ortenzia

'Closer' is ultimately about 4 peoples' bony lust for sex and possession of a member of the opposite sex to the point where they will destroy the relationship they are already in, not to mention their own self-respect and better judgment, and they will do this all without ever really ever achieving intimacy with anyone. Thus, you could say the play and now film is really a take on the neurotic self, the self that really only considers its own heart and its own needs.

However, the very flaw of the characters is the flaw of the film. Whereas the characters can't ever achieve real intimacy, the viewers can't ever achieve true understanding of what is going on inside these people. And since all you have is people, beautiful people in beautiful places, there's not much to this film at all.

This can be blamed mostly on the fact that this film runs like a highlight reel of bad relationships over a 4 year period. You see conclusions, major fights or interactions and meetings and break-ups. You never really get to see the thought process of the character and why they ultimately make the decisions they make (whether it is boredom or lust, whether it is spite or genuine need). Instead, you are forced to gleam these ideas from the portrayals.

In other words, it's an actors own wet dream. None more so than Natalie Portman. In what she will look back on and thank for years to come as it stands out in that rather large gap of quality between 'The Professional' and everything before this. I have never been much of a fan, but her performance is brilliant. I doubt any one could have done better.

In the same hand, Clive Owen gives a balls-to-the-wall performance. If anything, he should get an Oscar nod for being the only actor to have the courage to play this with such unabashed virility and verisimilitude. He does not shy away from asking explicit sexual details about his wifes' affair or tearing out the heart of the man she had the affair with, he marks his territory and then fights for it with spit and iron. Yet, the true joy in his performance is that there is absolutely no sarcasm in it – unlike T.J. Mackey (another great alpha male character), there is nothing that is performed about Larry and that is indeed a beautiful thing to watch.

Jude Law plays the straight-man, the pseudo romantic/wimbly writer who is ultimately the play thing in their games. He is mindful of this and continues on in his streak of good performances in good films. I would have preferred the raw emotion he expressed in 'Cold Mountain' to be channeled in this as well but at no time did I want for a different actor to come in.

Julia Roberts, on the other hand, could have greatly benefited (so could the film) from stepping out of this film. I can see why she wanted to do this. I just can't see why anyone would let her. I can see what she should have been through Larry's exposition, but never once did I see it from the performance. It is especially difficult because the scene in which Larry and Alice confront each other in the strip club is such a masterful scene, it makes Larry and Anna's own confrontation almost laughable.

All in all, I doubt the words or the situations will shock you very much although they are far from the norm. You can open your email box these days and see worse in the Spam folder. However, that is the problem – it is not the situations which are truly of interest, it is the reasons people get themselves into these situations and that process is left out entirely. Thus, the movie does not speak to really anything other than exhibiting screwed up people doing screwed up things. I think with a little more digging and some slowing down to show a key week or a thought process, the audience would have most likely seen a little of themselves in the characters even if they judged them as 'screwed up.'

As a result, even the audience cannot get closer to the characters and that doesn't come off as anything more than frustrating and all the effort of great performances, pushing the Sex and the City train of sex chat, right down to Jude Law's attempt to look like a working class Joe are lost completely on what might of a been a truly brilliant film. C+/B-.

Basically the film is about a lonely 39 year old woman named Louise (Laura Linney) whose only friend (self-admitted) is her ex-husband. She lives her safe and humdrum life working at Admissions for Columbia, talking to her best friend (Marcia Gay Harden) who is going through her own adulthood misery, and watching happier, younger couples from her office aloft. So, when an application with the name F. Scott Fienstadt (Topher Grace), the same name as the young love of her life who died, comes along she has no problem going completely out of her comfort zone and daily routine to meet, seduce, and compare the new to the old, or rather her indestructible memory of the old.

It's a dangerous plot premise-- already you've got the Mrs. Robinson comparisons, as well as the tiptoe out of reality with the same name as her dead love, and the adulthood alienation script. However, it seems that every single person in the movie was completely aware of the danger and paid so much care to their work that you don't even recognize it. Laura Linney, in a demanding role, manages to not only evoke sympathy while she tortures the younger man with her cynicism but also gives a complexity and innocence to the female character that most every actress in Hollywood strives for but seldom achieves. Topher Grace, as her paramour, gives a smart performance that mixes the self-confidence of youth with a restrained, intellectual, old soul backbone that really serves to offer himself up as more than a teenage, primetime face. Marcia Gay Harden is wonderful and real as always, she could have hammed up this character, but she played it very nicely -- so much so you could see the girl in the woman, which is exactly what she needed to do. The rest of the supporting cast is solid, and since it is such a small ensemble, heavily appreciated.

Yes, the ending isn't what it could have been but the relationship and the plot could have been a whole lot worse. If anything, I highly recommend it for people who love the small ensemble films that attempt to deal openly and honestly with out of the box relationships and being who you are at the age you are now. 6/10.

I'm not sure the Bourne Supremacy is a sequel so much as it is a reworking of the scope of the Bourne movies. The Bourne Identity was a white shirt of a film – it was a sleek, styled film that made it's metal on intelligent choices, disciplined acting, great chemistry, a streamlined script and clean, flawless direction. The Bourne Supremacy is not. In the Bourne Supremacy, you get bold almost reckless decisions, bullheaded direction, and a crash bang approach to storytelling and action.

From the first moment of the film to the last, it's about movement. The handheld camera work abounds, as well as the whip crack editing and pulsing background score (and it's a great score). The characters are fast-moving, quickly figuring out their next move and acting on it. The plot has been trimmed down to accommodate the action, which you'll barely notice considering how the movie barely pauses to let you think. And when the pauses do come, they are filled with an emotional backbone so raw that you wonder what is going to happen when it all stops rather than what just happened.

You have to know what you're getting into to enjoy it.

Things you should know – if you're looking for accuracy to the books and you're going to judge the film on it's accuracy, you will not like this movie. Matt Damon carries the film with an acute sense of the responsibility to do just that– he doesn't drop the ball once. If you can't make out every detail of the film or every detail of the story, it's okay, you're not the only one – same thing with feeling slightly woozy. There's less hand to hand but a great car chase scene, one that belongs in the category of films like ‘The French Connection' and ‘The Blues Brothers.' In my mind, Identity still is a better film (and I recommend watching it before you see this movie) if only for the fact that it didn't let the action get in the way of the relationships, the locations, and the characters. This movie is completely about the action. You have to want to see the emotional undercurrent or even the locations to get them.

Even so, this film is a head above its genre companions and its sequel companions. I recommend seeing this in the theatre if only for the car chase and to hear the score on THX. (7/10: Supremacy, 8/10: Identity)