The Next Three Days (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Paul Haggis. Starring Russell Crowe, Elizabeth Banks, Lennie James.
A prison break movie and a remake, but an especially well-written and acted one.
Russell Crowe is John Brennan, a community college teacher whose wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) is accused of murdering her boss over a minor argument before going out for a lovely evening on the town.
The story takes a leap forward in time after Lara's arrest, skipping her trial and leaving even the details of her supposed crime unrevealed until later. It picks up around the two-year anniversary of her conviction. As her psychological state diminishes in prison and her young son grows distant from her, Brennan begins to consider a last desperate measure to free the woman he still believes is innocent.
It's not the slick and stylish breakout we are used to seeing; Brennan learns bit-by-bit through a clumsy process of trial and error. This would have been interesting enough subject matter, but what makes The Next Three Days exceptional is the character of Brennan and the dynamic with his wife, who is not a typical unjustly imprisoned flower. As the evidence of her guilt grows, Brennan faces making a conscious decision to live in denial in order to preserve his precarious world view.
Banks is unremarkable as Lara, but Crowe finds plenty of room to exercise his considerable talents in his role as the husband.
The movie disappoints a bit in the third act when it resorts to some clichés of the genre. The final escape attempt is oddly ingenious in comparison to Brennan's earlier bumbling efforts, and he is pursued by a typical "supercop" (Lennie James) who gets onto his tail and stays there via a series of improbable hunches. It starts to feel a little too much like an ordinary thriller, and in the end, the film answers more questions than it ought to.
The story's tempo shifts dramatically a little past the halfway point from a crawl to a sprint-but it's actually the slow first half that is better paced. Every scene in this portion is purposeful and articulated with compelling dialog, whereas the conclusion, though intense, goes on several scenes too long.
As a complete picture, it's one of the best releases this year.
Rated PG-13 for vandalism of fences/people.
4 out of 5
Tales from Earthsea (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Goro Miyazaki. Starring Matt Levin, Timothy Dalton, Willem Dafoe.
Meandering and unsteady anime adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series.
Studio Ghibli films are almost always worth seeing for their beautifully crafted worlds, and this more or less applies to Tales from Earthsea. The world in this case, however, is built around a surprisingly generic story about a prince and a Merlin-type wizard battling an evil sorcerer who seeks immortality. The sorcerer in question resembles an anorexic Cher and (in the English dub, which by the way is quite good) has the voice of Willem Dafoe with low-talker syndrome. I guess that's something new.
Like most Ghibli films, and to its credit, Tales is unafraid to spend precious minutes relaxing and enjoying the view. There are more than a few drawn-out shots of nothing but characters riding across majestically-painted scenery while the music swells.
But where it differs from other Ghibli films is that these moments are taken at the cost of more important concerns. In two hours, the film paints only a dim outline of its universe and fails to return to most of the mysteries it develops. These are not the kind of secondary questions that add intrigue to a story, but fundamental matters about the plot and its characters.
The ending sequence, which could be said to occupy nearly the entire second hour of the film, does nothing but raise additional questions, almost none of which are addressed. The main character has some magical significance attributed to him that never makes much sense. Another character transforms into a dragon for no discernible reason except that, perhaps, someone told the creator that that's just the kind of thing that happens in anime films.
Not a wasted couple of hours, at least-if only for the spectacle.
Rated PG-13 for scary black ooze.
3 out of 5
