomaniac, Volume I is that I didn't have a stronger reaction to it. Perhaps Volume II will light a stronger fire.

'Veronica Mars' stalks the big screen

A TV series becomes a movie. The result is middling.

Whether you embrace Veronica Mars, the big-screen adaptation of a popular TV series that ended in 2007, may depend on whether you were a fan of the show to begin with.

At a preview screening, a knowing audience laughed appreciatively when familiar characters made their entrances. I think that's because they knew what these characters were about and didn't need much by way of back-and-fill explanation.

The film, by the way, begins with a short reprise of what happened on the TV series, persumably to allow for a bit of audience expansion.

If you're not a fan of the series, you may find the movie to be flat and unexceptional. If I knew nothing about Veronica Mars, the $5.7 million Kickstarter campaign that brought it into existence, and the obvious devotion of its fans, I would have had trouble understanding why this movie was even made.

Look, a 108-minute feature is not a TV series, and that may be the trouble. A TV series puts the emphasis on characters we get know over time. We live with these characters over entire seasons.

A movie, on the other hand, is a self-contained entity that needs a strong story. Veronica Mars doesn't really have one.

For those who need a quick primer, it's worth pointing out that Veronica (Kristen Bell) started out as a teen sleuth who worked with her private investigator father (Enrico Colantoni) to solve crimes and to penetrate the veil of corruption that surrounds law enforcement in Neptune, Ca., Veronica's fictional hometown.

Throughout three seasons of TV, Veronica displayed a keen gift for mockery and contempt that made her both a participant and a commentator on the show's developments. She could pretty much burst anyone's bubble.

In the movie version, time has marched on, and Veronica just has graduated from law school. She's interviewing with a prestigious New York City firm when she's summoned back to Neptune.

There, she's drawn into the investigation of the murder of a rock star, a young woman with whom Veronica attended high school. Veronica's former boyfriend Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) -- now a Naval officer -- has been accused of the murder.

In traveling to Neptune, Veronica leaves her current boyfriend Piz (Chris Lowell) behind. Early on, you get the feeling that the Veronica/Piz romance is doomed. Veronica isn't one to be tied down.

At one point, the mystery takes Veronica into Hollywood, where she encounters James Franco, who's playing himself in a cameo that has an unfortunate in-joke quality.

Rob Thomas, who created the TV series, does a good job of keeping some of the high school dynamics alive, working a 10th anniversary class reunion into the proceedings.

And there's no faulting Bell, who maintains the smart, wise-cracking abilities that made Veronica so distinctive.

Usually when I see a movie, I have some idea about its box-office prospects. I have none with Veronica Mars, which will be made available on VOD at the same time as its theatrical release. The movie's success probably depends on how big a fan base it actually has.

I hope those fans find what they're looking for. As for the rest of you? I can't give you many compelling reasons for adding Veronica Mars to your moviegoing vocabulary -- unless it's to catch up on another pop-cultural phenomenon.

Speed? Yes Everything else? No

I wasn't going to bother with Need for Speed until I realized the movie starred Aaron Paul, best known as Jesse Pinkman, the young man who made meth on TV's Breaking Bad.

Meth. Speed. I thought maybe Paul had found a new drug on which he could pin his career hopes.

OK, I'm kidding. I knew that Need for Speed was developed from a popular Electronic Arts video game, but I'm not kidding about Paul. I wanted to see what he could do on the big screen.

The answer: If Need for Speed is any indication (and I hope it isn't), not much.

Paul plays Tobey Marshall, a blue-collar guy from Mt. Kisco, New York. Thanks to a few contrivances Tobey joins with Julia (Imogen Poots) on a cross-country trip. The goal is for Tobey to reach San Fancisco so that he can compete in a high stakes race sponsored by a former racer named Monarch (Michael Keaton).

Guess what? It's not all about racing. Tobey wants to defeat his arch rival Dino (Dominic Cooper), the immoral rich guy responsible for the death of Tobey's best bud (Harrison Gilbertson).

Dino forces Gilbertson's Pete into a lethal crash during an early-picture race, but the wrongly accused Tobey spends two years in jail for the crime.

Joining Tobey on his four-wheeled adventures are his pals Benny (Scott Mescudi), Finn (Rami Malek) and Joe (Ramon Rodriguez).

When Finn leaves his day job, the movie adds some gratuitious nudity to the proceedings. Eager to rejoin his racing pals, Finn shocks his office mates by stripping off his clothes, baring his butt and returning to the world of vroom-and-zoom.

En route to San Francisco, Tobey and Julia are chased by cops and by other enemies who want to stop them.

And just in case you don't think cars are enough, the directors add a Cessna that serves as a traffic reporter for the speeding Tobey and, later, a couple of helicopters.

The action (yes, there's plenty) sometimes seems more like vehicular homicide than racing with overturned cars and fiery crashes that look as if no one possibly could survive them.

Nothing makes a great deal of sense here, and as shocking as it is to say, the movie makes the Fast & Furious films -- at least the better ones -- look like masterpieces.

Based on his work in Breaking Bad, I'm thinking there's more to Paul than Need for Speed allows him show. I hope I'm right.