Tower Heist

Tower Heist stars established comic actors Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy.  Alan Alda plays a villainous businessman who scams the employees of a luxury apartment tower in New York City, where Stiller and others work.  The story starts out by showing how Josh (Stiller), as the building's manager, has worked hard to make the lives of the affluent tenants in The Tower easy.  He knows their every little whim, but he knows all their habits and secrets too.  Without the knowledge of his co-workers he has invested their pensions with Arthur (Alda), a businessman whom he finds out later has used the money in a ponzi scheme and defrauded all the savings of the "little people" who work in the building. 

Into the Abyss

I think this is the third or fourth documentary of Werner Herzog's I've watched. As with the others his personal passion about his subject is evidently displayed.

This documentary focuses on the case of a Texan who is on death row.  Herzog interview this young man as well as his cohort in crime--who was also convicted and is in prison; the cohort's father, who has been in and out of correctional facilities all his life and contemplates how this has affected the life of his son (as well as another son who is also in prison); relatives of a couple of the murder victims; an ex-executioner who no longer could deal emotionally with his job and had to quit; a policeman who worked on this particular case; and a woman who was some sort of caseworker for the cohort and eventually married him (the film did not make clear what her initial involvement was on his case).

In the interviews Herzog asks questions about their feelings and experiences, as well as injects some of his own views about capital punishment. Although I can understand that a filmmaker can have a passion about any particular subject, I find Herzog kind of invasive and in this particular film I was not really sure what his object was. Supposedly it was to show his personal anti-death penalty views, but it felt more like he was indulging himself (as I feel he does also in other docs) by having the opportunity to support his passion by pushing people to say and do more than they want, to give people their fifteen minutes of fame whether they want it or not. The title talks about an "abyss" but the film doesn't really address this.

The Artist

This French film played at the Chicago International Film Festival this year as its Closing Night film.  It stars Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, as silent film stars in Hollywood.  The story is a little bit A Star is Born, a little bit Singin' In the Rain.  Dujardin, as popular star george Valentin (no doubt a play on Rudolf Valentino) has enjoyed a successful career as a leading man in silent films.  It is now the mid-1920s.  Bejo is pretty young thing Peppy Miller, hoping to make it big in Hollywood, and they have a "meet-cute" at a premiere.  Valentin, despite being married, is taken with her.  As her star rises, his falls, due to two key events of that time.

CIFF 2011: King of Devil's Island

There are so many real stories in history that I wonder why filmmakers tread into remake territory.  The great acting in King of Devil's Island (even with its Titanic-type ending) is strong throughout, showing how the friendship of two boys can outlast the abuse they and others suffered in a prison-like reform school, in this true story from Norway in the early 1900s.

The Color of Magic

Terry Pratchett is a fantasy comedy writer with a big library of titles based on his fantastical flat-as-a-pancake creation, the Discworld. It is a place filled with inept wizards, smart witches, vampires, wolfmen and trolls, and every creature in between. Among my favorite storylines are those that involve the witch Granny Weatherwax and her friends, and Death and his adopted granddaughter Susan.

This second live action film based on Pratchett's works is a combination of the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, as well as The Light Fantastic, and involves the dotty wizards at Unseen University, who do their utmost to retain tenure while shirking as much work as possible.