Movie/TV Reviews

P.S. I Love You

Susan Granger’s review of “P.S. I Love You” (Warner Bros.)

While Hilary Swank has won two Oscars – for “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby” – she’s unable to exude femininity. Graceless in “The Affair of the Necklace,” she’s almost as awkward, cavorting in her underwear, in this disappointing melodrama.
Although Holly’s (Hilary Swank) marriage to Gerry Kennedy (Gerard Butler), an impetuous Irishman, is fraught with problems, she’s stricken with grief when he dies of a brain tumor. Her mother (Kathy Bates), two best friends (Lisa Kudrow, Gina Gershon) and a blundering bartender (Harry Connick Jr.), try – in vain – to comfort her.
Then on her 30th birthday, a celebratory cake, tape recording and letters start arriving from her dead husband who has taken great pains instructing her how to rebuild her life. He’s even arranged for a bittersweet trip to his native Ireland so she can meet his parents, along with a hunky boyhood chum (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).
Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (“The Fisher King,” “Freedom Writers”) collaborated with Steven Rogers to adapt Cecelia Ahern’s novel and he also directs. Therein lays the problem. All too often, when a screenwriter directs his own project, he loses focus and that’s what happens here. As a couple, the Kennedys seem destined for divorce anyway, so why should we care about them or those gimmicky letters, all of which predictably conclude with “P.S. I love you”?
It wants to be “Ghost,” but she’s no Demi Moore and he’s no Patrick Swayze. The only cast members eliciting empathy are Lisa Kudrow (“Friends”), adorable as a blatant husband-hunter, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“Grey’s Anatomy”), whose smile could melt any woman’s heart. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “P.S. I Love You” is a sappy, floundering 4. Drop it in the dead letter office.

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National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” (Walt Disney)

This sequel to the immensely popular “National Treasure” finds Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) and his father Patrick (Jon Voight) on another archeological quest to unearth hidden history when a missing page from the diary of John Wilkes Booth implicates Ben’s great-great grandfather, Thomas Gates, in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Determined to prove his ancestor’s innocence, Ben embarks on a treasure hunt that leads him to Paris (inspecting a second Statue of Liberty near the Eiffel Tower), London (infiltrating the Queen’s Study in Buckingham Palace) and back to Washington, D.C. (exploring the Oval Office for clues), where he kidnaps the President (Bruce Greenwood) during a White House dinner at Mt. Vernon to plead for a peek at the appropriately named Book of Secrets. That’s when he discovers that somewhere in the Black Hills of South Dakota, near Mount Rushmore, is the entrance to the fabled Cibola, a pre-Columbian City of Gold.
Joining Ben and his dad are his estranged girlfriend, archivist Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), and his scholarly mother, Emily (Helen Mirren), an expert in archaic languages who broke up with his dad 32 years ago, plus their techno-nerd sidekick, Riley (Justin Bartha). Their adversary is Confederate sympathizer Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris), who has problems with his own family legacy. Plus, there’s a suspiciously well-informed FBI man (Harvey Keitel) on their trail.
Written by Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, directed by Jon Turtletaub and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, it continues the whodunit/where-is-it/what-does-it mean formula. It’s a picturesque, minor-league Indiana Jones romp, filled with arcane information – and adding spunky Helen Mirren to re-kindle an old flame is a humorous touch. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” is a fun-filled 7, chock-full-of-historical trivia.

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The Bucket List

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Bucket List” (Warner Bros.)

It’s time to rejoice – the darkly comic “The Bucket List” is a gift for moviegoers.
Crusty, cranky corporate billionaire Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) and knowledgeable garage mechanic Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) become unlikely friends as they share a hospital room. Terminally ill with cancer yet feeling fine, they both realize they have ‘unfinished business.’
In an exercise in forward thinking, they make a list of everything they want to do before they “kick the bucket” and embark on the most unlikely road trip you can imagine: skydiving, race car driving and laughing ’till they cry. While they relish their high-flying adventures – exploring Egypt’s pyramids, a safari in Tanzania, the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China – they also learn more about themselves and what really matters on this often-confusing journey of life.
Charming Jack Nicholson’s sly, twisted nature has an irresistible appeal. As an actor, he is totally liberated, creating one of the most memorable characters this year, while Morgan Freeman is extraordinary, completely believable, delivering a quietly composed and curiously touching performance. Together, they get away with outrageous gallows humor and black comedy that would sink more timid thespians. Their tandem performances are near to perfection.
Evoking memories of “The Odd Couple” and “Grumpy Old Men,” screenwriter Justin Zackham’s dialogue is deft, intelligent and laced with an outrageous sense of humor, while veteran director Rob Reiner understands the frailty and absurdity of the human condition. While there are editing and continuity glitches, particularly the CGI superimposing the actors’ faces during the stunt work, they barely detract from the characters’ emotional wallop.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Bucket List” is a 9 – a heartfelt, wickedly funny, one-of-a-kind holiday treat.

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The Savages

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Savages” (Fox Searchlight)

For those of us who have dealt or are dealing with angry, aging parents and grandparents, this dysfunctional family serio-comedy hits home.
39 year-old wannabe playwright Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) lives in Manhattan’s East Village with her cat and a married lover/neighbor for company. Her intellectual older brother, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is a professor of drama at a college in Buffalo, but his relationship with his Polish girlfriend is deteriorating because he cannot commit. Both obviously bear the emotional scars of an abusive childhood.
So when they’re summoned to a retirement community in Sun City, Arizona, to help their elderly, estranged father, Lenny (Philip Bosco), who has developed not only dementia but also Parkinson’s disease, they’re hardly equipped to care for the man who never cared for them. Frustrated at having their lives disrupted and squabbling as they’re desperately searching for a ‘good’ nursing home, they have to settle for one that will take irascible, rapidly deteriorating Lenny on short notice. Moaning, “We’re horrible, horrible, horrible people,” Wendy is more concerned about her father’s well-being and comfort, while pragmatic Jon realizes the senior residence is simply a place where people go to die.
While writer/director Tamara Jenkins (“Slums of Beverly Hills”) taps into the ‘guilt’ factor, she doesn’t offer easy answers to this depressing situation – because there aren’t any. What she does deliver are sad, yet funny, subtly fascinating and eccentric, three-dimensional characters, embodied by actors who deliver Oscar-caliber performances.
Laura Linney provides her own engaging brand of incandescence; Philip Seymour Hoffman is raw and riveting; and Philip Bosco’s work is rich and complex, speaking volumes without using words. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Savages” is an astute, empathetic 8. It’s a heartfelt, touching coming-of-middle-age drama.

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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (Miramax)

When Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of Elle France magazine, suffered a stroke at age 43, he was left almost entirely paralyzed, yet he dictated a best-selling memoir, communicating with his caregivers by blinking his left eyelid.
While coming to terms with his own father’s death, painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel (“Before Night Falls,” “Basquiat”) became intrigued by Ronald Harwood’s screenplay about Bauby’s suffering – and he’s brought it to the screen in a most unusual way, casting a French actor (Mathieu Amalric), instead of Johnny Depp who was first signed, and persuading the Normandy hospital where Bauby had been confined to allow the production to film there.
Except for kaleidoscopic flashbacks, it’s narrated entirely from Bauby’s “locked in” perspective with Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (“Schindler’s List,” “Saving Private Ryan”) utilizing a special lens with a shock absorber that makes his vision seem a bit out of focus.
As his story begins, there’s inevitable confusion and self-pity as Bauby realizes his condition, yet he’s soon cooperating with his tireless attendants (Marie-Josee Croze, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, Anne Consigny) who devise the painstaking pattern whereby he blinks at letters of the alphabet in order to form words, then sentences. Bauby’s wife Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner), whom he’d abandoned with their children for another woman, devotedly visits, while his mistress balks; there’s also a poignant scene with his elderly father (Max von Sydow).
The title derives from Bauby’s nightmarish description of himself confined in a deep-sea diving bell; only his fertile imagination and intriguing, often amusing memories allow him to soar like a butterfly.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is a stylistically engrossing, compassionate 9. In French with English subtitles, it’s a testament to the indomitable human spirit.

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There Will Be Blood

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “There Will Be Blood” (Paramount Vantage)

“I hate most people. My goal is to earn enough money so that I can get away from everyone,” states taciturn Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s strangely mesmerizing character-study of a ruthless, misanthropic oilman doggedly building an empire in early 20th-century California.
Based on the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel “Oil!” the sprawling historical saga follows Plainview and his adopted son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as they wheel-and-deal unsuspecting homesteaders out of their land rights, pursuing a plan to construct an oil pipeline to the Pacific Ocean from a rural enclave called Little Boston, near what is now Los Angeles.
Running roughshod over their competitors, they find an immovable obstacle in Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), an avaricious young evangelist who is as ambitious and unscrupulous as they are – only his goal is building the revivalist Church of the Third Revelation.
Delivering a powerful, Oscar-caliber performance, Daniel Day-Lewis embodies the driving force of the determined entrepreneur, as he, literally and figuratively, trounces all opposition, even banishing his son when the boy goes deaf after an accident. As his spiteful, Bible-thumping, mirror-image adversary, Paul Dano matches Day-Lewis’ ferocious intensity.
Filmed around Marfa, Texas, where both “Giant” and “No Country For Old Men” were shot, P.T. Anderson’s daring, adventurous storytelling process often unfolds without spoken dialogue, utilizing Robert Elswit’s spectacular cinematography, Jack Fisk’s brilliant production design and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s evocative, dissonant score.
This epic concept is quite a departure from director/screenwriter Anderson’s previous films – “Punch-Drunk Love,” “Magnolia,” “Boogie Nights” and “Hard Eight” – and he emerges as one of the most exciting filmmakers of this decade. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “There Will Be Blood” gushes to an astonishing, enthralling 10.

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The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep” (Columbia Pictures)

In a pub in a small village in coastal Scotland, an old man (Brian Cox) is explaining a photograph of the so-called “Loch Ness monster” to two curious travelers.
According to his tale, back in 1942, 12 year-old Angus MacMorrow (Alex Etel), a wee lonely lad whose father is off fighting in W.W. II, finds a mysterious object on the beach that he lugs home in a pail. It’s a giant egg from which hatches the most magical creature. Not a reptile, not a mammal, it’s a legendary Celtic water horse that he names Crusoe. Angus hides the mythical creature in a shed but Crusoe soon outgrows his confined quarters and his appetite seems insatiable. There is no choice but to release the water horse into the sea, where Crusoe must learn to survive unexpected perils.
Meanwhile, Angus’ mother (Emily Watson), the housekeeper of a large estate, is coping with an enigmatic new handyman (Ben Chaplin) and the unexpected arrival of troops led by arrogant Captain Hamilton (David Morrissey), who commandeers the Manor House to billet his English officers. They’re on the lookout for German submarines that may be in the area.
Based on a novel by Dick King-Smith, cleverly adapted by Robert Nelson Jacobs, it’s filled with the enchantment its predecessors, “E.T.” and “Free Willy,” to which director Jay Russell (“My Dog Skip,” “Ladder 49”) adds some exciting maritime chases.
Weta Workshop, the computer-graphics company responsible for effects in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “The Chronicles of Narnia,” created Crusoe, who resembles a giraffe-seal-horse-like dinosaur. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep” is a sweet, escapist 7. It’s a whimsical fantasy-adventure for the whole family.

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The Orphanage

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “The Orphanage” (Picturehouse release)

In this haunting, supernatural Spanish drama, a devoted mother discovers the dark secrets hidden within her childhood refuge, situated on a lonely stretch of coastline near an abandoned lighthouse.
When Laura (Belen Rueda), a sensitive nurse, and her physician husband, Carlos (Fernando Cayo), buy the decrepit orphanage in which she grew up, they plan to make it a home for children with disabilities. They move in with their adopted, seven year-old, HIV-infected son, Simon (Roger Princep), who soon acquires some ‘imaginary’ friends, one of whom, inexplicably, leaves a trail of seashells from the shore to their doorstep. Then there’s a sinister ‘social worker’ (Montserrat Carulla), who evidences unusual, even menacing interest in the spooky place, and a ‘medium,’ Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin), brought in to create a sŽance to bridge the gap between humans and the ghosts that seem to surround them as the nightmarish line between fantasy and reality fades.
Written by Sergio G. Sanchez, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona – making an auspicious feature-film debut – and produced by Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), it delves far below the surface of the ‘haunted house’ horror genre, evoking the stylish subtlety of “The Innocents” (1961), “The Haunting” (1963) and “The Others” (2001). And while there are sudden, scary jolts and dark, creepy, disturbing images, there are also underlying psychological themes of love, loss and guilt, tinged with dread, remorse and regret, epitomized by several astute allusions to J.M.Barrie’s classic Peter Pan legend of the lost boys.
Led by Belen Rueda (“The Sea Inside”), the performances are totally believable, augmented by Oscar Faura’s inventive, evocative camera work. In Spanish with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Orphanage” is a suspenseful, eerie 8. Prepare to shudder – and weep.

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Persepolis

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

S.usan Granger’s review of “Persepolis” (Sony Pictures Classics)

What’s unusual about this hand-drawn animated feature from France is that it tells an adult story from a child’s point-of-view. With the aid of French graphic artist Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi boldly details her very personal autobiography.
Back in 1978, little Marjane (voiced by Gabrielle Lopes) – an avid fan of Bruce Lee, Iron Maiden and most things Western – sits with her enlightened, progressive family in Teheran, anxiously watching their Shah’s repressive government become the Ayatollah’s far worse fundamentalist revolution. Bewildered, yet defiant beneath her veil, she struggles to understand what is happening from the stories that adults relay to her, particularly her mother (voiced by Catherine Deneuve), grandmother (Danielle Darrieux) and Communist uncle (Francois Jerosme).
As Iran deteriorates, her parents dispatch the rebellious, now-adolescent Marjane (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni) to a French-speaking school in Vienna, where she becomes ambivalent and depressed, burning out on Euro-hedonism and gradually losing all sense of her own identity. Finally, she comes home, only to discover the strictures of Islamic law under the mullahs even more restrictive.
Filmed primarily in stark black-and-white, except for brief scenes in color, it’s a monochromatic, simplistic narrative which delves into contemporary political history, including war, torture and execution. And the title ‘Persepolis’ derives from the original capital of Persia, founded in the sixth century B.C. and destroyed by Alexander the Great in 330 A.D.
In Farsi and French with English subtitles, the vocal talent is remarkable: Catherine Deneuve is Chiara Mastroianni’s real-life mother and Danielle Darrieux played Ms. Deneuve’s mother 40 years ago in “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Persepolis is a stylized, sensitive 7, an often comic, yet heart-breaking, outspoken portrait of a young girl and a nation in turmoil.

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No Reservations

Movie/TV Reviews / Susan

Susan Granger’s review of “No Reservations” (Warner Bros.)

“I wish there was a cookbook for life,” muses temperamental chef Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones), as the precise complications of creating magnifique haute cuisine pale in comparison with the dilemma of nurturing her 10 year-old, recently orphaned niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin).
While neurotic Kate’s been seeing – or, rather, feeding – a therapist (Bob Balaban), refusing to discuss her control issues, when the owner (Patricia Clarkson) of her Greenwich Village restaurant, 22 Bleecker Street, brings in a scruffy, gregarious but strong-willed new sous-chef, Nick (Aaron Eckhart), she’s thoroughly steamed.
Kate’s palate is strictly French – her signature dish is quail in saffron truffle sauce – while Nick’s culinary taste is Italian, his tasty pasta accented in its preparation by classical opera.
As Kate flounders before finding a recipe for happiness, she discovers that if you mix in traumas and tears with some poignant moments – and a touch of sexual tension – cooking can not only be fun but it can also heal broken hearts.
Although their roles are a bit undercooked (a.k.a. underwritten), Catherine Zeta-Jones’ icy, emotionless perfectionism gradually and subtly melts as she heats up some affectionate warmth, while Aaron Eckhart keeps his carefree earthiness from turning into a romantic leading man clichŽ. And Abigail Breslin (“Little Miss Sunshine”) delivers a touching portrayal of a grieving child, seeking solace where she can find it.
A remake of the 2001 German import “Mostly Martha,” it’s been predictably Americanized by screenwriter Carol Fuchs and director Scott Hicks (“Shine”), who co-owns a vineyard in Australia with his producer wife Kerry Heysen; note his Yacca Paddock label. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “No Reservations” is a slyly sensual, succulent 7, a deliciously delectable froth in which food is the metaphor for love and life.

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