The Messenger - 7.5/10 - Refreshingly non-traditional buddy flick with Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson playing soldiers set out on death notification duty. Glad to see Ben Foster growing into starring roles; I've always felt he was a guy to watch.
Crazy Heart - 8.5/10 - Pretty safe bet that Jeff Bridges is going to win an Oscar for his turn as aging country singer Bad Blake. My feelings on this film echo most critics': at face value, it sounds like a trite retelling of an oft-told story, but Bridges really makes this his own. "That's the way it is with good ones -- you're sure you've heard them before."
That pretty much summarizes my feelings on Crazy Heart. I'm not even a big country fan and I was really impressed with even the music in there. That movie utterly hinged on Bridges, and he hit it out of the park. I also liked how it didn't try to scale too big, it was really about the characters, most importantly Bad Blake, and it didn't mire down in pointless subplots or artificial drama.
That said, on to :
The Road : 5.5/10
Given that this is based upon the novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) that is supposed to be the best American Novel written in the past 30 years, I was tremendously disappointed with how this film turned out. More than anything else, I'd blame this on the difficulties of translation from page to screen rather than on any of the actors or the director really.
Viggo was superb, perhaps his best performance to date really, and the supporting cast was mostly excellent, particularly the brief but fascinating appearance of an almost unrecognizable Robert Duvall.
What I think came across most poorly was the behavior and presence of the wife (played by Charlize Theron) in the flashbacks. I imagine that the book gave that a lot more detail and nuance, but in the film it felt artificial and rushed, and just made her character look like a cruel gutless loser.
There were brief periods where Viggo would narrate (obviously from the source material), and it was incredibly well written, poetic and hard-hitting, but then the movie would return to the near-slient malaise that dominated the running time. I can only imagine that the book kept up that feeling by continually keeping in touch with the thoughts and memories as things happened, and the disconnect with the film version made things a lot more difficult to endure.
In retrospect, it seems that this would have made a better translation had there been more narration, and a greater attempt at living up to the source material. Perhaps a 4 or 5 hour HBO-quality mini-series or something of that nature. As it was, I can only regret that what is widely viewed as one of the finest novels in recent history has been reduced to :
Unknown disaster : family struggles to survive : a handful of lines of dialogue/narration : despair : emptiness : ambiguous ending.
If I was bored enough, I could have made a 5-minute summarized version and virtually nothing would have been left out, and I refuse to believe that the book itself was that vapid.