MOVIE REVIEWS: 'The Prestige,' 'Flicka,' 'A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints'


Movie reviews in Friday’s Oregonian. Click on the title links for the print versions.

I also talked about “The Prestige” on Friday’s “Cort and Fatboy” broadcast. (I dragged in special guest Dave Walker to talk about “Flags of our Fathers.”)




The Prestige
(dir./co-wr. Christopher Nolan)

Director Christopher Nolan has made a career out of surprise -- out of misdirecting you like a magician. “Memento,” and to a lesser degree “Insomnia,” used the POVs of disoriented characters to set up revelations, shocks and “aha”s. Even “Batman Begins” has one big twist.

So it’s a little strange that Nolan has finally made a movie about magicians, a film about the trickery that clearly obsesses him … and it contains the sloppiest misdirection of his short career.

That’s not to say “The Prestige” isn’t sophisticated, well-made or well-acted, or that it doesn’t have fascinating, occasionally shocking stuff on its mind. It does. The less you know about the story going in, the better. But here are the very basics:

The film, which adapts Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel, opens on a wintry hillside littered with magician’s top hats. A disembodied voice asks a question: “Are you watching closely?”

From there, we witness a murder and a murder trial -- kicking off a series of time-hopping flashbacks tracing the rivalry of two 19th-century magicians, Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Borden (Christian Bale). Each nurses a legitimate grudge against the other. Each goes to ridiculous lengths to steal the other’s secrets. And each pays a tragic price in their attempts to top the other’s variations on a trick called “The Transported Man.”

You could argue that stage magic was the blockbuster cinema of the 19th century -- and Nolan is very obviously using “The Prestige” to explore the personal cost of the showman’s vow, particularly as it relates to filmmaking and technology.

I interviewed him recently, and he laid all this out: “There’s a fascinating relationship between the essence of an audience’s experience of magic and the audience’s experience of film,” he said. “People know it’s a trick, and that’s part of the attraction…. What’s strange is that both magicians and filmmakers spend the whole time trying to make things as convincing as possible.”

There’s a disappearing-bird trick in the film that actually kills the bird, and it mirrors the larger way in which Angier and Borden harm themselves and assorted loved ones and assistants (including Rebecca Hall, Piper Perabo and Scarlett Johansson) in their “total devotion” to finding better illusions -- at one point enlisting scientist Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) to blur the lines between science and magic.

“You’ve got to get your hands dirty if you’re going to achieve the impossible,” says Angier’s master trick designer (Michael Caine). But Angier and Borden plunge both arms into the muck.

The film weaves these rich themes and more into an incredibly dense tapestry. Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan do a masterful job telling their story out of order, dancing through time and space and points of view as each magician studies the other’s private journals. The film itself is structured along the lines of a magic trick.

Unfortunately, “The Prestige” fails to be masterful in one key respect, and I’ll try to tread lightly here: It’s clearly trying to build to some final revelations that don’t end up being all that surprising, given the clues and camera glances and remarks liberally sprinkled throughout the story. The film’s sophisticated enough to offer dramatic rewards beyond that -- it’s a gorgeous, strange little piece -- but I did find myself wishing it poked fewer aces out its sleeve after urging us to pay such close attention.

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Flicka
(dir. Michael Mayer)

The filmmakers behind the sweet-hearted, mostly well-made family film “Flicka” know their target audience. In fact, they cater to it at the expense of the original book.

The movie’s a loose adaptation of Mary O’Hara’s 1941 children’s novel (and the 1943 film ) “My Friend Flicka.” And by “loose adaptation,” I mean the new “Flicka” changes the lead character -- a kid who forms an irrationally close bond with a horse -- from a boy to a girl.

Which is a brilliant marketing move. Because it allows the new “Flicka” to become a Red Bull-level fix for young girls who crave stories about girls and their animals.

I know how cynical that sounds. But it’s sort of impossible to discuss “Flicka” without admiring its genius as a piece of niche-audience wish-fulfullment. If you’ve raised a teenaged girl who loves Tamora Pierce books or their many imitators, you know exactly the niche audience I’m talking about. (Lots of sentences about “velvety flanks.”)

“Flicka” courts this demographic so aggressively, its end credits play over a montage of random snapshots of girls of all ages riding and/or nuzzling their steeds.

Anyway. The movie follows boarding-school student Katy (Alison Lohman) -- “the only daughter in a long line of ranchers.” She’s failing in school because all she can do is write essays in her head about how “the history of the West was written by the horse.” Home at her dad’s Wyoming ranch for the summer, she falls down a hill and meets cute with a black mustang after it saves her from a mountain lion.

“You came to me,” she whispers later. “You know me.”

Daddy (Tim McGraw) corrals the mustang to keep it from compromising his quarter-horse herd. From there, “Flicka” falls into a familiar rhythm:

• We fly over gorgeous scenery to the strains of country-pop selected by McGraw;

• Dad forbids Katy to train/ride/touch the titular horse;

• Katy does something headstrong, in the grand tradition of kids in movies who bond with animals at the expense of people, rationale or indeed the most basic forethought;

• Something tragic happens;

• And someone gives a speech about shared identity. Katy says about Flicka, “We’re the same!” McGraw’s wife (Maria Bello) tells him, “When are you gonna look at your daughter and realize she’s you?” (Everybody is everybody else in this movie, apparently.)

Rinse and repeat. The story gets a little over-the-top cheesy toward the end, right around the time Katy dresses as a boy to enter an insane rodeo race. But it’s hard to argue with the movie’s big heart, solid craftsmanship, likable characters, decent acting, gorgeous scenery or the fact that it’s going to leave its audience blubbering and smiling.

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A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
(wr./dir. Dito Montiel)

The IMDb.com trivia page for “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” tells us about a moment in which actor Channing Tatum “throws a table through the glass window of a door. This was improvised by … Tatum, who got so wrapped up in the scene he nearly lost control…. [“Nearly”?] The director liked it so much he kept it as the final version.”

With all due respect to the real-life experiences of “Saints” writer/director Dito Montiel -- who’s adapting his own memoir about growing up in Astoria, New York -- over-indulging that sort of chaos is the movie’s fatal flaw.

Montiel shifts back and forth between two eras of his life story: a horrible turning point in his chaotic Queens upbringing in 1986, and his hesitant return to the neighborhood 20 years later after he learns his father is sick. (This is considerably less epic than the book, which also chronicles Dito’s road trips, punk-music career and encounters with Allen Ginsberg.)

The older Dito is played by Robert Downey, Jr., in a performance so muted he seems slightly bored. It’s a stark contrast to the ’86 scenes -- where 14-year-old Dito (Shia LaBeouf) and his reckless pals (played by Tatum, Peter Anthony Tambakis and Adam Scarimbolo) fight with Puerto Rican thugs, tango with girls from the block, hang with Dito’s parents (Dianne Wiest, Chazz Palminteri) and get in loud, grating, endlessly repetitive arguments.

This is Montiel’s first film, and he shoots and edits with the raw enthusiasm of someone trying to chase down “Mean Streets” and beat it senseless with “Do the Right Thing.” Characters stop and address the camera like they’re in a Spike Lee Joint. Dialogue is delivered in multiple takes out of sync with the images, as if the film itself had shifting memories.

It looks sharp. But Montiel’s love of semi-improvised pandemonium dilutes his story. Nearly every scene set in the ’80s is a loud, shapeless, escalating argument that feels like it might end with someone throwing a table. The actors yell and curse around the points they’re trying to hit -- repeating the same lines over and over like they’re in an acting-class exercise pretending to be Martin Scorsese street toughs. It gets excruciating in a hurry.

The story of Dito escaping and then facing his demons is meaningful. But that story is so buried in actorly noise that it feels false.

The showman tips his hand
Saddled with emotion
When the ‘Saints’ go screaming in
(The Oregonian, Friday, Oct. 20, 2006)

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Oct. 20, 2006)

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Posted: Sat - October 21, 2006 at 04:37 PM        

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