Since there are as many slow days from a quality news standpoint in this industry as there are, I figured I would go ahead and do a recap of some of the movies I have recently seen from my Netflix queue.  These will just be quick shots, mini-reviews of these dvd rentals; just my feelings on the films I have seen.  I’ll try to update a post like this every so often, once I have enough to report on.  Maybe every month or two, something along those lines. Just work with me on this, cool?  I’ll even throw in my Netflix rating, based on their 5-star system.  Not the same system I use here, so my official The Film Nest ratings might be different.  Anyway, here are the latest movie rentals I have seen from my Netflix queue.

Brooklyn’s Finest

Don Cheadle and Wesley Snipes in Brooklyn's Finest.

This is a movie I was really excited about upon first hearing about it, but then mediocre reviews led me to skip it in theaters.  (This is a common theme with many of my Netflix movies BTW.)  Nevertheless, the movie didn’t do it for me.  I was hoping for a mini-New Jack City or Training Day, but while in some ways it came off as Training Day 2, with Ethan Hawke still there, I’ve never been a huge Richard Gere fan, though he was fine here.  Visually the film was good looking, it just didn’t have any emotional resonance and the script was a bit jumbled.  Essentially a talking head movie, when I was hoping for something more action oriented.  The suspense was there, but something was just missing.  2 stars of 5

The Wolfman

Benicio really didn’t need much make-up to become the Wolfman, based on the original film.  Cheesy graphics didn’t help this.  The film had a strange tone.  Really, Emily Blunt’s character is going to fall for the Wolfman even though her husband/fiancee just died?  Silly really.  There wasn’t enough rhyme or reason to why certain things were the way they were in the film.  Hopkins was actually tolerable as Wolfman senior, but this was just a poor effort overall.  1 star/5

Edge of Darkness

Mel Gibson dreams of Oksana's fate. Just kidding. I think.

Mel Gibson’s return to the big screen before we heard the recent tapes from dude’s personal life.  He is thrashed, but again, I was down with seeing him return to his action roots.  Unfortunately, this was far too much if a talky to ever get too involved.  Where was the action? This was basically him investigating the entire time.  Disappointed.  The best part was (spoiler!) when that chick got killed by a car when exiting Mel’s vehicle. That was cool.  2 stars/5

Shutter Island

I’d already seen it in theaters, so you can see what I felt about it right here.  Very good movie.

The Book of Eli

Denzel and the Hughes Brothers sounded like an intriguing combination.  The look of the film was cool, with the washed out film stock.  I actually liked this about as much as I expected to.  I didn’t find the spiritual elements too overwhelming and actually thought that the end of the movie was pretty cool.  Maybe a little unrealistic for Denzel to care about the Mila Kunis character enough to worry about her the way he did, but it made for a decent film.  3 stars/5

Un Prophete (A Prophet)

This was a bit of an unexpected movie in terms of the way it played out.  It is set nearly entirely in prison, on the inside.  Not what I was expecting from a story about the rise of a kid into a gangster, baller.  Still, it was unique, a little gritty and pretty cool direction.  I was overall pleased.  If you can handle the foreign aspect of the film, I recommend it.  It was a little graphic in its violence and had some weird undertones with the ghost hanging around as much as he did, but still a nice work.  4 stars/5

The Burning Plain

I’ll watch a lot of Charlize Theron since I respect here so much as an actress.  This movie qualifies as one I wouldn’t otherwise have seen.  Catching Charlize naked was enough to make me finish the film.  Unfortunately, it all takes place the first five minutes of the movie.  Still, the story was interesting, if a little uneven.  I was down with the youngsters forbidden love storyline.  This was one of those full circle sort of films.  Not enough to recommend it highly though.  2 stars/5

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

Bad acting is the law in I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell.

I expected this to be unwatchable and it essentially was.  Its a guy movie through and through and yet it plays the happy-ending card at the end.  Completely lame, with marginal acting, an unbelievable story in some ways (that was supposedly based on true events); I am just shocked I actually sat through it all. A rare movie I watched during daylight hours just to finish the film.  Highly unrewarding in every way. 1 star/5

District 9 (Note: o.g. review not mine)

Saw it already last year and liked it enough to re-watch it. Not quite as good the second time through, but still an original story. Check it if you are a sci-fi fan. 4 stars/5

In last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, there’s a great sequence which breaks down the cause-and-effect small events have on the future. If just one tiny thing hadn’t happened that way at that exact time, the next series of events would be drastically altered. It’s the defining thought which fuels the ideology of everything happening for a reason. If it didn’t, the current situation wouldn’t have arisen. The characters in The Burning Plain are caught in a decade-spanning chain reaction which largely stems from one singular event, but had it not been for a frowned-upon affair, that event wouldn’t have taken place at all.

Sylvia (Charlize Theron) is a manager for a fairly upscale, Oceanside restaurant, happily greeting her usual customers with a smile, while privately suffering immensely. She leads a life of promiscuous sex, throwing her body at anybody willing to accept it. Even when one of her bed-post notches confronts her about her distance, she refuses to let him in. She smokes to fill her lungs with imminent death, scars her thigh with jagged rocks and contemplates taking a dive off a cliff, all in attempt to make her feel a different sort of pain, just for once, instead of the lingering past which haunts her.

A good decade plus in the past, Sylvia, then known as Mariana (played by Jennifer Lawrence), is a high schooler, living the nuclear family life in a dusty, urban town. She has a few younger brothers and a mother and father who are still together and married. Mariana’s suspicions arise about her mother, Gina’s (Kim Basinger), poor excuses for being out late and not making meals on time. One day, she follows Gina on her bicycle to the middle of nowhere and finds an old Winnebago. Her mother is there to meet another man, Nick (Joaquim de Almeida), with whom she’s been carrying on an affair for months.

A matter of time goes by and Gina and Nick have been burned alive inside the motor home in the middle of adultery. Nick’s family has a funeral for the departed husband and father, putting in his son, Santiago (J. D. Pardo), in an awkward position, as his mother refuses to attend the funeral. Mariana’s family shows up at the funeral to heckle the family and the departed Nick for taking Gina away, although she was fully committed to the infidelity. Santiago takes note of Mariana and they develop a bond between them, trying to make sense of their parents’ indiscretions.

It's easy to ignore someone when you face away from them. Harder, is staring them straight in the face.

Writer-director Guillermo Arriaga is no stranger to non-linear storytelling. In fact, he might be the king of it. The Burning Plain is his first stab at directing, but he’s written Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. He brings his tried and true formula, the cinematic version of a chopped-and-screwed song, back again, but it doesn’t seem to work like his previous scripts. As the film bounces back and forth from the past to the present, there’s little to no indication about which is which unless one character just happens to be absent from the current scene. Adding to this confusion is Mariana/Sylvia having two different names, seemingly for the sole purpose of throwing the viewer off. The audience member is granted a sense of discovery once things have been pieced together, but there’s a sense of disjointedness up until then.

Arriaga’s directorial style is somewhat staid and as the title would suggest, plain. In many instances, that certainly isn’t a bad thing, but in this case it keeps the film at a distance, continuing to make it more difficult for the viewer to enter the story, no matter how compelling. Arriaga, the screenwriter, has certainly crafted a tale full of drama, but the layer by layer unveiling of the full story is far less enticing than in previous ventures. You can’t help but wonder if the film would have been more successful and inviting had Inarritu been at the helm.

For their part, is should be said the performances are fantastic. Theron and Basinger serve as the heart of the piece, and both deliver troubled and challenging portrayals of women in conflict. Basinger’s Gina is a woman caught between taking care of her family and taking care of her needs as her husband seems either unable or unwilling to provide. Sylvia is just permanently stuck in her harrowing place, screaming to get out, but Theron pulls this off with a quiet graciousness. However, the standout character depiction belongs to Jennifer Lawrence’s Mariana. She’s is caught between both worlds and is the one who must transition from suspicious daughter into the emotional wreck Sylvia is to become. Her reaction in the film’s inciting incident is haunting.

Though great performances abound, Arriaga’s storytelling technique is what mars the film, as most characters are spared the revelations necessary to make them work competently in a story with this type of structure. Arriaga has proven to be an excellent writer, but either he chose the wrong script of his to direct or simply hasn’t caught up to his skills with the pen, while behind the camera. For now, The Burning Plain can be chalked up to a learning experience, although it does retain elements of excellence. Hopefully for Arriaga it’s the second time which proves to be the charm.