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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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