Arts & Entertainment

This Week at the Movies

"Certified Copy" is a Heady Trip, "Battle: Los Angeles" Bangs You Over the Head

One of this weekend’s releases, “Certified Copy,” relies mostly on words, defying audience expectations by refusing to provide easy answers to its beguiling, and often, confounding structure.

Another film, “Battle: Los Angeles” – the nation’s top grosser for the week, in fact - is a cacophonous two hours of nonstop explosions, headache-inducing cinematography, shouted dialogue and frantic editing. It makes “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” look like “The King’s Speech.”

In the former, Juliette Binoche (who won Best Actress at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for her performance) plays an art dealer who attends a lecture in Tuscany by an author (William Shimell) on the value of reproductions of famous pieces of art.

Find out what's happening in Bayside-Douglastonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The pair ends up taking a trip to the countryside, where Binoche plans to show a work of art she admires to Shimell’s opinionated author.

At one point during their trip, the duo stops in a café and is mistaken for a married couple by the taverna’s owner. Binoche does not correct the mistake and, at this point, the film makes a subtle and a peculiar shift.

Find out what's happening in Bayside-Douglastonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

The two art lovers begin acting as a couple, bickering over their failing marriage as the wedding of a younger couple takes place in the background.

Is the film’s first half supposed to represent reality and the other half meant to be a copy – or vice versa? If so, which is better? Don’t expect easy answers – or, rather, answers at all.

The film, which opens at Kew Gardens Cinemas on March 18, is the first foray out of Iran for filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The picture’s final third does not quite hold up to its first two sections, but “Certified Copy” is still worth a look.

“Battle: Los Angeles,” on the other hand, is two of the longest hours I’ve spent in a movie theater. The film briefly introduces a squad of Marines, giving them each just enough personality so that we remember their faces amid the melee that is to come.

Aliens attack Earth, supposedly for our water supply, laying downtown Los Angeles to waste. The film’s Marines, led by Aaron Eckhart, head into the heart of the city to battle off the otherworldly beings, who are tall, slimy and have large machine guns attached to their arms.

Visually, the movie makes no sense. “Battle” is filled with wall-to-wall explosions and employs that popular modern style of editing in which most shots last less than several seconds.

Most of the dialogue – “Look out!” or “We did it!” – is delivered in shouts that are barely audible above the endless Sturm und Drang. However, Eckhart pauses at one point to tell an 8-year-old boy, “You’re the bravest Marine I ever knew.” Ugh.

Early blockbusters – I’m thinking Steven Spielberg’s films of the 1970s and 1980s or George Lucas’s “Star Wars” pictures – were primarily inspired by silver screen experiences of their filmmakers’ pasts. But our modern action adventure films are increasingly bearing more resemblance to video games than blockbusters of yesteryear.

It’s appropriate that “Battle” chronicles an alien invasion. There’s hardly anything that resembles a human experience to be found in it.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

More from Bayside-Douglaston