THE ROAD ☆☆☆

A dismal, bleak and gloomy world destroyed and dejected is well created and captured for "The Road," a movie about a father and son, here nameless, traveling along derelict America in road to the coast, where is hoped salvation might exist. The filmmakers have created a post-apocalyptic terrain that truly withers your heart to see it, filled with overcast skies, graying plaines, and sweeps of whole cities set ablaze or just left vacant and neglected, blanketed by dense fog, or, for all we know, pollution. It's a truly horrific, or more appropriate, heartbreaking sight. Terrific production design, and wonderful photography by Javier Aguirresrobe, who gives all this destruction and despair the right dreary touch it needs. And praise to costume and make-up for giving Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall and others the ragged, soiled clothes, dirtied faces and flat, greasy hair. Production design, photography, costume, makes-up, it all helps to bring the dead world of "The Road" out. Should I mention Mortensen, Duvall, Theron, and new kid Smit-McPhee, and others, who all do good work here? Yes, and they do. Mortensen plays his character of the Father with a cracked, low voice, who speaks to only show his tiredness, irritation, and complete dread. It's one of his best roles, and he does it well, though he might be bypassed by the Oscars this year. Duvall plays his weary old man with the same air about him, who is just as hard to watch on screen because of how much hurt is in his scared, wizened face, and in his sad voice. Theron too, as the Mother in flashback showing her in a worse state, in early post-cataclysmic destruction, than her husband. And Smit-McPhee is great in complete contrast with Mortensen as the Son who carries the last remnants of innocence in humanity left.

Director John Hillcoat (of "The Proposition"), I felt, could have approached the movie with more intimacy, rather than being laid back. Though the script couldn't be any better written by Joe Penhall (Well, the way I look at it is I couldn't have done it any better).

"The Road," overall, is good in how it presents the scenarios of a world destroyed, and through it, plunged in utter turmoil, but could have been more intense, more intimate. Catch it for the vision, and Mortensen and gang, if anything else.

2012 ☆☆☆

I admit my initial surmises were wrong, "2012" is a much better film than I thought it was going to be. It's a highly enjoyable blockbuster crowd-pleaser that's well written and nicely expanded (with my first thoughts given the movie is over two-and-a-half hours I feared it would be too long to bare) with scope and characters given more width and breath than any other visual effects film would allow (TRANSFORMERS!!) and played be a good ensemble cast, and Roland "Disaster Movie!" Emmerich has made his best executed and most exceptional quality effects film since "Independence Day."

He did say he would never make another disaster film. Lets be happy that this is what he does best.

If anyone was planning on not seeing "2012" because of the negativity surrounding it, you should forgot those and see it anyway. For the price of a theater ticket (mine for an evening showing was $11), "2012" is well worth it, and, besides, you can't beat seeing huge visual effects doomsday on the big screen! (Why, I wonder idly, was the movie not filmed in IMAX?)

Another thing surprising me about "2012" is how much more emotionally involving it is than, say, "A Christmas Carol," another big budget effects movie released only last week (I have seen it, but my insuperable laziness and writer's block has stopped me from writing a review as of yet), a movie meant to pluck your heart strings and enlighten your soul, but fails by being unintentionally cold. "2012," more weirdly, puts hope and warmth in you, and this is because the film is put together with practiced skill and, I was so sure, if anything, the movie would fail on this regard, a well written story. Emmerich has made movies like this before, big effects shows with a large scale plot and smaller intermittent, connecting sub-plots, and lots of key characters; most of the time they have come out well done and tremendously exciting: "Independence Day" and the mostly overlooked "Godzilla" remake being his best ones. In his lesser works: "The Patriot," yes I didn't like it, " the recently bad "10,000 BC" and "The Day After Tomorrow." Speaking of the latter, "2012" is what that film should have been. I thank Columbia and the producers for giving the budget and space to make "2012" the big disaster film of it's length, because, given "After Tomorrow" is only two hours long, and also having a bad script and a smaller budget, that film was just too constrained to give Emmerich any room to spread his skills. "2012" was the chance he hasn't been given that often, and he has proven it again.

Lets thank the producers for giving Emmerich two more things: a doomsday concept just waiting to be made into a disaster movie, the mayan prediction of the end of days on 12/21/2012 (I just noticed now that date has all the same numbers.....nevermind, just lots more gruel for theology nuts to feed off of), and given that wonderful banking concept, a big budget to create all those glorious visual effects sequences. The destruction scenes are Emmerich at his best, and two of my favorites, the escape from LA and the escape from Yellowstone, are so beautifully animated and directed by Emmerich the scenes are not only a visual wonder, but are, as intended, thrilling and frightening to watch. Well, not so frightening. The one thing about the writing, especially for those scenes, was the constant gags and light banter between the characters as the world was collapsing around them. It seeped the suspense and terror of those scenes immensely, and might have improved the emotional impact of the movie, but I suspect anyway those were put in so as to not make them as scary, as visual realistic as they are, because as close as we are to the year 2012 it might shock enough people to strengthen the already mass hysteria. Amateur panics.

I hope Roland Emmerich will continue to do more movies like this just because he's so damned good at it, so lets look forward to another, maybe even better movie than "2012." In the mean time, catch this while you can in theaters, for the high ticket price you might be glad you didn't spend it on anything else (sorry, couldn't come up with anything reasonably wasteful just now).

A SERIOUS MAN ☆☆☆ 1/2

The Coens have a way with subtle comedy, and by also having it be darkly humorous. Here they take us to a 1960's suburban jewish community, if that isn't a very whimsical setting, and give us mild-mannered dork Larry Gopnick, a well-to-do math professor who is getting his life beaten by lots of lowlife cretins. This includes his mean, adulterous wife and her too close for comfort life-giving boyfriend, community-man Sy Ableman; his pot-smoking son and bratty daughter, and Arthur, his harmless but incapable brother who lives with him. There is also a korean student of Larry's who tries to bribe him for a passing grade, but turns around and has his dad sue for not taking it.

This is what film historians call "dark comedy," but the story the Coens set for you, you would wonder how they pulled it off, and how they did it so masterfully.

The way these filmmakers capture and represent this is what is so unique to their style. The almost deadpanned way characters go about quietly ruining Larry's life in awful indifference as he seems to be the only sane one out of all of them, and having him go to his religion for guidance, from one clueless Rabbi after another, and even Larry's divorce lawyer, but never getting any closer to understanding his suffering. This itself is hard to laugh at, but you do, because there is an art to how Joel and Ethan Coen seep out the humor in all this madness, and by mixing it with melancholy and philosophy you get their own batch of a normal life in quiet, but utter chaos. If I could just describe what watching a Coen Brother's movie is like, but I don't think I could, and I wouldn't be doing it justice if I tried. All I can say is in the simple, quiet way they and the actors play the story it all just comes out beautifully. Almost like how Clint Eastwood effortlessly does drama, I can't describe how he does it either.

However, some things you can say about the Coens is sometimes you don't understand completely everything they do. For one, the prologue. Not that it was a bad scene opener (it was actually very well done), but that had as far as I was able to understand nothing to do with the plot. So if anybody could figure that out and tell me, that would be great. Also, I didn't like the ending. Oh, boy. Another abrupt Coen Bros. ending. Now, even though the ending is very open-ended, you can still figure out what happens, it's not that hard, I just didn't personally like it because, if I can agree with a lot of people, the ending was really just too abrupt. But, it still makes sense anyway (better than the beginning). But hey, based on the art the rest of the movie gives you, there is a chance we're all missing something here...Or maybe after "No Country for Old Men" the Coens just wanted to piss us off.

Go out and see this movie for a full experience if my writing won't help, but if I can say anything it's that "A Serious Man" is one of the better films to come out this year. So go see it, even if it does have a wacky ending.

Great cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed and Sari Lennick, and, as always, great photography by Rogar Deakins, I can't imagine the Coen style without him.