Author Archives: Eleanor Ringel Cater

“Fruitvale Station” isn’t a great film. I’m not even certain it’s a good one.

But it is an important film. And its timing — i.e., right as the George Zimmerman trial concludes — makes it doubly, triply, quadrup-ly important.

Because right here, we see what we already know: Trayvon Martin isn’t the only one.  Never was. And, alas, never will be.

Early in the morning on New Year’s Day, 2009, a 22-year-old unarmed black man named Oscar Grant III was fatally shot by a transit cop. At that moment, Grant was handcuffed and facedown on the subway platform at the BART stop called Fruitvale Station.

The first time I saw Sandra Bullock in a movie she was a creamy-skinned second banana — the girl River Phoenix wasn’t interested in. “The Thing Called Love,” which follows some aspiring singers in Nashville, was a flop. What little reputation it has is mostly for being Phoenix’s last picture show, before he overdosed in front of Johnny Depp’s club, the Viper Room.

Bullock’s character was meant to be a little plump, a little dense (at least, compared to the designated leading lady, Samantha Morton). Turns out Bullock was neither, as she quickly showed in ”Speed,” “While You Were Sleeping” and at least a dozen other hits.

Then, after playing role after role that both incorporated and ignored her fabulous femininity, she finally won an Oscar for her turn as the feisty Southern wife devoted to football and her relationship with the hulking ghetto teen she rescued from the streets.

I have a very cool Johnny Depp story. I met him in 1994, when he was doing press for his new movie “Ed Wood,” directed by Tim Burton. It’s the true story of the ‘50s filmmaker once reputed to be the worse filmmaker of all time.

I have a few other nominees myself… but anyway, that was who the movie was about. Depp played Wood, an eccentric who often showed up on set wearing a pink angora sweater.

The film, which is now something of a cult classic, won Martin Landau an Oscar for his role as Bela Lugosi, the once and future Dracula, who had a small part in the film within the film.

Back to ’94…I was Depp’s last interview that day. He’d spent much of the week making headlines and front-page photos by trashing various hotel rooms or lashing out at photographers who caught him walking around New York.

Given how many times we’ve seen the world almost end, I figured “World War Z” would have to be “World War Zzzzzzz…”

Instead it’s one of the most enjoyable zillion-dollar state-of-the-tech horror/apocalypse movies I’ve ever seen.

“WWZ” begins routinely enough with a traffic jam in Philly. It happens, you know. But it doesn’t happen this way. The problem isn’t too many people on the road; it’s too many zombies, who flood the backed-up cars like a river devouring a flood plane.

And the emphasis, of course, is on devour. Or rather, One Big Bite. These running dead are like rabid animals…chomp down and move on. One fanboy complained in his blog “review” that one of the picture’s problems was that it didn’t show enough scenes of zombies eating people. Ah, the young folk…

“Man of Steel” may not be the worst summer blockbuster I’ve ever seen.

But I’m pretty sure it’s the worst “Superman” movie I’ve ever seen.

Worse than the pathetic “Superman Returns,” starring Brandon Routh, the George Lazenby of Supermans. And worse than the pretentious “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” Christopher Reeve’s rather sad (albeit well-intentioned) attempt to bankroll his superhero celebrity into a plea for the eco-future of the planet.

I will give it this, though: “Man of Steel’s” last three minutes are among the best I’ve seen in many a movie, summer blockbuster or not.

If I had to name four actors I’d love to see burn in Hell, they would be, in no particular order, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen and Danny McBride.

Hence my admittedly twisted interest in “This is the End,” that stars out at a party at James Franco’s house and ends up dispatching various people in various to various locations (the choice is limited to Heaven and Hell).

Mid-party, all hell breaks loose and what is initially presumed to be another earthquake is, instead, the End of Days, the Rapture, the Apocalypse or whatever you like to call the craziness going on in Revelations.

Getting Greta Gerwig hasn’t been easy.

Cast in middling-important semi-glossy indies like “Greenberg” and “Damsels in Distress,” she seemed a kind of Parker Posey follow-up. Not that she is anything like Posey — who’s small-boned, beautiful, angular, and brunette. Gerwig is large-ish, pretty-ish, blonde-ish and more odd than quirky.

And as the title character in “Frances Ha” (the name is explained in a lovely last-minute moment), she’s not only irresistible; she’s spectacular.

“After Earth” is a simple (some might say, simple-minded) film with complex baggage.

Let’s start with the star package: Will Smith and his teenage son, Jaden.

Nepotism is a tricky thing, almost insidiously so. Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, have long ago proved their devotion to family. Remember when they left the Oscars to be with their sick daughter?

Their son, Jaden, has wanted a movie career for some time now. The first time I saw him on screen, he was uncomfortably paired on stage with Justin Bieber in the documentary “Never Say Never.” Their interaction — or rather, lack thereof — came off as disastrously inappropriate, overlaid with the moneyed whiff of a behind-the-scenes deal. The pair seemed wary of each other, as if they both knew all they had to do was make it through this one performance and that was that.

They say that all good things must end.

Sometimes that applies to bad things, too.

Not that the “Hangover” series is all that bad.

To their credit, these overgrown frat boy comedies deliver pretty much precisely what their intended audiences crave: a raunchy Three Stooges movie.

Think about it. Bradley Cooper is sort of the leader, like Moe. Ed Helms is the harried middleman, like Larry. And Zach Galifianakis indulges in a cherubic mayhem that’s not unlike Curly Joe (or just Joe, depending on your choice of Stooges).

The most revered of all the “Star Trek” movies, “Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan,” hangs over “Star Trek Into Darkness” like a shroud.

Much of this, of course, is intentional. J.J. Abrams, whose successful reboot of the redoubtable sci-fi franchise was one of the more unexpected pleasures of 2009, stitches “Khan’’ pre-story into both the plot and the atmosphere of “Into Darkness.”

It’s not a bad idea for a second “Star Trek” movie; after all, those of us who date back to the original TV series have always recognized that “Khan,” aka, “No. 2” as the picture that truly proved the old gang were big-screen-ready.

By invoking “Khan,” with its memorable turn by Ricardo Montalban as a madman of Shakespearian proportions, “Into Darkness” means well. But it’s both muddled and over-thought-out. Everything means everything (except when it means nothing).

You could say Hushpuppy meets Huck Finn in ‘Mud,” a remarkably fine film written and directed by Jeff Nichols.

Set a little ways up-water from “Beasts of the Southern Wild” in a soggy Arkansas tributary, “Mud” mixes the hard-scrabble reality of the Piggly Wiggly South with what’s left (barely) of the semi-mythic legacy of, say, Mark Twain.

The title character is a charming drifter played with exquisite rattlesnake charm by Matthew McConaughey. Mud isn’t a bad guy, but he’s capable of bad things — especially when he’s caught up in his blinkered romantic pursuit of a redneck temptress named Juniper (Reese Witherspoon, perfect as a sleazy angel in cut-offs).

Mud will — and has — do anything for her. Including murder.

If “Disconnect” had a subtitle, it would be “The Techno-Phobe’s Nightmare.”

Here is every sin of the Internet any of us Old Schoolers or merely tech-impaired ever dreamed of.

Identity theft? Check.

The perils of computer porn? Check.

The Catfish effect whereby someone poses as someone else? Check.

“Disconnect” abounds in digital dangers, some deadlier than others, but none of them much fun.

The title is meant to be taken as both verb and noun. The disconnect between people when we no longer talk, just text. The disconnect between the real world and the world on-line. The emotional disconnect engendered by disembodied texts, emails, etc.

Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” is about a girl who lost her twirl.

Malick, of course, is the famously infertile filmmaker who once went two decades between movies. After blazing a name for himself with a pair of brilliant efforts in the 1970s, “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven,” Malick went all J.D. Salinger on us. Reclusive. Elusive. Legendary.

Finally, in 1998, he completed the fairly oblique albeit star-laden “The Thin Red Line,” a World War II tale that misused everybody from Sean Penn to George Clooney.

But it was pure genius compared to Malick’s follow-ups: “The New World,” an epic-sized bit of nonsense about Pocahontas, and the interminable — and interminably ludicrous — “The Tree of Life,” which co-starred Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and some dinosaurs.

There is nothing like a good heist movie, and “Trance,” I’m afraid, is nothing like a good heist movie.

True, it begins with a clever bit of chicanery at a high-end auction. A priceless Goya is up for bids when the alarm system sounds.

A trusted employee, Simon (the ever-good James McAvoy), heroically tries to foil the thieves. In the process, he suffers a head wound.

As often happens in this sort of picture, Simon is actually an accomplice. But the knock on the head has messed things up…in his head. Which messes up everything else.

I’ve only met a few people who loved movies as much as Roger Ebert did.

I’ve known fewer still who played a bad hand so well and so bravely. The cancer that finally got him was an exceptionally cruel disease — disabling and, as many of us saw in his final years, as disfiguring as anything dreamt up by any horror-movie-master.

Funny how upstarts become institutions. When Ebert and his Chicago Tribune rival, Gene Siskel, first started their Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down routine — first locally, then nationally — I know a lot of movie critics who wearily moaned, has it come to this? Two Thumbs UP???!!!! Or One Thumb Down

When the top four movies at the box office are (in descending order) “G.I. Joe: Retaliation,” “The Croods,” “Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor” and “Olympus Has Fallen,” which do you choose to write about?

Why not take a stab at all four?

“G.I Joe” is based on a doll — I mean, action figure — first popularized in 1964. He has gone through several incarnations since then, including movies, comics and video games. He has even, like Alice and her mushroom, changed sizes: 12 inches originally, then shrunk to 3 ¾ inches, then released in both sizes.

Chile.

1988.

Tyrannical despot (is that redundant?) Augusto Pinochet has just (for the heck of it ?) called for a referendum on his leadership.

This is not a gracious gesture on his part. Under his iron-fisted rule, voting against him would be like voting against your right to breathe.

But as it turns out, there are many in Chile who would rather hold their breath indefinitely than rubber-stamp Pinochet’s right to rule.

There are two movies opening this weekend, and I don’t want you to get them mixed up.

One is “Spring Breakers.” The other one is “The Gatekeepers.”

The first one is a “t-and-a” comedy (not necessarily intentional) about four girls in bikinis who get busted and end up working for James Franco.

I know. It also sounds awfully close to “Beach Blanket Butts.” However, the director is Harmony Korine who, if you haven’t already heard of him, specializes in the sort of calculated smut that’s supposed to be a turn-on in a forbidden-fruit sort of way.

If it only had a brain.

A heart.

The noive.

Though, when you think about it, the makers of “Oz: The Great and Powerful” had some nerve when they chose to tamper with L. Frank Baum’s classic series of books about a land over the rainbow, ruled by a wizard and various witches.

That said, it seems odd so many reviewers are bringing up Judy Garland and 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz.”

As fractured fairy tales a la Hollywood goes, “Jack the Giant Slayer” is better than most.

If anything, it reminds you of the Disney live-action adventures from the early 1960s. Movies like “In Search of the Castaways” and “Swiss Family Robinson” — only with a little more gore and a lot better special effects.

The picture begins appropriately with twin bedtime stories. In the royal palace, the Queen reads her little girl to sleep with the tale of how one of her long-ago ancestors defeated a gang of bloodthirsty giants who think humans taste just like chicken, only better.