Like Someone in Love (2012)

Tadashi Okuno (foreground) and Rin Takanashi in
Abbas Kiarostami's "Like Someone in Love."

Filmed in Japan, Abbas Kiarostami's “Like Someone in Love”—a ruminative, visually intriguing but sometimes frustratingly cryptic character study about the subtle friendship that develops between a reticent, secretive young college student and an elderly, retired professor—is the second feature by the acclaimed writer-director made outside of his native Iran. The first, “Certified Copy,” was made in Italy.

The movie begins at a small club in Tokyo, where we meet Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a beautiful sociology major whose curious side job as a call girl leads to complications in her life. She has an argument on the phone with her boyfriend, and a late night appointment with a new client causes her to miss a visit from her grandmother, a faux pas revealed in a series of heartbreaking voice messages.

Enter Tadashi Okuno, who plays the widowed Takashi. He prepares dinner and warmly greets Akiko at his cozy upstairs apartment decorated with artwork and lined with books from his research work. Friendly, fragile and far from a creeper, the lonely scholar wants company more than anything. After a brief but pleasant conversation, Akiko falls asleep by herself in the old guy’s bed.

The next day, Takashi drives Akiko to class where her boyfriend (Ryo Kase), a streetwise young mechanic who wants to marry Akiko, turns up. After mistaking Takashi for Akiko’s grandfather, the two men have an uneasy but candid talk about responsibility, love, maturity and marriage.

The conversation continues when Akiko returns and they drive to a bookstore. Lesser directors might cut back and forth and use close-ups, but Kiarostami—a master at filming scenes in cars and other small spaces—shows his visual virtuosity by keeping all three characters in frame in one extended shot. The effect invites the viewer to read facial expressions during pauses. The reserved, mysterious Akiko is the most difficult to figure out and therefore the most challenging; she seems to be carrying the weight of the world beyond those anxious, vulnerable eyes.

But the movie stumbles mightily at the finish line with a jarring shift in tone, veering wildly from contemplative and understated to irrational and crudely overt. It also suffers from one of the more abrupt, bizarre and inelegant endings in recent memory, as if Kiarostami hit a wall and just wasn’t sure where to go with the material.

Still, “Like Someone in Love” does have some fine performances from Takanashi and Okuno, who turn Akiko and Takashi into the kind of likable characters that are a joy to spend time with. It’s too bad Kiarostami didn’t make the film entirely about them. Their friendship evokes some of the great pairings of the cinema—like Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory in Louis Malle’s fascinating “My Dinner with Andre,” or Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s masterful “Lost in Translation.”

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

Teen Wolf: Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart in
the second Twilight chapter, "New Moon."

“Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” is the title of a popular, romantic song from the 1950s. Had the tune been made today for Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, the mismatched lovebirds of the “Twilight” franchise, it would probably be renamed “Love Is a Many-Splintered Thing”—amended to describe the cacophonous, painful sounds of smashing objects, crashing bodies and breaking bones that have become a dominant motif in the series.

When we last left the pensive Bella (Kristen Stewart), the diminutive teen was pulling shards of glass out of a broken leg after getting caught in a vicious battle between rival vampires, including her boyfriend, the blanche, brooding vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson).

In “New Moon,” the second film based on the young adult books by Stephenie Meyer, it doesn’t take long before Bella is dealt even more spine-crunching abuse, when an innocuous mishap at her birthday party—she leaks a few drops of blood after a paper cut—draws the ravenous appetite of another vampire and leads to her being violently whipped across the room.

After the latest fracas, Edward decides to move away without his girl, perhaps because he finally realizes that Bella risks paralysis or death if the couple remains together. Whatever the reason, it’s ultimately just primer for another character, the grinning, hunky Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), to segue into the narrative, offering comfort and a well-muscled shoulder for the grieving, heartbroken Bella to cry on.

But this is still Forks, Washington, where overcast skies are interminable, sinister eyes glare out from the forest, and seemingly normal teenagers aren’t what they seem. Jacob, the seemingly normal young stranger—the new moon of the title—is really a werewolf. Eventually, he begins to get jealous when Bella keeps pining for Edward, since werewolves and vampires don’t get along.

Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson)
face a new threat in "New Moon."

“Promise me you won't do anything reckless,” Edward tells Bella before he leaves. Which is, in a movie like this, as good as giving license to go carte blanche on the reckless-o-meter. Bella rides off with menacing strangers, drives her speeding motorcycle head-first into boulders, and plummets off a towering cliff into the churning Pacific—all just to see the ghostly visage of the omnipresent Edward, beamed back to her “Star Trek” style.

Directed by Chris Weitz—a sometimes producer who takes over the reins from Catherine Hardwicke—“New Moon” is careful not to deviate from the spirit of the book and establishes a melancholy mood that swings between overwrought and downright silly. The screenplay, again by Melissa Rosenberg, does include some playfully funny one-liners that seem open to self-parody.

“What is that awful wet dog smell,” a female vampire asks Bella after Jacob slips out of the room. Another character asks Bella if she’s freaked out by werewolves. “You’re not the first monsters I’ve met,” she says wryly. And the century-old Edward to Bella after they inevitably reunite: “Leaving you was the hardest thing I've done in a hundred years.” He should try sitting through these movies.

Visually, “New Moon” is a campy circus of red, yellow and orange-eyed vampires—as if the inspiration for creating them came from looking at items in a fruit bowl—and giant, comically bizarre computer generated wolves. Plagued by feverish nightmares throughout the film, you half expect Bella, who needs a new hobby more than anything, to come to her senses and declare that she's had enough and is trying out for the cheerleading team.

About Alex (2014)

"About Alex" directed by Jessie Zwick.

The unexpected suicide of a friend named Alex was the impetus for bringing together a group of college buddies in the 1983 drama “The Big Chill.” Though the suicide is only an attempt this time, the formula gets revisited in writer-director Jessie Zwick's “About Alex,” a talky but dull wannabe examination of contemporary twenty-something malaise.

Just released from the hospital, Alex (Jason Ritter) returns to his cozy childhood home in a wooded, rural part of upstate New York with his wrists bandaged and blood still splattered in the bathroom where his botched attempt at his own life took place. Several former college cronies, many with problems of their own, collect for a weekend of sometimes harmless, sometimes awkward reminiscing complete with eating, drinking, plenty of pot smoking, and of course, the predictable, angry third-act quarrel that results in an accident.

There’s the anguished Ben (Nate Parker), a newspaperman and novelist stuck in a yearlong writer’s block; Siri (Maggie Grace), Ben’s anguished wife who just got offered a dream job in L.A. but isn’t sure Ben wants to go and also thinks she might be pregnant; unhappy Sarah (Aubrey Plaza), a single and dissatisfied tax-attorney with mildly self-destructive sexual urges; bitter Josh (Max Greenfield), a pseudo-intellectual who indulges Sarah in noisy moments of mindless, escapist sex; ambivalent Isaac (Max Minghella), Sarah’s former crush turned right-wing businessman; and likable Kate (Jane Levy), Isaac’s current girlfriend, a rep for a suicide hotline (what are the odds?) and the lone stranger to the group.

“About Alex” seems to aspire to be a glimpse of challenges faced by today’s millennials, but the conversations struggle to rise in depth above anything more important than petty jealousies and relationship scuttlebutt. The closest the film comes to social relevance is a short exchange about the ways social media seems to keep people apart rather than bringing them closer.

Saddled with superficial material, the actors do what they can to stand out. Max Greenfield is convincing as the cynical curmudgeon decrying the current state of things and Jane Levy is endearing as the pretty but emotionally vulnerable outsider. However, the usually deadpan Aubrey Plaza, with her trademark baleful eyes, seems miscast in a lighter, chirpier role.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

Yellow-Haired Warrior: Uma Thurman
stars in "Kill Bill: Vol. 1."

Late in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” a character delivers a somber voiceover about the often messy business of revenge. “Like a forest,” he says, “it's easy to get lost, to forget where you came in.”

Indeed, the film's heroine—known alternately as the Bride and Black Mamba, her codename as a linchpin of the Deadly Vipers Assassins group—seems lost in a veritable forest of trouble at the beginning when she's inexplicably double crossed by Bill (little seen David Carradine), her taciturn mentor and husband-to-be, savagely beaten by fellow members of her own gang, and gunned down in a mass execution on her wedding day. And, oh yeah, she was pregnant.

They leave her for dead, but somehow the Bride lives, waking up from a coma four years later in a murky hospital just in time before a stranger prepares to violate her. Fear and confusion quickly give way to steely resolve and fiery rage, and what she does to the creep is only a small prelude to the wholesale retribution to come. It does get quite messy along the way.

Fortunately, there’s nothing messy about Quentin Tarantino’s superb execution in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” the fourth and by far most richly entertaining and satisfying film by the talented writer-director of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.”

Known for genre bending and ultra-violent tales, Tarantino has a new set of influences this time. If “Dogs” was a fresh take on the film noir movement of the 40s and “Pulp” was a homage to 50s crime novels, “Kill Bill” is in part a tribute to the Japanese samurai classics of Akira Kurosawa (“Seven Samurai,” “Yojimbo”) and to Bruce Lee’s martial arts movies of the 70s. But it takes its biggest cue from Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 “Lady Snowblood,” in which the revenge-minded main character was a female.

Chiaki Kuriyama

There hasn’t always been much of a place for strong women in Tarantino’s world, but “Kill Bill” changes that. Brilliantly played by the lanky blonde Uma Thurman as a steamy, seething engine of deadly vengeance, the Bride also suggests a female version of Charles Bronson in the gritty, urban “Death Wish” films. Likewise, there are admirable turns by Vivica A. Fox, who draws the first card on the Bride’s fight list; Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii, a quietly vicious, Lady Macbeth-type Japanese-American hit woman with redoubtable swordsman skills; and Chiaki Kuriyama  as O-Ren’s diminutive but fearless bodyguard Go Go Yubari, a beautiful but chillingly dark-eyed, merciless teenage killer outfitted like a schoolgirl whose cruel weapon of choice—a heavy metal ball with retractable razors attached to a chain—nearly finishes off the Bride for good.

Tarantino’s crisp, exciting fight choreography and inventive, highly stylized cinematography blend to make “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” one of the most visually striking and exuberant action films to come around in a while. And though it seems illogical to use the word playful to describe a movie replete with so much graphic violence—flying bullets, sliced limbs, and geysers of blood sometimes spewing from beheaded characters—Tarantino’s use of artfully exaggerated, comic book inspired chaos and delirious camera angles is always more darkly funny than disgusting, without the excess shock gore that has sometimes tainted the filmmaker’s previous work.

More highlights include an eight minute long, astonishingly beautiful animated sequence that supplies the moving backstory explaining O-Ren’s tragic tumble into a life of crime, and a soaring musical score—beginning with Nancy Sinatra’s ghostly elegy “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” and culminating with pan flute master Gheorghe Zamfir’s haunting “The Lonely Shepherd”—that evokes Ennio Morricone and gives “Once Upon a Time in the West” a run for the money.