Nowhere Boy (DVD/Blu-Ray)

"And so I sing this song of love for Julia..."

About two years ago, I had the lucky opportunity to take a Beatles tour in Liverpool.  Along with my Beatles-adoring mom, we were in fan heaven visiting places so well-known from songs, such as Penny Lane, the gate to Strawberry Fields, and Eleanor Rigby's tombstone.  But what was most striking about the whole thing was the realization that The Beatles were just kids here, who loved to hang out, write and play their music totally unaware that they would go on to become one of the biggest bands of all time.

Nowhere Boy takes place during that time.  The movie isn't even really about The Beatles - hell, the name of the band is never mentioned.  What the film is about is John Lennon's relationship with his mother, Julia.  The story is well-known:  raised by his Aunt Mimi, the teenage John befriended his estranged mother, who lived so nearby she was practically a neighbor.  A fellow free-spirit (perhaps too free-spirited for her own good), Julia taught John the banjo, introduced him to Elvis, bought him his first guitar, and provided a welcome relief from the strict rules of home.  However, the reunion came to a tragic end when Julia was struck by a car and killed, a loss from which John never fully recovered.

Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, the movie doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know about the events of that time.  John himself wrote a number of heartbreaking songs on the subject, and of course, he even named his first son Julian after his mom.  But it's still an interesting look at what a young John (not to mention a young Paul McCartney and George Harrison) might have been like as just a teenager struggling to find his own identity while discovering a gift that would ultimately define him to the rest of the world.

Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass) does an admirable job as John Lennon.  He looks a little like him, he does that crazy thing with his voice that John would sometimes do in interviews, and he sings well.  He wasn't playing a Beatle, he was playing a messed-up kid, and your heart broke for him.  Kristin Scott-Thomas is great in the thankless (in the film and most likely in real-life as well) role of John's Aunt Mimi, who provided the tough love that John needed and probably wouldn't have survived without.  Plus it was hilarious when she referred to Paul McCartney as John's "little friend."  Speaking of Paul, Thomas Brodie Sangster (who will always be that little kid running through Heathrow to kiss his girlfriend in Love, Actually to me) is impressive as well.  There's a whole other movie in that John/Paul relationship, and it would almost be worth seeing Sangster and Johnson reunite for the roles if that ever happened.  Anne-Marie Duff rounds out the cast nicely as Julia.

Nowhere Boy is probably most enjoyable for a Beatles fan, but it's still a solid film and well-acted...plus you can't beat the music.  I'd defintely recommend checking it out.

True Grit

I'm probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but here goes:  I've never seen the 1969 film version of True Grit.  Sad and totally irresponsible, I know, but there you have it.  That being said, this new version directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen, which is more of a new adaptation of the original 1968 Charles Portis novel than a remake of the first film, is pretty damn good. 

Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is a 14-year-old girl in 1877 Arkansas who hires tough, merciless, and mostly drunk Deputy US Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to hunt down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the hired hand who murdered her father.  Cogburn certainly doesn't need any help, but the strong-willed Mattie, determined to see her father's killer brought to justice, accompanies him on the hunt.  They are joined by Texas Ranger LaBeouf (Matt Damon), who has also been chasing down Chaney for killing a senator.  The three ultimately combine forces, however unwillingly, to get the job done.

Now despite the impressive roster of big names in the cast, this is Hailee Steinfeld's film.  This was her first major acting gig and somehow she manages to blow away everyone else in the film.  Which is not to say the adults didn't do their part either.  Taking on a role that the legendary John Wayne won an Oscar for is no easy task, but Jeff Bridges is brilliant as Rooster.  Matt Damon's LeBeouf is a perfect as a reluctant third party in the manhunt, and while Josh Brolin doesn't have a whole lot of screentime, he brought the right amount of sleaze to Tom Chaney.

It would almost criminal not to mention Barry Pepper's performance as outlaw "Lucky" Ned Pepper.  Almost unreccognizable under those sheepskin chaps and his red eyes and rotting teeth, he makes an even better villain than Brolin does.  Why don't we see this guy more often?

I'm not the biggest fan of Westerns (hence why I've never seen the original True Grit), but that didn't really matter here.  The new True Grit was terrific, with fantastic performances, sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, sometimes melancholy and tragic.  Definitely don't miss it. 

The Fighter

In my review of The King's Speech, I noted that I would reserve judgement on this year's Best Supporting Actor race between Geoffrey Rush and Christian Bale until after I had seen The Fighter.  Well, now that I've seen The Fighter, I can say for sure that it's not even a contest:  it's Christian Bale, all the way.  And considering what an acting showcase this hugely entertaining film is, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the only award it wins.

The Fighter is the true story of junior welterweight champion "Irish" Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), whose rise to boxing stardom is threatened by his horribly dyfunctional, overbearing family.  Chief among his obstacles is his older half-brother/trainer Dickie Ecklund (Christian Bale), a former boxing champ himself who threw away his own promising future to a crack cocaine addiction.  Adding to this mess is their manipulative mother Alice (Melissa Leo), who's not only totally oblivious to her favorite son Dickie's self-destructive behavior, but so clueless as how to manage Micky's career that she's about to run that into the ground too.

The story as a whole is fairly predictable:  Micky is a nice enough guy with some talent, he's spent a lifetime in the shadow of his brother, and he needs to get the hell away from his family if he wants any shot at a future.  And with the help of his no-nonsense girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams), he's finally able to do that, albeit with some major obstacles along the way.  Even if you've never heard of Micky Ward before seeing the movie (which I hadn't), you pretty much know where this movie is going. 

But it's a really good movie, and the acting is phenomenal.  Bale is definitely the standout.  His character is such a pathetic mess - a guy who once faced Sugar Ray Leonard in a boxing ring but who now wanders around his hometown oblivious that the HBO documentary crew following him around town is making a movie about his downfall from drugs and not his never-gonna-happen comeback.  Melissa Leo compliments that perfectly as their mother, who's just painfully clueless about everything and just adores this disaster of a human being.  Amy Adams plays this hard-nosed ray of light as Micky's girlfriend, who's not intimidated by his family (in hilarious fashion, in a few scenes) and helps him learn to break away.

This is the third film Mark Wahlberg has worked with director David O. Russell on, Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees being the first, and they work well together.  Compared to everyone else, Micky is probably the least interesting character of the film, but you still felt for him and you still rooted for him...he looked terrific too.  I loved how they mixed in video footage of the boxing scenes with the actual film, it felt like you were really watching actual footage of the fight.

I'm still going with Black Swan as my favorite of the Oscar frontrunners so far, but The Fighter is a good one too.

The King's Speech

It must be difficult enough to be the King of England...but as we learn in The King's Speech, it's even more difficult to be the King of England when you have a dreadful, crippling stammer.  It also takes a lot of talented people to make a film about stuttering even remotely interesting, but director Tom Hooper and the always wonderful Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter manage to do just that.

The King's Speech is the story of England's King George VI, who was unexpectedly forced to take over the throne from his philandering brother in 1936.  Unfortunately for King George (or "Bertie," as he's called by his family), he had suffered since childhood from a terrible stammer that would render him nearly unable to speak whenever he was called upon to address the public.  Not a good thing to have as a King, especially not one that was going to have constantly take to the airwaves to reassure the masses through the horrors of World War II.

In the years before ascending to the throne, Bertie had sought help for his stutter from a variety of doctors without any real success.  Enter Lionel Logue, an Australian speech therapist/out-of-work actor whose unorthodox methods teach a frustrated Bertie to finally find his voice, and, just as importantly, find his first real friend. 

The movie plays out very much a like a stage play (in fact, that's what the script was originally intended to be) and I would love to see this performed on stage.  Most of the action plays out between Logue and Bertie as they go through their speech therapy...Bertie begins the sessions as a bit of a royal snob, reluctant to believe anyone could help him and almost unwilling to try, while Logue pushes back at every turn making it clear he simply didn't give a damn if Bertie was royalty or not.  But unlike most, Logue believed in him, and in the end that made all the difference.  Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush are simply brilliant in the roles.  Also, it was nice to see Helena Bonham Carter, who plays Bertie's loving wife Elizabeth, play a non-psychopath for a change.  She really is a terrific actress.

I'm not sure The King's Speech can overtake Black Swan as my favorite of the big Oscar contenders so far, but I'd love to see Colin Firth take home an Oscar for this one.  I'm going to reserve judgement on Geoffrey Rush until after I see Christian Bale in The Fighter, but Rush is so fantastic in everything anyway so I'd be happy if he won as well.  But I thought the film was excellent. 

Tron Legacy

Full disclosure:  I don't really remember the original Tron.  I was eight years old when it was released in 1982, and I remember that it looked really cool and that I really wanted to see it, but I never got there (ET, on the other hand, I saw three times that summer).  I finally got to check it out when it aired on HBO, but even by then the special effects looked pretty cheesy and I remember being so bored by it that I don't think I ever made it through the entire movie, and I haven't tried watching it again since.

Regardless, I did check out Tron Legacy in IMAX/3D, since, like its predecessor, it still did look really cool.  And the visuals were, particularly the lightcycles and the arena games where the 3D looked amazing. Unfortunately, I wish I could say the same for the story.  I figured since Disney seems to have hidden the DVD of the original film into some sort of home video witness protection program (the last release was in 2002 and it's gone MIA on Netflix) that it wouldn't matter that I hadn't seen the first movie in a long time.   Either it did matter or the story was just so lackluster that it just wasn't interesting enough to follow.

Tron Legacy is the story of Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the son of Tron's genius video game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges).  Essentially orphaned after his father disappeared some 20 years earlier, Sam follows a mysterious page to his dad's old arcade one night and winds up being swept away into The Grid, a virtual world created by his father.  There, he's not only reunited with his long-lost dad, but he also confronts Clu (also Jeff Bridges) his father's genocidal virtual double gone bad, and Quorra (Olivia Wilde) a sentient computer program that Kevin has been protecting from Clu, who's planning to escape with all of his virtual badness through a portal into the real world.

Again, the special effects are really terrific.  When Sam first arrives in The Grid, he's captured and forced to participate in these gladiator-type games in a huge virtual arena.  It's one of the best sequences in the film, and if that had been the story and there had been more scenes like that I probably would have enjoyed the movie a lot more.  That stuff was much more fun.  Once Sam escapes off-Grid with Quorra it just became a not-particularly interesting sci-fi movie.  And I hate boring sci-fi.  It was great to see Jeff Bridges in the dual role as Kevin Flynn and de-aged to his 1982 self as Clu (although in a few shots he looked too much like a Polar Express character), but most of his scenes kept reminding me how much more excited I was for True Grit instead of this.  It was also nice to see Bruce Boxleitner reprise his role as Tron, but his character seemed totally shoehorned into the story.

It's a perfect movie for a 3D junkie (and I enjoy 3D when it's done right), but like the first movie, it suffers mostly from a lot of wasted potential.  Great visuals, but couldn't they have spent some of that budget on a better story?