Film Shuffle

Film Shuffle's Top 20 of 2011

2011-12-29T05:14:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again! Time for me to play make-believe movie critic and do my "best of" list. I made it 20 this year instead of 10, because ... well, I just felt like it. Everybody who does a list like this has their own rules, and I have mine. Most notably I try to only count movies officially released in 2011, which excludes films from 2010 that I didn't get around to seeing until early 2011. There are a few big releases I've yet to see - namely War Horse, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Pariah and We Bought a Zoo. I may end up seeing one or more of those before the year is out, but I don't trust my opinion on any movie for a list like this when I've had less than a week to marinate my thoughts.

ANYWAY, here goes. Several of these are favorites on other lists, but hopefully there will be some surprises.

"My boy Treelore always said we gonna have a writer in the family one day. I guess it's gonna be me."

20. The Help (Dir. Tate Taylor)
There are two ways to misread this movie, in my opinion. One is to treat it like it's trying to be the definitive work on racism and the true experience of black maids in white households, and by extension finding it offensively wanting in that goal. The second is to treat it like it *is* the definitive work on racism and the true experience of black maids in white households, and to love it for being a great success at that. It's a movie, y'all. An entertaining, often moving flick about women, friendship, and taking a stand. And no matter what you think of the material, it's hard to argue that the cast - especially Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, and Jessica Chastain - make it sing despite its weaknesses. (Original review)

"I'll be the candle."

19. Arthur Christmas (Dir. Sarah Smith, Barry Cook)
This is a new Christmas classic, as far as I'm concerned. Right up there with Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol, and Black Christmas. (Okay, your mileage may vary on the classic-ness of that last one, but probably because you haven't yet discovered it.) It may be the time of year in which I'm writing this prejudicing me in this film's favor, but then again maybe not. Because it's not just that it's thoroughly drenched in the Christmas spirit or that it makes me want to believe in Santa again that makes it special to me. It's clever and witty in a way that reminds me of Aardman's other brilliant movies. (Original review)

"Elizabeth is dying. Wait ... f*** you! And she's dying."

18. The Descendants (Dir. Alexander Payne)
I'm probably kinder to and fonder of this film than I ought to be, but I think it's quite a good picture of the complexity of grief and family. Better certainly than most death-in-the-family melodramas that we've all seen and which tend to elicit a sort of Pavlovian response of emotion. This boasts at least two of the best performances of the year, by George Clooney and Shailene Woodley, and for Clooney's part it's a career best. (Original review)

"No man can walk out of his own story."

17. Rango (Dir. Gore Verbinski)
The animated western is a seriously underexplored genre. This is some of the most original and beautiful animation i've ever seen and a love song to both "spaghetti westerns" and their more romantic John-Ford-y predecessors. As much as I love Pixar, I'm glad to see other studios get a chance to shine in this medium. This is not a cute and fluffy animated film for kids. There's a sass to this movie that's irresistible and very entertaining to watch. (Original review)

"I don't know anything. I'm just a rock in the sky"

16. The Future (Dir. Miranda July)
Miranda July sees the world in a very unique way, and I envy her for it. I'm also grateful that she sometimes lets me see the world through her filter by way of her filmmaking. A couple adopting a cat might seem like a simple thing that could not sustain a movie, but July turns it into a Great Life Crisis for her characters as this commitment forces them to realize the limits of their own lives. Yet these limits are as nothing compared with those of the cat they hope to adopt, and one of the (many) strokes of genius in this movie is that the cat itself is given a voice to tell us about its anxieties, making it as complex and neurotic a character as any human in the film. (Original review)

"With pleasure."

15. The Artist (Dir. Michel Hazanavicius)
I find it hilarious that people are so surprised that a black and white silent movie can be engaging and entertaining. Of course you can tell a great story with no dialogue! Hollywood was doing it for years before Al Jolson turned the sound on. What I find more impressive about the movie is the modern sensibilities it brings to it. The dream sequence - one of the only scenes in the movie that has sound - is one of my favorite scenes in a movie this year. This is an old story, using old tools, but made with modern eyes and hands. And the modern is what makes it remarkable. (Original review)

"That's what everybody's been saying: You'll feel better and don't worry and this is all fine and it's not."

14. 50/50 (Dir. Jonathan Levine)
This movie is a rare tear-jerker that earns its tears. It's not precious about the main character's cancer, nor does it trick you into feeling something because you think you're supposed to. We've seen loads of people in movies fighting cancer, but this movie makes the bold decision (though calling it bold is sad, however true it is) to show real people dealing with it. Not just the patients themselves but the people around them. Some handle it well, others spectacularly not, but that's life. And it's refreshing to see those rare occasions when actors and storytellers manage to conjure that elusive life and capture it on film. (Original review)

"If you ever wonder where your dreams come from, look around - this is where they are made."

13. Hugo (Dir. Martin Scorsese)
I've said a lot about the first hour of this film, which I still find incredibly flat, especially when it's in the same movie as the amazing second half. But that second half can't be ignored. As much a tribute to film preservation as to film history, Hugo is something I love more than pretty much anything else - a surprise. Once Hugo and Isabelle finally uncover the mystery of the automaton, the movie (like many of the characters in it) finally finds its purpose. And it's a beauty to behold. The recreation of iconic images of early cinema are less realistic and more evocative of the dreams that must have inspired them. As Norma Desmond would sing in the Sunset Boulevard musical, "we taught the world new ways to dream." And nowhere is that clearer or more beautifully portrayed than in the last act of this movie. (Original review)

"Stop talking about production value, the Air Force is going to kill us!"

12. Super 8 (Dir. J.J. Abrams)
With all the attention Hugo has gotten for its moviemaking nostalgia, I'm surprised a lot of people seem to have forgotten this gem from J.J. Abrams which riffs most obviously on Spielberg's E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind but also Alien and The Thing. A group of kids are making a monster movie and a real monster movie basically shows up and starts happening to them. Great, natural performances from the young actors, which is rare. Also rare - a Fanning that doesn't make me roll my eyes. (Original review)

"You are a piece of work."

11. Young Adult (Dir. Jason Reitman)
As prickly and unpleasant as Juno was cuddly and offbeat, this was a bold move for director Jason Reitman's and screenwriter Diablo Cody's reunion. This movie is more a character sketch than a story, and the journey of the main character is an unusual one, leaving her worse off in the end than she was in the beginning (despite passing through a clear "epiphany" moment, which is turned completely inside out). This is a bitch of a movie. Uncomfortable, but undeniably brilliant.

"I've always wanted to do that spell!"

10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (Dir. David Yates)
More than providing a fitting conclusion to a series of films that - along with the books that inspired them - have consumed the last decade of my life. More than the thrill of seeing people I'd watched since they were practically babies grow into actual actors. The accomplishment that means the most to me is that when it was all over I wasn't sad. I wasn't thinking about the end of an era and what on earth I'd do with my life now. I was thinking about how proud I was. Proud that these films were passing into the halls of cinema history alongside other beloved epic fantasy adventures, in whose company (to paraphrase Theoden in Return of the King) it need not be ashamed. (Original review)

"At first, I did not know it was your diary. I thought it was a very sad handwritten book."

9. Bridesmaids (Dir. Paul Feig)
Just like it's a mistake to expect The Help to be the kitchen sink of movies about racism, it's a mistake to expect Bridesmaids to be the definitive work on women. What this movie is is a refreshing kick in the panties to the traditional "chick flick" and (in a smaller way) a portrait of how intimidating and soul-crushing a wedding can be when you're not the one getting married (and ESPECIALLY if you've NEVER been the one getting married). I found this movie surprisingly relatable, and I hope it's the beginning of more good and entertaining stories about us wimmins. Not holding my breath, but it's certainly a start. (Original review)

"I should have known if a guy like me talked to a girl like you, somebody would end up dead."

8. Tucker and Dale vs Evil (Dir. Eli Craig)
On the surface, this is a spoof, plain and simple. But a closer look shows a surprisingly clever script with more genre subversions than seems possible in one movie. The idea of plopping kids in the woods and using their prejudices about rural people against them is a genius one, and the fact that the movie is able to sustain the joke for as long as it does is rather amazing. Honestly one of the best times I had in a movie theater this year. (Original review)

"There's worse things out there to be scared of than us tonight. Trust it."

7. Attack the Block (Dir. Joe Cornish)
I can't remember the last time I was as scared by a movie monster as I was by the creatures in this movie. GAH! But this is not just a monster movie. This movie is like if Aliens married the fourth season of The Wire. There's some great characterization and social commentary here, but not so much of the latter that the movie drowns in its own self-importance. The wonderful cast of kids is led by the amazing John Boyega, who I'm certain we'll see much more of in the future. And boo to the AMPAS for passing over the awesome score, which gives the film its urban pulse. Awesome, awesome movie. (Original review)

"I shall accomplish your task with magnificence."

6. 13 Assassins (Dir. Takashi Miike)
Samurai stories hold a real fascination for me. The idea that men train for years and years in preparation for battles that will almost surely end their lives. The idea that in so many of these stories, these warriors volunteer for causes that have little to do with them personally but are a stand against a dishonor that is too great to be borne. That this was made by Takashi Miike, who has given us some of the most twisted films to come out of Japan (Fudoh, I'm looking at you), is kind of flabbergasting to me. But, as I said above, I do so love a surprise. The final battle is one of the most breathtaking action sequences in any movie this year. In any year, really.

"Your hard drive is filthy."

5. Shame (Dir. Steve McQueen)
We have such a tendency as human beings to judge people who are different from us, who are dealing with demons that we will hopefully never have to face. What makes Shame such an incredible film is not its bold, unflinching portrayal of its protagonist's depravity, but its sympathy for his suffering (even if it's suffering that we can't quite understand). Michael Fassbender gives easily the most astonishing and painful - not to mention far and away the best, male or female - performance this year. An excellent, excruciating movie that I'm not sure I could watch a second time. (Original review)

"Why would I not understand the context? I am the context."

4. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Dir. Lynne Ramsay)
A horror movie along the lines of The Bad Seed or The Good Son, this movie presents a fascinating relationship between a bad kid and a bad parent. This inevitably reminds many viewers of the events at Columbine in 1999, but what's at play here is more than a reference. Tilda Swinton plays a mother at three different stages - in the beginning and formative years of her son's life, in the weeks/months leading up to the horrible crime he commits, and some time after his crime as she deals with the aftermath, at least some of which is almost certainly in her own mind. I went in thinking this would be an "eat your spinach, it's good for you" indie film, but I was gobsmacked at how compelling it is, especially the astonishing performance of Tilda Swinton.

"It was a good time back then."
"It was a war, Connie."

3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Dir. Tomas Alfredson)
Chilly, methodical, and precise. That describes most of the characters in this film, but it describes the film itself as well. The plot is so tightly wound that you're afraid to blink in case you miss something, and the cast is a who's who of Britain's greatest (male) acting talent. On top of that, the nostalgia of the period setting lends itself uncommonly well to the pervasive sense of an era coming to an end. A near perfect suspense thriller.

"I can never decide whether Paris is more beautiful by day or by night."

2. Midnight in Paris (Dir. Woody Allen)
This movie contains my absolute favorite moment in any film this year, and I think it's at least partially responsible for a film project I'm undertaking in the coming year. I've admired Woody Allen's films for many years, but this is the first film of his I've loved. It's pure magic, and a dream - everything I ask from a movie. C'est magnifique. (Original review)

"And you have proved to be a real human being and a real hero."

1. Drive (Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)
I wish I'd posted this list sooner, because this film has cropped up at the top of a lot of lists lately, and now I look like a bandwagoneer. But in all honesty, this was my number one as soon as I saw it in September. This is a movie that seems to be directly lifted from my subconscious - like the team from Inception went into my brain and downloaded everything I thought was awesome and made a movie about it. Every single thing about this movie - the music (THE MUSIC!), the meticulously framed shots, the badass yet surprisingly likable villain, the Gosling, the Gosling's satin jacket - seems like it is just for me. Like Midnight in Paris, this movie shaped my movie watching in general. And I can't remember the last time (maybe never) that I thought of Los Angeles as a cool and romantic place. Guys, this movie. THIS MOVIE. *swoons* (Original review)

Alright, 2012 - whatcha got?

Shame

2011-12-03T04:46:00.000-08:00

First things first - this movie is most certainly not for everybody. The litmus test comes in the first few minutes of the film, when a naked Michael Fassbender gets out of bed and walks alarmingly close to the camera. If this is going to make you giggle or storm out of the theater in outrage, you're probably not going to get anything out of the rest of the movie. For the rest of you, if you see this in a theater, I have one bit of advice - don't sit too close. Just saying.

If you know anything about this movie, you probably know that it's rated NC-17 - a rating that has sadly become synonymous with "porn" for a lot of movie theaters and the fear of which has led a lot of quality storytelling for adults get chopped up and artistically compromised. (I use the word "adult" here in the literal sense, not in the "adult entertainment" sense.) Kudos to Fox Searchlight for putting it out there as an NC-17. Not that they really had a choice once they decided to distribute it, because director Steve McQueen (not to be confused with that other Steve McQueen) was adamant about not cutting one frame.

I have a fairly particular stance on sex in movies. While exploitation has its place, sex scenes in mainstream movies have to have a purpose other than telling the audience "these characters are having sex." There are too many other ways to meaningfully convey that to relegate onscreen lovemaking to a mere story beat. (See the beginning of Barefoot in the Park, for an example of the right way to do it.) Screen sex, in my opinion, should always be about revealing something about the characters involved. It's the most intimate and revealing situation that characters can be in, and can be a brilliant way to unveil or underline something about someone. There is a great deal of sex going on in Shame, but none of it is expository.

Fassbender plays Brandon, a New Yorker who works in an office doing we-don't-know-or-care-what. Things come easy to Brandon and he doesn't have to try very hard, either in his job or with women. He's single, good looking, financially well off, and living in both an era and a city where everything is available to him whenever he wants it. This might sound like paradise, but we quickly see that for Brandon it's a punishment. He is a sex addict, if such a thing does exist (psychiatrists are divided on it). Sex is not fun for Brandon; it is a compulsion that is slowly consuming his life. If that sounds ridiculous, it wouldn't after you'd seen Michael Fassbender in this film. There's a moment near the end, when his character is climaxing, that is one of the most horrible things I've ever seen happen on an actor's face. The camera closes in on his face, and he looks for all the world like he is dying in the utmost agony. I've never seen anything like that.

Brandon's sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), comes to his apartment to crash for a few days that turns into an indefinite amount of time. There is something in both hers and Brandon's past that haunts them, but the movie doesn't clarify it beyond a few subtle hints. But her visit brings the burden of his addiction into sharp relief. He can't bring a woman home while she's there and there are certain things he doesn't like having in the apartment in case she snoops around and finds them. After spending so much time immersed his own needs, it's suddenly quite inconvenient to have someone else to look out for and he can't really take it. Add to that the fact that his addiction is starting to affect his professional life as well, and Brandon is very near a breaking point.

The women (and in one case, man) Brandon screws are nameless (well, one of them has a name, but you've forgotten it as soon as she says it). They're things, just as Brandon's own body is a thing, that he uses and (more accurately) abuses. The one woman he tries to have a normal relationship with he can't bring himself to have sex with, and when I say "normal relationship" I'm being charitable, because they go on exactly one dinner date before he tries to seduce her the next day. When Brandon finally breaks, it's quite hard to watch, but the rather perfect end of the film gives you the hope that he's turned a corner and is on his way to getting better.

Challenging subject matter aside, this is a FANTASTICALLY made film - beautifully shot, with lots of great little touches, particularly in the sound mixing. Performances are phenomenal, especially Michael Fassbender, and I'm so glad that he's being seriously talked about (and promoted by the studio) as a player in the Best Actor race (which seemed impossible a couple of months ago, given how explicit the films is). Carey Mulligan is at her best here, as far as I'm concerned, and those of you who were wondering if she could sing well enough to pull off the still-in-development My Fair Lady remake - yes, yes she can. I want a recording of her rendition of "Start Spreadin' the News" right the heck now.

I still have yet to see the other McQueen-Fassbender collaboration, Hunger, but have new incentive to do so. Again, this film is not for everyone, but it is an astounding piece of work.

The Artist

2011-12-03T03:11:00.000-08:00

I think movie nostalgia must be the unofficial theme of the fall movie season. There are more than a few movies that pay homage to different classic eras of filmmaking, but two of them are among the critical darlings and the frontrunners of the Oscar race. One I've already written about is Hugo, which is a love letter to very early (turn-of-the-century) films. The other is The Artist, which deals with the time when silent films were being phased out and "talkies" were taking over.

The Artist reminds me a great deal of Singin' In the Rain, though it is fundamentally a very different film. The main character is George Valentin, a silent film superstar. An innocent chance encounter between George and an ambitious ingenue, Peppy Miller, is captured by photographers and the girl gets a sudden leg up in the acting world. The film charts a very basic rise-and-fall story. As George fades into obscurity along with the art form that made him famous, Peppy rises to great heights as a talking film star. The story itself is nothing earth-shattering; what makes this film sing (there's a joke there, and if you don't get it, you will in a second) is the way it's told.

It's a silent movie.

Not only is it silent (well, mostly silent), it's black and white and it's French-made, with a French actor you've probably never heard of in the lead and only a handful of actors you might know (all of whom are in small roles). And it's wonderful.

It's a bit frothy, which has made some critics look down their noses at it, but it's a brilliant piece of storytelling and manages to do it with virtually no sound. It might look on the surface like an imitation of a silent movie - just going through the motions and lazily employing the old techniques - but that's a short-sighted criticism, in my opinion. The cinematography is quite obviously not an imitation of the silent style, nor is the music or (again, despite surface appearances) the acting. The movie actually looks, photography wise, like a Fred & Ginger musical. The sets and costumes are all Old Hollywood glamour. And, in the same way that Tropic Thunder is a riff on war movies and Young Frankenstein is a riff on classic monster movies, The Artist is a riff on silent movies that actually makes genuine and serious use of the conventions of those movies, while giving the current film its own unique twist.

George lives in a world that is dying and making way for a new world, and with that comes a certain anxiety. Nowhere is that fear more vividly or brilliantly expressed than in an exceedingly clever dream sequence that I don't dare spoil here, mostly because I can't possibly convey it properly, which is one of only a couple of instances where the film breaks its own sound rule. It's genius. One of my favorite scenes in a movie this year.

Berenice Bejo is very charming as the up-and-coming actress Peppy, and the character has some unexpected layers that make her both endearing and almost a villain at times. The real star of the show here, though, is Jean Dujardin, who plays George. There's something very Chaplin-esque about how he plays this character. There's a moment in the film where he's at the breakfast table and I almost expected him to break into Dance of the Dinner Rolls. There's such a profound sadness to his character, too - again, like Chaplin's tramp character - that's heartbreaking to watch, even while you're laughing.

Okay, I lied. The REAL star of the show is Uggy the dog, George's canine sidekick. This dog is capable of skills and thought processes that aren't supposed to be in an animal's repertoire. I haven't seen Tintin yet, but I hear Snowy is a similar kind of character. Uggy does a trick where he sits up on his hind legs, George pretends to shoot him with an imaginary pistol, and he keels over like he's really been shot. And there's a scene with him and a policeman that you will not believe.

Stanley Kubrick once said that "silent films got a lot more right than talkies." The culture of filmmaking may have moved on, but there's still a lot to learn from those early days (or maybe we just need to be reminded once in a while). It's been said that you can tell if you're watching a great movie if you can turn the sound off and still be able to tell what's happening, and The Artist is a twenty-first century testament to that. If you've never been interested in silent movies before, I would highly recommend this film (and Hugo, for that matter) as an entry point.

My Week With Marilyn

2011-12-03T00:58:00.000-08:00

Time to catch up with reviews again! Still writing about stuff I saw last week, but hopefully I'll get fully caught up tonight or tomorrow.

I've been a fan of Michelle Williams for a while now, going back to her Dawson's Creek days and even her role as a young Natasha Henstridge in Species (don't you dare laugh!). She seems to have been the one in the Dawson's crew to come out with the most significant career, not perhaps money wise but certainly in terms of artistic merit.

My Week With Marilyn is a fairly mediocre film - a pretty middle-of-the-road period piece about a classic Hollywood era, in a year with so many nostalgia-fest movies about classic Hollywood eras. What elevates it and makes it worth watching is Williams' performance as Marilyn Monroe. She doesn't look like Marilyn at all, but her embodiment of Marilyn as a character is so uncanny that it's almost like she's channeling.

The film takes place during the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl in England. Marilyn had just married Arthur Miller and was probably the most famous woman in the world. The film was being directed by Laurence Olivier, who was also co-starring. And a young man named Colin Clarke had moved to London to get a job in movies and found himself as Olivier's 3rd Assistant Director (a.k.a. gopher). Though the movie covers the length of the movie shoot, it centers on around nine days in which Colin is drawn close to Monroe (while her husband is away), only to be devoured and spit back out again. That sounds harsher than it is, but it's something Marilyn can't really help. Because Marilyn at this point in her life is much bigger than just a flesh-and-blood woman; she's a brand. I love the little moment where she's about to greet a crowd of fans and whispers to Colin "Shall I be her?" as if she's going to play a character, because in a lot of ways Marilyn was a character she was playing.

The thing that struck me most is how the mood of a room changed - helped along by cinematic elements, of course - whenever Marilyn entered the room. The first time she steps on the set in costume is just magic. Everyone, especially Olivier, is upset that she's two hours late, but in that moment no one seems to care. The entire shoot is fraught with drama, with Monroe frequently late, occasionally absent and, on most days when she showed up to work, difficult. But when Olivier and others watch the dailies, it's undeniable that she has a gift for acting for the camera that no one else has, even thespian icons like Olivier and Sybil Thorndike. You can see, and Williams conveys it perfectly, what a burden all that attention is, though. And having the particular kind of notoriety that she did was rather self-defeating. The moment in the film that I probably felt the most for her is when Olivier tells her to not think about the acting so much and simply do what she does ("Just be sexy!").

One of the elements that amused me was the obvious battle between the classic style of acting and method acting. Marilyn's acting teacher had to be on set with her every day and was with her most of the time off set, too. We're told that Olivier hates "method" and has hated it since his then wife, Vivien Leigh, worked with Elia Kazan on A Streetcar Named Desire. That triggered something in my memory about some comments that Kazan apparently made at Leigh's expense during the making of that film, as if method was the only way to act and everything else was just silly. *rolls eyes*

The movie is fairly forgettable, but there are several good performances. Aside from Williams, Kenneth Branagh is quite good (and serendipitously cast) as Olivier. Julia Ormond was actually one of my favorites, playing the small role of Vivien Leigh. And I was pleasantly surprised by Emma Watson, who has another small role that is thankfully easily distinguishable from the brainy witch she is best known for playing.

One last thing. While the movie itself is not extraordinary, it is nonetheless a good example of How To Do a Biopic. The problem with most of these biographical movies is that they're kind of sampler platters of a person's life. This is the trap that J. Edgar and (as I understand, as I've yet to see it) The Iron Lady fall into. "Life stories" don't make good movies, because people's lives are not actually stories. They are a series of stories, many of which overlap one another. The best way to tell a story of someone's life is to not try and tell *the* story of their life. As lukewarm as I am on My Week With Marilyn in general, it at least gets that part right.

Bottom line: This is good, the performances are mostly great, but you can probably wait until DVD to see it. Unless, like me, you're obsessed with seeing all the Oscar contenders before nominations come around. :P

Arthur Christmas

2011-11-27T14:56:00.000-08:00

This movie was not on my Must List. There was SO MUCH coming out this week in particular that I wasn't going to be bothered with a holiday kids movie. It looked cute, but the teaser didn't grab me, and I could probably catch it on television eventually. But when people started seeing it, they were saying how clever and funny it was, and then I remembered that Aardman was involved, so I gave it a go, and I'm SO glad I did. If you're looking for a family film and you've already seen The Muppets, and maybe you'd like to see something with a similar kind of dry humor that you might associate with Harry Potter or Doctor Who, I humbly submit Arthur Christmas for your consideration.

I had intended to use a picture of Arthur, GrandSanta, and Bryony in the oldschool sleigh, but this picture pushed my "awwwww" button so hard, I was compelled to use it instead.

We start with the little girl in the picture above. She's writing a letter to Santa, and she has all kinds of questions about how Santa-ing works. At least one of her questions is answered in a shot of a series of framed photographs in a corridor at Christmas headquarters. No, the Santa she's writing to is not the same person as Saint Nicholas. He was the original, but the title has passed down, father to son, to the current Santa (voiced by Jim Broadbent). We also learn that Santa doesn't actually read the letters that are sent to him. That job is delegated to the Mail Room, which is where we find Arthur (James McAvoy), Santa's younger son, who is the biggest fan of Christmas EVER. He writes a very sweet reply to the little girl, assuring her that Santa is very much real, and keeping the drawing she sent pinned to the wall behind his desk.

Arthur's older brother is Steve (Hugh Laurie), who is pretty much the brains of the operation. He's taken Christmas Eve into the 21st Century, making present drops a well oiled machine, run by thousands of elves, with Santa only placing one ceremonial present in each town where their huge spaceship of a sleigh stops. I love the little ninja action of the elves and that everyone in the operation has a smartphone with GPS and naughty/nice gauge. :P So everything's going swimmingly, and they return to the North Pole to have Christmas dinner, celebrate another "Mission Accomplished" (yes, there's a Bush-era-esque banner), and get some well-earned rest.

Except there's a problem. There's a present still undelivered. Which means a child got missed. And what a coincidence - it's the little girl we met in the beginning. Arthur is very upset - she's going to wake up and think Santa doesn't care about her! Or doesn't exist! Steve assures him that they'll messenger the package and she'll get it in five days, but that's not good enough for Arthur - it will ruin the magic! Steve says there's not another way - they can't take the super-sleigh back out, because it just traveled 7 million miles or summat in one night. And his feeling is that it's not a big deal if only one child out of all those millions is missed - it's only a tiny margin of error, after all. The rest of the film is Arthur's quest to deliver this present and preserve the magic of Christmas for this one child, with the help of GrandSanta (Bill Nighy) and a gift wrap elf named Bryony.

There are a lot of great little details. One of my favorite things is Bryony and her bow porn - she's loaded her smartphone with pictures of bows like you or I would load an iPhone with pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch. Not that I have done any such thing, and how DARE you insinuate such a thing! And I looooooooved GrandSanta and his efforts to prove that Christmas can be done without all this newfangled-ry. And the newfangled-ry itself is quite a clever commentary on how crazy the commercial aspect of Christmas has become.

This movie - the basic story, anyway - reminded me a lot of the Book of Mormon musical, and I'm not sure I can explain why without going into spoilers. For those of you who've seen the musical, though, Arthur is totally the Elder Cunningham and Steve the Elder Price; the journeys of their characters are very similar. "I'll be the candle" may be my favorite line from any film this year. My favorite image, though, is of the four generations of Santa, peeking through the closet door at a sight none of them has ever seen - the look on a child's face on Christmas morning.

LOVED this movie, and it was the perfect thing to see to put me in the holiday spirit. I hope many of you get a chance to see it and that it does the same for you. If you do Christmas, of course. :-)

Hugo

2011-11-27T13:20:00.000-08:00

*sigh* I seem to be in the minority on this movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I think an awful lot of people are letting their quite understandable love for the second half of this movie make them see it as better than it actually is. That's not to say it's not a good movie, but the thing as a whole is not as great as a few of its parts. I'm sorry. It's just not. In my opinion, of course.

The movie is based on a novel by Brian Selznick, whose first cousin, twice removed, is the great golden age movie producer David O. Selznick, and the book is clearly a love letter to movies. But the book has the same problem the film has. It spends a lot of time - too much time, in my opinion - in the train station where the title character lives, just following his routine and his continual attempts to evade the attention of the station inspector. I will give the movie this - it actually does show us that Hugo is quite right to worry about what will happen if he is found and why it is so important that he keep the clocks running, which the book only tells the reader as almost an afterthought.

The first hour of the film is rather frustrating to get through, because it feels like it's marking time until it gets to the part that Scorsese was clearly much more interested in. For the first hour, it's like Scorsese is trying to make the kind of film his friend Steven Spielberg is best known for. But he's not as good at it as Spielberg is, and the stakes just seem too low. The main reason this first half is tolerable is that it is so wonderfully shot and the 3D is so captivating. This is definitely a "must see in 3D" movie. It's not just a visual gimmick; the technology is actually integral to the themes of the movie. And Scorsese, who is a true artist of cinema, is using the technology in ways you've never seen before, which is very exciting to watch, even during the sections where the movie isn't as much so.

Hour One introduces us to Hugo Cabret, the orphaned son of a clockmaker who has started to learn his father's trade when the father tragically dies in a fire. He lives for a time with his inebriate uncle, Claude, with whom he lives in the walls of the train station and who teaches him how to wind the station clocks. The most important of Hugo's possessions are a wind-up automaton that his father found abandoned in a museum where he worked and a notebook with pictures and notes on how the automaton was built and which Hugo has been using to try and repair it. He's been stealing parts from toys at a small toy booth in the station, but the owner of the store catches him one day and punishes him by taking his notebook. Hugo eventually learns, with the help of the toymaker's goddaughter, Isabelle, that the toymaker is actually Georges Méliès, who was a pioneer filmmaker at the turn of the century (and, incidentally, the designer and maker of the automaton). He made something like 500 films, but his most famous is A Trip to the Moon. You may recognize this still from it.

And here's where the movie FINALLY finds its purpose. There's a bit of talk about halfway through the film about machines having a purpose, and that when they're broken they can't fulfill that, and how people are much the same way. This movie is (I suspect unintentionally) the perfect metaphor for that, because it doesn't find its purpose until this point. Méliès is a very sad man. He doesn't like to talk about his time as a filmmaker, and possibly has forgotten or blocked out a great deal of those memories, because he believes no one cares about or remembers his work. It is unfathomably tragic that nearly all his films were melted to make shoe heels or else recycled to make new film and that (we believe at the time) there is only one of his films that remains intact. And the rest of the film is as much a meditation on the magic of filmmaking and the importance of film preservation - a longtime passion of Scorsese's - as it is a conclusion to the story.

This second half is simply magical, and I think the movie might have worked better if it had pruned or truncated the story of Hugo and centered the film much more on Méliès and his legacy. Ben Kingsley gives easily the most compelling performance as Méliès, and Helen McCrory is almost as delightful as his wife, Jeanne. I can't quite put into words how amazing the behind-the-scenes filmmaking scenes are, as well as the stunning recreations of some of early cinema's most iconic shots. If I were only to go by this section of the film, this would be my favorite of the year, hands-down. But I can't quite ignore the first half.

I really would like to see this again and give it another shot (though I can't imagine I'll have the time). The reason for this is because I suffered what is easily the WORST audience I have ever had the misfortune to sit with. There was a loud-talking woman who had to be emphatically told (twice!) to be quiet just as the movie was starting. There were so many latecomers - some of them as much as an hour into the film's running time - that I lost count. And the man a few seats down from me was (perhaps unconsciously) tapping his feet continuously throughout the film as if he was practicing choreography. It's possible I might have been more receptive to the film if I hadn't spent most of it in a rage at my fellow moviegoers. It was Thanksgiving Day, and I know there were people there who don't get to the movies frequently, but that's no excuse. Audiences like this are a huge reason why people don't go out to the movies anymore.

The Muppets

2011-11-27T12:08:00.000-08:00

Alrighty, here we go. The Muppets. Bottom line. Absolutely back to the spirit of the classic Muppet movies and the television show. If you have any lingering affection for these creatures at all, you will enjoy it. I have a couple of quibbles, but the joy here is far too large to be undone.

There. If you plan to see it, that's all you need. Read nothing. Watch no clips. Just let the joy wash over you, then come back. You know, if you want. No one's making you, jeez!

And now, if you've seen it already, here's a closer look.

You know the story. Even if you'd never seen a trailer or read anything else about it, you could have guessed without much difficulty. The Muppet Studios in LA are about to be torn down by an evil oil magnate unless the Muppets can raise the $10 million needed to keep it. So they decide to put on a show - a telethon to raise the money. It all starts, however, with a man named Gary and his muppet brother Walter.

Walter is the Muppets' biggest fan. He grew up watching the show and the movies, and Kermit and the gang were his refuge when the world wasn't so kind to him. It's not easy bein' felt, yo. So when Walter gets a chance to go on a trip to Hollywood and visit the old Muppet Studio, it's the greatest day of his life. What he doesn't know until he gets there is that the studio has fallen on hard times. No one is there now except an old guide giving $5 tours, almost all the attractions are closed, and everything is in a serious state of disrepair and disuse. He sneaks into Kermit's old office and overhears a plan to turn the studios into a Muppet Museum, but that's just a cover. The greasy Tex Richman plans to tear everything down and dig for oil.

Walter is deeply upset - he screams for like five minutes - and he's determined to Do Something. He and Gary, along with Gary's lady friend Mary, find Kermit's house (or mansion, rather) and give him the bad news. Kermit is saddened but doesn't really know what can be done. He sings The Most Heartbreaking Song in the History of Time ("Pictures in My Head"), whose title I can't even type without tearing up. If you have ever had people who were once incredibly important to you and who you couldn't imagine drifting away from, only to find that eventually that's exactly what happens, this song was designed to make you cry like a crying crier who cries. I thought the transition into this song was a little weird and abrupt, but forgot all about it when the song started. Definitely the best of the new songs.

Kermit thinks it'll be impossible to get the gang back together, but Walter tells him he should at least try. So they hit the road (and eventually travel by map LOL) and track everyone down. Along the way, the usual Muppet story absurdities crop up - e.g., Gonzo and Scooter are doing pretty dang well, so couldn't they afford to pony up some money and at least put a dent in that $10 million? Who cares - we're going to put on a show, dangit! When they've gotten everyone back but Miss Piggy, Kermit shows a strange reluctance to go and find her.

And here's where the movie hit the biggest snag for me. I have always been a huge Kermit/Piggy fan. You might say they were the first couple I ever "shipped," and their romance has always been one of my favorite parts of the show and the movies. A love so powerful it transcended not only species but animal grouping, it was always fraught with conflict (mainly, I think, because she expended so much more energy on their relationship than he did). But it was just ... meant to be, you know? I'm fine with them having drifted apart, and I appreciate that they were genuinely trying to explore their relationship and make it feel real and textured. But the way the two characters are written here is just weird and doesn't feel like them at all. It's like it was written by someone who doesn't quite get what made them tick - like a Harmonian trying to write Ron/Hermione. Well, not quite that bad, but it just felt off, and that was kind of disappointing. I did mostly love the scene where they're walking the streets of Paris - she in a beret and he in a turtleneck, like they tripped and fell into a Jean-Luc Godard film. But again, the writing is not quite there. Perhaps it would have been a bit better if we'd seen flashbacks to what drove them apart instead of all the telling. I don't know. Minor quibble, I guess, but it felt major because it had to do with my favorite aspect of the movies/show.

BUUUUT, back to the good stuff. Kermit and the gang manage to get two hours of broadcast time for their telethon, even though everyone has told them they're not relevant and no one cares about them anymore. But they need a celebrity host, and no matter how many eighties stars Kermit calls (the only people in his Rolodex) no one is interested. They get desperate and decide to try and plead with Tex Richman, but he does an awesomely bad rap number about how that's not going to happen, and to top it off, he's not only going to take the theater, he's going to take the brand name and all the character names and start his own muppet show, with edgier muppets - to cater to the more cynical world they all now live in.

But hope is not lost, and in typical Muppet fashion, everything comes together at the last minute. I loved that the theater was empty at first, but that it filled up over the course of the two hours as people realized how much the Muppets had meant to them over the years. What I loved more was that people in my audience started singing along with the songs. Notably, the theme song ("It's time to play the music! It's time to light the lights!") and the One, the Only, don't pretend you don't know it's the Ultimate Heart-Tugger "The Rainbow Connection." If I thought I'd cried all my tears at "Pictures in My Head," I was so wrong. There are some wildly funny musical moments, too, such as the barber shop quartet singing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl also has a cameo early in the film) and and Camilla and the chicken chorus doing CeeLo's ... I guess it would be "Cluck You." ;-)

I loved the message in the end, which, like all messages in Muppet movies, is pretty standard stuff but good to hear anyway. And the moment at the end, when Kermit opens the theater door, genuinely took me by surprise. And of course brought back ALL THE CREYS.

There are some excellent cameos, most of which I won't spoil, but - hey, you're not supposed to be reading this until you've seen it anyway! My favorite is Emily Blunt, giving a nod to her Devil Wears Prada character as Miss Piggy's assistant. Oh, and HELLO THERE, MICKEY ROONEY! He was a muppet before there were Muppets, don't you think? Loved all the throwbacks to old Muppet numbers (great use of "Mahna Mahna") and covers of famous songs, and I liked most of the new songs, too. I already mentioned "Pictures in My Head" and the lolarious Tex Richman Rap, but there's also "Me Party," which in addition to being a great disco sendup, is like the story of my life - pretty much every day is a Me Party. :P And there's a great Serious Character-Building Song called "Man or Muppet" (Jim Parsons, FTW!).

It's not perfect, even for a Muppet movie, but it's close enough. It's good to know that the world hasn't gone so far into the cynical that the Muppets can't bring us back to a place where genuine sweetness trumps trash and hipster ironic commentary.

The Descendants

2011-11-19T01:38:00.000-08:00

Alexander Payne hasn't made a feature film since 2004's Sideways, which many consider his best (though About Schmidt gets the crown, as far as moi is concerned). And while his latest film, The Descendants, doesn't quite rise (though it comes close) to the excellence of either of those films - again, as far as moi is concerned - it is probably the likeliest of his films to date to get some serious Oscar ground, especially as regards its star, George Clooney.

The Descendants

You know the basic story if you've seen the trailer. George Clooney plays Matt King, a lawyer in Hawaii, and Matt's wife Elizabeth is in a coma after a boating accident. Oh yeah, and she was also cheating on him - a fact he doesn't learn until after it's too late to confront her about it. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you this, because we learn it very early on - Elizabeth is not going to come out of her coma, and according to the instructions set down in her will, the doctors can only care for her in that state for a short while. So it's time for Matt to get in touch with family and friends and begin a long and painful goodbye. And the knowledge that she'd been having an affair makes it all the more excruciating. Add into this mix Matt and Elizabeth's two daughters, 17 year old Alex and 10 year old Scottie. Alex, played by the remarkable Shailene Woodley, is a wild child, frequently indulging in booze and older men, but she's actually surprisingly pulled together considering all this. Scottie is out of control in her own way, often getting into trouble for her smart (and occasionally foul) mouth.

Matt is, at first glance, the stereotypical "too busy to emotionally connect" male, but Clooney's portrayal and the writing of the character win you over very quickly. I particularly love his line about thinking a parent with means should give their children enough money to do something, but not enough for them to do nothing. This is significant to the B story, because Matt is the trustee for his family's ancestral land (his family's line traces back to Kamehameha I, hence the movie's title) - one of the increasingly few untouched bits of paradise in the state. He's under pressure from not only his family but the entire state of Hawaii to do the right thing with the land. The family wants to sell, because the sale will make them a lot of money and it's an incredibly complicated process to keep the land. Most of the rest of the state think it would unconscionable to sell. The family wants to somewhat compromise by taking the option that, while paying less than other bids, will at least keep the money in Hawaii. But Matt's more immediate family matters understandably overshadow this decision for most of the film.

The movie itself is nothing incredibly new. It reminded me a bit of Terms of Endearment in the way it handled family comedy/drama and hospital bedside tragedy. It doesn't weave the comedy and drama together as successfully as it might have. In fact, it feels like the second act is almost a different movie entirely, bringing the levity that the first and third acts make necessary. The movie has some really extraordinary moments of emotional frankness. That's partly the writing - I especially love the moment where Matt has an extended scene of yelling and cursing at his comatose wife for her infidelity before chastising his daughter for doing the same thing later. But where the movie really shines is in the superb performances, pretty much across the board.

Shailene Woodley is fantastic as the older daughter, Alex. Her reaction to hearing the news about her mother is absolutely heart-shattering and her chemistry with her screen dad, Clooney, makes some of the movie's greatest moments. Amara Miller, as Scottie, is your typical movie kid for a lot of the film, but she gets some great moments, especially toward the end. I don't think I need to tell those of you who know me well how much the whole situation of most of this movie affected me, and I don't think any moment in this movie broke me more than when they break the news to Scottie, much later in the film. Judy Greer, I'm glad to see, has finally broken out of the "quirky/evil best friend in a rom-com" hell and gotten to do some great things lately, and her role as the wife of the Other Man is really wonderful, especially her final scene. Beau Bridges plays a character that MUST have been a straight-up homage to his brother's most memorable character, The Dude. And Robert Forster is rather amazing in the couple of scenes he's in, playing Matt's father-in-law. And I kind of loved Nick Krause as Alex's hilarious stoner boyfriend. He brought humor where it was desperately needed, but even he has a serious side.

But the star of the show, and not just in billing terms, is George Clooney. I was intrigued before seeing this by the idea of him playing a husband and father, as Clooney has eschewed anything resembling that lifestyle in his own personal life. This is the kind of character you've seen dozens of actors play in other movies. Another director, fifteen years ago, would have cast Tom Hanks. Sixty or seventy years ago, it would have been Jimmy Stewart. It certainly wouldn't have been Clark Cable or Cary Grant, the easiest parallels for Clooney that come to my mind. We've just never seen him play this kind of character. He's not the warmest or most successful of fathers in the beginning, but there's a real connection with his kids and a desire to do what his wife would have wanted, even though she doesn't particularly deserve it except in a "she's dying, cut her some slack" kind of way, that makes him a sort of hero over the course of the movie. And when he makes his big decision at the end of the film, and there are people who object strongly (and with a lot of passive aggression, I might add), I wanted to badly to jump into the screen and tell them to [BADWORD] off, because in that two hours of storytelling, this character gained my trust and I felt that whatever decision he made, after the journey he'd been on, was going to be the right one.

It's not perfect, but I loved loved loved this movie. I'm not sure I could see it again soon, because hoo boy is it emotional, but I highly recommend it. It's rated R, but it's barely an R (for language and, I'm almost positive, nothing else). It's getting serious buzz as an Oscar frontrunner, but I have a feeling that may disappear next week when The Artist steals everyone's hearts.

Immortals

2011-11-18T22:40:00.000-08:00

I was 'meh' on this beforehand. It was on my schedule, but I was ready to cross it off if there was going to be an issue of making time for it. I was also further annoyed that NONE of the AMC theaters in Manhattan (which is the only chain in NYC that does any kind of matinee pricing) were screening the film in 2D. But then I saw some wonderfully ecstatic responses from a couple of AICN screenings. So I ponied up the extra money for 3D but brought my own glasses - the nice ones we were given at BNAT1138 that you can use as sunglasses and that don't give you the 3D headache.

Immortals

Let me start by giving you the bottom line. If you loved 300, this movie is right up your alley. In fact, you might think it's the same movie. Scantily clad warriors doing battle against impossible odds, with gods in the mix and plenty of highly stylized violence ... sound familiar? It did to me, but I didn't really care because it was all so AWESOME!

Henry Cavill - who you may or may not remember as the jerkwad Humphrey from Stardust - takes the lead as Theseus and shows us why he's going to rock like a hurricane as Superman in the forthcoming Man of Steel. Mickey Rourke is the baddie, and Slumdog Millionaire's Frieda Pinto is the beautiful virgin oracle. John "Ollivander" Hurt plays a wise old man who is much more than he seems. And an actor named Luke Evans who I've never seen in a movie in my life, but he looks FOR ALL THE WORLD like Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse star Tahmoh Penikett, plays Zeus (also, he'll soon be appearing as Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit). Oh, and one of the lesser known Cullens from the Twilight movies plays Poseidon. Stephen Dorff is in it, too.

The basic story is that the ruthless king Hyperion (Rourke) wants to declare war on the gods. To do this, he's going to release the Titans (who are not what you might think they are from seeing Clash of the Titans), and to do THAT he needs this special bow that was forged by Ares. Theseus, with the help of his fellow slaves and the lovely oracle, must lead the fight to stop him. Now, I'm a huge fan of Greek mythology, and while I was fine with the different way the gods were portrayed here, my one beef with the movie was that there wasn't more of them. Because when they finally join the fight, it is a beautiful, slow-motion-y, head-exploding thing to behold.

This movie was made by Tarsem Singh, whose first film was The Cell, which had a fairly forgettable story but a truly unforgettable visual aesthetic. I didn't see his later film, The Fall, but Immortals is cut very much from the same cloth as The Cell. The visuals are like nothing you've ever seen before, and even though it's not quite as coherent a movie as 300, I liked the look of it a bit more (notably, the color palette, which I found more pleasing to the eye than 300's nearly monochromatic look).

Like I said, if you dug 300, you will probably like this a lot. Yeah, it's essentially trash, but it's GLORIOUS trash. If you can find a theater that's showing this in 2D, I don't think it will lessen the experience at all. In fact, I think huge chunks of the movie aren't even in 3D anyway. (Though Frieda Pinto's naked bootay gets the up close, 3D treatment, if you're into that sort of thing.)

J. Edgar

2011-11-12T02:16:00.000-08:00

First, let's get this out of the way. I am a mere (ha!) 36 years old and was not even born yet when J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972. The only reference I really had for him was Bob Hoskins's brief appearance in Oliver Stone's Nixon. I knew nothing about the man going into this movie, except that he essentially created the FBI as we now know it and that he was rumored to be a homosexual and occasional cross-dresser. Those latter details have so permeated our culture's portrait of him that I didn't know until a couple of months ago that these were unconfirmed rumors. Well, I guess they'd have to have been, given the time period.

Not that that matters, as both his (repressed) homosexuality and the cross-dressing are accepted as fact in this film, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. The film goes back and forth between the young Hoover, in the very first days of his leadership in the Bureau of Investigation, and the older Hoover, in the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon years. Both versions are played rather spectacularly by Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes, the "old age" makeup is pretty bad and at times distracting, but the performance is so good - a true "movie star" performance - that most of the time you can forget about it. The older Hoover is dictating a memoir and telling stories (in more senses than one) about his early days in the FBI, notably his part in the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping. These stories of his professional life show him as a man desperate to be respected and admired, and desperate for his Bureau to be respected. I don't know how accurate this is, but the film indirectly credits Hoover with the implementation of a lot of the basic tools of investigation that we take for granted today (i.e., fingerprinting and keeping a crime scene free from contamination). There's a great scene, when he arrives at the Lindbergh estate, where he chastises the local police for carelessly traipsing over potential evidence and handling the ransom letter with bare hands. It's bizarre to think, in our current culture that is so saturated in police dramas and investigative storytelling, that it wasn't long ago when most people had no idea how important that kind of thing could be.

The movie doesn't raise Hoover up too high, though. It's unclear how much of the older Hoover's flashbacks are actually being dictated to the memoir writer, and that could very well be by design. Hoover often acted officially out of personal motives (jealousy and paranoia), and the film definitely doesn't let him off the hook for that, but you can tell that Hoover's version of events has been in his head so long and so firmly that whatever he's exaggerated or rationalized to himself has become the truth in his mind.

Hoover's political life story in the film is wrapped around his personal story, a story that I suspect no one alive can do more than guess at and extrapolate from facts and testimony. We see his social awkwardness, which the script attributes both to his devotion to his career and to a bitter struggle between societal expectations and his own desires. He attempts to woo and even propose marriage to typist Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts) after knowing her only a few days, but seems dreadfully uncomfortable around other women. His mother (played by Judi Dench) loves him very much, and quite possibly knows the truth about his ambivalence to women, but makes it unmistakably clear that she does not approve of homosexuals (her conversation with Edgar about "Daffy" is devastating).

Which brings me to Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, perhaps better known as The Social Network's Winklevii), who Hoover made his Deputy at the Bureau (though he was nowhere near qualified) and who was possibly the love of his life. There were some giggles in the audience during their scenes together and the obvious tension between them, but this story is really the heart of the movie. What's heartbreaking is that these two men clearly love one another, but while Tolson doesn't have a problem subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) expressing his feelings for Edgar, Edgar never reciprocates any of those sentiments and it may be that he can't even admit his feelings to his own self. Their feelings for each other are never played for a laugh, and it's just so unbelievably sad to see how much they mean to each other and know that they can't even properly express it, even in private. The image of Hammer's Tolson reading a love letter, written by someone else but that Edgar had once partially read aloud, is one of the most moving things I've seen in a film this year - seeing him agonizing over things he heard in Edgar's voice and wishes had been addressed to him.

I have to address the cross-dressing thing, because the film does, and I was very impressed with how they did it. Again, it wasn't done for a laugh or even a hint of a joke. Of course, it wouldn't have been in the movie at all if there hadn't been the rumors, but it's not an "oh yeah, and he wore dresses" kind of thing. It's a legitimate expression of grief, and I totally bought it.

This film does have some issues. I thought the flashbacks were occasionally a little awkward, and as I said before the aging makeup was mostly awful. It wasn't so bad on Naomi Watts, but DiCaprio and Hammer looked like something from Madame Tussaud's. Again, though, the performances more than make up for it. I did feel like some of the historical cameos were more impressions than characters (e.g., Burn Notice's Jeffrey Donovan as Bobby Kennedy), but they weren't too distracting.

In the director's chair is the Man, the Myth, the Legend - Clint Eastwood. If you've seen any of his other films, you probably know what to expect here. It's not bombastic but quiet, steady, and sure. Eastwood also composed the score for the film, which is a very subtle, mostly (perhaps purely) piano score. A critic made the observation that Eastwood spent his career as an actor playing men who were above the law, like The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry, and that he's spent his career as a director telling stories about how these kinds of men are obsolete, which is part of what this movie is about. I can't help observing, though, that - for better or worse - the FBI is what it is today because of Hoover, and whatever else he might feel about his legacy, he'd probably be proud of that.

Quick thoughts on some recent releases

2011-10-28T23:52:00.001-07:00

I've been so busy knocking horror classics off my to-watch list, I've been remiss (well, not completely, but more remiss than I'd like) with newer releases, particularly in writing about them. But here are some brief thoughts on some movies that are in theaters now.

The Ides of March - I love George Clooney as a director, but for me this movie falls short of Good Night and Good Luck and even Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The second half works more than the first, where everyone seems to be working too hard to be their characters, especially Evan Rachel Wood, who's trying way too hard to be the sexy intern. Ryan Gosling is quite good, and so is Clooney himself, but only once they're both allowed to get to the dark side of their characters. The most impressive work, though, comes from Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as the head of the campaign. His final scene with Gosling is amazing, but it's not quite enough to overcome the first half. Again, for me. Your mileage may vary.

Take Shelter - I've been a fan of Michael Shannon's since his breakthrough performance in Revolutionary Road, so it's wonderful to see him take the lead here. His character is having visions and experiences that lead him to believe that an apocalyptic storm is coming. He's a modern day Noah, doing things that convince everyone else that he's crazy, but firmly believing that his actions are absolutely necessary. Jessica Chastain (in roughly her sixteenth movie role this year - I exaggerate, but she's been in a LOT this year) turns in another great performance as Shannon's long-suffering wife. Like Martha Marcy May Marlene below, I think I like the performances and the idea better than the film itself, but it's still pretty remarkable.

Footloose (2011) - Believe it or not, I had NEVER seen the original before a few weeks ago. I absolutely loved it, of course, and was really glad to see that John Lithgow's preacher character wasn't a caricature of religious fanatics. I really loved the relationship between him and Ariel, and that you could see that he was not in favor of all the morality measures. I was really struck by how much I loved the music (especially as I already knew all the songs). And I don't care if it's an unpopular opinion, I had a way bigger crush on Chris Penn in this movie than I did on Kevin Bacon. The remake is, in my opinion, REALLY good. One of the key changes that actually improves on the original is that they begin the film with the car wreck that we only hear about as backstory in the original. We see the pain it causes the community, and even though you know it's an overreaction, you can understand (especially in our 9/11 culture) why they put all the ridiculous laws in place. The tragedy hangs over the rest of the movie and gives it a bit more poignancy. I loved that they used so many of the original songs, albeit mostly new versions of them. The slowed down "Holding Out For A Hero" was a favorite of mine, and much more suited to the moment in which it was used than Bonnie Tyler's version was in the original. The one thing I thought was not quite as good as in the original movie was the relationship between Ariel and her father. It's still pretty good, but not as layered and not as warm. There were SO MANY nods to the original, though. The whole film begins with the original Kenny Loggins "Footloose," Ren drives the yellow bug, and he and Ariel even wear almost the exact same outfits to the dance that Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer wore in the original - the red jacket and the white ruffled dress!

The Woman - Even without the Sundance controversy (there's YouTube video of a guy sort of snapping at the screening there), I was interested in this because of its director, Lucky McKee. McKee's wonderful May played at my first BNAT and Sick Girl (his Masters of Horror entry) played BNAT 7. He's an interesting filmmaker and his films all seem to heavily revolve around women. This is kind of a revolting film, but not in a bad way. The plot centers around a man who finds a feral woman in the woods and brings her home, chains her up in the barn, and attempts to "domesticate" her. He recruits his family to help him, and the domestication inevitably involves him (as well as his son) taking sexual advantage of her. The climax is completely over the top and operatic, but fairly consistent with McKee's style. It's kind of a fable and not meant to be taken literally.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - I'd heard raves about this movie, but I'd say it's a good film (not a great one) with great performances, notably that of Elizabeth Olsen (younger sister to Mary Kate and Ashley), who plays the titular Martha (and Marcy May and, for one scene, Marlene). The film goes back and forth between Martha's refuge in her sister's home and her life in the commune from which she escaped. You're never quite sure why she joined the commune in the first place, nor at which precise point she decides that it's no longer somewhere she needs to be. That's probably by design, but it keeps the viewer at more of a distance than I like. Oscar nominee John Hawkes (I love typing that) is amazing as the commune/cult leader, and he's such a talented actor that he never comes off as creepy as characters like that often are, and you can totally see why Martha would have fallen under his spell. Sarah Paulson is the other great performance here, as Martha's sister, whose guilt and paranoia over her sister's circumstances slowly unravel her over the course of the movie.

It's the most spook-tastic time of the year!

2011-10-28T23:43:00.000-07:00

As is my habit in October, I've been gorging myself on horror movies - more than usual, I mean. I'm making a concerted effort to fill in gaps in my genre knowledge, which means I've exposed myself to some real gems.

The Stuff - Oh, how I wish I could describe to you how amazing this little 80s nugget from Larry Cohen is, because a plot summary won't do it. "The Stuff" is an edible substance that becomes a huge craze all over the world, replacing ice cream as the dessert of choice. But the movie's tagline says it all - are you eating it or is it eating you? LOVED this movie. Michael Moriarty is genius. Larry Cohen even more so.

The Howling - I'm not sure why I'd never seen this before. This may be the best werewolf movie ever, and I'm pretty sure I like it more than American Werewolf in London (which I also love, but not as much as The Howling). Most notorious scene is obviously the moonlight wolfsex scene, but the transformations are really spectacular. There's an actor named Dennis Dugan in this, and I couldn't keep myself from remembering him from a trailer for another film - one of those "ain't those gays hilarious" comedies from the 1970s called Norman, Is That You? (starring Red Foxx). Dugan is also the man who's directed most of those horrible Adam Sandler comedies, including the forthcoming Jack and Jill. He's fine in The Howling, but I'm afraid his career prejudiced me against his character. :P Oh, and Dick Miller is in this, which makes this movie 100% cooler than anything not including Dick Miller.

Something Wicked This Way Comes - If you're looking for something not terribly scary and not too gross, this is an EXCELLENT Halloween flick for the family. Reminds me a lot of Stephen King stories, which is inevitable, I guess, as the novel was supposedly a huge influence on King's work. Jason Robards is great in this as the guilt-ridden father. Jonathan Pryce is wonderful, too, as the sinister and aptly named Mr. Dark.

Creepshow - Speaking of Stephen King, this was one I'd never seen in its entirety. It's an anthology film (or portmanteau, if you will), and features five stories, all written by King, with a bookend story featuring TOM ATKINS OMG. The fourth story, "The Crate," is probably my favorite, mostly because it has the awesome Adrienne Barbeau in it ("I know all the best stores."). The one with Leslie Nielson and Ted Danson is great, too. The one starring King himself is a bit weak, and "Father's Day" seems far too short (though it does have the most fantastic, incongruous dancing-around-the-house scene EVER). The standout, though, is the last segment, "They're Creeping Up On You," with E.G. Marshall as the germophobe whose pristine apartment is completely overrun by cockroaches.

[REC] - This is another one of those "found footage" films, a la Cloverfield, and it was remade almost shot for shot a couple years after its release as a movie called Quarantine (directed by the Dowdle brothers, who also made the BNAT9 dud The Poughkeepsie Tapes). This was quite good, and I loved that the sickness was thought to be what people in older times believed was demon possession. (Not that I don't believe demon possession is a real thing, but it was an interesting detail.)

The Fly (1986) - Oh, WHY couldn't Cronenberg have done Breaking Dawn?! I know it's only a dream, but the horrible baby!Brundlefly birth is AMAZING. Jeff Goldblum is so great in this, but the star of the show is the special effects. This movie is a perfect example of why I will wave my flag for actual makeup effects and practical stuff over CGI any day. Also, this movie is SO GROSS EWWWW.

Candyman - Yes, I totally believed in the legend when I was growing up, and NO, I will not ever stare into a mirror and say it five times. Nope. This is a darn good horror movie, with a great "is this real or is the character crazy" dilemma. The ending is your typical horror movie gotcha, but after what happens with the character in question ... it's kind of satisfying, to be honest.

The '81 Slasher Triple Feature - All three of these were released in 1981, kind of the Golden Year for the subgenre. It's interesting to look at these and see how much they have in common, down to specific scenes and shots, in some cases.

The Burning - Classic campsite slasher with some notable "before they were stars" performances - Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens (and Fisher Stevens' ass in the World's Most Unappealing Moon Shot). Half of this movie is Meatballs, but when the horror kicks in, it REALLY does. The most famous (and infamous) scene in the film is the Raft Scene of Death, where the killer abandons the traditional one-by-one stalk-and-slay and lays waste to half a dozen kids AT THE SAME TIME. Also unconventional in that, instead of a final girl, it's a final boy - a boy who is not even a terribly sympathetic character.

The Prowler - This is touted by horror fans as a fairly legendary early installment in the slasher genre. I didn't really see what was so special about it, other than OMG A GAZEBO DEATH in the first ten minutes. This has a lot in common with the original My Bloody Valentine, which also came out in 1981, notably its use of the party/event where something bad happened, leading to the town never having the party/event again (at least for several years), leading to the inevitable reestablishment of the party/event, which also inevitably leads to the something bad returning. The killer even wears a mask that looks a lot like Harry Warden's gas mask from MBV.

Friday the 13th Part 2 - The last F13 movie with any kind of respectability. Ginny (played by the incredible Amy Steel) is one of the great final girls in ... finalgirldom. Right up there with Chainsaw's Sally and Halloween's Laurie, as far as I'm concerned. The way she thinks through and outsmarts Jason - down to putting on the dead Mrs. Voorhees's smelly sweater and pretending to be her - is above and beyond the typical final girl badassery. Oh, and the opening murder of whatsername (the final girl from the first movie) is pretty dang awesome - Jason frikkin' TRACKED HER DOWN!

The "Peter Jackson Is Twisted!" Double Feature

Dead Alive - Possibly the most disgusting movie I've ever seen, but also really funny. You'd never guess, just going from the LOTR movies, that this kind of thing was lurking inside that sweet Kiwi man. There's a sequence where the hero is fighting an evil baby in the park that is one of the most hysterical things I've seen in a movie. The climax, though - where the hero experiences an all-too-literal Freudian rebirth - is seriously disturbing.

Bad Taste - This is one of Jackson's first films, and while Dead Alive (or Braindead, as it was originally called) put Jackson on the map, this film gave him a career. It is low budget genius, and Jackson actually plays a couple of roles in it. It's kind of awesome that this and Braindead were the kind of films he was known for when he got the Lord of the Rings gig.

The "Mannequins are EVIL" Double Feature

Tourist Trap - Classic stranded-in-the-middle-of-nowhere plot, but with CREEPY MANNEQUINS and TELEKINESIS! Normally, my big screen is the best way to see any film, but I should NOT have seen *this* film that way. First ten minutes kind of broke me. If you find mannequins creepy AT ALL, this movie will freak you out. Chuck Connors is awesome in this, though, and oh, that last shot is hilariously disturbing.

Maniac! - I had been so scared of seeing this, but coming right on the heels of Tourist Trap it was a breeze. This is a pretty great flick, though - one that gets slapped with the misogyny label pretty often (and wrongly, in my opinion). The gore is wonderful, Joe Spinell is fantastic, and it's a glimpse at that creepy, grimy, early 80s New York that a lot of grindhouse movies exploited so well. It also, like Creepshow, has a wonderfully incongruous musical moment, when the main character (Frank) goes to a photo shoot and we hear the wonderful "Showdown," which has the following classic lyrics:

Put on something nice
Just in case you die.
You'll leave a pretty corpse behind--
Yippee ... ki yo ... ki yaaaaay!

Asylum (NOTHING is more awesome than this image!)
I *LOVED* this movie! This 1972 anthology movie stars Peter "Van Helsing" Cushing, Herbert "Inspector Dreyfus" Lom, Frank "Clockwork Orange" Magee, Robert "Jesus of Nazareth" Powell, Charlotte Rampling, and Swedish siren Britt Ekland. There are a handful of stories, all told by patients in an insane asylum, and Robert Powell has to guess which one of them is the former head of the hospital - as a test to see if he gets the job as the former head's replacement. "Frozen Fear" is brilliant, especially when the chopped pieces of a dead body reanimate and get with the murdering. But the greatest of the stories is "Mannikins of Horror," in which Herbert Lom's character has built a little robot version of himself (with real human guts (!!!), which you see when the robot gets crushed). There is nothing more magical than the sight of that little robot sneaking around (very slowly) and hiding in shadows to escape detection.

The Sentinel - This is another great "crazy-ass 70s" movie, in which a model rents an unbelievably affordable apartment in New York, only to find out that the building is a portal to hell and that she's been chosen to be the new gatekeeper. There's lots of hilarious things in it, such as Burgess Meredith throwing a birthday party for his cat (which he forces to wear a little party hat). It was fairly controversial when it came out, too, as the director chose to cast deformed people as the demons for the climax (I recognized one of them as an actress from Mutations, which played BNAT 6). This is also another all-star cast - the aforementioned Meredith, Chris Sarandon, Ava Gardner, Beverly D'Angelo, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken, a mustachioed Jerry Orbach, Sylvia Miles, and Eli Wallach, among others.

Trick or Treat - Not to be confused with 2007's Trick 'R Treat. This is ... not a great movie, horror or otherwise. It's a slice of 1980s cheese, starring (STARRING!) the kid who played "Skippy" on Family Ties. There are some cool cameos from Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne and some rockin' (if still pretty bad) 80s hair metal music, but it's not great and its relationship to Halloween (as you'd think would be substantial, given the title) is tenuous. The thing that I will remember it for, though, is where I saw it. There's a little theater in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) called The Nitehawk, and until the Alamo Drafthouse decides to open a theater here, this is the closest thing we've got to it. They've got the "dinner and a movie" gimmick, and you can tell that they've got a similar love for movies that the Drafthouse does, but they're just now kind of building their programming cred, which is what makes the Drafthouse stand out. This month was, I think, their first attempt to actually do non-first-run movies, and they're off to a good start, but there's a long way to go. My favorite part of the screening was the series of grindhouse trailers that made up the pre-show - there must have been about twenty, and almost all of them were spectacular and very reminiscent of my fondest memories at the Alamo. The trailers didn't belong to the theater, though, and it makes me sad that that won't be a regular feature of screenings. I understand they do have clips and things playing before all the movies, but ... I'm so spoiled on the Drafthouse that I fear it will pale in comparison.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil

2011-10-06T00:38:00.000-07:00

Man, I'm behind on movie reviews! I saw Tucker and Dale vs Evil nearly a week ago, and I've GOT to get something down about it before this weekend's crop of releases! Oh, fall movie season, you wear me out!

This movie is going to be available on DVD and for download soon, I think before the month is out, and if you can stand gore and like something a little different in your horror now and again (plus ALAN TUDYK OMG), I cannot say enough good things about it. I will, however, say a few good things here for posterity.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil is not a conventional horror film by any means. It's a spoof, but it's not even a conventional spoof. What it's specifically spoofing is the "hillbilly horror" subgenre, occasionally (depending on the film) known as "Hicksploitation." But if you think this movie is another case of dumb kids go out into the sticks and have bad things happen to them at the hands of scary inbred rednecks ... well, you'd only be partially right. Because what this is, and what makes it so dang clever, is a truly brilliant twist on that whole setup.

A bunch of college kids (I can't even remember how many now, six or seven?) go to the woods for some camping. At the same time, country bumpkin BFFs Tucker and Dale are on their way to their new vacation home, which looks like the setting for chainsaw murder and mayhem (complete with ominous news clippings about missing persons and found bodies), but which Tucker and Dale see as paradise. On their way there, they stop for gasoline and supplies and see our young "heroes." Dale is immediately taken with Allison, but his inept attempts to flirt with her (and his bucolic appearance, of course) convince the group that he and Tucker are crazy murdering hicks. This prejudice is helped along by the "leader" of the group, Chad (who reminded me forcibly of a young Tom Cruise, only with 100% more douchebaggery), who is especially prejudiced against rural folks since his biological parents were the victims of killer hillbillies (I think his story is the event that's in all the clippings at Tucker and Dale's cabin).

It couldn't be more clear, meanwhile, that Tucker and Dale are as sweet as can be. They get to their cabin and they're all excited about how they're going to fix it up. That evening, they go fishing, and they happen to be near where the kids are going skinny dipping. Allison sees them and, startled, falls into the water, hitting her head on the way down. Dale jumps in and saves her, pulling her into his and Tucker's boat, but what the kids see is their friend, in her underwear, being dragged off by the scary hillbillies.

Dale takes care of Allison at the cabin while Tucker does some man-chores outside the house, and though Allison is scared at first when she wakes up, she immediately realizes that she's safe and starts to bond with Dale (having been raised on a farm herself and hence an appreciator of rural life). She also reveals that she's majoring in psychology, specializing in communication, because she believes that most problems are caused by people not listening to each other and jumping to conclusions - an idea that sadly bears fruit in the fate of her friends.

Oh yes, her friends. Because while she's chilling with Dale in the cabin, the rest of the group have become convinced that they are characters in a hillbilly horror movie. Misunderstanding after misunderstanding ensues, and the kids end up accidentally killing themselves all around Tucker and Dale's cabin. The men are seriously befuddled by the chain of events and can only conclude that these kids are part of some suicide cult. They try to explain and make things right, but the more they try, the more accidental carnage piles up due to the kids persistently misinterpreting Tucker and Dale's motives.

What kills me about the whole story is that I've seen countless horror movies with dumb kids in them - kids who take unnecessary risks, kids who have positively life-threatening curiosity about strange noises and the like, and kids who recklessly poke a situation they don't understand until you're almost gleeful to see it bite them in the ass. I read a comment from a critic who said something I very much agree with - that a movie about people so annoying and horrible that you can't wait to see them chopped up is not horror. I'd say it's more like gladiator-style bloodlust. This movie seems to agree, and it doesn't feel the least bit bad for throwing dumb, prejudiced teens into woodchippers and practically shrugging its shoulders and saying "Hey, hate destroys, man."

The teen actors in this (or actors pretending to be college-age, to be more accurate) are about what you'd expect, though Katrina Bowden who plays Allie turns out to be better than most "pretty-face" heroines. But Alan Tudyk (Tucker) and especially Tyler Labine (Dale) own this movie, as well they should. I heard someone on my way out of the theater explaining to a friend that Labine was "like Larry the Cable Guy, only a good actor." That sums it up rather nicely. (No offense to Larry - he's a comedian, though, not an actor. I'm sure he'd agree.)

I won't spoil any more of it, but this is an absolute gem of horror comedy and closes on a comic rather than a horrific note. It is ridiculously gory, so if that's absolutely not your thing, you might want to stay away. For my part, I love it to pieces and can't wait to own it. Thankfully, I won't have to wait too much longer.

50/50

2011-10-04T03:28:00.000-07:00

I hate tear-jerker movies. Oh, occasionally I'll be in the mood for one, but I always hate myself afterward. Nearly every tear-jerker that has ever been made is a revolting piece of manipulation. You're not crying because you're feeling something; you're crying because the music cues and the sentimental dialogue are telling you you're *supposed* to be feeling something. You're one of Pavlov's dogs, essentially.

50/50, however, is a tear-jerker that I absolutely love. I make no apologies for the blubbering I did during this movie, because every bit of it was earned through clever writing, solid storytelling and characterization, and incredible acting.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, a guy who takes excellent care of himself and never takes chances with his body. He doesn't smoke, he doesn't do drugs, he runs regularly, and he doesn't even cross the street without permission from the crosswalk light. He works hard at his job and is supportive of his girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard). He's been having some pain in his back and night sweats, so he goes to the doctor. Guess what? He's got a rare form of cancer, and it's in such a position near his spine that they'd rather not operate unless they have no choice.

What follows is how he and the people around him deal with this situation. His girlfriend vows to take care of him, but she's not terribly good at it. His mother is like any mother would be, but she's perhaps a little more smothering than average because she's also having to deal with her husband's Alzheimer's. As one character puts it later, she has a husband who can't talk to her and a son who won't talk to her. Adam's best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen) is supporting but occasionally takes advantage of his friend's misfortune for his own gain (though not really in a deplorable way). Into the mix comes Katherine (Anna Kendrick), Adam's assigned therapist who is actually younger than he is and still a little awkward in her connection to her patients (of which Adam is only the third).

The movie is best categorized as a comedy, and there are a lot of laughs (many of them rather crude), but everything in this movie feels absolutely real. There's a great scene where Adam is going in for his first chemotherapy session and looks around him at all the other cancer patients, clearly thinking "Is this going to be me?". His scenes with two fellow patients he does his chemo with are a highlight as well, and when one of them dies, it's an absolute heartbreak. There's no cloying setup to prepare you for it either; it's just out-of-the-blue, the way death almost always is. The most crushing scene by far, though, is when Adam is about to go in for a procedure and starts to realize he may not live through it. I don't know that I've ever wanted to step into a movie screen and hug a character harder than I did here.

This is a seriously fantastic movie. Near perfect, actually. Some viewers might be put off by the language, I suppose, but there are few movies nowadays that are more genuine about topics that turn lesser movies into fake, weepy schmaltz.

Moneyball

2011-10-04T03:17:00.001-07:00

This was one of my top 10 most anticipated films of the fall, largely because I've long been fascinated by the projects its star, Brad Pitt, has chosen to affiliate himself with, way back to the halcyon days of the one-two punch of Interview With the Vampire and Legends of the Fall, both of which made him What He Is Today and which he followed by the shrewd choice of working on David Fincher's pitch black thriller-but-really-a-horror-film Seven (which, incidentally, is the film that made Fincher what *he* is today).

Speaking of Fincher, this movie reminds me quite a bit of The Social Network, despite its outward appearance as a "baseball" movie. Moneyball is not a baseball movie, by the way, but it does have an element of he magic that we Americans associate with that sport. It's also about underdogs, which is something we associate with a lot of sports films.

The movie is about Billy Beane, the man who is still the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics (or the A's, as they're more frequently called). The movie begins by showing us the sickeningly wide gap between what a team like the New York Yankees can afford to spend on players' salaries (something like $132 million) and what the A's can spend (more like $34 million - less than 1/4 the Yankees' budget). We see a very painful loss at the end of the 2001 season, followed by three of Beane's star players to other teams. Beane can only play the hand he's dealt and we sit through a couple of excruciating meetings with scouts trying to find replacements for the lost players. We hear all about what traditional wisdom says makes a good ball player - even down to silly things like whether the player has an ugly girlfriend, a detail which these old guys parlay into a lack of confidence - and it's all just noise to Beane, because they have this conversation every year and it never gets them anywhere.

He meets a young guy named Paul Brand at a failed trade meeting with another team. Brand is a Yale grad who majored in economics and has some very unconventional (some might say crazy) ideas about how to evaluate players. They should be buying home runs, Brand argues, not players. Beane brings him on as assistant GM and aggressively initiates this new approach (called sabermetrics) to their scouting, selecting players based almost entirely on their ability to get on base. This new method flies in the face of everything everyone has always thought about baseball, and as such draws the ire of the scouts and the manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Howe refuses to play several key players in the positions they were hired for - most notably Scott Hatteberg, who had spent most of his career as a catcher but was hired as a first baseman for the A's, and who Howe was consistently relegating to the bench because he wasn't a traditional first baseman and was still essentially learning how to play the position. The A's don't do well at all at this time, which most critics and much of the team staff blame on the new system, but which Beane is sure is only because everyone is bucking his methods. He eventually trades away the only "stars" on the team so that Howe will use the players in the way they were intended to be used when they were brought on.

And then they start winning. They win 19 games in a row, tying the all-time league record, and game 20 is probably the greatest sequence in the movie, culminating in Hatteberg's home run, which is a thing of absolute and flawless beauty. Seriously, I don't think the crack of a baseball bat has ever sounded so gorgeous.

I won't spoil the rest of it, though you could find out all the facts on the internet anyway. The script was written by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin (not together, but they share credit), and you can see both of their handprints on the film. The director, Bennett Miller, also made 2005's Capote and this film has a similar kind of measured pace and discipline (though it's obviously more romantic - as Pitt says in the film, though, it's hard not to be romantic about baseball). I loved the use of (what I presumed to be) archival footage and its integration with the staged reenactments of the various games. Acting is great across the board. Most surprising, perhaps, is Jonah Hill, who's most recognizable as part of the "Apatow stable" but who really shines here in a much more straight role. Also of note is Chris Pratt as Scott Hatteberg, who generates a lot of sympathy as an everyday player who is scared to death of his new position.

A great movie, and if you haven't seen it yet and have any affection for sports whatsoever, I'd definitely recommend it.

Red State

2011-09-27T18:35:00.000-07:00

I'd been hearing about Kevin Smith's Red State for a few years, I guess ever since word got out that he was trying to get it made. I enjoy Smith's films, for the most part, and the idea of his doing something different than the talky relationshippy stuff he's best known for was intriguing to me. Then of course Sundance happened and everyone was up in arms over the circus and presentation of Smith's fake bidding war over selling the film that ended in him buying it himself for $20 and announcing he was "four-walling" it (i.e., taking it on the road for one-night engagements instead of releasing it in a bunch of theaters at once). I thought very seriously about going to the NYC date back in March, but ultimately decided I could wait until it got its wider release in October. I'm very glad I kept an eye out for the release, because as it turns out the regular theater release was a one-night-only event in a hand full of theaters, to be followed by a Q&A with Smith beamed to all the theaters from the New Beverly in LA. And even though I'd been anxious to see this film for several months, I *almost* didn't go and even paused to rethink once I got to the theater and found out that tickets were a good deal more than usual. After all, it's going to be on VOD and DVD in just a few weeks. But I'm really glad I decided to see it with an audience.

Because it's quite good.

Red State

This movie employs a rather brilliant take on the classic three-act structure. Each act could be its own unique movie. We start with a tried-and-true teen horror movie set-up. Three teenage boys (led by Kyle Gallner, who many of you might know as Cassidy or "Beaver" from Veronica Mars) find this prostitution website, where women (and probably men, too) post naked pictures of themselves (with the face obscured) and name their price for some you-know-what. The boys can't really take a trip to New York or Los Angeles, where most of these girls are from, but there's one woman from a small town nearby. One of the boys has been emailing with her and she's agreed to "do" them all at once. The kids have some thoughts about the fact that she's 38, but they decide to go for it. They get to the woman's home (a trailer) and drink some warm-up beers, but they've clearly been drugged and before they can get their clothes off, they're unconscious.

The ringleader wakes up in a cage to find that he's part of an "object lesson" in a church service and now we're in a "captured by lunatics" horror movie (such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Behind the pulpit is Reverend Abin Cooper (played by the amazing Michael Parks, whose praises I have sung before), and we're treated to a roughly fifteen-minute real-time sermon about how godless the world is and how all the sinners are going to hell, especially the gays, who are the agents of the devil himself here on earth, says Cooper. It should be noted that we've heard this man's name and seen his face before this scene. He and his family are seen protesting outside the funeral of a murdered gay man (a la Westboro and the Phelps family), and he's the topic of a brief conversation in our doomed trio's history class. Apparently, Cooper and his family are so bonkers that even a neo-Nazi group has distanced themselves from them. We also hear later on that he and his "Five Points" church are worse than the Westboro lot, who are admittedly annoying but at least don't carry guns like the Cooper clan. The Five Points congregation consists entirely of family - around twenty-five people in all, including some small children - and that for this reason it has been impossible for the FBI to do any undercover infiltration.

I wondered how the people around me felt about sitting through the sermon. Fifteen minutes is about right (maybe a bit shorter) time frame for most of the sermons I've heard in my lifetime, having gone to church regularly for most of that time. Smith, having been raised Catholic, is probably drawing from similar experience. I'd say a congregation like this is used to much longer sermons, but you can only spend so much time with this kind of thing in a movie, especially when the content is so abhorrent. It was frankly chilling for me to watch the congregation in a scene - again, content MOST CERTAINLY aside - that I have experienced many, many times in my life. All the nodding and "amen"s and things that I have always felt were (or at least could be) meaningful expressions of real worship ... to see them distorted like this and used as an earnest response to what is such a blatant perversion of God's word was, to me, the most frightening part of the film. And then, of course, a woman takes the kiddoes out to have their lessons because, as Cooper says, "it's about to get grown-up in here." I just love it when people use that word and "adult" to describe things that really, really aren't.

The first "grown-up" object lesson involves a gay man who has been plastic-wrapped to a big cross and gagged (whaddup, blasphemy!) before being shot in the top of the head with a tricked-out handgun. The ringleader's two buddies, meanwhile, manage to cut themselves free and try to escape. Emphasis on the word "try." It is here that the film morphs into its third incarnation - a hostage scenario and feds-to-the-rescue climax. What was supposed to be a simple in-and-out mission for a handful of BATF agents has become the Waco Siege of 1993, with Cooper and his crew completely unconcerned about dying, because dying just means they get to go to heaven (um, don't count your chickens, dudes). The conflict ends more peaceably than it should, mostly thanks to a mysterious loud noise that the Coopers think is the Trumpet of the Lord announcing the return of Christ. The agent in charge (played by John Goodman) brings the remaining family members in and explains the rest of the story, including his decision to disobey direct orders, to his superiors.

I don't know what this film's detractors were expecting, or if they were just so disgusted at the Sundance media circus that they were prejudiced against the film itself, but I think it's a dang fine movie. Something you absolutely would not expect from Kevin Smith, but which just as absolutely fits his style, especially with regard to writing. Acting, across the board, is great, even from the guys playing the teenage victims (the kinds of characters that sadly do not get parts as good as these written for them - I don't mean they're all DeNiro in Taxi Driver, but for horror movie victims, they're surprisingly layered). Goodman is wonderful in his role, but the real standouts are Michael Parks and (Oscar-winner) Melissa Leo. Leo's character is the one who lures the boys in the first place, and it's horrifying to see her calmly sitting next to her husband in church, like she was just doing God's will by drugging those kids and tying them up. Parks, though, is an absolute revelation (*rimshot*) as the patriarch and preacher. I've been a fan of his since for several years now, and he's a great "character actor" who doesn't often get a lot to do in the films he's in. It's great to see him step up and be the lead here.

There's a part of me that's sad that here's yet another movie where religious people (the only religious people in the story, in fact) are crazy murdering lunatics. On the other hand, it makes me even sadder that people like this really do exist. There's not much in the world that's more disgusting than a group of so-called Christians standing outside a funeral and basically saying "nah-nah-nee-boo-boo" to a dead person that they clearly couldn't have cared less about trying to reach.

Drive

2011-09-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

"I used to produce movies in the 80s. Kind of action films, sexy stuff ... one producer called them European."

Albert Brooks, in the quote above, might as well have been describing the film he was currently in - Nicolas Winding Refn's sleek and stylish Drive. I had only seen one of Winding Refn's films before this, which was 2009's Bronson and which also incidentally announced to the world that Tom Hardy was made of awesome. I thought the film was interesting, epecially style-wise, but I wasn't in love with it like a lot of my movie nerd friends were, and I wondered if I would have responded differently if I had seen it with a bunch of them in a proper theater instead of by myself on my laptop. I was, however, completely excited about Drive after hearing about it from Cannes back in May.

I'd been counting down the days to seeing this, and had more than I wanted in adventure trying to lay eyes on it this weekend. I could have seen it first thing Friday morning, after work, and was tempted to do just that - such was my chomping at the bit. But I decided to make it a rare evening viewing - rare because it costs more than twice as much as AMC's morning screenings, and because it's difficult to find a showtime that's convenient with my work hours. It was important to me to see it with a good audience. I'd even put together a playlist with the film's (AMAZING) soundtrack and a bunch of 1980s songs that I thought had a similar chilly, urban vibe. There was some drama at the theater that night, and I was forced to wait another 24 hours, which drove me crazy. I was pretty exhausted by the time I hit the cinema and the movie was going to have to be pretty danged good to keep me awake.

Far from being pretty danged good, it was flipping awesome. Hands down, my favorite film of the year so far.

The film opens with a pulsing music track and credits that look like they were scrawled on a mirror in shocking pink lipstick. We meet Ryan Gosling's character, whose name we never learn (he is simply "the Driver"), and he's laying out the rules for his "getaway" services. If you've seen the trailer, you've heard this schpiel - his clients have him for five minutes. Whatever happens in that five minute window, he will get you out of there. If something goes wrong before the clock starts or after the five minutes is up, you're on your own. He speaks very directly and succinctly, and you get the feeling you should listen to him closely, because he's not the kind of person who repeats himself. We see him on a job like this, and where another movie would show you all manner of metal objects weaving in out of each other in furious pursuit and flight, Winding Refn starts slow, putting the focus on Gosling's face instead, and you can see the wheels turning behind his eyes. When the volume gets turned up, though, it's exhilirating. But even as the chase kicks up several notches, we still mostly stay on Gosling and watch as he shifts strategies (could I get any more automobile metaphors in here?) and tries to elude the police.

The Driver doesn't just do getaways; he's also a stunt driver for movies and does some work in a garage. He's kind of a genius with cars, and his boss Shannon (played by Bryan Cranston) tries to get him into racecar driving, with the help of crime boss Bernie (in a knockout performance by Albert Brooks, who is about the last person you'd imagine being as great as he is in a role like this). He also becomes involved (though not romantically - at least at first) with his neighbor Irene (the always excellent Carey Mulligan), who struggles as a waitress at Denny's while her husband is in prison. You can sense that the Driver likes to keep people at a distance, but his relationship with Irene is what sets the bulk of the film's action in motion. We see a man who is initially very reserved and calm (comparisons to Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver are not far off the mark here) become violent and scary in the defense of the innocent.

Nowhere in the film is this better crystalized than in what may be the centerpiece of the entire film, "The Elevator Scene." The Driver is going to walk Irene out of their apartment building, and they get into an elevator with a third person. We already know that the Driver is in danger, but when he looks sidelong at the stranger in the elevator, he spots a concealed gun and shit's officially real. But rather than ratchet up the adrenaline right away, the film slows down a bit and the Driver pushes Irene protectively behind him. He turns around and kisses her, presumably knowing that after what's about to happen this may be his only chance, and then proceeds to beat and kick the man to death as she looks on, part horrified, part exhilirated.

The film is quite violent, but what I love about it is that it doesn't fetishize the violence. There are cool weapons (I love that you rarely see a gun in this movie) but it doesn't wallow in the horror-show. What it does tend to linger on are the moments just before the violence occurs. I kept thinking, after this movie, about the Solozzo scene in The Godfather - that moment the camera seems to stay a bit too long on Al Pacino's face and you see, plain as day, the change that turns Michael Corleone from war hero to future crime boss, just before he guns down Solozzo and McCluskey. There's an especially operatic scene in Drive when Gosling's character dons one of his movie diguises (a rubber head mask) and goes to take out the penultimate baddie. The music choice here is inspired - the main theme from a film called Farewell Uncle Tom, which I saw at BNAT in 2007 and which is the most offensive movie I have ever seen, despite some excellent filmmaking elements, including the music. And for the length of the song - about three minutes (an eternity in movie time) - the Driver simply drives to where he's going and then looks through a window at his prey. You know for a certainty, just from the actor's eyes, that someone is about to die, probably painfully, because that's just what time it is.

This movie has been compared to early Michael Mann (think Thief or Manhunter) and William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. It even has a similar feel to Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, a vintage hit from BNAT last year, and the camera work was apparently inspired by Melville's work. The plot is not anything earth-shattering - typical biolerplate stuff - but plot is not what makes this movie extraodrinary. Style and love of cinema make this film something special. (And speaking of style, this movie gave me an intense desire to own a satin jacket and a pair of driving gloves - and I don't even drive anymore!)

Drive has the trappings of all those fantastic car movies of the 60s and 70s, the flash of 80s neo-noir, and the sensibility of a dark fairy tale. I don't see anything happening on the Oscar front for this movie - perhaps a supporting nod for Brooks (I'd be overjoyed if Gosling were recognized, but I don't dare hold my breath), but that's not because it's not great. It's absolutely fantastic. This was originally developed as a $60 million blockbuster starring Hugh Jackman. Nothing against Hugh, but I'm so glad *this* movie is what got made instead.

Warrior

2011-09-17T01:04:00.000-07:00

[Cue obligatory sing-along with Scandal's 1980s hit "The Warrior" because I'm just that dorky.]

This is a movie I probably wouldn't have seen had it not been for very enthusiastic responses coming out of an Ain't It Cool screening. I put it off a little while (hence my lateness) because fight movies aren't typically my thing, unless they are largely about something else (such as Million Dollar Baby). As such, I feel like I could have skipped this one. That's not to say it's a bad movie, but it's just not my kind of movie. I also have to say that the fact that the director also made Miracle was not a selling point for me. "Inspirational" "sports" films are rarely my cup of tea.

That's not to say that Warrior is a bad movie or that there weren't things I enjoyed about it, because it's not and there certainly were. I thought the performances all around were really great. Nick Nolte, I thought, was especially strong in a pretty thankless, generic role. The fight choreography was incredible, and the ending was surprisingly suspenseful.

It was an interesting decision to leave the abuse backstory mostly off-page, with only a few references here and there, but it doesn't do the characters any favors. The brothers seem less sympathetic, because we never see what they suffered at the hands of their father. Nick Nolte's character passes 1000 days of sobriety (and then falls off the wagon briefly), but we can't be invested in it because we haven't seen what he was like when he was a drunk and a wife/child-beater. And the one time we see him drunk he's just kind of sad, not scary like we've been told he used to be. It's just hard to get invested in a family's history when you're only allowed to hear about it.

Another thing I found a bit strange was a handful of shots of people watching the "Sparta" tournament on television. There were crowd scenes in the actual arena, sure, but all the reaction shots of people watching were of people just by themselves, which felt a bit unnatural (until the end, of course, when the students are watching the final fights at the drive-in). You want, when you watch scenes like that, to be inspired to jump up and cheer yourself, and I just wasn't feeling it, and it didn't feel like the movie was even interested in arousing that response.

I did like the (somewhat) suspense of the ending, because all the way through the tournament you're cheering for both brothers. I say somewhat because if you've seen the trailer you already know that they end up fighting each other in the final. You want to see them both win, and they both have very sympathetic stories, but I found myself wondering who to root for in the end. It didn't take long to figure out who the winner *had* to be, from a narrative standpoint, and I guess you could imagine that the winner could have shared a bit of the prize money with the other brother. I wondered how that all worked out as the credits rolled, but I was kind of relieved the movie didn't show it to us.

I sort of giggled at the big confrontation scene on the beach, because it looks like both brothers randomly decided to go walking on the beach and just happened to come across each other. That scene is probably the strongest in the movie, and I'm so glad they got all that out there and didn't have a bunch of dialogue in the actual fight. There's almost none there, which is perfect, until the very end. It got a bit weird at that point - there's just something about two men rolling around with their legs around each other saying "I love you." :P

10 Movies I'm Pumped to See This Fall

2011-09-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again! Entertainment Weekly has released its Fall Movie Preview issue, and it is time to plan the season! I had to remove the cover of this year's, though, because I couldn't look at it (Bella and Edward, blech!). I don't have the energy or the time to do a full rundown of everything, like I've done in the past, but I've still carefully calendared it all, as is my yearly ritual. And here are the ten films I'm *MOST* anticipating this fall. I say most, because there's plenty more I'm looking forward to. Just these a bit more than others.

Perhaps I should be sad that of these ten films, only one has a female as the lead character, and perhaps it's just as sad that that same film is alone among the ten that was *written* by a woman (and as for directed by a chick - pssht, forget it). It certainly does seem like a Mandom-y fall for movies. But I'd rather think about the wealth of Ryan Gosling and George Clooney on this list.

10. Moneyball - Not a baseball movie, but more a business movie set in the world of baseball, based on the book about how the Oakland A's management reinvented how they chose players. Written by rock star screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin (not a co-write, but a shared credit). Starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

9. J. Edgar - Eastwood directs DiCaprio in a movie about America's original G-man. Written by Dustin Lance Black, one of my new screenwriting heroes who won an Oscar a couple years ago for Milk.

8. Hugo - No, not a book about the youngest child of Ron and Hermione Weasley. :P I read the book (The Invention of Hugo Cabret) last year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn't grab me as a piece of narrative. But the idea of making it a film actually excited me. Especially since it was a book about the magic and love of the cinema and was being made into a movie by perhaps the greatest cinematic enthusiast making movies - Martin Scorsese. Add to that the fact that Chloe "Hit Girl" Moretz is in it as well, and it's a must see.

7. The Descendants- Alexander Payne's first directing job since Sideways back in 2004. His films are always such a sublime mix of comedy and tragedy, and I'm intrigued by the fact that he's directing George Clooney. Though not as intrigued as I am by Clooney playing a middle aged suburban dad whose wife was cheating on him. How do you cheat on Clooney?

6. The Muppets - This is supposedly a return to the kind of Muppet movie we know and love. My favorite is still The Muppets Take Manhattan, and I've never seen what is a lot of people's favorite (Muppet Christmas Carol - yes, I KNOW), but I'm jazzed for this. The Muppets have kind of become cool again in the past couple of years (though they were always cool to me), and the fact that Jason Segel co-wrote it with his Forgetting Sarah Marshall director Nicholas Stoller makes me hopeful this will be magic. (If you wonder why, watch the last few minutes of Marshall, which feature a puppet musical about Dracula which is out of this world.)

5. Young Adult - Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, who previously worked together on Juno (for which Cody won an Oscar), are reteaming for a story about a successful YA writer who goes nuts when her high school sweetheart has a kid. As excited as I am about this, I'm a little nervous about the "message" behind it. I don't really like Cody's description of the main character as "living like an adolescent in her 30s" and "living that kind of selfish, childish life." Is your life somehow worthless if you're not married with kids and a house full of Pottery Barn furniture? Kind of daring this one to piss me off, in a way, but Cody's writing is always funny and heartfelt. I'm also kind of in love with that recent picture of Charlize Theron in sweatpants and a Hello Kitty shirt. Accurate picture of a lot of YA writers? Probably.

4. The Ides of March - The latest directorial effort of George Clooney, who also acts in the film, playing a presidential contender. Ryan Gosling plays his ... Robert Gibbs, I guess? I'm fascinated by Clooney's work as a director, as well as his recent choices in acting roles. Count me in.

3. The Artist - I've heard all kinds of amazing things about this one, though it seems like the most difficult film in the world to sell (to audiences and Oscar voters alike). It's black and white, it's French, it has no big name Hollywood stars, and it has almost no dialogue (it's being described as a silent film). It does, however, have the Weinsteins behind it, who have placed it in a prominent place in their release schedule - Thanksgiving week (which is, incidentally, the "King's Speech" slot). It was also a huge crowd favorite at Cannes. This is supposedly "the one to beat" this year.

2. Drive - I've heard great things about this since Cannes (where it took Best Director prize), and every piece of the promotion I see makes me more pumped to see it. There's something "Kiss Me Deadly" (the movie, not the song - wait, the song too) about it. Noir and a kind of 1980s vibe. Actually counting the days to this one.

1. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - This is like the best cast list I've ever seen, and may be Gary Oldman's chance at his first nomination (how is that possible?!). Directed by Tomas Alfredson, who made the beautiful Swedish-language vampire love story Let the Right One In (not to be confused with the lesser, though still, good, American remake). I'm not familiar with the John le Carre novel on which this is based, but perhaps I should become so. So pumped for this. You lucky Brits get it in September, but it won't come out here until ~~November 18~~ December 9.

Fright Night (2011)

2011-08-20T05:51:00.000-07:00

The original Fright Night came out in 1985 and I was a few weeks from 10 years old. I was decidedly not a horror aficionado and frankly the poster (and matching soundtrack album cover) was the scariest thing I'd ever seen in my life at the time. I stayed well away. I finally caught up with it a couple of years ago, when I did a series on vampire movies on my LJ (Fright Night post is here, if you're interested) and I LOVED it. It wasn't nearly as scary as I'd built up in my mind as a child (few films are, in my experience), and it was half comedy anyway.

When I first heard it was being remade, I had all the "ehhhhh, why" that everyone has when anything is remade. I've recently been thinking that it's less the idea of something being remade that bothers me and more the idea of it being a lazy artistic choice, which it almost always is. But not *quite* always. I'd love to do a post on that topic some time, but back to business.

Bottom line - I think the 2011 Fright Night is a genuinely good remake, one that honors the original while bringing something new to it (something besides just new actors, that is).

Fright Night (2011)

The script was written by Marti Noxon (yay, women screenwriters - double yay, women HORROR screenwriters!), who many of you know as the woman who took the lead on Buffy as Joss Whedon relinquished some of his responsibilities on that show to start creating Angel and (*wistful sigh*) Firefly. Some of you might also consider her the person who ruined Buffy, but that's neither here nor there. The woman knows her way around vampires. Real vampires, that is. :P Tom Holland, who wrote and directed the original, had story duties here, and it always helps when the original creator has his/her hands on a remake.

The story is basically the same as the original. Boy discovers his neighbor is a vampire and gets help from a "vampire expert" to defeat him. There are plenty of differences, though, and something I loved was that they weren't just changing things to make them more hip and cool. These were meaningful changes. In the original, Charley and Evil Ed are friends, but now they're former friends, Charley (Anton Yelchin) having essentially "dumped" Ed (Christopher Mitz-Plasse) for cooler friends because he's so amazed that his girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots, who must have had a horrid childhood with a name like that) likes him that he wants to be cool enough and have cool enough friends to hang on to her. Now Ed is the one to notice that Charley's neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) is strange and conclude that he's a vampire. Charley doesn't buy it until it's too late and Ed has been turned, and it's only when Jerry won't cross the threshold into the house that Charley gets suspicious.

The film is set in Las Vegas, which I'm pretty sure is another change. It's a great fit for a vampire story, because there's all kinds of people just passing through, and so many people work nights and sleep during the day (which is why no one asks why Jerry's windows are blacked out; apparently loads of people in Vegas do the same thing). And we get to see a bit of the Strip when Charley pays a visit to Peter Vincent, played by the criminally awesome David Tennant, who is the best thing about this remake. Vincent, I mean. Tennant is great, but I loved what they did with the character. This is absolutely who Peter Vincent would be today. In the original, Roddy McDowall played Vincent as the star of a television show called "Fright Night," which was very old-school, gothic, Dark Shadows stuff. Here, Vincent is the star of a Vegas illusion act called "Fright Night." He's very new-school gothic and kind of a rock star - leather, guyliner, long hair, etc. But when Charley meets him in his huge and lavish apartment, he peels off the layers (in more ways than one). Off comes the coat, the wig, and the facial hair, and he turns out to be kind of a loser and a jerk. He curses at his girlfriend (or sex buddy, whatever) and guzzles Midori and is a general layabout. Sexy, though, no doubt about it. There's also some interesting, though perhaps predictable, backstory with this character.

If you've never seen the original, this film might remind you a bit of Disturbia in terms of tension and who's spying on who, and that's not a bad thing (though the original FN had a similar style). There's not a lot of chair-jumper scares, which I liked. Chair-jumpers are effective, but you can't overuse them. Tension is always better. One new element is that Jerry is not just killing his victims; he's built a small prison in his basement, with several little rooms where he holds his victims (which reminded me forcibly of Martyrs), "snacking" on them (as Vincent calls it) until there's nothing left. Charley tries to rescue one, but as soon as they leave the house, she's burnt up in the sunlight. Another element that may have been in the original but it just never struck me is that not only does Jerry cast no reflection, his image doesn't show up on camera. He kills a security guard at one point and the camera pans back to show just the guard, being ripped apart by some invisible force.

This is rated R, which doesn't really suit it, in my opinion. The original was rated R, mostly for violence (and a little nudity and language, but nothing crazy). This new film is not quite as violent, and kudos to the filmmakers for not just adding more gore gratuitously, but it was almost like they were afraid of not getting an R so they threw in a bunch of f-bombs. A strange choice since the screenwriter comes from television and therefore ought to be good at finding clever ways to avoid profanity. Most of the cursing is from David Tennant, whose character is barely hardcore enough to get away with it, but eh, whatever.

One bad thing about my experience, though, which had nothing to do with the movie. Some JERK-OFF, who apparently has never heard of the memo that says you DO NOT TALK DURING A MOVIE just Could. Not. Shut. Up. He was, like, narrating the movie, constantly blurting out what he thought was about to happen and asking his girlfriend what he missed while he was too busy YAPPING. Ugh. I shushed him twice, which worked for a minute or two before he was back at it. At that point it becomes a fine line between making a stand and contributing even more noise, so I just sat there and seethed instead.

There is a very cool cameo by Chris Sarandon, who played the vampire in the original. Even with the small 10am crowd, there was a good response to the sight of him on screen, and I got a sick joy out of the rare moment of silence from my noisy neighbor, who clearly had no clue why everyone was laughing. I guess I should be thankful he didn't ask out loud what was so funny. OH! And the best part - in my opinion - was the TOTAL lack of a sequel-baiting ending. It's over, the monster is gone, and everyone lives happily ever after, with absolutely no sly shot of a lone vampire still out there winking at the camera as if to say "See you in Fright Night 2, muahahaha!" Yes, original Fright Night, that was partially directed at you. ;-)

This is a great, fun movie. It's not *too* violent, and - surprise, surprise - there are characters you actually care about. It also has some rather bitchin' music, which has convinced me I need the soundtrack (though I'm sad to see the wicked rockabilly cover of "99 Problems" that plays over the final credits is not on it, so I'll have to get that elsewhere). Good performances from the "kids" (well, not really the token douchebags, but Yelchin, Poots, and Mintz-Plasse are all good), and great stuff from the (older) adults (Colin Farrell, Toni Collette, and especially David Tennant). Good summer fun, and best of all, NO sparkles. :D There's a couple of cracks about Twilight in there, and I suspect Marti Noxon has been holding that in for a while.

The Help

2011-08-13T06:10:00.000-07:00

Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level

Those are lyrics from a Bob Dylan song ("The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol") that I couldn't help being reminded of as I watched The Help, a movie set very near the time that Dylan wrote both this and "Only a Pawn in Their Game," a song centered on the assassination of Medgar Evers (an event that serves as background to the film). This was the peak of his "protest" era of songwriting, and he actually sang "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at the 1963 March on Washington, where later Martin Luther King would give his "I Have a Dream" speech.

The Help (2011)

There's been some talk about the "whitewashing" this story might be guilty of - this being supposedly yet another story where a white person "rescues" black people. Similar charges were leveled at The Blind Side, a movie which I feel deserves the charge, at least more than this one does. I'm sure some people in Mississippi will see The Help, enjoy its Southern fried humor, and pat themselves on the back that Mississippi is no more like it is portrayed here, and that's as annoying to me as to anyone else. However, I have to disagree with accusations that this is a "safe" film about a dangerous subject. Anyone who thinks that has never spent a significant amount of time in the South and does not understand the incredibly deep sense of shame that any decent Caucasian Southerner has about racism and slavery, despite being so far removed (supposedly) from such unthinkable times. We don't need an "edgy" story to make us remember, thanks.

There's a scene in the movie where a young woman's maid has the temerity to ask her boss for a loan. The woman, Hilly (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) explains that, as a Christian, the right thing - the way to be of most help - is for her to do nothing, reminding her maid that God helps those who help themselves. Ironically, this maxim turns out to be true for the characters in the film, though in a very different sense than the snobbish, bigoted Hilly understands it. Yes, the black women in the story need the help of the nice white lady. But they have to take a very big step for themselves first. A step that, in 1960s Mississippi, could not only cost them their jobs but potentially their lives as well.

Emma Stone gets top billing in the film, but she is not actually the main character, in my view (though she may be more definitively so in the novel on which the movie is based). The movie is narrated by a woman named Abilene (played by the phenomenal Viola Davis, a Tony winner for Fences and an Oscar nominee for Doubt). Abilene has been a maid for many, many years. She cleans house, but her primary job is taking care of rich white women's babies and essentially being those children's chief caregiver. This is more than just changing diapers and feeding hungry mouths; Abilene also gives the children a tremendous amount of love and support, holding them and rocking them much more than their mothers do and giving at least one of her baby girls the self-affirming mantra of "You are kind. You are smart. You are important." This same baby will later tell her "You my real mama, Abie."

But this is the 1960s and, worse, it's also Mississippi. There are actual laws on the books that basically amount to keeping white people from getting black people cooties, and if that sounds ridiculous and makes you want to both laugh and shoot someone in the face, IT TOTALLY SHOULD. This goes beyond bus seats and water fountains. Black people have to use different bathrooms, and in fact white homeowners have begun to build separate, outdoor bathrooms for "the 'colored' help." Not only are the schools segregated, but schoolBOOKS are segregated; books used in black schools can't be used in white schools and vice versa. And just to make sure some tree hugging free love hippies don't upset things, it's also illegal to publish anything about how wrong all this is and how people should be equal no matter what color their skin is.

Into this environment steps Skeeter (Emma Stone), who has just graduated from Ole Miss, which I'd hold against her (being a State gal myself - GO DAWGS!) except that her education has put her miles ahead of her hometown peers. She is a born writer and applied for a job at a newspaper (magazine?) in New York, but was told to get some experience and then try again. She maintains contact with the editor, Elain Stein (Mary Steenburgen), who has advised her to write about something that disturbs her but doesn't seem to disturb anyone else. She comes home to find that the maid that helped raise her, Constantine (played by living legend, Cicely Tyson), has "quit" and after not getting adequate answers as to why, she finds her subject and starts planning a book.

She asks Abilene for help, but like I said, this is a dangerous proposition to even talk about, let alone put into action. Little by little, Skeeter collects stories from her and eventually more than a dozen additional women. She's changing the names to give the women as much protection as she can, and one of the maids (Minny, played by the wonderful and hilarious Octavia Spencer) tells one story in particular (the "Terrible Awful") that is so scandalous it acts as insurance in case local readers figure out who's who once the book is out and try to make trouble.

The writing in the film is nothing mind-bogglingly superb, but the dialogue has a genuine Southern verve (even if the accents are a bit spotty, *ahem* Miss Stone). The directing is perfunctory, but the cast is what makes the movie shine. At the top of the class is the peerless Viola Davis. I hope the studio is planning an Oscar campaign for her and that it's for Lead, not Support, because she is absolutely the star of this movie. Emma Stone continues to make me fall in girl-crush love with her, and the whole theme of her insecurity about her beauty struck quite a chord with me. Octavia Spencer is the scene-stealer, and her character gets to have the greatest culinary revenge since Fried Green Tomatoes. (Incidentally, I thought the movie used this a bit too much, but it's still wickedly funny.) Bryce Dallas Howard made me forget all about her foray into sparkly vampirism and hate - HATE - her social-climbing, "negro"-phobic character. Cicely Tyson is Cicely Tyson, 'nuff said. Allison Janney is great as Skeeter's cancer-stricken, racism-enabling mother with a heartbreaking secret. Sissy Spacek shines in a small role as Hilly's mother. The real surprise for me, though, was Jessica Chastain, who I was not terribly impressed with in Tree of Life, but who was all kinds of wonderful in this movie as the sweet and naive Celia. Celia is a girl who gets a lot of words thrown at her that I don't like, no matter who they're said about. Words like "white trash" and "slut." But if you see this movie, you try and tell me she's not worth at least ten of Hilly. Her sending a check to "Two Slice Hilly" is maybe my favorite thing in the film, and I may or may not have screamed in laughter. Also those of you who saw Equus on Broadway will recognize Anna Camp, who played Jill, in a minor role.

This is a movie that, like Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes, is very quotable. It reminds me most closely of Fried Green Tomatoes, mostly I guess because 1) it deals with bigger social issues and 2) it's a chick movie that's not about chicks trying to catch a man. (Skeeter does have a tiny romance in the film, but it very much takes a back seat to the main story, in more ways than one.) It's also a film about Southern people that is not hopelessly embarrassing, like so many of them are. It was weird to watch this with a bunch of New Yorkers, though. There was so much of it that they clearly were not connecting with, even though my audience seemed to enjoy the movie very much. One little but important thing I noticed was that I felt like I was in Mississippi in the summer watching it. It's not all over-the-top sweaty faces and bodies like in A Time to Kill (MAN, I wanted to send that movie a church fan!), but just about every time you see Abilene, there's sweat under her arms. A small detail, but one that adds just the extra bit of authenticity.

It all ends on a up note that might feel false to anyone who is conscious that yes, this is still 1960s Mississippi and these women are still stuck in unfair circumstances. But, in the words of yet another Dylan protest song, "the times they are a-changin'." It would take a long time for things to get better in Mississippi. In the background of the movie, the characters learn not only of Medgar Evers' assassination, but also President Kennedy's a few months later. My dad was in college at Mississippi State when JFK was shot, and he once told me that people were practically jumping for joy in the streets that "that '[badword]-lover' was dead" (their sentiments, not his - I hope that doesn't even need clarifying). It would take the State of Mississippi 31 years to convict Byron De La Beckwith of the first-degree murder of Medgar Evers. I was in college at MS State myself when that happened, and still boggle that I knew someone who had a relative in the KKK - in 1994, for crying out loud! And it was only five or six years ago when I heard a relative of my own utter the words "Slavery wasn't that bad" over Thanksgiving dinner.

Mississippi has had farther to come on the race issue than most places, but they've gotten as far as they have the same way everyplace else has - one person, one voice, one opinion at a time. And maybe it's insufferable that in this movie a black voice needed the help of a white voice in order to be heard - one of the characters even says as much - but there's no denying that that's the world we've come from.

Now I want to read this book. And go to Sylvia's for some fried chicken.

Midnight in Paris

2011-08-07T06:18:00.000-07:00

Midnight in Paris

You probably either *are* a Woody Allen person or you're *not*. His films, for the most part, have a very distinct voice and a distinct style. The opening credits are all in the same familiar font, perfectly and simply underscoring this fact. I consider myself on his side of the fence, even though I tend to admire his films more than I love them. I love pieces of Annie Hall (Marshall McLuhan, FTW!), I love the look and the sound of Manhattan (because it's such a travelogue of New York), and I love the themes in Crimes and Misdemeanors. But his films have largely left me cold, emotionally, with the glaring exception of Sweet and Lowdown.

Midnight in Paris feels both like an atypical Woody Allen film and at the same time is very typical of his work. There is the central character, a neurotic writer, who would have been played by Woody himself twenty or thirty years ago. The central character clashes intellectually with the mundane and pedantic people whose company he is forced to endure. And the whole story takes place in a great city and is as much a love song to that city as a story in its own right. That city used to be New York in all his films, but he has branched out lately. I don't think he quite *got* London well enough to pull this off in Match Point, but he certainly seems to *get* Paris (at least, from what I understand - I've never been *sniff*). But there is an optimism and sentimentality in Midnight that I have never really associated with Woody's films, and it's kind of refreshing.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a successful screenwriter in Hollywood who is vacationing in Paris with his fiancee, Inez (played by the flawless Rachel McAdams). The two of them and Inez's mother are pretty much piggybacking on her father's business trip, and we see instantly that Inez and her family are not where Gil needs to be, for the sake of his sanity, not to mention his creative impulses. They are frequently joined on their tourist ramblings by an old college professor of Inez's, Paul (Michael Sheen) and his wife Carol, because Paul is in town getting ready to start lecturing at La Sorbonne. Paul is an "expert" on everything, frequently corrects tour guides, and is the kind of person that we all have known and have frequently wanted to throttle into non-existence. Old HP ship debaters will no doubt call to mind at least one or two names among our former opponents that fit this bill.

Though Gil makes a respectable living churning out movie scripts and this is something he's quite good at, he's dissatisfied. He's written a novel, but he's afraid to show it to anyone. Inez suggests he show it to Paul, but obviously Gil would rather spork his own eyes out than let Paul anywhere near it. Inez sort of pokes fun at the book, making Gil tell everyone about the main character who works in a nostalgia shop, which everyone but Gil thinks is trite and hilarious. This kind of stings Gil, on whom the book character is quite obviously based.

One evening after dinner, Gil goes for a walk on his own and gets a bit lost. He sits on some steps and after a while a car pulls up. Not just any car - a 1920s model Peugeot. Several people are inside and a man beckons him to come along with them. Gil is reluctant, because who are these people?, but goes along for the ride. They soon arrive at a party and a woman introduces herself to Gil as Zelda. They are soon joined by her husband, Scott Fitzgerald. At this point, I'm thinking (and perhaps so is Gil) that this is a rich people theme party, where everyone has come dressed as their favorite writer or something and for some reason everyone is staying in character. But no. This is actually Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. And Cole Porter is playing the piano. They go to a bat and Gil meets Ernest Hemingway. Gil has somehow traveled back in time to 1920s Paris, his idea of Paris's Golden Age and the place and time where he would have most loved to live, and is hobnobbing with the artistic giants who have inspired him. But when he leaves a place by himself, he leaves the 1920s behind and goes back to his own world.

He tries to show all this to Inez the next night, but he doesn't quite understand how the magic works yet, so she doesn't see anything special. She leaves, rolling her eyes madly at him, and the clock strikes midnight, which Gil realizes is the key. The car comes along again and takes him to meet Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). Ernest Hemingway, who he'd met the night before, promised to introduce him to her and ask her to read his manuscript and give him feedback. Hemingway wouldn't read the book himself, telling Gil "I hate it ... If it's bad I'll hate it because it's bad. If it's good, I'll hate it because I'm jealous." Stein is going to read the book later, but she reads the first sentence or two aloud, and we see that Gil is a gifted writer. His talent catches the attention of a woman named Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who is having an affair with Pablo Picasso. Gil and Adriana talk and there is an obvious connection between them, and over the course of several more visits to the past, Gil realizes that he's falling in love with her and she with him.

And then comes the most perfect scene in the film. Gil tries to engineer things with Adriana that ought to have happened (and probably would have) naturally, but as they pause on the street, a carriage approaches and stops, beckoning them to come along, much like the Peugeot has stopped for Gil each night. It drops them off at Maxim's restaurant. In the 19th century, Belle Epoque. Adriana's idea of Paris's Golden Age. You guys, I seriously cried from the magic.

I won't spoil the rest of it - I've gone on quite long enough already - but it ends fairly happily, in a way that many will probably expect. This has been out a while, and I was a bit surprised it was still in theaters this past weekend when I went. I don't know whether this will be your cup of tea or not - lately I haven't been too confident in my radar. But if you have a warm sigh in your heart for Paris or are a nostalgic or romantic person, I could not recommend this more highly.

The Future

2011-08-06T06:16:00.000-07:00

The Future

I fell deeply and truly for Miranda July as a filmmaker with her 2005 debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, so it was with a certain amount of expectation (and maybe a little anxiety) that I approached her latest film, The Future.

July and her costar Hamish Linklater (a perennial favorite at Shakespeare in the Park here in NYC) play a couple, Sophie and Jason, who are about to adopt a cat. They can't bring it home for another month, because it has a broken leg that has to heal, and it's already a sick cat, requiring a strict regimen of medication. Sophie and Jason realize that, once they bring the cat home, they won't be able to make any drastic life changes until it dies, which (best case scenario) will be about five years from now. They'll both be forty at that point, and Jason states that "forty is basically fifty" and that everything after fifty is "loose change." That's harsh, especially to my nearly 36 year old ears, but it's an interesting observation about most people's life patterns. These characters are at that age - and I am too, I guess - where we start to realize that there are only a finite number of things we're going to be able to do before we die. They decide to live this final cat-free month as if it's the last month of their lives. Jason decides to quit his tech support job and follow wherever fate leads. Sophie quits her job as a children's dance teacher and tries to start a YouTube project. Each of them deals with this life experiment in different and inept ways, and their lives basically fall apart.

Threading the whole thing together is narration by Paw Paw, the cat, who is voiced by and whose front paws are animated by July herself. These bits of narration serve much the same purpose as the video art segments do in Me and You and Everyone We Know. They give the film its voice and unique language.

There are several great scenes that could almost be short films by themselves. One of my favorites is when Sophie has called to have the internet turned off - part of their re-prioritizing - and rushes Jason home so that they can look up whatever they need to look up in the hour they have left. Jason thinks it's crazy to turn the internet off and asks what they're going to do if they want to know something, and Sophie says they'll just have to ask someone or ... not know. Which I couldn't help thinking is EXACTLY what the entire world had to do before we had the internet at our disposal (which was not really all that long ago). After looking up some not-terribly-important stuff for a minute or so, Sophie and Jason soon seem to realize this fact as well and calmly close their twin laptops.

The two of them each strike up unexpected relationships with strangers. Jason befriends an elderly gentleman who gives him some perspective on his relationship with Sophie, telling him that after four years with her, he's still in the beginning part. That those are the hardest times and they're both going to do horrible things and they'll just have to work through it. Sophie cold calls a single dad who drew a picture of his daughter that Jason bought from the animal shelter in the beginning of the film, and what starts as a bizarre phone conversation becomes a full-fledged sexual affair (speaking of doing horrible things).

Miranda July's films are devilishly hard to describe. This film in particular has some great magical elements - Jason, for example, can stop time with his mind, and has a conversation with the moon. Sophie has a shirt that follows her and that she ultimately has this rather amazing dance with. It's all part of her singular imagination, and it's a big reason why so many people love her films. And why others hate them.

Because July has plenty of detractors - people who think she's the epitome of everything that is wrong with hipster culture. They call her films "precious" and "twee" - which I can't help feel are insults about her gender as much as her filmmaking. Perhaps worst of all, some feel that the oddball nature of her films and her characters are just a big joke or some ironic comment. July's films are actually the opposite of the hipster chic embodied by films like Napoleon Dynamite. She's not trying to be quirky or offbeat in some ironic way, like someone who's trying to be cool by being uncool. This is really her mind and her imagination. People connect with her films - or at least I do - because there's something in them that makes them think "I thought I was the only person who did that!"

Attack the Block

2011-08-05T06:15:00.000-07:00

Attack the Block

Oh, how do I love this movie? Let me count the ways. I'd been hearing about it for months, ever since it played SXSW in March.

So a young woman named Sam is on her way home from work. She's a nurse, and she's had to stay a bit past the usual end of her shift, which makes her nervous walking home because it's kind of late. Sure enough, as she gets to the home stretch, there are five kids blocking her path up ahead. She tries to cross to the other side of the street, but they've clearly marked her and cross to block her again. She gets the typical mugging scenario - give us your phone/wallet/whatever, she tries to plead with them, they pull a knife, etc. Later, taking refuge and consolation in a neighbor's flat, she calls the kids "monsters." Understandable, but she will see much more frightening monsters before the night is out.

Sam was only able to escape her attackers in the confusion of a mysterious something-or-other falling from the sky onto a parked car. The leader of the group, Moses, seeing that the car has been rendered rather easy to rob, investigates to find something of value, only to be attacked by a strange creature (the thing that fell from the sky) which runs away. The other boys laugh and taunt Moses for being attacked by "Dobby the house-elf" (no kidding), and they all go chasing after it. They eventually kill it and boast that no one messes with their block. Moses thinks the creature might be rare and worth a lot of money, so they take it to "Ron's weed room" (it's a big room, full of weed, and it's Ron's, another character explains later), which is supposed to be the safest place in the block. Ron (played by Nick Frost) has no authority ("I just work here"), but his boss, the gangster Hi-Hatz, agrees to let the boys keep the dead creature there. In exchange, though, Moses must start selling cocaine for him (in addition to the weed he already sells).

The boys then see a strange sight out of the window - streams of light falling from the sky, much like the one that delivered their now dead furry companion. Thinking these are the same kinds of aliens, they go to their homes and "tool up" - with machetes, baseball bats, swords, fireworks, etc. - ready to take some more of these creatures on. Two even younger boys - nine-year-olds who insist on being called "Probs" and "Mayhem" - go to the crash site too, to prove how badass they are. These aliens, however, are much bigger. I'm telling you, it takes a lot to freak me out nowadays, but these guys are SCARY! Pitch black, shaped like something between a bear and a wolf, with no eyes, and blue luminescent teeth. And inside their mouths, where a tongue should be, there's just more teeth. The boys wisely run away.

The rest of the movie sees them trying to escape and eventually taking on these creatures, unexpectedly joining forces with the woman they mugged earlier in the evening. Like the better examples of the horror genre, this film too has a bit of social satire. The idea that no one really cares what happens to these kids, because they're poor or they're not white or their music is too loud is touched on, but the crux of the story is Moses's heroism and his learning that he has to take responsibility for his actions. There's also a bit of Scooby-Doo-ing (or Buffy-ing, if you will) going on, as the boys start to figure out what it is that the creatures are specifically drawn to and how to deal with them.

This is a really, really great flick, and a lot of fun. Once again, it's strange to find this so amazing, but here's a genre movie with some great characterization and amazing performances. John Boyega is the obvious stand-out as Moses, but all of the kids (all of them newcomers) are really great. They're not the fresh-faced, perfectly coifed teens of modern horror movies (though I would probably have crushed on Alex Esmail, who plays "Pest," when I was younger), and that's quite a nice change. Thumbs way up for this one, but with a warning - it's pretty bloody, so if you have problems with that, this might not be a good idea for you.

One more thing. If you see it and love it, I would also recommend checking out the soundtrack, which has a great urban pulse - some parts of it remind me of the 1980s classic "Pass the Dutchie" - and a couple of non-score tracks. "Sound of Da Police" by KRS-One is highly dance-worthy, and you can stop laughing at at that mental image of me dancing right now. :P

Cowboys and Aliens

2011-08-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

Cowboys and Aliens

I was privileged to see a couple of reels of this at Butt-Numb-A-Thon last year, and I was pleased but not terribly excited about what we saw, to be honest. A lot of the character stuff felt very in media res and awkward. Despite the "meh" reviews, I went in with an open mind, and though I winced at the sight of five screenwriting credits, I was still determined to at least not hate it.

Well, I loved it, as it turns out. No, it's not as good a sci-fi/western mashup as Firefly was, but what is? (Alan "Wash" Tudyk amusingly Tweeted that it suffered from a painful lack of Chinese.) It's a little more western than sci-fi, and it's the western portions where the movie really shines. Daniel Craig proves more than ever why he's an excellent addition to the Leading Men Club, and while Harrison Ford doesn't have *quite* the spark that he used to, he's still Harrison Ford, which is more awesome than most of us will ever be. Paul Dano, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Clancy Brown, and Keith Carridine are all stellar in supporting roles, and they're the movie's real strength.

The movie is beautifully shot, and I think it has one of the best-written kiss scenes in recent memory (one that actually has a plot purpose and isn't just there to make you all tingly). The alien tech is kind of generic, but then that's how it is in most space movies nowadays. The aliens themselves are duly terrifying (though nowhere near as scary as Attack the Block's aliens). I think the biggest thing that I wish had been better was the music. I know it's tough to find a balance between western themes and sci-fi themes, musically, but this score was pretty bland, in my opinion.

The movie as a whole, though, is very enjoyable.

Super 8

2011-06-11T06:22:00.000-07:00

After work yesterday morning, I went to see Super 8, which was one of my most anticipated movies of the summer. I spent the week wallowing in some the movies that inspired it - Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Alien, Scanners, E.T., etc. - and walked into the theater with a mixture of excitement and trepidation (because it probably was not going to live up to expectations).

The movie is certainly not perfect, but it is EXTREMELY good, worthy to be put next to the awesome geek movies of most of our childhoods, particularly those centered around child characters. I say "most of our" childhoods, because I'm still catching up to movies that everyone else my age saw when they were kids. I don't have the nostalgia to look back on these movies as the Best Ever (I mean, E.T. is quite good, but robbed for Best Picture in 1982? Not really. Yeah, I said it.), but I definitely get warm fuzzies just as if these movies were actually a part of my own childhood.

The less said about the plot of Super 8 the better. The trailer tells you everything you need to know before going in. A group of kids are making a movie, and strange things start happening that turn their little town upside down. There are a bunch of kid actors you've never heard of and one that maybe you have (Elle Fanning, who I vastly prefer to her older sister), plus the Friday Night Lights guy (Kyle Chandler), the guy who used to date Julianna Margulies on E.R. and in real life (Ron Eldard), and the guy who's in every Frank Darabont project except Shawshank (Noah Emmerich).

The mysterious element in the movie is ever so slightly underdeveloped. I think this is mainly because the movie is far more interested in the kids - as well it should be - and their point of view is limited. These are some of the best movie kids I've seen in a long, long time. They are real kids, not actors playing some Hollywood jagoff's idea of what kids are like. They talk like real kids, about topics that kids actually talk about. It's hard for the main character Joe (Joel Courtney) not to be a favorite, but he gets serious competition from Cary (Ryan Lee), the runt who's way too into explosives. Cary is just such an awesome kid, and I want to hang out with him and watch movies. I also really dug Charles (Riley Griffiths), whose family is very reminiscent of the Weasleys of Harry Potter. He's not as awesome as Ron (but then, who is?), and he has kind of an unlikeable streak, but he still manages to be a mostly sympathetic character. Notable small roles are filled by the amazing Dale Dickey (one of the great supporting actors of last year's Winter's Bone) and Dan Castelleneta (the voice of Homer Simpson). I want to see it again so I can spot Abrams regulars Greg Grunberg and Michael Giacchino in cameos as well (Giacchino also composed the wonderful score).

This movie is clearly inspired by the classic "Peter Pan era" Spielberg films, and as one of the film's producers, his stamp on the material is hard to deny. But I feel like Super 8 is very much its own film. In the same spirit as those great early 80s adventures, but it never feels like a copy of any of those films.

I don't think you'd get very far out of the theater after the movie before you realized this, but stick around for the credits and you will see Charles's film in its entirety. It is fantastic, and I was very much reminded (not just during their little film, but in the scenes where they were making it as well) of those guys who made their own version of Raiders of the Lost Ark when they were kids. Lots of cool movie geek references are woven into their story, like the fact that Joe learned about makeup from Dick Smith's book (Smith is a legend in film makeup, having most notably created Linda Blair's super-scary demonic look for The Exorcist).

Side note: In watching all those movies in preparation for Super 8, I have discovered that - aside from it being the film Super 8 most closely resembles - I find Close Encounters of the Third Kind to be Spielberg's greatest film, period. The scope of that story is unreal, and the various human perspectives on the mysterious elements are some of the best storytelling I've ever seen. I need to do a proper post on it someday.

X-Men: First Class

2011-06-04T06:28:00.000-07:00

Mutant and Proud!

So I went to see X-Men: First Class yesterday, which I thought was mostly excellent. My only big problem was the way they tried to shoehorn in the nicknames. There's actually a scene where the "teen" mutants are sitting around figuring out what they're going to call themselves. "And you should be Professor X! And you should be Magneto!" I mean, really. And don't get me started on the coining of the term "X-Men." I mean, I'm sure the film accurately explains where the term came from, but to have someone actually say it was unbelievably corny.

The rest of it, though, is pretty spectacular. I love the 60s trappings and that Charles says "groovy." There are also two cameos from familiar franchise faces that should please fans (and certainly pleased the audience I saw it with). The most compelling parts of the film, as one might expect, are the scenes with Charles and Erik (later known as Prof. X and Magneto, respectively, of course, but those aren't their names yet). My movie husband, Michael Fassbender, is amazing as usual and he and James McAvoy have pretty great chemistry. I've never read the comics, so I don't know if this is true to the canon or not, but I love the idea that they were friends - and very likely are still quite fond of each other. They just stand on opposite sides of the mutant issue and have very different moral values. My favorite scene by far is the sequence where they are going around the world and contacting fellow mutants, especially when they're recruiting "Angel." I almost wanted one of them to ask "Do I make you horny, baby?"

There's some great action in this movie, too (I would expect no less from the director of Kick-Ass). And I loved the integration of historical events, most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This brings me to one weird thing about my screening, though. About ten minutes before the show started, about 100 children came filing in (seriously). All schools are presumably out by now, so I'm thinking this was a summer camp or something. Some of the kids were 12/13, but many of them could not have been older than about 7, which is TOO YOUNG (in general) to see a movie like this. Seriously, there are Nazis and torture chambers and mothers getting shot in the FIRST TEN MINUTES. In the rest of the movie, there are also exotic dancers, a blue but otherwise quite naked Jennifer Lawrence, and a good deal of violence. And the f-word, though only once. Earth to adults who are responsible for other people's children - just because it's a comic book movie doesn't mean it's for kids. Just, wow.

Overall, I really loved it. I don't remember much about the first two X-Men movies (which are the only ones I've seen), but this one is just as good as those, as I remember them. Maybe my favorite of the lot (if you leave out the cheesy nicknaming scene, of course :P).

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

2011-05-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

Since this is over a week out from the release date, it's probably too late to urge anyone NOT to see this movie in 3D. Audiences have apparently gone overwhelmingly for the traditional format, so perhaps the warning isn't necessary. It actually was filmed in 3D, so it probably looks better than most, especially some of the beautiful daylight scenes, but a LOT of this movie takes place at night. And since 3D makes the picture dimmer, that means it's REALLY dark. So if you haven't seen it yet, skip the 3D.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

So, I guess the cool thing for all the cool kids to do in CoolTown is hate on this new Pirates movie. As such, I guess I'm just uncool.

Because I really enjoyed it. A lot.

That's not to say it doesn't have problems, and it's certainly my least favorite installment (though I loved 2 and 3, so your mileage may vary). But it's still a Pirates movie. It still feels very in character with that world. Jack is very Jack. Hector is very Hector (except when ... no no, that's spoiler territory). And the biggest new addition, Edward Teach (a.k.a. Blackbeard), is as epic a pirate as the best of them. Oh, and there is a handsome shirtless young man, which no entry in this franchise should EVER be without.

We begin with the Spanish and the start of their quest to find the Fountain of Youth. This was, admittedly, a little hastily conceived and could have been given more weight. We then make for London, where we're reunited with Jack (in the type of reveal we've come to expect) and Gibbs, who is the only crew member left from the old crowd (we shall see in the fullness of time what presumably became of the others).

The main plot is deceptively simple. Everyone and their brother is out to reach the Fountain of Youth. Our major players are Barbossa, who seems to be working as a privateer for the King of England (Richard Griffiths) in his race to beat Spain to the prize; Spain, of course, though we see very little of them; and the famous dread pirate Blackbeard (played to wonderful piratey perfection by Ian McShane, who will always be Judas Iscariot to me, but that's beside the point). Oh, and Captain Jack Sparrow is in the mix, though he actually has little interest in the Fountain (though that's not what everyone else has heard - look, this is the Pirates franchise, it's complicated, okay?).

Add to this the impossibly beautiful Penelope Cruz, playing Angelica - a former flame of Sparrow's who may or may not be Blackbeard's daughter. Daughter or not, she's still his first mate. A lot of people seem to have problems with her (both in this film and in general) but I thought she was fine, neither wonderful nor horrible. She has a good chemistry with Depp, but it's put to better use in another film (2001's Blow, if you're curious). Jack, for his part, may or may not have had ... feelings for her. But make no mistake - Jack's true love is himself, and he even says so at the end of the movie (love that line, but I think a lot of viewers are missing it). Blackbeard, by the way, has some black magic mojo going on, and not just around his eyes - he has powers over his ship (and others, apparently) that seem to emanate from his sword, he's zombified several crew members, and he has dabbled in ~~dopples~~ voodoo. I love the implications of these powers and who they eventually pass to.

Contrary to what most of us have always probably thought, it takes more than simply drinking from the Fountain of Youth to receive its full effects. There is a ritual (I loved Jack's response to being asked if he believed in the supernatural - oh yes, he's seen his share). It takes two special chalices and one tear. A tear from a mermaid, no less. I felt the introduction to mermaids and what they are like in this universe was mishandled. We're given the tease of White Cap Bay first and just expected to accept that mermaids are something to be afraid of, and then in a later scene we get the explanation of why they're scary. The explanation should have come first, in my opinion, because most people don't think of mermaids as terribly scary - even the spear-wielding ones in Harry Potter.

There's no Will and Elizabeth, but there's still a romantic subplot with a missionary and a mermaid. This was actually one of my favorite parts of the film and the chief redeeming portion of the interminable island hike segment. There were a lot of useless or pointless scenes here, perhaps none more so than Blackbeard's attempt at Russian roulette. I kind of hated Jack for playing games about diving off the cliff, just because it led to this. :P

There weren't many truly spectacular set pieces in this movie, and certainly nothing like the more iconic scenes in the other films (the moonlight reveal, the underwater walk, the mill wheel, the Kraken, and the absurd final ship battle in AWE). Jack's chase on top of carriages across London was a bit lackluster, but his sword fight with "himself" wasn't. I really loved Blackbeard hanging the mutineers from the rigging and Jack's escape up the trunk of a palm tree. And most of the third act was pretty incredible, if you ask me. I especially loved how director Rob Marshall envisioned the actual Fountain and the entrance to it. Oh, and LOL at Jack's suggestion that everyone else hang back, have some drinks, and place bets, while Barbossa and Blackbeard duke it out just between the two of them.

This film was less about spectacle and more about character and story, which I thought was a welcome step back from the increasingly ludicrous (though admittedly entertaining) antics of the second and third films. I enjoyed it immensely, and even went back to see it a second time. I feel it's also worthy of a DVD buy and a place on my shelf along with the other three. True, Marshall didn't add anything special to this franchise, but nor did he ruin it (as some people seem to believe, judging from some overemotional responses I've seen).

Hollywood Slut-Shaming

2011-04-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

I was reading a frankly depressing article linked on ONTD about sexism in Hollywood and saw a reference to this movie, What's Your Number, where Anna Faris plays a woman who is afraid that if she's slept with too many men already, she'll never get married. First of all, the book this is based on has the woman reading in the New York Post (not exactly the most respectable bastion of journalism in the first place) that the average person has 10.5 partners in their lifetime; she then sets a number for herself, saying that 20 will be her limit before getting married. Naturally, the story has her hitting that limit and then freaking out because she's not married yet, and she goes on a quest to seek out her former lovers and determine if she let The One slip away. I haven't read this book, but I really hope the point is not to encourage that kind of arbitrary quantification system.

But then again, maybe that's exactly what it does. ONTD's linked source describes the film as being about a woman who learns in a "ladymag" (oh, what a lovely, condescending little word) that if she sleeps with one more person than the 20 she already has, she'll never get married. So the NY Post has become a "ladymag" and the woman gets her "limit" advice from the mag, not her own relationship issues. Great. But that's not even the worst part.

Apparently, the studio is haggling over the number, trying to figure out how many partners they can give the character without making her a slut.

Did you hear that? That was my foot kicking something hard.

If this were an independent movie or a foreign movie, this would not be an issue. I'm FORCIBLY reminded of a theory I had several years ago, when the script was being written for the second Bridget Jones movie. Renee Zellweger apparently had some issues with the initial script, and I was musing over the plot elements of the book to try and figure out what might be amiss. After seeing the final film, I became convinced that earlier drafts of the script must have included both Bridget and Mark seeing (and sleeping with? I can't remember from the book) other people while they were broken up. In the book, there is nothing terribly appalling about this - just your normal obstacles to getting the couple back together. But I KNEW - especially after they turned Bridget's rival into a sweethearted lesbian with a crush on her - that somewhere, in some meeting, it had been decided that audiences wouldn't forgive Bridget (and probably not Mark either) for being with someone else.

At another point in the article, Anna Faris mentions a movie she made with Kate Hudson called Gold Diggers, which was supposed to be the feminine answer to Wedding Crashers. But she says that they couldn't really make it a female Wedding Crashers because, and I quote, "the big hitch was, nobody's going to like those girls if they seem like sluts... We realized we can't make an actual female ‘Wedding Crashers,' because then it would be ‘Call Girls.' " I'm telling myself that she said this sadly and with resignation, because ... *boils*

I'm also picturing that scene from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, where Matthew McConaughey looks out upon this sea of former flings - I don't know how many there actually are, because I've never seen the movie, but in the trailer it sure looks like more than 20. Nothing wrong with that, though, is there? No, sir. Men can have all the conquests they want, with however many people they want, because they're Manly Men of Manparts.

I could draw a parallel here to female circumcision, a practice that is still used in many places in the world to make sex painful for women so they'll look upon it as a duty to their husbands, not a pleasure, and won't seek sexual encounters outside the marriage bed. Oh look, I just did.

Sucker Punch

2011-03-26T06:44:00.000-07:00

Sucker Punch

I should have hated this movie. I saw it under not the best circumstances. I decided to see it at the 34th Street AMC, mostly because it had the most convenient showtime and partly because it's across the street from one of my favorite breakfast places (one of the few places in NYC that serves grits). I was going to go all out and see it in IMAX. It was a matinee, so it wasn't ridonkulously expensive. But the theater turned out to be one of an alarming number of "fake" IMAX theaters, i.e., theaters with slightly-larger-than-normal screens that for some reason are allowed to use the IMAX brand name. Also, they gave us 3D glasses, and I spent the first 40 minutes of the movie trying to keep them on my face before discovering that THE MOVIE IS NOT IN 3D. Shame on you, AMC 34th Street.

This movie is, by all empirical standards, not a good movie. It has huge, HUGE narrative issues. Other folks will find many other flaws, but I think at least some of those are clever subversions. Nordling of Ain't It Cool News calls this a "kitchen sink" movie, wherein a filmmaker throws all of his passion and resources into a project in the hopes that this will be his/her definitive work. Those movies rarely turn out to be anything but hot messes, and Sucker Punch is no exception. This is a movie with big ideas, ideas that are tragically too big for the story in its current form. I think it might have fared better as a two-parter. Preferably with a different writer.

The basic setup is fairly simple. Our heroine, played by Lemony Snicket's Emily Browning, has just lost her mother, and her conniving stepfather is furious that the mother left all her money to the girl and her sister. After a sequence of events that's a tad confusing but culminates in the murder of the younger sister, the stepfather has our heroine committed to an asylum and arranges for her to be lobotomized. The rest of the movie consists of her attempts to escape, both figuratively and literally.

Almost as soon as she arrives, her mind constructs an alternate reality, though only slightly less bleak than her current one. Part of the inmates' therapy is to act out their issues, quite literally, on a stage. So "Baby Doll," as she comes to be called, imagines the asylum as a burlesque theater where she and the other girls dance for "clients." The asylum orderly who abuses the girls becomes a cruel boss figure, and the psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) becomes an artistic director of some sort. (Just a note, while we're here and while you may or may not be frozen with a "huh?" expression on your face at what you've read so far ... if suspending disbelief is not your thing and you demand logic from your stories, stay far away from this movie.)

Baby Doll is asked to dance. The music starts and eventually she starts to (barely) move, but suddenly we zoom in on her eye and we enter a third level of reality. Baby Doll is now in a completely different place and time within her own mind, and she meets The Wiseman (Scott Glenn), who tells her how to escape. She needs five things - a map, fire, a knife, a key, and a fifth item that is a mystery. She defeats three giant mecha-monsters in a sequence that at first might seem frivolous and lacking in risk and emotional connection, but which I think merely serve to show Baby Doll the rules of this reality and what she is capable of. After this initial battle, Baby Doll is back in the dance studio and has finished her dance, and she has apparently impressed everyone so much that she's going to use her dancing as part of the plot to get the items she needs for escape. But first she needs help from the other girls - Rocket (Jena Malone), Sweet Pea (Abby Cornish), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgins), and Amber (Jamie Chung).

We see the girls fight to secure the needed items, both in the dance hall reality and in the third reality. Baby Doll uses her dancing in the second reality to distract people while the other girls get the tokens. And, just as before, whenever the music starts, we enter that third and much more heightened reality, and the girls are on missions (led by The Wiseman) to capture items that are analogous to the escape tools. They fight Nazi zombies to steal a map, they slay a baby dragon and steal the fire from its throat, etc. One of many things I felt should have been different is that I wish the movie had cut back to the *actual* reality of the asylum at least once or twice. Maybe Snyder was trying to make the ending more surprising, when you see that she was in the asylum all along and - aha! - she really did do the things she did in those other realities, just more mundane versions of them.

As I said, there are huge story problems with this movie. It feels a lot like it was meant to be longer and just got chopped to pieces, with the action setpieces getting priority in the editing process and the actual storytelling and characterization stuck on the cutting room floor, or perhaps merely ghosts from earlier drafts of the script.

However, there are some subversive elements that I quite liked and wish had been in a better movie. I cringed like hell at the trailers and what I saw as Scott Glenn's dumb hero lines, notably "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything" (the origin of which has been credited to many historical figures, including Malcolm X, General Patton, and Alexander Hamilton). But I think they're *intended* to be awkward and somewhat meaningless. If you watch the film, you'll notice that his mentor advice is always two-fold. The first bit is the dumb hero line, the second (preceded by "oh, and one more thing") is actually useful information for whatever task the girls are trying to accomplish. I thought it was kind of poking fun at other movies/stories that use that kind of dialogue much more earnestly.

Mr. Beaks of AICN wrote a fairly thoughtful (though still very critical) review in which he proposes the idea that Snyder is criticizing the fetishization of sexy, scantily clad, fighting female badasses. I'm not sure how confident I am about it being a critique, but I don't think it's an accident that Baby Doll is made up to look eerily like Sailor Moon.

Nor do I think it's an accident that the logos for the two works are so similar.

As disappointing as the movie is on so many levels, though, I still really dug it. I'd much rather see an ambitious failure, where I'm certain that everyone involved believes in the story they're telling and are having a good time telling it, than a lazy cash grab. Perhaps this is why I have an unusually rosy response to the Harry Potter films (not that I think those are failures AT ALL, though some of you may). It puts a grin on my face to see David Heyman and his posse trying (and yes, usually failing) to do Rowling one better. They REALLY want those movies to be good. You can feel it (or at least I can), and that's pretty intoxicating to watch (again, for me, at least). And I can tell how much Zack Snyder wants Sucker Punch to be good, which is why, even though it's mostly a mess, I respect it and I respect the effort. [NOTE: I hope no one thinks I'm comparing this movie to the HP films, by the way. I AM NOT, BY ANY MEANS.]

If you're wondering whether you should check this out ... I honestly don't know what to tell you. If you're intrigued by what I described of the plot above, I'd say it's at least worth a matinee. I personally think it's worth seeing for the pretty stunning visuals of the "third reality" alone, especially (OMG!) the "bomb on the train" sequence. There's some good music on display, too, but it's kind of wasted. But if you decide to see it, don't make the mistake I did. This is NOT a 3D movie, and there are theaters posing as IMAXes that are NOT IMAX. It probably looks great on an IMAX screen, but it looks good on a regular (or slightly larger) screen too.

Final Girl Film Club - Blood and Roses

2011-03-22T14:01:00.000-07:00

This month's Final Girl Film Club pick is Roger Vadim's vastly under-appreciated Blood and Roses. If you remember the series I did a couple of years ago on vampire movies, you might remember the well-established trope of the lesbian vampire, originating from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's short novel Carmilla. Carmilla the novel actually pre-dates Stoker's Dracula by about 25 years and there have been several interpretations of it, either literal retellings of the story or other tales that follow the female vampire trope with varying degrees of lesbian subtext (and often plain text). Perhaps the best known and most faithful adaptation is The Vampire Lovers (1970), part of Hammer Horror's Karnstein Trilogy. I'm quite fond of that one, but I do believe I like Blood and Roses even more.

Blood and Roses (1960)

The story begins on an airplane - a setting far removed from the 18th century trappings of the original novel. We hear some vague drivel in voice over about the spirit world, and there's no explanation as yet for why a vampire who has been alive for hundreds of years is flying the friendly skies. We travel to Italy, to a branch of the Karnstein estate. A count, Leopoldo, is about to be married and he's consulting a pyrotechnics expert to design a fireworks show for his engagement party. The fireworks expert has found the perfect spot for the spectacle - the abbey on the estate. This causes some concerned looks from several people in the room, because this is where the old Karnstein cemetery used to be. Thankfully, all the tombs have been empty for a couple of centuries, but this leads to some half-amused/half-serious discussion of the old Karnstein vampire legend.

Leopoldo's cousin, Carmilla, tells the story of her ancestor Millarca (anagrams yay!), who died the night before her wedding in the arms of her lover Ludwig, who swore eternal faithfulness. There is a clear parallel between Carmilla and Millarca and, in turn, between Leopoldo and Ludwig. Leopoldo is marrying a young woman named Georgia, though, and it's clear from the start that Carmilla is jealous. At the engagement party, Carmilla sulks and drinks in her room but eventually joins the party at Leopoldo's infuriated insistence. After a few moments at the party, however, she wanders off again, toward the cemetery. Some unexpected explosions from the fireworks display open Millarca's tomb, and voila - Carmilla is dead, her spirit replaced by that of the sleeping vampiress.

I'd only ever seen one other of Vadim's films, Pretty Maids All in a Row, but I knew enough about Vadim as a filmmaker to be aware of his reputation for sensuality. This seems more restrained than I'd have expected from him, but it still manages to have definite erotic undertones with little winks of partial nudity and, of course, the lesbian subtext which is not as overt as in The Vampire Lovers but is certainly still there. In particular, I have to love Leopoldo's strangely gleeful expression as his fiancee undresses the unconscious Carmilla. See something you like there, dude?

I really, really dug this film. The look is very dreamlike, and a lot of credit must go to Annette Vadim (who plays Carmilla/Millarca) for giving the film its melancholy soul. The highlight of the film, though, is a surreal sequence where Millarca seduces Georgia and enters her subconscious. Wonderfully bizarre stuff and quite ahead of its time. And man, I love the ending.

Great movie. Thanks to Final Girl for picking it.

2011-03-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

With March upon us, the winter "take out the trash" season is mostly in the past and it's time to get back into the groove. I saw three new movies this weekend, all of which are worth talking about.

Rango

Our story begins with a four-bird mariachi band (!!!!) and their hilariously on-the-nose lyrics which give us a series of signposts through the story. Johnny Depp gives voice to a lizard who's spent his whole life in a dry aquarium, his only friends a plastic fish and a naked Barbie doll with no head or legs. He keeps himself amused by staging theatricals, but he seems completely unaware that his tank is in the back of a pickup truck and that said truck is moving him and the rest of his owner's belongings to presumably a new home. One severe bump in the road, however, and the tank goes flying. Soon our not-yet-Rango is taking advice from a run-over armadillo and heading out across the desert to a town called Dirt, where he is told he can find water.

What follows reminded me quite a bit of The Three Amigos, actually. Rango is a character whose entire life has revolved around making things up to keep himself amused. He's an excellent improvisor, which comes in handy in the beginning, but he hasn't had the opportunity for real life lessons, and he certainly has never been put to any kind of test as far as his bravery or moral code might be concerned.

This movie is an utter delight, with some really unique-looking and photo-real animation. It's probably not what you're expecting, and that's a very good thing. It's a western, plain and simple, and the look is very much The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (especially the creatures who are all pretty salty characters). It isn't the least bit cutesy, as you could probably tell from the ads, but what you might not know is that there's a sauciness that will sail over kids' heads and hit adults in their giggle spots. Just to give you an idea of the kind of thing the movie gets away with, in the first scene of the film, our hero makes a breast implant joke. Oh yes. This has the audacity and nudge-nudge-wink-wink that the original Shrek had, only it goes a bit farther.

Voice talent is really exceptional here, and the best part is that, except for Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy, whose voices you could not mistake if you tried, you can't really tell who's who. These aren't characters built on a particular actor's gifts, these are original characters played by actors who don't want you to know who's behind the microphone. One of the most impressive moments for me was the appearance of The Spirit of the West, which you would swear up and down is the voice of exactly who it looks like on screen but is in actuality Justified's Timothy Olyphant.

I really loved this, and I think it would appeal to most moviegoers, but especially those of you who like westerns.

The Adjustment Bureau

This was much better than I expected, mostly because of how great Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are. The concept is interesting and very sci-fi - what if our lives were designed to follow a certain plan and there were people whose job it was to make sure we stayed on that plan? Damon Lindelof (formerly of LOST fame) recently compared it to the Desmond/Penny storyline on LOST, and that's pretty accurate. I don't want to give too much away. If you've seen the trailer and the ads you know enough about the premise.

It seems weird to talk about this as if it's something revolutionary, but it was refreshing to see a movie with some actual characterization, with people in it that you care about. This is not a movie that expects us to root for people just because they're played by pretty actors and, well, we're just supposed to care. David and Elise feel like real people with real issues, and I loved that. I also loved that there was some thought behind not just *why* everyone in the "bureau" was so desperate to keep them apart, but what it was about each of them that, when put together, was bad for the other person (in the eyes of the Plan).

Some of the philosophizing was a bit ponderous at times, such as the whole speech about what happened on the two occasions that the organization stepped back and let people make their own decisions, without any adjustments. (Not to mention the fact that the premise starts to fall apart if you think about it too much.) Actor-wise, I was also disappointed by Anthony Mackie, whose heart didn't seem to be in this movie. I hope all this doesn't sound like I hated the movie, because I definitely didn't. It works very well as a romance and mostly well as a sci-fi story. Above all, it's an engaging and entertaining movie, anchored by two good performances. I was also glad to discover that there was a reason for Matt Damon to be wearing that hat in all the trailers. :P

On a more trivial note, there are loads of cameos in this from political/news figures, like Jon Stewart and Mayor Bloomberg.

I Saw the Devil

Expectations were pretty high going into this, after hearing one critic compare it to The Silence of the Lambs. Disappointment, therefore, was inevitable. This is straight up horror, and certainly not the kind most of you reading this would be into. It's even a bit too much for me, but there were elements that I did like.

Basic story. A young woman is waiting for a tow truck when she is beaten nearly to death, kidnapped, then brutally murdered by a maniac who proceeds to chop her into pieces, despite her pleas for her life and the life of her unborn child. And that's just the first ten minutes. Bad luck for our murderer that his latest victim was the daughter of a retired and venerated police chief and the fiancee of a secret agent (though not that secret, since several people in the film seem to know what he does). Secret Agent Man vows revenge, but can't bring himself to strike a fatal blow. So he catches up to the killer repeatedly, inflicts painful wounds, and repeatedly lets the killer go, swearing that he's going to keep coming and that the attacks are going to get worse.

Over the course of the story, we're supposed to be getting the impression that Secret Agent Man is becoming a monster just like the man he's hunting. But I'm afraid I just could not get behind that idea. The killer is so disgusting and abominable that I was cheering for Secret Agent Man throughout. There are some interesting notions, I suppose, about how useful revenge is and who really comes out the winner in this scenario. There's also something to be said here about the illogical nature of engaging oneself in a battle of wills with a soulless maniac who can hurt you far more effectively than you can hurt him. But the movie doesn't lean on either of those ideas as much as it does the "who's the real monster" thing. And the movie's biggest problem for me is that this question is not nearly as ambiguous as the movie would like it to be. Spoiler Alert - the serial killer is the monster. There is no doubt in my mind about that.

This movie sort of piggybacks on Chan-Wook Park's vengeance trilogy (the killer is even played by the star of Park's Oldboy), but doesn't explore the idea of revenge quite as thoughtfully, in my opinion. And while the camera work, music, and acting are all top notch, there are some things I found incredibly difficult to watch, and not in a good way. There's a "dinner" scene in particular that exploits the horror of cannibalism beyond the bounds of decency, even for shock cinema. I never thought I'd find myself longing for the delicate sensibilities of Serbian cinema.

Next week brings us another good cinematic haul - notably Jane Eyre (!), Battle: Los Angeles, and Red Riding Hood.

Scenes Made of Awesome - Out of Sight

2011-03-01T19:04:00.000-08:00

In honor of this movie's Blu-Ray release today, I thought I'd give a shout-out to one of my favorite love scenes of all time. George Clooney was still best known for being Dr. Ross on E.R. Jennifer Lopez was still an actress, and her "J.Lo" days were a few years away. And director Steven Soderbergh was still an indie guy, a few years away from the critical success of Traffic and the commercial successes of his Ocean's movies.

In the 1998 film Out of Sight, Clooney plays Jack Foley, a bank robber, and Lopez plays Karen Sisco, a U.S. Marshal. They have a connection while sharing the trunk of a car after one of Foley's escape attempts, and Sisco pursues Foley as a U.S. Marshal pursuing a criminal, but she may have other motives as well. Foley tracks her down in a Detroit hotel, and what follows is this scene, where they try and figure out how to explore their attraction to one another.

The editing in this scene is where the magic is, taking the scene in the bar and the scene in the bedroom and weaving them together. I compared it once to the love scene in Don't Look Now, and apparently Soderbergh did style his scene after that one. The sense I get from Foley and Sisco in this scene is that, despite the difficulties their prospective careers pose to any kind of relationship, there's an inevitability about their being together, however briefly. They're sitting there talking, but it's as if they're already in bed together.

"Well, there it is."

2011-02-24T03:13:00.000-08:00

The target of perfection at which posing, period "Oscar bait" pictures shoot in vain.

Amadeus

I was 9 years old when this movie came out in 1984, and my parents went to see it without me (I would discover it on television soon after). I remember that they dressed up as if they were going to the theater and were appalled that people had shown up to the cinema in jeans and shorts. To see a movie about MOZART, forsooth! They talked rapturously about it with my piano teacher, and I listened jealously. This was a point in my life when I was completely unaware of the Oscars and the honors lavished on this film the next spring. But this has been a very important movie to me for most of my life, and it's a case of a great movie that has only gotten better with age (both the movie's age and my own).

My first vivid memory of the film was always the horror of the Salieri's suicide attempt, which for the longest time I could not watch - a fact that seems hilarious to me now. There are many moments in the film, though, that have lived in my memory for a long, long time. At the center of this fantastic movie are two phenomenal performances. F. Murray Abraham (Salieri) and Tom Hulce (Mozart) would each go on to be nominated for Academy Awards, and when Abraham won, he paid tribute to his co-star and on-screen rival by saying that the only thing missing from the experience was having Hulce standing at his side.

The first thing to note about this film, which was written by Peter Shaffer (who also wrote Equus), adapted from his own 1979 play, is that it is not a biography. It is a highly fictionalized story about real people. Mozart's (and Salieri's) music is heavily featured throughout and is an essential piece of the storytelling. Perhaps more than anything else, though, what it is "about" is the nature of genius and the appreciation of it. It may be a cliche to say that a true genius is never appreciated in his/her own time, but I have to say that seeing this film again in the context of an Oscar season puts a fascinating new spin on it. With all the arguments over what the "best" film of the year is and many people feeling (as if this is anything new) that the frontrunner is merely a sentimental favorite rather than a genuinely great work, I can't help thinking of Mozart and Salieri. One was perhaps the greatest composer who has ever lived but, at least as the film portrays him, he was not the most popular composer of his day because he was ahead of his time in so many ways and because he was not a toady of the Emperor's Court. The other man had musical talent - was quite good in fact - and received many honors and accolades while he lived but was all but forgotten by history (until Shaffer's play and the film brought him back to people's attention). Salieri receives medals and commendations by the Emperor who calls one of his works "the greatest opera yet written." Mozart, on the other hand, sees his own opera, La Nozze di Figaro (arguably his greatest work), pilloried and parodied on the vaudeville stage as if it were part of one of those awful pop culture pastiche movies like Not Another Teen Movie. Mozart obviously got the better deal in the long run, but we can only see that conclusion through the long lens of history.

I won't go through a play-by-play of the film, because there is far too much to say. I will just leave you with my two favorite moments from the film, both of which are key musical moments as well. In the first, we're watching the premiere of La Nozze di Figaro. Salieri, despite his resentment, cannot but marvel at the beauty of the piece. Abraham's narration is absolutely perfect here, putting each word in precisely the right place in the music so that he only adds and never takes away from it. This part of the opera, by the way, is probably my favorite piece of music ever, I'm sure in no small part due to the meaning Abraham gives to it in this scene.

Of course, before we can get too carried away, there is that yawn which changes the tone utterly and irrevocably, followed by another scene that spookily mirrors the film criticism world (to me, anyway). Salieri suggests that Mozart's opera was too long, and that he should have given the audience a big bang at the end of songs to let them know when to clap. I've seen loads of film critics say comparable things about films, to say nothing of snap judging a film because it doesn't have "X" or "Y" in it. Or, you know, snap judging at all (Incidentally, I think Twitter has been the worst thing to happen to film criticism in a great many years - how can you possibly judge something adequately before you've had a chance to think about it?).

And then there is this moment. I don't know how much you may know about sound mixing. I'm pretty ignorant about it myself, but it's really hard not to see how massively important it is to this scene (and the one embedded above, for that matter). Mozart, on his sickbed, is dictating part of his Requiem, specifically the "Confutatis," to Salieri. You hear each piece of the whole by itself, as Mozart dictates, and when he finally looks at the whole thing you hear it all together and can see what each little piece brings to the whole. I've heard this piece of music many, many times since first seeing this film, and I never fail to marvel at all those amazing little pieces.

There is a director's cut of this, which adds a great deal of character development, but which doesn't flow quite as well as the theatrical cut, in my opinion. This is a perfect film in every way. If you have not yet seen it, by all means do so. It is definitely not one of those "eat your spinach, it's good for you" period movies. It is bold and hilarious and moving and is a movie I could watch again and again and again. Even if you have resisted because you don't like classical music, this film could very well make you a newborn fan.

Final Girl Film Club - Frozen

2011-02-20T04:09:00.000-08:00

February's Final Girl Film Club is the ski lift chiller (*rimshot*) Frozen.

BRRRRRRRRR!

I'm tweaking a previous review here, but giving it a bit more context. I was fortunate enough to see this at Butt-Numb-A-Thon (BNAT) in Austin (held at the Alamo Drafthouse) in December 2009, about a month before it made a more official bow at Sundance. This film played roughly 2/3 of the way through our 24-hour cinematic journey (roughly 2am) - the 8th film out of a total 12 - and was sandwiched between Jean-Pierre Jeunet's then-new film Micmacs and the banned Shaw Brothers flick Centipede Horror. (NOTE: Centipede Horror is not to be confused with Tom Six's The Human Centipede; Centipede Horror has REAL centipedes, not to mention flaming zombie chickens.) We'd had a couple of mild forays into semi-horror already that evening, with Shutter Island and The Lovely Bones, and everyone expected great things from Adam Green, the guy who made Hatchet and who showed up and braved a probably very ripe-smelling and farty room to personally introduce the film to us.

As with most of the films over the 24 hours, this one was preceded by some appropriate vintage trailers.

The Ski Bum

and

Hot Dog: The Movie

I love the Alamo Drafthouse.

So anyway ... FROZEN.

This movie is about three young people - a guy, his girlfriend, and his best friend - who go for a short ski trip. They spend most of the day on the bunny slopes, because the girlfriend is not an experienced skier, and the guys decide to go up again that evening by themselves to do some real skiing. After some arguments and hurt feelings, however, the girlfriend ends up going with them, and they get stuck on the chair lift while the place shuts down for the week.

Okay, so let's get the implausibilities out of the way, because they are many and pretty egregious. These kids must have driven a car to this place (though it's possible they took a shuttle). If they drove, someone would have noticed an extra car and asked whose it was, realizing that someone could still be on the mountains, possibly even trying to get a free night's stay or extra skiing they didn't pay for. Second, no skiing establishment is that lackadaisical about people being on the chair lift or on the mountain. You wouldn't be able to bamboozle someone into letting you on the chair lift without paying in the first place, and you certainly wouldn't have one solitary chair lift operator be the final word in whether everyone was down from the lift and the mountain. There are way too many precautions in place at ski resorts for what happens in this movie to happen. Third, wolves don't hang out where there are loads of people skiing.

HOWEVER. Forget about all that for a minute. What if you DID get stuck on a chair lift and there was no way down and no one would find you for several days? If you take it from there, this is a pretty fantastic scary movie about the series of bad decisions you might make in the huge effort to get out alive. Decisions that are bound to be further hampered by the extreme cold weather and its effect on your brain.

The first huge mistake is made when the boyfriend decides to try and jump down, however much it might injure him. Well, it injures him a hell of a lot. Both his legs snap (there were some excellent sound effects in this film, by the way), and when he tries to move himself, he just injures himself exponentially more and more. A wolf finds him and eventually leaves after a stare-down, but this is not a victory for our poor broken-legged hero. Oh no. The wolf went and got a few friends and they proceed to eat him alive while his girlfriend and best friend can only listen to his screams and do their best not to watch from above. This was fairly affecting to me, actually, as the guy screams to his best friend not to dare let the girlfriend look. Story issues aside, there was still some pretty great acting in this, I have to say.

The rest of the movie alternates between the girlfriend and best friend blaming each other, consoling each other, and making fresh attempts to get out of this situation. Strangely, they make little attempt to huddle together and actually keep each other warm, which might have been helpful. And I can't figure out why the girl, after losing one of her gloves, didn't pull her coat sleeve over her bare hand. That would have saved a lot of pain, especially when she wakes up with her bare hand frozen to the safety bar.

OWWWWWWWW!

The movie manages to be very effective, though, despite it's implausibility issues, and was one of the better examples of audience reaction of the evening. A woman in our audience actually FAINTED during this movie (she was alright, by the way, just overcome by the movie, it seems). This was probably the most talked about film at the post-BNAT dinner and party. Several in our crowd were from Minnesota and had HUGE issues with its plausibility. But there was no doubt that it made an impact.

Regardless, though, if you can let go of the need for accuracy and credibility, it's a pretty dang good scary movie.

The Oscar Time Capsule

2011-02-01T03:25:00.000-08:00

Kristopher Tapley, of InContention.com, is a critic who frequently infuriates me, but who just as frequently allows the clouds of whiny punditry to part and lets the logic shine through. Case in point, this article about the inevitability of The King's Speech's frontrunner status, how that status was decided not just in the last week but at the end of the summer (when it received a five-minute standing ovation at its Telluride Film Festival premiere), and how that status (coupled with disappointment over The Social Network's fading star) is starting an inevitable backlash.

One thing to remember is the difference between these supposed early indicators - the critics groups and the Hollywood Foreign Press who put on the Golden Globes (all of which are pretty small groups of people) - and the real meat of the season - the guild awards and the Academy (each of whose membership runs at the several-thousand mark). The Social Network is an exquisite film that does exactly what it sets out to do, but the buzz around it became built up to the point of hyperbole in the early weeks of campaigning, mostly due to Rolling Stone's Peter Travers and his comment about "defining a generation" (which, by the way, I don't think is true, but that's a whole 'nother post). Meanwhile, if you stepped back from the stats and actually talked to Academy members (obviously, I didn't do this personally, but I've read a great deal of commentary from those who have), upon mentioning The King's Speech, you'd see many, many of them get that far away look in their eyes and gush like a teenager with a life-defining crush. People really love this movie. So do I. The "Camptown Races" bit brings me to tears every --- damn, there I go again.

But of course, once a film starts to become the more obvious frontrunner, people will try to knock it down. It already happened with The Social Network, back in those heady days of its reign atop the prediction lists. If it's not historians or the real people involved complaining because it isn't a documentary and leaves things out (e.g., Bertie's support of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement and whether or not Mark Zuckerberg had an "Erica Albright" in his life when he started Facemash), then it's the screeching commenters claiming that if the movie wins (just talking about King's Speech now) it will be a blight on the Academy's history, which ... really, now. Rotten Tomatoes is probably not a completely objective measuring stick, but it's probably as good as we've got, and while The King's Speech doesn't have quite as high a rating as three of its Best Picture competitors - The Social Network, Toy Story 3, and Winter's Bone - at 88% fresh it is still "better" (whatever that means) than 2008's Best Picture Slumdog Millionaire, 2002's winner Chicago, and 2004's winner Million Dollar Baby. I mean, it's not like we're talking about the embarrassment of 1956 known (sadly) as "Best Picture winner Around the World in 80 Days," for crying out loud!

As exciting as the race is to watch, it doesn't ultimately mean anything, other than that whichever film wins will possibly make a bit more money - or, in the case of The Hurt Locker, maybe not. (Side note, loosely related: Harvey Weinstein, sensing victory in the air for The King's Speech and hence more money for the studio, is trying to edit the film to get a PG-13 so that more people will see it. Director Tom Hooper, for his part, has no intention of cutting anything, and his DGA plaque could give him some pull there. But they may add ... bleeps. *facepalm*)

The Oscars are a time capsule. They are, to paraphrase Amy Poehler's genius deadpanning at the SAGs, the opinion of a certain group of people at a certain time. The Academy is not five guys in a room somewhere, nor are they some all-ruling Taste Police. Was Rocky really the best film of 1976? I don't think so, but it caught the collective cultural consciousness that year in a big way even if history would grow more respect and affection for its stellar competitors Taxi Driver, Network, and All the President's Men. Was Titanic really a better film than L.A. Confidential and Good Will Hunting in 2007? I say no to L.A. Confidential, actually, unless you cut out that bullshit ending, but who cares, really? Loads of people (not just Leo fangirls but people in the industry) LOVED that movie. Personally, I really love that the Academy so often votes with its 6000 or so hearts rather than with its heads.

I do think there's something to Matt Damon's old suggestion that you really can't properly appraise a film's merits until it's at least 10 years old (though I disagree that we should wait that long to give awards). But hey, let's try it. Let's take a look at what was up for Best Picture 10 years ago...

Chocolat
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Erin Brockovich
Gladiator
Traffic

Dudes, I love Chocolat as much as the next red-blooded gal, but it had no place on that list. Nor did Erin Brockovich, if you ask me. Of course, if we were really doing this proper, those same five films would probably not be the final five in contention now. So let's look at some of the notable films that might or might not make that list if we were to make it today.

Almost Famous
American Psycho
Amores Perros
Battle Royale
Before Night Falls
Best in Show
Billy Elliot
Chicken Run
Croupier
Dancer in the Dark
In the Mood for Love
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Memento
Nurse Betty
O Brother, Where Art Thou
Quills
Requiem for a Dream
Sexy Beast
Unbreakable
Wonder Boys
You Can Count on Me
Sunshine

At a glance, I see at least a few among those titles that might get in due to their directors having done excellent work over the last decade and bringing new appreciation to their 2000 films. Specifically, I see the films of two current Best Director nominees, Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky) and O Brother, Where Art Thou (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen). Plus a third film by a director many feel should have been in that mix this year - Memento (Christopher Nolan). Two of those three could respectably replace Chocolat and Erin Brockovich in a list of 5, and if we're going for 10, let's throw in all three. Billy Elliot should probably be in there too (its director, on the other hand, probably wouldn't be in the Directing slate if we were doing this now). I'd round the 10 out with Almost Famous, Quills, and Wonder Boys. But that's just me. Those movies have, I think, stood the test of time and people enjoy and respect them as much as, if not more than, they did during the films' original releases.

I'd better not go further than that, because man, can you imagine how different the movie business would be if we waited that long to give out awards for a particular year? Not just to movies but to actors and craftspeople as well? I mean, you could stage a comeback off an "Oscar bump." That is, if the Oscars still had as much prestige and pressure around them if they were ten years behind the times.

But then again, I kind of like the way it is now, being able to look back over Oscar history and see, with pleasure or regret, the films that were loved and revered at the time. It's certainly nice to have your affection for a film validated by an award show like the Oscars. I mean, who among us LOTR wonks could forget the anxiety and excitement that accompanied the 2003 Middle Earth Oscar ceremony (and the subsequent laying down of crowbars after Return of the King's clean sweep)? But the films we love should be the films we love, regardless of what some voting body declares is awards-worthy.

One of my favorite things to read between last year's Oscar season and this one has been a column called "Life Without Oscar," also on InContention.com. Chad Hartigan went through each Oscar year and picked one film that didn't receive a single nomination and highlighted it as an example that the Oscars are not the be-all and end-all of what a great movie is. There's a good deal of snooty arthouse fare among his posts, but there's also "Kindergarten Cop" and "What's Up, Doc" - just to give you a feel of the range of titles. :P

Not that it matters, since I don't get to vote on the Oscars, but my Best Picture pick of the ten nominees THIS year would be Black Swan, with Aronofsky as Best Director. Obviously, I always knew there'd be no way in hell my FAVORITE movie of the year would be in the race, even with ten nominees. :P But hey, you love what you love. Don't let any stupid critics or award shows (or me, of course) tell you what's worth admiring.

Unless what you love and admire is Twilight, in which case ... I don't even.

Scenes Made of Awesome - Kill Bill, Vol. 2

2011-01-24T23:32:00.001-08:00

With all this hysteria over Red State, I was thinking about its star, Michael Parks. Parks is an actor, like Dick Miller, who should be way more famous than he is. He is best known lately from his work with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, namely his role as Sheriff Earl McGraw, which he has played in From Dusk Till Dawn, Planet Terror, Death Proof, and Kill Bill, Vol. 1. But it's his role in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 that I want to talk about, because I think it's my absolute favorite moment of that film.

Parks was not supposed to be in Vol. 2 at all. The Mexican pimp, Esteban Vihaio, was originally given to Ricardo Montalban. However, when Montalban missed a script reading, Parks happened to be on hand and Tarantino asked him to fill in and read the part. He was so good that QT decided then and there that he should play the part in the film, prompting David Carridine to later remark that he would never, ever miss one of Quentin's readings.

Here is Michael Parks as Esteban Vihaio, the last stop for The Bride on her way to the titular killing of Bill. I also really dig the music here, as it perfectly sets up this great moment.

Topsy-Turvy (1999)

2011-01-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

I was in the middle of writing a post on Mike Leigh's new film, Another Year, when I suddenly came over all nostalgic for my all-time favorite movie of his.

I can't even tell you how much I adore this movie. It is practically perfect in every way, chock full of details of the Victorian era (love the description of eleven-year-old Winston Churchill as "covered in freckles, and has a total disdain for authority"), overflowing with witty period dialogue ("And now, sir, I am going in search of some Italian hokey-pokey, and I care not who knows it."), and positively teeming with the wonderful music of Arthur Sullivan (often accompanied by the clever words of W.S. Gilbert).

One of the things I love the most about this movie is the level of painstaking research, which a film about people and stories familiar to so many could hardly have done without. Almost all of the characters are (or were, rather) real people and many elements of the story are based on historical events. No doubt some artistic license was taken (for instance, I believe "The Lost Chord" was written several years before it is presented as debuting in the film), but I get the impression that it was not a large amount for this movie. Mostly just filling in a few blanks, I should think.

There are lots of familiar faces here, three of them from Harry Potter films - Jim Broadbent as W.S. Gilbert, Timothy Spall as Richard Temple, and Shirley Henderson as Leonora Braham. Kevin McKidd, of Grey's Anatomy fame (and Rome and the short-lived Journeyman) plays lead performer Durward Lely, who cannot sing without his corset. Martin Savage (perhaps known better to you Brits) is beyond wonderful as the famous George Grossmith. LOTR fans may or may not recognize Andy Serkis as choreographer John D'Auban. Ron Cook plays D'Oyly Carte, owner of the Savoy Theater. Jim Broadbent's Another Year co-star Lesley Manville here plays his wife, "Kitty" Gilbert. And those of you who revere, as I do, the classic BBC production of Pride and Prejudice will recognize Mrs. Bennett (a/k/a Alison Steadman) as Madame Leon, the costumer. Another interesting Potter connection is that Alan Corduner, pictured below as Arthur Sullivan, has provided voice work for almost all of the Harry Potter video games, doing voices for Filch, Snape, and Flitwick.

The plot is your average backstage drama. We meet both Gilbert and Sullivan at the height of their popularity, after the successes of most of their well-known productions - The Pirates of Penzance, The Sorcerer, HMS Pinafore, Patience, Iolanthe ... you know, all those ones about duty (they're all about duty). Due to Sullivan's ill health and subsequent trip abroad, combined with a an impasse with Gilbert over the "topsy-turvydom" that defined most of their past work together (including Gilbert's latest libretto, which employs the use of a magic lozenge, thought by Sullivan to be too similar to the magical device in The Sorcerer), the Savoy Theatre which puts on their operas faces a dilemma. Their latest Gilbert and Sullivan opera, Princess Ida, is not as successful as previous efforts, owing both to the repetitive nature of the story and an especially hot London summer which has kept many patrons away. And for the first time since the theater opened, they will have no new opera to replace Ida when it closes (again, this is all based on the actual events and circumstances). Producer Richard D'Oyly Carte revives The Sorcerer to buy some time, but says in no uncertain terms that his theater is not in the business of revivals and that some compromise must be reached soon.

About this time, the Japanese Village in Knightsbridge opens, taking advantage of English fascination with Japan following the opening of trade between the countries. Gilbert reluctantly accompanies his wife to the exhibit in Humphreys' Hall, and after a katana sword he purchased there falls off its hanging place in his study, he is struck with inspiration. I love this scene in the movie, by the way. Broadbent takes the sword and play-acts the part of a samurai for a bit before setting it on the desk to be rehung later. The camera closes in on his face as he looks at the sword, and we hear the faint opening strains of "Behold the Lord, High Executioner" as the light of inspiration fills his eyes, followed by a peek at a song he is about to write from what will be his most successful collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, The Mikado.

Over the course of the rest of the film, we're introduced to various performers in the D'Oyly Carte company, as well as people working backstage, and see various rehearsals and costume fittings, peppered with musical numbers from the opera itself. And these, combined with the struggles in the first part of the film, serve to really invest the viewer in the success of the performance. That's a difficult thing to pull off, but it works remarkably well here. I love how the musical numbers of woven throughout, instead of just a concert dump in the third act. For example, the scene pictured above is a performance of "Three Little Maids," which we see in rehearsal. Gilbert brings in three Japanese women to watch the original choreography, which is cute but not remotely Japanese. He then has the three women replace the actresses and move down the stage, which they do very timidly and gigglingly, and which inspires the eventual staging of the scene, which we see immediately after that rehearsal.

There are many standout scenes, but two in particular that I'm even more fond of than the rest. First is the scene where the ladies and gentlemen of the chorus persuade Gilbert to reinstate a previously cut solo, the only solo that had been written for the eponymous Mikado (who is played by Temple, a/k/a Timothy Spall). The second, and undoubtedly my favorite scene in the film, is very near the end, where Kitty Gilbert talks with her husband about the Mikado opening night and attempts to reach out and, well, woo her husband. The entire history of their marriage is written in this scene and on Lesley Manville's sad but hopeful face. Theirs is not a loveless marriage, but it is a childless and apparently a sexless one. They sleep in separate rooms, and presumably always have. Victorian propriety and probably personal awkwardness have kept them from any kind of intimacy, and what's strange is that you get the impression that each of them would like to have that kind of relationship, but they seem to have lived in polite frigidity so long that neither of them knows how to go about it. A beautiful scene, and a heartbreaking one.

This is getting a Criterion release this March with lots of tantalizing special features (*bounces*), but you can also see it for free on Hulu, if you don't mind the occasional commercial interruption. If you have ever been involved in any way with the theater or enjoy backstage tales like Shakespeare in Love or A Chorus Line, I would highly, highly recommend it. It is rated R, for "a scene of risque nudity" which isn't terribly essential to the story, but I think is a significant moment of character sketching.

I leave you with one of many brilliantly written and performed scenes from this delightful movie - and another example of how the songs are juxtaposed with the backstage moments. Watch how Kevin McKidd gets even Scottish-er at the peak of his anger. :P

Blue Valentine

2010-12-30T16:47:00.000-08:00

This film has gotten a lot of attention since its Sundance debut nearly a year ago. Unfortunately, perhaps the thing it's best known for is receiving an NC-17 rating from the MPAA ratings board that was appealed and changed to an R rating, thankfully without the need for cutting any content. I saw this in a sold out theater - one of only two in New York - and the director, Derek Cianfrance, introduced it at our screening, having led a Q&A after the previous show. He was so excited to see a room full of enthusiastic people wanting to see this movie he spent the last 12 years trying to make that he took a picture.

I love living here. :) ANYWAY, the film.

If you're looking for the bottom line, I'd call this more of an actor's setpiece (and it's a truly extraordinary one) than a total package kind of movie. That's not a slight on the film or the director at all, but this film (for me, at least) is all about raw emotional power rather than stunning camera work and storytelling. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams do some amazingly heartbreaking work here, and they deserve all the accolades they're currently enjoying in this year's nascent awards circuit.

The first thing we see is the start of an average day in the home of Dean and Cindy and their daughter Frankie (who is possibly the most adorable and guileless child I have seen in any film, ever). Already you can sense some tension in this little family. This becomes a rough morning fairly quickly, and you can tell this is nothing new for Dean and Cindy. Over the course of the film, we'll follow them through two hellish days of their marriage, wherein they will try - and utterly fail - to keep things together and rekindle the magic. And the worst part of it is that there's no telling how many times this has happened before.

But that's only half of the film. The other half is set six years earlier, when Dean and Cindy first meet and fall in love. This is the sweetness that tempers the bitter of the other section, but it's got its own kind of sadness. See, Dean and Cindy aren't soulmatey made-for-each-other lovebirds. They're into each other, but you can tell from the beginning that they don't feel the same way about one another. Dean says early on in the film that he thinks men are more romantic than women. That men marry because they fall in love and have to be with that person, while women marry more pragmatically and calculatedly, because it's the right time and this is the right guy with whom to start the kind of life they want. This strikes me as rather childish and simplistic, but I definitely think that Dean is more romantic than Cindy about their particular relationship. Dean falls head over heels for Cindy, who is coming to this relationship with all kinds of baggage, and Cindy marries him because he's the most appealing option at the time. And that, to me, is the most heartbreaking thing about the entire movie. Because I don't think there is anything more soul-destroying than being completely in love with someone who ... well, they like you a lot, but they just don't feel about you the way you feel about them.

Of course, six years later, they're both a mess, because they're completely wrong for each other, which is not a deal breaker for every couple, but if you're not both willing to work on it, there's no amount of romantic chemistry that can make up for that. Dean is not the ideal husband. He drinks, for one thing, and is more of a peer for his child than a parent. But when Cindy asks him what he wants to "do" with his life, you can't not love him for answering that all he wants to "do" is be a husband and a father, and that what she would call gainful employment is just a way to make money so he can come home and be with them and do his real job.

Now, about Cindy. I was frankly disturbed by the slut-shaming mutterings of the girls sitting next to me during this movie. No, I don't think 13 years old is the ideal time to lose one's virginity, and yes, I do think that 25 sexual partners (which is only Cindy's best guess) in the space of about ten years is ... rather a lot. But every time the girls next to me said "slut" about Cindy, I wanted to smack them. Because we've been through this, people - slut is just a name for someone who's having more sex than you're personally comfortable with, and using it says more about you than the so-called slut you're shaming. *ahem* Moving on.

Though blame can be laid at both Cindy's and Dean's feet, I can't help feeling that Cindy ... well, no, I can't do that. Dean is trying harder than she is to make the marriage work, but she's trying to make their life work, and that's a huge, thankless job. And on top of that, she's trying to achieve something for herself. She's exactly the kind of woman that Dean described before, though. She married him because she couldn't bear to have an abortion and he was there and was so in love with her that he wanted to make a family with her, even though the child she was carrying was most likely not even biologically his. Dean is trying to make things work between them, but he can only do so much. Cindy is a dutiful partner, but it is obvious that this is a toxic relationship for her. There are moments, and I'm sure she's not the first person to feel this way about her spouse, where she just has to walk away and just be like "get out of my face, I just want to not have to see you for two minutes together."

A lot has been said about the sexual content in this movie, but I don't think it's gratuitous or excessive. It's realistic, rather than softly lit and romanticized, and it does what all sex scenes *should* do, which is inform the characters. It really underscores what it means for each character in a way that dialogue just can't. This is a good example of the MPAA appeals board doing the right thing with a rating. Because context matters. And I think if there is anything in the film that someone is too young to understand, they're probably not going to notice it anyway, frankly. That's just the nature of this film, I think.

Anyway, good, good movie, but if you're a Plot Person you might not be satisfied with it, because it's more of an intense character/relationship study than a traditional narrative film.

My Top 10 of 2010

2010-12-28T04:41:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again! Time for all the real critics to post their much more meaningful Top 10 lists and time for me to mimic them, like a child playing dress-up in mommy's clothes and high-heels. Again, as in previous years, this is not my notion of "the best" or "most awards worthy" films of the year, but it's a little more complicated than just a list of my favorites. I genuinely feel that each of these films is a great total package and more than just a good time at the movies or a great performance or good writing.

"Did you ever want to be a proper politician in your own right?"

"Of course. Didn't you want to be a proper writer?"

10. The Ghost Writer (original review here)

It's past the point of cliche now to say that "They don't make them like they used to." But here is Roman Polanski, a filmmaker in his seventies, making them exactly like he used to, like he hasn't for decades. This is a real meat-and-potatoes thriller for grown-ups, without the frills and audience grabbing tactics of modern films of the genre but overflowing with the solid storytelling skills so many of those films sorely lack. This film excels on pretty much every level - writing, acting, and technical. Ewan McGregor gives the film its foundation with a modest, understated performance, but Dollhouse's Olivia Williams is the standout.

"Jessup and me run together for comin' on forty years, but I don't know where he's at, and I ain't gonna go around askin' neither."

9. Winter's Bone

A film that, like so many of its characters, keeps its cards close to its chest. Ree Dolly has a seemingly simple task - track down her missing father. But the reason she needs to find him and the obstacles in her way are eked out slowly and brilliantly over the course of this remarkable film. The most fascinating aspect of this film to me is the unique role that women play in how this particular subculture deals with Ree as a potential threat who happens to be female. This is a hard film to categorize (though the climax takes it almost into the horror genre), and that's kind of its genius for me.

"You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can't be sure. But it doesn't matter - because we'll be together."

8. Inception

I struggled with whether to include this, because I feel that once I got the hang of the mechanics of the movie - the dream levels and how they work - a lot of the magic was gone. I found myself less excited by my second viewing, and while everyone around me was hashing it out and discussing it, I just didn't feel like I had anything to say. But the more I thought about it, the more I found that what makes it memorable for me is not the mind-bending dream world - not even, as amazing as it is, Joey Gordon-Levitt doing his zero gravity thing - but the fact that, stripped of all its gimmickry, it's this moving love story. Sure, all these other characters are brought into it, but the impetus for the entire setup is Cobb's grief and guilt over his wife's death and his desparate need to get back to his kids.

"How do I get a hold of you?"

"You just contact the mayor's office. He has a special signal he shines in the sky. It's in the shape of a giant c**k."

7. Kick-Ass (original review here)

I will readily concede that part of my affection for this movie has to do with the amazing screening it had at BNAT last year. But while no screen audience comes close to the enthusiasm and appreciation of a BNAT audience, pretty much every "normal" audience I saw this with had a similar appreciation for it. It wasn't as successful as it should have been, but I think that, like Scott Pilgrim, this will gain a pretty substantial following in the coming years as people discover it at home. This is a movie that speaks to our culture's fascination with celebrity and what draws us to superhero stories in particular, and it does it irreverently, humorously, and intelligently (no matter what its detractors say). It might have been an even more compelling story if, as was originally intended, it had revolved around Hit Girl and Big Daddy. But its hard to argue against the focus on Dave/Kick-Ass. He's the viewer's proxy and the reason it's as thoughtful a film as it is.

"I hold out little hope for you winning your bounty ... My man'll beat you to it. I have hired a Deputy Marshal, the toughest one they have."

6. True Grit (2010)

It seems like every new film that Joel and Ethan Coen make feels like an odd decision at first, and this was no exception. Taking a classic that has perhaps been better remembered than it ought to be and remaking it seemed a bizarre choice, even for these unconventional filmmakers. Focusing the film on a precocious and wise-beyond-her-years child character was a bit risky as well, as those characters can so frequently be off-putting (*raises a knowing eyebrow to Dakota Fanning*). The result, however, is a genuine masterpiece and a noble addition to the ranks of The Searchers, The Magnificent Seven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Shane, and other great westerns, in whose company this new True Grit need not be ashamed. Bravo, Messrs. Coen, Bridges, and Damon, and especially Miss Steinfeld.

"You better lawyer up, asshole, because I'm not just coming back for 30%, I'm coming back for everything."

5. The Social Network (original review here)

I don't think it's incidental that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin chose to title this film The Social Network, rather than use the title of the book on which the script is based (The Accidental Billionaires). This could not be a clearer attempt by Sorkin to mimic the work of his idol (and mine), Paddy Chayefsky, and Chayefsky's beyond brilliant script for the 1976 film Network. Few films in recent memory have dealt more closely with the kind of world we live in today. Not just our interactions on social networking sites, but the nature of the business world, where it's not so much being the first to have an idea but having the talent to take a good idea and make it bigger and better. And how lonely it must be to be that kind of person. People who aren't plugged in to Facebook and other networking platforms might not relate to a lot of this movie, but the final shot of the film is one of the most human moments I've seen in a film in this or any other year. Refresh, refresh, refresh...

"Please don't do that. ... I believe sucking smoke into your lungs will kill you."

"My physicians say it relaxes the throat."

"They're idiots."

"They've all been knighted."

"Makes it official, then."

4. The King's Speech (original review here)

At first glance, this looks like an Oscar war horse. It's British, it's a period costume drama, it's set just before World War 2, and it features a character trying to overcome or at least deal with a disability. In other words, it's right in the Academy's wheelhouse. This film is much, much more than that. The Big Scenes in the film get all the attention, but they would mean nothing without the little moments that build up to them. This is not a movie centered on a disability (sorry, Harry Knowles, but you are wrong about that); it is a movie about a friendship and a king's duty as a symbol for his country during some of the most difficult times in our world's history.

"Now Woody, he's been my pal for as long as I can remember. He's brave, like a cowboy should be. And kind, and smart. But the thing that makes Woody special is he'll never give up on you ... ever. He'll be there for you, no matter what"

3. Toy Story 3 (original review here)

How - HOW - did Pixar take a movie trilogy about toys and teach us about our own lives and human frailty? The first film showed us a world where toys not only talked but had feelings; they could fear being mishandled by a malicious child and, most significantly, they could feel jealous of newer, cooler toys, much like a child feels jealous of a new sibling. The second film took it a step further, showing us toys who fear their eventual neglect as their child outgrows them. And the third film takes it even further, showing us what happens to these toys when they are eventually cast aside, in a setting that is somewhat analogous to a nursing home. Not only that, but having them face their own mortality and be, in a way, resurrected as they find a new life with a new child. As strange as it seems, though, the toy box is a rather perfect metaphor, since as children we act out what we know of life with our own toys. If this is what Pixar can do with sequels, I frankly can't wait to see what they can do with new chapters in the Cars and Monsters, Inc. universes.

"I just want to be perfect."

2. Black Swan (original review here)

The best High Horror film since Silence of the Lambs? Quite possibly. A critic I follow said that the two overarching themes of films this year (as far as his responses to them were concerned) were 1) art, and how artists create it, and 2) human frailty. This film is a brilliant meditation on both of those themes. Natalie Portman's struggle to play a dual role in Swan Lake and her eventual descent into madness vacillates from the humorous to the horrifying. We are appalled by the lengths she goes to to achieve her art, but we are nonetheless fascinated and full of admiration for her achieving it. The thing about art is that is it important enough for people to want to give their whole selves, their sanity, their health and well being, and perhaps even their lives in pursuit of it, and even though we might hate to see people suffer like that, the scariest thing is ... isn't it worth it to create something of true beauty?

And now...

L...

"Such a beautiful place .. to be ... with friends."

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I (scattered thoughts here)

I realize that for some people this choice may invalidate the entire list, but this is my list and there is seriously not one film this year from which I derived more joy or meaning. I am forever grateful that I encountered Rowling's books and these films precisely as I did, and whatever remakes the future might hold, these particular films will always be entwined for me with the books and my own fandom experiences. I think all of the films prior to this have their peculiar mix of virtues and faults, but as I said earlier this year, there is not one thing about this movie I don't like, even after five viewings. Every aspect of filmmaking has gone up several steps with this one, and kudos to them for just going for the best adaptation of this particular book that was possible, regardless of whatever setups and clues from the earlier books they neglected in earlier films in the series.

SPECIAL MENTION

"You're a porn actor who wants to know what a porn film is about?"

A Serbian Film (original review here - by all means, click if you're curious, but DO NOT GOOGLE THIS FILM)

I could not, in good conscience, even think about giving this a number on any kind of list. But at the end of the day, no other film this year - in my life, I expect - has had a bigger impact on how I watch movies, how I think about them, and how I talk and write about them. This is a truly shocking, boundary-pushing film, but an intelligent and very well made one. I'm rather surprised at all the people calling shenanigans on the metaphor, because if you are paying attention to anything besides the shocks it is splattered all over the film, especially the dialogue. These filmmakers are mad as hell, and they express that feeling in a piece of extraordinary political and pornographic rage. I'm not sure director Srdjan Spasojevich and his co-writer Aleksander Radivojevich could ever top this (and I don't really think I want them to), but I'm excited and frankly a bit horrified to see what they do next.

Final Girl Film Club - Sugar Hill

2010-12-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

Time for another round of Final Girl Film Club! This month's selection is the blaxploitation zombie flick Sugar Hill. Indicentally, the neighborhood in Harlem where I live is called Sugar Hill, so I felt a connection to this movie right off the bat. Also, this is a Samuel Z. Arkoff and AIP production (that's American International Pictures, not Amazingly Idiotic Productions), and if that name means anything to you, a) you probably watch too much MST3K, and b) this movie probably just jumped up several points on your AwesomeMeter.

The film begins with what appears to be a voodoo ritual - drums, dancing, chicken blood, you probably know the drill. The natives are voodoo-ing to the particularly groovy strains of "Supernatural Voodoo Woman" by The Originals - a song that's a bit too slow for what's going on, until - wait a minute. It's not an actual voodoo ritual. The lights have come up now and what we've just been watching is the floor show at the popular Club Haiti.

We meet Diana Hill (aka "Sugar") and her man Langston, who owns the club. They are a loving pair, which is good because this is the only opportunity the movie is going to offer us to be invested in their relationship at all. Some thugs come around, talking trash, and Sugar begs Langston not to provoke them - "I just don't want anything to happen to mah man," she says. But lo, something does happen to her man, and the thugs, all white men except for the pimptastic Fabulous (yes, that is his name) beat Langston to death.

Sugar swears revenge and goes to visit Mama Maitresse (which may, in fact, just be a fancy name for "mattress") to order up some zombie-style retribution. Mama Maitresses (played by Zara Cully, aka Mother Jefferson) conjurs up this guy, Baron Samedi (played by the disturbingly cheerful Don Pedro Colley)...

...who commands a gang of zombies who, when they lived, were plantation slaves who died of fever. These dead-heads, it must be said, are fairly awesome zombies. Sugar is told "Put them to evil use; it's all they know or want." These are happy zombies, and you can tell because they SMILE. CREEPY! Perhaps even creepier - they have shiny ping-pong ball eyeballs that make them look like bugs.

So Sugar summons the zombies, who are much more like Inferi than traditional zombies in that they don't just shuffle and eat; they actually do someone's bidding. The zombies kill the guys who killed Langston, and that's pretty much the story. The script, when not dealing with the zombies, is pretty painfully bad, though the actors do what they can with it. What sets this apart are the aforementioned zombies and some rather unique kills. My favorite is when Sugar uses voodoo to make one of the guys stab himself. And once it's down to just the main bad guy, we pan around the group of zombies and his recently killed cronies are among their number! So not only has Sugar killed them, she now commands them to do her will!

There are so many things to love about this movie, but the greatest and strangest is Sugar's two separate identities, the purpose of which is never really addressed. All I know is that Sugar looks like this when she's not doing zombie things.

And like this when she's an ass-kicking zombie queen.

There may be something metaphorical there, but that's probably giving the filmmakers way too much credit.

There are definitely problems with this movie, but what works REALLY works. Sugar Hill is, in 70s parlance, DYNAMITE!

Black Swan

2010-12-04T23:27:00.000-08:00

I'm still working out exactly how I feel about this movie - meaning that I'm trying to figure out if I merely love it or OMG LOVE it. I'm leaning toward the latter. There was something about the very end that was ... I don't want to say unsatisfactory, but it wasn't quite the "woaaaah" I was expecting after the twenty minutes that immediately preceded it. Twenty minutes which, I must say, make up perhaps the most perfect movie climax I've seen on a movie screen this year. Period.

Natalie Portman plays Nina, a professional ballet dancer in New York. She's been with the company for a long time, and you get the impression that if she were going to break out and get lead roles it would have happened by now. It's not that she's not a good dancer - she has great skill and technique - but she's not a Star. Still, when the company's prima ballerina, Beth (Winona Ryder) is pressured into retirement, the director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassell) needs a new face. He picks out a few girls to audition for his reimagining of Swan Lake, and he is going to pick one girl to play the dual role of the White Swan and the Black Swan. He tells Nina, in as many words, that if he were only casting the White Swan it would be hers. But the Black Swan is supposed to seduce the Prince, and he doesn't see the seductress in her at all. She manages to persuade him, however, during a private moment in his office, and she gets the one role every ballet dancer dreams of.

The problem, though, is that her persuasive moment in Thomas's office, was just that - a moment. She knows the steps, but she can't find the inner siren, no matter how impatient Thomas gets with her (or how many times he tries to kiss and grope her and bring that out of her again). Meanwhile, there's a new girl in the company named Lily (played by Mila Kunis). She's everything that Nina is not - she's confident and sexy but lacking in technique, she's got an attitude, she smokes, she eats hamburgers, she's frequently late for rehearsal, etc. Thomas points Lily out to Nina, though, as an example of the passion he wants to see in her Black Swan. Nina becomes paranoid that Lily is trying to steal her role, and the two of them have quite an uneasy relationship, but she's also kind of drawn to her (though not exactly in the way you might be thinking). The stress of trying to develop the dual role of the White Swan and the Black Swan drives Nina to the brink (beyond it, actually) of psychosis and self loathing, pushing her to an opening night performance that starts as a failure and becomes an utter revelation. And that's where I'd better stop with regard to story.

The film's crowning jewel, without a doubt, is the last approximately twenty minutes, which involve the opening night performance. And I'll have to be vague as heck because this is spoiler territory. Most of these "backstage melodrama" films have the big performance scene or sequence and they can occasionally be thrilling but usually only serve to weigh a film down. Not here. Oh no. The whole film has been building to this climax of Nina's inner demons and watching what she goes through to be what she needs to be for each act of the ballet took my breath away.

For some reason, although I'm usually quite the spoiler whore, I was quite scrupulous about spoilers for this movie. I watched the trailer once, then immediately watched it again, and was so intrigued that I decided then and there that that was all I wanted to know about the movie until I saw the whole thing for myself. I'm still not sure whether that really made any difference or not. Possibly the thing I love best about this movie is that it's not a "Gotcha!" kind of movie. It's not a movie built on twists. There are reveals, to be sure, but they're not of that nature. There are clear indications early on that things aren't what they seem and that Aronofsky is engaging in some metaphor. I was reminded a bit of movies like Jacob's Ladder and The Shining, where you're never entirely sure what's real and what's not. And maybe the greatest thing is that a lot of the time there's not really a right answer to that.

This is, at its most basic, a horror movie. It's been compared to David Cronenberg's work (I think The Fly and The Brood are the most comparable), but there's a lot more going on here than a body horror comparison will cover. It's been compared to Dario Argento's work, but while it's about people in the arts (specifically, about ballet dancers, as Argento's Suspiria was), it's still more than that. Nina isn't just a ballerina dealing with the pressure of her first major role and the other struggles that accompany her career in general. She's a woman trying to claim her identity, and while we may not all be ballet dancers, that is something at least that we can all relate to. And I think we can all agree that it can often be scary as hell. Okay, maybe not quite as scary as Nina's experiences, but frightening nonetheless.

I'd love to talk about Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassell, and Mila Kunis, because the acting across the board is superb, but I'm afraid of making this even longer than it already is. So I'll leave it with a "These guys totally own!" and move on, because I have to say a bit about casting, particularly the casting of Winona Ryder and Natalie Portman.

Darren Aronofsky's casting choices can be downright uncanny commentaries on the actors themselves, perhaps none of them more so than Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. It's almost as if he wants an actor's baggage to add an extra layer to the character they're playing. I was especially intrigued by the choice of WInona Ryder to play the involuntarily retiring ballet dancer. She's not someone I can really imagine as a dancer, but that doesn't matter as we never see her dance in the film. What we do see are a few choice meltdowns. Ryder's real life drama a few years ago can't help but affect how you view her in the film, and I think this is at least half the reason she was cast. And having her play the fading star while Portman's character rises to take her place was kind of genius. Because in many ways Natalie Portman is, for her generation, what Winona Ryder was for hers when she was that age. And speaking of Natalie...

I don't think I'm alone in having found Natalie Portman's transition from child star to adult actor a trifle disappointing. She had a maturity beyond her years as a young girl. When she was in Beautiful Girls alongside Timothy Hutton, his character told hers that he was sure that when she grew up whatever she ended up doing with her life was going to be amazing. Audiences had a similar expectation for Natalie herself, I think, but her adult roles have been frequently flat (with a couple of exceptions). So it was only fitting for her to play this dancer who has skill but can't quite sell herself in a grown-up role. Any doubts on that score should be put to bed with this film. And yet what I love is that she isn't wildly different. She's not made up to look different, her voice is not suddenly more sultry or aggressive. She's not all of a sudden hardcore, like this gangster rapping self-parody she did on SNL.

WHAAAT!

She's simply using her instrument in a way that I'm convinced she's just never been asked to before. It's hard to even imagine something like "Hold me like you did on Naboo!" after seeing her in this. Her Nina in is a cut above every single lead female performance I've seen this year. (Yes, even you, Annette Bening. I know losing the Oscar to Swank twice has got to burn, but if you won this year, it would be an apology Oscar.) While still managing to make what she does look easy, Portman's performance is nevertheless a reminder that not everyone with a pretty face can be an actress. There's a fearlessness and a dedication to the role and the world of this film that I think have put her in another league of artistry altogether.

Excellent, excellent movie. Man, I love this time of year!

December Movie Releases

2010-12-02T01:53:00.000-08:00

Okay, here goes. The end of the year is nigh, and the studios have saved a lot of their best stuff for last and before the end of this week we'll start to get the first look at who the award show contenders are shaping up to be (*waves to the National Board of review*).

DECEMBER 3

[MUST-SEE] The Black Swan - [limited] I've watched the trailer twice by my own volition (and a few times in front of films it's been attached to), but I am determined to know as little as possible about this going in. There is ballet, body horror, and psychological terror. The director said this and his previous film The Wrestler were at one point all one movie. That's already more than I want to know. This has gotten some incredible buzz coming out of the festivals, and I cannot wait to see it. Darren Aronofsky is fast becoming one of the all-time greats. Another one in my "most anticipated" pile. I'm hoping to make it a triple feature with two other ballet-centric movies, The Red Shoes and Suspiria.

All Good Things - [limited] Now is the winter of our Ryan Gosling (with this and Blue Valentine coming out this month)! I've seen the trailer for this a few times, and I still can't figure out what it's about. Is it a love story about people from opposite sides of "the tracks"? Is is a story about a man's career and family heritage coming between him and his wife? Is it about a woman giving up everything about herself for her marriage? Is it (and this doesn't even come up until the last couple of seconds) a murder mystery? I'm waiting to hear more, even if more is just "trust me, you want to know as little as possible."

I Love You Phillip Morris - [LA/NY] I am downright furious at the treatment this film has gotten in the last several months. I've put this on I don't know how many drafts of the coming months' releases and it has kept getting pushed back. I saw it written in my old calendar for JULY. And it's as clear as day why this has happened - studios don't know how to sell Jim Carrey as a man in love with another man. I hope THIS time it actually sees the inside of a theater.

Night Catches Us - [LA/NY/Phil.] I have literally never heard of this film (which apparently premiered at Sundance in January) until today when it suddenly showed up on IMDB's "coming soon" page. This also just got nominated for Best First Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards. Anthony Mackie, who made a memorable supporting turn in The Hurt Locker, gets top billing in this, alongside Kerry Washington, as a man accused of orchestrating the murder of a Black Panther. This looks very interesting and has (judging from the trailer) some amazing music by The Roots. Sadly, however, this is exactly the kind of thing that slips through the cracks of my movie-watching. Hopefully, it will be playing somewhere in January during the nadir of good movies.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale - [NY] Last holiday season I amused myself while listening to "Here Comes Santa Claus" that the lyrics could be the tagline for a slasher flick - "Hang your stockings and say your prayers, 'cause Santa Claus is coming tonight - MUAHAHAHAHA!" The good people of Finland seem to have heard my giggling and have made a film about Santa as the boogeyman. Which, if you think about it, is not far off the mark.

The Warrior's Way - The trailer totally had me at "Ninjas ... damn." Ninja assassins AND Geoffrey Rush? God bless us every one, it's Christmas after all!

Meskada - [LA/NY] What is it with these movies popping up out of thin air on the release schedule?! Buzz on this is not good, despite the impressive cast (Nick Stahl, Walking Dead's Norman Reedus, and Grace Gummer (daughter of Meryl Streep, and I'm sure she loves people calling her that)).

DECEMBER 10 - BNAT WEEKEND OMG OMG OMG OMG! *ahem*

The Tourist - Something about Angelina Jolie's way-too-clean British accent is off-putting. But ... Johnny Depp. You know I'm there. :-) Also, the line about "upgrade it from room service" gets me every time I see the trailer.

The Tempest - Julie Taymor's film projects have been hit and miss, mostly miss for me. The film I like best of hers is Across the Universe, but it's still deeply flawed, in my opinion. This has not gotten good reception at all. I still think my favorite way of experiencing this particular Shakespeare play is the fantastic documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars. May watch that again instead and listen to the recording of Anne Hathaway and Audra McDonald singing "Full Phathom Five."

The Company Men - I could have sworn this was coming out a couple of months ago, and I may have even had it on one of the other months' posts. John Wells, the television producer who gave us E.R. and (*choir of angels singing*) The West Wing turns his eyes to films. The trailer breaks my heart, and it actually looks like even more of a "movie of the moment" than Up in the Air, with the focus on layoffs and trying to pick up the pieces and start one's life again.

The Fighter - [limited] After screening at AFI a few weeks ago, this has gotten all kinds of Oscar buzz. It's the kind of crowd-pleaser that would do well, even without the expanded Best Picture field. Most attention seems to be going to Christian Bale, though, rather than Wahlberg, the film's star. What is it about boxing movies that's so darned captivating?

Voyage of the Dawn Treader - I confess that I have read none of the Narnia books save The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, so I have no idea what to expect here. Except that I understand what little there is of shipping to be had in the series appears in this book. I'm not sure what it is about these films that strikes me as disappointing, but this looks more in the same a-cut-below vein.

DECEMBER 17

[MUST-SEE] TRON: Legacy - Possible BNAT premiere? It's 1982 predecessor screened at the very first BNAT. I appreciate the nostalgia for the original, and I do think it's rather cool, but I saw it relatively late in life, so I don't have the same reverence for it that the fanboys do. Still, it looks pretty wicked awesome. And how about that movie magic making Jeff Bridges look twenty-eight years younger?

Yogi Bear - No. I don't care who does the voices (Dan Ackroyd and Justin Timberlake, in this case). Thank goodness for Tron, otherwise this would make even more money than it probably still will.

Rabbit Hole - [limited] Nicole Kidman is apparently back in fine form in this grieving parent dramedy from John Cameron Mitchell (of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame). Everything I've seen and heard makes me want to see this even more. Perhaps no piece of marketing, however, is as brilliant as this poster. How amazing is that?!

Casino Jack - [limited] Wasn't there a documentary about Abramoff recently? This is getting pretty good buzz. I haven't seen a lot of Kevin Spacey lately, but it's good to see him ... back, I guess.

How Do You Know - It's hard to believe James L. Brooks has only directed five films before this in his entire career. He's been far too busy with "The Simpsons," I expect. But three of his five films are absolute classics - Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good as It Gets. I look forward to seeing this latest directorial offering. Except that I resent that idea that a woman of 27 is "a bit past her prime," as the IMDB synopsis puts it. Hmph.

DECEMBER 22

[MUST-SEE] True Grit - Now is also the winter of our Jeff Bridges. This looks so awesome it ought to be criminal, which usually means a movie is bound to disappoint, but the response to this week's secret screening has been incredible. I'll go ahead and say that I don't foresee it making a huge Oscar impact, since the Coens sweep for No Country for Old Men (another western) was just three years ago and Jeff Bridges won just last year. Honestly, though? I don't really care. This looks amazing and I can't freaking WAIT. *crosses fingers for a BNAT screening, though we'll probably get our Bridges fix with Tron instead*

[Side note: I was watching the first trailer recently that has the a cappella gospel song playing in the background. The song is "Where No One Stands Alone," as recorded by the Peasall Sisters, who provided the singing voices for George Clooney's three daughters in another Coens film, O Brother, Where Are Thou?. I just thought that was cool. And a great song, too. :) ]

Little Fockers - I have never gotten into these films at all (I think I finally, accidentally saw the first one a few years ago and found it mildly amusing at best). I'm impatiently waiting for this franchise to just go away.

Gulliver's Travels - Everything I've seen looks terrible, but I guess the studio has faith in it if they're putting it out this close to Christmas.

Country Strong - [limited] So ... Crazy Heart, but with a rich female singer instead of a washed up has-been? Seriously, the character even has a drinking problem, which of course is not unusual for the country music business, but still. And while I love me some Gwyneth Paltrow, her accent in this kind of grates. I think it's cool that she's getting another chance to show off her singing ability, though, because she's pretty darn good. And I have to say that setting it in Nashville is obviously pushing my hometown buttons. Also, YAY WOMEN FILMMAKERS.

DECEMBER 24

The Illusionist - [limited] From the filmmakers who brought us the delightful Triplets of Belleville. That alone is enough to recommend it.

Somewhere - [limited] The latest from Sofia Coppola and the big Venice Film Festival winner. There's a thread running through most of her work regarding the loneliness of fame. This looks pretty interesting, but the name Fanning (even if it's not Dakota) makes me twitch.

DECEMBER 29

Biutiful - [limited] Responses to this on the festival circuit have been all over the map. The trailer for this movie may in fact be the most pretentious thing I have EVER seen, and the director Alejandro González Iñárritu is sometimes brilliant, sometimes infuriating (I loved his 21 Grams, hated Babel). Javier Bardem, however, may be enough to get me to a theater to see it.

Another Year - [limited] I love Mike Leigh, and he's made some of the most interesting and complex character studies of anyone making movies in the last twenty years. I don't know that anything of his will exceed my affection for Topsy-Turvy, but this looks wonderful. Speaking of Topsy-Turvy, I'm always amused to see people who've played a couple (in this case, Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, played in TT by Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville, respectively) playing something totally different.

DECEMBER 31

Blue Valentine - Another movie the MPAA ratings board has picked out to make an example of, this time slapping an NC-17 rating on what should by all accounts be rated R. The trailer is adorable (though I understand the film is heart-shattering), and I can't wait to see this.

Final Girl Film Club - The Initiation of Sarah

2010-11-28T20:16:00.000-08:00

It's been several months since I actually participated in the Final Girl Film Club in a timely fashion. I usually either watch the movie too late (which is pretty much every month) or just can't bring myself to write something about it (Hellbound and the annoyingness of Jackson and the dearth of Chuck Norris ass-kicking depressed me to no end). But NOT THIS TIME.

Oh my gosh, you guys! I'm so enraptured with this month's pick, I can hardly express it! But I'll try.

The Initiation of Sarah was one of several "The [SOMETHING] of [SOMEONE]" movies from the 1970s. FinalGirl did a whole Awesome Movie Poster Friday post about them - The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, The Eyes of Laura Mars, The Haunting of Julia, The Possession of Joel Delaney. Whatever else these movies were about, you know from the title that SOMEONE is going to have SOMETHING happen to them. Which I guess is fairly basic for a movie plot, but it just SOUNDS EXCITING, doesn't it?

This was a made-for-TV movie with a pretty HAWESOME cast. You've got Kay Lenz, who has been on pretty much every television show ever, was in both Rich Man, Poor Man (!!) and the sequel, and has the distinction of being the first Mrs. David Cassidy. You've got Morgan Brittany, who is probably best known as Pamela Ewing's half-sister on Dallas (!!!). You've got Robert Hays of Airplane! fame ("Surely you can't be serious."). You've got Morgan Fairchild, who is ... MORGAN FLIPPING FAIRCHILD. And you've got Shelley Winters, who is just plain rules the planet with her awesomely brassy and badass self.

This is very much a 70s movie, and you can see it from the first frame. The soft lighting, the credits, appearing in a font that looks like it's right off a package of Massengill. The disco music. Every frame of this movie looks like it was cut out of an old JCPenney catalog, and I LOVE IT.

We begin on a beach at dusk. It's the last beach party of the summer and Sarah and her sister Patty are having some fun, yo! Until the guy who takes Patty off for a swim turns out to be a rapist. We then get our first glimpse that Sarah is a little different. She's a good distance from Patty and her attacker, but a few jumpy camera moves and a "STOP IT!" later and Mr. Rapist is thrown back into the water so that Patty can escape. Yes, that's right - Sarah has some telekinetic mojo.

Because the other thing this film is besides a 70s-fest and a "something of someone" movie is a ... let's just call it an homage to Brian DePalma's Carrie. Unpopular girl turns out to have powers, so you'd better not mess with her or she will set the whole school on FIRE.

Sarah and Patty leave for college. It's clear that they're quite close. It's also clear that one of them is adopted, because while mommy gushes over Patty and gives her enthusiastic advice about how to pledge a sorority, she says farewell to Sarah as if it's an afterthought. Patty is excited about rushing, because Mommy was once a member of Alpha Nu Sigma - the hottest sorority on campus - which should mean both girls have a leg up in becoming pledges. But poor adopted Sarah is worried people will go digging into her past, a past which even she knows nothing about.

The girls go to sorority row, which seems abysmally empty considering it's meant to be Rush Week. Their first stop is the Alpha Nu house, where Patty is taken to meet some of the other actives and Sarah is taken ... to the refreshment table. Just when I thought I couldn't love this movie more, suddenly Sarah has like 70% of my college experience in the span of a few minutes. I RELATE TO YOU, GURL! The Alpha Nus are a special brand of snotty bitches, and their Head Bitch in Charge is none other than Jennifer Lawrence (Morgan Fairchild).

"Stranded at the punch bowl ... branded a fool.
What will they say ... Monday at school?"

The girls then go to the Pi Epsilon Delta house, which the Alpha Nu girls have nicknamed "Pigs, Elephants, and Dogs." Yeah, it's lame, but it's still mean. They're an older house, the girls are more brainy than beauty, and they don't really do the tradition thing. Naturally, they love Sarah, and she feels a connection to them too. But more than anything, she doesn't want to be parted from her sister. Mommy, however, thinks it's time that Patty and Sarah went their own ways.

Soon it's time for the girls to find out which sororities want them, and, predictably, Patty ends up with the snooties and Sarah ends up chosen by only one sorority, the "Pigs, Elephants, and Dogs," which she calls "P.E.D." like it's a venereal disease. Jennifer and the other Alpha Nus forbid Patty to talk with any P.E.D.s. including her own sister, for the duration of pledging, leading Sarah to run off by herself and cause another strange accident. It's starting to get confusing, though. Does she actually cause these things to happen? Or does she sense that they will happen in time to save someone from getting hurt. I think we're meant to understand that she actually causes these things to happen, but a couple of times it's not clear.

Patty and Sarah move into their respective houses, and we get some generic spooky mood setting in the P.E.D. house. There's a room that's always locked that only the house mother, Mrs. Hunter, has ever gone into. Oh, and by the way, the house mother is SHELLEY WINTERS. This is ... not her finest acting moment, but she's Shelley Winters, so that's okay. She's supposedly very into the occult and has been working on a thesis on the topic for hundreds of years or whatever. She calls Sarah into her room to get to know her a bit better, and it looks like the writers meant to drop some heavy clues here that Mrs. Hunter is Sarah's biological mother. It's never resolved beyond this one scene, but I suspect it was originally meant to be and they just ran out of time or had to cut that particular subplot. In any case, Mrs. Hunter recognizes Sarah's special abilities and you can tell already that she's thinking of how to exploit them.

Sarah makes friends with her sorority sisters (and even, bizarrely, becomes their leader, even though she hasn't even been initiated into the sorority yet) and develops an almost-relationship with her cute Psych T.A., Paul. She has a standoff with the snooty Jennifer, using her powers to send her for a swim in a campus fountain, and oh honey, it is ON. Jennifer goes to Patty, pretending that she feels bad about how she treated Sarah and even hinting that she'd like to invite her to join Alpha Nu Sigma. She weasels some details out of Patty, including that she's been spending a lot of time with Paul, and Jennifer hatches her plan. It's very clearly inspired by the Carrie prank, but while it's not as iconic, it's still incredibly mean and sends Sarah into revenge mode (again like Carrie), egged on by Mrs. Hunter, who has a longstanding grudge against Alpha Nu Sigma and Jennifer's mother. The initial revenge is a bit lackluster - Sarah telepathically causes Jennifer (and inadvertently her sister Patty) to be trapped in a shower with scalding hot water pouring on them. (I will give the film points, though, for not only referencing the shower scene in Carrie but for giving an unexpected nod to women in prison flicks with the two chicks in the shower - you go, movie!)

Speaking of Carrie, though, here are some more parallels. Jennifer is quite clearly the Nancy Allen character - the leader of the mean girls who sets up the prank. Her boyfriend Scott (played by Airplane!'s Robert Hays) is a cross between the John Travolta character who helps her with the prank because he's under her sexual spell (they have some of the ugliest fake kissing I've ever SEEN, blech!) and the William Katt character who feels sympathy for her. Patty is the Amy Irving character who reluctantly participates in some (though not all) of the taunting, but is actually really nice. And Mrs. Hunter is kind of the inverse of Piper Laurie, an enabler rather than an abuser.

Everything comes to a head on the night of initiation, and here's where the film falls a bit short. It's not horrible, it's just ... I think the film takes on a bit more than it can handle given its limitations. If this were a theatrical feature and not a TV movie, they could have gone full on Suspiria with the crazy ritual stuff. As it is, it's kind of a jumbled mess. I do kind of love the jumps back and forth between the fairly innocuous Alpha Nu initiation (part of which includes feeding the blindfolded initiates peeled grapes and telling them they're eyes) and the more sinister P.E.D. ministrations (where the girls wear what can only be described as black KKK hoods - WTF?!). Mrs. Hunter wants to use Sarah to bring down the Alpha Nu house, particularly Jennifer (who becomes horribly disfigured), and restore P.E.D. to its former glory. For some reason, this involves a human sacrifice, and one of the girls (who has apparently already had blood taken from her for the ritual) is trapped-but-not-really under the table awaiting the fulfillment of this purpose. Everyone manages to escape, however, leaving Sarah to have a final showdown with Mrs. Hunter, ending with the two of them dying in a fiery flame of burning fire and leaving the viewer to think to herself "Well, that made no sense."

Um, what the--?

Even though the ending is a bit "bzuh?" I really loved this. It gets MAJOR style points, if nothing else, and there's some fairly good characterization. Nobody felt like a generic "bad guy" or "good guy." I adored Kay Lenz, and she really pulled off the girl-who's-pretty-but-so-down-on-herself-you-can't-see-it. Yet again, much like Sissy Spacek in Carrie.

Anyway, despite my misgivings about the plot and the very obvious influence of Carrie, I thought this was awesome. Would watch again.

Scary Scenes Made of Awesome - Zombie

2010-10-07T07:00:00.000-07:00

Seven days into October and I'm finally getting with the program! I hope to do *something* spooktacular each day this month - probably not all (or even many) reviews, because those usually turn out to be quite time-consuming - but something.

Today, I offer one of the most awesome scenes in all of horror. For simplicity's sake, we'll call this film Zombie (though it goes by several others). This is an Italian horror film, made by one of the handful of great artists of gore to come out of Italia, Lucio Fulci. More specifically, though, this is an Italian zombie film, and those are a particular breed. Where most zombies are blue-faced or bloody or whatever, Italian zombies really give you the impression of having rotted in the earth a while. They're all oatmeal-faced and you can almost smell them coming. I mean, just look at this guy on the poster.

EWWWWW, I SAY!

Italian horror films are also known for going all out in the departments that horror is best known for - blood & guts and T&A. Like almost all zombie films, including Italian ones, the plot of Zombie is incidental. People trapped in a blahblahblah, zombies come out of the ground and eat them, the end. Even Romero's zombie flicks, while rich in social subtext, follow this simple, fool-proof formula.

What sets zombie flicks apart from one another are the kills. It's amazing how creative filmmakers can get with a genre that could so easily be a one-note snorefest. Some of the best kills in the horror genre come from zombie flicks, and Zombie has two great ones. One is the famous splinter-meets-eyeball scene. The other is a zombie fighting a shark.

Yes, you read that right - ZOMBIE VS. SHARK. This is one of the most awesome things ever committed to celluloid. If you love Jaws and you love zombies, this scene is greater than anything else in the world, the end. Even if you don't love either of those things, it's still pretty awesome. You know what would make Shark Week the best thing ever? ZOMBIES.

The Social Network

2010-10-02T17:43:00.000-07:00

This is not a movie about Facebook. Let's just get that out of the way.

On the surface, The Social Network is a story about Mark Zuckerberg, the founding of his Facebook empire, and the lawsuits involved. But ... well, no it's not. This is a movie, not an episode of Biography or a History Channel special. And that's the main thing to remember going into this. Mark Zuckerberg and the other characters in The Social Network are just that - characters in a story. It's *based* on real events, but there's a good bit of fiction and connecting dots as well.

I need to do something substantial to get into the clubs. ... Because they're exclusive, and fun, and they lead to a better life.

The movie starts with a dizzying conversation between Zuckerberg (played absolutely brilliantly by Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Erica (played by Rooney Mara). Great acting aside, you should know at this point (if you didn't already) that this film was written by Aaron Sorkin, a fact which may or may not mean anything to you. If you remember the rapid fire, mega-smart dialogue in The West Wing, this is, if you can imagine it, even more intense than that. Imagine a much less charming Sam Seaborn on a date with a girl he likes but who he feels is beneath him. There are so many levels to the conversation in this scene, that it's difficult to keep up; I almost wish there had been subtitles, but they'd have gotten in the way. Mark, a sophomore at Harvard, is having about ten conversations to Erica's one. His voice is very clipped and controlled, but the conversation itself is spiraling out of control so fast that he doesn't even register when Erica suddenly announces that they're not dating anymore. I say suddenly, because I honestly think the decision was that quick - like, she went on this date with a guy who sometimes annoyed her but who she truly liked, and then in the space of a few minutes like turned to contempt. She shreds him with an epic burn that all the reviews I've read quote word-for-word but I won't here, because you need to just experience it. And Mark runs home to his dorm to take it out on her. On the internet.

First, he posts to his LiveJournal about what a bitch Erica is, and this is one moment in the film that rang a bit false to me, because I have an LJ - I'd had it for over a month, in fact, when this scene was supposedly taking place, in late 2003 - and I couldn't concentrate on the next few minutes of the film because my brain was busy going "LJ DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT, GAAAH!" But that's another post for another time. Anyway, his bitterness and frustration lead to an all-night coding session, where he, his roommates, and his best friend Eduardo Saverin (played by the new Spidey, Andrew Garfield) post pictures of most of the girls on campus two-by-two, so that people (read: douchebag guys) can vote on which girl is hotter in each pair. The site was known as "Facemash," and according to the film, it got 22,000 hits in 2 hours before crashing the Harvard servers. I don't know about the numbers, but the site was real enough, and the articles about it in the Harvard paper are still online.

This event draws the attention of the Winklevoss twins, Tyler and Cameron (both played by Artie Hammer in one of the more amazing portrayals of twins that I've ever seen). The "Winklevi" ask Mark to help them with a campus social network called HarvardConnection (later, ConnectU) that was meant to start at Harvard and then expand to other schools, and the main appeal they saw in this was exclusivity. Mark makes an oral agreement with them to program the site, but while HarvardConnection is a good idea, Mark has a better one.

And thus "thefacebook" is born.

A million dollars is not cool. You know what's cool? A BILLION dollars.

It is, as I'm sure any of you who log on to it's current form at least once a day can imagine, instantly popular and highly addictive, and Zuckerberg is suddenly a campus celebrity before his sophomore year is even over. He and Eduardo Saverin, who is his CFO and provides the initial financial backing, make plans to expand to other colleges, including Boston University, where his ex-girlfriend attends. Most notably, however, they want to get the site to Stanford University, which just happens to be in Palo Alto, CA. Which just happens to be a significant corner of Silicon Valley. The Winkelvoss twins are livid that Mark stole their idea, though probably even more livid that it is successful, and they go to the university president to try and get Mark thrown out for breaking the school honor code. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, the president essentially laughs them out of his office, with a hearty "why are you wasting my time?". They soon come to the conclusion that it's time to lawyer up.

Meanwhile, "thefacebook" has caught the attention of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), who at this point has already become an internet rock star for founding Napster. He meets with Mark and Eduardo, filling Mark's head with stars and filling Eduardo with apprehension and distrust. Sean is against Eduardo's quest for advertising revenue (so is Mark), and while the site is already bigger than either Mark or Eduardo could have imagined, Sean's vision is even bigger. Facebook's current market value today, just so you know, is just over 25 billion dollars.

"Your best friend is suing you for 600 million dollars."

The story of The Social Network unfolds in a deceptively scattershot way. It is, in essence, a courtroom drama, consisting of two big lawsuits - that of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss against Zuckerberg and, most significantly and rather sadly, that of Eduardo Saverin against Zuckerberg. The rest of the scenes - the Harvard and California scenes - appear as flashbacks. The characters are telling the stories in a hearing and the movie is showing those stories to us. A good bit of attention has been paid to Justin Timberlake, who was kind of the perfect person to play Sean Parker, being something of a rock star himself. But make no mistake, the real stars of the show are Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield.

Mark in this movie, as I said above, is not meant to be the real Mark Zuckerberg, who could very well be a lovely person, but a fictionalized version - the version of Zuckerberg that works the best as far as telling this story. Here's a guy who founded a site that has 500 million members and counting, a site that's defined by the act of "friending," and yet he doesn't seem to have any actual friends at all. I won't spoil it for you, but the last scene in the film is a perfect encapsulation of who this guy is personally and the irony of that in the context of who he is in terms of Facebook. "It's lonely at the top" is not an original theme, but it certainly has an interesting twist when what you're the top of is the social business. In a world where millions of connections are made every day, the person who makes all this connecting possible can't make one himself.

The tension between Garfield's Eduardo and Eisenberg's Mark is palpable, but it's not a matter of hatred, at least not entirely (and not really at all on Mark's side). There's all kinds of flavors in it - betrayal, resentment, regret, sadness. Despite the fact that Mark does some shady things, you can't help sympathizing with him a little, and Eisenberg is a huge part of why that works. He really does seem to be sad that things with Eduardo fell apart. The thing with the Winklevosses has some nice layers too, because while what Mark did to them was pretty shady, their vision was just so small due to their focus on exclusivity.

What's interesting, though, is that Facebook has its own kind of exclusivity. Anyone can be a member, but you have to be "accepted" to have access to content. I can't help thinking that Zuckerberg was inspired by LiveJournal in this, though that may be the movie's artistic license playing with me (who knows if he ever even had an LJ account). And then there's the whole issue of the term "friend," which Facebook has basically made meaningless. I remember, in the dim and distant past when I started my LJ, "friend" was not such a virtual term. But that's yet another post for another time. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the film, though, is that a moment of rejection leads to the creation of something that brings so many people together. In superficial ways, yes, and I think that's a point in the movie as well, but in spite of the illusion of exclusivity, Facebook is a pretty accepting, inclusive place.

This film has been compared to several greats of the past, and it's not hyperbole because we're not talking quality. It's like Citizen Kane in that it's about a human enigma at the center of a media empire. It's like All the President's Men in that it shows us a glimpse of the inner workings of a particular form of media. And it's like Network because it speaks to how people can be influenced by that media. And, like all three of those films were for their time, this is a Zeitgeist Film. It's a movie about who we are and how we relate to each other.

I think it's too soon to start talking Oscars, and by the way neither Citizen Kane nor All the President's Men nor Network won Best Picture (though all three were nominated). However, I feel confident in saying this will end up on a lot of Top 10 lists (including the Best Picture nominees) and almost certainly will end up on mine, possibly in the top 5. Aaron Sorkin's Oscar chances are inevitable. This is one of his more brilliant pieces of writing - maybe not above the best of his West Wing work, but it's definitely the best film writing he's done, period. And I can't imagine another film coming along in the next few months whose writing can even compare. There are none of the platitudes that often bring Sorkin's stuff down a notch (meaning down a notch from galactically awesome, which is still awesome), and I was struck as I've never been struck before - even on The West Wing - with how tight the script is and how efficiently and smoothly the story is told. The film is two hours, but it passes very quickly, and I was actually surprised when it ended, thinking it couldn't possibly have been two hours since the film began.

Director David Fincher deserves a whole lot of credit as well for how good this is. He does what great directors do, which is not get in the way by showing off. That said, there are some pretty stunningly shot scenes, most especially the boat race scene, which is exciting to watch without making it all about the "who's going to win" tension.

As I said before, this isn't a movie about Facebook, any more than Citizen Kane was about a newspaper or All the President's Men was about Watergate. It is also, again, not a movie about the real Mark Zuckerberg. The movie's Mark is drawn in a way that highlight's the movie's themes; real people aren't like that. Mark as a character has an almost Shakespearean ironic flaw for the story he is in. This is a *version* of Zuckerberg, a *version* of the events that led to Facebook, and it's the version that makes an awesome movie.

I hope this movie is huge and that everyone loves it, gets it, and wants to talk about it.

Easy A, or Hester Prynne Goes to High School

2010-09-30T02:28:00.000-07:00

Easy A is a movie I wish I'd written. I don't mean that in an "I could have pooped out a better script than that" way; I genuinely wish I had written something as clever and heartfelt and, for a genre that nowadays is either smug and superior or dumb and offensive, a breath of fresh air.

"We've had nine classes together since Kindergarten... ten if you count Religion of Other Cultures, which you didn't because you called it science fiction and refused to go."

It feels too easy to say "If you liked Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You, you'll like this movie." I do think Easy A bears a resemblance to both those films, notably as another modern take on a literary classic (in this case, Nathaniel Hawthorne's short novel The Scarlet Letter). But in a way I find it more satisfying than either of them. Yes, even more than Clueless, which has been the standard bearer for cute and smarter-than-you'd-think teen comedies lo these (*gulp*) fifteen years. What Easy A brings to the table are some surprisingly nuanced performances and a knack for the dynamics of high school that is frankly unnerving.

Here are the basics of the plot. Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone, in what is sure to be a breakout role) is an average high school chick, practically invisible to boys. To avoid an uncomfortable camping weekend with her best friend and said friend's naturist parents, she makes up a college guy out of thin air and says she has a date with him that weekend. After her actual boring weekend at home, she forgets about her lie until the friend asks her how the date went. Through a series of unfortunate accidents in tale-spinning, she "confesses" to having slept with her sockpuppet boyfriend. She is overheard by her ultra-conservative classmate, Marianne (Amanda Bynes, in her last role before bizarrely "retiring" from acting at age 24). Marianne starts the rumor mill a-spinning, and pretty soon Olive has a Reputation. There's an almost chilling scene in which Olive walks the hall after the rumor spreads, and the reaction of the two genders could not be more telling, and it makes me sad that slut shaming is still a thing in this day and age. With her perceived virtue essentially in the toilet, then, she agrees to pretend to have sex with a gay friend of hers, so that he can get a reprieve from the homophobic bullies who are plaguing him. Things spiral from there, and soon she's practically running a service, selling her pretend sex favors to various guys for various reasons.

There's a good bit of homage to great teen movies of yore, particularly those of John Hughes, and there's a self-awareness that just works, as if the movie itself is saying to you that it wants to be as good as those other movies, while humbly aw-shucks-ing that it never will be. This is mostly achieved by Olive's webcam narration, and Emma Stone reminded me oddly of Robert Downey, Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - only more coherent and less scatterbrained. I've been a fan of Emma Stone's for a few years now - I guess since Superbad - and I sincerely think this movie could put her on the map in a big way. I've heard musings about her possible Oscar chances, which might sound ridiculous, but I'll go ahead and say that she's at least going to the Golden Globes. She's really incredible, and it's a strangely empowering female role. On the surface, Olive is sacrificing her good name, moving herself down the social ladder so that several boys can move up. But it's not really like that at all. Olive takes charge of her sexuality, without even having sex. She owns it and doesn't let what people will think of her dictate what she does (or falsely admits doing). Because, at the end of the day, it's nobody's business but her own. The whole controversy surrounding her is ridiculous, and every lie she tells is another riff in an epic joke.

Also, as a person of faith, I was pleasantly surprised at the portrayal of the school's little Christian clique. The prayer circle especially tickled me, because what a lot of Christians call "prayer requests" are really just gossip and group judgment sessions.

Performance-wise, in addition to the awesome Emma Stone, Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci are wonderful as Olive's groovy and totally cool parents. Thomas Haden Church is pretty great as Olive's favorite teacher. Lisa Kudrow is delightful as the school guidance counselor who has serious issues of her own. And there are some really outstanding little parts, especially for Olive's, ah, clients. The script really explores sexual politics in fascinating ways, especially with a couple of guys who illustrate that a lot of times it's not the fact that a guy is a nerd that makes him unattractive. Sometimes the guy is just a jerk.

If you haven't already seen this, I highly recommend it. I think it has more to say about young adulthood and gender roles than just about any of its contemporaries.

October Movie Releases

2010-09-30T02:27:00.000-07:00

We're getting deeper into Oscar territory. Only two movies that I've labeled "must see"s this month, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It leaves a lot of room for the "maybe"s and the "I'd love to see it if only there wasn't so much else coming out"s.

OCTOBER 1

[MUST-SEE] The Social Network - Otherwise known as "The Facebook Movie." Definitely one of my most anticipated movies of the year and currently considered one of the Best Picture frontrunners. Written by Sorkin. Directed by Fincher. I challenge you not to be wowed by the full trailer and its strategic use of a girls choir's cover of Radiohead's "Creep."

[MUST-SEE] Let Me In - Horror geeks were appalled that anyone would dare remake the perfect Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In, but everything I've heard convinces me this is one remake that does it right. The conversation may now, in fact, be turning toward whether this actually improves on the original. Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee of The Road and Chloe Kick-Ass Moretz.

Case 39 - It is freaky to watch the trailer for this film and see a younger Bradley Cooper, before he got all buff (because the movie was shot four years ago and then shelved). It almost doesn't even look like him. I hate that this movie comes out on a weekend with such heavy competition, because it looks interesting and I'm afraid it might fall through the cracks. And even though I haven't yet seen Eclipse (waiting for the Rifftrax), I'm pretty sure that little girl is the same actress who played Bree "cheeseburger of pain" Tanner.

Freakonomics - [limited] I have not read the best-selling book on which this is based, but while the ideas seem pretty fascinating, I'm wondering how they're woven together into a film without it feeling too fractious. I don't even know how to explain this one properly, so click on the title to go to the IMDB page, which has the trailer. See what you make of it.

Hatchet II - I never got around to seeing the first Hatchet, but I loved director Adam Green's follow up, Frozen, immensely. *checks Netflix* Maybe I can check out the first one before this comes out. It might be better to see it closer to Halloween anyway (especially as there's jack-all coming out the second half of the month).

Barry Munday - [LA/NY] This was a pretty big hit at SXSW this year, and I'm kind of stoked to see it. And one of the main things that interests me is the prospect of finally seeing Judy Greer starring in her own freakin' film and not just playing the snotty/quirky/clingy "best friend type" to Jennifer Garner or Katherine Heigl or whoever.

Chain Letter - [limited] Eh. I feel conflicted. I know that some of my favorite horror movies have been cheap stuff like this, but there's just something about today's horror sensibilities that make me distrustful. It's good to see a fairly original idea in the genre, though, and not just another movie spit out of the remake factory.

Douchebag - This strikes me as unbearably smug, like a funnier but less intelligent Noah Baumbach movie. No.

OCTOBER 8

Life as We Know It - Before you immediately turn your back on this because of the presence of Katherine Heigl, I've heard this is actually quite good. I still hate that poster with Josh Duhamel in a diaper, but that's marketing, not the movie. At least not the whole movie. Even the snarky blog boys seem to like it.

Secretariat - Didn't I see this movie like seven years ago when it was called Seabiscuit? I don't know. The cast is impressive, the director, Randall Wallace ... I'd like to have faith because his two other films as a director (We Were Soldiers and The Man in the Iron Mask) were decent. But he also wrote the script for Pearl Harbor. My faith is not strong.

It's Kind of a Funny Story - [limited] Originally in the September post. Buzz has been horrible. This is a skip or a rental for me.

Tamara Drewe - [LA/NY] Will someone please tell me what is so special about Gemma Arterton and why I'm supposed to even know who she is? This is based on a graphic novel that is supposedly based on Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. I'm skipping this, though, because I'm not a fan of the plot where a hot girl goes to a small town and all the men fall all over themselves for her as if the women who already exist in their lives Don't Count and this is the first time they've actually seen a female. Bella Swan, much?

Nowhere Boy - [limited] The lovely Aaron Johnson (the eponymous hero of Kick-Ass) plays a quite young John Lennon. I have always been more of a Paul gal myself and there's always been something kind of off-putting about Lennon. I mean, he was a genius, but he knew it. This is, however, the most exciting thing coming out this weekend, so I'll probably see it. The music and Aaron Johnson will be worth it, if nothing else.

My Soul to Take - Wes Craven brings us a film that bears more than a passing resemblance to his genre-defining A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dare I hope for another truly awesome Craven horror movie? Waiting to see other people's responses to this.

Stone - The notion of Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton teaming up again is definitely enticing, and I'm hearing this is actually quite good. I confess, part of my interest is in seeing Milla Jovovich act in a movie not directed by her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson.

I Spit on Your Grave: Unrated - This movie, and the ungodly original film that it is a remake of, can kindly go and die in every fire that ever burned. I am curious, though - will there actually be a story this time? Or will they fall back on the original's more, shall we say, deliberate plot pacing and faithfully recreate the (I kid you not) THIRTY-FIVE MINUTE GRAPHIC GANG RAPE SEQUENCE. In case you were wondering, I'd rather eat my own face than see this.

Inside Job - Another doc about the economic meltdown and one that looks particularly infuriating. Love the moments in the trailer where people do not want to be participating in this or ask for the camera to be turned off. I don't think I can handle this, though. I'm still seething from the last doc these filmmakers made, No End in Sight.

Today's Special - A cooking comedy. I'm intrigued by the presence of Kevin Corrigan and Aasif Mandvi, but I'm not sold.

OCTOBER 15

Jackass 3-D - Don't judge me, but I may be kind of pumped to see this. May. Also, I may or may not be contemplating checking out the two previous movies. The big hand high five gets me every time I see this trailer. I think this is what 3D was made for. *wipes a proud tear from eye*

Conviction - Hearing good things about this one. But am I a bad person for hoping there's no Oscar campaign planned for Hilary Swank? I really cannot take a third round of Swank v. Bening. Sam Rockwell seems to be the jewel in the crown here, though. I'm interested.

Red - Helen Mirren has a license to kill, bitches! I think this is a definite yes, for the awesome cast alone. Willis. Freeman. Parker. Malkovich. Mirren. 'Nuff said.

Down Terrace - [limited] Most of the trailer makes it look kind of boring. UNTIL one of the characters shoves a little old lady in front of a speeding car. Sadly, that alone is not enough reason to see a movie. Waiting to hear more about this. It's being touted as "Mike Leigh meets the Sopranos" but ... I don't know.

OCTOBER 22

Paranormal Activity 2 - Unless I see some downright stellar reviews of this one, this is in my "no" pile on principle. The whole charm of the first one was that it was at least somewhat original and homemade. I'm glad it was a huge hit, though I don't see what the point of rooting for original content is anymore. It doesn't help new filmmakers with new ideas at all; it just turns original content into sequel factories.

Hereafter - The trailer is lovely, but I'm hearing mixed-to-bad buzz. However, Eastwood's Gran Torino had a similar response coming out of the festivals, and then a few months later people were wondering why it got shut out of the Oscars. Also, Peter Morgan wrote the script, so there's that. I'm also intrigued by the casting of Cecile De France, who was that crazy chick in Haute Tension. I'm determined to see this and make up my own mind instead of defaulting to critical opinion.

The Company Men - [LA/NY] John Wells, who produced two of the biggest ensemble dramas in the history of television (ER and The West Wing), turns his eye to films with what looks like an incredible - you guessed it - ensemble drama. I think the most exciting thing about the trailer is "Academy Award Winner Ben Affleck ... Academy Award Winner Chris Cooper ... Academy Award Winner Kevin Costner ... Academy Award Winner Tommy Lee Jones." This is a yes.

Inhale - [NY] This looks pretty awesome, I have to say, but I'm curious as to why I've never heard of it before. It seems like a movie that appeared at a festival and took a long time to get picked up, because while I can't find any official reviews, what I *have* found are loads of links to bootleg copies on the internets. I may balance out my Paranormal Activity Principled Boycott with a Principle Viewing of this film. I can't help feeling this just deserves to be given a chance. Not that my one ticket will achieve anything, but then my not going to PA2 won't put a dent in its box office either.

OCTOBER 29

Monsters - [limited] I don't know, guys, this sounds an AWFUL lot like District 9, only with a different social subtext. Reviews I'm seeing emphasize the shoestring budget and the fact that the director did the special effects on his computer. Impressive to be sure, but I'm worried people are pointing that out in an effort to adjust audience expectations. Waiting to hear more about why critics are calling it so "original."

Saw 3D: The Final Chapter - No. A thousand times no. I'm afraid this kind of sequel cycle is the fate that awaits you, Paranormal Activity.

Welcome to the Rileys - [limited] I like the idea of this story, where a married couple takes a young stripper under their wing. But I'm afraid I can't watch Kristen Stewart in anything right now.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - [limited] The third and final chapter in the successful adaptations of Stieg Larsson's smash hit book series. I have yet to see or read any of these, but they're on my to-do list, I promise! I don't think I'll be caught up in time to catch this in theaters, though.

The Kids Grow Up - [NY] Documentary about letting go of kids who leave home for the first time. What little I've heard about this is not promising.

Never Let Me Go

2010-09-20T01:04:00.000-07:00

This movie has been dividing critics for a few weeks. There are folks that really love it and folks that can't stand it. I'm on the "really love it" side, but I think I understand why some people aren't connecting with it. This was my favorite thing I saw this weekend, so without further ado, let's dig into...

Never Let Me Go

This is a movie essentially about death. It's kind of a downer, and it's very British, which is part of the problem I think people have with it. But I'll get into that later. Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate version of our own world, where scientific breakthroughs that our world has not yet made (or at least taken advantage of) have led to significant extensions in human longevity. But we don't hear much about that at first (or really, in much of the rest of the movie). Our concern is to be with Kathy H. and her childhood friends, Tommy and Ruth.

Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth attend a kind of boarding school called Hailsham. It looks like most other boarding schools, but there's something a bit different about it. Their new teacher explains to them the conceit that frames the film. These children are not like other children. They cannot grow up and be anything they want to be. They were created for a specific purpose. They will be adults, but not for very long. After they leave school, they will begin their "donations," and when their bodies can no longer sustain themselves, they will achieve "completion." In our own terms, these children have been cloned in order to provide organs for transplants. They are kept alive as long as possible, through as many organ removal surgeries as their bodies can handle, until they die, after which presumably the remainder of their organs are kept for future use. The teacher who tells the children this is either fired or abruptly leaves the school, but she is not really telling the children anything they don't already know.

See, unlike a lot of these "clone farm" plots, and there are several, where people are being raised in order for their organs to be harvested, these children are not being lied to. They are fully aware of what is in store for them, and that they will not live long past the age of thirty. They accept this and make no effort to fight it. They don't even seem to think of themselves as being the same as their "originals." They go to school and are never allowed to leave the property until they are 18, when they move to living facilities with others like themselves and await their notice for the first donation, after which they will be moved to a kind of hospital. They have an option to apply to be "Carers," which is not a medical position but rather one of moral support for someone through their donation process.

There is a sweet romance at the center of the film. Kathy and Tommy are childhood sweethearts, but Ruth comes between them and instead she and Tommy are the couple for several years. This is actually maybe my favorite performance that I've seen from Keira Knightley (who plays Ruth). It's refreshing to see her play kind of a bad girl - well, not bad exactly, but our sympathies are not really with her, at least in the love triangle plot. I'm becoming more and more intrigued by Andrew Garfield, who plays Tommy. I first took notice of him in the extraordinary Red Riding 1974, and his is supposedly one of the strongest among several strong performances in the upcoming The Social Network; and of course he's going to be a much bigger deal soon, when he takes on the red and blue tights of Spiderman. He's pretty wonderful here. His character as a child is very angry and prone to bouts of rage, but these urges are subdued as he gets older, which makes his one last outburst at a key moment in the film that much more emotional.

The jewel in the crown, though, as might be expected, is new Hollywood "It" girl Carey Mulligan, who plays Kathy. She gives the film its soul and there's such an understated peace to her performance that I found really moving. She makes the most of her circumstances and does try to get a deferral for the start of her donations, but she has accepted her fate. The realization she eventually has that makes up the last lines of the film is pretty staggeringly beautiful. I have to give props, too, to Isobel Meikle-Small, who plays young Kathy. Not only does she physically resemble Mulligan quite uncannily, she also gives a pretty great (and not child-actor-y) performance.

Whether you like this movie or not is probably going to depend on a couple of things. First, I think younger people may have a hard time identifying with this movie. The theme of death and coming to the end of one's life is one that is probably more easily accepted and relatable to older viewers. Second, this movie is most definitely British - not just in setting and regarding the cast, but in terms of tone. There is a distinct "stiff upper lip" reserve about it that I think a lot of Americans are put off by or at least have trouble connecting with. I noticed something similar in people who didn't like Gosford Park, another movie that is English Liek Woah. I think people want it to be more dramatic and conflict-heavy, but that's just not the point of this story. It's not that there's no conflict, obviously, but I think a lot of people just don't buy the quiet acceptance. That's totally their prerogative, but I don't share that opinion.

Very, very good movie. I wish it every success as it traverses the dangerous waters of Oscar season, and I have no doubt we'll still be talking about it when those awards roll around.

The Town

2010-09-19T23:29:00.000-07:00

Saw a few movies this weekend and fully intended to post about them sooner, but I've had a kind of weird weekend. Here we go, though, and I'll start with the one many of you have probably already seen, and which has taken the top box office spot. Gigli who?!

The Town

This was a pretty awesome movie. I've seen some folks say they wish it had just been an action thriller, without the "trying to be a better man" plot, but that plot was kind of the point. The story is set in Charlestown, Massachusetts - a working class subset of Boston. Charlestown is heavily populated by people who make their living robbing banks, and the trade is very often passed down through generations. You get the idea that being born into Charlestown is a trap, and that it's near impossible to get out. Doug McRay (Ben Affleck, who also directs) is the ring leader of a particularly successful robbery crew - they've done four armored cars and two banks. They report to "The Florist" (Pete Postlethwait), who is the guy who really runs shit and tells them what jobs to pull. Meanwhile, an FBI agent, Adam Frawley (Mad Men's Jon Hamm), is trying to bring down McRay's gang, with the help of a witness/hostage from their most recent robbery, Claire Keesey (the always amazing Rebecca Hall).

Things start to go screwy Doug introduces himself to Claire as just another guy and falls in love with her. He wants out of the life, but his best friend and partner in crime James (played by The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner) is reluctant to let him go. "The Florist" is even more reluctant to do so. Doug belongs with them, period, and they're not going to let him walk out on them.

There are loads of great character dynamics at play here, and both those dynamics and the general story remind me of Michael Mann's brilliant film Heat. Affleck, Hamm, and Hall all bring their A-game, but I found myself even more impressed with Jeremy Renner and (wait for it) Gossip Girl's Blake Lively, who plays James's sister and Doug's sometime girlfriend, Krista. James is a tough guy, and it shows on Renner's untypically weathered face, but you can't help loving his affection and loyalty for Doug. In one of my favorite scenes, Doug asks for James's help - he's found out that some thugs have threatened Claire while she walked to work and he wants to take James with him to kick some ass. Doug doesn't tell James what is really going on and asks his help on the understanding that he can't ever ask about it, and James amusingly agrees. It's a great little relationship moment, but it's also a specific character moment for James, to show us what a violent person he is and that he really doesn't care about "who"s or "why"s - he just likes to make people hurt.

I was pleasantly surprised by Blake Lively, though. Krista starts out as a kind of generic trashy, drug-addicted girl with cheap pick-up lines. She has a kid which may or may not belong to Doug (he claims not), and while you get the impression that she sleeps around a lot, she claims a kind of ownership over Doug and does not like it at all when he expresses his intention to beat a path out of town with someone else. Frawley uses this to his advantage, and while I hated that this had to happen, I still felt sorry for Krista.

The movie ends as satisfyingly as it can, and there's a certain inevitability about it, which I think ties into the theme of inescapability rather nicely. I don't know that it's better than Affleck's other directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, but I like The Town immensely.

September Movie Releases

2010-09-03T04:40:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again, my friends! Fall movie season is upon us. I have procured Entertainment Weekly's Fall Movie Preview issue, and my calendar is marked. Which is kind of pointless, I know, because like 75% of these dates are going to change as festival flicks get picked up and everyone rushes to shove their movie into theaters before the end of the year because OMG OSCARS. But it's my ritual, and I do it, even though I'm going to have to scratch stuff out and do it all over again.

SEPTEMBER 3
Yes, I am fully aware how annoying it is to see six of the nine movies for this weekend sporting the "nah-nah-nee-boo-boo" tag of limited distribution. I feel you, I do. It's frustrating to hear critics yammer about how people don't go see these good little movies when THERE IS NO OPPORTUNITY TO in most places across the country. *ahem*

The American - [9/1] George Clooney continues to show us why he is one of the few people who deserves his "movie star" mantle. He makes a genuine effort to do interesting, original work and never rests on his laurels. This movie looks all kinds of exciting.

Machete - HO YEAH! What started as a fake trailer for the Rodriguez/Tarantino (OTP!) double feature Grindhouse is now a real, actual movie. Starring the baddest assest Mexican-American actor ever, Danny Trejo, along with a whole lot of the people who made cameos in the trailer (including Jeff Fahey, aka "that pilot who looks like he wandered off the set of a Burt Reynolds movie" [/Lost]). This movie looks so awesome it HURTS.

The Tillman Story - [limited] Pat Tillman gave up a lucrative NFL career to fight in the Army after September 11. After his death in the line of duty, his family started asking questions trying to uncover the truth about his death. In what is poised to be an uncommonly good year for documentaries, this is getting an awful lot of buzz and people are already calling it an Oscar frontrunner.

Going the Distance - I could have sworn this already came out, but I guess not. Looks like a better than average rom-com, but that's not saying much. I think the main thing making me reluctant to see this is that godawful gag in the trailer where the woman drops the corn on the table. Can we have a moratorium on gross-out comedy, please? Even the Farrelly brothers don't really get into it anymore.

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 - [limited] This is the second of two halves, and I completely missed the first, I'm afraid. If I can't catch the first one somehow, I'm just going to have to wait until the DVD. Which KILLS me, because I love Vincent Cassell to distraction.

A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop - [LA/NY] For some reason, IMDB is calling this "A Simple Noodle Story," which I guess ties it more closely to Blood Simple, on which it is based, but it's not as cool. So yeah, a remake of the Coen brothers' classic Blood Simple, only set in China. The film looks vibrant and interesting in the trailers, but people who've seen it so far don't seem to like it. Still, this is from the filmmaker who gave us Hero and House of Flying Daggers. At the very least it will be gorgeous to look at.

The Winning Season - [LA/NY] This sounds incredibly formulaic (alcoholic has-been coach asked to run girls basketball team), but it has Sam Rockwell, so I'm torn. It also has Rooney Mara, who is going to be the American Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The trailer is pretty great and sells it like a way less offensive and way less skeazy Mr. Woodcock. It's on my "maybe" list.

White Wedding - [LA/NY] This looks like the perfect film to catch at a festival, but that will probably slip through the cracks when it comes time to actually see something at a regular movie theater. And that makes me sad, because it looks lovely. Road trip to a wedding, South Africa style.

Last Train Home - [LA/NY] This is probably a beautiful, wonderful movie, but it also looks like the most depressing thing you'll ever see in a cinema. The story is about a family that tries to get home for Chinese New Year, along with 130 million other migrant workers. It's not that I don't like depressing movies, it's just that I'm rarely in the mood to properly appreciate them. This is a "probably not."

SEPTEMBER 10
Gah, two out of eight in wide release. Come on, distributors!

Resident Evil: Afterlife - No.

I'm Still Here - [limited] This is that thing Joaquin Phoenix was doing when it looked like he'd gone round the bend. It's directed by Casey Affleck, which I find interesting, but what little I've seen of the film is the opposite of interesting.

The Virginity Hit - I *HATE* the ads for this that I've seen all over the subway stations, acting like virginity is some disease or a problem to be solved. I hope I'm wrong about this movie and that it's some clever commentary on the pressure on kids to "do it." So far, it looks like a poor man's Superbad (which is a movie I love, but I'm not sure it needed to be remade).

Heartbreaker - [LA/NY] If this were a Hollywood movie, I would be rolling my eyes so hard right now. Here's hoping the French can do this stale rom-com formula (man hired to break up woman's marriage falls in love with woman) a notch better. Incidentally, one of the stars is Vanessa Paradis, who gets to sleep with Johnny Depp every night.

The Romantics - [LA/NY] I liked this movie better back in 1985 when it was St. Elmo's Fire. Hits and misses in the cast - Elijah Wood yay, Josh Duhamel eh, Anna Paquin yay, Malin Ackerman alright, Katie Holmes eh well at least she's playing the bad guy (I think). Sadly, this looks like the most exciting release of the weekend.

Bran Nue Dae - [limited] Looks kind of fun, but I'm not sure about musical numbers where people sing about how great it is to be an aborigine. It does have Geoffrey Rush, but ... I don't know.

Legendary - [limited] Brought to you by World Wrestling Entertainment? The trailer is charming and the cast impressive, and I kind of dig the idea of a wiry geek who goes out for wrestling, but it still looks like a generic family/sports drama.

Expecting Mary - [Release date taken from EW; none listed on IMDB] This movie looks so cute and quirky I could puke, but it has two eye-popping names in the cast - Gene Simmons (yes, DEMON GUY from KISS) and Linda Gray (Sue Ellen from Dallas!!!). That's kind of awesome by itself! But probably a rental, not a theater experience.

SEPTEMBER 17
Now we're getting to some good stuff!

Never Let Me Go - [9/15, limited] This is one of my most anticipated movies of the fall. I'd love to be able to read the book on which this is based before the film, but it may not be possible. Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and a dowdy (psht) Keira Knightley star in a British boarding school drama, with a dystopian twist. When Masterpiece Theater Met Parts: The Clonus Horror.

Easy A - I have heard EXCELLENT things about the performance of this movie's star, Emma Stone. Like Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You, this is another high school movie that's riffing on a classic, this time The Scarlet Letter.

The Town - I'm loving Ben Affleck the director. I think, like George Clooney, he is making a deliberate effort to stay away from projects like the ones that made him a joke several years ago. His directing debut, Gone Baby Gone was incredible, and this looks like a similarly brilliant effort. Maybe too similar - how many more Boston-set stories does he want to tell? Still, the cast is pretty darn stellar (Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, and Affleck himself), and what I know of the story is pretty cool.

Devil - They should seriously take M. Night Shyamalan's name off the adverts. It is an anti-selling point right now. And yes, this is a no. Every time I see this trailer (it is in front of EVERY MOVIE I HAVE SEEN for the past two months) I roll my eyes. Also, the director is one of the directors responsible for The Poughkeepsie Tapes. My memory is long, gentlemen, and I am slow to forgive.

Jack Goes Boating - [limited] Directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, this is based on an Off-Broadway play he was in with John Ortiz and RENT's Daphne Rubin-Vega, both of whom reprise their roles in the film, along with Hoffman. Amy Ryan (who most of you know from The Office, but who you should totally check out in her Oscar-nominated role in the aforementioned Gone Baby Gone) rounds out the cast as Hoffman's love interest. This looks pretty incredible.

Catfish - [limited] This is probably the most talked about film from Sundance, and I'm dying to see what the fuss is about. A big deal is being made about knowing as little as possible going in, which is kind of exciting. However, I have heard the "twist" of this story, and I have to say that if you find it shocking, you have not spent enough time on the internet. Because seriously, I have actually witnessed worse. There is some confusion about the genre. It has most consistently been described as a "reality thriller," which is what the studio is supposedly calling it, but there are arguments about whether it's a documentary or staged. Maybe I'm cynical, but I'm calling shenanigans. I can totally believe that it COULD be true, but it's way more likely that a studio is falsely selling a story as true than that they are fighting cynical audiences and critics to get The Truth out there.

Alpha and Omega - This movie annoys me, and all I've seen is the trailer. It's pretty much your basic high school movie, where the boy from the other side of the tracks is in love with a girl who is out of his league and miraculously wins her, only this is a movie about animated wolves. I also don't like the wink-wink-nudge-nudge about mating (seriously, children's movie!). Anyway, this is on my no list, but I suspect it will win the weekend box office unless the teens turn out like mad for Easy A.

Leaves of Grass - [NYC] Finally! This looked like it wasn't getting released at all, but yay! Tim Blake Nelson directs Edward Norton, who plays twin brothers - one an Ivy League professor, the other a pot grower. This is supposed to be brilliant. I can't wait.

The Freebie - [Release date taken from EW; none listed on IMDB] The premise is an immediate turn-off to me - couple decides to give each other a night off, a gift certificate for one cheat, if you will. I can understand that relationships are all different and that there might be people who would have legitimate reasons for doing such a stupid thing. I just don't care to see a movie about them.

SEPTEMBER 24

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger - [9/22, LA/NY] Woody Allen's latest. It looks like ... a Woody Allen film. I mean, what else would it look like? His films are usually interesting, and I'll probably see it. This is another foreign-set film - London again.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps - The plot summary sounds like it's a bit behind the times. Or are our not-quite-heroes supposed to be trying to avert another or even worse financial meltdown than the one that already happened two years ago? Anyway, greed is good and all that. Love Gekko getting his giant cell phone back when he gets out of prison. Charlie Sheen supposedly makes a cameo. I have to see this, for curiosity's sake if nothing else.

You Again - I love Betty White, but her awesomeness is starting to crash in on itself. I also love Kristen Bell, but she is wasted on all these comedies. And there is something so unappealing about grown women who have apparently never left high school. This is a no.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole - The plot sounds like, I kid you not, Harry Potter if, like, Hedwig was the main character and was the one who went away to school. The voice talent includes ~~Faramir~~ David Wenham and ~~Elrond~~ Hugo Weaving. The director is, bizarrely, Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300, and now owls?). It looks beautiful, but ... owls? Really? I'm curious, to say the least, which is probably enough to sell me a ticket.

Buried - [limited] Great, simple premise that could either be really awesome or really lame. Ryan Reynolds (and the audience) spends most of the movie in a box under the ground. Will he be able to do what it takes to stay alive and get out? This has gotten some pretty great buzz, and I'm excited for it. The Alamo Drafthouse is doing a special deal where you can be buried alive and watch the movie from inside a coffin. I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong there.

Waiting for 'Superman' - From the makers of An Inconvenient Truth, this is a documentary about the sad state of America's education system. I've heard nothing but raves for it. I hope this is huge, and I hope that every parent of a school-age child gets to see it.

Enter the Void - [LA/NY] Drew McWeeny named this his top film of last year, and what little I know of it is intriguing to say the least. The director, Gaspar Noé, is also the man behind Irreversible, the dizzying (literally) reverse chronology drama/thriller with an infamous 9-minute scene in a pedestrian subway. I'm interested in this movie, because the visuals look incredible and the concept (a young man dies and returns as a ghost to watch over his sister) is a fairly unique one, at least in Noe's hands.

Howl - [Release date taken from EW; none listed on IMDB] The Allen Ginsberg obscenity trial, starring James Franco. This one opened Sundance, but people didn't seem terribly excited about it. It's got an amazing cast, though (Mary Louise Parker, Jon Hamm, Alessandro Nivola, David Strathairn). I'm on the fence still; regardless, it's not really a priority.

It's Kind of a Funny Story - [Release date taken from EW; none listed on IMDB] This is the other trailer I see on every single movie I go to these days (and another trailer that, like The Virginity Hit, uses that "Oh my God" song by Ida Maria). I love Zack Galafianakis, and I'm kind of excited to see him to a more serious role (though still, from all available evidence a shade of his usual role).

A Face in the Crowd (1957)

2010-08-28T23:31:00.000-07:00

I first became aware of this film back in 1999, when Elia Kazan received an Honorary Oscar and they showed clips from several of his movies, and my first response to the clip from this film was "Willikers, is that Andy Griffith?!" Yes, indeed it was. This was before he was Mayberry's sheriff - before, in fact, he was even somewhat typecast as a "good guy." He was mostly known for stand-up comedy at this point, but this was a completely - COMPLETELY - different role than he would ever play for the rest of his career.

The film begins in a small town somewhere in the Ozarks. It's set in the year it was released, 1957, when people were starting to do a lot less listening to the radio and a lot more watching television. Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), whose uncle owns the local radio station, is in search of material for her radio show, "A Face in the Crowd," in which she interviews everyday schmoes or, as some might call them, "real Americans." She goes to the local jail, in hopes of finding a colorful character or two, and meets Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith), who is in for a week on charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct. Working out a deal with the sherrif for an early release, Marcia persuades him to talk for a few minutes and sing a song with his "Mama Guitar." She instantly senses something very special about him, and convinces her uncle to hire him for the morning radio show. Convincing Rhodes, who she has unofficially named "Lonesome Rhodes," is another matter altogether. She manages to, however, mostly by assuring him that if he doesn't like it he can leave, with a plane ticket to wherever he was walking to when she found him.

Lonesome agrees and is a huge success on the radio. He has keen powers of observation and a way of talking to people that convinces them he speaks their language. He pulls a couple of stunts that help him realize the kind of sway he has over people and that he can get them to do just about anything he says. It isn't long, though, before television comes calling. He is offered a job on a Memphis channel, and when he and Marcia board the train, he makes a snide comment under his breath and she sees the first true glimpse of who he really is. She was shocked but accepting of his drunkenness and womanizing, but this is her first clue that he's a fraud.

Things go well on Memphis television, crossing paths in the process with Mel Miller (Walter Matthau in a surprisingly dramatic turn), one of his staff writers, and Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa), an office boy who becomes Rhodes' agent. Mel and Joey are basically foils for each other, Mel being the overlooked conscience of the film and Joey being in a lot of ways the devil on Lonesome's shoulder (not that he needs one). He has conflicts with one sponsor and gets in bed with another, Vitajex, using his skills of persuasion to turn a pill that is mostly sugar and has almost zero nutritional or health value into the biggest thing since sliced bread. He soon finds himself with a nationally televised show and a penthouse in New York.

Despite his protestations that he loves Marcia and needs her, he pretty much shoves their personal relationship down the toilet (as well as any lingering audience sympathy for him) by marrying a 17-year-old baton twirler that he meets when judging a contest in his hometown. Marcia stands her ground, though, and at least claims what she deserves from their business relationship.

In what is the next logical step in his ascent, he starts taking meetings with a politician who is trying to run for President and coaching him on how to better sell himself. He has a new show called "Lonesome Rhodes' Cracker Barrel" (no, really) where he and a bunch of other fake hicks chew the fat about politics. He invites the politician, Senator Fuller, to come and sell his ideas on the show. At this point, it's hard to imagine how much further up the ladder Rhodes can go, and as a viewer you're not sure you want to see it happen; it's only a matter of time before the tide starts to turn against him.

I'd like to remind you, in case you forgot since I mentioned it above, that this guy is played by National Treasure ANDY EFFING GRIFFITH. You have NEVER seen him like this, unless you've already seen this movie. It's incredible!

He gets a painful but satisfying (for the viewer) slap in the face when his small town child-bride turns out not to be as innocent as she first seemed. This drives him to seek solace in Marcia's bed, but thankfully before anything can happen he shows her his true face, his true ambitions, and what he really thinks of his followers. She sees for the first time what a monster she created and sets out to destroy him. It doesn't take much - just like in modern times, there are few things that change people's perceptions about a public figure more effectively than a microphone left on when someone thinks it's off. In a fairly obvious, but nonetheless clever, metaphor, in the time it takes Rhodes to ride the elevator from the upper-floor studio to the ground floor to get in his car and go back home (where he's supposed to have dinner with all kinds of powerful people), his stock with the public plummets along with him. The switchboards are on fire with people calling to complain about him, his agent has lined up a replacement for him, and he gets home to find that absolutely no one has shown up for his dinner party. He's finished, and only half an hour has passed since the microphone incident.

This movie is a brilliant bit of writing that I'd stack up against The Greatest Screenplay Of All Time, Network, and the two films have similar themes. Both of them involve how people are manipulated by the media, particularly television. I'm going to say this, and I realize this may make a few of you tune out, but it is no accident that Keith Olbermann's nickname for Glenn Beck is "Lonesome Rhodes." I am going to be generous and give Beck at least the benefit of the doubt that he at least believes in (some of?) what he is spewing. Perhaps that is too generous, but I am reluctant to think less of any actual human being. But the similarity in the hold that has over his audience is frankly chilling. Here was a guy (I'm talking about Rhodes now) who came from nothing, had no possessions that didn't fit in his rickety suitcase, reeked of ignorance (by which I mean literally without education), had virtually no morals, and had no friends. And yet he went from that to being one of the most powerful men in America, simply because he spoke to people like he was "one of them."

I can't say enough about the performances in this film. You are seriously not prepared for how skeezy and manipulative ANDY FRICKIN' GRIFFITH is in this movie, and yet he still manages, at some points, to be likable. Patricia Neal is outstanding. I once went to see this at an arthouse theater in Nashville, and she was in attendance and answered some questions. She sat right behind me during the movie and I kept hearing her soft, husky laugh in my ear. Walter Matthau owns every scene he is in, and despite the fact that this is not one of the comedic roles he's better known for, you can totally see from this performance what he had that made him a huge star. Anthony Franciosa is near diabolical, turning his friendly office boy role into someone who has even more power than Rhodes. And Lee Remick, in her big screen debut, takes a tiny bit of screen time and makes an authentic character out of her baton-twirling Barbie doll role. Of course, it helps when Elia Kazan is calling the shots. He made many famous and great films, but this one is definitely my favorite of his.

I'll leave you with this scene and remind you (again!) that this is the man little Ronnie Howard used to call "Paw." And I will also take this opportunity to express my deep straight-girl crush on Patricia Neal, who is absolutely gorgeous in this scene.

July Movie Releases

2010-07-01T15:44:00.000-07:00

Um, why are there so few movies slated for release in the middle month of the summer? Look at July 16, for example. I mean, I know no one wants to go up against a movie made by the "Dark Knight" guy, but damn. One movie (plus another that's going to try for a two-day jump on the weekend)? I suppose if nothing else, this is a sign that Hollywood is hurting as much as the rest of the world right now.

JUNE 30
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - Apparently the least sucktastic (no pun intended) of the series so far but that's certainly not saying much. There is probably nothing that will convince you to either see this or not see it, so I'll leave it there.

The Love Ranch - Taylor Hackford (Ray) directs his wife, Helen Mirren, in what looks like a fantastic B-movie about the couple that owned the first legal brothel in Reno, NV.

JULY 1

The Last Airbender - I have heard - literally - nothing positive about this movie. This makes me sad, but perhaps it's not surprising. Anyway, in case you hadn't heard already, this film is apparently not even worth seeing to spite the sparkle.

JULY 8

Grease Sing-Along - If this doesn't make you excited, you are dead inside. That is all.

JULY 9

Despicable Me - I don't care what anyone thinks, I want to see this. The marketing has been all over the place, from the excruciating teaser trailer (dumb American crackers in Egypt, yo!) to the enigmatic ads that feature nothing but those adorable yellow minions. This looks like fun, and the voice talent is intriguing on its own (Julie Andrews, FTW!), but after over a year of seeing ads for it, I still don't know what it's about. I *think* it's about an evil mastermind who's put in charge of a couple of cute kids, but after all the marketing whiplash, I'm not entirely sure.

Predators - Am I a bad geek for having never seen the original Predator? This is supposed to be a reboot, directed by Nimród Antal and produced by Robert Rodriguez. It's got a pretty kick-ass cast, so that's worth something right there. I feel like I need to see the original first, though.

MUST SEE: The Kids Are All Right - (limited) One of the darlings of Sundance, this may actually have legs as an early award bait movie. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play lesbian parents whose kids seek out their sperm donor dad. The trailer, at least, is very warm and funny, and I get some You Can Count On Me vibes from it, which is no bad thing.

JULY 14

MUST SEE: The Sorcerer's Apprentice - There is some good word of mouth on this, and I have to say it looks like something worth checking out. Jay Baruchel's star may finally be on the rise, after watching the enormous successes of his friends and sometime co-stars Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and Jason Segel. And man, it's good to see Nicholas Cage back in the game.

JULY 16

MUST SEE: Inception - Yep, this is the one most of us have been waiting for most of the year. Christopher Nolan follows up the jaw-dropping success of The Dark Knight with something more like the films he used to make (like Memento and The Prestige - the latter being probably my fave of his), but with way more cool toys at his disposal. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a thief who takes ideas from people's dreams. There's been positive early feedback, though some people seem to be disappointed that it's not the BEST MOVIE EVER OMG. Anyway, for once, I can't wait to go into a theater not knowing a thing about what to expect.

JULY 23

Salt - I don't know why, but this just doesn't interest me. I love that this character was originally a man, but the comment from someone involved with the film about changing the script to avoid having Evelyn save (and therefore metaphorically castrate) her husband? Seriously sold me a ticket to another movie this weekend.

Ramona and Beezus - I might dig the trailer for this more if it didn't have Selena Gomez's inspiration-y theme song all over it and just let it be quirky, like Cleary's stuff should be. This isn't top priority, but it's still ahead of Salt if those are my only choices for that weekend.

Countdown to Zero - (NYC, Wash. DC) From some of the folks who brought us An Inconvenient Truth comes a documentary about the escalating nuclear arms race, from the Cold War to the present.

JULY 30

MUST SEE: Dinner For Schmucks - Saw the original French version, called The Dinner Game, when I was in college, and it's a pretty great character comedy. I'm wary about what looks like a ratcheting up of the goofball quotient, but I hope they at least do justice to the friendship between the two guys.

MUST SEE: Get Low (limited) - This one has been around since last summer's festival circuit, and there was strong buzz about Robert Duvall in last year's Best Actor race until they pushed the film to this year. The story is basically about a man in 1930s Tennessee who wants to hold his own funeral while he's still alive. Also stars Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, and Gerald McRaney. Cannot wait to see this.

Charlie St. Cloud - Looks like Zac Efron is starting to break out of the teen idol mold and take on some more challenging roles. This movie seems an awful lot like a three-hankie weeper, and as such I will probably skip it for now and wait until it shows up on cable.

Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore - I confess, I saw the first Cats and Dogs and it was mildly funny (Sean Hayes as Mr. Tinkles = WIN). But every time I see the trailer for this new movie I want to slash my wrists. I'm sure kids will eat this up, but they will forget about it five minutes after they leave the theater. I also hate the deliberate attempts to crack "grown up" jokes (Kitty Galore, "hopped up on catnip," etc.). Just no.

Twelve (limited) - This kind of movie is right in director Joel Schumacher's wheelhouse. He does so much better with more intimate, relationship-driven movies than with big studio fare. This movie, which made its debut at Sundance, has been savaged by critics - except for Roger Ebert. I'm interested in it, if for no other reason than the narration by Schumacher alumnus Keifer Sutherland.

Scenes Made of Awesome - Me and You and Everyone We Know

2010-06-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

Miranda July's wonderfully bizarre Me and You and Everyone We Know came up on one of the blogs I read as an example of great use of scatological humor in movies, and I almost did a post about the "poop back and forth" scene instead (Brandon Ratcliff is seriously one of the cutest kid actors in the History of Cute). But then I watched the Tyrone Street scene again. This is one of my favorite movies ever, and there are so many great, poetic scenes in it, but the Tyrone Street scene is perhaps the most special of all.

Christine (director and star July), is an elder-cab driver by day and video artist by night, and she takes one of her elder-cab clients to shop for shoes. Working at the store is a guy named Richard (John Hawkes, who Lost fans might recognize as Lennon from Season 6), and Richard is bummed because he's just separated from his wife, who doesn't seem to have loved him in quite the same way he loved her. He and Christine have a -- I don't want to call it meet-cute, but it's definitely a connection. Christine impulsively catches up to Richard as they both walk to their cars, and what follows is just plain magic. An entire lifetime together, lived in one block. The whole film is kind of about this moment, about the characters finding other people who speak their unique "language."

The A-Team

2010-06-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

The A-Team

This plot isn't nearly as convoluted as in his previous film, Smokin' Aces, but director Joe Carnahan brings the same unabashed sense of gleeful mayhem to his take on the 1980s action-comedy series The A-Team. The movie is an origin story - a two hour expansion on essentially the opening credits of the show. How did these guys meet? What crime were they accused of that they didn't commit? Why is B.A. afraid to fly, and what's with the mohawk? All these questions and more are answered.

I really couldn't tell you with any certainty what the plot of the film is, so I am cribb. Hannibal (Liam Neeson) and Face (Bradley Cooper) already know each other when the movie begins, and very soon after the opening scene Hannibal meets B.A. (Quinton Jackson) and they rescue Face from some Mexican badasses. The threesome, in desperate need of a pilot, recruit "Howling Mad" Murdock (District 9's Sharlto Copley). And by recruit, I mean break him out of a mental hospital, because his insanity is all too real.

There is a ridiculously over-the-top opening action sequence, culminating in Hannibal uttering his famous line from the show - "I love it when a plan comes together!" And "eight years and eighty successful missions later", the Alpha Team is stationed in Iraq. They take on a mission, against fairly sound advice, and though the mission is a success, the only person who could have testified that they were acting on the U.S.'s behalf ends up being killed, and the four of them are dishonorably discharged and sent to separate maximum security prisons. Pretty darn close to the background of the show.

The rest of the film is about them breaking out and attempting to clear their names and be reinstated. This doesn't quite happen, but it effectively serves as background for the canon of the show, where we were told each week:

"...a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team."

Something I used to love about the show back in the day was that the good guys always won and nobody got hurt (or at least killed). There have been complaints (from Mr. T, for one) that the movie doesn't follow this formula (he also complains about the sex in the movie, which makes me think he went to see something else, because there is nothing sexual except some innuendo and one kiss in the film). But I submit that both the nature of the times and the nature of the medium of film make the violence necessary. And something I appreciated is that the movie, as empty as it is in most respects, manages to deal with the violence in a surprisingly thoughtful way, giving Quinton Jackson a lot more to do with B.A. than Mr. T got to do on the show - and even giving the mohawk a backstory!

One thing critics complained about that I kind of loved - the flashbacks to things that we saw half an hour or so before. The biggest example of this is in the climax. We've already seen Face lay out the plan, but when we see the plan executed, we flash back to that "plan" scene again, and the lines have a little more meaning. Tons of movies have used this effect, and I think - at least in the climax (perhaps using it more than once was overkill) - it was crucial to understanding what was going on and the knowledge that everything that happened was part of the plan.

It might be silly, but I loved this movie to pieces. There are some weak spots, sure (most notably Biel's character, who is pretty badly written), but the good stuff far outweighs any of that. Neeson is surprisingly good in such an uncharacteristic role. Bradley Cooper is hilarious, and gorgeous. Quinton Jackson, as I said above, gives B.A. a lot more meat than just the fool-pitying. Sharlto Copley is the best thing about the "Team." And Patrick Wilson as the CIA heavy is possibly the best thing about the entire movie.

The Karate Kid (2010)

2010-06-15T14:51:00.000-07:00

The Karate Kid (2010)

In a time of far too many remakes, this is a surprisingly good one. John Avildsen, who directed the original, had a great "underdog movie" mold and he used it to great effect with his 1984 film, just as he did 8 years before with the Best Picture winner Rocky. So when you've got a good formula, it's tricky to mess with it.

Which is why the remake is nearly a beat-for-beat copy of the original, only put into the new setting of China so that the sights are different, more dramatic, more majestic. And, despite what the title says (I will never understand why that essential change was not made), it's a different martial art, so the moves are different. Seriously, it's like all those posts about Avatar this winter, where someone just took a copy of the already existing story and, as they say, filed the serial numbers off (and not even all of them). Dre instantly makes a friend when he gets to his new home, but the guy disappears after the first few minutes of the movie. Dre is targeted by the bullies because he flirts with a girl one of them knows (or is "promised" to?). He gets beaten up and hides from the bullies at school. He gets just a little revenge and gets a group ass-kicking for his trouble, which is interrupted by the maintenance man who is actually rather good at ass-kicking himself. Dre and the maintenance man go to the - I'm sure the word is not dojo - class where his bullies are learning kung fu, and the similarities to the original have to be seen to be believed. Even the tournament hits almost exactly every note the original does. Dre is given a special garment - in this case a white tunic "like Bruce Lee's" before his first fight. There is then a tournament montage accompanied by some peppy music - sadly, not Joe Esposito's awesome "You're the Best." Dre makes it to the semi-finals and his opponent is told by his master to break a rule and disqualify himself in order to put Dre out of commission. Dre is injured and pleads with his teacher to do that magic healing thing we saw earlier in the film so that he can fight in the final. Dre goes to fight, on an injured leg, and his final opponent is instructed to ~~sweep~~ break his leg. And while it's not the Crane, Dre still witnesses ancient technique that somehow masters and uses in the very end to defeat his opponent.

This is not to say that these similarities are a flaw in the film. Far from it. For people who haven't seen the original, this simply pushes all the same buttons that the original did for us fans. As I said, it's a very effective formula, so why mess with it. For us fans, though, it does something just as cool. Since we know how the story goes, it becomes a game of how much of the original can they fit into this new setting, and how will they transpose our favorite elements of the original.

I thought this was a very satisfying film. Jaden Smith, it must be said, is a little annoying at times. Jackie Chan gets to demonstrate that he can act AND fight (his character's Obligatory Family Tragedy scene is actually very well played). And Taraji P. Henson is possibly the strongest link in the cast.

(Brendan and) The Secret of Kells

2010-03-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate enough to catch this before the Oscars this past weekend, and while I don't think it was the strongest film of the Animation nominees, it's nonetheless a staggeringly beautiful myth of a movie. Click on all the images below to see them bigger; there's a lot of detail that rewards a closer look.

The Secret of Kells

The story revolves around Brendan, who lives in a little village called Kells with his guardian uncle, Abbot Cellach (voiced by Mad-Eye himself, Brendan Gleeson). The Abbot is consumed with a project of building a wall around Kells, in order to protect it from attack by the approaching barbarians. He forbids Brendan from straying on the other side of the wall, but Brendan is as restless as any other boy his age. He spends a lot of time with the scribes and becomes obsessed with illumination - an intricate process of drawing which was used to create the wondrous Book of Iona, a book prophecies were made about which was largely made by the work of Father Aidan. Father Aidan seeks refuge in Kells from the barbarians, who are moving ever closer, and Brendan befriends him and becomes his apprentice.

On a mission to find special berries to make ink for the Book, Brendan ventures outside the wall into the forest and is nearly killed by wolves. He is saved, however, by a faerie named Aisling (which may sound to an American ear more like "Ashley"), who can also transform into a white wolf (zomg stolen from twilight!). Aisling befriends Brendan and guides him through the forest (which she calls *her* forest), and she helps him find the berries he needs to bring back to Father Aidan. Over the course of the film, Brendan must face many fears, from fear of his uncle's disapproval and punishment to more mythical fears such as monsters.

This is very much a hero's tale, with a real sense of fear - Brendan must face his fears in order to accomplish his fated task and finish the Book. There is even a quite striking "belly of the beast" sequence that features some of the most spellbinding animation and drawing that you've ever seen. Seriously, just wow.

My favorite sequence, though, is the one embedded below. Brendan has been locked in his room for disobedience, but he desperately needs to make another trip into the forest to get an essential item for illuminating. The key hangs above where Brendan's uncle is sleeping, and Aisling goes with the cat Pangur to get it.

This is a real gem of a movie, and if you get a chance (I'm not sure how widely it will be released in theaters, but it should be at least on DVD soon), I highly recommend it. It's a storybook come to life, and it tells its tale in a way no other medium but animation can.