BP Quick Hitter: Taken

 

She said she was just going to the mall and would be back by 1o.

Taken is the first film I’ve rented using Redbox. There’s one around the corner at the Harris Teeter.

Redbox is the service that lets you pick a DVD from a kiosk and rent it the next day. And it lives up to its initial impression as a vending machine, where you’ll always find a Reese’s Cup but rarely a Zagnut. So, don’t expect to be taking home The Bicycle Thief for your evening’s entertainment. In fact, I think going forward the terms “Redbox” should be synonymous with mainstream, multiplex offerings, offering cheap thrills with a minimum of thought. (As in “I saw the new Redbox with Anne Hathaway.”)

On that score, Taken delivers. It’s actually a strange little action film, made in France a while back and starring, of all people, Liam Neeson, taking a break from his mopey, hang-dog dramatic personage to play a mopey, hang-dog former CIA agent.

In doing so, Neeson may have established a new subgenre: The Divorced Dad’s Action Fantasy Movie. In more traditional settings, these kinds of movies had their day as families split in the 1980s and 90s. Then, Dads would do crazy things to get their kids to like them again, such as dress up as a woman, or be reincarnated as a talking snowman.

That won’t work in these more ruthless, desperate times. In Taken, Neeson, in order to just spend some time with his teenage daughter, has to travel to Paris and rescue her from Albanian sex traffickers. You can’t do brunch at Ruby Tuesday like the rest of the divorced dads?

BP Quick Hitter: In the Valley of Elah (2007)

I need to know something. Can you pick up the check?

Director: Paul Haggis

Writer: Paul Haggis, Mark Boal

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron

A largely quiet meditation on the fractured nature of perception. Army vet Jones’s son goes AWOL upon returning home from Iraq and Jones takes it upon himself to investigate, with the help of taciturn police detective Theron. (These two together don’t produce heat, just the opposite; their lived-in resignation in the face of inalterable truth puts the entire film under a cloud.) There is something wonderful, if not novelistic, in the movie’s march toward its conclusion, one that refuses to tie anything up neatly, but has much to say about pressures soliders face. Jones knows more about himself, his son, and his country by the end of the movie. But to him, there isn’t much reassurance there.

BP Quick Hitter: The Kingdom (2007)

I know this isn’t the time, but damn if you aren’t one fine FBI agent.

Director: Peter Berg

Writer: Matthew Michael Carnahan

Starring: Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman

There was real hope here for awhile. Director Peter Berg was responsible for the sublime (albeit still bombastic) Friday Night Lights. And in its early reel, the film takes some pains to detail the inacessible nature of Saudi society. And more hope in the form of supportings Chris Cooper, Jeremy Piven, and Jason Bateman (as an FBI agent? Really?). But all of that flies out the window as things begin to explode, rockets fire, and automatic weapons rattle. Syriana for Dummies. Black Hawk Down for, well, those who never tire of urban shoot-ups. I blame Jamie Foxx.

BP/DVD Review: The Darjeeling Limited

 

Have you noticed that we all have very similar noses?

Year: 2007

Director: Wes Anderson

Starring: Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman

 

I approached The Darjeeling Limited with equal parts anticipation and trepidation.

Wes Anderson’s films are like the elaborate set designs he favors: they are easy to appreciate, yet ultimately claustrophobic. He fashions worlds that match his highly styled characters and only they can truly feel comfortable within them. The rest of us find ourselves looking for an exit.

I say this while admitting that Rushmore, my first exposure to Anderson, felt like a small miracle. I reveled in its tone, its refusal to provide anything in terms of narrative comfort. Anderson constructs worlds with rules that are known only to their inhabitants.

And The Royal Tenenbaums holds a special place on my DVD shelf, if only for Owen Wilson’s thickheaded author. (“Everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is . . . maybe he didn’t?)

But then came The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I eagerly anticipated and which left me almost angry. And what was becoming clear is that Anderson’s world was growing smaller even as his subject matter (and his budget) was adopting a large scale. While his films had never been studies in realism to begin with, Life Aquatic felt rooted in nothing save the production design, with its characters completely subsumed within.

BP/DVD Review: Into the Wild

You know, i suppose I could drive you a few more hundred yards.

Year: 2007

Director: Sean Penn

Starring: Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook

I’ll admit it. I’ve been sitting on Into the Wild for at least a week, and watching it felt a little bit like a homework assignment.

I knew what was coming, having read the Jon Krakauer book years ago. And even though I had largely avoided the reviews, I had a sense of what was coming: Lots of rapturous shots of a man in the Wilderness.

Not to criticize Sean Penn, who had a real sense of what he was trying to do. But it’s too easy to hold Chris McCandless up as a cure for all that is wrong with the world. The kid was a dreamer, but if there’s a reason why the story of Icarus has been a legend for more than 2,500 years. If you fly near the Sun with wings made of wax, guess what happens? And if you move out to the middle of Alaska with few supplies and a belief you can live off the land even though you have never done it, guess what happens?

That being said, for a movie about isolation, Penn does an admirable job of showing the human relationships that McCandless established on the road before his fateful trip up North. And he has a real feel for the less-than-perfect dropouts from mainstream society. A sequence where McCandless lives with two surrogate parents in a barren stretch of California known as Slab City is particularly resonant, as is Hirsch’s widely praised interaction with a tender, lonely Hal Holbrook.

But it makes it all the more frustrating that the protagonist’s decision to leave people behind once he’s created the bonds for which he was obviously starving is poorly understand, by the people who knew McCandless and by the audience. And while you wish the ending would be transcendent, a moment that encapsulates all that is gorgeous about the mystery of existence, you can’t quite escape the feeling that you are watching a story about a guy who was crushed by his car fixing a flat tire because he didn’t know how to jack it up correctly.

My guess is that there is a large generational split among people who have seen this film. Just like that there’s a certain age when you should read “On the Road,” and then there’s a certain age here you can’t.