The Final Take with Parker Mott

Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio) and Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) reunite in "The Great Gatsby".

The initial reactions to Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, are strangely similar to the ones of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original 1925 book. Both works were first critically rebuked, respected only for a single redeeming quality: Luhrmann’s style and Fitzgerald’s prose. People complained that the latter’s characters were “marionettes” and in Luhrmann’s adaptation it can argued that the characters are merely dancing puppets of a cinematic pageantry. (continue reading…)

Don't go into "Room 237"...but "The Shining" still keeps its doors wide open.

The Shining is probably Stanley Kubrick’s most mind-boggling film, certainly not his best but not far from what its poster heralds as “a masterpiece of modern horror.” Watching the film for maybe the seventh time the other day – but the first ever on the big screen, in a gloriously crisp 35mm print at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox – the film registered to me as droll. Many scenes, thanks to Kubrick’s craftsmanship, sink their hooks in you, while others hang loosely with pin-dropping bemusement. (continue reading…)

Sidekicks: Robert Downey, Jr. and Don Cheadle face-off against the ruthless Mandarin in "Iron Man 3".

Iron Man 3 marks the first Marvel blockbuster of the summer (and, assumedly, a box office wonder), thus detonating the big bang of Hollywood spectacle and action-oriented narrative sure to disperse across the multiplexes these next coming months. The Marvel movies are typically theme-park rides, built on a grand scale and meant simply to thrill (Iron Man 2’s motif use of ACDC’s “Shoot to Thrill” was thereby apt). (continue reading…)

Compromised identities: Robert Redford is on the run in "The Company You Keep".

Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep is a passably entertaining thriller, light albeit on the politics and heavy on the sentimentality. We’re introduced thus to characters who seem too likable, and emotionally approachable, based on their past dark deeds. That’s Redford: the forgiving romantic. He tries to create confrontational morality tales, but his soft, soapy liberal-mindedness holds the impact, truthfulness back. (continue reading…)

A brat pack of attractive misfits in "Spring Breakers".

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is so lavishly absurd, irreverent – cruel even – and unapologetically self-indulgent that you’re almost compelled to think the director is getting at something. Almost. Korine, a notorious enfant terrible, uses the cinema as a prodding rod, too willingly that he often overlooks the medium’s ability to necessitate social critiques. Alas, Spring Breakers is mostly an empty provocation…but not entirely. (continue reading…)

The tragic Fantine (played memorably by Anne Hathaway) in Tom Hooper's adaptation of "Les Miserables".

Les Miserables is a wildly flawed display of musical numbers, that for the most part wildly evoke the misery of urban class living in mid-19th century France (although, yes, the performers chant with mint British accents). There’s little depth (or, heck, logic) to how this tear-jerking show finds its way, but it’s as if King’s Speech director Tom Hooper does this purposely by cutting off our peripherals. He frames most of the action in loopy steadicam closeups (behold, a Terrence Malick musical!), occupying faces – not sets or, you know, narrative. (continue reading…)

FDR (Bill Murray) has a good time – and we don't – in "Hyde Park on Hudson".

Dealing with a political personage like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it’s peculiar that Hyde Park on Hudson staidly limits the drama to the little bits of business at a small and sumptuous estate in the bucolic Hyde Park in upstate New York where the 32nd president of the United Stated does little else but drive his 1936 Ford Phaeton in daisy fields and guzzle dry gin in his timber-furnished quarters. The landscape itself is Granny-Smith green; the trees and hedges nestle around the mansion adding texture and beauty. In the distant future, I bet curmudgeonly Frank from this year’s comedy Robot & Frank lived near here. (continue reading…)

I'm on a boat: A boy and tiger band together to survive out at sea in "Life of Pi".

Deemed nearly “unfilmable”, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, in spite of its shortcomings, is a worthy, lustrous rebuke: an epic and visually resplendent 3D cinematic adventure out in the cosmic waters of the South Pacific. Intended as a reflective piece, Life of Pi dramatizes the survival of a young, determined, and idealistic Indian boy named Piscine “Pi” Patel (Suraj Sharma), named after a French swimming pool (as bad a name since Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue”). (continue reading…)

Tom Hanks and Halle Berry avoid trouble in "Cloud Atlas".

I can’t – I simply can’t – recommend Cloud Atlas, but not for a second would I discourage seeing it. It’s a three-hour cosmic blockbuster-of-sorts hermetically sealed in its own visual grandiosity. While a theoretical philosopher would probably call it Beclouded Atlas, I know there are viewers out there who will embrace the movie for its imagery. It took me two viewings to embrace the mystique of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and after doing the same with Cloud Atlas I wasn’t as convinced, although still a bit dazzled. (continue reading…)

Frankenweenie.

Frankenweenie may be a return to Tim Burton’s past, but it’s not quite a return to form. This is an example of a filmmaker who employs all his tools and tricks, but can’t find a way to twist out the awe – or, what might be more accurate for Burton, morbidity. His latest film, a 3D stop-motion monster romp, is not at the mediocrity of Burton’s last two efforts Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows, but it feels for too much of its 87 minutes unremarkably Burton-lite. (continue reading…)