Film Week

A review of the films I've seen this past week.

MISS CONCEPTION (2008)
Not as bad as the movies I usually end up seeing just because Heather Graham is in them. Heather plays a British woman who finds out she's only got one ovum left and has to be pregnant in the next week or else she'll never conceive. But her boyfriend, a documentarian, is out of town and isn't even sure he wants kids. So decides to get knocked up any way she can. Not as silly as I figured it would be, but not really a winner, either. Heather still looks beautiful. **1/2 stars.

MY SISTER'S KEEPER (2009)
Nice try, but no. Sofia Vassilieva, the star of my beloved Eloise movies, plays Kate, a teenager who has been dealing with leukemia her entire life. Her sister, Anna (Abigail Breslin), was basically bred to provide bone marrow and other biological resources. The story begins when Kate starts to get close to renal failure and Anna, supposed to give her kidney to her sister, challenges her parents in court to keep medical control of her own body. Having lost a teenage sister to cancer a few years ago, I wanted to like this movie, but I found it ultimately too typically Hollywood (read: shallow) in its approach to something so big and dramatic. The science fiction court case is really only there to put a clock on the drama and force a sort of urgency out of the audience. The compelling stuff happens in flashbacks, and even then it's just one section of the movie that details Kate's relationship with another teenager who is also a cancer patient. That was genuinely sweet and moving, watching two kids with a tragic awareness of their impending mortality fall in love. It's enough to watch a family being torn apart by illness, but the movie make unnecessary additions and imposes a flashback structure (complete with competing narration) that doesn't work and turns the whole enterprise into sentiment porn that loses entire characters (why is that brother even there, really, other than to have his outburst in the courtroom?). Vassilieva and Breslin are very good. I felt bad for Cameron Diaz; she has a hard job. She comes across as a total bitch in everything she's in, and here she had to play a woman whose drive to care for her sick daughter has made her hard and single-minded. That she generates any sympathy at all is either miraculous or very good editing. ** stars.

SIN NOMBRE (2009)
I found this film very moving. It focuses on two young Latin Americans--Mexican Willy, a gang member fleeing retribution, and Honduran Sayra, seeking to be reunited with her father--headed for America and an illegal border crossing. It's a very moving story about the drives and motives illegal immigrants have for seeking a better life in the United States, but it's also about compelling characters. You relate to Willy and Sayra emotionally, and in personalizing the journey to America, the film succeeds in not reducing their story to a cliche or in turning them into three-dimensional characters among a bunch of cliches. No one in the movie is a cliche immigrant or an extra simply there to fill the screen. It forces you to see them for the people they are, desperate to find a place where they can catch a break and eke out a better living for themselves or their families. In an America that dehumanizes these people into a political issue, I found it remarkably powerful and necessary. One of the best films of 2009. Beautifully shot, too (eschewing a lot of today's stylistic cliches). **** stars.

AN AMERICAN AFFAIR (2009)
Fitfully interesting movie about a teenage boy in 1963 Washington, DC, who becomes obsessed with the woman across the street, a beautiful blonde (Gretchen Mol, whom I always like) with ties to John F. Kennedy. It drags in spots, but is a mostly okay, if heavy-handed, coming of age drama/political intrigue movie. **1/2 stars.

THE EGG AND I (1947)
Cute movie with Fred MacMurray giving up city life to buy a run-down chicken farm in the mountains and try to hew his life out of the earth. Claudette Colbert, as his new wife, is sort of forced to hang on for dear life and adapt to what he wants, which she certainly does. This is the movie that introduced Ma and Pa Kettle--I've seen none of their movies, but Marjorie Main is delightful in this one as Ma. It's a comforting movie about the closeness of community, and I probably would have loved it a lot more when I was 10. As it is, though, I thought it was very nice and pleasant. *** stars.

LAUGH, CLOWN, LAUGH (1928)
Lon Chaney in one of his many excellent performances stars as a traveling clown who finds an orphaned girl and takes her in. When she grows to womanhood--into gorgeous Loretta Young--he falls in love with her, though she loves someone else. Rather than a simple love triangle, the film elevates their clashes of passion, as the salvation of both men lies with the girl and their love for her. The mere force of Chaney's performance makes this a film hard to look away from. **** stars.

SALT OF THE EARTH (1954)
This film has been labeled as a communist one over the years, as are most socially conscious works that actually care about the struggles and well-being of people who do the actual work in this country. This film (directed by Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten) doesn't propagandize an ideal, but it does focus on the struggle of Mexican-American miners in a labor dispute. For 1954, it's unusually sensitive to what happens to women in the world of poor workers; feminism ahead of its time. It's sad that now, 56 years later, this movie is as relevant as it was then, as we experience the abuse of labor rights and regulations, and prejudice against Mexican-Americans. The use of a mostly non-professional cast gives this a naturalistic feel that makes it more urgent. **** stars.