The Year of the Woman? Isn’t every year allegedly the Year of the Woman? Nonetheless, my essentially interchangeable top two films are both from female directors – Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion – who have established reputations for talent and inconsistency. It is wonderful to see them both hit the top of their games at the same time.
1. Bright Star – Jane Campion’s love story of the poet John Keats told through the eyes of his fiancée Fanny Brawne, Bright Star is a film that works emotionally on the surface level and intellectually on deeper levels. In the old days, we used to call that a masterpiece. Set in 19th Century England, the film’s restrained love story is unusually moving. However, Bright Star is more – a contemplation on the force of beauty in the world. Aided by stunning cinematography and production design, as well as head-turning performances from Abbie Cornish and Paul Schneider, Campion’s direction is gently assured; you wonder if other directors watch this film and wonder if they’re working hard enough.
2. The Hurt Locker –It’s rare that you find a film that takes a spent genre and re-wires it for modernity. Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War film eliminates decades of “Army of Victims” assumptions and rewires the war film for a modern professional military. The Hurt Locker confounds the accepted liberal post-Vietnam wisdom by presenting a demolition expert – simultaneo1usly professionally focused and divinely insane - who lives for war and couldn’t live without it (a great Jeremy Renner). While the film is one tense wartime set piece after another, it’s that quietly shocking five minutes on the homefront that seems to stick out in everyone’s mind.
3. Thirst- Vampire films are tales of male predation upon women. Films noirs are stories of female predation upon men. Put them together and apparently you get a fantastic vampire screwball finale in Chan Wook-Park’s mucho bloody, darkly funny morality tale.
4. The Road – I don’t understand the critical hesitation to accept The Road. There seems to be a thought that it is too bleak or that the book does not translate well to screen. What I saw was a tender father-son story in a post-apocalyptic imaginative space that re-inforces the timelessness of love and morality. Even in humanity’s worst moments, we have the choice to love and to do the right thing. Fantastic performances from Viggo Mortensen and the youngster Kodi Smit-McPhee, as well as Charlize Theron’s great five minutes.
5. A Serious Man - The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man is the most intellectually challenging major American release of the year. It's too bad that it's only half-enjoyable to watch. Nonetheless, the brothers re-imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey as a Jewish-American domestic black comedy. The film contemplates the ways that both fables and rationalism fall short in understanding the mind of God.
6. Inglourious Basterds - All the endless discussion of Quentin Tarantino, The Director, misses his true great contribution to film history - liberating screen dialogue. In the Pulp Fiction era, Tarantino was superb at writing lines primarily in that one familiar Tarantino voice. The World War II dazzler Inglourious Basterds finds him writing great lines in multiple voices, multiple styles, and multiple languages.
7. Fantastic Mr. Fox - Some view Wes Anderson's animated outing as a return to form. I never thought he ever lost form. I just think of it as another terrific outing. Glad to hear nice things being said about him again, though.
8. The Brothers Bloom - One wag memorably described Rian Johnson's quirky con man film as "The Sting directed by Hal Ashby." Actually, this mix of con man picture and anachronistic screwball comedy is better described as The Lady Eve directed by Hal Ashby. Rachel Weisz dominates as the reclusive innocent Penelope Stamp, a cross between a Katharine Hepburn screwball heiress and Being There's childlike hero Chauncey Gardiner. A smart post-modern sensibility permeates, giving us the brilliant bit of wisdom, “The ultimate con is to tell a lie so well that it becomes the truth.”
9. Adventureland - Greg Mottola upped the ante on the Apatow comedy with this late eighties summertime memoir set in an amusement park in the last rung of Hell. Nostalgic and tender where others are coarse and cynical. Too bad everyone’s forgotten Ryan Reynolds in this.
10. Public Enemies - Michael Mann's take on the short, brilliant bank robbing life of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), bathed with a death wish and a taste for fame. A throwback crime film in which the crook is a one-man last stand of romantic American individualism, as both law and crime advance to a more corporate and technological condition. A film that starts slow and gets better and better as it goes along.
Free Admission Granted on some of these
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Extraordinary Measures
Extraordinary Measures
Grade: C
Cast: Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser, Keri Russell
Director: Terry Vaughan
Free Admission Granted
Things to like about Extraordinary Measures, with clinical researcher Harrison Ford and father/businessman Brendan Fraser joining forces to save Fraser’s children from a deadly form of muscular distrophy:
1) It’s relatively adult.
2) It treats its subject seriously.
3) It treats its subject carefully.
4) Based on a true story, it doesn’t much Hollywood-up its ending.
5) For a disease-of-the-week flick, it’s fairly spare on the mawkishness.
6) It rolls out the sick kids more for soft humor than to tug the heart strings.
7) It chooses a rare subject, work. Don’t we all go to the movies to watch what we do every day?
8) It’s actually interesting, for me anyway, to watch the details of medical research and see how they play as drama. I mean, who doesn’t want to watch the quiet explosiveness of cost-benefit analysis of medications for orphan diseases?
9) It’s a story of two men doing nothing more “dramatic” than bonding over a common goal.
10) It gives a realistic portrait of starting up a business and keeping it going. In fact, this makes up some of the more compelling moments in the film.
11) Therefore it tends to use natural drama, rather than manufactured drama, to propel its story.
12) It gives Harrison Ford something to do, even if it is a bit grumpily over the top. You half expect him to utter, “Dammit, I’m a doctor, Jim.” And no, we don’t want to watch him run wind sprints ever again.
And still even with these positives, could I look you in the eye and tell you to spend money to go see it? That’s what this comes down to, right? No, no, not really.
Produced by newcomer CBS Films, which is exactly what it sounds like it is, the film looks like it was shot on rejected sets for CSI on mid-80s film stock left over from the vaults of Knots Landing. The product never escapes its television movie tendencies.
Grade: C
Cast: Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser, Keri Russell
Director: Terry Vaughan
Free Admission Granted
Things to like about Extraordinary Measures, with clinical researcher Harrison Ford and father/businessman Brendan Fraser joining forces to save Fraser’s children from a deadly form of muscular distrophy:
1) It’s relatively adult.
2) It treats its subject seriously.
3) It treats its subject carefully.
4) Based on a true story, it doesn’t much Hollywood-up its ending.
5) For a disease-of-the-week flick, it’s fairly spare on the mawkishness.
6) It rolls out the sick kids more for soft humor than to tug the heart strings.
7) It chooses a rare subject, work. Don’t we all go to the movies to watch what we do every day?
8) It’s actually interesting, for me anyway, to watch the details of medical research and see how they play as drama. I mean, who doesn’t want to watch the quiet explosiveness of cost-benefit analysis of medications for orphan diseases?
9) It’s a story of two men doing nothing more “dramatic” than bonding over a common goal.
10) It gives a realistic portrait of starting up a business and keeping it going. In fact, this makes up some of the more compelling moments in the film.
11) Therefore it tends to use natural drama, rather than manufactured drama, to propel its story.
12) It gives Harrison Ford something to do, even if it is a bit grumpily over the top. You half expect him to utter, “Dammit, I’m a doctor, Jim.” And no, we don’t want to watch him run wind sprints ever again.
And still even with these positives, could I look you in the eye and tell you to spend money to go see it? That’s what this comes down to, right? No, no, not really.
Produced by newcomer CBS Films, which is exactly what it sounds like it is, the film looks like it was shot on rejected sets for CSI on mid-80s film stock left over from the vaults of Knots Landing. The product never escapes its television movie tendencies.
The Lovely Bones
The Lovely Bones
Grade: D
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Rachel Weisz
Director: Peter Jackson
Free Admission Granted
Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones accomplishes one thing that’s hard to do.
I’ve never seen a film in which the foreboding sounds of inanimate objects cause such an emotional stir while the allegedly animate actors cause almost none.
In his adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel about a child murder, Jackson’s film does pretty well in re-creating the sights and sounds of 1973, capturing that Lynch-ian fraudulent suburban paradise with the depraved desires lurking underneath. And yet for all of its indulgence in graphic situations, you never get that disturbed jolt. The movie’s narrator isn’t the only thing that’s dead.
The gimmick of The Lovely Bones is that it is narrated by the dead child, Susie Salmon (whom Saoirse Ronan at least keeps her from also being a dead fish), from a halfway point to Heaven that bears considerable resemblance to Candyland or an endless screensaver. There, she watches her murderer and family from above, and soapily longs for the boy she longed to kiss. Having been brutally killed, these digs aren’t too bad. Child murder has never looked so inviting.
The tone of the film swings wildly among horror film, domestic melodrama, Twilight-y romance, and cheesy comedy. At times it is deadly serious. At other times, deadly ludicrous. This culminates in Stanley Tucci’s murderer. Under dorky windbreakers and a ridiculous sandy mustache, the effect is more comedy than horror. It’s hard to be too creeped out when the epitome of evil appears too much like a Carol Burnett skit character, to make a nice seventies reference.
The film seems to have little to say and exists only to bathe in (un-)emotional pornography. That is until the end, when it suddenly advises against vengeance and tells everyone that we should chill out and Zen-like move on from the tragedy. Then it reverses course and grants the audience’s desire for the bad guy to get it. There’s nothing worse than a movie that can’t take its own advice.
Grade: D
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Rachel Weisz
Director: Peter Jackson
Free Admission Granted
Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones accomplishes one thing that’s hard to do.
I’ve never seen a film in which the foreboding sounds of inanimate objects cause such an emotional stir while the allegedly animate actors cause almost none.
In his adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel about a child murder, Jackson’s film does pretty well in re-creating the sights and sounds of 1973, capturing that Lynch-ian fraudulent suburban paradise with the depraved desires lurking underneath. And yet for all of its indulgence in graphic situations, you never get that disturbed jolt. The movie’s narrator isn’t the only thing that’s dead.
The gimmick of The Lovely Bones is that it is narrated by the dead child, Susie Salmon (whom Saoirse Ronan at least keeps her from also being a dead fish), from a halfway point to Heaven that bears considerable resemblance to Candyland or an endless screensaver. There, she watches her murderer and family from above, and soapily longs for the boy she longed to kiss. Having been brutally killed, these digs aren’t too bad. Child murder has never looked so inviting.
The tone of the film swings wildly among horror film, domestic melodrama, Twilight-y romance, and cheesy comedy. At times it is deadly serious. At other times, deadly ludicrous. This culminates in Stanley Tucci’s murderer. Under dorky windbreakers and a ridiculous sandy mustache, the effect is more comedy than horror. It’s hard to be too creeped out when the epitome of evil appears too much like a Carol Burnett skit character, to make a nice seventies reference.
The film seems to have little to say and exists only to bathe in (un-)emotional pornography. That is until the end, when it suddenly advises against vengeance and tells everyone that we should chill out and Zen-like move on from the tragedy. Then it reverses course and grants the audience’s desire for the bad guy to get it. There’s nothing worse than a movie that can’t take its own advice.
Youth in Revolt
Youth in Revolt
Grade: B
Cast: Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta
Director: Miguel Arteta
Free Admission Granted
…. And so once again we join Michael Cera in progress as he tries to lose his virginity ….
Does this sound like the plot of every Michael Cera film? I mean, at least in Juno, he got it over with real quick-like. In Youth in Revolt, it doesn’t come so easily. But at least it is, surprisingly, darn funny, if silly as hell. You must wonder why the Weinsteins would wait to stash this in the January dump period.
With a loser mother (Jean Smart), a loser father (Steve Buscemi), a loser mom’s boyfriend (Zach Galifianakis) and …. well, a loser life, Cera’s over-intellectual teen-ager Nick Twisp is floating through high school without hope of a lay. When they head for the hills – or rather the trailer park – to keep mom’s loser boyfriend from getting a good beatdown, he meets the French-film-loving girl of his dreams (Portia Doubleday), until fate separates them.
The film goofs on Cera’s awkward image by pairing him with a more confident (and more French) alter ego. The alter ego – a perfectly foul-mouthed, mirrored-sunglassed psychopath, by his own description – instructs his innocent formal self in arson and other acts of delinquency, all in a plot (that I couldn’t explain if I wanted to) to re-unite him with the momentary love of his 16-year-old life. From there Youth in Revolt gets less and less probable and more and more humorous.
Director Miguel Arteta (Chuck & Buck)simultaneously mocks and tries to achieve the spirit of the New Wave and other restless youth films of the sixties. It doesn’t rise to the level of appreciation or success of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore in that category, but it could be worse. The plot is silly, the humor is broad but clever. That means it had better make you laugh or fail. Haha. Ha haha ha.
Grade: B
Cast: Michael Cera, Portia Doubleday, Jean Smart, Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta
Director: Miguel Arteta
Free Admission Granted
…. And so once again we join Michael Cera in progress as he tries to lose his virginity ….
Does this sound like the plot of every Michael Cera film? I mean, at least in Juno, he got it over with real quick-like. In Youth in Revolt, it doesn’t come so easily. But at least it is, surprisingly, darn funny, if silly as hell. You must wonder why the Weinsteins would wait to stash this in the January dump period.
With a loser mother (Jean Smart), a loser father (Steve Buscemi), a loser mom’s boyfriend (Zach Galifianakis) and …. well, a loser life, Cera’s over-intellectual teen-ager Nick Twisp is floating through high school without hope of a lay. When they head for the hills – or rather the trailer park – to keep mom’s loser boyfriend from getting a good beatdown, he meets the French-film-loving girl of his dreams (Portia Doubleday), until fate separates them.
The film goofs on Cera’s awkward image by pairing him with a more confident (and more French) alter ego. The alter ego – a perfectly foul-mouthed, mirrored-sunglassed psychopath, by his own description – instructs his innocent formal self in arson and other acts of delinquency, all in a plot (that I couldn’t explain if I wanted to) to re-unite him with the momentary love of his 16-year-old life. From there Youth in Revolt gets less and less probable and more and more humorous.
Director Miguel Arteta (Chuck & Buck)simultaneously mocks and tries to achieve the spirit of the New Wave and other restless youth films of the sixties. It doesn’t rise to the level of appreciation or success of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore in that category, but it could be worse. The plot is silly, the humor is broad but clever. That means it had better make you laugh or fail. Haha. Ha haha ha.
Monday, January 11, 2010
The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon
Grade: No Rating
Cast: Christian Friedel, Ulrich Turkel, Burghart Klausner
Director: Michael Haneke
Free Admission Granted
Misanthropy can be a powerful tool in the chest of a filmmaker.
Few are as misanthropic as the German filmmaker Michael Haneke, and The White Ribbon might be the bleakest film that you will see in a long time. Reviling humanity isn’t a crime. It just tastes better with a little cube of humor. For all of its stunning filmmaking, The White Ribbon is misanthropy without the charm.
Inspecting the psychological dynamics of a small German village on the brink of World War I, The White Ribbon follows a series of mysterious unsolved murders that are driving the villagers nuts. The village life is dominated by several powerful father figures – particularly a cruel doctor and a dour minister who is a monstrous father – who fail to live up to the virtue of their profession. Haneke makes one gesture of conciliation to his audience –the courtship of a wife by the narrator, a schoolteacher re-telling the story from the distance, safety and sad perspective of the future. But that is a crumb of sunshine in an onslaught of paranoia and dread.
Like Cache, The White Ribbon sweats underneath the feeling of being watched. Even without videotape, the village is a crucible of surveillance. Children peer through windows. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. In this little Peyton Place of a town, knowing your neighbor’s business isn’t appealing. When one woman declares her desire to leave, she runs down an indictment of the village’s envy, brutality, and other very bad things. Andy Griffith, this is not.
Visually, The White Ribbon is quite impressive. It is shot on film in a stark black and white. It is a film of open gates and closing doors, creating frames within frames, alternately giving a sense of enclosure and disclosure. Captured in long takes, the camera alternates between eavesdropping gently and freezing characters in close-ups, leaving them imprisoned in their own isolation.
The White Ribbon has a weird way of seeming both like reality and like a dream. Without Haneke’s liquid filmmaking talent, without the film achieving such amazing verisimilitude, would the story seem comically over-the-top? Or is the Funny Games director entirely serious about the dire cruelty he sees in humanity? There is a disenchanting lack of sympathy found here, and little hint that Haneke knows that his concentrated mendacity isn’t the only thing there is.
Grade: No Rating
Cast: Christian Friedel, Ulrich Turkel, Burghart Klausner
Director: Michael Haneke
Free Admission Granted
Misanthropy can be a powerful tool in the chest of a filmmaker.
Few are as misanthropic as the German filmmaker Michael Haneke, and The White Ribbon might be the bleakest film that you will see in a long time. Reviling humanity isn’t a crime. It just tastes better with a little cube of humor. For all of its stunning filmmaking, The White Ribbon is misanthropy without the charm.
Inspecting the psychological dynamics of a small German village on the brink of World War I, The White Ribbon follows a series of mysterious unsolved murders that are driving the villagers nuts. The village life is dominated by several powerful father figures – particularly a cruel doctor and a dour minister who is a monstrous father – who fail to live up to the virtue of their profession. Haneke makes one gesture of conciliation to his audience –the courtship of a wife by the narrator, a schoolteacher re-telling the story from the distance, safety and sad perspective of the future. But that is a crumb of sunshine in an onslaught of paranoia and dread.
Like Cache, The White Ribbon sweats underneath the feeling of being watched. Even without videotape, the village is a crucible of surveillance. Children peer through windows. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. In this little Peyton Place of a town, knowing your neighbor’s business isn’t appealing. When one woman declares her desire to leave, she runs down an indictment of the village’s envy, brutality, and other very bad things. Andy Griffith, this is not.
Visually, The White Ribbon is quite impressive. It is shot on film in a stark black and white. It is a film of open gates and closing doors, creating frames within frames, alternately giving a sense of enclosure and disclosure. Captured in long takes, the camera alternates between eavesdropping gently and freezing characters in close-ups, leaving them imprisoned in their own isolation.
The White Ribbon has a weird way of seeming both like reality and like a dream. Without Haneke’s liquid filmmaking talent, without the film achieving such amazing verisimilitude, would the story seem comically over-the-top? Or is the Funny Games director entirely serious about the dire cruelty he sees in humanity? There is a disenchanting lack of sympathy found here, and little hint that Haneke knows that his concentrated mendacity isn’t the only thing there is.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Grade: B
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams,
Director: Guy Ritchie
free admission granted
In its still short history as a sub-genre of film, the series reboot has traditionally been an origin story. In a word, it's been "elementary."
By that, we mean a back-to-the-basics sort of the story - a neo-traditional approach that takes and re-works the original elements of a character and points him in a new direction. It contains a sort of puritanical fundamentalism, even if it ultimately points this new fundamentalist character can taste somewhat different than its literary forbear.
Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes is something of an oddity in this context, because we have reached the point that the re-vitalized character isn't necessarily a fundamentalist. Playing up the action hero of the world's best known fiction detective, this is not your father's Sherlock Holmes. Or your grandfather's Sherlock Holmes. Or his father's. Or his father's.
In fact, it might not be Sherlock Holmes at all, but whatever it is, it is still quite fun. Traditionalists might shudder at the thought of Holmes doing action set pieces, but they're fairly enjoyable in a Hollywood sort of way. The sooty London streets are enough to make you sing, "A sweep is as lucky as lucky could be," even if the fog is lifted too often for presumably California sunshine.
The clues here are an eccentric detective (Robert Downey Jr.), an able doctor (Jude Law), some tremendously fun chemistry between the two leads, and a somewhat goofy supernatural criminal with aspirations of world conquest in Victorian England.
Downey is thoroughtly enjoyable as the half-cocked detective, strumming his violin as he silently contemplates clues, all with a method to his madness. It's a role built for Downey and around Downey, and he delivers with an enjoyably spacy twist. Law provides a sober and practical sparring partner.
One thing that I found interesting about Sherlock Holmes is how difficult it is for the modern audience to buy into a mystery. As a society, we're used to the instant payoff, and holding an audience's attention is considered a risk. Watching Avatar within a few days of watching Sherlock Holmes, you're struck by this difference in pace. It might be a shame that this is true, but it is rather bold to try a mystery these days. The audience might not accept the delayed gratification.
Much of your taste for Sherlock Holmes is a glass-half-empty-or-half-full sort of thing. If you see it as a Hollywood-ized action-hero corruption of Doyle's detective, then you are bound to hate it. However, you might see it as that rare thing - a thinking man's franchise movie, one that runs on brain rather than brawn. It would be nice to have one of those.
Grade: B
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams,
Director: Guy Ritchie
free admission granted
In its still short history as a sub-genre of film, the series reboot has traditionally been an origin story. In a word, it's been "elementary."
By that, we mean a back-to-the-basics sort of the story - a neo-traditional approach that takes and re-works the original elements of a character and points him in a new direction. It contains a sort of puritanical fundamentalism, even if it ultimately points this new fundamentalist character can taste somewhat different than its literary forbear.
Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes is something of an oddity in this context, because we have reached the point that the re-vitalized character isn't necessarily a fundamentalist. Playing up the action hero of the world's best known fiction detective, this is not your father's Sherlock Holmes. Or your grandfather's Sherlock Holmes. Or his father's. Or his father's.
In fact, it might not be Sherlock Holmes at all, but whatever it is, it is still quite fun. Traditionalists might shudder at the thought of Holmes doing action set pieces, but they're fairly enjoyable in a Hollywood sort of way. The sooty London streets are enough to make you sing, "A sweep is as lucky as lucky could be," even if the fog is lifted too often for presumably California sunshine.
The clues here are an eccentric detective (Robert Downey Jr.), an able doctor (Jude Law), some tremendously fun chemistry between the two leads, and a somewhat goofy supernatural criminal with aspirations of world conquest in Victorian England.
Downey is thoroughtly enjoyable as the half-cocked detective, strumming his violin as he silently contemplates clues, all with a method to his madness. It's a role built for Downey and around Downey, and he delivers with an enjoyably spacy twist. Law provides a sober and practical sparring partner.
One thing that I found interesting about Sherlock Holmes is how difficult it is for the modern audience to buy into a mystery. As a society, we're used to the instant payoff, and holding an audience's attention is considered a risk. Watching Avatar within a few days of watching Sherlock Holmes, you're struck by this difference in pace. It might be a shame that this is true, but it is rather bold to try a mystery these days. The audience might not accept the delayed gratification.
Much of your taste for Sherlock Holmes is a glass-half-empty-or-half-full sort of thing. If you see it as a Hollywood-ized action-hero corruption of Doyle's detective, then you are bound to hate it. However, you might see it as that rare thing - a thinking man's franchise movie, one that runs on brain rather than brawn. It would be nice to have one of those.
Avatar
Avatar
Grade: B
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi
Director: James Cameron
free admission granted
In the many early raves for James Cameron’s Avatar, one critic compared the film to the first major talkie, The Jazz Singer.
Not a bad comparison. The 1927 audience for that film was undoubtedly astounded by that first magic sprinkling of sound onto film. Yet 1927 happens to be the greatest year for silent filmmaking. Few would think of The Jazz Singer as being artistically in the same league as Metropolis, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sunrise, The General, Eisenstein’s October, etc.
It is undeniable that Avatar is a stunning 3-dimensional showcase that may well be ahead of its time.Nor is it mind-numbed – it has something to say. Cameron’s Noble Savage fantasy is too deeply felt a mindset to deny it springs from a personal ideology. Yet Avatar is so miserably written and so far off on its own merry Marxist moonbeam that it becomes a challenge to entirely give your heart to. I left wishing that this staggering technological advance had accompanied a story that didn't need excuses made for it.
Avatar is a sort of Space Age Dances With Wolves, with one eye beautifully open to painterly excess and one ear closed to its atrocious third-grade dialogue. With its three-dimensional CG effects, every inch of the theater seems to be in play with something new and stunning to see. Unfortunately, though, we must hear, too. It’s not that the dialogue is badly written. It’s that it is calculatingly idiotic, betting on exactly how low the international lowest common denominator goes.
The plot can be (and is) diagrammed in the first ten minutes, which it then executes like a battle plan for the next two and a half hours. Wheelchair-bound Marine Jake Sully volunteers for a mission to a far away forest moon Pandora. A human military outpost has been scraped onto the surface. The planet’s natives are the 12-foot blue Na’vi, the sort of eco-friendly inhabitants that only exist in the minds of the Hollywood Hills.
The scientists on the planet want to make peace. Through technology, the humans transport into Na’vi bodies – called avatars – when they sleep. Jake’s avatar comes to be accepted among the Na’vi, learning their ways with horse-like creatures, flying on candy-colored pterodactyls, and falling in love. For a peace-loving society, all of their customs are curiously martial. Who exactly is at home cooking the roast?
Once taken in by the Na’vi, the military branch wants him to spy. Their mission is to clear the Na’vi village to make way or mission of peace is spat upon by the militarists on the moon, who want to drive away the Na’vi and clear the woods so that a corporation can mine a valuable ore.
Avatar’s anti-imperial enviro-friendly storyline, of a purely innocent living in harmony with nature Na’vi and the bulldozing American military, is heavy-handed, and presumably designed for distribution overseas. Really, it’s only missing Richard Gere asking us to send vibrations of good feeling to the Chinese leadership. However, what it reduces the Nav’i to plot points and constructed others without much personality, whose only duty is to create a fantasy opposite for thinly-drawn humans to mistreat.
The motion-capture animation is brilliantly life-like, and there isn’t a hint of feeling like you are in a movie. It is lovely, painterly, and from the minute you arrive on Cameron’s Fantasy Island. the concentration the way that every inch of it is loaded with a small, beautiful detail, is truly astonishing. But is it really worth $400 million dollars to produce a better flying dragon?
Avatar forces its viewers into a huge choice – should we forgive Avatar its trespasses in favor of its claim to film history? Or should we wait until someone uses the same technology to make an indisputably great and complete film. Is it a crime to hold out for a film with the same technology to a more satisfying artistic end? I think I’ll wait.
Grade: B
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi
Director: James Cameron
free admission granted
In the many early raves for James Cameron’s Avatar, one critic compared the film to the first major talkie, The Jazz Singer.
Not a bad comparison. The 1927 audience for that film was undoubtedly astounded by that first magic sprinkling of sound onto film. Yet 1927 happens to be the greatest year for silent filmmaking. Few would think of The Jazz Singer as being artistically in the same league as Metropolis, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sunrise, The General, Eisenstein’s October, etc.
It is undeniable that Avatar is a stunning 3-dimensional showcase that may well be ahead of its time.Nor is it mind-numbed – it has something to say. Cameron’s Noble Savage fantasy is too deeply felt a mindset to deny it springs from a personal ideology. Yet Avatar is so miserably written and so far off on its own merry Marxist moonbeam that it becomes a challenge to entirely give your heart to. I left wishing that this staggering technological advance had accompanied a story that didn't need excuses made for it.
Avatar is a sort of Space Age Dances With Wolves, with one eye beautifully open to painterly excess and one ear closed to its atrocious third-grade dialogue. With its three-dimensional CG effects, every inch of the theater seems to be in play with something new and stunning to see. Unfortunately, though, we must hear, too. It’s not that the dialogue is badly written. It’s that it is calculatingly idiotic, betting on exactly how low the international lowest common denominator goes.
The plot can be (and is) diagrammed in the first ten minutes, which it then executes like a battle plan for the next two and a half hours. Wheelchair-bound Marine Jake Sully volunteers for a mission to a far away forest moon Pandora. A human military outpost has been scraped onto the surface. The planet’s natives are the 12-foot blue Na’vi, the sort of eco-friendly inhabitants that only exist in the minds of the Hollywood Hills.
The scientists on the planet want to make peace. Through technology, the humans transport into Na’vi bodies – called avatars – when they sleep. Jake’s avatar comes to be accepted among the Na’vi, learning their ways with horse-like creatures, flying on candy-colored pterodactyls, and falling in love. For a peace-loving society, all of their customs are curiously martial. Who exactly is at home cooking the roast?
Once taken in by the Na’vi, the military branch wants him to spy. Their mission is to clear the Na’vi village to make way or mission of peace is spat upon by the militarists on the moon, who want to drive away the Na’vi and clear the woods so that a corporation can mine a valuable ore.
Avatar’s anti-imperial enviro-friendly storyline, of a purely innocent living in harmony with nature Na’vi and the bulldozing American military, is heavy-handed, and presumably designed for distribution overseas. Really, it’s only missing Richard Gere asking us to send vibrations of good feeling to the Chinese leadership. However, what it reduces the Nav’i to plot points and constructed others without much personality, whose only duty is to create a fantasy opposite for thinly-drawn humans to mistreat.
The motion-capture animation is brilliantly life-like, and there isn’t a hint of feeling like you are in a movie. It is lovely, painterly, and from the minute you arrive on Cameron’s Fantasy Island. the concentration the way that every inch of it is loaded with a small, beautiful detail, is truly astonishing. But is it really worth $400 million dollars to produce a better flying dragon?
Avatar forces its viewers into a huge choice – should we forgive Avatar its trespasses in favor of its claim to film history? Or should we wait until someone uses the same technology to make an indisputably great and complete film. Is it a crime to hold out for a film with the same technology to a more satisfying artistic end? I think I’ll wait.
The Young Victoria
Grade: C
Cast: Emily Blunt Rupert Friend
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee
So we’ve started to reach that point with Emily Blunt.
Is the talented English actress going to become a true star in her own right, rather than supporting everyone else’s star? Or will she turn dull watching Rebecca Hall steal all her roles for the next decade?
The very talented English actress has been One to Watch since catching the critical eye, first in 2005’s My Summer of Love and as Meryl Streep’s other assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. Originally, it was assumed that The Young Victoria would be her potential star turn.
A year’s delay in release and a film suffering more knife wounds than Rasputin, it remains to be seen. Fluttering between youthful confidence and political naivete, Blunt is the best thing about this otherwise average costume drama. Beyond her performance, the slender story doesn’t have reason to exist on film besides the fact that every Oscar season needs a queen.
In fairness, The Young Victoria takes the mustached matron of later years and turns her on her head into a passionate youngster tormented by her power-mad mother and step-father and deeply confused by her marital prospects. Never mind that at a tender age 18, she is about to be thrust onto the throne of England during a turbulent age.
All this would make for an interesting story, if the queen herself had much to do with it. The impression left is of social upheaval happening outside the Palace walls. As a counterpoint, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth felt like the lynchpin in her era. Blunt’s Victoria feels like she’s trying to keep the turmoil from compromising her social life.
Jean-Marc Vallee’s direction glows on the surface but doesn’t have much steel underneath. It’s pretty, but in that suspicious way. The final version takes an already thin story and chops it even thinner. The Young Victoria is a film that feels like it has been given the once-over twice.
What we’re mainly left with is a performance by Blunt that reminds us that she is still a comer. But she needs to find that role soon.
Grade: C
Cast: Emily Blunt Rupert Friend
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee
So we’ve started to reach that point with Emily Blunt.
Is the talented English actress going to become a true star in her own right, rather than supporting everyone else’s star? Or will she turn dull watching Rebecca Hall steal all her roles for the next decade?
The very talented English actress has been One to Watch since catching the critical eye, first in 2005’s My Summer of Love and as Meryl Streep’s other assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. Originally, it was assumed that The Young Victoria would be her potential star turn.
A year’s delay in release and a film suffering more knife wounds than Rasputin, it remains to be seen. Fluttering between youthful confidence and political naivete, Blunt is the best thing about this otherwise average costume drama. Beyond her performance, the slender story doesn’t have reason to exist on film besides the fact that every Oscar season needs a queen.
In fairness, The Young Victoria takes the mustached matron of later years and turns her on her head into a passionate youngster tormented by her power-mad mother and step-father and deeply confused by her marital prospects. Never mind that at a tender age 18, she is about to be thrust onto the throne of England during a turbulent age.
All this would make for an interesting story, if the queen herself had much to do with it. The impression left is of social upheaval happening outside the Palace walls. As a counterpoint, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth felt like the lynchpin in her era. Blunt’s Victoria feels like she’s trying to keep the turmoil from compromising her social life.
Jean-Marc Vallee’s direction glows on the surface but doesn’t have much steel underneath. It’s pretty, but in that suspicious way. The final version takes an already thin story and chops it even thinner. The Young Victoria is a film that feels like it has been given the once-over twice.
What we’re mainly left with is a performance by Blunt that reminds us that she is still a comer. But she needs to find that role soon.
The Young Victoria
The Young Victoria
Grade: C
Cast: Emily Blunt Rupert Friend
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee
free admission granted
So we’ve started to reach that point with Emily Blunt.
Is the talented English actress going to become a true star in her own right, rather than supporting everyone else’s star? Or will she turn dull watching Rebecca Hall steal all her roles for the next decade?
The very talented English actress has been One to Watch since catching the critical eye, first in 2005’s My Summer of Love and as Meryl Streep’s other assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. Originally, it was assumed that The Young Victoria would be her potential star turn.
A year’s delay in release and a film suffering more knife wounds than Rasputin, it remains to be seen. Fluttering between youthful confidence and political naivete, Blunt is the best thing about this otherwise average costume drama. Beyond her performance, the slender story doesn’t have reason to exist on film besides the fact that every Oscar season needs a queen.
In fairness, The Young Victoria takes the mustached matron of later years and turns her on her head into a passionate youngster tormented by her power-mad mother and step-father and deeply confused by her marital prospects. Never mind that at a tender age 18, she is about to be thrust onto the throne of England during a turbulent age.
All this would make for an interesting story, if the queen herself had much to do with it. The impression left is of social upheaval happening outside the Palace walls. As a counterpoint, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth felt like the lynchpin in her era. Blunt’s Victoria feels like she’s trying to keep the turmoil from compromising her social life.
Jean-Marc Vallee’s direction glows on the surface but doesn’t have much steel underneath. It’s pretty, but in that suspicious way. The final version takes an already thin story and chops it even thinner. The Young Victoria is a film that feels like it has been given the once-over twice.
What we’re mainly left with is a performance by Blunt that reminds us that she is still a comer. But she needs to find that role soon.
Grade: C
Cast: Emily Blunt Rupert Friend
Director: Jean-Marc Vallee
free admission granted
So we’ve started to reach that point with Emily Blunt.
Is the talented English actress going to become a true star in her own right, rather than supporting everyone else’s star? Or will she turn dull watching Rebecca Hall steal all her roles for the next decade?
The very talented English actress has been One to Watch since catching the critical eye, first in 2005’s My Summer of Love and as Meryl Streep’s other assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. Originally, it was assumed that The Young Victoria would be her potential star turn.
A year’s delay in release and a film suffering more knife wounds than Rasputin, it remains to be seen. Fluttering between youthful confidence and political naivete, Blunt is the best thing about this otherwise average costume drama. Beyond her performance, the slender story doesn’t have reason to exist on film besides the fact that every Oscar season needs a queen.
In fairness, The Young Victoria takes the mustached matron of later years and turns her on her head into a passionate youngster tormented by her power-mad mother and step-father and deeply confused by her marital prospects. Never mind that at a tender age 18, she is about to be thrust onto the throne of England during a turbulent age.
All this would make for an interesting story, if the queen herself had much to do with it. The impression left is of social upheaval happening outside the Palace walls. As a counterpoint, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth felt like the lynchpin in her era. Blunt’s Victoria feels like she’s trying to keep the turmoil from compromising her social life.
Jean-Marc Vallee’s direction glows on the surface but doesn’t have much steel underneath. It’s pretty, but in that suspicious way. The final version takes an already thin story and chops it even thinner. The Young Victoria is a film that feels like it has been given the once-over twice.
What we’re mainly left with is a performance by Blunt that reminds us that she is still a comer. But she needs to find that role soon.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Up in the Air
Up in the Air [R]
Grade: C
Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman
Director: Jason Reitman
The word on the street is that Up in the Air captures the way we live in a downsizing world.
The thing that you must realize is that the critics saying this mostly have worked for newspapers or print publications. They work in a notoriously fickle industry that currently going through financial and existential crises. So a movie about downsizing that follows a corporate downsizer is going to feel intensely real and relevant to those judging it.
Up in the Air creates a world of airports as palaces of disconnection. Ryan Bingham is the crown prince. He keeps a hotel room in Omaha to keep the IRS happy, but the terminal is the only homes that he really knows. It’s there that he meets and falls for the Gold Club version of the truck stop floozy (a splendid Vera Farmiga), who coordinate their stopovers to maximize sexual enjoyment. His way of life is threatened by the just-out-of-school whipper-snapper who thinks it would be more efficient to fire people over the Internet. She tags along with Bingham’s traveling show to learn the ropes.
Up in the Air is not a terrible film, but it is liquored up in seat 27D with smugness and self-congratulation. It also has tonal issues – flying and trying for dramedy, but its jocular script too often battles with its serious setting. So does Kendrick, whose chatty insecurity routine is about as one note in acting as it comes.
Clooney has several very good scenes, notably firing a man while encouraging him to follow his youthful dreams. Farmiga is the real highlight –you wonder if this will launch her more than The Departed. Jason Reitman’s hand is steady, his framing solid. He wants to be a classic studio director, using the model of Billy Wilder. That means the film has only so adventure or personal touch. Perhaps that’s fitting for a film about modern dislocation.
Grade: C
Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman
Director: Jason Reitman
The word on the street is that Up in the Air captures the way we live in a downsizing world.
The thing that you must realize is that the critics saying this mostly have worked for newspapers or print publications. They work in a notoriously fickle industry that currently going through financial and existential crises. So a movie about downsizing that follows a corporate downsizer is going to feel intensely real and relevant to those judging it.
Up in the Air creates a world of airports as palaces of disconnection. Ryan Bingham is the crown prince. He keeps a hotel room in Omaha to keep the IRS happy, but the terminal is the only homes that he really knows. It’s there that he meets and falls for the Gold Club version of the truck stop floozy (a splendid Vera Farmiga), who coordinate their stopovers to maximize sexual enjoyment. His way of life is threatened by the just-out-of-school whipper-snapper who thinks it would be more efficient to fire people over the Internet. She tags along with Bingham’s traveling show to learn the ropes.
Up in the Air is not a terrible film, but it is liquored up in seat 27D with smugness and self-congratulation. It also has tonal issues – flying and trying for dramedy, but its jocular script too often battles with its serious setting. So does Kendrick, whose chatty insecurity routine is about as one note in acting as it comes.
Clooney has several very good scenes, notably firing a man while encouraging him to follow his youthful dreams. Farmiga is the real highlight –you wonder if this will launch her more than The Departed. Jason Reitman’s hand is steady, his framing solid. He wants to be a classic studio director, using the model of Billy Wilder. That means the film has only so adventure or personal touch. Perhaps that’s fitting for a film about modern dislocation.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Grade: B
Cast: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Owen Wilson
Director: Wes Anderson
Smart. Witty. Cool. Hip. Imaginative. Different. And, like any good fox, sly.
Those are the words that apply to The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s impressively retro journey into stop-gap animation. The film is a breakthrough for those thirsting for something other than the present CG domination . It is also a breakthrough for Anderson, who has been looking for a second act.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox is first an exercise in style. The film is layered in fall colors –oranges and yellows and browns. More importantly, it is a piece of animation that is directed rather than produced.
Where Pixar’s animation bears the brand and the qualities of the studio that makes it, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is clearly the act of a single mind on a visual level. All the hallmarks of Anderson’s visual style are there – off-center compositions, extreme use of the screen’s width, and most impressively, a world that burrows beyond the edges of the screen. The camera goes up, down, all around. Has the visual style of an animated feature ever seemed so liberated?
Its story (Based on the Roald Dahl book) of a patriarch in midlife crisis is sufficiently foxy. Mr. Fox has traded stealing chickens for a day job as a columnist, a wife and a freaky outcast son. Yet something’s missing from his life, because a fox is made to steal a chicken. He resorts to thievery of a major corporation. That brings all sorts of hell when the owners decide to get bloody revenge.
Anderson has suffered the build him up tear-him-down mentality. Like what once happened one of his many heroes, Francois Truffaut, observers have unfairly thrown him into the category of early brilliance who has not been able to live up to it. Having re-watched The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou recently, I feel confident in saying that reputation won’t last, as it did not with Truffaut. However, it is nice to see Anderson laugh again and break out of his ultra-deadpan Hal Ashby phase.
Grade: B
Cast: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Owen Wilson
Director: Wes Anderson
Smart. Witty. Cool. Hip. Imaginative. Different. And, like any good fox, sly.
Those are the words that apply to The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s impressively retro journey into stop-gap animation. The film is a breakthrough for those thirsting for something other than the present CG domination . It is also a breakthrough for Anderson, who has been looking for a second act.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox is first an exercise in style. The film is layered in fall colors –oranges and yellows and browns. More importantly, it is a piece of animation that is directed rather than produced.
Where Pixar’s animation bears the brand and the qualities of the studio that makes it, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is clearly the act of a single mind on a visual level. All the hallmarks of Anderson’s visual style are there – off-center compositions, extreme use of the screen’s width, and most impressively, a world that burrows beyond the edges of the screen. The camera goes up, down, all around. Has the visual style of an animated feature ever seemed so liberated?
Its story (Based on the Roald Dahl book) of a patriarch in midlife crisis is sufficiently foxy. Mr. Fox has traded stealing chickens for a day job as a columnist, a wife and a freaky outcast son. Yet something’s missing from his life, because a fox is made to steal a chicken. He resorts to thievery of a major corporation. That brings all sorts of hell when the owners decide to get bloody revenge.
Anderson has suffered the build him up tear-him-down mentality. Like what once happened one of his many heroes, Francois Truffaut, observers have unfairly thrown him into the category of early brilliance who has not been able to live up to it. Having re-watched The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou recently, I feel confident in saying that reputation won’t last, as it did not with Truffaut. However, it is nice to see Anderson laugh again and break out of his ultra-deadpan Hal Ashby phase.
Precious
Precious
Grade: B
Cast: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’ Nique, Mariah Carey
Director: Lee Daniels
Free Admission Granted
We could talk about Precious as a film, but it’s far more interesting to talk about the cultural impact of its partron, Oprah Winfrey.
Derived from an Oprah Book Club selection called Push, the arrival of Precious as a huge indie circuit hit and critical favorite is testament to her much-bowed –to influence.
When Winfrey started her book club a decade ago, cultural observers were skeptical. Would housewives really pick up the reading bug? Would she belittle literature? The verdict is in. You can’t go on a date without hearing about a woman’s book club, and all those arty coffee-shop skeptics should admit that she has been a one-woman last stand for American letters.
That said, there has been some truth to the criticism. It so happens that two Oprah Book Club favorites are out as films this year. The Road is a fantastic film version of a critically acclaimed novel, the sort that lit types sneered she would never champion.
Precious, on the other hand, is both the good and the bad of what one would expect Winfrey to bring to the table. It is powerful, but it is also exploitative. It is realistic but also melodramatic. It is a story of a young woman’s empowerment, but it is also a story deeply rooted in the Culture of Victimization spread by Winfrey America.
The good news is that it builds into a pretty watchable film that features a tremendous amount of dangerous spontanaiety. While the scenes of domestic violence in Precious might not hit that level of a John Cassavetes film in this regard, they occasionally achieve that “what the hell happens next?” momentum. Yet the film just as easily slips into comedy from out of nowhere(through the adolescent fantasies of its impoverished, overweight subject Clarice Precious Jones, an African-American teen-ager living a tough life in Harlen in the 1980s.).
This is a credit to first time director Lee Daniels, who obviously has a fantastic touch with actors (He may one day be known as the only person to get a good performance out of Mariah Carey.) It’s also a tribute to the comedian Mo’nique, who plays the most monstrous welfare queen you’ll ever see; and its young star Gabby Sidibe, who brings both bravery and humor to the role of a teenage mother who has seen far too much of the worst that life has to offer. There is an exaggerated quality to the characters and the actions, but you have to give the actresses credit for reining it in.
There has been a habit in our recent intellectual life to celebrate (perhaps over-celebrate) hidden voices and hidden perspectives. Following an illiterate heroine on the outskirts of society, Precious is undoubtedly that sort of film. It does a very respectable job of signaling the limits that we place on a person as a society based on appearance, and it breaks through those limits with a likable character with a smart inner monologue and a sweet disposition. It’s hard not to get involved in her struggle for dignity, even if it is difficult for her.
Grade: B
Cast: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’ Nique, Mariah Carey
Director: Lee Daniels
Free Admission Granted
We could talk about Precious as a film, but it’s far more interesting to talk about the cultural impact of its partron, Oprah Winfrey.
Derived from an Oprah Book Club selection called Push, the arrival of Precious as a huge indie circuit hit and critical favorite is testament to her much-bowed –to influence.
When Winfrey started her book club a decade ago, cultural observers were skeptical. Would housewives really pick up the reading bug? Would she belittle literature? The verdict is in. You can’t go on a date without hearing about a woman’s book club, and all those arty coffee-shop skeptics should admit that she has been a one-woman last stand for American letters.
That said, there has been some truth to the criticism. It so happens that two Oprah Book Club favorites are out as films this year. The Road is a fantastic film version of a critically acclaimed novel, the sort that lit types sneered she would never champion.
Precious, on the other hand, is both the good and the bad of what one would expect Winfrey to bring to the table. It is powerful, but it is also exploitative. It is realistic but also melodramatic. It is a story of a young woman’s empowerment, but it is also a story deeply rooted in the Culture of Victimization spread by Winfrey America.
The good news is that it builds into a pretty watchable film that features a tremendous amount of dangerous spontanaiety. While the scenes of domestic violence in Precious might not hit that level of a John Cassavetes film in this regard, they occasionally achieve that “what the hell happens next?” momentum. Yet the film just as easily slips into comedy from out of nowhere(through the adolescent fantasies of its impoverished, overweight subject Clarice Precious Jones, an African-American teen-ager living a tough life in Harlen in the 1980s.).
This is a credit to first time director Lee Daniels, who obviously has a fantastic touch with actors (He may one day be known as the only person to get a good performance out of Mariah Carey.) It’s also a tribute to the comedian Mo’nique, who plays the most monstrous welfare queen you’ll ever see; and its young star Gabby Sidibe, who brings both bravery and humor to the role of a teenage mother who has seen far too much of the worst that life has to offer. There is an exaggerated quality to the characters and the actions, but you have to give the actresses credit for reining it in.
There has been a habit in our recent intellectual life to celebrate (perhaps over-celebrate) hidden voices and hidden perspectives. Following an illiterate heroine on the outskirts of society, Precious is undoubtedly that sort of film. It does a very respectable job of signaling the limits that we place on a person as a society based on appearance, and it breaks through those limits with a likable character with a smart inner monologue and a sweet disposition. It’s hard not to get involved in her struggle for dignity, even if it is difficult for her.
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