Month: December 2011

The Best:

The Artist (France, Michael Hazanavicius)
This nearly totally silent, black-and- white film is a sizzling masterwork that celebrates not just the silent film but the film medium in general–both as a whole and as two very distinct halves separated by the breakthrough of sound. Simultaneously amusingly and poignantly, it portrays the emotional turmoil suffered by a silent era star (Jean Dujardin, Best Actor winner at Cannes) once Hollywood rather quickly transitioned to talkies in the late 1920’s. If you decide to skip it based on either its silent or black-and-white characteristics, you’ll be doing yourself a major disservice.

Incendies (Canada, Denis Villeneuve)
A brilliant saga about a Middle Eastern- born woman’s heroic response to privation and adversity amidst a Civil War reminiscent of Lebanon’s in the 1980’s, Incendies is as draining as it is perceptive. Starring Luban Azabalas as Nawal, cool as a Nazy seal, who repeatedly out-stares insurmountable risk after insurmountable risk, the film maintains a tight-as-a-knot sense of suspense. Tragedies fueled by hatred and war, while sorrowfully limitless in ways often unimaginable, can only be overcome by a relentless resistance to resignation.

Melancholia (Denmark, Lars Von Trier)
In a year when multiple new films tackled mental illness, the end of the world, or both, visual poet Lars Von Trier tied the two subjects together with an uncanny verve and a vision, which, while pitch-dark, contains a shred of hope. A superb cast and Von Trier’s stunning craftsmanship (his use of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” is a thing of beauty) enhance this frightening yet cathartic allegory of life and death. The film’s ending is one of the most moving finales imaginable.

Double Hour (Italy, Giuseppe Captondi)
First-time director Captondi mixes robust character development with Hitchcockian suspense elements and not a little horror genre sprinklings. He also uses a device you’re better off not knowing going in since we’re basically talking The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game level of “stunt.” Will have you on the edge of your seat from the jump.

Midnight in Paris (U. S., Woody Allen)
While concluding the cultural spotlight of a bygone era (here Paris in the legendary Roaring 20’s) can unnerve present-day sensibilities, Woody Allen both celebrates and exposes droll, charming nostalgia in his most effective fantasy since The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Drive (U. S., Nicholas Winding Refn)
Ryan Gosling achieves a stunning minimalism that is at once terrifically appealing and, over the course of the film, increasingly frightening. He’s a walking teapot ready to boil with all the rage and angst of the best screen action/noir/heist heroes. The contrast Refn achieves with a tone of utter quietness setting up some of the most exaggerated violence is the key to this film’s uniqueness.

A Dangerous Method (Canada, David Cronenberg)
The essential argument in this film that superbly articulates conceptual differences is that Jung’s vision to move past Freud’s achievements were met by a stone wall by the movement’s founder. Freud’s insistence that every human behavior is rooted in sexuality drew a rift between the two men, as did Jung’s notion of the relevance of the supernatural, which Freud regarded as useless “mysticism.” Of course what also tore the men (Michael Fassbender and Vigo Mortensen) apart after an initial harmony was the young woman, Sabrina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who Cronenberg etches with a remarkable complexity.

Source Code (U. S., David Jones)
Back to the future? As a plot device here it’s a surefire stimulant. Jake Gyllenhall has to save the world in eight minutes, and has to do it over until he gets it right. Flopped back and forth between the 8- minute train ride adventures and rest periods in a mysterious and confining pod, he comes to wonder, How did I get in another person’s body, and what the hell am I doing here? Like an old Twilight Zone episode on steroids, Source Code pulls off feeling grounded, not in some forsaken and fantastic future, but in an all-too-real, eerie present.

The Descendants (U. S., Alexander Payne)
Payne goes after life’s little details with an uncanny casualness. His contagious confidence in his characters seems to arise out of an all-knowing perceptiveness regarding their often offbeat reactions. Pulling the comedic out of the serious and vice-versa is no easy task. We like to think our often absurd daily lives have a rich poignancy despite their utter messiness. In Payne’s films our best wishes are persuasively confirmed.

Poetry (South Korea, Lee Chang-dong)
Yun Jung-hee plays a woman who works as a maid, raises an ungrateful slacker 16-year-old grandson, and at the film’s outset, is diagnosed with dementia. She enrolls in a poetry class and with sheer grace moves through a series of decisions regarding a moral dilemma involving her son. Her performance is so riveting and resonating it will haunt you and Lee Chang-dong (check out Oasis) is one of the masters of world cinema.

Ten Honorable Mention Films:
The Skin I Live In
Of Gods and Men
Margaret
Another Year
Margin Call
Le Havre
Take Shelter
50/50
Point Blank
Young Adult

Best Performance By An Actress:
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Anna Paquin, Margaret
Yun Jung-hee, Poetry
Lubua Azabel, Incendies
Juliette Binoche, Certified Copy
Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Michele Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Best Performance By An Actor:
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
Ryan Gosling, Drive
Demian Bicher, A Better Life
George Clooney, The Descendants

Best Performance/Supporting Actress:
Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method
Charlotter Gainsbourg, Melancholia
Jessica Chastain, Take Shelter
Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Anne Heche, Cedar Rapids

Best Performance/Supporting Actor:
Jeremy Irons, Margin Call
Michael Lansdale, Of Gods and Men
Albert Brooks, Drive
Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method
Jonah Hill, Moneyball

Best Unreleased Films:
The Kid With A Bike, Miss Bala

Best Documentaries:
Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Tabloid

Best First Films:
Double Hour, Margin Call, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Submarine

Most Entertaining Film Hardly Anybody Saw:
Attack The Block

Most Overrated:
Hugo, Like Crazy

Worst Trend: Glut of “2011”
Films That Won’t Be Released Anywhere except NY and L.A. Until 2012: A Separation, The Iron Lady, Corialanus, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Flowers of War, Albert Nobbs, Pariah, etc.

Worst Films:
The Beaver, No Strings Attached, New Year’s Eve, I Don’t Know How She Does It.

Steven Spielberg’s latest, War Horse, welds the boy-and-his-horse tearjerker with the isn’t-war-senseless gripping depiction of World War I battle scenes. Benign film manipulation rarely gets this good.

Plumbing the depths of wretched hand-to-hand trench warfare, the film’s calm eye of the hurricane is equine Joey, who we first meet in a tranquil Devon just before the war. Grandiose without being rash or maudlin, Spielberg starts us off with with the calm, idyllic pre-war Devon (brilliantly shot by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) where Joey first meets the tenant farmer family who adopt him. There’s Peter Mullan as the hard-drinking veteran of the Boers War, his steadying wife Emily Watson and their son Jeremy Irvine. An oppressive landlord (David Thewlis) threatens to take their farm away if their equine investment doesn’t begin paying off. Irvine develops a bond with Joey that has him plowing like all get out. Seems this horse has plenty of drive and stamina.

He’ll need it. What follows once Joey’s sold to the British Army at the verge of the war’s outset, is a whirling odyssey that will see Joey change hands numerous times, and even end up with the Germans for awhile. Captured along the way are stirring vignettes such as when Joey ends up with a rural French adolescent girl and her grandfather. Much as the film earlier depicted the prewar English class system, it equally portrays the innocence of everyday folk caught up in the war’s grip. An expression heard repeatedly in the film, “The war has taken everything from everyone,” couldn’t be more true.

Mullan (My Name is Joe, Tyrannosaurus), Watson (Breaking The Waves) and Thewlis (Naked), are three of the U. K.’s finest actors, and press notes claim all of seven different horses comprised Joey’s role, but the real star here is Spielberg. The action, which is never overweening, comes to a blistering crescendo in its first battle scene. Though understated compared to the opening scenes in Saving Private Ryan, Joey’s supremely confident British regiment charging an unsuspecting German contingent to a surprising result, is every bit as powerful. It’s not until a climactic “truce” that Spielberg presents his trademark optimism in humanity. He chases it down by then flouting the Black Stallion-ish aspects of his film but, hey, this is a boy-and-horse story, remember?

Sentimentality, always an important thread in classic American cinema, often mars even works of the highest intention. Spielberg here, as he has so often, opts for clemency in judging our baser instincts. No one alive can make an old- fashioned film this convincingly. Do you really want to nitpick this time of year and disagree with him?

8.5 Unfettered Steeds (out of 10)

The Artist, the nearly totally silent film shot in black-and-white, is, paradoxically, a joyful noise that will delight your senses and leave you, no pun intended, speechless. If you decide to skip it based on either its silent or black-and-white characteristics, you’ll be doing yourself a major disservice.

Director Michel Hazanavicius has constructed no less than a sizzling masterwork celebrating not just the silent film but the film medium in general–both as a whole and as the sum of two very distinct halves separated by the breakthrough of sound. The Artist simultaneously amusingly and poignantly portrays the emotional turmoil suffered by a silent era star (Jean Dujardin) once Hollywood rather quickly transitioned to talkies in the late 1920s. Dujardin, winner of Best Actor at Cannes, plays George Valentin, a Rudolph Valentino-esque god of the silent film. Opposite him is the up-and-coming Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), who Valentin “discovers” and gives a major push to her own eventual stardom Their trajectories are mirror opposites of each other, as Valentin refuses to embrace this revolutionary talking cinema while Peppy nearly overnight becomes a major starlet of the new art form. There’s a scene where Peppy walks by a marquee for a film called “Guardian Angel,” a fitting symbol for her persistent devotion to George (whose own marquee, “The Lonely Star,”sums up his fallen state compounded by his prideful resistance to Peppy’s devoted friendship). John Goodman and James Cromwell deftly play a studio chief and Valentin’s chauffeur. The film’s hands-down Best Supporting Actor though is a delightful Jack Russell Terrier, who demolishes any preconceived notions you may have about film dogs. The Jack Russell in Beginners ought to take acting lesson from The Artist’s pup.

As outlandish as it sounds this exquisitely entertaining film will make a serious run for the Academy Award as Best Film. Producer Harvey Weinstein, no stranger to winning Oscar strategies, seems to be overcoming nicely the additional taboo that could scare away jaded filmgoers: The Artist, adhering to the strict Hays Code of the 1930s, contains nothing more explicit than a hug (even kissing was off limits) and no violence either (other than a strategically placed “Bang”). You’ll want to more than hug this film.

9.5 Bangs (Out of 10)

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the first volume in Steig Larsson’s immensely popular Millennium Trilogy, is essentially about Lisbeth Salander’s response to the perpetration of violence against women, including herself. It’s original Swedish title translates as “Men Who Hate Women,” euphemistically changed to what long-time Larsson companion Eva Gabrielsson calls a title which sounds like “a children’s book.” No such dumbing-down-danger presents itself here, as long as this American version of the film has David Fincher (The Social Network, Zodiac, Seven, Fight Club) at its helm.

In addition to having an extraordinary knack for crafting just the right mood and setting for pure evil, Fincher is also the master caster and can film an action scene that is on par with the best of them. Lisbeth’s stealing back her swiped purse on a subway escalator is purely stunning to watch. But in remaking the 2009 Swedish film, it is in his casting and what he gets out of his actors where he not only equals the original but surpasses it. Stellan Skarsgard and Daniel Craig make us easily forget their Swedish counterparts. Overall Rooney Marta’s (The Social Network) depiction of the complex character Lisbeth gives the film it’s profundity. Her ascension from near-catatonic street punk to abused genius, near-catatonic street punk to vengefully heroic, and less catatonic street punk is as believable as it is marvelous.

This in a film where the procedurals border on the clunky and played out and are a dour variation on the film’s strengths. What we have here seems like a less great or even very good plot than a remarkable character study in a year of outstanding ones (Young Adult, Take Shelter, Martha Marcy May Marlene). Lisbeth is one doozy. She can hack any computer and figure out any code better than anybody. Originally hired to do a background check on fallen journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig and Larsson surrogate) they come to work together halfway through the film in trying to solve a decades-old disappearance of the niece of financial magnate Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, who’s having quite a year).

Required to relocate to a remote island to investigate, the Vanger clan turns out to be a dysfunctional extended family, some of whom live next to each other and don’t talk to one another. A couple of their ancestors were no less than Nazis and one still survives. It is not revealing anything to say that he is not the villain responsible for the disappearance. Even a novel whose worldwide sales last year topped every other book in the world as “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” did, is not that silly. And even if it didn’t keep the original Swedish title it is at least bound to spur discussion of sexual abuse and misogyny at a time when our society certainly needs it. That is after the initial discussion surrounding Rooney Mara dies down. Her performance very much deserves the Golden Globe nomination she received for Best Actress. And David Fincher continues to roll on as one of our very best modern day directors.

8 Vengeances (Out of 10)

Once upon a time Robert Downey Jr.’s considerable  talent and moxie was enough to protect even the most insipid project from total abomination. Alongside his numerous achievements (Iron Man, Chaplin, Tropic Thunder, and the underrated Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Two Girls and a Guy), Downey has been able to buffer numerous lesser films from a far worse fate. No more. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, like a Republican debate or any other vintage train wreck, is pretty much beyond redemption.

Director Guy Richie, fallen from grace even faster than David Gordon Green, throws out a thumb-in-your-eye structural sensationalism as the film’s central core in lieu of a plausible plot or any in-depth theme or characterizations.  A veritable position paper for self-conscious special effects as the film’s raison d’etre, Sherlock is Richie as Baz Luhrmann with Conan Doyle as Shakespeare.

Unlike Richie’s first Holmes film where the iconoclastic modernizing vision of his hero had some wisps of wit to stir in, the newest entry in the franchise begs what the director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch and one of the most savvy actors in Hollywood are doing in this homily to hollow action.  It’s ironic a character so loaded with intellectuality in the Conan Doyle  novels and previous cinematic versions is so bereft of anything remotely cerebral here.  The banter between Downey and Jude Law as Dr. Watson  lags behind the earlier Holmes film’s dialogue and it isn’t the best thing about this film, it’s the only worthy thing.

A Game of Shadows also stars Noomi Rapace, who played the Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (looking mostly shellshocked as if she’s just seen the opening week box office number for the American Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and a limp Jared Harris as Dr. Moriarity. Tune Harris in on Mad Men and you’ll be way ahead.

I could bore you with a description of the film’s plot but let’s be real–you’ve got some holiday shopping to finish and I doubt you’d want to hear it anyway. No wonder Downey’s drinking embalming fluid in the film’s first scene.

3 Embalming Fluids (Out of 10)

The trouble with a flawed film, whose good parts and core “feel” are head and shoulders above most movie fare, is viewers with limited moviegoing time are tempted to dismiss it. Take the case of Young Adult, the new Charlize Theron film directed by Jason Reitman (Up In The Air, Juno) and written by Diablo Cody. Detractors are carrying on about the film’s screenplay lacking the full believability of, say, Cody’s Juno. Stressing that they’re partially correct would be to miss the point.

First of all, if Theron’s gleaming, cheeky portrait of an insecure yet totally charismatic narcissist isn’t the year’s best performance by a lead actress, it’s got to be damn close. Movie heroines these days tend to be all great or all bad. Theron’s Mavis, a former high school beauty, is bad to the core, yet since it is easy to recognize a little bit of ourselves in her every declaration and act of selfishness, we are wooed into liking her. Mavis is not above doubting herself, and does so with a self-mocking, wan gusto that is completely infectious. We’ve all known self-assured prima donnas like this. Mavis’ version exaggerates their inherent vanity into the realm of the tragic. Which brings us to the script’s “flaws.”

Theron, on a whim, returns to her Minnesota hometown upon learning her former high school beau (Patrick Wilson) has just become a father. We soon learn her goal is to no less than seduce him into leaving his family. How wrong of her to assume that’s even possible, you say. Yet her self-image is, from the film’s outset, projected as, well, exaggerated. Now living in the big city (Minneapolis) she prides herself on her status as a children’s author, yet we soon learn she’s no more than a ghostwriter. Propelled by her big-fish-in-a-small-pond resurgence onto her previously conquered domain, she proceeds to act like no years, let alone marriages and baby births, have gone by the wayside. Keeping her honest, or trying to, is Patton Oswalt, as the former picked-on kid from high school who was seriously injured in a bullying incident.  Mavis, not recognizing him at first, is soon reminded he had the locker next to hers and she never bothered talking to him.

The entire set-up with Patrick Wilson inviting her over for a dinner with his wife and baby borders on the highly flammable in terms of credibility.  Yet given its farcical conceit, the films works largely due to Theron’s amazing performance but also because the screenplay is uncannily adept at interjecting poignant vignettes along the way.  These devices may occasionally seem jarring,  but they gradually give Mavis a depth that we don’t see at first.  She’s still incorrigible and delusional, but she’s starting to get it.  She plumbs to the lowest depths of a character steeped in depression, then bounces back from her ordeals at least a little stronger.  You don’t often see a character as striking and memorable as this one.  Theron glides through it all completely owning every nuance and detail.  Oswalt gives a restrained performance in a role that could have easily gone bonkers.

Reisman, quickly becoming a master of the “small” scene that makes a large impact, has tackled a film that had to be a risky undertaking.   Young Adult’s mantra could easily be The Animal’s “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” Speaking of which, Young Adult may be the most musically sophisticated movie in some time.  Its use of Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept” will give you goosebumps as surely as Theron’s performance and character will be solidly etched in your memory.

8 Narcissists (Out of 10)

Is the stress of ludicrously manipulative films getting on your nerves? Had it up to here with the canned, filtered and processed holiday dreck that is a Garry Marshall movie? By all means stay away from his latest, New Year’s Eve, unless you’re able to make a deal with the movie theater and allow them to let you in just for the outtakes during the closing credits. You can sneak them in on your way to one of the many bonafide quality end-of-year films that are out there plentifully. And, mercifully, you will have seen the only good parts of New Year’s Eve, which if it isn’t the year’s worst film, is certainly the most offensive to any sensibility higher than that of, say, the average lemur.

Small-minded sure comes to mind in searching for a description of this cinematic tour bus of copious Hollywood stars all in search of a shred of plot, character, one iota of depth, anything. Robert DeNiro isn’t the only big name who’s fallen so low here he may never get up. There’s Sarah Jessica Parker, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Seth Myers, Jessica Biel, Zac Ephron, Katherine Heigl, and, creepers, Jon Bon Jovi (rest assured your sister is a better actor than him). And while I don’t want to spoil it, there’s a mysterious character named Ingrid who you may not be able to identify until the closing credits. She’s a former A-list actress who gives a genuinely formidable performance in the face of the overwhelming odds here. Her surprise kiss from the much younger Ephron at the stroke of midnight is diffused by Ephron subsequently announcing it as no more than a checked-off New Year’s Eve resolution. Prone to play it safe above all, and pander to the most potentially “tasteful” outcomes of a scene, Marshall insults our intelligence by teasing with provocation and a hint of realism, only to descend into mind-numbing dumbness is very short order. Parker’s daughter (Abigail Breslin) finally negotiates going out unchaperoned, yet, as a Marshall safety valve, the mom of a girlfriend is not so subtly spying on her in every nook and cranny. Myers and a pregnant Biel compete to win money by giving birth to the earliest baby delivered after midnight, then their fierce bickering with the other father (Til Schweiger) inexplicably fizzles when it’s revealed he has two other kids. Myers, without any scene provided to explain his sudden empathy other than shots of Schweiger’s kids, recapitulates and lies about his wife’s delivery time so Schweiger can have the prize. Come to think of it, there couldn’t have been an extra authenticating scene inserted there. This film has so many alternate stories Marshall and “screenwriter” Katherine Fugate, barely have time for much besides switching back and forth. See, if you can switch to the next story, then the next, you can avoid having to come to that crux when something resembling a slither of depth is required.

So check out this wussed out, flabby, and pretentious excuse for a feel-good holiday movie only if continuous cringing, rolling your eyes, and shaking your head is your idea of a good time. Myself, I wanted to throw a bowl of yogurt at the screen.

2 Eye Rolls (Out of 10)…Woulda been a “1” if not for the mystery actress.