...On the Movie

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (2011)

2012-01-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

Do individuals who coordinated to destroy thousands of buildings and pieces of property nation-wide for the purpose of speaking out against perceived crimes against the environment deserve to be labeled as "terrorists"? This question is at the heart of the documentary "If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front," a surprisingly even-handed and journalistic look into the phenomenon known as "eco-terrorism."

The aforementioned question is one debated by Daniel McGowan, the film's main subject and a man awaiting two life sentences in prison for his involvement in arsons and descructions of property in the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, largely in the American northwest. The film, directed by Marshall Curry, is largely a look back through various key acts of protest by a group called the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, how McGowan came to be involved with the ELF, and in what capacity McGowan was involved.

At no point does "If a Tree Falls" attempt to persuade its audience that McGowan is not guilty of his crimes. There is no mistaking that he is. Instead, Curry attempts to hook the audience into an ambiguous place by stimulating an intellectual debate as to whether or not should be considered "terrorism." McGowan and others argue that because not one person was killed in hundreds upon hundreds of the ELF's acts, the moniker of "terrorist" is incorrect and inapporopriate. They believe that a terrorist seeks to end human life.

The dissenting argument, led by the U.S. government, makes the case that a terrorist does not need to target human life and that a terrorist instills a state of fear in people, a perpetual insecurity, that the ELF has clearly achieved through its acts at the expense of logging companies, laboratories, and other businesses tied to environmental practices opposed by the ELF. According to one federal prosecutor, "You don't have to be Bonnie and Clyde to be a bank robber, and you don't have to be Al Quida to be a terrorist."

For a majority of the film, Curry is largely successful in maintaining a relative journalistic neutrality that keeps the focus on the debate and forces the viewer to consider how he or she feels about what has taken place. But the revelation of McCowan's eventual acceptance of a plea bargain to reduce his jail time to what would amount to seven years (he is now currently serving that sentence) is damaging to McCowan's character. The plea bargain is certainly understandable, but it wusses him out and any admiration one might have for McCowan seems to slip away.

If it hadn't already. Interviews in the second half of the film show McCowan increasingly questioning the decisions he's made, leading up to his active role as an arsonist in the destruction of a facility thought to have ties to the genetic cloning of trees for paper manufacturing that was carried out based on faulty information.

And then, of course, there's the issue of whether or not the destruction of property is a valid and acceptable practice when one wants to make a point or get something done. Logic would tell us it's not. But Curry also shows us that peaceful protesters acting on their First Amendment rights were systematically attacked in violent ways by law enforcement, pepper sprayed and even having their pants cut so that their genital areas could be sprayed with chemicals. Certainly, that's not right, either.

In the end, though, it's awfully difficult to have a lot of sympathy for McCowan as Curry tosses objectivity aside in the film's final 15 minutes to watch McCowan accept the plea bargain, lose the battle against the government to have the label of "terrorist" removed from him, and say goodbye to his family before heading off to prison. I'm still not certain whether or not I believe the term "terrorism" truly applies; it's certainly not as accurate as "arsonist," and McCowan and his former companions are most certainly criminals worthy of convictions and jail sentences.

There's an old saying that goes "if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." What's sad about "If a Tree Falls" is that we see a man stand for something yet fall anyway.

2.5 out of 4

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011)

2012-01-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

I don't normally watch a sequel without having seen the chapters of the story that come before them, but one of the things that makes "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory" so good is the fact that having seen the two previous films in this documentary series is not necessary.

I have not seen 1996's "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills," nor its 2000 follow-up, "Paradise Lost 2: Revelations," but "Purgatory" quickly gets viewers up to speed with the back story of the West Memphis Three, a story that seems to be among the most compelling true crime stories of the past 50 years in the minds and imaginations of many Americans. I was, sadly, only peripherally aware of the details of the 1993 murders of three eight-year-old boys and the convictions of the three teens who are now considered to be innocent of those murders.

But the story is clearly compelling enough - and the sense of injustice by many was so strong - that filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (who have filmed everything from the Metallica documentary "Some Kind of Monster" to Oprah's current O Network program "Master Class") have apparently made keeping up with the story of the wrongfully-convicted Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Miskelly their cinematic life's mission.

Without having seen those previous films, I can only assume that the history Berlinger and Sinofsky have, not only with the details of this case but with the three men in jail themselves, is what allows "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory" to be the compelling documentary that it is. This is not objective documentary filmmaking; its creators clearly believe that the three men were wrongfully committed of the killings. Nor does it go to Michael Moore-style extremes in impressing a version of what did happen on audiences (though it certainly offers up a potential suspect with more than a slight subtlety).

Like the two installments before it, this film is a part of HBO's documentary series. It showcases a decades-long persistence on the part of the filmmakers in tracing the journey of how Baldwin, Echols and Miskelly were arrested for the murders of three boys in Arkansas, railroaded into false confessions, and tried as practicing satanists, a tactic that is surprisingly convincing at times. Indeed, one of the things the film does most effectively, at least in my mind, is helps me rush to the judgment that the three young men appear to be guilty before proving to me that they are innocent. I know that viewers who arrive to this viewing experience with more information about the case than I did probably won't take this same mental journey as I did, but I was shocked and embarassed by how much of perception of their guilt was based on their appearances. They looked guilty to me. Shame on me.

I read Roger Ebert's reviews of this film and its previous chapters to get a sense of what versions of the story each previous film told, and Ebert mentions that the second film pulls out one of the slain boys' stepfathers, John Mark Byers, as the potential real killer. It is an added thrill, I'm sure, to viewers who have followed the whole story to find that in this third installment, the attention turns from Byers toward another step-father, Terry Hobbs, who is linked to the crime scene through the DNA testing of a hair.

This same DNA testing is what ultimately causes the state of Arkansas to realize that Baldwin, Echols and Miskelly did not kill the boys. They call a hearing with shocking speed after the DNA results arrive (this happened just about a year ago) and agree to set the men free under the condition of an asinine plea strategy that requires the men to essentially say "I didn't do it but I'm pleading guilty." The logic, twisted as it is to us, is that by entering this plea, the state of Arkansas is, theoretically, protected from having wrongfully jailed these men for 17 years. They can claim that the time served by the men - including one, Echols, who was on death row - was sufficient for the crime by virtue of those guilty pleas.

But Berlinger and Sinofsky are not subtle in allowing those filmed here to point out that just because these innocent men are now free doesn't mean that justice was served. Jason Baldwin even explicitly states that he might have more luck outside of jail than in getting something done, indicating that this story is not over. And while I'm not sure whether or not I'd enjoy reaching back to watch the first two Paradise Lost films, I'd certainly look forward to a fourth installment in which the now-freed men pursue the clearing of their name and go after the flawed justice system and the state of Arkansas. I'm sure that story is in the works.

Cinematically, "Paradise Lost 3" is frequently blunt, which means that you should be forewarned that it can be unwatchably gruesome in spots, particularly when it plainly offers up images from the crime scene. They are wincingly terrible to look at, but arguably necessary as well.

And we now know not only that the case of the West Memphis Three not only attracted the attention of rock stars like Eddie Vedder and the Dixie Chicks and actors like Johnny Depp (all of whom briefly appear in the film footage) but also Hollywood. Director Peter Jackson has just produced and released "West of Memphis," yet another documentary on the subject (this one directed by Amy Berg).

Do we need another film about this case as it stands right now? I don't know. I find it hard to imagine that anyone could tell the story better than these two men who have followed it so passionately from the beginning. "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory" is now nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. And after having told the story for over 15 years, that accolade feels well-deserved.

3.5 out of 4

Moneyball (2011)

2012-01-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

Every critic seemed confident that Bennett Miller's "Moneyball" would receive a Best Picture Oscar nomination, and indeed they were right. I assumed as much as well, but stop short of agreeing that the accolades are truly deserving. To me, "Moneyball" is a solid and enjoyable film that can now claim its Best Picture nominee status only because of the new rules allowing for a bloated list beyond what should probably be the five most worthy films each year. I enjoyed watching it, was impressed by how engaged I was in a film about a sport that I care little about, and then promptly forgot about it.

Based on Michael Lewis' supposedly un-filmable bestseller of the same name, "Moneyball" tells a true story from the recent past of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's who, due to lack of finances, cannot compete in the major leagues with a team like the New York Yankees, the MLB's "best that money can buy."

In a serendipitous moment of opportunity, Beane (played by Brad Pitt), is open and observant enough while sitting in a player trading meeting to notice something in a punky, pudgy young Ivy league graduate named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). His theory? Beane can also have the best that his money can buy. Even with a budget that is modest by comparison to other ball clubs, Brand needs little time to convince Beane that there is a mathematical formula that can be used to determine if a player is worth the investment.

As we now know, Beane nabbs Brand away from his low-level position with another team and promotes him, and before long, Brand becomes Beane's timid Yoda and Oakland turns around its win-loss record and barrels into the playoffs with nary a big-named player on its roster. It's a classic underdog story from the sports world built for the movie screen.

Without question, "Moneyball" is well-acted, and indeed, both Pitt and a surprisingly good Jonah Hill are both nominated for Oscars, though I would contend without a second thought that Pitt's truly great performance this year was not in this film but in "The Tree of Life." Personally, I could have done without the repeated image of Pitt's Beane throwing metal folding chairs around in impulsive fits of frat boy anger. But maybe that's Miller's fault and not Pitt's.

Miller, who worked with "Moneyball" co-star Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote" (a film I liked better than this one), gives us a few moments of lovely cinematography but also throws focus on some tired cliches. In addition to Beane's chair-throwing tantrums, for example, he dots the film with scenes of Beane as a divorced dad madly in love with his teenaged daughter. Each of these instances in the film felt forced. The only emotion meant for this story is the emotion that sports fans feel about their teams. The rest of this movie is, by design, entirely cerebral. Yet Miller feels the need to throw in a cheap attempt at tugging at our heart strings. They didn't work.

When I finished watching "Moneyball," I agreed with all I had heard from those who said things like: "This is a baseball movie for people who don't like baseball" and "This is a math movie for people who don't like math." Indeed, baseball is low on my list of interests and math is at the very bottom, so the fact that I was engaged at all certainly requires me to agree with these statements.

But is this the new "greatest baseball movie of all-time"? I'm not sure I think so. And I wouldn't call it one of the greatest movies of 2011 either. For me, it was merely a solid movie, and I'm left wondering why others see it as more than this. Are we all now delusionally worshiping at the altar of Aaron Sorkin, who co-wrote the script? Are we stunned by the muted and excellent dramatic work of the potty-humored actor Hill? Is this the great Pitt performance we've all been waiting for because nobody is willing to watch "The Tree of Life"? These are all valid questions, I think.

In the end, "Moneyball" is a great rental. It's a smart film, but delivers its intelligence with a side order of cliches. I enjoyed it while I watched it, but I don't find myself remembering much about it.

3.0 out of 4

The Tree of Life (2011)

2012-01-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

It's difficult to write about something when you don't fully understand it, so I've delayed my writing of a review of "The Tree of Life" for some time now, but as the film was just nominated for three Academy Awards (all in categories for which I believe those nominations were deserved), it's time for me say something.

When discussing "The Tree of Life" with a co-worker, I suggested that it is the kind of movie that, if you showed it to 10 friends, one would like it. So, does that make it a failure of a movie? After all, hundreds of films of far less quality - those frequently starring "Saturday Night Live" alums, for example - are adored by moviegoers in far greater numbers. I've thought a lot about that. And I've wavered on the conclusions I've drawn from that internal debate.

So what do I think of "The Tree of Life"? Well first, I think it is a true work of art, a piece of filmmaking that transcends its genre and method of delivering information. And I celebrate the vision of director Terrence Malick, who does not seem to have been forced to compromise any of his personal vision when making the film.

But what's wrong "The Tree of Life," oddly enough, are the same two things. More on that in a minute.

There's a difficulty in offering a plot summary for Malick's "messy masterpiece" other than to say that after about an hour of this slowly-paced film expires, some semblance of a plot finally begins to emerge. That plot is intentionally generic and features a stern father (played by Brad Pitt) lording over his modest, middle class household in 1950s Waco, Texas. His three sons fear him and desperately crave affection from him. His wife (Jessica Chastain) fears him, too, and lavishes affection on her boys to supplant the lack of it from their father.

The oldest son, Jack (played as a boy by the riveting Hunter McCracken) seems the most damaged by distance his father creates between the parents and the boys, and is most frequently the object of the father's cold life lessons and lectures on the world's harsh realities. We see Jack as an adult in flashes throughout the film, played by Sean Penn, with a lost look in his eyes. Even if we can't explain how and why, we know that his relationship with his father continues to hold influence over him as an adult.

Brad Pitt is nominated for Best Actor this year for his excellent work in "Moneyball," but I strongly believe that his work in this film is not only his better performance from 2011, but the finest acting work of his career. His ability to communicate the classic masculinity of fathers of this generation is without a misstep; he communicates emotional detachment and profound love for his family simultaneously and understands the conflict that a man has when faced with the challenge of hardening his son for the sake of survial in this world but trying to nurture as well. I never felt the threat of abuse from Pitt, and yet one could argue that the whole experience was abusive.

And not only was Pitt's performance one of my favorites of the year, but the rest of the cast is fantastic as well, which is made all the more impressive when you consider that Malick does not give them large amounts of dialogue or anything that resembles a classic story structure to build their characters upon.

Malick intercuts this family's daily moments with sun-soaked images of nature. The unbelievable cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki (who I believe deserves to win the Oscar) presents mundane landscapes with saturated colors and awe-inspiring appeal, reminding us that these things were created by an Awesome God. Various cast members pass fleeting and whispered lines of voiceover, all presumably directed toward their Creator. Many of these voiceover moments are in the form of challenging questions: why. And the audience of this film is forced to do what we all must do in real life, which is take in our surroundings, search our hearts and minds, and suggest an answer to ourselves, based on whatever we perceive to be evidence.

Much as been written about the front half of the film, which leaps backward in time to the very creation of life and features everything from micro-organisms to dinosaurs. The best we can make of it is that Malick wanted to show how all of this is connected, and he wanted to do it all in one place. It's a wonder to watch but it's sloppy. The visuals are stunning and kalidoscopic, but at the expense of narrative, almost completely.

This brings me to the two points I made early in my review.

When I said that "The Tree of Life" transcends its method of delivering information, I'm talking about the fact that Malick attempts to do things with cinema that cinema is not traditionally built for, and this is why most people won't appreciate the film. I think most people would agree that it's beautiful, but there won't be a patience or a tolerance for it. Why? Because "The Tree of Life" is film as a poem is to a short story or novel. This is a visual poem, plain and simple. It breathes in the cracks between what we see and the questions we have about what is happening. It lacks a traditional cinematic three-act narrative. It observes existence in non-sequential snapshots.

Movies, on the whole, are not designed to communicate poetry. They're built for stories. If you try to make "The Tree of Life" into a "story" by traditional defnition, it will fail. In other words, the film was not made for the genre and we were not made for it. And yet here we all are, staring at this wonderful work and trying to figure out what to make of it. It feels a lot like staring at a Pollack in a modern art gallery and attempting to explain it.

My second point was that "The Tree of Life" seems to have allowed Terrence Malick complete control over his vision. As a lover of auteur films, this is a pure thrill. But there's a downside as well, and this is the fact that Malick seems to have made the film with little regard for what his audience would - or even could - get out of it. This begs the question: Does a film director have a responsibility to consider an audience when making a film. Or, more broadly, does an artist have a responsibility to create art for an audience? Apparently, Malick doesn't think so.

But if I'm being honest, the cinema is a delivery mechanism of storytelling for the masses. It is, at its core, a collaborative medium of artistic expression, no matter how singular the vision of the director or writer. And in that way, "The Tree of Life" is too challenging of an anomaly to the chosen method of its presentation as a movie. But then, how else could this message be communicated?

I always feel like there's a direct correlation between the quality of a movie and the time I spend after consuming it thinking about it. Many movies are empty calories. This one is not. And by that measuring stick, "The Tree of Life" has got to be one of the most incredible movies ever filmed. But movies are meant to entertain and satisfy on an emotional level. "The Tree of Life," I felt, aimed for the soul instead of the heart, and I doubt many viewers are willing to afford Malick the time and a mind open enough for that connection to happen for them.

A four-star review is usually reserved for a movie that is perfect in every way, or at least imperfect in only trivial ways. "The Tree of Life" is not perfect. It's left me awed but confused, exhilirated and exhausted. But I would watch it again. Multiple times. Because when you strip down the visual poetry and the conceits of a cinematic artist, it's a conversation between a man and his two makers: his earthly father and his heavenly father. And however inaccessible "The Tree of Life" might be, this core message is universal.

4.0 out of 4

Oscar predictions for 2011

2012-01-23T14:44:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce their nominations for the Academy Awards, honoring the work of films released in 2011.

For over a decade, I've made it my business to attempt to predict which films and performances would garner Oscar nominations, as the film award season has been a great hobby of mine going back as far as I can remember. I'd like to think that I got pretty good at making predictions, too, considering my lack of access as simply a passionate, serious film-lover (and not a professional award season writer). I would read books about how to predict what would be nominated and what would win. I'd devise my own methods for making my choices.

But something I wrote in last year's predictions bears repeating today, and that is the fact that the prevalence of award season blogs and insider information has actually made my job a little less fun and, in many ways, less difficult. Whereas I once had to watch each film and guess what I thought the Academy would support, I now simply have to read five or six trusted sources online and then can shoot down the middle with my predictions, using a law of averages. It's certainly less mysterious today.

Some mystery has returned this year, however, with the rule change to allow the Best Picture category to fluctuate between five and 10 nominees, based on the support shown to each film via first place votes. I am almost certain that everything you'll see me predict here today will be nominated in this category; it's just a matter of how many. So I'll try to predict that number, too, and not award myself full credit for any over/under that.

The format I use for my nomination predictions is the same one I've used for the past decade or so. I attempt to predict who will be nominated in the "big" categories: Picture, Director and the four acting categories. I predict the five nominees and provide two alternates that I think could sneak in. I give myself a point for each one I get right and a half-point for alternates. This used to total 40 points, but now it will total 45 because of the expansion of the Best Picture race to 10 nominees. Then, I tack on what I call "The 10," which is a list of 10 random nominees from any of the other categories I feel certain will be nominated.

BEST PICTURE

I make no genius statements here when I say that filling out the first five nominees - the minimum possible - is easy. I'm also no maverick in predicting that the Academy will likely take advantage of the new rule and nominate more than five. And, not straying in any way from the other prognosticators, I'm doubting that they will nominate a full slate of 10. So how many get in?

Well, I think the following are sure bets: The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo and Midnight in Paris.

So that's five. I feel pretty good about adding Moneyball as a sixth choice, as it will certainly score nominations for its screenplay and for Brad Pitt as actor.

But there's a part of me that says we'll see a seventh nominee, and possibly an eighth. If these slots happen at all, I predict that one of them will go to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The other will go to either War Horse or The Tree of Life. This leaves Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Bridesmaids as the supposed nine and 10 choices, with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on the outside looking in. I don't need another alternate when I have this many on my list, but I'll throw The Ides of March on there just to have one.

BEST DIRECTOR

I wasn't feeling certain before but am now feeling more confident that we'll here Woody Allen's name for his first nomination here since 1994's Bullets Over Broadway, and that makes me very happy!

My picks: Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), David Fincher (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Alexander Payne (The Descendants), Martin Scorsese (Hugo)
My alternates: Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Steven Spielberg (War Horse)
Second guessing myself: There's only one guy on this list I'm not sure about at all, and that's Fincher. He was nominated last year, and he seems overdue for a win, though there's no chance in hell that can happen this year. The more I sit and think the more I feel like Malick could steal that slot. The Tree of Life hasn't been high on people's nomination lists for months now, but I can't shake the feeling that it is a respected work of art as a film and that he'll be rewarded for it. I'm also a tad nervous to leave Stephen Daldry off the list, when every single one of his previous films (Billy Elliot, The Hours, The Reader) has nabbed him a nomination here, but Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close just doesn't seem like it ever got off the ground.

BEST ACTOR

My picks: George Clooney (The Descendants), Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Michael Fassbender (Shame), Gary Oldman (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Brad Pitt (Moneyball)
My alternates: Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter)
Second guessing myself: I think Clooney, Dujardin and Pitt are locks here. Though the NC-17 rating of Shame might off-put some, I think Fassbender is one of the most talked about actors out there right now, and I think they'll welcome him to the club for this daring work, however difficult it is to watch. That leaves Oldman on shaky ground, but I've heard great things and he's overdue. Otherwise, the slot would be DiCaprio's. But J. Edgar has fallen off the radar and most likely, so will he. Shannon seems like a good alternate for Fassbender, should the academy choose to elevate a daring, serious actor.

BEST ACTRESS

My picks: Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Viola Davis (The Help), Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin), Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn)
My alternates: Just as everyone thought Kate Winslet would be nominated as a Supporting Actress for The Reader a few years ago, I think Berenice Bejo could be nominated here for The Artist instead of in the supporting category. Truthfully, this is the correct category for her because it's a leading performance and she's more than worthy of a nomination. Assuming she's placed in supporting where her studio wants her, the alternates are Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene)
Second guessing myself: The Davis-Streep-Williams trifecta has been a foregone conclusion for what seems like months now, and most agree that Close will make it, as she was once a front-runner here. That leaves Swinton the most vulnerable but she's a past winner and brilliant in her film this year, which leads me to believe that unless the scenario I posed above happens, she's in instead of Mara, Olsen or Charlize Theron (in the underperforming Young Adult). Kristin Wiig, another name being thrown around, will get a screenplay nomination for Bridesmaids, not an acting one.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

My picks: Kenneth Branagh (My Week With Marilyn), Albert Brooks (Drive), Jonah Hill (Moneyball), Ben Kingsley (Hugo), Christopher Plummer (Beginners)
My alternates: Nick Nolte (Warrior), Corey Stall (Midnight in Paris)
Second guessing myself: They've all but handed this over to Plummer, and bravo to that. But I'm confident that he'll be joined by Brooks and Hill for playing so jarringly against type and Branagh for playing brilliantly within his wheelhouse. Kingsley was the emotional center of a film that stands a chance to garner the most overall nominations, so I'm going out on a limb and predicting he'll be swept in in place of the more frequently predicted Nolte. And as for Corey Stall, he's my one original, out-of-left-field prediction among everything here, and I had to have at least one. But when a Woody Allen film does as well as Midnight in Paris is doing, an acting nomination tends to follow. And who is more memorable in the film than Stall as Hemingway? Nobody!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

My picks: Berenice Bejo (The Artist), Jessica Chastain (The Help), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs), Octavia Spencer (The Help)
My alternates: Shailene Woodley (The Descendants), Carey Mulligan (Shame)
Second guessing myself: A lead nomination for Bejo moves Woodley in, but that'd be the only change in a category I feel very confident about.

THE TEN

Take these to the bank:

1. Original Screenplay: Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris)
2. Adapted Screenplay: Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball)
3. Foreign Language Film: A Separation (Iran)
4. Animated Feature: Rango
5. Animated Feature: The Adventures of Tintin
6. Art Direction: Hugo
7. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki (The Tree of Life)
8. Film Editing: Anne-Sophie Bion (The Artist)
9. Original Score: Ludovic Bource (The Artist)
10. Original Song: "The Living Proof" (The Help)

Midnight in Paris (2011)

2012-01-06T16:17:00.000-08:00

I used to find it difficult to objectively review a Woody Allen film because I love his work so much. I love that there are always a few jokes that work on a modern, crass level in his films but they are surrounded by other one-liners and situations which require a deeper level of observation, a greater level of intelligence. I love how Woody Allen movies, no matter what they are about, make some kind of philosphical statement about life here on Earth. No matter how trivial or profound the plots, Woody Allen movies always have philosophy.

But even I was not immune to a late-90s to mid-2000s stretch of lackluster releases from Allen, and for a guy who ran to the theatre for each new release, I started to find myself waiting for the DVDs and letting them collect on the shelf in plastic. And while I'm a firm believer in not judging a movie unless you've seen it, I'm fairly certain I haven't missed anything incredible if I have yet to see "Anything Else."

So then came "Match Point," one of my favorite films of 2005 and in my top five all-time Woody favorites. And then "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." And it seemed as though Allen was just New York-ed out, because with each new European city as a backdrop, the magic was back again.

Magic is the perfect word, then, to describe "Midnight in Paris," Allen's latest and his most magical film since "The Purple Rose of Cairo." So frequently grounded in mundane-but-worthy tete-a-tetes and the difficult-to-forgive mistakes of libinous adults, Allen seemed to have forgotten how much a little fantasy in his films could deepen our search for the meaning of life, rather than distract from it.

In "Midnight in Paris," the "Woody Allen role" is played by Owen Wilson. He's a writer named Gil, smitten with the city of Paris as he and his fiancee, Inez (the glowingly beautiful Rachel McAdams) tag along with her parents on her father's business trip. Her father's devotion to the Tea Party branch of the Republican party, by the way, gives the film its only modern or political flourishes.

Gil is successful enough as a film screenwriter but wants to be a novelist. He's disgusted by a man named Paul (played with delicious arrogance by Michael Sheen), a friend of Inez's who acts as their personal Paris tour guide, monopolizing the couple's time when Gil would rather be walking around the city, particularly in the evening and especially in the rain. This is when he finds Paris the most beautiful. And in the company he's keeping, he's alone in that thinking.

But Gil's company takes a mysterious turn when he goes out for a midnight stroll without Inez one evening and ends up in an antique car with a handful of rowdy partygoers. They deliver him to a heavily-populated gathering where he first speaks with a boozy, flirty young woman and then is soon introduced to her by her husband. The woman, the man says, is Zelda Fitzgerald. He is Scott. As in F. Scott. As in the 1920s.

Without saying too much - because the joy of "Midnight in Paris" is to revel in the figures that populated the Golden Age and appear to Gil here - Gil is newly-inspired to work on his novel after spending his nights sneaking away from Inez and drinking with the likes of Hemingway and Dali. He gives his manuscript to Gertrude Stein and her belief in his promise gives him more confidence than his fiance ever could. He witnesses an argument over the merits of a Picasso painting of one of his mistresses and then falls in love with the mistress, a stunning girl named Adriana (Marion Cotillard, officially in my top 10 favorite actresses). He uses what he learns from the debate to attack Paul when he pontificates about that same painting during a day trip to the Louvre.

As with any Woody Allen film, the cast is filled with award-winning stars and name-draw talents. Surrounding Wilson and McAdams are Oscar winners Cotillard, Kathy Bates and Adrien Brody. But equally impressive are the lesser knowns, particularly the machismo-oozing Corey Stoll as an honor-driven Hemingway.

But perhaps the best character in "Midnight in Paris" is the city itself, and making a city a character in his films is something Allen has been doing for decades. He does here for Paris what he did for New York in "Manhattan." An opening montage is like a slideshow for viewers of the city's most recognizable landmarks. They're filmed in daylight and the montage slowly gives way to evening and then to a rainy night. There is pure poetry in the sequence.

The film is shot by the brilliant cinematographer Darius Khondji, an Oscar nominee for his work on "Evita" who serves as D.P. here on his second collaboration with Allen. (The two are currently working together again on Allen's forthcoming Rome film.) Khondji plays with Allen's signature palate of golds, reds and browns with sensual, rich results. The film is as visually rich as is the script.

On that subject, Allen is most likely looking at his latest Oscar nomination for his screenplay. He hasn't been nominated since "Match Point" for his writing (or anything else), but his blend here of fantasy, poetry and philosphy is award-worthy. It's his most steady mixture of classic Allen themes with movie magic in a long time. "Match Point," as amazing as it was, won part of its glory by being such a departure for a Woody Allen movie. "Midnight in Paris" is as Woody Allen as any of his movies have ever been, making it all the more enjoyable to see it succeed as it does.

"Midnight in Paris" has, shockingly, become Allen's biggest box office performer, ever. And, it should be noted, the film is wet dream for the literati and anyone who majored in English. But it's style with substance, something rare these days. Inseprarable from the plot's unbelievable trip back in time comes a message about the perils of being too attracted to the past. The message is weighty and profound but the film does not weigh it down. Instead, the ideas linger, along with the film's visuals, for hours after watching it.

There's no question that "Midnight in Paris" belongs in the top 10 of all-time great Woody Allen movies. It might even rank quite high within that elite list. But wherever history will place it, I can put it in the context of this year alone and say that you're unlikely to find a movie this witty, this romantic, this thoughtful and beautiful, all year. Merci, Woody.

4.0 out of 4

Woody Allen: A Documentary (2011)

2012-01-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

Though not a theatrical release, "Woody Allen: A Documentary" merits inclusion here for a number of reasons. For one, the film is quite long, clocking in at close to three-and-a-half hours. (It originally aired on PBS's "American Masters" series in two parts.) And second, Woody Allen is having a banner year again, and I'll be posting a review of his latest, "Midnight in Paris," soon.

With the lengthy running time, director Robert B. Weide (an executive producer of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm") is able to casually drop in on the majority of Allen's 40-plus feature film releases, showing key scenes from each as they relate to the discussions Allen and members of his casts or inner circle are having about that film or period in Allen's life. It's no surprise that a film of this length is quite comprehensive, taking the viewer from Allen's childhood and early days as a professional joke writer all the way through images of him filming his as-yet-unreleased 2012 picture.

As a long-time fan of Allen's work, I enjoyed lingering in the history of such a legend and perhaps picked up even more interesting factoids about Allen from discussions of his childhood. I was already somewhat familiar with Allen's philosophies on life and death, his work habits, and his personal and working relationships with 70s muse Diane Keaton and 80s muse Mia Farrow. That said, it was a stunning reminder of the productivity and creativity of those relationships to see all of that work stitched together here.

I particularly enjoyed Weide's use of interviews with various cast members from past Allen films. One of the most enlightening conversations is with Dianne Wiest, who, after having won an Oscar for Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," appears profoundly lost and feels miscast in 1994's "Bullets Over Broadway" and remains in the role only by Allen's urging and at the expense of Allen's production team. And, of course, the role would eventually score Wiest another Academy Award.

Film scholars address the "periods" of Woody Allen's career: his early years of flat-out, clever comedy with films like "Bananas" and "Sleeper," followed by his more serious, Bergman-inspired period which included "Interiors" and "Manhattan." His late-90s creative slump is explored, as is his recent resurgence with "Match Point," "Vicki Cristina Barcelona" and "Midnight in Paris."

In addition to Allen's successes and failures financially and critically, "Woody Allen: A Documentary" makes it clear to viewers that Allen sees basically all of his work as a failure on some level, his defeatist outlook allowing him to perpetually generate new work in pursuit of an unobtainable excellence. Many times, we roll our eyes when a genius downplays his abilitites; here, we truly sense that Allen doesn't fully believe that he knows what he's doing. And this explains a lot about him.

Allen's profound fear of dying is also discussed and tied thematically to a number of his works, and the template for the "Woody Allen character" in most of his films, whether played by Allen himself or someone else, is not directly explored but can be found underneath everything else presented here.

"Midnight in Paris" gets a lot of screentime in the documentary, and there are times when the film seems as much of a commercial for Allen's new movie as it does a comprehensive look back at his career. And, of course, with such a body of work, many of his films are not included at all, and I would have liked to hear what Allen thought of them. At one point, Allen casually mentions, for instance, that he really felt good about "Hollywood Ending." And yet, that movie appears to have failed. As someone who refuses press tours and home video director's commentaries, I would have loved to hear Allen speak about these experiences in a bit more detail.

Instead, a good deal of attention is paid on Allen's tabloid-fabulous split from Mia Farrow over his new relationship with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. And although Woody was maligned by the mainstream media during those years in which a fierce child custody battle ensued, "Woody Allen: A Documentary" paints Allen as almost heroic during that time period due to his ability to compartmentalize his work from his personal life, and thus continuing on his film-a-year pace even during the most difficult times in his life.

I would definitely recommend "Woody Allen: A Documentary" to anyone seeking to understand just why Allen is a true auteur in the film world. The exposure one gains to a large chunk of his body of work certainly creates for viewers a wish list of films they will want to watch next; the documentary certainly sells Allen's body of work and generates or renews interest in in. The non-Allen fan would, of course, find such a long film to be rather painful. And the psycho fan might not get much new insight. Regardless, this is a good reminder of one of America's best filmmakers, and can cause us to be just as afraid of Allen's death as he is of it himself.

Drive (2011)

2012-01-02T14:54:00.000-08:00

Combining elements of film noir with generous helpings of both "Bullitt" and "Taxi Driver," I'll bet "Drive" polarized a lot of audiences in 2011. At times, the film even seems at odds with itself, as its slick and silent opening half gives way to a shock of violence that I'll admit I was not prepared for.

But I liked "Drive." A lot. Why? Because it's smarter than most action films out there. And because Ryan Gosling is in it. And because director Nicolas Winding Refn knows how to do style but without completely disposing of substance.

In "Drive," Gosling plays a car driver. He doesn't even have a name, which turns out to be a key existential element to the story. The driver is good at what he does. So good that he makes two careers out of it. By day, he is a stuntman driver for films. At night, on the neon-lit streets of L.A., he's a driver-for-hire behind the wheel of robbers' getaway cars.

Though excellent at both, a heist eventually goes wrong as is inevitably the case in all of these kinds of movies. And when this one does, the Driver learns that a contract has been put on him.

The film is laser-focused in plot but throws in a few interesting side stories. One involves Carey Mulligan as a young woman who's husband is getting out of prison and involved in the criminal underworld of the film's plot. The Driver clearly has feelings for her, and sympathy for her young son.

A more delicious subplot involves Albert Brooks, cast wildly and brilliantly agaist type as a low-level Hollywood film producer capable of great violence. Brooks is riveting in "Drive." His work takes your breath away because the film has him heading into territory so unusual for a typical Brooks character.

There's not much more about the plot that I want to share here, because it's best to experience the film without knowing much more. But although the film has numerous strengths, it truly works because of Gosling.

Gosling's performance is nearly silent for the bulk of the film. A splicing together of boyish charm and thrill-seeking know-how and determination, Gosling's performance here is more electrifying than most you'll see all year, which is even more impressive considering that at it's core, "Drive" is largely a style piece. But if Gosling was fast becoming one of the best actors in Hollywood (and, dare I say, criminally disregarded for Oscar consideration for last year's "Blue Valentine"), this is proof that he's made it. I cannot for the life of me figure out why he is so compelling when, half the time, he doesn't seem to be exerting much effort. That must be the secret, and the reason. This is good stuff.

Refn's direction brings a neon-80s style to the film, from the Driver's jacket to the Los Angeles nightscapes to the 80s synth cheese soundtrack. And because Gosling is so boyishly charming and almost passive in the opening third of the film, Refn is able to shock the viewer into a second half that is difficult to prepare for, and possibly difficult to watch.

Does "Drive" get too violent? Yeah, probably. It does seem to be out of character with all that comes before it, because once the film goes down that path, it stays on it. But maybe people who look at the movie as two contrasting sections and tones that didn't fit together are missing the point. Maybe the point is that this slick, quiet, mostly docile young man is dragged into a world and a situation where only such low-level thinking and behavior will allow him to survive. It is in this way that I sensed some thematic kinship with Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," though Travis Bickle (another driver, by the way), resorts to violence for reasons he believes are for the betterment of society, whereas the Driver in "Drive" becomes violent as a means of self-defense and escape.

Whatever the case, "Drive" is a very interesting action film, shockingly violent and very well acted. Sitting in the middle of a pile of car-related action films from recent years with words like "Furious" in the title and bald, muscular men in their casts, "Drive" turns out to be a much better ride.

3.5 out of 4

The Help (2011)

2012-01-01T09:14:00.000-08:00

I hadn't yet read Kathryn Stockett's breakout hit novel "The Help" prior to the release of writer/director Tate Taylor's big screen adaptation, but once the buzz began to circle the film, I grabbed the book and read it quickly - in just a few sittings, actually. It was the kind of book that kept me entertained and involved at all times but never went as deep as it could.

The filmed version of "The Help," despite some talk arguing that it actually elevates the source material, accomplished the same goal in my mind. It was the kind of movie that kept me entertained and involved at all times but never went as deep as it could.

Many of my co-workers read the book at the same time and most wanted to compare and contrast it with the film. Did Stockett write black dialect the way people really talk? Is there something insensitive in a white person's verison of black dialect? (If so, then we need to deal with Huck Finn and a bunch of other stuff!) Is this just another black-people-can't-save-themselves-so-we-need-a-white-person-to-swoop-in-and-rescue-them sort of story?

Those are fair questions.

"The Help" can either be seen as being the story of a young white woman who is forward thinking enough in the racially divided South of the 1960s to not give in to the prejudices of her family and neighbors, or it can be seen as the story of a middle-aged black maid who is corageous enough in the racially divided South of the 1960s to motivate her fellow servant-friends to share their stories with an opportunity-seeking white girl.

Perhaps the problem of the story itself is that "The Help" probably wants to be the latter but is just as easily the former, and the film does not solve this problem from the novel. In the film, actress Viola Davis gives such a powerful, soulful performance as Aibileen, the black maid, and Emma Stone is so frequently awkward and too pretty as Skeeter, the white wanna-be writer, that the weight of the movie wants to shift in narrative favor toward Aibilieen. But Taylor includes so much of Stone in the film in terms of her character's personal life that we're left with essentially a 50/50 split. That, to me, was troublesome to this story.

Thank God for the x-factor, a character named Minny Jackson. In the novel, Minny is hard, angry and tough to like, though her frankness becomes comical and readers root for her in every decision and learn from her more than any other character. In the film, actress Octavia Spencer, a Hollywood bit player, has her coming-out party in what is certainly the film's most engaging and entertaining role. The film bests the novel in its use of humor to lighten the tone, and Spencer drives the funny car. "The Help" is a better movie whenever she is on screen.

I'm certain I haven't done a very comprehensive job of explaining the plot, but I feel like most people know this one by now. Skeeter is kind to "the help" while the other white women lording over their huge Mississippi plantation mansions are condescending and entitled. The women who work for them, always black, are direct descendants to slaves. They touch, comfort and care for the white babies more than their mothers. They are a precarious blend of slaves and mothers themselves.

One woman named Hilly Holbrook is particularly uppity. She commandeers the local ladies bridge club and starts a grassroots campaign among the ladies auxiliary to get a law passed requiring the help to use separate, outdoor bathrooms. "They have their own diseases," she tells the other women.

Aibileen is the dutiful maid to the Leefolt family. She's a strong, proud woman with a tragic past. It's important for her to have her job. Mrs. Leefolt appears to be fair to Aibileen, at least for as long as she can stay out from under Hilly's influence. But the word coming from the high society dining rooms, coupled with the images of segreation and political turmoil on the TV remind Aibileen that things are getting worse.

Skeeter takes a job at a Jackson newspaper writing a cleaning column. She's out of her league and relies on Aibileen for help. This soon turns into an idea for a book. Skeeter convinces Aibileen, under the protection of anonymity, to talk about what it's like to be the help. She encourages Aibileen to wrangle other women to participate in the discussion as well. Before long, Aibileen even comes to believe in what they are doing.

Reluctantly, Minny is the first to come on board, but her stories are becoming so legendary in the neighborhood that her anonymity would be more difficult to protect. And outside of this work, the recently-fired Minny has taken up a new job for a somewhat-crazy white lady on the outskirts of town named Ceelia Foote, who before long becomes the film's most sympathtic character.

The film's triumph lies in its acting. Davis is perfect for the part of Aibileen and gives a fully-formed and lived-in performance. She provides the film with its dramatic grounding and is riviting at all times, though I must admit that I'm not convinced she was more powerful here than in her 10 minutes of Oscar-nominated screen time in "Doubt." Nonetheless, she is excellent.

And, as I've mentioned before, this is Spencer's movie. I couldn't wait for her to show up on screen. Her Minny is a take-no-sass firecracker, and in one of the film's key moments, Spencer is able to milk more laughs with the drop of eyes' focus than most actors could achieve with a solid delivery of a well-written line.

I'm wondering, in retrospect, if Spencer is too good at times and shifts the tone away from the real seriousness of the social climate of the time. "The Help" is "civil rights-lite." This was the novel's problem and it does not get fixed here. Taylor's tempered blend of the comic with the dramatic keeps the film in a TV-movie-of-the-week place, never allowing it the weight it deserves.

Perhaps this is why, for me, some of the most heartbreaking moments in "The Help" come not from the overburdoned black maids but from the character of Celia and a powerful performance by Jessica Chastain. Celia is an outsider, somewhat inexplicably. In moments that resemble the deep South's "Mean Girls," she is kept out of the loop and treated condescendingly. Her life is sad, and her eventual connection with Minny is touching. This, for me, gave "The Help" more of an emotional center than the race issues of the film.

I enjoyed "The Help." I was involved in it the entire time. I laughed a lot. I wish I could say I was moved to tears, but I was not. I think I should have been. It was enjoyable. It looked great. It was a little too long. The acting was wonderful. When I add up all of these somewhat generic but true phrases, "The Help" ends up being a solid, if not amazing, movie.

3.0 out of 4

The Descendants (2011)

2011-12-30T17:38:00.000-08:00

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)

2011-12-30T11:32:00.000-08:00

"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)

2011-12-29T11:56:00.000-08:00

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)

2011-12-29T10:01:00.000-08:00

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)

2011-12-28T10:09:00.001-08:00

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)

2011-12-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

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...

2011-11-29T18:26:00.001-08:00

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!

2011-11-29T18:18:00.001-08:00

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

2011-03-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

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)

2011-03-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

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)

2011-03-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

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)

2011-03-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

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

The Town (2010)

2011-03-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

There was a lot of speculation that THE TOWN, Ben Affleck’s sophomore feature as a director, might earn a Best Picture nomination and/or a screenplay nomination for Affleck and his co-writers. Neither of those things happened, though Jeremy Renner scored his second acting nomination in as many years as a reckless bank thief. I’m not sure if the film deserved to replace any of those that eventually did get nominated, but make no mistake – THE TOWN is a well-acted, intense and fun-to-watch thriller, and it marks a noticeable step forward in Affleck’s skill as a director. His “Gone Baby Gone” was a solid debut; now Affleck is developing a style.

Affleck also stars here as Doug MacRay in the unoriginal setup of a criminal discovering that his days on the job are numbered but too pulled by the allure of one more great attempt to say no. The story is complicated here when Doug develops feelings for a bank manager (played by Rebecca Hall) who was just one of his victims days before and, because of the disguises worn by Doug and his partners, is unaware that the man who once held her at gunpoint and drove her out of Boston until her toes were touching the Atlantic Ocean is now her boyfriend.

THE TOWN features some semi-familiar but well-executed sub-plots with regards to the men with the brains pulling the strings behind the crime syndicate. Here, that man is played to perfection by Pete Postlethwaite in what would sadly turn out to be a posthumous performance. John Hamm, of “Mad Men” fame, plays the FBI agent devoting every bit of his attention to taking down this particular group of individuals.

The best scenes in THE TOWN happen when Affleck taps his inner-Hitchcock. There’s an unforgettable sequence involving the unexpected appearance of Renner’s James Coughlin at an outdoor café where Doug and Hall’s Claire are having lunch that turns into a suspense-filled sight game as Affleck works to hide the tattoo on the back of Renner’s neck from Hall’s view; that tattoo is the only identifiable mark on any of the men that she can remember from the bank robbery. It is a genius sequence. Another great moment is a climactic heist that takes the robbers into the bowels of Affleck’s hallowed Fenway Park.

If I’m being really picky, THE TOWN was probably a little long at 125 minutes, and I was surprised to see Affleck also release a 150-minute director’s cut, which tells me that he still has a little to learn about making choices to tighten up a story, though I did not see the extended cut to be able to tell you whether or not those extra minutes were justified or add anything of value to the story.

But for a pure cinematic thrill-ride, it’s hard to quarrel with a movie like this. The acting is excellent, even from Affleck himself, a performer I’d previously dismissed as much more of a lightweight than his co-Oscar-winning writing partner and BFF Matt Damon. Here, Affleck is emotionally tight and cuts a handsome, scruffy leading man figure as Doug. He is surrounded by equally strong performances, and it’s not hard to see why Renner stood out to the acting branch of the Academy this year.

THE TOWN makes me look forward to more work from Ben Affleck The Director, who with only two pictures has established a voice as a storyteller of down-and-out, suburban Boston family tales of compromised dreams and violence. This one, if you haven’t seen it, is worth your time…at least the original running time.

3.0 out of 4

Animal Kingdom (2010)

2011-03-09T09:27:00.001-08:00

Short film director David Michod thought he’d try his hand at writing and directing a feature-length film and began that phase of his career with a doozy, the intense and interesting ANIMAL KINGDOM. A story of the criminal underworld in Melbourne, Australia, ANIMAL KINGDOM tells the story of the Cody family and is, apparently, based on a true story.

The film opens on 17-year-old Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville) witnessing the death of his mother from a heroin overdose. With no family left, he contacts his grandmother for a place to stay, never mind the fact that his grandmother presides over her three sons in a quasi-incestuous manner and that the sons are all openly involved in some sort of crime, from drug dealing to theft. These things happen right in front of the grandmother, played with quiet intensity by Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver, thus the reason that J’s mom kept him shielded from this side of the family prior to her death.

Without looking to do so, J is quickly versed on the rules both spoken and unspoken of the criminal underworld and how the business works. He attempts to main teenage normalcy by spending time with his girlfriend, but just as it happened to Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” the pull of the family business begins to become too great. Even as J stays out of the criminal acts, he finds himself defending his cousins and covering for them, and things get more complicated when a homicide detective tracking one of the brothers as a prime suspect for some murders attempts to befriend J and rescue him from the rest of the Cody family. But devoted first to her sons, J’s grandmother puts him in the middle of a tense standoff between the police and the family.

With the always-awesome Guy Pearce as the detective and a breakout performance by Frecheville as the film’s main character, J, ANIMAL KINGDOM succeeds in large part because of the quality of its performances. Weaver’s nomination for an Oscar is perhaps a bit of a surprise, as she is certainly intense but definitely a lot more understated than the types of performances that get such recognition. This makes her nomination refreshing, regardless of whether or not she might have been better than other deserving possibilities. But if you put her work in this film up against what eventual-winner Melissa Leo did in “The Fighter,” you might not even notice her.

What works best in ANIMAL KINDOM is the study of family dynamics and the natural human panic of being hunted, which undoubtedly explains the film’s clever title. It’s the kind of film made outside of the United States that a film lover worries others won’t know about and check out. Your loss. ANIMAL KINGDOM is intensely-acted, suspenseful and engaging. And writer/director Michod now belongs on the radar of cinephiles everywhere.

3.0 out of 4

True Grit (1969/2010)

2011-02-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

John Wayne won his only competitive acting Oscar for playing U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in the 1969 Henry Hathaway-directed adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel, TRUE GRIT. That original film co-stars Kim Darby as the young Mattie Ross, a revenge-seeking girl who hires Cogburn to help locate Tom Chaney, the man who killed her father. The two are accompanied by Glen Campbell as La Boeuf, a Texas Ranger, and the original band of criminals included Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper.

And yet, in virtually every conceivable way, the Coen Brothers top the original film with their remake of TRUE GRIT, based more directly from the novel than from the original film, though watching the two back-to-back reveals countless commonalities.

There are many reasons why I like the new TRUE GRIT better, beginning with the acting performances. For me, Jeff Bridges (himself nominated for the same role that won Wayne the Oscar), acts circles around Wayne as Cogburn. Wayne deserved his Oscar for “The Searchers,” a John Ford masterpiece made a decade and a half prior to this film and the go-to answer to any accusation that Wayne could not act. But in the 1969 TRUE GRIT, he really does feel like John Wayne with an eye patch, not nearly as offensive, cantankerous and dangerous as Bridges’ foul Rooster.

And new discovery and fellow Oscar nominee Hailee Steinfeld is miles better than Darby as Mattie Ross. Darby, with her pixie bob haircut, is far too Disney-looking for a tale as dark as this; she’s a squeaky-clean androgyne and far less believable than Steinfeld’s acid-tongued, independent Ross. I never once could imagine Darby’s Mattie taking care of herself, but I never had that thought with Steinfeld. In fact, it is her performance that ratchets the film up from great to greatness, and though Melissa Leo was great in “The Fighter,” I secretly wished that Steinfeld would win that Oscar.

The Coens’ TRUE GRIT also outguns the original in terms of art direction and cinematography, both of which set distinct tones between the two versions. There’s a surprising amount of green grass and daylight in the original film, whereas the remake is all brown and grey and happening under the cover of night and in the shadows. The new GRIT is more dangerous and surprisingly more antiquated in look and feel, and it does the material justice.

As I continue to grow as a fan of the Western genre, my expectations for attempts to revive the genre for modern audiences continue to elevate, and I found the new TRUE GRIT to be the best film of its kind since “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” a few years back. With a supporting cast that includes Matt Damon and Josh Brolin in memorable roles, this is a film I can’t wait to buy on Blu-ray and watch over and over again. The original, sadly, is too innocent looking now and lacks the impact of what the Coens brought to their modern adaptation.

One complaint about the 2010 version: no Oscars? The film was the second most nominated this past year with 10 nods, and not a single win. Steinfeld and cinematographer Roger Deakins were, in my mind, the most noticeably robbed of the accolade. In a year when the love was spread around on Oscar night among many films, it’s a crime that this TRUE GRIT was left out. But like many great Westerns, including the aforementioned “The Searchers,” it joins a list of vital classics of its cinematic genre overlooked at the time of its release for just how profoundly perfect it is.

1969 TRUE GRIT: 2.5 0ut of 4

2010 TRUE GRIT: 4.0 out of 4

Dogtooth (2009/2010 distribution)

2011-02-20T15:52:00.000-08:00

Towards the end of the film DOGTOOTH, an adventurous choice for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination from Greece directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, a young woman stands in the family bathroom with a hand weight and proceeds to punch herself in the mouth with it until one of her teeth is knocked out. When her younger sister discovers that she has done this (and subsequently taken off), she awakens her dad by first licking his hand and then, after straddling him and unbuttoning his shirt, licking his chest.

If that sounds good to you, you’ll like DOGTOOTH. If it sounds insane, as I’m hoping it should to anyone, the film is only watchable as a car crash-styled fascination. Billed as a dark comedy, DOGTOOTH is 90 minutes lacking in rationality and morality. And I have to tell you that I never laughed, not once.

There are aspects of DOGTOOTH that are visionary, such as sharply-contrasting visuals and tone. The film, for all practical purposes, is a science fiction movie, yet it’s set on the grounds of a comfortable suburban home with a spacious yard and in-ground pool. There, a husband and wife raise their three young adult children. None of them are named. Only the father leaves the house, so that he can earn a living for the family by running a local factory. If the wife wants to call her husband, she uncovers a hidden phone in their bedroom; the kids are completely closed off from the outside world.

If you think that’s weird, you don’t know weird. The dad brings a woman named Christina over regularly. She is blindfolded first. The purpose of her visits is to satisfy his son’s sexual needs. Sex in this film, as it is in many European films, is graphic and in plain view. In this film, it often feels moments away from pornography, were it not for the fact that every sexual act in this film is presented with all the passion of a business exchange. Christina eventually gets bored with the young man and coaxes one of his sisters into some, um, licking. You can let your mind wander on that one.

A huge fence surrounds the house and yard, and one of the behavior modifications used on the kids is that they are told that they have a brother who lives on the other side of the fence because he was bad and this is his punishment. Throughout the film, each of the three kids is seen staring at the fence or going near it; one even sneaks cake out of the house to throw over the fence, hoping to feed her brother. But the brother, of course, is just one of many things that is completely made up by their parents. And when they feel their children are getting too inquisitive about the real world, they “kill off” the brother in dramatic and incredulous fashion, instilling the lesson that safety only exists within the house. Eventually, the father decides that Christina is a corrupting influence on the family and does away with her – by beating her with a VCR. His next brilliant idea is to suggest incest as a way of meeting his son’s carnal needs.

The kids are taught their own vocabulary. If they hear a word from Christina that is unfamiliar to them, they ask a parent about it and are given crazy answers that they have no ability to discredit. A “zombie,” for example, is a “small yellow flower.” One daughter asks her mother to pass the phone at dinner and receives a salt shaker. In addition, the kids compete in bizarre endurance contests and receive stickers as rewards for their efforts. One of the film’s most striking images is watching the young man having very graphic and passion-free sex with Christina as she’s grabbing the headboard of his bed, which is covered in stickers as a little kid might decorate his room.

DOGTOOTH is such a puzzling world unto itself that I had to keep a list on paper while watching the film of everything I was seeing and try to put things together as I went along. My observations included everything from the youngest daughter cutting the feet off of Barbie dolls while shrieking as if the pain was her own to the kids being told that their mother is pregnant with “two kids and a dog” so that the father can explain the existence of the family dog he bought that is being trained at a kennel before it joins the family. There must be a reason for everything, but the kids don’t know those reasons until the dad tells them. And the film doesn’t give us any of the reasons. Truth be told, I often felt I had little reason to continue watching this perverse movie.

Lanthimos sprinkles the film with bizarre frame compositions that often cut off the heads and limbs of the characters onscreen. He also shows us a shocking amount of matter-of-fact and graphic violence that, even when it doesn’t draw blood (and it frequently does) is as horribly violent as anything in a Hollywood film. While watching, I was reminded of Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist.” I thought that movie was the most outrageous thing I’d ever seen. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think DOGTOOTH has it beat. At least I cared about one of the characters in that movie. I’m not sure I cared about anything in this one. I guess I wanted to see the kids escape; I felt sorry for them. But Lanthimos has all of his actors deliver their lines with an anesthetized chill, making it difficult for the audience to draw close to anyone.

Like the aforementioned “Antichrist,” DOGTOOTH is more of a cinematic experiment than it is a movie that could possibly satisfy an audience in any conceivable way that a “normal” film would satisfy an audience. And like that film, a fascinating psychological idea – worth of exploration – falls prey to ridiculous plot twists and visuals. I will admit that I couldn’t turn away from DOGTOOTH, as revolted as I was by it. But that’s not enough to make it a good movie. Comedies should make you laugh. This one doesn’t. And probing psychological studies should make you think. This one only shocks.

1.0 out of 4

Blue Valentine (2010)

2011-02-18T08:44:00.000-08:00

I saw BLUE VALENTINE weeks ago and forgot to write a review soon thereafter, so I wish I could see it again before posting something here on the film, because I probably won’t do a good enough job of convincing you why you should see such a raw and downbeat film. But you should.

Dean, played by Ryan Gosling, and Cindy, played by Oscar-nominated Michelle Williams, are a young married couple with a young daughter. Like so many other couples out there, their marriage is on the rocks. In this case, Dean wants them to stay together but provides Cindy with little to justify that they should. Cindy is becoming increasingly aware of what a dead-end the marriage is but struggles to walk away. Both of them know what they want, but neither do much of anything to get it.

As if the film is mimicking Cindy’s search for good enough reasons to stay while Dean slips further into erratic, alcoholic behavior, the movie skips around in time. We are taken to the euphoric, quiet and silly moment when, on a sidewalk, the two first fell in love. We are brought in uncomfortably close to the private desperation of Dean’s attempt at reigniting marital passion in a blue-lit hotel room.

Dean is uncontrollably romantic at times and, at other times, erratic and melodramatic. Cindy is often the opposite: quiet, guarded and weary. Both characters are played so magnificently by their actors that the film seems to offer little separation between fiction and real life. Only the movie screen reminds us that this isn’t a voyeuristic glimpse into the struggles of real people. Consequently, Williams’ Oscar nomination is refreshing because she eschews actor-y flash at all times.

Criminal, however, was the exclusion of Gosling from the lead actor nominations. I feel like this is – by a mile – the finest work from an actor who continues to delight audiences with complex portrayals, able to mine deeply from emotional wells. While I’m not sure which acting nominee this year should have omitted for his inclusion (because they are all worthy), when I reflect back on BLUE VALENTINE it is Gosling’s performance that I remember the most.

Director Derek Cianfrance has created a film that at times makes your face hurt from smiling at the possibilities of romance and, at other times, makes you cringe from the emotional violence it portrays. I suspect that there are many out there who wouldn’t look at such a realistic and painful story as “entertainment” and would, therefore, not enjoy a film like this. But I measure the success of a film by how deeply I care about its characters, and I cared as deeply for both Dean and Cindy as I did for any characters in a film this year. Yes, Dean is an alcoholic, but he believes – blindly – in the power of love. I wanted him to do the right thing and be happy. I wanted him to work at it. And Cindy, though she is always masking a bubbling anger, is plainly beautiful, gentle and caring. My desire for these two to work it out was as ridiculous as their prospects for successfully doing so. But isn’t that how it is in real life?

BLUE VALENTINE is downbeat, yes. But it’s also wonderfully real. And watching it has value because it makes you think about your own relationships. I can certainly understand why you might want to avoid a movie like this, but I assure you that you’ll be glad if you don’t.

4.0 out of 4

Oscar predictions!

2011-01-24T21:18:00.000-08:00

I’m starting to grow a little tired of guessing who will be nominated for the Academy Awards because it’s gotten a lot easier to find out what all of the professional pundits think, and my decisions are always heavily influenced by them. Guys like Dave Karger of Entertainment Weekly and Tom O’Neil (my hero) over at Gold Derby have access to actual voters, and I really don’t. So it’s not exactly smart on my part to ignore their ideas.

It’s also foolish to think just with my own head and heart. The nominations are not always about who best deserves these accolades; sometimes it’s about who has had a long and unrewarded career—who’s due. And other political factors can come into play as well.

The format I use for my nomination predictions is the same one I've used for the past decade or so. I attempt to predict who will be nominated in the "big" categories: Picture, Director and the four acting categories. I predict the five nominees and provide two alternates that I think could sneak in. I give myself a point for each one I get right and a half-point for alternates. This used to total 40 points, but now it will total 45 because of the expansion of the Best Picture race to 10 nominees. Then, I tack on what I call "The 10," which is a list of 10 random nominees from any of the other categories I feel certain will be nominated.

Check back here soon to see how I did. The nominations are only nine hours away!

BEST PICTURE

Like last year, there are essentially five films that are truly competing for this award and then five others who will be lucky to consider themselves nominees in this category but have a much smaller chance of winning. Everyone believes this is already whittled down to a two-horse race between THE SOCIAL NETWORK and THE KING’S SPEECH. I think it’s a little dangerous not to include a few more films at the top as well, though I admit that these two are the front-runners.

My picks: 127 Hours, Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King’s Speech, The Social Network, The Town, Toy Story 3, True Grit
My alternates: Winter’s Bone, The Ghost Writer
Second guessing myself: Winter’s Bone has been on most lists for a long time now, and it’s a good movie. But I’m letting my heart get the better of me here because 127 Hours is a GREAT movie, and I think Boyle, a recent Best Picture and Director winner, should have more friends in the voting block. There’d be room for both if I didn’t think that The Town now feels likely, too.

BEST DIRECTOR

My picks: Daren Aronofsky (Black Swan), David Fincher (The Social Network), Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech), Christopher Nolan (Inception), David O. Russell (The Fighter)
My alternates: Joel and Ethan Coen (True Grit) and Danny Boyle (127 Hours)
Second guessing myself: I’m feeling confident about this category, as this basically lines up with the DGA nods and they tend to not vary by more than one nomination. After seeing True Grit, I feel like it’s a fantastic film that is not very Coen-y, and it will probably score in the screenplay and acting categories, along with technical nods. This lets Russell in for stepping into a project that was already in the works and doing a good job with it. I have NO doubts about any of the other nominees.

BEST ACTOR

My picks: Javier Bardem (Biutiful), Jeff Bridges (True Grit), Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), James Franco (127 Hours)
My alternates: Robert Duvall (Get Low), Mark Wahlberg (The Fighter)
Second guessing myself: Duvall would replace Bardem, but I feel confident about the other choices. Wahlberg would be swept in with the other acting nominees from his film, and that could very easily happen and would not be shameful, as he gives the most understated performance of all of those listed here. The name I’m nervous about not including is Ryan Gosling for Blue Valentine. But I think Michelle Williams has a better chance than he does, though he’s a fantastic actor. I wouldn’t mind being wrong about leaving him off my list completely. I also thought about Aaron Eckhart for Rabbit Hole, but not everyone loved his work in that film as much as I did.

BEST ACTRESS

My picks: Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit)
My alternates: Julianne Moore (The Kids Are All Right), Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine)
Second guessing myself: Steinfeld has been on everyone’s supporting list all season, but that is a lead performance and my gut tells me we’ll in for the surprise we got when Kate Winslet was nominated in lead instead of supporting for The Reader (which she won). I’m putting Steinfeld as a supporting actress nominee, too, just in case. So I’m essentially throwing away one slot by double-booking her. This keeps me from adding in Leslie Manville for Another Year, a much-talked-about performance that I have not seen and also one that I’ve seen on a few supporting lists. And what about Hilary Swank? I’m nervous not having her on here, though I think she’s a long shot.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

My picks: Christian Bale (The Fighter), Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), Jeremy Renner (The Town), Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right), Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech)
My alternates: Matt Damon (True Grit), Michael Douglas (Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps)
Second guessing myself: I’m confident about this category. Douglas would be a sympathy vote for his recent cancer battle and the fact that he’s reprising a character over 20 years later that won an Oscar already. I wonder if Sam Rockwell has a chance for Conviction. Or maybe Pete Postlethwaite for The Town, in light of his recent death. The only other name that I wish I had room for here is John Fawkes for Winter’s Bone. I’m more nervous about omitting his name than any of these others.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

My picks: Amy Adams (The Fighter), Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech), Mila Kunis (Black Swan), Melissa Leo (The Fighter), Jackie Weaver (Animal Kingdom)
My alternates: Dianne Wiest (Rabbit Hole), Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit)
Second guessing myself: Steinfeld was once a lock for me here but now I am wondering if there won’t be a best actress surprise with her. I’m feeling like she will be nominated in one spot or the other, so I’m either getting a point for her or a half-point. Kunis is the shaky choice for me; I could see her being swapped out for Barbara Hershey from the same film. Short of Leslie Manville showing up here, I think just about any other name not already listed here would be the shocker of the day.

THE TEN

I will be shocked if I got any of these wrong…

1. Art Direction: ALICE IN WONDERLAND
2. Costume Design: ALICE IN WONDERLAND
3. Visual Effects: INCEPTION
4. Original Score: Alexander Desplat (The King’s Speech)
5. Original Screenplay: David Seidler (The King’s Speech)
6. Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network)
7. Animated Feature: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON
8. Animated Feature: TOY STORY 3
9. Cinematography: Wally Pfister (Inception)
10. Documentary Feature: WAITING FOR SUPERMAN

Despicable Me (2010)

2011-01-22T11:01:00.000-08:00

Having been a Disney devotee my whole life, I realized after watching DESPICABLE ME that 2010 might have been the year that finally broke me of my animation elitism. I was not a fan of the Shrek or Ice Age movies, and barring the occasional exceptions (such as “Happy Feet” and “Monster House”), I tended to dismiss most animated films that were not Disney or Pixar films. I had no rational reason to do so, of course; many of the Disney studio’s recent films (“Bolt,” “Meet the Robinsons”) were sub-par and certainly not as good as some of the animation happening outside of the mouse house.

This year, Disney hit the jackpot twice for me. Their Pixar entry, “Toy Story 3,” ranks among their best, and that’s saying a lot considering their unprecedented consistency of quality. But their traditional animation branch also returned to form with “Tangled,” which exceeded my expectations. And a non-Disney animated film, “How to Train Your Dragon,” was one of my favorite films of the year. How could there be four fantastic animated films this year?

Somehow, there were. DESPICABLE ME has sweetness and sass, not to mention all-star vocal talent. It’s the story of Gru, voiced by Steve Carrell. He’s an aging and out-of-practice super-villain, who has the ability to make people’s lives miserable in town, but he no longer seems able to pull off a significant heist or act of crime. His partner, Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand), creates weapons such as farting guns and robot cookies, and his “minions,” hundreds of mumbling yellow capsules in overalls and goggles who come in both one and two-eyed varieties, are too loveable to be sinister, as hard as they try to please Gru.

Gru’s villainous reputation is overshadowed by Vector (Jason Segal), a punky young upstart who managed to steal the pyramid of Gisa. So when Gru goes to the Evil Bank for a loan to finance his plan to steal the moon, he is told that unless he first hijacks a shrink ray gun to prove his worthiness, his request for money will be denied. Gru’s plan to steal the ray ends up including the use of three little orphan girls who travel door-to-door selling cookies for Miss Hattie (Kristin Wiig), the surprisingly evil orphanage matron. Gru adopts the girls and does everything in his power to keep them at arm’s length, planning to dump them off once he’s done with them. And while it’s predictable that he will grow attached to them and that the film will end with him softening his heart, the sequence of events to get there is entertaining and fresh.

The vocal talent in the film is stellar. In addition to the those already named here, the film features the voices of Julie Andrews, Jack McBrayer, Miranda Cosgrove and Will Arnett, just to name a few. A musical score and original songs by hip-hop producer Pharrell Williams ads a unique vibe to the film, and it works. And the minions? Well they are adorable.

DESPICABLE ME contains an ample amount of little visual homages to adult films, affording it the requisite amount of inside jokes for grown-ups without confusing the kids. There’s a hilarious nod to the horse head moment in “The Godfather,” for instance, as well as a sequence reminiscent of “Apollo 13.” And though in some ways the film steals liberally from “Up,” with a crabby old man making room in his heart for a child, its sentimentality is pure of heart and touching. You know exactly what’s going to happen by the end, but you get the ending you want. Any other ending would have been a disappointment.

I wouldn’t say that DESPICABLE ME was better than “Toy Story 3,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” or “Tangled,” but it’s at least amply good enough to be included in the same sentence with them, (which is good because I just put them all in the same sentence! Ha!). It was fun, funny, touching and sassy: the kind of animated film you could see yourself adding to your home collection and watching again with the kids.

3.0 out of 4

Buried (2010)

2011-01-21T18:15:00.000-08:00

Though “127 Hours” had a much higher profile and an Oscar-caliber pedigree, it was not the only film released in 2010 that focused solely on one actor for the majority of its running time. BURIED, starring Ryan Reynolds, took that concept even further; Reynolds is the only actor to appear in the film. And his character is equally trapped, if not more so. The result is a film that probably falls more into the category of an experiment, and while it’s certainly too bleak to merit repeat viewings, it’s the kind of experiment that can satisfy true movie lovers.

Reynolds is Paul Conrad, a U.S. contractor working in Iraq. He is introduced to the audience in complete darkness through a series of grunts, scratches and coughs. We quickly discover, when he does, that Paul is trapped in a wood box—buried alive in a coffin. He is unaware of his specific location or the identity of his captors, and struggles to remain calm and maintain faith that he will be rescued.

A few of BURIED’s plot conventions seem a little too hard to believe at first. Chief among them is the existence of a fully-charged cell phone in the box with Paul that does not have perfect reception but still better reception than my phone has in the back aisles of a Target. He also has a Zippo lighter so he (and the audience) can see, and a writing utensil to jot down phone numbers on the roof of the box. I suspect that the whole cell phone thing will be too much for some viewers to accept as plausible, but this did not bother me. Many movies employ conventions that force their audiences to buy into sometimes unbelievable coincidences and situations, and I was able to suspend my disbelief here and simply accept the premise.

Director Rodrigo Cortes makes some gutsy and, I think, brilliant choices with BURIED. He does not show us a single shot outside the buried box. I definitely expected to see military personnel negotiating with the terrorists above ground and at least one scene of Paul’s despondent wife and child back home. But Cortes executes the film with more discipline than that, and it enhances BURIED’s excitement. In addition, the film’s only light sources are the glow from the cell phone screen and the light from the Zippo. Whenever one of those two sources isn’t active, the audience sees complete darkness, just as Paul does.

I read that there were seven different coffins used to film the claustrophobic interior shots of the box, and Cortes manages to squeeze enough variety out of the shots to keep the visuals interesting, which might sound crazy considering that for the film’s entire 95-minute running time, we’re simply looking at a panicked man in a box. There are a few moments, however, when perhaps Cortes did not trust himself or our attention spans enough, and in these moments, the camera takes a bird’s eye view of the coffin’s length from overhead. These shots throw the audience out of the believability of the visuals; I think they were a mistake. But this only happens a few times.

BURIED’s script is surprisingly engaging. All of Paul’s circumstances are revealed through his cell phone calls, including his home life and job situation. Calls made to the FBI and 911 are circumstantially cruel and, surprisingly, darkly comic. We’re reminded of just how hard it is to get good customer service on the phone, especially when we see Paul struggle to receive aid in the situation he’s in, which is far more life-and-death than anything we’ve ever experienced. Never has “I’m transferring your call…please hold” been more agonizing!

There are a half-dozen other characters in BURIED, all of them voices over the phone. The film’s villain is a terrorist voiced by Jose Luis Garcia Perez, and he is amply threatening. But the work of the film falls squarely on the shoulders (or in this case, back) of Reynolds, and BURIED proves to me that his talents are heretofore underappreciated. Like Brad Pitt before him, Reynolds is proving himself to be a legitimate acting force paralyzed by his status as eye-candy. It’s a shame, too, because he conveys the alternating panic, resolve, frustration and desperation of a man in Paul’s situation with a believability that never falters. I’m looking forward to the day when Reynolds gets his due, and I’ll look back on this film as one of the movies that got his serious acting career started.

As I said before, BURIED is a cinematic experiment, not a crowd-pleaser. But I think the world of movies has room for both. And watching a clever filmmaker attempt a unique and unconventional idea can be, for me at least, as engaging as watching a well-made but more conventional movie. For me, it’s a work firmly in the experimental exercises of Alfred Hitchcock, mining similar ground to films like “Lifeboat” and “Rope,” where Hitchcock played with the ability of keeping an audience engaged in a single-space location, a concept in direct opposition to the very definition of cinema and more in tandem with the stage.

I did not like how BURIED ended, but I also don’t know how else it could have ended while maintaining plausibility. I won’t spoil that ending, but I will say that it’s both realistic and highly unsatisfying. And strangely, that analysis seems fitting, as I really appreciated the film itself but couldn’t see myself watching it multiple times. At bare minimum, BURIED is worthy of study for any budding filmmaker. It shows that that a visceral script and one good actor might just be enough to pull off something engaging, even without a huge Hollywood budget.

3.5 out of 4

Get Low (2010)

2011-01-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek are two of the American cinema’s finest living actors, and that’s probably the best case to be made for watching GET LOW, a small and quiet film about an old man with secrets who plans his own funeral and wants to have that funeral while he’s alive to witness it. Bill Murray, no acting slouch himself, plays the funeral director hurting for business who takes on the unusual idea.

Felix Bush (Duvall) is a keep-off-my-property kind of hermit living in backwoods Tennessee in the 1930s. The film opens mysteriously with a man running from the scene of a fire. Is it Felix? We don’t know—at first. But what we do know early on is that Felix is a man with many secrets and few friends. He is feared and hated in town. This makes his idea to pay for and throw his own funeral while he’s still alive all the more of a head-scratcher. Who will work with him? Who would show up? And why would Felix choose to put himself through some potentially uncomfortable conversations?

It turns out that Buddy, a young apprentice to a local funeral director (played by Murray), is the guy willing to take on the job, with the blessing of that director, Frank Quinn. Quinn’s business is hurting, and a customer is a customer, however strange the request. Buddy takes Felix’s demands seriously. He publicizes the “party” on the local radio station and posts flyers all over town. But it remains to be seen if anyone will show up, until Felix pulls an unusual stunt. During a live radio interview, Felix tells listeners that there will be a lottery, and that a winning ticket will be drawn that awards the winner all of his land and property when he dies. It’s a big piece of land, too—quite a prize. Suddenly, the town is interested.

The turnout at Felix’s funeral is massive – one of those huge crowd scenes you see in folksy movies like this, usually set at a state fair. And if there’s a reason to see GET LOW, it’s for Duvall’s performance in this scene, where Felix delivers a painful and confessional speech to the stunned crowd, coming clean for past transgressions. It’s an acting master-class, and if Duvall scores another Oscar nomination for what is otherwise a fairly pedestrian film, it will be no surprise. It’s one of the best things he’s ever done, and this man has done some amazing work. But not since “The Apostle” have I seen anything from him like this.

GET LOW plays a charming and emotional film version of a folk tale. When it’s over, I felt glad that I went along for the ride but did not feel that I witnessed film greatness (Duvall’s work notwithstanding). And Spacek’s work as a woman from Felix’s past was also good, but nowhere as substantial and flashy as some of the supporting work from women in films in 2010. Director Aaron Schneider makes his feature film debut as a director here after working chiefly as a cinematographer, and GET LOW does play out like the work of a newbie looking for his voice. It’s a quiet little diamond in the rough, but nothing transcendent. And if nothing else, it places another memorable character and performance onto one of the most astounding resumes in Hollywood history.

2.5 out of 4

Restrepo (2010)

2011-01-15T10:26:00.000-08:00

Watching RESTREPO did not feel like watching a movie; it felt like watching—perhaps for the first time—what is really going on in Afghanistan with our military. We read in the news about embedded journalists and hear their stories when they come home. On occasion, we get a glimpse of reality when a reporter stands in front of an authentic background during a relatively safe moment to report from a war zone.

But RESTREPO is different because it was made in a war zone, and at the height of war. Journalist Sebastian Junger, a writer skilled at making external conflict visceral (as he did with books like “The Perfect Storm”), spent 15 months with a U.S. platoon in Afghanistan during the heaviest fire in the Korengal Valley, which at the time was referred to in the media as the “deadliest place on Earth.” Photographer Tim Hetherington was there with him, and the two capture a raw look at the work that goes into the ongoing daily military operations in the Middle East. They make it clear from the beginning that in this movie, when the audience sees a soldier firing a machine gun, it’s not an exciting part of a cool movie action sequence. Here, it’s true, ugly survival, not something the audience gets excited about.

I find it somewhat difficult to critique RESTREPO as a piece of filmmaking because I look at it more as a piece of journalism. To that end, the film is incredible. As mentioned earlier, there are numerous reports from places like Afghanistan, but this feels like the real deal when you watch it. Of course it is the real deal, but films like “The Hurt Locker” are praised by many for their realism, and RESTREPO makes those films seem a lot more constructed and manufactured.

The film is titled after an outpost created in the middle of a warzone and named after a private from the company who was among the first killed. Private Restrepo was a well-liked soldier, and the other men speak about him with the same hesitation and internal torture that they speak about any others among them who have been injured or worse.

RESTREPO shows glimpses of the soldiers’ down time but, more frequently, follows them in the hard work of doing everything from digging and creating Outpost Restrepo to weekly council meetings with local elders who are upset about what happened to their cows or why their sons were shot. The creation of "OP Restrepo" is considered the most important accomplishment of the men serving in the Korengal region, because it was created square in the middle of a war zone and served as a metaphorical middle finger to the Taliban; it frightened them.

The film intercuts this raw footage with debriefings from a half dozen of the men in the company; some of RESTREPO’s most compelling moments are those when, in interviews conducted after their deployment ended, the men are unable to cleanly articulate the events that transpired. They work hard to hold themselves together. Sometimes they even smile. But they are deeply affected. One soldier says it best: “I can only hope that I’ll learn how to process what happened to me better,” he says (and I’m paraphrasing). “Because I’m never going to forget that it happened.”

I did not perceive this film to be political in any manner. It was without an agenda, unless the agenda was simply to present a reality that’s been largely withheld from the American people. It seemed to me like even the men fighting were less about their political beliefs than they were about their desire to protect, honor and defend each other. More than political, this felt personal.

Junger and Hetherington clearly put themselves in harm’s way to deliver RESTREPO. Junger is certainly known for accepting life-threatening reporting challenges, but this one feels particularly threatening. The courage of the filmmakers is equal to the courage of the soldiers, and it feels to me like the duty of the film-going public to witness their reporting.

The closing minutes of RESTREPO are among the most powerful. In a silent sequence, the directors feature the faces of each of the men interviewed for the film. They stare silently into the camera, and their faces are held on screen for what seems like minutes. One can't help but see the pain in their eyes and wish for the opportunity to personally thank them for their sacrifices. It is a humbling montage.

I have watched many films about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but most of them felt like films, and many had a political slant. RESTREPO is none of that. What it is, instead, is required viewing. And in a year that featured a number of films about tough, depressing subjects that were hard to watch, this one might be the hardest.

4.0 out of 4

Rabbit Hole (2010)

2011-01-04T22:05:00.000-08:00

The media tells the story that when a married couple experiences the death of a child, the marriage cannot withstand that grief, resulting in a divorce rate of somewhere near 70% for couples in this situation. That makes a lot of sense when you think about it, because each of us grieves a loss in our own way; it would be difficult for a couple to grieve together in the same way and keep that unity intact.

In reality, however, the divorce rate of couples who experience the death of a child is under 20%. For this and many other reasons, David Lindsay-Abaire’s play-and-now-movie, RABBIT HOLE, is a stunning, raw and real piece of theatre, a transparent look at marriage and grief as it really is, not how it’s portrayed in the media.

The film version of RABBIT HOLE stars Nicole Kidman as Becca and Aaron Eckhart as her husband, Howie. The are only eight months removed from the day when their 4-year-old son chased the family dog out of the yard and into the street, where he was stuck by a teenage driver and died.

Becca and Howie do what they are supposed to do in their attempts to deal with their soul-crushing despair. They attend group therapy sessions for couples who have lost children, but Becca is incensed by the “God thing” and freaked out by couples who have been attending meetings for close to a decade. Howie returns to work and old schedule, an attempt at normalcy. Becca tries to be happy for her wayward sister who is suddenly pregnant, and tries to stay quiet when her mother, bless her heart, offers her advice about how to deal with the grief.

But what is most evident is that Becca and Howie have their own very different ways of dealing with the loss of their son, and the conflict of RABBIT HOLE, which is beautifully staged by director John Cameron Mitchell and acted by Kidman and Eckhart, is that their individual needs are driving a wedge of distance and silence between them. Becca starts to take all of the pictures their son drew down from the fridge and launders his clothes to remove his smell from them. She bags them up and gives them away. Howie, on the other hand, doesn’t want to touch anything in the boy’s room. In the middle of the night, he’s fiddling with his iPhone or the old camcorder, rewatching video footage of a then-whole family. He keeps going to therapy even after Becca stops. In large part, their needs and desires are at complete odds with one another.

The conflict and interest escalates when Becca begins to follow the whereabouts of the teenager who struck their son. She ends up befriending him, though befriending is probably not the right word. Howie, meanwhile, befriends a woman from group therapy whose marriage goes the way of that fabled majority. That woman offers Howie the intimacy his wife says she can’t, but Howie will not accept it out of devotion to his partner-in-grief.

I cannot accurately express how moved I was when I first read Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play and then saw it performed at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2007. I was so stunned with not only the depth of this couple’s despair, but the undeniable honesty, humanity, and even humor the play possessed. So I was nervous about seeing the film version.

Fortunately, and probably because the playwright maintained possession of his own work for the screen adaptation, the film retains the bulk of the original play. Working in the new conventions of film, it takes some of the moments that were only conversations in the play—such as an incident where Becca lashes out at a mom in the grocery story who won’t buy her kid some fruit snacks—and literally presents them here. Those changes are to be expected, and most of them work okay.

There is something small lacking for me in this film version of RABBIT HOLE, though. And while I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first, I think I know what it is.

In the play, all of the action takes place in that house—the place where their son’s memory looms and where every item therein contains a memory of him. The conversations between characters in the play, such as the aforementioned example of Becca’s anger at a mom at the store, are told around the kitchen table in the play; the manner in which they are told serve to deepen our understanding of those characters almost more than actually witnessing the events do. The teen boy responsible for the accident shows up at their house in the play, not in a neutral park as he does here in the film (until the end, anyway). That, for me, adds another element of depth that isn’t duplicated here.

Staging the entire work inside the family house spoke volumes for how Becca is trapped after her son dies. Howie comes and goes, but she’s stuck there. It’s hard for a film to stay that visually static, and this one doesn’t even attempt to. That’s understandable, but it deflates the emotion a little bit. And for a while there, I worried that Mitchell and Lindsay-Abaire were going to take Howie too far down a different path from the original work, though I’m happy to say this doesn’t happen.

One thing that is absolutely wonderful in this filmed version of the play is the acting. I dare say that this is the finest work of Nicole Kidman’s career. Yes, she won an Oscar for disappearing under a prosthetic nose in “The Hours,” but here she is more vulnerable, raw, and even funny than I have ever seen her. I expect her to contend for the big awards for this performance, and it’s a bit of a shame that her work won’t be flashy enough in this year of outstanding work to earn her a second Oscar, but she’d be deserving.

She’s so unbelievably good in RABBIT HOLE, in fact, that it’d be easy to overlook Aaron Eckhart. I’ve even read a few reviews that said that he was bad and that Kidman blows him off the screen. I think that’s unfair, and not even accurate. In fact, the real tragedy is that Eckhart will get overlooked for what I feel is maybe his best work, too. Howie’s pain and journey are every bit as real as Becca’s; they’re just different. The two of them together are fantastic.

Equally fantastic is the always wonderful Dianne Wiest as Becca’s mother, who mines a little bit of her work in “Parenthood” here but is less of a pin cushion. As a mother who has lost a son herself, Wiest conveys the confusion of a woman who can’t understand that what happened to her doesn’t translate directly to what is happening to her daughter. Some of the best words of wisdom in the play come during a scene in this film version when Becca asks her mother when the grief goes away.

There is nothing special about Mitchell’s directing, but that is not a negative. Having been so flashy with his indie films “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Shortbus,” one might have expected work with far less restraint than this. Most of his choices border on TV movie-ish, but he is right to leave the work to the actors, and directs their performances well.

There is absolutely no doubt that RABBIT HOLE is a sad, sad movie. It’s hard to watch, especially if you are a parent yourself. But it rings so true and is so wise. It is a moving story of the human spirit that doesn’t quite move you on film to the extent that it does on the stage, when those emotions are just that much more raw. But I’m thankful for having a film to remember this wonderful play by.

3.5 out of 4

Black Swan (2010)

2011-01-04T22:01:00.000-08:00

The front-runner for this year’s “messy masterpiece” award is BLACK SWAN, auteur Darren Aronofsky’s ballet thriller starring a give-her-the-Oscar-now-dammit Natalie Portman as a stressed-out ballerina whose landing of the lead role in “Swan Lake” becomes both her career’s apex and her undoing. A film that I can only compare in terms of feeling to the way I felt after watching “There Will Be Blood” a few years ago, I think this is going to play itself out to be a rather polarizing film. I know of a few people who have seen it multiple times and have heralded it as a work of genius. I know others who found it so melodramatic and ridiculous that they couldn’t handle it.

So where am I on BLACK SWAN? It’s a testament to the ingenuity of Aronofsky, I think, that I’m not yet quite certain myself. That I would be struggling with what I saw so long after seeing it certainly means the film merits such debate and study. For many reasons, BLACK SWAN is a worthy entry in a very promising career of a modern auteur. And for many more reasons, it is a spectacular mess of a film, a one-tone shocker with a script that pays little attention to the need for some kind of reality as grounding.

Both the script and the visuals of BLACK SWAN are populated with clear symbolisms. Nina Sayers (Portman) is a replacement for a soon-to-retire ballerina, played by Winona Ryder. A new dancer, Lily (played by Mila Kunis), threatens to be a replacement for Nina. And then there’s Nina’s mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey), who once danced herself and now uses her daughter as a sort of dancing avatar/replacement for her now-ended career.

Then there’s the color duality of black and white, a little obvious but simpatico with the story and the production of “Swan Lake” itself. Thomas Leroy, the egotistical man who is staging the ballet, messes with Nina to toughen her up but tells her flat out that while he buys her as the White Swan, he doesn’t see her pulling off the Black Swan alter-ego required of her in the ballet. Nina is all technical, a seeker of perfection in her performances unable to cut loose and simply feel.

Like many young woman seeking the unobtainable (perfection), Nina self-injures. As if the rigors of ballet weren’t punishment enough on her frail body, she rips her cuticles and scratches herself. This detail is a very real touch, but one of the last real details in the film before it gets all wacky. When Lily shows up, the story goes all “Single White Female.” Nina is threatened by her presence, convinced that Lily is going to take her role from her. This, too, is realistic in the world of performers. It’s the whole “All About Eve” thing, and it’s a story that’s been told before.

But then Lily starts trying to get chummy with Nina. And for a little while, Nina gives in. And once this happens, Nina goes off the deep end, and so does Aronofsky. The final 30 minutes of the film—the details of which I won’t spoil here—are batshit crazy. The film becomes a game of “which moments really happened and which were imagined,” which is a tactic far beneath a director of Aronofsky’s talents.

If BLACK SWAN does anything with undeniable brilliance, that would be its stunning sense of tone. Aronofsky establishes a sense of suspense right away, and that suspense is visceral. I can honestly say I thought I’d soil myself on numerous occasions, and damn-near screamed out loud more than once while watching it. Only the arm-chopping-off scene in “127 Hours” comes anywhere close to this level of intensity in a film this year. BLACK SWAN literally gets your heart rate up.

But while I can praise this intensity, I also feel a bit critical of it. So consistent is its tone—a sustained two hours of frightening suspense—that the film lacks levels. And worse, it begins to descend into horror film clichés, such as the lead actress quickly turning her head with a gasp after looking in a mirror to reveal who is or isn’t there, and spooky low-end notes on a piano to signify scary moments. I can’t say I saw many of the jumpy moments coming, and that’s a credit to the film. But I can say that many of the techniques used to shock bordered on campy.

One of the film’s biggest WTF devises is its use of CG graphics in a few key scenes toward the end of the film. They are clearly intended to be a part of Nina’s increasing hallucinations and instability, but they also, I think, turn BLACK SWAN into “The Fly.” I don’t want to spoil it by being more specific; if you see the film, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about immediately upon seeing it.

As mentioned before, Natalie Portman is stunning. I worry that not enough people will fully appreciate what she clearly had to do to prepare for and live in this role. She clearly lost weight – an already skinny girl reduced to a wisp of a thing here. And she also learned ballet dancing, which is no small feat. This in addition to the acting itself, which is intense and exceptional. She deserves, I think, every award that is currently heading her way. It’s the female acting performance of the year.

Matching her in intensity is the work of both Kunis and Hershey, and were this not such a damn strong year for female supporting performances, both would get Oscar nominations. That said, I suspect that one of them still will, and it will probably be Kunis, because she gets more screentime, freaks the audience out more, and does a lesbian love scene.

It should also be noticed that few critics are saying much about Vincent Cassel as the manipulative ballet director, but he is great here, too: seductive, sexy, charming and coldly controlling.

For all of the choices Aronofsky makes as a director with BLACK SWAN that drove me crazy, there are some that I think are brilliant. All of the film’s dance sequences are exquisitely shot with tight camera work that floats and spins as if the camera is dancing, too. While I sometimes dislike this kind of flashy intrusion, it is fitting and wonderful here. Aronofsky shot this film with handheld cameras just as he did his last picture, “The Wrestler,” and the similar choices he makes here with a camera that follows the subject closely and often from behind help to establish the director’s consistency in style. Some have criticized the similarities, but I think similarities between a director’s films are a good thing! They indicate that a director has an identity. We are now getting to the point where it is easy to identify what an Aronofsky film looks like and, quite possibly, what its themes are.

All of these compliments aside, I cannot fully forgive, much less wrap my brain around, the film’s final act. Like I said before, it’s simply nuts. It’s nuttier than Daniel Day-Lewis’ bowling scene at the end of “There Will Be Blood.” And while the chain of events maintains that ridiculous level of intensity, Aronofsky discards any desire for the audience to have some clearly-discernable reality to use as narrative grounding, to distinguish from Nina’s paranoid delusions. What happens works as a figment of her paranoia, but the lines blur and then, explode. Ultimately, I’m left feeling impressed by the film’s sustained sense of intensity more than I care about the characters.

BLACK SWAN is worthy of much praise, though I would probably stop short at any kinds of rewards for its daffy script. But no matter how ridiculous I thought this was, I doubt you can watch BLACK SWAN without at least admitting that it is shockingly riveting. It’s the kind of mess you don’t mind watching, and movies today could use a few more of those.

3.0 out of 4

Tangled (2010)

2011-01-03T13:14:00.000-08:00

I did some research online and found out that TANGLED is the 50^th animated feature from the Walt Disney Animation Studios. This is certainly an amazing feat, and when I say 50 titles, I’m leaving out all of the Pixar movies, which have justifiably stolen the thunder from Disney’s traditional animation house in the past decade.

It might also startle some to note that there have been a dozen animated features since Disney’s last Oscar-winning full-length cartoon, “Tarzan.” Yes, that many! So what happened to all of those films? Well, as a life-long lover of Disney movies, I can tell you that I saw most of them, and none of them lived up to the Disney standard; a few were even flat-out bad. That, I think, is what makes TANGLED that much more special. Yes, “Toy Story 3” from Disney’s sibling studio Pixar is the best animated film of the year. And yes, I think it will be nominated for at least three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. But I’m going to remind us all that Pixar has rarely faltered from a tradition of quality it’s developed since the release of the first Toy Story, a track record unparalleled by virtually any other movie studio. It’s almost a freakish anomaly.

The “regular” Disney animation studio has had the normal ups and downs of any film studio, but because of the hot streak of wonderful animated musicals that ran from 1989’s “The Little Mermaid” through, arguably, 1999’s “Tarzan,” even a mediocre film is going to be quite a disappointment. And I believe that TANGLED is a return to that form, a film that is simultaneously a firm return to the tradition of the Disney princess film and a fresh and modern take on the fairytale from a studio that hasn’t been able to produce “fresh” in years.

Not that they haven’t tried. Last year, Disney released “The Princess and the Frog,” and its attempt at being fresh was to set the story in New Orleans—a real place—rather than some fantasy kingdom, and to cast its first-ever African-American heroine as its princess. These factors were indeed virtues, but the script didn’t pull the weight; it was a Cajun coat of paint on an uninspired rehash of a story. Sure, Disney got another (and unique-looking) princess for girls’ doll collection. But that’s about it. And the music, while it was organic to that story, was not particularly memorable in the long run.

In comes Disney’s Oscar-magnet Alan Menken, who hadn’t worked on an animated feature since “Home on the Range” and last wrote for Disney’s live-action (and wonderful) “Enchanted.” This time, his show tune sensibilities are given a decidedly pop edge, resulting in some of the best songs from a Disney musical in years.

The plot of TANGLED goes far beyond my memory of the Rapunzel story, though who knows much more to that story other than the whole “let down your hair” bit? In this version, Rapunzel’s hair actually has magical healing properties and glows when she sings. In a modern spin, and though she’s been trapped in that tower until her 18^th birthday, where the film’s plot begins, she is armed with her hair and not afraid to use it—intuitively capable of using it as a weapon and a productive tool.

The villain in this film is Rapunzel’s mother, Gothel, wonderfully voiced by Donna Murphy. After a few Disney films with bombastic villains, here we have a cross between the old hag version of the wicked queen from “Snow White” and the stepmother from “Cinderella.” The script’s lines for Gothel are wisely understated and passive-aggressive, making her that much more frightening and the subtext of her hold over Rapunzel infinitely more sad and cruel. Gothel, we learn, kidnapped Rapunzel and uses her hair to remain young and healthy. Naturally, she raises the girl to be terrified of the dangers of the outside world and to want to remain in the tower forever. Conveniently, this would also keep her from learning that she is actually a princess, missing for 18 years from the castle of the nearby kingdom.

Fortune intervenes in the person of Flynn Rider, a petty thief and handsome charmer who ends up in the tower as a refuge of escape while being chased down for stealing a crown from that very castle. Except the tower turns out to be no refuge; one of the most refreshing aspects of TANGLED is just how far from helpless this princess is, even though her life is as provincial as it gets (sorry, Belle). Rapunzel knows he wants the crown back and has no idea that it belongs to her. She makes a deal with Flynn that if he takes her into the kingdom while Gothel is away to view the “lights” she witnesses from a distance every night, she’ll hand over the crown and they can both go their separate ways.

That, of course, is not how it all goes down. Naturally, in Disney fashion, love blossoms. But what makes it special here is the fact that this is no prince. In fact, he’s really cut from the same cloth as Aladdin. And his transformation gives the film a good chunk of its soul, not to mention its sense of humor. This is a laugh-out-loud-funny film at times, usually at the hands of either Flynn or his horse-that-acts-like-a-dog sidekick, Maximus.

I’m not sure why Disney felt the need to play games with the film’s title, calling it TANGLED here in the United States but sticking to “Rapunzel” for its overseas release. The stories have it that after the disappointment of “The Princess and the Frog” and in light of Pixar’s work, Disney didn’t want to alienate its boy audience with “another princess movie.” So the princess’ name was removed from the title and the trailers for the film focused more on Flynn than Rapunzel. I’m not sure if that gimmick worked, but it wasn’t necessary. TANGLED has plenty for boys and girls alike. I loved it every bit as much as my daughter did!

While the animation of TANGLED is computer-generated like all of the Pixar films, it’s fashioned in the traditional Disney animation style, if that makes any sense. Using a technique called non-photorealistic rendering, the film takes on the finish of oil paintings, and it’s beautiful.

As I mentioned before, Menken’s songs, with lyrics by Glenn Slater, work perfectly with the story. The love duet “I See the Light” stands out for worthy inclusion next to songs like “A Whole New World,” and “I’ve Got a Dream” continues the tradition of the typically witty group number. Pop star Mandy Moore and TV actor Zachary Levi handle their vocals fantastically—both spoken and sung. But in some ways, “Mother Knows Best,” sung by Murphy, gives the film its depth and gravity. The song is Gothel’s demonstration of her cruel emotional manipulation over Rapunzel. It’s chilling and sad and strangely, if taken the right way, the kind of song any parent would sing to his or her child. The psychological complexity here is, to make the comparison, at Pixar-level.

TANGLED returns the traditional Disney animated studio to a place it hasn’t been in over a decade. It’s surprisingly good, though we shouldn’t be surprised. Disney has always had the magic. They just had to let down their hair and figure out where they put it.

3.5 out of 4

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)

2011-01-03T13:10:00.000-08:00

We’ve got all of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books at my house, but what little I know of the details therein are provided to me by my almost 9-year-old daughter, as I have not read any of them myself. She is constantly entertained by them, and that’s good enough for me because she’s not a big fan of reading, so anything that captivates her attention is worthy in my book.

So when I watched the film version of Jeff Kinney’s first book in the series, DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, along with my daughter (who was seeing it for the second time), I quickly realized that it would be somewhat ignorant of me to tune out and stamp this as the “worst movie of the year” without giving it a shot. Is it my kind of movie? Perhaps not. But I always teach my students to measure a movie’s success by how well it accomplishes what it sets out to. And by that measuring stick, WIMPY KID is, surprisingly, quite good.

The story, for those of you who have not read, centers around scrawny Greg Heffley as he enters middle school. His older brother, Rodrick, terrifies him with stories of how horrible middle school will be, and Greg’s experiences live up to Rodrick’s gloomy predictions. Greg has a best friend, Rowley, who is chubby and has no clue socially as to how either of them can move up the popularity ladder. This results in Greg treating Rowley quite poorly in a number of different situations, and his actions often—in fact usually—backfire on him.

The best thing about DIARY OF A WIMPY KID is that it is made specifically for kids. The film lacks the typical inside jokes woven into the scripts of kids films for the sake of appeasing adult audiences. I found that refreshing, especially since the film also accomplishes something rather unique for a modern kid’s movie, and that is that it is maturity-level appropriate for its audience.

Go figure. A movie about sixth graders where the problems they face are actual sixth grade problems and the actors appear to be age appropriate. Nothing in WIMPY KID is too advanced for its age; the jokes, scenarios, and even the clothing the kids wear, is what a real middle schooler would look like. I’m so tired of the movies and television that my daughter watches subliminally forcing her to grow up too quickly and champion materialistic virtues. Though my middle school experience (it was junior high back then) wasn’t nearly as miserable as Greg’s is here, this movie more closely resembles that time in life than most of the stuff on TV.

As Greg, Zachary Gordon is engaging and watchable. And director Thor Freudenthal, who previously helmed another of my kids’ favorite live action films in recent years, “Hotel For Dogs,” keeps the jokes coming and the pace moving. It’s a fast and fun film that I’m sure holds up to repeat viewings.

Better than the film itself was listening to my daughter, as we cuddled on the couch, tell me which parts were in the book and which ones were changed. That conversation was heightened by the film’s frequent inclusion of Kinney’s now-famous stick-figure drawings from his novels, sprinkled throughout the film’s narrative. They added whimsy to the viewing experience and strengthened, I’m certain, the book-to-movie translation.

Is DIARY OF A WIMPY KID a children’s film masterpiece? Not by any means. It’s no “Babe,” no “A Christmas Story.” But it very handily accomplishes what it should, and it’s a lot of fun. To watch it and not think so is to have fallen out of touch with your inner wimpy kid.

3.0 out of 4

Blu-ray!

2011-01-03T12:44:00.000-08:00

Well, it took a while, but the Carlson household has finally entered the Blu-ray era!

I've heard the stories about the noticeably better quality of blu-ray films on a blu-ray player, but I never had the extra couple hundred bucks laying around to take the plunge. But thanks to a sweet deal, my wife showed up with one on New Year's Eve, along with copies of "Toy Story 3" and the 3-disc collector's edition of "Avatar." I figure "Inception" is my next blu-ray purchase.

So far, I haven't even hooked the player up yet, but I'm looking forward to it. But I'd love to hear from you.
Given the higher price of blu-ray discs, how often do you, if you are a blu-ray user, purchase them?
Do you still purchase some movies or TV shows on regular DVD even though you own a blu-ray, and if so, how do you decide which format to buy?
Do regular DVDs look better on a blu-ray player than they would on a normal DVD player, like I've heard they do?
Which blu-ray discs are worth the purchase? What belongs in my library?

I'd love to hear from you!
KC

Looking for my Best of 2010 list?

2011-01-03T12:38:00.000-08:00

Like I did here last year, I plan to compile a list of my favorite films of 2010.

If you've been reading my blog, you might have noticed that I didn't post my list for 2009 until early April of 2010. The reason for this delay is simple; given my limited amount of time as a husband, father and fully-employed person (and not as a movie critic, though a boy can dream), and given my often delayed access to films that I feel might be in contention for such recognition, I try to wait until I have a more complete list of films under my belt before I compile that list.

As of the start of 2011, I have seen about two dozen films from 2010. I've identified just over a dozen more that I have access to and plan to watch before the Academy Awards in February. So my goal right now is to move up my Best of 2010 list by a whole month from last year, if not sooner.

I'd rather be more complete than timely, especially considering my limited readership. Nobody's in a hurry! I am looking forward to taking in everything I need to see and getting back to you soon. Thanks, as always, for reading.