"Atonement" and other recent DVD releases

"Atonement" is the tragic tale of how a lie can destroy lives and completely redefine the life of the person who told it. It is a marvelously told tale from director Joe Wright, much darker than his "Pride and Prejudice," but equally as well adapted. In 1935 England, 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) has just finished writing her first play when she looks out the window of the family estate and sees an incident at a fountain between her older sister Cecilia (Kiera Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of the estate’s gardener, that Briony doesn’t quite grasp the reality of. Wright does an interesting thing with this scene (as well as others in the film): First he shows it from Briony’s point-of-view and then we get to see it as it really took place. Robbie has been taken under the wing of the Tallis family to the point where Briony’s and Cecilia’s father is paying for his education. Somewhat emboldened by what happened at the fountain, Robbie writes Cecilia a note that makes a sexually profane reference to a certain delicate part of Cecilia’s anatomy. Realizing this is not the best thing to do, Robbie re-writes the note and then asks Briony to take it to her during a lush party on the estate. Robbie, however, gives Briony the wrong note and, already alarmed by what she saw at the fountain, Briony reads its scandalous contents. Later that the night she witnesses a scene of passion in the estate’s library and, probably no more than an hour later, during the search for twin boys who have run away from the estate, she stumbles across her cousin being sexually attacked. Because of what she saw at the fountain, read in the note and saw in the library, she is convinced Robbie is a sexual pervert and her cousin’s attacker. She identifies him as such to the authorities, who arrest him on the spot. That is Act I of the film. Act II tells the story of the effects of what Briony said. Robbie is given the opportunity to serve in the Army in lieu of prison time and winds up in France and at the evacuation of Dunkirk. Cecilia becomes a nurse and Briony, now played by Romola Garai and who has come to realize she made a mistake in identifying Robbie as her cousin’s attacher, is working as a nurse’s aide, apparently in a form of self-inflicted atonement for what she said she saw five years earlier. The brief Act III, set in 1990 and featuring a stunning performance from Vanessa Redgrave as Briony, now an acclaimed novelist, delivers one final punch to the gut. (In this scene, she is interviewed by a television journalist played by Anthony Minghella, who died the day I saw this DVD.) I have not read Ian McEwan’s novel from which this film has been adapted, but I’m thinking he made the Cecilia character more important than she comes across here. The film is really the story of Briony and the effect of her actions on Robbie, which is made even sadder by the fact that she carries a life-long infatuation for him. Knightley is fine in her scenes but this film really belongs to Wright, McAvoy and the Ronan-Garai-Redgrave trio that brilliantly brings Briony to life. But what really elevates the film, what stays with you long after you’ve finished watching it, is that it has the audacity to pose the question of whether the ultimate act of atonement is yet another lie. Grade: B+

For most of its running time, "Enchanted" is exactly that, only faltering in the last 30 minutes or so. This is satire on some of the memorable movies and characters created by the Walt Disney Studio and it comes from, of all places, the Walt Disney Studio. It begins in an animated fairyland like those places inhabited by Cinderella and Snow White with Giselle, a young beauty who lives in her cottage with her friends, the cuddly creatures of the forest. There she dreams of finding her prince and love’s true kiss. It just so happens that not far away is a prince, Edward, looking for his true love. They meet, they fall in love, and he whisks her away to his castle where they plan to wed the next morning. Only one problem: Once the prince weds, he becomes ruler of the kingdom thus disposing of the current one, Queen Narissa, the prince’s evil stepmother. Obviously the new bride has got to go so the queen, in the guise of a haggard old witch (the first of many Snow White references), throws her down a well, sending her to a land where no one lives happily after, namely New York City and more specifically Times Square. There she morfs from an animated woman to one of flesh and blood and portrayed by Amy Adams in a comedic performance so that’s so marvelously effortless it indicates that, after all these years, the cinema may have finally found someone to assume the throne vacated by the death of Carole Lombard. Ms. Adams is that good, that talented. She meets Robert (Patrick Dempsey) a single father/divorce lawyer with a young daughter (Rachel Covey) and a girlfriend (Idina Menzel) who acts as though she has a constant wedgy. During her first hours in New York and her being a cartoon character from the Disney production line, Giselle bursts into songon two different occasions, each time leading to incredibly inventive and choreographed production numbers. The first is the send up of the classic scene in which the princess summons the various animal creatures to help her clean house. However, this being New York City, the creatures she summons are, well, let’s just say they are not the lovable furry types normally associated with scenes like this. The second is a major production number that uses Central Park as its stage and what seems like every available dancer in New York City. These numbers are original and exhilarating -- so much so that they place the movie on a level that it can’t ever quite equal. Not that it doesn’t come close, especially with Timothy Spall as Nathaniel, a squire-like character sent to New York City by Narissa to dispatch Giselle with, what else, poison apples, and James Marsden who is incredibly funny as the incredibly square Prince Edward in NYC. His exasperated attempts at heroism are a howl. But the film’s most biting moment comes when Nathaniel has a scene with a chipmunk that comes dangerously close to a crucifixion. Then, however, Narissa comes to New York City looking amazingly like Susan Sarandon at which point the movie seems to lose its focus and sense of purpose. But until that time, "Enchanted," is pure enchantment. Grade: B-

"Love in the Time of Cholera," I’m guessing, should be this passionate, lusty, heartfelt tale of unrequited love with an uplifting coda of redemption. Under the direction of Mike Newell, however, it becomes a plodding, often dull, poorly scripted mess with, admittedly, a few redeeming features. It tells the story of Florentino Ariza (Unax Ugalde) who, as a teen, is dumbstruck by instantaneous love the moment he lays eyes on Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). At first, Fermina returns his ardor, if from afar, until her father Lorenzo (John Leguizamo, who plays the part as though any minute he’s going to tie his daughter to the railroad tracks), who wants his daughter to marry up in society, whisks her away to the jungle retreat of childhood pal Hildebranda (Catalina Sandino Moreno). Fermina becomes ill and thinking his daughter has contracted cholera, Lorenzo summons the area’s foremost authority on the plague, Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) to treat her. Urbino also falls in love or in lust with Fermina, but this is a match Lorenzo approves of and soon they are wed, much to the consternation of the now adult Florentino (Javier Bardem), who spends the next 50 or so years pining away for Fermina but also becomes this walking-talking aphrodisiac. It seems that every woman in the southern hemisphere craves his body and they keep hurling themselves at him -- 622 of them if my count is correct. I never bought into Florentino, especially as he advances in age, as this chick magnet, nor did I buy into any of the words the script forced Bratt’s character to say, especially his speeches on his wedding night. But back to those redeeming features. I did admire the performance of Mezzogiorno, an Italian actress who is new to me and who seemed to grow physically more beautiful with age and certainly stronger in character. She reminded me a lot of Debra Winger. I also admired the setting (the film was shot on location in Cartagena, Colombia) and a lot of the scenes, especially aerial ones of the countryside, were stunning. Grade: C+

"I am Legend" has two brilliantly conceived scenes. One features Robert Neville (Will Smith) riding a Mustang and chasing a herd of antelopes. This time, however, the Mustang is a souped-up version of the popular car and the hunting ground is mid-town Manhattan. It seems that Dr. Alice Krippin (an uncredited Emma Thompson) has developed a virus that will cure cancer but it has the nasty side effect of turning the world’s population into zombies who only inhabit dark places. Which brings us to the second brilliantly conceived scene. Neville’s beloved dog chases another antelope into a building that is a very dark place and Neville’s search for the animal provides a couple of minutes of pure suspense. For some reason, Neville who, I guess, is a military scientist (what a scary prospect that is) because he wears a uniform in flashback scenes in which he is escorting his wife (Salli Richardson) and daughter (Smith’s daughter, Willow) out of Manhattan before it is quarantined, and then spends a lot of time in a lab in the sub basement of his apartment off Washington Square trying to find a cure for the zombie-causing disease, is one of a minute minority immune to the zombie causing disease. The other members of the minority, however, have apparently all been devoured by the zombies. Since the zombies only come out at night, Neville has all kinds of security devices that protect his apartment after the sun goes down. Thus, you can probably guess where this movie goes; that’s right, unfortunately it becomes a retread of "Night of the Living Dead," with the major difference being these zombies don’t lumber around clumsily but instead act like they constantly mainlined Starbucks’ most caffeinated offerings. As these kind of movies go, this one is OK, but I was hoping for a lot more, especially after being bombarded by trailers that never mentioned zombies. Grade: C

How producers assembled a team that included a Nobel Prize-winning writer, a two-time Academy Award winning actor, a director known for his adaptations of Shakespeare, and a talented good looking chap and came out with a movie this bad almost defies logic. My first meeting with "Sleuth" came almost 38 years ago when I saw Anthony Quayle and Keith Baxter play the leads roles on the London stage. Then, two years later, it became a wonderful film starring Laurence Oliver as mystery novelist Andrew Wyke and Michael Caine as hairdresser Milo Tindle. The film assumed an audience would be riveted by 2 and a half hours of conversation between two men in a British country manor and because the script was written by the play’s author Anthony Shaffer, who made Wyke's fictional detective St. John Lord Merrydew an important if unseen character and stressed the idea that in England class is far more important than fidelity, the audience was riveted. Kenneth Branagh, the director of this remake, doesn’t give modern day audiences that much credit. Perhaps he’s right, I don’t know. But, at any rate, he lopped off about an hour of the original’s script, threw in way too many stark interiors and all kinds of electronic surveillance gadgets and featured camera angles in almost every scene that draw attention to themselves and/or are just plain wrong. The film convinces me that, as a director, Branagh is a very good actor. Harold Pinter’s screenplay substitutes a homoerotic tone for the original’s wit. Caine, who is re-cast as Wyke this time around, and co-star Jude Law are fine, although it’s obvious Caine recognizes the assignment is nothing more than an exercise. For those not familiar with the story line, Tindle has been havng an affair with Wyke’s wife so he drives out to Wyke’s country estate to ask the writer to give his spouse a divorce. Wyke tells Tindle that he’ll never be able to afford to keep the woman in the style Wyke allowed her to become accustomed do, but, never fear, he has a plan that can help them both. He convinces Tindle to stage a robbery of his wife’s jewels, which are still at the estate. Tindle can keep everything he gets from fencing the jewels and Wyke can collect their full value from the insurance. However, the entire robbery is nothing more than elaborate setup that gives Wyke the motive and the opportunity to kill Tindle and make it appear justifiable. Grade: D

"Southland Tales" is going to rank close to the top of my list of most bizarre movies. Unfortunately, it’s also going to rank up there on my list of bad films. I’m still trying to figure out if I’m supposed to take this seriously or this simply as a very bad riff on the films of David Lynch. From what I gather, writer-director Richard Kelly adapted this from his own graphic novel, which explains the various chapters listed in the film but doesn’t quite explain why we start at Chapter 4 (unless, of course, it’s an offbeat "Star Wars" reference). I could try to tell you the film’s story if it had a coherent one. It seems Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea have teamed up to launch a nuclear strike against the United States and bombed the hell out of Abilene, Texas. Flash forward three years to the presidential election year of (I’m not making this up) 2008 when the son-in-law of the senator who is the vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket becomes lost in the desert. The son-in-law, Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) is now an amnesiac who thinks he is a film maker named Jericho Kane and falls into the clutches of porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Sean William Scott wanders in and out of the film playing alter-ego versions of himself, Wallace Shawn is someone who harnesses control of the ocean to remotely power all vehicles now that all other forms of energy have run out, Miranda Richardson does a parody of the Mrs. Iselin character from "The Manchurian Candidate," Justin Timberlake lip syncs badly and shoots people, Jon Lovitz just shoots people and Mandy Moore stands around looking fetching. There are people who are probably going to try to convince you that this is some great morality tale. Don’t believe a word of it. Grade: D-