All the Movies I Watch

A Better Life (2011) (Wednesday, February 1, 2012) (150)

2012-02-01T12:12:00.001-08:00

A Better Life is a precious film about how hard life is for Mexican immigrants in East L.A. It's not at all a bad film, just one that wears its sentiments on its sleeve and makes sure that you know how important a story it is.

Carlos (Demian Bichir, who was nominated for an Oscar for this role) is a Mexican immigrant working as a day laborer landscaper in fancy parts of Los Angeles. His son, Luis (Jose Julian), is a Chicano kid, born and raised in East L.A. who is struggling in high school and considering joining a gang rather than continuing his studies.

The father and son don't really connect well, which is sad for Carlos as he's doing all this hard and illegal work for his son who seems oblivious to his father's work and efforts. When Carlos gets into financial and work trouble and might be sent back to Mexico, both he and Luis have to face the fact that the world is a tough place and there might not be a happy ending for them.

There is nothing in this movie I haven't seen before and I worry that the filmmakers, director Paul Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason, are a bit proud of themselves for making such an important film. It feels in every scene like they're patting themselves on the back - or at least that's how I feel as an ultra-liberal viewer who is very glad I'm watching such a film.

Bichir is actually very good in his role and I can't really say he doesn't deserve a Best Actor nomination (though it does feel a bit random that he has such an honor). I guess I feel like the film is such a narrative and emotional paint-by-numbers that it's hard to give him all that much credit. Still, it's a good job. The film is good - it's not bad at all - I just wish it was a bit more inventive than it is. This is a hard criticism as I'm mostly annoyed that my experience watching the film was different, which isn't really the worry of the director or writer. Still I felt like it wasn't as emotionally complex as it could have been.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Haywire (Sunday, January 29, 2012) (5)

2012-01-29T14:34:00.001-08:00

Steven Soderbergh is a good and talented filmmaker. Above everything else, he's a great watcher of other, older movies. Maybe that's why I generally like his movies, or, at a minimum, find his work interesting, because I feel like he's a movie watcher just like I am.

His newest film, Haywire, is a really fun, small action film that plays very much like one of those sleek post-Bond action flicks, like John Boorman's Point Blank (with Lee Marvin). The story here is not too complicated (well, there are lots of moving parts to it, but it's not too hard to follow), the action scenes, fights and chases, look great, it does not spending too much time dwelling on character development and pathos (it's an action film, after all) and it all ties up well in the end.

Mallory (MMA star Gina Carano) is a super spy who works for some private firm that consults with the CIA. When a job goes pear-shaped she finds that people on her own team might be out to get her and she looks to find them before they can find her. She seems always a half-step ahead of them and is not afraid to put on heels and a black dress and kill people (like a girl James Bond). It's a very sleek movie, though nothing too deep or psychologically rigorous.

It's always a big risk to cast a non-actor in a major role, especially one like this which is not really autobiographical. I think Soderbergh rather enjoys making the audience feel uncomfortable with non-actors in major roles, a bit of a thumbing his nose at Hollywood tradition.

Carano does a very good job here, actually (much better than the last non-actor SS had in one of his movies, when anal porno superstar Sasha Grey was in The Girlfriend Experience in 2009), and comes off as an aw-shucks girl next door... but a badass one. She's totally sexy - and thick, which is doubly sexy - and plays well opposite the various males who want to lay her (Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor). I'm not sure she has a lot of other acting roles left in her career, but this is a great effort here.

I also appreciate that this is a pocket-sized action flick. It's a lot of fun and doesn't have the bombasity of a bigger-budget action movie, like a Mission: Impossible or a late-model Bond. It's got a great look, a great soundtrack (by David Holmes), and is a lot of fun.

Stars: 3 of 4

Roadie (Sunday, January, 29, 2012) (4)

2012-01-29T14:33:00.000-08:00

Michael Cuesta's last major film, L.I.E. is a very interesting look at suburbia and teen sexuality. His newest film, Roadie, has almost none of the same subtlety and interest. This is a bit unfair, though, as this film also has almost none of the same expectations going in (like I'm kicking a handicapped kid when he's down). It's not a bad movie, but it just doesn't live up to the filmmaker's previous work.

Jimmy (Ron Eldard) is a 40-something guy who has worked for 20-some years as a roadie for the Blue Oyster Cult on their various international tours. He returns to his mother's house in Queens one day after getting fired (finally) and has to face the reality of the total end of his musical dream. He will not become a rock star and will never be discovered. This is the end of the road for him. When he goes into the local bar, he meets Randy (Bobby Cannavale), a bully from his high school days, who is now married to Nikki (Jill Hennessey), his former flame. Life has come to a similar halt for these two, but they seem happy in their mediocrity. Jimmy begins to lie about the direction of his life and reconnect to Nikki, though his true life might come back to bite him.

The tone map for this film would go something like, "sad, pitiful, very sad, sad." I actually like that this never gets very happy and that everything is generally beige and ugly (it's Queens, after all). This is a pretty true picture of life, really, and I like that it's not made prettier than it should be. But still, it's a bit strange to see a movie that really doesn't show much development of the characters nor change in emotions. This is a very thematic and psychologically monotone story and never really develops well. Not that it's bad, but that it's frustrating to experience. I like its realism, but it's not a world I want to spend much time in (real life is hard enough, amaright?!).

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Albert Nobbs (2011) (Friday, January 27, 2012) (149)

2012-01-27T12:04:00.000-08:00

There is one interesting scene in Rodrigo Garcia's film Albert Nobbs. At one moment, Albert (Glenn Close) and his friend Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), both of whom are living as men, though they are biologically woman, go for a walk on the beach dressed in women's clothes. This has a certain strange quality to it, as we know well that both of these characters are women and that dressing as such should not be a problem, but as we've spent 80 minutes watching them as men, it still feels like they're just two guys cross dressing.

This is not very dissimilar from a moment in Celine Sciamma's recent film Tomboy, where young Laure's mother makes her wear a dress, even though we've only seen her in boys' clothes. I would say, though that that scene was much more interesting as it was not simply a superficial statement, but much more of a psychological one. Garcia might have been attempting to make a psychological statement, though it just falls flat. It's a strange feeling to see a character we think of as a man dressed as a woman, though I'm not really sure what to make of it. I'm not sure Garcia explains his intentions well enough here.

Nobbs is a butler in a Victorian-era Dublin hotel, where he has worked for years. It seems at some point it became easier for her to get a job as a butler than as a woman servant, so she decided to cross dress and identify as a man. There's certainly a suggestion that he identifies as a gay woman, though the psychology gets very uncertain. One night Nobbs has to share his bedroom with Page, who is in the hotel repainting the walls, and they each find out the other's secret (by opening their shirts and showing their breasts. Subtle.). It seems Page made a decision to live as a man to protect herself from an abusive husband a long time ago. Now he lives as a transsexual in a relationship with a woman. When Nobbs decides to get out of the hotel game (why now?!), he decides he should marry young Helen (Mia Wasikowska) a girl who seems more interested in the hunky handyman than Nobbs.

Aside from the frustration of not really understanding the psychological point of view of Nobbs, this story is extra annoying as it shows Nobbs making only bad decisions. Why in the world would he want to marry Helen? She seems totally average and not unlike hundreds of other chambermaids he might have met over the years. Why would he decided to get out of hotel butlering now when it seems like a very safe place for him? Why not open a tobacconist shop alone without a wife?

I don't think Garcia explains enough here about the motivation of Nobbs or what goes into his decisions. It seems like he's leaving most of that interpretation work up to the audience to figure out, but I don't think that's very fair in the context of this film. I have no good idea about Victorian mores regarding cross-dressing and transsexuals and I don't think we know enough about what Nobbs' deep feelings are regarding Helen or any other woman. Does he really love her? Is she just the means to a "normal" end? Does he have similar feelings toward Page? It's all very muddy and difficult to understand.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Warrior (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (148)

2012-01-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

I had no interest in seeing Warrior when it came out. It looked like any average boxing movie that have been made over the years (there have been a lot of them recently). But then it got an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for Nick Nolte, so I decided I'd give it a change. Well, it's really nothing more than your average boxing movie - though this time it's not boxing, per se, but mixed marshal arts (MMA).

The film follows two brothers, Brendan Conlon (Joe Edgerton) and Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy), who live in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh respectively. They were both raised partly by their drunk dad, Paddy (Nolte), who was an ex-Marine and a high school wrestling coach. It seems at some point their mother took them to the West Coast, from where they split up. Later, Brendan became an amateur MMA fighter and Tommy went to the Marines and served in Iraq.

Back to the present day, they are both having a hard time in life, both underemployed and looking for a shot of cash to make everything better. They both begin training for some big super MMA tournament that apparently people care a lot about (because that's just like it would be if this happened outside of a movie!). Against big odds they both make their way to the final match where they have to face one another. Oh - and there's something about both of them dealing with their drunk dad, who is soberish but still a jerk.

There's really nothing special about this movie, aside from the fact that it runs about 130 minutes, which is way too long. All the traditional tropes of fight movies are present here, the pretty but powerless wife/girlfriend, the underdog gaining respect by brawling, the fighter who is also a physics teacher (no, he doesn't also play the violin).

Nolte is fine here, though there's really no reason for him to have gotten the Oscar nom. He's basically playing himself again, drunk who can sober up here and there, but is generally a psychologically underdeveloped man. He's not a leader and hero the way Mickey from Rocky is, nor is he an outright scoundrel. This is much more of a boxing movie for kids who prefer MMA to boxing than any sort of interesting or compelling narrative.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (147)

2012-01-26T11:38:00.000-08:00

There But for Fortune is a very good biodoc about the life and career of the great folk singer and Lefty activist Phil Ochs. It shows how he came up in the late-'50s Greenwich Village folk scene, how he was friendly and competitive with Dylan and how he got involved in the various civil rights and anti-war movements of the Left. The third act, about his fall into manic-depression and his ultimate suicide is a bit rocky as it features less music and, as a result of his doing fewer interviews, more speculation by his friends.

Still, the music throughout the film is, of course, fantastic, and this really shows Ochs as the musical and cultural genius and firebrand that he was. It's sad that he's not thought of by most in the same way Seeger, Dylan and Baez are, but his work clearly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with any of theirs.

Stars: 3 of 4

HappyThankYouMorePlease (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (146)

2012-01-26T11:37:00.000-08:00

It's an old story. A guy on a subway train, who is late for a meeting, finds a lost little boy and takes him in, learning more about himself as he teaches the boy things about life and the city. No, this isn't Chaplin's The Kid, nor is it Adam Sandler in Big Daddy. It's HappyThankYouMorePlease, Josh Radnor's pet project that he wrote, directed and stars in.

This is a nice little ensemble comedy about Sam (Radnor), a New York writer who is rather stuck in his life. He meets Rasheen (Michael Algieri) on the subway and all of his friends think he's nuts for not going to the cops to find his family. It seems that Rasheen is a foster kid and is just as happy with Sam as with his foster people. Sam's cousin, Mary Catherine (Zoe Kazan), is an artist and in a rather rocky relationship with her boyfriend and his best friend, Annie (Malin Akerman), has alopecia and works in a law firm where she's hit on by all the nerdy lawyers, despite not having any hair on her head. With Rasheen as the catalyst everyone finds their own happy way.

There's nothing particularly wonderful about this film, but nothing really terrible about it either. It's a movie I've seen a few times already and nothing really fresh at all. The best thing in the film is the discovery of young Algieri, who seems to really have something... but he's a kid and those things are designed to be cute.

I give Radnor credit for writing a movie and casting the beautiful Kate Mara as the romantic love interest. That's a great idea, bro. I'd have done the same, I'm sure!

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Sleeping Beauty (2011) (Wednesday, January 25, 2012) (145)

2012-01-25T09:04:00.001-08:00

Julia Leigh's sex rompy Sleeping Beauty should not be confused with Catherine Breillat's politico-Freudian film The Sleeping Beauty (the definite article is very important). The two films have very little to do with one another, aside from both having female protagonists. In the Leigh, Lucy (the super fetching Emily Browning) is a college student who works several odd jobs to make her way. She does medical experiments, works as a copy girl in an office, waits tables and turns tricks in nightclubs and for private clients.

One day she is hired by a fancy lady for a strange and secretive group of rich men in some elite and sex-focussed supper club. She's told to strip down to her underwear and pour wine in the fancy dining room, for which she's paid very well. The next day she is served a sedative and asked to lay down naked in bed while one of those old men uses her (with no penetration, leaving no scars, of course) until she wakes up. It's not clear what this sexual servitude means or what exactly happens, but, again, she's well paid for her work.

This film is what happens when someone only looks at Pasolini's Salo from a superficial perspective. In fact several of the set-ups seem to be taken directly from that film (particularly the post-dinner brandy session where two women curl up on the floor showing their anuses). I have to admit, I don't really get this film or what it's trying to say. Unlike with the Pasolini, there doesn't seem to be a strong political underpinning to the narrative, although the supper club members are clearly super rich and powerful. It seems that Leigh blushes a bit too much and doesn't go as far or as strong as PPP went in his film, as she shows only fleeting nudity and tries to remain decent as much as possible (though I'm sure Browning's contract also had something to do with that).

This is a lightly erotic film, but really only inasmuch as it shows a young woman with a tiny body in little or no clothes doing some near-sexual things (there's really no fucking, per se). This is yet another example of how filmmakers trade ellipsis for meaning, hoping you'll do most of the heavy lifting on your own. The problem here is that the story is so incomplete there is no way to fully understand it.

We can guess that the men in the supper club are rich masters of the universe and they have these strange interactions with young girls as a way of disproving their mortality, but we really have nothing to base this idea on aside from circumstance. Furthermore, as much as these men seem to be bourgeois and monied, Lucy and her peers are economically unknown, so there's not really a full Marxist argument being made.

Technically this is a totally gorgeous film (aside from Browning's own technical gorgeousness). The cinematography by Geoffrey Simpson is crisp yet dreamy. The costumes and production design (by Shareen Beringer and Annie Beauchamp, respectively) are perfect for the content (or suggested content) of the film and create lush and glamorous interiors.

I feel like Leigh is on the edge of having a very good movie here, but there is just too much left untold.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus (Tuesday, January 24, 2012) (3)

2012-01-24T11:13:00.000-08:00

The title of this film, Bonsai People, comes from one of Muhammad Yunus' millions of aphorisms about how people are like bonsai trees and that they can grow but they need care and love and the right soil. Yunus is a really great guy. He saw a need for micro-lending in his native Bangladesh and began the Grameen Bank, a nimble bank that broke with international tradition by lending small amounts of money to the poorest people they could find. Grameen's clients are almost all women who are looking for small loans under $100 to buy a cow or a few small trees or some seeds to start a small business. This documentary looks at all that Grameen and Yunus do.

After Yunus got tons of attention in 2006 when he won the Nobel Peace Prize, international companies fell all over themselves to work with him in one of the zillions of Grameen off-shoots, in health, housing, farming, livestock, childhood and women's education, disaster relief, food and on and on. The film is punctuated with some of Yunus' more wholesome and banal chestnuts ("Credit is a human right;" "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime;" "Making an impact in people's lives is as important as making money.") and we see how his policies and ideas are helping to life poor women out of poverty throughout Bangladesh.

Strangely criticisms of Grameen's lending practices are mentioned and quickly dismissed. We never really see what happens to women who can't pay back their debts and why (there's a suggestion that health care emergencies sometimes get in the way of paying back the loans... but that seems like a much too specific reason). There's also a strange sense, in discussion with some of Grameen' more long-term borrowers, that the bank acts as a bit of a pusher forcing women to take loans they might not need or want. One women proudly shows off her beautiful house and farm paid for by work and Grameen loans. Wonderful - but it does feel a bit like she's a junkie showing all the wonderful different drugs her dealer has given to her. A bit strange. I wish there had been a bit more balance to this portrait and that it came off as less of a propaganda tool than it does.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011) (Monday, January 23, 2012) (144)

2012-01-23T11:02:00.001-08:00

Page One: Inside the New York Times is a documentary that follows the Media desk of the New York Times during the end of 2009 and early 2010. One of the main characters of the film is Media columnist and reporter David Carr, and with his rough Upper Midwest voice, he takes on all attackers who claim that the paper is going under and that the days of broadsheet print are over.

Throughout the film stories pop up, get discussed, are printed and then forgotten. We see the first WikiLeaks video dump showing US armed forces killing Reuters journalists, we see the late-2009 withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, we see the Tribune Company fall apart. With each story it is clear that the editors and writers of the Times are serious thinking people who try to look at more than one side of the issue.

Meanwhile, from every angle, they are under attack from other journalists and news media players such as blogs and news aggregators who claim that the world wouldn't be so bad if there were no more Times. Each time this comes up, director Andrew Rossi shows that the claim is worthless without a full consideration of the ramifications of such a situation. The New York Times is the originator of many stories each day and a world without it might very well be a worse place.

This is clearly a glamor project that shows how wonderful and smart everything surrounding the New York Times is. There are brief mentions of the Carlos Slim loan to the Times, the new building and it's sale-leaseback deal, the new pay-wall on the website and the buyouts of old staffers. Mostly we see how a bunch of young (mostly) good looking (mostly) men make tough decisions all the time.

I generally don't like films like this that come off as much as an advertisement for the subject as a document about it, but this is generally not too offensive. It is interesting and clever how stories come and go through the film just as they do on the front page of the paper. Still, it sometimes seems like a movie with no plot and no beginning or end.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

My Piece of the Pie (2011) (Saturday, January 21, 2012) (143)

2012-01-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

My Piece of the Pie is Cédric Klapisch's latest film about class and power in France. Middle-class mother of three, France (Karin Viard), lives in Dunkirk when her factory is shut down and she loses her job. Depressed that her life is not what she had hoped it would be, she goes to Paris to get trained to be a maid. She is sent to work for Steve (Gilles Lellouche), a French stock broker who has been working in London for a decade. Now back in Paris, he hopes to settle down and get married.

The problem is that he's a pig with women and doesn't understand that money can't buy happiness or love. He treats all women badly in general, be they girlfriends, Russian prostitutes or fashion models who he whisks off for a weekend in Venice. When his young son is dropped off at his apartment by his ex, he finds himself in desperate need of France's child rearing expertise. The two grow closer as they spend more and more time together, as she looks after his son and mothers him as well.

As with other Klapisch films, this has a generally light and happy tone, even silly at times (and yes, as with all of his films, there are two fun dance sequences in it). Viard and Lellouche are both great and totally relate well as maid-boss, mother-son and maybe more. Unlike a film such as Laurent Cantet's beautiful Time Out, another French film dealing with lay-offs and also featuring Viard, the economic criticism and despair over losing a job is not as seamless. Here, the near-romcom of France and Steve seems rather separate from the bitterness France feels toward Steve's work and money spending. The last 20 minutes turn the story dramatically into what I feel is more of a silly melodrama than it needs to be. Still, this is generally good and well made.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Coriolanus (2011) (Saturday, January 21, 2012) (142)

2012-01-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

Coriolanus is Ralph Fiennes' modern interpretation of the Shakespeare Roman play. Adapted by playwright-cum-screenwriter John Logan, the film is set in our contemporary world, where "Rome" is a contemporary country at war with an invading force from Volsci. On its surface, Roman looks much like any Western superpower of today: they drive Mercedes-Benzes, they watch 24-hour news channels, they get into bitter political and diplomatic debates. The Roman general, Caius Martius (Fiennes) fights a protracted battle against the Volscian leader, Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), and when he comes back after the victory he becomes a national superstar.

Renamed Coliolanus, after the town of Corioles where the battle took place, he quickly becomes a bright political star. The problem is that he's very conservative and doesn't believe people who don't serve in the military should be entitled to food and power. Rome is in the midst of major protests from the poor (very similar to what one might see on the television today with any Occupy rally in the world) and Coriolanus takes a rigid and extreme position.

Just as he is about to win more political power, he is ousted from the Senate and banished from Rome. With nowhere else to go, and with his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and wife (Jessica Chastain - her 6th supporting role of 2011) working to restore his power behind the scenes, he joins his once-enemy Aufidius to try and retake control of Rome.

This is Fiennes' directorial debut and he does a really good job with it. The leap of a Roman play taking place in our contemporary world totally works and looks great. Cleverly Fiennes sets up transitions as small news segments on cable news, so the story flows easily without confusion and naturally inside the world we see. Rome is filled with a diverse group of people from around the world, with John Kani, a South African actor, playing Cominus, the head of the Senate. All of this gives the sense that Rome is a powerful and far-flung empire filled with people from all around the world who speak in many different accents (much as it must have been, of course).

I am particularly interested in how straightforward the story is (with not many story elements cut from the play) compared with other tragedies and Roman works. The characters' motivations are all very clear and interesting, and Coriolanus' own vengeance, even in the face of his mother, wife and son, is fascinating. This is very good movie and one that works very well as an adaptation. Clearly Fiennes knows what he's doing behind a camera and I look forward to seeing more from him.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Best Films of 2011

2012-01-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

I saw fewer movies in 2011 (141) than any year since I have been keeping count, yet I really don't feel like I missed much good stuff. I am shocked by how many movies are merely average (2 or 2.5 stars). I will say that when it came to making this Top Ten list, I struggled a bit to get it down to only ten titles... so I cheated... twice.

I have two ties, not only because I felt bad about cutting the list down further, but also because two sets of films seemed to deal with similar subject matter in a somewhat similar way. At the #2 spot are Herzog's The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a story about human consciousness and memory and about the medium of film (and 3D) as a new way of recording our thoughts. Also at #2 is Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light, a film about lost memories or unknown information. Stylistically these films are similar and thematic they relate closely.

At #10 I had another tie between Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty and Sciamma's Tomboy. Both of these deal with either child sexuality or pre-sexuality that might translate as sexuality in an interesting way. I think both of these women directors imbue their works with film theory in a Freudian context and neither one is as easy as it might seem on the surface.

Some interesting statistics: There are two Iranian films on the list (even though Certified Copy was made in Europe and is mostly in English), there are two Romanian films (and a third on the honorable mentions list), there are two French films, a Chilean film and a Portuguese film. There are three documentaries and three American movies (plus a Germanish movie... where Werner speaks English and riffs on Hollywood 3D movies of old). There are two films that clock in at three hours each and one that clocks in at four-and-a-half hours.

I think The Tree of Life is one of the best films ever made. I recently had to make up a list of the greatest 100 films of all time and I strongly considered putting this on that list (I only didn't because such an inclusion requires a bit more time to marinate, digest and live with). I can't think of another film that is so beautiful thematically and technically and moves the audience along in a similar way. This movie is really in a category entirely by itself and to compare it to anything else would be silly.

I also know it's a bit silly to have so many films in the "honorable mention" category, but I didn't want them to go unmentioned. Amid all the terrible movies, there were lots of good movies in 2011 and they should all be seen and enjoyed.

1) The Tree of Life
2) The Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D and Nostalgia for the Light
3) Aurora
4) Meeks Cutoff
5) The Future
6) Mysteries of Lisbon
7) The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
8) A Separation
9) Certified Copy
10) The Sleeping Beauty and Tomboy

Honorable Mentions:

* Beginners
* Drive
* Hesher
* The Kid with a Bike
* The Muppets
* Over Your Cities Grass Will Go
* Le Quattro Volte
* Pina 3D
* A Screaming Man
* The Skin I Live In
* Super
* Take Shelter
* Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
* Tuesday After Christmas
* Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
* Weekend

The Worst Films of 2011

2012-01-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

So 2011 had lots of mediocre movies and lots of really awful ones. Here is my "bottom 10". They range from the facile and deeply offensive (both historically and intellectually) to the ridiculous and the stupid. I hope all of these films are burned and are never shown again. They're terrible.

1) The Help
2) Sarah’s Key
3) Rise of the Planet of the Apes
4) Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D
5) Miral
6) Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
7) Super 8
8) The Roommate
9) Margaret
10) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Honorable Mentions:

* L’Amour Fou
* Thor
* Midnight in Paris

X-Men: First Class (2011) (Wednesday, January 18, 2012) (141)

2012-01-18T13:40:00.002-08:00

X-Men: First Class is the origin story for this comic-book series. After a CIA agent sees a group of people behaving with super-human powers, she enlists the help of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) who is a researcher in human mutations. Xavier himself has powerful telepathy abilities and his best friend is a girl named Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) who can transform herself (clothes and all) to look like anyone she sees.

Meanwhile, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor, Eric Lensherr (Michael Fassbender), who has the magnetic power to move and control metal, is out trying to avenge the death of his mother at the hands of the Nazis as well as years of experiments performed on him for the Nazis by Dr. Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). Shaw, the consummate eugenicist, believes normal humans are terrible and they should be wiped out and replaced with mutants.

At some point Xavier (with Raven) and the CIA meet up with Lensherr and they all join forces. It seems the CIA is trying to collect all the teens in America who have these mutant powers. With the help of a massive computer helmet, Xavier is able to find all these kids and bring them in. Shaw uses the Cuban Missile Crisis as the stating ground for his massive overthrow of humanity and Xavier, Raven, Lensherr and their teens have to stop him.

This is a fun movie and I generally like "origin" stories. It's neat to see where characters I know come from and what they looked like younger (hotter, yes). There are lots of fun set-ups with the teens training their powers and learning how to use their skills for good rather than evil.

Still, the dialogue throughout the film is ridiculous and much of the acting is too. Jennifer Lawrence (who I really liked in Winter's Bone) is particularly bad here (and is certainly not helped by the silly lines she has to speak). Fassbender, who is a great actor, again struggles with his accent here. It's all a bit of a mess, as it was with him in the film Shame, where there was a ridiculous line about how he was born in Dublin and moved to New York, as a way to get around his terrible Americun accent.

This doesn't really take away from the fact that this is generally a fun action super-hero movie set in the 1960s that generally looks great and tells a good story of choosing to be good or evil.

Stars: 2 of 4

Arthur (2011) (Tuesday, January 18, 2012) (140)

2012-01-18T13:40:00.001-08:00

This new Arthur movie, with Russell Brand, Hellen Mirren and Greta Gerwig, is a remake of the 1981 comedy of the same name with Dudley Moore, John Gielgud and Liza Minnelli. Today we find ourselves in another economic pit and what will make us happier than watching a drunk asshole win by being sober and less of an asshole.

There are a handful of updates or tweaks, but most of the story is the same. Arthur (Brand) is an out-of-control billionaire who does anything and everything he wants to do in New York City. His best friend is his butler Hobson (Mirren), who constantly insults him with a sharp tongue and generally looks after him. He is told he'll lose his money unless he marries Susan (Jennifer Garner), the heiress of another gigantic fortune, partly because she is a proper fit socially and partly because it would be a good business move for his family company.

Just as he's about to settle down against his well, he meets Naomi (Gerwig) who is a middle-class girl from Queens who runs illegal tours of New York (which is almost the same as stealing from Bergdorf Goodman, of course!). He falls head over heels for Naomi because she's honest and smart and has to figure out how to keep his money and win her over.

I like the original film, but I don't love it, yet it's much, much better than this heap. Brand is a total asshole and not appealing at all. Part of the reason the first film works at all is that Moore is charming and generally likable, even in his drunkest. Brand is a lot more juvenile than Moore was, more like a kid with a lot of money than a man who behaves badly.

Mirren is great in this role, though I think it's the ultimate straight-man and it's written well (Gielgud was also great in this role as well). Gerwig is always fabulous, though it's still weird for me to see her all clean and with makeup on as I always think she does better when she's more natural and awkward, less scripted. Her character is less loud and crazy -- because she's not Liza, with all that she brings -- and I think the connection here between Arthur and Naomi is more suggested by the context of the story than shown clearly.

This is a totally recycled film that really has no business being remade. I don't think this adds anything to the original film (which is still pretty funny) and I can't figure out why anyone would want to watch Brand, who is a total hack.

Stars: 1 of 4

Tomboy (2011) (January 16, 2012) (139)

2012-01-16T13:41:00.001-08:00

Writer-director Céline Sciamma's previous film, Water Lilies, was a great, simple and beautiful film about teen sexuality and power. In Tomboy, she makes another film that rests on the edge of Western cultural mores about children and sex, this time with younger, pre-sexual kids.

The film opens with a prepubescent child with short hair riding in the car with his/her father. It is not clear if this is a girl or a boy, but he/she looks about 10-years old. The family has just moved to a new apartment in the Paris banlieue. Right after moving in, the child goes outside to walk around and meets a young girl, Lisa. The child says his/her name is Mikael and is then introduced to the other kids as the new boy in the building. Later, in a bath with his younger sister, it becomes clear that Mikael is not who he says he is, but rather is a girl named Laure. Now Laure/Mikael has to pass as a boy, despite her sister finding out about the situation.

This is a very simple film in narrative. There is one falsehood presented early on and it leads to a few situations that are totally uncomfortable for the audience and difficult for Laure. Much of the tension in the film relates to Laure's "secret" coming out and how the viewers generally root for her to pass as a boy. Sciamma beautifully plays with this idea, however, as she puts Laure in positions that bend gender, and make the audience squirm. At one point, Lisa puts makeup on Mikael the way two 10-year-olds might play. For us, this is a very disconcerting moment as it feels like a boy is being forced to look like a girl... though, of course, it's really just a girl getting makeup on her face. At another moment, Laure's mother insists she put on a dress, which feels very much like she's a boy wearing a dress.

This brings up all sorts of interesting stuff about how society prejudges kids with regard to gender and who once we think a kid is a boy or a girl, they are put into categories in our minds. Girls wear pink and play with makeup; boys wear blue and wrestle. (Laure's mother mentions offhandedly that her bedroom was painted blue.) Even when we know Laure is a girl, her wearing a dress still feels uncomfortable. This also leads to questions about our feelings of childhood sexuality and presexuality. It's very easy to just to the conclusion that Laure is a pre-lesbian, but she's really pre-sexual and this experiment has much more to do with being a new kid in the building, wanting to fit in and her feelings about her parents and sister.

There's something about French directors that they direct kids in amazingly and naturally, unlike most English-speaking directors. Sciamma is working mostly with non-actor kids or kids with very little experience and most of the scenes in the film involve kids running around and playing or talking and arguing as kids. Throughout the film, everything feels totally natural and honest. Some scenes could pass as unscripted documentary footage (much of it is probably unscripted). Zoé Héran, who plays Laure/Mikael, is particularly great in this role, though with kids it's always hard to compliment acting because it's not clear how much of a stretch they're making or how aware they are of what they're doing.

This is easily one of the best films of 2011. Much like Lucia Puenzo's fabulous film XXY from a few years back, it examines childhood gender roles in an elegant, non-exploitative fashion. It is straightforward with an uncomplicated plot, it has a beautiful realistic quality and interacts with the audience in very interesting ways that force reflexive analysis and more consideration.

Stars: 4 of 4

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) (Monday, January 16, 2012) (138)

2012-01-16T13:40:00.001-08:00

Somehow I missed Mission: Impossible 3, directed by J.J. Abrams. I can't say I really regret missing it, but it is a fact I had to deal with as I watched Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. It seems that all that's really important about the third film is that hero Ethan Hunt (wow - that name totally screams "straight American man"!) (Tom Cruise) got married to a lady and killed some dudes on a train and went to jail in Russia. That's basically where this fourth movie begins.

Ethan is broken out of jail and his team is all there and they're working on getting back some Russian nuclear submarine launch codes from some French people who stole them. Because 2011 is actually 1979. It seems the Frenchies want to sell the codes to a Swedish journalist, Mikael Blomkvist... er... rather a Swedish arms dealer (there are lots of them. Really. The unfinished Bergman film was a sequel to Lord of War. Really.) who wants to create a nuclear war to kill weak humans. Eugenics is fun! Oh - and the French lady super thief loves diamonds... and is willing to sell the codes for something like $300,000 in loose stones. Because that's the cost of nuclear war.

So this deal is going to take place in Dubai, because Dubai is very friendly to film crews who don't care about slavery, inside the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will also require Ethan to scale the outside of the building with special suction gloves... which don't work, of course. Ooops. It seems the deal goes wrong and there's more chasing and explosions.

Aside from the totally dated, recycled and ridiculous plot, this is actually a lot of fun. Lots of the story elements were big and blew up well. The final battle inside an automated garage tower was clever, though silly. I was a bit upset that the scaling-the-outside-of-the-tallest-building-in-the-world scene was so quick (like about three minutes). Director Brad Bird made it look great, but it was over before I got a good sense of it.

There was also a ton of homoeroticism between Ethan and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), a new team member. They're both really skinny and good at "hand-to-hand combat". They both run really fast and their verbal jousting was only lightly veiled. ("I'll tell you my secret if you tell me yours.") This was mostly fun and didn't get in the way of the stupid story otherwise... though I would have loved if they had just decided to screw... which would have been the biggest bang of all. Alas.

Stars: 2 of 4

Norwegian Wood (Saturday, January 14, 2012) (2)

2012-01-14T08:33:00.001-08:00

Haruki Murakami has an interesting style that is very specific and could be difficult to translate to film. Several years ago Japanese filmmaker Jun Ichikawa adapted a short story Tony Takitani to the screen in a beautiful film. Now Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran has adapted Murakami's Norwegian Wood, one of the most straightforward and least magical of his novels.

The film (and the book) deal with Watanabe, a man looking back at his days in college in the late 1960s. Back then he was best friends with classmates and couple Naoko and Kizuki. After Kizuki's suicide, Naoko and Watanabe become close and ultimately fall in love as well. Right after the first time they have sex, she leaves and checks into a mental hospital in the mountains. This leaves Watanabe loving her, or the idea of her and the magical aura she represents in his mind, though far away from her. He meets another student, Midori, and the two fall in love, though his thoughts frequently wander to Naoko and the past. In his effort to juggle his love for the two women, he risks losing both of them.

An interesting twist to the adaptation of the script (by Tran) and production of the film is that what was a more down-to-earth romantic drama becomes onscreen a pure melodrama, one that Douglas Sirk himself would appreciate. The feelings and actions of Watanabe become bigger-than-life plot points rather than intimate moments. The different women are somewhat faceless, as their emotional and narrative significance to Watanabe becomes more significant. For me, as a viewer who has never totally connected to melodrama, this is a bit difficult, though I really appreciate what Tran has done. I do feel, however, that the Midori character, in particular, becomes a bit slight and the concept of Watanabe being "torn" between two women, one of whom he 'has' one he does not, is more told to us than really shown (he's not really torn at all).

The technical aspects of the film are absolutely stunning. Ping Bin Lee, who also was the cinematographer on several beautiful films by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar-Wai's masterpiece In the Mood for Love, again shoots one of the most gorgeous and crystal-clear films I've seen in awhile. Almost ever shot is filled with bright, saturated colors, even the grimy interiors. There is a lot of play with near-burning and over-exposure, so sunny days become almost blinding in their clarity and whiteness (particularly effective in a film about nostalgia). Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood gives a beautiful, nostalgic and romantic score that fits into the sociopolitical and musical era of the film. He has developed into a very interesting score composer in recent years.

This film is rather different from the book, but it does follow a similar narrative journey. Much of the political tension that's in the book is eliminated here and forced into the background. Still, there is no mistake that this is a film based on a Murakami novel. It retains his pop culture connections, his cerebral/psychological interest and tone and his appreciation for the beauty not only in nature but also in banal and dirty things.

Stars: 3 of 4

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011) (Friday, January 13, 2012) (139)

2012-01-13T12:34:00.000-08:00

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is the third part of the documentary series about the so-called West Memphis 3, three teenagers who were convicted of murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. From the outside, the prosecution relied heavily on the boys appearance and fascination with the occult and heavy metal (which, of course, is not totally unusual for teenage boys). There was never any strong physical evidence, no motive and the convictions were largely based on the confession of Jessie Miskelly, the most damaged of the three, whose testimony was forced and hard to believe when heard. Of course, the convictions were really based on the fact that the community needed scapegoats and these kids were weird, had long hair, wore heavy metal t-shirts and didn't have lots of friends. Guilty.

The second film, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (from 2000), dealt mostly with the appeals process, where the three men brought new evidence and testimony to the court. Unfortunately for them, the judge hearing their appeal was the same one who presided over their original trials and his most important goal was to save face for himself and the police department, who had screwed up a handful of time.

Now, 11 years later the story goes on. The first 20 minutes of the film serve as catch-up to some of the more unusual details of the murders and the original trial. The body of one of the murdered boys had strange scratch marks on it and had its testicles and penis removed. Prosecutors used these facts to suggest it was a Satanic ritualistic murder, though an expert brought in by the appeal team says now that it's consistent with an animal clawing and eating parts of the body.

The step-father of one of the boys famously was accused by Damien Echols, the suggested leader of the killers and the only one on death row, to be the murderer and he, in turn, had acted out a manic ritual himself of burning and burying the "bodies" of the three murderers. That man is now on the side of the guilty men, saying he's been swayed by the lack of physical and DNA evidence in the States' case. The good news for the convicts is that the original judge was elected to the state supreme court (fail upwards!), so they would get a new judge who would hear their new evidence.

The second film dealt a lot with the cause celebre that the case had become and how celebrities like Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp had taken the story and raised money for the appeal process. There was also a lot in the appeal case seen in that film about how the cameras of directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky that were in the court room in the original trial might have affected the outcome one way or another. In this third film there is a lot more of this reflexive analysis about how much of a thing this story of three teens became due to the popularity of the films. In the end, there would not have been a strong appeal possible without the financial and emotional support of the public for the three convicts. The documentary itself changes its own outcome (very un-Frederick Wiseman).

One very interesting element about this third film (and really the second one to a degree) is how this series emerges in a very similar if unintended way to the Up Series, the group of documentary films by Michael Apted that follows a group of 7-year-olds every seven years as they grow up. In those, as in this, you see how the characters grow and change and meet different experiences depending on how the deal with the reality they are each given. Similar to those films, Purgatory also shows how the experience of being in the films changes the men's lives. Damien Echols himself got married to a woman who watch the original documentary on TV in 1996, began a letter relationship with him and ultimately moved to Little Rock to marry him. Similar to the Up films, this is not an experiment sealed in a vacuum, rather they each have different opportunities because they are known from the film.

It says a lot that when I read in August that the West Memphis 3 were getting out of jail I knew exactly what the story was about and let a few friends know about it. It has become a cultural touchstone for this era that people around the world know about. Few documentaries have this reach and few can help to free wrongly convicted men the way this series has.

Stars: 3 of 4

I'm Glad My Mother is Alive (2011) (Thursday, January 12, 2012) (137)

2012-01-12T07:01:00.001-08:00

I'm Glad My Mother is Alive is the story of Thomas (Vincent Rottiers), a French boy who was put up for adoption when he was five because his young mother wasn't able to deal with him and his half-brother. The story begins when he's a teenager and having difficulty relating to his adoptive parents (who seem like wonderful people). In a fit of rage he goes to find his birth mother and reconnect with her.

We see him again, when he's 20, struggling to keep his life together. He's an auto mechanic and seems to have come to some sort of understanding with his adoptive parents. He goes out looking for his birth mother again, this time as a grown up. When he finds her, he feels some sort of connection to her (and her young son, his half-brother). They become friends, though he never tells his adoptive family about her.

This is generally a good film with an interesting story. There is a constant tension with Thomas as we see him lashing out at people for almost no reason and being on the verge of violence several times. When he meets his birth mother there is an almost immediate sexual tension between them (he's 20, she's in her late 30s), reminiscent of the views we see of her from when he was a child (sensually looking at her breasts and her legs). We don't really know what he's going to do to her or around her. He's a very guarded person, probably due to his need for self-preservation, and it's hard to totally guess what is next from him.

Vincent Rottiers is really great in this role and plays Thomas as a likable, normal-seeming guy with a darkness below the surface. He loves his birth mother, but doesn't know how to interact with her (particularly considering his feelings for her) and is easily wounded. This is a small film, but is generally interesting and well done.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Lebanon, Pa. (2011) (Wednesday, January 11, 2012) (136)

2012-01-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

Lebanon, Pa. is about Will (Josh Hopkins), a guy in his mid-30s who lives in Philadelphia who has to go to Lebanon, PA to deal with his estranged father's estate once after his death. Once he gets there he becomes friendly with his dad's neighbors, a guy about his age who is raising two teenage kids. The daughter, CJ (Rachel Kitson), is in a Juno-like dilemma about whether or not to keep an unplanned baby and the son is just discovering sex with girls. Will also falls in love with Vicki (Samantha Mathis), a teacher at the high school (yes, of course she is one of CJ's teachers. Of course.) who is married buy upset with her average life.

Easily the best thing about the film is Rachel Kitson who doesn't appear to have ever acted on screen before, but is totally wonderful as a precocious, self-determined teen. She's particularly great because she looks like a teen, a girl who a geeky guy could fall in love with, who would want to go to college rather than becoming a housewife at age 18. She's totally genuine and wonderful. I hope she acts in other stuff again.

This has an overall light tone and is a bit of a real-feeling twist on the "going back home" genre with the abortion talk and all. It's a very small movie and nothing more than one would expect from such a movie... though it does have some good pro-choice, anti-counseling center stuff in it and that's wonderful.

Stars: 2 of 4

Buck (2011) (Tuesday, January 10, 2012) (135)

2012-01-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

Buck is a biodoc of Buck Brennaman, a famous horse trainer, whose kind approach to the animals has led him to become a minor celebrity in the horse world. Buck was raised by a physically abusive father and put onstage at an early age performing rope tricks. When his mother died and his father began beating him and his brother more, they were moved to a foster home. There he learned about love of people and of animals.

Nowadays Buck tours the country presenting horse clinics, teaching people with young horses how to interact with them better and safer. He doesn't believe in roughness at all with the animals and tries to explain "feel", the idea that one can lead a horse with one's mind better than with one's body and actions. He also manages to be on the road for nine months a year and stay married with a teenage daughter who loves him.

This is a nice little movie that has a very good message about love for people and for horses. It's not particularly intellectually stimulating and probably would have been stronger as a short rather than a feature, but it's a nice story about a very good man.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

3 Backyards (2011) (Monday, January 9, 2012) (134)

2012-01-09T11:42:00.001-08:00

Sometimes indie movies are interesting and do things that mainstream and Hollywood films couldn't do... and sometimes indie movies are just small and weird. The latter is the case with 3 Backyards, the small film by writer-director Eric Mendelsohn. The film deals with a day in the life of a handful of people, people from three homes, in a suburban Long Island town.

One story is about Peggy (Edie Falco) who is asked by an actress and minor celebrity (Embeth Davidtz) to drive her to a ferry (I think it's a ferry they're driving to... that's not totally clear to me). Clearly Embeth Davidtz is the first person anyone thinks about to play any skinny, cold, English-speaking foreigner -- and she does a great job here with that material. Falco is great too.

Then there's the story of John (Elias Koteas), a married man who gets in a fight with his wife as he's about to leave on a business trip. When flight changes interrupt his plans, he has a free day to figure out what he's doing in his marriage. Finally there's Christina (Rachel Resheff) a pre-teen girl who is dealing with boredom at school and normal kids stuff.

There is nothing really bad about this film, but it never totally amounts to much of anything. The three stories are only slightly connected, aside from the fact that the people involved in them live on the same block. Each one is basically a nice short that is intercut with two other nice shorts. I'm not totally sure I get what this is getting at totally... but overall it's good and not brilliant.

Stars: 2 of 4

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (2011) (Saturday, January 7, 2012) (133)

2012-01-07T11:50:00.000-08:00

Cameraman is a biodoc about Jack Cardiff, the great early Technicolor cinematographer. The film shows how he moved up in the ranks of English cinema and, due to his years of experience as a camera operator, was selected to learn the complicated process of color photography from the Technicolor labs. He worked on several productions with The Archers, that is the great British filmmaking collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger. He was a camera operator for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, partly because he was one of the only people on the continent who knew how to use the gigantic camera, and later went on to be the director of photography for the great A Matter of Life and Death.

Once Powell and Pressberger split up, Cardiff worked as cinematographer on such films as John Huston's The African Queen and Lawrence Olivier's The Prince and the Showgirl (the subject of the new movie, My Week with Marilyn).

This is a very nice tribute piece filled with wonderful clips from some of the greatest British color films ever made. It makes very clear how talented Cardiff was and how important he was to the development of color filming. There are lots of talking-head interviews, including Martin Scorsese, for whom The Red Shoes (another film that Cardiff worked on) was an important work.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Friday, January 6, 2012) (1)

2012-01-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time In Anatolia has almost no action in it, and yet is is one of the best policiers I've seen in a long time. The film opens in a small police car as five men drive around the Turkish countryside looking for a particular, but hard-to-find location. It seems the man in the middle of the back seat has admitted to murdering a man and dumping his body. The cops in this car, and two other cars in a caravan, are out looking for that location, along with the prosecutor and a doctor who is there to give medical evidence at the scene of the crime. Because the murder occurred at night, the man has difficulty knowing exactly where the body is now.

Considering they are driving around at night in the first half of the film, it is shot mostly in extreme chiaroscuro, with the dark black outside interrupted only by the moonlight reflected on the men's faces and the occasional headlights in wide landscape shots. The roads they drive weave around the rolling hills of Anatolia, generally directionless, and the murderer tries to recall where the act was committed, possibly near a natural spring, possibly near a tree, maybe with a bridge nearby and a wide farmer's field.

This is wonderful and pure Becketian existentialism as the film moves along slowly and carefully. The men have several seemingly insignificant conversations that all seem to reveal nothing. It's an immersive experience to be with them, bewildering in it's solemn pace and tone. One scene drips slowly into another. First they go to one possible location, then they go to another, then the murderer thinks he finally remember something and they go to another location, but that's not it either. We keep getting stuck in mundane and ridiculous arguments about exactly what town a certain field is in, and whether that town's line is on one side of a tree or another. It's all beautiful and rather absurdist (as we're supposed to be investigating a murder).

This film is probably the most Romanian New Wave film I've ever seen that is not a Romanian film. The long, long scenes with nothing happening are very reminiscent of Corneliu Porumboiu's brilliant Police, Adjective. Certainly the mix of existentialist non-action combined with arch bureaucratic formalism is something both these films share. Like the Porumboiu, the second half of this film brings out the absurdity of paperwork, situational malaise and the sadness connected to the browns and beiges of officialdom.

The acting throughout the film is amazing, particularly the three leads, Muhammet Uzuner (who plays the doctor), Yilmaz Erdogan (who plays the police commissioner) and Taner Birsel (who plays the prosecutor). They are totally natural and honest, a bit arch and silly at the proper moment, though straight in a way that helps to underline their winking.

The whole experience of watching this film is very interesting on a meta level, I think. It's 150 minutes long and almost nothing happens, yet it's almost always totally gripping. It's the lack of action, the attention you feel you must pay at every moment that keeps you glued to the screen (not unlike Chantal Akerman's masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the formal antecedent to the Romanian New Wave).

There are small beautiful things dotted throughout the film that show that Ceylan is a brilliant director. At one moment when the caravan is driving along the country, we see the lighted windows of a train passing in the distance. Immediately we consider that for people on that train, this caravan of several cars probably looks much the same to them. There is an elegance and a minimalism to the concept that the first half of the film is shot in near darkness, while the second half takes place the following morning, in bright light. There are several more of these dualities: rural and city, nature and buildings, rich and poor (between the doctor and the functionaries), Turkish and ethnic (it seems the murderer is an ethnic minority, possibly Kurdish).

This is a long movie, but a gorgeous one. At this point in the year it is silly to suggest it's going to be my favorite film of 2012, but I can't imagine there will be many other films that I like this much. It has a beautiful script, fantastic acting and looks amazing.

Stars: 4 of 4

Nostalgia for the Light (2011) (Thursday, January 5, 2012) (132)

2012-01-05T13:42:00.001-08:00

I feel like watching Werner Herzog's The Cave of Forgotten Dreams should be a requirement for anyone watching Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light. Part of this is due to the fact that this film is one of the most Herzogian films not made by Herzog that I've ever seen. Furthermore, both films deal with the concept of researching and discovering the unknown past in similar ways. Both director's films look at physical and celestial things, but investigates the metaphysical along the way. They both look at the very small in a greater search for answers to the very big.

Guzman's documentary looks at the Atacama desert, a high desert in northern Chile, where, due to an unusual lack of any humidity, astronomers have found it to be an ideal place for observing the night sky and extraterrestrial bodies. In addition to this, it is also a bleak landscape where, due to it's salty soil, pre-Columbian human history for tens of thousands of years is evident. But this is not the only history that lies inches beneath the surface. During the 19th century, this area was the home of a massive mining industry that relied heavily on slave or indentured-servant labor. Most importantly it was also the home of several concentration camps for political rivals during the Pinochet regime. Thousands of people were "disappeared" to the desert, many of them were buried there for a time, until, it is suggested, their bodies were exummed and subsequently dumped in the ocean to cover the state murderer's tracks.

This film is a look at people who study several things and several points in history from the same place on earth. There are scientists who look up at the heavens through their telescopes and search for evidence of the beginning of the universe. There are archeologists who look at the pre-Columbian, prehistoric human record. There are political historians who look at the Pinochet era. Finally there is a group of women who visit the desert looking for human evidence of their lost or missing loved ones who might have been buried in the desert, even for only a short time.

The connections that Guzman makes from one person's testimony to another's is wonderful. He asks the astronomers about their thoughts on the desert itself, as a harsh, almost-extraterrestrial landscape and beautifully connects what they say to shots of women digging in the dirt for signs of human bone fragments. At one point he takes two of those women and sets them up inside one of the oldest telescopes in the area, brought there by German scientists in the late-19th century. The connection between old and new, celestial and terrestrial, known and unknown is powerful and elegant.

The film is shot on DV camera and looks more like a home movie, than a internationally funded documentary. Still, there is a homemade intimacy here that is very powerful. I appreciate that this is a very personal, human story of trying to wrap one's head around difficult matters. Of course, this is a movie that is trying to gather material about people who are trying to gather material, and I think Guzman is aware of the cheekiness of such a proposition.

The title, Nostalgia for the Light, suggests that we are all searching for some sort of light, either literal (as in the astronomers) or metaphysical (as in the women who look for their loved ones). There is also the suggestion by Guzman that seeing some of the old telescopes in this high desert is a return to the Chile of his youth, a nostalgia for the pre-Pinochet eden of his childhood. This is a totally wonderful and brilliant film that should be seen by anyone interested in great documentaries about ontological dilemmas and the human condition. This is easily one of the best films of the year, of any genre or format.

Stars: 4 of 4

Hanna (2011) (Wednesday, January 4, 2012) (131)

2012-01-04T20:22:00.000-08:00

Hanna is the story of the eponymous girl (Saoirse Ronan), raised by her father in the wilds of northern Finland to be a super spy and super killer. It seems her dad (Eric Bana) used to work for the CIA and left around the time she was born. When they decide her training is complete (she's about 16 or so), she is "released" into the world and recaptured by the CIA. She escapes and kills a bunch of people and then goes on a killing spree throughout Europe to Germany, where she discovers things about her conception and life that she was not expecting (though none of it is much of a surprise to us).

Hanna is a totally great looking movie. At times it looks polished like a big Hollywood sci-fi movie (actually McG's Charlie's Angels comes to mind... though that has a lot to do with the stylized camerawork and fight scenes) and at other times it feels like an indie Euro movie, like Tykwer's Run Lola Run or Assayas' Carlos (yes, I know they're different, but they both have that sorta crummy late-20th-century Euro look to them). Everything is art directed to within an inch of its life - and then some. It's right on the edge of being a bit too much, but it's a lot of fun. The final chase sequence takes places in an old amusement park under overcast skies and looks particularly great. On top of all of this is a very tone-appropriate score by the Chemical Brothers (no surprise, this film feels like what a Chemical Brothers song would look like). More great look and feel...

Sadly the content of the narrative is hackneyed and not thrilling. It's basically The Bourne Identity with a girl instead of a grown man. I guess geeks like stories about girls (because they can't have sex with them in life...?). To add to the silliness, there CIA back story, involving a Cate Blanchette with a painful Americun southern accent, is more over-the-top than the rest of the film, which is rather moody and dirty. The two styles create an interesting juxtaposition, but I don't think it totally helps for telling the story. Rather, it feels too obvious an intersection, clean and polished versus dirty and rough. I'm gonna fall asleep...

The whole film feels a bit too facile and ultimately less-than-gripping. It really does look great, but that's about all that's worth much in it. The rest you've seen a million times before.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Iron Lady (Saturday, December 31, 2011) (130)

2011-12-31T11:29:00.000-08:00

The first thing I noticed about Phyllidia Lloyd's The Iron Lady was that the makeup in it is amazing. The film opens roughly in the present day as Margaret Thatcher (Dame Meryl Hepburn Dench Streep), now in her late 80s, is walking around her London flat talking to her dead husband who seems to stick around in her mind as if he was really there. At first glance it really doesn't look like Meryl at all. As much as you look for a terrible wig seam on her forehead or terrible plastic droopy jowl, you can't find any evidence that it's makeup. It's really remarkable (particularly in light of the makeup debacle that just occurred onscreen with J. Edgar).

I was totally expecting that I would hate this movie before I went in to see it. I expected that it was going to show Thatcher as a heroic feminist who fought men and did what was right for her country, while underplaying her major and lasting sins. I have to admit, it was not that bad... though it was really not that brilliant either. Much of the praise of the film will go to Meryl, of course, and more than anything, this feels like a movie created for her, while trying to not offend anyone one any political side (it's really not offensive... which is a bit offensive in its own right).

The film has a typical biopic structure, told mostly through flashbacks. We see present-day Maggie looking back at her life: the daughter of a middle-class grocer with conservative political leanings himself, she went to Oxford and then became a young star in the Tory party. We see her quick rise through the party until she became P.M. in 1990. From there the three major events of her tenure are mentioned and shown, but not dwelled upon. We see the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, though we never really get much info on that story; we see the Falklands War for awhile, but never really see how she used it to wag the dog and get out of the heat she was taking for the terrible economy (that third thing)... which we don't really see or hear any mention of. Ultimately we see how either because she was losing some level of mental clarity or because she was losing track of sound economic principles, she was shown the door by her party and resigned.

Meryl is much better as the doddering old Maggie than the middle-aged spitfire (young Maggie is played well enough by Alexandra Roach). I think a lot of that comes the fact that the old Maggie is a bit of a subtler performance with small reactions and lots of associations by the audience, while the younger Maggie is filled with all sorts of speechifying and grandstanding, which I've always found to be Meryl's weakness (though I know most people love that stuff from her). I guess I also have to admit that I'm so repulsed by the positions the middle-aged Maggie took that my reaction to that segment of the film was probably not unclouded.

There's a good deal of really cliched and lazy filmmaking here as well. At one moment when we see Maggie walking into Parliament for the first time, we look down a long hallway with windows at the end. Through a lighting trick, the windows are all white and the foreground is dark. As she steps into the frame she's out of focus and is merely a dark spot in a white background. Then the focus racks and she comes into focus as she approaches. This terrible shot is used in terrible TV shows nightly, to say nothing of silly movies. I hate this shot. Later, we see old Maggie in her flat watching the TV as a commentator explains that "she's a polarizing figure because..." and goes on to list her basic resume of achievements and perceived failures. Show, don't tell, Phyllidia. Show, don't tell.

I'm not really sure what Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan (who also co-wrote Steve McQueen's disappointing Shame) are trying to do here. There is no particular emotion that comes out of the film. It's not an intricate take-down of a villain, like Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall and it's not a heroic social-political piece like Ford's The Young Mister Lincoln or Eastwood's Invictus. At times the tone felt rather over-the-top and goofy like a film by Bunuel or John Waters (I'm sure John Waters would giggle throughout this film if he were to see it... it's pure camp), though I can't be sure that that was intentional or if the tone was just too earnest at those moments. At one point we hear the song "I'm in Love with Margaret Thatcher" by the Brighton punk band The Notsensibles... but out of context there's an idea that it's actually a pro-Maggie song... which it's not... it's a joke... at least I've always thought it was...

I guess I really should hate this movie because it doesn't tear down someone I hate (I would be throwing this computer across the room if such a polite film about Reagan was released... and I'm sure it's coming). I guess I just was expecting so much more of a story of sacrifice and achievement than this, that what we get was really only lightly painful. She really comes of as a typical silly old lady more than any sort of political hero, and although I wish she had been decimated by this film, I guess that's better than being lionized.

Stars: 2 of 4

A Separation (Friday, December 30, 2011) (129)

2011-12-30T09:11:00.000-08:00

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation begins with Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) in a courtroom speaking to a judge about getting a divorce. Simin has just gotten a job out of the country and wants her her husband Nader and daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, Asghar's own daughter), to go with her, but he refuses, claiming he has to take care of his elderly father in Tehran. As a result they get a separation and she stays in Tehran just the same, with the Termeh living mostly with Nader.

He is a good father, very understanding and honest and she's a very good mother. They are an upper-middle class family with a nice apartment in a nice building. To help him take care of Termeh and his father, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) a woman who can help him keep the house and manage things. One day, when he gets frustrated, Nader fires her and shoves her out the door rather violently.

This brings about a lawsuit about how much she was really hurt and if Nader actually was the one who hurt her or if she was hurt by other means. It seems Razieh is working with a handful of lies that might protect her and her husband. Nader is a bit of a scapegoat here for other things that are happening.

The story deals a lot with issues of class and money, reminiscent of themes in films by fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. It is clear that Nader and Simin are rich and more European in their tastes. Simin wears a colorful chador (either burgundy or green), that seems much more liberal and design-forward than the more conservative and traditional one worn by Razieh. Simin also looks a lot more European with red hair and less Persian (I am not aware of Iranian minority groups enough to know if Razieh and her husband are from a minority group, such as the Kurds, but the possibility is certainly there). There is also the idea that the rich can do what they want to the poor, even though Nader is being accused of harm that we're almost certain he didn't cause.

Putting this all in context, it is important to be aware of the extreme attention and deference that is paid to the Iranian jurisprudential system, not only in the case of the separation proceedings at the beginning (and end), but later during the trial, when Razieh and her husband sue Nader. The judges seem to be reasonable non-idealists who are looking to do right regardless of politics. There is no criticism of the post-Revolutionary government or the rights of women or poor people. This is presented as a sober tale of lies and hidden facts. Albeit one that involves a good amount of interaction with the courts.

The writing in Farhadi's script is wonderful and all the acting is tremendous, particularly Peyman Moadi, Leila Hatami and Sarina Farhadi. They all deal with their various legal troubles differently, but totally naturally. It is wonderful to see such interesting and powerful acting, when it's not overdone or forced.

At one point near the end of the film, as Termeh talks to Nader about the legal issues they're involved in, she says, "I thought you said this wouldn't be difficult," to which he snaps, "Well, it got difficult." This is a beautiful and uncomfortable commentary on life and an efficient explanation of a neorealist view of this world. This is a beautiful, dispassionate film and one that explains things simply and effectively.

Stars: 4 of 4

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Sunday, December 25, 2011) (128)

2011-12-25T06:42:00.001-08:00

So this is this movie based on Jon Foer's much-heralded book. It takes place in the days after September 11, 2001, when young boy Oskar Schell (Oskar with a K because his parents both read Gunter Grass in college) (Thomas Horn) is having difficulty dealing with the fact that his dad, Thomas (Thomas Hanks), was caught on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center and died a lot. Oskar has Aspbergers and is a fucking annoying and weird kid. For some weird reason he seems to be in no sort of therapy, either for his disorder or for the fact that he's a kid whose dad just died in a horrible tragedy. But that's cool... and totally the way Upper West Side Jews relate to the world. Totally.

So he starts snooping through his dad stuff and finds a key in an envelope that has the word "Black" written on it. He decides that this is some sort of posthumous game his dad has arranged for him, so he goes off on a long journey to find this Black person and figure out what the key means by visiting all the people with the name "Black" in New York City. Along the way he meets his long-lost grandfather who no longer speaks ... but we don't know why and never find out... and he meets a black couple in Fort Greene who are getting a divorce, but give a shit about Oskar for no particular reason.

There are so many layers of shit to dig through in this story, let alone the presentation on screen, that it's hard to know where to begin. Why does Oskar have to be on the Asperberger's spectrum? Why does Tom Hanks have a terrible New Yawk accent in some scenes and not in others? (Answer: looping.) Why does the grandfather not speak and why should I care about that? Why would a mother let her sorta special-needsy son walk around without her (even if she scouts the locations first)? (And how on earth does she have time to scout the locations for him?)

To say that Thomas Horn is annoying is like saying that Hitler wasn't fond of Jews. There really aren't words for whatever Horn is in this film. "Repulsive" comes to mind. It's impossible to align with the kid because his way of talking and looking at the world is so precious and otherhumanly that I could only be totally turned off by him. He's a totally concocted persona whose artifice is on display to all. And he carries around a fucking tambourine that somehow soothes his soul (like how watching Judge Wapner soothed Raymond Babbitt) so every time we see him walking around New York (which is about 80% of the film) he's ringing a goddamn tambo. Ugh!

I've said here before that movies about September, 11 are cheap because it's just simply too soon to have any perspective on. I had my own experience that day and I don't care about a fucking annoying kid's experience. What's more insipid here is that the fact that Thomas Schell died that day has nothing to do with the story. It's sentimental shorthand of the most vile variety. All that matters is that he dies - he could have simply chocked on a bagel and lox any other day in history. That would have been random and unfair. This is just manipulative garbage that tries to help understand what Oskar is feeling, but really just sets us spinning in a cycle of "I remember where I was on that day when..." - which really isn't story telling at all.

This is a movie about fathers and sons. Big fucking deal. Yet somehow it became a story about pain in the wake of September 11. It's all nonsense.

Stars: 1 of 4

In the Land of Blood and Honey (Saturday, December 24, 2011) (127)

2011-12-24T16:57:00.001-08:00

In the Land of Blood and Honey is allegedly the directorial and writing debut of Angelina Jolie. I shouldn't really say allegedly, because there's no evidence that she didn't totally write this on her own and direct it on her own... but it is curious that someone who has only ever acted (and maybe "produced" movies) and has never really been on the creative side of movies has single-handedly written and directed a film about a historical event (in a rather obscure foreign language) that has nothing to do with her own experience. I'm just sayin'...

Anyhow, the film takes place during the Bosnian war in Sarajevo where a Muslim woman, Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), and a Bosnian man, Danijel (Goran Kostic), fall in love. He's the son of one of the Bosnian senior generals and is a big military person himself. As Muslims are rounded up in the city, Danijel is able to save Ajla and keep her in a room in his command station. This causes trouble for both of them as different military people, some of whom resent his nepotistic status, find out about their relationship arrangement.

This is a good movie; there is nothing particularly brilliant about it and nothing really bad about it. In terms of romantic war movies, I'd say this is is above average -- it's not too sentimental or fantastical. Meanwhile, it has basically no style to speak of, but it's effective in telling a story and getting certain emotions across when Jolie wants them. Before I praise her for this work I'd like to see more of what she can do to make sure it's not just an aberration.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (Saturday, December 24, 2011) (126)

2011-12-24T16:56:00.000-08:00

This documentary looks at the life and work of Roger Corman, sometimes referred to as the "King of the Bs" (as in "B movies,"or some such variation) and how he has managed to produced and direct about 400 movies over a 50-year career. He's always been on the outside of Hollywood, working on incredibly small budgets, raising the exploitation genre to new heights.

There are wonderful clips from some of his best-loved films (The Little Shop of Horrors, and The House of Usher), some of his worst films (The Terror, The Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women) and some of his most odd-ball stuff (Teenage Cave Man), as well as tons of interviews with directors, actors, writers and producers who came out of the "Corman Film School," such as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, William Shatner, David Caradine, Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern, to name a few. They all have great stories to share about making terrible movies on low budgets.

There are some wonderful historical details shared, such as when Corman was distributing foreign films by Bergman, Kurasawa, Antonioni and Fellini for a period in the '70s, and how he managed to get Bergman's Cries and Whispers shown (for a short period) at a drive-in who was used to showing his movies. Producer Gale Anne Hurd has probably the most interesting line of the film when she says that with the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster and the marginalization of Corman, you look at some of the big-budget action/sci-fi/horror flicks in theaters today and you realize that they're basically Corman-style exploitation and that he could have done any of them better and much, much cheaper. It's probably totally true.

Stars: 3 of 4

Pina 3D (Friday, December 23, 2011) (125)

2011-12-23T11:05:00.002-08:00

Pina is a wonderful dance documentary by Wim Wenders about the work of the modern dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. But it's much more of a documentary in the document element of the term - it's really a dance recital, or the presentation of several of Bausch's best-known and loved works, as there's not much biography in the picture. Wenders weaves these performances, presented by Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal and the dancers who knew and loved her (she died in 2009, just as filming was commencing), with brief testimonies by these dancers about their art and their love for Pina.

I had the opportunity to see this film in 3D and I have to say it was totally a wonderful experience. I normally find the 3D process to be disorienting and irrelevant to the movie watching process. Most films shown in 3D aren't really enhanced by the perspective. Some of the best 3D films play with a meta-concept of the format, so it's enjoyable to watch it in a "third dimension," partly because the director is making a point about the experience of watching or a joke about 3D films of yore (House of Wax, Dial M For Murder, etc.). Here, however, Wenders uses the 3D to really put you inside the dance performance. I know that sounds really annoying and cliché, but it's totally true. The way it's shot, with cameras onstage between the dancers, you lose track of the end of the stage, the proscenium and where/who is the audience.

To further enhance this submersive experience, Wenders shoots a good amount of the dance pieces on the Wupperthal Schwebebahn, a hanging tram line that runs through Wupperthal (OK - how did I never know this existed? It's amazing!). What results is the most visceral flying experience I've had since I saw To Fly! in IMAX at the Air and Space Museum in the early '80s. You're actually hanging over a city, over a river, and the sensation is breathtaking (regardless of the dancing).

I also happen to love the concept that the Schwebebahn was built in the early 20th century, as a crowning achievement of the Industrial Age, and that we're now experiencing it a century later, in 3D, an achievement of the digital age. I expect that's part of modern dance and performance, bridging generations and centuries. How lovely.

Stars: 3 of 4

Margaret (Friday, December 23, 2011) (124)

2011-12-23T11:05:00.001-08:00

I first heard of Margaret when it was playing in a theater in New York in September, I read a scathing review of it and spoke to a friend who told me it was terrible, so I avoided it. Then it appeared on a handful of Best of 2011 lists, so I felt like maybe it was the sort of unusual or difficult movie that I frequently like and that it was only rejected because it didn't fit some prescribed genre specifications. When it was briefly re-released in New York I jumped at the chance to see it. Sadly, it is unusual and doesn't fit any genre specifications... and is pretty terrible.

Some quick back story: Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote and directed You Can Count on Me, which I think is great, wrote this film in 2003 and shot it in 2005 (so says Karina Longworth in her rave review of it from the Village Voice). He then took 6 years to cut the film down to under 150 minutes (it's now 149!!). Apparently he just couldn't do it for a long time. Then there were a few law suits about it (he broke a contract, I imagine the producers wanted out or their money back...). Now it's released. And it's really long.

The idea of the film is that it's about a girl, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), who lives on the Upper West Side with her actress mother. Her father lives in LA with his new, younger wife, and she is a bit of a typical, smart, Jewish teenager. She's glib and talks back to adults, she's interested in sex, though generally apprehensive about it, she's precocious because she lives in New York City. At some point she flirts with a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) who then gets distracted and his and kills a pedestrian.

Feeling guilty about the death, she sets her mind to sue the bus company for the driver's negligence and get money for the pedestrian's family. In the meantime, she flirts constantly with her youngish high school teacher (Matt Damon), has sex with some kid (Kieran Culkin) (I hope they can date sometime so they can be called "Culquin" by the paparazzi!) and becomes friends with a fucking annoying Upper West Side woman who is the friend of the dead lady. There's also a story about her mother who starts dating Jean Reno (who is Colombian in this... whatever) until he dies unexpectedly. The movie is about the lies that surround us on a daily basis and how we have to create stories to manage our lives.

The problem is that there's really no structure to the narrative, it's just a lot of Lisa going around talking to people and making bad decisions. There's no reason huge chunks of this film couldn't have been cut to make it closer to 100 minutes. It's like an abstract painting - sure, sometimes the size and scale of the work is what it's about, but generally a corner of the canvas covered in an abstract design means as much as any other corner, doesn't it? If this film is unbalanced and long and is about how life has no internal logic, then why not make it a shorter version of that? Isn't that what watching movies is about - a director telling you a very specific story?

I found Paquin to be annoying and overdone, mostly struggling through her Paquinese that sounds more southern than New Yawk (and this was made before True Blood was a faint speckle in her Triple-D brassiere). The supporting cast is so chopped up into random half-fragments of scenes that nobody really gets much time to develop or expand on screen. Ruffalo and Damon are pretty good - though they're generally good actors, so that's no surprise.

Mostly this feels like a project that Lonergan started honestly and got too tied up in details, forgetting the basic story he was trying to tell (I'm not sure what that seed was, really). He really just needs a good story/script editor to begin to make it a watchable film. It feels like if he had been asked to start from scratch and rewrite the whole thing, some things would have stayed and some things would have fallen away and we would have been left with a better final film. Instead we have all sorts of random secondary and tertiary stories that really don't mean much, are redundant or confusing.

Stars: 1 of 4

Urbanized (Friday, December 23, 2011) (123)

2011-12-23T11:04:00.000-08:00

Urbanized is the third part of director Gary Hustwit's design series (is it a proper series? I'm going to call it a series.). Helvetica was his brilliant examination of the modernist typeset, Objectified was a less wonderful survey of contemporary design of things we use on a daily basis and now this film is a look at the design of cities. He explores how towns end up looking like they do and how municipalities have tried innovations to make things more useful or more beautiful and how sometimes people respond negatively to these changes.

Hustwit makes beautiful looking films filled with wonderful photography, this time by Luke Geissbuhler, and interesting shots of things that we might take for granted (like the sun setting over a highway). There are some absolutely wonderful transitions from one chapter to another here, one element that is rarely used but really helps in documentaries.

There are a bunch of talking-head interviews with international "starchitects," including Rem Koolhaus, Norman Foster, Oscar Niemeyer and designer/critic Michael Sorkin. Overall this is a pretty, fun and interesting film. It's much better than Objectified, but not nearly as good as Helvetica.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Thursday, December 22, 2011) (122)

2011-12-22T19:50:00.000-08:00

I recently re-read my review of the Swedish adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from last year in advance of seeing this newer update from David Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (it's fine, you can tell me my methods are unfair). After seeing this new version, I can tell you it's almost exactly the same movie and the things I said about that version I would say again here.

This film has a nice fast pace, the acting is solid throughout -- even considering the corny Swedish accents all the actors have to use (including the honest-to-goodness Swedes in the cast who almost sound more American than anything else) -- there is nothing particularly Swedish or Scandanavian in feeling in the style here (sorry, Ingmar and Carl Theodor), and overall it's a fun, pulpy movie that leads you down six different roads and pulls them all back together nicely at the end.

The story has not changed much from the book (which I've never read) or that other movie. Mikael Bloomkvist (Daniel Craig) is a journalist who starts to research a murder on a remote island for a billionaire industrialist. At some point he hires a research assistant, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), who has a checkered life, an awesome libido and an inky back. The deeper they dig into this family history, the more they find Nazism, sexual abuse and weird culty murders. Add on top of this a sprinkling of leather camp and sexual torture and you got yourself a blockbuster!

It's hard to say if this is a particularly Fincher-ific movie. Much of the story happens to take place at night (when Fincher really comes alive, like the cyber-noir director he's meant to be), the heroine is written as a Goth who rides a motorcycle and there's already some delicious torture porn elements to the story. Having never read the book and only knowing the story from the Swedish film, I can't say much about any details that were in the book that Fincher extracted or what he might have injected himself, but I will say that this seems like a generally light amount of Fincherese (mostly seen in the sex torture parts). Mostly this feels like a very well made, polished Hollywood movie -- a bit of a director-for-hire piece than any standout in his oeuvre (like Se7en, Fight Club or Zodiac are).

There's really nothing negative to say about this film. It's very long (as was the Swedish version... I guess that's the result of a long and intricate book... and I'd much rather a 160-minute movie to a two-part piece, like they did with the last books of the Harry Potter or Twilight series), very detailed and somewhat complex in terms of familial relationships and who did what to whom and when. I guess I would say that all of that is a bit of complexity for complexity's sake; I'm not sure it's a particularly richer movie because of the baroque plot. It's a bit of bread and circus, but it's pretty tasty.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Thursday, December 22, 2011)(121)

2011-12-22T12:55:00.001-08:00

Much like its steam-punk aesthetic, Sherlock Holmes 2 spends a lot of time spinning its wheels making a simple story really, really complicated, in the end being effective, but much more complicated than is necessary. This is an action movie, not a mystery. It has much more in common with Batman or James Bond (in Victorian machines) than it does with Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett.

The story here is much too multi-layered and unnecessarily veiled to get into in detail here, but generally is seems that Holmes and boyfriend Watson are chasing Moriarty around Europe for no reason, until it becomes clear that Moriarty wants to start World War I 25 years early. There are lots of fun set-ups with classic film chestnuts (formal-dress balls, trains, ships in shipyards, waterfalls, chases through forests) that all lead to an elaborate, clever finale involving a literal and meta chess game.

It's filled with typical Guy Ritchie jump cuts and crash zooms, this time spiced up with lots of fun slow-mo affectations. There's also lots of fun homoeroticism and opium jokes, played for laughs rather than sadness or love (which is rather disappointing... though I totally understand that gayness isn't half as entertaining as fake gayness).

This is a big movie with a lot of big action scenes. It's very light on the brain and heavy on special effects. All in all a fun ride, but rather shallow ... exactly as a holiday blockbuster should be!

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Khodorkovsky (Wednesday, December 21, 2011) (120)

2011-12-21T13:18:00.001-08:00

Khodorkovsky is a documentary about the Russian oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly the richest man in Russia and one of the richest people on the planet. This shows his rise to billions, his run as an influential man in Russian and World politics and philanthropy and his ultimate fall, after crossing president/emperor Putin.

As with all oligarchs, he gained his wealth quickly as the former communist state sold off it's industries to a handful of individuals for little or no money. Khodorkovsky, a chemist working in oil extraction, got lucky and was given (well, basically given) the oil fields in Siberia. But things got tricky as he started to diverge from Putin and move to the left (or is it the right...? Russian politics baffle me). He was more interested in more government transparency and the progressive opposition. In 2003 his company, a main rival of the national gas service, was taken over by the government and he was jailed for tax evasion (probably a trumped-up charge). He's been in jail ever since.

The story is told mostly through television footage, interviews with Khodorkovsky's former colleagues and a series of stylized black-and-white animated segments (for the parts where there is no archival footage). I happen to dislike the look of the animation, it's all a bit too modern and stylistic for no reason. The third act of the film, where Khodorkovsky is in jail and interviewees are discussing his reason for not fleeing the country before he was arrested (which he could have done very easily), is a bit long and dull. I think at 111 minutes, the film is about 20 minutes too long and would have held together better if more was taken out.

There is a wonderful metaphor at the tail of the film of the suburban subdivision for billionaires outside of Moscow, where all of these heads of companies lived next to one another with gates around them and watch towers above safeguarding them - or imprisoning them. Nowadays many of the residents have been arrested for various political reasons, and the houses are largely vacant, aside from the servants who still live in them, keeping food in the fridges is if their bosses could return at any moment. There's a wonderful and evocative existentialist notion... I just think it takes too long to get there.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Eames: The Architect & The Painter (Tuesday, December 20, 2011) (119)

2011-12-20T13:38:00.001-08:00

This is a nice little documentary about the lives and work of Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife team who captured the spirit of the post-war boom years with their elegant, efficient, modern and futuristic designs. (In case you didn't know, Ray was a lady.) It's an interesting story about how they fell in love due to their mutual respect for one another and their ability to work beautifully together. It shows their work not only designing the chairs and tables, but also their houses, paintings, films and other artistic projects. They had a studio where they worked with dozens of young designers over the years in a free-for-all of creative exploration.

The film also examines how Charles, the face of the company (because he was a man, of course), frequently took full credit for the work of his underlings and Ray. He comes off as a bit of a creative egomaniac who gave little explanation about his ultimate choices. Ray shrinks a bit into a corner of the screen here, partly because she was simply not in as many films of the time (because Charles was in all of them, by choice), but also because she gave into the dynamics of their relationship. This is a bit frustrating as it's really mostly a movie about Charles with a chapter on Ray, but told with a post-Second-Wave tone that suggests the couple were co-equal partners... which they might have been, but is hard to see with the materials presented on screen.

This is a fun movie and very informative. There are a handful of creative flourishes that directors Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey insert at times to tell the story in an Eamesian way, though nothing too revolutionary.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

A Brighter Summer Day (Saturday, November 26, 2011) (118)

2011-12-20T08:11:00.001-08:00

Note: The great Taiwanese director Edward Yang made A Brighter Summer Day in 1991 and released it on the festival circuit then. Due to a few complicating factors, such as its unwieldy 4-hour length, it was never released theatrically at that time. It did however gain a tremendous status in the cinema world for being an unknown gem, a magnum opus that was all but unavailable.

This year, just over five years after Yang's death, it was finally released theatrically. Although I could consider the film for my year-end "Best Films of 2011" list, I will not, because I don't feel like that's very fair to the films of 2011. I am thrilled to have been able to watch it (it's a magnificent film), but I do not really consider it a 2011 release.

The title of A Brighter Summer Day comes from a scene when a few of the main kids in the film are sitting around a record player trying to transcribe the lyrics to Elvis Presley's "Are you Lonesome To-Night,"released a few months before the story takes place. The kids are obsessed with rock music and have a not-terrible band that plays in the local diner. The band members are all from the same street gang and they hope their shows won't get broken up by the rival gang.

They are all the children of mainland Chinese people who fled the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Now, in the early 1960s, they are teenagers, mostly 12 to 15-years-old, trying to make their way in the world and find some grounding. Their parents are all modest people, generally working for the government, and they live in massive public housing compounds that contain apartments, several cafés and their school.

The gangs they create are more like the gangs of West Side Story than of Boyz n the Hood, they get in fist fights and political battles over turf, but generally are not too dangerous. They're much more likely to use a bat than anything more, even a knife.

As we follow the main character, Xiao Si'r, we see him trying to survive the street, needing to show his toughness to his fellow gang members, hoping for a better life than what his parents have given to him, trying to remain a good student and trying to negotiate the trickiness of developing a crush on a girl from the rival gang.

The story is simple, actually, but because it is 4-hours long, it has a lot of detailed information in it. It's a wonderful narrative filled with small ups and downs as the Xiao Si'r and his friends work to survive. There are hundreds are kids in this film, though it's never really hard to figure out who is doing what. Yang is very clear about everyone's intentions and motives as the story moves along.

This is what neorealist cinema is and should always be compared to. This has more of a logical connection to films by de Sica and Rossellini than anything in Hollywood or Asia. I keep thinking about Ozu's Tokyo Story, because it's equally domestic and neorealist, but it's much bigger than that and much less sentimental. The colors of the film are largely gray and green due to the concrete structures the kids exist in and the public street lighting of nighttime Taipei. The interiors are modest, but rich in detail. Xiao Si'r and his brother sleep in two levels of a closet in order to fit all their sisters into the bed rooms.

Yang had an amazing ability to work with kid actors (or non-actors) and get them to come off more naturally than just about any other director I can think of (possibly similar to the boy in Rossellini's Germany Year Zero). In his masterpiece Yi Yi the son takes pictures of the backs of people's heads, saying that that is the most honest way to shoot someone because they don't know they're being shot. It's such a simple and basic idea, a childish idea even, but a true concept.

Here too, Yang works with a passel of kids, most of whom are non-actors, and gets them to be as natural as if they were not acting at all. Their troubles and fights are real and don't feel forced or faked at all. What they do and say comes off as totally honest and significant. This is a great achievement because it's a very fine line between manipulation and profundity. Yang always stays on the good and smart side of that edge.

Stars: 4 of 4

Carnage (Saturday, December 17, 2011) (117)

2011-12-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

I didn't see the Yasmina Reza play "God of Carnage" when it played in New York a few years ago. Something about the celebrity cast and the concept of the story turned me off. Now Roman Polanski and Reza have adapted the play for the screen and I see why I avoided it to this point.

Carnage is a movie about American liberalism run amok. Two couples, the Cowans (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) and the Longstreets (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz), meet in a North Heights/DUMBO apartment to discuss a violent fight their sons had. Nobody wants to really say what is on their mind (that they are incredibly embarrassed and that they are somewhat ashamed of their sons' bad behavior) but nobody really wants to let the situation pass without getting in the last word. Their discussion begins with an agreement of guilt and then devolves into a shitshow of accusations and torturous interactions where each of the four people show themselves to be disgusting for what they say and do.

I read the tone as particularly anti-Liberal and specifically anti-American (though I guess that has a lot to do with me). The idea that these people are obsessed with this event and can't see how unimportant it is, shows how shallow they all are. When Foster's character talks about a book she is writing, about Darfur, our eyes all roll as we realize she's that fucking person... obsessed with saving the world as she lives in a gorgeous apartment with the view of bridges.

Polanski and Reza seem obsessed with showing that this is reality - that these people are you and me - but it all comes off just a bit off-key. It's 98% real, but that missing 2% is rather painful. To be picky: At one point, Waltz looks out the window and comments at a passing train, "Look, you can see the El." Sorry, buddy, but the El is a thing in Chicago -- in New York and Brooklyn it's called a "subway" or a "train"; there is a lot of discussion of the "flower shop up by Henry," but Henry Street is a North-South street and if you're talking about it, you say "over by Henry" or "up on Henry". (Prepositional shibboleth... like how you live in Manhattan but on Miami Beach.) I know these are really small and insignificant things, but they point to the "fun-house mirror" quality to the film and its conclusions, rather than it being a real reflection of anything in our world. I can imagine a guy getting a phone call while at a friend's house, but I can't imagine a guy taking a call every three minutes and not excusing himself. (This is something I blame on the transition from play to movie, where a small thing we must suspend disbelief for onstage doesn't work onscreen.)

This is all further magnified as the actors all speak in a very deliberate, enunciated style, highlighting the written-quality of their language. Sadly Waltz's American is rough and has rounded consonants... and Reilly is not really that kind of actor, so we end up with the two women speaking in this style and the two men struggling to catch up. It seems very unintentionally Brechtian and uncomfortable (to say nothing of the Brechtian idea that this is was not shot on location in Brooklyn and is a reconstituted apartment, shot somewhere in Europe).

I can't totally understand what Polanski is trying to achieve with such an expressionistic film. Is he criticizing American liberalism because it has directly affected his life? Am I reading too much into that? Is that the very point? It all seems interesting as a curiosity, but a bit shallow. As much as I love Brooklyn apartment porn, this all feels more like snuff than anything particularly erotic.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Young Adult (Thursday, December 15, 2011) (116)

2011-12-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

Young Adult is the second movie by the writer-director duo of Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman. Their first effort, Juno, was peppered with the cool lingo of the youngs and seemed to convince people for a minute that it was an accurate depiction of what young culture was like - honest to blog! And yet, Juno was one of the most shrill and frustrating films I've seen in a long time. It was totally cutesy and overdone, to say nothing of the ridiculous decision to keep the baby - which relegates the precocious high school girl to a life of subservience and mediocrity.

Young Adult is a similar window into a world that we all feel familiar with, but wish we could forget or ignore. It's as much an attack on Middle America, its values, aesthetic and gestalt, as it is an exploration of a reckless misanthrope. What comes off, though is much more cruel and mean-spirited than anything I would have expected from this tandem.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a young-adult fiction writer in her mid-30s whose life in Minneapolis seems to have hit the rocks in recent years. She's divorced and lives alone in a nice-looking condo with her purse dog. She drinks a lot and falls down drunk in bed alone most nights. One morning, when struggling with a writing assignment, she gets an e-mail from the wife of her high school boyfriend that they had a baby.

This sends her into some bizarre manic episode where she drives to her small hometown, ostensibly far away and in the middle of nowhere (though it looks like it's in the Minneapolis suburbs), so she can reconnect with the ex, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), and woo him back to her. While there she meets up with the nerd from her high school, Matt (Patton Oswalt), who has grown up to be a nerd, but nice a nice one, and runs into her parents a few times. She finds that life is not as wonderful in a small town and that she's much more messed up than she wanted to admit... and that she really doesn't want to go back to her glory days of high school.

My biggest problem with the film is that it's never clear to me what the hell Mavis is looking to find. We understand her life is a mess, but she seems to deny it to herself (or if she is aware of her issues, she doesn't want to face them and keeps doing the stuff that's bad for her) (a comedy about an alcoholic is pretty thin, no?). It seems she wants to regain the stature she had in high school, when she was "cool" and hot and had lots of sex behind the football field (even though she was dating Buddy...?), but it's never clear what her ultimate goal is. Does she want to ruin Buddy's happy life for the schadenfreude? Does she really give a shit about what happened to her 20 years ago? This feels like an atmosphere piece and really under-developed, more concerned with cutesy jokes and "remember-whens" more than a Sweet Home Alabama return-to-glory piece.

The troubling part throughout this film is that it has a very mean undertone to it. Mavis looks down on the losers of her hometown because she lives in the big city... of Minneapolis (which I'm not judging). The weird thing is that the film's basic premise of city vs. small town doesn't work because the small town looks really sweet and rich. Despite the abundance of fast food (which Mavis seems to relish), there's nothing really wrong with the place. The finale has a bitter tone to it, when Mavis and Matt's sister (of all tertiary characters!) have a discussion at cross-purposes about what they want and hope for. That no characters' stories really ever end (Matt is asleep and unresolved; Buddy will probably hate her, but we don't know) is particularly frustrating.

I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to feel and think about Mavis by the end of the film. She seems mostly aloof, self-centered and mean and doesn't seem grow at all from the first scene (OK - she says she'll clean up... which you can totally believe from an addict). I don't know why I have to sit through this whole film if Mavis neither learns a lesson to be better or pays for her shitiness. I'm not sure Cody and Reitman know the answer to this. Basically she goes from shity, to lady who wants to regain her lost youth, to shity. That's pretty silly, I think.

Stars: 2 of 4

War Horse (Tuesday, December 13, 2011) (115)

2011-12-13T11:38:00.001-08:00

I should say right up front that War Horse is probably not a movie for me. I really hate animal movies because I think they're generally overly sentimental and rather thin when it comes to content ("Look - you can see the horsey is scared. I'm scared for him.!"). I also find episodic stories like this one frustrating because the moment you get to know any characters, the story switches to a new set of characters and a new situation. War Horse is a terrible, dumb, empty movie that has a greater level of Spielbergian emotional manipulation that I have seen in a long time, possibly ever. If at any moment you are emotionally ambivalent or unsure of what is going on, the director will come down on you with a sledgehammer to make sure you understand exactly what he's trying to do.

Based on a book by Michael Morpurgo, the story is about a thoroughbred horse named Joey (oh, how sweet - his name is Joey!) who is raised by a young man in England before World War I. There's a whole lot of stuff that happens with nobody believing the horse is worth anything and him almost getting shot. Actually, every person who "owns" him at any point almost gets him shot. This is the horsey torture porn thread of the story. The horse is sold to an officer in the British military who takes him to the Front at the beginning of the Great War, at a time when the Brits thought the war was going to be old-fashionedy with horses and swords and all. Of course the war was not like that, and horses were only used up and then discarded as the war went along. Joey is first stolen by some German deserter boys, then taken to a small strawberry farm and looked after by a French girl, then is stolen back by the German army to pull stuff with. At some point there's "miraculous stuff" that happens.

As much as the film is called "War Horse," there are really only three sequences directly involving the war and fighting, and one of those is very brief. It's more "Around a War Horse." This is basically Forrest Gump with a horse. The moment you get to know and like any particular character or story, it switches to be about something else, with new characters and a new set of rules. Every character falls deeply in love with Joey, though I don't know why. I guess I'm a heartless person, but just showing me a horse with big eyes doesn't make me fall in love with him. I guess I need more content or reasons to fall for him. Well, really, I don't fall in love with movie animals, because I can't interact with them and make any sort of personal connection. I don't go in for anthropomorphizing of animals, and I think that's my problem here. There is no reason why Joey doesn't get killed several times - which I guess is not totally true... the reason he doesn't get killed is because he's the star of the movie and is written that way. He doesn't seem to have any particular traits that help him. Sure he's a fast runner, but so are so many other horses.

This is a very cruel and violent movie, which on its surface would seem like a "family film." Putting aside all the guns that are aimed at Joey for non battle-related reasons, Spielberg has a fascination with disgusting, uncomfortable situations, like the penultimate sequence when Joey runs into no-man's-land and gets rolled up in barbed wire. All I could think about was the endless and cruel beatings in Gibson's loathsome The Passion of the Christ. Is Steven suggesting Joey is Christlike? ("Take these oats, brothers. They are my body.") I don't really see the point in all this. Yes - it's war and war is hell, but it seems like most of the war stuff is much more bland than Spielberg has shown in past films (Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List), except when it deals directly with Joey, when he gets particularly frank and mean. This is not a movie for kids. (I'd like to thank my mother, here, for showing us The Great Santini when I was about 5. Because it's a movie about dogs. Right - a dog who is shot. Thanks, Mom!)

Spielberg is anything other than subtle in this film. There are loud bangs, open wounds, cuts to what look like tears in the horse's eyes (they're not tears, by the way. I'm not sure horses can cry), and lots of sentimental garbage with drawings and journals of Joey. We are reminded over and over again that the war changed from being about "gentlemen with horses" to being a technological nightmare with trenches, tanks and machine guns (I wish we could come up with a phrase for this war about how it was so big and how it might be the last war because it was so violent and terrible). The final sequence is so over-the-top with digitally enhanced "magic hour" lighting that it's almost painful to watch both from a technical point of view (magic hour is already gorgeous, Steve, you actually don't need to touch it with a computer) and a thematic view (OK, we get it. It's a happy, beautiful, wonderful, sentimental ending).

There is a single wonderful shot in the film, as the British soldiers mount their horses before the first battle of the war. It is reminiscent of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (a film I love) and Malick's The Thin Red Line. I wish that one shot could be excised from the final film here and put on display on a 5-second loop. This would leave War Horse with nothing but garbage... all the easier to send to the soap factory.

Stars: 1 of 4

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Saturday, December 10, 2011) (114)

2011-12-10T06:22:00.001-08:00

I was totally expecting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to be a very typical mystery/spy movie with twists and double twists and lots of Cold War stuff with secret tapes and the Berlin Wall and all, but it's actually a whole lot more than that. Director Tomas Alfredson (who previously made the Swedish Let the Right One In) does a lot with a very well-written script (by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan, adapted from a book by John le Carré) and probably brings more to the story from a directing point of view that most movies I've seen in a long time.

The story is about a double-agent in the MI6 agency who is working for the Russians spying on the British spies from within during the early 1970s. George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is relieved of his duties largely due to a botched job and then becomes obsessed with finding the leak, which nobody else seems to notice or care about. The title comes from the code names for three top-level spies in the agency, Tinker, Tailor and Soldier. Smiley conducts interviews with agents who have recently been in the field, in Budapest and Istanbul, and gets a young agent to help him get documents out of MI6 to examine so he can find the rat within. We see flashbacks to earlier days in the intelligence service, where Smiley is trying to put small details in order to try to solve the case.

Alfredson creates a world with a wonderful motif of frames and windows. Almost every shot has some sort of frame or window in it, or is in a room with no frames and no windows. The concept of deeper and deeper levels of security is constantly present, interestingly undermined because, of course, we know there's there's a double-agent in the midst. There is one amazing shot of a British spy watching a Russian agent in his hotel room through the window from across the street. This Rear Window homage is not only gorgeous, but also underlines how important the concept of perceiving oneself to be safe and the freedom to move within such a space really are in the spy game. Even the wonderfully stuffy wool suits the characters wear highlight these themes, as they all have waistcoats, adding yet another layer of material to their bodies and helping to frame each of their faces.

The film is a collection of old and young British actors from John Hurt, Colin Firth and Oldman, to younger up-and-comers like Tom Hardy, Mark Strong and Benedict Cumberbatch. All of them are really fantastic, though Oldman and Hardy stood out to me the most.

This is one of the best spy movies I can remember seeing in a long time and a really excellently made film. It's sometimes a bit confusing with the time lines and knowing if we're in the past or the present, but it does all turn out to make sense by the end. There are wonderful small details throughout that would make it a joy to see a second time, I'm sure.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

The Sitter (Friday, December 9, 2011) (113)

2011-12-09T18:54:00.001-08:00

There are two tracks to director David Gordon Green's career in film: a gritty, dirty, independent, Southern American Gothic dramatic line featuring films like George Washington, Undertow and his best film, All the Real Girls; and a totally different, goofy, gross-out, pot-hazed comedy thread featuring Pineapple Express, the brilliant Eastbound and Down TV show and his latest film, The Sitter. It would be easy to dismiss this latter category as "director-for-hire movies," though I think that would miss the point. I see these two streaks as closer to a director more like Howard Hawks, who made brilliant westerns (Rio Bravo), brilliant film noirs (or is it films noir?) (The Big Sleep) and hilarious screwball comedies (His Girl Friday). I'm not saying DGG is as good as Hawks (that would be silly), but he's just about the only active director now who has that same flexibility with tone and genre. (For what it's worth, he only wrote the dramas he directed; the other films were written by other people.)

Sadly, the script for The Sitter is pretty typical, which results in a rather average movie, rather than a hilarious one. It's a pretty typical babysitter movie. The loser dumbass sitter, Noah (Jonah Hill), gets into all sorts of shenanigans when he's looking after three very self-determined kids (one of whom is played by the brilliantly named Max Records from Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are). They get wrapped up in a chase with drug dealers and cops and have to end up back home by 1am. It's very light, very dirty and has a very warm heart throughout.

Green does a great job with one of the funniest tongue-in-cheek gay camp sequences I've seen in a long time. He's clearly a talented guy. I just wish he would make a few more small dramas again, as his comedies are a bit too silly for his chops.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

London River (Tuesday, December 6, 2011) (112)

2011-12-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

Rachid Bouchareb's London River is a very nice and very small movie about the loss of children in both a spiritual and physical sense. Elizabeth (Brenda Blethyn) is a humble and unworldly woman who lives on the island of Guernsey and Ousmane (Sotigui Koutaté) is an African man living in France working for the forestry department. After the bombings of July 7, 2005, they both get worried that their children (her daughter and his son) were killed in the attacks. They both go to see if they can find them.

In London they meet as they find that their children knew one another and were probably dating. This comes as a shock to both parents who realize they actually don't know much about their kids. He left Africa for France when his son was a child and she only had a telephone relationship with her daughter. Each one loses their kid twice, essentially.

There is a lovely parallel structure here as both parents have complimentary backgrounds, even though they're from very different places. As she lives on Guernsey, she's something between English and French. She raised her daughter mostly alone after her husband was killed in the Falklands. He is clearly African, but has lived in France for a few decades and is not totally either one. He didn't raise his son at all and has no idea what kind of man he became. There's also a lovely visual pairing of the two, where she is short and chubby and he's extremely tall, skinny and has fantastic dreadlocks. They couldn't be a more unusual pair.

Sadly, as nice and sweet as the film is, it's very simple and straightforward, with the only real excitement coming from a moment when they've lost all hope of finding their kids alive and then they regain hope suddenly. This is a very manipulative film that toys with emotions in a rather banal way. Blethyn is actually very good, but plays a pretty terrible woman who's shrill and annoying. The worst kind of loving mother possible. Koutaté is fantastic. Quite and contemplative, knowing full well the whole time that he's sorta out of place everywhere.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Hugo 3D (Friday, December 2, 2011) (111)

2011-12-02T11:35:00.001-08:00

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is supposed to be a family movie, but I don't think it really is at all. In fact, I think it's pretty freaking boring for adults and kids alike. Based on the book by Brian Slznick, it tells the story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a preteen boy who lives in secret in a Paris train station in the 1930s. He's effectively an orphan and spends his days winding the dozens of clocks in the station. His main passion, though, is the nonfunctional automaton his father stole (!!) from a museum that he was trying to get running again before he was killed in a fire.

Between his winding duties in the station, he runs around the stores in the station, which seems a bit odd considering he's always being chased by the station master (Sacha Baron Cohen). One place he loves to go is the toy maker (Ben Kingsley), where he can steal mechanical parts and wheels that will help him rebuild the automaton. One day he meets the toy maker's young ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), and the two find that she wears a heart-shaped key (oh - how magical!) that will turn on the automaton. When they get it working they find that it draws a picture of the Man in the Moon being hit in the eye by a rocket... a still from Georges Méliès' 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. They then spend days researching early movies - because kids love reading books and doing research in libraries, of course.

I think I like what the film is getting at in general - that a fascination with mechanical stuff in the hopes of connecting with dead daddy leads a boy to discover the wonder of cinema, but it feels cold and stale. The case isn't helped by the fact that the plot plods along with no particular direction for most of the way. At first it's a film about an orphan boy, then it's about a broken automaton, then it's about the life of an old man, then it's about the history of cinema. It's slow and boring, and, although I love movies about movies, I would rather just watch a documentary about Méliès rather than seeing this inelegant tribute to him.

The whole thing feels much more like the sort of history lesson you'd get from someone who reads a lot of books and has a lot of facts available to them, but presents it in a showy rather than a structured way. I get that Marty loves old movies (he talks about them all the time), but why waste time with the kid and his father, who is almost totally forgotten by the end of the film? (And this is to say nothing of the automaton, which is just a silly MacGuffin... but a fake-magical one. Pardon me while I throw up in my mouth.)

The connection between clocks and mechanical stuff (a toy mouse, the station master's mechanical leg) and early movies is thin at best. Yes, early cameras shared a lot of moving parts with clocks, but that's sorta missing the point. Why not connect internal combustion engines to early cameras and movies too? (OK, fine, Méliès was some sort of clockmaker... but still, the connection seems forced.)

I'm sure screenwriter John Logan and Marty wanted to stick close to the book, but I think cutting a lot of the boy's journey, as well as some totally flaccid romantic material involving secondary and tertiary characters, would have greatly improved the story. The only reason the station master is in the film is to create chase scenes - because kid audiences need chases. But these chases are not very exciting and ridiculous when Hugo keeps going back to the same station where he'll inevitably get chased out again.

I paid extra to see this in 3D and I will say that it's totally not worth it with this film. There's an elegant meta explanation for why this would be Marty's first foray into 3D - that the movie is about technology and mechanical stuff, so he's flexing his technological muscles here - but he didn't do enough with it to make it worthwhile. I don't know why he, a lover of cinema, wouldn't have done some grand allusions to de Toth's House of Wax or Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. Instead we get a movie that would totally work in 2D, but just wants to fool people into paying more.

The film generally looks good (though very storybooky and a bit like the early Harry Potter movies) and the acting is good, but the story is dull and meandering. I think there's material here for a good movie written and cut differently, but the way it all rolls out is totally banal.

Stars: 2 of 4

One Lucky Elephant (Friday, December 2, 2011) (110)

2011-12-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

One Lucky Elephant is a small documentary about David Balding, a circus owner in St Louis whose best friend and star is Flora the elephant. After working together for about 16 years, he decides he need to give her to an elephant sanctuary rather than keeping her working. This is apparently difficult, as she's an African elephant, a more violent species, and she has never really interacted with other elephants in her life, as she was taken for circus use as a baby (a very big baby).

David talks to a bunch of zoos before finding a sanctuary in Tennessee where Flora can live. There's lots of sadness as he give her up. Later he's told that he shouldn't visit her because that would hurt her transition to the new life (those elephants have long memories). This is particularly sad for him.

This film feels a lot like Project Nim, from earlier this year. There it's a chimp who is raised by humans and then has to be reintroduced to a chimp life. Both of these films rely a bit too much on the anthropomorphising of these animals and giving them deep human thoughts and feelings. I'm sure they do think things and feel things, but it's impossible to know what exactly. That we're sad when they are sent to a wild animal park, doesn't mean they are and always will be. They they get scared by new animals means more about their instinct to fear trouble than it does about their sadness of losing human contact. Besides, if we're so worried about how their lives end, why aren't we worried about how they begin - how they get to be in human culture and outside of their natural one?

The last third of the film is mostly about the obese Balding nearing the end of his life and feeling bad for his old, tusky friend. I think this is really boring and that this part should have been cut to make it a 45-minute short.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Muppets (Thursday, December 1, 2011) (109)

2011-12-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

I was very worried that The Muppets would be just another Muppets movie with not much going for it (can you say Muppets from Space?). Happily I was totally wrong about it. It's fantastic. It's funny and fresh and has all the warmth a joy of the gold-age Muppets with a very clever contemporary flair. It feels much more geared toward Muppets fans who grew up with them in the '70s and '80s than for kids today. Happily that's not my problem.

In the world of the film, puppets of all shapes and colors live among people and that is totally normal for everyone. Walter, a boyish puppet, lives in the mid-American town of Smalltown and is the biggest fan of the Muppets, a group of puppet performers he knows from the Muppet Show and several movies from his childhood. His brother and best friend Gary (Jason Segal) and Gary's girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) want to go on a vacation to Hollywood and agree to bring Walter along so he can visit Muppet Theater, where the Muppet Show was produced a long time ago.

When they get there, they find that it is closed to the public and in terrible shape. Walter overhears oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) buying the theater and talking about how plans tear it down and drill for oil there. Walter, Gary and Mary have to find Kermit the Frog to get the Muppets back together to perform a telethon and raise the money to buy back the theater back from Richman. In grand Muppets style, they all go around the country picking up the old gang (Fozzie is working in Reno with his band, the Moopets; Gonzo is a plumbing and toilet bowl magnate; Animal is in anger management rehab; Piggy is in Paris working for a fashion magazine).

I love that the story is silly but generally simple enough to hold together. It's very, very funny and filled with some of the wonderful double jokes that work for kids and adults on different levels. There's lots of Muppet-centric humor and lots of very clever and timely jokes. There are great songs, including some of the old favs like The Rainbow Connection, Moving Right Along and the Muppet Show theme song. The tone is very fun and silly and it's constantly winking at us as ridiculous stuff happens. The film was co-written by Segal and Nicholas Stoller and the script is great.

There's really nothing to criticize about the story or the production. There are a few fantastic moments that I still laugh about now when I think about them. This is a warm, wonderful movie that I hope to watch again and again and fits in perfectly with early Muppet films like The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper and Muppets Take Manhattan. This is an instant classic in my book and totally wonderful.

Stars: 4 of 4

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Wednesday, November 30, 2011) (108)

2011-11-30T15:31:00.001-08:00

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a movie by Lynne Ramsey based on a novel by Lionel Schriver. I haven't read the book, and that might have been a problem for my appreciation and understanding of the emotional and psychological narrative of the film. Boiled down to it's core, the movie is about a cold, clinical woman, Eva (Tilda Swinton), for whom motherhood is probably a bit of a stretch. When she and her husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), have a son, Kevin, and move to the suburbs, she has a tremendous difficulty connecting with the child.

It seems that baby Kevin is very willful and very hard to control. Eva spends her days with the baby constantly trying to engage and connect with him, but to no avail. At a point she thinks (we think) he might be autistic, though the doctors say he's totally healthy. As he grows up to be a young child, he becomes more and more willful and self-possessed, being a total terror for his mother and an angel for his father. The story continues to unwind as we see Eva struggle more and more with her son with whom she doesn't connect.

This is basically an update of The Bad Seed (which is a fun, but terrible film), or any of the dozens of books and films that continued that idea (Orphan, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child). With all of those works, there's always a question of "nature vs. nurture". Is it that the kid is just rotten to his core and a hopeless case or is he a product of his cold upbringing? Ramsey deals with that dilemma here, though I don't think there is anything more than that chestnut.

It is a very beautiful film to watch. Ramsey does a masterful job creating an incredibly cold tone to the story and atmosphere. The modern suburban house the family moves into has few decorations and is mostly white and angular. The camera doesn't move much and, when it does, it is very slow, so everything feels restrained and uncomfortable. Ramsey does use lots and lots (and lots and lots and lots) of red in the film. Clearly this is a visual clue into the the bloodiness the boy (or the mother) has in him, but it's a bit too obtuse for me. Still, there are some lovely images that come out of this icy setting with bolts of passionate color.

Ramsey also seems very interested with sound effects, soundtrack and score. Scenes transition with sound effects that lead us from one moment to another, frequently featuring uncomfortable sounds like scratching and sirens. I think this is an interesting way of creating a world in our minds of unexpectedness and discomfort that never lets us rest in the back of our seats. (I was very disappointed with one scene involving a guinea pig where Ramsey pulled her punches and didn't use the aural as well as she could have. Alas.)

I think the biggest problem for me is that I had trouble understanding the psychology of Eva, which, I would imagine, is better spelled out in the book. I worry that Ramsey and co-adapter Rory Kinnear are very familiar with the anguish of Eva from the novel, but just didn't put much of it on screen, or simply used a shorthand for big swaths of background. It's clear that Eva is a cold person, but not clear why or how she transfers that to her son. Considering this would normally be thought of as a "psychodrama," without the psychological aspect shining through more clearly, it really is just reduced to a campy melodrama (not that there's anything wrong with melodrama - they're just less psychologically engaging for the audience... by design).

Ramsey is clearly a talented director, though I would be interested to see her direct this film with a different script. I appreciate the offensive and brutal sense of humor peppered throughout the work, such as Kevin eating a lychee right after his sister is fitted with a glass eye or him barely flinching and then staring at his mother after she accidentally walks in on him while he's masturbating. This is a good movie buried in a tired story. I don't really need to see another Bad Seed and that's really all that this movie is. It's a very pretty and clever version of the story, but it's not much more than that story.

Stars: 2 of 4

Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Friday, November 25, 2011) (107)

2011-11-25T14:12:00.000-08:00

What is there to say about Twilight Part 4 Part 1? It's a movie about vampyres who fuck teens, but only after their married in special Mormon ways. Then it's about how those teens get preggers with monster babies (hello, Rosemary!) who eat them from the inside out. Then there are some werewolves who want to kill the vampyre family because they're really a cult (they are!) and broke the hymen of that teeny girl. Then the teen girl gets all rexy and gray-green-toned. Then one of the wolves decides to fight his brother dawgs because he really likes skinny girls, even tho she's a fang-banger.

Somewhere in there there's a lot of really bad acting. I don't know what you call what K-Stew, R-Patz and Tay-Lau are doing onscreen, but it's ain't acting. They each have reach the bottom of their tanks and are just saying words and looking sweaty. I hope none of them is still doing that stuff in ten years.

Bill Condon has a great inside joke in one scene where people are watching the Bride of Frankenstein, which is a film directed by James Whale, a homosexual and the subject of a biopic he made a few years ago. That split-second moment was the best part of this movie.

Stars: 1 of 4

My Week with Marilyn (Friday, November 25, 2011) (106)

2011-11-25T13:12:00.001-08:00

My Week with Marilyn is about the 1956 shoot of the film The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) and Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). While in London during the shoot she meets the story's narrator Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) who is an assistant director trying to break into the film industry. The two work on the film for several weeks and develop a friendship as she proves to be a fish out of water in London with actors who are not movie stars. She brings with her an acting coach, her husband Arthur Miller and her manager who try to help her at every moment not freak out.

At some point the stress gets to be too much and she panics. The only person who can help her is Colin, who proceeds to have a week-long romantic interlude with her, despite her husband and management team's wishes.

This is a movie about falling in love with actors and actresses and falling in love with movies. This is a nice little idea - that we fall for celebrities who don't really know us and can't ever love us back and that the relationships they have with us is as fabricated as the characters they play onscreen.

Clearly the biggest performance here is Williams as Marilyn - and she does a very good impersonation of her. The problem that I had is that the character is so annoying that it's hard to like her at all. She's such a moron at all times and totally unable to even pretend to act. It's clear that Marilyn was a movie star because she knew how to play to the camera, but it's infuriating to watch her here barely able to chew gum and walk at the same time. It's impossible to align with her, and I think that hurts the dynamic of the film. If we can't fall in love with this Marilyn the way Colin does, there is no magic. Branagh actually does a great job as the pompous and irritated Olivier, though he's not getting much attention for his performance.

This is an OK movie, but is not brilliant. I love movies about movies (though this one is in London, not Hollywood) and this is a decent one, but not as wonderful as some from the past.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

A Dangerous Method (Thursday, November 24, 2011) (105)

2011-11-24T18:24:00.001-08:00

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method tells the story of Carl Jung's early relationship with Sigmund Freud, from around 1904 until 1914. These are the early days of psychoanalysis when many of the Freudian methods that we take for granted were being established. Jung (Michael Fassbender) is a psychologist working in a hospital in Zurich. He has read all of Freud's writings and has started employing his "talking cure". Once they meet, Freud (Viggo Mortensen) expresses to Jung that he could be the "gentile savior" of psychoanalysis, putting a protestant face on the method that is largely practiced by Jews.

One of Jung's patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), has massive troubles with her sexuality and sanity. Over time Jung heals her through talking therapy and she begins to fall in love with him, or at least she becomes erotically interested in him. They have an affair, which is totally unsanctioned by the medical world and by his strict protestant background. The two doctors come into conflict over Jung's handing of the affair and what it means for his place in Freud's world.

I think this is a very well-made film (Cronenberg really doesn't make bad movies), but it's a bit cold in its tone and uninteresting beyond the depiction of obscure history. The parts of the story that deal with the two doctors' diverging beliefs is hard to establish as Jung had not yet written much of what he would become known for by this point in history. In other words, Jung is just a doctor trying to practice Freudian psychology, he could be anyone really. The film seems to be presented as an "either/or" between the two philosophies, but only Freud's ideas are presented.

The thematic structure seems to fall apart further when you engage in the father-son story. Clearly there are the suggestions of a Freudian Oedipal relationship going on (that Jung wants to bring down his father... though not to sleep with the mother, per se, rather to take control of the movement and establish himself as king). This is only briefly interesting, though, as any analysis of the film from this point of view underlines the relevance and durability of Freud's ideas. The conflict in the film is resolved entirely by analyzing it. A snake that eats its own tail.

Fassbender gives another great performance here, as a stiff and tortured Swiss man, dealing with more emotional issues that he seems ill-suited to deal with. Knightley's performance is good, but a bit showy. I guess it's easy to say playing a crazy person is easy, but it's really hard to do it convincingly. I think her performance is more affectation than virtuosity.

I actually like this film, but there's something in it that's missing for me. It seems like it's trying to be more than merely a historical drama, but I don't know what that "more" is. I want it to like it more, but in the end, it leaves me a bit cold. I wonder what Freud would say about that...

Stars: 3 of 4

In Time (Tuesday, November 22, 2011) (104)

2011-11-22T18:35:00.000-08:00

In Time is a dystopian sci-fi movie that is totally silly and terrible, but actually really fun and very close to being interesting. The film is a straight-up Marxist polemic about a future world (of downtown LA) where all money has been turned into time. In this world, humans are genetically modified to live until they're 25 and then stop aging. At this point, a digital clock on their arm (genetically built into them, you see) turns on and begins to tick off one year, after which they're supposed to die.

This being a hellscape, it's not so simple, though, as one can work and earn more time (as one would earn more money) and the "rich" of this world are able to buy and sell time, as if it was money. Ersatz "billionaires" live wonderful lives, and, because they don't age past 25 and have unlimited resources (time), they lead totally different lives in another "zone" from the poors. Of course they're all hot. (This is complicated.)

At some point, Justin Timberlake gets sick of always being poor, that is, close to being dead, and he is given a century by a rich guy who is sick of living anymore. JT goes into the world of the rich looking only to see how they live, but once he gets there, he finds that he's not trusted and not wanted.

The idea of the film is actually pretty clever, and I totally give writer/director Andrew Niccol credit for making such a blatant and angry Marxist film (it fits in very well with the current Occupy Wall Street movement). Still, the dialogue is totally laughable throughout the film, either totally banal or filled with every "time" and "clock" pun you can imagine ("I'm gonna clean your clock" - literally; "your time is up"). Also, the acting by JT and Amanda Seyfried is really terrible and hard to take seriously. It feels as over-the-top as Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, but it's played as totally serious.

The art direction and costumes are really wonderful here, probably some of the best art direction and production design of any film this year (Gattica looked great too, by the way). Everything is 1960s-70s futuristic. The cars are either '60s Lincoln Continental sedans or '60s Dodge Chargers (or some such Mopar car) but always painted matte black. There is something wonderful about how part of the nightmare of this world is that they went back in time for their future. It's a very clever thing and looks amazing. In spite of this, though, it's a goofy movie that's much more unintentionally funny than serious.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Weekend (Tuesday, November 22, 2011) (103)

2011-11-22T13:42:00.000-08:00

Weekend is a wonderful little movie about two guys who meet in a bar and have a weekend of falling in love before one of them has to leave town. It has the romance and sad nostalgia of a Noel Coward story (the bittersweetness of Brief Encounter comes to mind, though neither guy is cheating on anyone) and the freshness, sexual frankness and energy of a mumblecore movie.

This film is written and directed by Andrew Haigh, who has previous worked as an editor on big-budget fare and made one gay documentary, and shows lots of skills in terms of overall look, interesting point-of-view shots and an intense intimacy in the lives of the two guys. I think there are moments when the very slow pace of the film hurts the overall storytelling and perhaps less would be more there. That is, I understand that time, for the two guys, seems to slow down to a standstill because they're so in love, but standstills don't work well for holding audience interest.

The film is really about opposites and unusual juxtapositions. The main guy, Russell, played beautifully by Tom Cullen, is still in the closet and leads a very conservative lifestyle, while Glen, played by Chris New, is out and loves going to clubs and doesn't seem to work. Of course, the biggest "opposite" is that this is a movie that would otherwise be about a man and a woman, but here it's two men. It is a wonderful thing, thematically and theoretically, that this is not really a movie about two gay men being "normal" or "fitting in as a couple in society". This is just a movie about two lovers being lovers, who happen to be men.

This is a good movie and I look forward to other films by Haigh, who clearly knows how to direct.

Stars: 3 of 4

Margin Call (Saturday, November 19, 2011) (102)

2011-11-19T07:18:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure you heard, but a few years ago, there were a bunch of banks that sorta fell apart because they were over-leveraged and had too much risk for their asset base. Well, the good news is that if you somehow missed that story, Margin Call is a movie about one such bank and all the good people who work there who didn't mean to cause any harm to people and were really doing their best to stop the damage before it got out of hand.

This is an ensemble piece about the risk management department of a bank, where one of their analysts discovers that the firm is massively over-leveraged and that by the next morning could collapse the whole international banking sector. From late one afternoon until the early morning the next day, the banker people work to stem the tide of destruction that is coming.

As with most ensemble pieces, this is much more about the fact that a certain actor is in the film at all than that he or she actually does a good job acting. Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker and Mary McDonell are just a few of the (small) stars who deliver totally pedestrian performances here. One actor who does a really great job is Zachary Quinto, who plays the young buck analyst who puts all the numbers together. He's cocky about what he knows, but humbled by the size of his revelation. He has one great scene where he's speaking to the chairman of the bank about his C.V. and his background.

I really hate ensemble movies and I also hate movies about recent events. I think we're way too close to the economic troubles of 2008-9 to have anything worthwhile to say about it. I also think such a story functions as shorthand for real storytelling, allowing very average stuff to be presented, rather than something more critical or thematically significant. Still, this movie is really not bad. It's a good movie with a clever, if precious, script and not too much room for grandstanding acting.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Artist (Friday, November 18, 2011) (101)

2011-11-18T13:48:00.003-08:00

The Artist is a silent movie about silent movies. It's totally charming and has a lot in it for cinefiles who love silent movies. It is set in 1928 Hollywood and follows the fictitious George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent leading man from the era of great silent stars. He finds that once 1929 comes around and studios begin to experiment with talkies, he is not able to make movies anymore because he doesn't translate well to sound pictures. His life is turned upside down as he gets a divorce, has to sell all his belongings and move out of his gorgeous mansion and into a modest flat.

Meanwhile, as his star is falling, that of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) is rising. She had a small part in one of Valentin's last silent pictures and fell madly in love with him then. As she climbs the ladder of success in Hollywood in talkies, she never forgets him and always keeps an eye out to make sure he doesn't get into too much trouble.

This is all a very sweet story of romantic love and all that, but the really great thing that I liked is that it's a silent movie about silent movies. It's very clever and very funny - but smart funny, not just silly funny. There's a very clever nightmare scene, where Valentin worries about literally not being able to speak in a sound world. There's a wonderful sequence on a beautiful staircase that feels like it was pulled right out of a Murnau film. There's also a lot of very clever use of music and print color, where some of the reels seem to have a yellow or blue tone to them, just as old reels of silent films sometimes have. There's a very clever use of Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo, at a particular moment when the idea of image and possession is very important.

Overall this is a very good movie with lots of good stuff in it. It would not surprise me if it gets lots of Oscar nominations and wins (for direction, acting, costumes and picture, just to name a few). Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood and this is a great one for that. My only real issue with it is that it's a bit too sweet at times and relies on our desire to "fall in love", more than any particularly effective storytelling... that said, it is a very good movie.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

The Descendants (Friday, November 18, 2011) (100)

2011-11-18T13:48:00.001-08:00

Alexander Payne's newest film, The Descendants, has a lot going on in a pretty modest little movie. George Clooney plays the father of young girls, one is 10 and the other is 17, and his wife is in a coma in the hospital after a massive head injury. They live in Honolulu and seem like pretty normal, nice people. As Clooney is reeling from his wife's situation, he finds out that she had been cheating on him for a few months. Meanwhile, his family owns a significant amount of land in a trust that they're being forced to sell and he is the final decision-maker about whom to sell the land to. At some point Clooney and his daughters, along with the older daughter's stoner boyfriend, go to find the man his wife was cheating with, only to discover there might be some ramifications of that affair in the land deal.

The central motif of the film is family, and that makes me really sleepy because that's a dumb thing to make a movie about.There are a bunch of tangents to the story and it's much too complicated for what it needs to be. I think there is probably a pretty decent movie that could be reformed from the skeleton of this one just about the wife being in a coma, having had an affair; there is no need for the land deal part or the daughter's dumb boyfriend part.

If the script for the film, by Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, were cleaner and better, this could ultimately be a good movie. It's very small and really doesn't have the materials to be more than just good. Probably the most remarkable thing about it is that Clooney really looks like a normal middle-aged dad in this, not the gorgeous movie star that he has become over the past decade or so. I give lots of credit to Clooney, Payne and the costume designer, Wendy Chuck, who really transform him and make him seem totally normal, desexualized and not at all hot.

Stars: 2.5 of 3

Melancholia (Sunday, November 13, 2011) (99)

2011-11-13T14:54:00.001-08:00

The opening of Lars von Trier's Melancholia is a wonderfully rich and sumptuous 20-minute sequence that shows the whole of the film en bref with Wagner's Tristan and Isolde pumped loudly behind the pictures. We see Kirsten Dunst getting married, then going crazy, then snow falling as Charlotte Gainsbourg runs with her small son (at least he's not falling out a window while she fucks Willem Dafoe in the shower this time!) and then a planet comes and hits the Earth destroying everything. That's basically the whole story in a nutshell and the rest of the two hours are a more-detailed, less interesting look at those bits.

It seems Kiki is getting married to Alexander Skarsgard and at her wedding, everyone is walking on eggshells knowing she's mentally rocky. Alexander's best friend and Kiki's boss is Stellan Skarsgard (isn't that nice- father and son are playing best buddies together!), her dad is John Hurt, who finally looks as old as he is, her brother-in-law is the humorless Kiefer Sutherland and the wedding planner is Udo Kier. (Together that's only one American there.) I dunno - at some point Kiki ruins her own wedding by insulting Stellan and then goes into a deep depression. Then it turns out that there's a rogue planet flying through the universe toward Earth. Kiki is pretty calm about it, but her family is less so and they all try to figure out what to do before the end of the world.

This is a very pretty film - particularly the 20-minute overture - but not really that interesting or compelling. There's an alienating baroqueness to LVT's style that's aesthetically unusual, but ultimately cold. This is really a melodrama pretending to be a psychodrama. In the end, Kiki is a type (a depressed person) and Gainsbourg is a type (a controlling sister) and Kiefer is a type (super controlling husband/brother-in-law) and the story is rather incidental.

LVT does use Tristan and Isolde very well here, though it's a really pretty bit of music. Kiki has one great moment, when she's telling off Stellan, but mostly she's just acting dour, which I don't think is very interesting. I guess her performance is exactly what the movie it: one great moment with a lot of other stuff also.

Stars: 2 of 4

J. Edgar (Friday, November 11, 2011) (98)

2011-11-11T13:32:00.000-08:00

It's really not clear to me why Clint Eastwood made the movie J. Edgar. The film seems to be totally uninterested in getting into the mind of the FBI boss and seems to be particularly prudish with some of the sweatier details of Hoover's life, like how he had a "male life-partner" for thirty-some years.

The biopic shows Hoover (Leo Dicaprio) as an old man dictating his memoirs to a series of typists. He looks back at his rise through the Justice Department to become the head of the FBI. It goes into great detail about some of the bigger events in his career, such as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder, his obsession with Communism and his secret files of political and social leaders of the age. It is very clear from the film that Hoover and his deputy, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), are lovers of some sort, though there are several scenes of aborted non-sex, leaving us wondering what their relationship really was. This is, of course, absurd that two gay men would live together (in separate residences in Washington) for so long and never have sex. Though I have to wonder what the point is in making a movie about a mysterious man that doesn't try to figure him out more. All in all it feels very disinterested in Hoover as a persona.

Clearly part of the problem has to do with the cumbersome script, by Dustin Lance Black, though Clint's direction is equally inelegant. On top of this, the makeup looks silly on Dicaprio and Hammer when they get older, and it's problematic that they speak like the young people they are now when they get older (yes, voices age like skin ages). This feels like a movie that has no point and no insights into its subject. It's pretty dull and not very well made.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Into the Abyss (Friday, November 11, 2011) (97)

2011-11-11T13:27:00.000-08:00

Into the Abyss is Werner Herzog's second documentary of 2011 - and it's his second-best documentary of the year as well. Well, that's being very generous: The Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D is one of the best films of the year and one of Herzog's best documentaries, while Into the Abyss is clearly a passion piece that is really not wonderful.

Herzog examines a murder that happened in suburban Houston in 2001 that was apparently committed by two young men, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett. The two were arrested shortly after they killed a woman in her home while trying to steal her car and then killing her son and one of his friends after. They were both convicted for the murders, although only Perry got a death sentence. Part of the film looks at the murder, walking through some of the scenes of the crime with the sheriff, and part of the film is an interview with the two killers, who claim they're not guilty.

There is no real structure to the story, even though there are a handful of inter-titles that pop up now and again to transition from one sequence another (eg: The Crime, The Trial, The Execution, etc.). This mostly feels like a really shoddy version of Errol Morris' brilliant The Thin Blue Line, about another Texas murder. It's clear that Herzog hates the death penalty, though unclear why he's examining this case, where the guy on death row seems pretty darn guilty. That is, his case might be more effective if he was examining a wrongfully convicted man (as Morris did). On top of this, there is a ton of useless back story for each man, including extensive interviews with a woman who met Burkett after he was already in jail and then married him as well as Burkett's father, who is also serving a life sentence for a different murder. It's just a really muddy story and only works if you're already anti-death penalty and just want to hear some sermonizing.

This is a big disappointment for me, as I think Herzog is one of the smartest, greatest filmmakers working today (in documentary and narrative cinema). He does have some wonderful insights at moments in this film, but they're frequently on top of second- and third-level stories that don't really matter to the main thrust of the picture. This is a very missable movie.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (Saturday, November 5., 2011) (96)

2011-11-05T15:23:00.001-07:00

The good news is that this movie is exactly what it should be and exactly what you'd want it to be. It's totally stupid, pretty fun, simple enough in story and has all the pot and sex jokes you could imagine. The bad news is that it's not much more than that... but why should it be? The general story has Harold and Kumar estranged from one another at the start of the film after they seem to have moved in two different directions. Harold has become a suburban square, living a wonderful yuppie life with a serious banking job and a new dorky best friend. Kumar has recently broken up with his long-time girlfriend and is now smoking weed full time. When Kumar gets a misdelivered package for Harold at his apartment, he goes to return it and hijinks ensue. There's a thing with Harold's father-in-law, amazingly played by Danny Trejo, a thing with having sex with a virgin girl who is the daughter of a Russian mobster and a thing with Neil Patrick Harris, NPH, who is now "out" - but only as a way to get more sex from women who now trust him more. It's all very silly and fun. The 3D is used well here, as an homage to B-movies of the '50s and '60s, where stuff comes flying at you in the audience for no particular reason aside from getting you to say, "woah - cool". I love this franchise, and though this film is not as amazing as the original, it's still very much worth it, if you want to see it.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Crime after Crime (Friday, November 4, 2011) (95)

2011-11-04T08:07:00.000-07:00

This is a very good documentary about the legal battles of Deborah Peagler, a woman convicted of killing her boyfriend in the early 1980s after he had abused her and her daughter for years. She should have only served six or so years in prison but because of several bad and illegal decisions of the Los Angeles County D.A.'s office, she served 27 years. The story shows her with her two pro bono lawyers digging up information on how her case was mishandled and then how the DA took some particularly shameful decisions in the appeal process in order to save face and advance a political career. The format is very direct and easy to follow chronologically. Peagler's story screams for a Hollywoodified narrative adaptation, along the lines of Erin Brokovich ("They're called tits, Ed.") or Conviction. I'm sure that movie won't be as good as this one.

Stars: 3 of 4

Anonymous (Tuesday, November 1, 2011) (94)

2011-11-01T17:53:00.001-07:00

This is a rather fun movie about the back-story behind the true identity of William Shakespeare, who was not the humble man from Stratford-upon-Avon, as we have all learned over the years, but a nobleman with dreams of political influences and an undying love for poetry and playwriting. All this from Roland Emmerich, the man who put a necklace made of ears around Dolph Lundgren's neck in Universal Soldier. The film is told elegantly, as a play within a play (get it?) and shows many classic moments from Shakespeare's works play out in the real life of the suggested author, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. The film makes a compelling case for de Vere being the true author, but there are clearly lots of ways the viewer's feelings are swayed by information given or withheld. The William Shakespeare in the film is a medium-talent actor, illiterate and completely incapable of creating anything of substance. It all fits together a bit too neatly and raises as many questions as it answers. The story is a bit muddied by parallel narratives on the political level and the artistic/authorship level, creating dozens of characters with the same facial hair and similar noble names. It all gets a bit confusing, though, is generally enjoyable. There are lovely cameos by great Shakespearean stage actors Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance and a very clever framing sequence. I find myself asking why it really matters who the real Shakespeare was - it's rather missing the point. Besides, if what the film is arguing is true, I really don't care because mythologizing artists, to say nothing of writers using pen names, goes back as long as there have been artists and this is nothing special.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Wednesday, October 26, 2011) (93)

2011-10-26T14:32:00.001-07:00

I think the content of and idea behind this film is slightly better than the net result. This is a documentary about the Black Power movement told through footage shot at the time by Swedish television crews in America. I have no idea why, but apparently the Swedes were totally obsessed with the movement and several black leaders went to Sweden to speak and raise money for their cause at the time. Weird. This brings to mind all sorts of interesting ideas of how a domestic issue or art is best analyzed by foreigners who have more perspective on the issue. It's hard to imagine an American crew treating the players involved and the history herein similarly. Still, there are aspects to this film that don't totally make sense, like why the director, Goran Olsson, feels it's necessary to have contemporary black American musicians comment on their views of '60s-'70s black leaders or the very footage we see (a bit of a mise-en-abime nightmare, really). What do I care what Talib Kweli or Questlove think about Angela Davis or Stokely Carmichael? And why not, say, other civil rights leaders, still alive today? Why not get Jesse Jackson to talk about his views of the more militant faction of the civil rights movement? The film raises as many questions as it answers... though it's still well done and interesting.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Skin I Live In (Saturday, October 22, 2011) (92)

2011-10-22T12:48:00.001-07:00

This is a very nice film, beautifully executed and directed by Almodóvar and a real pleasure to watch. I think it's about the creation and consumption of art as much as anything. It's a loose update of the Frankenstein story, but as a contemporary psychodrama. The narrative gets a bit lost in the middle act, but it all ties up nicely. I like how it functions as an exploitation film, a virtual ode to Val Lewton, and I don't really think it has much more depth than that. It's a bit of a trifle. I think it's Almodóvar's best work since some of his early films, possibly because it's so uncomplicated by other noise his recent works have been surrounded by. Overall a very good, but not perfect work.

Stars: 3 of 4

Le Havre (Thursday, October 13, 2011) (91)

2011-10-13T18:36:00.000-07:00

This is Aki Kaurismaki's interesting take on European immigration issues. It tells the story of an African boy who is being smuggled from his home country to London, but gets out in Le Havre, France, where he meets a nice, sad Frenchman (Andre Wilms) who takes him in and tries to help him get to London, his ultimate destination. It is a story about uncomfortable juxtapositions, black boy/white man, comedy/drama, old/young. At times is slips into a rather gonzo mannered, absurdist comedy, particularly around the domestic scenes, and at other times it's a send-up of classic French policiers. Overall it's a lovely film and beautifully executed. I'm a bit tired of this kind of story (it's very reminiscent of Philippe Lioret's film Welcome from last year, which dealt with a similar story a hundred miles up the coast in Calais), but this is at least a fresh look at it.

Stars: 3 of 4

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Wednesday, October 12, 2011) (90)

2011-10-12T12:20:00.001-07:00

This is a pretty annoying story and a really bad script. Or, more than annoying, it's just a stupid, tired idea. Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, sister of the Olsen Twins) is a white girl who is escaping an upstate-New York cult when she's rescued by her tightly wound sister (played by Sarah Paulson). We see her life in the cult through her own flashbacks as she tries to re-integrate herself into normal non-cult society... albeit one that has country houses in Fairfield County, Connecticut. The cult leader, Patrick (John Hawkes), is a nice guy on the surface, but requires sexual submission by the women members of the group. He sings pretty too. Some nasty stuff happens, too, with murder and psycho-torture, but it's really never translated to us very clearly how disturbing it is or isn't. First-time director Sean Durkin would have done well to separate himself more from his script, which is clearly his passion piece. He's clearly a talented director and an average writer. Well, it's too soon to comment on his writing after on this work. There has been and will be lots of talk about Olsen's performance, but there is really not enough here for me to comment on. I think most people are taking the whole thing and the psychological effects of it and turning her into a superstar, but I need to see more. I feel most of what we see is the negative space of her acting - the spaces between spaces. There's lots of reaction here and I don't think her performance is really all that special. I'll hold judgement just for now.

Stars: 2 of 4

Shame (Sunday, October 9, 2011) (89)

2011-10-09T12:13:00.001-07:00

I think that Steve McQueen's fist feature, Hunger (2009), was one of the best films of that year and one of the best films of the past five or so years. It has a frankness and a narrative structure that is stunning and has as a subtle beauty that comes around only occasionally in movies. His follow-up film, Shame, sadly lacks all of those qualities. It is a stupid movie that trades in shock more than substance and doesn't amount to much of anything, borrowing frequently from the elegant style of the first film, but with totally banal results.

The film tells the story of a Wall Street banker-type guy (Michael Fassbender) who is a sex addict who fucks any woman he wants (he's incredibly hot, of course, so he can) and fucks a lot of them. He has relationships with prostitutes and online video-chat strippers, to say nothing of strangers he meets on the R train in the subway or at bars. He also has a sister (the tiresome and forgettable Carey Mulligan) who is a bit of a mess who ruins his mojo for unexplained reasons. Once he loses it, he can't get it back and his world crumbles.

There is a lot of nudity here (full frontal male!) and lots of frank sex. It all is just superficial, though, as it really doesn't mean anything. Who cares that his world is built on control and domination and when he loses control of everything, it tips over off it's precarious perch? One of the saddest moments of the film is when he goes on a date with a coworker and the dinner scene is a cheap rip-off of the magnificent long-take scene of Bobby Sands talking to the Priest in Hunger. Here it's just a cheap trick and packs no punch. Perhaps its that the brilliant Enda Walsh co-wrote the script for Hunger with McQueen, while he didn't work on this one... I don't know, but the end result is forgettable and dumb. What a shame. By far the biggest cinematic disappointment of recent years.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

50/50 (Saturday, October 8, 2011) (88)

2011-10-08T10:56:00.001-07:00

A comedy about cancer?! They said it could never be done, but here it is! Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a twenty-something guy who is diagnosed with some bad kind of cancer (as opposed to the good kinds). His best friend, played by Seth Rogan, is a bit of a clown and doesn't deal with the news well. The only place he finds solace is with the hospital social worker, played by Anna Kendrick. This is a very OK movie, not really all that funny, but not really a downer either. I was impressed by Kendrick, who I normally find particularly forced and showy (as in her role in Up in the Air), but here is understated and vulnerable. I hope she can keep up this tone and not try to be the high-school-drama-queen she has been up to this point in her onscreen career. JGL is brilliant as always, though the role he's playing here is more limited and not really interesting. Rogan phones in his performance as only he can.

Stars: 2 of 4

Ides of March (October 7, 2011) (87)

2011-10-07T17:28:00.001-07:00

God - I've almost totally forgotten this movie. It's based on an off-Broadway play and really feels like that. It's a very small political story about a guy running for President in the Ohio primary (George Clooney) who has a young political advisor (Ryan Gosling) who is sought after by his main rival. There's some messiness with a young intern (of course), and lots of banal liberal claptrap about energy policy and giving power to the people. It's all very stagey and very slight. Clooney, who also directed the picture, does an adequate job with the script, but can't overcome the mundaneness of the story. It all feels very on-the-nose about our political system, but doesn't really say anything significant. I love independent, non-profit theater, but this is a bad example of the worst part of it. This was clearly adapted because of the subject matter rather than the strength of the work. I'm totally uninterested in it.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

The Kid with a Bike (Thursday, October 6, 2011) (86)

2011-10-06T17:50:00.000-07:00

Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne are together one of the most interesting writing/directing forces of recent years. Their neo-neorealist style is shown beautifully in this film, an examination of a fairy tale... but again from their neo-neorealist style. Cryil (Thomas Doret) is an abandoned kid who has one love in the world, the bike his father gave him before giving him to the orphanage in the small Belgian town where the story takes place. He is found by Samantha (Cecile de France) who takes him in on weekends as long as he behaves himself. She is his belle, and he is, effectively her knight in shining armor. Things go slightly pear-shaped when his is rejected once and for all by his father, Guy (Jeremie Renier). There is an inherent self-referential quality to the tale, of course, in that Renier is effectively rejecting the kid he was in the Dardenne's La Promesse (1996), Bruno, making this film as much an analysis of their oeuvre as it is a story in its own right. I love that the Dardennes dare to make a fairy tale in their realistic style and, of course, they succeed brilliantly. It's still a slightly small movie and doesn't pack the wallop of La Promesse or The Son (perhaps because it's ever so slightly more complicated than those masterpieces). Still, this is wonderful and and fun to be inside their world for 87 minutes.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Moneyball (Thursday, October 6, 2011) (85)

2011-10-06T13:05:00.001-07:00

Ever since the Michael Lewis book The Blind Side became a box office behemoth, Hollywood has decided to moviefy each of his nonfiction books. This movie is the result of the second effort down this path, an adaptation of the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The film tells the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) who was the Oakland A's general manager in the early aughts, where he built an LCS-competing team with a very small budget by using sabermeterics, a mathematical approach to statistics that puts value on non-traditional elements of the game. In other words, this is a move version of a boring baseball story that happened a few years ago. The film is almost totally without any characters of interest and gives us almost no view into who these people are. It's about as exciting and interesting as a history text book would be about this topic. To make matters even more strange, Beane doesn't really succeed in what he was trying to accomplish (his teams never got to a World Series), so his experiment never proves to be a winner. If you care about baseball you might care about this movie, but as a movie, there's really nothing very interesting in it. The story is boring, director Bennett Miller seems to not be interested in looking into the minds of his characters and the acting is generally pretty dull.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Take Shelter (Friday, September 30, 2011) (84)

2011-09-30T09:39:00.001-07:00

So this is Jeff Nichols' sophomore effort, and as such it's slightly inferior to his debut (Shotgun Stories). This is a very good movie about paranoia also starring the transfixing Michael Shannon. (Shannon is perhaps the most interesting, strangest actor working today, or really ever to appear onscreen. He seems totally unhinged, like a modern-day Kinski. Amazing.) Here Shannon's character believes the world is going to end with a weather event, so he builds a storm shelter in his back yard, at the expense of his job and his family's faith in him. I do generally like the final product, but find the whole work less-than-totally perfect. The magical Jessical Chastain (2011 is the year of Chastain, dontcha know) plays Shannons's wife who is dealing with his mania and again gives a near-perfect performance. Nichols is turning into a really wonderful American auteur and I love what he does with atmosphere, in the weather and the thematic sense of the term. The film's European ending is fun and interesting, but a slight bit less than totally fulfilling. I do love the sum of its parts, though: Nichols, Shannon, Chastain, psychodrama, American-Gothic (albeit a more Northern one, this time Ohio).

Stars: 3 of 4

The Debt (Tuesday, September 27, 2011) (83)

2011-09-27T05:14:00.000-07:00

This is an American update of a little-known Israeli film from a few years ago. It's a story about a Massad group from the '60s who was supposed to kill a Nazi doctor but actually botched the job. They said they did the job, and thought they got away with it, until there is a small possibility that their lie might get out. They try to fix the job, but that opens up all sorts of other ethical questions that had previously been closed. It's basically The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, but if Ransom Stoddard had tried to make it right with Tom Doniphon for no particular reason. It's a good movie, but not a great one. It does continue Jessica Chastain's amazing year of acting (this time she's a ginger Jewess! Sigh.). It's a bit better than meh, and hurt mostly by it's moral grayness.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Restless (Wednesday, September 21, 2011) (82)

2011-09-21T14:44:00.001-07:00

Restless is a Gus Van Sant movie about a boy obsessed with death (Henry Hopper, fils de Dennis) who becomes friendly with a girl who has a few months to live because she's about to die of cancer (Mia Wasikowska). It's slight and facile and generally boring, but it does portend nice things from Master Hopper... and once again begs the question: why the fuck does Young Mia get work - she's really not good at all. There's nothing here that you didn't see done better in Harold and Maude (though this time the sex is at least age-appropriate... though that was part of the beauty of Harold and Maude that it was so wrong). There's really nothing about this film that's wonderful or terrible. It's mostly a fart in the wind.

Stars: 2 of 4

Contagion (Monday, September 19, 2011) (81)

2011-09-19T19:36:00.000-07:00

Why Steven Soderbergh made a big budget, ensemble disaster film is totally beyond me. Contagion is not as bad as you've heard, but far from good. It tells the story of a virus that began somewhere in China (that new evil-empire, for it's vastness as much as for its secrecy) and moves along the line to all continents and all people until a viable antivirus can be found (this time with crowd-sourcing and YouTube!) (ugh). I like how it feels like a modern zombie movie with allusions to 28 Days Later and World War Z, but the fact remains it's only a movie because it's about a virus that affects white people in suburban Minnesota (aw, how nice). There's a fun 80s'ish score by Cliff Martinez that feels a lot like Vassal Benford and Harold Faltermeyer's score for The Running Man. Still, the script here, by Scott Z. Burns is terrible and inconsistent and begs for a scene in the New York City subway. This is a dog with only a few tricks.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Drive (Sunday, September 18, 2011) (80)

2011-09-18T15:23:00.001-07:00

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn makes really interesting movies that are about suberficiality and technical surface qualities as much as they're about genres. Drive is an operatic noir but also a baroque driving movie and borrows from all of those subgenres in a very interesting visual way. There really isn't much of any narrative in this film: Ryan Gosling plays a driver who works part time at a mechanic's shop, part time as a Hollywood stunt driver and part time as a getaway driver for Los Angeles heist gangs. He has a direct way of dealing with everything he does, a style that can easily get ultraviolent in the blink of an eye. He falls for a typical noir mol, this time played dully by Carey Mulligan (that's the only way she knows how to do anything), who enters the plot only as a device to move the story to its next level. Any search for depth of story will lead one down blind alleys and into oblivion. This is a film about surface and it is interesting and quite beautiful in that context. Albert Brooks plays a wonderful bad guy here and is deserving of any acclaim he might get. All in all a fun film and pretty one, but not a great one.

Stars: 3 of 4

Autobiography of Nicolae Caucescu (Saturday, September 10, 2011) (

2011-09-10T12:03:00.001-07:00

OK - so I admit that I have a never-ending boner for anything Romanian these days, but this is such an amazing film it's hard not to be totally bowled over by it. It's 3+ hours of found footage of Commerade Nicolae Caucescu official films (with some home movies thrown in for texture in a few places) cut together as an "autobiography". As a theoretical piece it's one of the most interesting pieces in a long time (at least since Alexander Olch's The Windmill Movie, an autobio-doc made by a third party). It brings up important questions about what makes an "autobiography" and what makes a "documentary". The suggestion here is that Caucescu's persona was a creation of the Party, therefore his autobiography would be a creation of texts (films) of him in an official capacity. The suggestion is that there was no there there with him from a psychological point of view, so his autobiography is simply a superficial view of him looking at stuff (mostly of parades). This totally brings to mind Kundera's assertion that commies loved parades and how fabricated they are themselves. (Who walks down streets to music and choreography... and then who would think they're anything but concocted simulacra of reality?) It is a marathon in length, but I think that's part of the point as well: aside from the formal qualities of contemporary Romanian narrative pictures, only a megalomaniac could create an "autobiography" that was so long.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Senna (Thursday, September 8, 2001) (78)

2011-09-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

A very nice biodoc about the Ayrton Senna, the major Brazilian F-1 driver of the late-'80s and early-'90s. The film shows how he rose up to become one of the world's biggest sports heroes (albeit one that most Americans have never heard of... because F-1 is a dumb "sport") and how his "drive on the edge of sanity" style worked its way into his clashes with F-1 brass. There's a weird non-politics to the film suggesting that Brazilians loved him and his sport during one the biggest economic depressions in that country's history... a bit of bread and circus... er, circuits... (heh heh). Not enough is explained about the rules of the sport, but it's generally works as a good biography piece.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Higher Ground (Monday, August 29, 2011) (77)

2011-08-29T13:00:00.001-07:00

Higher Ground is the directorial debut of actress Vera Farmiga (it was written by Carolyn S. Briggs and Tim Metcalfe, based on Briggs' memoir). After seeing the film I hope it's the last film she directs as well. It is the story of Corinne (Farmiga), a woman growing up in the '60s in a typical, poor, somewhat broken house. She and her younger sister Wendy are sent to the evangelical church in their town where she's introduced to "giving herself to God" and whatnot. She's a bookish girl and only discovers boys in high school when one of them, Ethan, asks her to write a song for his band.

The pair quickly fall in love and by the time Corinne is out of high school she has a baby and is on tour with Ethan's band. After a terrible tour bus accident (see: Metallica), Ethan and Corinne decide to devote their lives to God. When they grow up a bit more (grown Ethan is played by Joshua Leonard), they join a hippie evangelical church with rather repressive rules (women must obey men totally and cannot seem to be teaching them anything, women have to wear very conservative clothes) but are happy with their friends in this community.

Time moves along and after a series of sad things happen to Corinne (her best friend gets cancer) she begins to question her faith and her marriage more and more. At a crossroads, she has to figure out if this is the direction she wants her life to move in or if she would rather have a more secular, worldly life.

The biggest problem with the film is that Corinne, as a main character, is a total cypher and gives us almost no perspective on her own life. It's never clear how faithful she really is and if she had doubts earlier in life. We see her struggling with speaking in tongues (something that her church doesn't believe in, but her best friend does) and we see her praying for help with certain things, but we never really understand if she's not faking it the whole time. Our view of her is entirely on the outside of her psyche, she's as much an object here as the furniture in her house.

It's a weird thing to watch a film about a person of faith and not get any sense of the depth of their faith or their subjectivity (if a man had made this film I would say it was a bit misogynistic). Forget Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, Dreyer's Ordet or Bergman's Winter Light; this is a movie about the surface of faith that thinks its a deep work.

The pacing of the film is very hard to deal with as it moves along quickly through time. From one scene to the next we're in 1969, we're in 1975, we're in 1980 and on and on. But all this change for what? We never really see a development or growth in Corinne (she might have just been faking it the whole time... we never know). I really don't think this obscurity and uncertainly is the point of the film either; I think it's the result of a bad script and bad direction.

Farmiga, as an actress is fine, but her character is rather monotone; Leonard and Norbert Leo Butz (who plays the young pastor) are very good; Nina Arianda who plays Corinne's grown sister Wendy is wonderful as she always is. It mostly seems like Farmiga, as a director, doesn't seem to know well how to tell a story with different formal and technical tools. (Silence and lighting are great, so is the use of a diary, in such a story.)

Above all else, I don't really care about Corinne or her life. She's boring and average and doesn't seem to have any story that is compelling in the slightest. A story about a religious woman who falls out of of love in midlife with her high school sweetheart? I've seen that a million times before.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Tales from the Golden Age (Sunday, August 28, 2011) (76)

2011-08-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

Tales from the Golden Age is a collection of six comedic film shorts all about life in Romania around the end of the Communist era of the mid- to late-80s, what Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu called "The Golden Age". All the films are written by Christian Mungiu, whose brilliant 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days set a benchmark a few years ago for what Romanian New Wave cynicism and aesthetics could look like.

Here, Mungiu works with five young directors to make the films, each one with a style that doesn't not seem to show the wonderful formalism of the movement: no long takes and no static shots. (Strangely the neither the credits nor imdb seem to say exactly who made which movies; the official website only mentions a few specific directors and films... oh, to be a real movie reviewer who gets press kits.)

The six shorts are mostly unconnected, but generally deal with the poverty of the era and how Romanians got along with subverting the official orders of the Communist party and bureaucratic suits, how the system was clearly too complex and top-heavy to survive. They each tell the story of so-called "legends" (urban legends) that persisted in the era, mostly about people who got away with naughtiness or ridiculous stories that could only come from a repressive, ridiculous system. They move on a string from short and silly to longer with a darker, more cynical humor. They are as follows:

1) The Legend of the Official Visit: A small village has to prepare for the official visit of a group of Party elites; just as they get everything set, the plans change, leaving the villagers bitter. (There's some hilarious puking in this one.)

2) The Legend of the Party Photographer (directed by Hanno Höfer): A group of Party officials have to correct a photograph of Ceausescu to make him look taller and not subservient to his Western guest.

3) The Legend of the Zealous Party Activist (directed by Ioana Uricaru): An urban Party activist tries to teach rural farmers to read and take better care of themselves.

4) The Legend of the Greedy Policeman: A family tries to hide a pig in their public housing apartment and kill and butcher it before a holiday.

5) The Legend of the Air Sellers: A high school girl tries to get enough money to go on a school trip by collecting bottles from her neighbors, saying she's a government official needing to do a scientific experiment.

6) The Legend of the Chicken Driver: A driver of live chickens figures out a way to make a bit of cash by selling left-over eggs laid by the chickens in his delivery truck.

Some of these are better than others (I particularly like the first two and the fifth), some of them are a bit more serious and drawn out (the second three).

At times this film feels a bit like Kieslowski's The Decalogue, a result of setting some of the stories in public housing blocks (all Communist-era public housing blocks in Eastern Europe looked alike, apparently) and the balance of absurd officiousness and absurd comedy; at times this feels like a Kusturica send-up of Yugoslavia and people doing silly things that they think are serious (there are no Romany here, but some of the rural people seem as capricious as Kusturica's gypsies). (I'm not saying all Eastern European movies are the same, I guess it's the Communist aesthetic that I'm responding to.)

This is a fun film, but not really an important one for the Romanian New Wave. It's an interesting analysis of politics on the ground during this era, but it's lessons are rather simple.

I'm a bit upset that it so greatly veers away from the slow and direct style of other films from the Romanian New Wave, but I guess that's the nature of movements - they move on and change over time.

Stars: 3 of 4

Your Highness (Sunday, August 28, 2011) (75)

2011-08-28T06:05:00.001-07:00

I had big hopes that David Gordon Green, Danny McBride and Ben Best's Your Highness would be much better than the reviews and box office numbers suggested it was. After all, the three of them are best friends with and close associates of Jody Hill, the brilliant creator of Observe and Report and Eastbound and Down (Observe is one of the best films of 2009 and the best comedy of the past decade). Sadly this film is every bit as terrible as one would understand from the hype. It's directionless and one of the most totally random ideas for a movie I've seen in a long time.

By randomness, I mean, of course, that the film is set in some sort of fantasy dungeons and dragons medieval-type world. Fabious (James Franco) is the son of the king and an all around fantastic guy. He is honest and brave and kills dragons and monsters all the time. He returns to his father's castle after a campaign and brings with him his new fiancee, Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel). Thadeus (McBride) is Fabious' ne'er-do-well brother who hangs out, smokes pot and fucks as many young wenches as he can find.

During the wedding of Fabious and Belladonna, bad wizard, Leezer (Justin Theroux... JenAn's babydaddy), comes and kidnaps the bride to take back to his dark castle. The two brothers have to set out with their knights and associates to rescue her, marking the first heroic thing Thadeus has ever done. Along the way he randomly meets Isabel (NatPort), a totally hot woman who also is randomly also seeking to kill Leezer. She joins the gang in their quest.

There isn't really much pot smoking or pot jokes in the film, unlike a past Franco-DGG effort, Pineapple Express (which was also not funny). Clearly the biggest problem here is the script, which is more forced than funny. That the story takes place in this fantasy world is sorta funny (in a stoner way), but random beyond all understanding. Why on earth are they making a stoner knight movie? Nobody was asking for this film (and there's a suggested of a sequel at the end... which will probably never happen).

This has the overall feel of the Evil Dead films - in that it's a monster/fantasy movie that has a very tongue-in-cheek tone to it. Clearly it's not that good (Evil Dead II is a great film). It doesn't feel nearly as self-knowing or self-confident as that film, and much of the awkward humor seems to be from the fact that the actors (particularly Franco) know that what they're doing is stupid and they're laughing at it as they act it (like the worst parts of Seinfeld).

David Gordon Green remains a total mystery to me. He started out his career with some very dark, small dramas that had interesting aesthetic tones and a powerful melancholic sensibility. He has now made two terrible comedies in a row (with his buddies) (although, in fairness, he's directed a few episodes of Eastbound). Where is he going? Has he told all the serious stories he has to tell? I feel like it's somewhat of a shame that he's doing this. I'm sure he's having fun, but it's a weird direction for his oeuvre, n'est-ce pas? Clearly this is a misfire of a film. I just hope it's not the sign of things to come for the people involved in it (almost all of whom I really like).

Stars: 1 of 4

Our Idiot Brother (Saturday, August 27, 2011) (74)

2011-08-27T08:27:00.001-07:00

Our Idiot Brother (co-written by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall and directed by her brother Jesse Peretz) is a feel-good indie comedy about a zany family and their aloof, sweetheart brother. In the future I will use the term "a feel-good indie comedy about a zany family and their aloof, sweetheart brother" as a euphemism for boring and stupid. This movie is so proud of its small weirdness that it covers all liberal bases (that is, it's a movie that liberals... well, white people, would love): pot smoking/dealing, lesbians, documentary filmmaking, dogs and being nice. All of these things, of course, when listed like this, are treacly and flaccid. There is really nothing different between this film and a list of things.

Ned (oh, isn't that a wonderful name for a doofus!) (Paul Rudd) is a hippie who sells organic vegetables at farmers' markets in suburbia. He has a naïve sense of the world, one where he doesn't understand how people lie to move along and how those lies should be met with some level of skepticism on his part. One day he's arrested for selling pot to a uniformed policeman and goes to jail. When he gets out he moves in with each of his tree sisters in succession (all of whom live in New York City) for a spell.

He ends up changing their lives (at first for the worse, but ultimately for the better) by being wide-eyed and having no ability to keep his mouth shut. He doesn't understand that when his brother-in-law says he is shooting his documentary of a dancer in the nude to get closer to his subject, that he's actually is lying to cover up the affair he's having. He reports this tidbit ("Did you know he shoots the documentary in the nude?") but doesn't realize that it's effectively going to end his sister's marriage (probably for the best, of course). He changes everyone's life, but not on purpose. He stumbles into being a good person, but is really just a loser all along.

Rudd is good, but the character he plays is really annoying. There's only so much stupidity I can tolerate as "he's just a well-meaning guy" before I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him to get him to realize he's being dumb. Are we really supposed to think he's just this aloof because he smokes a lot of drugs? Is there something here that "some people are just free-spirits and don't understand subtlety"? (One: there are not people like that, and; two: if there are, I hate them and don't want to watch a movie about them because they're annoying.)

I can't tell if the inclusion of a (magical negro) black parole officer is a cynical commentary here about how white people have it really easy in our world and how when they screw up (dumbly) they can get back on their feet. I don't think the film is that deep or that that criticism is really here, but that point is suggested. There is basically nothing different between Ned and, say, Gator from Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (a druggie who constantly gets into trouble with family and the law) other than their race, the state's treatment of that race and the drug of choice. Of course, Gator is a tragic figure (in a classical sense) and Ned is a lovable everyman (because he's white and the people who will see this movie are white).

The supporting cast of the film is actually solid, with Zooey Deschanel, Rashida Jones, Adam Scott and Steve Coogan (I don't really like Elizabeth Banks, who's doing her best impersonation of Parker Posey here, or Emily Mortimer, who's doing her best impersonation of an American here), though the script and dialogue are so terrible they might as well be doing bad college improv.

This movie is sweet, nice, happy and written to be funny (though I never laughed). It's just totally dull and frustrating. I think there's a nice germ of a film here. A loser brother helps his family by showing them how to be less callous. It's just the execution is so tedious, I can't even say I enjoyed it.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

The Guard (Thursday, August 25, 2011) (73)

2011-08-25T11:53:00.001-07:00

The Guard is a very weird movie. It's a cop comedy with a white cop and a black cop - but unexpectedly such a scenario plays out in Western Ireland, home to all sorts of gonzo hijinks and racist people who choose to not speak English. As the film opens, Sgt. Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) watches a car of drunk kids flip over on a road. He gets out of his cruiser, goes over to the crash scene, finds a bag of drugs, takes out a tab of acid and drops it. You see, Gerry has his own way of doing things. And it's gonzo.

There seems to be a big drug delivery that's going to come in to the port in the rural village where Gerry lives and works. To help with the arrangements to capture the dealers, the FBI sends agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheedle) to help out. Right away he's faced with all sorts of terrible stereotypes of black people from Gerry and other locals. He weathers it well, but it creates a contentious relationship between these two guys who are now working together. Ultimately Wendell returns the barbs to Gerry with stereotypes about Irish people (it's comedy, people!!).

Gerry's behavior is unconventional and goofy. He has an afternoon tryst with two hookers from Dublin (he brings them in on the train) rather than working on the case, he moves evidence from a crime scene for no good reason, he makes deals with the drug dealers he's supposed to be hunting.

Just when you think the film is a screwball cop flick, it gets sorta deep and serious. There's a story about Gerry's mother who is about to die; there's a story about rural Ireland versus urban Ireland; there's a buddy story about Gerry and Wendell. You can never really feel comfortable because it's both silly and serious.

It feels a bit like an Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg movie at times (Hot Fuzz in particular) and a bit like Henrik Ruben Genz's off-beat Danish cop western, Terribly Happy from last year (in large part due to the topography of the locations), but it's not really as good as either of those. Those films really know what they are and they do those things well (silly comedy;dark, atmospheric drama with comic elements). This seems to want to be all things at all times, but it ends up being neither fish nor fowl (cool metaphors, I know – you're welcome). It's not particularly interesting from a story/script point of view and has basically nothing artistic about it. It's a square peg jammed into a round hole and is not wonderful.

Stars: 2 of 4

Love Crime (Monday, August 22, 2011) (72)

2011-08-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

Alain Corneu's Love Crime owes everything that it is to Alfred Hitchcock. It is a noir-murder mystery very much in Hitch's style, down to the blond heroine and brunette villainess. It is, however, nothing close to anything he would have made, because the details that are the hallmark of his films are nowhere to be found here; this is the film Hitch would have made if he had had no imagination.

Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier... God, she's gorgeous) is the hardworking assistant to Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas... who can only make movies in French now) in an international business firm. As the film opens, we see Isa at Christine's house preparing for an upcoming meeting. Christine hits on Isa, who is clearly shocked by the overture, but also interested by it. Just then, Philippe (Patrick Mille) comes in to break up the tension. He's a client of the firm and Christine's lover.

Christine sends Isa to Cairo to present a deal to new clients. Her pitch goes off brilliantly and she celebrates with Philippe (who is there for the presentation) over a fancy dinner and roll in the sheets (French men are sluts). Back at the office, Christine, takes full credit for Isa's success, much to her consternation. Their relationship falls apart from there and culminates with Isa murdering Christine. It's unclear exactly why she does it, and also what her plan is to get away with it.

Whereas Hitch shows the amazing and meticulous detail of murder in a gripping, if mundane, dispassionate, way in Rope or Dial M for Murder, here Corneau takes out all the beauty and interesting minutiae and basically shows us a list of actions. It's an interesting difference that might have a lot to do with camera placement and depth of focus approaches of both directors (and a great lesson on the brilliance of Hitch).

Hitch shoots these expository scenes from far away or with short lenses that expand the frame, sometimes shortening the depth of a shot; Corneau, on the other hand, shoots this long murder and cover-up sequence mostly in close-ups or with longer lenses, isolating Isabelle (not a big problem for me, as I love looking at Sagnier up close) and merely presenting these mundane elements just as mundane elements. It reminds me of the expression that someone "is so interesting you could listen to them read the phone book". Here we have a very boring person just reading a phone book ... and it comes off sounding like a phone book.

The murder itself is weirdly direct and sudden with almost nothing shown to get us to expect it. In an interesting touch, Corneau uses a Pharoah Sanders jazz saxophone score layered over the action, adding a nonchalance to the act. I actually like this and respect the boldness of such a oddly fitting sound from what we are seeing (the conflict of the visual and the aural are wonderful), but it's almost too artistic for the overall tone of the film. It also hard to keep from laughing when you see Sagnier dressed in a white anti-bacterial suit as she does the deed (she really looks like an oompa loompa with a knife... you'll get no commercials).

Corneau uses two visual themes throughout the film, Isa in her bed going to sleep and Isa eating breakfast in her kitchen. They both seem to create a shorthand for showing her as a meticulous person who has a spotless house, who is almost totally isolated from warmth and love, who has few passions in her life but is still not average (as clean as she is shown to be, she might be the worst dish-washer I've ever seen on screen). As with the music choice, I like the strangeness of these scenes and how they break up the flow of action we see. I think they're ultimately unnecessary, or at least there should be fewer of them, but again, I like Corneau's daring to include them.

As much as I like looking at (OK - watching) Sagnier, I have to admit that her performances are wildly inconsistent from one to the next. Here she is actually pretty wonderful as the workaholic woman who clearly cares more about her job than her her physical appearance or dating life. In one scene when Christine comes on to Isa, there is an amazing moment where we see Sagnier's eyes change at the realization that she's being hit on; later we see a similar change in her look when she is given a work assignment. Clearly she is a good actor, perhaps some of the roles she gets are less interesting.

Aside from the overall polished and banal look of the film (why couldn't have been shot like a classic noir?) I really don't like that the narrative here is rather obscure. We never really learn why Isa does what she does. Is it really a crime of passion or is it a complicated way of getting rid of her boss to get promoted? There is almost no look into her psychology - not even through objective correlatives or stylized lighting and mise-en-scene. The murder is almost comically sudden and unprovoked. There are clearly some good elements here, but the overall aroma of the piece is stinky and underdeveloped.

Stars: 1.5 of 4 Stars

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (71)

2011-08-16T06:24:00.001-07:00

Omigod - there's so much punctuation in the title of the film Crazy, Stupid, Love.! What's going on there? It's a list with a period at the end? Is it a statement? Is it a description of the three acts of the film? What the eff?! Ugh!

This very sweet movie, written by Dan Fogelman and co-directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, has a very nice story with a wonderful little twist at the end. It's totally unoffensive and a wonderful love story ... or, well, four or five love stories, or something.

Cal (Steve Carell) is a sad-sack forty-something dad who is kicked out of his house by his wife of twenty-some years, Emily (Julianne Moore). He goes to the bar at a mall (naturally) where he meets the lothario Jacob (totally the name of a lady-slayer... in the Old Testament) (Ryan Gosling) who proceeds to update Cal's wardrobe and give him lessons on hitting on women and general gamesmanship.

Meanwhile, Cal has two young kids who have a 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica, who is in love with him, and Jacob is trying to make it with a redhead law student, Hannah (Emma Stone), who thinks she's better than him. (Oh - I love the idea of a hot gentile couple called Jacob and Hannah! Oy vey! The Elders of Zion indeed!) Then Emily's mister, David (Kevin Bacon) is hanging around too, and Cal's son, Robbie, is in love with Jessica... and Marisa Tomei plays a woman who Cal takes home from the bar.

I hate ensemble stories. They're so goddamn overly complicated and unnecessarily redundant.

Suffice it to say that most of the humor in the film is us laughing at Cal and the ridiculous situations he gets himself and his family into. There is a silly quid pro quo, straight out of Beaumarchais and a scuffle that ensues (physical comedy!!). It's all very nice, but really not earth-shattering.

Gosling, as always, is very funny and self-assured. I still have no idea what is up with his affected speech and it wears rather thin, when he's playing a very fashion-forward guy, leaving him sounding like he's some millionaire hood-rat. (Did he learn to speak like that from Eminem? Isn't it really fake for both of them? I still think I'd rather hear Ryan rap than MM.) Carell is very good in a more dramatic role with less goofiness and less "look-at-me-I'm-being-silly" hammy stuff we're used to from him.

This is a very watchable movie, filled with tiresome cliches and only the most polished-down modernist style. It won't upset anyone and will make everyone kiss their loved one. Bo-ring.

Stars: 2 of 4

Friends with Benefits (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (70)

2011-08-16T06:23:00.001-07:00

The magical thing about Hollywood is that movies frequently come in pairs. Sometimes that's a result of silly luck (like how last year had two mall-cop movies open), but sometimes it's because ideas float around and don't get made and then other versions are written and produced that copy from them. That is the case with Friends with Benefits, which was based on a similar screenplay bouncing around Hollywood for awhile, called No Strings Attached. Now we have two movies about "fucking friends" and they're very similar.

As with NSA, Friends with Benefits is a surprisingly watchable film. This is not to say that it's deep or interesting, or particularly good, but it is silly and fun and generally holds together storywise. Dylan (Justin Timberlake) is a magazine designer who is recruited from LA for a big job at GQ in New York. Jamie (Mila Kunis) is a headhunter in NYC who brings him to the position. After he accepts the job, the two become fast friends and commiserate over their mutual dislike of dating and their love for sappy rom-coms (OMG - so meta!).

They decide they'll start having sex all the time, but only remain friends and not consider themselves "dating". This of course goes terribly wrong at a certain point when it becomes clear that they have different expectations from their arrangement and that "friends with benefits" is really a sloppy situation.

As with most young rom-coms these days, this is an extremely foul-mouthed film with tons of frank details about sex and sexual desires. There's something strange about a guy (JT) saying he sneezes after he cums - because it's both shocking and banal at the same time. We never hear guys talking so directly about sex, but, of course, talking about it in a studio film like this, makes it tremendously less risque, more bubble-gum. Eh.

Timberlake shows himself (again) to be a true "triple-threat" talent. He's handsome as shit, funny with great timing and very good at conveying his point. Kunis is very good here (I'm not as familiar with her work, aside from Black Swine), though her role here is more regular than his. (I have to admit, in my ideal world, I would take JT from this one and NatPort from NSA to make the perfect film... but then you'd have Kutcher and Kunis - which might make a good movie poster, but would die onscreen.)

It's funny that kids who are so happy to be fluid about what "making out" and "hooking up" is, are so concerned about titles of relationships ("dating", "friends with benefits"). I guess I don't really related to these stories in some weird way - maybe I'm too old for them? They really feel like a younger generation's idea of sex projected onto characters around my age. Interesting.

Then again, I don't know why people as perfect-looking as Kunis and JT would ever get frustrated dating and having sex with as many people as possible (you could call it "pretty people's burden"). (This goes back to the Jennifer Aniston politique, where she is not a convincing sad-sack girl who can't get a date.)

And then, of course, one has to ask what the difference is between "friendship" that involves emotional support and unlimited sex and "dating". I guess I'm old-fashioned.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Help (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (69)

2011-08-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

The Help is a film about piss and shit. One might think that it's a story about empowered women, racism in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, mean-girl bullying or the humanity in every human, but it's really about scatology and urology. At our cores are not good souls that deserve racial and gender equality, rather we are all vessels for our next bowel movement. At least that's what I learned from The Help.

Skeeter (Emma Stone) is a self-possessed white woman in 1964 who just graduated from Ole Miss and has just gotten a job at the Jackson daily newspaper. She goes to her bridge club where she sees all the white girls she went to high school with (and apparently, even though Oxford and Jackson are only a few hours apart, she hasn't seen them for four years, or something). They are all dominated by the ginger hell-bitch Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) whose power comes from her deep faith in segregation and her own whitedom (actually, it's a total mystery why she's the boss as her mother, played wonderfully by Sissy Spacek, seems much more liberal and less bossy than she is).

The intrigue begins with Hilly needing to relieve herself, but refusing to do so because Elizabeth, in whose house they're playing, lets her black maid use the toilets rather than having them go outside. This is an affront to Hilly and her asscheeks and she insists that Elizabeth shape up.

As this hubbub is going on, Skeeter, who, Jesuslike, is the only White woman to care about the Black maids, notices that Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) are listening and feeling bad. They don't think their backsides are disgusting and neither does Skeeter (and neither do we, goddammit!).

In need of a story that she can write "from her heart" (let's begin the list of terrible misogynistic cliches that the film highlights rather than criticizes) for her cartoonish New York book publisher, Skeeter arranges with Aibileen and Minny to have them tell her their "stories" about looking after Whitefolk so she can write a book... by which, of course, she's really just going to transcribe (secret: transcription is not the same as writing non-fiction, Miss Skeeter). Skeeter wants to "shake up" the precious Southern society she lives in... though we never really know what drives her (aside from that "she went to college").

Pier Paolo Pasolini used shit and piss a lot in his masterpiece Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. For him it was a symbol of bourgeois tastes, of cultural fascism and of the decline of a great Western tradition. He saw the controlling of a person's basic bodily functions as the most debasing thing one could do to another.

Writer/director Tate Taylor seems interested here in the control part of this equation, but only in the most banal terms. For him, this is a symbol of blind racism, of how white people in this era had crazy notions of safety based on bigotry and how dehumanizing it was for these black maids. Pretty understandable.

But that is possibly the most superficial readings of the Jim Crow South I've ever seen. Black people had their feelings hurt by mean white people? That's insulting. Almost no time is spent discussing lynchings, segregation, terrible living situations for blacks, pay inequalities or racially bigoted laws. Looking at a very basic timeline, one sees that James Meredith entered as a student at Ole Miss when Skeeter was a junior in 1962, so she might have had something to say about her bigoted colleagues at school who harassed him. But no.

It's never really clear that Skeeter is the instigator that she's meant to be. She certainly has a beef with Hilly who she sees as insensitive and overbearing, and clearly has a desire to tell the stories of all the black maids, though that's also personally motivated. She never makes any speeches or comments about how the segregation system is wrong-minded and basically goes with the flow more as a prankster than a revolutionary.

Our hearts are supposed to be warmed by Hilly getting her just desserts (so to speak), but she really only gets embarrassed in our eyes, those of the black maids and a few white women. She still wields tremendous power by the end and her dark ways continue (as does segregation and bigotry in Jackson). There's a weird non-ending to this film, where basically nothing happens and nothing changes. Here we get a re-heated tale of subterfuge and good and evil, but nothing really happens. Black maids continue to get paid pennies for their work, continue to have to use the toilets in the back yards of their employers' homes, continue to live in a world that hates them.

Worse than anything else, the shit and piss here really comes back in act three to be merely a punch-line. So much for racial equality and human decency. But that's really all this film is. This is not a movie about the fight to end racism (like In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or even Remember the Titans). This is a movie that uses the era of major changes in Civil Rights understanding and legislation merely as the wallpaper for telling a "women's story" about women who work (black women) and women who don't work (white women). This would be an interesting Marxist parable, but it's not even that. It's a knitting-circle story that asks few questions and requires even less understanding.

The main lesson here is "all shit stinks the same" - and this film certainly is that.

Stars: 1 of 4

30 Minutes or Less (Saturday, August 13, 2011) (68)

2011-08-13T13:14:00.001-07:00

The title of Ruben Fleischer's 30 Minutes or Less comes from the fact that the main character, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), works for a pizza delivery place that has one of those deals where if you don't get your pizza in 30 minutes you don't pay for it. Considering the plot of the film involves a bomb/kidnapping, you'd expect some sort of "you-have-30-minutes-before-the-bomb-goes-off" sorta thing, but, alas, writer Michael Diliberti apparently isn't that clever.

Nothing about this film is clever or particularly funny. Nick and his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari) are fighting over their past jerky behavior and the fact that Nick slept with Chet's sister, Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria) (which, of course, is totally uncool, brah). Meanwhile across town (this town is Grand Rapids, Michigan, home of great tax-free filmmaking!), losers Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson) are trying to kill Dwayne's dad (Fred Ward) so he can inherit the lottery money he won a few years ago.

Their dumb plan involves them ordering a pizza from Nick's place, kidnapping him and strapping a bomb to his chest, then forcing him to go rob a bank. Oh-kaaay. Nick has to enlist the help of Chet to rob the bank and save his butt.

There are a bunch of moments here where you presume what you're hearing was written as comedy, but none of it is very funny. The plot is stupid in the worst banal way and the acting all around is wooden (and I'm a big fan of Zucker- ... uh, I mean Eisenberg and McBride). Ansari's style is to normally rather monotone with punctuations of high-pitched shrieks; that's normally funny, but here it just comes off as line-reading and uninspired.

This movie is a bomb.

Stars: .5 of 4

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (Wednesday, August 10, 2011) (67)

2011-08-10T14:44:00.001-07:00

Sophie Fiennes's documentary about German mixed-media artist Anselm Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, is an interesting and beautiful meditation on the creative process and a fascinating examination of how one artist sees the world and the future. The title is taken, apparently, from the biblical story where after humans leave the earth, there will be a new world of life, that there's a cylce to things and that we build things and they fall apart and then they're re-built later.

Kiefer's art is very much related to this. He's a post-structuralist painter and sculptor whose work generally is abstract but deals with the general driection of things moving toward their endings and toward chaos. Generally his work is about post-war, post-industrial, apocalyptic and post-apocalypic themes where stuff falls apart and breaks and the colors and textures are earthy, dirty and somber.

Fiennes filmed Kiefer during a time he was working at a former silk factory in the South of France. Apparently he took over a complex of buildings for several years, excavating certain areas, using the industrial spaces and materials as his inspiration. The work there is an expansion on the motifs and materials of lead, cement, dust, glass, water, books, boats (and all that those things symbolize). We see him working with his assistants on certain paintings (which are really assemblages of paint, found materials, glass and lead arranged in generally significant ways - though their significance is a bit hidden from us).

Fiennes alternates between expositive sequences of the work in the spaces of the building, undercscored by minimalist music by Ligeti and others, silent shots of the assistants and Kiefer working on the art in silence and more interactive parts where the artist explains to his assistants what he needs done by them. There are no talking heads or voiceovers explaining what we're seeing. There is, however, an interesting sequence in the middle where Kiefer is interviewed by a German journalist. He's very funny, in a very German way, in this element, possibly because the journalist is so literal and rigid — even more German than the artist.

This film is a very interesting examination of how art is about exploring human existance and how art refers to other, older art. There's an interesting dialectic between heavy, solid things and new, fluid things and how monumental elements fall apart over time. This is an investigation about how concrete can be soft and malleable and how dust and dirt can be pretty, about how all that remains after a silk factory leaves is concrete and metal. Soft and hard. Kiefer's work is not particularly aesthetically beatutiful, but it is powerful and full of complex emotions. This is an interesting look at a chapter of his career, moving from order to chaos.

Stars: 3 of 4

Sarah's Key (Sunday, August 7, 2011) (66)

2011-08-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

There have been a handful of thematically and intellectually offensive movies about the Holocaust in recent years: Life is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Schindler's List, to name just three. We can now add Sarah's Key to that list. All of these films take the already emotionally charged and boldly "good versus evil" elements of Nazis, death camps and murdered children and trivialize them until we get these cumbersome tales so thick with shallow sadness it is hard to breath.

Sarah's Key is so emotionally superficial and sentimental that it makes us feel angry that someone would have so little sense as to make such a work of dreck. The story is utterly forgettable and recycled and has such an accusatory tone that the meta-film, the concept of how the French respond to the Holocaust inside a Holocaust film, becomes more important than the narrative itself. This is a French film in the style of an American Hollywood film. The symbolism is blatant and hackneyed and historical details are pushed aside for manipulative devices. The film is facile to a fault and disgusting in its tone.

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist married to a Frenchman and living in Paris where she writes features for a magazine. She and her husband (and their early-teen daughter) are about to movie into his family's apartment in the Marais and are busy renovating and updating it. Meanwhile Julia begins writing a story about the collaborationist French government's arrest and deportation of French Jews in July 1942, known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. (This is indeed a largely unknown atrocity in the history of the Holocaust, one that is not taught often in American schools, at any rate.)

The deeper she gets into the story, the more she finds out about the fact that her husband's family probably moved into their apartment days after the previous tenants (a Jewish family) were sent to their deaths. She discovers that the daughter of that family, Sarah, might have escaped and survived after the war (well, really she just finds that there are no records of her in the Nazi records, so she assumes she survived - whatever). She goes off in search of the girl, who somehow represents the hope of happiness and freedom she is missing in her marriage (or something like that).

The film is told by bouncing back and forth between the present with KST and the past where Jews are rounded up and sent off to their deaths. Most of the time, however, the moments where we jump from the past to the present or from the present backwards seem absolutely arbitrary and more motivated by script structure than by anything thematic or resonant. Most of the transitions happen when the young Sarah, who is trying to escape the Nazis to go find her younger brother who was locked in a closet in the apartment, is in a particularly precarious position - just in case you thought Nazi roundups were all sunshine and daisies.

This tedious manipulation and banality is so omnipresent in the film, it's hard to even single out a specific moment. At one point, when Julia is telling her journalist colleagues what she is uncovering in her research, one of them says, "When you think that such terrible things happened, it really gives you pause." Gee, thanks. I wasn't aware that an anecdote about thousands of people being rounded up and put into a filthy stadium before being sent off to their deaths was sad and terrible. Thanks for making that clear to me.

I have said in the past that nearly all contemporary French films deal with national guilt over the nation's role in the Holocaust, North Africa or other colonial outposts and here we have yet another example. (I should say that this is not a negative thing, but just an observation. Audiard's A Prophet is loosely about North Africa and colonialism, but is brilliant.) What's unusual here (and not unusual in a good way) is that the story is about an American digging into the story rather than a French person. When Julia's family seems to not be interested in the story of their apartment, she gets angry and judges them for their aloofness.

This feels like director/co-writer Gilles Paquet-Brenner is both a criticizing French society for not being more interested in the history of such a bad event as well as a strange celebration of American tactlessness. Why in the world would a woman shove a painful story down the throats of her family (and then later suggest that she regrets having done it)? When has it ever been acceptable to air dirty family laundry when nobody was asking about it? What's so wrong with people wanting to live naïve lives where they don't dig into the corners of historical events for which they're not guilty? Make no mistake, Julia is an asshole in this story and she is treated like a hero.

Stylistically, Paquet-Brenner treads on the most cliched turf imaginable in film. Just like the "girl in the red dress" in Schindler's List, Sarah's key (a key she used to lock her brother in a hidden closet in their apartment before they were rounded up) becomes some sort of supersymbol that we see over and over again, always with the same superficial effect. Why does it need to be so literal? Don't we understand the pain Sarah and her family feel for their lost brother/son without needing a visual clue to explain it to us? Are we really that stupid that we can't understand the sadness of the murder of a child?

This film is much more of an American-feeling film than a French one. There is no depth to the discussion and seems to move along on a surface level, pulling on heartstrings (like introducing irrelevant other kids, just to kill them off... in case we didn't know that lots of kids died at the hands of the Nazis) rather than anything in our brains (and, yes, the average French movie is smarter than the average American movie... this probably has to do with production volumes as much as anything else).

Somehow Julia's quest, even though it shakes two family's to their foundations (despite nobody in either family ever doing anything offensive), is some sort of righteous experience. It is not, of course. Julia is a sociopath and utterly unaware of the fact that Sarah's story is unremarkable and irrelevant to the lives of contemporary people. Not to say that hidden stories are better, but exposing pain from long ago isn't always worth the trouble (Julia and Paquet-Brenner seem to think it is).

I don't need to be told that the murder of children and innocent people by the Nazis (and their Petainist collaborators) was a bad thing. I learned that lesson a long time ago. This is a case where the truth is so banal that it doesn't really set anyone free, but just makes them frustrated for finding it out - and for finding out in such a trite way.

Stars: 1 of 4

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Friday, August 5, 2011) (65)

2011-08-05T19:13:00.001-07:00

So, it's pretty special right now that there's this new blockbuster called Rise of the Planet of the Apes and there's also a documentary called Project Nim and they're both about chimps and human-chimp interactions. In fact the first 20 minutes of Apes lines up almost directly with the first act of Nim. Special. Of course one film is more or less scientifically rigorous and raises questions about our humanity and methods and the other is a popcorn-seller that feigns those things, but really just gives us a bunch of shrieking primates (humans and chimp) and no story, structure or sense.

Will (James Franco) is a scientist working for a lab to develop an Alzheimer's drug. When one of the apes he does his tests on goes crazy he smuggles its baby out of the building and into his home attic for safekeeping. It seems that this chimp, Caesar, has been genetically enhanced by meds given to his mother. OK. Will's dad (John Lithgow) suffers from Alzheimer's, but when he's given these still-untested meds, he shows tremendous mental recovery. Will thinks he's on to something... .

What he's not onto (what would have been clear if he had watched Project Nim) is that living with a chimp is not easy and that chimps are really strong and can be very violent. At some point, Will meets a veterinarian (Frida Pinto) who explains to him that he has to let Caesar run around in the outdoors out of the house (he's been living with the feckin' chimp in the attic for three years! Jesus!). They fall in love.

Five years later, they're still living with the chimp (by which point it's probably bigger than a human and many times stronger) until he attacks a neighbor (stupid gag: the neighbor gets attacked or harassed several times in the film; it's actually not funny). He's sent to a primate collection center run by Brian Cox and Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), who apparently hate primates, or something. Over time we see Caesar becoming the king of this zoo (oh, I get the significance of his name now!) and ultimately his revolt against the humans. Then there's a big fight on the Golden Gate Bridge (even though they start on the North side and then end up on the North side... confusing).

It's never clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are here. Draco and Brian Cox are clearly bad, but Franco is good (even though he's the worst scientist in the history of the world and Frida Pinto is the worst vet and the least interested girlfriend/wife ever) (there's a scene where, after living with him for five years, Franco shows Pinto the research he's been doing... and it's all out in plain view in his study in the house... as if she never though to wander in that room and read the stuff). The big pharma lab Franco works for seems to be bad, but we really don't care about it; the apes are good, then bad, then good again. There are a lot of people who die but no blame is assigned for their deaths. It's not as if this is ambiguous and interesting, it's just confusing and impossible to align with anyone (or anyape).

Technically this film is a big steaming pile of apeshit (question: why is 'apeshit' a synonym for 'crazy', but 'horseshit' is a synonym for 'shit'? Ima change that.). Baby Caesar looks like a special needs child (crossed with a Conehead) and looks nothing even close to real. The CGI animation here is a joke, particularly in the early stages of the film.

At some point when Caesar gets to be "fully grown", he is animated with the help of human-puppet-like-person Andy Serkis (who also did the "acting" for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies). Much attention and praise has been given to Serkis - and I absolutely can't figure out why. It basically looks like it could have been animated the same crappy way with or without him in a motion-capture suit. And really, if we're giving credit to the actor playing the ape, doesn't that mean the actors playing humans are doing a terrible job? (They are.)

(I want to add a few points here: 1) Most people don't know what the heck apes look like or how they move, so to say Serkis looks natural as an ape is bunk because that's an assessment based on no reference; 2) The original 1933 King Kong looked much more "natural" than this, whatever the hell that means; 3) I don't think Serkis does anything that thousands of modern dancers/Cirque de Soleil people couldn't do and I don't know why he's getting such attention.)

To say the wrting and directing in the film are bad is to insult bad writing and directing. (And yes, this might have a worse script and be directed more ham-handedly than Transformers 3.) Director Rupert Wyatt so totally doesn't know how to organize a competent sequence or scene that most of the time we're left wondering about basic things like what we're looking at or the geography of floorplans. The crowning jewel of the film is a totally unnecessary shot of Caesar and his crew, having busted out of ape jail, on top of a San Francisco trolly-car going over a hill and posing; the reverse shot of their backs show the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, mostly obscured by the apes themselves. This is terrible shot construction (all digital, of course, meaning they could have put any of those elements anywhere on screen) and fits in nowhere to the continuity of the story.

The script, by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (veterans of schlock horror garbage), is a structural mess: the first two acts are really about nothing but Caesar being locked up and not being an interesting character and only the last act has any action in it. It also has some of the worst dialogue in recent memory. When Will finally finds Caesar after he's thrown his feces all over San Francisco, all he can do is to ask him (nicely) to come back home with him. Yes, Will, your pet chimp just went fucking crazy all over town, killing people and destroying a major steel bridge; I'm sure he'd love to move back to your suburban attic. Stupid.

I can't imagine why so many reviewers are so kind to this film. It's an absolute turd and has no redeeming qualities to it. Everything from the wooden acting (Franco has that in him, to be sure) to the terrible technical stuff to the terrible artistic stuff makes this movie just awful. Rather than seeing it, you should see Project Nim. It's a very similar story and done much better.

Stars: 0 of 4

Mysteries of Lisbon (Friday, August 5, 2011) (64)

2011-08-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

Filmmakers, perhaps more than any other artists, have always been fascinated by point-of-view and the internal narrative structure of a story. There are probably many reasons for this, but it has a lot to do with the fact that film is a multi-media, multi-sensory format where things like the camera's angle, what is seen and what is unseen, who the narrator is and at what point in the story is he or she sitting all affect the audience's view of something. In literature there are certainly issues of a narrator's voice (first person, third person) and if any of the characters in the story are telling the tale, but I don't think this element is as interesting or as deep.

Raoul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon is a long movie to be sure, at a staggering 272-minutes, but it's rich and filled with an interesting investigation of point-of-view and of stories within stories. He takes cues from Kubrick, Sokurov and Bergman and turns out one of the best films of the year.

The gigantic tale, adapted by Carlos Saboga from a book by Camilo Castelo Branco, mostly revolves around Pedro da Silva, a boy who lives in a Church school when the film opens in mid-19th-century Lisbon. He does not know who is parents are and is ostracized by the other kids because of this. It is soon revealed that he is the out-of-wedlock child of a noblewoman and her lover and was protected by the head priest, Padre Dinis (Adriano Luz), when he was born. Now his mother is back in his life and Padre Dinis is going to give him the story of his birth and his parents' romance.

From this point forward we see a tremendous story along the lines of Dickens, Hugo or Thackeray that investigates the histories of every person in Pedro da Silva's family, and many of his family members' associates. This is a story of discovery for the boy, for Padre Dinis and for us as they delve into the baroque complexity of his parentage and his life.

In one of the first scenes, Pedro's mother gives him a cardboard proscenium frame for cut-out puppets - a clear homage to the toy that Alexander played with in the opening shot of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Our first thought is of all the themes from that film: the questioning of faith, the loss of faith, death, humiliation, anger at parents, reconciliation, magic and imagination. This is a powerful symbol and an efficient way of bringing up these ideas that we come back to later in the story.

This proscenium also serves to show us that the story is just a story and that we will be experiencing it through the eyes of several characters; the frame of the cardboard stage lets us know that we will be seeing a story from many different frames of reference told by many different people. Throughout the film we see sequences set up by having the characters appear in cardboard cut-out-form inside that proscenium, underlining the fictional, manufactured elements of the story. Right away there is an idea that there is no absolute truth that exists in this world, but that all history is relative, complicate to understand and somehow unnatural or fake.

From here we see and hear stories told by different characters, like Padre Dinis, some of whom tell stories within stories (and some stories within stories, within stories) about different characters and their backgrounds. We find out that basically everyone has a complicated past where they had a different identity (and some will have different identities in the future). We see how small decisions at one point will affect many points down the road, but then when you go back to retrace the steps, understanding becomes difficult.

This richness we find is not only visible in the storytelling, but also in the amazing direction by Ruiz and his brilliant composition of the frame and choreography of movements within it. He brilliantly uses short and long lenses to gain depth of field or focus on small elements, he frequently stages gorgeous static moments when characters are seen in the frame in beautiful correspondence with the others. Scenes where there is movement, like the requisite dance scenes in period pictures (there's always got to be at least one, doesn't there?), are full of people and textures, decorations and objects - a total delight for the eyes (an very reminiscent of Sukurov's Russian Ark).

Big productions are always complicated to make and open their directors to tremendous criticism (James Cameron for Avatar) or praise (Olivier Assayas for Carlos), much of which stems from the sheer size of the work (they're too long, too complicated, hard to follow, amazing in their detail, such a big and wonderful story). This film, originally made for Portuguese television where it played as a six-part miniseries, is just about the grandest thing you'll see this year, but it is also an incredibly dynamic story with a gripping plot filled with intrigue and masterful visual artistry. It's rare to see a movie of this length where the artistic elements are as compelling as the story (Assayas, for instance, didn't use much style or creativity in his presentation of Carlos - the story was really the most important element for him).

Despite its length, I strongly recommend sitting through the whole picture (it's shown in two parts and one could easily see each part on a different sitting). The scope of the story from beginning to end is amazing and beautiful and it's wonderful to see how each character deals with his or her own story, considering they are each living in their own subjective worlds seeing life through their own prosceniums.

Stars: 4 of 4

Beginners (Thursday, August 4, 2011) (63)

2011-08-04T20:18:00.001-07:00

Beginners is a very intimate, funny, personal and sad movie by writer/director Mike Mills. It does sometimes boil over with sentimentality and cuteness (he is married to Queen of Cute Miranda July), but his enthusiasm is infectious and he communicates the difficulties of discourse brilliantly through montage, score and clever dialogue (sometimes from a dog).

As the film opens, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) tells us that his mother died five years ago and that his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer) has just passed away from cancer. Hal had just came out as gay after living as a straight married man since the 1950s; in his final years, he had a lover, Andy (Goran Visnjic) and began to open up to his son in ways that he had never done in the past.

The story is told simultaneously in the present and flashbacks at the past, sometimes at Oliver's childhood interacting with his off-beat mother and sometimes looking at the last years of his father'a life, but always from Oliver's point of view. He's a sad guy; now in his 40s, he is an artist living and working in LA and never totally connecting to anyone (including his friends). There is a suggestion from them that he used to be more "into it all," but he's gotten sadder and more quiet, either because of his father's death or exacerbated by that.

At any rate, he goes to a party with them where he meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) a French actress living in an LA hotel for some short period of time. The two immediately connect, probably they each see a similar dourness in the other, and they try to make it work together despite their individual distrust of humanity and Oliver's specific pain from losing his father, who had become a close friend in recent years.

I think that a well-crafted montage is one of the best and most interesting devices a director can use, and Mills employs them here wonderfully and rather unlike anything else I've ever seen. There is a refrain and a structure they all come back to. In a monotone voice-over we hear Oliver say, for instance "I was born in 1963. This is the President in 1963; this is what nature looked like; this is the sun; the stars." As we hear these things, we see advertising or publicity stills of the things being described. Yes, it's certainly a bit precious, but it's effective. This is how Oliver sees the world and this gets us into his literal frame of reference. He is not a very elaborate emotional person, rather he sees things in a binary way: happy/sad, pain/pleasure, good/bad, comfort/discomfort. These montages lead us into this understanding.

To say they are reminiscent of Hollis Frampton's seminal art film, (nostalgia), is an understatement, and perhaps strikingly naive. The disembodied voice feels close and uncomfortably clinical at the same time; the idea of images summing up emotions and acting as stand-ins for whole stories. Really what the connection comes down to is exactly the title, nostalgia - and more specifically sadness over things long ago (even things you didn't experience yourself).

As the film goes along, Oliver seems to be working on an art project about sadness, hand-drawn pictures that have some political message and some personal connection (they're about his father's suppression of his sexuality). Clearly Mills isn't subtle with his themes.

Back with Anna, they both have issues with their parents (she has an ongoing discussion with her father he wants to kill himself for reasons we never find out). They connect because they're both moving at the same slow pace experiencing everything, stopping to smell the roses, as it were. Oliver is clearly afraid of commitment, and ambivalent about "taking the next step" with her, for fear their relationship will evaporate (because things move toward nothingness, of course).

The connection they mutually feel is frightening to Oliver, who has connected to several people over the years. First we see his unconventional mother (who is a riot, played by Mary Page Keller), who seems to interact with the 10-year-old Oliver as if she is a 10-year-old. She does a silly dance in an art gallery, she has a game where she shoots him with her fingers as a gun and critiques his death-fall. It's clear that as a kid, he connected more to his mother. After she died, he clearly connected to his father and appreciated his joie de vivre and recognized his life-long struggles. After his father's death, he connects to his father's dog, Arthur, who doesn't speak, though we do see his glances subtitled several times (this is wonderful and very reminiscent of Miranda July's joyful eccentricity).

Oliver is worried that he might not be in an emotional position, at this moment, to properly give himself to Anna, and he wants to cut off the relationship before they get in too deep. Clearly this is a self-fulfilling action, as pushing her away for no good reason...well, it pushes her away. We feel bad for her, but also bad for him. He knows not what he does.

All four lead actors here are non-Americans (and then the fifth is a dog) and only Laurent is playing a foreigner. I found McGregor's American accent difficult throughout, as much as I tried to ignore and just chalk it off to a silly LA affectation. Really, Plummer, Visnjic and McGregor all struggle with their accents, though they all give very nice heart-felt performances. I guess Laurent's performance feels the most honest (possibly because she's playing a French woman who speaks with a French accent), because she doesn't seem to be reaching as far for the emotional connections to Anna's actions. (I'm very upset that I'm not dating Melanie. She's beautiful and talented... and Jewish... .)

Perhaps Mills relies too much on his montages. I think they would have been even more effective than they are if there had only been three or four of them rather than the six or seven we see. He's certainly a bit too blunt about the theme of sadness. Clearly the actors' accents are distracting too, but Mills gets great performances out of them all. He also uses technical stuff, like a wonderful, sad piano score by Roger Neil, Dave Palmer and Brian Reitzell to convey the darkness of the film, despite it's very funny writing. This is a movie that I expected to hate for being too sweet and too on-the-nose about child-parent emotions. It's much better than that and is a very nice work.

Stars: 3 of 4

Beats, Rhymes & Life:The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest (Sunday, July 31, 2011) (62)

2011-07-31T14:20:00.001-07:00

Actor Michael Rapaport directs Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, a documentary about the history of the hip hop group and their current struggles to stay together. It's a documentary with a similar feeling to Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, that is not only about the biographical look at the band, but also an evaluation of a beef between two leaders that they're having a hard time settling.

Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, the two MCs of the group were childhood best friends, but always had a different view of their craft. For Tip it was always a serious job that demanded the most accurate attention. His passion has always laid in finding amazing music to sample on each track and knowing exactly how the layers of sounds would would perfectly together. For Phife (aka, the Funky Diabetic), he was always more interested in amazing rhymes and the more poetic aspects of the art. This always worked well for them, as they made six albums in about 12 years, including The Low End Theory, one of the best rap/hip hop albums of all time.

By the late 1990s, however, they were fighting more and more and seemed less interested in keeping the group together. They had already lost one of the original members, Jarobi, who seemed to be less into the touring thing than the others, and their DJ, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, seemed to not be interested in fighting the two titans he worked with. The band melted away, but they remained friendly. Sort of.

Phife was always upset that Tip became known as the "leader" of the band and didn't like how he would run things; Tip didn't like that Phife was never as serious about the work as he felt it necessary to be. When they got together for a reunion in 2008 at the Rock the Bells show (to help Phife pay for medical issues relating to his juvenile diabetes), they ended up fighting constantly and not speaking to one another by the end.

Rapaport talks to most of the important rappers whose styles either were influenced by Tribe or developed at the same time. Interviews include members of De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers, Monie Love, Prince Paul, Common, Questlove, Black Thought and Pharrell Williams, to say nothing of appearances by Mary J. Blige, Busta Rhymes and Mos Def. They all talk about how important Tribe's music was to them. Common has what is probably the most important comment that they all had access to the old vinyl that Tribe found their beats and samples from, but Tribe were the first guys to actually listen to those albums and use them.

Rapaport, as passionate as he clearly is about Tribe, is not a great documentarian and the film loses some power with a very sloppy style and inconsistent pace. There are some frustrating transitions and at least two albums (of the six they released) are barely discussed at all.

This is a good documentary from the point of view of telling a story of a band and getting a generally good understanding about their history. Unfortunately the issue of Phife and Tip not liking one another is not really dug into very deeply. Rapaport presents the fight they're having in it's basic terms, but doesn't really get deep into why they are fighting (unlike how Berlinger and Sinofsky handled a similar event in Some Kind of Monster). This is not a very deep movie, but it does have great music... which Rapaport can't take credit for, of course.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Another Earth (Sunday, July 31, 2011) (61)

2011-07-31T14:19:00.000-07:00

As Another Earth opens, the young Rhoda (co-writer Brit Marling) is partying in her Connecticut town before she goes off to college at M.I.T. She drives home and hears on the radio that a new planet has entered the solar system and is now visible with the naked eye. Transfixed by this tiny blue dot in the night sky, she does not pay attention to where she's driving and crashes head-on into another car with young family inside.

When Rhoda gets out of jail (a four-year stint for manslaughter), she seems to be a changed person. Sober now in every sense, she realizes that she was reckless as she tries to re-start her life in a much more modest way. During the the four years that have passed, that blue dot in the sky has come closer and closer to Earth and scientists have studied it and have come to understand it as an Earth clone, Earth II, which seems to have the exact the same land masses, cities and people that we have on our planet. That is to say there is a likelihood that each person has a double on Earth II.

What is wonderful about Another Earth is that while this very challenging string-theory-multiple-Earths story line is going on, what we experience from scene to scene is really just a very down-to-earth tale of Rhoda coming to terms with killing two people and trying to make right with the man who survived the accident, John (William Mapother). In order to do this, she becomes his house cleaner, trying desperately to help him through his depression and trying to find the right moment to reveal her identity to him. It is clear that such an existential change as Earth II affects everyone in dramatic ways, but this is much more of a melancholy drama than it is a sci-fi movie (the way Moon, District 9 or 2001: A Space Odyssey are really just dramas set in a sci-fi genre).

I really like the moody, gray-green look to the film. That it takes place in winter, gives everything a cold and wet look, which is very important to creating an interesting atmosphere. We're constantly reminded of how mediocre life is for most and the outside world works as a nice objective correlative for the internal struggles of both Rhoda and John.

As the film moves along, there's a lovely idea that Earth II represents a mulligan, a do-over, for people on Earth (I). Clearly Rhoda and John are in need of such a do-over, though as much in an existential sense as a literal one. This is a lovely device, if a bit heavy-handed. (In fact it's perhaps that it's so unapologetically heavy-handed that it works so well. Co-writer/director Mike Cahill and Marling never flinch from the inherent silliness of the story and never stop to answer questions, like "won't this new Earth crash into our Earth?" Nobody ever blinks about this construction and it works because it's so earnest.)

Marling is really amazing in this movie, particularly for a new actress I've never seen in any major role before. OK, first, she's objectively beautiful, sorta a grown-up looking Jennifer Lawrence or blond Jessica Chastain. But she brings with that a self-effacing honesty and an elemental naturalness that's refreshing and particularly rare for actors of her age. She feels like a mumblecore star with a legitimate script and real makeup. Rhoda is ashamed of what she did and feels obliged to suffer now that she's out of jail and "free," but also is a bit of a mouthy 22-year-0ld whose first-instinct sometimes is to talk back.

Sadly the third act of this film is a complete mess, filled with sentimental, romantic garbage that feels contrary to the real dark story of angst and self-torture (although I'm sure it puts butts in seats, as they say). This sequence is much more typical of what you would expect from a Hollywood production than an independent one (though it's hard to begrudge the filmmakers for wanting to be able to sell their movie, I guess). I should say my favorite directing moment happens here, when an aleatory pants pulling gives a glimpse of unplanned reality. Sometimes the best moments in movies are unscripted.

This film really is good, even if the last 20 minutes are annoying. I like the way it's a movie about the effects of science, but not really about the science itself. I think as an atmosphere piece it is very effective and indelible. I look forward to seeing more of Brit Marling and more from Mike Cahill. Clearly they're talented and know how to do the things they do.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Devil's Double (Saturday, July 30, 2011) (60)

2011-07-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

The Devil's Double, directed by Lee Tamahori, tells the story of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi man who became Uday Hussein's body double in the years just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The story does not get into the interesting stuff you would want it to get into like doppelgangers, doubles and loss of identity. It is basically an action movie with lots of tits and ass and no interesting narrative.

It seems that Latif knew Uday from some level of school, though it's not clear exactly when (maybe elementary school). At any rate the moment he returns from the battlefield of the Iran-Iraq war around 1989, he is called to meet with Uday, Saddam's oldest son. Latif and Uday look alike because they're both played by Dominic Cooper (just like Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap!). Latif is reluctant to become the double because he's not a Ba'athist and worries for his safety. He ends up taking the job and getting some plastic surgery to make him look more like his boss.

As he does stand-in appearances fro Uday, he meets all sorts of business and political contacts as well as hundreds of bikini-clad hot women. It seems that Uday's main squeeze is a prostitute named Sarrab, played by the magnificent Ludivine Sagnier (OK - she might not really be a prostitute as she really only works for Uday, but he does give her a lot of money for sex and there is a suggestion that she was a prostitute at some point in her life). Over time, Latif realizes that Uday is a psychopath who enjoys murder and chaos as much as fast cars and expensive champagne. Latif has to figure out a way to get out if his situation without dying.

The film has no particular flow, and we mostly just see a list of events from the period around 1989 through early 1991. There is no sense that the story moves in any particular way. Uday is always outrageous and turns up the craziness when he throws big parties: In one party he makes his guests, male and female, strip down naked and dance (sadly Sagnier does not join them); at anther party he literally guts one of his father's lackeys with a hunting knife for speaking back to him.

The most frustrating thing is how terrible basically all of the decorative aspects of the film, from the makeup and hair to the sets and decor look totally fake, as if they were being presented on afternoon television. The film opens with Latif riding in a car to Uday's palace and the rear-projection landscape that passes is laughable. Every close-up we see is terrible because all we can concentrate on is the caked-on makeup and prosthetic or teeth on Cooper. Even the furniture in Uday's palace looks fake and cheap.

It's really terrible that there couldn't have been a slightly deeper level to this story (even if it might have touched the line of cliche). There's no reason why we couldn't have learned about the psychology of Latif as he becomes a double for a monster (for the devil). Was he ever excited by the violence and power himself? Did he really not enjoy the whores and money that came with his job? Latif is so clean and Good and Uday is so dirty and Bad that the film becomes more of a comic book tale than a real interesting narrative. It's really just long and tedious... and even Sangier can't save it.

Stars: .5 of 4

American Grindhouse (Tuesday, July 26, 2011) (59)

2011-07-26T12:10:00.001-07:00

American Grindhouse is a fun documentary about the history of exploitation flicks and B-movies, featuring interviews with contemporary directors who were either influenced by those pictures or merely grew up in their heyday. Made by Elijah Drenner, the movie shows rather soberly this wild and limitless group of movies.

We see how early filmmakers experimented with sex and violence, until the Hollywood Production Code forced such pictures out of the mainstream and into alternate theaters. Then we see how over time, these movies became more and more popular with a public eager to see skin and/or blood, until Hollywood pictures themselves started emulating these depraved or gonzo films.

There are dozens of interviews with film histories, Hollywood directors (John Landis and Joe Dante probably the two best known of this group) and grindhouse directors, now as old men. There are fantastic clips from some of the most terrible films, including Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and Blood Orgy of the She Devils. There's a wink with everything we see, as it is all so crappy, it's hard to take very seriously in any context other than a sociological appraisal of the culture at that moment.

One very interesting thing is to see how close some of these films are to experimental films by artists such as Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor and Jack Smith. It's clear that these filmmakers looked to grindhouse fare for inspiration, and this really underlines how bizarre and unconventional such films were (like pregnancy movies or the psychedelic bloody orgy movies).

John Landis probably has the best line of the documentary, saying that The Passion of the Christ is the best grindhouse film of recent years. It is indeed - great because it's terrible and offensive.

Stars: 3 of 4