The Rail of Tomorrow

Declare It

2012-01-27T16:20:00.000-08:00

My review of the mysteriously-titled-but-enchanting new film Declaration of War is now up at Battleship Pretension. It opens today in, at the very least, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but beyond that, it's hard to tell. I love IFC Films to death for the films they acquire and their habit of making them available on many platforms, but an updated theatrical schedule is not exactly their forte. But I strongly urge you to see it at your earliest opportunity.

Also at Battleship Pretension, reviews of The Criterion Collection's Blu-ray releases of The Moment of Truth and Godzilla. Come for the cinema, stay for the totally surreal comments section.

Image of the Day

2012-01-21T09:15:00.000-08:00

Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Dušan Makavejev, 1967)

The Best Films of 2011

2012-01-15T02:16:00.000-08:00

I've only been doing these lists for the last seven years, but I've never had as difficult a time making one as I did this year. A big part of that is I saw far more films this year than any other (140 might not be terribly impressive to full-time critics, but I have a full-time job on top of all this), and as I always say, the more you see, the more impressive the cinematic landscape seems.

As much as people tagged this year as one overrun by nostalgia, looking at the list that follows, I was struck by a very different trend, one characterized by rigorous intellectual pursuits, pursued in very emotional ways. When one thinks of these, one might be overwhelmed by the questions and mysteries they invite, but also think of the very visceral reactions they provoke, and I'll be returning to that theme many times over in the following paragraphs.

There's no such thing as a bad year for movies, but even so, this one felt especially lush.

Honorable Mentions

J. Edgar
Unfairly maligned for being something it never sought to be, Clint Eastwood's best film since Letters of Iwo Jima is the only way to capture its subject - a fussy little man obsessed with his own legacy. Using his typical economy of direction, Eastwood (guided by an excellent structure courtesy of screenwriter Dustin Lance Black) effortlessly takes us through fifty years of American history without ever missing a beat biographically or emotionally. There are images here among the most powerful and transportive I saw all year.
Full review here. Still in some theaters, due on DVD and Blu-ray February 21st.

Green
I hesitate to keep bringing this up, because it's looking like it's going to be tougher and tougher to see the damn thing, but I hold out hope that there are still a few festivals yet to unveil it. If one must lump this in with the rest of the mumblecore genre (of which I am cautiously supportive), know that this is so much more ambitious than the usual affair, and easily more aesthetically accomplished. But what I was struck by was how unbelievably honest writer/director Sophia Takal was, and how perfect her expression of that honesty is.
Interview with Sophia Takal here, and initial thoughts here.

The Green Hornet
Yep yep! If, as Truffaut said, a film must express either to agony or joy of filmmaking, no film this year more directly captured that joy. Forget the useless 3D, this is all about Seth Rogen's uninhibited performance as an entitled asshole who decides to become a superhero, and the consequences of that decision that would come about in a Frank Tashlin cartoon.
Initial review here. Available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Runners-Up (in no particular order)

Hanna
Joe Wright's entry into the action genre was propulsive, rhythmic, and fluid, as aesthetically audacious as it was thrilling.

Martha Marcy May Marlene
A hell of a debut from Sean Durkin, whose total command of his frame is matched only by the power of his edits (and no, not just because it skips back and forth through time a lot).

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Years from now, I'll probably regret not putting this in my top ten, but for now, there are still so many nooks and crannies that remain unexplored. Potentially a perfect film.

Bridesmaids
As honest as it is hilarious, and sometimes because of that.

Hugo
The very thought of a Scorsese film not being in my top ten is startling, but that speaks much more to the quality of films this year than the lack thereof in Scorsese's. A beautiful ode to childhood, second chances, and yes you bastards, the cinema.

We Were Here
Contagion, but purely on the ground floor, and horrifyingly, heartbreakingly real. Riveting from top to bottom, holding an inescapable undercurrent of melancholy that comes from only hearing from the survivors.

Melancholia
Lars von Trier continues to make movies that don't make sense, because the core of our emotions don't make sense. Some passages are terrifying in their honesty, others beautiful, others surprisingly funny. The world finally realizes Kirsten Dunst has been a great actor the whole time.

The Loneliest Planet
To say much more would give away the game, but...Straw Dogs and Gerry all wrapped up in romance.

Numbers 11 & 12, or Top Ten Worthy if I'd Had Something Different for Breakfast

12. We Need to Talk About Kevin
Operatic and painterly, psychologically naked and existentially terrifying. As much about a woman grappling with what the world has done to her as what she has done to the world.

11. Shame
Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan cement their place in modern film acting, conveying a depth of experience not explicated by the screenplay. If McQueen only scratches the surface, then so be it, that's his approach - but there's an ocean underneath the ice.

The Top Ten

10. The Arbor
In 1977, at age fifteen, Andrea Dunbar unloaded the misery of her childhood into a play called The Arbor. Growing up in a poor London suburb that supplied her title, she was the product of a family of alcoholics, and by the time her play premiered in 1980, she'd already had one miscarriage and two children to two different fathers (she'd have a third by another before dying at age 29). Her first, Lorraine, was born to an Asian man, and the blatant racism of The Arbor did not make her life very easy. Her own tragic tale, from childhood to present day, serves as director Clio Barnard's story in this new film. In recording interviews with her subjects and hiring actors to lip-synch over them, Barnard has not only given us welcome distance from the horror of the content, but also created a natural extension of Andrea's original play - using the words from primary accounts and building an aesthetic through which they become a piece of performance. I watched this thinking I'd be in for a fascinating intellectual exercise, and came out emotionally ravaged.
Initial thoughts here. Available on DVD, Amazon Instant Video, and Netflix Watch Instant

9. Midnight in Paris
Woody Allen gets a lot of due credit as a writer of clever lines that convey surprising insight into our relationships between each other and the world around us, but when he sets out to direct these light comedic gems, he really hits his stride. He creates a natural ease and flow that makes the whole affair seem effortless, but stands in stark contrast to the sea of comedies overburdened by a commitment to improvisation. Allen's camera, frequently capturing whole scenes in one take, glides peacefully from moment to moment, as enraptured as we are by the newer and wilder characters he puts in front of it. Leading the whole affair is Owen Wilson in the kind of role he seems naturally suited to - a casual, laid back intellectual willing to take in and roll with whatever's put in front of him - only why has it taken so long for someone to draw him out like this? With one glance, he has our undivided attention, just as he cannot draw himself away from the unfolding pleasure suddenly granted to him.
Initial review here. Available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Amazon Instant Video

8. Nostalgia for the Light
Terrence Malick made the sort of connections between the far reaches of the universe and the individual human experience that works on a visceral, spiritual level; Patricio Guzmán found those same connections in science. I'm not much of a science freak, but I'm continually overwhelmed by the way each new discovery reveals how little of our surroundings we really understand at all. Guzmán grabs hold of that unknowability, transforming it into something miraculous, while exploring the real, tangible nature of the oft-used saying "everything is connected." It's the rare documentary as fascinated with the prospect of discovery as it is with imparting information.
Reviewed on Blu-ray here. Available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Amazon Instant Video.

7. Carnage
Simply put, I didn't laugh as hard during any other film this year. Throw in Roman Polanski's razor-sharp direction and a very game cast, most doing their best work in years, and this makes for a hell of a night at the movies. Shallow? Absolutely, but look at the story they're dealing with here, let alone the people trapped in it (as trapped as they are in the apartment). Polanski slowly increases his depth of field until characters seem to be lunging off the screen in a way that even few 3D films manage, and by the end, the character have nearly destroyed his cinema altogether. If this isn't cinematic enough for you, maybe the cinema ain't your bag.
Initial thoughts here. In theaters.

6. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
One of several films on this list I'm at a loss to explain completely, but which nevertheless is such an overwhelming visual/intellectual/emotional experience, I don't particularly care, either. Even the nature of its title is up for grabs, as writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul never really divulges whether or not Boonmee, who's in the final days of his life, can in fact recall anything before this life. But what he can recall from that would be enough to fill any man's conscience. Unafraid of diving into spiritual realms, Weerasethakul's has more diversions than an episode of Family Guy, but they all add up to a total view of life that is breathtaking in its expanse and depth of consideration. There are enough single images here to last a lifetime, enough questions to keep you up all night.
Initial review here. Available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Netflix Watch Instant

5. Winnie the Pooh
The best animated film of the year, like Woody Allen's latest film, tests the limits of how much charm one person can take. But it does so genuinely, with so much joy in every turn-of-phrase (it's also one of the best-written films of the year; lyrical and clever and so funny) and every quiet moment of trust. I was won over by the film's casual faith in the human condition, that none of these characters "get along" perfectly, but never question the fact of their friendship. It's also a subtle bit of advocacy of the written word, established in the way the text of the story interacts in the frame, culminating in the characters being literally saved by letters. There are few better messages to put into a film than these, and it's hard to imagine them being conveyed with the kind of grace on display here. Simple and sweet, perhaps, but more films could benefit from same.
Initial review here. Available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Amazon Instant Video

4. The Turin Horse
When you're talking about a two-and-a-half-hour black-and-white movie with only thirty shots that chronicles the slow descent of a father and daughter living on a broken farm, it's hard to convey how visceral an experience it can be. This will apparently serve as writer/director Bela Tarr's final film, and one could do worse than to go out on such an unassailable masterpiece, which echoes Tarkovsky, Murnau, and Dreyer as much as it stands alongside them. Chronicling, in many ways, the slow decay of the earth as a physical presence, Tarr inverses Beckett's famous line, "I can't go on, I'll go on," putting the emphasis on the struggle to survive against insurmountable elements. The Turin Horse gets you to reconsider that void that you sometimes feel is out there; the vast expanse of nothingness. I left the theater shaken to my core.
Initial consideration here (along with some notes from a Q&A session with Tarr), and full review here. Its proper theatrical run begins in March.

3. Certified Copy
A woman meets a man in Tuscany. Or does she? Nothing can really prepare you for Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece, which takes Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset and sends it beyond the infinite, because I've yet to meet anyone who can get a handle on it. But we can all talk about how remarkably pleasurable an experience it is to see two informed people (Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel) discuss and evoke everything that really matters in life, and if a careful replication of those things is good enough, or indeed if anyone would ever know the difference.
Initial, gushing, incomprehensible review here. Now available on Netflix Watch Instant and Amazon Instant Video.

2. Margaret
For those of you just joining us, the troubled production history of Kenneth Lonergan's magnum opus has led it to becoming a rather difficult film to see for the time being. But my purpose in placing it on this list is no more than any other - to champion an important piece of cinema that I love dearly. And I love Margaret. I don't love it with faint praise, imagining what might be if we ever get Lonergan's preferred cut (though should we, I'll be the first one in line). I love it as it is - a fractured nerve, exposed and fraying at the edges, threatening to unleash hell at any moment. I love that in the week after I saw it, I couldn't think of anything else, and I love that, months later, I still get swept away reflecting on its insane ambition and the perfection with which Lonergan attained it. Led by Anna Paquin in the performance of the year and the sort of acting company any piece of drama dreams theatrical dreams of, this would be the kind of film about which people would say, "man, they don't make 'em like that anymore," but they never did. This is real cinema, dense and uncompromising, a piece that functions beautifully as metaphor and viscerally as drama. It's full of a million moments that could break your heart and a million more that beat you senseless with the unrestrained fury of oncoming adulthood. It's big and terrifying and so smart and so very, very good.
Initial review here. It's not easy to see right now, but a DVD release is expected this spring. Additionally, Los Angeles residents can see it at The Silent Movie Theater January 27th-February 2nd, and it's still playing at New York's Cinema Village, where it's enjoyed a longer revival run than it did an initial one.

1. The Tree of Life
Admittedly, putting the new Terrence Malick film at number one was a lot more daring and interesting when it was called The New World, but I'm no less honest now than I was then. Weaving his childhood against the history of all life on this planet, he's crafted at once the most distilled and wildest version of the thematic concern that's carried his career - that although our lives are not so impressive against the backdrop of the universe, we create meaning with every moment. Nobody has better expressed that duality of existence, nor expressed it so richly.
Initial review here. Available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Godard, and Women, and Music, and Film

2012-01-07T15:58:00.000-08:00

The great, priceless organization known as Cinefamily is performing a public service by exhibiting Jean-Luc Godard's astounding Week End now through Wednesday, followed by some of his best stuff from the 1960s January 20th-26th. Those will in turn be accompanied by his latest (and supposedly last) film, Film Socialisme, which I've not yet seen but am, naturally, dying to.

If you haven't seen these, I couldn't possibly urge you more strongly to do so now. I'll be trying to make it to Week End at the very least (if this damn cold ever lets up), which is showing in a new 35mm print, and has heretofore only been available in a rather shabby DVD edition. For those who don't live in the Los Angeles area, all of these are available on very good DVD or Blu-Ray editions (yes, even the Studio Canal release of Contempt is pretty fantastic).

And, well...they're masterpieces. It's been said (and I don't recall where, but the sentiment is wide and pervasive) that Godard's films are better discussed than watched, and I hope the following will disabuse you of that notion. Few directors have so consistently reminded us of what we love about the movies.

(Clips from A Woman is a Woman, Vivre sa vie, Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, and Band of Outsiders)

Movie Journal #6

2012-01-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the long time between posts, dear readers. I took a little break for the holidays, and was instantly struck with an illness that rendered my usual habit of writing on and on and on rather inert. I didn't exactly stop watching movies, however much that may have slowed. Although I only saw one new release over my Christmas vacation in beautiful Portland, OR, I also managed to sit my mother down for Chaplin's Modern Times, which went over splendidly. As I always say, if the audience is willing to give it half a chance, a movie from an era will still play.

However, I'm here primarily to discuss a set of new-ish releases, some of which came out much earlier this year, but all of which are now widely available for viewing by various means, by they theatrical, DVD, or our old pal Netflix Instant.

War Horse - This Christmas Day viewing was the aforementioned new theatrical release I saw in Portland, and, in the interest of full disclosure (or something thereabouts), the projection quality was quite shabby. The bulbs were bright enough and the thing was generally in focus, but I'd say a good...tenth of the frame on the lefthand side was lopped off. So that was fun. However, my overall mixed reaction to it was not hampered by the director Steven Spielberg's style, which I found tremendously refreshing (what cinephile isn't down for a recreation of classical framing and acting? Except, of course, those who want nothing to do with The Artist), but the thrust of the story was, to say the least, a little strained. And as fine as most of the performances were, I found Jeremy Irvine to be far too earnest (nobody should shout "we'll be together again!" at a horse, and in public no less). I suspect there's more to this one than what I've found in it, however, and do hope to revisit it in short order.

The Adventures of Tintin - Spielberg's other feature this winter provides more immediate satisfaction than War Horse, but to less lasting effect. When dealing with big action set pieces in animation, one has to trade out the visceral thrill for the sheer ingenuity of the set-ups and execution, and on that level, Tintin delivers the best Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions you'll find in any film this year. Nearly every scene in this film inevitably turns into a set piece, each one wilder than the last (ever seen dueling cranes? Now's your chance!), but there is so much that feels terribly misguided on a technical front. I understand Spielberg's personal attraction to making an animated film with motion capture rather than pure animation - it's the difference between working with actors physically and just voice actors - but the result gives the otherwise light film an unfortunate leaden weight, with the characters' physicality in dramatic scenes operating in direct contrast to the more spectacular segments. His use of 3D is fine, using it more to peer deeper into something in the far depths of the frame than anything else, but it's hard to imagine the accomplishment wouldn't have been just as fine with the digital equivalent of whatever apparatus Alfonso Cuarón and Emmanuel Lubezki used on Children of Men.

A Separation - I was rather taken with writer/director Asghar Farhadi's breakout film, though not quite to the extent many others were. He weaves plot and theme together in a way that's really quite striking, and I loved the way he played with the lies we tell ourselves to uphold the belief that, deep down, "I'm a good person." As clever as his screenplay is in terms of set-up and payoff, I found it a little less structurally satisfying in how it focused totally on a certain character only to abandon him or her when the narrative had other concerns. Maintaining the tapestry would not only have been more interesting, but much more honest to what he's getting at. Nonetheless, it's an exceptional film, one you really, really don't want to know too much about going in.

We Bought a Zoo - In spite of the fact that I've liked (to varying extents) all of writer/director Cameron Crowe's work to date, I was more than a little worried going into his latest. Crowe's particular brand of schmaltz always felt honest to me - I believed he really felt these huge emotions that drove his characters - but this felt like the first time he was lying. I am happy to report, however, that this is as earnest an effort as he's ever given, even as it's certainly one of his more problematic ones. Matt Damon goes a long way towards selling the schmaltz, and Crowe is great as ever at finding the smaller moments to emphasize big emotions ("I would LOVE to teach you to shave! Let's shave!" being a real standout) while still be unafraid of big, blatant sentimentality. Not a great film, certainly, but as genuinely warm-hearted and fun as you'd want it to be.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - Being not particularly fond of the first installment, I was surprised to be even remotely so of this. Don't get me wrong, it's still not a "good film" or anything, but I was rather appreciative of it's even more exaggerated sense of play, due in no small part to the inclusion of Sherlock's brother Mycroft (played by Stephen Fry). Even if he, and Fry, are somewhat wasted, they provide for many avenues of good humor, and Jared Harris is a much worthier villain than whoever Sherlock was up against last time (I think he was play by Mark Strong...). Director Guy Ritchie, as ham-handed as ever, manages to get away with one great sequence that is equal parts Sergei Eisenstein and the opening of Melancholia, but beyond that, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything but manufactured "fun" here.

Albert Nobbs - I tend to dislike films built around a strong lead performance. If they're not driven primarily by an actor as an executive producer, they are at least because a director saw what they had, and wanted to use as much of it as possible, ignoring everything else along the way. Albert Nobbs is quite a bit better than all those, with thematic ambition extending far beyond the front door as it were. Its weak link, somehow, is Glenn Close's lead performance, which reveals on the surface far more of the character's interior life than that character ever would. Nevertheless, it is, as they say, a handsome production, and quite a bit more engaging than you might expect.

The Trip - I have an uneasy relationship with what could be termed "British comedy," though I do recognize that is in no small part because of its ardent - you could say strident - fanbase, but director Michael Winterbottom ended up finding something truly special in its most common detriment - the repeated joke. British comedians seem to love nothing more than repeating one joke over and over again until you want to puke, but here Winterbottom used that tendency as a game of one-upsmanship between his two stars, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, as a way to revel in male competition. What he comes out the other end with is something not only quite funny, but quite melancholy in a way as well.

The Arbor - A towering achievement, the rare documentary film that is cinematic in its bones. Director Clio Barnard took an unusual (to say the least) tact in recording interviews with her subjects and hiring actors to lip-synch to them. This is absolutely as weird as it sounds, for the first few minutes, until it quickly becomes the most natural, brilliant move in the world. The genesis of her project is Andrea Dunbar, who wrote a major play (The Arbor) at age 15 and died at age 29 after a lifetime of alcohol abuse, giving birth along the way to three children by three different fathers. To say their lives were unhappy would be only the beginning of their troubles. Barnard spends most of her time with Lorraine, whose biography serves as a spiritual, and in many ways direct, sequel to Andrea's play, which told the story of her own upbringing in the titular rundown neighborhood. The lip-synching provides necessary distance from the increasing horror of Lorraine's life, while also serving much the same purpose that the stage did for Andrea's - getting the honest truth from a primary source, and creating an aesthetic through which to explore it. You think I'm intellectualizing it, but once you see it, you see right away how natural it is.

Movie Journal #5

2011-12-23T12:33:00.000-08:00

Y'know, you try to get a new post up every week, and sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. On the plus side, plenty of new movies have been seen in the intervening time, including a few not represented here, namely The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, both of which are reviewed at Battleship Pretension.

The Iron Lady

After praising J. Edgar for telling Hoover's story from his own perspective, you may find it suspect that I'm more or less disenchanted with The Iron Lady for doing same, but hear me out. Eastwood made it clear from the beginning that Edgar was not to be trusted, and brought his unreliability back around to make a thematic point by the picture's end. The Iron Lady presents a series of montages highlighting Margaret Thatcher's victories, minimizing her success, and finding little insight beyond the fact that it apparently took her a few days to get over the death of her husband (spoilers for...something, I'm sure). It amounts mostly to a rather breezy Wikipedia entry that manages to tell us that Thatcher's roots as a grocer's daughter may have had more to do with her political policies than we previously suspected (conspiracy!). Meryl Streep, an actress so much better than the impersonations she's been saddled with of late, is fine in the role - acute, but not terribly compelling or penetrating.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas

Because I missed the few opportunities available to me to see Arthur Christmas (I'm busy, all right?), this ended up being the only true new Christmas film I saw this year. The good news is that it has more than enough Christmas to go around. I missed the second Harold & Kumar adventure, and maybe some key developments along with it (I doubt it), but for me, this delivered joys in much the same vein as the duo's now-legendary trip to White Castle. Only in 3D, which, particularly in this case, really does make everything better. Danny Trejo has been widely, rightly praised for playing Harold's Christmas-crazed father-in-law, but I sure wasn't expecting Elias Koteas to show up playing a Russian gangster, and yet there he is! And not a moment too soon. And I'll be damned if, somewhere between a sex-crazed Neil Patrick Harris and Santa getting shot out of the sky, it didn't deliver a nugget of the Christmas spirit along with it, albeit in a manner more befitting South Park than Charlie Brown, if you get my (snow)drift. Wow that was a bad pun, but I really, really couldn't resist it.

Weekend

While I don't think this quite holds water for the best-of-the-year race in which many would have it, it's a pretty solid little indie debut there. The whole film is largely building to one very key moment, but it does it in a very subtle, surprisingly effective (and affective) way. The moment itself is pretty striking for how quickly writer/director Andrew Haigh undercuts his own emotional note with the painful sting of reality, and how much more poignant it makes it. At first blush I thought the use of sex was perhaps a little too indulgent, but the more I think about it the more I notice its rather smart structure - skipping past it entirely the first time, building up to showing pretty much the whole shebang by the end (without becoming pornographic, mind), which is a pretty solid way of showing growing intimacy.

Carnage

A film for which I have infinite, unfathomable affection, but a very difficult time actually, you know, discussing. But honestly, that's only because I was laughing harder than I have during any other film this year. I laughed so hard I wasn't looking at the screen for stretches of seconds, too occupied was I with doubling over, spilling into the empty chair next to me, closing my eyes, and losing my damn fool mind. I loved watching this movie, plain and simple. That said, I do know enough of it to know a good one when I see it, and this one has the chops. I have no response to those who say it's uncinematic, other than to suggest they look beyond the inverse relationship between number of locations and number of lines and look at, well, you know, the cinema. Polanski's use of space and depth, and the way he plays with that, is as arresting as any use of 3D I've ever seen, never mind where he chooses to point his camera, how he moves it, what he captures, or how he arranges his subjects. All of which are still concerns of cinema, mind.

That he also directed his four stars (Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet, and Christoph Waltz) to some of the finest performances of the year seems almost secondary, were it not from the unbelievable humor he wrings from each and every last one of them. I could watch Foster leap up to snatch a bottle of Scotch from the towering Reilly for days, man, never mind Waltz's sudden interest in the proceedings as soon as the bottle is unveiled. It's a film all about behavior, and if it's not probing enough for some, well, fine then, but for those of us who delight in a line delivery, the way a sentence is formed, the way a person reacts to something, and the willingness of four very fine actors to go for broke, well, this is a treasure trove.

And it's just so freaking funny.

Senna

A pretty stock sports story about the earnest outsider in it purely for the joy of the sport and his nemesis, who relies on (dun dun DUN) science and personal/political connections to ensure frequent victories (I half expected a Rocky IV montage in which Prost gets strapped into a car full of hypodermics while Senna builds a car out of wood), and in this way its resemblance to Speed Racer extends to arenas outside of merely their shared sport. Director Asif Kapadia also perhaps strains to craft a narrative out of disparate events taking place over several years, but that's kind of the name of the game and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find it compelling regardless. The footage he had access to is pretty stunning, particularly those POV shots from a car (oh, to have seen this in the theater!), and he edits them together into surprisingly visceral showdowns. That it builds to a wallop of an ending is, well, something I'll leave you to discover any further on your own.

We Need to Talk About Kevin and Young Adult

2011-12-14T21:55:00.000-08:00

Well, we REALLY need to talk about We Need to Talk About Kevin, which I make no bones about declaring an out-and-out masterpiece in my review at Battleship Pretension. And dammit, I meant it. Lynne Ramsay turned out a force of nature of a film, brilliantly emotional, dynamic, horrific, and really everything you'd want from a gut-punch at the movies. It's wrapping up limited runs in New York and Los Angeles right now (sorry for not posting this earlier, kids!), but hopefully it'll expand to other theaters soon? I can't imagine it just wouldn't, but stay on top of Oscilloscope's website, as I hope they'll have the latest.

Far more problematic is Jason Reitman's Young Adult, a film that tries to put on a grown-up face with its unlikeable-but-hot-female-protagonist (so daring you guys) but just doesn't have the conviction to really be anything. I liked moments in it tremendously, but in taking a comedic premise and playing it for tragedy, Reitman really undercuts the impact this could have had. I get into the meat of it far more in my review at, yes, Battleship Pretension. That'll expand to more theaters on Friday if it sounds like the kind of thing you might be interested in.

Oh, and while you're at it, why not check out my piece on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a film I was delighted to discover upon rewatching I still really dig. In fact, I dig it a lot more now. I get into THAT at Shadowlocked, for whom it turns out I still write from time to time!

Movie Journal #4

2011-12-14T21:44:00.000-08:00

Time for a larger-than-normal edition of this little journal thingy to make up for lost time.

A Dangerous Method - Not the easiest film to love, but a superbly accomplished one nonetheless, and one of which I’ve become more fond as time goes by. Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley really walk away with the film, and I really admire director David Cronenberg’s choice to let the sunshine in, as it were. Most directors doing a piece about some grittier psychological elements would opt for a more dour color palette, but the power of the film is not unrelated to contrasting a pristine location in an optimistic era with the behavior that one was encouraged, often insisted to hide or disguise. Doesn’t exactly provide the visceral thrills of the typical Cronenberg production, but hardly shortchanges the psychological probing.

My Week with Marilyn - I came away from the film feeling slightly more engaged than expected, but the ensuing time has not been kind. I now find it almost unforgivable, a weak attempt to pander to ideas of how we would’ve liked the period to exist without asking why we want it to exist that way. Michelle Williams is fine as Monroe, as is Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier, but the film’s eternal quest to find its reason to exist is fruitless. The protagonist, Colin Clark, is not worth following, but provides the filmmakers just the right amount of distance so they can show you some of Marilyn Monroe without really getting to the beating heart of who she was and what drove her. It’s portrayal without introspection, and for arguably the most famous actress in motion picture history, that’s not enough.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop - Thoroughly enjoyable and surprisingly reflective. I don’t know how true to life this is, but O’Brien seems quite candid in the film and director Rodman Flender doesn’t shy away from the many instances in which his subject comes across as a bit of an asshole. It humanizes O’Brien tremendously, but it also humanizes celebrity - it takes quite a lot to make you sympathize with a guy whose biggest problem on a given night is that too many people want to talk to him, but the film effectively takes those sort of struggles and makes them credible. It’s also, no surprise, funny as hell.

Bellflower - Kind of blown away by the misogyny tags that have been leveled against the film, not because the film doesn’t depict a certain strain of woman-hating, but because I thought we’d all learned by now that just because a film portrays a certain behavior doesn’t mean it supports those ideals. The film is ultimately too slight and far too fractured to amount to much, but I found it viscerally satisfying in many regards and refreshingly honest about the effect of testosterone on the mind.

We Were Here - Achingly sad and surprisingly beautiful, this account of the AIDS epidemic, focused on the San Francisco gay community, is absolutely stunning. After briefly recapping the late ‘70s joyful period for the city, it launches right into a scenario far more terrifying than Steven Soderbergh’s considerable Contagion, because this time the government isn’t even trying to help. From the slow whispers to packed hospitals to the eventual stemming of its impact, the film analyzes the whole period at levels you probably never thought of before. Through the unimaginable tragedy, it also demonstrates the power of a community to come together in times of crisis, undefeated by the denial of help from those outside of it. One of the best films of the year, certainly.

Movie Journal #3

2011-12-05T21:13:00.000-08:00

The Descendants - Writer/director Alexander Payne is certainly back in form after seven years away (and I wasn't a huge fan of Sideways as it was; love About Schmidt though), creating a very real sense of place in a state (Hawaii) so often ill-represented. The beginning is frontloaded with enough voiceover exposition to kill Robert McKee ten times over, but once it moves past that it becomes a quite effective (and affective) piece of dramedy about getting the family back together, as it were. Payne certainly still has his chops when it comes to showing people at their pettiest, and the humor that comes out of this, though this is easily his most humorless film. Some of this could be attested to George Clooney's lead performance, which, while good, isn't up there with his best and belies his rather limited range. The man is as skilled at comedy as he is drama, but I've never seen him effectively mix the two, and The Descendants suggests he may be unable. But again, in the realm of "good story, well told" cinema, this is a very fine entry and makes for a rather emotionally satisfying evening at the movies, and I'd lie if I said I wasn't touched by the whole affair.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil - I'm as much a fan of genre deconstruction as the next guy, though I think this one sets itself up for a premise it can't quite deliver on. It's taking hillbilly horror and pointing out the privileged, xenophobic perspective from which it stems, which makes for a series of good laughs, until it turns the tables and becomes a straightforward lost-in-the-woods horror film of a slightly different variety. Genre deconstruction is so often made by huge fans of the genre in question, and it seems like director Eli Craig (who wrote the screenplay with Morgan Jurgenson) wanted to have his subversion while still "playing by the rules" as it were, which doesn't totally gel or make for a satisfying whole. Still, I'd be lying if I said the movie wasn't a fun sit.

Margin Call - I mentioned on Twitter that I was already bored of this film well in advance of seeing it, so the good news is I ended up mostly liking it. It's nice to see Kevin Spacey this engaged in a role again after what's honestly been a pretty dreary decade, and he gets the film's most complex role just right. The dialogue, when it comes down from the ledge of profundity, is nice and snappy, the characters are well-drawn and instantly accessible, and the cast is pretty uniformly good. It's hard to totally buy Zachary Quinto as a rocket-scientist-turned-stockbroker (I know his job is more complex than that, but come on now), but he sells it remarkably well. In scenes that require him to say things his characters has said or thought about nine hundred times, he has a kind of hurried, nervous, let's-get-on-with-it approach approach that suits the character nicely. And writer/director J.C. Chandor, making his feature debut in both departments, does a fine job of condensing some rather complicated material (the whole insane practice of credit default swaps that got us into the financial crisis), thought he often resorts to the "tell it to me in English!" approach.

The film's biggest issue? Worst cinematography of the year. Easily. Unmotivated handheld mixed with Tony Scott lighting (look, we're being flashy) and zero sense of composition. If the visual element of filmmaking matters to you, Margin Call becomes almost unbearable to sit through at times.

Shame (dir. Steve McQueen)

2011-12-02T09:40:00.000-08:00

It'd be easy to tag Shame as a film about sex addiction, because, yes, it plays an awfully big role in it, and anytime any film tackles sex in a serious way, that's all anyone is ever going to talk about. On top of which you have a superhero (Michael Fassbender of this year's X-Men: First Class) and a young hot-on-the-scene actress (Carey Mulligan) taking their clothes off, which makes for a perfect storm of people wanting to talk about a lot of stuff that doesn't really have much to do with the film, which I found to be of considerable substance beyond its, um...substance.

Fassbender plays Brandon Sullivan, one of those high-class, clean-cut, a-little-too-well-dressed white guys who works at an anonymous Manhattan firm that does something or rather, whose apartment is way too clean, but who has a hidden secret, that the movies love so much these days. While his secret isn't quite of Patrick Bateman proportions, writer/director Steve McQueen (not that one) turns his sex addiction into something that seems almost as dire. When we meet Brandon, if he's addicted, he seems functionally so. He pays off a hooker, masturbates frequently, and has anonymous hook-ups, but the most desperate he gets is following a woman he was flirting with on the subway, and looking a little disappointed that he lost her in the crowd. When he goes out clubbing, his friend is far more active in looking for women than he. Brandon sits back and more or less lets them come to him (which I guess is easy when you look like Michael Fassbender), which belies a degree of confidence, but in all the wrong areas - he knows he'll eventually get his next hit. If not from this girl, then one of her friends. If not them, someone else. This is the addict who has become his own dealer, and he has his system to get by day-to-day.

His system gets a good deal complicated when his trainwreck sister, appropriately named Sissy (Mulligan), runs out of places to go and decides it's time to crash with him. Though it's easy to tell Brandon isn't wild about this idea - and the mountains of porn he has stashed in his closet is as good a reason as any - he allows it, and slowly his world becomes unraveled. His descent starts to be a more even-tempered version of Requiem for a Dream, twice as harrowing because Fassbender and McQueen actually invest in this guy as a character (zing!). Fassbender's achievement here is critical to the film's considerable success; McQueen's a big fan of the long take, and quite often we're left peering into Brandon's eyes, searching for the buried soul amidst sleepless nights and a constantly drained system. Brandon's confidence isn't an act - he knows exactly how to get what he wants, and puts no effort into obtaining it - but it's just as much his escape. While he and Sissy's past is only hinted at, her specific presence seems to unsettle him on a chemical level, in no small part because she shares his struggle.

If Brandon's the functioning addict, Sissy's the one who's just started recovering. Mulligan can convey infinite sadness with one glance, and easily overcomes the initial image of her as an actress (young, beautiful, almost flawless) to show us that Sissy's way past hitting rock bottom. She's not a ball of emotions as much as a constantly-erupting volcano that's as ecstatic to finally be spending time with her brother as she is thrilled to meet a new man as she is furious at her ex-boyfriend who won't take her back or even much talk to her on the phone as she is forever swimming in a deep depression. Mulligan is one of the most intuitive actresses working today, and her total commitment here is revealed in Sissy's unpredictability - we never quite know how she'll react in a given situation because Mulligan herself seems open to that discovery organically. A lot of awards talk is justifiably surrounding Fassbender, but I really hope Mulligan doesn't get lost in the process.

As the third man in this organization, McQueen guides all of this admirably. He opens the film with an extended eerie montage that instantly catapults us into Brandon's ongoing, pervasive, grinding nightmare. There is a lot of sex in this film, but McQueen ensures right away that none of it will be the least bit appealing, and only get less so from there. Escape seems impossible - when Sissy takes up with Brandon's boss in Brandon's apartment, he goes on a run, but McQueen's endless tracking shot keeps him centered, unable to totally escape, forever running down what seems like an endless block (and I know the streets in New York can be long, but this was a particularly keen location find). McQueen is one of the kings of the long shot that pulls you in deeper and deeper until the emotion is unbearable. Here he grants his performers a little more freedom than in his debut film, Hunger, using the handheld camera as a way to catch live behavior as opposed to the usual oh-man-it's-handheld-what's-gonna-happen-now set-up. It's also just a gorgeous film, bright and colorful in a way that heightens the seedy underbelly without being terribly ironic about it.

And I'll be honest, it's an exciting film, in that rare way few other films can be. It's tackling subject matter that is rarely addressed but critical to delve into in our culture (which uses sex as a means of comedy, entertainment, arousal, advertising, and a million other ends), and doing so in a mature, thoughtful way. It features the best work yet by, for my money, the two finest actors to emerge in the last few years, and it establishes its director as a permanent fixture, a guy whose every new film now matters. It's ambitious in subject, theme, and emotion, but never indulgent; it's not trying to make a "big statement," but wisely focuses on how two very damaged people deal with their trenches. It's bold and brash and it doesn't care that it got an NC-17 rating (and it's hardly the wildest NC-17 movie you'll see, but it ain't kidding about it either) - it just is what it is, and it takes it all the way.

Shame will open in limited release on December 2nd, followed by small expansions on the 9th and 16th, though its rating will prevent it from getting to all theaters. To see when and where it will play near you, check out Fox Searchlight's website.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (dir. Tomas Alfredson)

2011-11-30T21:24:00.000-08:00

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an incredibly dense, uncompromising film. It doesn’t take a second worrying about whether or not you understand the terminology, know who the people are, or even fully grasp its setting. I placed it in the early-to-mid-’70s based on the clothing and hair styles, and the press notes confirm it in 1973 (but then there’s the matter of the flashbacks...). It’s immediately evident that it’s during the Cold War (because of course it is), but the rest is as elusive as the characters we’re following. It’s an admirable approach to the material, and even if it made for rough waters to tread, I also liked it all the more for it.

The central thrust of the story involves George Smiley, ousted member of the SIS (or MI6 if you prefer), rehired in secret to track down a mole within the organization (more generally referred to as The Circus). Through the course of his investigation, he digs up other business, both savory and otherwise, of the members’ past, including his own. Screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, and more importantly director Tomas Alfredson, make little effort to separate the flashbacks from the present, but if you really pay attention, you can catch on pretty quickly to figure out what the film’s rules are for such diversions. And it would all feel so terribly cumbersome if the film didn't so constantly reward your attention.

Like Robert De Niro’s excellent and sadly underrated The Good Shepherd, Alfredson’s film thoroughly enjoys its spy trappings (the code names, the passwords, the subterfuge, etc.) while never forgetting the human element. Spying is a calculated field of operation, but it’s still overseen by people, who are inherently full of weakness and can be unpredictable. They can be swayed (towards you or against you), reasoned with (to a point), disillusioned, and enraged. They have blind spots. They forget. All of these are dangerous elements on a field called “intelligence,” so they have to be accounted for as best they can. But they can never totally covered, and the way in which small mistakes and accidental revelations betray them is so subtly well-played, but ultimately the true meat of a very meaty picture.

Gary Oldman is otherworldly in the lead role. Smiley is the ultimate spy, allowing as little emotion as possible to cross his face, leaving his neutral expression a creepy blank slate. He doesn’t say a word in his first few scenes, and as the picture wears on, you start to learn he doesn’t have to. He has the kind of face that can draw a confession because he seems to already know everything, making it all the more alarming when he (and we) realize he doesn’t. When he discovers that he was also suspected of being a mole, Alfredson is smart enough to hold on a lengthy shot of his reaction, and Oldman expertly navigates some tricky emotions while belying very little. When the revelations get more personal, his sudden burst of immediately-suppressed emotion is startling.

To say the supporting cast is “strong” would be an embarrassing understatement, but let’s just say Alfredson gets a return on his considerable investment. Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hines, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch are nobody’s idea of low class, and boy is it great to see them all onscreen in an ensemble. None of them are out to steal the spotlight (though John Hurt almost does by default), but Alfredson plays them each very wisely, not just towards their individual strengths, but more aggressively towards your suspicions of each character. Most of them, at one point or another, are suspected of being moles - all of them with good reason - but none are played too strongly as a red herring, nor as an obvious suspect (and there's a difference between the two). Better still, the mystery is not even the most compelling part of the film, with the implied history between each character making for more valuable interactions. Alfredson knows how to catch just the right moment between two people, and when to subtly recall that interaction later in the picture. It's brilliant ensemble work all around.

Alfredson's manner of shooting, in fact, is very sharp. Very often we enter a scene through a window, mirroring the characters’ paranoid suspicion that they’re constantly being watched. It’s rare that such a shot will pay off as a genuine point-of-view perspective, and all the better for it, but Alfredson also knows how to use his camera subjectively. George has a wife, Ann, who has since left him. We glimpse her in memories, but she’s never directly seen. How better to portray a person who’s a bad memory to one man and a pawn to another? It's a handsomely shot film to be sure, with compositions straight out of Antonioni that really, truly demand to be seen on the big screen. I popped in the screener to scope out some scenes again and clarify some details, and while the picture certainly holds up, the power is somewhat diminished. Do not wait for this on DVD; it may be a procedural, but small screen stuff this ain't.

I was consumed by Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as I watched it, and it's stayed nice and sharp in the intervening weeks. It doesn't once assume you're anything less than an attentive viewer, so chin up and dive right in, because the rewards are great. A compelling, kind of pulpy spy plot mixed with the right dose of emotion under very careful direction, and boy...I'd love to talk about the ending at some point.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will be come out in limited release on December 9th, expand to a few other cities on the 16th, before hitting art house theaters nationwide on December 23rd. Click here to see release info.

On Stations Both Police and Train, and a Little Nostalgia for a Bygone Era

2011-11-28T21:20:00.000-08:00

After getting bogged down in analyzing Eastwood's remarkable J. Edgar, I was remiss in my duties to link you to three other reviews I wrote, and a podcast on which I appeared.

First, I wrote about Martin Scorsese's fantastic Hugo, and came under fire for so doing. Still don't understand the guy's problem, but, you know, there it is.

Then there's Oren Moverman's Rampart, a decidedly weird normal film, if you get my meaning. It's not weird like, say, The Skin I Live In, but that is a very outwardly weird film. Rampart is a totally straightforward film told in from a rather psychotic perspective, and this, I'd argue, gives it its power.

And finally, we have Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, which I admired greatly and really have no understanding of those who take great issue with it. It might be getting a little big for its britches with all this Oscar talk, but it's still a very fine piece of work. These, and other concerns, are further discussed on the latest episode of the ShockYa podcast, hosted by the affable Rudie Obias, who was good enough to have me as a guest.

J. Edgar (dir. Clint Eastwood)

2011-11-27T18:41:00.000-08:00

At this point in its run, discussing J. Edgar without bringing up the considerable negative reaction the film has accrued would be...difficult. Not just because I feel that they couldn't be more off base, but just as much because I realize that my surprisingly passionate response towards Clint Eastwood's latest opus is by far the minority opinion, particularly among writers of my age range. And if Clint Eastwood only makes films for old people and young people who are regularly referred to as "old man," then so be it - there are too few films for us as it is. But I will nevertheless attempt to show you the film I saw on Tuesday.

The film opens on what will have to pass as the "present day," or roughly the early 1960s (though this "present day" will extend all the way up through 1972). Eastwood shows a total lack of concern for making explicit dates throughout the film, befitting screenwriter Dustin Lance Black's method of diving across decades in the blink of an eye, and back again. This isn't a film about what happened, but how one man says it happened. The problem is that that man is J. Edgar Hoover, one of the most powerful men in American history, and as they say, history is written by the victors. As much as I hate the modern method of just naming biopics after their subjects, J. Edgar is a particularly apt title - this is Hoover and he sees himself, and what becomes so fascinating over the course of the film is just how pathetic that is.

Right away his whole testimony should be called into question - when the agent taking dictation for the purposes of memoir asks if Edgar was really at the scene of an early crime, he simply says, "Let's leave that to the reader's imagination." The J. Edgar Hoover of the past, at least the one he describes to agents, is a bright, ambitious man who always has the right thing to say at the right time, and though he may battle bureaucratic forces, he will always prove the victor. But of the present? Tossed out of the offices of his superiors, rejected by those he loves, questioned by everyone, and belittled at every turn. Near the end of the film, he reflects on how evil flourishes when good men do nothing in conjunction with Richard Nixon taking office, which seems like kind of a stretch (that Hoover saw Nixon for what he was right away, despite their overlapping interests). This is undermined a few minutes later when it turns out Edgar was mostly concerned with Nixon going after his personal files, which he'd kept locked away in his office for decades. When Clyde suggests to Edgar that he retire after Nixon takes office, Edgar just says, "Shut up, Clyde," and when pushed, he rattles off the resume he finds so impressive, but can only come up with examples from the Great Depression. These instances reveal the truth underneath his version of the story (and thus the key to unlocking the film as a portrait of a "fussy little man"), and more so the truth behind the framing device, which I don't think is everything it appears to be.

If there's one thing we learn about Edgar (as he prefers to be called), it's that he doesn't take guff from many people, least of all his underlings. Yet every agent who comes to take his dictation questions his past decisions, corrects some facts he misconstrues, and points out the dark underbelly of the empire he built. Why would he put up with that? Well, chiefly, I don't think they're really there, per se. Not that Edgar is literally walking around his office talking to himself (after all, he and his secretary discuss one of the agents), but rather that it's a particularly keen invention on the part of screenwriter Dustin Lance Black to reveal the rather sorry state of Edgar's soul - a man constantly propping himself up, even as he knows his actions have resulted in men losing their careers, their families, and their lives. That Eastwood directs each of the agents towards very monotone, even, undistinguished performances is part of the point; these men represent Edgar's conscience, not his employees. This is underscored right up front if you know Hoover's education background (the first agent says he received his law degree from George Washington University, and had an ailing mother to care for; both are true of Hoover), but the general pitch of the scenes indicate this far more interesting subtext.

This is far from the Eastwood we're used to, and his stylistic touches hardly stop there; the one that really knocked me off my feet was the introduction of Clyde Tolson.

There are so many aspects to this scene I scarcely know where to begin. Not only is it an incredibly effective, haunting scene, but it points to some fascinating thematic undercurrents. Edgar has just finished recounting his raid on a Communist organization in New Jersey, which cost, according to the agent transcribing his tale, everyone else in the Bureau involved in the arrests their job. We faintly hear a man call Edgar's name, and Edgar instructs the agent to "ignore him," which he does, up to a point. A figure, this haunting, ghostly image on the other side of the opaque doorway, opens Edgar's door a crack, and reminds him of his appointment with the Attorney General. Edgar insists the figure, who he regards as "Mr. Tolson," "please go away", with a rudeness that will be uncommon in their relationship as we eventually see it unfold. Mr. Tolson holds there for a second longer than is necessary, all the while framed as this ghostly image, a figure haunting Edgar just outside of his comfort zone.

This comes twenty-five minutes into the film. It takes that long for Black and Eastwood to introduce the other man in the film's supposedly-central love story. It will take another seven before we get the flashback explaining who Mr. Tolson even is, much less who he will become. This decision, which can look careless on paper, is of monumental importance on a structural level - Mr. Tolson (Clyde, as he will come to be known) is a person Edgar tries to push away from his public life however possible, until the memory of him, the figure (if not necessarily the man himself) comes barging into his subconscious and refuses to be ignored. From there, it's a flood of memories, as Clyde grows more and more important and eventually is inextricable. Eastwood being Eastwood, this isn't piled on, but it is nonetheless a felt influence, and central to the film's work-before-pleasure attitude.

I know many would have liked a more urgent exploration of Hoover's alleged relationship with Clyde Tolson (and one must bear in mind that, like many aspects of Hoover's life, the extent of their real-life relationship will never be fully known), but I think Eastwood and Black's treatment of it is far deeper, and far more interesting, than the simple "yeah, okay, probably he was gay, but let's not dwell on that shall we?" attitude to which many are ascribing it. Their vision of Hoover is not only probably more historically accurate, but it's also a lot more dramatically compelling - he drew Clyde close to him until he couldn't allow himself to get any closer. The film ascribes much of the blame for Edgar's psychological resistance to homosexuality to his mother (played here by a very creepy Judi Dench), and maybe they're right to do so and maybe they're not, but his mother at least represents some essential element within Edgar that makes homosexuality repellant to him. Eastwood doesn't always handle this push-and-pull gracefully, and I don't think he really builds to their major confrontation in the hotel room in a dramatic sense. From a structural standpoint, however (and Black's screenplay is magnificent in this regard), it's an important operatic note approaching the final third of the film that reveals the raging inner passion within both Edgar and Clyde, albeit to differing ends. It's also played admirably petty and shrill, a true fight.

The point is that for Edgar, the possibility of a romance is an intrusion. He proposes marriage early on to Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), who refuses but becomes his lifelong secretary, but after that is actively uncomfortable with any romantic proposition, even one as simple as a dance. He simply looks away and goes right back to work, and while this might not be the most exciting path the filmmakers could have taken, it strikes me as admirably insightful.

Besides, his career in the FBI, an organization he practically founded, is storied enough. Edgar naturally focuses on their victories, the golden years when his publicity machine was working overtime to promote the G-Men to the status of superheroes (an era that is thoroughly undermined by the picture's end), but again, look to the present, when he's subtly orchestrating a plot to undermine Martin Luther King, Jr. The film naturally avoids some of the more controversial allegations in that regard, but it makes no bones about how Hoover saw King as the latest version of the Communist terror he had long sought to thwart. And if he pursues it as passionately as ever, nobody else seems to understand his choice of an enemy, recognizing instantly that he's searching for one anywhere he can find it. In another fruitless pursuit, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy (portrayed very badly by Jeffrey Donovan) pretty much throws him out for even bringing it up.

While I admired the film principally for Eastwood's masterful direction and Black's solid-as-a-rock screenplay, it'd be disingenuous to not discuss Leonardo DiCaprio's lead performance. This is not the first busily-conflicted historical figure he's played, and like his Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover is a man full of eccentricities (DiCaprio gets knocked for what many see as his inability to do comedy, but I found his instructions to the men bringing in his filing cabinets to be a very acute comedic beat), but is a far sturdier presence (eventually aided by padding his mother and doctor assure him is "solid weight"). Like all of DiCaprio's performances over the last nine years, it's wildly theatrical, the kind the cooler-than-the-Oscars crowd likes to rail against but which inevitably draws praise from all corners. DiCaprio has long been tagged for his "boyish" looks, and indeed there's rarely anything masculine about his face, aside from one, important feature - his eyes, which have a steely determination that is near lunacy, and especially as Edgar gets older and older and the make-up thicker and thicker, those eyes will become the characteristic to which we are most attached. As well we should be.

DiCaprio is often criticized for his accent work, which he indulges in regularly but has never quite mastered. This is probably his most affected to date, but I've always found his vocal performance to be totally compelling, and that is no different here. He is our guide while the picture criss-crosses through the decades, and a commanding presence it is. Eastwood wisely directs the rest of his actors around DiCaprio, pushing them to performances that might fit the stage better than the screen (they would undoubtedly be more widely-acclaimed there) to fit Black's admittedly stage-y dialogue. While he certainly commits some egregious sins of exposition ("your brother, the President of the United States" and "You mean Mrs. Roosevelt?" sting especially hard), Black isn't going for conversational dialogue, nor should he. It's big dialogue befitting a big story about a powerful figure. It's lightyears away from his work on Milk, but it's also more thematically, structurally, and dramatically rewarding.

And Eastwood...man. As noted previously, I never would have guessed he had this in him, but his execution of some rather tricky transitions and ambitious structure is incredible. He weaves the past and present together so effortlessly, creating visual parallels to emphasize the thematic ones. I was particularly taken by a montage in which Edgar rides comfortably in an elevator in the 1960s while his men do his dirty work (and dirty it is), a juxtaposition that will pay off in spades by the end of the film, and then...the elevators open, and we're effortlessly back into the 1930s. No music (Eastwood is characteristically restrained in his use of score, which he writes himself), no sweeping camera moves. Simple, elegant shots and sharp, rhythmic cuts. Classical, but very effective montage. Time slips and flows like sand, getting jumbled up every time you dip your hand in.

It's a story, but it's more important than that - it's an idea, an emotion, a clear dissection of the line between Edgar's work and that which he instructs. This isn't the only instance of Eastwood cleverly slipping through time as his characters enter and exit rooms (most notably, one sequence has Edgar exist Clyde's house in 1969 and arrive at his own in 1972), but it is by far the most elegant.

For all his restraint, however, Eastwood displays a certain charming messiness that...well, it's the most difficult aspect of his work to discuss, because his sharpest critics accuse Eastwood of being too dry and also too messy. But it's that element that makes Eastwood's work so electrifying, and causes it to rise above from the biopics both montage-laden (Ray, Milk, etc.) and truly "uninvestigative" (The Queen) to which we're accustomed. Richard Brody describes it best:

Eastwood is, and always has been, a great sketch artist for whom brisk, stylized restraint - a sort of opaque tightness within a frame of breezy looseness - has always been second nature. The sense of improvication in tension with reserve, of expressive freedom conflicting with circumspect reticence, is one of Eastwood's fundamental themes, not least in J. Edgar. What's more, most directors, when they get older, get even sketchier - they're in more of a hurry to expose their feelings and ideas and they have learned not to worry about trivia in their urgency to get to the heart of the matter. They get both quicker and more radical.

When I was at AFI Fest, I attended a panel dedicated to young actors who had some heat going into awards season. Armie Hammer (whose work here is fine, if a little knowing and mannered, but he absolutely nails his old-man phase) was on that panel, and spoke of how he was introduced to Eastwood, a week before shooting was to commence on J. Edgar. This means that not only had Eastwood not met Hammer prior to casting him, and Hammer's story implied that they hadn't even spoken. Eastwood simply said "I'm looking forward to seeing what you'll do."

I know, to many, this statement will confirm everything they despise in Eastwood's work, which takes on an air of the studio era way of working, in which everybody pretty much showed up to work and was responsible for their assigned department. And maybe it is, but they made some damn electric films back then precisely because of the invisible specter of the unexpected. Resultantly, Eastwood creates a unified theatrical environment in his performances, but each actor brings a very distinct interpretation of their character and the story as a whole to bear, and creates a more lively environment than many give it credit for.

After two notable, but not exactly good, films (even I can't find anything notable in Invictus), Eastwood has reemerged here with his best film since Letters from Iwo Jima, and one of the most electrifying directorial turns of the year. His methods, if unusual, pay off in spades here, in no small part because he tapped Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the finest actors of this generation, to lead the charge with a performance as commanding as it is compelling. If they don't find the truth of the real J. Edgar Hoover, they certainly find his truth, and what better way to get at one of the most powerful men of the 20th century?

Movie Journal #2

2011-11-27T17:07:00.000-08:00

Rejoice and Shout - So, yes, admittedly, only an idiot would say the movie's a total loss. I mean, you get to sit and listen to all this great music, and typically watch some film of the performers doing it live. And man...that is a sight to see. Totally lives up to the title of the documentary. But, you know, as a documentary, as a piece of filmmaking, this couldn't have been any flatter. It's a strict chronological tale of the evolution of gospel music, focusing of course on its life pre-1960, but certainly touching on music made all the way up until, well...now, actually. But there's no pep to it. They talk to the same five people the whole damn time, and it quickly develops into a very predictable artist showcase, followed by several minutes of talking heads, then another artist, then...well, you get the idea. It's dry, dry, dry, even though the music couldn't be more ecstatic. Great subject, poor documentary.

Into the Abyss - Whoooo, baby, this was exhausting. Werner Herzog's latest film has been pushed as a documentary about the death penalty, and by the end it certainly takes on that subject as its thesis, but it focuses so specifically on one case that it's almost solely an exploration of only those people involved. But by taking on the larger issue towards the end, he really gets you to think about the societal and moral implications of the ever-controversial practice. I've been staunchly against the death penalty since I was 18 and really started diving into it, but even I could see the perspective of those who feel differently thanks to Herzog's film. Herzog, for what it's worth, isn't too fond of capital punishment either, but was good enough to give all of his subjects their due in the interviews. Fascinating story on its own with overwhelming implications.

Secret Sunshine - I'm not pleased to say that I don't really understand the overwhelming love for this one, but it's not one I'm ready to dismiss outright. Its totally unpredictable plot and tonal shifts are something to behold, as is the lead performance by Do-yeon Jeon. I found myself emotionally devastated quite frequently without ever feeling terribly caught up in either the protagonist or the plot. As a total work, I might have more appreciation for it a few weeks hence, but right now, I'm feeling the weight of aimless scenes and unsteady camerawork.

Movie Journal #1

2011-11-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

I'm not saying this to brag as much as provide context - with the end of the year and awards season approaching, I've been receiving a ton of screeners. My goal is to somehow plow my way through all of them, and write at least a little bit about each. Hopefully I'll get one or two of these up each week to let you know how the progress is going, and maybe tune you into some films you might have missed this year.

Page One: Inside The New York Times - I was really looking forward to this one, and it's certainly not without its pleasures. Choosing David Carr as your chief subject will certainly yield many, and I've had a long fascination with "the newsroom." Add to that a little social relevance with the decline of the newspaper as an industry (and, in many ways, an institution), and you've got the makings for a fascinating doc. Andrew Rossi takes advantage of these interests, but doesn't do as good a job at finding the wider appeal, the deeper importance. For a film that's already a bit of a self-reflection (a piece of media about the media), it would have been greater served by spreading itself around offices at the Times beyond the Media Desk, where it spends nearly every second of its time. We get a sense for how this department's concerns can be extrapolated and applied to any other desk, but that's hardly the documentary's doing. As a result, we don't get the full impact of the paper and what it really is to be "inside The New York Times." Worth a watch if you're into that sort of thing, though.

Project Nim - Partially as a function of covering more movies semi-professionally this year, I've seen far more documentaries this year than any other (three today alone beats the count for some years), and Project Nim is definitely in my top three or four. Go for the crazy ape behavior, stay for the people, I say. I was expecting the unforeseen consequences of a group trying to raise a chimp as a human would be, but I did not at all expect the people involved to be so endlessly fascinating. As Nim's life progresses, people fall away, and people join, but every last one of them is more interesting than the types you get in most narrative films. The self-involvement and narcissism on display is breathtaking, as is director James Marsh's slight prying into...well, just what kind of person signs on for something like this? Excellent film all around; Marsh injects it with real style utilizing the surprisingly extensive footage shot at the time, reenactments, and stately-shot interviews. Loved it.

Ceremony - An absolute delight. It's one of the more obvious of the "sons of Wes Anderson" set of films to which we've been treated over the last decade, but that doesn't stop it from developing an entertaining wit and rapport amongst the characters. It becomes a tad staid and conventional as it progresses, but the first 30-45 minutes in particular are dynamite. Michael Angarano gives an amazing lead performance, a character far from what I expected after seeing the trailer. If it is another film by a lonely guy reflecting on some real life unattainable woman (which it kind of reads like at times), at least he went through the trouble to make it not boring.

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front - Fascinating stuff. It uses one man's arrest in conjunction with one of the ELF's arson jobs to explore the short history of the movement in America in the late nineties/early oughts. In so doing, we have a personal story to follow as well as a deeper history. It definitely has a perspective on the whole affair, but gives due time to those opposed, and doesn't judge either for their beliefs. It also provides some insight into protests in general, chiefly the effectiveness of peaceful, unobtrusive protest (relevant all over again with the Occupy movement), and explores the question of whether what the ELF did could even be called terrorism. They raise, but don't explore any further, the question of whether or not these crimes were prosecuted as terrorist acts so the government could have one more terrorist conviction under its belt. Good stuff all around.

AFI Fest A-Go-Go!

2011-11-05T09:33:00.000-07:00

I'll be updating this daily with links to my daily AFI Fest pieces at Battleship Pretension, and I'll keep this page active as I post future reviews directly tied to AFI Fest, so feel free to bookmark away!

Day 1 - Green, Young Hollywood Panel, and Miss Bala

Day 2 - Snowtown, Restless City, Michael, and Rampart

Day 3 - The Dish & the Spoon, Almayer's Folly, and Melancholia

Day 4 - The Turin Horse, Pina, and Coriolanus

Day 5 - With Every Heartbeat, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, The Artist, and Cafe de Flore

Day 6 - Jeff Who Lives at Home, shorts program, Alps, and The Loneliest Planet

Day 7 - Silver Cliff and goodbye!

Interview with Sophia Takal regarding her debut film, Green.

The Turin Horse

The Other F Word (dir. Andrea Blaugrund)

2011-11-04T13:36:00.000-07:00

Chuck Klosterman wrote this great essay cataloguing life on a rock cruise headlined by Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon. It was something like a month at sea with a regular rotation of shows headlined by these three bands, and in it he talked about how part of the appeal for most of the attendees was that their interests and concerns had grown alongside the bands’. They all started out young and hungry and just wanting to make some noise, but now they were settled into careers, and there was something comforting about watching a band as big as Journey that now plays solely to make a living.

One of the central conflicts in The Other F Word, the thoroughly enjoyable new documentary now playing in New York and Los Angeles, is the search for nobility in playing in a punk band so you can feed your family. After all, punk grew out of a young, primal urge to tear down the system (one that it still feeds), and many of the bands that have been around for ten, fifteen, twenty years aren’t exactly in it for the reasons they were when they started. They do it because it’s their job.

The word to which the title refers is actually “fatherhood,” which is what inevitably spurns the primary concern to pay the bills. When you’re childless and especially single, it’s in your best interest to keep a roof over your head, but you’re almost equally concerned with finding some form of self-expression. But suddenly your sole concern has to be for these kids, and for most of these guys, that means their music becomes a passion in a whole new way, with the added ironic sting that the method by which you provide for your family also keeps you far away from them on world tours for over half the year.

Fatherhood had a varying effect on the film’s subjects (which are pretty wide-ranging, focusing on Jim Lindberg of Pennywise but bringing in Tony Hawk, Art Alexakis of Everclear, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mark Hoppus of Blink 182, and many more), but most expressed a determination to not entirely release their roots. The other great irony they run into is that their music has, in several cases, made them quite a bit of money, so they end up rubbing elbows with their respective city’s more affluent population (who, as one of the guys notes, “are fine...but really boring.”).

It’s not an incredibly complex film, but it nevertheless gets into some interesting territory about how practical it is to keep “living the dream” twenty years in. All of the stuff between the guy and their children is pretty touching, with the added amusement that comes from a guy covered in tattoos of questionable material and screaming for the rise of anarchy wondering how he’s supposed to realistically prevent his kid from using bad words in school. Most of them, unsurprisingly, came from broken homes, typically a result of an absent father, and they seem genuinely motivated to not be that guy at all costs.

The Other F Word is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, and can be seen in several other cities in the weeks to come.

AFI Fest Preview

2011-11-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

AFI Fest 2011 kicks off tomorrow, and I’ll be there all week covering as many damn films as time and my own ability to stay awake will allow. I’ll be rolling out daily recaps over at Battleship Pretension, but you can come here for regular link round-ups. I’ll also be Twittering vigorously @railoftomorrow.

I was unable to attend the press screenings preceding the festival, but I researched all of the films as they were announced, and have thus assembled a list of what I feel are the movies to see, though scheduling will prevent anyone from possibly seeing all of them. Admittedly, some of my reasons are a trifle vague, but I’m trying to maintain some of the mystery for myself.

If you end up attending the festival, shoot me a tweet, say “hi,” buy me a sandwich, whatever! I’ll be busy, but not that busy. As always, the comments are open, so if you want a different kind of coverage, be sure to let me know as well - I hope to get to all types of things, but you never know everything you leave out.

J. Edgar (dir. Clint Eastwood) - It's the opening night gala, and tickets are scarce. More are supposed to pop up any second now, so keep your eyes peeled! But any new Clint Eastwood movie is a must see, and this one has the benefit of almost certainly being better than Hereafter.

The Adventures of Tintin (dir. Steven Spielberg) - I don’t care what your too-cool-for-school friends say. Spielberg is one of the greats. This is his first foray into animation, 3D, and digital filmmaking, and for that alone it demands your attention. Plus it’s been getting great reviews overseas, where it’s already opened.

Carnage (dir. Roman Polanski) - The reviews have not been across-the-board praise, as many feel the film is trapped by its stage-y roots (it’s adapted from the hit show, God of Carnage), but beyond the allure of any new Roman Polanski film, there are few directors who can turn one room into such a dynamic force as he.

The Artist (dir. Michel Hazanavicius) - The Artist has remained every cinephile’s fantasy film since it premiered out of nowhere at Cannes (literally - it was added to the competition a week before the festival). Initial reviews were ambivalent, but it’s been gaining steam ever since. I would be ecstatic if this revives interest in silent film, but for now, I’m just hoping for a damn good movie.

Shame (dir. Steve McQueen) - This is easily required viewing based on the strength of McQueen’s debut film, Hunger, which, like this film, starred Michael Fassbender. Unfortunately, not very many people saw Hunger, but the reviews for this have been extraordinary so far, and its reputation alone will make it one of the most talked-about films of the fall - it’s without a doubt the highest-profile NC-17 film of the last decade.

Into the Abyss (dir. Werner Herzog) - It’s the new Werner Herzog film. Need I say more? Strategic festival-goers may want to wait on this, as it’s released in Los Angeles mere days after it’s shown at AFI Fest (I’ll be waiting, but only because there are more rare, and equally enticing, opportunities at the same times).

The Kid with the Bike (dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne) - Once again, one could do worse that to rely on a reputation as strong as the Dardennes, but even those given to say “more of the same” are declaring this especially noteworthy. Those who do not tire of artistic excellence are over the moon.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (dir. Mark Duplass & Jay Duplass) - I’ve had an unsteady relationship with the Duplass brothers since their breakout film, The Puffy Chair, culminating with what I felt was a massive misfire with Cyrus. Yet I can’t resist the pull, especially with a cast headlined by Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Judy Greer(!), and Susan Sarandon.

Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier) - Once again, strategists may want to take its impending release (November 11th in Los Angeles) as reason to check out some smaller stuff, but this is my one major indulgence - I’m dying to see this projected on the Egyptian’s enormous screen. Reviews have been exuberant, and many felt it could have taken the Palme d’Or if not for von Trier’s knack for getting into trouble.

Miss Bala (dir. Gerardo Naranjo and Mauricio Katz) - A few months back, I was embroiled in an extensive, multi-blog debate about the modern quick-cut style of action films. My opponents will be delighted to know their precious “classical” camerawork is, reportedly, very much alive. Don’t get me wrong, I’m dying for a more rigorous action movie myself, so if you see me at the 8:30 show on Friday night, do say “hi.”

Pina (dir. Wim Wenders) - In addition to praising the cinematic stylings of Michael Bay, I’ve also sought to alienate myself from critical circles by vigorously championing 3D. And a 3D dance documentary directed by Wim Wenders is just what the doctor ordered! Those I know who have seen it think very highly of it.

Rampart (dir. Oren Moverman) - I enjoyed, but was not particularly electrified, by Moverman’s debut, The Messenger, but it was enough to get me curious. Plus, co-written by James Ellroy? Corruption in the LAPD? Indeed!

We Need to Talk About Kevin (dir. Lynne Ramsay) - I am, regrettably, not as familiar with Ms. Ramsay’s career as I (or I’m sure you) would like, but I hear she’s one hell of a filmmaker, and this one’s got Tilda Swinton! Maybe that doesn’t make it the must-see movie for you that it is for me, but if that’s the case...why?

The Loneliest Planet (dir. Julia Loktev) - Ecstatic reviews out of the New York Film Festival. Phil Coldiron called it “the sharpest account of what it means to be an educated, disillusioned young American made thus far in the 21st century.” Richard Brody noted that Loktev “condenses a world of bitter and incommensurable experience into a single shot.” Hurrah!

Michael (dir. Markus Schleinzer) - Reportedly a very calm, measured portrait of an accountant who keeps a ten-year-old boy locked in his basement. Not for those whose souls have not already been sanded to dust, I’m sure, but I’ll give it a go anyway.

Green (dir. Sophia Takal) - I’ll be honest, I don’t know anything about this one, but it was one of a handful that was highlight by those who would know as a must-see. Sure, I could look up reviews, but I don’t want to totally spoil my own fun.

Alps (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) - Did you see Dogtooth? I still don’t know what to think about it, but I wouldn’t trade watching it for...well, seeing it on the big screen as opposed to a standard-def stream on Netflix wouldn’t have been so bad. Nevertheless, Lanthimos is more than a director worth watching - he’s worth fearing. In a good way.

The Day He Arrives (dir. Hon Sang-Soo) - Again, woefully unfamiliar with the director, but I hear it has intellectuals discussing things! While drunk! In black-and-white! Yeah, I did go to film school, why do you ask?

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb) - An apparently enrapturing portrait of a world-renowned sushi chef who operates out of a subway station, and whose waiting list can stretch for years.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan) - Very depressed I’ll have to miss this one (due to scheduling conflicts), as it’s a slow-burning procedural in which a killer leads the police to his victim’s body. I’m sure things don’t quite go as planned.

A Separation (dir. Asghar Farhadi) - Another one very close to getting cut from my schedule due to a very tight day, but this has become the movie to see in the rounds it’s made through festivals. The screenplay is apparently tight enough to bounce a dime off, and the emotional punch quite a wallop.

The Turin Horse (dir. Bela Tarr) - Tarr claims this will be his final film, which makes it something of an event unto itself. Never mind the reviews that have called it a devastating masterpiece, which should be a good way to start off the day (both screenings are in the first block, and while one would like to wander around town late into the night pondering the fragility of existence after such a thing, them’s the brakes). It runs a scant 146 minutes with only 30 shots. I couldn’t be more giddy. Word on the street is that Tarr himself will be there. For which screening, I do not know. The word was not that elaborate.

Extraterrestrial (dir. Nacho Vigalondo) - Timecrimes fans will want to note that this is director Vigalondo’s follow-up. Me, I’ve yet to see Timecrimes, but I know its fanbase is expansive; hence, I have included it.

Bonsai (dir. Cristian Jimenez) - Like so many others, this is getting fantastic reviews, and it has a very friendly premise to those who share my interests: “In Cristian Jimenez’s wry and nostalgic tale of love and literature, struggling writer Julio revisits and revises his memories of his college romance with Emilia.” Sadly, as with so many others, scheduling will prevent me, but it needn’t you.

Bullhead (dir. Michael R. Roskam) - If you think about it hard enough, you already know the premise based on the title. And it sounds righteous. Word out of Fantastic Fest was strong. Strong like a bull.

Le Cercle Rouge (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville) and The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak) - No, Melville and Siodmak didn’t come back from the dead and remake his own classics, Haneke-style (note: there is no proof that Haneke has died, though he often looks not unlike an extra in a Romero film); rather, this is one of the films Pedro Almodovar has chosen to highlight in his stint as guest director. The other two - Eyes Without a Face and Nightmare Alley - I’ve unfortunately not seen, but these two are dynamite.

Shorts! - There are four shorts programs, and one of the major recommendations from festival veterans is to make sure to catch at least one at any festival. I’ll probably be catching Shorts 1, but that’s purely a function of scheduling, as it’s actually the shortest program.

There will also be a few events at the festival, namely the Young Hollywood Panel, featuring Kirsten Dunst, Anton Yelchin, Armie Hammer, and Evan Rachel Wood (that might be too much pretty on display, but I think the room will find a way to manage), and the Sony 3D Panel. Those who read this whole damn thing might remember that I’m quite fond of the potential of 3D, and I want to see what Buzz Hays, Senior Vice President of the Sony 3D Technology Center, sees in its future.

Getting by far the least notice of all is Two Visions of the West with Bob Birchard. Part of that is the time - 9:30 am makes it by far the earliest event all week - but it’s also one of the few retrospectives, and worth taking note of. Birchard will present The Canadian, a silent later noted for its stark realism, and Trail of the Vigilantes, the description for which includes the words “oater,” “lawman,” “outlaws,” “comic,” “mysterious,” “hell-raiser,” “sidekick,” and (wait for it) “nymphomania.” This falls at the beginning of my busiest day, which will end well after midnight, but I’m pretty intent on making it.

Finally, there is a Secret Screening scheduled for November 6th at 9:30. I don’t have any insider knowledge, and my plan is still to attend Melancholia at 8:30 that evening instead, but...if I hear tell that it’s something irresistible, my plans may have to change.

Communists, Young Love, Bastards, and Hipsters

2011-11-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

Did I go too far in noting Communist ideology into my review of In Time? Only...time...will tell.

Moviegoers outside the multiplex aren't going to fare much better, I'm afraid - I was really looking forward to Like Crazy, and was sorely disappointed. It's not awful by any stretch; it's more that it keeps showing promise but on which it can't really follow through. Some nice moments here and there, but not enough connective tissue. Anyway, I wrote a whole damn review about it.

I don't know if I'll get around to writing about The Rum Diary or Hipsters, but suffice to say neither are particularly noteworthy. The Rum Diary is enjoyable enough for much of its running time, with sporadic bursts of wonderful inspiration, and it's great to see Depp subverting his relatively-for-him wholesome Disney image again, but it's a little too celebratory of its subject, Hunter S. Thompson (by way of fictional Paul Kemp). Michael Rispoli is magnificent.

As for Hipsters, well, it uses my least favorite convention - introducing us to this crazy group of characters through a totally bland protagonist - and its storytelling is pretty patchy. Great music, though.

To Havre and Have Not

2011-10-24T09:30:00.000-07:00

Just to clear up any confusion - I liked Ari Kaurismäki's Le Havre. I just didn't love it. It's a boldly theatrical film exploring rather minor emotional shifts, and is an absolute pleasure to watch in many regards. I just didn't think it all came together as successfully. In any event, my review is now up at Battleship Pretension.

The Skin I Live In (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

2011-10-18T18:38:00.000-07:00

The following review contains spoilers.

In the supplements on the Criterion edition of Harakiri (which I reviewed for Battleship Pretension (plug!)), screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto provides some insight into why his flashbacks are so effective, noting that "it isn't a flashback if it moves in the direction of the drama." Each of the flashbacks is "introduced" by an important dramatic turn or a new question. Also, there are people in each scene as clueless about the story Hashimoto is about to cut to as we are in the audience. Each time, we get a dramatic, emotional reason for diving into the past to illuminate the present.

And this is the key to what's missing in The Skin I Live In. Almodóvar begins with a fascinating set-up. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a brilliant surgeon researching a new type of artificial skin, which he's testing on a patient, Vera (Elena Anaya), who also seems to be his prisoner. Their relationship is intriguing, as Vera seems to want him desperately while Robert is constantly battling his own attraction towards her. The film's best image is classic Almodóvar - Robert spies on Vera through a camera, which he views on a plasma screen as big as his wall. Before long, a crook will break into their house and rape Vera, with strong implications that they used to have a relationship. She tosses out a line that feels revealing even before we know the context - "I've had enough of sex in the garden" (or something to that effect).

Even better, the answers to all of these questions are thematically satisfying, emotionally shattering, and quietly terrifying, but their presentation is so ham-handed and obvious, bereft of true dramatic impact and stuffed into a flashback that serves no structural purpose.

The key revelation is that Vera was once Vincente, a wayward, pill-addicted twenty-something who raped Robert's daughter, Norma, sending her spiraling into insanity and eventually killing herself. Upon hearing about the rape, Robert kidnapped Vincente and locked him in a dungeon, before performing on him a forced sex change (the result of which leaves him looking very similar to Robert's late wife, who ran away with her lover, was burned in a car crash, and eventually committed suicide) and keeping her prisoner for further experimentation. Which, by the way, is an awesome story, but even the best concept goes sour when mishandled.

The flashback itself is totally unmotivated. Robert and Vera have sex, and then each seems to dream, or at least reflect upon, about how they met. First, we see Robert's perspective of a wedding he and his daughter attended, and how he found his daughter lying in the garden unconscious, clearly the victim of rape. Then, Almodóvar cuts back to the present, gives us an isolated shot of Vera asleep, and fades back into that same night to show her perspective. But her flashback doesn't start there - it starts in Vincente's mother's vintage clothing store, in which Vincente and another woman work. We know right away, because of the principles of cinematic language, Vera has to be one of these two people. But then Vincente attends the wedding alone, and suddenly the whole movie opens up in front of us - Robert kidnapped Vincente and locked him in a dungeon, before performing a forced sex change on him and keeping her prisoner for further experimentation. And yes, I know I already typed that sentence, but only as a means of pointing out how redundant the film becomes, because the next ungodly amount of time is showing step-by-step how this is carried out, and the whole affair starts to feel a lot like the last few episodes of Lost - lots of answers without any emotional heft.

The key problem here is that all of the characters already know the whole story. We're kept in the dark because it's more surprising that way, but as a result, we're on a totally different trajectory than the characters. We don't get any time to truly appreciate Robert's struggle, because by the time we move back to the present, he's made up his mind - Vera goes free, and they're going to live together and have lots of creepy sex. Vera, despite her promises, eventually turns on him, killing Robert and Robert's mother/housekeeper. But her struggle, her chess game, is kept totally secret until a few seconds before that particular showdown.

So we can reflect on the earlier, more intriguing part of the movie, and apply the twist in order to gain some emotional resonance, but it's unnatural, unearned. We're being manipulated, saving the film's most intriguing element for a revelation that operates as a twist. But unlike the twists in Memento, Fight Club, Psycho, or any of the other classics of "gotcha!" cinema, it's not used to mirror the characters' emotional journeys. It's used cheaply, and elaborated on unnecessarily, when time could have been spent with the characters and what all this has meant to them. Instead, by the time we cut back to the present, everyone seems pretty content. Until suddenly they're not. Couldn't we have gotten a hint of Vera's plan? Wouldn't that have been more emotionally satisfying, never mind the heightened dramatic intrigue. Couldn't we get a moment of Robert wondering what kind of monster he has become, or maybe an indication that he believes he's earned his monstrosity after the tragedies that befell him? Or maybe he's too completely lost in his own obsession and madness to even think these things. We never know.

I'm left wondering just what this movie was trying to do, exactly. If it's yet another contemplation about how an urge for revenge manifests itself in worse acts than that which it's avenging, fine, but by the time we meet Robert, it's already clear that whatever he did to Vera was far worse than anything she could have done to him. Robert's plight remains distant, unknowable to us; he's a monster when we meet him, and the unfolding revelations only help us to understand, but never sympathize. Meanwhile, save for one glorious moment in which she discovers yoga, we never really see Vera for who she is until the final minutes of the film. The last scene, in which she reunites with her mother and the other girl in the shop, is similarly backwards - because of the events shown in the film, it makes narrative sense for Vera to reveal herself to the shopgirl first, but the true emotion should remain between Vera and her mother, and we're only given a slight hint of that.

The Hills Have Ides

2011-10-10T22:11:00.000-07:00

Among my observations that didn't quite fit into my review of The Ides of March, which is now up at Battleship Pretension:

-I loved, loved, loved the way the characters kept referring to life after campaign management, and starting a consulting firm, with the kind of tone people usually use to talk about retirement homes or death. Said so much about these people and their way of life.

-I knew instantly that Marisa Tomei played a reporter, not because I read/saw the played or read any review or really had much in the way of prior knowledge of the film. I knew she was a reporter because she wore glasses and had ruffled hair. Clooney, for all the subtlety he gets from performers, is in full-on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind mode when it comes to visualizing his characters.

-Speaking of Confessions, this makes two films in which Clooney has cast himself as the antagonist of sorts. I don't think it's a role for which he's particularly well suited, but since it's only really been twice now, it has felt like a breath of fresh air each time. So in other words, if he made a habit of this, I'd get sick of it fast, but since it's so spread out, it works quite nicely, and he's very good in the film.

-IMDB assures me that I have seen Jennifer Ehle in stuff before Contagion, but that was the first film in which I really noticed her, and between that and this, she's my new favorite actress. Does almost nothing but is so naturally wonderful it makes me wonder if I'm just missing the millions of tiny things she's doing.

-Max Minghella (a.k.a. Divya a.k.a. the Winklevii's friend in The Social Network) is a really good actor, but I wonder if he'll only ever work in movies about processes, i.e. he's uniquely suited to spouting exposition and portraying someone caught in the beginning of a success he always expected.

-I know it's cool to rag on her, but I still like Evan Rachel Wood. This isn't her strongest moment, but her character is also kind of ridiculous, and more than a little bit of a plot device. I can totally see the character working really well onstage, and a little bit broader, but the translation loses a lot by demanding subtlety.

It's an uneven film to be sure, yet I think it might be Clooney's best to date. Good Night, and Good Luck was a more unified work, perhaps, but it was also a lot simpler. With this, Clooney's actually making a film about something in us as people, and how that manifests itself in modern life.

Two for Blu

2011-10-04T22:26:00.000-07:00

Well, more of Blu as in Blu-Ray, but hey, that works too.

I recently had the chance to look at two recent releases from The Criterion Collection for the good folks at Battleship Pretension. I loved the hell out of Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage, even if I wish the special features were a little more...I don't know, special or something. On the flip side, I was a little ambivalent about Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins, but gained a greater appreciation for it after listening to Adrian Martin's commentary, which sadly stands as that disc's sole supplement. For the rest of my thoughts, click on the respective links. We've been getting a lot of readers, which is awesome, but very few comments, and we'd love to see more discussions start up!

You Can Count on Margaret

2011-10-02T15:04:00.000-07:00

Meant to post this on Friday, but if you live in New York or Los Angeles, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go see Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret this week. It was shot several years ago, but has been held up in editing and legal proceedings ever since. The result isn't perfect, but it's so, so, so good. Fox Searchlight is dumping it big time, but it's a damn good movie that deserves better. I don't know when or if it'll be hitting other cities, but if Fox updates their website or I hear about it opening elsewhere, I'll be sure to at least post it to Twitter. In the meantime, my full review is up at Battleship Pretension.

Oh, also, I'd recommend against seeing the trailer; it misrepresents the hell out of the movie, among other undesirable traits.

On Movie Stars and Hands in Jars

2011-09-24T15:28:00.000-07:00

The above image will START to explain the title of this post, anyway. Point is, I have two new reviews up at Battleship Pretension, and I have been remiss in sharing them. The first is of the amicable, if not exceptional, Moneyball by the might-be-great-someday director Bennett Miller. I found his Capote to be similarly bland, directionally, though he's now two-for-two in bringing out great performances from his leading men. Not a major accomplishment when dealing with Philip Seymour Hoffman (who also co-stars, rather ineffectually, in Moneyball), but Brad Pitt has a surprisingly uneven track record as a leading man. In fact, looking at it now, this is only the second time I thought he's actually given a truly great lead performance*, for reasons detailed in the linked review.

On the other end of the equation, I gushed for many, many words about The Criterion Collection's outstanding release of all of Jean Vigo's films, titled appropriately enough, The Complete Jean Vigo. As I said, my gushing knew no bounds there, so I will keep it necessarily bounded here. Other than to say if you've never seen Vigo's work, life's about to get a little sweeter.

*The first was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and you can just suck on it if that's not good enough for you. Or read my lengthier, more well-worded rational, here. Also, he was not the lead in Fight Club, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Seven, or probably any other movie about which you're ready to say "well, clearly you haven't seen..." though I welcome all attempts to the contrary.

The Help (dir. Tate Taylor)

2011-09-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

There has, unsurprisingly, been a lot of discussion surrounding The Help since its release. Movies about race tend to do that. There have been the usual claims that it's another movie about whitey saving the black folk (although the film makes great pains to not come across that way, and I really don't think it does). There have been issues of representation - are the black people too saintly or just saintly enough? And perhaps more importantly, there's been debate about whether making a comedy about mid-century race relations in Mississippi is a good idea at all.

All that is sort of besides the point to me. My big beef with the film - along with several smaller beefs - is that it doesn't give racism its due.

Now let me explain. Racists be crazy, we know that. But there has long existed a strand of institutionalized racism in this country, and when people use that term "institutionalized racism" they're not talking about the institution like the government's an institution. It's not as though someone laid down the law and all the white people kind of sit around saying "I know, this segregation's a bitch, but what'll you do?" It was an institution because nearly everyone was onboard with it. Undoubtedly there were some people who bowed to public pressure because they're trying to keep up appearances or wanted to fit in or hey life's hard enough as it is without doing the whole changing the world thing and sometimes you just want a decent meal and to keep the electricity on. But for the most part? That was an ugly scene, man. But The Help would have you believe that NO ONE in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s was totally down with the whole racism thing except for ONE PERSON, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard, playing somewhere in the key of Timothy Dalton in Hot Fuzz), who must have some sort of unimaginable power over the residents because she's managed to convince all of them to go along with this whole racism idea of hers. All except that damn feminist!

The story nominally centers around Skeeter (Emma Stone), a recent college grad who just landed a job as a journalist, in her quest to give voice to the long-suffering maids of Jackson, though she doesn't really have much of a story here herself. Her purpose is purely political - she's there to convince us we'd be just like that if we lived back then, and to assure the viewer that the filmmakers don't believe these racist things the characters are saying, because look here's this nice independent liberal woman who agrees with 2011 sensibilities and rolls her eyes at all this other silliness. Dramatically, her role is as the vehicle in which we travel to visit the maids - chiefly Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) - or the racists, or all the nice people who just can't wait for Skeeter to get the word out that black people are people too so that they can finally come out and say the same thing. It's as though, by the end, everyone suddenly woke up and said, "my goodness, the 1960s are here!"

There are other more objective, dramatic issues with the film. For instance, just to make sure Hilly isn't the only one we'll have, we're given Minny's abusive husband, who exists entirely offscreen, lest he take on the qualities of, y'know, a person. That'd be complicated. Then there's an extended, frequently referred to bit of quite literal bathroom humor that, were it a part of a Farrelly brothers film (and it would not be out of place), would earn derision from the very crowd who here celebrated it. But perhaps that's speculation on my part. Maybe what I meant to say is that it wasn't funny the first time, nor the nineteenth time the movie makes a joke about the same freaking incident. Don't these people have anything more important to talk about? There's also the scene in which Skeeter completely rips into her date, who despite being a bit of an ass, probably at least deserved the consideration of a conversation. And I'd appreciate this bit as a nice little character flaw on Skeeter's part - maybe she's a bit of a hothead? - if the film didn't leave a beat for the audience to cheer.

On the whole, the Tate Taylor's direction is an abomination that would make Stanley Kramer rise from the dead to join Paul Haggis in saying, "miiiiight wanna hold back a little there." Every opportunity for subtlety is completely glossed over - Hilly is absolute evil and Skeeter is absolute good. Pure and simple, and even the slightest suggestion otherwise would totally undermine what we're going for here, which is the oh-so-daring message that racism is bad. At least Kramer and Haggis had the guts to tackle the subject in their own time, and with characters that had some semblance of dimension. Taylor's direction is flat and uncompelling, barely a step above Judd Apatow aesthetically and near the bottom of the barrel emotionally. I know there are those out there for whom this created a grand emotional swell, but I simply can't get that worked up when the film can't give me an actual person to root for or against while actively denying the very real stakes that would have been present in this setting. It's no great victory defeating the concept of racism when that entire struggle is waged against a single person.

I swear the movie would have you believe Hilly invented racism, and as of 1960, was its sole proponent, so if we can just do away with her this whole misunderstanding would clear right up! Even her ancient mother (Sissy Spacek), who probably knew people who fought for the Confederacy, just adores the maids in that homespun racist sort of way (and the film urges us to laugh along with, and celebrate, a character who not too long ago had Minny fanning her with a newspaper, with absolutely no sense of irony about the whole thing). In one scene, one of Hilly's friends even tries to speak up on her own maid's behalf, and Hilly just keeps shutting her down like an abusive husband.

I don't have a problem with light, frilly entertainment, but I do think it's immoral and irresponsible to present something so complex, volatile, and still relevant so simply. The film's treatment of racism is too pat for a force that continues to drive at the way this country operates. It's a nice enough way to introduce a 7-year-old to the concept, I suppose, but no adult should accept the ideological undertones of the film. Sure, it makes mention of the KKK and of other people, somewhere over there, committing horrible acts based solely on the color of a person's skin, but the people in your neighborhood, the ones you go to church with? Oh, they'd never do that. Look at how nice they are! They might be a little curt, but that's only because life's stressful sometimes and they are so very Southern. But give them time, talk reasonably to them, and they'll understand. The film doesn't quite end on a note of "and none of that was ever a problem again!" but it seems to suggest it's only a few years down the line (just as soon as Mighty Liberal Skeeter puts a stake through Hilly's heart...or something).

Contagion (dir. Steven Soderbergh)

2011-09-18T00:06:00.000-07:00

This will be no great insight, particularly since I heard it from the man himself in an interview, but Steven Soderbergh has a distinct preoccupation with the process of various professions. Whether it be something as entertaining as the process of a heist in the Ocean's films, the process of raising your profile in the prostitution game in The Girlfriend Experience, or especially the process of a revolution in Che, Soderbergh loves examining skilled people at work.

So it was for that reason (not to mention my delicate stomach in exploring the inner workings of the human body) that I was delighted to discover that his movie about disease outbreak, Contagion, is more about the process of containing and eliminating a deadly virus than about exploiting its effects. Aside from a show-stopping moment for Gwyneth Paltrow and a few people with an awful lot of sweat, Soderbergh restricts his virus' outward damage to some discoloration and scar marks around the mouth. But the societal damage, of course, can be far deeper, from people exploiting widespread fear to others simply acting out of it. Contagion isn't about the panic that results from such an epidemic, but it does frequently acknowledge it, but Soderbergh knows that an empty airport can be as terrifying as a hectic mob. I fear that in doing so, however, many will be turned off by its resulting lack of urgency.

Many of the film's characters - CDC head Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishbourne), field doctor Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), researchers Ally (Jennifer Ehle) and David (Demetri Martin) - are the types who deal in this stuff every day. They might not know exactly what they have on their hands, but they know the parameters. Namely, that very little can be known immediately, that it takes a long time to develop a vaccine, that all their research can be thrown out in a single moment as a virus evolves, and that the loss of human life is inevitable. That this whole thing is a process. Thus, after the first act, the film is mostly about people waiting - waiting for clearance, waiting for lab results, waiting for a phone call, their turn in line, anything.

It should be boring, but it's not in the least. It helps that Scott Burns' script turns back to Matt Damon's grieving father for a more street-bound perspective, but perhaps I simply share Soderbergh's fascination with watching highly qualified people doing their job. I love the lively banter that neither over-explains nor undercuts, the petty squabbles (I could've spent a whole movie watching Winslet's Erin sparring with the Minnesota government to get even a basic operation going), and the small manipulations of power. Soderbergh has a very casual attitude towards corruption, which shows how innocently such transgressions can occur. Though the film is cloaked in many colors (Soderbergh's palette in his digital era has been decidedly lively), it's the shades of gray that are most fascinating here, which makes it all the more depressing when the film shows such absolute contempt towards Jude Law's blogger character from the start.

Other problems abound, but hardly detract from what the film had already achieved. Soderbergh certainly could've used another half-hour - 105 minutes to cover six months of story with at least six people who could be said to be main characters is a pretty thin stretch - and the last scene is a complete waste, especially after the outstanding shot that preceded it. This isn't going to go down as one of his towering works, or even one of the year's best, but it's a very, very good film from someone who knows his craft inside and out.

Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

2011-09-17T21:39:00.001-07:00

The other night I was watching The Long Goodbye, one of my very favorite Robert Altman movies (which would place it high in the running for favorites all around), and marveling, as one is wont to do during such an occasion, at just how freaking cool Elliott Gould is. But the thing is that neither Altman nor Gould call much attention to it; it's almost as if they don't even notice it. They're just doing their thing, and their thing happened to result in one of the coolest film characters in one of the coolest visions of Los Angeles.

And Drive wants to be that. It wants to be it so badly that it will stop at nothing until you bow before its absolute, unrelenting cool. Driver (Ryan Gosling) is so cool, because he has no name and doesn't really say much. He just looks at you, constantly thinking, in the words of Chili Palmer, "You're mine. I fuckin' own you." But unlike Chili, Gosling is constantly feeling one way or the other about it - or anyway, his director is.

I've only seen one other Refn film to date (Bronson), and I liked it an awful lot, but he's up to something very different here. There, he was crafting a cage from which his totally unbound star could express his every whim; here, he's doing the expressing for his terribly contained characters, but he's doing it sort of poorly, cheaply. He's doing it with quasi-deep-cut music cues and oh-so-elliptical editing tricks. I'm a staunch defender and admirer of movies that put their style first, but Refn is suggesting here a film that doesn't exist. I love his vision of Los Angeles, in no small part because it so closely aligns with my own (and of course it would take a foreigner to show the self-loathing Coasters the beauty of this fine city), but this sort of pace would suggest a man apart from his surroundings, but in actuality, Driver lives a pretty cool life, and seems pretty satisfied with it. The resulting conflict comes because he went looking for it, not that it found him.

The film's violence, which is remarkably pronounced, is also something of a mystery. I know Driver's supposed to be all mysterious and so forth, but what are we to make of his actions when he actively hunts down, and kills in the most brutal way possible, his enemies? Is Refn trying to say something about man's inescapably violent nature? Or is Driver himself a man of violence, and his little affectations - his choice of music, his manner of dress, his constant supply of toothpicks - are just barely restraining his true nature? These are questions not asked by the film, but by me, on the ride home, digging deep into a film that is content simply imitating prior modes of communicating such concepts.

The performances, sadly, follow suit, playing modes of characters rather than characters operating within modes. Most of the cast seemed hired for their aesthetic qualities (which, in a cast that includes Ron Perlman, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Carey Mulligan, and Christina Hendricks, are considerable), and were left at that. I am especially perplexed by the outcry for an Oscar nomination for Brooks, who, fine as ever, doesn't exactly bring any unexpected or exciting quality to his role of "mob boss."

I should say that I didn't outright hate Drive; I'm sympathetic to its general cause, stylistically, and especially the few instances in which it achieves the perfect nirvana it hopes to elicit throughout its running time. It has one of my favorite shots all year (a POV shot from Driver's perspective, looking through a window at Ron Perlman letting out a howl of a laugh while a middle-age woman looks on with something between contempt and boredom) There's an action scene at its center that is pretty fantastic, and by far the best extended sequence of the film, but then this isn't a film about action now is it. This is about crafting a specific mood, a certain vaguely detached vision of the seedier side of Los Angeles that has nothing new to say about detached visions nor Los Angeles. Nor crime. Nor, certainly, existentialism (and all the critics who throw that label around need to watch some serious amounts of Antonioni before they go too far with it). It's a film with nothing to say in search of a reason to be.

Traveling Through Time and Space From Beverly Hills

2011-09-12T19:16:00.000-07:00

Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker are fond of saying that the further you look back at cinema, the more you realize that everything you're attempting has already been done. And if you'd never found convincing evidence of this, one could hardly do better than "A Trip to the Moon, And Other Travels Through Time, Color, and Space," an event that took place last Tuesday evening at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

After all, they had 3D back then.

The program was hosted by Serge Bromberg, a French cinephile whose business it is to find as many rare films from the silent era as possible and restore them to their best. Not bad work if you can get it. Bromberg made for a tremendous host - not the most comfortable in front of crowds, but full of information, and more importantly, out of his mind excited to show us what he had. Even more surprising was that he played live accompaniment on the piano for all the films that required it. So yes, he was easily the classiest guy in the room.

Let me get this out of the way - I have now seen six 3D films from the 1900s. Three, from 1900, were very short - under 10 seconds - and were not originally exhibited theatrically, but rather through a sort of personal viewing device (I wish Bromberg had explained this a little further, as it was a little unclear, but apparently watching movies on a tiny screen isn't such a modern development either). One showed people strolling about a train station, another featured a young woman being awakened in the morning, and the final one...well, frankly, it looked like the beginning of an orgy. It only lasted about four seconds, but a man was approaching a bed from which two sets of women's legs could be seen kicking about, so you tell me.

The second set weren't 3D films precisely, but they did reveal that the same production techniques were used to conquer piracy even then (if not exactly the same sort of piracy).

See, Georges Melies made almost no money off of "A Trip to the Moon," even though nearly everyone saw it (the Avatar of its day, Bromberg said more than once). That's because nearly everyone who exhibited it was showing a duped version, or even a dupe of a dupe (of a dupe and so forth). Demand was too high to wait for Melies to make copies in France, and hey, it was cheaper that way. After that, he made his shorts by filming on two cameras simultaneously, and sending one print immediately to the United States while keeping another in France. But in doing so he also created the exact elements needed for stereoscopic 3D. So Bromberg and his team simply combined them digitally, and showed them to us in the now-common digital system.

Something, huh?

And no, for you purists out there, the 3D then wasn't remarkably better than live-action 3D now. It still has the same problem of appearing more as a series of layers, and not keeping up with movement very well (especially in the days of hand-cranked cameras). But it was pretty amazing to see 3D films from the turn of the century (and kind of weird to see a 3D film with damage marks).

Beyond that? I saw the saga of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a totally indescribable animated short, a butterfly hunter besieged by his targets, only to end up under their study, a very racist (but incredibly amusing) optical trick to create the illusion of gymnastics, and an acrobatic fly (to describe "The Acrobatic Fly" any further would be nearly impossible, and unconvincing - it really had to be seen to be comprehended, much less believed, so I've embedded it below). I saw a short in which a man seduces a woman on a train (which contained probably the best use of dissolve to show the passage of time this side of Buster Keaton's car traveling to the other side of town in Seven Chances), something of a peep show in which a woman gets nearly nude for a bath, and an actor (badly) pantomime opera. India came to life in glorious hand-tinted color.

Many of them, in fact, were in hand-tinted color (the process of which entailed a group of people - typically women - going in and painting individual frames of film by hand). The process obviously fell by the wayside with the advent of Technicolor (and Eastmancolor and all the rest), but the result is a totally unique view of the world.

The one I really want to call attention to is "A Trip Down Market Street," which was the first up and might have actually been my favorite of the evening. In San Francisco in April of 1906, two filmmakers were assigned to record a boxing match, which ended roughly twenty rounds before a typical match would. Instead of just bringing the extra film back, they hopped aboard a trolley, and filmed life as it passed in front of them. The film is essential several long, rarely broken tracking shots down a major city road at the turn of the century, and it was unbelievable. Admittedly, I'm fascinated by any documentary whose mission it is to simply show life as it happens, but who wouldn't want a window into city life then? Who wouldn't want to see cars interact with horse-drawn carriages and trollies and pedestrians (free from crosswalks, I might add) and bicycles? If rules of the road existed then, I'd need someone to explain them to me - people drove on the right side of the road, but that was about it. The print of the film was a wonder, and seeing it on the big screen (the screen at the Samuel Goldwyn theater is massive) was revelatory.

A lot was made of the fact that the film was shot no more than five days before the 1906 earthquake (a historian determined this by tracing the license plates on the cars, which were registered as late as March, 1906, then studying weather patterns to account for the puddles on the ground), which is certainly of interest, but this could have been shot five years before the quake or fifteen years after and it would be no less gripping.

The main event was, of course, the unveiling of "A Trip to the Moon" in color. We didn't quite make the North American premiere (that honor went to Telluride mere days prior), and certainly not the world premiere (it opened the Cannes Film Festival in May), but I'll take it.

"A Trip to the Moon," for those who have not yet had the pleasure, is completely insane in the best way possible. It's about a group of scientists who design and execute a giant gun to shoot a capsule containing them at the moon. It works, naturally. Once on the moon, they battle moon people, before pushing their capsule off the edge of a cliff and falling back to Earth. And because it's a silent movie (and hand-tinted color at that!), visuals are everything, so every plot point is communicated with enormous gestures (lending the scientists an element of the eccentric), scantily-clad women are there for some sort of technical support, all of the backgrounds are gorgeously painted, and the moon people do cartwheels, 'cause hey, why not.

But it's a treat, it really is, so much so that I stuck around for a second viewing following the restoration presentation. The first time they presented it with a new score by the band Air, which was...interesting...if not terribly fitting. Modern scores on silent films can really run the gamut. The Alloy orchestra ones are particularly snazzy, utilizing a definitively modern take on classical music while still crafting tunes that fit the era in which they're working. But the Air score was so out there, so bombastic, it felt more like it was trying to bring change the film to suit a modern audience, rather than a modern audience to suit the film. The second showing was delightfully narrated by Randy Haberkamp, the Academy's Director of Education, with Bromberg on accompaniment. I suspect the best version lies somewhere in between.

In terms of its visual splendor, the print looked spectacular. Anytime you hear the story behind a massive restoration (in a far-too-long presentation - it was interesting material, but much of it got repeated over the course of the 45-minute lecture), you come away with so much more appreciation of what's in front of you. And this one was a doozy.

Essentially, when they received the color print, it was totally unusable. The nitrate film had solidified to resemble more of a brittle glass, making it impossible to project or digitally scan. Never mind the condition of the individual frames. What followed its acquisition in 1999 was a two-and-a-half-year process in which Bromberg and his team stuck the film in a gas chamber and slowly peeled away at it, bit by bit, sometimes removing as much as three or four frames, other times coming away with only a fraction of one. They photographed those elements using the best digital cameras available at the time.

And then they waited. Mostly for technology to catch up to what they had on hand. And, of course, for money.

Finally, in 2010, funding came through from the Academy, and the long process of editing all of those elements together to create a new, playable print began. The files were not well catalogued - utilizing different file formats and unclear labeling systems - so they had to basically go through each picture and visually match it up with a black-and-white version of the same frame in context. If they only had pieces of the frame, they had to be lined up, the seams digitally erased. In the case of missing or totally unusable frames (in which the damage was too great to clean up), a black-and-white master was used and digitally colored, using a process that mimicked the original hand-painted color.

Before/after comparison. See more at the Academy's website.

As with any restoration, this information can be vital to appreciating what's in front of you, so the second viewing following the presentation was much appreciated.

While we were standing in line, waiting to get in, the guy in front of me said he couldn't believe so many people had come out for it, and frankly neither could I, but I remarked that it was kind of refreshing. As hardcore cinephiles we too often dismiss contemporary culture readily disposing of the past and moving onto the next big thing, but over one thousand people turned up that evening to watch a program of films that were all (save for one) over one hundred years old. And that wasn't half as staggering as the films themselves.

Winnie the Pooh (dir. Stephen J. Anderson, Don Hall)

2011-09-05T21:48:00.000-07:00

I am not a major attendee of the loosely-defined "family film." I see the Pixar flicks of course (even Cars 2, which was the most morally irresponsible film I've seen in some time), a handful of Dreamworks' output, but from there, all I go on are reviews and vibes. So when I say that Winnie the Pooh is the best family film of the year, and one of the best of the last few years, know that I'm not speaking with a great degree of authority, but that I also deeply love films that can truly be enjoyed by anyone of any age. Fantastic Mr. Fox was my favorite film of 2009 for a reason.

And Winnie the Pooh may well land in my top ten for this year. Its overwhelming genius is its delightfully underwhelming simplicity. It runs just barely over an hour, and even then has room to stretch its legs, sing a song, walk across the Hundred Acre Wood, and ponder the similarity between "issue" and "achoo" in certain accents. The plot is threadbare and of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, just as playtime should be - Pooh seeks a pot of honey, Eeyore has lost his tail, and the whole gang is greatly concerned about a monster lurking in the woods after Owl incorrectly reads a note left by Christopher Robin.

Much like Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, one could (and many have) read the cast of characters in Pooh to be different aspects of Christopher Robin's (or indeed any child's) personality and development. Pooh is the warm, content, and easily satisfied side, Piglet is eager to please, Owl is the know-it-all, Rabbit is fastidious and easily frustrated, and so on. Thus the characters are easily and quickly defined, even to someone like me who hasn't watched or read any Pooh-related material since childhood, and better still, are naturally flawed. Tigger may have boundless energy and optimism, but when he tries to reshape Eeyore in an attempt to imbue him with same, he can be a bit of a bully.

What is remarkable is that these characters are never, at least in the film, torn apart by their differences or sometimes aggressive personalities. They may scowl at Owl (rhyme!) for causing a panic over nothing, but they are constantly encouraging and supporting each other, both for the benefit of the group and because that seems to be their default attitude. There isn't any cynicism in Hundred Acre Wood, nor pettiness. There are no grudges held. Everyone is included in a given activity, because why wouldn't they be? This kind of casual optimism, the idea that people (or, you know, stuffed animals) naturally treat each other with the utmost kindness and respect, may be unrealistic, but it is a perfectly noble and worthy pursuit in a work of art. And it created in this viewer a rare, warm fuzzy feeling all too absent in theaters this or most other years.

There is one final aspect of the film that I have to touch on, and that is its use of language. For a film centered around a bear who, by his own admission, is rather flummoxed by quite a lot of words, Winnie the Pooh shares a concern with language not often found in films for audiences of any age. The characters speak eloquently, in their own way, and there are some misunderstandings and re-appropriations that would delight any enthusiast of the spoken word. It's witty and clever in an understated but no less rewarding fashion. Furthermore, the characters literally interact with the text of the story they're in (as narrated by John Cleese), to the point that their rescue at a crucial moment is aided by the letters themselves. From a simple aesthetic level, it's lovely and nicely creates a storybook feeling, and if one were so inclined, it opens up a number of wonderful interpretations about the importance of the written word in our culture.

But I'll leave it at that for now, save that I was really swept away by this film. The animation is at once clean and slightly rough around the edges - watercolor backgrounds and slight traces of pencil marks give it a personal, homespun touch (fitting for a film set in the woods) - and the voice cast is superb in regards both oratorical and musical. Unpretentious but surprisingly smart and clever, free of cynicism but not from honesty, it is not only the most rewarding family film I've seen in some time, but one of the more pleasurable encounters I've had with the cinema this year.

Chaos Cinema, Abstract Painting, and Sforzandos

2011-08-25T18:15:00.000-07:00

I should've seen the warning signs when I read the introduction at the otherwise stellar new blog, Press Play:

EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play is proud to premiere a new video essay by Los Angeles scholar and filmmaker Matthias Stork. His video essay, Chaos Cinema, should be a welcome sight to anyone who's ever turned away from a movie because of a director's shaky camera.

What's next, aim for people who turn away because of widescreen? Steadicam? Color? Sound? A good policy when publishing (or even reading) criticism is to stay away from something that promises up front to simply reaffirm a theory - not argue persuasively, provide deeper insight, or explore an issue. Just be a small comfort for those who think likewise.

I've linked to the essay in question above in case anyone wants to hear (or read) the prosecution's position, but here's a brief recap. In, "Rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths, and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial filmmaking." We understand that these are bad things because in his introduction, he praised such films as Hard Boiled, Die Hard, and Bullit for their "classical" style, noting that "the default style of commercial cinema was...meticulous and patient," and that "in the past decade, that bit of received wisdom went right out the window."

Leaving aside the idea that there is anything "classical" about Die Hard's form (the clip he uses to illustrate this point is hardly exemplary for restraint in cutting), has Stork even been going to the movies? The past decade has been loaded with films that employed this so-called "classical" style. A quick perusal of just the films I've seen in the last few years, I came up with Matrix films, Speed Racer, Kill Bill, Death Proof, Punisher: War Zone, The International, the Iron Man films, Captain America, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 2012, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 300, Knight and Day, the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Children of Men, Superman Returns, Avatar, and Tron: Legacy. Never mind brief flashes of action in such films as A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. These are films in which the primary goal is "keeping you the viewer well-oriented because they wanted to make sure you always knew where you were and what was happening," to use Stork's explanation of the style he prefers. Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men even used a extended tracking shots to ensure success in that area (of which Stork, in citing Hard Boiled's incredible achievement of doing the exact same thing, should be fond).

Okay, but let's pretend he didn't mean that whole business of "they don't make 'em like they used to!" and intended only to point out that a lot of movies are hard to follow, that cinema (a visual medium) should only be employed to communicate facts (this person does this, this person says this, etc.), and that any film that fails in this mission isn't worthwhile. To this end, he says, "Trying to orient yourself in the work of chaos cinema is like trying to find your way out of a maze, only to discover that your map has been replaced by a reproduction of a Jackson Pollock painting, except the only art here in the art of confusion." There are too many qualifiers here to possibly orient myself in this sentence ("no you guys, I know Jackson Pollock was important, don't worry!"), but essentially it's saying that all cinema has to be straightforward, linear, coherent, and literal (which instantly removes Terrence Malick, a favorite director of myself and Mr. Stork, from his own definition of what makes a good movie). And that Jackson Pollock should have buckled down and drawn maps, apparently.

No, honestly, I know what he's getting at here, but he also answered his own concern - Pollock wasn't trying to depict anything literal, instead creating works that produce emotional, visceral responses that come from the thrill of the abstract. How is that any different from Michael Bay's "explosive mixture of out-of-control editing, intrusive snatch-and-grab shots and a hyperactive camera" (I see we're also not fond of the Oxford comma), or the whole of Tony Scott's Domino and Neveldine/Taylor's Crank? Wasn't Pollock's whole point the release of control, and the invitation of the element of chaos into art?

Number 1 by Jackson Pollock

A frame from Bad Boys II by Michael Bay

Two frames from Domino by Tony Scott

I wrote a longer piece centering around Domino, but addressing what Stork terms "chaos cinema" in general, in a piece back in 2009. An excerpt (emphasis added now):

There's a fantastic featurette on the Domino DVD that deals solely with the visual style of the film. Basically, they used six hand-cranked cameras for all of the "manipulated" shots [those in which figures blurred, the contrast was cranked up, etc.]. All of those cameras were loaded with high-speed reversal film, which increases the grain and pumps the reds, greens, and yellows. They would crank the cameras forward and backward to get images to layer over each other, something shooting at different frame rates. The film would then be processed on machines not meant for that stock, and transferred at a high speed, creating streaking and trails. The ultimate goal was to create a texture you can touch, reach, and smell, and to let the mistakes that would happen with reverse-cranking inspire them. Thankfully, the DVD shows some of the dailies, which aren't so different from the final product, indicating relatively little postproduction work on the individual image.

It's fine if you reject Domino on narrative grounds or whatever similarly-ill-suited definition of cinema you employ, but I've never read a convincing argument against it artistically. And there are plenty who try, including Mr. Stork. Look at the frames above, or better yet, skip ahead to the 2:10 mark in the clip below (just after the helicopter crashes, and forgive the subtitles), and tell me if this at all seems like a movie that is worried about telling a straightforward, linear story and communicating its action clearly. Because that's not what I see. I see a full-on sensory assault dedicated to visual abstraction and the destruction of our notions of what cinema should be. Which seems like a pretty decent purpose for art to have (Lord knows that art lovers lose their shit whenever MOMA highlights a painter who did just that).

"A film is not about what it's about, but how it's about it." - Roger Ebert's famous maxim, though I remember reading he actually got it from someplace else.

I also don't know how Domino is even mentioned in the same breath as Paul Greengrass' work (which we'll get to in a minute). The two styles could not possibly be more dissimilar, or used to more different ends, though apparently "cutting a lot" is enough. By that measure, there's really nothing to distinguish Terrence Malick from Wes Anderson - according to the Cinematrics Database, they have comparable average shot lengths, so what's the difference, right? You could argue that Stork is only examining editing patterns, which is true, but he also dismisses the notion that they could ever be used for a purpose.

Unless, of course, the film wins an Oscar. And not one of those crummy "technical" ones.

Predictably, Stork excuses Kathryn Bigelow's work in The Hurt Locker, because that's the movie we're all supposed to line-up and appreciate, right? Never mind thinking about why we all love it so much and if those applications of style could possibly be used in other pictures. His mild-mannered shrug of an admission reveals the fallacy upon which his entire essay is based. He writes:

To be fair, the techniques of chaos cinema can be used intelligently and with a sense of purpose. Case in point: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. The film uses chaotic style pointedly and sparingly, to suggest the hyper-intensity of the characters' combat experience and the professional warrior's live-wire awareness of the lethal world that surrounds him. Bigelow immerses viewers in the protagonists' perspectives, yet equally grants them a detached point of view. The film achieves a perfect harmony of story, action, and viewer involvement.

So it's okay for Bielow to create a visceral piece "to suggest the hyper-intensity of the characters' combat experience and the professional warrior's live-wire awareness of the lethal world that surrounds him," but when Paul Greengrass uses that same style to immerse us in Jason Bourne's world, it's an abomination? The style isn't always used equally, to be fair (and he's right, Quantum of Solace is a mess), but if there is a marked difference between the way Greengrass employs it and the way Bigelow does, Stork doesn't find it. For him, it's simple - Greengrass is bad, Bigelow is good.

Watch the clip below, particularly the beginning. Here, Greengrass uses rapid-fire editing to follow Bourne (Matt Damon) as he searches for Nicky (Julia Stiles), both of them well aware that Desh (Joey Ansah) is trying to kill her. The shots of Nicky, while hardly up there with Bela Tarr (or even Alfoso Cuaron), are much more patient, quiet, and focused. For Bourne, it's all about what's in front of him, noticing every detail and fast as possible, and barreling forward. For Nicky, it's about keeping quiet and out of harm's way. Different approaches for different intentions, effectively contrasted to create tension.

As for the fistfight that follows, I've heard those complaints too, and all I'll say is that every shot is there to communicate what's happening in that scene. Feel free to go through it frame-by-frame and tell me I'm wrong, but I'll tell you right now, that's a road to nowhere my friends. Directors such as Greengrass (and, yes you bastards, Michael Bay) do assault you with their images, which are - wait for it - sometimes devoid of thematic import - but so did Stan Brakhage, and that worked out okay for him now didn't it. But while Greengrass used his assault to communicate unstoppable force (suitable for super-soldier Jason Bourne), Bay's set pieces are more like classical music, with crescendos, diminuendos, and certainly sforzandos.

Watch - and I mean really watch - the car chase from Bad Boys II. Watch the way Bay punctuates the smaller movements within the larger piece ("Now show 'em your badge!" denotes the transition into stationary firefight, which comes to an end when the track rams into the water tanks), maintains continuity of movement (staying in the cars' perspectives when taking the ramp out of the garage, creating a consistent downward spiral), and allows for an accident to create the perfect abstract expression of destruction (a cop car knocking over the camera, creating a crazy, split-second spiral). Once he's on the freeway, it's build, build, build, build, build, then the car flies over Martin Lawrence's head, followed by a brief respite, until the boat comes and the piece reaches its fiery conclusions. Movements. Crescendos. Pause. Builds. More crescendo. Finale.

"But such exceptions do not disprove the rule," Stork continues, in his line of don't-worry-I-liked-The-Hurt-Locker reasoning, "Most chaos cinema is indeed lazy, inexact, and largely devoid of beauty or judgment." Yes, absolutely. So is most cinema, of any kind, from any era. Stork front-loads his argument by citing movies everyone loves (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, Bullit) and comparing them against movies most people agree aren't very good (Quantum of Solace, the first Transformers film, Bad Boys II, Domino, Battle Los Angeles). Even when citing films with great action scenes (Inception, Shoot 'Em Up), Stork only points out the ones that don't work, and he refuses to acknowledge the idea that cinema could be used for pure expression or narrative abstraction. I take issue with his argument, certainly, but he could have at least made it well.

There are other points in his essay that I take issue with, but they're mostly nitpicks (I do wish he would have gone further into dialogue scenes, which are nearly an across-the-board abomination these days, and a subject into which I may dive in the coming weeks).

On his blog, he features a quote from Eric Rohmer that reads, "Every auteur possesses his own style, his own vision of the world, his own poetry," but I see little evidence here that he's ever thought about what that idea really means, and the infinite possibilities it reveals in cinema.

Criterion on Hulu: Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1961)

2011-08-22T21:48:00.000-07:00

I first saw Through a Glass Darkly in January of 2009. I was living in Boston at the time, and typical to that city in January, the temperature around 20 degrees in the afternoon. I had one of the worst colds of my life, and was running through Kleenex by the box. I don't know what compelled me on that day to watch this (much less make the extra trek home to go to the video store to acquire it), and while it did put me in the right psychological mindset to enter one of Ingmar Bergman's bleakest works, my familiarity with subtitled films made me forget the practical implications of having to read while my face was buried in tissues for half the running time. I thought it a solid addition to Bergman's filmography, the major works of which I was still working through at the time, but not as exceptional as Persona, Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander, etc.

But, hey, what better use for Criterion's Hulu channel than to dive deeper into a major work, and I believe Through a Glass Darkly is just that. The first thing I was taken by was just how watchable this is. Read enough about Bergman and you'll find that keeping the audience attuned and entertained was of foremost priority for him (even if his idea of "entertainment" was a little broader than most), and it really shows here. It's a short film - only 89 minutes - but a film about four people on an island could easily feel a lot longer in different hands. Taking place over the course of only 24 hours, the pacing is appropriate, giving us an insight into just how little time all four people have left together, and just how quickly that can come to an end.

While Bergman could always be counted on for a certain dourness, his collaborations with cinematographer Sven Nykvist (starting with The Virgin Spring, in 1960) took on a different tone than those with his previous cameraman, Gunnar Fischer. Whereas Fischer's images were marked by strong contrasts between white and black, Nykvist's work during Bergman's final monochrome years infused his work with the color (or tone, if you will) gray. Bergman's films don't explore the battle between good and evil as individual forces, but his years with Fischer were strong in symbolism and a sense that there is a moral order to the universe, if only we could find it. His work with Nykvist, particularly in the 1960s, questioned even that, and the overwhelming grayness not only conveyed Sweden's endless winters particularly effectively, but also the notion that there aren't strong forces of good or evil, and that this is all some form of purgatory.

No unhappy accident, then, that Through a Glass Darkly marked Bergman's first venture to the island of Fårö, which he liked for its particular gloominess. And indeed, if ever cinema gave us a place that God rejected, Fårö would be it. Desolate, rocky, perpetually on the cusp of storm, and seemingly uninhabitable (the film is set in the modern day, but the company still heats well water for baths and explore the nighttime by candlelight), Fårö has become my mental image of purgatory, if not Hell itself.

It is just off the shores of the island where we first meet Karin (Harriet Andersson), her brother Minus (Lars Passgård), their father David (Gunnar Björnstrand), and her husband Martin (Max von Sydow). Karin suffers, we soon learn, from schizophrenia, and has been going through one of her darker times as of late. Bergman's treatment of Karin and the her struggle with the disease is particularly noteworthy. First, he doesn't define it as such, though the symptoms are clear enough. By expressing the disease not as a medical concern (until the end, when unseen paramedics come to helicopter Karin to the hospital after a particularly nasty breakdown), but rather one of the mind and the soul, and not giving it a name, he allows for the possibility that Karin really has been given window into a deeper understanding of God and the nature of the universe. Or perhaps she has this ability, and her discovery is so overwhelming that it drives her insane. At any rate, Bergman approaches Karin compassionately, showing her breakdowns as an extension of herself, rather than a total transformation.

He also allows her to know she's ill, making her a character we can at once connect to and feel pity for, while still remaining distant enough to be terrified the actions her madness drives her to commit. We come to understand that she can lose complete control of herself because she has such a clear understanding of what happened immediately afterward. If madness isn't committing surprising, unforgivable acts (and Bergman is extremely daring in exploring these depths for his time), but being unable to stop yourself, I don't know what is.

And not nearly enough can be said for Andersson's performance, of which she said, "I was completely happy to play this sick person, to use my negative register and give it all in front of the camera to scream and race... At last I was out and up again!* Among people who embraced me - the more I yelled the more they embraced me... The cage was opened." She makes Karin endearing, terrifying, alluring, and tragic, quite often all at once. Bergman gets a bad rap for pushing his performers to histrionics, but those moments never feel unearned to me, and are part and parcel with his commitment to put all of his feeling onscreen. In performing scenes that could easily have seemed excessive with even a moment of hesitation, Andersson is unafraid to rip apart the seams of her character, just as Karin's mind is being eviscerated by the disease.

*Despite being a regular fixture in his work in the early 1950s, Andersson hadn't been in a Bergman film since Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955 (the same year she and Bergman ended their three-year romance), and had given birth to her first and only daughter not long before filming commenced on Through a Glass Darkly.

Through a Glass Darkly was a rare film that found almost immediate acclaim and has still withstood the test of time. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and was even nominated for Best Original Screenplay. It has since lived on as part of a poorly-defined trilogy (Winter Light and The Silence followed), a designation to which Bergman regrets giving credence, writing, "the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnaps-idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol, not always holding up when examined in the sober light of day." The films could said to all be exploring aspects of faith, but that classification hardly distinguishes them from many of Bergman's other films. And though he once declared that The Silence would be his final film about the nature of God, it would forever be an inescapable part of his career, and was intrinsically tied to Fanny and Alexander, his final film. Nevertheless, Through a Glass Darkly can only be bought on DVD as part of a box set with the other two films in the loose trilogy.

The HD transfer on Criterion's Hulu channel is marvelous, surpassing their DVD edition and practically a benchmark by which streaming video could be judged. The same day I watched this, I also caught Pale Flower on Hulu, and was disappointed by murky, blocky blacks and digital noise, none of which was the case here. It's a flawless representation of the film.

I cannot recommend Through a Glass Darkly highly enough. Years after his death and decades after his heyday, no filmmaker has accomplished what Bergman did so regularly onscreen. He gave us new ways of examining the nature of faith, and through that the nature of humanity. He was the rare filmmaker to approach the nature of God with complete seriousness, but no reverence, and the result examines a world in which God is present, but can never be known. Those who glimpse Him go mad as a result. It's a terrifying perspective on the spiritual universe, but invigorating in its intellectual and emotional rigor. Absolutely essential cinema.

A War That No One Can Win

2011-08-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

So I'm mostly onboard the Rise of the Planet of the Apes train. It's smart in how it goes about telling its story, does a good job of not randomly assigning antagonist roles to those who aren't deserving of them (though admittedly, Tom Felton does push things a little far), and its action scenes are surprisingly organic to a story that really doesn't call for them. The characters seem to make decisions of their own accord, not because the plot dictates it, and I'm quite fond of the relationship that builds between Will Rodman and his surrogate son, the ape Caesar (Andy Serkis), not because they build convincing chemistry - they do - but for how their relationship eventually crumbles.

What I'm not so hot on is the ending. As you may have guessed from the title (or the original film released in 1968), the world is going to be taken over by apes. It's going to happen. So how do you create appropriate sympathy for the simian dissidents in a film centered around their uprising without celebrating the fall of humanity? Even without the continuity-required ending, you couldn't exactly make a whole movie to make us feel sorry for super-intelligent apes only to have them gunned down in the end. Either way, you're going to create a feeling of unease.

Which is exactly what they should have done.

I finally saw the original Planet of the Apes the other day (a decade after my local comic shop guy told me I should be ashamed to walk into a comic book store and admit I'd never seen it), and while I obviously knew the ending going in (I had seen Spaceballs after all), I was struck by the note on which it ended. No music, just the wind and the ocean. Desolation. It could've been a moment out of Through a Glass Darkly (if not for, you know, the huge Statue of Liberty). And that's the exact right note to end that film on - a condemnation of the nuclear age in which the film was released, and it perfectly evokes Taylor's personal and philosophical isolation.

The tone wouldn't have been inappropriate in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, either. Instead we get a huge, swelling, triumphant score as the apes soar up into the heavens and survey the kingdom which will soon be theirs. And sure, you can say that it's just a summer film and most of the humans are bad guys anyway, but if you don't think Frida Pinto's going down with that plague or eventually with the fall of the human race, you're selling yourself a bill of goods my friend. What makes Planet of the Apes so effective is that, for as silly as it is (and it kind of is), it takes its story and moreover its purpose seriously. If you trivialize the fall of the human race as a component of popcorn entertainment, you're also trivializing the stakes of the film, thus leaving us without a reason to be invested. The Terminator films always toed this line nicely (haven't seen Salvation), building very entertaining films but never forgetting the enormity of what's at stake. The same could be said for the first Matrix.

Of course, those have the advantage of not needing our sympathy with our enemy, a push-pull that works well in the structure of the Apes franchise.

Like I said, I mostly dug the film, but the ending just reeked of a studio note or screenwriting textbook saying, "always send them out on a high note!" without any regard for the thematic significance of it.

Now I've Got My Magic Bus...

2011-08-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, I took went on the road for a little more than a week with two friends. It all seemed really romantic from the outset, and all in all, I still had a great time and it's one of those life experiences I wouldn't trade for anything, but the day-to-day drudgery of constant driving, inconsistent bathing, and crammed quarters sort of took its toll on me, so while I'm sure one day I'll make a similar venture, today is not that day. But I still do have a great fondness for life on the road, and more than a passing interest in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, so it came as little surprise than I quite liked Magic Trip, which I reviewed for Battleship Pretension.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (dir. Glenn Ficarra, John Requa)

2011-08-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

I don't typically nitpick such minor, superficial issues, but let's start with the title Crazy, Stupid, Love. I am not entirely whether or not to use two periods at the end of that sentence, or merely one, because the title does, in fact, include a period at the end (and two commas, which is another grammatical nightmare altogether). Why? Who's to say. It's cute and catchy I guess. But it's also totally phony, contrived, and meaningless. Much, and here's where we get into the meat of it, like the film itself.

Steve Carrell plays Cal, whose wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), has just told him she wants a divorce. I'll commend directors Glenn Ficarra & John Requa and screenwriter Dan Fogelman for this - they set up the characters and the stakes quickly, and with ease. Back at home, Cal and Emily's kids are under the watchful eye of their babysitter (Analeigh Tipton), on whom their son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) has a crush. On the other end of town, Jacob (Ryan Gosling), your standard-issue ladies' man/womanizer, is trying to pick up Hannah (Emma Stone), who's about to pass the bar exam and, at first, is having none of it (don't worry, she'll come around - the trailer, and common sense, assures us of this).

Cal takes the impending divorce hard, but plays ball - rather than confront the horrible reality, he retreats, accepts Emily's terms unconditionally, and promptly moves out. Drowning his sorrows at the local bar (which, despite Cal stating he's never been in before, seems to be the only bar in town), he meets Jacob, who for no reason in particular decides to take him under his wing and teach him the tricks of the trade. Cal makes a pretty good player at Jacob's game, but is unsatisfied because his soul mate (and yes, the film uses this term many, many times) is still his wife.

But the film is emotionally dishonest long before the talk of soul mates crops up. I don't ask for realism in my cinema, but this is clearly a film about the world we live in today and is aiming for a certain emotional resonance that, say, Bringing Up Baby wasn't all that concerned with. And yet there are so few instances that portray true human behavior, or even a heightened version of same. For example, Cal meets Jacob after the latter calls him over to his table and instantly launches into a whole speech about how he's going to give Cal a makeover. There are a million ways for these two people to meet (the trailer contains a much more believable one), yet Fogelman went the route that would almost certainly result in Jacob and Cal going home together. And not to try on clothes. Or, you know, maybe.

Then there's the matter of Marisa Tomei, who plays a schoolteacher Cal picks up and promptly forgets about, and who later turns out to be his son's English teacher. But rather than act like a sensible adult who could have conceivably taught children anything for more than a few minutes, Tomei (an actress deserving of so much better) goes absolutely batshit insane when she runs into him again at parent/teacher night.

And then there's the matter of every single scene with Robbie, not a single one of which represents any truth about adolescence. Robbie is completely certain of himself and his place in this world - his parents will get back together, because he really wants them to. The man his mom slept with (a suitably, but not excessively, sleazy Kevin Bacon) must be a horrible person, because he slept with his mom (though thankfully, the film does put some of the onus on Emily for this). Robbie even tells him so, something 13-year-olds do all the time, I'm sure. Robbie knows he will someday be with his 17-year-old babysitter (he's 13), it's just a matter of changing her mind. At the end of the film, he vows to never give up in this pursuit, in spite of the fact that she has told him to shove it a half-dozen times. This conflict is introduced by him telling her he thinks about her while masturbating. In the version of this story that bears any relationship with reality, this is called stalking, and Robbie would have a good talking-to, if not several sessions of therapy. In the film, this is the sweetest thing in the world and she gives him some naked photos of herself to tide him over.

Oh yeah, they go there. And it'd almost be a cool, subversive move if the film didn't present it like they just exchanged promise rings.

I could go on and on, but in all fairness, there is one scene that lands and feels true - Jacob and Hannah eventually get together, and share one of the finer getting-to-know-you montages I've seen. It's nice, it's sweet, and Gosling and Stone lend a lot to make this scene credible. But that's it, man. The rest is truly awful, repugnant stuff, both from a storytelling perspective (a third act "twist" revealing a relationship between a few of the characters is needlessly obscured; a declaration of love given to a crowd there to see something else entirely, which, yes, ends in applause) and a moral one.

If you're onboard with the concept of a soul mate, then hey, more power to you. It's not my bag, but neither are a lot of things people believe in this crazy world of ours. My thing is that it's not terribly cinematic, and it's bad enough that our action movies are overrun by the concept of destiny and fate and being the chosen one and now our romantic comedies are too? Screw that. Give me a movie about two people who just like being together, who function well together as a couple, and are in love (again, may I point to Friends With Benefits). If the film declares at any point that anyone is anyone else's soul mate, then it's totally removed the power of choice, and aren't stories supposed to be about people making choices, not fulfilling predetermined destinies? And maybe this is all a little bit heady for the film, but if the film can't handle this, it shouldn't bring it up. And again, it uses this concept to justify near-sociopathic behavior, which is sort of the great failing of many a romantic comedy.

As for the "comedy" part of that, the film earned two honest laughs from me. The audience seemed to enjoy the rest, but I knew within minutes that this was a bad film, and was never presented with any evidence to the contrary. The Gosling/Stone getting-to-know-you bit comes really late in the film, far too late to affect the outcome or save us from anything. With a cast as strong as this, it's tempting to call Crazy, Stupid, Love. an earnest failure or a missed opportunity, but at no point during the running time did I feel like the film was on the right track. To make a good film from this would require it to be an entirely different film.

Me and the Cap'n, Makin' it Happen

2011-07-31T14:06:00.000-07:00

What a week, what a week, what a week. What a month, really. Without going into the boring details, the last two weekends were consumed with non-moviegoing commitments, but I'm making up for it in earnest. Reviews are forthcoming of the films I saw yesterday (which ran the gamut from awful to pretty good, so it wasn't exactly a banner day), but in the meantime, I have reviews for A Little Help, Captain America, and Cowboys & Aliens posted at Battleship Pretension. I wish I could recommend any of them in earnest, but at best they offer small pleasures and a certain earnestness that can be charming at times.

Had I more time or sufficient enthusiasm, I'd have had a piece about Attack the Block up weeks ago. I loved the film, don't get me wrong, but given the assault on the Internet the film has committed since its debut at SXSW, another review saying it's a near-perfect genre film and one of the most entertaining pictures of the year seemed unnecessary. Just know that if you're looking for the best summer entertainment for your buck and have the good fortune of living in a town in which it's playing, look no further.

Criterion on Hulu: The Devil and Daniel Webster

2011-07-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

I had the good fortune of seeing The Devil and Daniel Webster for the first time this week. I resisted watching this movie for a long time, and eventually came around to it almost out of obligation - first, because of its place in the Criterion Collection, and second, once a movie gets mentioned by enough people whose tastes you admire, its place in the cannon rises considerably. The classic story of a man, (here, Jabez Stone, played by James Craig) who sells his soul to the devil (portrayed by Walter Huston) for fame and fortune but eventually finds despair never much appealed to me, for reasons I'll get into later, but...wow...I'm glad I took the plunge on this one.

The Devil and Daniel Webster had a wild ride from its initial success - critically, though not commercially - to near-obscurity. It was originally released under the title All That Money Can Buy not only to remove the word "devil" (which didn't play well in the South), but also to distinguish itself from The Devil and Miss Jones, which had been released that same year (and is one I highly recommend). Over the next ten years it was known by several names, from Mr. Scratch to A Certain Mr. Scratch to Here is a Man. One could have missed its running at a local theater and never known it. In 1952, it landed on a semi-permanent name through a re-release that removed over twenty minutes and several key scenes. Daniel and the Devil reportedly shrunk both the Devil and Daniel Webster's roles in the film, and nearly decimated the film's most striking tonal achievements. That version was thought to be the only one in existence until 1990, when a full-length 16mm print was discovered, which has since become the basis for future releases.

Though The Devil and Daniel Webster seemed a near-afterthought for its studio, RKO, in the years following its release, the opposite could not possibly have been more true during its production. The cinema of the 1930s, with the invention of sound, was characterized largely by people in rooms talking, and it would take a decade before filmmakers were able to capitalize on the visual freedoms their silent counterparts had enjoyed, and it took directors such as William Dieterle to do it. With The Devil and Daniel Webster, I would Dieterle did as much for sound film as Orson Welles had the same year (and at the same studio) with Citizen Kane. In parts, the editing (under the guidance of Robert Wise, also fresh off Kane), is shockingly aggressive and experimental, giving us a visceral window into Jabez's uneven hold on reality, sanity, reason, and his very soul. Other times, Dieterle is wonderfully patient, allowing tension to build within a space while his camera simply takes it all in. Meanwhile, Bernard Hermann's Academy Award-winning score (his only Oscar, competing against his own work in Kane no less) dances along, itself teetering on the brink of insanity and the edge of damnation. The whole film is remarkably free-wheeling cinema that seems to be the successor of the silent era (especially in abandoning reality in favor of symbolism and fantasy) while still capitalizing on sound's innovations.

But what I like best about the film is how it treats Jabez's plight. The classic Faustian set-up runs one of two ways. One is that the Devil tricks the protagonist into a raw deal, wherein your success comes only at a great cost to someone you love, or something along those lines. The original short story upon which the film is based takes the second tact - Jabez's only plight is that eventually the Devil comes to collect. In the intervening time, he only gets more successful and more popular. That whole time is pretty much skimmed over as "and things went well." Both of these scenarios let the audience off the hook. We can recognize some sort of basic moral, but in the end simply say, "well, if the Devil ever came to MY door, I'd turn him away (but good thing that will never happen)."

In this film, it's a different story altogether. While Jabez initially takes joy in his prosperity, and has no hesitation in sharing it with others, he soon gives over completely into a materialistic lifestyle, giving no regard to those who used to be his friends. When the Devil sends a temptress (played by the ever-captivating Simone Simon), he wastes little time before making her his mistress. His deal with the Devil plays out exactly as planned, and everything bad that happens from there on out is entirely his doing. And so the classic deal with the Devil story becomes something more than a cautionary religious tale - it becomes a tale of one's moral responsibility as a member of a society. Sure, it leans a little heavy on the idea that riches spoil a man, but it still allows for the possibility that good could have come of his wealth, if only he hadn't allowed his good fortune to give way to greed. All of the conflict of the story is rooted firmly in Jabez, and his moral weakness, so rather than the audience saying "oh, that darned Devil," we can see something of ourselves in that, something of the world around us, in which the wealthy do everything they can to keep the money on their side of the table.

It's a much more interesting take on the Faust tale, made all the better by Dieterle's supreme command of his craft. I've yet to see the film on Criterion's DVD, but the monochrome HD transfer on Criterion's Hulu channel is magnificent. The black levels, perhaps, are not as deep and abyss-y as one would like in certain shots, and there are some digital artifacts (compressions, etc.), but most of the time it felt a lot like watching an actual print. I was amazed to find out that a 16mm print has provided the basis for parts of this film (a better, 35mm version of the short version was used where possible, and the splicing between the two versions might account for the varying quality). It's as beautiful and clean a black-and-white presentation of such an old film (70 this year!) as I've seen from a streaming service.

The audio fares a little worse - there's a constant hiss throughout - but the dialogue is clear and Bernard Hermann's score is thundering. I eventually had to turn it down to spare the neighbors, but I loved soaking in the noise.

This is a different sort of thing that I really love from Criterion's Hulu channel. It presents an upgrade of one of their classic titles (the DVD was released in 2003), free perhaps from the bells and whistles of a Blu-Ray perhaps, but no less satisfying. I don't know if the HD presentation indicates a future Blu-Ray release, but for now, it's great to have available.

Netflix - The Best Barely Acceptable Way to Rent Movies

2011-07-12T21:11:00.000-07:00

Ahhhhh...those were the days.

In case you haven't heard, Netflix has completely changed their pricing structure, and unless you were already on the streaming-only bandwagon, you will have to pay more for what you currently get. That's the way of the world. Eventually things get more expensive. Netflix, naturally, is trying to spin it as their "cheapest option ever," and while, yes, $7.99/month is the cheapest they've ever made an unlimited disc rental plan, the fact still remains that last week you could pay $9.99 and get all that with unlimited streaming. If you sign up today, that same plan will cost you $15.98.

And again, I say, that is the way of the world. Inevitably, Netflix was going to have to raise their prices. Streaming is way too lucrative for studios to not ask Netflix for more money, so on one hand, saying this is a huge greedy pull on Netflix's part is some form of ignorance, willful or otherwise. I do think there is some truth to the cries of "greed" in HOW Netflix chose to raise their prices.

For the past 18+ months, Netflix has made it very clear that streaming is the future. They've so buried the fact that they're a DVD rental company that, even now, there is a question in their "how it works" section that reads, "Can I get DVDs by mail from Netflix?" It's in their "Other" section.

And this is where we start of have problems.

There's very little that's wrong with their instant streaming plans. They offer an enormous selection for a very reasonable price, and it just keeps getting better. Next year, they'll have an original TV series, House of Cards, produced by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey. Even if they bump it up to $9.99 by then (and I expect they will), it'll still be an unbelievable value for those of us who remember the dark days of spending $3-$4 per disc every time we wanted to rent a movie. Now I can barrel through a season of television over a weekend, or school myself on some classic silent cinema in a couple of nights. It's all right there.

But in the wake of this, Netflix's quality of service in their DVD (and especially their Blu-Ray department) has completely shit the bed, and they seem content (sometimes intent) on shutting down their DVD division, which would save them boatloads of money (think of the facilities and people they'd no longer have to pay for!). I would have no problem paying $15.98/month for streaming and discs if I was actually able to rent the movies I wanted to rent. The problem is, they're asking us to pay more for an increasingly dwindling service.

I resisted Netflix for a long time, and for a lot of reasons, finally signed up in September of 2007. The biggest one is that they had everything. I had recently started diving into the classics of foreign cinema, and their selection was overwhelming. And I adored and defended and celebrated their service vigorously over the last three years. When I like what I'm getting, I make sure people know about it. And equally, when that service declines, I have no problem turning right around on it.

The past year with Netflix has blown. They added an extra charge for Blu-Ray use - fine - but then stopped carrying many new Blu-Rays, especially of classic films. First the Criterion Collection got thrown under the bus, then I found I couldn't rent Bridge on the River Kwai, Fantasia, and many other great, classic titles being released in premium editions. They also started removing DVD titles from circulation altogether. The Tenant, avant-garde film collections, even Droopy cartoons for God's sake!

I've been slowly finding a way to break up with Netflix, and that started with a free trial to Blockbuster online, which doesn't have a perfect selection, but is light years ahead of where Netflix is now. So far I've rented Fantasia, Shock Corridor, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Blow Out, Amarcord, Insignificance, and People on Sunday. All on Blu-Ray. None of them were available on Netflix. And these are all very recent releases. I fully intended to cancel my subscription, as their base price of $11.99 was a little more than I could swing, and they instantly offered me the same plan at $8.99. Sold. No questions asked. I'm in the process of porting over my queue from Netflix, and have encountered very few instances in which I've had to let something go. I've encountered far instances in which I've been able to add discs I never had with Netflix.

And while I'm keeping Netflix for streaming purposes, I've also added Hulu Plus in as well, and I cannot recommend this highly enough. As an alternative to cable, it's been a dream, and with the addition of The Criterion Collection to their service, it's been like a jukebox of classic cinema - all my favorite hits, plus many I never would have discovered otherwise.

We live in a paradise for film fans these days, but only if there are services available to enable it. Blu-Ray offers far and away the best quality available, but Netflix seems content with delivering the lowest. And for those of us with the set-up and the passion for cinema, that's simply unacceptable. That they are now charging even more for a service that seems determined to only get worse is the final insult. I'm canceling my DVD plan with them (which I'm sure has been their plan all along...eventually so many people will cancel that they'll be able to shut down their DVD division under the guise of "insufficient consumer support"). I've said it before - I'd gladly pay $20 for one service that gives me everything (by which I mean a sizeable streaming option and every disc on the market), and I think a lot of other people would, too.

The latest move by Netflix doesn't surprise me in the least after seeing their service circle the drain for the last year. I am somewhat surprised that they think this is a viable business option. Streaming is the future - for now - but we've seen what happens when other companies put all their eggs in one basket. I'm especially thinking of Blockbuster's in-store service, which dispensed with classic movies in favor of nine hundred copies of whatever was new that week, which made a lot of sense for a long time. Until suddenly it didn't.

Admittedly, yes, I should cancel my streaming service in protest. Unfortunately, I'm too poor to seek another option. Trust me, if I could afford to shell out to rent movies as often as I stream them, I'd be gone in a heartbeat. But until then, my constantly fluctuating viewing requirements have created a need for Netflix Instant. And that's just the way they want it.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (dir. Michael Bay)

2011-07-09T22:07:00.000-07:00

There are no words to describe how awesome that scene is.

So far no one has taken me to task for my very positive review of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. I take that as a sign that either I've so convincingly made my case that every reader has stood there and said "my God, man, how can anyone challenge such reasoning," or no one's plowed through the 1,600-word behemoth (if it helps my cinephile cred, my piece on The Tree of Life was longer, and I once wrote a 10-page paper on Pierrot le Fou...and I LIKED IT). Naturally, I'm choosing to believe the former, though my heart is certain it's the latter.

But enough about me. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a pretty great li'l flick by one of the most interesting mainstream directors working today. Here's how my review starts...

The auteur theory was developed nearly sixty years ago (feeling old yet, Andrew Sarris? HUH?), and yet critics still seem intent on reviewing films as though they were novels or plays, almost totally ignoring or marginalizing the work of the film's supposed author. I'm sure there are reasonable people out there who can acutely dismantle a Michael Bay film on its own terms, but by and large, every review of his career has reflected the same old tired "Bay doesn't understand plot or character argument, which are only valid complaints when Bay is making a film that concerns those elements (hello, Pearl Harbor). Bay's best films (The Rock, Bad Boys II, now Dark of the Moon) approach storytelling differently, starting by taking a page from Hitchcock's method in North by Northwest (oh, I'm going there) - build a plot around action sequences, rather than the other way around. And here, he's chosen to populate his world not with likable characters just tryin' to do some good in this crazy world of ours or people driven to success with a dark side that will undo them (you know, like good little movies do), but with cartoonish, oversized, near-sociopathic assholes.

And there's a good taste of what you're getting yourself into in my review, up now at Battleship Pretension.

Larry Crowne (dir. Tom Hanks)

2011-07-06T19:38:00.000-07:00

How could anyone hate Larry Crowne? I ask this in spite of the dismal reviews the film has been receiving thus far, and if you don't like it, that's fine. That's your prerogative. It's certainly not a perfect movie - the "romantic comedy" aspect is such a massive afterthought, and the decision to suddenly make that the absolute focal point in act three is a strange one - but it's one of such generosity of spirit and modest ambitions that seeking is destruction seems like a display of excessive force.

Read the rest at Battleship Pretension!

Green Lantern (dir. Martin Campbell)

2011-06-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

You may be surprised to learn this based on the reviews thus far, but Green Lantern is not the worst thing that's ever happened. It's not very good, either, but...come now people.

In particular, I'm sort of surprised that Thor, which had many of the same problems (often-unconvincing special effects, poor storytelling with almost no logic present ever, a terrible romantic subplot), got a huge pass from critics while this got absolutely trounced. I guess some bloated CGI diversions are acceptable, while others are not.

I even sort of liked Green Lantern in parts. Ryan Reynolds is certainly very good as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern, the action, though sadly not as frequent as one would like, is top-notch, and the special effects are actually kind of wonderful. It helps that most of them are supposed to look fake (the power of the Green Lantern is, after all, creating objects out of light, which is exactly what CGI is), but I digress. The biggest thing the film has going for it is absolutely Reynolds, who grounds a film that otherwise is desperate to run away with him in tow. The screenplay is, indeed, a complete mess, the exact result people are desperate for when they bemoan the idea of more than one person writing a film, and the second act in particular is so scattershot, and so frequently unmotivated, that the heavier beats didn't land at all. Peter Sarsgaard plays the film's villain (well, one of them anyway), Hector Hammond, and although his performance is delightfully silly, the film takes his arc waaayyy too seriously, and takes it into some dark territory that is totally ill-fitting with the rather light tone of Hal Jordan's journey.

The other villain is Parallax, which, without rehashing too much of the film's convoluted backstory, is essentially an entity that feeds on fear, and the source of Hal's final confrontation. And this scene in particular gets everything right about the big summer superhero movie. I mean, their battle ends in space. Next to the sun. There are no two ways around that - that is awesome. Really, my chief problem with the film is that there isn't enough that. Green Lantern, as a character, is built for cinema - constructs that appear at the speed of thought aren't nearly as compelling on the comic book page, so every second it can revel in the joy of that creation is a second well spent.

Of course, it would help if the other seconds strung together at all. The prevailing theory is that this was cut down from a much longer cut, and that wouldn't surprise me in the least. There is a LOT of exposition packed into a 105-minute film, and in the process, they've unsurprisingly decided to load up on information-loaded speeches and cut down on character development. Hal is not only the best-formed character in the cast, he's the only one who comes across like a fully-formed person. And I'm fine with stock, one-dimensional characters in big bright CGI movies, but whereas something like Speed Racer embraced its silliness head-on, this is trying to present an actual story with actual people, and it just doesn't fly. So to speak.

Warner Brothers has said they want to replace their nearly-completed Harry Potter franchise with an emphasis on DC superheroes, which is a smart and very overdue move. But they need to realize what made the Potter franchise so successful - strong characters in fantastic situations. The DC characters are sort of famously simple, with much of the nuance added to them decades after their creation, but they still have decades upon which to draw. I hope after this, they use that history to its fullest.

Criterion on Hulu: The Circus (Charlie Chaplin, 1928)

2011-06-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

Hey, welcome to the weekly column digging into the offerings on the Criterion Collection's Hulu Plus Channel. This week, we'll look at Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, which represents a sort of in-between mark of Criterion licensing. When Criterion hinted over a year and a half ago that they'd be putting out new editions of Chaplin's films, there was (rightfully) a lot of celebration. The old MK2 DVDs were serviceable - they sported fine transfers for their time, and included a bounty of extras. But few are able to match what Criterion does, and this was a near-guarantee of seeing these films in high definition.

Among the first offerings by Criterion on Hulu were several Chaplin films - The Great Dictator, Modern Times, A Woman in Paris, City Lights, and The Circus among them - but only Modern Times used a new HD transfer. The rest were sourced from the MK2 discs (I've tried contacting Criterion to see if they plan on updating those files as they create new transfers, but received no response). And while those transfers were serviceable on DVD back in the day, they're pushing it on streaming.

But first, let's dive into the film itself.

The Circus begins with one of Chaplin's finest, most lyrical images - a girl standing on the suspended rings, swinging back and forth as music plays and the credits roll. It's an arresting image to begin on, and it hints at the emotional current of the picture to come. The girls eye project longing for a better future and sadness at her present situation, in which she's stuck swinging back and forth. Though in many ways, this image would be better suited to the Tramp (as much as he advances, he's doomed to regress), having him up there would be more silly than touching.

Chaplin's famous character enters the film as he usually does - out of work, conniving for scraps of food. He'll soon (it's only a 71-minute film after all!) land work in the circus as a performer, though he won't know it. He's instead hired as a prop man and, because he can't help but wreck the whole show, the audience loves him. Chaplin's great victory with the Tramp over his many years is toeing the line between gaining audience sympathy while still letting us laugh at his misadventures, and this film presents that wrought large. The gags absolutely land. Chaplin starts big with a police foot chase that's as clever as anything he's done in how characters intersect, part, reappear, transfer props, and so on over the course of the chase (and as a side note, these are exactly the kind of things that classic comedy junkies like me mourn the loss over in the rise of Apatow). Physical comedy gets a bad rap these days, both by its viewers and those who utilize it most, but in a visual medium, there are few things as satisfying as a well-executed, physically-driven joke. But it also obeys the primary rule of cinema (which itself is most chiefly trotted out by people who don't understand what it means) - show, don't tell. Character and philosophy are revealed through action, not speeches.

Those who prefer Buster Keaton over Chaplin tend to note that the former's philosophical angle is more interesting, that he specializes in characters whose lives are determined and redirected by forces greater than their own (the train in The General, the storm in Steamboat Bill, Jr.). But I've rarely found that Chaplin, for all his emotion, engages with any more forceful in terms of fate vs. free will. Looks at Modern Times, City Lights, even The Kid - his films are a little more sentimental than Keaton's, sure, but any major gains he eventually encounters are as much, if not more, due to luck, circumstance, and fate rather than his own personal determination. All of the Tramp's success in The Circus is a direct result of an accident or misunderstanding. He gets the job at the circus after being chased in there by a policeman and subsequently wrecking the show. His continued success there is buoyed by the girl (the same one from the film's opening shot) who he loves, and he mistakenly believes love him, too. Perhaps it is because of this bedrock that the film's conclusion feels so false, so forced.

After getting kicked out of the circus, the Tramp goes back to his hobo ways. He is soon joined by the girl, who declares her determination to stick it out with him. The Tramp, realizing that, although this is his dream, he really has no means by which to provide for her. So instead he rushes back to the circus, begging her tightrope-walking former boyfriend to marry her, so that he may give her the life the Tramp cannot. The tightrope walker accepts, proposes to the girl, and they go on to live happily ever after. The girl returns to the circus, but insists that her father, the circus manager, takes the Tramp back into his employ as well. The manager begrudgingly agrees, telling the Tramp to get on the last car as the caravan moves out. The Tramp waits for the cars to pass, and then simply walks off into the distance.

For a movie all about accidents and fate, the ending of The Circus feels too heroic. The grand gesture doesn't feel earned. It doesn't negate the film as a whole, but perhaps the emotion wasn't built into the film early on, perhaps the Tramp wasn't as well-developed this time out; I'm not sure. It simply feels forced, an ending crammed into a story that cannot support it. A slight misstep at the end hardly undoes Chaplin's many achievements here, though. The Circus remains a pretty great motion picture.

The transfer on Hulu, which is advertised as being in HD, varies wildly. Sometimes it absolutely delivers, but too often it settles for low-level DVD quality. This is certainly due to the using the MK2 source rather than a new one (the film opens with their logo), so I'm very much looking to what Criterion does with it if and when they put it out on DVD and Blu-Ray. I don't mind a digital presentation of a film looking rough, so long as it still looks like film (I'm a grain monk myself), but this too often looks more like video. It hardly destroys the film, which is still in its correct aspect ratio and free from major damage, but it's just uneven and nothing extraordinary. But then again, they don't all have to be.

Midnight in Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

2011-06-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

The following review contains spoilers, but in all fairness, I knew the "plot," such as it is, going in, and it didn't affect my viewing in the slightest.

There are a few of the golden boys of cinema that I just can't stand. We all have 'em. Directors whose films we try and we try and we read vast appreciations and we watch their films again and we just keep coming up empty. Woody Allen is my big one. Allen's a fascinating figure any way you look at him, and I have enormous respect for his work ethic (at least one film every year since 1982) and the ways in which he bends to commercial pressures continue to fascinate me (can't find funding for New York? Okay, rewrite for London!). Moreover, he seems to always make movies that he would genuinely want to see - even the silly ones come from a real place, a real love of how silly movies can be. And yet I just don't really like very many of his films. Now, the plus side to turning out a movie every year for thirty years is that inevitably you've made at least one for everybody, so I will say I deeply love Radio Days and I like Hannah and Her Sisters and Sweet and Lowdown an awful lot.

And I loved Midnight in Paris. I just adored every second of it. I love that there's no explanation for how American screenwriter-turned-struggling-author Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is able to literally transport to the 1920s on a visit to Paris. I love how easily Allen lets you in on some of the references - figures as famous as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are introduced without it feeling like a Saturday Night Live impersonation marathon - but allows others to elude. I love Owen Wilson's wide-eyed expression throughout the whole affair (much more on this later). I love every shot of Marion Cotillard, an actress I've admired but who here is in another stratosphere. I love every line Allen gives Hemingway. I love Allen's lightness of touch, which Kent Jones correctly identified as "his most underrated asset as an artist." Allen gets all the credit in the world for his writing, his cutting wit and insight into relationships, but when he's working like this, I adore his work as a filmmaker. I've often thought that creating something truly charming and light on its feet is the hardest thing in the world (which is why Lubitsch, particularly Trouble in Paradise, is one of my favorites), and Allen does it like the best - he makes it look so damn easy.

It starts with him not really asking any big questions. He brings up matters of looking to the past with rose-tinted glasses and seizing the present and all that, but doesn't weigh on them. They're there to gently nudge the story along, and that's fine; the best lightweight comedies have an air of the philosophical. What he really succeeds at is letting go, allowing Gil, and us in the audience, get caught up in the current of this magical, inexplicable event. He populates the 1920s Paris arts community not with the people as they are (I'm sure), but how we imagine them to be. Hemingway is a brute, but sort of jolly in asking "do you box?", Dali is inarticulate and difficult to follow but incredibly exotic, Fitzgerald says "old sport" at every turn and feels like he stepped straight out of Gatsby, and so on (to say nothing of the remarkable cast Allen has, all of whom are just totally game for anything and everything). It's an interesting choice for a film about not glamorizing the past, but ultimately, it makes for a much more enjoyable ride and, dramatically, it means Gil won't get off the hook so easily. If they'd all been bastards or bores or whatever, there'd be no magic, no reason for him to want to stay. He comes to realize that living in the past is a pointless fantasy for personal, interior reasons (though this transition could've been handled more gracefully) rather than external forces.

In interviews, Allen has talked about how he came to cast Wilson after much hesitation, but he's hardly the only one who's since realized how lucky he was in doing so. Wilson, too, is a guy who seems effortless in nearly everything, and his version of the classic Woody Allen protagonist is one of the best. His remarks come not from an ideal that has long been tarnished (which is the sense I get from most of Allen's protagonists), but one which he still genuinely holds onto. He still gets frustrated by "pseudo-intellectuals" and political disagreements, but his positive reactions and sense of wonder always come off so much stronger. We understand that although this is a guy stuck in a dream of the past and what could have been of his present, he's still living for something, still looking forward. He's trapped in a relationship he shouldn't be in with Inez (played willingly by Rachel McAdams), and even still he talks about what he wants from his future. We come to understand, not through direct dialogue necessarily but just through implication, that he's always wanted something grander but just kind of went along with what was in front of him. Some of that is in the writing, but Wilson does all the heavy lifting and, like Allen, makes it look absolutely effortless. He's so naturally funny and charming and - a quality too often overlooked in modern criticism - instantly likable. It is a marvelous performance.

I'm really pleased with how joyfully Allen embraced the comedy in this movie, and I laughed more here than I have at any of his other movies to date. Allen's funnier movies tend to play like a rack upon which he can hang a range of jokes (in case you ever needed evidence of his Groucho Marx influence, there you go), and that's fine as far as it goes, but they too often stop the film in its tracks. The best comedies meld jokes into a genuine film that has a genuine flow to it, and Wilson's casual delivery of some of his lines, almost burying the joke, end up making them all the funnier. They come off as real off-the-cuff remarks instead of really hitting them. To say I laughed "frequently" during this film would be an understatement - scarcely a second passed that I didn't at least have a smile on my face.

And there's something to be said for such a thoroughly pleasant, charming film like this. A lot, actually. I am in no realm a Woody Allen fanboy. Even his famous stuff only really rang true to me from time to time, but this is simply magic.

Criterion on Hulu: Summer with Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953)

2011-06-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

I figured I'd start off this column with Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika, as it's not only a great film, but it represents everything I love about the Criterion Collection in a general sense, and their contract with Hulu specifically. It's a grant, important classic foreign film by a major director that remains unavailable on DVD in the United States, and is presented here in what seems to be a new high-definition transfer. One day, I had little hope of seeing it, and the next day I was actually watching it. Criterion has been putting films on their Hulu Plus page well in advance of their DVD/Blu-Ray release since they embarked on this venture, so I wouldn't be surprised if Monika eventually gets a proper release. But for now, this is really the only way to see it in the U.S.

The film itself is widely misunderstood. Released in the United States in most markets strategically cut to emphasize the film's nudity and sexuality, it has become one of the hallmarks of the mid-1950s erotic foreign film (and the basis for the Seinfeld parody, Rochelle, Rochelle). Sure enough, all of the film's stateside publicity material prominently features Monika's (Harriet Andersson) age and free-spirit sexuality. But watching the film is a whole different experience.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a couple who fall in love at the dawn of adulthood, quit their dead-end jobs, and set out for the wilderness. Like anyone of eighteen or nineteen, they're passionate and infinitely hopeful, and if this section feels naive or a little cliche, there are two reasonable explanations. First, cliches such as these come from a real place, and this was one such film. Second, I've always argued that pure romance is a viable emotion that inevitably feels naive or a little cliche, and I commend filmmakers willing to go there. Plus, it makes it all the more heartbreaking to see what comes after.

See kids, in those days, you had to sit through some tough, raw emotion to see some nudity. Bergman isn't shy about showing the inevitable outcome of a relationship based purely on passion, one that follows the whims of a girl who refuses to work or take any responsibility in her life. In this way, our sympathies are aligned with Monika's lover Harry (Lars Ekborg), who for much of the film takes the kind of passive role many of us have probably fallen into when we suddenly find ourselves in a new relationship with someone much bolder than we are. Harry and Monika's downfall might seem obvious, but we feel all the worse for him because he probably sees it, too. But what sets this apart from being a mere cautionary tale is that Monika's position is not without its sympathetic side - Bergman really shows that there were greater problems before sexual harassment suits than the occasional off-color joke. At work, Monika is grabbed at every turn and nearly raped at one point. Bergman and cinematographer Gunnar Fischer film her warehouse workplace as little more than a dungeon. Contrasted with the bright whites of the warm Swedish summer, it's no wonder she so desperately clings to her newfound freedom once a need to survive calls her back home.

In between these two poles, Bergman captures lower-class Swedish life with the kind of color you don't usually see in one of his productions. Monika's neighborhood is presented with the liveliness of an early Fellini or Scorsese film, with boisterous neighbors, crammed apartments, and demanding parents. Again, contrast these compact spaces with the wide-open space of the river she and Harry will later travel on; the freedom seems infinite, and consequences don't exist.

It is a beautiful film on every level - earnest and heartfelt, honest and unrelenting, it captures that horrible period in which we finally discover that it's time to grow up. Some people are automatically up to the task, others need time, but Harry and Monika's story proves a great external expression of the internal struggle all too familiar to someone joining the work force for the first time. Melodramatic? Sure, but it's the kind of melodrama that gets to the cold, hard, wonderful truth. As it's a Bergman/Fischer collaboration (they'd go on to work on such films together as Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, and The Seventh Seal before Bergman began collaborating with Sven Nykvist), the cinematography is expectedly lush. Fischer was a much more classical cinematographer than Nykvist, and while the latter's work is more dynamic and tends to receive more praise, I adore all of Fischer's work with Bergman.

Criterion gives us a wonderful presentation of that over their Hulu channel. I am in awe of where HD streaming is at the moment, particularly in representing classic films made well before the digital era was ever a consideration. While streaming tends to produce an inconsistent image - shots can run the gamut between fooling even the most hardcore Blu-Ray enthusiast into thinking they're seeing a perfect high-def image to looking about suitable for a DVD - seeing Summer with Monika like this for the first time made for a remarkable experience. Streaming it through the television, I noticed a fine grain structure and a razor-sharp image; there was even some light flickering, long the hallmark of 35mm projection but sometimes found on Blu-Ray, present in certain shots. Most important, there were very few, if any, compression artifacts. I cannot recall any blocking, ghosting, or those smudges you so often get in the darker parts of the image. The grain on the title sequence reads a little bit more like noise - not uncommon on any digital format - but once we get into the film itself, we're treated to a very fine presentation indeed. The monochrome image varies widely between the piercing whites and deep blacks mentioned above, and the transfer kept up perfectly in both instances without letting the whites blow out or the blacks obscure detail. Streaming images often feel a little bit "thin" to me, for lack of a better word, but given the format's parameters, I could hardly ask for better. Sweden has rarely looked so lovely.

As this is exclusive to Criterion's Hulu channel, there are no supplements currently available. Summer with Monika is presented with a clean, original Swedish sound track and English subtitles.

All in all, this is a sterling example of what The Criterion Collection offers through their Hulu channel - a great classic foreign film by an important director, unavailable for many years, now available for a small monthly fee. Highly recommended.

If you want to try Hulu Plus and get your first two weeks free, click here to sign up.

Note: All screencaps are provided through other sources, and are not representative of the streaming quality.

X-Men: First Class (dir. Matthew Vaughn)

2011-06-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

X-Men: First Class is a film that has a lot of great stuff in it, and fooled me a couple of times into thinking it was really great, but too often wallows in its own lack of direction. Over the weekend, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis wrote a bit about "slow and boring" movies, which concluded with Scott asking, "is there a recent movie more deserving of being called pretentious than Thor?" And given the actual definition of "pretentious" - "attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed" - I'd say the description is spot-on for Thor and for a great many comic book movies, including X-Men: First Class, that think settling as great entertainment is such a sin.

Oh, if only we could have a whole movie about Erik Lehnsherr (a.k.a. Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender to great effect) going across the globe hunting former Nazis. If only there could be endless training montages and spies sneaking around nightclubs in their underwear and terrific, exciting action sequences and clever uses of telepathy and Kevin Bacon doing anything. I don't want to totally undercut the character work, because aside from the film's attempts at the grandiose (oh, 45-second scene of Charles and Erik playing chess at the Lincoln Memorial), it's all pretty well-observed stuff. In this trip down memory lane, Charles Xavier (a very good James McAvoy) and Raven (a.k.a. Mystique, here played ably by Jennifer Lawrence) are best friends, and their eventual rift (yeah, spoiler alert, they fight each other in a movie made ten years ago) comes from a believable place of ideology. Raven comes to believe mutants gotta let it all hang out there, so to speak. Be loud and proud and all that. But she doesn't arrive at this through some sort of logical deduction; it happens because she's been sort of repressed all her life. Charles has always made her hide being blue, and Erik comes in and says "you're great just the way you are." Her move to "the dark side" as it were is motivated just as much by her friendships as her ideology.

The rift between Charles and Erik was always established as a friendship turned sour in the Bryan Singer films, but here we understand it much better for what it really was - a partnership of convenience. Both of them, for a short period of time, get to work alongside a colleague who genuinely challenges the other, until eventually they push each other to a breaking point. And it's odd that, for as positively as the franchise has portrayed Charles' opinion of mutant/human relations (why can't we be friends?), Erik definitely has the better case here. He's the one who thinks they should all be able to hang out in the streets, letting their freak flag fly, while Charles wants to cover up any abnormalities.

But do they have to take everything so damn seriously? If I never hear another conversation about mutant/human relations, I'll be a happy moviegoer. I like to think that these themes can run concurrent with a huge superhero adventure instead of being the entire driving force. It's not that I think serious stories can't be told with tights and a cape - rather, if they're going to take this tack, I'd rather they go all the way with it, a la Superman Returns or Ang Lee's Hulk. These one-minute bits of easy pathos and pseudo-intellectual (all incredibly on-the-nose) musings crammed in between Kevin Bacon absorbing the blast of a grenade with his bare hands becomes a little tiring.

The pacing as a whole is a little problematic. We've become accustomed to the rather short scenes necessitated by the summer blockbuster run-and-gun pace, but the actual story being told in X-Men: First Class is actually sort of slow and meandering. It develops focus as it goes on, but it doesn't have the central narrative drive that would make a quick pace the natural route. Instead, we have scenes in which tension is supposed to build - the grenade scene or any of the Erik Lehnsherr: Nazi Hunter stuff - but the air just gets let out too quickly. On their own, the scenes work nicely, but it takes a long time before they start to build off of one another and form a cohesive whole.

But when they do, it's quite the whole. X-Men: First Class has a really fantastic third act, finally delivering the kind of wham-bang mutant adventure we've been wanting. The cross-cutting can be a little troublesome when the big showdown between Erik and Sebastian Shaw (Bacon) keeps being interrupted by whatever Beast is up to, but on the whole it's strong stuff, and it builds to a final climax that's as good as they come.

While X-Men: First Class ends on a strong note, it's a really rough road getting there. For as many really good performances, there are an equal number of...let's call them unfortunate uses of screen time. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender soar, as anyone who's been watching movies for the past five years could have ensured, as does Nicholas Hoult (who plays Hank McCoy, later Beast), though he definitely had some trouble with some truly awful make-up in the third act. Kevin Bacon is on his own planet and I love him for it; it's been too long since we had a comic book villain this silly, and maybe the first time it actually worked. Jennifer Lawrence is fine, as is Rose Byrne as a CIA agent/token human, but everyone else is only occasionally rising from "present." The rest of the kids who make up the "First Class" are a joke, barely given any screen time and giving little effort to earn it, following in the footsteps of their counterparts working for Sebastian Shaw (though to be fair, their directions in the screenplay couldn't have amounted to more than "scowl" and "wave arms around").

And then there's January Jones, who more and more seems to be good on "Mad Men" (yeah, I said it) only by accident. Of all the major characters, hers is by far the most quickly dismissed creatively, in spite of playing a pretty large role in the plot, and Jones seems to hold the same contempt for the whole production that it holds for her. Whereas Fassbender certainly and McAvoy at his better moments are capable of taking what is frankly kind of stupid dialogue and making it sound like something someone would have some conviction in ("the point between rage and serenity" is the result of the ultimate writer's roadblock - "what the hell would the best advice be to give to someone who has trouble finding their full potential as a super-powered mutant?" - and it's miracle I believed McAvoy for a second), Jones takes the easiest and most convincing dialogue (you know, stuff like "they're here") and makes it sound like something no one would ever say.

So X-Men: First Class is a delightfully uneven film, saved largely by director Matthew Vaughn's eye for iconography, ease with actors, great staging of action, and occasional flair for what should have been the worst parts (hello, recruitment and training montages). Unfortunately, some of the looser stuff eludes him - the bonding between the teens feels like someone replicating what they think it's like when teenagers hang out - but he certainly does his best with a very uneven, unfocused screenplay. But boy, what a finish.

Family, God, and Creation in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

2011-05-27T19:42:00.000-07:00

In...I guess it would have been early 2006, Terrence Malick revealed the cinema to me. I had seen Badlands and The Thin Red Line already (Days of Heaven would come later), and though I'd liked both (particularly Badlands...still struggle with TTRL to be honest), I was completely unprepared for The New World. Maybe it was the difference of experiencing it first on the big screen; I don't know. But my reaction to The New World was completely unlike any I'd had to any film prior. I felt, for the first time, I had seen a vision of this art form that I didn't know was possible. No, not just a vision - a total realization. With just one movie, the cinema had become so much bigger and grander. More exciting, more alive. A friend I saw it with needed only to look at me before saying, "you loved it, didn't you?" I struggled for words, tossing out "I...love is too small..." Walking out of it I felt both more enlightened to the world around me and numb, for it didn't always feel as grand as the vision Malick presented.

I've been waiting ever since for a new Terrence Malick film. Trust me, I was prepared to be bowled over, wowed, enlightened, enthralled, numb, and completely and totally in awe. And still The Tree of Life completely took the wind out of me. I sit and hope and pray that the movies can make me feel this alive, and so often I settle for less declaring something a "great film." Malick redefines that, shows that the standard by which we typically judge greatness is too often inadequate. I'm not saying I don't still love Never Let Me Go or Fantastic Mr. Fox or Synecdoche, New York or any of the other films I've called the best of their year, some of which are starting to become the best of the decade, and will eventually go onto be our new classics. I'm saying this to call attention to one of the greatest accomplishments I've ever seen, not just in cinema, but in all of art.

To give you a limited outline of the story, The Tree of Life is about a family in a small Texas town in the 1950s, largely as remembered by Jack, the oldest of three children, who now works as an architect (or so I gather) in a large metropolitan area. On that level, it's a totally involving family drama, a fascinating exploration of oppression, the limits of ambition, the small things we do to hurt the people who mean the most to us, and the inevitability of forgiveness. It just also concerns the moment of creation and the evolution of life, and for the purposes of this piece, that's really all you need to know.

Malick has been working on this story in various forms since the 1970s, and it still comes across with such incredible clarity of vision, such distinct purpose and vulnerability. The press likes to call Malick a "recluse" because he refuses to speak to them, or to any other public forum, but I can't imagine anyone watching The Tree of Life and not fully understanding who he is. Every other director hits the publicity trail, but what do we really learn about any of them? Can you say you've gained a greater understanding of James Cameron because he was interviewed constantly surrounding the release of Avatar? Malick puts all of his hopes, his fears, his curiosities, and his artistic ambition onscreen, and somehow that remains insufficient. There is plenty from what little we know of his life to draw comparisons to the film, but even without the advantage of a biography, can't you see it all? The search for God in all living things, the questions about why life even exists and how small we are in the grand scheme of things and how truly tragic that is on a personal level.

Malick's camera, guided by the great Emmanuel Lubezki, wanders the world, at once searching for meaning and finding it in everything. Malick has the most improvisational camera style of any director, willing to send it in any direction on a moment's notice to capture the way light fills a room, a bird in flight, a shadow, a leaf, or a tear. Too often criticized for creating beautiful images that back up nothing, in The Tree of Life they directly underline his central philosophy - that all of this matters ("All things shining," as he says in The Thin Red Line). Everything is an expression of our importance.

Malick proves that one need not treat the universe's indifference to us with a similar mindset. He expresses our infinitesimal smallness in the context of time and the universe while acknowledging how monumental our lives feel. Each moment, each touch, each action, every run down the street or argument or failure is the stuff that can shake the foundation of God himself, and yet this too shall pass. God, or at least the fundamental idea of Him, has always been a presence in Malick's films; even Badlands, albeit to a smaller degree. In Days of Heaven, Linda reflects on the apocalypse just as harvest begins, and notes the presence of the angels and demons wrestling inside all of us. In The Thin Red Line, much of Private Witt's voiceover could be read as prayer, and much of the film seems to ask what place war has in God's plan. The New World is almost a retelling of the Garden of Eden, the fall of man, and the search for redemption (in spite of the studio's attempts to advertise it as the the greatest love story since Titanic).

God (or, again, the fundamental idea of Him) is almost a character in The Tree of Life, inhabiting both the natural world, a common concept in Malick's work, and, more uniquely, the world we have built on top of it. So much of the voiceover sounds like a prayer, so much of the yearning an ache to find something at the heart of existence. All of the characters grew up in the Church, and their expression of that is varied. Both Mr. (Brad Pitt) and Mrs. (Jessica Chastain) O'Brien accept God; Mr. O'Brien on uneasy, if devotional, terms, and Mrs. O'Brien on a deeper level she probably couldn't express.

Mr. O'Brien (neither of the parents have first names) is the product of an earlier era - he would have grown up through the depression and almost certainly fought in World War II. Almost all of the adults in his childhood would have seen World War I firsthand. He's seen the cruelty of the world, and works actively to prepare his sons for it, regardless of what opinion of him that creates. And yet he yearns for love, constantly asking for them to affirm it while being unable to keep his frequent disdain for them hidden. He is the expression of the Old Testament God, certainly, in that he seeks the best for his children by huge, forceful, sometimes violent gestures that come from what he must see as a loving place. He once wanted to be a musician. He still believes that with enough hard work he can create something lasting and fruitful. This stands as perhaps Pitt's best performance to date - there exists not a trace of ego nor grandstanding. He simply inhabits a cold, cruel man with overwhelming sympathy and understanding, and through his performance I found the greatest sadness in his character.

Chastain is, like all Malick women aside from Holly in Badlands, the ultimate expression of goodness, and the God of the New Testament - loving and forgiving, she believes the postwar world will be a beautiful and good place. She is pure, curious, and in a constant state of awe, eager to pass that feeling along to her children, who sometimes lash out at her but always come back with adoration. Chastain, like Q'orianka Kilcher in The New World, often feels unleashed in this film, free to simply exist rather than perform, a defining trait of Malick's later works.

Jack (Sean Penn) seems to still be searching for God (or any meaning to his life), and while we're not given much time with the adult Jack, we understand everything very quickly. Penn is an actor who so often gives too much to his performances, so it's nice to be reminded here that simply one look at his face tells you everything about his emotional state - constant search and doubt. The product of the modern age and a steady career, he has the luxury of curiosity and no immediate need for the certainty his parents had. He wanders around his house or office in a daze, despite Malick's camera telling us that these places can be just as full of wonder as the childhood stomping grounds he remembers with equal parts fondness and trepidation. And if he'd look deep into those memories, he'd find the purest expression of faith - his relationship with his brothers. Their actions gave their churches and faith meaning - in one shot of the boys playing amongst the pews, Malick restores majesty to a building so often diminished and institutionalized. Their faith is established when their parents tell them stories, or teach them about the world around them before they're even able to speak. It is instilled in fundamental steps of forgiveness, trust, and the bond of brotherhood. They naturally came to understand all of their teachings, and in doing so, found God.

And yet I don't think of this as fundamentally a Christian film, or at least a film only people of faith will find value in (its critical championing, which includes Richard Brody's declaration that God isn't in the film at all, is enough to buoy that anyway). I think anyone who asks questions about the nature of existence and believes in the profundity of the human experience will find The Tree of Life a welcome expression of those concerns. It is simply that the character's search for meaning, along with Malick's by all appearances, come from a Christian upbringing and are explored through that foundation. Its conclusions, suggestions, and remaining questions are human ones filtered through a specific mindset but ultimately, fundamentally untethered to any specific religion.

After all that, I'm still not making any claims to understanding everything in The Tree of Life. I know some are confronted with a lack of comprehension and scoff at it, but I don't need to totally understand The Tree of Life to recognize its magnificence, to know that it deeply affected me at my very core. I spent the whole film on the verge of tears, not overwhelmed by any particular tragedy (though the film does explore that) or sadness (though the film is most definitely immersed in the sometimes unbearable sadness of existence), but by the beauty of what was onscreen and the outpouring of emotion. Many have criticized Malick's later-period films (this, The New World, and The Thin Red Line) for being terribly on-the-nose with the voiceover dialogue, but that seems more to me a reaction to the emotionally guarded landscape we now live in. Malick's prose is not only beautiful, often poetically written and so earnestly expressed by his actors, it is the complete outpouring of its author. As a society, we reject emotional authenticity as "cheesy" and "sentimental," which I find to be an immense tragedy, especially in approaching art. Emotional authenticity should be the ultimate goal, a sign of greatness, in all artistic pursuits, especially when it expressed this adroitly.

I loved The Tree of Life, and I suspect you will, too. For anyone who cares about film, it's essential viewing. For anyone who cares about art, it comes highly recommended. For anyone who wonders about the nature of existence, it is and indispensable conduit. It is an overwhelming, profoundly affecting artistic experience, one that expresses how essential our lives are all the while giving us something to live for.

On the Other Hand, Men Are Incapable of Being Funny at Times

2011-05-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

Well, the parallel worked, anyway. I'd be lying if I said I never laughed during The Hangover, Part II, or that it was an awful movie or any of that. It just doesn't hang together all that well, you know what I mean? If you don't, I reviewed it for Battleship Pretension.

By the by, I'm bringing back "A Movie a Day" very soon. I realized that I'd just started watching a movie every day, so I might as well write a little somethin'-somethin' about them.

Sigh...Yes...They Can Be Funny, Too

2011-05-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

Bridesmaids is the funniest movie I've seen since Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and one of the best movies of the year, period (I'd still put Certified Copy ahead of it, because Certified Copy is so very wonderful). And I don't want to hear any crap about how women star in it. Seriously. I thought we all understood that women were people, too, by now, but I am astounded by how many people are like blown away that a movie with women in it could possibly be good, and how even if it is good they don't really know if they'll end up seeing it because, you know...women. Good Lord. A movie is either worthwhile or it is not, and Bridesmaids is seriously awesome.

And I explain why in my review at Battleship Pretension!

Short Film Shout-Out

2011-05-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

Last Monday I had the pleasure of attending the premiere of The Character Project, a series of short films produced by the USA Network. This is an odd undertaking for a non-premium channel - each film totally stands alone, and they all vary in length. The project's goal is to present "the character of America," and while each film sort of falls into the stereotype of what you would expect a corporate entity to see as "the character of America" (mostly white, save for a black kid with a disability, all with fairly lofty struggles), one of them absolutely knocked my socks off.

That film was Lauri Faggioni's "Wyckoff Place," a short film about a group of kids who all live in a Brooklyn apartment building. And yes, they all play together and through them we can learn lessons of togetherness and so forth. And yeah, I'm the first (or maybe second) person who would find this sort of thing totally hokey. But as with all great things, it's all in the presentation.

Faggioni's film feels like a modern-day, documentary version of "Peanuts," oddly enough. Her subjects - the kids - are just as broadly drawn and well-defined as anyone in Charles Schultz's classic strip, and except for the occasional instance when we can hear Faggioni's voice, she presents their world as totally adult-free. Her interest is solely in the society these kids have created for themselves, and the strange politics of gender and rules of play that I had completely forgotten about. Her film perfectly captures what childhood is like with idealizing it and without injecting adult struggles into it. Too often when we see kids struggle in films, it's an extension of whatever problems their parents are having - money troubles, divorce, etc. Faggioni's kids struggle with being well-liked, wondering what the other kids think of them, having control of whatever game is taking place, or trying to ditch an unwanted nickname.

In the Q&A afterward, Faggioni said she set out to make a film about how the kids see race barriers (almost all of the kids are first- or second-generation immigrants), but found that the kids didn't think about that at all, and to her credit, she didn't force her original intent. She found something else, and made the film about that. The result is a far more universal portrait of a specific period in grade school when all that mattered was what game was being played, what the rules were, and the extent to which boys or girls were included.

Her aesthetic is fairly low-key, but totally spry. It's very difficult to keep up with kids, but Faggioni and her camera operators never fail to capture the right action at the right moments. The result is a wonderful, poetic version of a home video that just captures life as it is with little interference. It's uncommonly funny and touching in a genuine, unforced way. I really hope she's able to make a feature from it, and I greatly look forward to whatever she does next.

"Wyckoff Place," and the other films in this series, will play in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles again, but are becoming available online here. I cannot recommend enough that you catch "Wyckoff Place," and if you have the time, give "The Fickle" a look. It's the shortest of the films, and it's a clever execution of a simple concept; that's all I'll say.

Thor (dir. Kenneth Branagh)

2011-05-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

The true measurement of Thor is not known until the end, when the credit "Based on the comic book by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby" comes up. It'd be one thing for Thor to succeed on its own terms, as the latest in what is now a long line of comic book adaptations, but for Thor to truly be special it has to either break totally free of its legacy and be its own weird little thing (like Ang Lee's Hulk, of which I am a fan), or be the perfect live action embodiment of what the character was created for (like Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man films).

You can count Thor in the latter category, if only by accident.

Stan Lee is sort of a brilliant mind, specifically in the realm of inventing and identifying instant archetypes in his own work. In a modern media environment that seems structured against innovation, it seems impossible for anyone to come up with Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, or The Incredible Hulk, much less for all of them to come mostly from one person. But Lee was not then, nor is now, a great writer. It was the ideas that provided the hook, and the incredible imagery that artists like Jack Kirby built around them.

And in that way, Thor is kind of the perfect Thor film. The plot is forgettable to the point of being disposable, and since the only world in jeopardy is the one we were introduced to five minutes ago, the stakes are shockingly low. The characters function as archetypes and nothing more, in spite of whatever flavor the actors give to them (and they give quite a bit). And setting the majority of the story of a Thor film in the New Mexico desert is pretty weak - you can say costumed superheroes always look ridiculous, but the fact is they just do look way more ridiculous in small town America. It screams "low budget."

But Asgard is spectacular. The bridge they travel across to pass between worlds is a stunning thing to behold, and in rare moments one does get the sense that this was the world Jack Kirby imagined. Thor, as played by Chris Hemsworth, is a spectacular screen presence. And Kenneth Branagh's direction is so outlandish, so over-the-top, and so perfectly suited to his bold source that the film is so much better than the script deserves. Branagh never saw a conflict that wouldn't be better settled with screaming, and a simple set-up that wouldn't be better suited to outlandish cranes and dutch angles. I love big, silly direction in my comic book movies, and I so wish the screenplay was as willing to be as theatrical as the film Branagh ended up crafting, because ultimately the plot and storytelling do drag the film down.

Thor, as a character, is barely one at all. He has an arc, eventually, and so we're told, but we never see him engage with any internal struggle at all. And again, I'm fine with Thor having no internal struggle. He is THOR after all. But the film presents a change in his character that isn't developed so much as occurred. Can't have it both ways, fellas. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Odin (Anthony Hopkins) are allowed some depth, but aren't terribly present in the film. Everyone else - Jane (Natalie Portman), the Warriors Three, etc. - are all background material. Every summer film needs a romance, and this one has Natalie Portman, but the Oscar winner's talents are put to even less use here than in Your Highness.

After an early, kind of great battle between Thor, his companions, and the Frost Giants, the action also takes a backseat. Sure, Thor eventually has to break into a government facility and stuff, but this is a Thor film without much THOR in it - most of the time he's stripped of his powers and is just a guy. And that would work in a sort of deconstructionist way if the film were at all thinking on that level. It'd also work in a sequel when we already know the character (Spider-Man 2, Superman 2). It'd also work if he had any kind of personal journey, but he's mostly the same guy at the end as the beginning, and what does change is too sudden to fall under the realm of "journey." As it is, it just robs us of what we paid for.

In all, it feels like an odd middle chapter to a slightly more interesting story. The beginning would have epic Thor action as he pillages and plunders. The end would show him returning to Earth to bring the thunder. This just has him moving sort of listlessly about, "learning about himself." If only we were to benefit. Branagh's direction of the camera and the actors is commendable, and nearly makes a good film from a lousy script, but there's only so much one can do with the words on the page.

Movie Memories: Revenge of the Sith

2011-04-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

This really begins in the spring of 1999, in the weeks leading up to The Phantom Menace. It's sort of insane to think back on it and remember that people camped out for weeks to secure their seat. I've since often wondered what they did for a living, if anything. But that's not the point. The point is that I was insanely jealous. I was thirteen when The Phantom Menace came out, and still in the throes of my Star Wars obsession, so I found myself turning to my mom and saying, "When the third one comes out, I'm going to camp out!" The next two films were already scheduled for release, so I figured I'd be nineteen then. That's plenty old enough to spend weeks on the sidewalk! It would be such an adventure, and of course I'd go with my best friends and it'd be the greatest moment of our lives.

In the spring of 2005, I did indeed turn nineteen, and was about to graduate high school. Not only did I know The Phantom Menace and its sequel, Attack of the Clones, were not terribly good movies, but I had other things on my mind. By May, I was deep into rehearsals for a play I had co-written, a one-act musical featuring the music of Queen. And as much as I had loved The Phantom Menace when it came out (I was thirteen!), I had discovered good movies by then. Hell, I'd already been accepted to film school. I really was in no rush to see Revenge of the Sith when a friend casually mentioned he was putting a group together for a midnight showing.

"Midnight" means quite a different thing when you're in high school than it comes to mean later in life. "Midnight" was still somewhat the great beyond. Not that I didn't have my fair share of late-night escapades by this point. Hell, I'd had nights prepping for plays that took us well into the wee hours of the morning (capped, as always, by a trip to Sharis). But "midnight" on a school night, when I had to be up at 5:30 am and work all through the day on my play, was a push. But then, I've never been one to turn down a social opportunity, no matter how insane. So I found myself on Thursday, May 18th, with a ticket in hand, ready to roll.

That day we had rehearsal as always. By that point we had crossed well over the line from the play being a lark (my friend and I thought it up one afternoon and wrote it, cumulatively, in about four hours) to being genuinely awesome, which was fortunate because half of us were too distracted by the forthcoming night to focus on the play at all. Most of us had brought the lightsabers we bought as kids (and inexplicably still owned) to school, and, since they didn't fall under the "weapons" category even in our Catholic high school, had been engaging in duels throughout most of the day. No reason that should stop now.

Right after rehearsal we sped downtown to join our friends who were already waiting in line. By now it was 6:00 or 7:00, so we still had a good haul ahead of us. The weather wasn't doing us any favors. Spring in Portland can be a bit of a crapshoot, and we were just thankful that we were able to wait in line under cover. Smarter people - okay, the girls - brought blankets. We grabbed dinner in shifts, played cards, and upon realizing that some of us had tickets for different screens inside the theater, bartered for tickets with other people in line. Everyone I knew ended up in the same theater. Mitch, who earlier that day wasn't even sure if he wanted to go, somehow got a ticket to our sold-out show and joined us at the front of the line.

Every hour, on the hour, we proudly drew our lightsabers and ran around the block waving them in the air. Lord knows what the people working at the theater, never mind people who were just downtown on business, thought of the whole scene. It's fashionable now to have a laugh at the whole franchise, especially since Lucas has recently announced 3-D rereleases of all six films. And we even knew the film probably wouldn't be any good. On some level we even knew Lucas would find a way to continue the franchise, even if he didn't make any more movies. But that was just it - this was the last Star Wars movie. Star Wars itself would live on, but not as a direct product of Lucas' imagination. And for all we made fun of him for "ruining" his own creation, it mattered, if only as a way to capture once more the youth we knew we'd soon be leaving behind.

I often wonder if our saying goodbye to Star Wars didn't in some way overlap with our feelings about graduation. You go to a lot of parties around that time of year, and what you realize pretty soon is that the parties are not celebrating the completion of high school, but are more a celebration of the past four years. I had most of the worst and some of the best times of my life thus far in high school. I know that was true for everybody I grew up with; it's too emotional of a time for it to not be true. And we were in a privileged enough position to let that emotion be the center of our lives. Star Wars gave us a chance to let it all out before it was over.

As the film was about to start, I said tonight was for the experience; the movie could come later. I still haven't seen the film since that night. I'll bet it doesn't hold up as well as I remember it. Doug believed it to be the best of the series, for which we all told him he could go to Hell. I said it was at least better than Jedi, which admittedly is probably still true. For all the moments of sheer inanity (Natalie Portman screaming out the names of her children as she's giving birth to them and dying at the same time) or fan-baiting (Chewbacca cameo), there are incredibly rousing sequences that are among the best of the series and a really great, knowing denouement on a set that looks like it could have come from the original trilogy.

And again, I know it's fashionable to dismiss the series altogether, particularly the prequels, but I don't know anyone who's a fan of the series who can't find something to latch onto in each film. Maybe it's all misplaced nostalgia. Maybe none of the films are all that good. And maybe lightsaber runs around the block are an empty exercise devoid of meaning except that which we attach to it. And maybe that's all high school ever was. But I doubt it.

Source Code (dir. Duncan Jones)

2011-04-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

I've always felt it was a critic's job to accurately communicate the experience of watching a movie. Some are transportive, others thrilling...others infuriating. Source Code falls into that last category.

What is Source Code, anyway? Is it, as IMDb labels it, a sci-fi thriller? Well, there's no real tension to the plot, where one would normally find the thrills. There is something mystery to the program that Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself involved in, but to what end? And then there's the mystery of Colter himself, and how he came to be involved in the Source Code program, a mystery perpetuated purely for audience involvement and not to any logical story end. But could it be more? Could it actually use a sci-fi thriller premise to explore some sort of existential issue about the nature of identity? Oh, if only...

The set-up is pretty solid - Colter is plugged into a program (the Source Code) that can let him re-line the last eight minutes of someone's life. The government is harnessing this program so that Colter can search a recently-exploded train as one of its passengers to find the bomber before he has the chance to carry out his next attack on downtown Chicago (why don't movie terrorists ever go for the big target first?).

This is about as good as sci-fi thriller set-ups get. It has a new concept, a short window of time, a lot of fun chances for repeated and slightly-altered behavior based on what Colter does each time he goes through the system. If one were inclined to go deeper, one could explore all kinds of things about what makes us us. So on a plot level, where does it go wrong? Well, first, there's no solid tension from the outside world. We understand theoretically that the clock is ticking, and that the bomber could strike at any moment, but is this yet-untested system really their only means of catching the guy? After all, he has issued a threat, and law enforcement has been able to trace those sorts of things back. And would it have been so hard for screenwriter Ben Ripley to have included a time with that threat? I know the "ticking clock" thing has been done to death and is ridiculed, but at least it works.

And then there's the tension on the train - will Colter find the bomb and the bomber? Now seems about the right time to enter spoiler territory.

Well, yes, of course he will. And fairly easily, too. The bomb is literally in the first place he looks and the bomber is really the second or third person he goes after in a major way. Ripley and director Duncan Joens (Moon) discard the bomb plot so quickly and carelessly that I thought surely Source Code is just dressed as a sci-fi thriller as a means of getting to something a lot bigger. Let's find out...

To do so, we have to go back to the beginning and explore the mystery of Capt. Colter Stevens. After some opening credits, the film starts in earnest with Colter waking up on a train, uncertain of how he got there and sitting across from a woman named Christina (Michelle Monaghan). Christina knows him, but he's certain they've never met. After eight minutes, the bomb explodes and he's thrown back into reality, where Capt. Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) appears on a TV screen and asks him if he found the bomb. What bomb, he asks? A bomb exploded, go find it, try again. And bam, without knowing where he really is or why he's there, he's back in.

This repeats to varying degrees several times. And why? Why would Goodwin not explain the mission? For the first few times through, Colter believes it to be a simulation. Once he accepts the reality, he then wastes his time figuring out how he got to be there when the last thing he remembers was a mission in Afghanistan. How is this beneficial to him, the mission, or the lives he's supposed to save? The clock is ticking - why not tell him everything? Wouldn't it at least help if he understood the extent of his mission before the third or fourth time going through it?

The bomb plot is a total waste here, and again, nobody benefits from not telling Colter that he was actually shot down two months ago and now lives in a vegetative state with his brain hooked up to the Source Code (which raises all kinds of questions - were they just hanging onto him in case he eventually has the same physique as the victim of a major tragedy?). You could say they don't tell him out of concern for "national security," but wait, he's just over there on a table. Who's he going to tell, all these people riding the train who are already dead? From a plotting point of view, this is creating an external mystery (that is, something that affects the protagonist without him playing an active role in causing it), and the only reason to put off its revelation is to create tension for the audience. It does not serve the story or the character. Him finding the bomb is purely perfunctory, and discovering that he's already dead is a quest of self-interest rather than self-discovery. By the time the bomb plot becomes personal, he's already solved it, leaving him with no goals by the end of the second act. Well, okay, he does create a goal to save the train, but this plan completely works from start to finish. He does not encounter a single obstacle once he decides to go through with it.

"Hey now," you say. He's been dead this whole time, and how about that? How about a movie about a man coming to terms with his own death? And on a train full of the dead? That's some purgatory stuff right there. Isn't it interesting that he has to deal with being dead while seemingly fully alive? And yes, all of this would be fascinating if that was at all what the movie was about. The thing is, Colter coming to terms with his death registers in one beautiful little moment before being disregarded forever. After that, it becomes purely about being awesome action hero man and repairing his relationship with his father. And maybe getting a little action on the side.

There is a moment, right near the end, where the film had a chance to redeem itself. Colter, in the Source Code, kisses this girl he suddenly fell in love with, while in the real world Goodwin unplugs his life support. As he and Christina kiss, time stops, and for a brief moment everybody's happy, just as the bomb is about to go off. It's a small little celebration of life amidst tragedy, and it'd be beautiful in its own little way, a true testament to the power of fleeting romance and the importance of appreciating the little things in spite of the fact that, in the end, the world's just going to have its way with you...

...until it's not.

Because don't worry, audience, nobody actually died. It turns out that unbeknownst to its creator, Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), the Source Code has created an alternate reality and done a little soul cloning along the way. After defusing the bomb and catching the bomber, Colter not only doesn't die, but his created reality also saves everyone on the train. AND he gets to life out the rest of his life in another man's body with a woman he barely knows. Yay? It's staggering to think that the same people who routinely dismiss romantic comedies are lining up to praise a movie that comes to so misguided a conclusion, one in which happily every after happens...I don't know, an hour or so after you meet someone, and all the while you're lying to her about your very identity. It's bad enough you've been macking on her in disguise, now she's what, the love of your life? So that'll make for an awkward second date...I'm sure she won't think you're completely insane when you explain your were ported over from an alternate reality right as the government unplugged your life support. Maybe you can tell your kids!

And romantic tension aside, what are you going to do tomorrow when you have to go back into work, where you're a HISTORY TEACHER? What are you going to do, learn history over the weekend? Hell, what happens when you go to the bank and you don't know your own PIN? It's a good thing you have the dude's driver's license, otherwise you wouldn't even know where you live. And of course this "happy ending" only took place because they actually killed you back at the base. And what exactly happened to the man who's body you're now inhabiting? Oh well, dude, you totally scored a hot chick! High five!

Jones actually does a pretty good job directing this, giving the film a great high-contrast look and a few really winning shots. It's a fast-paced film, the total opposite of the tone he created so well in Moon, and he handles it nicely. He gets a few decent performances, but doesn't really form a cohesive unit very well. Gyllenhaal is mostly good here, though his outrage over his enslavement doesn't really register. Vera Farmiga plays standard "middle age female" well enough, and Michelle Monaghan is always great, and given the unique challenge of having to say the same lines over and over again comes away looking especially good. Jeffrey Wright is...good...but isn't really performing in the same movie as the rest of the cast. And the film tries to cast him as the bad guy, only he actually invented something that saved millions of lives and accidentally created another dimension...but he's not very good with people, so it's best to call him a jackass and move on.

End of spoilers

I really, really hated this movie. None of the mysteries presented at the outset have anything resembling a compelling pay-off, and the character struggles are somewhere between weak and overused. I've said before that I can overlook all kinds of bad plotting if the film manages to explore some important thematic or personal concern, but this film tries both and accomplishes neither.

I've been among those calling for more original screenplays to go into production, but if this is what an original idea looks like in Hollywood, bring on the next bloated adaptation of a line of action figures.

"Sometimes, Children Are Bad People, Too."

2011-04-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

I've been kind of kicking mainstream cinema in the crotch lately, so I wanted to make sure I got my positive review of Hanna up before I just gutted Source Code like the smelly fish it is. But really, Hanna is a pretty amazing piece of work, the most exciting piece of action cinema since The Bourne Ultimatum. Aside from Speed Racer of course, which is just in a class all by itself, and was mostly an animated movie that doesn't really have the same challenges as shooting entirely live-action.

ANYWAY...my full review of Hanna, along with some thoughts about why it is that action is cinema at its purest, is now up at Battleship Pretension. Source Code in a couple of days, and at some point I'll finish up this actual, y'know, like, article that I've been working on. I've been busy, get off my back.

"Yeah, well, I didn't get it, did I?"

2011-04-05T06:38:00.000-07:00

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1971) is, for me, the definitive film of the 1970s. It's not the best film made during that time - Barry Lyndon, Days of Heaven, The Last Picture Show, and everything Coppola made are all more accomplished films - but it perfectly surmises what people are talking about when they're talking about film in the '70s. And it is just such a great, and in its own way very heartfelt film.

Five Easy Pieces is the kind of film that almost never happens anymore. And I don't mean that bunk that baby boomers won't quit talking about, that "movies were just better back then! They had stories! Now you just have effects!" No, I mean a movie that completely and totally made a star of its lead. Stars nowadays, if there are any left, come up slowly through the ranks until suddenly we all know who they are. Or, increasingly, we get stars whose names we know but whose work, if they've done any, we cannot name.

Jack Nicholson was on the public's mind after Easy Rider, but every second of Five Easy Pieces makes him a star. He takes all the attention-grabbing personality he displayed in the former and builds a character, a kind he will revisit constantly throughout his career and will lead more shortsighted viewers to declare "he's not much of an actor, he just plays the same guy over and over." The latter might be true, but he invests that guy with so much depth and charisma, and what exactly are we doing watching actors anyway if not to see some element of truth buried in performance? Nicholson always managed to find that truth, and here, as Bobby Dupea, is where he discovered it.

Click here to read the rest at Battleship Pretension.

Makin' Copies!

2011-04-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

I am so sorry for that headline.

My thoughts on Certified Copy, the best film I've seen so far this year, are up at Battleship Pretension.

A "Punch" in the Smarts

2011-03-29T08:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm not going to say I regret going to see Sucker Punch. It's pretty rare that I really regret seeing anything, as I'm a movie guy and this is very much the movie of the moment. But it does lend itself to some good thoughts about where we are as a society in empowering women. I'll say that when I was watching it I wondered to myself, "this is what passes for female empowerment these days?" Luckily, the response by and large has been "nope."

I get into that a little bit in my review over at Battleship Pretension, but deal more with the film as a whole. If you want to really dive into the film's gender politics, Monika Bartyzel of the wonderful Girls on Film column at Cinematical really just guts the film and examines the remains.

The Adjustment Bureau (dir. George Nolfi)

2011-03-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

As my feelings towards this film are wrapped up in the ending, it's impossible to discuss the film at all without a big heavy spoiler alert front and center.

I'm not a guy who needs big stakes in his films (though I do need big steaks in my life, but that's a subject for another time). If you listen to a lot of Filmspotting, or even a little, you'll hear them talk time and time again about the importance of stakes in films, and from a certain perspective, it's hard to disagree - big stakes give a film a real drive. This is why the Coen Brothers often start their films at a point when most films are just getting to the second act. The stakes already seem insurmountable, and the fun becomes watching them become even more difficult. But the Coens are smart enough as writers to be able to pay off their massive stakes.

As a first-time director, George Nolfi has an assured visual style and and creates a great rapport for his stars (Matt Damon and Emily Blunt) but as a screenwriter he completely undercuts himself by the end. His premise, from a Philip K. Dick short story, is of politician David Norris (Damon) who suddenly discovers a world controlled by mysterious forces that guide our reality in small but significant ways. This affects him because they're trying to get him elected Senator, and eventually President. The problem is that in order to do so, they have to stop his romantic entanglement with Elise (Blunt), the only person who ever fulfilled the void in his life.

Nolfi's stakes are thus gigantic. This is obviously a story of fate vs. free will, but the consequences of each are more intriguing than the question itself. Nolfi never explores why it is so important to these higher forces (they're never referred to as "The Adjustment Bureau" in the film) for David to become President, but we do learn that for them to spend as much time as they do keeping David and Elise apart, it must be something pretty huge.

So if David follows the path chosen for him, he'll become President and probably do a great many things for the betterment of the country, but he'll never truly be happy. If he stays with Elise, he'll be happy but too content to aggressively pursue higher office, and the country will be worse for it. The first scenario is emphasized, but there are never any consequences put forth for him choosing Elise over politics, other than perhaps sacrificing some career benefits. This is the movie's first big failing - we know him becoming President is important, because it's important to the higher forces, but explaining why it's important would presumably be too morally ambiguous when David puts all his effort towards being with Elise.

But the biggest problem is that Nolfi doesn't pay off these stakes at all. Instead it's determined that because David worked so hard to be with Elise, he deserves to do whatever the hell he wants, even though it's been previously established that the only reason David can't be with Elise is that, when he does whatever the hell he wants, he won't end up becoming President. He'll just stay content in a well-paying career and accept no responsibility for this decision.

If you're confused, it's because Nolfi's conclusions works not on any logical or thematic level. The lesson at the end is that we deserve to do whatever we want to do if we want it bad enough, with no regard for the consequences of those decisions. I'm far more in the "free will" camp than the "fate" camp myself, but if you're setting up a world in which fate does play a very tangible role, a role designed primarily to keep humanity intact and potentially even improve it, then you have to explore the consequences of going against your fate.

This is made all the more frustrating because the movie's a pretty good watch up until it all falls apart. The stakes are enormous, which gives it great drive, and Nolfi has some solid Bourne-esque chase sequences (Nolfi had a hand in writing The Bourne Ultimatum), full of clever innovations and quick thinking. Damon and Blunt are terrific together, and quickly and easily sell the importance of their relationship. I did genuinely want them to be together, but unfortunately the film set up a reality in which there's more at stake than simply being happy.

Much as I get excited by any Hollywood film willing to tackle bigger questions than "do I cut the green wire or the red one?", I also expect it to deliver somewhat on those demands, and The Adjustment Bureau simply doesn't. At all.

Paul (dir. Greg Mottola)

2011-03-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

Wow, okay...this one is gonna hurt.

I'm only trying to be a little bit cooler than the crowd when I say that I saw Shaun of the Dead in theaters. I know, now who wants to touch me? It's weird that mere months after its release, we all had a handle on just how great a movie it is, and it provided a basis for the complete understanding we have of Edgar Wright (co-writer and director), Simon Pegg (co-writer and star), and Nick Frost (co-star). And by the time their next film, Hot Fuzz, hit theaters, they were rock stars. They did a nationwide tour of preview screenings to packed houses (I was there for that, too, naturally). Wright has since proven himself as a genius apart from his frequent collaborators with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and I was hardly alone in thinking Pegg and Frost would be just behind him with Paul.

Never mind the fact that they'd be teaming up with Greg Mottola, who after Superbad and Adventureland quickly became one of my favorite fresh filmmakers, a guy with a real grasp of the way comedy and drama naturally intersects in our lives. Add to that a stunning supporting cast of Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig (one of the few breakout talents of Saturday Night Live who might actually be a better actress than she is a sketch comedian; see Whip It for prime evidence of this), Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, John Carroll Lynch, and several others in smaller roles.

Expectations can be a funny thing, and movies are rarely the experience we hope them to be when we hope them to be anything, but mine would have had to have been abysmally low to consider this a success.

There are some aspects of interest, to be sure - for every half-dozen on-the-nose references to Star Wars, E.T., or Close Encounters, there are a few that'll fly just under your nose if you don't know it (a Capturing the Friedmans one is particularly splendid). In these instances we're reminded of the great television show Spaced, which Pegg co-wrote with Jessica Stevenson, and which more than any other show really knew how to use a pop culture reference to dramatic/comedic effect.

Better still is Pegg and Frost's vision of America, which borders on a parody of what Americans think Brits think of our country (alternately a subject of fascination and terror). Or it could just be what these guys think of America; who really knows?

Unfortunately, interesting references and thematic points of interest aside, the movie's just not a whole lot of fun to sit through. I forced a laugh out from time to time, but I can't think of a single joke that landed genuinely, and too often I sat silently wondering if many of the lines were in fact supposed to be jokes at all, and how can three guys involved with three of the funniest films of the past decade not recognize a bad joke? And who writes a character like Paul, who ends up being right about everything? And just where is the line between mocking fundamentalist Christianity and dismissing religion altogether? And has there ever been a successful comedy that dismisses atheism as swiftly as comedies have dismissed Christianity as of late? And could some key plot points - Paul can bring dead things back to life, but it takes a lot out of him and trying it on humans would be very dangerous - be set up any more obviously?

I guess what saddens me most about the film is it's just lazy. Lazily plotted, lazily acted - I'd kill for half the energy from Pegg and Frost that they showed in Wright's films, though Lord knows Hader's giving it his all - lazily funny, and lazily paced. It becomes weirdly intense, emotionally, or anyway it tries to be, very suddenly, and the deft touch that Mottola showed in his previous two films isn't present at all here, never mind his eye for aesthetics.

David at Battleship Pretension wrote that the film ends up far more disappointing than the average studio comedy purely for the talent on hand, and I'm afraid I have to agree with him. Much as we might say all films are judged in a vacuum and it's not really fair to hold up past work against current, it's also a disservice to past achievements to simply disregard it. Artists should be held to their own standards as well as ours, and I'm afraid Paul meets neither.

Angel of the Morning

2011-03-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

I wanted to like The Strange Case of Angelica an awful lot, but I never did find the movie I'd hoped for or that I felt it was trying to be. My full thoughts are up at Battleship Pretension.

With the exception of these somewhat-regular reviews, posting will probably be fairly light until the end of April, at which point (fingers crossed!) I'm hoping to have some very exciting stuff to write about.

Two Surreal Options for Your Weekend Viewing

2011-03-05T17:43:00.000-08:00

Well, that was the best I could do to tie together Apichatpong Weerasethakul's masterful Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Gore Verbinski's almost-masterful Rango, both of which I've reviewed at Battleship Pretension, and both of which are more or less in theaters this weekend. I say "more or less" because Uncle Boonmee, being what it is an all, is getting the ol' slow-release pattern across the country (unfortunately there's no page laying out its playdates in other cities, but keep a watch out for it, it's worth it!). Rango, naturally, is out everywhere.

Oscars Already?

2011-02-27T00:06:00.000-08:00

Every year, after the Golden Globes are over, the Oscars still seem so very far away. And yet, six weeks later, they're here before you know it. This year's timeline was ramped up quite a bit for me, as I was preparing and soon after executing a move to Los Angeles, a city I am now proud to call home. Tomorrow, I will enjoy the Academy Awards not from the comfort of my living room, but in the welcoming arms of the Silent Movie Theater, a wonderful establishment about which I'm sure I will write more in the future.

First, though, I want to direct you to a piece I wrote for Battleship Pretension that outlines my general feelings on the Oscars. I'm not one of those movie fans who decries the whole operation only to tune in with great anticipation every year. I love the Oscars, through and through.

For those of you curious about the competition, might I recommend catching up with the coverage over at Yidio? We've been covering all the Best Picture nominees and those competing in major creative categories, making predictions and taking sides.

And finally, for funsies, here are the predictions I'm going with in my yearly competition with my girlfriend. I've never felt less certain of victory.

Picture - The Social Network
Actor - Colin Firth (The King's Speech)
Actress - Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
Supporting Actor - Christian Bale (The Fighter)
Supporting Actress - Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit)
Director - David Fincher (The Social Network)
Original Screenplay - David Seidler (The King's Speech)
Adapted Screenplay - Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network)
Animated Film - Toy Story 3
Foreign Language Film - In a Better World
Cinematography - Roger Deakins (True Grit)
Editing - Andrew Weisblum (Black Swan)
Art Direction - Robert Stromberg, Karen O'Hara (Alice in Wonderland)
Costume Design - Colleen Atwood (Alice in Wonderland)
Makeup - Adrien Morot (Barney's Version)
Original Score - Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network)
Original Song - Alan Menken and Glenn Slater ("I See the Light," Tangled)
Sound Mixing - Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo, Ed Novick (Inception)
Sound Editing - Richard King (Inception)
Visual Effects - Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley, Pete Bebb, Paul J. Franklin (Inception)
Documentary - Restrepo

I'm not even going to bother listing my picks for short subject. I'm a bad person and never get around to seeing them, so they're complete guesses.

The End of the Century: Robert Altman's Popeye

2011-02-20T22:33:00.000-08:00

Robert Altman gets a lot of (due) credit for a lot of things, but one thing I don't see mentioned enough is how effortlessly he expresses something essential about a place. And more amazingly, what he's expressing changes and grows from film to film. His work across many genres and tones seem to stretch wider than the films they inhabit, influencing the next and the one before it and the one decades ahead. His view of Los Angeles in The Player is more magical and charming because of The Long Goodbye and California Split, and more cynical because he'd be back in town the following year for Short Cuts, and more unnerving because of 3 Women, which doesn't really take place in Los Angeles so much as a desert on the outskirts, but then none of his films really take place in Los Angeles, do they?

Altman's view of the world is sort of like that - one step removed from reality, a little heightened, and never exactly consistent (certainly from picture to picture). One could call it a certain detached bemusement, but the sadness over the state of the world in McCabe is miles from the bitter anger of Short Cuts, and neither do much to explain anything about The Long Goodbye. Popeye is not so far removed - though set in the fictional and clearly constructed town of Sweethaven, Altman captures the town no differently than he did Los Angeles, Nashville, or the similarly-constructed town of Presbyterian Church in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. It's Altman's most exaggerated reality, but not by as much as you would think.

As much credit as he gets for dialogue, Altman has a unique talent for filtering seemingly diametric world views through his own, expressing equally everything that made the original (book, short story, play, radio show, comic strip) so beloved and a certain way of seeing things that you won't necessarily find in his other work or the source material itself. This is why A Prairie Home Companion is everything that makes the radio show so great (yes, I am a fan of Garrison Keillor, and whatever that makes me is whatever it makes me), while still being as uniquely Altman as The Long Goodbye, which is in turn a perfect modern interpretation of Raymond Chandler. Never mind Short Cuts, which is so exactly evocative of Raymond Carver that you cannot, for the life of you, explain what exactly makes it different from reading his short stories.

So yes, where was I? Right. Popeye, of course, SOUNDS like a Robert Altman film. There are more throwaway jokes in the dialogue than most films have right up front, and Popeye's mumbling from the classic Fleischer cartoons - long my favorite aspect of those cartoons - is a constant companion in a very strange journey (not unlike Phillip Marlowe's live-read voiceover in The Long Goodbye, but even less coherent). And Popeye really is equal parts Altman and, well...Popeye. I'm hardly a historian on the cartoon icon; I know he started in a comics form that I've never read, but I know the cartoons very well. More accurately, I know how they feel, and Altman's film is a remarkable recreation of that feeling. Spontaneous, inventive, unbound by any physical limitations, boundlessly joyful, and weirdly musical.

That last part is where the Altman influence is felt strongest. Music plays a surprising role in Altman's films, be they out-and-out musicals like Nashville or mood pieces like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 3 Women, or The Long Goodbye, the musical elements play as much a role in setting tone as the cinematography or performances. The credit sequences of McCabe and 3 Women are enough proof alone - you instantly know exactly the film you're watching.

Popeye is Altman's most outwardly musical film, with characters regularly bursting into unannounced, completely delightful songs (by Harry Nilsson), but the music feels ingrained in the people of Sweethaven as a way of life. In a manner not dissimilar from Jacques Demy's masterpiece, The Young Girls of Rochefort, characters will sing bits of songs out of context and have a more fluid way of moving than is natural. It's a common, shallow, cynical approach to complain that musicals aren't realistic because who just bursts into song anyway, but musicals do suffer when they try to create some realistic environment in which the characters do just that. Musicals are better for the realm of some degree of fantasy, and Popeye toes that line so perfectly you wonder why a) it has been so totally dismissed over the last thirty years, and b) more musicals don't understand these simple principles.

I really do honestly wonder why Popeye has the reputation it does. It's pointed to as the film that ended Altman's career until his resurgence in the '90s, but it did astonishingly well at the box office. In doing some research, I found a pretty thorough and almost convincing takedown of the film, but it is only so if you buy into the idea that a Popeye film can only be one thing. Don't get me wrong, I picked up on the Marxist leanings, too, but this IS still a Robert Altman film after all. If you're not onboard with radical leftist thinking, Popeye is merely the least complex distillation of Altman's political leanings (you know, for kids!). I just never really tend to fault a film for having a point of view.

And Popeye does have so much worth celebrating beyond any discussion of its politics (and anyone who faults its gender politics really isn't familiar with Popeye in any iteration). It's completely charming through and through, oddly sweet at points, and has the most remarkable performance by a baby that you've ever seen. Honest. It jettisons the concept of story structure out the window pretty quickly, and is all the better for it. It opens up the film, leaves room for the small joys to take center stage. In many ways it was the last of Altman's '70s films. Not just chronologically, but it was the last time Altman would have such resources until the '90s, the last time he'd make a film that centered around small moments. For all the pleasures of his later work, they were much more driven, less lived in, more complex, less...pure. Popeye was his last pure film.

Whatever your reaction, it's on Netflix streaming, and you have very little to lose by giving it a go.

Best House Ever?

2011-02-18T00:33:00.000-08:00

One of the pleasures of moving to LA has been decorating the new place from the ground up. The Portland apartment was rather hastily assembled, but a surprising amount of care and attention to detail has been afforded the new Hollywood location. And so it's resulted in things like the image above, of the wall adjacent to the kitchen.

In other news, I cannot say enough how great LA is. For all the talk about how it steals your soul with its glamorous-but-ultimately-shallow lifestyle and how there's no art or culture or intellectual pursuits, I have experienced a stunning amount of art and culture and been afforded some very rewarding opportunities. All in under a month. I liked living in Boston, and Lord knows I love Portland, but LA is really something else, man. Oh, and the weather kicks ass.

Nose to the Grindstone

2011-02-16T09:25:00.000-08:00

What can I say, I've been busy. I have a couple of pieces in the works for this site, but in the meantime I've been overwhelmed by some projects that might actually bring, y'know, a little money to the old bank account. In the meantime, I have two new pieces up at Battleship Pretension. The first is the beginning of a series going through the rather amazing Criterion box set America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. I'm going in order, so of course that forced me to try to unwrap the undeniably strange Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968).

On the more linear side, I also have a review of Aaron Katz's new film, Cold Weather, which is starting its theatrical run nationwide. And can I just say I really love living in LA and getting movies right when they come out instead of at some undetermined point down the road? It's bliss.

If you really need me on a more regular basis, I'm writing news for Yidio. But I do hope to have a couple of the old in-depth, obsessive pieces up here before long.