The current cinema, "Debt" management edition

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• Lex says:

  August 29, 2011 at 6:06 pm

  LOOK AT HIM!!!!! WORTHINGTON POWER, YOU WILL BOW. BOW. GOD.
  Anyway, this movie is pretty sol­id plus Chastain tries to kill a guy with her bare feet, which is kind of awe­some. It has that gray, wan, widescreen cold-movie look and an awe­some mid-movie sus­pense scene, plus Mirren kicks ass in it, and as Wells went on a TEAR about and walked out of the movie (!) over, nobody remotely looks like the “older” ver­sion of them­selves, a par­tic­u­larly glar­ing prob­lem in a movie where all the par­ti­cipants are pretty famil­i­ar actors.
  Of course, the “oth­er” way to solve this prob­lem lands you where it landed Roland Joffe in this not-dissimilar to this “There Be Dragons”– with Wes Bentley in a fat suit and pros­thet­ics play­ing Dougray Scott’s 70-year-old dad.
  This September is the most excit­ing month of movies in maybe CINEMA HISTORY. Where do you get that it’s a “month of meh”? There’s like four mas­ter­pieces com­ing out every single weekend.

• AdenDreamsOf says:

  August 29, 2011 at 6:37 pm

  I agree with a lot of what you noted in your review. The film’s music is very over­done and self-serious, and over­all the movie is very ser­i­ous without ever say­ing any­thing pro­found or insight­ful (and the movie con­trib­utes noth­ing new in my opin­ion to dis­course on the Holocaust and Israeli iden­tity). You were also cor­rect in your assess­ment of the ‘love tri­angle’: Chastain’s char­ac­ter comes across as fool­ish and selfish when her motiv­a­tions and issues are prob­ably far more com­plic­ated than the writers cared to detail. Which leads me to some­thing that was on my mind through­out the entire film: this is a movie with basic­ally four char­ac­ters and only one of them, the Worthington/Hinds role, is sym­path­et­ic, hero­ic, and likable. This might come across as overly mali­cious, but I did­n’t find the Mirren and Wilkinson char­ac­ters to be par­tic­u­larly more likable than the evil Nazi doc­tor they were hunt­ing down (and that says a lot about how poorly those two char­ac­ters are writ­ten and presen­ted). “The Debt” is self-serious, self-righteous, and only a decent espi­on­age film for the first half of the film.

• Mr. Peel says:

  August 29, 2011 at 11:07 pm

  I was kind of hop­ing THE DEBT was going to con­tin­ue the Labor Day tra­di­tion, begun last year with THE AMERICAN, of pulling a fast one by selling an art film as a crack­ling, action-packed thrill­er. This case does­n’t sound quite so extreme (and I loved THE AMERICAN) but I’ll prob­ably see THE DEBT anyway.
  Is it bet­ter than Madden’s KILLSHOT? Did any­one oth­er than me both­er to see KILLSHOT?

• Lex says:

  August 30, 2011 at 6:12 am

  I liked KILLSHOT, but some­how in my head it kind of con­flates with Lee Daniels’ SHADOWBOXER… I think The Debt is bet­ter than Killshot over­all, if only because it plays like a real movie, semi-epic and sin­gu­lar of pur­pose, where­as Killshot in its DTV form just seemed like a hack-job of a longer, bet­ter movie; The Lane/Jane stuff was fine, but the brief runtime (espe­cially from a blow­hard Miramaxer than Madden) and choppy pacing gave away that Killshot was inten­ded as some work of “art” that at some point turned into some Thursday Night Prime level junker; That said, the pair­ing of ROURKE and JOSEPH GORDON LEVITT was fairly elec­tric… Was Rosario Dawson in there some­where too? And how does a punk kid like JGL know how to even act oppos­ite a god like Rourke? Would any of US even DARE speak to LORD MICKEY ROURKE? Probably not, but the punk-ass kid from 30 ROCK knows how to approach him as an equal.
  Anyway, THE DEBT is stronger and more focused and EPIC, where­as KILLSHIT feels like a remake of Burt Reynolds’ MALONE.