At the Cinema - March 2014

3 Days to Kill – 6

You’ll like this movie if you:

a.  Have 117 minutes to kill

b.  Like Kevin Costner

c.  Appreciate Cliches

Kevin Costner takes a piece of pulp and elevates it to a watchable level in this sometimes tepid, sometimes exciting action piece.

He’s a CIA hit man closing in on retirement when he discovers that he’s terminally ill.  So, he decides it’s time to reconnect with his neglected daughter, who of course wants no part of such sentiment, because well, she’s a teenager and that’s reason enough.

Along comes a CIA operative, played by Amber Heard, offering an experimental drug that could extend his life if he’ll just do one last job, because of course, extortion can be fun.  Especially if it’s offered to you in a car racing around Paris streets for no apparent reason.

Who is Amber Heard you ask?  I had to look her up.  She’s apparently the beautiful girlfriend of Johnny Depp, which qualifies her to play one of the most clichéd spies ever in the cinema.  She’s a CIA agent who for some reason  is dressed in various wigs and flashy clothes, wearing enough bright red lipstick to stop three lanes of traffic, and always smoking a cigarette like she’s some kind of Marlena Dietrich clone following Kevin around and driving real fast.  You can tell she’s driving real fast because the camera keeps cutting to her foot stomping on the clutch and her hand shifting gears.  Is this for real?  Did director McG do this caricature as a joke?  Was she meant to be so offensive to women, or am I the only one that noticed?

What’s the result of all this?  A movie you’ll probably watch over and over again once it hits HBO.  The credit for that goes to Costner.

Tim’s Vermeer – 9
The documentary revolution continues with this Penn & Teller production.  Documentaries are getting better and better in direct proportion to action movies getting more and more ridiculous with every lick of CGI.  If you’re not watching some documentaries you’re missing some incredible stories.

Let’s start with who is Vermeer?  He was a dutch painter who was once obscure, but is now renowned for his incredibly detailed paintings.  His work inspires Tim.

Who is Tim?  He’s Tim Jenison, an inventor with a theory.  His theory is that Vermeer’s paintings are so good that they couldn’t have been done by a painter just walking up to a canvas and going to town.  He thinks Vermeer had a mechanical assist and he seeks to first unlock the mystery and then recreate it.  This film chronicles Tim’s journey to duplicate a Vermeer painting by hand.  This journey of several years is documented here in glorious and fascinating detail.

This movie actually got me wanting to see a Vermeer in person.  Me.  Go see a painting.  That tells you something right there.