by Brent Simon

A sensitively told remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s same-named 1991 Italian film, Everybody’s Fine slots in respectably as the holiday season’s obligatory commercial drama of familial reconciliation.
Robert De Niro stars as Frank Goode, a blue-collar retiree and recent widower from a small, south-central suburban New York burgh who, in the wake of a sudden rash of visit cancellations by his adult children, embarks on an impromptu road trip to individually reconnect with his kids. Repeatedly unable to link up with his youngest son Robert, a painter, Frank then cycles through advertising executive Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and her family, orchestral percussionist Robert (Sam Rockwell) and Las Vegas dancer Rosie (Drew Barrymore), slowly coming to realize there may be significant elements of their lives to which he is not privy.
A straightforward description of the movie’s plot is fairly pedestrian, and there exists the possibility of it slipping into something much more maudlin in the wrong hands. But the material benefits greatly from the elevating direction of adapter Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine), who imbues the film with the rootedness of smart, small details (Frank’s brown Member’s Only jacket and 35mm camera, a wine stocker’s cheery ignorance) and winning supporting characters. If the metaphorical subtext is sometimes writ large, one doesn’t hold it against the film too heartily.
Mostly vacuumed free of agitation, De Niro also gets a chance to work in a more purely reactive mode than he has in a long time. There’s a quiet patina of regret to the proceedings, particularly in a notable, reflective conversation with Rosie, and a more mannered dream sequence in which Frank queries his children about their dissembling as he remembers them — as shifty elementary school age kids.
The themes of empty nest parental disconnection totally mark this as a boomer-specific story, but Everybody’s Fine is also about the secrets we keep in families — sometimes unwittingly at first, to safeguard delicate or overly fretful loved ones — that then snowball into bigger and bigger deals. If that’s not emotionally resonant fodder for the holiday season, I don’t know what is.

(PG-13, 2 1/2 out of 5)
Would Like This: Fans of About Schmidt,
The Bucket List

by Todd Gilchrist
While I’ve never been particularly keen on filmmakers who openly reference big-name works in the service of creating their own (the Tarantinos of the world are exempt by virtue of the obscurity of their sources of inspiration), I admire the fact that writer-director Duncan Jones tapped no less than 2001 as a foundation for his filmmaking debut. A meditative, thoughtful, and patient film that simultaneously achieves proportions both epic and intimate, Moon is a terrific movie that announces the arrival of a new cinematic talent even as it recalls an era in which special effects and imagination were used to explore real ideas rather than be simply
action set pieces.
Sam Rockwell (Choke) plays Sam Bell, an astronaut in the not-too-distant future whose three-year residency on the Earth’s Moon is rapidly coming to an end. His job is to monitor and export a wealth of energy that has rejuvenated Earth’s energy reserves, but prestige aside it’s a lonely existence, and he’s eager to return home to his wife Tess and daughter Eve. After an accident during a maintenance run in one of the facility’s cumbersome moon rovers, Sam awakens safe and secure in the sick bay, with his automated companion GERTY (Kevin Spacey) monitoring his recovery. Though initially relieved, he soon realizes that something isn’t quite right, and soon begins to investigate the facility’s secrets, eventually uncovering information about his mission that not only calls into question the work he’s doing, but his very identity.
Despite the fact that the film features an isolated astronaut paired up with a sentient computer in a remote location, the film’s plot is quite frankly the element of Moon that least evokes Kubrick’s transcendent science fiction classic. More similar are its artistic flourishes and technical details, such as the rudimentary video phones that Sam uses to communicate back and forth with his earthbound superiors, the classical music that fills parts of the soundtrack, and the pastoral tone that Jones creates as the story unfolds. In the best possible way, however, these points of influence or reference never inundate the film in minutiae, instead they provide a palpable backdrop for a sort of “science fact” world that seems wholly plausible, and comfortingly familiar as Jones and co-screenwriter Nathan Parker introduce their own, completely original concepts.
Additionally, for a film that was no doubt inexpensively produced, the special effects are consistently believable, possibly excepting the strange lack of commitment the film demonstrates in maintaining the reality of a zero gravity environment. But as a whole, the effects are great, the acting is great, and best of all, the ideas are great, proving that you can still make a smart, interesting science fiction movie without resorting to shootouts, spaceships, or set pieces. In short, Moon represents the future of science fiction filmmaking, even if it reminds us that the last time the genre made its biggest intellectual leap was way back in 2001.

by Todd Gilchrist

As the second Chuck Palahniuk adaptation to grace the silver screen – following the iconoclastic charms of Fight Club – Choke arrives in theaters with seriously high expectations. Like its predecessor, the story’s protagonist is an otherwise nondescript fellow who is largely defined by dubious behavior, and the protagonist’s story takes the path of greatest resistance (at least cinematically speaking) in order to reach his realizations about life and love. But unlike David Fincher’s groundbreaking visual and conceptual odyssey, writer-director Clark Gregg is far more content to create a recognizable (and conventionally rewarding) hero’s journey, in the process crafting a funny, odd film that fails to fully exploit the depraved, dirty, and potentially devastating
underpinnings of his source material.

Sam Rockwell, a reliable eccentric since his breakthrough role as a potty-mouthed inmate in The Green Mile, plays Victor Mancini, a sex addict who supplements his income as an “historical interpreter” at a Colonial theme park by soliciting strangers in restaurants where he pretends to choke on food. Though he dutifully takes care of his institutionalized mother Ida’s (Anjelica Huston) medical bills, she is advancing rapidly towards dementia, with no sign of a cure. But when a young doctor named Paige (Kelly Macdonald) approaches him to suggest a radical, unproven treatment method, Victor discovers that the cheap and fleeting thrills of his bad behavior have little value in comparison to the promise of a real and lasting relationship with another person. 

While Choke’s sexual content surpasses that of virtually any other mainstream movie in recent memory, what’s most surprising is how tamely Gregg approaches the material, in particular the characterization of Victor. Simply by virtue of all of his vices, Victor’s could have been a really powerful redemption story – an unapologetic sleaze ball coming to terms with the humanity he smothers in a haze of sex, drugs, and misbehavior. But the director really wants us to like him from the get-go, even when he’s sneaking off from his sex addiction meetings to exchange anal beads with fellow members. Rockwell, who has made a career out of challenging audiences’ sympathies, does his best to get to Victor’s heart of darkness, but the film provides so much explanation and justification for his self-destructive impulses that we can’t help but be
sympathetic rather than repulsed. 

That said, Huston does a brilliant job making Ida’s advancing craziness seem at once sad and hurtful, and Macdonald succeeds in being the bright spot in Victor’s life without branding her with sainthood. But Palahniuk’s raison d’être has always been to find the extremes of human behavior, realize them fully, and then find the humanity within; Gregg approaches his story from the other direction, sort of like starting with the sweet and advancing to the bitter rather than the other way around. Consequently, the biggest problem with Choke is that it’s too easy to swallow, which is a little disappointing because it’s a story interesting enough to make you want to gobble it down whole, yet it doesn’t stick with you after you’ve finished it.