Movie Review: Into The Forest (2015)

A survival drama with suspense elements, Into The Forest explores the bond between two sisters as the world seems to plunge into catastrophe.

In the near future, teenaged sisters Nell (Ellen Page) and Eva (Evan Rachel Wood) are spending some time at their remote cottage in the west coast woods with their widowed father Robert (Callum Keith Rennie). Nell is studying for her SAT exams and pursuing a relationship with Eli (Max Minghella). Eva is practicing hard for a dance audition.

A power outage affects the area, and seems to be part of a much larger national technological failure. Communications are cut off, and the family has to make do without electricity or internet and limited gas for their car. A trip into town reveals people on edge, including supermarket clerk Stan (Michael Eklund), and mostly empty shelves, although Nell reconnects with Eli. Back at the cabin Robert has a bad accident, forcing Nell and Eva to face the sustained crisis on their own.

Written and directed by Patricia Rozema, Into The Forest is interested in people and a sense of place rather than a galloping plot. And Rozema is relatively successful, creating an emphasis on two typical sisters, generally adept at getting along but never too far from sulks and petty arguments.

The power outage and loss of all communications is the baseline premise to test Nell and Eva, and the film leaves the context at that. No explanations are provided, neither about the why nor the what next. Something big has gone wrong, really wrong, and in a world wholly dependent on technology, the sudden loss of all power effectively stops routine life in its tracks. No music to practice dance, no internet to study for exams, no functional phones, radios, televisions or refrigerators.

Old fashioned books reclaim their status as the most advanced form of technology, and as food runs out and the sisters resort to foraging and then hunting, textbooks explaining the natural world become essential survival tools.

Gas for the car and the generator becomes the most precious commodity, and understandably a spark for serious disagreements between Nell and Eva. They are not only dealing with a changed world, but also grief due to parental loss. They only have each other, and take turns testing and then strengthening their bond.

Although a couple of episodes of shocking violence punctuate the film, the sense of suspense comes not so much from impending jump scares but rather the creeping sense that all the old rules have been swept aside and the world is a different place. The cottage is isolated and nestled in nature, and Into The Forest works its way towards comfort in seclusion and a return to basics. Other people, freed from societal norms, may now be the biggest threat.

Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood develop a warm affinity and are quickly credible as sisters. The film rides on their shoulders, and they both rise up to deliver layered performances, stitching the inherent independence of young women with the essential need to work together to survive.

Into The Forest does not search for answers, but does find the human spirit, throbbing amidst the rubble of modern society.

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Movie Review: To Rome With Love (2012)

An episodic comedy romance with some fantasy elements, Woody Allen's To Rome With Love offers mild amusement but minimal substance through four unrelated vignettes.

American tourist Hayley (Alison Pill) meets and falls in love with Italian lawyer Michelangelo. When Hayley's parents Jerry and Phyllis (Allen and Judy Davis) arrive in Rome for a visit, Jerry, a recently retired opera producer, discovers that Michelangelo's father Giancarlo, a funeral home director, has a magnificent singing voice, but only when he is in the shower.

Young student architect Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) lives with his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig). When Sally's alluring friend Monica (Ellen Page) comes for a visit, Jack can't help but fall in love with Monica's seemingly sophisticated charms. John Foy (Alec Baldwin), a successful architect revisiting Rome where he once lived, provides spectral advise to Jack. John and Jack may be the same person, 30 years apart.

Antonio and Milly are newlyweds from a rural town who have just relocated to Rome to start a new life and seek better jobs. Inadvertently separated, Antonio finds himself in the compromising company of vivacious prostitute Anna (Penelope Cruz); he has to pretend that Anna is Milly in front of his stuffy relatives. Meanwhile Milly stumbles onto a film set and allows herself to be seduced by famous Italian movie star actor Luca Salta.

Leopoldo (Robert Benigni) is an average office clerk with a mundane life. One day he wakes up and inexplicably finds himself an unlikely celebrity, with media and paparazzi hordes chasing after him with microphones and cameras and documenting his every move.

A flighty exercise in saluting the ethereal beauty of a city, To Rome With Love is almost astonishing in its lack of depth. While all four stories offer a benign level of enjoyment, the film is the equivalent of flipping through a glossy travel magazine; the articles are at best quick glance-through fluff, the pictures professional but also exceptionally familiar. The entire exercise is wholly forgettable moments after it ends.

While none of the stories carry any impact, a couple offer some marginal entertainment. Allen sporadically infuses a common theme of unexpected but non-threatening interventions altering the planned course of life, with the diversions from a charted course coming with both a smile and no explanation needed. The imaginative elements of the film work well, John Foy as a ghostly presence drifting in and out of Jack's life and Leopoldo's sudden detour into an alternate celebrity reality carrying some intrigue.

Antonio and Milly experiencing a chaotic start to their life in Rome appears to be a parable for the temptations of the big city, and is less successful. Least interesting of all is Allen inserting his typical neurotic New Yorker persona into the Roman context. The tiresome opera-singer-in-the-shower story starts out as not funny and is then stretched well past its breaking point.

To Rome With Love is Allen at his flimsiest, offering some old-world eye candy with a side of empty calories.

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Movie Review: Juno (2007)

A teenage pregnancy comedy-drama, Juno is bright, breezy and refreshingly honest. Understated directing by Jason Reitman, a radiant Ellen Page performance and a witty script by Diablo Cody elevate the film to classic status.

In suburban Minnesota, 16 year old high school student Juno MacGuff (Page) finds herself pregnant after having sex once with her best friend and classmate Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). Juno considers having an abortion but cannot go though with it, and with the help of best girlfriend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), she reveals her condition to her father Mac (J.K. Simmons) and stepmother Bren (Allison Janney).

Juno connects with childless yuppie couple Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and arranges for a private adoption. Vanessa is desperate to be a mom, but Juno senses that Mark, a former rock musician now reduced to composing television commercial jingles, is not nearly as enthusiastic. As the pregnancy progresses Juno has to face scorn at her school, and her friendship with Bleeker is strained to the breaking point. She finds herself spending more time with Mark, and starts to question what it takes for two people to stick together and raise a family.

Juno is a small, lighthearted film that treats its subject matter with refreshing candor. The characters and events come across as simply real, free of theatrics, and a plain yet wacky matter-of-factness permeates through the economical 96 minutes of running time. This is a film about teenage pregnancy that contains no lectures, recriminations, episodes of tears or adult/child shouting matches. Instead, Juno is filled with the soul of grounded individuals carrying on and dealing with the stresses and issues at hand as best as they know how, and climbing the hill of the next challenge along the way.

There are moments of tension, with Juno and stepmom Bren having a hot/cold relationship and the realities of the pregnancy proving too difficult for Juno and Bleeker to deal with as a couple. But the film never descends into banal territory, and instead always latches on to the fundamental humanness of the characters, where humour, some cynicism and plenty of emotional survival instincts reside.

Diablo Cody wrote the original script with plenty of inspiration from her real life. She captures high school teen talk at its most fluent, Juno and Leah adept at rattling off the euphemisms reflective of their time, all conveyed with the attitude of 16 year olds caught somewhere between fierce individuality and the typical need to find acceptance. Juno has moments of childlike brattiness mixed in with lucid realizations of what the challenges of the adult world are all about, and the film shines in portraying a girl literally evolving into a woman, physically and emotionally.

Jason Reitman directs with a tactful yet distinctive touch, allowing the story and his main character to dominate, while adding nimble stylistic touches. Filmed in and around Vancouver and perfectly capturing middle class suburbia, the changing seasons represent the three trimester of Juno's pregnancy, the high school varsity runners pant year round as everything else changes, and the adults carry as much baggage as the high schoolers do, only it's less visible but much heavier. Meanwhile the distinctive music of singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson provides a backdrop of laid back lo-fi puzzlement, reflective of the typically warped high school ecosystem thrown further askew by Juno's pregnancy.

Ellen Page lights up the screen as Juno. The Canadian actress was 20 at the time of filming and convincingly plays at 16, bringing to the role edginess, humour and the over-excited self-confidence of a teenager. Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman are delicious as the couple who seem to have it all, but with a palpable current of tension running from their tight smiles and into every room of their too-perfect home.

Juno is the perfect little film, a jewel of self-aware quirkiness.

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Movie Review: Inception (2010)

A near-future science fiction thriller that is a breath of fresh air in terms of new ideas, writer and director Christopher Nolan demonstrates in Inception that originality is alive and well, and action movies need be neither derivative nor interpretations of obscure comics.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) specializes in modern industrial espionage: stealing ideas by invading the dreams of executives. Dom has unresolved emotional issues related to the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard); as a result her image frequently appears and disrupts his progress at critical points in his invasive work.

Businessman Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires Dom for a special assignment: conduct an inception by invading the dreams of rival executive Robert Fisher (Cillian Murphy) and planting an idea that will benefit Mr. Saito's business interests. An inception is the opposite of a theft, and is rarely successful, but Cobb assembles a crack team to pull it off. His associates include architecture student Ariadne (Ellen Page), a couple of other expert thieves, and a chemist specializing in dream-related sedation.

The inception operation will require an elaborate dream within a dream within a dream structure, and the whole team may be forever lost in limbo if the plan fails. An extra complication for Dom is dealing once and for all with his emotions surrounding Mal's death.

Inception is both challenging and complex to follow, but in an era of cookie-cutter sequelitis, a movie that demands attention is a good thing. Nolan spent 10 years developing the script, and it shows. Inception has an elaborate structure resembling Matryoshka nesting dolls, with fine threads connecting events happening in several dream dimensions at once. Knowing what is real and what is a dream is a challenge for both the characters and the viewers.

The main heist involves three dream levels, and when things go wrong an unscheduled descent into a fourth dream level becomes necessary. All events in each of the levels are interrelated, and it's not an easy task to keep all the action straight. Nolan pulls this off with a combination of slick editing and sheer bravado, helped by a dedicated Leonardo DiCaprio performance.

The movie does suffer from some routine, prolonged, and unconvincing shoot-out sequences, as Dom's team unexpectedly encounter heavily armed defenders in the dreams of Robert Fisher. The sequences revealing Dom's history with his wife Mal are better, and that is where the film finds it's emotional high points.

Inception is a showcase for some incredible modern movie special effects, but in addition to being justified as part of various dream worlds, they are placed at the service of a fascinating story and engaging characters. Demonstrating an appreciation for old-school film elements, Nolan also brings in Michael Caine for a few scenes to add acting depth as DiCaprio's father-in-law.

Inception inspires awe and head-scratching in equal measures, and the best proof of its impact is that it demands to be viewed again, as soon as it ends.

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