Don't bother

Cinema Salon has become a multi-platform vehicle for sharing my cinematic enthusiasms, but this blog has taken the aspect of consumer advice, so I will offer brief comments on several 2010 films already out on DVD that you might consider seeing, but from which I’ll warn you off, so you can save the time I wasted.

 Scorsese and DiCaprio – a talented pair, but no guarantee of a great movie.  I’m a fan of both, and liked The Aviator in particular, so I ignored the disparaging reviews and my own lukewarm response to supposed “Best Picture” The Departed, and was willing to give a look to Shutter Island (2010, MC-63).  What I wasn’t willing to do was watch it all the way through, fast-forwarding to the conclusion.  So I don’t presume to evaluate the film, but simply to report there was little in it for me.  As a devotee of classic cinema from Hollywood and around the world, Scorsese has made virtuoso films, and may do so again, but as a director he now seems trapped in a cycle of would-be commercial product, his long-awaited Oscar making him a prisoner of corporate moviemaking.

Within the rock biopic genre, I have enjoyed a number of films about groups that I never listened to myself, so with some critical prodding I gave The Runaways (2010, MC-65) a chance.  Was the Seventies group of that name a breakthrough all-female proto-punk band, or a jailbait marketing ploy?  Or both?  With Kristen Stewart (who means Adventureland to me and not the Twilight series) evoking Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning breaking out as the baby doll lead singer Cherie Currie (on whose memoir the film is based), under the svengali managing of Michael Shannon, the movie does a pretty good job of exploding “Cherry Bomb” in our faces, but then director Floria Sigismondi does not know where to go with the story except down the tried -- and more tired than true -- road of too-much-too-soon in the world of sex- drugs-and-rock’n’roll.

Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon are another talented pair.  I’ve followed the former since Bloody Sunday and through United 93 and even into at least one of the Bourne series with Damon, so uninspiring notices did not keep me out of the Green Zone (2010, MC-61).  And indeed Greengrass’s style of on-the-fly, you-are-there-in-the-middle-of-a-shitstorm filmmaking did draw me in, until the superhero thriller dynamic took over the proceedings, and all plausibility went out the window.  After the film establishes a highly credible picture of Baghdad in the first months after the American invasion, Matt Damon’s “Chief” goes way off the reservation, as he rebels from his assignment to search for nonexistent WMDs to go unraveling the contradictions and fabrications of the American mission.  At the same time, the film goes way off track, in morphing from serious political exposé to tiresome first-person-shooter video game.  Is blowing shit up a war crime, or is it entertainment?  Make up your mind.