Eat Pray Love ***

Director: Ryan Murphy
Cast: Julia Roberts
Javier Bardem, James Franco, Richard Jenkins, Viola Davis
Billy Crudup, Hadi Subiyanto, Tuva Novotny, Mike O'Malley
Luca Argentero, Rushita Singh, David Lyons

How do you sell a movie about a woman who leaves her husband to find herself, while traveling to some of the most exotic locales on the planet? You get Julia Roberts to play her.
It makes no difference that Eat Pray Love is based on the autobiographical novel written by Elizabeth Gilbert, the truth is that perhaps there would've been no way to bring this movie to the screen without making it feel like a "whine fest" if it wasn't because Roberts turns it into a Julia Roberts movie.
Not to pay any disservice to Gilbert, since apparently those who love her book think it gets to be spiritual and transcendental, but the thing is that watching Julia on a movie screen immediately takes you to a place where movie stars still are gods of sorts and mortals can still drool over them.
This helps the movie because it helps make Gilbert approachable, given that we rarely think of her as an actual "normal" person, she's pretty much Julia Roberts' version of Gilbert.
This makes it easy to like Julia because it wouldn't really be easy to like Liz.
When the film begins she decides to leave her husband (Crudup) after figuring out she doesn't love him. She begins an affair with a young actor (Franco) who she doesn't love either and then decides it's time to travel the world and find her balance.
She begins her journey in Italy where she eats, then goes to India where she prays and culminates it in Bali where she loves (Bardem plays Felipe her Brazilian love interest).
Director Murphy (who also wrote the screenplay with Alice Salt) seems to have no real intention to make anything in the movie subtle.
Besides the obvious explanation of the title, he spends trying to digest everything for the audience. Along with director of photography Robert Richardson he tries to make everything seem like what we'd expect it to be.
Therefore the entire movie is bathed in a golden light that makes everything seem nice but doesn't really allow elements to breathe. Richardson who is an extraordinary DP, here seems restricted by the homogeneous look Murphy tries to impose on everything.
The same can be said about the editing, which more often than not seems overcompensating. The scenes where Liz eats are usually cut with such quickness that they make her bites seem car commercials, it's as if Murphy is too worried we would get too envious about the foods and chose not to show them too much and there's a particularly obnoxious scene where a woman's fashion success is celebrated by an entire crowd of football fans.
It's fortunate then that while Murphy digests for us, Julia gets to do the actual savoring. Her performance might not be a reinvention of modern acting but the actress shows glimpses of a maturity that she has experimented with very few times in her career.
Not only does she look more radiant and beautiful than ever but she also manages to infuse Liz with a certain sense of earthiness despite the whole "she's Julia" issue.
Even when the movie succumbs to cliché Julia takes it to a completely different place. For example it doesn't take long to assume Gilbert was a fan of Sex and the City given the way she narrates and tries too hard to deliver Carrie Bradshaw-isms, but Roberts takes these comments with a pinch of salt and instead of turning them into puns or teabag advice she confronts them and even make us wonder if Gilbert wasn't actually consciously creating a marketable product while trying to be spiritual (think Paulo Coelho minus the ominous hocus pocus).
After all this is a woman who literally had to begin from zero after an ugly divorce. It would make sense, and give her some humanity, to think that she was finding ways to make money after her trip was over.
Eat Pray Love rarely gives us a glimpse of the Julia Roberts laughter, you know that big, loud roar that's impossible to ignore, instead we get more of her soulful smile this time around.
Perhaps the screenplay doesn't really try hard to see what's behind Liz, her motivations rarely move past the "find myself" stereotype but Julia detected this and tries to explore it without acquiring methodical tics.
Instead of approaching Liz like a vessel waiting to be invaded, Roberts gets near her and tries to empathize, which is why it's evident that nobody else would've been able to play this woman and not make her seem selfish and to an extent an anti-heroine.
Because for all its soul searching and mumbo jumbo, Eat Pray Love is still very much about an American woman using the world to expiate her sins but without the selfawareness to make it a satire.
Because it has Roberts though it gains a heart, one that is broken on several occassions (mostly by herself) and because of this we leave the movie, not feeling patronized or offended but actually questioning what we just saw.
If people like Gilbert get to travel the world and still come up empty handed, what hope is there for the people who only get to travel from movie to movie looking for answers to their existential questions.
Murphy doesn't seem to know that his glossy travelogue might seem shallow but Julia does and with a comforting smile lets us know that however deep we sink in our own tragedies, almost everyone knows that a spoonful of gelato makes the world seem perfect even for at least a second.

Public Enemies **

Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard
Stephen Dorff, Billy Crudup, Stephen Graham, Channing Tatum
Giovanni Ribisi, Lily Taylor, Branka Katic
David Wenham, Leelee Sobieski

"Public Enemies" gives away its biggest flaw just when it thinks it's making a point.
In one of the film's last scenes, bank robber, John Dillinger (Depp) sits in a movie theater watching "Manhattan Melodrama".
The Clark Gable gangster film, after which he met his demise at hands of the FBI. During the movie Dillinger's eyes shine with mockery and recognition.
He sees himself as the Gable character, a gangster coming to terms with his actions. If director Michael Mann was trying to point out the dicotomy of similarities and differences between movie and real life gangsters his intentions get lost in the process.
Because even if his movie is shot and styled like a docudrama, it still plays out like a Hollywood movie.
Filmed in high definition video by the brilliant Dante Spinotti, "Public Enemies" follows Dillinger's-short, but infamous- career as a bank robber during which he became America's number one public enemy.
The film also follows the rise of the FBI led by J. Edgar Hoover (played spectacularly by Crudup who gives the film's best performance) and agent Melvin Purvis' (Bale) interstate hunt for Dillinger.
The plot (or lack of it) extends languidly for almost two and a half hours during which nothing much happens. Dillinger goes to jail, escapes jail, robs a bank, is involved in a shootout. Purvis looks for him, thinks he's got him, he escapes...
Somewhere in the middle of this Dillinger is smitten by coat check girl Billie Frechette (Cotillard) and they become each other's anchors of sort.
But with this, as with almost everything else, "Public Enemies" fails in providing a sense of realism.
Ironic, thinking how the natural cinematography should by default give the movie a sense of honesty. Mann's biggest mistake was trusting movie precepts.
While Spinotti's work is commendable, most of the time the movie looks, and sounds, like a taped rehearsal. Hollywood hasn't gotten us used to watching gangsters look like real people, they have always possessed an aura of glamor (something highlighted in the "Manhattan Melodrama" scene) that makes them almost mythical creatures.
Now, if Mann's intention was precisely to bring the myth down to earth-which in itself would've been an admirable feat-why then does he insist on having them move, act and talk like movie characters?
Graham as Baby Face Nelson comes off looking like something James Cagney would've played while imitating Richard Widmark. It has been said that 1930's gangster copied their style from the way movies depicted them (a postmodernist stroke of genius by them) in order to justify their public behavior.
But Mann's gangsters act the same way in the comfort of their hideout places. Dillinger is given lines that make you cringe and while Depp gives the character a touch of vulnerability in the end once again it's Johnny Depp being Johnny Depp; an amalgam of mannierisms, quirk and "acting" trying to be passed off as non-acting.
Bale gives Purvis some affecting qualities and realism (augmentated by how magnified his pores look with the cinematography) but again he plays his character like a somber figure who speaks only when needed. Inside Purvis was Dillinger, inside Bale there's Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown".
It is Marion Cotillard who gives the most enigmatic performance in the movie, we do not for a single moment belive her love for Dillinger to be the stuff of "movies", but there is something buried inside her that make her behavior fascinating.
She is swept off her feet by the gangster like Jean Harlow-he needs only to use the perfect line-but in latter scenes when we see her loyalty towards him we wonder what is behind all this.
It's possible to say not even the actress is sure of what Frechette's psychology is (none of the characters in this movie provide the slightest glimpse of backstory).
But it is Billie who haunts us after we leave the theater. Perhaps because she represents everything the film could've been, but wasn't.
This is best summarized in the "Manhattan Melodrama" scene where Dillinger looks upon the screem at Myrna Loy.
Loy appears in several scenes looking stunning and magical, her eyes shining like cinematic diamonds and when we see Dillinger's face we're supposed to know he's remembering Billie.
And how wouldn't he, turns out even Dillinger knows best for the movie; he knows that Cotillard's eyelashes weren't made for shaky docudrama, they were made for celluloid.

Watchmen **

Director: Zack Snyder
Cast: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode
Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson

It is 1985, the United States have won he Vietnam war and Richard Nixon is elected to run his third presidential term.
The ongoing Cold War with Russia has led the U.S government to create something known as a "doomsday watch" leading to an impending nuclear holocaust.
Masked superheroes known as the Watchmen also exist in this alternate universe and it's mostly because of them that history has been so different.
There's Nite Owl (Wilson) who masters advanced technology, Rorschach (Haley) a mysterious man who finds patterns in unexpected things, Ozymandias (Goode) the world's smartest man who has turned into a business mogul, Silk Spectre (Akerman) who is preserving the legacy of the name after her mom (the effortlessly wonderful Gugino) retired and then there's Doctor Manhattan (Crudup) a man who suffered an accident that has turned him into a nuclear entity that can manipulate energy and see the future.
But the Watchmen have stopped working after the President (when in doubt blame Nixon...) passed a bill that deemed them unnecessary.
Things change when the Comedian (Morgan), a former superhero, is murdered, leading Rorschach to believe there's a conspiracy behind it and reuniting the other Watchmen to uncover the hero killer, deal with their own personal demons and save the world from nuclear war.
Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's graphic novel is a perfect example of how you can, almost, never have it all.
With a reverential tone meant to pay homage to the source material without offending the feared fanboys, the film loses the rest of the audience who had never heard about these heroes before.
And with a combination of forced comedy, satire, gruesome violence and gratuitous sex meant to entice a larger audience, it's easy to detect that the film is losing whatever profound meaning was in the original.
Because if there is something obvious is that "Watchmen" isn't as much about plot, as about ideas.
Part cautionary tale, part satirical fantasia, the ambiguity of the actions by who we consider heroes and villains is suggested by larger story connections, not by Snyder's directorial efforts.
His characters come off as singularly one dimensional and erratic. Wilson's Nite Owl is dull and uninteresting, while Akerman's Silk Spectre's mommy issues never justify her bizarre choices and her Cameron Diaz pout. Most of the performances lack the energy to feel as if they deserve to be off the novel's pages.
Crudup's Doctor Manhattan is fairly interesting, even if the actor's forced indie-ness tries too hard to turn him into the next quotable Buddha figure, a la Yoda.
Snyder takes away most of the seriousness from the character by playing around with his blue penis which dangles threateningly across the screen as if to defy what skin color you need to avoid triple X rating.
Jackie Earle Haley gives the film's best performance as the slightly sadistic Rorschach with whom the whole neo-noir spirit finds its best ally.
It doesn't matter that the lines he's forced to narrate with sound like Raymond Chandler parodies, Haley's enigmatic take on his character give the whole movie its only signs of relevance and humanity.
Curious, considering that the discourse behind the heroes' plight is for others to find humanity in them (Doctor Manhattan even leaves the planet in a very adolescent rant to find himself).
It's sad that while Snyder has the visual skills to keep the audience watching, he lacks the depth to engage them and involve them in what's going on up there.
The director prove to be a master at evoking the feeling of reading an actual graphic novel providing the film with long, slow scenes, filled with detail that remind us of the square by square process involved with the source material.
But his artsy attempt is made seriously dull, because he seems to have forgotten that film goes at twenty four squares per second.
Viewers can not invest the same energy into mediums as different as these, a novel can be closed at any time, a film playing in a theater can't.
And with a selfindulgent running time of almost three hours, the movie is an endurance test that never achieves the feel of movies like "Zodiac" instead dragging us back and forth in time because it doesn't know just when to stop.
Whatever postmodernist wonders could've been extracted from a political comic book movie "borrowing" elements from other pop culture elements (there's an "Apocalypse Now" reference that should be kitschy but actually works!) are just disposed of.
"Watchmen" is at its worst when it goes and tries to shake off what we've been watching for two and a half hours; when a character declares "I'm not a comic book villain" you can almost see the speech bubble.