The Descendants (2011)

Writer/director Alexander Payne does it again with "The Descendants," his latest film and the first since the wonderful "Sideways." But even moreso than that film, or its predecessors, "About Schmidt," "Election" and "Citizen Ruth," "The Descendants" is grounded in the heavy drama of profound loss and doubt. It might be Payne's weightiest films, and it's one of the best of 2011, with an Oscar-worthy performance by George Clooney.

Clooney plays Matt King, a lawyer, husband, and father of two who lives in Hawaii. King is a descendant of Hawaiian royalty, and the executor of the largest undeveloped piece of land left on one of the Hawaiian islands. But just as meetings are underway with his cousins and relatives to discuss the sale of the land, a business move that would make all of them quite wealthy, King is slapped with a personal tragedy.

Elizabeth, Matt's wife, is critically injured in a sport boating accident. On life support and in a coma, a doctor sits Matt down and makes it clear to him that she will not recover. Matt is instructed to begin telling people, encouraging others to say goodbye to Elizabeth, and start pulling his life together and planning for the future.

The main focus of his life becomes how he will care, alone, for his sassy 10-year-old daughter Scottie and her older and infinitely more rebellious teenaged sister, Alexandra. He doesn't know what they need. He's made it his job to make money for the family, and to keep the girls from having things handed to them. "Give them enough money to do something, but not enough money to do nothing," Clooney's Matt says in one of the film's multitude of clever lines and voiceovers.

Since it wouldn't just be enough to have to break the news of Elizabeth's impending death to his girls, Matt learns from Alexandra that Elizabeth had recently been having an affair and was considering leaving Matt. Through a neighbor, Matt and Alexandra learn the man's name and even track him down to a vacation home he's renting with his family. Matt says he wants to tell the man about Elizabeth's condition and afford him the opportunity to say goodbye like anything else. But is that all he wants out of it?

As with any Payne film, the script is outstanding. Payne has a knack for somewhat quirky characters with unusual backgrounds who are otherwise so completely real and normal in their domestic struggles that his films play like cinema verite with a polish of organic comedy. As with "Sideways," I found myself laughing heartily throughout the film.

But I was also incredibly sucker-punched in the gut by the emotional impact of "The Descendants," so much so that I cancelled going to see another film immediately after this one because I felt I needed time to process and recover.

In addition to the script and the sunny cinematography, "The Descendants" is transcendant due to the acting performances, led by Clooney. I am not on the George Clooney bandwagon, nor do I dislike him. But I tend to feel like Clooney plays some version of himself in all of his films. Here, he's a little bit paunchy and pathetic, and Clooney digs noticably deeper with this film than with anything I've ever scene him in. I feel confident in saying that it is the greatest performance of his career thus far, requiring more emotional depth than any of his other roles and removing Clooney's ability to rely on his rakeish charm. Maybe some won't want him to win another Oscar because he's already plenty rewarded and beloved. I say give it to him; though there are plenty of 2011 films I have yet to see, this performance sets the Best Actor bar in my book.

A lot of attention is also being paid to Shailene Woodley as the tortured teen daughter, Alexandra, and I agree that she is indeed good. Like Clooney here, Woodley is deceptively natural in digging deep on an emotional level. She's not just an entitled teenaged bitch, but a truly troubled, complicated and scared young lady. Her performance, too, is fantastic. And it's worth noting the work of Amara Miller as the young Scottie, every bit Woodley's equal.

"The Descendants" is being labeled a comedy by many, but for me it was a complex drama. Yes, it was pointedly funny in many places, but in that very natural way that we find ourselves laughing in the middle of life's greatest chaoses, tragedies, and most harrowing moments.

As a dad, I was deeply moved by the challenge Matt is faced to rise up to in this story. Am I going to be good enough for my kids? How much of this is my fault? Can I forgive others? Myself? And I left the theatre feeling like what I'd seen was more important than just a little slice of someone's life. It felt a lot like life itself.

4.0 out of 4

The Artist (2011)

"The Artist" is certainly a charming film, but I'm going to say what I can't find anyone else out there saying, and that is the fact that its charm - coupled with the novelty of it being a black-and-white, silent film in 2011 - is tricking almost everyone into believing that it one of the greatest movies of the year and the frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars.

But here's the truth. While "The Artist" is certainly a pleasure to watch for anyone who truly loves movies, it is almost painfully derivative and, more disappointingly, entirely predictable from start to finish. In fact, the film clearly rips off both "Singin' in the Rain" and Chaplin's "Modern Times." And yet audiences are sitting there, awed by the fact that a director made a silent film now. Is that such an unbelievable accomplishment? The real accomplishment is that people are going to see it.

Now don't think I'm telling you that "The Artist" is a bad film. It's not. It has two wonderful performances in Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo and the black and white photography is gorgeous. And director Michel Hazanavicius metculously recreates the era of the late 1920s-early 1930s, down to  shooting the film in an authentic (and now seemingly antiquated) 1:33:1 aspect ratio. But I think a film should be judged against what it set out to accomplish. And this is no reinvention of the silent film genre. It's a copycat.

"The Artist" begins in 1927 with silent film star George Valentin basking in the applause from an audience after screening his latest picture. Dujardin plays Valentin, and though the name (and some of the scenes of Valentin making movies) directly references Rudolph Valentino, Dujardin bears a striking resemblence to Gene Kelly, another reference point to be milked repeatedly in the film. Valentin gamely soaks up applause at the expense of his disgruntled blonde co-star, the first direct reference to Don Lockwood and Lena Lamotte from "Singin' in the Rain."

Outside the theatre, Valentin is talking to reporters when the crowd accidentally shoves a beautiful young girl into him. There is an instant connection. There was one for me, too, as this is the exact same moment as when Janet Jackson bumps into Cab Calloway in her "Alright" video from 1990.

On the set for another film, the ego-driven Valentin notices a pair of legs behind a set piece and anonymously engages the woman connected to them in a playful dance. When the board separating them is finally moved (just like the one Donald O'Connor rides on in "Singin' in the Rain,") we are not suprised to learn that these are the legs of that same girl. And it turns out that this girl, Peppy Miller (Bejo) has just been cast as an extra in Lockwood...er, Valentin's latest picture.

A studio executive (John Goodman, lending one of a few known faces to the film) pulls Valentin aside to show him some footage from a "talkie." Valentin waves it off as ridiculous, in much the same manner that Charlie Chaplin did until he could no longer avoid it. Chaplin dipped his toes in the talkie waters, as we now know, with "Modern Times" in 1936. Hazanavicius steals the film's few moments of sound that break from the silent film format directly from "Modern Times." In fact, the "sound scene" is thematically identical. But I digress.

Predictability ensues. Peppy Miller is on her way up as one of the studio's first talkie stars, and the stubborn Valentin is on his way down for resisting them. He tries to make a silent film masterpiece on his own and it bombs; everyone is down the street at the latest Peppy Miller film. Meanwhile, Valentin's personal life has deteriorated along with his career, save for his faithful Jack Russell terrier. All the while, the attraction between Valentin and Miller is undeniable but Valentin overhears Miller giving an interview that does not reflect kindly on his craft and he keeps her at arms length.

The film's most melodramatic moments involve Valentin at the height of his despair, and just when I thought Hazanavicius couldn't steal from anything else, I was shocked to hear - sandwiched in an otherwise gorgous score by Ludovic Bource - a familar melody in the film's most dramatically climactic moment. I couldn't put my finger on where the music was from, but it seemed Bernard Hermann-y. And damned if it wasn't. Later on, while reading my Chicago Tribune, I learned that the tune was lifted from Hitchcock's "Vertigo," a film made more than 20 years after this one is set. Oops!

It's sad that the only idea someone today can come up with for a silent film is to go back and explore that precarious point in time when film was transitioning to talking picutres and some of the old guard put up naive resistance to it. Had this topic not been so wonderfully explored already both on screen (in "Singin' in the Rain") and off (with "Modern Times"), it might have been more interesting. But for all of the novelty of delivering a silent film in 2011, something essentially unheard of, it's a bit shocking that "The Artist" seems so familiar. It shouldn't, but it does.

Dujardin and Bejo (the director's partner in real life) have amazing faces for a silent film and give wonderfully nostalgic and expressive performances. Expect both to be nominated for awards, and both deserve them. They are the best part of the movie.

But when Hazanavicius throws in a few moments of sound in "The Artist," however well-placed and clever they may be, I wonder if he just couldn't fully trust that the film could carry with today's audiences without the presence of this inside joke. And in doing so, he steals from Chaplin and what he went through with "Modern Times."

Audiences will probably say that they can't believe how entertained they were by a silent film. But did they not see "Wall-E," who's first half hour was almost entirely silent and filled with pathos and poetry? Did they not see the opening, half-hour scene of "There Will Be Blood," which was almost dialogue-free? Smart audiences have demonstrated that they can handle silence in films more recently than the 1930s.

In the end, I suspect that "The Artist" will continue to charm the pants off of audiences. I'll admit that I was charmed too. But I was so disappointed that I was able to predict every major plot twist down to the final scene before it happened. Maybe I've seen too many silent films... In any case, you can call "The Artist" a pleasure to watch. But don't call it imaginative or inventive, because it's neither.

2.5 out of 4

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

The high school students who take the film class I teach tend to love horror movies, and most semesters, we'll engage in a debate over the merits of the genre. I'll show them "Psycho," which they don't find particularly scary, and then I'll show them "The Shining," which tends to register as a lot more freaky to many of the kids.

Once I taught "The Exorcist." Once. I terrified me watching it again and the religious connections made me too uncomfortable, so I shelved it from my list of teaching titles.

But the debate I have with students often centers around the very definition of what horror is. I don't think a great horror film even needs to be a film within the horror genre, much less a torture-port flick or a traditional jump-from-behind-a-tree-with-a-knife kind of film.

So although I have yet to see any 2011 releases that were specifically labeled as horror, I'm going to tell you what the best horror film of 2011 is: "We Need To Talk About Kevin."

Perhaps it's because I'm a parent. Or a teacher. Likely, it's the combination of both. And, as with any good horror film, it's in the performance of the "bad guy." Here, that guy is Kevin, played in his teenage years with chilling menace by Ezra Miller. Miller's every glance terrified me. And what he did terrified me further.

Based on a novel of the same name, "We Need To Talk About Kevin" is really the story of the boy's mother, Eva, played here by Tilda Swinton in what I think is the most accomplished and affecting performance of her career thus far. The film, directed by Lynne Ramsay, shifts in time throught Kevin's life up to and after he executes a brutal, Columbine-style massacre on unsuspecting students in his high school. One of the film's primary angles is to focus on Eva and what her life is like as the mother of a child who could do such a thing.

Of course one of the great techniques of horror is to let the audience in on the secret all along but then have them second-guess that what is to happen will actually happen, or at least keep them from understanding just how and when it will happen. Ramsay does this. We know right away what Kevin did by virtue of the way the film is edited. But we don't know how. Or any details. And most shockingly, we miss the clues along the way just as Kevin's parents do.

How could this happen? That's the film's central question. And at first, we feel like we have it all figured out. Kevin, it turns out, is a terrible child. He doesn't listen. He is angry and spiteful from an early age. In one particular scene of rage-inducing parental frustration, Eva is trying to get Kevin to count and add using a book. Kevin knowingly defies his mother with a manufactured progression of numbers and answers we know he knows is wrong. And he does so with malice. Kevin seems to be, from early on in the film, Rosemary's Baby.

Still, we sympathize with Eva and her passive husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), whom film critic Brad Brevet calls the film's weak link because the screenplay employs the tired "boys will be boys" cliche regarding the dad's impression of his son. I'm inclined to agree with Brevet's analysis, though the father's naivite is central to the plot development. Without giving away too much, some of the "boy things" that Franklin and Kevin engage in together explain why Kevin grows to be kinder to his father than to his mother. It turns out that his father is accidentally and unknowingly preparing Kevin to be able to carry out his plan.

I don't want to say more about that, or how the story unfolds. I will say that before the end, I literally yelled out loud on at least one occassion as was terrified more than once. Certainly, "We Need To Talk About Kevin" depicts every parent's worst nightmare. What if you try as hard as you can to raise your child and he turns out like this? How can you live with yourself? How can you live where you live? It's an unthinkable tragedy, and when you watch it, you want to feel like it was an avoidable one but when you go back through the story, you get discouraged. What could Eva have done differently? What would I have done? Would any of it have mattered?

As I mentioned, Swinton is fantastic here. In one powerful scene, Eva physically lashes out against a bratty young Kevin, throwing him against the wall after a disgusting act of defiance on his part. Any parent would have wanted to react the same, whether or not we'd have actually followed through on it. Her split-second and thoughtless response to Kevin lands them in the emergency room. Now this is Eva's fault. And Swinton effortlessly communicates the self-disappointment, exhaustion and despair of a mother at the end of her rope.

"We Need To Talk About Kevin" is artistically shot and edited. The sound is fantastic, as sound must be in any good horror film. The build-up to the inevitable plot conclusion is harrowing and tensely unavoidable. Sympathy, terror, anger and despair swirl together, ducking in and out of the film and often coexisting in its frames. It is one of those movies that stuck to my ribs for hours after. I couldn't shake it or get it out of my head.

Don't be fooled by the "drama" label. "We Need To Talk About Kevin" is a terrifying and deeply psychological horror story, steeped in the reality and precedent of recent (and ongoing) national tragedies. But it's not a movie about Columbine. Or Virginia Tech. Or Northern Illinois. It's a movie about the part of all of those stories that we've never heard told...the one about the parents of the killer.

3.5 out of 4

Carnage (2011)

My initial response to hearing that legendary director Roman Polanski would be helming a screen adaptation of the Yasmin Reza play, "God of Carnage," was that Polanski was the wrong man for the job. What, after all, does a play about four entitled, upper-class parents have to do with "Chinatown" or "The Pianist"?

Upon further consideration, it dawned on me that Polanski, more than perhaps any other director out there, understands clausterphobia because he lives it. The choices he's made in his life have confinded his travels. Maybe, I thought, he is the right guy for the job. After all, almost the entire play takes place in one living room. It doesn't get much more clausterphobic than that.

In the end, my opinion of "Carnage," (the title being one of only a very few changes Polanski made in this adaptation) is most closely alligned with my initial instincts, and I think the best way for me to put this is to say that if you have never read the original play or seen it staged live, you will probably be entertained by the film. Unfortunately for me, I have both read the play and seen it peformed (at the Goodman in Chicago a few months ago, in a fantastic production, I might add). I say "unfortunate" because, shockingly, Polanski does almost nothing to put his own spin on the original work. Consequently, I was sorely disappointed.

My disappointment over "Carnage" is amplified by the presense of one of the best casts Polanski could have assembled. The four-character piece puts Jodi Foster and John C. Reilly as parents of a boy who was poked with a stick on a playground up against the parents of the boy who performed that act, played by recent Oscar winners Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz. It's practically a dream come true in terms of on-screen talent.

And, indeed, the acting in "Carnage" gives the film its fireworks, especially, I'd guess, for those unfamiliar with the story. This is one of those films that is purely conversation; there is no plot whatsoever. That fact might turn off a lot of potential viewers.

On stage, though, that talk crackled and sparked. The mother of the boy who was injured, Penelope Longstreet (Foster), wants to make more out of what happened than what did. Her henpecked husband, Michael (Reilly) is forced to acquiesce with each bend in the conversation until he reaches his breaking point. The couple are a curious combination already; she has high-class tastes in art and he sells plumbing fixtures.

Their lack of 100 percent agreement on how to approach their conversation with the Cowans leads to the undoing of their unified front, and when I saw the play, the shifting allegiances among the four were palpable to me. Throughout its brisk 80 minutes, it's husband and wife against husband and wife, men against women, and then spouses against each other in sudden shifts, revealing the silliness of the adults who devolve in to something more childish than their kids who fought on the playground in the first place.

Winslet's Nancy is probably the flashy role here, as that character ends up getting sick during the parenting summit and adding another level of chaos to the story and, one could argue, its only sense of physical movement. Her husband Alan (Waltz) carries with him what might be the story's fifth main character: his cellphone. He is, as they say, addicted to the Crackberry, and is constantly making calls and only half-assing his part in the "what should we do about our kids" discussion.

To me, the things that made "God of Carnage" exciting and funny on stage did not work in the film "Carnage." I was shocked that Polanski virtually translates every element of the play over to film. Only at the very beginning and end does he take advantage of some things that a movie camera can do with a story that can't happen on a stage. Yes, these few add-ins are clever. But they frustrated me because they reveal what someone with Polanski's talent is capable of, making me wonder why he adapted little else to his own design. Sure, there's some tight camera work and cool tracking shots. But big deal!

The performances are all intense, and I'd say that Waltz and Foster probably get the best parts here. But even this aspect of "Carnage" was lackluster to me. What I saw was four great actors delivering great lines of dialogue with authority, none of them really living in those lines. Over and over again, the Cowans talk about how they have to leave. But they never go. Why? Because the script says they stay. Winslet and Waltz are not able to convince us that some greater force than their scripts consider their characters to reconsider.

Becuase of its pedigree, "Carnage" is an early favorite for my year-end list of the biggest disappointment of 2011. Having said that, let me be clear again that it is a solidly entertaining film, and a refreshingly quick view at only 80 minutes. And I really think that if you've never been exposed to the material before, you will find "Carnage" to be witty, ironic and interesting: a true sign of the times in our age of entitlement.

My familiarity with the material, though, kept me from enjoying this as I'd hoped to.

2.0 out of 4

My Week With Marilyn (2011)

I'll be quick and clear about "My Week With Marilyn." It's the kind of movie you go to if you appreciate rich and layered acting performances. If that's what you're looking for, bingo.

Michelle Williams, in particular, does more than just study and deliver a caricature of the late, great Marilyn Monroe. She nails the changes between the public and private Marilyns. She hints at her infamous insecurities and public presentations. The sheer fact that, in theory, Williams doesn't look that much like Monroe makes her performance that much more revelatory. Here, she's Marilyn's spitting image. It's one of the performances of the year.

Plotwise, not much of anything really happens in "My Week With Marilyn." Its title shares properties with other films such as "Snakes on a Plane" (never thought I'd make THAT comparison, did you?) in that the title basically tells the viewer everything that is going to happen. We will be spending a week with Marilyn Monroe, as did Colin Clark, a young filmlover with stars in his eyes who charmed his way onto the set of a Laurence Olivier picture as a third production assistant, which is a fancy term for the guy who gets the coffee.

Clark wrote two memoirs about his time with Monroe, and I've heard that he cashed in a little on what might have gone down between his 23-year-old self and the hottest actress in the world. As the story goes, Olivier was eager to return to greater hights as a film actor and director and thus cast Monroe to play opposite him in a film called "The Prince and the Showgirl," in spite of knowing that she had a reptuation of being next to impossible to work with.

At this time, the 30-year-old Monroe had recently married playwright Arthur Miller, and her arrival on Olivier's set is an instant circus, in no small part due to the presence of Paula Strasberg, her acting coach. It becomes clear early on that all commands given to Monroe will first go through Strasberg. That is, until she develops a sweet fondness for Clark, who is thrust into the role of go-between as Olivier attempts to maintain his composure and finish the film.

And that is the basic plot. That's it. Somewhat amusingly, however, the bulk of the film's running time does not focus on the actual narrative, but instead on those stolen moments between Clark and Monroe: a ride in a car, an intervention staged at the house Monroe is renting, an impromptu skinny dip in a secluded lake.

Williams, as I've said, brilliantly nails her performance as Monroe, and has to be a lock for a third Academy Award nomination. She is quickly growing into one of my favorite contemporary young actresses, and with this role demonstrates that even with the challenge of resembling someone so known, she is still able to infuse the character with her trademark "normalness" and depth. What Marilyn did to the libidos of men of all ages when she was on screen, Williams duplicates. As much as I felt pity for Colin because of how badly Monroe teased and flirted with him, I was left with an equal amount of jealousy. She broke his heart, but he saw her naked. He kissed those lips. He captured her attention. Amazing.

As Colin Clark, Tony Award-winning actor Eddie Redmayne is sufficiently wide-eyed and charming in a performance that will probably not garner the attention it deserves specifically because Redmayne is so perfect for it.

More likely to attract additional attention, if there is any justice, is the work of Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier. For years, Branagh has been one of my all-time favorite actors, though lately, he's been focusing on TV miniseries work and continues to direct (most recently, this year's film adaptation of Marvel's "Thor"). It was such a treat to see that searing, intense Branagh in a role befitting his abilities. Though far less flashy than what is required of Williams, Branagh's work here is every bit her equal.

Perhaps the real treat of "My Week With Marilyn" is that it permits us to dance for a brief amount of time with film history and its royalty. Arthur Miller appears, as does Olivier's wife, Vivian Leigh and British actress Dame Sybil Thorndike. But all of this is just fabuous window dressing for Williams as Monroe, as "My Week With Marilyn" seems to confirms the backstage antics of one of our largest personalities as being quite a challenge. Simultaneously, though, it reveals a fragile young woman who does not know where to plant her feet.

3.5 out of 4

Beginners (2011)

As a big fan of quiet little films about the complexities of human interaction (and particularly those within a family), I had been waiting for a while to see "Beginners" and was hopeful that the film would be one of those movies that I call "lake movies": the kind where you can dive in to the depths of characters and also see yourself in the reflection of the surface.

"Beginners" is a lake movie.

Garnering attention for the performance by Christopher Plummer, a giant of the film world still patiently waiting for that long-overdue Oscar statue, "Beginners" is based on the life of its writer and director, Mike Mills, played with profound sympathy by the fantastic Ewan McGregor in a sort of alter-ego version of Mills known as Oliver Fields.

Mills intercuts three stages of Oliver's life together to form the film, which is told in a non-linear but highly understandable manner. The earliest stage is Oliver as a boy, spending most of his time with an emotionally vague mother (Mary Page Keller) while his father (Plummer) runs an art museum. The young Oliver regularly questions whether or not his parents' relationship is all right. He is assured that it is. He is, of course, being lied to.

The second stage of Oliver's life places him in his mid-30s. His mother has recently died from cancer and his father, Hal, has used the occassion to announce to Oliver that he is - and has always been - a homosexual. Oliver takes the news calmly, likely due to his overwhelming sense of shock and bewilderment. His father, now 75, seems like a new person to him. In a nod to the film's title, Hal flouishes in his eleventh hour, falling deeply in love with Andy, a much younger man (Goran Visnjic, of TV's "ER"), and embracing the culture of his now-open identity.

Hal's period of truly living in his own truth, sadly, is shortlived, and I'm not ruining the film to reveal that the third time period of "Beginners" follows a 38-year-old Oliver in the aftermath of his father's death, also from cancer, only four years after his mother's passing. This Oliver is a shell, a man engulfed in sadness, intimidated by Andy's love for his father and unwilling to let his feelings for a woman grow too complicated for fear of it leading to marriage, something he's convinced must end in failure. To keep him in the deep end of this lake of despair, Oliver grows inseparable from his father's Jack Russell terrier, Arthur. His friends drag him to a costume party for Halloween and he falls quickly in love with a guest at the party named Anna (the lovely Melanie Laurent), but seems ready at a moment's notice to sabotage the progressing relationship.

For a quiet film, "Beginners" has a depth that sneaks up on the viewer, and lest you think I revealed too much about its plot, know that the manner in which the events from these three stages of Oliver's life are revealed is a large part of the film's charm, and that I do not wish to spoil. Mills infuses the many sad moments of Oliver's life with a great deal of humor, or at least light-heartedness; at times, the dog Arthur "speaks" to Oliver in the same way that any dog lover can tell you he/she has conversations with his/her own pet. Here, Mills uses subtitles. He does not overdue the effect, and instead of throwing the viewer out of the reality of the picture, it deepens our understanding of Oliver.

Mills also subtly films flashbacks in static, framed and stable shots, while using handheld camera work for the scenes that take place in the present. In a brief documentary about the film inlcuded in the DVD release, Mills explains the logic of this choice by saying that our memories are like pictures, unchanging, while the present is active. It's a mature choice that elevates "Beginners" above what one would expect a movie like this to be.

As for the performances, they are the reason the movie washed over me and moved me so much. The spotlight on Plummer's performance is probably more because of his status as a legendary actor overdue for big awards than for his actual work here, which is understated. But for my money, the performance of the film belongs to McGregor, an actor perhaps sidelined in terms of his profound depth of ability by his cardboard appearances as the young Obi Wan Kenobi in George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy. In some other year, I'd say McGregor is equally, if not more, deserving of recognition. There is pain in his eyes and in his posture, mixed with surprise and confusion. Who is this man he calls "father"? And who is he?

"Beginners" quietly shows us that life can begin at any time during our earthly years if we're willing to let it, and there is joy to be found in new beginnings. It is a touching "lake movie," always completely honest about family dynamics and the winding path of loss.

3.5 out of 4

Coming soon...

The following titles are films I have seen since I stopped blogging. I will be chipping away at this list and posting reviews for all of these films at some point:

Captain America: The First Avenger
Carnage
Cars 2
Drive
Green Lantern
My Week With Marilyn
Rio
The Muppets
The Smurfs

I'm back!

If you want people to read your blog, you really need to post more frequently than once every six months. I certainly realize this is the case and also understand that I will now need to rebuild whatever small audience I had. If you've read any of my reviews before, I hope you'll join me here again for the latest.

We're now entering my favorite time of year, when all of the serious contenders for awards are released. And though my primary jobs are as a husband/parent and a teacher - not to mention the fact that grad school has particularly sidelined me from blogging all this time. It has also prevented me from seeing movies. In fact, in the months since I last posted, I saw no more than a half dozen films.

I will, of course, post reviews for those films (most of which are children's movies). And I'll try to stay current with what I'm seeing now. But for a while, at least, my postings won't necessarily be in the order in which I saw the films, but instead, in the order in which I feel like writing about them.

I hope you'll be interested in reading. And feel free to add your reactions.

Keith's Top Films of 2010

I have a rule that there’s no sense in deciding what the top 10 films are from a given year unless you’ve seen at least 40 of them. Even then, a quarter of what you’ve seen makes the list. But when you’re not getting paid to see movies (and I wish I was), it’s hard to fit viewing them into your budget and schedule. So 40 seems noble and fair, and it took me a few months of 2011 to get to that point, which explains why my top films of 2010 list is just now seeing the light of day.

Like last year, and thanks in part to Chris Zois, a former student, I’ve also included additional categories to include films that don’t fit tidily into my list but deserve special mention. I also, like last year, have included a list of dozens of films I wish I had seen prior to making this list, and suspect that at least a few of them might have appeared on my list of favorites if I had seen them.

But you have to go by what you’ve seen, so that’s what I’ve done. Enjoy and feel free to comment!

Keith's Top 10 Favorite Movies of 2010
1. The King’s Speech
2. Exit Through the Gift Shop
3. 127 Hours
4. Blue Valentine
5. True Grit
6. The Fighter
7. Toy Story 3
8. Inception
9. Winter’s Bone
10. The Ghost Writer
Honorable Mentions: Restrepo, Tangled, Rabbit Hole, Buried, How to Train Your Dragon

The "Messy Masterpiece" Award: (tie) Black Swan, Dogtooth
(This goes to a film that is equally brilliant and bad and is therefore hard to categorize but unworthy of pure dismissal.) There is much to admire about “Black Swan”…until the final half hour. Then, the movie goes off the rails. There is no clear sense of what is reality to ground the narrative. And while the film is a masterwork of tone, it maintains virtually the same tone throughout, without levels. Having said all of this, it’s too well-made and occasionally brilliant to be anywhere close to a bad film. “Dogtooth” is even more polarizing; it takes the stunning premise of protective parents raising their children in physical and mental captivity and explores the deep psychology therein, but does so with ridiculous, WTF moments that tend to defy the message instead of supporting it.

Overrated: (tie) The Social Network, The Kids Are All Right
"The Social Network” is not a modern-day “Citizen Kane,” as some have suggested. Nor does it speak for a generation the way Peter Travers of Rolling Stone swears it does. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even explore the psychology of what social networking is doing to us as human beings the way everyone claims it does, though if it had, the film would be brilliant. Instead, it’s just a fantastically-made, well-acted and brilliantly-written, solid film. A great way to spend a few hours and nothing more. “The Kids Are All Right” generates its smokescreen of importance from the fact that the parents in the film are lesbians and from the fantastic acting performances, with Julianne Moore giving the film its true emotional center, though she was overlooked during the award season. But on the whole, the film was fairly pedestrian. People are mistaking the buzz surrounding the movie’s topic with the film itself. And the film was, well, “all right.”

Underrated: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
A small part of me found “Scott Pilgrim” to be just as much of a game-changer as last year’s “Avatar” was; perhaps it is the first film to truly deliver cinema from the perspective of video game culture. While I felt a bit old for some of its humor, the visuals were stunning, the symbolism rich, and the effects top-notch. Not enough people were talking about this movie, overlooked for the accolades it deserved.

Guilty Pleasure: Jackass 3-D
While the gross-out humor was more gross than ever, the Jackass gang delivered some its biggest laughs in franchise history in this third film when it created sketch comedy-styled situations and allowed them to play out away from high concept stunts, such as when they staged a midget-cheating-on-another-midget scenario in a bar, with hilarious results thanks to the “regular-sized” bystanders. By no means quality cinema, and by no means a waste of $10 when you’re looking to have a great time!

Biggest Disappointment: TRON: Legacy
The effects for “TRON: Legacy” were as good as I hoped they’d be. But I was also hoping someone could iron out a better story than the limp original. Nobody did, leaving only a few sequences and a kick-ass Daft Punk score as a signpost of what could have been.

Most Pleasant Surprise: (tie) The King’s Speech, Tangled
I expected “The King’s Speech” to be an excellent film. What I didn’t expect a movie that was among the funniest of 2010. And “Tangled” looked ripe to be another botched attempt to keep the Disney princess franchise alive, with the studio not knowing if it wanted traditional animation or CG animation, traditional song scoring or Pixar-styled music use. They compromised by using CG animation that looked like hand-drawn paintings and traditional song scoring by Alan Menken, the Disney master. In doing so, they surprisingly gave the Disney studio (excluding Pixar) its greatest animated film in probably 20 years.

Worst Movie of 2010: Death at a Funeral
All those funny people in a room and the original is still better, with the exception of James Marsden. Truth be told, I enjoyed “Dogtooth” the least of any film this year, but I don’t think this moniker is a fair description of that film. I also feel that I’ve avoided most of the movies that got horrible reviews this year, and I suspect that my true least favorite film of the year is something I’ll come across during some late-night HBO viewing six months from now.

Still to See: I would have liked for my list to have been based off of a more complete viewing experience, so in the spirit of full disclosure, here’s what I planned to see from 2010 that I haven’t had the opportunity to watch yet:

The A-Team, The American, Another Year, Barney’s Verison, Biutiful, Burlesque, Carlos, Catfish, The Company Men, Conviction, Country Strong, Day Breakers, Easy A, For Colored Girls, Frankie & Alice, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Green Zone, Hereafter, I Am Love, In a Better World, I Love You Phillip Morris, The Illusionist, Inside Job, Knight and Day, The Last Airbender, Let Me In, Letters to Juliet, Little Fockers, Love and Other Drugs, Made in Dagenham, Morning Glory, Never Let Me Go, The Next Three Days, Nowhere Boy, Red, The Secret in Their Eyes, Solitary Man, Somewhere, The Tempest, The Tillman Story, Unstoppable, Wall Street 2, The Way Back, Waiting For Superman, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Studs Terkel: Listening to America (2009)

In a quick 40-minute blast, one can better understand the monumental influence of Studs Terkel on the journalism profession in the form of Eric Simonson’s STUDS TERKEL: LISTENING TO AMERICA. The documentary, which aired in 2010 on HBO, includes many interviews with Terkel, including interviews conducted when he was 95 and just six months prior to his death at 96 in 2008. It also includes snippets of fascinating interviews conducted by Terkel – both on the radio and on television – that help the viewer to understand his deep skill in the area of talking to people.

“I never invited a guest I didn’t respect,” Terkel said. And when you see that his interviewees were not just landmark author James Baldwin and acting great Marlon Brando, but also housewives and steelworkers, it becomes clear that Terkel had a great deal of respect for the “ordinary man” – so much so that he makes it a point in one interview to share his distaste for the word “ordinary” in such a context. To Terkel, no man or woman’s life is simply that.

LISTENING TO AMERICA briefly traces a history of how Terkel progressed from his early radio days in Chicago to a career as a best-selling author, where he documented in writing the “verbal histories” he conducted via thousands of hours of reels of tape for books like “Hard Times” and “Working.” It also touches on his persecution by McCarthy during the Red Scare, where Terkel admits that he “never met a petition he wouldn’t sign.”

If there’s anything wrong with LISTENING TO AMERICA it’s simply that Terkel is a subject worthy of a longer documentary and deeper exploration. This film serves as a wonderful primer or sampler to one unfamiliar with one of the greatest broadcaster/writers of all-time. With any luck, the impending centennial of Terkel’s birth in 2012 will spark an even richer cinematic document of just what an impact the man had on the stories of the common man in America. Until then, watching this little taste is enough to garner an appreciation.

Death at a Funeral (2010)

Playwright Neil LaBute seems like a jarringly odd choice of a director to take someone else’s work, written in an entirely different tone from his own, and assemble a film from it in a director-for-hire invisible style. This is the man who brought us the angry “In the Company of Men,” among other things.

But maybe the guy wanted a break, looking no further back than a few years for source material on his latest film, DEATH AT A FUNERAL, an African-American version of a perfectly enjoyable British comedy from just a few years ago. This remake is almost a paint-by-numbers “cover” of that relatively unsubstantial but fun-to-watch 2007 film, and even features Peter Dinklage in the exact same role from the original, but with a different name.

Given the fact that the purpose Dinklage’s character serves in the film is one of its best comedic surprises, LaBute must have been confident that the audience that this DEATH sought to reach had not seen the original; it’s a surprisingly hilarious and shocking bit.

In this version, Chris Rock is Aaron, the man responsible with organizing his father’s funeral, which is to be held at the family home. Mother Cynthia (Loretta Devine) is in no condition to be of any assistance, and things start to go wrong early on when the body the funeral home delivers to the house is not his father’s.

The supporting cast of wacky funeral attendees are a perfect storm of mayhem-in-waiting. Aaron’s brother Ryan, played by Martin Lawrence, flies in from New York to attend; he is now a successful writer and a thorn in Aaron’s side for succeeding in a profession Aaron himself aspires to, and with lesser material to boot. A family friend is placed in charge of getting a crabby, unpredictable and wheelchair-bound uncle to the funeral, and a niece arrives with her white fiancé, to the instant disappointment of her father.

Making matters even more ridiculous, that white fiancé, played by James Marsden in the film’s most lively comedic performance, has taken what he thought to be a valium in an attempt to calm his nerves about being in the presence of her family, only to discover that it was LSD, a mistake that an audience might think could never happen but one that the film makes relatively believable. Naturally, this is also a plot device that allows Marsden’s Oscar to engage in the most erratic behavior of all, and Oscar memorably spends a large chunk of the film completely naked and on the roof of the house.

The relationship here between Aaron and Ryan sucks a lot of the comedic joy from the film, and it’s hard to buy Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence as brothers. But a ridiculously good Marsden is flanked by a crabby Danny Glover, the always-wonderful Devine and the always-clueless Tracy Morgan, each of whom delivers on whatever jokes they are given.

Dinklage, called Frank in this version, has the same purpose in this film as he did in the original, as I’ve mentioned before. He’s a fish-out-of-water guest at the funeral, in the original because of his dwarf stature and here because of his skin color as well. And I won’t spoil his purpose in the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, because it’s worth a good laugh, though I will caution that LaBute is not as successful in hiding the surprise for as long as Frank Oz did in the original. (I’m sure it was hard, though, for me to observe this with any kind of objectivity, as I knew what would come to pass going in.)

DEATH AT A FUNERAL was an unnecessary remake but a universal and simple enough story to merit an American reboot good for a few hours on the couch when all of your network favorites are reruns and you want a good laugh or two. It’s by no means a disaster; neither is it anything to remember.

2.0 out of 4

Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)

The opening of GNOMEO & JULIET actually looks surprisingly promising, as a garden gnome wobbles out in front of a red curtain to warn the audience that “the story you are about to see has been told before…a lot.” The cute little ceramic guy then goes on to whip out a long scroll and attempts to read Shakespeare’s prologue to “Romeo & Juliet” verbatim until the shepherd’s hook snags him offstage.

Though this Elton John-produced animated feature goes on to include a few sly literary references thereafter, there’s not much from a storytelling perspective that makes GNOMEO & JULIET very interesting. In this setting, the star-crossed lovers are garden gnomes in the bordering backyards of the Capulet and Montague families living in the duplexes in front of them. The “gangs” distinguish themselves from one another by their red and blue hats, respectively. And since the humans are rarely seen in the film, the gnomes attack each other with gusto as Gnomeo and Juliet fall in love with one another in spite of it, coaxed on by a plastic lawn flamingo.

John not only produced the film but lent a stable of his classic hits to the film, to mixed effects. While “Saturday Night’s All Right For Fighting” works relatively well during a fight sequence and “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word” is moving as instrumental scoring behind one of the film’s emotional moments, it’s hard to watch this film without wishing we were getting the kind of high-quality original material we got with “The Lion King,” or even “Road to El Dorado.” Why didn’t they want new music here? It’s puzzling.

The film isn’t a complete disaster, however. As a matter of fact, the vocal talents assembled make for quite a distinguished and clever group, starting with James McAvoy and Emily Blunt as the couple and featuring the work of everyone from Michael Caine and Maggie Smith to Jason Statham and Ozzy Osbourne. And perhaps my favorite thing about the film is the way the animation team creates the garden gnomes to truly appear as plaster lawn decorations. The faded and chipped paint, the cracks and imperfections and, especially, the hollowed-out chinking sound they make when the move around – some on square bases – heighten the film’s sense of place and its element of kitsch.

Adults will get an extra chuckle whenever a good Shakespeare joke flies by, but there are only a few. While any film that co-stars both Patrick Stuart and Hulk Hogan is worth a look, there’s little else in GNOMEO & JULIET to knock our socks off.

2.0 out of 4