I’m mumbling and grumbling about the movies. Recently I’ve been buying tickets with a gulp of dread, sharply aware I might not like the film despite year-end critics’ raves. I haven’t been having a good time, see.
I’m quick to call the middlebrow mediocrity “The Descendants” rashly overrated. “A Dangerous Method” — a stifling chamber drama that’s as stiff as a sepia photograph. “My Week with Marilyn” — a mushy trifle. Lars Von Trier’s weirdly hailed “Melancholia” (is it really his “best” film??) — inexcusably misshapen (the movie flatly doesn’t work). An otherwise conventional children’s bore that’s much too long, “Hugo” only came to life during scenes animating the work of silent movie wizard Georges Melies.
(What have I liked? “Pina,” Wim Wenders’ exquisitely rendered look at the dance of Pina Bausch, was nourishing art, and the silent bauble “The Artist,” cutesy as it can be, didn’t offend. The Iranian domestic drama “A Separation” was riveting. Some older titles: “Midnight in Paris,” “Ides of March,” “Moneyball,” “Bridesmaids.”)
All this disappointment serves as a fat yellow caution sign. Now I’m wary of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Shame,” to name a few.
I got suckered the other day. After a deluge of critical plaudits, I saw Spielberg’s Oscar-baiting “War Horse,” and damn I want my money back. Like most of the movies described above, it’s not a terrible work, it’s just a superfluous one. I can’t fault it for feeling like it’s based on a children’s book, since it is, but Spielberg does little with the material except stage it often beautifully. It’s a rote work, freeze-dried and hung up like a pretty picture.
There’s ghastly warfare and some horsies (and men) die, but it’s not all that bad. Amid it all is cornpone humor and cornpone valor and mighty pronouncements and emotions fluttering on gusts of John Williams’ thrusting score. Old-fashioned and overly long, it would try a kid’s patience. I have to quote David Denby, when he calls “War Horse” “bizarrely unimaginative.” He also, wisely, makes fun of the movie’s squawking impish goose, a barnyard critter that seemed to have walked off the set of “Babe” and lost his way, waddling onto the sun-drenched grounds of the squarest movie of the year.
