RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is a tendency among critics to assume that an inscrutable, disjointed, overlong, tendentious film with characters bearing the names Bloom and Dedalus – must be paying homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses and must therefore be deep. There is also the tendency to give a pass or the benefit of one’s doubt to a director who has achieved some prominence with past work. So this rebuke is meant for movie-goers only – do not fall into the same trap as the pro’s. Ismael’s Ghosts, starring Matthieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg – all first rate French actors – is a mess. It asks viewers to do the work of turning a grab-bag of plots and characters into a coherent narrative – something the screenwriter is supposed to do way before filming begins.

There is the re-entry of a woman who disappeared 20 years before the film takes place and has been presumed dead; there is her husband, the filmmaker creating a story based on his brother, a mysterious spy; there is the woman’s father – a master filmmaker whom her husband idolizes and who will be honored at a Tel-Aviv Film Festival; there is an astro-physicist who is in love with the deserted husband/director and an actress who is in the film within the film who is smitten with him too. At his best – all 110 pounds of him – Matthieu is not a sexy man; in this movie he is increasingly more dirty, disheveled, sleep-deprived and bug-eyed – the kind of man anyone but the French would hose down before touching Yet we are meant to believe that the beautiful Marion Cotillaard needs to be frontally nude in an attempt to win him back. After seeing over-the hill Stormy Daniels on tv, we know that Marion would only need to expose one of her shapely legs to get a man’s attention. But why would she want to? Why would anyone?

“As is customary in Mr. Desplechin’s work, there’s a lot of dialogue in “Ismael’s Ghosts,” but this movie’s nerve endings vibrate most avidly and tenderly in scenes where not a word is spoken: Sylvia on her first ride home with Ismael, looking up in serene rapture from a cab window toward the night sky; Ismael, angry and confused, framed between walls at the top of a dark staircase; Carlotta in tears, letting the blast of water from an ornamental shower head blast against her brow. It’s moments like these that make Ismael’s Ghosts” an unforgettable experience. (Glenn Kenny, NYT 3/22)

Caution: this is critic’s snake oil. Do not believe a word of it and do not go near this film – it will make you more frustrated and angry than its characters and you will find yourself wishing that you could watch The Sound of Music a few times to clear Ismael from memory. I’ve just done you a big solid – you are very welcome

His new movie reflects on the flight from reality.

Ready Player One presents a sci-fi vision of the near future so eerie and provocative that the first half of the movie constitutes Steven Spielberg’s most captivating work since A.I. (2001), the only film he’s ever done that merged his fairy-tale awe with Stanley Kubrick’s cold fatalism. By the climax of the new film, though, it has morphed into a serviceable if trite blockbuster about a plucky multicultural gang of cute kids outsmarting the cruel chief of the greedy corporation.

It’s a serviceable if trite blockbuster about a plucky multicultural gang of cute kids outsmarting the cruel chief of the greedy corporation.

On the surface, the screen version of Ernest Cline’s novel is a quest narrative set in a dystopic 2045, when Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a resourceful orphan, undertakes a search for three magical keys stashed inside a massive multiplayer virtual-reality game by the game’s late creator, Halliday (Mark Rylance). Wonka-like, Halliday (who continues to exist in virtual form online, as a wizard avatar) has promised to give away the kingdom to whoever proves worthy enough to solve his riddles. That prize is also sought by a nasty corporation whose domineering boss (Ben Mendelsohn) is using a brute-force strategy of sending out an army of players to find the keys by trying every possible option.

That’s the core of the film, and also the most routine aspect. But it’s interspersed with a delightful Gen X pop-culture scavenger hunt that gives the film considerable bounce: In retrospect, The Lord of the Rings could have used the leavening touch of a couple of Hall & Oates tunes. References to Back to the Future, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Atari video games, Twisted Sister, and especially The Shining (which gets a lengthy homage) blanket everything as relentlessly as the popcorn explosion in Real Genius. Ready Player One may feature more direct references to other movies than any blockbuster ever, even The Lego Movie, though Spielberg is notably coy about referring back to his own movies or to those of his sometime partner George Lucas. That’s probably just as well; Spielberg ruled the early 1980s and it would be unbecoming of him to brag about it. (No need to inform me he had an executive-producer credit on Back to the Future, by the way.) For extra nerd points, there’s a special guest appearance by the Holy Hand Grenade, that super-weapon from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

It’s Easter weekend. Like any good Southern mom, I have approximately 17 pairs of shoes for my daughters and me, three coordinating but not matchy-matchy Sunday dresses, and some very matchy-matchy polka-dot bunny leggings I picked up at Target in the little girls’ section for good measure. Those were all easy to find.

A little trickier to find are activities that commemorate the actual reason for Easter in a way that young children can understand and enjoy. Obviously, if you’re looking for stories of suffering and sacrifice that end with the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises, start with the Bible.

But may I also suggest the 1998 animated movie, “The Prince of Egypt.” This ambitious production was the first project undertaken by Jeffrey Katzenberg’s DreamWorks and was the top-grossing non-Disney animated film at the time, but it’s a bit of a forgotten gem 20 years later.

Here are five reasons to watch it this weekend with your kids.
1. It’s Epic

I don’t mean epic in the overused modern Internet slang way. I mean the themes are serious and universal, the story timeless, the music moving. Animation allows for the locusts and the blood and the frogs to pour forth in a truly stunning fashion, giving the Exodus story the towering, overwhelming imagery it was meant to have. There is one shot, during the parting of the Red Sea, of a whale silhouetted behind the giant curtain of water as a parade of tiny people walks to freedom in its shadow that is just stunningly beautiful.

As Roger Ebert said in his review, “What it proves above all is that animation frees the imagination from the shackles of gravity and reality, and allows a story to soar as it will.”

A lot of animated films aim to be entertaining for both adults and kids, tossing in sly jokes for the parents in the crowd. Pixar is famous for this. “The Prince of Egypt” feels more like an animated film for adults that children will also enjoy. There’s a bit of comic relief in the form of the Pharoah’s two hapless magicians (Martin Short and Steve Martin), but the movie is dignified and sophisticated. I discovered it as an adult and it holds up 20 years later with my kids.
2. The Cast

“The Prince of Egypt” was lauded for its voice acting, and with good reason. The cast is a bunch of A-listers in their prime in the ‘90s. Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Patrick Stewart, Sandra Bullock, Danny Glover, Helen Mirren, the aforementioned comic superstars as Pharaohs lackeys, and a special treat for any cast, but particularly voice acting — Jeff Goldblum.

This version of the famous Israeli rescue of hostages from the hijacked Air France plane should be known for its hard-left slant and its glaring omissions. Written by Gregory Burke and directed by Jose Padilha, its main purpose is to humanize the hijackers and to trace all of Israel’s current problems to ITS failure to negotiate with peace-loving, occupied Palestinians. Here are some of the facts this movie does not contain.

Palestinians began the practice of hijacking planes in 1968 and were the leading perpetrators of this particular form of torture, managing one a month in 1972. The Entebbe event of 1976 was organized by a founding member of the German Revolutionary Cells (RZ) and his female accomplice together with two Palestinian drop-outs from Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Though they appear in the film, we are not given any background into the virulence of these movements. Rather, the German Bose (played by Daniel Bruhl) is seen as a humanitarian who stands up for women and children. His accomplice (Rosamund Pike) is a garden-variety nut bag compelled to save Palestinians who are described by one of the hijackers as the people who were treated just like the Jews in the holocaust once those Nazi-like Jewish survivors came to Palestine to steal land and occupy it Of course many Jews had already emigrated in the 19th century fleeing European pogroms and some had drifted back after much earlier expulsions of Jews from several European countries. Many “Palestinians” were actually Arabs from Syria and other parts of the middle-east who migrated after the Jews began draining the malaria-infested swamps and creating jobs and better living conditions for unskilled labor.

Sternly, one character tells another that the fight must go on, for the sake of the hostages. Just as sternly, the other character replies that if the fight must go on, then we are all hostages. The latter is being metaphorical, maybe even metaphysical, musing about a future marred by perpetual hostilities. The former is being a bit more literal: There are 246 men, women, and children held at gunpoint in Uganda who need saving.

How to resolve this breakdown in communication? You can’t, which makes 7 Days in Entebbe, a new movie adaptation of what may be history’s most audacious rescue operation, particularly vexing to watch. One moment it’s Ziv, a hardened young commando about to report for duty, bickering with his girlfriend, a peaceable dancer. The next, it’s Shimon Peres, the operation’s chief cheerleader, bickering with his quivering frenemy, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. No matter who’s doing the talking, the question pondered is the same: How long must we fight?

The answer, to all but high-minded screenwriters intent on making serious movies about moral conundrums, is not too complicated: as long as there are bad guys with guns trying to kill us. In 7 Days, however, the bad guys aren’t that bad—they’re German intellectuals, which means that, periodically, they must put aside their AK-47s and debate the dialectical nature of history.