The Odd Life of Timothy Green (2012)

3/5

The Odd Life of Timothy Green is a fairly benign family film. The plot follows Cindy (Garner) and Tim Green (Edgerton), a young infertile couple. The movie starts after another unsuccessful attempt at pregnancy. Distraught, they drive home barely talking to each other. To cheer themselves up, they allow themselves to dream up the perfect child. They write down the six characteristics they would see in their child, put the papers in a box, and bury the box in the yard. Magically, a ten-year-old boy named Timothy (Adams) sprouts out of the ground and into their lives.

All the technical aspects of the film, from acting to shooting to editing, are satisfactory enough not to stand out. The movie is honestly quite silly. But the plot is merely a device to allow the characters to learn about life, love, and parenting. Despite that, there are so many extraneous scenes to explain the plot instead of digging in to meatier thematics. It actually held a lot of potential with its simple metaphor, but the director chose to go for trite tropes rather than intellectually-stimulating concepts. Still, it's a saccharine story with attractive actors and colorful cinematography and is perfectly fine for afternoon filmgoing. It just isn't as good as it could be.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1462769/

Falling Down (1993)

2/5

Joel Schumacher's Falling Down follows an unemployed defense worker (Douglas) with a temper problem. Seeing "flaws" and "problems" in society, one day he violently and psychotically lashes out against them. A cop about to retire (Duvall) spends his last day trying to hunt him down and stop his violence. The characters are very much off the wall and unique, yet don't quite work. They're too extreme. The story escalates formulaically, but doesn't follow the formula to the end. It starts too exaggerated and goes sideways halfway through instead of finishing with the explosive finale expected. The acting was actually pretty good (Duvall's laugh was amazing). I liked the intro (a ripoff, but a good ripoff, of the intro to 8 1/2); it was incredible at eliciting discomfort and an unsettling atmosphere. The rest of the movie is so ludicrous that it becomes laughable, but is fun and funny in its caricatures. This isn't a good movie, but it's enjoyable in the same way Sameer can place Crash in his top ten comedies.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0106856/

Hollywoodland (2006)

3/5

I saw this with my mom and brother tonight. Let me just say that this is not a film noir (or neo-noir), which is what I was expecting going in. Don't get me wrong; it tries to be with its hard-boiled style and sometimes clever dialogue, but the images are too perky, Adrien Brody is immensely unconvincing as the tough-as-nails detective, and the plot is just too simple. What this movie is, is a murder mystery set in the 50's. It reminded me of Michael Crichton's book Airframe because the main character just goes back and forth between theories of what "actually happened," except in this movie the murder is never solved. The method of flashback used is so conventional that it became jarring because it took me away from the 50's setting of film noirs. The movie can't really decide whose story it wants to tell: the detective who loses sight of morals and family or George Reeves and the mystery surrounding his death. So it tries to tell both but fails to quench your thirst for either. The recurring side characters were worthless. Utterly. The feeble attempts at giving the characters backstories by referencing one unique feature felt like something learned as a requirement in a scriptwriting class.

Even so, this movie is mesmerizing, which I think it takes partly from the true mystery surrounding Reeves' death. Despite what I said about leaving the theater knowing as much as when you went in, I like the fact that the director doesn't impose his own point of view on you. Despite the flashbacks, I found the directing to be surprisingly competent. He really respects the audience's intelligence and maturity levels. There were some really nice transitions and artistic flourishes that elevated this into a film instead of just a script. I can't really say I recommend it to either the film noir crowd, the cinema as art crowd, or the murder mystery crowd as it doesn't particularly excel in any of those facets. But it's a worthy attempt.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0427969/