Ecstatic Text

Harmony Korine is Not Joking

2013-05-07T01:04:00.000-04:00

★★★★★

Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2013) - With Spring Breakers, director Harmony Korine creates an utterly convincing dreamworld with his playful intercutting, fluorescent photography, and ingenious use of music. It is indulgent, in the best sense of the word. It indulges your senses. It is a remarkably clear artistic expression. It defies easy categorization, despite Manohla Dargis's unfortunate attempt to do just that ("more of a horror film than a comedy" - it is neither). There are several sequences that I will remember for a long time.

Spring Breakers has undoubtedly been reviled by certain morality cops. But Korine's surprisingly earnest approach to his characters, a hallmark of his career, should neutralize such criticism. Korine is a provocateur, not a prankster. He is riffing on certain darker aspects of the American psyche, meditating on certain symptoms of postmodernity. He starts with the relatable if often thoughtlessly dismissed (spring break culture), moves to the implicitly connected but repressed (gang culture), and then springboards into a fantastical resolution that firmly situates the film as pop meta-commentary. Spring Breakers shouldn't be taken literally, but it should be taken seriously.

Spring Breakers obliterates the virgin/whore dichotomy.

Zero Dark Thirty

2013-05-05T17:13:00.000-04:00

My first new review since my extended absence from the blogosphere (due to the push to complete The Only Real Game, my first full-length feature as editor) is actually an old review, never-completed (until now):

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

★★

Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) - Let me start off my review of Zero Dark Thirty by addressing the controversy surrounding the depiction of torture as a means to track down Osama Bin Laden. The criticism from the left has been that the film justifies the use of torture because it shows that torture leads to the recovery of information that leads to Bin Laden’s eventual assassination. However, this ignores what the film actually depicts. In the film, a suspect who has been tortured is allowed to rest and clean up, eat good food, and have a cigarette. He is told that while under extreme duress he already gave up information that prevented his fellow jihadis from executing a planned attack. Tricked into thinking he already broke, the prisoner divulges the names of several men he knows were members of al Qaeda, one of whom turns out to be Bin Laden’s personal messenger.

When criticizing torture as a viable interrogation technique, the American left likes to point out that prisoners divulge more information when their captors are being nice to them, or when using psychological manipulation. This is precisely what Zero Dark Thirty shows. When under torture, the prisoner divulges nothing. When treated nicely, he lets his guard down, and allows himself to be tricked by the American interrogator.

The filmmakers said they had no agenda and did thorough research when crafting the script. Given that the resulting film is muted and neutral to a fault, I take them at their word. It’s true that without being tortured, he would not have been tricked, at least not in that way. So, it’s complex. Reality does not conform to one’s ideological preferences.

Zero Dark Thirty shows how the CIA’s job largely is to weed out disinformation, false information, misleading information, or just flat lack of information. Even after they find the compound in Abbottabad, the top analysts give the chances of Bin Laden actually being inside a “soft 60%,” which, a character remarks, is lower than the estimated odds on Iraq having weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion. The CIA is always dealing with ambiguous degrees of certitude. The film strikes me as authentic when it touches on this theme.

The problem is the film is too bound by the filmmakers’ concerns about factual accuracy, which lacks enough drama to carry the film. The mission, and the majority of the film’s plot, largely consists of CIA analysts sitting behind their desks yelling at each other with simplistic lines like “We lost 3,000 lives on 9-11!”, “We have to kill Bin Laden!”, and “Why haven’t we killed Bin Laden yet! Do you realize he killed 3,000 people?!” As an effort to raise the level of drama in such a serious film, this kind of dialogue is comes across as amateurish.

Maya, reading facts and looking at video facts

Another problem is with the female protagonist, Maya, who is shown pushing against an anonymously sexist male hierarchy within the CIA. We are positioned firmly to root for her and against her narrow-minded colleagues. This conflict is really poorly-handled. At times it seems like all she does is speculate about what they don’t really know, and then demand that her colleagues agree with her about everything. One of these men is played by Edgar Ramirez, whose presence only serves to remind me of how much richer, darker, and better Carlos was from 2 years ago, another fact-based history lesson about political terrorism.

In a climactic scene when the CIA brass are deciding whether or not they will pull the trigger on sending a team in the dark of night into Pakistan to raid what they believe to be Bin Laden’s hideout, Maya taunts her male colleagues, who have understandable reservations about executing such a risky maneuver when their analysis yields a “soft 60%.” “It’s 100%,” she proclaims, surprisingly. “Okay, 95%, because I know certainty freaks you guys out, but it’s 100.” Well, which is it? 95% or 100%? And, is she basing this on how much she despises her male-chauvinist bosses? Are we not supposed to care about the science of information analysis and probability theory? I mean, she seems to be pulling these numbers out of her ass!

Director Kathryn Bigelow is much more at home when we close out the film with the special forces executing the infamous raid on the Abbottabad compound. Bigelow’s depiction is haunting and disturbing, and will have any attentive audience-member asking many difficult questions with no easy answers. Finally the film gets dark, unsettling, complex. The “Greatest manhunt in history” boils down to a gang of heavily armed, trained-to-kill soldiers breaking into a residential building in the dead of night and shooting a bunch of people in their pajamas. This is cold-blooded assassination. It doesn’t feel like something worth celebrating. It feels like something much more murky and morally-compromising.

The "Greatest manhunt in history?"

Easily the best part of Zero Dark Thirty, this ending seems to contradict the gung-ho “Why aren’t we killing Bin Laden a lot faster!” attitude of the first two hours of the film. Perhaps Bigelow thought this change in tone would turn the film’s narrative on its head in a satisfying way, but for me, it makes the film’s overall message muddled.

As for the civil-libertarians upset at the depiction of torture, I say they are missing the assertion in the film that should be the real controversy. In Zero Dark Thirty, the black site program is shut down, hindering the intelligence-gathering tools at the CIA’s disposal. Several times afterwards, characters refer to how this program no longer exists. This is an accepted fact, and a frustration to our supposed heros. Do you, reader, believe this to be an accurate account of the present reality, in real life? Of this assertion, I am most skeptical.

Oscars 2013...

2013-02-25T22:11:00.001-05:00

In the Best Picture category this year, I feel like Argo was among the least-deserving of the lot. Argo feels to me like a good TV movie. I felt Affleck's direction was pretty weak. I was very heartened that Ang Lee won for Life of Pi. Jennifer "JLaw" Lawrence's win was a typical Hollywood "christening" of young, bankable talent on the rise. She is good, but Best Actress? I don't think so. Naomi Watts would have been my preferred choice. I thought Daniel Day-Lewis was very deserving, but I strongly feel Joaquin Phoenix should have walked away with it.

The Academy spread around the love, even giving Tarantino an award for best screenplay for his n-word-laced Django Unchained. The biggest surprise may have been a TIE in the Sound Editing category. And not only that, the respective winners also had the same long hair! (Fun Fact: The last time there was a tie was in 1969, when Barbra Streisand split the Best Actress award with Kate Hepburn.)

Long-haired Sound Editor 1 (Paul Ottosson for Zero Dark Thirty)

Long-haired Sound Editor 2 (Per Hallberg for Skyfall)

I will remember this year's show for the show-stopping song-and-dance performances, especially for Catherine Zeta-Jones doing "All That Jazz," Shirley Bassey doing "Goldfinger," and the cast of this year's Les Miserables belting out a medley of their songs for the multi-nominated film. I thought host Seth MacFarlane was pretty good, and I loved his bringing in James T. Kirk. But, I didn't understand the Affleck-Kardashian joke (which MacFarlane clearly didn't want to do). Anybody care to enlighten me?

2012 top ten list

2013-02-24T04:59:00.001-05:00

2012 was a relatively weak year for fiction films, and a relatively strong year for documentaries. It is encouraging to see more and more excellent docs released in the US every year. All the Oscar-nominated Best Picture films are flawed to some degree or another, but they all have their strengths, so in that sense they are a nice snapshot of the year in fiction film as a whole.

Out of my top fifteen films, seven are documentaries (an unprecedented number). Two of the fiction films are in black and white. Only one female director this year.

Honorable Mention:

Life of Pi; Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry; Silver Linings Playbook; Bonsai; Django Unchained; Why Stop Now; Pelotero; Haywire; Nobody Walks; A Late Quartet; The Avengers; Damsels in Distress

Top ten (plus five):

15. Photographic Memory (Ross McElwee) - McElwee has developed a personal, confessional style of documentary, in which he is always penetrating to a deeper, more profound truth. Few filmmakers share McElwee’s storytelling gifts.

14. The Invisible War (Kirby Dick) – A straight-forward advocacy doc that shines a bright spotlight on the US Military’s culture of rape. Upsetting and powerful.

13. Marina Abramovic: the Artist is Present (Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre) – Part biography, part document of Abramovic’s 3-month show at MoMA, in which the artist shared a personal connection with each and every patron willing to wait in line. A surprising, intelligent film about an artist who puts the wholeness of her body into her work.

12. Sleepwalk with Me (Mike Birbiglia) - Birbiglia establishes a conspiratorial relationship with the viewer by speaking directly to the camera, in character, a technique which also stems from the language of stand-up. Funny and heartfelt. (from my review)

11. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson) - In The Master we get to watch Paul Thomas Anderson indulge his imagination, and it is thrilling every second to watch what he is able to create with these actors and his intuitively brilliant filmic sensibility. (from my review)

10. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin) – An exciting first feature from Zeitlin, approaching themes of outsiderness and acceptance through magical realism.

9. Beware of Mr. Baker (Jay Bulger) – A biography of the influential but self-destructive drummer, immortalized by his pounding rhythms while playing in Cream. Baker’s history of flaming out and moving on develops into a portrait of a troubled rock god with very human problems.

8. Compliance (Craig Zobel) – A dramatic re-telling of a real-life event that raises difficult questions about the nature of human social behavior. Ann Dowd is terrific.

7. The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield) – Greenfield’s portrait of an immensely rich American family should be titled “The King and Queen of Versailles.” A surprisingly deep documentary about social mobility in America, tying the 2008 economic crash to a culture of mindless expansionism.

6. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr) – A gorgeous cinematic rendering in black and white filled with dread and weary. Reminiscent of Tarkovsky.

5. Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier) - A 30-something man is on the recovering end of a life swallowed up by drugs. The film respects both the audience’s intelligence and the character’s humanity. Its soulfulness is very affecting. (from my review)

4. 5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi) – A documentary about the Palestinian struggle, and the generational inheritance of suffering. A perfect balance between the political and the personal.

3. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo) – A beautiful and abstract exploration of the lives of young artists and lovers from the singular Korean auteur.

2. The Imposter (Bart Layton) – The best documentary of the year in a year full of great ones, The Imposter tells the story of a boy from New Mexico who goes missing at the age of 13, and shows up 3 years later in Spain. Full of surprising twists and turns, perfectly teased out.

1. Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh) – Though many did not take Channing Tatum’s stripper story seriously, Soderbergh clearly did. His direction is very controlled and perfectly attuned to the story’s textures. It’s so fun to watch, it’s easy to miss the hooks its getting into you, until the story turns, and you feel them.

Happy renting! Onward and Upward! May 2013 be better!

The Turin Horse

Life of Pi and the question of religion

2013-02-22T23:24:00.001-05:00

Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012)

★★★½

WARNING: BIG SPOILERS

Ang Lee's film adaptation of Life of Pi is undeniably a moving experience. Lee succeeds, incredibly, at building a believable relationship between a shipwrecked boy and tiger, and in so doing, honing in on the central question of man's relationship with the natural world. Surprisingly, what had been proceeding as if it were one of the most "true-religious-believer"-oriented films Hollywood has put out in some time, by the end turns into one of the most profoundly atheist films I've ever seen. I can't speak for Lee's intentions, but my own atheism I feel has been further-informed, and even sharpened, by the story told here.

This story turn is actually a huge twist at the end. Let me try to articulate it. The film is saying that morality and justice are uniquely human characteristics, and that God does not exist in nature. The narrator all but literally says that religion is a story we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better. Further, it is a story we tell ourselves in order to reinforce our structures of morality and justice, which is what separates us from the animals.

For me, this turn enriches the story itself and the telling of the story, because suddenly the relationship with the tiger is given a touchingly real human origin, as one of psychological-coping-mechanism (and the world of metaphorical interpretation is suddenly open to one who wishes to re-watch the film for that purpose). Of course, this interpretation would run in direct contradiction to the narrator's stated objective of making us believe in God. Perhaps this is an ironic twist.

Life of Pi isn't all great. The dialogue, most of it in voiceover narration, unfortunately dumbs down the material to the point of sounding like a children's movie. But, this kind of works given the nature of the story. The film looks absolutely gorgeous in 3D, but I do have a little issue with the camerawork. Lee claims this was one of the hardest shoots he ever had to do, which I do not doubt, but he also said this was in part due to having to learn how to direct for 3D. Yet, somehow, he seems to have not realized that a shallow focus does not a pretty 3D picture make. There are many beautiful large compositions with deep focus, utilizing the technology's sense of depth (especially with the vast ocean), but there are just as many shots with blurry areas in either foreground or background, which in 2 dimensions looks like an artistic choice (as a photographer would do), but in 3 dimensions looks like a mistake. It could be because the third dimension gives us the illusion that we can decide the depth at which we focus our vision. When the image doesn't snap in focus, we grow frustrated. Or, perhaps its just because the out-of-focus parts of the image flatten out to look like they are on the same plane. Interesting to think about, this 3D stuff, though not as deep as the religion stuff.

BTW, interesting article here.

2013 Sundance Film Festival - Too Small Films About Sexual Obsession

2013-02-02T17:48:00.000-05:00

Breathe In (Drake Doremus, 2013)

★★½

Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones, and Amy Ryan star in this drama about an upper-middle-class family living in a picturesque upstate home about 90 minutes from New York City. Keith (Pearce) is a high school music teacher who keeps his cello-playing sharp by subbing for a professional orchestra in New York whenever he can. He is bored and wants to move back into the city in an apparent attempt to recover his lost youth. Megan (Ryan) is his wife, who is also bored, but takes her husband's light suggestion of moving back to the city as a signal of impending betrayal. She collects cookie jars and never attends her husband's performances with the orchestra. Keeping these two under one roof, at least for the time being, is their daughter (Mackenzie Davis), a senior in high school who likes a boy who took her virginity but now treats her like crap.

Into this house of separate miseries walks Sophie (Jones) a beautiful, serious, secretive young exchange student from England. Keith is instantly drawn to her. Sophie hides much of the details of her past from her American hosts, but she was clearly unhappy back home, and perhaps took up the exchange program as a means to escape. She has a great talent for piano, but refuses to play, saying that if she were to play piano, it must be because she "chooses" to. While her petulance is on one level naïve, this statement implies a troubled history. One pictures an overbearing instructor making her cry through her lessons as a young girl. The details are left to our imagination.

Soon Keith and Sophie grow closer, partly over their shared love of classical music, but mostly because they make each other really horny. Doremus is good at tapping into his character's states of mind, finding the emotional beats of the scenes, and staying close on his characters' faces where necessary. The spiteful gamesmanship between the members of the ostensibly happy family, and the broken trust thusly implied, are at the core of Breathe In. The musical score reflects the narrative arc in its lush use of classical themes. The performances by the three leads are all subtle and note-perfect.

However, when all is said and done, the film feels overly small. Doremus excels at subtlety, but not complexity. A sexy young woman with a mysterious past is the perfect thing to reveal the growing fissures in that household. But, in a way, this is the problem. Sophie doesn't feel like a real character with her own motivations, but rather as a device, a writerly conceit. Doremus's refusal to reveal some layers of backstory for the Sophie character feels like a missed opportunity. The character of Megan is thinly realized and left largely out of the story. I get the feeling that Doremus was concerned that a deeper exploration of her character would throw this carefully-tuned plot out of balance.

Keith is the only real character here (other than the daughter, whose B-story is left entirely separate from the A-story). Keith has a lot of self-regard, but his cockiness covers up his core insecurities. Never has a character so needy, feckless, whiny, and selfish been portrayed in such a dignified and respectful manner, which left me feeling cognitive dissonance.

While there is much good to say about it, Breathe In is too reserved, too concerned with narrative balance, and too neatly-tied-together for me.

A Teacher (Hannah Fidell, 2013)

★★

Lower-budget and a bit rougher-in-style than Breathe In, A Teacher nonetheless suffers from some of the same problems. While director Fidell shoots with a sure hand (some great tracking shots here) and gives her actors the space to shine (lead Lindsay Burdge is especially strong), her touch is too soft. A story with great potential feels smaller and smaller as it plays through.

The film begins by following an attractive female high school teacher in Texas as she carries on a sexual relationship with one of her male students. She has rejected her family for reasons left unclear. Soon she becomes obsessed with the boy, whom she finds massively superior to the single men her roommate tries to set her up with. Her obsession grows. She begins to feel paranoid, trapped, but emotionally incapable of making a clean break.

It's a film about sexual obsession in violation of the rules of civil society. But Fidell doesn't explore enough interesting aspects of this obsession. How is her position as an authority figure actually compromised by her relationship? How does she explain her apparent sexlessness to her friends, and how does that affect their relationships? How does the relationship affect the boy and his family? The film's laser focus on sticking only to her point-of-view leaves the story feeling half-told. This isn't just something that happened to her. This story is important and interesting because of the larger social issues it raises. Fidell's approach reduces the story to its base emotions, which allows us to identify with the character because of the universality of these kinds of emotions (as pointed out by Burdge at the Q+A). But what is missed is an exploration of the specificity of these circumstances, which are not universal.

In speaking about the experience of making this film, director Fidell told Entertainment Weekly:

"I showed a very rough cut to another filmmaker early on and she started crying afterwards, saying that she had had a relationship with her English teacher in high school and that many of the events that happened in my film had happened to her. I think it was more than a little startling for me to realize how easy it could potentially be to cross that line."

But Fidell never shows that line being crossed. The film begins with their relationship already initiated. In retrospect, I feel this is the most regrettable aspect of A Teacher, in failing to depict this transition from student-teacher to lover-lover. Who initiated? How was the line finally crossed? Did it happen after class? At lunch? If this crucial piece of the puzzle were filled in, I feel it would go a long way to informing each character's motivations and states of mind in a more fully-realized way than is presented here.

2013 Sundance Film Festival - Todd McCarthy is a wrongheaded and hateful man

2013-01-25T22:26:00.000-05:00

Todd McCarthy used to be one of my favorite film critics, at least until I read his recent reviews of Shane Carruth's Upstream Color and Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess. Let's begin with the former.

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)

½★

Upstream Color is director Shane Carruth's first film since he made waves at Sundance 9 years ago with Primer. The earlier film's elliptical, hyper-intellectual style was an exciting challenge to work through as a viewer, because the film had at its core a puzzle to figure out (the science, and mechanics, of time travel). With his new film, Carruth has taken that style, amped it up a couple levels, and applied it to a sci-fi/fantasy scenario that is head-scratchingly strange. I give Carruth credit for going all-out in developing his rather seductive filmic language. Dreamlike images skip through large stretches of time at regular intervals (I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mathematical algorithm dictating the length of shots). We drop in on the characters mid-conversation. Think of The Tree of Life, a film that I loved, but which turned many people off because of perceived pretentiousness. Now imagine if that film were about a worm that passes from a woman to a pig, thereby connecting the pig to the woman, and also to another man who had a similar experience and also has a pig proxy, and both pigs are lovers and so therefore both humans are lovers, and when the pigs produce babies, the pig farmer puts them in a sack and dumps them in a stream, where they drown, and after awhile their rotten corpses release blue ink because apparently when the pigs had babies, they passed along the worm, and it produces a blue ink. That's why some orchids are blue, apparently. Okay, so imagine that story, shot in the style of The Tree of Life.

See, they are compelled to be together, because the pigs are compelled to be together!

The story has no value! There isn't a drop of humanity in this film. Any pretentiousness felt by certain audiences in Malick's ambitious personal epic would only be amplified by such an inane plot. In his Q+A afterward, Carruth was asked what the significance of the worm and pig were, and he had nothing to say other than what I described above. "That's pretty much it," he explained. His inspiration for the story, he said, was to explore what it would be like for people to have their lives suddenly altered, where they would have to tell themselves new stories that were rational to try and cope with new, unknown forces controlling their lives. "Transference," is what he called it.

This sounds like it would be an interesting idea, only Carruth's "exploration" feels miles away from any real human condition. These people's new lives, after all, are tied to the fate of two pigs on a farm somewhere. The humans spend their time arguing, going out to dinner, having sex, looking at birds. Their "transference" has left them with shared memories, for some reason. The man has some anger issues. He chops down the trees in his backyard, and beats up some men in an office building. The woman likes to dive to the bottom of a pool to pick up pieces of broken concrete. They both start reciting from Henry David Thoreau's Walden. The color yellow suddenly has some symbolic meaning.

I was bored after a half hour. Each new "twist" was as meaningless and random as the last, and it quickly turned into a mental exercise, a shallow curiosity, which I guess is exactly how one might engage with it. In the Q+A, one audience member remarked that this was his first Sundance screening ever, and he thanked Mr. Carruth for providing him with the experience he was hoping for. In his stunningly arrogant review, critic McCarthy writes

Trained academically as a mathematician and engineer, [Carruth is] into structures… rather than working out whatever it is that is to be expressed… All this will seem profound to some and mean nothing to those who never got algebra.

If you are looking to watch a movie in order to feel better than other people who just don't get it, Upstream Color is the film for you. And, Mr. McCarthy, I got an 800 on my math SAT, and I thought Upstream Color sucked, big time.

Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, 2013)

★★★★

The day after the Upstream Color article, McCarthy wrote a similarly gross review of Computer Chess, which, he writes, "will be of interest only to the snootiest of specialist festivals and venues." What balls(!) to write that, after writing that anybody who doesn't like Upstream Color is too dumb to learn algebra. Aside from the dickishness of his statement, McCarthy just really couldn't be more wrong here. Unlike the Carruth film, Computer Chess is brimming with humanity, finding a wealth of insightful humor in recognizably human interactions, and with open arms welcoming the audience to engage with its formally playful spirit.

A group of young computer programmers gather for an annual computer chess competition in the early eighties. Computers had yet to achieve the level of sophistication required to beat a human chess master, but they were on their way, and one way for these programmers to test their models was to enter them into competition with each other. It was a very small, unheralded gathering, in a crappy hotel, sharing space with a hilarious EST-like "encounter" group holding a seminar in the same hotel.

Computer Chess is a situational comedy, albeit told in a refreshingly (and purposefully) unpolished way. Bujalski seems bored, or worse, by the conventional way of doing things, and he stubbornly blazes his own path. His edits are so jarring it will inevitably turn some people off, but I really think Breathless is an analog here. As Godard doubtlessly encountered, Bujalski will be accused of bratty pretentiousness by the likes of McCarthy, et al, but such an interpretation misses that his bizarre edit choices are visual jokes, which Bujalski makes clear in several spots. He's not alluding to some enigmatic deeper meaning, as Carruth does. He is remarkably clear in what he chooses to communicate to us. He just refuses to allow us to mindlessly consume it.

Bujalski at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. See the trailer here.

That's not to say Bujalski isn't shooting for something akin to profound, for while Computer Chess is very funny, it's not merely a comedy. It winds up having thoughtful things to say about artificial intelligence and the progression of technology, nerdishness, sex, and confirmation bias. With Bujalski's emerging canon, it is clear he harbors a nostalgia for old shooting formats. This is his first film shot on video, and he uses an ancient Sony camera first manufactured in the 1960s. In fact, the camera was his inspiration for the entire film, as he asked himself, "What kind of story can I tell with this camera?" I can't help but think of the resulting film as the product of postmodern restlessness, reflecting an instinct to deconstruct representational systems and methods of storytelling so as to better see ourselves, to tear down what has been said in order to say something new.

Blog blurbs part 2

2013-01-15T01:46:00.001-05:00

It is again time to blurb on my blog:

Pelotero (Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin, Jonathan Paley, 2012)

★★★½

A documentary about the system in place in the Dominican Republic for scouting and signing professional baseball prospects, Pelotero has the guts and smarts to explore the exploitative aspects of Major League Baseball’s practices. Athletically gifted young men with the weight of their entire family’s future on their backs have to compete against each other for million-dollar contracts while dealing with untrustworthy agents and scouts, constant suspicion over their age, and collusion on the part of the teams to drive signing bonuses down. The film is intimate with the details of two young men in particular, whose paths diverge through the course of the story. I was surprised to see that the film had Bobby Valentine listed as a producer. My respect for Mr. Valentine has grown as a result (but I’m still glad the Red Sox fired him!)

Oslo, August 31^st(Joachim Trier, 2012)

★★★★

Trier’s second film after his excellent debut, Reprise, Oslo, August 31^st has a very different temperament and pace than the earlier film. It is dour and down-on-life. It follows a 30-something man who is on the recovering end of a life swallowed up by drugs, and whose newfound sobriety has left him feeling simultaneously betrayed and guilty. His obvious intelligence does not arm him with the tools to deal with his problems, but instead allows him to see himself clearly and judge himself harshly. None of this is heavy-handed. The film respects both the audience’s intelligence and the character’s humanity. The film’s soulfulness is very affecting.

Wuthering Heights(Andrea Arnold, 2012)
★½

Andrea Arnold impressed me with Fish Tank a couple years ago, a beautifully observed coming-of-age story in the British Realist tradition. Here she switches gears and takes on a period piece based on a classic novel. Arnold responds by ignoring typical rules of the period drama entirely. Her Wuthering Heights is often wordless, her handheld camera always hovering close to the subjects with a wide-angle, soft-focus lens. The characters drift through the landscape, suffering, and causing suffering. For awhile her technique is moving. But then it just drags on and on, punctuated sporadically with increasingly overheated melodrama. It felt like Arnold forgot about her audience, or ran out of ideas, or both.

Dark Horse(Todd Solondz, 2012)

★½

Dark Horse is about a middle-aged man who still lives with his parents and even works for his dad. He constantly screws up and then accuses his dad/boss of being too hard on him. His growth is stunted. The character felt right, three-dimensional. Unfortunately, the plot never gained any traction with me, the scenes too sketchy and loose. We see him lost in his own head, imagining different, weirder versions of real people he knows. We see him embarrassingly pursue a romantic relationship. None of these things connected with me. Large stretches of the film felt like amateur-hour, and I was surprised to see that it was directed by Todd Solondz. (Yes, it is odd that I didn’t check before watching.) I kept trying to care about the character, but all Solondz allows you to feel is pity.

part 3 coming soon (like, sooner than last time I said soon)...

Briefly

2013-01-09T10:45:00.003-05:00

Briefly - I'm seeing 6 new films at Sundance this year, and I'm hoping to blog about all of them. This includes Andrew Bujalski's new movie, which is exciting.

The much anticipated Blog Blurbs part 2 is coming before the end of this week, I promise!

In the meantime, a link to an article featuring a deconstruction of the new Bowie album cover:

http://virusfonts.com/news/2013/01/david-bowie-the-next-day-that-album-cover-design/

Blog blurbs part 1

2012-11-17T18:53:00.001-05:00

It's time to blurb on my blog:

Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)
★★½

Looper is a time-travel sci-fi action-adventure that is more successful than most (though not entirely) at articulating a consistent internal logic. (For the ultimate mindf*ck on time travel, see Primer). Taking place in a lawless 2044, Johnson's vision is most striking when exploring the chaotic urban environs, with their bombed out boulevards and notorious back alleys, an eerily realistic possibility for our future. The pace slackens as our protagonist Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as opposed to Old Joe, from the future, played by Bruce Willis) hangs out with Emily Blunt and her crazy 7 year-old son on their farm. Young Joe meets Old Joe in a final confrontation that is both meant to sort out which version of Joe gets to make his reality, and to resolve the endless loop of violence that is man's ability for selfish and amoral acts. It's a lot of weight to put on a single scene, asking more seriousness from the audience than this movie justifies, and coming off as moralistic and even a tad preachy.

Looper effects shots

Marley (Kevin Macdonald, 2012)
★★½

Marley is a chronological retelling of Bob Marley's life, from birth to death. It's utterly conventional structure had me bored. At times it felt like homework. A few things stood out, like understanding the depth of the rejection he felt growing up in Jamaica as a son of mixed parents ("half-breed" seems to have been the insult of choice). His casual affairs with many women is treated in an adult and complex way. He coped with his dramatic decline in health by projecting a spirit of positivity and hope for the future, a theme which became his trademark throughout his career, and which carried added weight in such dire circumstances.

Bob Marley growing up in Trench Town.

Sleepwalk with Me (Mike Birbiglia, 2012)
★★★★

Stand-up is very, very hard, and it takes a particular talent for storytelling to set up a joke in the right way that it pays off, and that you don't lose the audience along the way. These strengths are clearly in Mike Birbiglia's possession, and they are on full display in Sleepwalk with Me, adapted from his autobiographical one-man stage show. This is a movie about growing out of the extended adolescence that is one's middle-twenties, and about taking responsibility for the little lies you tell people to avoid the ugly truth. Such themes are well-worn territory and ripe for maudlin and condescending interpretation. Birbiglia avoids these traps by grounding the dramatic in his dead-pan, observational humor. He establishes a conspiratorial relationship with the viewer by speaking directly to the camera, in character, a technique which also stems from the language of stand-up. It feels true, and it's quite charming.

Mike Birbiglia laying it on the line.

Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry (Alison Klayman, 2012)
★★★½

It didn't take long into this documentary on the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Wei Wei for me to become a fan of his work. It was the middle-finger series of photographs, as well as his themes of sexual openness and confrontational pushing-of-the envelope, armed with the simple truth and his ability to reframe it, that instantly drew me to love him. I think it'd be hard for anyone to come away without a similar feeling after seeing this documentary. Director Alison Klayman explores some aspects of his personal life that serve to make him seem less god-like. This only adds weight to his immensely brave actions against the Chinese government, when he literally risks his life. For fans of art, and for those concerned about human rights, Never Sorry is a must-see.

A Study of Perspective, Tiananmen (Ai Wei Wei, 1998)

June 1994 (Ai Wei Wei, 1994)

more to come...

The Hip

2012-11-11T00:28:00.001-05:00

One of the reasons I love going to Tragically Hip shows is the utterly unique phenomenon of lilly-white jock-type frat boys shouting along in unison to anthems like "Courage, it couldn't come at a worse time" and "We'll live to survive our paradoxes!"

The most literate rock band ever.

Don't worry readers, there will be new film reviews this week. Stay tuned!

The Master

2012-09-26T14:09:00.000-04:00

★★★½

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012) - The Master is at once the most serious and mature work Paul Thomas Anderson has ever done, and the least satisfying. Threadbare in plot elements, it's a showcase for the actors and director to work their magic. The film is comprised of a few number of long scenes, all of which are impressively staged and acted. But to begin to compare the film to other masterpieces of which I am reminded, like John Huston's The Dead, or even earlier works by Anderson, is to reveal what this film lacks, and that is a place for the audience to enter into the story, and to care about the proceedings.

Getting off on teasing the audience with expectations of narrative coherence, (one can easily imagine moviegoers scratching their heads on their way out of the theatre going, "I thought it was supposed to be about Scientology?"), it is a thrilling choice to continually disappoint said expectations. Nothing is ever quite fully sussed out, but Anderson hints at just enough meaningful backstory that the looming impressions left by two powerful portrayals of character stay with you long after you leave.

One could also say its not about very much. An editor-philosopher once told me convincingly "I like movies that are ABOUT things!" In raw intellectual terms the film falls flat. At best it is a rehashing of a point made more forcefully in There Will Be Blood - history is comprised of stronger men walking over weaker men.

I am also reminded of Taxi Driver, at least in that Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), like Travis Bickle, seems to represent pure id. (In The Master, Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, represents pure ego.) Quell and Bickle lack the ability, or at least the enthusiasm, for true introspection. However, Bickle had thoughts and ideas, manifestations of his delusory perception of the world, and he acted on them, and they were destructive. This is interesting. Freddie Quell doesn't seem to have very many thoughts at all, and his adolescent impulses are too brief and impulsive to be really dangerous to anybody but himself. Maybe it is brave to take seriously a character who is truly empty-headed, truly, exceptionally weak. This may be a smart thing to do but, in this case at least, it doesn't make for a very interesting movie.

To be fair, it is fascinating to watch how a vulnerable person like Quell can be so enraptured by another man simply by the forcefulness and eloquence with which he speaks. Influenced by what I can only call Dodd's projection of pure masculine power (the religious/philisophical nonsense Dodd spews is merely the language of manipulation), Quell does seem to eventually find some inner peace, and seek some resolution in his life. But Anderson gives us few clues to help us reach any deeper conclusions.

From an auteurist perspective, The Master is a further development of the recurrent theme of the dynamic between the stronger man and the weaker man. In Anderson's oeuvre, that dynamic has had many different colors. In Hard Eight, we see the consequences to the soul of the stronger man when he has to act as a hero (Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly). In Boogie Nights, we see how both the stronger man and weaker man are equally vulnerable to the forces around them (Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds). In Punch Drunk Love, the weaker man finally stands up for himself and he finds a paper tiger and a renewed sense of purpose (Adam Sandler and Hoffman). Daniel Day-Lewis rules over everyone and the world in There Will Be Blood, and loses his family for it. Life is a struggle for these characters, and the struggle is one of self, of will-to-power.

So in The Master we get to watch Paul Thomas Anderson indulge his imagination, and just because I am not as interested in this story as he is, it doesn't mean it isn't thrilling every second to watch what he is able to create with these actors and his intuitively brilliant filmic sensibility. High marks for the camerawork, lighting, blocking, art direction, costumes. The chaotic and fascinating music score by Jonny Greenwood is in the vein of There Will Be Blood.

Premium Rush

2012-09-21T13:16:00.001-04:00

★★★

Premium Rush (David Koepp, 2012) - Premium Rush has a simple set up that lets you sit back and enjoy the ride. It's about bike messengers in Manhattan. They make very little money. They do what they do because they love riding, and getting paid to ride is like a blessing.

I'm a sucker for stories wherein people love their jobs and work hard at it, as a team, with a degree of self-respect and self-awareness.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee, who not only loves his job, but also seems to have a pathological need to take extreme risk. He rides without a brake, at top speeds, refusing to slow down for busy intersections. I wouldn't say he has a death wish, however, because that would be much too dark for this kind of film, which doesn't bother to psychologize its characters beyond stock two-dimensionality.

The plot involves a crooked cop who gets in trouble with the Chinese mafia. Both the cop and the Chinese are after Wilee for whatever it is he's messengering from Columbia all the way down to Chinatown. Michael Shannon, who plays the cop, overly relies on quirk. The role is too light for him. He doesn't know how to make it fun, though he tries. It's just not a very interesting character who gets way too much screen time. I would have preferred more of a concentration on the Chinese plot, which has more textures and is more effective at adding dimension to the story.

There are many funny lines in Premium Rush, especially between Wilee and his girlfriend Vanessa, a fellow bike messenger. While dodging bad guys, and other vehicles, Wilee also has to contend, as I'm sure he does every day given his tendencies, with normal cops. An amusing gag has one bike cop, particularly irked by Wilee, in frequent pursuit.

The plot circles back in time to look at events from multiple angles in a very effective manner. We always know where we are spatially as well as in terms of consequence to the plot. This is a big credit to the filmmakers: it is luxurious to not have to stress your brain trying to wade through unintentional incoherence.

Most of all, the pleasures of the film are found in the physicality of the messengers and their natural presence within the streets of the city of Manhattan. The deeper meaning held within this film is that it is a love-letter to Manhattan, to the physical closeness in which Manhattanites live, which shapes who they are and how they act.

In memoriam: Tony Scott

2012-08-22T22:38:00.000-04:00

Tony Scott specialized in action-epics, finding early success in the 80's with hits like Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II. He was a visual craftsman in the best sense of the word - his images could be downright seductive (The Hunger). More than that, though, Scott had a sense for how to allow the audience into his films. At his best, such as in Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, and Unstoppable, for example, Scott imbued the action-film formula with a keen instinct for the small human elements that allows one to connect to the larger-than-life stories.

Two films from his oeuvre truly stand out. He went on to direct the first film based on a Quentin Tarantino script, True Romance. His interpretation involved doing away with Tarantino's nonlinear structure, and finding the fairy-tale soul within the dark (and juvenile) subject-matter. Tarantino was very pleased with the result.

But Scott's best film is Spy Game, a masterpiece that elevates the action genre. The film is that rare balance of visual spectacular and brainy seriousness, crisscrossing the world and exploring the morally troubled center of international covert politics. Scott does a lot of dazzling things with the camera and with his editing, but all of it is in service to the telling of a story that has purpose and weight.

Around midnight on Sunday, Tony Scott jumped off a bridge in Los Angeles, an apparent suicide. He will be missed.

Thoughts on Tarkovsky's The Mirror

2012-08-07T04:18:00.000-04:00

★★★★★

The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)

Of the Andrei Tarkovsky works I love the most, Andrei Rublev is the best. But The Mirror is one of my absolute favorite films that clock in around 90 minutes or less.

I love it because I think it's incredibly beautiful. It's like a trip through the memories of a man full of longing and regret, but also remembering peacefulness, calm, and also fear. There's an incredible sense of youthful mysteriousness, anxious, perhaps fearful, of what will happen next. And by "youthful" I mean like an old man looking back on his younger self and remembering how he was once was, awakening to the vastness of the world, clinging to his mother while also trying to understand her.

In addition, it doesn't wind up meaning something that can be easily outlined in a review or in discussing it - its meaning must be unlocked through the cinematic apparatus and through no other means. It's strengths do not borrow heavily from other arts such as literature or painting or still photography. It's visual poetry. The scenes tend to begin with mystery and perhaps dread, and wind up cohering to some degree, and then pulling back to reveal both a visual beauty and also a complexity of meaning.

Simply put - it's just damn beautiful! For me, Truth and Beauty are the two pillars which I worship. Documentarians tend to discount the latter. I do not mean to disparage one for doing so. Documentaries require luck and are quite difficult and underfunded so I'm not complaining - I get the mentality! But for fiction films, I do pay attention to aesthetic quality, though not to require a specific style nor even that it has to be "pretty" in a simplistic sense. I guess by "Beauty" I mean that it needs to have an aesthetic methodology that brings out its strengths. It needs to pay attention to what it is that it is doing, not just to the meaning presumed to be produced by what it is doing.

Prometheus, son of man

2012-06-14T23:55:00.002-04:00

★★★

NOTE: I changed it to three stars, which seems to reflect my feelings more accurately, which is consistent with the review.

Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012) - Prometheus begins in a very promising way, establishing a mythos as a jumping-off point, and then quickly immersing us on the incredible ship that gives the film its title. The attention to technological detail is second to none, and the visual and spatial coherence of the different cabins and their functions is matched only by the mix of wonder and dread that such a claustrophobic environment induces, and which director Scott teases perfectly.

Simultaneously, we meet the only nuanced and interesting character in the film, the android David, played by the immensely gifted and versatile Michael Fassbender. His smirk belies his otherwise creepily cold activities, and one is left to wonder at the motivations of a being without emotions, especially considering the human lives depend on his superior functionality. He is the most fascinating Android since Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unfortunately, unlike Data, David is crammed into a swiftly-paced monsters-in-space action thriller such as this, and the filmmakers struggle to adequately give color and dimension to their formally ambitious creation.

It is not a coincidence that David is named for the first biblical man. The film is peppered with allusions to the Christian God and how belief in such is somehow related to the supposedly scientific quest to encounter mankind's creators and ask them "why?" (a dull and simpleminded desire that is repeated over and over in this film, even after they all start getting killed). How David fits into this human quest is complicated, which is why its interesting. David is programmed as a "son" of human parents, yet he proves to be an unreliable one. The conception of the David character opens up a can of worms and threatens to break out of the box of an otherwise generic plot.

The Christian theme, David's father-issues, and the central plot itself, all revolve around the theme of the unreliability of children. Despite the intelligence behind the original story idea, the writing here is quite lazy. If only Scott had put as much focus on story development as he did on visual effects. Unexplained plot turns abound, and it winds up being the most gorgeous B-movie ever made, with stock 1-dimensional characters (apart from David) and goof-ball Alien-movie self-referentiality (which, admittedly, is what makes it fun to watch).

Yes, the film winds up not taking itself too seriously. The suspense is acute, the monsters rendered beautifully gross; the film is a must-see for the visual effects and art direction alone. But that's not enough. The bar was evidently raised at some point in the conception of Prometheus, but the finished product settles for something less meaningful.

Hud

2012-06-07T18:59:00.001-04:00

★★★★★

Hud (Martin Ritt, 1962) – I’ve long been a fan of Hombre, which is a masterpiece of the late-Western genre (and currently streaming on Netflix), dealing with the Indian question with a progressive ear for racial prejudice mixed with a complex understanding of the thin line between justice and fatalism. The filmmakers behind Hombre were also responsible for Hud, the much more widely-known and lauded film from 1962. Both films star the great Paul Newman. So, finally getting around to see it, I expected Hud to be a Western.

Instead, it is very much grounded in present-day Texas 1962, with a big government and infrastructure already rooted, so it does not really belong to the traditional Western genre. Here, the sense of community is already lost. Hud is a panicked sounding of the tolls at the death of basic human goodness, and a pointed critique of crass American libertarian laissez-faire capitalism.

Melvyn Douglas plays the patriarch of a cow ranch. Paul Newman plays his irascible son whose rebelliousness implies a great, unarticulated, existential despair. His instincts are always toward satisfying the id, the immediate need of the self, without regard to consequence or anyone else, despite his father’s overbearing insistence on ethical behavior.

Yes, I can wax on about the incredible performances by Newman, Douglas, and Patricia Neal (who won an Oscar for her performance), and about the gorgeous wide-screen cinematography, but what makes it a masterpiece is the writing. It articulates many things that could stand in as an “explanation” for Hud’s behavior, the kinds of things that cinema studies courses pay particular attention to (economy, gender, social mores). But what really gets to your gut is when the explanations don’t add up, and the “answer” evades us. You feel the desperation and the panic that much more sharply.

Douglas evokes this overwhelming despair when he observes, “It don't take long to kill things, not like it takes to grow.”

Post Script

2012-06-03T18:25:00.001-04:00

★★★½

P.S. (Dylan Kidd, 2004) - If you've ever heard me speak about Roger Dodger, you know I consider it to be a nearly perfect film, with its probing insights into the loner male psyche whose faux-confidence barely covers up a battered and bruised ego, and whose penchant for self-sabotage due to a childish yet somewhat sympathetic fear of relationshippy commitment belies his obvious intelligence and in this way prefigures Lena Dunham's Girls, despite the fact that he is male, middle-aged, and from the pre-Bush economy. Failing to pitch his script to the studios, Kidd randomly bumped into actor Campbell Scott and handed him a copy. Scott read it, wanted the role, and helped get the picture made the way Kidd wanted it made (with him as director). Roger Dodger ended up winning Best Feature at the very first Tribeca Film Festival in 2002.

So what happened to him after that? He made what appeared to be (based on watching the trailer) a treacly Hollywood love story starring Laura Linney and Topher Grace. And then, he dropped off the planet. I never got around to seeing P.S. in part because I didn't like the trailer (this is über-ironic in that not only do I have a rule about not judging a film by its trailer, but one of the big reasons for said rule is due to the unfortunate trailer for Roger Dodger), but also because I assumed Kidd would make several more films thereafter that perhaps I would be more interested in. But, Kidd never made another film.

I hoped that I had a hidden gem on my hands when I finally got around to Netflix-streaming P.S. What I watched was a film with very obvious flaws and just as obvious strengths. The film's individual scenes are often brilliant, sometimes head-scratching, but always unexpected. Linney and Grace, along with co-stars Gabriel Byrne and Marcia Gay-Harden, all give mature performances as characters who shape-shift before your eyes while at the same time remaining believably grounded in reality. The twists and turns of the central unlikely romance reveal our protagonist's needs, assumptions, and unreasonable projections. Kidd treats the act of sex with a refreshing frankness, though the complicated repercussions are never ignored nor mitigated.

The problems, however, are many. When it should plunge us immediately into the story and the characters so that we have something to care about, instead the first 15 minutes are basically shots of Linney looking sad while staring out a window, the lousy indie guitar music attempting to put us in the mood to feel something deep, in a way that feels cynically conceived in a production meeting. Every single transition between scenes is similarly tone-deaf. It is a badly edited film, which I mean truly, and this is a rare thing. Linney's character's position as dean of admissions at Columbia University doesn't seem fully fleshed out. She has all of 1 interaction with anybody who isn't Topher Grace or Gabriel Byrne, her secretary who notices she changed her clothes midday as she rushes by her desk. That's it. She never does any work at the University, it seems. Also, I still have NO IDEA what the title of the film is supposed to mean.

P.S. was adapted from a novel by Helen Schulman, with Schulman and Kidd sharing co-writer credit. It has 10(!) listed producers on IMDB. Maybe I'm just biased, but I'm inclined to think Kidd is responsible for the good stuff in this film, and the producers are responsible for the bad stuff. And I wonder about the level of cooperation between Schulman and Kidd. There is a level of incongruity in the work, as a metaphysical aspect of the script contrasts with the types of things Kidd seems to be interested in in the performances he draws from his actors.

P.S. is excellent in the ways that truly matter. Life is messy (overdetermined plotlines, typical of mainstream fare, work against this notion). Adults often succumb to selfish and immature behavior, though they are better at dressing it up than young folks. You can't escape your past. Kidd hits all these notes and more, thanks to his rigorous focussing on building character and working with his talented cast.

A Man Escaped

2012-04-27T20:42:00.000-04:00

★★★★

A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1957) - I went to BAM to see a film by Robert Bresson, a French filmmaker who I had studied at NYU. In school I had seen clips from his Diary of a Country Priest but had a hard time recalling what I had been taught. I hoped my BAM screening would jolt my curiosity in a new filmmaker.

After having seen A Man Escaped, I imagine the book on Bresson is that he was really into spirituality, and in finding transcendent themes while studying base human situations. While these kind of grander notions are hinted at in this early film of his, what was really impressive about this film is how grounded it is in physical reality. It pays almost exclusive attention throughout the length of the film to the minutiae of one man's jailed existence, his attempts at escaping, and the obstacles to said escape.

The story takes place in Nazi-occupied France in the midst of World War II. We never really find out about the protagonist's supposed initial crime, nor the state of the larger war, nor any activity that exists outside of our protagonist's point of view. It is incredibly precise and restricted in terms of point of view, and I mean this as a commendation. Its disciplined, crafted style is quite impressive. I am reminded of Taxi Driver because Scorsese tried to do the same thing with point of view, (although at least 2 scenes do not feature Travis Bickle).

As I think more deeply about it, the comparison to Taxi Driver is not so apt, though it is instructive in a limited way. Taxi Driver was concerned with psychoanalyzing its protagonist. Bresson is not. While Taxi Driver rang out with paranoia and self-loathing, A Man Escaped rings out with self-discipline and humanism. The former is a reflection of the protagonist's state of mind, the latter is a reflection of the filmmaker's state of mind. It is possible this is a defining difference between Modernist film and Postmodernist film.

Notwithstanding it's lack of psychological inquiry, the film remains quite affecting, for its impulse toward human understanding in the midst of inhuman circumstances. The sound editing is brilliant, enriching our visceral experience, which is one of the reasons this is in many ways just an early action film for sarcastic anti-social types. And I mean that in the best way possible.

Woody Allen at his finest

2012-04-05T20:57:00.006-04:00

★★★★★

Another Woman (Woody Allen, 1988) - After a long break from watching movies following the release of my top ten list (due in part to overdoing it beforehand and in part to there being almost nothing new in theatres that I want to see) I finally popped in a DVD that I remember discovering a few years ago and recently purchased. Woody Allen's films in the late 80's were often much more starkly serious in tone than the tragedy/comedy mix that had become his signature style. Many critics look back on this period as ponderous, in many senses. Films such as Crimes & Misdemeanors and September tend to leave people wishing he would inject these depressing stories with his biting humor, as he so successfully did before. While this kind of criticism unjustifiably reduces Woody Allen's intellect, I can in a way understand it, as these films, though intriguing, remain problematic.

Yet, nobody ever seems to mention Another Woman, the true masterpiece of this era, and perhaps his greatest film. Rather than leaving one wanting something perhaps a little more yielding, Another Woman leaves one wanting nothing. It is a simple story that suddenly becomes not so simple. It is a film of digestible length. It is undeniably moving and impeccably acted by its wondrous cast (Gena Rowlands and Gene Hackman are riveting). Woody Allen's writing has rarely been so penetrating or complex. But more than that, his choices as director are experimental in a way that is perfect for the subject matter, and that wildly succeed at deepening our involvement in the narrative.

It is about a woman who tells us very calmly at the beginning who she is. And then the rest of the film is dedicated to dismantling the comfortable self-assurance that such a premise implies. I cannot recommend it enough.

Top Ten List Change (Oops)

2012-02-27T23:16:00.004-05:00

NOTE: I originally left Drive off the list entirely, and had Contagion at #10. After publishing the list, it just wasn't sitting right. I was missing the boat on something. And, after 24 hours of letting it sink in, I knew what it was. It suddenly became so clear - Drive is great in uniquely cinematic ways, so even though people can't seem to agree about why it's good, they just know they like it. We want to call it great, so we find a credible reason that sounds smart and good. But, it's ineffable, really. It doesn't translate directly to words. That's why I struggle so often with how to write about films without resorting to just describing how it's shot and edited.

What ultimately led me to rewrite my list to include Drive was that I was reminded of my youthful self and what drew me to the cinema to begin with, and I came to realize that I've been overthinking the question. So, there it is. #6.

2011 Top Ten List

2012-02-26T12:28:00.018-05:00

This year had a nice wide variety of quality films out. Let’s get right down to it. I’m listing the honorable mentions first, because I always feel sorry for them sitting at the end of the article. Putting them here seems more honorable.

Honorable Mention:

Contagion, Poetry, Weekend, The Names of Love, A Dangerous Method, Blackthorn, Coriolanus, Rampart, Meek’s Cutoff, Hugo, The Man Nobody Knew, Winnie the Pooh, Young Adult, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Warrior, Win Win

Top Ten:

10. Terri (Azazel Jacobs) - "Terri is not deliberately quirky, nor predictable. It does not exploit Terri’s problems for easy sympathy. It is strange and unique and utterly human." (from my review)

9. Beats, Rhymes and Life (Michael Rapaport) – “Just as you are riding along thinking this is a nice crowd-pleasing but fairly surface-y picture, it gets deep … The film contains a subtle yet powerful message about the importance of music itself as a means of bringing people together…” (from my review)

8. Restless (Gus Van Sant) – “It’s about living with the tragedy of untimely death: the death of loved ones past, death standing beside you in the present, and the lonely life that comes after.” (from my review)

7. Senna (Asif Kapadia) – “Documentaries are often re-enacted or stylized in certain ways … but here, we see it all happen before our eyes. His emotions are played out all over his face. The filmmakers didn’t have to resort to tricks or testimony from others for us to feel like we know Senna.” (from my review)

6. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn) - "It’s hard to explain what the film is about. It’s not a very 'heady' picture. But it gets to your gut. It is able to articulate a strangeness and a slow-burning horror at the inhumanity of man that stays with you, long after you see it." (from my review)

5. Melancholia (Lars Von Trier) – “Here he sets aside all trickster impulses of provocation to create striking visual tableaux that, in their majestic simplicity, convey a profound emotional depth that transcends words.” (from Lisa Schwarzbaum’s review)

4. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) – “The film is a singular achievement, a piece of realist cinema with the pull of a suspense thriller, given its characters' array of deceits, troubles, burdens and miseries both self-inflicted and society-reinforced. Yet the level of craft, and the ease and rightness of every performance in this tale of divorce and its collateral damage, transforms what might be crushing melodrama into a moral riddle with no correct answer.” (from Michael Phillips’s review)

3. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) – “The characters, along with the filmmaker, are Christian, but the spirituality of the film is universal. I would say Malick is evoking the Japanese concept “mono no aware” – a gentle sadness at the passing of all things. Malick leans into the specific but then, constantly, jumps off the specific and flies into an exploration of the universal. It is universality through specificity, and thus grand perspective.” (from my review)

2. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan) – “Following years of troubled post-production, Kenneth Lonergan's long-awaited follow-up to You Can Count On Me finally sneaks its way into theaters with a startlingly low-key release. Now an unintentional period film, Margaret follows a New York City high-schooler named Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) as she grapples with witnessing a fatal bus accident she feels is her fault. A fascinating, deeply felt film of wild, untamed emotions and probing insights, the film will likely confound whatever audiences find themselves aware it's in theaters.” (from Mark Olsen’s review)

1. Shame (Steve McQueen) – “What makes it a masterpiece is how McQueen articulates all the small moments that add up to a whole. Each scene really seems like it's been cinematic from the moment of conception, with the director closely attuned to what needs to be articulated and how the composition, focus, blocking, pacing, all determine how we engage with it, shaping our experience, and thereby speaking complexities to us. He shoots using a dazzling array of styles. The stable wide shot, long and graceful tracking shots, shallow focus, and unblinking close-ups suddenly feel like they’ve never been used with such clarity of intent before.” (from my review)

That’s 2011. Shame is a masterpiece. Good year for docs. Good year for movies that were shot a LONG time ago (other than Margaret, there was also Miss Minoes and A Brighter Summer Day). A bad year for Oscar. After overlapping quite a bit with Academy tastes over the last few years, this year the only Best Picture nominee represented on my list is The Tree of Life, although A Separation is up for Best Foreign Language film, and Drive squeaked into the race for Sound Editing. And it’s not like I've only chosen super-obscure films, either. There is broad consensus about the poor Oscar picks. Check out Peter Travers ranting:

Men who act

2012-02-21T22:28:00.008-05:00

Michael Fassbender’s daring, powerful work in Shame was not recognized by the Academy, and this is patently criminal. Ah, but the Academy’s sins do not end with this. This category is a real mess. I am about as big a fan of George Clooney as you will find, but I don’t think he should be nominated for the mediocre The Descendants. In the weeks before this Sunday’s Oscar broadcast, The Descendants has been written about as a possible spoiler for the favorite, The Artist, but I just can’t get excited about the race. Ditto for Clooney. I liked Jean Dujardin, but it seems odd to include him in this category for his broad, faux-silent-movie intentional over-acting. Oldman and Pitt were fine, but they are boring roles. Demian Bichir’s inclusion on the list seems like a strange joke. As in the Academy’s prior embrace of Sandra Bullock and The Blind Side, the Academy seems to be cynically making nakedly pandering choices. (But, isn’t the Academy voting democratic? Do all the voting members really want higher ratings for the Awards show badly enough that they’d jeopardize the integrity of their Awards? Aren’t these people supposed to be experienced and artistically exceptional?)

It really is head-scratching, in light of Fassbender’s work as mentioned above, but also because of two other lead male performances of note: Michael Shannon in Take Shelter and Woody Harrelson in Rampart.

★★

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011) – Michael Shannon plays a man experiencing frightening visions of an impending storm. It’s a metaphor, duh. The problem with the film is it doesn’t do anything with the metaphor. The plot never develops beyond it’s initial concept. We just see the same scene over and over and over again. Shannon gives a very controlled, commanding performance of a man who becomes delusional and paranoid, in danger of destroying his marriage. The problem I have with the character, though, is that he both takes his visions completely seriously, as a real harbinger of a real storm, and acknowledges that he is suffering from mental illness. He knows that he has a family history of schizophrenia and seeks out counseling, even as he takes a loan out on the house to get the storm shelter expanded. This contradiction is not satisfactorily explored nor resolved. But, the bigger problem is that the metaphor goes nowhere. The filmmakers wrote themselves into a corner, which can happen with high-concept material like this, but usually not as early as the first act.

★★★½

Rampart (Oren Moverman, 2011) – Rampart is about a beat cop in LA. He’s a bad guy. He’s not racist, per se, but he has no qualms about using brutal (and illegal) methods to do justice, or to graft some untraceable money. It’s like a more realistic, and realism-oriented, version of Training Day. While occasionally beautiful, I found most of the photography to be distracting. The film lets a lot of its larger ideas about society fade into the background, as the plot focuses in on our lead character. While I would have wished for more development of the cop's indignation at being "judged" by politicians for doing, as he says, their "dirty work," the film is strong when depicting the domestic life of the man, and his relationship with his two daughters. It is an intelligent and mature character study of a stereotype. He escapes cliché in many ways. He’s a character who has a kind of integrity about him. He is very smart. He seems to genuinely love women, and remains respectful to them even while unashamedly committing crimes against men.

Rampart is an excellent film, though not perfect. What makes it a must-see is Woody Harrelson’s riveting, nuanced, and absolutely flawless performance.

Catching up on missed 2011 films…

2012-02-05T16:28:00.004-05:00

The average, mainstream non-movie-buff type person, in my estimation, does look to the list of Oscar nominations as a shorthand way of getting a snapshot of the quality of the year in films. Yes, many people do not think of the Oscars in this way, but for those who don’t see many films during the year, but do watch the Oscars, this is the chance for Hollywood to communicate the worth of their profession to the masses.

That’s why it is a real shame they blew it like they did this year. I will be issuing a correction (and unofficial apology) when I release my top ten list the night before the Oscar telecast. It’s been a surprisingly deep year in quality films, and as a reflection of that I feel forced to expand the format to 15 films, especially as I catch up on DVDs of films from earlier in the year or that were released later in the year but flew entirely under the radar. I’ve seen a number of great films over the past couple weeks on DVD or Netflix Streaming. Here are my favorites:

★★★★

The Names of Love (Michel Leclerc, 2011) - The original title of this French film literally translates to “The Names of People,” which I find more interesting, and also more accurately descriptive of what the film is really about. Masquerading as a meet-cute love-story, it’s really about the legacy of political repression in families as passed down from one generation to another. The film is lively and lovely, funny and intelligent, and charmingly made. It’s a rare example of what a romantic comedy can actually be.

★★★★

Blackthorn (Mateo Gil, 2011) – An old-school Western about Butch Cassidy as an older man, living a quiet life in Bolivia. Like any good Western, Blackthorn is really about the fundamental questions of civilization and morality. It is about a specific time and place, and the advancement of technology and how this affects how people live. The film has stayed with me strongly in the weeks since seeing it. It is directed with a spare and poetic eye by Mateo Gil, who previously wrote Open Your Eyes and The Sea Inside for director Alejandro Amenábar. Sam Shephard plays Cassidy as wizened and wistful, weighed with regret. The Bolivian landscape is beautiful and punishingly vast, the perfect setting for a Western. Unfortunately, the flashback scenes featuring Cassidy with the Sundance Kid as they make their original escape to Bolivia are cheesy and unconvincing.

★★★★

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2011) – An ambitious film from South Korea from the director of Oasis and Secret Sunshine, Poetry is similar to Margaret in its non-prioritization of tonal consistency in favor of reaching for the richness and complexity of an individual life over a short period of time. Mija, an older woman, joins a poetry class at the same time as she is confronted with a horrible truth about her grandson, whom she raises alone because her daughter is working elsewhere. She is not wealthy and she receives government assistance, which she must supplement by taking care of a sick old man who doesn’t always treat her with respect. This woman seeks to be more spiritually in tune with the world around her, only to find others who are cold, jaded, lewd, or just dumb. To seek truth in the world around you is to be confronted with the pain of living. To see how Mija negotiates her response to this realization is when Poetry is richest.

★★★★

Terri (Azazel Jacobs, 2011) – Terri is probably my favorite of this bunch. It is a very small film, and it isn’t about anything overly-ambitious nor groundbreaking. Terri is an overweight high school student in California, who takes care of his uncle, who vacillates between lucidity and dementia, because his parents are not around. He is an intelligent and sweet kid, who just has had a hard life and needs psychologically healthy formative

experiences. John C. Reilly plays the school principal who recognizes Terri’s potential, yet also recognizes the need for concern for his stewardship, as Terri begins to consistently show up late and wear pajamas to class. All of this sounds like well-worn territory, but Terri is not deliberately quirky, nor predictable. It does not exploit Terri’s problems for easy sympathy. It is strange and unique and utterly human, and I fell in love with the characters and the film.

★★★½

Putty Hill (Matthew Porterfield, 2011) – A fictional film with a bare wisp of a plot which serves as a hook to let the camera (and by extension audience) meditate on a portrait of a town, and a reality of life. The subjects are families poor and white, and their disaffected youths. Director Porterfield chooses to shoot as if it were a documentary, letting non-professional actors play versions of themselves while the camera rolls, and at times asking the subjects questions from behind the camera. The aesthetic may seem gimmicky to some (it was a bit jarring at first for me), but I stopped worrying and just went with it. I soon became absorbed in the accumulated portrait of a town full of people who go through life with, as one character says, a heavy heart, not just because of the specific events in the film, but also, the film implies, because of the cycle of poverty and the effects thereof on the entire community. It is a loving portrait that feels true, respectful and intelligent, and also very sad.

And the nominees are...

2012-01-25T00:25:00.017-05:00

Oscar nominations 2012

The last several years have seen a surprising array of challenging, emotionally difficult films get nominated for Best Picture and other major awards at the Oscars. This year, we see a return to that emotionally safe "bufferzone" at the heart of the mainstream, the only exception being Terence Malick's strange and beautiful Tree of Life. Still, out of 9 nominees, you'd think I'd agree with at least two of them, especially after wholeheartedly supporting Black Swan, The Fighter, 127 Hours, and The Social Network last year, and The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, and Up in the Air the year before. I don't always agree with the eventual winners, but at least the Academy wasn't completely embarrassing itself with its nominees lists.

This year, I'm dismayed. I liked Hugo a whole lot, but where are any of the following?: Shame, Margaret, Melancholia, Contagion, Drive, A Dangerous Method, or Young Adult? All of these are the kinds of films the Academy has nominated in the past. This year, the only nomination among this group is for Drive, for Sound Editing, a category in which I certainly feel it deserves to win.

By the way, no Pixar film this year! My theory of the Annual Pixar Best Picture Nominee is out the window. Of course, Pixar didn't actually release anything this year, so I think my theory still holds. Perhaps they are saving up their energy to come out with a really big film in the hopes of actually winning the big award next year. I hope this does not happen.

After reading absolutely nothing in the press about who is favored, I am going to make my predictions. The favorites for Best Picture have got to be The Artist, Hugo, or The Descendants, with an outside chance for The Tree of Life to take it, although maybe I'm overly optimistic about that. Clooney will take Best Actor, continuing his remarkable success at the Oscars. (Side note: Michael Fassbender's exclusion from this category for Shame is criminal.) Best Actress has got to be between the venerable Glenn Close and Meryl Streep, both in very "actorly" roles. This category is boring. Why wasn't Charlize Theron nominated?

Best Director category is up for grabs. Scorsese is the obvious choice, but the Academy just gave him an award recently, and given their previous stinginess with regards to the great Marty, I remain suspicious of the relationship. I suppose the winner will likely go along with whichever film gets picked for Best Picture). I will make a pick but I must say I think the odds are pretty evenly spread out between the top three.

I haven't seen enough of the nominated films yet to convey my opinion of who should win among this pool of presumably mediocre nominees. I did see The Descendants and didn't particularly care for it. I thought it was a good movie about real estate, which was supposedly the B-story. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was all art direction and no plot. My girlfriend fell asleep for nearly an hour and when she woke up, she hadn't missed a single beat of tangible forward momentum. The Artist was largely unoffensive, though a very light piece that fails to truly cash in on the potential of its premise. Moneyball has no core to it, nothing to make you really care about the lead character. Midnight in Paris is a Woody Allen movie, so it's good and I encourage anybody to see it, but it struck me as irredeemably sexist and not one of the Woodman's more emotionally honest works. Hugo is a wonderment of cutting edge 3D cinema in ode to the wonderment of the fantasies of George Melies, who pushed cinema at its earliest stages to inhabit the dreamworld. It has a needlessly overwritten plot, but is thrilling and intelligent nonetheless.

My predictions are in italic.

Actor in a Leading Role
Demián Bichir in "A Better Life"
George Clooney in "The Descendants"
Jean Dujardin in "The Artist"
Gary Oldman in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"
Brad Pitt in "Moneyball"

Actor in a Supporting Role
Kenneth Branagh in "My Week with Marilyn"
Jonah Hill in "Moneyball"
Nick Nolte in "Warrior"
Christopher Plummer in "Beginners"
Max von Sydow in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

Actress in a Leading Role
Glenn Close in "Albert Nobbs"
Viola Davis in "The Help"
Rooney Mara in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"
Meryl Streep in "The Iron Lady"
Michelle Williams in "My Week with Marilyn"

Actress in a Supporting Role
Bérénice Bejo in "The Artist"
Jessica Chastain in "The Help"
Melissa McCarthy in "Bridesmaids"
Janet McTeer in "Albert Nobbs"
Octavia Spencer in "The Help"

Directing
"The Artist" Michel Hazanavicius
"The Descendants" Alexander Payne
"Hugo" Martin Scorsese
"Midnight in Paris" Woody Allen
"The Tree of Life" Terrence Malick

Best Picture
"The Artist" Thomas Langmann, Producer
"The Descendants" Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Producers
"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" Scott Rudin, Producer
"The Help" Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, Producers
"Hugo" Graham King and Martin Scorsese, Producers
"Midnight in Paris" Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum, Producers
"Moneyball" Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt, Producers
"The Tree of Life" Nominees to be determined
"War Horse" Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers