August 5: Horrible Bosses (2011 -- Seth Gordon)

★★★
I know it’s just conventional, summer pablum, but this movie had me laughing in many, many places.

Part of the appeal is the story, which is quite tight, and another part is the obvious chemistry between the leads.  As you learn from the outtakes in the credits, a lot of the dialog was improv, and these guys are very good at picking up on each other when they are all in character.  I was already familiar with Jason Bateman before the film, but here he mostly played the straight man to Charlie Day’s and Jason Sudeikis’ characters.  Day was simply hilarious, into his character and playing him with abandon.  Of scenes I remember, the little guy Day was hysterical playing the little guy who accidentally ended up on coke even though a scene like this is close to cliché.  No surprises in this film but very competent.  Just the thing for a summer afternoon.

I went with a group of former students who were leaving the country, and they all thought it was funny, too.  My question: How did they ever learn that vocabulary?

August 4: Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1984 (2009 -- James Marsh)

★★★

Red Riding 1984 is the weakest of the trilogy, and watching it showed me what I liked in the others by the absence of it in this one.  The biggest lack her is the atmosphere of the first two.  In those films, the police are utterly, utterly ruthless and omnipresent. There’s an atmosphere of pervasive oppression there that informs every one of the banal, ordinary settings, and it’s almost work to get a breath in the films.  In addition, the camera work in the first two -- jerky, wandering, stream-of-conscious – disquiets a viewer, but the camera here is stable, the lighting more even, the editing smoother. The loss of the atmosphere and the unconventional cinema techniques of the first two films make 1984 far less involving than its predecessor.

Perhaps the lack of menace is related to what seems to be the main idea here – to explain all the mysteries to date and to tie all the loose ends up.  And it does so, if a pretty straightforward manner.  We find out who the killer is, what motives lie behind the non-serial-killer violence, and what happens to the important characters.  The film adds a little more story here, but the main thrust seems to be to wrap up things up.  Reminds of the last Harry Potter film.

I enjoyed the Red Riding Trilogy well enough.  It’s suspenseful and occasionally surprising, and it's solidly in the new European crime genre of hard crime film.  And the trilogy is effective to some point.  Before the film, I thought of the British police as some incorruptible institution,  but with this trilogy complementing the Murdock police scandal in the news daily, you almost have to wonder if there’s a generic truth behind it.