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Hal Holbrook’s career stretches back to the 1950s. Prior to his Oscar nomination for his touching performance in INTO THE WILD, he was an Emmy winner and a stage veteran. With that Oscar nod, he has become in more demand for movies and that is good for us all. He is the heart and soul of Scott Teems feature film debut, an adaptation of William Gay’s I HATE TO SEE THAT EVENING SUN GO DOWN. Old curmudgeons are not new to film, but Holbrook puts us into one’s shoes.

Abner Meecham (Holbrook) is an aging Tennessee farmer who has moved into a nursing home after an aliment. It’s not for him so he just up and goes home. When he arrives at his house, he finds a family has moved in. Turns out his lawyer son Paul (Walton Goggins, THE BOURNE IDENTITY) has sold the farm out from under him. Making matters worse is that he’s sold it to Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon, THE BLIND SIDE), a notorious ne’er do well from the town who Abner believes is trash. Choat lives there with his wife Ludie (Carrie Preston, TV’s TRUE BLOOD) and teen daughter Pamela (Mia Wasikowska, THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT). Abner subsequently conducts a campaign of civil disobedience by moving into the slave quarters near the house.

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Most film fans will know Tim Blake Nelson as an actor, particularly from the Coen Brothers’ O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?, THE GOOD GIRL or THE INCREDIBLE HULK. As a director he made the harrowing Holocaust film THE GREY ZONE and the teen rendition of OTHELLO, O. Now he combines the comedy of his acting roles to the smarts of his directing work. Few drug-themed comedies contain philosophical interludes about the nature of life and God and fewer yet are named after Walt Whitman poems. So you can expect something different going in.

Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton, THE INCREDIBLE HULK) is a philosophy professor at Brown, who lecturers his students on the nature of randomness in life. The problem is that he doesn’t practice what he preaches. He has everything planned out. But plans never work out the way they were planned… as we know. While he’s wrapped up in a sex scandal with a student, he is called back to his home in Oklahoma with the news that his twin brother Brady (also Norton) has died. Bill hasn’t been home in years.

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The real conflict in this film isn’t between the humans and Martians, but between the cliché and the generally humorous and touching. Weak pop culture jokes are pitted against heartwarming scenes between mothers and sons. Action out of the action device handbook pulls down some good character development. It’s a battle till the very end.

Our players are as follows. Milo (Seth Green, AUSTIN POWERS) is the broccoli-hating hero who wishes that his Mom (Joan Cusack, WORKING GIRL) wasn’t his mom after she bars him from watching his favorite zombie movie on TV as punishment for feeding the cat the aforementioned vegetable. As a result, the Martian Supervisor (Mindy Sterling, AUSTIN POWERS) rules her a perfect candidate to use as a brain donor for their Nanny Bots, the robots that raise all Martian female babies. The male Martians are too touchy feely so they are thrown into the garbage.

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Charles Ferguson, a former senior fellow at The Brookings Institute, turned to documentary filmmaking with NO END IN SIGHT, one of the premiere films chronicling the terrible beginnings of the Iraq War. The same extensively researched and clearly executed approach he brought to that Oscar nominated film he brings to this Oscar winning film. Upon accepting his Oscar, he commented that it’s was wrong that no financial exec has gone to prison for the fraud that led to the economic meltdown and it’s hard to disagree with him after watching the film.

Ferguson begins with a prologue to the greater financial crisis by looking at Iceland. Since 2000, the nation’s government has deregulated, which has led to multinational corporations moving in for the country’s resources and the privatization of its three largest banks. It’s a microcosm of what extensive deregulation can do. Bank execs borrowed billions and started paying salaries and bonuses that mirrored Wall Street. Stock and house prices skyrocketed. But it was all built on a house of cards. In five years, the banks had borrowed 10 times Iceland’s economy. Meanwhile, rating agencies were rating Iceland AAA. When the banks went bust in 2008, unemployment tripled and many lost their savings.

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Fate or chance, which rules our lives? Is there a higher power that is guiding our path or is everything just a series of random choices that lead us through our lives. Is it a combination of the two? The big moments are charted out, while we have the illusion of free will in the smaller choices. Is there some cosmic force that would stop us if we wandered off the path? These are some of the questions presented in this romantic fantasy thriller.

David Norris (Matt Damon, GREEN ZONE) was the youngest man ever elected to the House of Representatives. He’s a heavy favorite for the senate, but an immature prank tanks his campaign. In the hotel bathroom, working on his concession speech, he meets dancer Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA), who is hiding out from security because she crashed a wedding at the hotel. They have an instant connection. He gets her number. They share a passionate kiss. But the men in hats are going to intervene.

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I’ve been mulling over what to say about Gore Verbinski’s first foray into feature animation. Like it’s main character it has so many dual identities. Its photoreal animation is a truly original, while its script seems cobbled together from dozens of at right angle sources. The film has adult ideas that few American animated films ever have, but it seems lost at what audience it’s really targeting. It’s a Western. It’s a comedy. It’s an existential examination.

A chameleon with no name, who sounds like Johnny Depp doing Don Knotts, is trying to find his muse in a Beckett-esque performance for himself in his terrarium. Then he hits a bump along the road, literally. His tank is thrust out of the back of his owner’s car along a desert highway. A squished mystic armadillo called Roadkill (Alfred Molina, SPIDER-MAN 2) tells him to go out into the desert and that everyone needs to cross the road at some point.

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Buy It Now!

Read my review of 127 HOURS

Simply gorgeous. The MPEG-4 AVC 1080p transfer is flawless. Shot digitally on multiple platforms, the detail is remarkable, which is so compelling in the scenes where James Franco’s Aron Ralston is trapped in the canyon. The lines on his face, stubble and fabrics of his hat and shirt are impeccably nuanced. The color palette is rich from the deep red of Ralston’s blood or the reddish-orange rock walls or the turquoise skies of Utah. Contrast is spot on and the blacks are inky.

The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track matches the quality of the picture. This is a film where the sound is nuanced, but it’s handled extremely well. The rear speakers are used to create subtle atmosphere and wrap the viewer in the wonderful score and music. The LFE track rumbles when Ralston first crashes to the bottom of the canyon. The sound effects combined with the scoring are profoundly handled during the scene where Ralston cuts his arm off. Breaking bones and snapping nerves are what make the audience cringe more than the bloody visuals.

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Catfish - a look into our online lives

The purpose of this article each year to recognize some of the best films and performances that were missed at the big awards. This year’s crop of films is an eclectic mix of indies, foreign language films and documentaries. Many of these film flew under the radar and truly deserve reaching a wider audience.

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