Clash Of The Titans Warner Bros. • Directed by Louis Leterrier
2010 • 118 minutes • PG-13
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Whatever has been happening in Hollywood for the past 10 years can be epitomized today by going to see a movie called Clash of the Titans, which is preceded by previews for movies called Robin Hood, The A-Team, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. It seems that we have reached the point where it isn’t even necessary to rename the remakes anymore, because audiences are expected to not remember that there ever were earlier versions of these stories! The 1981 Clash of the Titans was a campy action extravaganza in the same spirit as the gleefully retro Raiders of the Lost Ark. The question now is: can such goofy spectacle be recast for modern audiences? If you delight in seeing Liam Neeson as Zeus dressed up like Skeletor from Masters of the Universe, and Ralph Fiennes as Hades skulking around with a Michael Bolton haircut, while Sam Worthington glowers gloriously in the face of giant scorpions and krakens from the deep, then this is your movie. It’s the story of Perseus, the demigod son of Zeus, who leads a quest to defeat the kraken and its master, Hades, the god of the underworld. But are we really worrying about the story? The effects-heavy action sequences are first-rate, including terrific set pieces involving Medusa and an undead warrior king, and for about the middle hour Clash even manages to conjure up the momentum and old-fashioned wonder of the great traveling quest films it imitates. The key is to have plenty of popcorn and to suspend your judgment for the beginning and ending, when things like acting and character development try to worm their way in, with laughable results. And above all—Greek mythology nerds, stay away!
The Ghost Writer RP Films/Summit Entertainment • Directed by Roman Polanski
2010 • 128 minutes • PG-13
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The story of The Ghost Writer is straightforwardly modern, revolving around an embattled British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan, so obviously a stand-in for Tony Blair that he deserves an end credit) and the ghostwriter hired to dress up his work-in-progress memoir. But the film, as directed by old-guard stalwart Roman Polanski, feels like something from a bygone era, an artifact from the time of stately noir thrillers so assured in their plotting that they proceeded like funeral processions rather than car chases. At times I was reminded of David Mamet’s slowly coiling 1997 thriller The Spanish Prisoner, and that’s a tremendous compliment. Ewan McGregor plays the unnamed protagonist as a man who isn’t really there, which, with Polanski mischievously nodding to fellow director Michelangelo Antonioni, may have been the only way to play him. Brought in for emergency literary repairs after an earlier ghostwriter turns up dead under mysterious circumstances, McGregor slowly finds himself sinking into a web of deceit and scandal surrounding nefarious deeds that the former PM may or may not have perpetrated. Given the transparent real-life parallels, it’s no surprise that the thicket of deeds turns out to be deep and sinister, but the thrill is in hanging on through a story so confident that when a pulse-pounding action sequence finally emerges, it comes naturally, after more than an hour of slowly building suspense. The only shame is that such an elegant diversion should be marred by its frequent and wholly unnecessary allusions to reality, whether in the Condoleezza Rice lookalike or the uncomfortable echo in the Brosnan character of Polanski’s own notorious history. It’s unsettling to consider that perhaps this director, whose films always seem to take place in the same stilted, foreboding, tongue-in-cheek alternate universe, is compelled to plumb our recent political history because the real world has finally become as lurid and unseemly as his imagination.
Greenberg Scott Rudin Productions • Directed by Noah Baumbach
2010 • 107 minutes • R
“Hurt people hurt people.” This trite but trenchant observation is passed along from character to character, all of them hurt and most of them bristling, in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg. It could also be reasonably put forth as the unifying theme of all of Baumbach’s cinema, as his previous films The Squid and the Whale and Margo at the Wedding also dealt with damaged, neurotic people. Greenberg stars Ben Stiller, utterly shedding his comedy roots just as Adam Sandler did with electrifying results for Punch Drunk Love in 2002, and his performance is one of the most accurate and piercing I have ever seen. Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a man we have all met: good-looking, witty, self-obsessed, constantly on edge, and incapable of viewing himself as the preening jerk that everyone else can clearly see he is. At the film’s start, Greenberg arrives in Los Angeles to figure his life out while housesitting for his brother. He meets Florence, a flirty girl who runs errands and walks the family dog. She is at the beginning of those dozen or so years in early adulthood that will define everything that comes after—a transition that Greenberg now realizes he handled badly. It is this feeling of loss mixed with awakening—a sort of silent kicking and screaming at the recognition that the life you once imagined will never happen, and that the life you’ve wound up with may not be so bad after all—that makes Greenberg actually quite profound, and far more meaningful than Baumbach’s previous films. Like The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg isn’t a very pleasant experience, but its awkward, biting, wandering characters form a portrait—a landscape, really—of the single biggest change that we undergo in life: from fighting for an imagined future, to accepting a real present.
