Christina Waters

By now you all know the story. Two brothers, one a crackhead, the other a straight-arrow. Both are fighters, one on the way down, the other on the way up.

Domineering mom, dysfunctional but loving family. Barmaid with a heart of gold.

Co-producer Darron (The Wrestler) Aronofsky knows his gritty rustbelt atmosphere. The collars here in the film’s location of Lowell, Mass, aren’t just blue, they’re fraying blue, just like the language that punctuates the dialogue like so much taser fire.

I went to see The Fighter mainly so I could make a few reasoned calls as to Oscars, and I will just cut to the chase and admit that yes, Christian Bale should absolutely walk away with the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Skeletal, glazed-eyed and letter perfect with New England accent and rhythms, Bale - along with co-star Mark Wahlberg - creates the most physically electrifying opening to a film this side of Do the Right Thing. (more…)

Dutch director Anton Corbijn makes beautiful people and places look, well, beautiful.

Corbijn hasn’t an idea in his head, but he knows how to make ancient cobblestone stairways look blitheringly atmospheric. He knows how to show off buck naked actors, and their assets, to voyeuristic perfection.

He knows how to photograph George Clooney’s best angles. (And yes, there are quite a few of those.)
But he really has no clue as to how to create an absorbing cinematic experience. Pity really.

So much to work with, so little point.

The American is a non-film disguised as (more…)

Eat Pray love is either better or worse than I expected. Like a wine that cannot be technically faulted, yet fails to engage the senses, this film seems to lack any distinction.

What it does have is a few fleeting glimpses of a potentially great actress struggling to break out of her contemporary, aging babe, Pretty Woman strait (sic) jacket. So frustrating, this one. The film is somehow packed to the hilt with clichés - wise little brown people, ex-pats finding each other and eating, dancing and drinking with gusto, peasant women disapproving of single women - yet also misses rich opportunities to bombard us with Hallmark moments.

St. Peter’s dome by sunset - a perfect all-purpose establishing shot that tells us we, and Liz Gilbert (the author/protagonist), are in Rome. You can practically smell the garlic and taste the wine. Yet we don’t get many glamor shots of the Eternal City. Instead we submit to silly new friends bonding episodes — so much so that between Roberts’ pleading eyes (more…)

Written with a crystalline ear for everyday miasmas, Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg dive deftly into the depths of contemporary family ties. The Kids are All Right stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a longtime lesbian couple whose teenaged children are busy testing boundaries. As their 18-year-old daughter Joni, played to restless perfection by Mia (Alice in Wonderland) Wasikowska, gets ready to go off to college, the younger son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) goads her into contacting their sperm donor father (Mark Ruffalo). Set in the hip enclaves of bourgeois Southern California, the film offers us the new American family—green, eco-conscious, bristling with political correctitude—on the verge of more revelation than it can handle.

Director Cholodenko and her co-writer achieve the exact angle of post-hippie rhetoric (more…)

Still haunted by Leonardo diCaprio’s beautiful face, taking on gravitas with time, I find it difficult to know where to start with Christopher Nolan’s hugely entertaining Inception. From the director of Memento and The Dark Knight, this dream-within-a-dream caper is everything a movie should be. Mixing up cinematic quotes from Mulholland Drive, The Matrix and many a 007 thriller, Inception offers tight script (too tight for those who don’t enjoy teasing out interlocking plot lines), mind-boggling cinematography (Paris morphed in on itself is easily one of the most thrilling uses of moving images ever devised), vertiginous editing (in the good sense), a relentless Hans Zimmer soundtrack, and a cast of ridiculously good-looking men dressed beyond Hugo Boss.

Perhaps the final race against time sequences go on ten minutes too long. Maybe there is too much verbal exposition. But I didn’t care. (more…)

Backlit by a throbbing, surging, overripe score from opera composer John Adams, and wandering stylishly through the mother of all Milanese mansions, Tilda Swinton & company offer much in the way of visual opulence, in the new Italian chick flick I Am Love.

Tall, attenuated and obviously, beautifully bored, Swinton’s character - a Russian blonde married into a wealthy family of spoiled Milanese textile magnates - is only one of many confined and closeted characters in this sensuous bit of fluff. With her Mannerist neck (more…)

They’re all here again, Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie the cowgirl (Joan Cusack)), Hamm, Bullseye, Barbie, and of course Andy the boy who loves all of these spunky toys. In the third installment, Andy has grown up and is just about to leave for college. Woody and the gang are growing anxious — will Andy store them in the attic? or will he toss them into the garbage?

If you loved the first Toy Story, easily one of the most ambitious — and successful — animated films of all time, then you’ll feast on this sequel showing once again that the folks at Pixar have no peers in the visual storytelling department.(Certainly the dummies over at Universal won’t make a dent in Pixar with the utterly clueless, sappy clunker called Despicable Me. Actually they should have simply called it Despicable and been done with it.)

What’s most delightful about the new Toy Story is that it is a tale told in every possible narrative dimension. (more…)

Kung fu king Jackie Chan, arguably the best-known human on the planet, was once a kung fu prodigy following in his father’s swift footsteps. At 12, Jaden Smith is also a child star, following in his talented father’s footsteps. And even if the dangerously cute son of Will and Jada Smith isn’t a martial artist, he is smart, quick, and poised enough to hold a screen for two hours.

I’ll be candid here. I’ve seen every Rocky at least five times. I am a complete sucker for the little guy who fights back to topple the big bully formula. That’s the story here with the remake of the 1980s Karate Kid. Only instead of Japanese karate, the name of the game is kung fu. The setting is today’s Beijing, and instead of avuncular Pat Morita, we have the amazing Jackie Chan, who at 55 still has technique, and acting skill to burn. Plus he’s sexy.

So even if you’re not a 15-year-old boy (more…)