Once Upon a Time in the Cinema

Film. Now more than ever.

2012-02-08T00:41:00.001-05:00

My favorite moment in The Artist isn't one of Michel Hazanavicius's deep focus, cross-compositional gags where signs comment on or joke about the action or the lack of talking. It doesn't involve Uggie, either.

My favorite moment in the movie is where Peppy recovers George's film and holds it up to the light, examining it carefully. The film cuts to a close-up of the frames, and as she looks, they animate ever so slightly. It is an image of the two of them in the outtake from earlier in the film, dancing for one moment and collapsing into laughter the next.

This is, for me, the soul of The Artist, and the whole reason it will win Best Picture, the whole reason it may become the platform from which many an impassioned blogger will campaign for the necessity of film. This is one of the few moments where The Artist overcomes its own nostalgia to revel in the beauty of its medium.

George, if we recall, has burned all of his films in a fit of drunken rage. Save this one. He holds on to it because of its exact lack of commercial or artistic value. It's just a shot, a moment that was discarded and tossed out of the film (though not of The Artist. One of several instances where the film effortlessly conflates the diegetic and non-diegetic seamlessly. We don't seem to care, even though it shouldn't make sense to us. It takes the POV shot to fascinating highs.). And yet, where George's producers could find no value in this shot -- this mistake -- he saves it at its moment of potential destruction.

"The film" has become, in this instance, a transcendental, romanticized artifact. The medium itself has captured a moment of real interaction. A "real interaction" that stands in direct contrast to the "artifice" of the scene that is being filmed.

The Artist is, deep down, a plea for us to keep films around. I have a couple of friends who like to poke at me for even calling them "films" -- it is, after all, the "pretentious" way of saying "movies," although not as bad as "moving pictures," which they see as just retrograde and silly. But there is deep concern in some pockets of the scholarly pool, and I'd argue beneath the cheery veneer of The Artist, about whether or not "films" are still "films," and if they're not, what are they?

If a "film" is meant to connote celluloid, is "digital film" still "film?" Is it more like video? Are video productions films? I know, it's a semantic quagmire, and part of me is simply being rhetorical. But as much as The Artist wants us to remember "the language of the silent cinema" as filtered through the retrospective mythologies of our 21st century perspective, its larger cause is to make us remember the medium itself.

There are many "gazes" in the film, and lots of them are turned towards a stage. In one shot, the camera takes the perspective of the screen, looking at the audience. In the theater, the effect is almost like being behind a one-way window. In other moments, George appears to be lit solely by the flicker of his small film projector. And while the film ultimately seems to insist that progress is more like a steamroller than anything (George has to do a film with sound, even if he just dances and covers up his very un-Hollywood voice), it begs us to at least think about what we're losing. It wants us to have a dialectical engagement with Hollywood history (or history in general?) even though I think it stages the thing a little incorrectly.

What will happen when "films" cease to be "films"? A Blu-Ray may look great, but you can't hold every frame in your hand. The Artist emphasizes, in my favorite of its moments, film's ability to stop and preserve life in an instance. An instant that is 1/24th of a second. What was a throwaway exchange was captured, preserved, and serves as the core of memory. Life, replicated mechanically.

Part of what's difficult to sort out about Michel Hazanavicius's film is where exactly he's placing this film rhetorically, critically, theoretically. Clearly, despite what this moment of holding the celluloid signifies, he sees film as a construction (it's one of the most formal movies imaginable) and not real. He makes us love Hollywood and its locations, even though any of us who've seen Sunset Blvd. have a pretty good idea of what will happen to George. Because in 2011, we know more than George Valentin. But because we know the "tragic" version, we can accept this fantasy, this alternate reality that "only the silver screen" can give. George Valentin is the shadow of the Old Hollywood. He is not its reality, nor does he try to be. He is its fantasy. That's why the omnipresent score grinds to a halt at the moment of the "BANG!" - The Artist delights, more than anything, in re-writing Hollywood history to something we want it to be.

Hazanavicius pays homage, invents his alternate ending of dialectical fantasy where George Valentin morphs seamlessly into Gene Kelly, but he wants to guide us back to a moment of "film language," a moment that lacks congestion and clutter. A moment that creates spaces to not only enjoy the film but think about its devices.

I don't mean to suggest that all the Academy members will vote for The Artist because it makes them want to "save film" from the unstoppable onslaught of digital projection and filmmaking. They'll vote for it because it makes them feel good and it's the ultimate "They don't make them like they used to" movie (even when it's not really making them like they used to, because it knows more than they used to).

But The Artist wants us to (figuratively) hold it as lovingly as Berenice Bejo holds that strip of celluloid. It wants us to remember not Hollywood, but film. Film now. More than ever.

Remembrances: On the 84th Nominees

2012-01-24T12:39:00.000-05:00

To remember. To create a history. To relive an experience. To suddenly have the past, as Walter Benjamin might suggest, "flash up" for a moment, hoping and waiting to be grabbed.

This is what unites this year's Academy Awards. The act of remembering, the act of creating a personal or collective history.

We see this most explicitly--or perhaps most pervasively--in our two Best Picture frontrunners: The Artist and Hugo. The former is constructed head to foot to look like something it isn't--a movie from the late-20s/early-30s. It's a feat of reconstituted aesthetics that brings with it the weight of mythologies about the movie industry's conversion to sound and a purely romantic ode to something past. The latter explores the technology of "the future"--3D cinematic space--by traveling to the past and reframing one of cinema's earliest technicians as a romantic martyr. In a more childlike, eyes-wide-open way, Hugo is the better movie about the magic of movies.

But the Best Picture race offers more outside of this hermetic seal of "movies about movies," even if there's virtually no chance for anything else to win. The Tree of Life is a movie of filmed memories and interior recollections, childhood approached from middle age. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close uses the shared memory of 9/11 as a space for a child to overcome his own personal loss (and boy, does it exploit that image). Midnight in Paris is about nostalgia--a particular kind of memory that distorts history. In that film, Allen explores a dislocation of place and identity, a soul trapped between multiple time periods and moments of history. War Horse takes place in World War I--a historical film--The Descendants has the spectre of a deceased family lineage hanging behind George Clooney's decisions. The Help reframes history from the perspective of white guilt and a search for a black voice (as problematic as its racial politics are). Billy Beane's memories of his own personal defeats haunt the narrative of Moneyball.

But as these films look toward the past, they also look at the future. Moneyball is about re-inventing the wheel and worrying about what that re-invention means for a whole institution. The Tree of Life pushes, in one majestic finale, from the past to the present to the future. Hugo has one foot in its diegetic past and another toward us in the theater: Scorsese seems to be asking, what will the films of tomorrow look like? Where is our magic? Ditto The Artist, a film that reads almost like a plea to remember "film for film's sake" at a moment where Kodak has filed for bankruptcy and the industry braces to switch almost completely to digital.

Every year I have people ask me why I care at all about the Oscars. After all, I haven't really agreed with them much since 2007, and I've become intensely indifferent about the actual winners in that time. But who they pick fascinates me because I see it as the story the industry wants to tell itself about itself. If they pick The Artist, or if they pick Hugo, that will say something about the industry's panic about moving into an era that is post-film. When "films" cease to really be "films." Of course, whether that's an empty gesture or not remains to be seen. Will they be like the Hollywood Foreign Press and help increase funding for film preservation? The Academy is many things, but it is first and foremost a symbol of what the industry stands for.

Overall, this is a really bizarre year for Oscar. They can nominate both The Tree of Life and Extremely Loud for their top prize. One is an oblique art house film, the other a straight-down-the-line-conventional three-hankie-weepie. They can nominate a performance as subtle as Gary Oldman's in Tinker Tailor and not nominate Michael Fassbender for, well, any of his four roles. They can nominate Rooney Mara in Dragon Tattoo but not its screenplay.

There are some great surprise nominees in here--Malick/Tree of Life and Oldman/Tinker's screenplay are chief among them. I have many films I adore--Hugo, Moneyball, Midnight in Paris--in the thick of the race. But overall, this was a year where Oscar played it safe. Buzzed performances like Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt's in Young Adult--daring, bracingly dark comedic performances--are slighted, while conventional "Oscar Roles" like Branagh's and Nolte's are front and center. Movies that "The Internet" (bloggers, digital critics, IMDb-active 18-49 year olds) loves like Drive and Melancholia are all but absent, while Big Hollywood gets its obligatory slots in the Sound and VFX categories (Bigger is Better, right?). John Williams gets TWO scores (including one that sounds remarkably like Apollo 13), while Trent Reznor gets the shaft. And at the end of the day, even the most successful film of the year--Harry Potter--can't crack out of the hell the Academy's relegated it to for the past ten years.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse when I bring up last year's show, but this is really the leftovers of The King's Speech winning those prizes. It brings them back to the center of their taste spectrum. It's not a tragedy if The Artist wins Best Picture, or if The Descendants wins Best Picture. They're both fine movies, maybe even great in their own ways, but they are particular kinds of movies that make those years like 2007 seem all the more anomalous.

"The trick is not minding," so the saying goes. And truly, I don't mind. I can't be bitter when Terrence Malick and Martin Scorsese are both nominated for Best Director. I can't be upset when Rooney Mara got her nomination, Moneyball earned six, and Hugo stands atop the pile with 11 nominations. It's just when you step back and look at the picture as a whole, you have to imagine what it could have looked like.

These are the kinds of memories the Academy wants to cultivate. The kind that show variation and a willingness to sort of think outside their box, but without being bold enough to cast the ballot that really breaks down even one of that box's walls.

Oscars: Category-by-Category Response

2012-01-24T10:02:00.000-05:00

You can see the nominees in my post below. This is purely reaction, speculation, cursory thought:

Best Picture: Um. Wow. It almost went according to plan, and then they announced The Tree of Life and I jumped so high I think I almost hit my ceiling. That might be an exaggeration, I don't know. Then they announced Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and I was kind of depressed but still happy with myself because I predicted it in the 9th slot. Then I realized The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo didn't get in. Frankly, that an organization can nominate The Tree of Life and Extremely Loud for the same award blows my mind, so far away are they on the cinematic pole--art house event and overly sentimental weepie--that it almost perfectly illustrates how truly confused this Academy is becoming.
My Prediction: They nominated 9, and I "officially predicted" 8 nominees, so I'm pretty happy I actually almost got that right. Outside of that, I went 8/9, putting in Dragon Tattoo and missing The Tree of Life.

Best Director: Again, I did a little victory dance when I heard Terrence Malick's name. Then I realized I didn't hear Fincher's name. It's a hugely bittersweet moment to me (and kind of a bitch-slap to Fincher after last year), but I guess I should stay positive.
My Prediction: 4/5 (5/5 with my alternate)

Best Actor: Congrats to the people who actually called Demian Bechir's nomination. That one was a total shocker. Outside of that, I'm so thrilled that Gary Oldman is actually nominated for an Academy Award. Yes, you may not have realized it, but he's never been NOMINATED for one. So that in and of itself is huge. I'm proud of myself for NOT picking Michael Fassbender (even though I'm sad he didn't get in, especially with the year he had), and I'm thrilled DiCaprio's hokey J. Edgar performance got the shaft.
My Prediction: 4/5

Best Actress: I felt so damn good when they read this one out. Not only is Rooney in (which, in my mind, both makes Fincher's omission both okay and all the more horrific), but I picked this one perfectly, resisting my temptation to slide Tilda Swinton in the 5th slot.
My Prediction: 5/5

Best Supporting Actor: Honestly, I'm ashamed the Academy didn't nominate Albert Brooks. It's THE quintessential supporting role, people! I'm shocked Max von Sydow actually couped a nomination, but at least he's the best part of that thoroughly middling film. I also picked Armie Hammer over Nick Nolte, because I had NO idea the Acad would actually snub J. Edgar completely.
My Prediction: 3/5

Best Supporting Actress: I know this is kind of silly, but the fact Shailene Woodley did NOT get nominated for The Descendants shows--to my mind--the film cannot win. It needed THAT nomination in particular to make a statement. Other than that, this one was easy to call.
My Prediction: 4/5 (5/5 with alternate)

Best Original Screenplay: I'm not surprised 50/50 didn't make the cut (it's not an Academy-type movie), but I'm thrilled J.C. Chandor's Margin Call took that crowded and competitive fifth slot. Great writing, and a really pleasant surprise.
My Prediction: 4/5

Best Adapted Screenplay: Well, this category went in a totally different direction. First off, I cannot tell you how happy I am that Tinker Tailor is nominated. Having said that, how in the WORLD can you nominate Ides of March ahead of Dragon Tattoo? If anything, I figured Zaillian's script would get in (big blockbuster novel, smart adaptation, big movie). Also, can we officially declare The Help DOA in the Best Picture race? No nod here thrills me, and dooms the film.
My Prediction: 3/5

Best Foreign Language Film: Kind of pissed about Pina not making it here, but it's nominated in Doc, so I guess it's okay. This one was straight down the line.
My Prediction: 4/5

Best Animated Feature: Talk about a political statement. Two of the movies nominated haven't even opened in New York and had no buzz. No Tintin, no Pixar. Something's going on in that animation branch.
My Prediction: 3/5 (4/5 with alternate)

Best Documentary: This is where I just throw my hands in the air and give up. If you've been following the Oscar commentary anywhere on the web, you probably heard all the roars of condemnation over this category this year. They need to fix how stuff gets nominated in this branch.
My Prediction: 2/5

Best Art Direction: I really botched this category. My bad. It's weird that War Horse is in and Tinker isn't, don't you think?
My Prediction: 2/5 (3/5 with alternate)

Best Cinematography: Nailed it.
My Prediction: 5/5

Best Costume Design: Nods for Anonymous and W.E.? They really just want to make this "the category period films go to die."
My Prediction: 3/5

Best Film Editing: Ah, yes. The elusive "Film Editing" prize that collapses the Best Picture race into four contenders, and keeps The Descendants rumbling in the conversation. Don't ask me how these statistics work. They just do.
My Prediction: 5/5

Best Makeup: Kind of surprised to see Harry Potter show up here. But hey, good for it. Ralph Fiennes's nose deserves the attention.
My Prediction: 2/3

Best Original Score: Proud of myself for calling Tintin as my alternate, and I guess we can go back to saying John Williams owns this category? Sad that Dragon Tattoo didn't get in (too good?) but I'm okay with Tinker Tailor taking that spot.
My Prediction: 3/5 (4/5 with alternate)

Best Original Song: This is so stupid. Two nominees? How is this allowed to change every single year? If I were Elton John, I'd be furious. I'm sure Madonna is.
My Prediction: 1/2 (that just feels silly to write)

Best Sound Mixing: So happy to see Moneyball in this category (hooray for actually recognizing how good its sound design is!). I put Pirates and Harry Potter in ahead of Transformers, thinking they'd be tired of those robot noises. Guess not.
My Prediction: 3/5

Best Sound Editing: Oh look, Drive's ONLY nomination! What a freaking shame.
My Prediction: 2/5 (3/5 with alternate)

Best Visual Effects: Can we make up our mind if this is 3- or 5-film category? It throws off all my predicting.
My Prediction: 2/5

So how'd I do?
Overall, I correctly predicting 72 of 104 nominees, which comes out to 69%. If you factor in my "alternates" in my predictions, that bumps it up to 78 out of 104, or 75%.
In the "Top 8" categories I predicted 35 of 44 nominees (37 if you include my alternates), which comes out to 80% (or 84% with my alternates).
I completely nailed three categories (five if you include my alternates), and dipped into the dread 2/5 on four.

This was a really bizarre morning (I'll touch on that in a piece later today, hopefully), but this was a really poor showing for me. Last year, I got 79% of my predictions (86% with my alternates), and if you factored my alternates into my top 8 predictions from last year, I got 96%.
Oh well, every year can't be as easy to spot as 2010. Live and learn!

84th Annual Academy Award Nominations

2012-01-24T08:29:00.005-05:00

Best Picture

The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud & Incredible Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

Best Director

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

Best Actor

Damien Bechir for A Better Life
George Clooney for The Descendants
Jean Dujardin for The Artist
Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt for Moneyball

Best Actress

Glenn Close for Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis for The Help
Rooney Mara for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams for My Week With Marilyn

Best Supporting Actor

Kenneth Branagh for My Week With Marilyn
Jonah Hill for Moneyball
Nick Nolte for Warrior
Christopher Plummer for Beginners
Max von Sydow for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Best Supporting Actress

Berenice Bejo for The Artist
Jessica Chastain for The Help
Melissa McCarthy for Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer for Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spenser for The Help

Best Original Screenplay

The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius
Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo
Margin Call, J.C. Chandor
Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen
A Separation, Asghar Farhadi

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants, Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash
Hugo, John Logan
The Ides of March, George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Beau Willimon
Moneyball, Steve Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Bridget O'Connor, Peter Straughan

Best Animated Feature

A Cat in Paris
Chico and Rita
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango

Best Documentary Feature

Hell and Back Again
If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
Pina
Undefeated

Best Foreign Language Feature

Bullhead (Belgium)
Footnote (Israel)
In Darkness (Poland)
Monsieur Lazhar (Canada)
A Separation (Iran)

Best Art Direction

The Artist, Laurence Bennett, Robert Gould
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Stuart Craig, Stephenie McMillan
Hugo, Dante Ferretti, Francesca Lo Schiavo
Midnight in Paris, Anne Seibel, Helene Dubreil
War Horse, Rick Carter, Lee Sandales

Best Cinematography

The Artist, Guillaume Schiffman
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Jeff Cronenweth
Hugo, Robert Richardson
The Tree of Life, Emmanuel Lubezki
War Horse, Janusz Kaminski

Best Costume Design

Anonymous, Lisy Christi
The Artist, Mark Bridges
Hugo, Sandy Powell
Jane Eyre, Michael O'Connor
W.E., Arianne Phillips

Best Film Editing

The Artist, Annie-Sophie Bion and Michel Hazanavicius
The Descendants, Kevin Tent
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall
Hugo, Thelma Schoonmaker
Moneyball, Christopher Tellefsen

Best Makeup

Albert Nobbs, Martial Corneville, Lynn Johnston and Matthew W. Mungle
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Nick Dudman, Amanda Knight and Lisa Tomblin
The Iron Lady, Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland

Best Original Score

The Adventures of Tintin, John Williams
The Artist, Ludovic Bource
Hugo, Howard Shore
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Alberto Iglesias
War Horse, John Williams

Best Original Song

"Man or Muppet" from The Muppets
"Real in Rio" from Rio

Best Sound Mixing

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, David Parker, Michael Semanick, Ren Klyce and Bo Persson
Hugo, Tom Fleischman and John Midgley
Moneyball, Deb Adair, Ron Bochar, Dave Giammarco, Ed Novick
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush, Peter J. Devlin
War Horse, Gary Rydstrom, Andy Nelson, Tom Johnson, Stuart Wilson

Best Sound Editing

Drive, Lon Bender and Victor Ray Ennis
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Ren Klyce
Hugo, Philip Stockton and Eugene Gearty
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl
War Horse, Richard Hymns and Gary Rydstrom

Best Visual Effects

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Tim Burke, David Vickery, Greg Butler, John Richardson
Hugo, Rob Legato, Joss Williams, Ben Grossman, Alex Henning
Real Steel, Erik Nash, John Rosengrant, Dan Taylor, Swen Gillberg
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White, Daniel Barrett
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Dan Glass, Brad Friedman, Douglas Trumbull, Michael Fink

84th Oscars Nominations Predictions

2012-01-23T13:04:00.001-05:00

Final Oscar Nom Predictions

Best Picture

The Artist

The Descendants

Hugo

The Help

Midnight in Paris

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Moneyball

War Horse

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Bridesmaids

Alternate: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Explanation: Since the Academy is doing “five to ten” nominees, I’ve gone ahead and included 10. My official prediction is that they will nominate eight films, and I’ve ranked this slate in the order of likelihood, meaning War Horse should be seen as the official cut-off of my prediction, but were it to extend to nine, ELIC would be in, and if 10, Bridesmaids would get in.

Best Director

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Alexander Payne, The Descendants

Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Alternate: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life

Best Actor

George Clooney, The Descendants

Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar

Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Alternate: Michael Fassbender, Shame

Best Actress

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

Viola Davis, The Help

Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Alternate: Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Best Supporting Actor

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn

Albert Brooks, Drive

Armie Hammer, J. Edgar

Jonah Hill, Moneyball

Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Alternate: Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method

Best Supporting Actress

Berenice Bejo, The Artist

Jessica Chastain, The Help

Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids

Octavia Spenser, The Help

Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

Alternate: Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs

Best Original Screenplay

50/50

The Artist

Bridesmaids
Midnight in Paris

A Separation

Alternate: Win Win

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Help

Hugo

Moneyball

Alternate: War Horse

Best Foreign Language Feature

A Separation

Bullhead

In Darkness

Monsieur Lazhar

Pina

Alternate: Superclasico

Best Animated Feature

The Adventures of Tintin

Arthur Christmas

Cars 2

Puss in Boots

Rango

Alternate: Kung Fu Panda 2

Best Documentary Feature

Buck

Paradise Lost 3

Pina

Project Nim

We Were Here

Alternate: Bill Cunningham New York

Best Art Direction

Anonymous

The Artist

Hugo

J. Edgar

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Alternate: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

Best Cinematography

The Artist

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Hugo

The Tree of Life

War Horse

Alternate: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Best Costume Design

The Artist

The Help

Hugo

Jane Eyre

My Week With Marilyn

Alternate: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Best Film Editing

The Artist

The Descendants

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Hugo

Moneyball

Alternate: Drive

Best Makeup

Albert Nobbs

Hugo

The Iron Lady

Alternate: The Artist

Best Original Score

The Artist

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Hugo

War Horse

Alternate: The Adventures of Tintin

Best Original Song

“Lay Your Head Down” from Albert Nobbs

“Hello Hello” from Gnomeo and Juliet

“The Living Proof” from The Help

“Life’s a Happy Song” from The Muppets

“Man or Muppet” from The Muppets

Alternate: “Masterpiece” from W/E

Best Sound Mixing

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Hugo

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

War Horse

Alternate: The Adventures of Tintin

Best Sound Editing

The Adventures of Tintin

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Transformers

War Horse

Alternate: Hugo

Best Visual Effects

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Super 8

Alternate: War Horse

Golden Globe Predix

2012-01-15T12:38:00.001-05:00

Best Picture, Drama

The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
The Ides of March
Moneyball
War Horse

Will Win: The Descendants
Should Win: MoneyballWhy? In many ways, I can see this going to The Descendants, Hugo, or The Help in equal measure. The Globes do love Scorsese (more on that below), but in the top category I remain convinced that Payne's dramedy is about to break through the ceiling and become the potential spoiler for this year. And George Clooney's involved.

Best Picture, Comedy/Musical

50/50
The Artist
Bridesmaids
Carnage
Midnight in Paris
My Week With Marilyn

Will Win: The Artist
Should Win: Midnight in ParisWhy? The Artist is the horse to bet on, and its international status should play well to the HFPA. Still, I can't help escape the feeling that if a major upset will happen, it will be here. The HFPA also goes for Woody a lot. There's a fraction of a chance, but hey, The Artist has to stop short sometime. Right? Right?

Best Director

Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris
George Clooney for The Ides of March
Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist
Alexander Payne for The Descendants
Martin Scorsese for Hugo

Will Win: Martin Scorsese
Should Win: Martin Scorsese
Why? Michel Hazanavicius is the big frontrunner after a mildly shocking win at the Critics Choice on Thursday. But as much as I suspect the Globes will love The Artist, I can't help feel Director will be headed somewhere else. Mainly because of how textured and rich Scorsese's work in Hugo is, but partly because the HFPA has been very vocal about their support for him in the last decade. It's a down-to-the-wire category that could still go all over the place before the Oscars.

Best Actress, Drama

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
Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin

Will Win: Viola Davis
Should Win: Tilda Swinton
Why? I think Viola Davis deserves this award, and even though the HFPA are star-whores, they've award Meryl Streep so many times that I think their love for the film (it has multiple nods - Iron Lady does not) will outweigh their Streep obsession. In reality though, these are five fine performances that deserve the award in their own ways. I'd give my vote to Swinton, who is the most revelatory and devastating.

Best Actor, Drama

George Clooney in The Descendants
Leonardio DiCaprio in J. Edgar
Michael Fassbender in Shame
Ryan Gosling in The Ides of March
Brad Pitt in Moneyball

Will Win: George Clooney
Should Win: Brad Pitt
Why? I've a feeling the Oscar is going to be a drag-down, knock-out fight between the two A-list superstars. George Clooney's film is in a better position than Pitt's, even though Pitt has received far less awards attention in his career and, I think at least, gives far and away the better performance.

Best Supporting Actor

Kenneth Branagh in My Week With Marilyn
Albert Brooks in Drive
Jonah Hill in Moneyball
Viggo Mortensen in A Dangerous Method
Christopher Plummer in Beginners

Will Win: Christopher Plummer
Should Win: Christopher Plummer
Why? I could see this going to Brooks or Plummer, with Mortensen as a super-upset (something the Globes aren't really famous for as of late). At the end of the day, Brooks gives a ferocious little performance, but Plummer towers over Beginners. In a career with very little recognition, he deserves this one.

Best Supporting Actress

Berenice Bejo in The Artist
Jessica Chastain in The Help
Janet McTeer in Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer in The Help
Shailene Woodley in The Descendants

Will Win: Jessica Chastain
Should Win: Shailene Woodley
Why? I've heard the rumbles for Octavia Spencer, but I don't buy it yet. Awarding Chastain lets the HFPA signal out an actress who had at least four (I could be miscounting) movies come out this year. She is the breakout story. On the other hand--if the Globes go wild for Descendants, you could hear Woodley's name, and if they fall out of their chairs for The Artist, you could hear Bejo.

Best Actress, Comedy

Jodie Foster in Carnage
Charlize Theron in Young Adult
Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids
Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn
Kate Winslet in Carnage

Will Win: Michelle Williams
Should Win: (Abstaining)
Why? I still haven't seen Marilyn or Young Adult, the two frontrunners of this race, so I can't really comment. The Carnage performances cancel each other out, but if it wasn't for the heat behind Williams I could reasonably see Kristen Wiig winning this. The love for Bridesmaids right now is kind of astounding.

Best Actor, Comedy

Jean DuJardin in The Artist
Brendan Gleeson in The Guard
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 50/50
Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris

Will Win: Jean Dujardin
Should Win: Jean Dujardin
Why? This is not a great slate of nominees. Everyone in the organization will vote for Dujardin. Only conceivable upset is Gordon-Levitt, if they're in the mood to star-whore.

Best Screenplay

Midnight in Paris
The Ides of March
The Artist
The Descendants
Moneyball

Will Win: The Descendants
Should Win: Moneyball
Why? This is a really tricky category. By the time we get to the Oscars, it will probably be Midnight vs. Artist in Original Screenplay and Descendants vs. Moneyball in Adapted. That's just where I think it's headed. So when you level the playing field, who comes out on top? All four of those have legitimate shots, but I'm giving the slight edge to Payne's script just because I expect it to clean up here. I'd love nothing more than for Moneyball to keep winning, though.

Best Foreign Language Film

A Separation (Iran)
The Flowers of War (China)
The Kid With a Bike (Belgium)
In the Land of Blood and Honey (USA)
The Skin I Live In (Spain)

Will Win: A SeparationShould Win: (Abstaining)
Why? I've heard from a few of the bloggers that Angelina Jolie's Land of Blood and Honey could be a legitimate upset, but the love that's forming around A Separation just feels too great to deny.

Best Original Score

The Artist
W.E.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
War Horse

Will Win: The Artist
Should Win: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Why? The music of The Artist is pretty phenomenal, classic Hollywood stuff that (almost) perfectly narrates the movie (except for that scene. You know the one). But the music of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo so rethinks how we hear film music, how they work in a movie like that, and the kinds of emotion they emit. It's the year's towering achievement of composing, if you ask me.

Best Animated Feature

The Adventures of Tintin
Arthur Christmas
Cars 2
Puss in Boots
Rango

Will Win: RangoShould Win: Rango
Why? Because Tintin is so internationally-oriented, you might expect a win from the Foreign Press Association. But it's hard to get past how tepid it's been received State-side, whereas Rango has gone on to be a commercial and critical success. In a lineup that simply looks mediocre, Rango really stands out.

Best Original Song

"Hello Hello" from Gnomeo and Juliet
"Lay Your Head Down" from Albert Nobbs
"The Living Proof" from The Help
"The Keeper" from Machine Gun Preacher
"Masterpiece" from W.E.

Will Win: "The Living Proof"
Should Win: (Abstaining)
Why? The Help has more overall support than probably all of these films combined. I could see Madonna winning, though. Just because.

The Top 20 Films of 2011

2011-12-23T15:10:00.000-05:00

PREFACE: This is not a complete list. At the time of its publication, I haven’t seen a great deal of films I wish I had seen, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or A Separation. This is, however, the culmination of seeing over 70 films from this year. It should be viewed as a time capsule of taste on this particular day at this particular moment. Were I given another week to mull this over or see more films, it might change drastically. I’m happy with how it looks, and so for the sake of my own sanity will let it stand in this form.

I’ve become more aware, having seen so many films, of my own biases. There are, I think, too many American films on this list, but that simply comes from my position as an American who studies chiefly American films. That’s not to detract from, for instance, The Kid With a Bike, which is marvelous in its own ways. My own biases also allow for choices that are deeply personal, and might make you balk unless you know the kinds of films I love. That’s one reason I’m happy with this list as it is.

I’m often asked if my lists are “Best” lists or “Favorite” lists. Well, they’re both. It’s a confetti of two sides modulated by a very precise equation. To put it another way, these are films that mean something to me. Some have emotional meanings, others intellectual. Some dazzle, some confound. Yet they are all on this list because they meant something. Sure, you can bicker about placement all you want. I invite you to. Debate these choices. They are what they are, but I feel they adequately represent the highs of my cinematic memory in 2011.

20. Bellflower (Evan Glodell)

A whole new kind of apocalypse movie. The team behind Bellflower made one of the most riveting aesthetic exercises of the year, engineering tricked-out cars and home-made movie cameras to capture a wild character study of two friends preparing for the apocalypse while dealing with a hellish and hallucinatory romantic/social spiral.

19. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)

Herzog photographs and comments on early cave paintings with the somewhat stream-of-consciousness verve that his documentaries are known for, but there is something grandiose and profound in his desire to connect our shared experiences of the world, and how we record those experiences. A study of early man’s mediation through a current method of inscribing ourselves.

18. The Descendants (Alexander Payne)

A fractured man tries to hold his immediate family together as they face a traumatic loss, while reconciling with his much larger place in a geographic and historical family. Each moment earns its pathos, its laughs, and its disarming vulnerability. Payne demonstrates his ability to hit each note, each moment with sublime precision.

17. Shame (Steve McQueen)

Not merely an erotic addiction movie, McQueen and Fassbender have created a canvas of compulsive behavior that boils to such devastating lows while the camera never loses its intense and unglamorous eye. A polarizing, perhaps misunderstood, but incredibly demanding effort.

16. Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino)

Is it a religious film? A philosophical film? A visual poem? A semi-nature documentary? Some kind of bizarre cocktail combination of all these? If it’s all of the above or none, Frammartino’s film would still stand as one of the year’s most unique and mesmerizing films. Nearly wordless, its beautiful rendering of rural Italy and its metaphysical ruminations on existence transcend language, time, and culture: this is an art film that digs into our universal souls.

15. The Muppets (James Bobin)

There may be a great deal of nostalgia in my unashamed love of this film, but every moment brims with a joy and sincerity you simply won’t find in any other movie this year. It may be paying tribute to the Muppets of yore, but it feels so much like its own creation, pulsing with its own huge heartbeat. The humor is subversive without being condescending, warm without being sappy, childish without being kiddy, and effortlessly walks an ever-increasing number of tight lines between solid belly laughs and going over-the-top. Not to mention it earns a fair share of misty eyes if you had any kind of love for the Muppets as a kid.

14. Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)

The space of this film is both highly formalized and remarkably lived-in, thanks in large part to Elizabeth Olsen’s amazing performance—one of the best in a year of great character studies. Durkin doesn’t just rely on her in this infiltration of personality cults, trauma, memory, and paranoia—he lets every cinematic mechanism he can summon aid in our doubt and distress. As far as first features go, you can't ask for much more.

13. X-men: First Class (Matthew Vaugn)

Vaugn is not appreciated enough for the intelligent genre filmmaker he is. There are so many moments in First Class that feature smart filmmaking choices, a deep understanding of how the genre and the franchise work, and more importantly of what we expect from the genre. Burying it in a moment of ideological warfare and flying the historical revisionism flag lets First Class go places the superhero genre hasn’t—and simultaneously sets a new kind of standard.

12. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

It’s not a film that you’ll fall in love with easily, despite all its superficial pleasures. Unless, I guess, you’re a genre scholar. While Reichardt’s previous film, Wendy & Lucy, was one of the most effortless and heartbreaking of the recent independent cinema’s strive for a new kind of naturalism, she finally finds in Cutoff a way to expand her naturalist, feminist point of view to an epic, historical canvas.

11. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

When I first came out of Anatolia at the AFI Film Festival, I was horribly underwhelmed by the final hour (the film is nearly 160 minutes, and very slow). In the days and weeks after, Ceylan’s brooding testament to how we record and communicate history, how we tell stories, and the violence that hides beneath our facades became increasingly complex and haunting. It demands total attention beyond what its painterly visuals show, and asks us to look at their increasing disjunction.

10. Beginners (Mike Mills)

There are moments in Beginners that feel almost miraculous in their honesty, their organic view on relationships, and the creativity with which they’re filmed. Always sidestepping the trappings of quirky independent movies (even though he manages to work in a talking dog), Mills uses autobiographical material to forge a surprisingly complex treatise on communicating, relationships, memory, and time. Not to mention all the phenomenal ink penned about Christopher Plummer is absolutely true.

9. Melancholia (Lars von Trier)

I’ve called it “The Lars von Trier Movie for People Who Hate Lars von Trier Movies,” and I still think that fits pretty well. It is alternately rapturously beautiful and horrifically ugly, totally captivating and repulsive. It’s about the disintegration of the family as seen through the end of the world, and even maybe the potential for love as a means of redemption. It’s the most coherent, most affecting film von Trier has made in a decade, and though it’s stuffed with his tough looks on gender and sexuality, it never feels alienating or unnecessarily provocative.

8. Hugo (Martin Scorsese)

Of all the movies-about-movies this year (and there were, let’s face it, a lot), Hugo was undoubtedly my favorite. Scorsese allows himself to be wonderfully experimental and disarmingly personal, rendering the world of 1930 Paris in lavish details aided by extraordinary uses of 3D. While the biographical details of Georges Melies and the beginnings of cinema are most certainly retrofitted to the aims of the film, it is nevertheless a beautiful ode to where the technology came from, and the medium’s power to hold us rapt.

7. Super (James Gunn)

I don’t know if it’s just because no one saw it or no one understood it, but Super might be the most overlooked film of the year. It’s the best of the “alternative superhero” (or heroes without powers) movies, simply because Gunn understands what the genre is doing, and he’s willing to push his content into darker, more violent places than Matthew Vaugn dared go in Kick Ass. With Rainn Wilson perfectly straddling layers of mental instability, it’s a perfect declaration of war on the sanitary representation of one of American cinema’s most important 21^st century genres.

6. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)

It’s tempting to call Kevin a horror movie, especially as its creepy-kid first half morphs into a this-kid-is-going-to-actually-kill-someone second half, but Ramsay and Tilda Swinton make it something more terrifying and more captivating than retreating into the banal space that genre usually inhabits. Kevin is more about memory than trauma—the need for a mother to assess herself in the face of sheer disaster, not to overcome the horrors she’s experienced, but to try however vainly to understand them. It’s this intermingling of devastation and terror that truly makes the film disturbing and unforgettable.

5. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)

As much as I like to think of myself as a detached, somewhat cynical critic who’s only judging a film on its construction and its arguments, I love a movie all the more for catching me off-guard and nailing those increasingly rare moments where I get completely wrapped up in the film. Moneyball is romantic, rousing, and incisive—a sports movie that’s just as much about ideas as it is about people. Bennett Miller makes so many smart choices in framing, editing, details of the space, uses of sound, and Brad Pitt backs him up in one of his most realized and accessible performances.

4. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)

Admittedly, there might be something a little snobbish about Midnight in Paris, at least in so far as it makes me feel good to be the only person laughing hysterically about a Luis Bunuel joke in a crowded movie theater. There are two sides to Woody Allen’s great, great film: The side that’s spilling over with amazing impersonations and jokes about the great literary and artistic figures of the 1920s; and a quite adept look at how nostalgia functions and why it’s so harmful. It’s about self-discovery as much as reliving the past, and performs both with simply beauty.

3. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)

It’s hard to imagine a better adaptation to the blockbuster pulp novel. Fincher brings his trademark obsessiveness, his grime, and his finely attuned eyes and ears to reveal all the repellant properties of Steig Larsson’s work, while he and the utterly captivating Rooney Mara work painfully into evoking the full icy terror of this tapestry of a society trying to cover up or come to terms with its festering wounds. The most stunning thing is how effortless it feels, how it trades big pulp detective work and serious traumatic sexual issues almost at whim without ever losing its balance. Every moment is masterful.

2. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

On merely the level of craft and aesthetic, Drive has almost no equal: every shot, every movement, every longing glance, every gun blast and burst of blood is stunning because it feels so perfectly realized. Its powerful, blunt shifts from romance to graphic violence are intense, honed juxtapositions that could actually make you gasp. Onto the sparse screenplay, Refn has molded an epic of antihero swagger and an intense meditation on heroism. That, and his foreign eyes capture something remarkably beautiful about Los Angeles, something that certainly inspired more than one late night drive down the surface streets blasting “A Real Hero.”

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)

The story of movies for me this year was really “The Tree of Life…and everything else.” It’s rare to feel like you’re actually part of a significant piece of art, that you simply know the film you’re watching is going to be debated, discussed, and heralded as important for years to come. Not only did I feel that with Tree of Life—when was the last time a major art house film was a huge part of the summer movie discourse?—but I too had something of a religious experience watching the film. Malick’s treatise on man’s place in the universe, enhanced so much through the prologue and epilogue that elevates the film into the cosmic, felt so real, as if he had captured life itself and morphed it through the cinema. The elliptical, canted view of childhood and memory are some of the most profound, purely human filmmaking I’ve ever had the privilege to watch. I understand why people (sometimes positively and sometimes negatively) compare it to 2001: A Space Odyssey—the long shots of space and the birth of mankind certainly share some structural similarities—but I think the comparison makes sense in a much deeper way. Like 2001, The Tree of Life is about exploring our space in the universe, but it also begs us to explore it on our own for the sake of our own meaning. This is the stuff great cinema—and great art—is made of.

On 2011: Falling in love again

2011-12-23T12:25:00.000-05:00

In many ways, 2011 was the most tumultuous year of my life. I wrote a thesis, graduated college, moved to Los Angeles, started working on a Masters, got my writing accepted into an anthology, left my friends and family on one coast, and started working on building a new one on a brand-new coast.

It was eventful. And in between all those events, I saw over 70 movies from 2011. Yep, 70+. How did I do it? I have no idea. I mostly chalk it up to where I live now, because I was able to see many movies that I'd have to wait a year to see either in their slow expansion across the U.S. or eventual DVD release. Take AFI Fest, for example. At the Film Institute's free, week-long festival in the first week of November I saw 11 movies in one week -- including two world premieres, a North American premiere, and almost all great movies. Take also UCLA's nearly non-stop lineup of sneak preview or L.A. premiere screenings, and I was actually able to keep up with the conversations critics are/were having about the "best of the year" for the first time in, well, ever.

I realize this may sound childish, or nostalgic, or hopelessly sentimental, but in many ways 2011 was about falling back in love with movies for me. Not in a sense of the medium itself, but of how I was able to experience it. I've always seen as many movies as I can (afford) in a theater, but with so many opportunities to either see things for free, or see them as soon as they're released, I became a kid in a candy store in Los Angeles. I'd wager that since moving there in August, I've seen at least one movie in a theater every week (oftentimes more, just because of the accessibility). It's not that my life is just that empty, it's that I've chosen to make time to do that. Even apart from seeing these independent or foreign movies, I've been able to see, for instance, restorations of "Gone With the Wind" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" on the big screen.

And yet while the screen is certainly thrilling, and certainly the way we're supposed to be watching film (although I'll gladly take Netflix on a 15-inch laptop screen in a heartbeat), there is a kind of romantic allure that surrounds it now. Because our screens are so multiple, our experience of the cinema so vast and so different, the idea of people actually congregating to watch something in a fixed time frame seems increasingly outdated. If anything, L.A. has allowed me to recapture the grandeur of watching movies with people. That's something I had forgotten about, in my rather cynical "wait for DVD or see it during the cheapest matinee" philosophy of the last four years.

And while I don't mean this as a crack on my time as a film critic, when I was working for "The Daily Gamecock" I often had to watch what was coming out, versus what I might want to see. So while I hear many people rightfully claiming how bored they were by Hollywood's output this year, I can't share their feelings. I've been nothing but exhilarated by movies in 2011.

It might be hard for Billy Beane to not be romantic about baseball, but it's hard for me to not be romantic about the movies.

And in that spirit, 2011 was the perfect year for me to have this nostalgic rediscovery of "the cinema." So many movies were about remembering the past. From "Midnight in Paris," which puts the perils of nostalgia front and center, to "The Artist" -- a gimmicky reconstruction of silent-era aesthetics -- the movies everyone talks about this year are almost explicitly about memory or nostalgia. Apart from those two examples, just think of "The Tree of Life," "Hugo," "Beginners," "X-men: First Class," "Captain America," "The Muppets," "Super 8," "Martha Marcy May Marlene," "The Descendants," "J. Edgar," "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," "Dirty Girl," "The Adventures of Tintin" -- these are all, to some degree, either about the past, about memory, or how we remember the past.

Not only that, some of these are movies about movies. "The Artist" -- silent movies. "Hugo" -- the birth of movies. "The Muppets" -- the muppet movies/TV show. "Rango" -- Westerns."Super 8" -- Spielberg.

And to get academic for a moment. It seems that as the academic community more and more talks about how mediated history represents a remembered history, or perpetuates the ideas that get remembered, so too do the media themselves start explicating their devices as specifically memory-geared.

In many ways, this was the hardest year ever to assemble a Top 10 list. So I did a Top 20, just to make room for some more films I really loved. Not only did I see so many movies, but I had so many different reactions. How best to measure the deep love for some things versus the intellectual stimulation of others? As always, it's a balancing act, and one that only speaks to how I feel on this given day. It's a time capsule. Stay tuned.

Sealed in ice - 'Dragon Tattoo' review

2011-12-23T11:48:00.001-05:00

It's hard to imagine a better adaptation of Stieg Larsson's international best-seller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo existing (and that most certainly includes the well-acted but sloppily consolidated Swedish version).

It's hard to imagine any other director than David Fincher possibly tackling the material. While it might lack the raw shock and awe of his absolute best, that has more to do with my knowing the novel than it does any of the beautifully cold sequences he strings together in the most breakneck 160 minutes of the year. Dragon Tattoo fits Fincher like a glove, and its basic plot might as well be a "greatest hits" sampling of his best movies: a serial killer replete with Biblical allusions? Sounds like Se7en to me. A gigantic waterfall of information as investigative reporters try to piece together the events of old murders? Seems a lot like Zodiac. Tech-savvy outcasts bending the Internet to their will? Shades of The Social Network. There's even a sense that Jodie Foster's mom-turned-badass in Panic Room is a banal precursor to the rage he finds in the iconic Lisbeth Salander.

It should be no surprise, then, how effortless The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo feels. Far from being a breezy mainstream film (as some have accused it, clearly the criticism of those who wanted Fincher to exceed The Social Network or felt he was taking a step back in his career by merely making the film), every moment is so well-calculated, moves with such perfect modulations of camera movement, editing, and sound-scape, that it's easy to simply get lost inside the film.

Keeping the film in Sweden gives Fincher the ability to work wonders with the icy desolation, locking his world-weary journalist protagonist Mikael Blomkvist in a purgatory of shivers and snowfalls. Daniel Craig strips his suave Bond style, making Blomkvist appear varying shades of tired and ragged, matching a clever wit with a profound defeatism. His investigation into a 40-year old murder mystery is the film's centerpiece drama, giving Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian a sturdy genre framework to work with.

Some of the film's best, most cinematic and absorbing sequences are merely the recapping of information, with wordless flashbacks, highlighted documents, and blurry photographs streaming across the screen in mountainous montages. The flow and process of information--not just in documents, but digitally as well--becomes a significant part of the film in its first two acts.

And that process of information is where the film starts working its counterpoint in. Lisbeth Salander, computer hacker extraordinaire, tracks Blomkvist's computer, fascinated by him after performing a background check. A social outcast and ward of the state, the digital landscape gives her a place to free herself from the masculine playground of society and take control. Rooney Mara, after threatening to steal The Social Network in two brief but towering scenes, becomes a full-fledged actress to be reckoned with, completely transforming her body through intense dieting, piercings, and makeup to fully inhabit this psychologically complex character. Whether she's staring blankly at a document or taking exacting revenge on an abusive guardian, she is completely fascinating, terrifying, and earns both our respect and sympathy. She can communicate entire worlds of thought with a blank stare.

More than that, though, Fincher and Mara never let Lisbeth dominate the film. While the duality of her is that she both draws attention to her exclusion from society through her physical appearance and yet uses that appearance as a way to shield herself from society, her best moments are her interactions with Craig or simply watching her use a computer. She is, at the very least, hypnotic

Reteaming with much of his Social Network crew--notably cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, and musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross--attentive viewers might notice a lot of similarities in filming style. The detached, tech-infused score perfectly communicates isolation, dread, and anxiety, simmering under the surface and always working in favor of the pacing of the images (one gets the impression Fincher edited certain sequences to the music, instead of vice versa).

The editing, odd as it may seem to suggest, gets more and more impressive as the film goes on. It almost starts out looking too conventional for Fincher, but as the cross-cutting becomes more intense, and the suspense starts being smothered on at the climax, the editing takes more hard, brutal cuts. The whole look of the film is filled with grungy greens and steely blues, with multiple layers of lighting, lots of scenes that appear diegetically lit, and uses simple camera tracks or pans to communicate large changes in particular moments.

The whole design of the film is absolutely immaculate, controlled, harnessed. It is the most marvelous kind of detective movie, where solving the crime isn't so much important as what the crime signifies, and how the characters interact as the mystery develops. There is a lot to swallow in terms of Sweden's history, how Larsson imagines an entire society wrecked by its unwillingness to address its sores, hobbling forward on its horrific violence. Much of this may be lost in the American translation, admittedly. Fincher directs this with an eye on narrative and character, but Zaillian's masterful adaptation (a true crash course in how to do book-to-film without losing anything) teases out this cultural critique for those who would seek it.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo proves that, in the hands of a master, even the most repellant, sadistic of acts can be utterly compelling and fascinating. Like all of David Fincher's films, it has the feeling of being held in a vice grip. And yet, that grip is oddly pleasurable.

'Shame' and the aesthetic of suppression

2011-12-06T13:48:00.001-05:00

Director Steve McQueen's "Shame" is not a movie to enjoy.

Hell, it's not even a movie to really like.

But beneath its finely honed superficial pleasures, between the edits, and underneath all the empty stares of its deadlocked characters, "Shame" is a provocative, devastating journey into the bowels of one man's personal hell. In Michael Fassbender, McQueen has undoubtedly found some sort of muse, an actor he works so harmoniously with, and one who's willing to push himself as deep as he can get (all the puns about "laying himself bare" notwithstanding). Together, the two have made a movie about addiction that offers only the slightest and most oblique chances of getting under its surface and hoping for any kind of personal redemption. It may not even be so much about addiction as it is about the almost self-flagellating shame its protagonist feels, and his battle to feel any kind of release from that dark cloud.

Fassbender plays Brandon, a New York businessman whose actual business means absolutely nothing for the plot, nor for Brandon. His life is defined by the sparseness of his apartment -- blank white walls convey an emptiness of meaning, while a turntable and several bookshelves of LPs and book reveal at least some kind of culture. In its opening twenty minutes, he may seem something of a Patrick Bateman (of "American Psycho") -- incredibly polished, stunningly handsome, and a man who seems to have everything worked out into the perfect routine.

That routine soon comes to only have anything to do with sexual release. Brandon calls prostitutes, devotes his online existence to watching porn and chatting with webcam strippers, masturbating in a bathroom stall at least once a day, as well as picking up anyone he can in the New York nightclubs he populates with his sleezy boss (James Badge Dale, who plays "sickeningly desperate" oh-so-well). It's almost effortless how easy he can attract a woman in one bar to have sex with him in an alley. It's shockingly aggressive how he "flirts" with a redhead on a subway car in one of the film's earliest scenes. He stares her down, never smiling; she adjusts herself several times, smiling awkwardly, never quite sure what to make of Brandon. He loses her in the rush of passengers, but their wordless interaction gets the point across without them needing to make it back to Brandon's apartment.

Words don't have much of a place in Brandon's existence, nor do they in McQueen's cinematic vocabulary. He seems much more at home with a disjunctive piano melody filling the aural space. Brandon never talks about his dependency on sex, his craving, his need for release. I say, the better for it. It might make Brandon impenetrable, but it creates a space where the spectator must be willing to meet McQueen halfway to work through the film. "Shame" becomes much more about what's NOT said, what's NOT shown. For much of its runtime, it's a series of vignettes, long sequences that build new levels of meaning without necessarily relating to how we predictably conceive of an "addiction movie."

The most disruptive force in Brandon's life is his sister, Sissy. As played by Carey Mulligan, she teeters through a wholly different kind of miserable existence. She fills her life with words and things -- aptly so, as she's an occasional club singer. From her first sequence, where she shows up out of the blue to crash on Brandon's couch for a few days, Mulligan and McQueen seed her depression deeply in her character. Her rendition of "New York, New York" -- shot almost entirely in a single close-up, is one of the film's most devastating moments. It's like a plea for salvation, one that seems to rattle Brandon. And yet, he detests Sissy. Possibly because she knows about his sexual compulsion. Possibly because of something more damaging from their youth (McQueen leaves it to us to piece it together however we prefer). One thing is sure: when the two are on-screen together, Mulligan finds the right way to provoke Fassbender into explosive rage. In just a few seconds, he goes from completely bottled to completely frightening.

"Shame" is filmed to complement the ways Brandon must suppress his compulsions. The camera at many times shoots from a very far distance, sometimes from another room, such that conversations are obscured. Sometimes it shoots in the dark, sometimes it doesn't move for a very long time, and sometimes it simply moves with Brandon -- such as a scene where he goes jogging late at night, trying to fight the restlessness of his sex drive, channeling it however he can as he passes a series of hotels and apartment buildings.

It's a rather thankless, pleasureless aesthetic, and one that will certainly be a turn-off for anyone looking for an accessible, erotic film. And on that last adjective, you're probably wondering about all that sex that earns the film its NC-17 rating. Don't expect scene after scene of Fassbender nailing high-class NYC prostitutes. If that's what you want, this is the wrong film. It's only in the last act, where circumstances propel Brandon into a "search for a fix" through increasingly hellish nightclubs and increasingly graphic sexual encounters, that the true weight of his compulsion and addiction become clear. Where most of the film's sex is filmed rather statically in single, occasionally aggressive placements, it takes on more disheartening tones and shapes as the film progresses.

And in truth, the cinema is the perfect place to explore sexuality in this way. The idea of "looking at" and visually controlling bodies, the eroticization of the body, turning the corporeal form into just another in a series of spectacles meant for pleasurable consumption, has been at the heart of many theoretical discourses on film. For Brandon, pornography -- sex as filmed event -- is like a 24-hour fix. There are several moments, such as in the aforementioned subway staredown, where Brandon seems bent on controlling that woman's body. The issue of power never enters "Shame" explicitly, but it's not a stretch to see this as a central problem for Brandon -- sex offers him a way to be in control, but it also makes him not in control. It threatens to consume him, even when he (vainly?) attempts to take some control in his life.

"Shame" leaves us in a moment where Brandon is poised between sitting and rising -- a decision that would dictate whether he does indeed have any control over his compulsion. It's interesting that McQueen should end the film in this way, especially since we the spectators MUST rise. Coming out of "Shame" is something like leaving an inferno (though one that might me more closely aligned with Dante's, given McQueen's penchant for charting the film as a descent into sin). It's a rattling, harrowing film.

You probably won't like it, or enjoy an inch of it. But I would dare suggest it's one of the more interesting and more accomplished character sketches of the year, because McQueen actually demands his spectators go beyond his accomplished surfaces and venture past Fassbender's handsome veneer. It's a film that pushes, over and over again, into places that are uncomfortable and occasionally difficult to grasp, especially since McQueen and Fassbender refuse to condemn or sympathize with Brandon.

Past imperfect -- 'The Artist' and cinema nostalgia

2011-11-29T22:10:00.000-05:00

The way critics are writing about The Artist, you would expect it to be the second coming of Charles Chaplin, F.W. Murnau, and Douglas Fairbanks. It's not. And what's worse, the way critics are writing about this film is so completely hyperbolic, so utterly selective, so clouded by grand rosy nostalgia that it's frankly baffling. You'd think these people were drunk off their asses when they watched this movie.

Maybe that's a little harsh. But The Artist is embroiled in a very nostalgic, very basic history of Hollywood from 1927-1933. Just as lead actor Jean Dujardin looks remarkably like Gene Kelly's silent screen star from Singin' in the Rain, so too does French director Michel Hazanavicius's film fall back into the commonly accepted mythologies that 1952 film purports about Hollywood. It never challenges our conception of Hollywood. It shamelessly endorses them. Which is fine for the light entertainment it is, but more problematic when you pair the film against the discourse surrounding it.

At least it doesn't suggest sound really took instant hold in 1927. It just pushes it back two years. For once, I'd like a film about Hollywood to at least give up a little bit of those fantasies. Talk about, if only for a few minutes, how complicated the transition really was. For crying out loud, even Singin' in the Rain works that in a little bit, even if it is spottily and covertly positioned using genre. As a postmodern reappropriation of the era, The Artist is about a quarter Singin' in the Rain, two quarters A Star is Born, and a quarter all its own. It follows the steep decline of Dujardin's A-list silent star George Valentin (did ya forget the "o"?) just as bubbly sweetheart Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo, who is utterly radiant and arguably the best part of the film) begins a chance rise to the top. Miller's career begins with a flirtation with Valentin (she's a dance extra on one of his final films) and their lives both refract and intersect throughout the film until, you guessed it, they dialectically converge.

But beneath its conventional narrative, the film is actually quite adept at staging its own series of visual gags, mostly calling attention to what the absence of sound can do. The film opens with a movie premiere, with an accompanying orchestral score moving with the action on the screen's screen. Only when "The End" flashes and the audience applaudes can we even realize we're in a silent film. Following are an avalanche of references -- from the Jack Russell terrier sidekick culled from The Awful Truth and The Thin Man to John Goodman's gesticulative movie producer -- that begin to form a postmodern reconstruction of the silent aesthetic. Signs such as "Silence Behind the Screen" are a tad obvious, as are title cards like "Why won't you talk?" -- It's charming, but a bit derivative when the same joke is done over and over. And, as an aside, if anyone can explain to me what five minutes of the Vertigo soundtrack is doing in the film, I'd be really appreciative, as that's one of the film's biggest miscues. I'd daresay it flattens the whole scene (and it's an important scene).

Part of what makes the film so interesting is its rather perfect recreation of the silent form. From the camera positions, the tracking shots, the lighting, the editing, the original music, and the acting are fantastic. And for the first hour of the film, it's all rather romantic and light-as-air. And while it certainly maintains this comic lightness throughout, earning its smiles and laughs through almost perfect aesthetics, it's still a film that feels broadly empty. At the end, it's not entirely clear what Hazanavicius is saying about Hollywood, or why he's using this particular set of mythologies to say it.

I came at The Artist just one week after watching Far From Heaven again, which to my recollection is the last time a major film tried to wholly recreate an older film style. But in Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes comes at the Sirkian melodrama from a more intellectual angle, thinking about how the 1950s created a prison for different genders and sexualities through a key mediated representation of the time.

Maybe I'm just blind to what the bigger idea of The Artist is. I'd like to know. I certainly feel like I get why it's so entertaining, but its painstaking recreation of a period and a form of making films must have something else going on. Why is Hazanavicius making this film now? Is it a plea for us to remember FILM as it is becoming eroded by digital? Or is it a potent reminder of technological change in the industry as we're experiencing a new kind of change? Is there an exploration of the contradictions and problems of this society buried within the text? None that I can see, or at least, none that weren't already being explored in the 1930s.

The Artist is a delightful film, don't get me wrong. I enjoyed most all of it, and definitely admired the pains Hazanavicius took. It's an experiment, but is it any more-so (or less-so) than what Guy Maddin did in Brand Upon the Brain (just to give one example)? Does it speak to the critics' selective memory when they overlook Maddin's work as exercises in silent aesthetics, and praise The Artist as a great representation of Hollywood in its transitional period?

This is what happens when nostalgia overtakes discourse and reception. It indicates how powerful a tool it is, especially for people who love movies (or, I suppose, anything). We let the Basic Story take control because it's simpler and more entertaining. Some critics can't even remember the movie properly -- I've read multiple reviews say it only has one line of spoken dialogue. By my count, it has four separate lines.

Again, my biggest qualms with the film are not about what it is. It's a fine film. I just can't fathom why it's been cobbled into this broader nostalgic discourse and catapulted into the "Best Picture of the Year."

I'd love for someone to convince me The Artist is one of the best pictures of the year, and deserves to have its praises sung through the rafters. I wish I thought it was one of the best pictures of the year, because I think it's great that not only are more people actually making retro movies, but they're getting distribution and generating conversation. It's entertaining, it's impressive, but it's hampered by regurgitating a silly mythology about industrial change. The critics may gobble that up and say it's a great love letter, but it all seems very manipulative to me.

Fears as chamber plays

2011-11-29T02:34:00.000-05:00

"A Dangerous Method" is, from my vantage point, getting very unfairly maligned. If you love David Cronenberg, you should like this movie. If you don't, you don't like Cronenberg for the right reasons. Psychology has always been a very strong part of his films, especially when it comes to how we interpret sex and violence (and, of course, how those two come together). In a lot of ways, it makes perfect sense for him to step back into the discourse of psychology and investigate a rift in its theory and practice.

While perhaps a tad "stage-y" (it's adapted from a play by Christopher Hampton), Cronenberg finds some great cinematic ways to shoot scenes: deep focus and mirrors get shining moments. That, and the performances are simply wonderful. Keira Knightley is like a bat out of hell; don't let anyone tell you otherwise. She's over-the-top, wild, and unchained. It's rare to find a performance this fearless because so often we expect our actors to be quiet, reserved, realistic. Knightley is playing a hysterical nymphomaniac. She acts accordingly.

Equally impressive is Viggo Mortensen, whose in-depth research into Freud pays off. He's gruff, disarming, and completely holds your attention when he monologues about his field. Michael Fassbender continues is stratospheric rise as Jung. While most of the film is these three characters (with a brief appearance by Vincent Cassel) sitting and talking, or having masochistic sex, it's a wholly engrossing intellectual outing. It looks like a typical period drama, but plays like a wholly unique film.

There have been lots of reviews and comments I've seen dismissing the film as boring, verbose, and disjointed, but it's exactly the elliptical and lofty qualities in it that I find very attractive. Psychotherapy helps erect and maintain cultural conceptions of gender and sexual behavior, "A Dangerous Method" suggests, and its deepest rewards come from applying its discussions on-screen to what happens to the characters between the scenes.

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"Margin Call" is not a film on a lot of radars. It was made cheaply and quickly, but it rattles with a kind of precision and assurance rarely found in productions that cost five times as much. Recounting the first 24-hours of the 2008 Wall St. meltdown through the eyes of an up-all-night session at a single firm as they try to figure out how to survive the impending financial devastation, it's also largely a film of talking. Characters talk about money, about risks, about life, and dreams, and failures. As time goes on, they start to look sweaty and grimy, and it's very clear none of these characters are good, but few are bad. They make decisions that look awful, but they justify it as a no-way-out scenario.

Among the stellar ensemble, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and Stanley Tucci stand tall for different reasons. They carry every moment they're in, and it's almost like watching an effortless master class at work. The writing is tight, and the acting sizzles.

The film is also remarkably well-shot. The offices are densely packaged, the lighting appropriately captures a kind of gorgeous blue nighttime hue, and yet there's lots of darkness surround this little world. It could easily work as a play, but the lighting in the close-ups and the editing around the boardroom tables make it come cinematically alive. Writer/director J.C. Chandor clearly has a passion for capturing human moments amidst a broader economic and political blanket (which is not to say the film is ideologically skewed--it is comfortably apolitical for much of the time), and finds plenty of ways to show off his considerable economic talents.

"Margin Call" is a quiet film, where only a raised voice accounts for the biggest action. Yet it feels so deeply realized, so impeccably staged -- in a word, tight.

Where dreams are made

2011-11-24T15:42:00.000-05:00

"Hugo" is a rare and wonderful thing -- an openly sentimental love letter, a deeply personal film, and a striking experiment all rolled into a package that feels more like a gift than a highly calibrated exercise. In making one from the heart, Martin Scorsese has defied the odds and made one of the most beautiful films of the year.

If you have any kind of sentimentality for the movies, if the child inside you seeks to rediscover the magic of the screen -- see "Hugo" now.

Although Martin Scorsese is most well-known for his urban crime thrillers/gangster movies (from "Mean Streets" to "The Departed") it still bewilders me that every time he makes a movie that isn't in this genre (which is often), people freak out. He's made intimate character dramas ("Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"), rich period romances ("The Age of Innocence"), horror movies ("Cape Fear") and even biblical epics ("The Last Temptation of Christ"). It doesn't matter the genre, to me Scorsese's films are united by several things, including the desire to belong. In as likely places as the social outcast Travis Bickle and unlikely places as the Dalai Lama, those on the margins -- on the outside looking in -- usually come to the fore of Scorsese's work.

Is it no surprise then that the first shot of young orphan Hugo Cabret (the charming Asa Butterfield) is of him looking from behind a clock, peering out into the 1930 Parisian train station he calls home? Borrowing a moment or two from "Rear Window," Hugo's existence at the start of the film is confined to looking. He keeps the clocks running in the train stations -- though the comically nefarious Station Inspector (a wonderful Sacha Baron Cohen) doesn't know he's taken up residence.

With no parents and no friends, Hugo watches the dramas of the shop owners and ventures out only to steal food and spare parts for an automaton his father recovered from a museum shortly before his death. Hugo's existence is driven by the singular goal of getting the very elaborate automaton to work, believing it can unlock a secret message from his father and allow him to maintain a connection to some kind of family.

In the first, mostly silent, ten or so minutes of the film, Scorsese introduces us to a world both fluid and imaginative. Beautiful tracking shots wander through Hugo's world, following him from clock to clock as trains, passengers and steam zig and zag through his elaborate little space. The 3D (the single most fantastic use of the technology I've seen thus far) brings this world even more to life. Depth is stunning, colors pop, and motion feels even more fluid. Working with Robert Richardson again (the two last teamed on "Shutter Island"), every shot in the film seems to perfectly account for ways 3D can bring more life to a shot. With expert lighting and beautiful tracking shots, this is every bit a visual splendor as we would expect from Scorsese.

The power of the visuals comes much more from their imagination than their compositions, as Scorsese and his team feel genuinely awe-struck by the technology's capabilities. Their desire to explore is a true next-step-forward for the technology, one that takes it out of gimmicks and sheer spectacle and anchors it as part of the narrative.

It's not long into the film that Hugo gets into trouble with curmudgeonly toy store owner Georges Melies (a best-in-show Ben Kingsley), who catches Hugo trying to steal and gives the boy plenty of hell. Through his budding relationship with Melies's goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz, who proves with every film she can go toe-to-toe with anyone), the two learn more about Melies's past as a filmmaker, sparking a journey into their own discovery of a "cinematic consciousness." Working from a children's storybook by Brian Selznick, John Logan's adaptation is simple and effective -- the story has plenty of trajectory but is also simple enough to give Scorsese lots of room to play and to communicate its very deep ideas to any kind of audience.

In many ways, "Hugo" is about discovering movies. Hugo takes Isabelle to her first movie, and smiles at how she reacts to the thrills of the plot. As Melies becomes more prominent a character, Scorsese recreates some of his more famous films and the famed director's studio, providing a concise (some might say "Basic") version of the beginning of movies and their dream-like potential. While plenty of Scorsese's films have been movie-movies in the sense that they borrow and reappropriate different shots and sequences (his forays into horror, "Cape Fear" and "Shutter Island," are perhaps the best examples), this is the only one -- besides "The Aviator" -- that's actually about movies.

But where "The Aviator" was more about the industry and more a study of ego and compulsion, "Hugo" is about discovery and love. Kingsley gives Melies such fractured anger and frustration, communicating how devastated the man was when he truly believed his films had been forgotten. In this sense, "Hugo" is a rather direct plea for film preservation, something very close to Scorsese's heart.

Encasing all this in the ostensible guise of a children's movie may seem kind of odd, but there's nothing childish about "Hugo." It's a very serious, but very accessible, journey into the fantastic possibilities of the medium. He uses cinema's newest innovation to explore one of its great innovators (and, because Melies often shot his films on two cameras side-by-side so he could have two prints right away, he inadvertently created 3D -- something I was fortunate to see earlier this year and which is truly mind-blowing. If only he had known what he'd made!). I daresay it also packs enough sentimentality to crack even the deepest cynic, especially those who hold any kind of admiration for the cinema and any kind of childhood memories of experiencing it.

Georges Melies was a fantastical director. He used trick effects and elaborate designs to try and, in the words of Kingsley in the film, make dreams. In the film's argument, these works were made with the experience of watching in mind, propelled by a desire to play with the newborn medium. In "Hugo," we watch two children watch "A Trip to the Moon" for the first time. Scorsese somehow perfectly captures the joy of not only watching a film, but experiencing it.

Scorsese has said in many interviews he made this film as a parent, and that kind of approach perfectly explains why the film is so affecting and so tender. It breaks new ground in his artistry. He's always been a gifted filmmaker and storyteller, but here it seems like he's reading a bedtime story through the devices of the cinema, crafting a whole world for us spectators through all the devices of the imagination he can summon.

Reconciling ourselves -- 'The Descendants' review

2011-11-22T01:35:00.001-05:00

"In a couple of days, it'll all be over."

It's not until relatively late in Alexander Payne's fifth feature, "The Descendants," that George Clooney says this line almost casually and nonchalantly, but despite his outward tone it carries so much weight and heartbreak. It's just one of many deft, blink-and-you'll-miss-it exchanges of throwaway sentences, grief-stricken faces, and warm humor embedded in Payne's tale of a family trying to pull itself out of a disaster.

To call it an intimate family drama of comedic highs and tearful lows would undermine the much larger project of Payne's film: This is a small epic of chronology about privilege and reconciliation, the interpretation of how families transmit values and connect to each other.

The latest incarnation of Payne's male-in-crisis, George Clooney plays Matthew King, a Hawaiian lawyer who controls a land trust inherited down through his family from his great-great-grandmother. The trust is set to dissolve in seven years, and King's vast network of cousins work to try and persuade him who to sell the land to -- and how they can best reap the profits. As the deadline to vote on the land decision looms, King's wife Elizabeth suffers a boating accident that puts her in a coma.

In the wake of the accident, King must connect with his two daughters -- the angry and insecure Scotty (child actor Amara Miller, who wonderfully conveys lots of very deep emotions) and the profane, drug-user-in-recovery Alexandra (Shailene Woodley, who may very well give the film's best performance) -- even as they deal with their increasingly stark reality.

Adapting a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, Payne's writing has the kind of acute sense of culture and character emblematic of his work. Characters aren't afraid to have sudden bursts of their true feelings, but in equal measure reserve those emotions to hushed glances and quiet sighs. Clooney's King is a great challenge for both director and actor: a man who readily acknowledges his the privilege previous generations have provided him and a workaholic who has a rough relationship with his daughters, he's not the most likeable person, and he doesn't have to be. This is not a film of good or bad people, but surprisingly honest and direct people trying to confront their most painful failings.

While this certainly isn't the most vulnerable or complex performance Clooney has ever given, it stands high among his work. There are moments where he explodes with anger at his situation, moments where he keeps his mouth shut despite his obvious desire to scream in anguish, and moments where he simply pulls off a good funny line and works his charm. Most surprising is Woodley, who goes toe-to-toe with Clooney in every scene. As a teenager who refuses to tone herself down in front of her father and speaks as explicitly as she likes, hers is a transformation not into a subservient position in the family, but into recognizing the world is larger than what she's seen it to be. The strength of Payne's characterization is to show them each needing the other, growing in simultaneously if divergent ways through the strength they each find.

The trailers for "The Descendants" unfortunately reveal quite a few plot turns, so I won't speak much to the narrative itself, which is worth meeting on its own terms for the somewhat ingenuous ways the various plots intertwine and complicate one another. Rather, it's worth noting the way Payne portrays the Hawaiian world, not just in the beauty of its oceans and landscapes, but in the ways people relate to this landscape on a social, cultural, and historical level. It's quite a precise theme in the film, and it slowly inches its way around every corner of the visuals and the sound.

What's most riveting, most accomplished in "The Descendants" is how Payne builds this rather large tapestry of meaning. Sure, there are some moments that are quite "on-the-nose" in terms of characters stating the theme or telling their feelings. But the film as a whole slowly accumulates a multi-faceted and surprisingly deep examination of what "family" means. It stirs us to recognize where we come from, who built the world we stand on today and what (if anything) we owe them, while also looking at the future generations -- what do we owe THEM, and are we doing what we should to ensure they can continue building the world in positive ways?

For a film that is, at its most ostensible level, about a family member dying, "The Descendants" thankfully avoids much of the schmaltz that usually comes with this brand of melodrama. Its teary moments feel earned, its comedy is barbed, but most importantly it feels born of a place of sheer honesty.

I realized, visiting several of Alexander Payne's films over the last week in preparation for this one, that I have intensely personal reactions to his films on an emotional level -- something that rarely happen to me at the movies. More importantly, his films have meant different things to me at different points in my life. When I saw "About Schmidt" in a theater nine years ago, it made a huge impression on me, and it still does, but in a completely different way. I suspect "The Descendants" will operate in the same way, and as such I can't properly sit here and say that I'm evaluating the film on a scholarly level.

Try as I might to divorce myself from the work and meet it on a formal and thematic level, Alexander Payne has thwarted my best laid plans, if only because "The Descendants" is a gigantic sneak attack. In ways both small and huge, it is a beautifully affecting film. Each moment is measured in equal parts heart and mind, calculated and spontaneous. It is full of -- by turns -- anguish, despair, and love.

If his films are about journeys and crises, be they literal (Warren Schmidt's journey across the plains) or slightly more figurative (Jim McAllister's spiral of self-destruction in "Election"), "The Descendants" journeys -- at times literally through the archipelago of Hawaii and at times figuratively through the relationship of the family -- to a place where it confronts us with the depths of love. Where do we find strength for compassion? Where do we look past our own failings and try to forgive? How do we deal with anger? With grief?

The answers are in the title: We are all "The Descendants" of someone and somewhere, and we must measure ourselves against that.

A thirst for adventure -- 'Adventures of Tintin' review

2011-11-11T20:20:00.001-05:00

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE EXCLUSIVE

When last we left Steven Spielberg, he had just finished what (for me, at least) was one of the most insipid, uninspired action films imaginable: An "Indiana Jones" follow-up with little in the way of spark and sheer love for adventure, and lots in the way of cheesy set pieces, horrible CGI, and ridiculously inert narrative. Maybe it was enough for Spielberg to realize that he was simply burned out on his own filmmaking. "Indy IV" was bloated enough to make even the most ardent follower of the director balk.

With "The Adventures of Tintin," Spielberg works in a medium he never has before -- animation -- using technologies he never has -- motion capture -- and distributed in a format he's never applied before -- 3D. Love it or hate it (and I suspect there will be many in both camps), "Tintin" brings a serious sense of discovery back into Spielberg's work, a love for the possibilities of constructing space. It also, and this is the most crucial, tries to push the fun quotient as high as he can get away with.

Now, I'm not at all versed in the comic serials by Herge on which "Tintin" is based, but the screenplay by Steven Moffat ("Dr. Who"), Edgar Wright ("Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"), and Joe Cornish ("Attack the Block") handles the balancing act of making a pulp adventure film *almost* work. There are a good number of silly moments in "Tintin," and most of them work surprisingly solid given their rather obvious nature, because the writing and Spielberg's direction almost make the film float on air. This keeps the film from really grounding itself and developing a sincere sense of tension, but it does keep it light and fun (which, ultimately, I think is better in this case).

And while the story is linked with the elements you'd expect from an adventure tale -- secrets, clues, missteps, evil bad guys, and legends to spare -- after a while it can't help but take on the feel of a series of admirable setpieces barely strung together. What makes "Raiders of the Lost Ark" the single best adventure film ever (my opinion, but c'mon) is that while the film *is* a series of setpieces, it never takes its eyes off the Ark and what the Ark means. That, and Dr. Jones is a broad character defined beautifully by Ford, but that's neither here nor there. The treasure in "Tintin" is more a MacGuffin -- something all the characters want, but something that takes backseat to the action for much of the film.

In "Tintin," the hunt to find a lost treasure pits the intrepid young journalist against the nefarious Sakharine, a villain who's just villainous enough to be the bad guy without presenting any really perilous threat. But after a while, the action is just much more interesting than what actually happens to the character. The animation certainly creates a level of inconsequential fakeness to the proceedings, where it seems like Tintin's sidekick Captain Haddock could survive just about anything.

But what of the animation? At first, it's somewhat jarring. Some characters look incredibly real, like Tintin and Sakharine, while others are incredibly stylized (like the bumbling detective duo Thompson and Thompson), which makes this world seem both identifiable and cartoonish. After a few minutes though, it's actually quite marvelous and makes the film more enjoyable. The "dead eye" syndrome that has haunted motion capture since its inception is certainly present on more minor characters, but the detail on Tintin is almost flawless.

As for the filming, Spielberg has used animation to completely free his camera. Shots that would otherwise be impossible are pushed to extremes: big circular motions, wild "tracking shots," and one action setpiece that's all in one shot, with the camera covering a somewhat ridiculous amount of geography. The care in designing these is incredibly impressive. The production design, the cinematography, the editing, the sound -- these are all top-notch, very detailed, and very rewarding. Also, the score by John Williams has him reliving the kind of wild, almost chaotic and whimsical stuff that made him famous back in the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" days. The music alone is enough to stir the young adventurer in you.

Okay, but then there's the 3D. I still think the film would have been just the same (maybe better) without it, BUT I was in the far left of the second row of the Chinese watching it (the screen is *enormous* and the rows are *long*). What I realized after a while is that I had to keep focusing on the center of the image to let it work, and I had to crane my neck to make the glasses work. After a while, I pushed the glasses onto my forehead and looked up to give my neck a break. So I'm not the best judge of the 3D. I will say that its unobtrusive and beautiful when it works, and I still think 3D is much more an "animator's platform" (with no disrespect to that craft, it just feels more natural than with live action). While Wim Wenders' "Pina" FLOORED me at AFI Fest with his use of 3D, I still think that's an artistic outlier when it comes to live action (I'm still waiting anxiously for Scorsese's "Hugo").

Still, the colors and the spaces really did pop in 3D, and it helps this kind of kooky stylistic project take on another dimension (no pun intended). "Tintin" is sometimes a wildly uneven film, as there are entire sequences that I think just didn't work or simply went on for too long (the film as a whole is only 107 minutes, but parts do feel a tad tiresome). Most dialogue scenes are just Tintin and Haddock recapping things I had already figured out, or saying what they were going to do next before they actually went about doing it. That may be in the spirit of the comics (I don't know), but after a while it started to feel very redundant. One thing I did notice was that 3D continues to make rapid editing or wild camera moves even more incoherent. True to Ebert's decrees, when the camera sits still for a while or the moves are smooth and patient, the eyes can process it easier. 3D is a whole different way to watch movies, and filmmakers need to adjust more and more to it.

But "Tintin" as a whole is a spectacularly silly ride of action fluff, and Spielberg embraces that. Despite its silly veneer, it manages to rouse a good deal of excitement and earns a few good laughs (especially when Tintin's dog, Snowy, is doing, well, anything). It certainly has Spielberg trying to get back to his childhood roots (without the father/son issues and sentimentality -- thankfully), and partnering with Peter Jackson as a producer certainly helps make the "bigness" of the film seem even bigger.

It's somewhat a strange film, just because of how new all the technology still is. Years from now, it will either be a curious detour in Spielberg's career, or a rather decisive moment in the motion capture/3D narrative. This makes it a love it/hate it film, even though I fall somewhere in the middle. I admire it, I even had a good amount of fun watching it (shocking for a 3D movie if you know anything about how much I hate 3D), but there's something oddly soulless about it. It's a visual tour de force, but the plot never really gets under the pulp adventure of it to care anything about Tintin as a character. Even Haddock's characterizations exist mainly to service the furthering of the adventure.

But again, this could be exactly like the "Tintin" comics, and if that's the case I imagine Wright and Co. serviced a rather wonderful homage/adaptation. If there's anything to praise about "Tintin" beyond its technological achievements and the "Spielberg/Jackson" partnership, it's that this film genuinely loves adventuring and exploring. It's a film for kids, sure, but it's also that rare film that dares you to feel like a kid for two hours without letting any of the pretensions of the adult world slide into the frame.

Something to do with death -- "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia"

2011-11-09T18:51:00.000-05:00

AFI FILM FEST REVIEW

Its title isn't just a fairy tale construct; "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" derives its namesake from the films of Sergio Leone ("Once Upon a Time in the West" and "Once Upon a Time in America") (not Robert Rodriguez), whose later works gradually became more and more fascinated with the operations of myth-making as it relates to the construction of a national identity and national perception, always making these arguments in a particularly generic context. Conveniently, that's where I also derive the title of my blog.

Now, don't let this preface mislead you: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest film is nothing like Leone. His wandering journey through the Turkish countryside is a painfully extracted drama. Over two and a half hours, his images are both fly-on-the-wall observational and strikingly poetic in their lighting and camera position, building to no sense of climax or even resolution. What starts as hypnotic ends in a confounding sense of imprisonment. In fact, I'm genuinely puzzled by "Anatolia," even if I think that Ceylan made every inch of this film exactly as intended. Its formal accomplishments are incredibly laudatory. Deciphering meaning isn't just difficult -- it's damn near impossible.

A band of cops and other officials lead two prisoners through the Turkish countryside in search of a body they have confessed to killing and burying. They start off at dusk, and over the night wind down a road, stopping ever so often as the killers can't seem to remember where the body is stashed. Along the way, the various characters discuss their lives, their sorrows, murder, death, and miracles. This is only the first half though, and after the body is discovered the film charts the return back to town and the processing of the corpse, while this mini-dramas between the characters continue to play out.

Right off the bat, the rather amazing landscape cinematography orients how we watch this film. Characters are often miniscule, as the camera photographs rather idyllic compositions of the sprawling hills and dusty roads. The sound gives us the impression we are right next to the characters, even when the camera leaves them to float freely through a field of tall grass. In one shot, an apple rolls down a hill, into a creek, and slowly tumbles through the water for what must be a good two minutes. The camera never cuts, and the characters continue talking over the image.

This disjunction between the narrative action (the conversation) and the treatment of images as somewhat apart from that give a rich sense of beauty to the opening act of "Anatolia." As it goes on, the conversations become more focused on the dead body they hunt, and of death itself. For each of these characters, death (and life) seems to have very particular meaning, much as their quest is, for some, a nuisance, and for others, a matter of utmost importance.

The discovery of the body (this isn't really a spoiler even though it comes about 105 minutes into the film; it's rather obvious this will happen) redirects the narrative into a somewhat more comic and yet more disturbing element. The prosecutor must process the body, and the language of his report is ever so slightly different from what we watch happen, giving us the impression that the stories we report are always divorced from the reality we experience them in.

Even police reports are constructs in this world that deals increasingly with the limits of construction, especially as it relates to death. While the retrieval of the body is the only narrative arc, and it ultimately lands in the morgue, there is still no real sense of closure for anyone in the film, especially the characters we come to learn a bit of backstory about. Maybe our jobs fill our existence, give us our stories? Maybe stories have conclusions, where reality doesn't? Maybe we can INVENT conclusions for our stories that elide the devastating aspects of life?

While I think these and many others could ultimately be the roots of the film, this last question seems to be the most apt way to start thinking about it. Stories smooth over harsher details, and the film works to unearth (quite literally, as they must exhume a dead body) what some of those details are. Even if we never learn why the man was murdered or get much of an insight into those who killed him, there is a quietly disturbing quality that seems to suggest the men in this film are consciously evading a confrontation with their reality.

Ceylan leaves this up to us to decide for ourselves, as there is little dialogue in the last 45 minutes, and the final sounds (as the image cuts to black as certain sounds continue) suggest the knowing eradication of evidence that contradicts a published account. Ceylan wants us to consider the ways we "create" our relation to the world. That he situates it in such a well-defined and gorgeous space is a credit to how particular and universal he is able to make this film once one sits back and starts peeling away the layers.

Its demandingly slow pace may infuriate some, but it also serves as the backbone for exposing the rigors of its procedural. In some respects, it's like a fine wine: it needs this space to breathe, for it's in the spaces that's between what's said and what's not ready apparent in the compositions that meaning starts to take shape.

"Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" deserves far more unpacking than I'm able to give it, but it's a perfect example of a cinema that demands active involvement to derive meaning. I'm not even sure if that meaning goes as deep as I suspect it does, but I know I'll be thinking about it for days and weeks to come.

Wedding crashers -- 'Melancholia' review

2011-11-09T11:49:00.002-05:00

And you thought it was bad having Owen Wilson and Vince Vaugn turn up at your wedding. Try having a whole planet ruin the show. Lars von Trier's apocalyptic drama of dysfunction, "Melancholia," is one of the most poetic, harrowing, and pessimistic films of the year, as one might expect with an even fleeting knowledge of von Trier's career. Those who admire him because of, or in spite of, his enfant terible attitude toward culture and the cultural industry that sustains him, will feel a familiar sense of oppression in "Melancholia" squarely channeled through feminine protagonists.

Similar to 2009's "Antichrist," the style of the film weaves in and out of his naturalistic, handheld style that favors lots of quick zooms, bouncy close-ups, and some extended shots of characters grappling with depression and despair; as well as a hyper-stylized slow motion technique that performs just the opposite function, letting us salvage a sense of beautiful composition in the face of the ugliness of the content.

The opening ten minutes of "Melancholia" show the end of the world in stunning grandeur. From the perspective of our sister protagonists, we watch the world literally crumble and melt before Melancholia, an apty named and hauntingly blue planet, collides with Earth. Quite a way to start the picture, and quite a way to form a response to Hollywood's recent obsession with the end-times. There's not hyperkinetic action or death-defying stunts. There are visual effects, but they certainly aren't showy or "cool." There's not one A-list celebrity who narrowly makes it out alive with a scrappy band of survivors. Rather, it's quite the opposite, a total inversion of everything we've come to expect from the spectacle of the world ending. The beautiful music and the rather painterly quality of the images von Trier produces in his slowed-to-stillness images invite us to admire the spectacle, even as it introduces a rather intense level of uneasiness.

That uneasiness carries well into the first hour of the film. After our "prologue," we jump back in time just a few nights to Justine's (Kirsten Dunst) wedding reception. Held in a remote, lavish castle with its own golf course (there's something almost Fellini-esque about the decadence of the decor), she and her new husband show up incredible late, to the ire of her well-to-do brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland) and sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who are funding the reception. For the next hour, the film rather painfully (in a good, cringe-worthy kind of way) wanders through a series of horrid interactions between Justine and her family. We get glimpses of her immensely dysfunctional relationship to her divorced parents (John Hurt and a particularly effective Charlotte Rampling); she wants to take a nap instead of cutting the cake; and she even goes off to have sex with a guest of the party on the golf course.

Clearly, there's something wrong with Justine. Though we learn something of her successful professional career, Dunst is effective at creating a series of masks for the character that are gradually stripped to reveal an empty, depressed personality seemingly incapable of connecting to the world around her. This may, to tease out von Trier's suggestion, have quite a bit to do with the breakdown of her family, and it's the continued tension between family members that informs much of the film's drama.

"Melancholia" never leaves the castle. Even after the guests depart, Justine, Claire and John stay behind and learn that the titular blue planet is on a collision course with Earth. Part two of the film is, as per von Trier's title cards, designed to reflect Claire's personality, while the first part reflected Justine's. Whereas the first half of the film uses a wedding -- a social gathering -- as impetus to uproot the depression lurking behind the family construct, the second half introduces a much larger problem: How do we deal with the end of the world? Claire's relationship with her husband, who embodies the "von Trier-ian" Man Who Thinks He Knows Everything, worsens as he insists the planet will pass Earth and her depression reaches hysterical heights, while Justine resigns herself more and more to the emptiness of life and the fatality of their situation.

As the blue planet looms ever closer, von Trier rather beautifully uses science fiction as a way to get deeper into the problems that exist between his characters. This is not the first time von Trier has used generic elements as catalyst or guide to hist intimate character studies. "Europa" and "The Element of Crime" take place in highly formalized futuristic landscapes, while "Antichrist" forms much of its meaning out of a crucial intertext with the horror genre. Here, the end of the world is an opportunity to place front and center a rather stomach-churning question: if the world blew up, would we be missed?

For much of the film, these characters in their insulated bickering space seem beyond redemption and hope, yet in a surprising move that belies almost everything we've come to associate von Trier with, the final moments hinge on an act of compassion that suggests beneath all of this horror, the capacity to love somehow endures. If the apocalypse of Earth deprives the universe of anything, it would be compassion.

"Melancholia" is, as I've seen a few people point out, the inverse of "The Tree of Life." Where that film celebrated the creation of Earth and the presence of God while navigating a complicated family construct, "Melancholia" impends the end of Earth, seems to believe we're all alone, and for most of its runtime leaves little room to rejoice in the world as we've left it.

This is the most complete film Lars von Trier has made in years. It startles and arrests because not only does it oppress us with its characters' increasing depression, it has an oddly beautiful vision. Von Trier, after a rather horrible case of foot-in-mouth disease at Cannes, should still be regarded as one of the world's most important directors. He has channeled such uncompromising bleakness with a blend of personal dilemma. The story he enacts feels like his own need to grapple with a personal depression and a concern about whether there is an innate goodness to humanity. As in life, there's no way to tell. All that's clear is that sometimes you have to live some days like it's your last.

World on a 'Haywire'

2011-11-07T04:26:00.003-05:00

WORLD PREMIERE EXCLUSIVE

The thing about Steven Soderbergh is that I truly believe he's a "filmmaker's filmmaker." He's almost impossible to pin down, in that he's tackled multiple genres, multiple styles of filmmaking, and vastly different budgets, all while retaining (in fact, increasing) his credibility. He does all this while promoting a basic love for the craft. He makes movies that are enjoyable (the "Ocean's" films, "The Informant!") just as often as he makes movies that are experimental and very personal ("The Girlfriend Experience" or "Schizopolis"). They're all unique films, yet they all bear a mark distinctly his own.

So it is with great pleasure that I can reveal a good two and a half months before you're able to see it that "Haywire" is everything you could hope it to be, if you're one of those people who just wants to watch a great action movie without the frills. This is tight, controlled filmmaking that makes the genre come alive.

Reteaming with Lem Dobbs for the first time since 1999's "The Limey," Soderbergh has once again assembled a cast worth drooling over -- Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton -- as well as a peculiar newcomer, "American Gladiator" Gina Carano. It's not the first time Soderbergh has explored atypical casting (he used porn star Sasha Grey in his small drama "Girlfriend Experience" recently), and the gamble certainly pays off. Carano is the film's biggest question mark. It's her movie; she plays Mallory Kane, a super-hardened ex-Marine working for a private contracting company that requires various dirty operations performed around the world.

Far from being awkward on camera, she exudes a rather natural effectiveness as an action heroine. Perhaps it's because Soderbergh has her DO things much more often than say them, but she seems perfectly in control of every sequence (especially the fight scenes). It helps to surround her with such A-list talent, where even Channing Tatum comes off effective in a small role (if Soderbergh can do anything, it's get solid work out just about anyone).

Dobbs has crafted, much like "The Limey," a screenplay that at a glance appears rather conventional. It has the spy-ring-operation-that-reveals-larger-conspiracy plotline very familiar to fans of the genre, and it has fight scenes, a car chase, a foot chase, a "shake off those tailing you" scene, and more. The characters are broadly drawn to fit archetypes far more than particular, quirky people, and there's little room for character development or tangential conversations. And really, I wouldn't have it any other way.

What's great about the Dobbs/Soderbergh partnership is that the seemingly skeletal screenplay gives the director room to develop the movie on his own visual terms. This is the Soderbergh I feel like most people love. It's not the cocksure deviousness of the "Ocean's" movies, but it's the small-yet-big feel of many of his mid-level successes that manages to host great sequence after great sequence. For those who get dizzy watching Jason Bourne but still relish a great scene, get in line for "Haywire" -- every camera placement, every edit in the film's multiple fight sequences feels perfectly designed and executed to give a clear sense of how it progresses and who's doing what so we're left to revel in the spectacle of violence in a coherent space.

This is an action movie for people who care about action movies. It shows brutal fights from long shots instead of close-ups, it has moves that feel intensely well-choreographed, and some of the chase scenes have some really beautiful camera work and position choices (such as leaving the camera in the car for most of a snowy-woods chase with a fantastic payoff). There may be a complaint when the film finally goes into wide release of its "emptiness," but as someone who loves genre I'd spit on that notion. Its structure and shape show the testing of feminine form against greed and power, a series of tests meant to reveal one's unknown drive and push towards some kind of truth. Best of all, "Haywire" makes clear Soderbergh's love for this kind of movie, and it's that unfettered love that's the unsung pulse behind every moment.

Soderbergh quite elegantly -- perhaps an odd word to use in a film with such messy bodily wounds -- restores an acute sense of fun to realistic fight scenes; an indebtedness to the basic craft of where to put the camera, how to light a scene, and when to cut; and an indelible nod toward the core of the action genre that should satisfy anyone looking for hard hits and sweaty-yet-beautiful actors. It's a blistering ride.

Hanging in a trance - "Faust"

2011-11-05T05:55:00.001-04:00

AFI FILM FEST REVIEW

I don't even know if I particularly like "Faust," but qualifying a movie like this based on personal enjoyment seems somewhat counterintuitive to the kind of work it's doing to sustain an immersive and very particular mood. Already the winner of the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Film Festival, Alexander Sokurov's film is difficult, occasionally maddening, emotionally empty, and strangely beautiful. It's also one of the best adaptations I've seen in quite some time, and deserves to be taken very, very seriously.

Johannes Zeiler assumes the titular role of professor with a thirst for more, but Sokurov's adaptation (co-written with Marina Koreneva and Yuri Arabov) makes a few major shifts in traditional perceptions of the character. First, there is a marked interest in carving up and understanding bodies and anatomies. The first shots of the film are an autopsy, or perhaps more accurately of Faust exploring the internal organs of a corpse. Over and over, bodies are twisted, fetishized, placed in oppositions, sexualized and desexualized, making this a very physical manifestation of the play. Second, Faust is not so much knowledge-hungry as he is desperate -- he is poor, hungry, and not making a particular amount of difference in the world.

His pact with "The Moneylender" (read: Mephisto) doesn't even take solid shape until perhaps 90 minutes into the film. Anton Adasinksy plays the Devil beautifully as a whimsical, disgusting, misshapen old man who engages Faust philosophically as much as he takes delight poking him in bizarre antics. His plot to gain Faust's soul comes less from exploiting his desire for knowledge than simply his desire to be recognized, sought after. That takes the form of Margarete, a young beauty whose brother the Moneylender kills (by manipulating Faust to do it) so that the good professor may console and seduce Margarete. It's a much more conniving, drawn out plan that introduces a rather fascinating (and, admittedly, deliciously creepy) romantic vibe.

The story of "Faust" is immensely well known, so while Sokurov and his writers take certain departures to make it their own, the real creativity comes through in the visuals. It feels like the camera is floating through most of the film, taking characters out of the center of compositions to almost lust over the architecture of the small German town or the nearby woods. There are also many instances of canted angles, intensely soft focus, and gels on the lens to create a reality that is constantly shifting (not to mention the beautiful intrusions of natural colors like greens and browns into the color palette), made more explicit from jump cuts that induce a lack of logic to the narrative progression and detached voiceovers that cobble together bits of conversations. Adding in some subtle (and some not so subtle) surreal imagery, the overall effect of the film is to be sustained in 135-minute trance.

That's both the most appealing and unappealing quality of the film. Occasionally, the languid pace is simply maddening; the film often feels like it sincerely is going nowhere and just wandering about. But at the same time, this often makes for the most captivating sequences -- this is a journey for Faust, where he may just be walking around his town and the surrounding areas, but the conversations he's having with the Moneylender and the truths these are revealing about himself start to confront us with his need for power.

All the gears of a poetic, abstract cinema are operating in full swing, which shouldn't detract from the rather wonderful performances given by the principals. If the film confronts us with startling, at times profound and even moving images of nature throughout, it still manages to let its story of multiple seductions creep in occasionally. The narrative is sublimated for the sake of exploring the visual landscape, and this at times lends the feeling of improvisation. That improvisatory atmosphere adds to the laboriousness of the film in places, but also makes it feel like a genuine exploration into the Faust story.

Certainly, Sokurov is doing a wonderful feat of adaptation, turning an established work of art into a meditation all his own. He uses adaptation as an excuse to transform the text narratively and visually, creating a version of the film that certainly goes heavily against its more renowned filmic adaptations of the past (specifically, Murnau's classic from 1924). While it's a potentially fresh film for visual theorists and adaptation scholars, especially towards its more ambiguous final twenty minutes (let's face it, the whole film is rather ambiguous and at times seems simply unsolvable), it's very tempting to just toss Sokurov aside as creating, frankly, masturbatory images loosely assembled around a classic story.

But to dismiss the film in such a way is to simply balk at its experimentive nature that seems, all in all, genuinely excited about the process of exploring narrative in such a sublimated visual way. That may come across as boring or over-long -- which it certainly is in places -- but that doesn't take away from the overall effect: it uses the camera to cast a spell.

Of power and suppression -- "J. Edgar"

2011-11-04T03:09:00.000-04:00

WORLD PREMIERE EXCLUSIVE

How do we present history? How do we even sit down and begin to recount our own personal lives, let alone connect ourselves to the broader tapestry surrounding us? This is a core question of "J. Edgar," one that is alternately summoned to the fore and relegated to the background. For a historical drama interpreting the life of one of 20th century America's most complicated figures, it is also a core dilemma, torn at the core between the intellectualizing of the screenwriter and the polished traditionalism of the director.

This is arguably Clint Eastwood's strongest movie since "Letters from Iwo Jima" (but considering my increasingly lukewarm feelings towards his three subsequent films, does that tell you much?), and it exhibits in equal push and pull the workmanlike director's best and worst qualities. There's the trademark polished/overblown/very shadowy cinematography from Tom Sterns, the measured editing beats of Joel Cox, the production design of James J. Murakami, costumes courtesy Deborah Hopper, and that equally uplifting and dissonant piano music -- if anything can be said of late-Eastwood, it's a remarkably coherent visual style that is pretty to look at but somewhat artistically empty, locked in a world of its own good intentions.

The dark inner offices of J. Edgar Hoover, never changing even as Leonardo DiCaprio alternates through many stages of make-up (perhaps the film's most crowning achievement. I increasingly marveled at the transformations of the principals over the course of the film), and the recurring night clubs and bedrooms all add to a sense of continuous visual space for a drastically uneven man, but it also depletes life out of the film in many of the less interesting dramatic moments. There's a sense that Eastwood, as competent a craftsman as he is, simply isn't interested in using the cinema beyond its ostensible Hollywood style. That's neither a compliment nor an insult -- it is what it is.

The far more important element is screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, penning his major follow-up to the Oscar-winning "Milk." Where I found "Milk" an incredible piece of character/historical writing marred to an inspirational discourse on the evolution of the gay movement, "J. Edgar" seems to trade in the passion for a more brooding, if no less intellectual, view of history. It's an original screenplay, meaning Black's interpretation should be viewed all his own. While many of the ideas in the film -- how to combat an ideology, assessing self-worth, creating a legacy, the changing face of American politics -- are all interesting, none resonate more than the homosexual reading Black gives Hoover.

Working off the whispers of Hoover as a closeted cross-dresser, Black's treatment of him as a man incredibly torn by his sexuality should be the film's selling point. This might be because it puts the film's shining element -- Armie Hammer -- front and center. While Hammer was barbed in literal twin roles in last year's "The Social Network," here he exudes such a basic humanity, an amazing sense of heart largely missing from the rest of the film's largely caustic and empty emotional impact. Hammer plays Clyde Tolson, Hoover's companion and potential lover. On the other end is Judi Dench in a somewhat underwritten role as Edgar's suppressive mother. It's this devotion to his mother's ideal of him that confuses and suppresses Edgar, forcing him to erect a model of masculinity that conforms to his idea of the American Male.

"J. Edgar" is at its best when it stops being a biopic and starts investigating its principal character. Detours like the investigation into the Lindbergh baby kidnapping are interesting enough, but they feel too procedural compared to moments where Hoover remarks on how the changing representation of the Feds in the cinema in the 30s helped mark a shift in their representation for the nation. The film rather obliquely teases out the idea of Man as Construction, and Hoover as an amalgamation of self-imposed ideas that work to suppress this other, more feminized form. Similarly, DiCaprio only obliquely approaches the character; his impersonation is rather grating and uneven, but there are several key scenes where he hits the multi-dimensionality of the character.

It's a wholly uneven film torn constantly between multiple ideas about itself. When it works, it can best be described as a meditation on how suppression leads to constructions of power as the ultimate masculine ideal, and the neuroses that take over when that ideal is pursued. When it doesn't, it's a rather static little period piece with interesting episodes, some big dramatic moments, and little else.

Perhaps J. Edgar Hoover, with his 50 years of service in the FBI, was just too much of a mythology to dissect in 137 minutes. The stilted flashback structure from the later decades of his life to the earlier certainly only work about half the time, as Edgar is trying to "write his own history," and the payoff to this comes a little too late to work through what could otherwise be a rather remarkable treatise on memory and history. When Black lets himself interpret Hoover's life to suit his own arguments about masculinity in the first half of the 20th century, and Eastwood's visuals simply relax a little bit instead of trying to get those formalized visuals so pretty, the film shines.

If only there was more of a spark to drive forward the critical arguments "J. Edgar" wants to make about the establishment and propagation of a federal law enforcement agency. It circles continuously around a very remarkable argument about masculine posturing and homosexual suppression, but its glamorous visuals and biopic conventions betray the better points of this argument.

Tattered souls -- 'Martha Marcy May Marlene'

2011-11-03T17:47:00.000-04:00

To begin any kind of discussion of "Martha Marcy May Marlene," one has to start at the end. Don't worry, there are no spoilers here. I only mean to suggest that the full force of the film, its true meaning, and its darkest implications, are only visible in its final cut to black. That alone is rare for a film, and in "Martha" it is at the least claustrophobic and the most horrific.

No, this is not the twisted psycho-thriller some of the more mainstream critics have claimed it to be. I'd argue its comparisons to Polanski's films (particularly "Repulsion," as I've seen some throw around) are also unwarranted, if only because first time director-writer Sean Durkin cares very little for the gothic expressionism Polanski was so obsessed with in his psychosexual horror films. Rather, "Martha Marcy May Marlene" is a terribly affecting study of psychological unhinging made with a deft sense of how to use cinema to get inside someone's head. Made with a subtle drive, an undercurrent of paranoia that gradually seeps into its farthest corners, this is both an admirably restrained first-time feature and an utterly astonishing star-making turn for Elizabeth Olsen.

Martha (Olsen) calls her sister out of the blue to be picked up somewhere in upstate New York. She is visibly emotionally scarred and hauntingly distant, and as she stays with her sister and brother-in-law in their New England lake house for two weeks, they try to reconnect with her as flashbacks gradually reveal the cause of her increasingly paranoid isolation. Martha spent the last two years living in a cult that borderline worshiped patriarchal Patrick (John Hawkes in a role less flashy but no less vicious than his Oscar-nommed turn in "Winter's Bone"), where she fell victim to and witnessed psychological violence, brutal sexuality, and home invasion.

The auspicious title derives from this polar existence -- in the cult, Martha became Marcy May, a name given to her by Patrick (as for Marlene, well, the film gives that one away too, but it's rather buried, so I won't spoil the fun). Told concurrently, the flashbacks intrude seamlessly into Martha's present space. The only way to distinguish how time changes between an edit is sometimes the quality of light, the film stock, or what Martha is wearing, so approximate are the match cuts between time and space.

At first, this is disorienting, but ultimately becomes decipherable and rather clever, largely because of how sparse Durkin chooses to edit the film. Many sequences play out in one long take, often from a stationary camera position. Cinematography Jody Lee Lipses uses very narrow focal planes to show Martha's isolation, or deep space to convey how out of touch she is with the house around her. Every time an edit happens, it begs instant analysis on our part to figure out what's changed, if anything.

I don't just say this because I'm a film scholar and I do it anyway: "Martha" is a film that forces you to wake up to the devices of the cinema in order to decipher meaning; only by becoming aware of what the camera, the editing, and the sound track are doing in any given moment are we able to connect with Martha's inner world.

While at first Martha just seems damaged and removed, a shell of a person trying to reconcile her absence from society, the film gradually pushes this closer to a raving paranoia, where she may or may not be hearing sounds, and people may or may not be following her. Again, the concurrent movements through time that gradually show the true nature of the cult help instill this dread in us as it comes out in Martha. The deepest credit must be given to Elizabeth Olsen, who is mute for much of the film and does everything to seem disconnected. Yet it's this disconnectedness that makes her so affecting; a paradox of a most intense nature. She seems so incredibly comfortable with letting the camera study her, with using the space of the frame to maximum effect, trusting Durkin's visual design to gradually reveal her tortured worldview.

"Martha Marcy May Marlene" is a difficult film, make no mistake. It has very rough questions about how to deal with loss, how to construct the self, how women relate to men, how power structures are formed, and how fear manifests itself. Martha's strained relationship with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) reveals a dichotomous worldview between them -- the film very much questions how we choose to live our lives, and what purpose we serve ourselves in choosing those paths. This question is key to the other half of the film as well, as Hawkes's selfish messiah Patrick wants so desperately to be loved he'll bend the will of others to create his own utopia.

For a film so quiet, it's easy to let these very complicated ideas slide to the wayside and become frustrated with the film's very deliberate pace and very closed off space. Admittedly, its conclusion comes with a rather ambiguous jolt. But the more time spent away from it, the more haunting it becomes. Durkin has created an atmosphere so insular, so psychologically damaged, so reflective of his protagonist's scars, that it's hard not to be impressed.

It's hard to place a final judgment on a "Martha," for it so slowly reveals itself and, similarly, slowly implants its effect once the lights come up. Suffice to say it is that rare psychological film less interested in scaring with its paranoia than honestly interrogating the creation of effects of paranoia.

Et tu, Gosling?

2011-10-18T22:12:00.001-04:00

The first question that probably comes to mind after Ides of March: Is there anything Ryan Gosling CAN'T do? In three major roles this year, he's been a comedic supporting player, a stoic action hero, and now a politically-charged anti-hero negotiating the shadowy labyrinth of election politics. Not only has he shown his diversity, he's batting a thousand, showing an intensity to character development and subtlety unlike anyone in his generation.

The second question might be, what does George Clooney actually accomplish with this film? Stepping back into the director/co-producer/co-writer/supporting actor chair that he used so well in his other politically-minded (but more historically-directed) film, Good Night, and Good Luck, he's now trying to feel more immediate, more acidic, and more politically relevant with a jab at the cynicism of the political landscape. And while The Ides of March certainly has moments of cold devastation and frosty bleakness, it's hardly the whopping indictment of the system its creators seem to envision it as.

Clooney plays Mike Morris, a Democratic candidate in the waning days of the primary elections. Focusing on the Ohio primary that, in the narrative, will ultimately decide who gains the Dem's presidential candidate, there are less speeches and grandstanding than there are volleyed conversations amongst campaign strategists. Enter Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ryan Gosling, the veteran and the upstart, and Morris's brain trust. Hoffman, behind a mop of greying hair and glasses, certainly looks the part of a political strategist, and his line delivery turns the whole thing into a numbers game as if it were nothing.

On the other side, there's Paul Giamatti as the opposition's chief political strategist. Conniving and smarmy as only Giamatti can be, his few scenes are some of the film's most electrifying, because he's clawing out of desperation to try and unseat Morris. Though Hoffman and Giamatti only exchange a few bits of dialogue early in the film, their conversations throughout about how to win elections are the film's most revealing -- they reveal the stakes not in terms of political ideals, but in terms of raw factors like cost, risk v. reward, demographic breakdowns, and margins of error within poll numbers.

The point, if you haven't caught on, is that elections are less about convincing people you're the right person for the job and more about conning them into voting for you through specific strategies. Though Clooney plays an idealist, someone who's determined to "make America number one," he's constantly butting heads with his crew and, wouldn't ya know it, by the time things are over even his shiny hands don't come off as totally clean. These broad thematic strokes -- politicians don't really care, it's all a game, the problem is the election system -- come in early and often, but after a while it all kind of loses its effect. It's a movie about people who lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top, but it all feels rather insular after a while -- as the stakes are raised, less seems to matter to people outside the campaign.

Yet, that doesn't mean Ides of March isn't absorbing. It's actually very tight, well-paced, and for those who love political thrillers, its dialogue-heavy script is certainly flashy even when it doesn't quite deliver on substance. Much of the film is focused through Gosling's Steven. The title of the film has Shakespearean implications, and by act three Steven readies himself to perform a political coup d'etat. There's plenty of double-crosses, manipulations, and even a bit of tragedy thrown into the mix that I dare not dispel. Some of it seems obvious, some of it comes as a surprise, and some of it feels manipulated into the larger storyline. Nevertheless, Steven's descent from wide-eyed believer into a selfish anti-hero is the crux of the film, and the film ends up surviving largely on Gosling's wings.

Part of the film's insularity comes from its stage origins. Based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, there's not a lot that feels "stage-y" about the presentation. Even if most of it is comprised of dialogue at bars, in hotel rooms, or behind the scenes at campaign rallies or at campaign headquarters, the constant changing of locations and the movement of the characters throughout Ohio certainly "opens it up." Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael uses lots of harsh, shadowy lighting to underscore the darkness that gradually overtakes the film, and uses plenty of close-ups and strategic blocking in doorways to highlight character subtleties and shifting relationships. This is aided by editor Stephen Mirrione, who gives every beat a sense of purpose and guidance to the overall shape largely by maintaining a strict continuity style.

There's little cinematic invention here, but that's nothing to lament. Clooney's direction is subdued; he puts his filmic devices to use under the action. He'd rather invest in how characters speak and behave to each other than stressing the visual components, which all seem to be working for the actors at any given moment.

There's a lot to like about The Ides of March -- mainly, that it's about our current political climate without talking down to us. That's also kind of its undoing -- it doesn't have a lot to add to the discussion. What it says, it says in an absorbing and economical fashion. There aren't a lot of big speeches (aside from Hoffman, who other characters poke about for his speech-making), and screenwriters Clooney, Willimon and Grant Heslov do a good job about keeping the most important elements between the lines and withholding major plot reveals for the right moment.

Sometimes, however, this restraint feels too pervasive. Sometimes it feels like Ides of March is comfortably floating through its political commentary without raising the stakes high enough. Sure, it discredits Morris as the ideal candidate (a resolution you should know will happen one way or another from just reading a plot description) and turns Steven into a tightened, jaded little bastard, but aside from strewing proverbial wreckage across the final act, and pointing out some of the glaring problems of our political landscape, there's not much to it.

Though its locked-in icyness may be part of the design, its this very icy insulation that keeps its sense of hopelessness about the whole system from turning it into a truly disturbing and nerve-wracking thriller.

Swinging for the bleachers

2011-09-30T02:10:00.001-04:00

First off, let's get one thing straight: Moneyball is not "The Social Network of baseball movies." Yes, they're both penned by Aaron Sorkin (though he shares a screenplay credit with Steven Zaillian here), and they'd both rather keep the action confined to the development of ideas. But that's about where it ends. The calculated coldness of David Fincher's film is nowhere to be found, and Bennett Miller gives Moneyball such an earnest, gruff quality that it sneakily builds into a roaring film that may very well rank among the best baseball films ever made. It certainly isn't like any of them.

The film is based on Michael Lewis's novel about how the Oakland Athletics built a competitive team out of the lowest salary in professional baseball and made a run at a divisional championship in the early 2000s using a complex system of statistics that bucked traditional scouting and managing trends. Moneyball is in one way about totally reinventing the wheel. It occasionally revels in a bit of baseball geek-speak not to be esoteric, but to get a tangible sense of what the debates about sabremetrics are all about.

But that's only half the story. Lewis described his book as the biography of an idea, so Zaillian and Sorkin carve the story of A's general manager Billy Beane into the foreground. Beane, a top high school prospect whose career nose-dived in the majors and has left him with a drastic sense of unfulfillment, finds his head on the chopping block at Oakland after other, wealthier teams poach his key players. And certainly, I feel like the film could speak to and be enjoyed by casual observers and non-fans of the game, as it puts Beane first and the diamond second.

In a sense, this is a classic story of redemption: a tortured protagonist fights for his moment of glory by defying the odds, beating the system, and finding his spotlight reinvigorated. I add the emphasis on classic and not cliched, because even though Moneyball may seem like those gruff underdog baseball movies fans of the game clamor for, it certainly isn't.

In fact, the project itself has a storied history that involves Sony pulling the plug when Steven Soderbergh was attached to direct several years ago. Brad Pitt remained invested, brought in Miller and Sorkin, and helped re-ignite the film. And for a work that draws on the emphasis of "the team" as opposed to "the superstar," Pitt, playing Beane, has certainly shred any veneer of his larger-than-life persona. At times, he is disarmingly casual -- haunted, even. With golf polos, track pants, and a bit of hair in his eyes, he often appears to be looking past what's in front of him -- unless, of course, it's the trade deadline, and then he's wholly committed to living in the moment.

And it's to Pitt and Miller's credit that they have assembled such a roster to work on the film, although their crew is certainly not undervalued. It starts with Miller -- this is, after all, his first film since 2005's Capote, and he still has a knack for the restrained. He finds a perfect partner in cinematographer Wally Pfister (last year's Oscar winner, and best known for lensing most of Chris Nolan's films). Pfister favors longer distances, as if his camera is lingering in the corner of a clubhouse. He lets lights and shadows infiltrate in natural ways that rarely feel disruptive, yet his framings still subtly comment on the relationship of the characters in their space.

When on the baseball field, however, his camera takes on an entirely different life force. The lights flood the field, it feels almost as if he's floating around, alternating frame rates, and yet there is something that feels so absolutely right about how he shoots baseball.

Editor Christopher Tellefsen, who edited Capote and some of Shyamalan's work among others, plays things very smart. There are many sequences that mingle television footage of the actual A's games, or use radio announcers from the games to tell the story, and he punctuates these well. At other times, such as when there's a big moment of suspense on the field, there are sharp edits that build scenes without feeling cheap. This is the same for the sound department, who mix in Mychael Danna's score marvelously, and find some terrific sound effects on the field (one instance in particular, where the entire sound track drops out except for the rattling crack of a bat, is magic). And Jess Gonchor, who's designed many of the Coens' films, provides a lived-in feel to the offices and club houses the narrative traverses.

But as much as I may try to rationalize and aesthetisize why Moneyball works, I simply can't dismiss one simple fact: It almost made me jump up and cheer, quite literally. I know, that's a silly and rather cliche thing for a film critic to write, but in this case it's absolutely true. The smartness and deftness with which this film is made lets it slowly build to some amazing emotional heights without ever selling out. There are so many moments where every element clicks, where it truly can catch you off guard.

I've heard some complain the film is actually unfair to the A's season -- it doesn't focus on, for instance, their award-winning pitching staff, and some characters are composites and stand-ins (as in Jonah Hill's stat-spewing assistant GM). I don't think that has any bearing on the film's overall quality (it is, after all, an adaptation) because it puts Beane front and center. This is, at the core, HIS story and NOT the A's.

It's a full-fledged character study that may care deeply about baseball, but only insofar as it can use baseball to help tell Beane's story. It is, in some ways, about a man who's become disenchanted by the game he loves, and who finds a way to re-energize himself and shake his establishment to the ground. Winning and losing on the field only matter if we can feel like we're winning it for ourselves and our own sense of purpose, the film seems to suggest. Baseball is a life force, a well that nourishes Beane and lets him learn to connect better to those around him.

It's high time we get a film that celebrates swinging for the bleachers without cheapening the moment with unnecessary layer of cheese.

"A Real Human Being, and A Real Hero"

2011-09-22T13:28:00.000-04:00

The disassociated, loner hero is a trope familiar to a wide array of historical periods, genres, and nationalities across cinema. James Dean in his red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause, Jean-Paul Belmondo's disconnected whirl through Paris in Breathless, Marlon Brando's struggle to establish his conscience in On the Waterfront, the minimalist assassin of Melville's Le Samourai -- these lonely men are just a few who awake our own sense of humanity through their recognition of their own failings.

In an American cinema of heroes gifted supernatural or highly expensive means of expelling the city of its woes and restoring a romanticized status quo to the world, "Drive" isn't just a breath of fresh air -- it's a slap in the face. Not only is it gorgeously filmed and meticulously crafted, it is at once full of despair, romance, and existential longing. It has the power to feel devastating and transcendental, excessive and minimalist.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Director honors at this year's Cannes film festival (and may be best known State-side for his Tom Hardy-starring psych-trip "Bronson"), takes to the streets of Los Angeles with Ryan Gosling as his "Man With No Name," Driver. Driver is a Hollywood stunt driver by day, a getaway-driver-for-hire by night. He lacks a voice and an identity -- a mode of expressing himself -- and is all but married to the cars he drives.

In a thrilling, nearly wordless opening sequence that follows Driver's meticulous getaway from the cops in downtown Los Angeles, Refn lays the groundwork for his craft. The lighting flows in oranges and blues, cascades of streetlights, headlights and neon signs; the camera angles are tight, and preferably inside the car, watching the streets as Driver sees them; the editing and motion of the camera and the focal planes are all purposeful (one might say "driven") to appropriately escalate tension without overplaying the drama; and Los Angeles feels stunningly represented, in that throughout the film it slides in and out of its real geography and its mythic constructs.

Aerial shots show the "one million streets" of Los Angeles lit up at night, and Driver's actions will move him through downtown, the valley, Echo Park, the Los Angeles river, and the Pacific. At the same time, this feeling of fidelity to the space is matched by the characters' tangential connection to the mythmaking power of institutional Hollywood. Not only is Driver is a working stuntman, his mentor Shannon used to sell cars to the movies, menacing thugs are one-time shlock producers, and even makeup artistry gets a shining (or, shocking) moment or two.

The impetus for the action in "Drive" is culled from familiar American filmmaking traditions: Driver is woken from his existential slumber by Irene (Carey Mulligan), a neighbor who he befriends until her husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison. Trying to help Standard end his debts and ensure Irene's happiness, Driver agrees to help with a pawn shop robbery. Things take an alternately predictably and unpredictably violent turn, unveiling a much more complex series of mob connections and a pervasive violent undercurrent to the city's gleam and grit.

Part of what makes Refn's staging feel so immaculate are the ways he chooses to represent time. Nearly every shot in the film can be associated with Driver's perspective, and certain moments capitalize on soft focus to help romanticize moments, deep focus to help call attention to the isolation between visual planes, or slow motion to help extend suspense and romance. While slow motion has often been the bane of contemporary action directors (here's looking at you, Zack Snyder), Refn uses it not only tastefully, but artfully. He slows the film down to help us fall in love with images or be stunned by them. Car crashes and romantic embraces feel almost balletic in this landscape.

The violence of the film, of which there is much, has the same approach. While the first half of the film is a romantic ode to self-discovery, the second half is a painful reconciliation with what that awakening can mean. Driver fights for Irene, but not in a didactic way. The film's minimalism makes him a universal crusader, "a real hero" who selflessly calls himself to arms out of necessity. Whether Driver enjoys the violence he ends up performing is something that remains relatively ambivalent (much as a theater experience might be filled with nervous laughter, patrons trying to decide whether the spectacle of it is entertaining or repulsive), which becomes part of the cost of his journey. The tragedy of Driver is his understanding that love and violence are incompatible. They cannot be juxtaposed.

This juxtaposition is what the film does quite provocatively, and quite masterfully. One scene in particular, "the elevator scene" as many refer to it, uses romantic slow motion and fast, quick cutting for its violent explosion. The incongruity of cinematic styles awaken us to the increasing incongruity of Driver's existence, even as he is discovering a purpose to his existence.

"Drive" is not a film for those looking for cheap thrills, and its beautiful stylization is matched by a narrative minimalism that may exasperate many movie-goers raised on intensified continuity (or what my colleague Matthias Stork would call "Chaos Cinema"). The chaos of "Drive" derives thankfully not from its aesthetic appropriations, but from the internal strife of its protagonist, a strife that is never given over to monologue or sentimentality. Rather, Refn directs the film like a poker player with an inscrutable tell: once we think we've figured him out, he throws something else at us, without ever overstepping the design of his film.

It's a genre-driven critique of violent heroism, one that acknowledges its debt to the globe- and decade-spanning films it draws influences from while feeling wholly original. That originality, moreso than the bloodbath, are what's really exhilarating about "Drive." Watching it is like sitting in the passenger seat and knowing your driver is in complete control -- even when he trips into triple-digit speed.

"The Black Dahlia" LiveCommentary

2011-09-15T01:17:00.001-04:00

<a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=aa39ad5798" >The Black Dahlia Live Commentary</a>

"No touching!" - "Contagion" review

2011-09-12T03:31:00.002-04:00

The horror genre has a deep history of masking and allegorizing its biggest fears. For instance, mass xenophobia and worries of foreign influence get combined into "Dracula," a character driven (at least in Tod Browning's 1931 incarnation) by his foreignness and his need to suck the life out of rich white people. Or, take zombie movies: fears of the apocalypse and the fragility of humanity's existence get converted into the undead -- mankind exacting revenge on itself for its own transgressions.

In fact, Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion" has some images that might feel culled from Danny Boyle's newly seminal "28 Days Later" -- deserted airports, trash flowing into the streets, food ripped from the shelves of stores. But this isn't some kind of deranged fantasy; the terror in Mr. Soderbergh's film is all too real, and the paranoia all too enveloping. It's a globe-trotting, fast-paced affair where the end of humanity threatens not from slam-bang sequences of iconographic destruction, but in hushed conversations between medical professionals and infected patients desperately trying to literally save human existence.

This is no "Outbreak," in that it's not dampened by awkward melodrama and a tumble into action-oriented filmmaking. Soderbergh -- whose career has always cleverly slid in and out of mainstream Hollywood moviemaking, giving equal attention to experimental projects and glitzy ensemble pieces -- continues to astound at his ability to make films that are simply difficult to pin down. It's also not the action-thriller many previews advertise (a welcome relief) but a thoughtful, provocative horror film that moves very evenly -- some may say purposefully rigidly -- through a labyrinth of political and scientific lingo.

In "Contagion," a new flu has erupted across the globe. In four days, it incubates, infects, and sends its victims into seizures and death. Minnesota, Atlanta, Hong Kong, and San Francisco are just a few of the many locations the film focuses, with no fewer than five major characters, many of whom either never meet or cross paths only intermittently. With Matt Damon as an immune father, Lawrence Fishburne as a CDC official, Kate Winslet as a doctor, Marion Cotillard as an epidemiologist, and Jude Law as a fear-mongering blogger, it's an ensemble to die for (and some of them do). All their parts may feel limited in screentime, but it all feels carefully modulated to reflect a broader fabric.

That comes courtesy of Scott Z. Burns ("The Informant"), who smartly structures the film around a tight chronology (title cards inform us of each passing day) while paying just enough service to each storyline to help us get a sense of how the virus is evolving and effecting global relations, political discourse, and people's struggle to survive in a world going increasingly crazy with desperation. It could play convoluted, but Soderbergh's editor, Stephen Mirrione, provides lots of efficient cross-cutting to keep us aware of how time is evolving across the various locales.

Credit also must be given to Soderbergh in his role as cinematographer. As in "Traffic," he uses different color schemes, hues, and filters for each segment (the Minnesota scenes are, for instance, filmed in icy blue, while scenes in government offices have a flat evenness to their lighting). He uses very limited focal planes to call attention to how the disease is spreading in early parts of the film, and uses longer shots throughout to call attention to how environments are reacting and how characters are interacting with each other.

And that, in many ways, is the real terror of the film. It's been said of films like "The Exorcist" that they can only scare you if believe they could happen (if your religious beliefs incline you to believe the devil could possess a little girl). With "Contagion," there is no line -- the paranoia and fear of a flu pandemic is certainly plausible. It's happened before, it could happen again. The stakes the film describes are astronomical, but they aren't farfetched. For the icing on the terror cake, its static images of people having seizures and dying are simply horrifying.

What's scary is the simplicity of a disease spread through simple interaction. Soderbergh loves calling attention to these elements -- people sipping on glasses in a restaurant, using the same door handle, shaking hands -- such that the integration of humanity is what causes its collapse. In a sense, it's a film that's also wary of globalization, as the connectedness of people causes the immediate international spread of the disease. Again, these ideas aren't ludicrous. We are a people living very densely and traveling often, and "Contagion" plays on this knowledge.

But what's the other interesting thread in the film, and one that might be easy to go unnoticed, is how communication breaks down. Government officials have increasing difficulty keeping track of each other and keeping things under control. On top of that, Jude Law's dirty blogger character enjoys sending out paranoid, hyperbolic disinformation that spreads like wildfire through his "12 million unique visitors." Disinformation, that is to say the Internet, is its own virus.

It's a film that's very cynical about the Internet -- Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere become weapons utilized by the less educated and less informed to create a false sense of superiority. It showcases the worst impulses of humans -- those who riot, steal, and kidnap for the sake of their own well-being -- and the humility and selflessness of the best of us. It's tempting to call it ambivalent about humanity's existence, save for a coda that actually earns a bit of indulgent cheesiness.

"Contagion" is a procedural; it charts with calm clarity a disturbing, downward spiral of impending violent doom. It corrals intimate images -- leaders reduced to rocking in their chairs, husbands unable to properly grieve loss -- amidst stunners like a mass grave of bodies. The dialogue is sharp, and the images work perfectly to build its dread and let its paranoia extend out to the audience. Safe to say, it's enough to make you want to cocoon yourself in saran wrap and seal yourself in a bubble for a few weeks.

Starring Los Angeles, as "Los Angeles"

2011-09-05T03:45:00.000-04:00

That night back in April where I decided to go to UCLA already seems like a distant memory (and yes, I still have yet to sit in a classroom. It's been an eventful couple months). But I had decided where to, in the words of a certain nefarious athlete, "take my talents" for graduate school, and so in a celebration I watched Thom Anderson's brilliant film essay "Los Angeles Plays Itself" on YouTube. It rocked my world, and in his deliberate, nearly-three hours of questioning how Los Angeles manifests itself on film and how its true character coolly eludes adequate representation, it actually provided me just one more in a very long list of reasons to go to Los Angeles and study.

Sunday night, the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica hosted a screening of Anderson's film, which has yet to receive a DVD release (though he hinted that one may be in the works). The director/scholar was there to talk about his work at the end of the film for what felt like a good 75 minutes, with a crowd who was eager to explore with him his process, what he loves about the city, and the implications of the mythical character of Los Angeles.

Now, I'm no expert. I've lived here for three weeks. I've seen many places, played the part of tourist, and am slowly starting to play the part of resident. I must acknowledge that "Los Angeles Plays Itself" is, on a second viewing with dozens of people who wanted nothing more than to talk about it seemingly endlessly, one of my new favorite films. It's not just for the care Anderson puts into his arguments about the city, or how many topics he traverses. It bounds -- sometimes free-form, sometimes more deliberately -- through the mystique of Hollywood, the mythology of the city's foundation versus its actual history, the history of many popular landmarks, and how Hollywood has transformed the city's meaning through its cinema. It also manages to elicit a very precise political argument about different classes and races, about the erosion of the city and the need to preserve it.

Anderson accomplishes this through two modes: A voiceover text, delivered in a very dry tone that's filled with a subtext of passion and ironic observation, and film clips. There is some supplementary footage -- showing how buildings look today versus how they looked in films in the 40s, showing popular locations and some not-so-popular locations throughout Los Angeles -- but mostly this sticks to the clips. At just under three hours, it plays like a magnum opus. Some in the audience called it a valentine, many expressed thanks for how much information -- visually and orally -- it was able to convey, but for me, it represents an important new way for my field to think about itself.

Much as Anderson wants to confront us with our perceptions of Los Angeles, I was confronted with how he seems to transform film criticism in the process. It's one thing to watch "film essays" on YouTube, but it is something entirely different to become absorbed in it in a theater. For years, film studies has labored under trying to do visual analysis in the written word. It works, but you have to take a lot of time to describe what you're talking about. The way Anderson complements text/voice and image are at times profound. He alternates between analysis, commentary, and poetry. In the moments where he stops to peruse his own recollections of Los Angeles, the film is actually quite powerful, especially when he's relying in clips to counteract these recollections.

These film essays are an essential new frontier for film theory and criticism. Thom Anderson says he's working on an expanded book on the topic as well as supervising a restoration of his film (which was edited on DV) for a DVD release. He took many questions on topics ranging from methodology to spirituality, and even though he at times seemed to shrink in the spotlight, not quite sure how to address an audience that simply wanted him to keep talking, the passion for Los Angeles reflected across the man with the mic and the people in the seats.

And as someone falling in love with the city for the first time, exploring it through my medium -- film -- and in my preferred mode -- film criticism -- is something wholly rewarding.

"What I know about is Texas."

2011-08-29T23:09:00.000-04:00

"The world is full of complainers. The fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. Now, I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or Man of the Year -- something can always go wrong. Go ahead, y'know, complain. Tell your problems to your neighbor. Ask for help, and watch him fly. Now, in Russia they've got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas. And down here, you're on your own."

So begins "Blood Simple," the Coens' first film. With its deliberate shots of a vacant Texas landscape, and its dry, thick voice reciting the words with a deep forlornness, it might as well be the opening of "No Country for Old Men." And while "Blood Simple" may be eclipsed by their later (and, well, better) work, it still lays the foundations for their complicated plots of dumb characters doing dumb things and meeting violence along the way.

Ray (John Getz) and Abby (Frances McDormand) are in the midst of a passionate affair, but when Abby's violently jealous bar-owner of a husband Marty (Dan Hedaya) finds out, he sends Detective Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) out on a bounty to kill. By the end of the film, three of those four people are dead.

"Blood Simple" is a film I don't watch enough, only because I tend to just watch the Coens' other movies. But for all the lunacy, power plays, and dissections of culture and genre at the heart of their work, "Blood" serves as the floodgate. As it opens up, we can see the chief interests of the brothers begin to take shape. This goes beyond the repetitious dialogue, the characters who try to behave smarter than the audience knows they are, or the macabre dips into violence that turn the narrative into knots.

It has more to do with their very deliberate visual style. This is before they put cinematographer Roger Deakins on their seemingly permanent roster of players, but Barry Sonnenfeld gives the brothers frames that teeter between the stoic -- close-ups of characters gazing off into directions, eyes wide or fixed -- and the fluent -- tracking shots that move from a floor-view to a top-down view of a crime scene.

Rooms are almost empty, save for the important details -- fish carcasses that end up concealing important information, signs on bulletin boards that become misdirection, guns that are hidden and used to stage a seemingly perfect murder. "Blood Simple" puts great emphasis on individual objects, often cutting conversation scenes around looks at and away from things situated between characters.

All of this is used to make the viewer aware of "knowledge." What the characters know about each other, who's playing whom, who's done what to whom and everyone trying to cover at least two things up at once. It's something they would explore to zanier heights in, say, "Burn After Reading" or "The Man Who Wasn't There," but here it's a calmer, almost devastating means of evolving the narrative. There's dark humor here, to be sure, especially in how much of a foul-up everyone is (a typical Coen characterization), but the cumulative effect is almost scary and sad. We learn things as they happen (which generally means we know things before anyone else) such that everything that ends up happening has a cruel, foreboding irony.

But as with the opening monologue, it all comes back to a strict sense of place and time. The opening monologue invokes two things: Russia, the Cold War enemy, and Texas, a wholly different place with laws and cultural conduct that take on a kind of mythological quality -- for the cinematic construction the Coens put forth, it's where cowboy-wannabes in cheap suits can sling around violent rhetoric. Russia is the collective; Texas is the individual. And "Blood Simple" reveals how alone the characters are, how their world is very much "every man for himself," as greed and lust create incredible violence.

This is where the Coens started their madcap tour of America and its time places, peeking in at the stupid people who think they can move up the social order with grand dreams and idealizations. They are dark filmmakers who punish those who dare stray from the social order with cunning retribution. They set fire to the American dream of self-prosperity at every turn and in multiple settings and periods. And it all started in Texas.

The End of Innocence: Gus Van Sant in the Millennium

2011-08-22T21:37:00.001-04:00

This article contains spoilers for "Gerry," "Elephant," "Last Days" and "Paranoid Park"

In the 2000s, Gus Van Sant retreated into a very minimalist, very independent cinema after poking his head into the mainstream for several years (most notably in his Oscar-winning "Good Will Hunting," least notably in his sick joke of a remake of "Psycho"). These films -- "Gerry" (2002), "Elephant" (2003), "Last Days" (2005) and "Paranoid Park" (2007) -- created a space for Van Sant to rethink his cinema. Indeed, they paved the way for "Milk," where many of his quirks seem to have new, effervescent life.

But what I'm interested in is not how one influences the other, but rather a theme that seems particularly evident and tortured within each of these works (even, in many ways, "Milk") -- the tragedy of adolescence. All these films feature very young protagonists, from the high schoolers of "Elephant" to the mid-20s rock God of "Last Days," and all of them turn on death. In "Gerry," one protagonist dies because of the duo's naivete and carelessness in venturing into the desert on a whim. The adventurous impulses of youth are struck apart by mother nature's displeasure. In "Last Days," the rocker who's unable to connect to the world outside his home collapses in a drug induced stupor and his soul ascends heavenward. Both of these events, which serve as the climax to these two films, are filmed in very matter-of-fact fashion, with distanced camera positions and minimal editing. Van Sant conjures a representation of death, but does not manipulate us into feeling one way or the other about it.

"Elephant" and "Paranoid Park," however, feel like complementary pieces in setting, character, style, and tone, even if their ultimate messages may seem divergent. "Elephant" conjures an abyss of violence predicated by a social structure that can't sustain its own weight; "Paranoid Park" allows its protagonist to glimpse that abyss but gives him a rather ambiguous chance to understand the devastation violence creates.

"Elephant" is a dramatization loosely based on the 1999 Columbine killings. Its elliptically circular narrative follows a string of high school students over the course of one day that ends with two of their classmates hijacking the school and shooting almost everyone. The tone of the whole film is elegiac; distanced. What's first noticeable about Van Sant's style is how much time he spends simply following his characters. His camera lingers at safe distances, roving around corners, watching them cross reflective linoleum corridors, moving within different social cliques or by themselves. These shots are hypnotic, yes, but they signal something darker -- the duration of each comes loaded with the growing knowledge of what's to come. Our distance from the characters becomes less and less a safe viewing distance and more and more an uneasy one -- we want to cry out, to warn them of what's to come, as Van Sant cuts increasingly away to the will-be-assassins planning their raid.

We see in "Elephant" the painful triviality of high school. Each character illuminates different aspects of this cruel hierarchy, they all have different stories about love, hope, aspirations, struggles, but all these myriad emotions are cruelly snuffed in the film's brutal final third. Why though, would Van Sant feel a need to adapt such a violent, tragic American event? And even still, why strip from it any sense of manipulation, crafting it instead in a series of motions that seem to glide on air?

The answer, I suppose, might be traced into "Paranoid Park," a film that's literally concerned with gliding. Its protagonist is a skateboarder, and several scenes of the film are filmed with Super 8 and follow skateboarders as they move through pipes and perform jumps. The repetition of their motions and the desaturated look of the film give a surprising sense of grace. These moments let Van Sant peel back from his otherwise dark narrative and let us breathe. The main character, Alex, accidentally kills a security guard and tries to cover up the murder and then deal with his overwhelming grief.

Like in the other films, death is a major event for the plot, but this time it is not the death of the central character. Though the narrative is still circular, moving around in time like an amateur storyteller might relay it (as is the point, as Alex's self-correcting voiceover guides the narrative), and the death is shown halfway through the film, most of the film occurs after the manslaughter.

Alex's inner life is destroyed by his actions, from his relationship to his friends, his parents, and most directly his girlfriend. It's Van Sant's preoccupation here to detail for his spectator exactly how Alex portrays this turmoil to himself. Many shots are pointedly in slow motion to highlight the growing weight of his conscience, with tracking shots again following him around his high school's hallways. But unlike the unceremoniously slaughtered sheep of "Elephant," Alex is not caught for his crime. If he learns anything, it's the gentle nature of grace.

In these films, life and death move along a very thin line. Characters teeter near one and the other much as they also move toward humanity and sin, letting violence into their lives or evading it in favor of love. Naivete is punished; egomania is abhorred. In Van Sant's cinema, those who survive aren't necessarily good, and those who die don't necessarily deserve their punishment. Indeed, it's easy to argue that Alex should be caught, even if he tries to purge his guilt and seek a better humanity. But at the same time, the children of "Elephant" may be trapped in their high school prison, but that entrapment doesn't warrant death. At the most, it merely warrants enlightenment.

Enlightenment is not for the diegesis, however. It's for the spectator. Van Sant's films are crafted for his spectators. The events that happen in the films are circumstantial, crafted for the emotional impact they have on those who view them. There are moments where character and apparatus are wed -- when the dread in Alex's mind renders the camera's motions in extreme slowness -- or when the apparatus refuses to engage the characters -- as in many of "Elephant's" tracking shots.

At the end, Van Sant wants us all to transcend our innocence, to see the world as the stark, violent force it is, and hope that perhaps we can salvage our own sense of love in its turbulence.

Six for Fall

2011-08-22T00:12:00.000-04:00

In the spirit of not being able to do a fall movie preview for The Daily Gamecock this year, I'm taking to the blog and laying down the six movies I'm most excited about, from now up to Thanksgiving.

Contagion (9/9)

Steven Soderbergh brings together a massive A-list cast for a globe-spanning pandemic thriller. Since he continues to be one of the only directors who uses each film as a vivacious new experiment, and one of the only who can gently move between being very mainstream and very independent, he could do some fascinating things with this one. Could it be the "Traffic" of the global apocalypse genre?

Drive (9/16)

I'd watch Ryan Gosling do just about anything. I think if he videotaped himself at Subway and put it on YouTube I'd marvel at it. He's just got that much charisma, that much intensity as an actor. So of course I'll watch him play a Hollywood stunt driver-turned-getaway driver. The trailer is pretty mainstream, but this won Best Director at Cannes, and the cinematography looks wonderful.

The Ides of March (10/7)

Speaking of Ryan Gosling, here he is again. Teamed up with George Clooney as director and star, and Grant Heslov in the co-writing/co-producing roles for a political campaign thriller, this one is oozing with not just Oscar-bait potential, but potential to open the very deep wounds of our divided political discourse. I smell another high-caliber outing with a similar feel as "Good Night, and Good Luck."

Red State (10/21)

Kevin Smith doing a horror movie? Say what? Kevin Smith doing a horror movie about crazy, murderous uber-Christians on what looks like a hyper-minimal budget? Holy self-recreation, Batman! Ever since I heard the festival rumblings and saw the trailer, I've been dying to see this film. It looks like a "Texas Chainsaw"-esque cult classic.

Melancholia (11/11)

It's pretty well known that I'm an ardent admirer of Lars von Trier, and think he's kind of a genius. I don't care about the controversial things he says or the ways he likes to poke people in interviews, his cinema stands on its own as visceral, challenging, and sublime. Here, he renders the end of the world as a dissolution of marriage and a series of family crises. Harsh statement on human relations? Almost certainly.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (11/18)

Thomas Alfredson's follow-up to his breakout masterwork "Let the Right One In" will test whether he really has the talent everyone thinks he does. But if the stark trailer of John Le Carre's novel is any indication, this one will deliver the goods. With Gary Oldman heading a terrific pedigree, it could be the actor's best chance for a long-sough Oscar nomination in quite some time.

Rise of the Convergence

2011-08-12T13:27:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of theorists who will tell you that the face is the most emphasized part of cinema. "The Close-Up" certainly meant a great deal to D.W. Griffith -- who would build entire films around one climactic close-up -- and Sergei Eisenstein -- who integrated it into a broader part of image montage. Contemporary Hollywood has only encouraged our association of cinema as a place to see spectacles of faces. Notice how most conversation scenes are shot in close or medium-close ups, rather than longer camera positions.

Devotees may remember I noted many of these aspects last December in my "Black Swan" review, where I called a lot of attention to how that film turns the close-up into a site of oppression and anxiety rather than a site of identification. I turn to "the close-up" or "the face" again with sheer peculiarity to talk about Rupert Wyatt's "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes."

Silly titles aside, this reboot/prequel is indeed as Time declares -- a moment in movie history. Utilizing motion capture technology and the best visual effects house in the business, Weta, "Rise" does things not even James Cameron's "Avatar" could do -- it integrates effects and people into real spaces. In Cameron's sealed off fantasy playground, he could build worlds on computers. Impressive, yes, and a necessary step forward for sci-fi and action effects extravaganzas. But now, taking it into sunlight and shooting in zoos, on the Golden Gate bridge, and in forests, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is a thing to behold.

But to know that motion capture works in real space isn't REALLY much of a surprise. Weta Workshops did, after all, create Gollum nine years ago for "The Two Towers," an effects performance that remains one of the touchstone achievements in the field. But in "Apes," those effects are amplified because these characters lack voices. Caesar (Andy Serkis) is an intelligent ape made even moreso by scientist Will Rodman's (James Franco) miracle drug that he thinks will allow the human brain to not only repair itself but increase its intelligence.

He's designing the drug for his Alzheimer's-ridden father (a rather enjoyable John Lithgow), and in Will's home he plays God to both his father and his primate son. He is ostensibly a Frankenstein archetype, and Franco manages to wrangle some real sympathy for how badly he wants to cure his father, and how he actually comes to understand Caesar's revolt against humanity.

The arc of "Rise" is also one of its chief problems. At only a brisk 100 minutes, the thing feels alternately too rushed and too slow (counterbalancing a need to explain with a need to save room for sequels). While it starts as a scientific exploration film, filled with great little tracking shots of Caesar in Will's home and in a redwood forest, its second act shifts gears to a prison-break film when Caesar is confined to an experimental ape institution after attacking a neighbor. From there, the title's promise is fulfilled in a third act where all hell breaks loose and the visual effects team can finally add some spectacle.

These different acts truly feel like three different films, and that makes the film feel stunted and awkward. What binds this together is Caesar. He is the film's sole reason for existing, and director Wyatt makes that known almost every second. Every moment seems crafted for us to look at how real Caesar behaves, how much emotion he's able to display on face. And, to their credit, it is rather astonishing. A voiceless performance by an actor whose actual face is never seen (Serkis), he is still able to convey his innocence, his anger, and ultimately his command of something terrifying and devastating to humanity.

But apart from a visual effects touchstone that joins the ranks of Weta's most impressive work and certainly stands a chance at netting the studio its fifth Visual Effects Oscar in a decade, the rest of the film doesn't really signify anything. While the 1968 "Planet of the Apes" gets remembered most as a feature-length "Twilight Zone" episode with one hell of a twist ending, it's far more notable for its satire on race relations, something that actually makes the film look and feel tired on a recent viewing.

If "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" signifies anything, it's the age-old tale of mankind extending his reach, using technology to override nature, but it doesn't have any sense of immediacy to our contemporary moment. At times, the film doesn't really talk enough about what's at stake (of course, the characters only gradually realize this) and it makes the whole thing seem rather abrupt. It's as if the film exists in an expensive visual effects bubble. Aiding this is the fact that Wyatt and screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver are incredibly sympathetic to the apes, meaning what should be a terrifying final third is turned into a "Spartacus"-type slave revolt.

That's all well and good, but the fate of the world is on the line. There are some moments that are downright jolting, particularly a confrontation between Caesar and one of his prison oppressors ("Harry Potter's" Tom Felton) that serves as a turning point for the whole film. Others, like a shower of leaves falling on a suburban street before the apes descend, or the monkeys using the fog of the Golden Gate Bridge to conceal themselves, certainly hints at some great sequence ideas.

Taken as a whole, however, Caesar's revolt seems like something to be glorified, and not at all feared. This might be because humanity is never shown as worth saving or caring about. Even Will is clouded by his good intentions, and Franco can't seem to wrest much of a personality for his character aside from what's made obvious through voiceovers in the first third.

More than what its plot signifies, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" as a product heralds a moment when sci-fi can take another step forward. It's a moment where animation and live action truly collide such that one blends into the other. This is convergence, certainly, but this "Planet of the Apes" suggests that the animation is more important than its counterparts. As in most cinema-of-spectacle of late, it wants you to care deeply about its special effects. So deeply, in fact, that it doesn't matter if those effects are going to take over the world, so long as you feel lots of sympathy for them.

Once Upon a Time in a Spaceship

2011-08-10T02:14:00.000-04:00

In the annals of film criticism, "The Western" is that big go-to, "The American Genre" that every genre theorist and his brother refers back to. It has produced more writing about it than any other genre. Beneath it is likely the gangster genre (in the early decades of film theory) and sci-fi (in more recent decades).

So, of course, when I hear a title like "Cowboys and Aliens," I think: "Well, I'm a genre theorist. I know something about how different theories of genre apply to the Western and the alien invasion film. This will certainly be an INTERESTING film, maybe even FUN."

There are five names attached to the screenplay of "Cowboys and Aliens," and that doesn't seem like a harmonious package when you watch the film. It features Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (of "Star Trek," "Fringe" and "Alias"), Damon Lindelof (of "Lost"), and Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (of "Children of Men" and "Iron Man"). This combination of different writing camps, of people who delight at complex television and those who work with re-thinking adaptations and genres, already puts the film on an awkward pedestal of trying to juggle too much at once.

At first, it's tempting to be thankful for Jon Favreau, a director who, from "Swingers" to "Iron Man," has at least proven he knows how to work with actors and big effects. He can iron out the multiple voices of the script into a smooth package. He's a solid craftsman, and that's not what bugs me about "Cowboys and Aliens." What bugs me is that the film is one joke stretched painfully into two hours, where a smirking team of high-minded writers seem hell-bent on taking genre-mashing to the next level, only to expose it as an empty exercise that ultimately reveals nothing about the Western or the sci-fi genre.

When Daniel Craig first appears in "Cowboys and Aliens," there's a bit of mystery about him: why doesn't he know his name? Why is he in the middle of the desert? What's this weird thing attached to his arm? How does he always look so badass? Matthew Libatique's cinematography in the first twenty minutes is, at the very least, relaxing. Craig is always framed at optimal angles, and there's a cavalcade of signatures familiar to the genre. The very look and manner of it all is slightly camp, but serious enough to prevent it from seeming too silly. When he puts on a wide-brimmed hat with the hand that houses the alien apparatus, it's hard not to smile at the obvious collision of semantic iconography.

And that's kind of the gear the whole movie stays in. When Harrison Ford finally saunters on screen, barking his lines in a kind of a stupor that belongs to a movie closer to "Blazing Saddles" than this one, the mixed tones, moods, and ideas embedded in "Cowboys and Aliens" become all too apparent. It starts to feel like every single person making this movie has their own idea about what it should be like, and what its ultimate meaning is.

It's befuddling, because there is genuine talent here: Craig, Sam Rockwell, Libatique (Oscar-nominated for shooting "Black Swan"), Favreau, etc. But that talent doesn't seem to know where to go. Yes, the visual effects look great. Yes, the alien designs are actually well-conceived. The score is even a pretty solid fusion of Western and sci-fi arrangements.

But what's the point? (HERE BE A SPOILER) The only argument the film ends up making is that aliens accidentally help settlers find gold and create a more prosperous community. Once we fight them off.

End spoiler.

It's as if most writing meetings must have involved variations on the sentence, "Well in most Westerns a stranger wanders into town, right? We gotta have that!" or, "Well in most alien invasion movies disparate social groups have to band together, so we gotta throw in some Native Americans and whatnot!" The tropes are there. They get deployed. But again, for what?

If your only answer is, "for the fun of it," I don't buy that. The first hour of this movie is pretty good blockbuster fun. But then it becomes more and more obvious it has no idea what it's saying. It's just mashing genres for the sake of mashing genres.

Remember "Back to the Future: Part III"? Sure, not the best in the trilogy. But for a trilogy incredibly concerned with nostalgia, how different eras get imagined and why certain representations of them exist, it uses its time-travel, "fish out of water" scenario to make a movie about how people in the 1980s perceive "The Old West," and how those perceptions need to be reckoned with. In that film, "The Old West" is supposedly a real place, but one that feels more indebted to Hollywood fantasies than history. Which, of course, ends up being the POINT of a lot of Western genre theory: Hollywood writes and perpetuates certain perceptions of history.

In the Western, we imagine what the world used to be. In sci-fi, we imagine what the world could be. In "Cowboys and Aliens," what could be facilitates the creation of what is. It's not funny satire, it's not compelling drama, and it's only intermittently a visual effects feast. In between, it's just confusing and kind of sad to think that these writers thought so reductively about the genres they were employing, instead of colliding them to create a unique argument about how they relate.

Notes on a Franchise

2011-08-08T21:03:00.001-04:00

My total indifference to "Harry Potter" over the last decade hasn't been a fact that I've tried to hide. This isn't so much because I don't like the texts -- I read the first four books, saw the first four movies, and shrugged them off to my pop culture periphery -- but rather because the rampant, aggressive fan discourse SURROUNDING "Harry Potter" tends to drive me, well, insane. And trust me, I know this isn't all "Potter" fans -- I am, after all, a "Gleek," and constantly plagued by how obnoxious fans of that show are.

But with "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" already the third-highest grossing movie of all time worldwide, I figured it was time to give it its dues. So over the last three weeks or so, I have watched all eight of the movies.

First off, let me say that I largely consider the manufacturing and phenomenon of this series to be one of the most notable stories of pop mainstream entertainment in the first decade of the 21st centuries. This is, simply and perhaps reductively put, Britain's "Star Wars." Watching "Harry Potter" with fresh eyes and largely back-to-back, I see in it a will and a drive to create mature storytelling, to advance visual effects, and to hone performances and scripts to a fine tee. Overall, it is stirring entertainment.

Revisiting the first four "Potters" again, I was actually very upset with how badly they've aged. With the massive exception of "Prisoner of Azkaban" (which I'll get to in a second), they are movies catapulted by cookie-cutter A-to-Z writing and a focus on getting big moments in plotting and piggy-backing those moments into character payoffs. "Chamber of Secrets" and "Goblet of Fire" are, in my estimation, the worst of the bunch, driven almost solely by overly eventful narratives where the characters are more game pieces than anything else.

But in "Prisoner of Azkaban," I finally started to get the big picture of "Harry Potter" -- director Alfonso Cuaron's style is such that he loves to fill his mise-en-scene to the seams with terrific details. His roving camera actually felt immersed in the little mysteries of Hogwarts, not just putting them front and center for our enjoyment, but putting them in the background and the characters in the foreground so that the camera (and by extension, the viewer) can feel more embedded in Hogwarts culture.

Cuaron's painterly aesthetic and proper integration of character, plot, and place elevated "Azkaban" to a truly fascinating portrayal of a majestic world plagued by an increasingly dark and violent evil.

So let us flash forward from 2004 to 2011. Four directors would helm the eight different movies, and while Cuaron's may be the most inventive work, the franchise truly belongs to David Yates, who directed the last four movies. Maybe it's just because the story got darker and the stakes became higher, maybe it's because Daniel Radcliffe and his cohorts matured into better actors, or maybe screenwriter Steve Kloves just settled into a groove and figured out how to adapt the novels, but I'm going to say something that my Potter friends should surely relish: "Half-Blood Prince" and "The Deathly Hallows" are massive, stunning achievements for the fantasy genre.

And because "Deathly Hallows: Part 2" is the most recent, and the one everyone's actually reviewing, I'll jump straight to there. Yes, this is the more eventful film; it's the pay-off for the two-hour setup that was "Part 1," and it's the culmination of seven previous films -- so in a way, to talk about the dramatic weight of the film or the "epicness" of the conclusion might be a little loaded.

But I think what's impressive about "Hallows" is that it finally finds a place where character and spectacle can interrelate. The plights of the secondary characters, traced subtly in earlier films, are brought to terrific payoffs (much as Rowling intended in her novels), the visual effects are incredibly top-notch, and the performers have so lived in their characters that each moment actually does feel bred in a kind of magical reality slightly askew of our own.

Credit must be given to Yates for the tenderness with which he directs his actors, especially the youth. Their energy here is palpable, and rightly so -- just as Harry is about to face the "destiny" to which he has been working toward these last few years of his life, so too are Radcliffe and Co. reaching the climax of a decade's work.

But where the other films may have seemed flattened visually, "Deathly Hallows" is an event for the eyes and ears. This is all, rather smartly, because everything that happens in "Deathly Hallows" -- and indeed "Half-Blood Princes" as well -- refracts images and concepts from the other films. The bright cheeriness of Hogwarts, so readily steeped in warm oranges in the first two films, is now rendered in charcoal gloom courtesy Eduardo Serra's cinematography. Where hallways were once lit prominently, they are now drenched in shadow.

The music by Alexandre Desplat reworks some of John Williams' original themes, but also adds a layer of its own pathos. It lacks the energy of its predecessors, but in its own way succeeds as a singular movement in a larger symphony. We see in the tattered cloaks and scarred faces of many of the characters an undoing of the wide-eyed splendor abundant in "The Philosopher's Stone," and the joys of discovering magic are replaced with the perils of performing it.

I've heard Harry Potter fans roughly my age refer to it as "Our Franchise" -- meaning, simply, that as Harry came of age, so did we. I believe that's true. But why I will now proudly admit to thinking "Deathly Hallows" is one of the best films of the year is because I think that maturation is two-fold: the movies themselves decided to grow up, ushering in waves of visual reform between "Order of the Phoenix" and "Half-Blood Prince," laying the groundwork for this exquisite finale.

Back in the 1940s, British producer Alexander Korda tried to challenge Hollywood producer David O. Selznick (of "Gone with the Wind") to the Global Crown of Box-Office Gold by creating a series of vastly epic, visually intricate films (see, for instance, "The Thief of Baghdad"). While Korda's contributions to British film are manifold, history clearly still favors Selznick as the exemplar of expensive, lavish entertainment.

I can't help imagining Korda smiling at the global success of "Harry Potter" -- the world's most financially successful film franchise. In the years to come, when "The Deathly Hallows" stands tall as one of Britain's most towering cinematic successes, maybe Alexander Korda will get the last laugh.

America, F&%k yeah

2011-07-23T23:30:00.001-04:00

There have been a lot of superhero movies this summer, but for some reason they all seem to take place somewhere else than the present. "Thor" and "Green Lantern" split duties between modern society and other worlds/dimensions, and "X-men" and "Captain America" are period pieces. For my money, I think the reason those first two films were under-received is because they were too divorced from socio-cultural space.

On exactly the opposite notion, I think "X-men" particularly and "Captain" to a degree are great entries to the genre in that they push an examination of the superhero back into different periods of history. This suggests most evidently that society's desire to utilize some kind of "super" element is not a new phenomenon, but can be traced in discussions of violence and power throughout at least the last century.

"Captain America: The First Avenger" is the prototypical Hollywood mega-blockbuster. It's glossy, it sounds incredible, it puts millions and millions of dollars on screen in dazzling special effects, and it bursts with snappy one-liners and incredibly attractive people. In this regard, it's one of the best of the "pure" superhero films I've seen in a while, in that it's not trying to COMPLICATE the genre so much as it is trying to find an exciting new way to make spectacle.

And if popcorn thrills are your thing, this has plenty of bite. At times, it's absolutely goofy, bouncing along like the best kind of pop entertainment. It rarely takes itself seriously, even when it pauses oh so fleeting to talk about patriotic ideals. With its amber-hued retro vibe and its almost cocky sense of pulp fiction swagger, it may even be the 21st century heir to "Indiana Jones" - a surprisingly smart update of serialized entertainment.

I know this sounds weird, considering Joe Johnston is the guy who directed "The Wolfman" and "Jurassic Park III" and it's written by the guys who penned the "Chronicles of Narnia" adaptations. I don't mean to suggest that "Captain America" is a sheer giddy ride in the way that, say, "Iron Man" was. Maybe it's just lowered expectations, or maybe it's just that I can really groove on pulp fiction, but I can only say that "Captain America" is a movie made for the kid inside you who just wants to watch the good guy kick some evil Nazi butt.

There are plenty of knowing winks, most noticeably a fun detour where Cap goes on a media tour and gets stuck in a Busby Berkeley-esque musical number and helps sell Captain America comics (he even enacts on stage his famous K.O. of Adolf Hitler - one of the hero's most indelible moments), and most rewarding in an early throwaway line that mentions how Hitler is "digging in the desert" for occult relics ("Raiders of the Lost Ark," anyone?).

Yes, "Captain America" is a movie where the occult takes center stage, the villain is a power-hungry Nazi who wants nothing more than total global domination, Tommy Lee Jones channels some kind of mid-60s WWII adventure in his officer role, and the kiss between the lead male and lead female is always playfully avoided.

To say the film looks good should come as no surprise - just look at how much money it cost. It's not an aesthetically daring pic, nor should it be. It aims to be mainstream, and it puts its attention on getting pleasurable lighting and making sure the camera moves smoothly and the visual effects are flawless.

Some silly moviegoers may try to tell you that "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," with its hour of non-stop action and destruction, best represents the future of Hollywood summer franchises. I see a film like "Captain America," with one foot lurking in the past of Hollywood's mythology and both of its eyes looking to a dreamland where effects can aid a story instead of destroying it, as the better exemplar.

This isn't to say the film doesn't have its problems: the pacing is very awkward once Steve Rogers becomes Captain America, rushing headlong to its conclusion instead of maybe having one or two more conversations about military strategy or character development -- something the first hour accomplishes rather economically.

But "Captain America" is much more about flexing Hollywood's muscle. It's about glamour and dazzle and showering you with the spectacle of it all. It just wants to have a little fun.

'The Tree of Life'

2011-06-25T19:57:00.000-04:00

In a rather wonderful essay featured in the Criterion version of "The Thin Red Line," David Sterritt writes of Terrence Malick: "His great creative passions -- nuances of light, subtleties of camera movement, rapport between word and picture -- all reflect his conviction that cinematic reality is reality, and that film, treated with due reverence and expertise, is able to absorb not just patterns of luminosity but also the transcendent essence of people, places, and things."

I wouldn't dare try to say it better myself.

Terrence Malick is many things as a filmmaker: perfectionist, reclusive, poetic, visionary, artistic, patient; the list goes on. Above all else, he is unique. In just five feature films spread out over almost forty years, he has made some truly gorgeous work. He is a mood filmmaker, concentrating much more on conceptual and emotional connections instead of narrative causality, something that certainly puts him at odds with most of Hollywood. His use of whispered voiceover, of effervescent camera motions and elliptical editing, of sequences that feel more like moments caught and preserved rather than staged in front of a crew, all make him special.

But what makes him IMPORTANT is that he's using this to redefine our conventional semiotic understanding of how film works as a medium. In the vein of Carl Dreyer, Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, Sergei Eisenstein, and any other number of filmmakers whose work feels more like exercises in theory or form than the conventional narrative engagement we usually expect from the cinema, Malick's meditations on the complex relationships between nature and humanity espouse a different kind of spectatorship. Tone poems, hymns, prayers, treatises -- call them what you will, but these films speak from his soul and seek to unite his spectators with the grandeur of the world as he sees it and tries to understand it.

While "The Thin Red Line" and "The New World," his first two features after a 20 year hiatus, sought to uproot war films and historical epics, respectively, "The Tree of Life" feels like a completely different work. On the surface, it's a domestic melodrama, about a family in the 1950s and how their children grow to perceive the world. But to call it that would seem incredibly reductive, even if this is most certainly a film about a family and, in particular, its elder son's loss of innocence and rediscovery of grace.

For a genre critic like myself, "The Tree of Life" is almost impossible to write about. It so defies structure and narrative, yet at the same time is wholly perceptive and perceptible. The telling is abstract, but the story is rather straightforward. It defies our understanding of "genre" as a way to communicate narratives and ideas, but it embraces every mechanism at the cinema's disposal.

But if I say it's impossible to write about, I could also fill pages and pages with thoughts about what it all means, why it's put together the way it is, and why Malick might have hit one of the most audacious grand slams in 10 years. We need films like this, and we need artists like Malick. We need people to shoot past the moon, to try and experiment with how film can create meaning, to develop it as a medium in exciting new ways.

We live in an incredibly gifted new period for American filmmakers. People like David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, P.T. Anderson, the Coens, Darren Aronofsky (usual suspects, I know) are giving young filmgoers reason to be excited and thrilled by what cinema can offer. Terrance Malick, a bridge figure from the 70s to the present, is, in his deliberateness, patience, and will to be perfect, our next Stanley Kubrick. But I'm going to stop right there, because I'm sure Malick would loathe the comparison, and what he's doing is certainly different from Kubrick. A comparison, like using genre to describe his films, is reductive to how unique he is.

Peter Travers has already made the claim that "The Tree of Life" is this generation's "2001." I'm sure he made that claim because the film opens and closes with a lengthy journey through evolution, into a moment of epiphany and clarity about the human condition, and seeks to explore without explaining "the meaning of life." It's a loaded comparison though, because "Tree of Life" is such a surprise, so infinitely rewarding for those willing to devote themselves wholly to it.

The "evolution of the cosmos" scenes have some of the most amazing photography you're likely to find this side of an IMAX nature documentary, but when you couple them with the story of the O'Briens, you're suddenly confronted with beauty and elegance that seems somewhat intangible. Why are these two interrelated? Why do the voiceovers speak the way they do? Are these flashbacks, imagined happenings? The answers aren't easy, and I don't feel like my providing my own interpretation here.

Every moment cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki captures feels bred from a mysterious reality: from a meteor crashing into the Earth to a child crawling across the floor, this is not a film of scenes that build to a climax. This is a collection of vignettes, images and incidents culled together to form a grander representation.

And while I usually ascribe to the philosophy that film evades reality every step of the way, that the camera apparatus displaces our reality, to watch "The Tree of Life" is to be caught in the midst of religious conversion to believing the camera can reveal the real beauty of nature. Malick makes every inch feel so alive with life, with color, with vitality, with meaning.

Is all this starting to sound a bit vague or general? I mean it to be, if only because I don't want to detract from your own experience of "The Tree of Life." Like so few films, it's an actual mystery. It doesn't spell itself out, it doesn't beg us to revel in its explicated meaning. It merely scrawls images onto celluloid and projects them for us. It's designed for us to be patient, to give ourselves over to the somewhat glacial pace of the film, if only so we can understand the gradual shifts and beats of life.

While Brad Pitt is borderline perfect as a man dealing with the realizations of his own failures, looking to control his family so he can have some semblance of control in his otherwise dictated life, and Jessica Chastain equally haunts as the mother wanting to teach love and grace to her children, their acting is blink-and-you'll-miss-it good. As are the children. They are only part of the broader spectacle. They all wander through the frame, casting gazes and frowns, but somehow they feel like they penetrate past the borders of the screen.

That's how all the film feels, in fact. Each individual moment feels so simple, but its execution feels so pure, and its cumulative effect raises us into a moment of grand epiphany.

Again, I could write more about why I personally think the kids were portrayed in particular ways. I could write about how Malick uses the space of the house and how industrial space and natural space collide and overlap throughout the film. I could certainly write about how he uses discontinuous editing, or what I think the meaning of Sean Penn's character is to the overall film. But in a way, I feel like I can't because I feel more and more overwhelmed by this film with every minute I spend away from it. I would need to see it at least two more times to begin tackling these subjects on my own, or at the very least a coffee with a friend who had also seen it once.

That's the real joy of the film. It makes me want to talk about it and explore it, not so much so that I can understand it, but so I can find the details and make my own conceptual connection with it. This is a masterwork, a modern art piece that shows us where films can take us, if only we'll let them.

'Midnight in Paris' is one smooth cocktail

2011-06-25T10:38:00.001-04:00

The opening moments of Woody Allen's latest, "Midnight in Paris," are in many ways reminiscent of those of his 1979 "Manhattan." Shots of Paris, expertly framed by Daruis Khondji (who worked with David Fincher on "Seven" and "Panic Room"), alternate striking views of familiar landmarks with equally gorgeous compositions of shops and side streets. Set to a soft jazz and building through a morning, an afternoon rainstorm, and an evening, this introduction plays far more like a city symphony from the 1920s (like say, "Rain," or "Berlin: Symphony of a City") than it does the familiar, swooping establishing shots that litter almost every film set in a major city.

This set-up accomplishes two things: It alerts us that "Midnight in Paris" is (again, like the aforementioned "Manhattan," with which the film has many similarities) a poem to Paris itself, in love with the architecture and the layout of the city and burning to explore all of its secrets. It's also a little jab that this movie is all about 1920s culture, and the first of many little "in-jokes" for those who love the culture of Luis Bunuel, the Fitzgeralds, and Cole Porter.

Now, I'm one of those people who love Woody Allen movies. I think the repetition in his films actually signals a HIGH creativity of an artist who wants to re-explore and re-evaluate different themes, motifs, and ideas across a broad array of expression and across many decades. And while "Midnight" isn't his first film set in the city of lights (that would be 1997's "Everyone Says I Love You"), it certainly fits his recent fit of "tourist films." Starting with "Match Point," he's done four movies in London, one in Barcelona, one in Paris, and only one in his native New York City.

But to call Allen a "tourist" has a negative connotation that suggests a filmmaker bound up in the sights and less attune to the story. "Midnight in Paris" certainly, at a glance, suggests that Allen has constructed this film as an opportunity to shoot Paris in as many beautiful ways as he can, with Owen Wilson meandering through the streets as his latest neurotic surrogate. That glance would only take you through the first fifteen minutes, though.

Wilson's Gil Bender, a successful screenwriter who wants to give up his luxurious life to become a novelist, wanders the streets of Paris after his fiance (Rachel McAdams, doing her best in a surprisingly one-note role) decides to go dancing with some friends in the midst of their vacation. A bit drunk and a bit lost, he stumbles on a 1920s-style luxury car. The passengers invite him to a party, he steps inside, and before he knows it he's chatting casually with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and listening to Cole Porter play the piano.

Caught in a time spiral, Gil has figured out a way to travel back every night and interact with his idols and inspirations. 1920s Paris is, to him, the greatest time and place in the twentieth century, a moment he feels a deep connection to and harbors great nostalgia for.

The world Allen crafts is evocative and, well, particularly REAL. With lots of soft lighting and wide compositions, he encourages us to look around and soak in the beauty as we watch a parade of familiar literary and art figures. While this could leave room for lots of broad comedy, satire, and caricature, the real deftness of "Midnight in Paris" is in how well Allen seems to write all these characters. True, he's going off perceptions garnered from their works and public knowledge, but Ernest Hemingway (as played by Corey Stoll) strikes the right blend of depressed alcoholic and genius writer. Every time he's on screen I found myself in awe of what a great conception it was.

It doesn't stop there: Alison Pill's Zelda Fitzgerald is, as Gil says, "How we've been led to believe she is," and Adrien Brody's Salvador Dali, easily the most eccentric of the cameos, is wildly fun. Gil even pitches "The Exterminating Angel" to Luis Bunuel, an extended joke undoubtedly placed to reward film buffs. Needless to say, I was the only one in the theater laughing at that, but I was laughing hard. And Wilson, with his wide eyes and slack-jawed awe, is the perfect choice to act as the spectator's surrogate. His exuberance, fascination, and joy in these interactions are both palpable and pitch-perfect.

"Midnight in Paris" is a charming film, and has a kind of indescribable vitality that's lacked in many of Allen's recent films. He's so often interested in themes and wit, putting ideas about fate/chance, tragedy/comedy and the woes of human existence in play, he does sometimes miss those little storytelling subtleties that can lead to a big payoff.

Here, he's thinking about nostalgia, about pining for a different time and different place while ranting about the conditions of one's contemporary moment. Gil's fantastic time travel is not simply a meditation on Paris or a chance to construct grand representations of famous early-20th century cultural figures. It lets him experience the disconnect nostalgia creates. It's not that 1920s is "bad" or "backward," as it seems lovingly recreated in every different trip, but rather Gil realizes that it's not HIS time, that he worships these people who don't necessarily see themselves as brilliant. They're trying to create, but create something for their moment.

It's this arc of Gil realizing he needs to create for his moment instead of wallowing in his love (or might it be a kind of lust?) for the 1920s that really makes the film profound. And I do think "Midnight in Paris" is profound, the first one Woody Allen has made in some time. I might think most of his films are good, and so perhaps I was bound to like this one, but there's something about it that seems to transcend his often defeatist view of life.

In a final moment that seems so full of hope and romance, it's hard not to see "Midnight in Paris" as something more than an ode to Paris, a witty exercise in intellectual jokes, or a meditation on nostalgia. It is all of these things yes, but also something more universal and more powerful. It's Allen celebrating inspiration, the sheer act of finding beauty -- be it in a bridge, a building, a song, or a woman's smile. In playing these inspirations so grandly, Woody Allen has made an inspired film.

The Spielberg Zombie of 'Super 8'

2011-06-11T19:04:00.001-04:00

"Super 8" is being billed as J.J. Abrams' "coming out party." I know, it's kind of weird, especially since the guy's been a veritable force of nature on television, co-creating "Alias" and "Lost," and already slung his name into the director's chair on 2006's "Mission: Impossible III" and 2009's "Star Trek." But this is his first time working with a non-property project. "Super 8" is entirely his own, his chance to show Hollywood and its ticket buyers what we have to look forward to from the mind of Mr. Abrams.

And he decided it would be best to do an homage to Steven Spielberg.

Don't get me wrong, I found "Super 8" alternately thrilling and tiring. As a narrative homage, it works almost perfectly. Set in 1979, "Super 8" is effectively a mashed, blended, pureed version of "Jaws," (1975) "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," (1977) and "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982). A monster who gradually gets revealed? Check. A small community struggling with a crisis? Check. An authority figure struggling with his commitment to a flawed system? Check. A child repairing issues with a father? Check. An alien? Check. A government conspiracy? Check. A fascination with visual effects? Check.

Oh yes, it's all on display. Displacing the California suburbs of Spielberg's "E.T" to the midwest of a small Ohio town, "Super 8" is resolutely a fairy tale in the vein of the aforementioned 1982 film and others like Rob Reiner's "Stand by Me." It is a parable of youth, about how kids simply get things grown-ups can't, how their perspectives should be valued, endorsed, and praised.

And Abrams does this all very well. He directs his child actors (chief among them Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning) remarkably, and they truly carry the movie. His lighting, which always lets streaks of light dash across the frame, and his camera motions, which are often grand and fluid, are very spell-binding. The sound is creepy, and even composer Michael Giacchino channels early John Williams in his brass-heavy, melodramatic score.

Yes, how you feel about Steven Spielberg will pretty much dictate how you feel about "Super 8."

And its devices aren't exactly hidden. The kids in the film are filmmakers themselves, and their titular super 8 movie camera captures a train derailment that leads to some horrible times for their small town. They're making a zombie film, which is why I choose to think of "Super 8" as "Spielberg's Zombie." Like the living dead, Abrams has rummaged around in the blockbuster filmmaker's body of work and revived various organs, wringing them together like a mad scientist bent on creating a new brand of Frankenstein's Monster.

But lest you think I'm harboring a grudge, I genuinely liked "Super 8." The mystery is intriguing, the action spectacular, the visual effects spot-on, and it even manages to wrangle some superb emotional moments. Like I say, it has the best features of Steven Spielberg: Abrams knows how to tell a story, and he knows how to foreground that story against the backdrop of his spectacle.

At the same time though, Abrams's screenplay is plagued by a lot of the problems of Spielberg's films: an overreliance on the fractured father-son dynamic, a retreat into melodrama, the military-as-enemy trope, and yes, a thick layer of sap. Occasionally this feels like design, as in the way the alien functions as a plot device to repair the father-son relationship (a fairly obvious homage). Other times, like the resolution's relatively banal homage to "E.T," feel like it's cheating us from something more, shall I say, true.

If it sounds like "Super 8" is a movie of incredible highs and lows, you're spot on. There are some scenes, specifically the ones where the monster lurks in the background before attacking unsuspecting townsfolk, that are riveting filmmaking. There are visuals that look like the kind of glorified summer entertainment we just have too little of nowadays -- wide-eyed visuals designed to make us go, "woah," without suffocating us in a hundred million dollar's worth of effects.

But as much as I enjoyed "Super 8" and want to see it as a film to curl up with the movie-goer of my youth, I have this nagging concern about what J.J. Abrams is DOING with this film. Yes, Spielberg is one of his idols, and to work with Spielberg as producer to make a big, beautiful homage to Spielberg's early work must give Abrams some personal satisfaction. It gives me some fun satisfaction, too.

All "cinema of homage" comes laced with a concern that the person creating the homage isn't doing anything aside from recreating it. It's what I call, "Brian De Palma Disease." BDPD afflicts a variety of filmmakers so in love with RE-creating that they forget to actually do some original CREATING. Is this what J.J. Abrams's movie career will be? Is he doomed to be our next BDPD filmmaker?

Again, this isn't to slight the film at hand. I enjoy it, but with reservations. I have reservations against what it represents, especially for a filmmaker with such capable directorial merit as Abrams. He can do the work, but if he'd spent more time teasing out the actual Super 8 stuff in the film instead of letting it slide toward the end of the second act (by the time the kids discover what they've accidentally filmed, it actually feels pretty meaningless to the storyline), we might be looking at a great, pulpy work of Americana. We might feel like we're rediscovering, instead of simply replaying, the pleasures of our childhood.

Fading spectacles in the Coens' West

2011-06-10T23:04:00.001-04:00

Last December, I failed to write a full review of "True Grit." Part of this was because I found it the most peculiar and yet most straightforward movie the Coens have made in quite some time. I didn't write anything because it was so NOT what I was expecting. Having watched it again on DVD this week, I see it for the big, grand filmmaking it is. It is both so UN-Coen and yet so fully Coen, the most mainstream film they've done in years but somehow still very quirky and nuanced.

Think about it though: Their last three films meditated heavily on the inability to achieve resolution. "No Country for Old Men" broke apart the Western's model of justice-driven violence and resolution, "Burn After Reading" turned the spy drama into a glass house and then giddily threw rocks at it, and "A Serious Man"...well, "A Serious Man" is a film with such a lack of hope I can't even string together a few paltry adjectives to properly describe it.

So why the sudden turn towards ostensibly mainstream narrative filmmaking? Why invoke The Western just three years after "No Country for Old Men" rejected the values of the Western? Further still, why invoke "True Grit" to the ire of John Wayne fans the world over?

The answers lie in the beginnings and the endings of things.

The prologue of "True Grit" is a single track-in and fade-in on a dead body lying in a light snowfall. Maddie Ross's old voice begins a reflection on the murder of her father. It is straightforward, almost journalistic, but certainly without the flourishes that come to line the coming acts.

The epilogue is twenty-five years after the fact, with Maddie traveling to visit Rooster, who has died from the heat just days before her arrival. Before his death, he was spending his time traveling with a Wild West show, "reenacting" the adventures and daring moments of his life.

Before I say a few things about the meat of "True Grit," I want to ponder this final epilogue. The Wild West Shows, and namely Buffalo Bill's, were the beginnings of the Western genre. They took historical events and played them up to mythic functions, satisfying for spectators a desire to see tremendous heroes conjured, dramatic problems resolved, and magnificent stories portrayed. Maddie's disgust with the Wild West Show is part of this recognition -- even in 1903, she can see how the debt to history is being severed. Historiography disavows history in favor a clearer, grander narrative that supports the myth of America.

It's this "mythic function" that the Coens' "True Grit" seeks not to debunk, but explore. If I believed John Cawelti, I'd tell you that genre is a mythic function. There have been many, many books written about the Western based on this conceit; its structures, themes, discourses all congeal around satisfying some sort of function. The best theory I've read is that the Western recounts/explains/sorts through the ideas behind America's expansion and its debt to violence.

So without writing pages and pages, a few thoughts: We generally conceive of the Western hero as a man of action, a man of DOING, who favors his gun over his voice. In "True Grit," everyone is concerned with talking. Characters recount stories, discuss deals, make trades, volley insults, establish plans, and engage in a very specific rapport. It's all structured with an incredible sense of detail to the beat of each conversation, the beat of each character. But the words become the action, the pauses in conversations the place to duel. Guns create disgusting wounds, and never quite work the way characters want them to.

Further, there's the quirky, gritty aspect to all the characters. No one is glamorous, no one is good. Not even Maddie. She uses a misguided sense of the "law" to let herself be driven by murderous impulses. It's against the muck of this society of ill-educated, drunken fools that the film establishes a fairy tale perspective, where Maddie is ushered through a series of tasks and meetings to learn certain lessons about having "true grit."

Most obviously though, there's Rooster, a man who rejects the very appearance, behavior, and action of any typical notion of "John Wayne." That was the beauty of John Wayne PLAYING Cogburn in the 1969 film -- it let him explore a whole series of traits he'd built for decades in a new light. Ironically, the demythologization of John Wayne led to the remythologization of John Wayne, such that anyone who hadn't seen the 2010 film recoiled in shock that the Coens would dare try to touch John Wayne's performance. That's part of the fun of watching Bridges do his take on the character. It's a total reaction AGAINST our impulse to create myth. It sees myth as born out of something else. That something else is, wait for it, DISCOURSE. Yes, myth is the result of a certain kind of discourse, a kind of talking and a pattern of explaining that "True Grit" uses over and over in its myriad characters as they take long pauses to tell stories and explain their motives. Genre is not myth, genre is a part of discourse that conjures myth (although were I to write further and more in-depth I'd do a series of moves that disavows our use of this silly four-letter word all together).

Its multiple discourses fracture instead of unite our sense of the West, such that it actually confounds our ability to clearly see the grandness of the vista. The vistas in "True Grit" are grand, beautiful, and well-lit, but they are foregrounded with characters locked in a fairy tale suspension. It resists turning them into spectacle because the Coens, with a cleverly placed eyewink at the epilogue, suggest that we've had decades of watching these characters parade as silly caricatures locked in a genre. And it's time we freed them of that prison.

Fincher's Panopticon

2011-06-08T12:03:00.001-04:00

I can't promise how coherent or well-formed this post is going to be. I mostly just wanted to share a couple thoughts I had while watching "Panic Room" for the first time in a looong time.

"Panic Room" gets a bad rap, along with "The Game," as kind of on the bottom rung of Fincher's ouevre (discounting "Alien3." We all know why), because the screenplays are pretty, well, mainstream. David Koepp ("Room's" writer) is about as Hollywood as they come, and were you to just READ "Panic Room," I don't think it's actually a very compelling read. It's littered with devices -- Meg hates small spaces and gets trapped in a Panic Room, Sarah has diabetes and gets trapped in a Panic Room with no sugar, the thieves bring along a wild card who deviates from the plan, etc. etc. etc.

Where the film excels is its visuals. Part of this is because I think Fincher used "Panic Room," like all of his films, as an experiment. This one's an experiment in space. His camera careens in and out of rooms, up and down floors, inside vents, through keyholes, windows, beams, walls -- it's a pretty intoxicating blend of tracking shots and visual effects.

But the Panic Room, that titular plot device where the protagonists hide and the antagonists want to break into, is actually a reincarnation (albeit modified) of Bentham's Panopticon, the prison device that Michel Foucault has written extensively about. The Panopticon is a circular-ish prison with a guard tower in the center. The guard tower and cells are such that the guard can see into any cell at any given time, but the prisoners cannot see the guard. The idea is that the THREAT of being watched at all times is enough to dissuade criminal activity and teach discipline.

"Panic Room" is all about putting these power models on display and subverting them over and over. Meg sits in a Panic Room, the guard tower, with monitors showing every corner of the house. She has the power of sight over the thieves. After a while though, they start to exploit the blind spots, hiding in corners and organizing schemes to break in to the room. Audio becomes another key -- Meg has a PA system to talk to them selectively, but they have no way of communicating with her via sound. They occasionally make hand gestures or write on pieces of paper to send a message, but Meg ultimately has the power because she is in the tower.

But as I said earlier, the tower is also limited, because Meg is trapped there. She can't leave, or she'll be shot. She doesn't have enough food, she has no way to communicate with anyone outside the house. Eventually, the tables turn and the thieves get into the Room while Meg is outside. She destroys the cameras, undoing their sight and subverting the power of the panic room.

While "Panic Room" opens with a Panopticon-ish structure, Fincher's visuals want to complicate the idea that the panic room works. It can't sustain either party as a power position, and the people outside it can learn to adapt and exploit the room to try and force the others out of the room.

Ideologies on Parade - "X-men: First Class" Review

2011-06-04T12:35:00.000-04:00

"Peace was never an option."

When Matthew Vaugn was announced as the director for Marvel's "X-men: First Class" prequel/reboot, my eyebrows were more than raised. This is, after all, the guy who directed "Kick-Ass," one of the most subversive and off-the-wall violent (not to mention one of the absolute best) superhero movies to come out of the post-9/11 surge. How could this guy, whose last film questioned the whole sanitization of the Hollywood superhero, turn around and become absorbed into the very franchise mindset he was supposedly critiquing just last year?

It seems that no matter what *kind* of superhero film he's doing, Matthew Vaugn simply *gets* something about "the superhero genre" that I daresay only Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan have gotten (except for maybe James Gunn, whose radical "Super" smartly tries to blow the whole genre to pieces). "X-men: First Class" is a shining example of what the genre should be doing, where its next step could be, and how great filmmakers are capably interrogating our continuing desire to integrate superheroes deeper and deeper into the fabric of American history.

Bryan Singer's first two "X-men" films, as witty and fun as they are, are great because of the political discourse so deeply embedded in each. They are about ideological warfare, its discourses, and diplomacy's limits as much as they are about grandiose set pieces and creature effects. Magneto is an ideological terrorist, bent on turning humankind to his point of view. Professor X is the diplomat who prefers political solutions and education to violence. Caught between them are a series of senators, presidents, and corporate figureheads who themselves become talking points for different ideas about political action and means of combating terrorism and hubris. That's, in part, what made "The Last Stand" so disappointing: it flattened out all this rhetoric and metaphorical warfare into a literal war with a climactic battle devoted wholly to spectacle and nowhere to the ideas behind that battle.

That's, in part, why "First Class" lives up to its title. Not only is it spectacular fun, not only does it showcase some tremendously smart casting, not only is it often very beautiful to look it -- it's almost, dare I say, brainy. If the first two "X-men" films were about critically approaching the ideological discourses and battlegrounds of their contemporary moments, "First Class" actually lays out an argument that these same ideologies have been in place since World War II. They've just been, forgive me, mutating.

In a pretty spectacular bit of revisionist history, a Nazi scientist obsessed with harnassing the power of mutants to help launch a global nuclear war is the one responsible not only for unleashing Erik's (Magneto's) hatred, he's responsible for the Cuban Missile Crisis (he also wants to turn himself into a nuclear bomb -- the ultimate superhero/villain-as-weapon). The remaining strands of Nazism feed into the hysterical rhetoric of the Cold War, a war that first unites and then divides the mutants and sets Erik and Charles on separate ideological paths. The smartest thing the film does is set itself not just in the past, but in 1962 -- with the world on the brink of global apocalypse, different mutants both almost cause and help avert catastrophe.

Michael Fassbender as Erik is truly the film's secret weapon. "First Class" reopens with the first scene from Singer's "X-men" - Erik in a concentration camp bending metal gates. In the 1960s, he becomes a Nazi hunter scouring Switzerland and Argentina for the man who killed his mother and unlocked his superpower (Sebastian Shaw, played with true scene-stealing ham by Kevin Bacon). The vendetta Magneto harbors against the human race comes from the vendetta he holds against the Nazis. Humanity is depraved in his view, and it's again this historical approach to the character that lets us think about, given the events from "X-men" and "X2," why Magneto has the point of view he does (and how he ultimately co-opts Holocaust memorializing as a means to embrace extremist terrorism). Fassbender is nothing but charismatic in every scene, and he turns Erik into a devastatingly tragic man.

He's matched not only by James McAvoy, whose Xavier gradually discovers the need to preach education and understanding, but by a whole cast of terrific young actors: Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne, and Nicholas Hoult chief among them. They bring energy to every scene, but they also deal with the film's political, philosophical, and ideological grandstanding with the right tone. "First Class" takes itself very seriously even while it's having fun.

But where the film really shines and stands out is in how interested it is in thinking about these different rhetorics: Nazism, American fervor, Communism, Cold War, Holocaust memorializing, diplomacy, revenge, nuclear energy. At times, they fall like a waterfall. They intermingle and shift with such rapidity it's occasionally hard to keep up (yet I found it absolutely thrilling to think about how they got repurposed for the genre). And yet, the four screenwriters responsible for the film make it so abundantly clear that these characters are all victims of the forces around them, and that the ultimate paths they choose to take are less their own choice as manufactured by circumstance. Mutants and superheroes are victims as much as they are saviors.

When I say "X-men: First Class" is where the genre could be headed, I mean that it moves it out of a contemporary setting and place to look instead at how historical issues get complicated by the addition of superheroes. Some of the best moments in the film are seeing actual newspaper headlines and the insertion of Kennedy's speeches during the build-up to the missile crisis. It gives the genre the kind of immediacy it sometimes lacks. It opens up a space for us as spectators to think about where the superhero fits into our own historical/cultural perspectives, and what we might make of their historical presence.

Are we, like they, victims of ideological rhetorics on parade? Are we now absorbed in THEIR culturally pervasive ideologies? Maybe these aren't the questions the film wants to provide, but they most certainly linger for me. Matthew Vaugn's work here is visually cohesive, constantly surprising, and gives me hope that the superhero genre still has many tricks up its sleeve.

Two by Oliver Stone: 'Platoon' and 'Born on the Fourth of July'

2011-06-01T13:52:00.000-04:00

In an effort to reinvigorate my much-backseated blogging, a retrospective on two important Vietnam movies. Sort of coinciding with Memorial Day.

Oliver Stone's sophomore effort, "Platoon," came out on Christmas 1986 and went on to earn Stone a Best Director Oscar, while the film won Best Picture. It came out on the heels of his first directorial feature, "Salvador" (also 1986), and, along with his writing credits "Midnight Express" and "Scarface," cemented him as Hollywood's next big player. "Platoon," along with "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989), presented him as an artist intimately concerned with and troubled by the Vietnam War. This extends not only to what it was like to fight it, but what its long-term effects are for our political and cultural societies.

When you look at his later films -- "JFK" (1991) and "Nixon" (1995) in particular -- they are often very concerned with how Vietnam happened and why it happened. But before he turned outward to the political side of it, he turned inward to look at the emotional side of it. His two "combat features" are essentially morality plays about the loss of innocence. Indeed, Vietnam becomes the site where America itself loses its innocence and its sense of dominance. It becomes a site where pride and physicality is actively questioned. What we see in "Platoon" is an archetypal good-and-evil set up where Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger play two surrogate fathers to Charlie Sheen's Private Taylor; the former is the "beneficial" guiding father, and the latter is the violent, corrupt father. One is a gentler masculinity of nurturing and logic, the other a hardened masculinity of aggression and revenge.

The film charts Sheen's moral decline, first painting him as a volunteer who thinks he can do good in the war, and then gradually detailing his revelation that no good can come of this war before he himself succumbs to its violent impulses and its unregulated morality. "Platoon" is remarkable for its realistically-staged combat, where the camera sits secure and the editing is very pronounced. There are little of Stone's eccentricities; it's an almost cold direction, where the faces of the platoon members offer little in the way of comfort.

"Born on the Fourth of July," on the other hand, is more of an overt memorial. Tom Cruise's soldier also believes being a marine will let him do great service for his country, until he accidentally kills a fellow soldier and loses the use of both of his legs. While he believes he will become a hardened male akin to what his parents want him to be, war actually castrates him; he loses his ability to "be a man." The film is shot in many warm, orange palettes and more extreme angles shot from below, emphasizing the stature of various figures as Cruise's paraplegic is looked down on and visually diminished as the film goes on. While "Fourth" is also about a loss of innocence, it is much more physical than spiritual.

Oliver Stone was a Vietnam veteran himself before turning to Hollywood. We can see in "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth" a desire to excise what he had seen. In that regard, you can consider them semi-autobiographical if not semi-journalistic. Even "Born" seems autobiographical in its construction of how war mutilates innocence, even if Stone is here choosing a physical rather than mental representation of that mutilation (he himself is not a paraplegic, but it's not hard to imagine him standing in for much of the critical discourse the film mounts).

These films actually undo some of the conventions of combat films. If we imagine going to war as "making a man out of you," "Born on the Fourth of July" is actually about unbecoming a man and needing to find an alternative for socially constructed forms of masculinity. His castration and loss of ability to perform sexually shows him go from a boy to a man and back to this childlike male who must grow again into a "new male" marked by his wounds.

"Platoon" works similarly - we imagine platoon movies to show the fellowship and coming together of disparate men into a singular, working ideology. The film stripes any semblance of community. Despite a scene early on where the men share pot and get high together, they never act like friends. By the end of the film, almost all of them are dead, they're divided based on the ideologies and philosophies of the various commanders, and most of the commanding officers are also dead. We expect Taylor to be integrated, but the end of the film leaves us with him as an unintegrated man. He is alone, as he was in the beginning, and also devastated by the violence around him.

If World War II narrative traditions create a fantasy of what combat does to create communities of men, Stone's two films unmake that fantasy.

The fact that most of his films are set in the 1960s and early 1970s mark him as a filmmaker absorbed by the trauma of the Vietnam War, extending into the paranoid discourses of conspiracy in "JFK" and "Nixon." They represent a man trying to grasp sense at what he conceives as the senseless.

Bridesmaid on the verge of a nervous breakdown

2011-05-30T20:48:00.000-04:00

The House of Apatow has received a volley of complaints over the years about its insistence on churning out films with a squarely male perspective. Katherine Heigl notoriously called "Knocked Up" a sexist film, months after she agreed to star in it and received great notices from critics. And while producer king Judd Apatow neither directed nor wrote "Bridesmaids," it's easily the most feminine film to come out of his production house. It also happens to be the most idiosyncratically satisfying in years.

Watching "Bridesmaids" is like watching a full-on revolt against the chauvinism of modern "bromance" comedy and against the idea that wedding movies have to layer on the sap higher than a tiered wedding cake. In its place, co-writer and star Kristen Wiig has used the film as a platform to show she's not just one of the best sketch comedians working today, she's used a wedding movie to create a bold, raunchy, and unflinchingly honest character study. Co-writing with Annie Mumolo, the script is very obviously indebted to sketch comedy, with many scenes structured like individual sketches. Yet Wiig, clearly writing for herself, gives her character the kind of shape and nuance you rarely see female leads given (especially in a comedy).

As Annie Walker, contracted as maid of honor to her best friend Lillian's (Maya Rudolph) wedding, Wiig is constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown: her cake shop has gone out of business, she's unpleasantly single and taking solace in a "sex buddy" (Jon Hamm, working with his conniving sexuality from "Mad Men" to produce a comically despicable male), and she can't seem to plan anything correctly for the wedding party. It's to Wiig's credit that she doesn't devolve into hysterics - when she does, she lets her physicality keep within the center of her frame, always playing herself as a woman fighting for her own smile.

It's this quality that makes "Bridesmaids" a truly deceptive film. On the surface, it's a brutal raunchfest full of nasty dialogue, gross gags, and free form conversations where the leads more than gleefully bounce one-liners off each other. Below that, though, lurks an intense commentary on female desire and the various shapes it takes. Annie is awash in a world of unflattering masculinity, a defeated sense of personal accomplishment, and a disconnect to her best friend. As in many Apatow-produced comedies, it's really a story of personal growth and redemption masked behind a cavalcade of well-delivered sex jokes.

Director Paul Feig, best known for his time directing many "Office" episodes, is a good fit for the ensemble, and for teasing out the many subtleties the females try to cram in. But what I think is most admirable about the film, and what makes it a true rarity, is that it doesn't attack or victimize anyone. Every character is flawed, they all have problems, but it doesn't treat men like naive imbeciles (devotees will remember my notorious rant against "The Hangover" for the way it demonized the women characters). Jon Hamm's character is a "toxic masculinity," but his is only a form of masculinity - there are plenty of others to counterbalance him, just as there are many different kinds of femininity (and some that are very unattractive and superficial).

For that, "Bridesmaids" is a refreshing and invigorating little comedy. Oh yeah, and it's darn hilarious.

"Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" Red-band trailer

2011-05-29T12:57:00.000-04:00

David Fincher's "Dragon Tattoo" adaptation is leaked in a shaky, tilted camcorder rip that almost makes this demented trailer even better. As much as I really liked the Swedish version of the film, this one looks darker and more visceral. Get ready to salivate:

Terrence Malick wins Palme d'Or

2011-05-23T10:02:00.000-04:00

The Cannes Film Festival wrapped Sunday night with their annual awards ceremony. Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life was awarded the coveted Palme d'Or, marking the first time since 2004 the United States has claimed the prize.

Malick's film, set to bow this weekend in limited release, had some of the most intense reactions at Cannes. Reports from the first screening of the film noted that a small sect of viewers burst into "boos" as soon as the "Directed by" title came up at the closing credits, but was momentarily drowned out by a burst of applause. The idea here that many bloggers played up was that Life is a film that needs to be thought about before issuing a rash judgment - the boos came from people who didn't want to think, the late applause from people who were taking a second to let it all sink in.

Indeed, several critics who took to Twitter immediately after the screening derided the film, but as last Monday wore on more and more people started calling The Tree of Life a beautiful and demanding art film. Malick was set to premiere the film at last year's Cannes Film Festival, but asked to be moved to this year's festival to give him one more year to work in the editing room.

Robert de Niro headed this year's jury.

Finality and 'The Office'

2011-05-05T00:39:00.001-04:00

"Sometimes goodbyes are a bitch." - Jim Halpert

"He wasn't sad. He was full of hope." - Pam Beasley

There's something so definitive about a goodbye.

I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like last week's episode of The Office didn't mean a great deal to me. It meant more to me than any other episode of the show, and maybe more than any television episode in quite some time. This isn't a review, or a commentary. This is simply me opening up, and trying to get something complicated down in words.

This weekend I'll say "goodbye" to the University of South Carolina, a place that's been dear to my heart and nothing but a home for the last four years. With its bricked pathways and idyllic locales, the Historic Horseshoe hasn't just been a place to retreat and reflect in the sun -- it's been my literal home, a place where I've proudly lived in the campus's oldest standing building for the past two years, and two other of its historic buildings for my other two years. I will be saying goodbye to a home.

I've already said goodbye to a job. Saying my farewells to the brilliant people at The Daily Gamecock has been far harder than I ever anticipated. Probably because they never cease to amaze me with their kindness. They are a family.

I've said "until next time" to the wonderful Film and Media Studies faculty and those responsible for giving me my education.

And now I'm trying to say goodbye to the intricate web of people who have made me who I am. But while we all like to say, "this isn't really goodbye - we have the rest of our lives ahead of us," this really is goodbye.

This is the end of an era.

So when I watched Steve Carell leave The Office in a moment so pure and so bittersweet it conjured only images of the amazing ending to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation I felt like it hit something very similar to this moment I'm in right now.

The word "goodbye" makes me sad. It really does. But saying goodbye to Steve Carell, and now thinking about the ending to one of my favorite movies of all time, I just can't help but try to feel that hope. To try and relish the sadness of leaving one family and embarking on a tremendous adventure.

This is a vain and rather silly attempt and putting a coda on the end of a chapter. I should take Rick Altman's advice, and realize the hardest thing to do is to define one's own era. Stop trying to make meaning and sense out of things as they happen and savor the "happening" of it all. But in days like these, it's harder to see each moment as "happening" and easier to see each moment as "just happened."

Maybe, and this is entirely possible, I'm just too obsessed with finding connections, and maybe that's why The Office resonated with me in a way the show has never resonated with me. Maybe it's the realization that I've been having for some time -- that Season 7 is the best the show has been in four years, and they've been building to that moment for months.

The thing The Office gave me, and I think the thing we're all really searching for, is a bit of catharsis. A moment where we can release our tensions and realize that goodbye isn't really as final as it sounds.

But just like I've freezed a frame of The Office above, I desire more than anything else to freeze something for just a second and remember these people and these memories.

From one era to the next.

'Super' pushes past the point of no return

2011-05-04T12:44:00.001-04:00

"I can't know, but I have to try." -- The Crimson Bolt (Rainn Wilson)

As I often do before I start to write a review, I glanced over the Metacritic blurbs for James Gunn's Super, about a lowly diner cook who decides to become a crime fighter to save his wife from an "evil" drug dealer. I realized, much to my dismay, that a lot of the critics either missed the point of Mr. Gunn's film entirely, or refused to acknowledge how or why it was doing exactly what it was doing.

So let's set the record straight: Super may be a bloody, almost grindhouse film, but it takes the idea of a "superhero" to such a dizzying high and with such complex morality that to call it anything less than a true stunner would do great disservice to its remarkably thought-provoking look at violence, humanity, and the limits of legal action.

Rainn Wilson of The Office stars as Frank D'Arbo, a cook who sees little worth liking in his life aside from his gorgeous wife Sarah (Liv Tyler). A recovering alcoholic and drug addict, Sarah begins to stray when drug dealer Jacques (or, as Frank calls him, "Jock") (Kevin Bacon, showing his smarmy best) gets involved in her life, ultimately convincing her to leave Frank and come live in a drug-induced stupor at his ranch.

Then things start to get weird. Frank has a vision -- is it a message from God or merely his own psychosis? -- where he feels compelled to become a superhero. He builds a costume and chooses his weapon (a pipe-wrench) with a little guidance from comic book nerd Libby (Ellen Page, doing her geeky best), and takes to the streets.

It's tempting to say, "oh, so this is like Kick-Ass?" Well, yes, but it's part of a larger "problem" the superhero genre is dealing with right now. Between Super, Kick-Ass, Defendor, The Green Hornet and others, the genre is now taking vested interest in what happens when real people becomes "superheroes." Kick-Ass is perhaps the most satisfying of these films -- with its wit, its myriad discussions, its polished look at a variety of characters embodying different elements of the "superhero gone awry."

But Super is a whole other monster. Gunn wants us to laugh, I think, at Frank's -- excuse me, The Crimson Bolt's -- crime-fighting spree. He beats a drug dealer, a thief, and a child molester with a pipe wrench. It's gruesome, it's blunt, but it's effective: he's stopping terrible people from doing terrible things. The most radically interesting component of the film is its pervasive religious content. Frank prays to God, believes he receives divine visions, and plasters a slogan ("Some of His Children Are Chosen") above the closet where he hides his costume.

None of this is necessarily "new" to the genre -- Superman is often read as a Christ figure, Batman as a holy martyr, and superheroes as a whole often take the form of ethereal saviors or angels who can protect communities from crime and sin. But to have the conversation so explicated, so deeply embedded in the text, brings up very complex issues not only about Frank's psychology, but about how we choose to read and interpret superheroes.

If Frank is God's messenger, Libby is his disciple. Where Rainn Wilson makes Frank a fractured, haunted man searching for a higher purpose and a reason to be recognized, Ellen Page makes Libby an overenthusiastic, troubled girl who equally needs someone to follow and someone to love her. Her zeal for Frank, her love of violence, profanity, and sexuality play in direct contrast to Frank's need for moral superiority, and give the film an outlet for the idea that believing in superheroes is potentially very harmful.

Super's greatest stroke of genius is not to argue that superhero philosophy is harmful, but to suggest that it's a very complicated kind of morality with an extreme debt to violence that can no longer go unrecognized. It goes places where Kick-Ass could only playfully hint at, turning into a catastrophic bloodbath in its final act. How do we watch superheroes? How do we understand them? Should we regard them as frivolous entertainment? Are they viable solutions to our personal problems, or our broader social problems? These are all questions Super is interested in exploring without necessarily answering. Despite Frank's desire to be a public crime fighter, his mission to kill Jacques is purely personal, and he seems to exist in a netherworld of his own visions.

Are they delusions of grandeur, or can The Crimson Bolt actually effect a chance? I pose these as rhetorical questions because I think they are the questions Mr. Gunn wants us to ask as we watch. Were I to write a conference paper on Super (now that I've seen it, it's certainly going to earn a valued spot in my broader scholarship on the superhero film), I would try to answer these questions.

I'll say this: Super does end in a peculiar, uneasy endorsement of rampant violence. Much like Taxi Driver (a film I feel must have inspired Mr. Gunn at some point), a bloodbath acts as a trade-off for a personal accomplishment and a small but deeply felt change. A superhero doesn't need to save a whole building from falling, in this film's logic, because every person is a building. Frank's mission to "save Sarah from evil" reaches out and touches many others in ways that only become clear at the surprisingly heartfelt end.

Its wild mood swings, its debt to swaying camera work and hyperbolic violence and its close examination of personal quests for redemption and purpose make Super unlike any other kind of superhero film out there. When I say it pushes the genre past the point of no return, I mean this: it goes down into depths far darker than Kick-Ass and even Defendor, and it's hard to imagine anyone who sees this film approaching the mainstream superhero film the same way. This loose group of films that actively respond to the genre and try to apply some form of critique or reinterpretation are only getting more and more exciting and provocative.

Netflix turns up heat

2011-04-26T00:09:00.000-04:00

From the Hollywood Reporter:

In a note to shareholders Monday that accompanied its first-quarter earnings report, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells wrote that the House of Cards decision “was driven by a desire to test a new licensing model using a small portion of our content budget.”
“We want to confirm our theory that because we are click-and-watch rather than appointment viewing, we can efficiently build a big audience for a well-produced serialized show,” they say in the letter. “We’ll license two or three similar, but smaller, deals so we can gain confidence that whatever results we achieve are repeatable.”
House of Cards, produced by Media Rights Capital, will star Kevin Spacey and some episodes are expected to be directed by David Fincher. Instead of airing on TV, Netflix has commissioned 26 episodes and will stream them to its customers beginning in 2012 at an estimated cost of $100 million.
Netflix added 3.3 million domestic subscribers during the quarter, giving it 22.8 million in the U.S., enough to tie it with Comcast as the biggest media-subscription business in the country. Sirius XM Radio boasts 20.2 million and Microsoft’s Xbox Live has 30 million, though the company hasn’t said how many are free and how many are paid.

To read my thoughts on the House of Cards deal from when it was announced, head here. As a Netflix devotee, I'm hyped to see them making this move.

On watching Jesus: Appreciating 'Last Temptation'

2011-04-24T16:57:00.000-04:00

"Easter films" don't have quite the categorical recognition and distinction as, say, Christmas films. Part of this is undoubtedly from how "Christmas" has a very bizarre secular manifestation in contemporary culture (it is, after all, a pretty capitalist holiday: why not make capitalist products to promote it?). But there is very much a vested concern with portraying Jesus's crucifixion and, in some texts, resurrection on film. This is a historical issue as much as a contemporary one, as Passion Plays are not anything new.

But today, I found myself compelled to watch Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ for the second time. I first saw it in 2008 and had kind of a revelatory reaction. I watched it late at night, in the dark, consumed by the very lyrical work Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus applied to Christ, along with Paul Schrader's incredibly complex adaptation of a pretty controversial (which seems like putting it lightly) book.

I think Scorsese's film has been horrifically misread. I don't think it's just a beautiful film, replete with the kind of eye-catching editing, atypical fusion of music and sequence and striking compositions that have made him one of America's best filmmakers. It takes the kind of psychological qualities he gives all his character studies and daringly applies them to Jesus Christ. It's brilliant and stirring in a way quite unlike any other spiritual film I've ever seen. So this Easter, I thought it was worth talking about.

There is this conception of religious films as walking on a ridiculously thin line between art and pandering. I personally feel like most of them end up feeling incredibly condescending because they can't cross the line from respect for the material and the desire to please the particular religious group. They try to "move you" so consciously, so relentlessly, it all just feels like an exercise in simultaneous hyperbole and restraint (talk about a paradox).

Look at The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson so literalizes Jesus's crucifixion that the film is an absolute chore to watch. He wants you to watch Jesus bleed, watch his skin get ripped apart, watch him moan and fall in slow motion, all to invest you with a sense of deep (and I'd argue this comes from a predominantly Catholic ideology) guilt about his crucifixion, such that the film's resurrection coda acts can't redeem it. Gibson's camera is designed to promote not only Jesus but his suffering as a form of pleasure. It's a rather perverse film.

Elsewhere, David Ehrenstein has argued that Last Temptation is about understanding divinity as a process. The vitriolic public reaction to the film, and its enormous cultural controversy, comes from a complete rejection of attempting to negotiate Jesus as both human and divine. This is the point of Nikos Kazantzakis's book, and I think rather eloquently translated in Paul Schrader's screenplay. The act of watching The Last Temptation is force yourself to take part in a process, a debate, where Jesus himself must reconcile his inherent paradox: he alternately embraces, rejects, thinks ambivalently and accepts his role as Savior.

Scorsese, who almost entered the Italian Catholic priesthood, and Kazantzakis, who is Greek Orthodox, graft onto Jesus their own interpretation of faith and their own need to debate divinity in order to come to grips with it. Though distantly infused with the rhetoric and structure of the Gospels, they see Jesus's dual nature as a way to understand oneself.

I love The Last Temptation of Christ because it's one of the only interpretations of the Gospels I've seen that actually creates a space to think about the problems we Christians face in accepting faith. There is, at least for me, a lingering doubt about the crucifixion sacrifice. The film, in its many debates with Gospel figures about the nature of faith, belief, and communication with God, offers that faith must ultimately displace temptation, that the messages we receive may confuse us but are ultimately able to inspire us to a greater understanding.

Let me be more concrete. At the end of Last Temptation there is an infamous 30 minute dream sequence. An angel (who is later revealed as a manifestation of the devil) comes to Jesus on the cross, takes him down, and unites him with Mary Magdalene. They wed, make love, try to have a child, but she dies. Jesus ultimately creates a family with Lazarus's sister, and comes across St. Paul late in his life. Paul is preaching Jesus's resurrection, but Jesus confronts him to call him a liar. This sequence is incredibly complex, for on one hand it argues Paul is a liar who invented the resurrection to make Christianity "work." On the other, this is a dream scene. The point a lot of people miss is that this is still within the devil's temptation. This is a moment for Jesus to realize the resurrection and crucifixion are necessary to "create Christianity," even if he doesn't realize that until his "death bed," when he repents and is catapulted from his dream back to the cross.

As the Rolling Stones said, Jesus Christ has his moment of doubt and pain. But instead of letting him overcome that in the Garden, he continues to doubt until the crucifixion itself. Suspended in time, the Devil tries to coerce Jesus to play out his human life. Were he to "die" in the dream, he would die on the cross without having embraced his divinity.

Some have argued that the film radically undoes Jesus because it shows him as susceptible to the temptations and sins he was explicitly above. Again, I would say this acts as a metaphorical exploration of our own need to interpret where Jesus's humanity ends and divinity begins. The film creates the space for us to do that and ask questions we might otherwise feel very uncomfortable asking. It doesn't ruin our conception of faith; it enhances it.

The Last Temptation of Christ is about the negotiation of Jesus's humanity and divinity. In order to do that intellectually, Scorsese, Schrader et. al. intensify each element and show them constantly at war, reflecting how they might be at war in ourselves. Jesus rejects the devil's fantasy though, understanding the need to shift from his humanness to his divinity.

This isn't just a representation of the crucifixion. This is a full-blown argument about its importance. It's an intellectual reappropriation of Jesus's life and teachings. Pasolini, an atheist, filmed The Gospel According to St. Matthew as "plainly" as he could in order to highlight the humanity of the story. The Passion of the Christ tried to coerce spectators into feeling guilt about the sacrifice. I see Last Temptation somewhere in the middle.

Looking at Dafoe's representation of Jesus isn't meant to elevate him. In his very nuanced performance with a wide range of emotions and thoughts, Scorsese and Dafoe want us to identify our process of interpreting Jesus's divinity with his. This is not a blasphemous film. This is a film that awakens us to the complexity of faith.

It inspires me deeply, and it's high time it be redeemed in the mainstream.

Cannes lineup finally revealed

2011-04-14T10:31:00.000-04:00

Opening Film
Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)

In Competition

The Skin That I Inhabit (Pedro Almodovar)
L'Apollonide (Betrand Bonello)
Foot Note (Joseph Cedar)
Paterre (Alain Cavalier)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
The Kid With the Bike (The Dardennes)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki)
Hanezu no Tsuki (Naomi Kawase)
Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh)
Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
La Source de Femmes (Radu Mihaileanu)
Polisse (Maiwenn Le Besco)
Harakiri (Takashi Miike)
We Have a Pope (Nanni Moretti)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
Michael (Markus Schleinzer)
This Must Be the Place (Paolo Sorrentino)
Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsey)

Un Certain Regard

Restless (Gus Van Sant)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)
The Hunter (Bazur Bakuradze)
Halt auf freier Strecke (Andreas Dresen)
Skoonheid (Oliver Hermanus)
Hors Satan (Bruno Dumont)
Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro (Robert Guediguian)
The Days He Arrives (Hong Sang-Soo)
Bonsai (Christian Jimenez)
Tatsumi (Erik Khoo)
En maintenant, on va ou? (Nadine Labaki)
Ariang (Kim Ki Duk)
Loverboy (Catalin Mitulescu)
Toomelah (Ivan Sen)
Yellow Sea (Na Hong-Jin)
Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo)
L'exercice de l'Etat (Pierre Schoeller)
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier)
Travailler fatigue (Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra)

Out of Competition

The Beaver (Jodie Foster)
The Artist (Michel Hazanvicius)
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Rob Marshall)
La Conquete (Xavier Durringer)
Kung Fu Panda 2: The Kaboom of Doom (Jennifer Yuh)

Special Screenings

Labrador (Frederikke Aspock)
Le maitre des foreges de l'enfer (Rithy Panh)
Un documentaire sur Michel Petrucciani (Michael Radford)
Tous au Larzac (Christian Rouaud)

Midnight Screenings

Wu Xia (Peter Chan Ho-sun)
Dias de gracia (Everardo Gout)

Wait, did you not realize it's awards weekend blow-out

2011-01-15T13:01:00.000-05:00

When I manage two blogs, I forget about the other one. It's how I hope to parent one day.

If you missed last night's feeble coverage of a less-than-interesting Critics Choice awards, don't worry! I've got more up my sleeve for tomorrow's Golden Globes.

But you can only find it if you go to Statue Tracker.

The Eighth Annual Jagged Edge Awards

2011-01-13T20:41:00.000-05:00

It's that time of the year where I let my voice be heard across all the categories, where you can finally figure out which actors, screenplays and cinematographers I loved the most. 25 of the roughly 50 films I saw in 2010 are represented.

It's time to know which films from this year I consider... Filmmaking Excellence Above the Cut

Best Picture

Black Swan
Inception
Kick-Ass
Shutter Island
The Social Network

Best Director

Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan
David Fincher for The Social Network
Christopher Nolan for Inception
Roman Polanski for The Ghost Writer
Martin Scorsese for Shutter Island

This is Darren Aronofsky's second nomination; he was nominated in 2008 for The Wrestler
This is David Fincher's second nomination; he was nominated in 2007 for Zodiac
This is Christopher Nolan's second nomination for Best Director; he won this category in 2008 for The Dark Knight. He is additionally nominated this year for Best Original Screenplay, and has twice been nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (The Dark Knight in 2008 [which he won] and The Prestige in 2006)
This is Martin Scorsese's second nomination. He won this category in 2006 for The Departed
This is Roman Polanski's first nomination.

Best Actor

Jim Carrey for I Love You, Phillip Morris
Leonardo DiCaprio for Shutter Island
Jesse Eisenberg for The Social Network
Colin Firth for The King's Speech
Joaquin Phoenix for I'm Still Here

This is Jim Carrey's second nomination. He won this category in 2004 for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
This is Leonardo DiCaprio's third nomination. He was nominated in 2004 for The Aviator and in 2006 for The Departed.
This is Jesse Eisenberg's second nomination. He won Best Supporting Actor in 2005 for The Squid and the Whale.
This is Joaquin Phoenix's second nomination. He was nominated for Walk the Line in 2005.
This is Colin Firth's first nomination.

Best Actress

Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence for Winter's Bone
Natalie Portman for Black Swan
Noomi Rapace for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Tilda Swinton for I Am Love

This is Nicole Kidman's second nomination. She was nominated in 2003 for Dogville.
This is Natalie Portman's second nomination. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2004 for Closer.
This is Tilda Swinton's second nomination. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2007 for Michael Clayton.
This is Jennifer Lawrence's and Noomi Rapace's first nomination.

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale for The Fighter
Nicolas Cage for Kick-Ass
Andrew Garfield for The Social Network
John Hawkes for Winter's Bone
Sean Penn for Fair Game

This is Nicolas Cage's second nomination. He was nominated last year for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
This is Sean Penn's third nomination. He won Best Actor in 2003 for Mystic River and was nominated in 2008 for Milk.
This is Christian Bale's, Andrew Garfield's and John Hawkes's first nomination.

Best Supporting Actress

Marion Cotillard for Inception
Dale Dickey for Winter's Bone
Rooney Mara for The Social Network
Chloe Grace Moretz for Kick-Ass
Hailee Steinfeld for True Grit

This is the first nomination for all nominees.

Best Original Screenplay

Black Swan by Mark Hyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin
The Fighter by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson
Greenberg by Noah Baumbach
Dogtooth by Efthymis Filppou and Giorgos Lanthimos
Inception by Christopher Nolan

This is Noah Baumbach's fourth nomination. He was nominated for writing and directing The Squid and the Whale in 2005, and for co-writing the adaption of Fantastic Mr. Fox last year.
This is Christopher Nolan's fifth nomination. He is nominated for Best Director this year, won Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay in 2008 for The Dark Knight, and was nominated in Best Adapted Screenplay in 2006 for The Prestige.
This is the first nomination for all over nominees.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Ghost Writer
Screenplay by Robert Harris and Roman Polanski
Based on the Book "The Ghost" by Robert Harris

Kick-Ass
Screenplay by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaugn
Based on the Comic Book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.

The Social Network
Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
Based on the Book "The Accidental Billionaires" by Ben Mezrin

Shutter Island
Screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis
Based on the Book by Dennis Lehane

True Grit
Screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen
Based on the Book by Charles Portis

This is Roman Polanski's second nomination; he is also nominated this year for Best Director.
This is the Coens' sixth nomination. They won Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay in 2007 for No Country for Old Men, were nominated for Best Original Screenplay in 2008 for Burn After Reading and in 2009 for A Serious Man, as well as a Best Director nomination in 2009 for A Serious Man.

Best Cast Ensemble

The Fighter

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

The Social Network

True Grit

Winter’s Bone

Best Art Direction

Alice in Wonderland

Inception

The King’s Speech

Shutter Island

True Grit

Best Cinematography

The American

Black Swan

Inception

The Social Network

True Grit

Best Film Editing

Black Swan

Inception

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Shutter Island

True Grit

Best Msic

Black Swan

The Ghost Writer

Inception

Shutter Island

The Social Network

Best Sound

Black Swan

Inception

Iron Man 2

Toy Story 3

True Grit

Best Visual Effects

Black Swan

Inception

Iron Man 2

Knight and Day

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Best Makeup

The Fighter

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Kick-Ass

Let Me In

True Grit

Scene of the Year

The American – Opening scene

Black Swan – Night out with Lilly

Dogtooth – Oral surgery

The Ghost Writer – Coda/Book premiere

Inception – First dream heist

Kick-Ass – Saving Big Daddy

The King's Speech - The Speech

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – Scott vs. Gideon

The Social Network – “You have my attention”

Toy Story 3 - One last play

Nominations Total

Inception - 11
The Social Network - 10
Black Swan - 10
True Grit - 8
Shutter Island - 7
Kick-Ass - 6
The Fighter - 4
The Ghost Writer - 4
Winter's Bone - 4
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - 4
The King's Speech - 3
Dogtooth - 2
The American - 2
Iron Man 2 - 2
Toy Story 3 - 2
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - 2
I Am Love - 1
Alice in Wonderland - 1
Rabbit Hole - 1
Fair Game - 1
Greenberg - 1
I Love You, Phillip Morris - 1
I'm Still Here - 1
Knight and Day - 1
Let Me In - 1

Top 20 Films of 2010

2011-01-10T10:06:00.000-05:00

Oh yes, that wonderful time of year, where we can list off our top choices for the year.

In lieu of 10, I opted for 20 this year, just because I liked that many movies.

1. The Social Network
2. Black Swan
3. Inception
4. Kick-Ass
5. Shutter Island
6. The Ghost Writer
7. Winter's Bone
8. True Grit
9. Dogtooth
10. Somewhere
11. The Fighter
12. I'm Still Here
13. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
14. The King's Speech
15. Toy Story 3
16. Rabbit Hole
17. Mother
18. Exit Through the Gift Shop
19. I Am Love
20. The American

Seeking Perfection: "Black Swan" review

2010-12-18T19:33:00.000-05:00

In most versions of film history, D.W. Griffith gets credited for "inventing" the close-up, for having the audacity (and, it turns out, the remarkable foresight) to move the camera right into the actor's face, cutting from a longer shot into the close-up. When audiences first saw an actor's face spread across the entirety of the screen's canvas, one can only imagine how revelatory it felt, to be able to read the movement of eyes, the curls of lips, the lines of the face in exacting detail at emotionally significant moments.

Watching Darren Aronofsky's torturous thriller, "Black Swan," is the closest I've come to feeling the sheer magnitude of the close-up in, well, ages. Following obsessively desperate ballerina Nina's (Natalie Portman) burning to desire to be the star of her company's "Swan Lake," and her subsequent mental breakdown over her desire to reach absolute perfection, the film doesn't so much let Portman create her fragility as it does graft it onto her. It is an oppressive, claustrophobic, utterly unnerving piece of psychological mayhem whose spiral into Nina's personal hell is as relentless as any American horror film in the past decade.

Aronofsky and director of photography Matthew Libatique take the film's aesthetic design to staggering extremes: they choose a film stock that is highly grainy and borderline desaturated, where every spotlight into the lens almost blows out the frame. Onto this plane comes Natalie Portman's face. Her eyes constantly circling, her brows twitching, her lips quivering, her skin either covered in make-up or cold sweat, she masterfully brings both a sense of obsession and a deep fragility with her (in)ability to perform. Further, Libatique's camera follows Nina in almost every shot. Almost like a dark companion piece to Aronofsky's last feature "The Wrestler" - a film also about desperation and a desire to reach personal and professional gratification - we follow the back of her head around hallways, down open streets, through her mother's apartment; it swirls around Nina's upper body on the stage instead of following the action from afar, and after a while this method of shooting Nina feels entirely too oppressive, as if we too want to escape the kind of terrifying panic she experiences.

"Black Swan's" opening act sets it up as a conventionally plotted backstage drama, and puts all the tropes on full display: the aspiring performer, the sexually-charged director, the envious and scheming co-star, the oppressive has-been mother. What's shocking and tremendous as it wears on is how it questions and twists these very conventions by gradually undoing any semblance of a concrete visual reality. With clever editing and some trippy visual effects, editors Kristina Boden and Andrew Weisblum go from making Nina the object of the camera's unwavering gaze to making the viewer a part of her confused world. She starts having violent and sexual experiences - or are they fantasies? - and sees her conniving, seductive understudy Lilly (Mila Kunis) everywhere she goes - or does she?

Moreover, she starts seeing herself. Over and over again, the film uses mirrors to confuse our sense of where we are and who we're looking at. Rooms first look massive until we realize it's a mirror magnifying it twice over, company director Thomas's (Vincent Cassel) face is doubled on two mirrors, Nina appears to retreat into infinity in a mirror, and on and on. Its use of reflective surfaces is almost beyond inventive; it's pervasive. Soon, she's even seeing doubles of herself when she's not looking into a mirror. "Black Swan" is dazzling to look at, and it's just as easy to get lost in its vortex. As Nina's identity, and the identities of the people around her, get more confused and confusing as the film catapults towards "Swan Lake's" opening night, its increased use of discontinuous editing and its overabundance of mirrors make it purposefully hard to follow, as we're supposed to be just as wary as Nina about her every move (and its potential to be a figment of her imagination).

This is a horror movie, make no mistake, and of the unbridled, purely psychological kind horror filmmakers rarely pursue. It emerges from dark places and aspires to ambitious heights. It mirrors personal insanity to professional aspiration, sexual frustration with violent unconscious. And by the time it's over, you won't really know what you believe. This is insular, technically and emotionally accomplished film that Darren Aronofsky's talent promised ten years ago when he made "Requiem for a Dream" - a perhaps more disturbing but nonetheless equally visceral and hallucinatory experience. This is the film that takes him beyond the fantastical ambition of "The Fountain" and the earnest melodrama of "The Wreslter" to place him firmly into the realm of America's best visionaries. It's true horror because it's a film that strives to get into the viewer's head as much as it does the character's head, and it strives to create a violent, paranoid reality of deep uncertainty. It's almost terrifying how deep it goes.

The same goes for Natalie Portman, who transcends all her previous performances to levels few actors ever reach. To create a performance as a performer is difficult enough, but Portman invests every part of her body. When she tries to unlock her sexuality, it's almost heartbreaking in how traumatic it is for her psyche. When she's asked to smile, her sheer inability to express happiness is truly saddening. Mila Kunis and Barbara Hershey (as Nina's has-been and deeply suppressive mother) are terrifyingly predatory in their own ways, but it's Winona Ryder, as Thomas's last prized ballerina Beth, who makes every one of her few moments absolutely chilling.

To speak more of "Black Swan" may be to discredit it, as I think it's a film best experienced with no preconceived ideas about what's going to happen. All the better to experience the last third, which is sublime, surreal terror that feels like poetry covered in blood. Let me just mention that as much as it is a companion piece to Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," it owes an equal amount of debt to Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," about a sexually repressed woman who loses her grasp on reality. It would be interesting to know if screenwriters Mark Heyan, Andres Heinz and John J. McLaughlin used "Repulsion" as a template or as inspiration, but "Black Swan" equally chronicles a particularly feminine descent. Its modes of blending reality and fantasy within the same shots and its integration of montage as a way to weave in and out of the character's fantasy owe quite a bit to Polanski's ideas about how to forge and manipulate cinematic perspective.

"Black Swan" is one of the best, most fully accomplished, and most awe-strikingly ambitious films of 2010. It melds backstage drama and psychological horror into a penetrating character study. Its writing is both convoluted and perfectly clear, its aesthetic perfectly marries the kind of tone, emotion, and ideas that Aronofsky and his team desire to emit. This is a cold-blooded masterpiece that tears the fabric of the film image to shreds.

'Waiting for My Real Life to Begin': "Rabbit Hole" review

2010-12-10T23:25:00.000-05:00

Becca (Nicole Kidman) goes to her garden. She lays soil, plants flowers, and gazes for just a moment at their beauty. The camera captures the purple flower in a dramatic close-up briefly before Becca is interrupted by a neighbor inviting her to dinner. She politely refuses, her wave of happiness vanishing behind slight coils of tension. Her smile evaporates and, for some reason, she seems nothing but defeated.

These are the opening moments of John Cameron Mitchell's "Rabbit Hole," a film comprised of small moments of unspeakable magnitude. Picking up with a grief-stricken couple (Kidman and Aaron Eckhart) eight months after their son was tragically killed by a wayward motorist, it's more than a poignant tear-jerker about learning how to deal with life's tragic luck. This is a film to stir the soul, about minute choices and unsolvable dilemmas. It's perfectly observed, marvelously captured, and somehow speaks to the deep recesses of our emotions.

Mitchell impressed the film world in 2001 when he brought his play "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" to life. With it came a rousing, quirky, and undeniably personal use of the cinematic form. He brought to the musical and to queer cinema a daring sensibility, and it resulted in a film that rocked to its own beat and broke conventions with a wrecking ball. With "Rabbit Hole," he's made a quieter, more sullen film, one that's bent on letting us soak in the details rather than be assaulted with them.

And these visuals are absolutely worth observing, worth pondering, for Mitchell and director of photography Frank G. DeMarco know where to place the camera at every moment. They use the space of Becca and Howie's house to maximum effect, putting the camera in corners, behind doors, or on top of the staircase, using a single table light to shape the whole appearance of a room. The camera lingers, it observes, and in its observance it notices the small fractures of its characters, but it also lingers long enough to let us watch them smooth over their own cracks. We catch not only Becca's sorrow sweep in, but we see her push it out with the simple readjustment of her shoulders or her lips.

"Rabbit Hole" takes its title from a thematic undercurrent that there could exist parallel universes; we could exist in several places at once, and this, as Becca says, "may just be the sad version." In a film pervasively concerned not only with grief but with the process of grief, it uses this "rabbit hole" as a way to help Becca experience the closest thing to closure she can give herself at this point in her life, but the film itself is a rabbit hole, a kaleidoscope of how different people experience the same kind of grief and learn to carry it with them.

Part of why the film succeeds is in how it continually confounds expectations for a drama of this variety. Howie, as played by Eckhart, tries to keep their son's memory alive wherever he can, going so far as to keep the car-seat firmly in place. He opens up to Gaby (Sandra Oh), a friend from their counseling group who is also experiencing deeply confusing emotions multiple years after her own tragedy. To reveal how their relationship develops would discredit the great lengths the film - and Eckhart - go to in creating multiple layers to these characters, but it never once develops into the cheap "sad husband decides to have an affair to find fulfillment" gimmick.

No, the film isn't interested in finding solutions to grief, it's interested in observing the process. Dianne Wiest, as Becca's mother Nat, also carries her own sadness, which she says can never leave her, but she carries it around "like a brick." Wiest's interchanges with Kidman are devastating in how deep they penetrate into these characters' psyches in only a few sentences at a time; they have the air of two people constantly trying to figure out how to communicate but never quite doing a good enough job. So too are Kidman and Eckhart, who don't just play their marriage as a series of highs and lows, but delve into the idea that their lives are trying to right themselves. Kidman has not been this good in years -- stripped of all her pretensions, she doesn't quite bare her soul as she lets us watch her try to cover it up. It's an incredibly moving and incredibly intricate role.

"Rabbit Hole" is adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his play, and while it at first has the ring of a chamber play, with multiple lengthy scenes taking place around the home, Mitchell finds so many ways to open the film up visually that it never feels redundant. The writing is sharp and tight, while the visuals take on a deeply meditative tone, letting the film almost glide.

I quoted a Colin Hay song as the title of this review: "Waiting For My Real Life to Begin." "And you say, just be here now / Forget about the past, your mask is wearing thin / Just let me throw one more dice, I know that I can win / I'm waiting for my real life to begin," the acoustic track croons, and this to me encapsulates what this beautiful little film is about. It's about grief, but it also shows love as something so profound, something that can fix even the deepest of wounds. While Becca and Howie are indeed waiting for their lives to begin again, trying to plant their feet on the ground and grieve together, trying to shed the masks they have to wear in public to keep up appearances, they still have each other. The film reminds us of this, and Kidman and Eckhart capture it all so perfectly.

New Blog, New Me

2010-11-26T22:55:00.001-05:00

Oh yeah, I forgot to totally use a lot of my online media again. I rule.

But that doesn't mean I'm not up to some tricks. I've activated a new blog entirely for this year's Academy Awards race. It's a grand experiment I've been wanting to try for a while now.

I'm going to try and sync the important content, but please follow it at: tdgawardscentral.blogspot.com. Comment, boost my page views, make this thing awesome!

"The Social Network" review

2010-10-02T12:11:00.003-04:00

David Fincher's latest exquisite dip into the anxieties of our culture is the most subdued and least auspicious film he's ever made. It lacks the whirlwind aesthetic of "Fight Club," the dark paranoia and period rendering of "Zodiac," or the romantic meditations of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." But "The Social Network" is undoubtedly the work of an artistic genius, for in its dark irony and immense cynicism about the collapse of social fabrics it's turned a story of pointing fingers and technological innovation into a haunting tragedy of obsession and self-destruction.

Earlier this year, Nolan's "Inception" claimed that the most valuable thing was a pure idea, and the idea of Facebook is a battleground for the first half of the movie - who invented it, how can it be properly implemented, and what it means to the users who spend time on it. These questions are, importantly, never answered, and instead of pushing the film outward -- to look at how Facebook effects the world at large -- writer Aaron Sorkin instead pushes it inward -- looking at how its development changes its CEO and disputed creator, Mark Zuckerberg. And over the course of the film, Mark Zuckerberg himself morphs and transforms from complete asshole to... well, he's still an asshole, but he's victimized and corrupted by the people around him.

As played by Jesse Eisenberg ("The Squid and the Whale"), Zuckerberg is a cold, calculated individual whose obsession with making a name for himself and with computer coding make him a complete outsider to 2003 Harvard. Dressed in flip-flops and hoodies, he's never effected by the frigid cold, and he constantly changes focus halfway through sentences. Eisenberg cracks Sorkin's dialogue without taking a breath. His eyes seem sunk back in his head and pitch black. It's a wholeheartedly brilliant and ruthless performance, one where Zuckerberg himself is crafted like a robot, like part of the technology.

But Eisenberg is so subdued you might miss the many nuances he pours into his performance, especially if you're caught looking too hard at the rest of this stellar ensemble. Andrew Garfield in particular is absolutely devastating as Eduardo Sevarin, one of Facebook's co-founders and its CFO, who later sued Zuckerberg for cutting him out of the company (or so the story goes). Garfield is the perfect antithesis to Eisenberg, ambitious in business but cautious in his choices; he tries desperately to cling to human relationships and, in the last act, he almost rattles the whole movie in one scene. The showiest guy in the movie is Justin Timberlake; he flashes and parades across each moment as Sean Parker, founder of Napster (and mentor to Zuckberg).

But beyond the acting and the writing, it's the craft that makes this such a powerful and amazing film. It's not noticeable and showy, and this is the first time Fincher has actually shown reasonable restraint in developing his own ideas. That's not an insult to Fincher -- he's one of the few filmmakers who actually seem interested in what he can make the image look like, but "Social Network" is a whole different animal for him. Jeff Cronenweth, who shot "Fight Club," makes Harvard look dark and grimy; he makes California look frighteningly bright, and his brilliant uses of focal planes shape the perspective of the film throughout.

Film editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall give the film a real sense of pulse. There are times when the editing flairs and drives, cutting miraculously around Zuckerberg's fingers and eyes, or moving towards or away from stronger close-ups. They also weave in and out of the deposition rooms, collapsing flashback and storytelling over and over. Then there are times when it cools and withdraws, cutting around small shifts in action with a superb sense of purpose. And the music -- oh, the music. Rarely has a score sounded so haunting, so creepy in a drama. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross do amazing things mixing traditional orchestral/pianos with unorthodox bass synthesizers, infiltrating technology in such an uneasy way.

What can't be forgotten is that this is historical *fiction.* It's a dramatization of what led to a technology that drastically altered how people experience each other. Sorkin's decision to let the depositions of two lawsuits guide the narrative make it clear that this is about peoples' perceptions. Importantly, Mark Zuckberg never really gets a chance to tell his side of the stories. He sits on the sidelines, interjecting and correcting bits and pieces. But this is vivid, procedural fiction -- it knows what the facts are (as much is on record, at least), and it knows how to push those facts to make its points.

But again, this is a meditation on how technology creates ideas. The comparisons to "Citizen Kane" that some major reviewers have made are not unwarranted. This is a movie about someone who had a vision for what the world could be, but the film paints him as someone who doesn't quite understand how he was about to change the world, and he had no one to share that vision with him. Yes, we can reduce it to -- "the guy who created Facebook has no friends" -- but that's a reductive way to think about the darker implications of Fincher and Sorkin's piece.

And it is dark. The best invention the film offers is Erica (Rooney Mara, startlingly good in two scenes), a woman Mark loses in the first few minutes of the film, but she's never gone completely from his mind. Subtly, almost invisibly, she guides every motion of the narrative. But this isn't just about someone who changes the world for a woman. No, it's not JUST about anything. It's actually, oddly enough, about close to everything. It's about the impulse to create, the desire to be remembered, the need to be immortalized. But it's also about the price of greed and fame. In these ways, Mark Zuckerberg is this generation's Charles Foster Kane -- a man who can only be understand by the people around him, but his story is so diluted through the raw emotions of those who know him best.

It's a wham-bam-pow knockout of a film, and even though it only happened seven years ago, its events feel like part of a cultural mythology because Sorkin, Fincher, and their cast and crew make this a wholly American epic for the age of technology. As it races through its breathless two hours, you may miss all the internal beats, all the construction, all the smart choices it's making as it builds and builds and builds to... a very small ending. It's the ending that finally illuminates everything the film only hinted at for 120 minutes. Two medium close-ups, one of a computer screen and one of Mark Zuckerberg, engaged in a fairly typical shot-reverse shot as the camera gradually tracks into each, uniting the man with his creation but also making it a trap.

"The Social Network" may be the smartest, and in some ways maybe the bravest, historical film a major Hollywood studio has produced in several years. It certainly elevates David Fincher to a different stratosphere and confirms him as an artist who is deeply concerned with the evolution of the American tapestry and the people haunted by its images and culture.

2010 Emmys Predictions

2010-08-29T13:36:00.001-04:00

Property The Daily Gamecock

Best Comedy Series
This race will be generating plenty of buzz throughout the night as it pits a television dynasty against multiple breakout hits. NBC’s “30 Rock” has won this award for three consecutive years, but this year its crown is threatened from multiple angles.
Fox’s “Glee” has more nominations than any other show in this category, and comes into the race with a Golden Globe win against a very similar line-up. ABC’s “Modern Family” likewise burst out as one of last season’s most impressive new shows and has five acting nominations to back that up. It’s a thick playing field without even factoring in the other nominees, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Nurse Jackie” and “The Office,” and it looks like it may be “30 Rock’s” time to take a seat.
Our Pick To Win: “Glee”

Best Lead Actor, Comedy Series
Matthew Morrison may have had shining song and dance moments on “Glee’s” season one, but he probably won’t be much of a match for back-to-back winner Alec Baldwin, whose biggest pressure comes from Tony Shalhoub’s final season as “Monk,” and Jim Parsons as an under-the-radar favorite for “The Big Bang Theory.”
Our Pick To Win: Alec Baldwin

Best Lead Actress, Comedy Series
A handful of past winners — last year’s winner Toni Collette and the previous year’s winner Tina Fey, 2006’s winner Julia-Louis Dreyfus and three-time Emmy winner Edie Falco (for Dramatic Actress for “The
Sopranos”) — compete against three-time nominee Amy Poehler and newcomer Lea Michele. It’s a category with no runaway frontrunner, and any winner would seem a logical choice.
Our Pick To Win: Toni Collette

Best Supporting Actor, Comedy Series
With “Modern Family” cast members holding half the nomination slots, expect them to cancel each other out for a win. While “Glee’s” Chris Colfer could be a surprise upset, look for Neil Patrick Harris to ride the good vibrations of his diverse and high-profile year to a win over last year’s winner, “Two and a Half Men’s” Jon Cryer.
Our Pick To Win: Neil Patrick Harris

Best Supporting Actress, Comedy Series
It’s a pretty solid line-up, again featuring multiple members of the “Modern Family” team, but if “Glee” is going to scoop an acting award, it’s going to be here. As much as Kristen Wiig has made her mark on “SNL,” it’s hard to deny the sensational buzz surrounding Jane Lynch, who nearly steals the show every week without even singing.
Our Pick To Win: Jane Lynch

Best Drama Series
Like Best Comedy Series, back-to-back winner “Mad Men” will have to push through plenty of heavy competition to score a triple win from the Television Academy. ABC’s “Lost” may receive recognition for its series-ending year, book-ending its Best Drama Series win for its premiere season. Meanwhile, “True Blood” and “Dexter” can reap the benefits of their cult followings
and break out of their niche labels while scoring major wins for premium cable. Despite “Mad Men’s” continued run of success, “Lost” is in a very good position to receive star treatment for its final bow.
Our Pick To Win: “Lost”

Best Lead Actor, Drama Series
Back-to-back winner Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad” will have to hold his own against a formidable Michael C. Hall, already Golden Globe-winning for his work on this past season’s “Dexter,” and “Mad Men’s” Jon Hamm, who has yet to win this award. With “Dexter” having one of the most buzzed-about seasons on television, look for Hall to scoop his first Emmy win.
Our Pick To Win: Michael C. Hall

Best Lead Actress, Drama Series
Back-to-back winner Glenn Close seems like a safe choice. Constant nominees Mariska Hargitay and Kyra Sedgwick are Emmy regulars, but neither of their shows have had a standout year. Look for Julianna Margulies to ride the high notices of CBS’s “The Good Wife” — and a Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe award earlier this year — to her second Emmy win.
Our Pick To Win: Julianna Margulies

Best Supporting Actor, Drama Series
With two of “Lost’s” most electric performers nominated, it’s easy to think they’d cancel each other out, but no one else on the list cries “potential winner” besides Aaron Paul of “Breaking Bad.” Barring an upset, look for Terry O’Quinn to nab an award before “Lost” rakes in the big one.
Our Pick To Win: Terry O’Quinn

Best Supporting Actress, Drama Series
With “The Good Wife” and “Mad Men” taking up two-thirds of the slots, conventional wisdom says someone from one of those two shows will win. Although Rose Byrne or Sharon Gless could easily sneak a win for their roles on “Damages” and “Burn Notice,” respectively, we’re hedging our bets that the seductive Christina Hendricks finally breaks “Mad Men’s” curse of no acting wins and gives the show a major prize, even if it loses Best Drama Series.
Our Pick To Win: Christina Hendricks

Best Made for Television Movie: “You Don’t Know Jack”

Best Miniseries: “The Pacific”

Best Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie: Al Pacino

Best Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie: Joan Allen

Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Movie: John Goodman

Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie: Susan Sarandon

Best Variety, Music or Comedy Series: “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”

Best Reality Competition Program: “The Amazing Race”

'The Kids Are All Right' full review

2010-08-25T14:37:00.001-04:00

Property The Daily Gamecock

miserably. While the action is certainly over-the-top, if only intermittently campy, it never exhibits the kind of care Stallone invests in those three minutes in the church with Willis and Schwarzenegger.

While it could have been a dream-team ensemble movie, a true throwback to “Rambo,” “Commando,” “Predator” and the rest of that dearly loved company, “Expendables” feels more like a shadow, a compromised project that has to shove its real attractions into cameos.

It’s like a high-concept project without its central concept. Even though it picks up significantly in its final act, everything before feels so arthritic, so creaky, it can never rebound from how insignificant an exercise it inevitably feels like.
earnestness, there’s a whole other element of the film that feels wholly calculated and cold.

Its evocation of the melodrama genre, specifically the kind of “middle-age couple in sexual crisis” and “teen child forced to mature through self-actualization” plot lines it hones in on, are beat-for-beat recognizable. The only difference, of course, is the kind of sexual politics underlying the use of the genre.

Now instead of fighting for the stability of the heterosexual couple, the film is questioning how heterosexuality comes into play in a homosexual relationship. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s a bold way to emulate progressive politics.

The real problem lies in how stale it all feels after a while. The characters may remain fresh and interesting, but the plot is anything but — its turns toward despair and redemption, to heartbreak and forgiveness, are plot points that feel so obligatory it makes the film feel less unique.

Perhaps that’s director/co-writer Lisa Cholodenko’s point: A film about homosexuals can look an awful lot like a film about heterosexuals. This kind of mirroring is evidently on her mind, as the film often repeats events like sexual intercourse, dinner meals and family arguments at different points in the narrative with different motives and effects for the various characters.

While it’s a heartwarming and funny movie, “The Kids Are All Right” makes its machinations all too apparent. Its soul is nearly compromised by its gender switch setup.

The naturalness of the performances and interactions is so often undercut by the film’s sharp cries for the spectator to think about family and sexuality in ways that draw so heavily on constructed convention that by the end it feels almost more tiresome than refreshing.

'Expendables' full review

2010-08-25T14:33:00.000-04:00

Property The Daily Gamecock

Early on in director/co-writer/star Sylvester Stallone’s testosterone overload “The Expendables,” Arnold Schwarzenegger enters a church through almost impossible brightness, creating the impression that a saint is descending to converse with mortals.

In the ensuing conversation, the “Terminator,” “Rocky” and Bruce Willis trade quips about a new mission. Schwarzenegger refuses and leaves in the same bright halo of light and Willis never makes a return for the rest of the film.

This is perhaps the only sequence that really reveals what Stallone had in mind when he set out to make “The Expendables,” which has been billed from the time it was announced as a rollicking reunion of ’80s action stars. In this brief scene, there is actual care with the camera, light and conversation — a kind of meta-wit to the proceedings.

Sadly, this playfulness is missing from nearly every other minute of “The Expendables,” a movie so awkward in nearly every element that it becomes almost impossible to enjoy once it finally gives over to nonstop madcap action and blood.

The most conspicuous problem lies in Stallone’s choice of casting. While it’s often fun to watch Stallone and Jason Statham bounce verbal folly off each other — the unstoppable action hero of the ’80s colliding with the unstoppable action hero of the ’00s — co-stars Randy Couture and Terry Crews are lifeless additions to the team.

On the “villainous” side of things, Eric Roberts (“The Dark Knight”) does great over-the-top work, but he’s a head-and-shoulders
standout over the unintelligible Dolph Lundgren and Steve Austin, who says every one of his few lines like he’s standing inside a wrestling ring with a microphone.

Stallone and co-writer Dave Callaham want to make every conversation scene memorable, full of jokes about masculinity, weapons, women and old age. Unfortunately, no one seems to figure out how to deliver the leaden, obvious dialogue, and almost every moment comes off either forced or blandly overplayed.

Even Stallone seems to suffer under the burden of his own words, as the 64-year-old looks more dazed than anything when the action isn’t a-blazing. The only member of the cast who actually breathes some soul into the proceedings is Mickey Rourke as a tattoo artist, but he is again shafted to a sideline role — a wasted asset.

But what of the action, which is really the only reason anyone would want to suffer through the awkward community of truly expendable co-stars? To Stallone’s credit, he stages several massive explosions and some staggering gore. Following on his blood-drenched “Rambo” (2008), the film loves to kill off as many extras in as many gory ways as Stallone can devise.

But this action is not necessarily a pleasure to look at. The editing is grossly inconsistent and imprecise, shots rarely feel framed to their maximum potential and cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball makes the nighttime climax a struggle to see. There’s nary a sense of rhythm or pulse.

Yes, there is such thing as “gritty action,” but if in-your-face verisimilitude was something Stallone was aiming for in “The Expendables,” he fails
miserably. While the action is certainly over-the-top, if only intermittently campy, it never exhibits the kind of care Stallone invests in those three minutes in the church with Willis and Schwarzenegger.

While it could have been a dream-team ensemble movie, a true throwback to “Rambo,” “Commando,” “Predator” and the rest of that dearly loved company, “Expendables” feels more like a shadow, a compromised project that has to shove its real attractions into cameos.

It’s like a high-concept project without its central concept. Even though it picks up significantly in its final act, everything before feels so arthritic, so creaky, it can never rebound from how insignificant an exercise it inevitably feels like.

Scott Pilgrim vs the World review

2010-08-19T09:11:00.001-04:00

Property The Daily Gamecock

Director Edgar Wright knows movies. His breakout hit, “Shaun of the Dead,” slyly melded zombies and romantic comedies with unassuming grace, while his follow-up hit, “Hot Fuzz,” was fully immersed in the conventions of buddy cop movies, Michael Bay action films and dozens more thrillers.

His latest film, “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” is a totally different kind of monster.

Adapted from the graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O’Malley, “Scott Pilgrim” oozes coolness. It’s an exhilarating, breathless and hysterical blend of comic books, video games, music and movies. It’s a mediated film for a mediated world.

Michael Cera continues to hone his deadpan skills as the titular bassist, whose crush on the literal girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (a seductively enigmatic Mary Elizabeth Winstead), ignites the League of Seven Evil Exes. In order to date Ramona, Scott must fight his way through Ramona’s evil exes, played deliciously by the likes of Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and Jason Schwartzman.

While “Scott Pilgrim” swirls in a sea of cultural references, rattling them off like combo moves in a video game, it’s Wright’s understanding of how to visually communicate the language and syntax of these different mediums into one package that really makes the film work.

Sounds on screen are often accompanied by text like “Ring” coming off a phone, as if to echo a graphic novel, while in other moments his split-screen and intercutting editing strategies feel strongly reminiscent of a comic panel.

Beyond that, classic video game themes often play under the soundtrack, characters use weapons that are pixilated to look like something on an old Sega and Scott is awarded “points” and “one-ups” for defeating his foes.

Not to mention the chronically cheeky dialogue always tries to incorporate video game language. Phrases such as “fight,” “finish him,” “continue” and “try again” are constantly recycled by characters in various circumstances.

Added to that, Scott and his friends are trying to get their band signed to a record deal, so the film often dips into loud performance moments or structures certain sequences like music videos.

“Scott Pilgrim” is pure stylistic excess, a movie whose barrage of images and sounds from a multiplicity of texts should threaten to make the movie rupture in its core. It regularly dips in and out of its “reality” in even the most simple conversation scenes, but Edgar Wright and his technical team know how to make each moment seem like a different riff that builds on the one before it.

Few filmmakers have the ability to create a world that draws so heavily on popular culture without seeming cloying or obvious. Wright’s film constantly surprises with the sheer earnestness of its players and the borderline experimental nature of its narrative.

“Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” is probably the best video game movie ever made. But to reduce it to that label wouldn’t do justice to how vast the myriad of texts Wright has chosen to draw on actually is. It’s a wonderful, playful concoction that takes the kind of “learning valuable lesson to get from adolescence to adulthood” narrative Michael Cera has centered his career around and blows it up with grand metaphors for emotional baggage and aching hearts.

It’s a movie that wants to give us a different way to think about movies, and its sealed-off whirlpool of media bombardment is a lavish treat for the eyes, the ears and any other sense that can possibly derive pleasure in something this gleefully unhinged.

I'm Still Here Trailer

2010-08-18T21:21:00.001-04:00

If you didn't know, this is on the Top 10 movies I'm most excited about this fall.

Dinner for Schmucks review

2010-08-17T21:56:00.001-04:00

Property The Daily Gamecock

“Dinner for Schmucks” assembles an all-star cast of outlandish comedians portraying an all-star team of outlandish characters. Though it plays close to the vest for most of the film, only spilling into the unhinged for the final dinner game, it’s a self-assured and consistently charming piece of awkward, life-going-off-the-rails comedy.

Paul Rudd stars as Tim, a businessman dying to get ahead. In order to secure a favorable position with his boss and colleagues, Tim is asked to attend a dinner where each guest brings the “most extraordinary” person they can find. By extraordinary, they mean idiotic.
Enter Steve Carell as Barry, a loner who Tim serendipitously hits with his car. Barry is a ringer, a man so out of touch with reality he all but guarantees Tim a victory at the dinner.
That is, of course, until Barry gets the dates for the dinner confused and shows up at Tim’s apartment the night before, threatening to spiral every part of his life desperately out of control.

As director of all three “Austin Powers” films and both “Meet the Parents” films, director Jay Roach is no stranger to using established comedic talent to provoke laughs. His direction of “Dinner” may not feel as precise or as loopy as some of his previous efforts, but he does know how to bring the best out of his players, letting them burst open in sometimes surprising and effective touches.

This is especially true of Carell, who is nothing but inspired as Barry, certainly the most complicated role in the production. As the central “schmuck,” Carell bears being the butt of most of the movie’s jokes, yet the shamelessly innocent way he plays Barry creates a sympathetic (and eventually empathetic) buffer: he’s a fool we can admire for his detachment, as opposed to ridicule.

With a dopey grin that jets his front teeth over his lower lip and a series of facial contortions and speech patterns that should be frustrating but always feel effortless, it’s a real showcase for Carell’s instinctive ability to burrow inside insecure characters.

Paul Rudd plays the kind of tight-laced man he so perfectly embodied in 2009’s “I Love You Man.” Rudd and Carell, opposites before in “Anchorman” and “40-Year-Old Virgin,” have a tangible rapport that lets the awkwardness of their interactions feel organic, creating plenty of room for subtle flourishes to slide in.

The film is best in its first hour, when the comedy stays squarely between Rudd and Carell, turning them into an odd couple trying to sort through Tim’s relationship problems. This may be due to the fact that this half strongly borrows from French film “Le diner de cons,” which served as inspiration to screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman.

The final hour turns into an ensemble piece, as the dinner party makes room for supporting actors like Zach Galifianakis as a man who claims he has mind control power,Ron Livingston and Larry Wilmore as Tim’s business associates. There’s also a delicious performance from “Flight of the Conchords” star Jemaine Clement as a contemporary artist. Clement sends a bolt of eccentricity through every scene he’s featured in.

“Dinner for Schmucks” is a breezy, three-course affair that satisfies without stuffing theappetite. While far from innovating the “night of chaos” template many recent comedies have chosen, it still offers plenty of awkward space for its giddy ensemble to turn themselves into schmucks.

Mad Men review

2010-08-17T21:55:00.000-04:00

Property The Daily Gamecock

“Who is Don Draper?” a reporter somewhat rhetorically asks the powerful and enigmatic advertising agent, played by Golden Globe-winning Jon Hamm, at the very start of “Mad Men’s” fourth season.

The AMC drama has stealthily tracked a group of decadent and psychologically troubled advertising personnel in and around the history and culture early ‘60s – through Kennedy’s campaign and election, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s assassination towards the end of last season – all while racking up major awards left and right (it’s won the Emmy for Best Drama Series two years in a row and the Golden Globe for Best Television Series – Drama three years in a row).

From its opening seconds and through every minute of the first two episodes of its fourth season, creator Matthew Weiner’s astonishingly sleek rumination on a major political, social and cultural turning point in American society astounds in all regards.

Its gorgeous production design leaves no stone unturned. Offices are fully furnished with beautiful décor down to the bottles of whiskey in the corner, while the costumes continually put both men and women in elegant, sharp ensembles. Not to mention the color-tinted and shadow-heavy cinematography that drapes all of the proceedings in rich tones.

The season three finale was a bit of a downer, with Betty Draper(January Jones) finally summoning the nerve to ask Don for a divorce, and Don’s decision to join Roger Sterling (John Slattery), Bertram Cooper (Robert Morse) and Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) in a split from their British-controlled agency and forge ahead as a new company.

Season four starts almost a year later, with the first two episodes featuring Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1964, sliding in bits of information regarding now-President Johnson’s social platforms and the escalating war in Vietnam.

To accompany a United States that is beginning to come face-to-face with radical changes, “Mad Men” has begun to introduce more cracks in the Don Draper façade. Now struggling to retain his irresistible charm and forced to adapt to a world without his family, Jon Hamm and the show’s team of writers are turning Draper into an artifact of a waning era.

Resigned to a tower of mod furniture, the executives of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce sip expensive whiskey and make attempts at womanizing just as they had in the show’s previous seasons, but never before have their actions felt so vain, so driven out of desperation.

Part of the consummate skill of “Mad Men” is its ability to refract the conditions of history through its characters, making them embody a myriad of complex social and political voices.

In that regard, some have labeled “Mad Men” as more of a dissertation in images than pure drama, a show that’s content to simmer beneath the surface and intellectualize every moment. The fact that it does ooze this riveting style makes it a unique feast for television.
“Mad Men” remains head and shoulders above anything else on basic cable, maybe on any television station. It presents its audience with constantly complex and invigorating protagonists whose actions are simultaneously both deplorable and fascinating.

Matthew Weiner has said “Mad Men” will not go beyond six seasons. If that’s true, the show has begun its second half. By touring the 1960s through the eyes of the upper crust who so desperately want to resist its changes while simultaneously exploiting them through advertising, it chronically provides radically new insights in mining one of the most fantastic eras of America’s last century.