Boston Globe -- Wesley Morris columns

Oh My God

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-27T15:20:54Z

For reasons only he knows for sure, Peter Rodger took a movie camera on a tour of the world and its religions. He came back with “Oh My God,’’ a documentary that succinctly captures the experience of enduring this ponderous, repetitive, and exasperating attempt at moral, philosophical, and spiritual discourse. The problem isn’t with the questions. It’s the manner in ...

He’s the mind behind magic of ‘Mr. Fox’

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-27T01:25:55Z

Early last week, Wes Anderson’s girlfriend had to be in Boston for a day or two. Rather than stay home, he came with her. Anderson is 40, but he seems considerably younger. Not youthful per se, but young. He speaks in long, energetic paragraphs that end when all the necessary information has been delivered. This isn’t as transactional or charmless ...

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2009-11-27T01:25:55Z

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-24T18:21:31Z

It starts with the Vicodin for his back, which he injured rescuing an inmate during Hurricane Katrina’s rising floodwaters. Then there’s the coke before entering a crime scene, and the crack while having sex with a woman in a parking lot.

Ninja Assassin

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-24T17:55:22Z

The credits for “Ninja Assassin’’ list two screenwriters and one director. But it’s fair to say the movie has come straight out of a box. Cobbled together from the instructions of assorted Hong Kong gangster bloodbaths and whatever the French superproducer Luc Besson did last, this long, thanklessly repetitive slice-kick-and-shoot-’em-up has nothing to offer but the aggravating awareness that Jet ...

Red Cliff

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-24T17:46:54Z

The very epicness of John Woo’s “Red Cliff’’ is an entertainment. It’s a siege picture set in ancient China, and it’s old-fashioned and newfangled at the same time. Most of the shots look either touched up or entirely artificial, and Woo wants us to laugh at the overripe flourishes. At some point, a zillion digitized arrows sail through the sky ...

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-20T01:54:36Z

In “Precious,’’ Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) usually comes home from school and prepares dinner for her mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), in their Harlem apartment. Mary could probably make dinner herself. But it’s easier for her to throw the dinner out or at Claireece if she’s not the cook. Mary curses at Claireece, who is dark-skinned, overweight, and, at 16, having ...

Black Dynamite

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-19T17:53:38Z

In the spoof that bears his name, Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) sports every outfit in the blaxploitation-look book. While investigating the murder of his junkie brother, he wears a cheap-looking suit with lapels that belong on a pterodactyl. He drops in on a warren of pimps in a leather trench coat, leather pants, and a turtleneck (all black). He ...

The Blind Side

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-19T17:52:19Z

It may be based on a true story, but “The Blind Side’’ delivers two heart-yanking hours of Hollywood physics. One kid’s bad existence gets better with the application of a great deal of upper-middle-class pressure. The movie recounts the story of how a tough-loving interior decorator named Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock ) invited Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), an enormous, ...

The Messenger

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-19T17:50:07Z

I’ve worried before that it might be too soon for movies about our current wars. They’re too fresh to get a dramatic grip on either the conflicts or what provoked them. What many filmmakers have produced were tracts that cast a skeptical eye. But, as it turns out, the proximity wasn’t the problem. It was the point of view. Americans ...

Capturing a spirit of old Hollywood

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-17T18:08:29Z

Kellan Lutz, who plays a vampire in the new “Twilight’’ movie, made an appearance at the Natick Collection last week. He signed posters for the 500 fans who persevered to earn that honor, and grinned heartily for the 75 fans anointed with the chance to be photographed at his side. Hundreds more - most of them girls, most of them ...

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-12T17:17:41Z

suggest a man whose political sympathies bordered on the promiscuous.

(Untitled)

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-12T17:15:37Z

The New York art world does such a wonderful job of satirizing itself that further assistance hardly seems necessary. But with “(Untitled),’’ writer and director Jonathan Parker takes for granted the trumped-up stakes, the humorlessness, and the artists’ capacity for opportunism and willful absurdity. The players in this movie are cynical, but, amazingly, Parker is not. His movie works as ...

The Box

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-06T18:39:50Z

“The Box’’ almost squeezes the non-anatomical part of your stomach that tenses up in moments of dread. Considering how long it’s been since a movie’s gotten near that part of my stomach, that’s not an insignificant “almost.’’ James Marsden and a twangy Cameron Diaz, looking like a Pan-Am flight attendant, play Arthur and Norma Lewis. A package appears on the ...

The Horse Boy

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-05T19:57:13Z

No one wants to say that a movie about two parents’ wish to alleviate their son’s autism is a bad idea. But when that wish produces an arduous trek across Mongolia in search of a shaman and when the movie about that trek is called “The Horse Boy,’’ my eyebrows go up. And up they stayed for most of this ...

The Fourth Kind

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-05T18:37:58Z

The big news about “The Fourth Kind’’ is that its supernatural horror is based on real events. This is true in the same way that Pamela Anderson’s chest is based on real breasts. In the opening scene, a blurry Milla Jovovich walks into focus and attempts to explain. “I am actress Milla Jovovich,’’ she says, as the camera jogs around ...

Severed Ways: The Norse Discover America

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-05T18:35:55Z

Doesn’t “Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America’’ sound like the driest piece of History Channel docu-tainment? And while most of the scenes in Tony Stone’s peculiar Middle Ages art project look like a homemade educational reenactment, the film is actually more involving than it should be. “Severed Ways’’ shrinks the line separating seriousness from keeping a straight face.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-11-05T18:34:58Z

In reading David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,’’ it may never have crossed your mind that his assault on a particular type of gender politics would make a cute little movie. That’s because it wouldn’t. John Krasinski, that nice guy from “The Office,’’ didn’t seem to notice. He’s strip-mined Wallace’s 10-year-old story collection, which sought to castigate the ...

35 Shots of Rum

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-29T16:46:21Z

I don’t want to know how Claire Denis makes movies. Her magic is her business. But I imagine the process is like sculpture. A block of story is whittled and carved until only what’s essential remains. With her, the whittling is a seductive technique. Only in the final scenes of her latest bewitchment, “35 Shots of Rum,’’ do we know ...

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2009-10-29T16:46:21Z

In ‘This Is It,’ the King of Pop lives on

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-28T16:18:44Z

The announcement earlier this year that Michael Jackson would be doing 50 concerts in London was greeted with equal parts euphoria and cynicism. Was he doing it for us? Was he doing it for money? Then in June, less than a month before the start of the sold-out run, Jackson died of cardiac arrest, and the news that a film ...

It’s a horror sequel and a health-care initiative

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-26T02:28:24Z

Here we are a half-dozen movies in and finally some ideas - and what passes for a navigable screenplay - are on display in “Saw VI.’’

Motherhood

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-22T18:04:40Z

Whenever a movie requires Uma Thurman to wear glasses, it’s reasonable to think she’ll turn into someone else. Once, in a “Batman’’ movie, she actually did. She’s bespectacled again for “Motherhood,’’ and it saddens me to report that neither she nor this comedy turns into more than an argument against procreation.

Good Hair

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-22T16:47:20Z

In the new documentary “Good Hair,’’ Chris Rock finds great comedy in what still lingers as a tragedy. The black compulsion to straighten, lengthen, and lusterize hair comes from an institutional preoccupation with whiteness. And it doesn’t feel like a vestigial preoccupation, either. The black hip-hop music video star Melyssa Ford tells Rock she grew up bitter that she never ...

Scenes from a marriage at the breaking point

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-17T17:19:05Z

As event movies go, there’s been very little like Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist.’’ It’s a shocker about a woman coming to grips with the death of her child by losing her mind, mostly at the expense of her husband. The violence is unsparing, and the woodland air tinged with an air of mysticism. Is the movie misogynistic or about misogyny? ...

New York, I Love You

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-15T19:32:00Z

‘New York, I Love You’’ wants us to know that the city is a sexy, romantic, thrillingly random place where anything can go down. Sadly, two of those things are your eyelids.

Law Abiding Citizen

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-15T19:29:09Z

You don’t want to snicker when two rows of parked cars suddenly blow up in “Law Abiding Citizen.’’ But that’s the only response to such desperate moviemaking. There’s no earthly reason for that explosion. Nor is there an explanation for lines like, “I do my job. I’m the best at it. It works.’’ That’s Jamie Foxx to Gerard Butler, but ...

The Damned United

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-15T19:28:00Z

Poor Michael Sheen. For every excellent performance he’s given recently, there’s been someone doing a flashier job in the same movie. In “The Queen,’’ his Tony Blair was a vision of poise and a voice of reason, but Helen Mirren got the Oscar. He was even better in “Frost/Nixon,’’ doing the opposite of what he did with Blair. His David ...

Earth Days

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-08T18:54:16Z

‘Earth Days’’ is the rare ecological documentary that doesn’t nag us to run out of the movie theater and change the world. Not that the environmentalists interviewed would stop us, mind you. But in reconstructing the rise of the American environmental movement, filmmaker Robert Stone creates a simmering, thoughtful, visually absorbing history out of the experiences of a handful of ...

St. Trinian's

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-08T16:42:08Z

What happened to Rupert Everett? He should have been a major movie star. He was so handsome, so debonair, so sophisticatedly English he seemed to be in a tuxedo even when he wasn’t. He was the rare actor whom you could see bantering with just about any woman. Everett was rumored to be the next James Bond (although, who hasn’t ...

Coco Before Chanel

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-01T17:01:54Z

As advertised, “Coco Before Chanel’’ shows us the life of the legendary fashion designer when she was just a skinny, young milliner named Gabrielle. It’s unclear what we’re to learn about Chanel from this movie, aside from the news that she styled herself as a somewhat androgynous rag doll and could do just about anything with a needle and thread. ...

The Beaches of Agnès

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-01T16:42:03Z

In “The Beaches of Agnès,’’ the effervescent 81-year-old French filmmaker Agnès Varda walks us through the story of her life. But rather than simply give us a guided tour, she explains that, “If you opened me up, you’d find beaches.’’ And so her film is set on her most formative shores, including the Belgian stretch of the North Sea where ...

Capitalism: A Love Story

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-01T16:41:37Z

The scope of Michael Moore’s documentaries gets bigger with each movie. Twenty years ago he told the story of how General Motors undid his hometown, and went on to tackle gun control, the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war, and health care. Now Moore is going after the entire American economic system. But “Capitalism: A Love Story’’ is redundant ...

Whip It

Wesley Morris, Globe Staff — 2009-10-01T16:38:55Z

Once in a while, a moviemaker will find it in her heart to make my dreams come true. In Drew Barrymore’s “Whip It,’’ when Juliette Lewis starts a food fight with Ellen Page that turns into about a dozen giggling women rolling around on the floor of a diner covered in condiments, grease, and cream, the movie had won my ...