Christina Waters

This Marvel Comix-based big screen adventure is not just for 15-year-old males. Brooding, smart, crisp, astonishing and edgy — that’s Iron Man, and its star Robert Downey Jr. who pretty much owns the screen from the scorching opening in war-torn Afghanistan to the final delightful shot. I repeat, Iron Man is a thinking woman’s gloss on at least three Greek myths, one or two Freudian complexes and the age-old battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

Value-added for film buffs, Iron Man looks sensational, and serves up an orgy of visual quotes from Metropolis, Aliens, Gattaca, as well as reframing both the tale of Icarus and Plato’s myth of the cave.

As a Blakean flawed genius, Downey works his way into the short list of great American actors. (I know you’re thinking I have slipped a cog here. It’s a marvel Comix industrial design heavy metal flick — but Downey rockets Iron Man way out of the mere fantasy hormone genre.)

Muscular, graceful and charismatically weary, Downey More…

Did I call it, or what? Well, almost. I was wrong about Julie Christie, but otherwise . . . An all-European quartet of major Oscar-winners surely made a statement, though I’m not quite sure what it was. It’s hard not to be moved at Javier Bardem’s jubilation (AP photo). Other than being thrilled about the Coen brothers big win - a more laconic duo is just not imaginable - there were a few, uh, highs.

The beyond-sexy Bardem kissing co-star Josh Brolin. Daniel Day-Lewis kissing George Clooney. Great moments in metrosexuality. Day-Lewis being knighted by “the Queen,” was a delicious bit of improv, as was the slash-and-burn haircut on screenplay winner Diablo Cody — who deserves an Oscar just for her name. More…

Not glued to the tube during this year’s Oscar telethon — I’ll be at a wine class for two of the three hours — I will nonetheless remain in solidarity with all the Red Carpet bling, AND the award-winners. These will include:

Daniel Day Lewis for Best Actor - his incandescent portrayal of obsessed oil baron Daniel Plainview shows us how the West was really won.

Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actor (even though his was arguably the central performance in the film “No Country for Old Men”) Bardem is an uncanny chameleon with vast reservoirs of power and charisma. His performance as an idiosyncratic assassin was the centerpiece of this year’s best film.

Julie Christie for Best Actress - The Academy loves to reward a body of work - as well as enduring screen radiance. Julie Christie has both, and her performance in “Away From Her” was indelible. More…

It’s not hard to believe, watching There Will Be Blood, that Daniel Day-Lewis could simply do a Google Search for an Oscar, and it would arrive at his door the next day via FedEx. He’s that good. And in this would-be epic by director Paul Thomas Anderson, his ferocious performance outstrips the film attempting to contain it.

Not that it’s difficult to become spellbound by Robert Elswit’s probing camerawork of New Mexico and California, or by the eerily engaging soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood. Blood has visual overtones of The Searchers and Giant, yet its tale of moral depression, greed and loneliness bears even closer resemblance to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with some Elmer Gantry thrown in.

The story, based on “Oil” by Upton Sinclair, is as simple and sweeping as Citizen Kane. It is a tale of one man’s blind obsession and how the fortune that follows alienates him from other people, and ultimately his own soul. But Blood is no tragedy, and Day-Lewis’ character, Plainview, is no visionary. He’s a doggedly ruthless, unlikeable, turn-of-the-century entrepreneur driven to prevail by some dark fire.

The opening scene sets the tone — for both the film and for Day-Lewis’ performance. For the first ten minutes there is no dialogue at all, as we watch the physical ordeal of a man out in the middle of nowhere, deep in a pit digging rock with a pickaxe. The sheer desperate hardship of this life is conveyed in every sinew, every throbbing vein of Day-Lewis’ anatomy. More…

How much is Julian Schnabel paying the film critics? There’s no other reason why intelligent film-goers would succumb to the sophomoric exercise in cinematic vanity that is The Diving Bell & the Butterfly. Intrigued by raves from a wide range of reviewers, including local filmies, I wasted $7 and two hours on this pathetic excuse for a movie about a magazine editor confined to almost complete paralysis and the “life lessons” he learns thanks to attractive therapists, hand-held camerawork and of course, those crucial sub-titles.

Did Schnabel really think that making the film in French would elevate its mawkish, soporific effect? It doesn’t. It just means that you listen to lots of French speakers while you’re being bored to tears.

Wait, I know. Schnabel (a well-connected New York artist famous for painting on really big plates) decided to invoke the “Atonement effect.” You know, that’s where you shamelessly capitalize on a five-minute cameo by a major-but-aging star. More…

How can we explain the Disney-produced mess that is National Treasure 2? How is it possible that Nicolas Cage - with his monochromatic, slack-jawed, puppy-eyed expression, his bad dye job, his cornball tendency to break out in patriotic sweats at the drop of a hat - how is it possible that this man continues to get work in the movies? (Surely it can’t still be the Coppola thing, can it?)

Lacking script, direction, competent acting (except from old pros Jon Voigt, Ed Harris and Helen Mirren, who must have needed the money), National Treasure 2 lurches through a visual wikipedia of great films from the past.

From Indiana Jones we get the underground treasure thing and rolling boulders. More…

I’m not going to be one of those reviewers who complains that the film isn’t as good as the book. It’s worse. Atonement is a film that manages to expose the flaws of the book so glaringly (translation: the film moves from atmospheric, to cloying, to boring, to sentimental, to cliché, to boring) that it makes me wonder why I thought I liked the book so much to begin with.

Director Joe Wright doesn’t so much direct as arrange his handsome cast in upper-crust English great houses, soft-focus lawns and smokey battlefields as if they were so many runway models on a fashion shoot. Atonement is graced with some staggeringly original and effective cinematography, to be sure. And the languidly anorexic Keira Knightley is surely a fetching partner for the insanely attractive James McAvoy. Chiffon never looked so appetizing. Cigarettes have never been smoked with such wanton, wealth-stricken abandon. Never has so much gorgeous imagery been squandered on such an obvious exercise in ironic cleverness. More…

Last week we were all over the map - Luca in Carmel, Soif for appetizers, and Au Midi for dinner. All wonderful stuff in general, with scallops, root veggies and wintry natural meat dishes showing off nicely.

Across Dolores Street from Winfield Gallery, Luca sits between Ocean and Seventh, in a contemporary re-design that moves from the intimate front bar seating, past the wood-burning pizza ovens, into a huge back dining room. Heavy beamed ceilings in the front room, brick barrel vaulting in back, attest to the vintage of this attractive space, masterminded by Mirabel Hotel and Restaurant Group entrepreneur David (Bouchée) Fink.

The lunch menu created by Executive Chef Jason Balestrieri (formerly of LA’s Patina) was instantly appealing, and our quartet ordered glasses of earthy Sardinian Cannonau to go with a shared arugula, pecorino and pear salad, a pizza Margherita, another pizza topped with caramelized onion and wild funghi and a shared salumi plate of artisan-made salametto and speck. I could admire the view of large slabs of hams and cured salumi hanging in a glass aging chamber from my spot on the banquette.

Every flavor was sparkling, from the delicious, ungreasy meats to the perfect pizza. Crisp crust, chewy delicious dough, buffalo mozzarella and San Marzano tomato topping. The arugula salad — inflected with beets and thin slivers of pear — was generous enough for us all to enjoy. Even the opening salvo of crusty bread was terrific, served with an addictive olive oil and balsamic mixture filled with chopped olives.

Put Luca on your list next time you’re in Carmel - open for lunch (during the week) and dinner daily - 831/625-6500.

The exact youthful energy, yearning innocence and reckless abandon that Baby Boomers brought to the world-altering ’60s is packed into Across the Universe, Julie (Frida, The Lion King) Taymor’s deceptively complex romp through the dawning of the age of counter-cultural awakening.

Ambitiously rife with imagination and spunk, the film takes Boomers on a magical mystery tour through the soundtrack of their coming of age.
That would be the Beatles, whose songs are re-awakened by the young cast who sing their way through a slender tale of boys and girls, hippies and wannabes, worlds colliding and tripping into the psychedelic fantastic. For any viewer old enough to remember all the lyrics, this film will more than reward its overly-long (and sometimes hokey) feast of sights and sounds.

Joe Alexander is brilliant as Max (above left), whose sister Lucy (in the sky with …played by Evan Rachel Wood) falls in love with a young Liverpudlian Jude (Jim Sturgess, above right). More…

Can you say “perfect film?” An existential tale of corporate corruption that plays like Greek tragedy crossed with Kafka. That’s Michael Clayton, the latest George Clooney cinematic encounter produced by a handful of gifted directors, written/directed by Tony Gilroy (who wrote all the “Bourne” films) and flawlessly cast.

Given Clooney’s remarkable presence, you enter the theater expecting slick, glamor and extreme urban style. What you get, thanks to the gritty intelligence of the entire filmic package, is a dreamlike membrane of loss, grit and greed whose central Everyman is an emotionally bruised company fixer for a New York corporate law firm.

Clooney is our era’s Marilyn Monroe. The camera adores him. It is impossible not to be drawn to his screen image, his brooding beauty — which is now tinged by enough middle-aged seediness to be haunting. The loss of Michael Clayton’s personal center echoes the threadbare quality of the northeast itself, and while never showy, the camerawork of Robert Elswit etches the disintegration just under the surface of humans, landscape and social networks gathered into this vivid film. More…