Quick Review: Green Lantern

I was worried about "Green Lantern," based on the DC Comics character. Face it, once you get past Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman you're dealing with DC's second string. And look at the trouble DC's parent company, Warner Bros., has had turning their properties into films. They had to go back to basics with the Batman films after what Joel Schumacher did to them (and struck gold, to be sure). Their first Superman franchise reboot took forever and was not as successful as they wanted, so now they're trying again with a different director, star, etc. And Wonder Woman's been stuck in movie and TV limbo. So a Green Lantern movie would have to be done right to cross over to the public at large. The box office may ultimately tell a different story, but for me, it wasn't a huge success.

Ryan Reynolds isn't terrible as Hal Jordan, the test pilot who is chosen to become the newest Green Lantern of Sector 2814 (that would be the one that includes Earth, of course) and receives the green ring that grants him superpowers. (And, as you can see, he's pretty, although he doesn't show much skin in this movie.) But the plot is splintered, veering between Hal's getting the ring and learning how to use it and meeting other members of the Green Lantern corps, and the threat of an entity known as Parallax (the essence of fear, which is represented by yellow, although the entity itself seems to be a smoke monster), and the relationship between Hal and Carol Ferris (Blake Lively), and then to Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard), a scientist who gets a piece of Parallax inside him and mutates into a villain himself, although he doesn't do all that much, really -- the character and actor are both pretty much wasted here. And to explain the history and mythos of the Green Lanterns and the Guardians who created them, and how green is the color of willpower, able to confront fear, and so on, took a lot of narration. I didn't dislike this movie as much as others, but it's still a disappointment. My grade: C-plus.

Quick Reviews (Oscar Edition): An Education, Precious

Of the 10 Oscar Best Picture nominees, I've now seen eight of them. Both are very good, but only one of them cracked my personal top 10 for 2009.

In "An Education," Jenny, a mature 16-year-old British schoolgirl (Carey Mulligan, deserving of her Best Actress nomination), is diligently on a path to attend Oxford when she has a chance meeting with an older man (Peter Sarsgaard). He is charmed, she is smitten, and some subtle manipulation of her parents allows them to begin seeing more of each other. She is intrigued by his life and his friends. She begins to see this man and his swanky, adult lifestyle, as preferable to the immature schoolmate who fancies her, and to her future at Oxford. How everything plays out held my interest, but how it ends was just a little too pat, keeping it from my top 10. My grade: B-plus.

As for "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," the story of Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is harrowing. Sexually abused by her father and impregnated by him twice (one baby with Down syndrome, a second baby on the way), physically and emotionally abused by her mother Mary (Mo'Nique), with whom she lives in Harlem (the story takes place in 1987), obese and illiterate, there would seem to be no hope for this girl. She's suspended from school when her second pregnancy is discovered, but the principal manages to get her into an alternative school. Precious begins to gain a support system in her new teacher (Paula Patton), a social worker (Mariah Carey -- completely de-glammed and nearly unrecognizable) and a nurse she meets at the hospital where she's given birth to her second child (Lenny Kravitz). It amazed me that by the end of the movie, although the future of Precious and her children is far from certain, it still felt uplifting. Something that amazed me even more is that, as much as Mary is an absolute monster, I felt sorry for her a little. The movie also made me angry, thinking about the kids who are in terrible situations in real life but don't get help the way Precious does. My grade: A.

Quick Review: Orphan

Let's just stare at Peter Sarsgaard for a moment...mmmmm...

There we go. I can't quite figure out how, with so many smaller, independent (or indie-minded) films like "Kinsey" and "Garden State" and "Year Of The Dog" on his resume, he ended up in "Orphan," a sometimes-formulaic but over-the-top fun horror movie. Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga are a married couple who, after their third child is stillborn, decide to adopt. At the orphanage they see a 9-year-old girl by herself painting instead of running around playing like the other girls because, she says, she's "different." They decide to adopt her, and everyone finds out (some more quickly than others) just how different she is. It starts slowly but the trashy fun quotient really starts to click in a scene where the girl sees her new parents engaged in some sexual activity...in the kitchen...and her mother talks to her the next day about what she saw. When the girl utters a certain four-word sentence the theater erupted in laughter, and on it went. There's a twist near the end of the movie that I didn't see coming. The end seemed to drag on too long, but maybe that was because I had a large diet soda and really needed to get to the restroom. My grade: B