Film & TV

Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm, directed by Jacob Hatley, is not seeped with nostalgia like so many other music documentaries (Martin Scorsese’s treatments of Bob Dylan or George Harrison, the Jim Brown directed tribute to Pete Seeger or even – though to a lesser extent – Lian Lunson’s documentary on Leonard Cohen). It is grittier and, one would believe, more truthful – a candid look into the final years of the life of Levon Helm, in many ways the special ingredient that really gave The Band their flavor.

Director Bryan Singer’s reinvention of “Jack and the Beanstalk” was a disappointment at the box office, a fact that probably has more to do with the concept than the execution. Although a fairy tale, the movie is presented as a big-budget, special-effects blockbuster that plays as much like “Clash of the Titans” as a Disney cartoon. That places a lot of limitations on audience.    Teens and young adults don’t typically line up for fairy tales, yet “Jack” has a dark tone that may concern parents of younger children. 

For a movie that looks gorgeous, evokes memories of a cinematic classic and boasts a bundle of star power, “Oz the Great and Powerful” is oddly flat. It’s not that the film is terrible; it’s just not as good as it could or should have been. Based on the “Oz” novels of L. Frank Baum, the story is set decades before events portrayed in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.”  That makes the project a prequel of sorts, and director Sam Raimi knew audiences would compare his work to the classic preceding it.

There’s nothing funny about real-life identity theft, but that didn’t stop screenwriter Craig Mazin and director Seth Gordon from attempting to milk laughs from the subject. In “Identity Thief,” the pair tell the story of Sandy Patterson (Jason Bateman), a finance executive who gets swindled by a shameless female grifter named Diana (Melissa McCarthy). Diana starts by stealing Sandy’s unisex name. Then, she runs up masses of credit card debt, ruins his reputation and triggers a warrant for his arrest. 

Stories We Tell, a new documentary by filmmaker Sarah Atwood, opens with this quote offered by her father, Michael, whose writings serve as the film’s narration. What follows is a methodical investigation into the life of one woman, her mother, from the perspectives of an entire family. Through their observations and experiences, we are presented with a fractured image of a dynamic personality, loved by all but known by few: Diane.

It’s hard to tell if Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s contemporary re-imagining of Henry James’ 1897 novel is too ambitious, or not ambitious enough; either way, the promising film features unavoidable plot holes large enough to fall straight into. There’s no question that Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan are both superb actors, but as little Maisie’s inept, spoiled parents, not even their combined power can fill these empty characterizations. 

The marketing for “Dark Skies” makes a big deal out of producer Jason Blum’s involvement in the horror hits “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious.” Emphasizing this makes sense because the three movies share the same structure, which involves placing characters in unsettling situations and slowly intensifying the danger.  The focus in “Dark Skies” is on Daniel and Lacy Barrett (Josh Hamilton and Keri Russell), a financially struggling couple whose problems multiply when strange things begin happening in their home. 

A film robs you of imagining the world of a novel as you want to, while a novel cannot as accurately capture the televisual world we now live in. Part of Gatsby’s appeal is its depiction of a time when the American dream was a promising ideal, when the U.S. was not, as Horace from Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (2010) puts it, a “fat, demented pimp.” The Great Gatsby was written when the U.S. was on the upswing, and now that the nation is in decline, it makes sense that there will be nostalgia for the ‘good-old days’.