GOOD PLOT

REVISITING THE 375TH STREET Y

2012-01-18T13:27:00.000-08:00

In the interest of upping this blog's quotient of shocking revelations of the sort that involve significant amounts of navel-gazing, I'd like to confess that a few weekends ago I came across The Royal Tenenbaums on the over-the-air channel known as PIX, watched a good deal of it, and found myself both amused and moved by a film I had long been in the boom business of maligning.

I used to hate to think that situational factors external to a movie could significantly influence one's final opinion of it, and as a 16-year-old (the age when I first saw Wes Anderson's third film) I would have likely also scoffed to myself were some vaguely condescending mossback to bring up the matter of life experience. Now, I'd say that back then a scarcely formed idea of uptown mores, an unfamiliarity with the tone of certain Joseph Mitchell profiles, and a generally unconsidered family life caused me to fixate too much on the front-and-center bric-a-brac, and to see only a troubling tendency to turbo-exotify where something a bit more complicated might have been going on.

Who knows, perhaps the events of my last decade have only conspired to nudge me away from what was an entirely sensible opinion. If one day in the future The Darjeeling Limited comes on some bastard internet stream and I find myself going through a similar process of reconsideration, I guess I'll know the drill for sure.

IN THE ORDINARIUM

2011-12-06T21:22:00.000-08:00

Larry Crowne, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Tom Hanks from a script by Tom Hanks (and Nia Vardalos), came in for quite a critical drubbing over the summer for being generally out of step and perhaps a bit arthritic. Not to say that it's not something of a red-giant star vehicle, and a comedy so creakingly conservative that it takes pains to show that, despite its initial layoff lament, it's still rabidly capitalist, only in a slightly more homespun way (Larry's neighbor, played by Cedric the Entertainer, has used his instant game-show fortune as an opportunity to operate a perpetual yard sale, complete with fantasy-land haggling).

The film does come to feel in its slackness a bit otherworldly, though, and it has what seems to be an appropriate amount of contempt for the act (and value) of blogging. Bryan Cranston plays Julia Roberts's blogger husband, a published author of two books who now spends his days at home, looking at some sort of vintage pornography. When his wife returns from work (she cannot be properly called a "teacher," I think, because while we see her presiding over her community-college classes, we see precious little actual teaching), he pleads with her about how productive he was that day. He is permanently on the defensive. This is a patently ridiculous subplot, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie acknowledge the temptations that might overcome someone who spends all day in front of his home computer. It was also weirdly bracing to learn that this otherwise vigilantly innocuous little comedy would probably sneer at the likes of me, were we introduced at a cocktail party, and were it to ask what I do with my time. But then again, I suppose this movie more religiously attends barbecues.

During the film, I also found myself unable to shake the feeling that Hanks had accidentally picked up some of the primitive static-crackle of Tom McCarthy's admirable recent novel C, which progresses, along a coil of wire, to an insistent Morse rhythm of signs and codes. The film keeps the information-to-meaning ratio at a strict 1:1, but there is nonetheless an elaborate system of encryption, centering around a protagonist who continually finds himself reinvented. "LC" becomes a sort of cipher for all the things an earnest and unassuming wearer of khakis might fashion himself as in a bad economy: Larry Crowne becomes Lance Corona (rechristened as such by a "gang" of scooter riders that he joins), Line Cook (he dusts off his Navy-mess experience to man the grill at Frank's Restaurant), Learner at College (he dutifully enrolls for the classes that the unctuous dean of students recommends), Late to Class (after new friends and a long-haul makeover place more demands on his time), and an un-Likely Crush (he wins the mild affections of his perhaps slightly alcoholic professor), while remaining always an agreeably Low-key Contributor. Much of the film's action, after all, takes place in an informal-speech class, a venue for experimentation in language and gesture.

THE DAY THE EARTH STRUCK OUT

2011-09-29T17:56:00.000-07:00

In the science-fiction screenplay I'm writing about the 2002 Oakland A's, an amateur astronomer discovers a massive celestial body called Planet Zito that has popped up out of nowhere and threatens to engorge the Earth. NASA scientists determine that the planet's atmosphere consists entirely of cannabis vapor. As Planet Zito approaches at approximately 85 miles per hour, radio telescopes begin to be overwhelmed by sweet guitar licks. Down on Earth, panic ensues, as do moments of introspection.

PEOPLE DO INCREDIBLE THINGS

2011-09-21T01:27:00.000-07:00

On the previous post, the commenter B.Arf told me not to speak to him if I didn't like Contagion, the pandemic thriller directed by potential retiree Steven Soderbergh. I would like to inform him that the lines of communication may remain open. I did appreciate the film, and that, unlike most of Soderbergh's recent work, there wasn't anything very in-your-face larkish about it. Contagion also represents a huge step forward for the cinematic representation of chat interfaces, not to mention on-screen discussions of the ethics of blogging. (But why on earth is Jude Law's snaggletoothed "personal brand" with countless "unique views" trying to freelance one particular story at the San Francisco Chronicle?)

What struck me most about Contagion, though, and what I suspect made Soderbergh-the-avowed-formalist want to make a pandemic thriller in the first place, was how purely and simply MEV-1, the contagion in question, serves as the story's engine—as seen here in overlapping narrative strands, the outbreak-containment scenario represents a sort of distillation of conflict-resolution storytelling. There is a moment of extreme panic, the nature of the problem gradually clarifies, and—spoileur alert—from then on out it's merely a matter of time until order gets restored (the movie has a surprising faith in human ingenuity, personified by a weirdly beatific Jennifer Ehle). Every film scenario is, in a sense, a virus the screenwriter must beat the clock to cure.

I have the sinking feeling that I have not articulated this correspondence very well, but what's a blogger to do? I guess I should just recommend that you guys try Forsythia, it cures most problems.

***

I was on the fence about seeing Warrior until a trustworthy source told me that there were some scenes involving Nick Nolte and a cassette-tape audiobook of Moby-Dick. After hearing this, I attended a matinee posthaste.

The film, co-written and directed by Gavin O'Connor (who made the serviceable hockey film Miracle, notable mostly for how becoming its period stylings were to star Kurt Russell), concerns two estranged brothers competing in a mixed-martial-arts tournament whose grand prize is the role of Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's upcoming version of The Great Gatsby.

The whole grand-prix-style event, dubbed "Sparta," is the brainchild of a sinewy impresario fresh off Wall Street, played by an uncredited O'Connor, whose function in this movie is to appear on camera looking like he runs the show (he is, after all, played by the director), and to repeat the same press-release particulars an unbelievable number of times. Economy is not paramount here; classing up the sport of mixed-martial arts, otherwise known as some guys just fighting, is. In addition to Moby-Dick, there are references to Theogenes and certain laws of physics, and handsome hardcover editions of various great American novels (notably, Steinbeck) enter the frame in the very first scene.

Warrior is a relentlessly conventional movie, almost shameless in the way it hits all the expected struggling-to-stay-solvent working-class-struggles beats, but it also achieves, through dogged persistence, something like gravitas—mostly thanks to the scenes between Pop Nolte and Tom Hardy, which in a more terminologically accurate world might be called "mumblecore." For Hardy's character, even every cup of coffee is a point of contention, an olive branch to refuse; the whole performance emerges from behind a pained squint, and lips pursed in an obscure fury. Nolte's Paddy Conlon, making an honest go at sobriety, dons a cap that nobody under 60 years of age who doesn't claim to be of Irish descent could consider wearing. He engages in extremely American activites, such as driving around in a vintage car and reading the newspaper at diners. (A biographer may one day determine what it means that Nolte starred in Peaceful Warrior and then, a few years later, just plain Warrior.)

I think O'Connor's film qualifies as a triumph. It induced in this viewer an extraordinary amount of involuntary smiling, the most in a solo viewing since I bore witness to the initial avant-laser-tag scenes of Tron: Legacy. By saying that, I do not mean to diminish Warrior, but rather to commend the filmmaker and his cast for vivifying, and lending some measure of credibility to, the most tired tropes of comeback-trail realism.

WHAT ARE THEY SEARCHING FOR? A SELECTION FROM THE YEAR-SO-FAR

2011-08-27T16:59:00.000-07:00

1. good plots
2. good plot
3. movies with good plots
5. good plots for movies
7. good movie plots
8. movies with good plot
9. good plot movies
10. movies with a good plot
11. good plots for a movie
13. good film plots
14. a good plot
16. films with good plot
17. jokes about energy drinks
30. raf spielman
33. what is a good plot
60. really good plots
65. "2004 ll bean catalogue"
78. "pedophile married couple"
129. clean jokes about energy drinks
137. energy drinks jokes
153. formula for a good modern movie plot
184. goog plot of film
191. how to find a good plot in nearest town?
193. how to recognize a good plot
201. it reads poorly
203. jokes for energy drinks
241. paula patton shower dailymotion
286. tron legacy has a good plot
306. why did will smith say i was saving that bacon

THIS PRETTY PLANET, SPINNING THRU SPACE

2011-08-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

This is addressed to the commenter known as The Everlovin' Whom, who posted on the previous entry on this blog that "I think I missed the plot." What you missed was a summer entr'acte. The plot has only continued to thicken. yrs Miss Jaw

***

Connecticut, winter. A young woman walks in slow motion; she's wearing a knit cap, a hoodie, and janitor pants. She keeps walking in slow motion. People, especially the members of her nuclear family, don't seem to understand how morose she is, so they talk to her, and then she shudders in response, and appears instantly even more morose. Oh my goodness she is still walking in slow motion.

Another Earth, directed by Mike Cahill, starts with one of the most academically prestigious car wrecks in the history of cinema. Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling, who also co-wrote), a teen bound for MIT who can't keep her eye off a newly discovered planet dotting the night sky, plows into the station wagon of John Burroughs (William Mapother), a composer and professor of music at Yale, killing his wife, son, and unborn child, and putting him into a lenthy coma.

Once out of jail, Rhoda pays a visit to the mostly recovered John, posing as a housecleaner, which we know John needs because he's got a huge stain on the front of his undershirt when he comes to the door. They sleep together after John jawbones about the Allegory of the Cave and plays the saw for her. Rhoda also forges a sliver of a connection with her co-janitor (played by frequent Anderson/Wilson collaborator Kumar Pallana), an oldish man who one day up and pulls a Hazel Motes. So her visit to him in the hospital must necessarily turn in to a platonic cuddle session.

With every minute of runtime elapsed, that car-crash-causing planet appears to get closer to Earth. And it turns out to be Earth, or at least a carbon copy of it. Rhoda enters a competition to start over on "Earth 2," where she might finally be freed from her overwhelming feelings of guilt (i.e., not have to wear a frumpy hoodie all the time). The science-fiction elements, more or less intriguing in their own right, are not so well integrated into the drama.

Tonight I saw Another Earth in Theater 3. The entire time I kept hoping that some Australian philanthropist, or really just anyone, would stand up and announce an essay contest whose grand prize was a free trip to Theater 2. I did not know what was playing in that particular theater, only that it would present an opportunity for a fresh start.

***

In Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's Crazy, Stupid, Love, characters keep convening at an upscale hotel bar. It is the "watering hole" where lothario and amateur mixologist Jacob (Ryan Gosling) has set up shop. (One gets the sense that if he just took off his gold chain, he might find himself frequenting a sports bar.) What a disquieting conception of the regular, perhaps appropriate for a film that so brazenly mixes parts of speech in its title.

APRIL 2011 (MOSTLY TRIBECA)

2011-05-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

Straight Time (Ulu Grosbard, 1978)
Role Models (David Wain, 2008)
*Shotgun Stories (Jeff Nichols, 2007), second viewing
Flowers of Evil (David Dusa, 2010)
Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell, 2010)
L'Assault (Julien Leclerq, 2010)
The Good Life (Eva Mulvad, 2010)
The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2010)
The Bang Bang Club (Steven Silver, 2010)
Bombay Beach (Alma Har'el, 2011)
Grey Matter (Kivu Ruhorahoza, 2011)
Elizabethtown (Cameron Crowe, 2005)
Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe, 1996)
Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001), second viewing
The Beaver (Jodie Foster, 2011)
Magic Valley (Jaffe Zinn, 2011)
Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)
The Way Back (Peter Weir, 2010)
Cinema Komunisto (Mila Turajlic, 2010)
The Union (Cameron Crowe, 2011)
*Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)
The Journals of Musan (Park Jung-bum, 2010)
Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, 2011)
Jesus Henry Christ (Dennis Lee, 2011)
*Artificial Paradises (Yulene Olaizola, 2011)
Detachment (Tony Kaye, 2011)
Catching Hell (Alex Gibney, 2011)
Love During Wartime (Gabriella Bier, 2010)
Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)

SOURCE COMMODE

2011-05-02T16:41:00.001-07:00

What is Source Commode?

You know when after you flush your toilet, sometimes the water keeps running in the tank? This aftereffect is the key to Source Commode. It is a toilet invented by Jeffrey Wright that certain dead people can use for eight minutes at a time.

GETTING BEHIND OF MYSELF

2011-04-17T10:15:00.000-07:00

At the L, reviews of Film Forum's current first-run offerings: Meek's Cutoff and A Screaming Man. At Reverse Shot, my NYFF review of Le Quattro Volte got bumped up. The film was also at Film Forum, but has now been reconstituted/reincarnated at the Quad.

So many Atlantic items: a ranking of this year's Best Picture nominees, with something of a justificatory preamble; a revisiting of The Weather Man; a partial overview of alien-invasion movies; an appreciation of Four Lions; a reconsideration of The Tourist; a rundown of some of the more underappreciated baseball films; a look at Rabbit Hole; and a recap of Cameron Crowe's last decade-and-change.

MARCH 2011

2011-04-02T13:34:00.000-07:00

The Weather Man (Gore Verbinski, 2005), revisiting
The Adjustment Bureau (George Nolfi, 2011)
*Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956)
Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)
*Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
Lifeforce (Tobe Hooper, 1985)
3 Backyards (Eric Mendelsohn, 2010)
Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011)
Rock Hudson's Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992)
The Soft Skin (Francois Truffaut, 1964)
*Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman, 2010)
Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), revisiting
Hall Pass (Bobby and Peter Farrelly, 2011)
The Tourist (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2010)
*Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), revisiting
Armadillo (Janus Metz Pedersen, 2010)
*Eight Men Out (John Sayles, 1988)
The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood, 1942)
NEDS (Peter Mullan, 2010)

*Best New Music

SEARCHING THE COSMOS

2011-03-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

One year for my birthday — judging from the release dates listed on IMDb, it must have been my 15th — I requested that my parents drive me to Mesquite or Garland or somewhere equally far away to see a black-and-white movie called Judy Berlin. Eric Mendelsohn's debut feature intrigued me because I had read that it involved a lunar eclipse, and I also knew that, like a few other formative viewings (notably Shinji Aoyama's Eureka and Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort), Judy Berlin was a Shooting Gallery release. I recall enjoying it. I suppose if you drive a considerable distance to do something on your birthday, you will usually find ways of not letting disappointment enter the picture.

If you had told me around that time that one day Mendelsohn would make a movie called 3 Backyards, a significant portion of which would consist of character actor par excellence Elias Koteas wandering the quasi-industrial wasteland around a midsize Long Island airport, I would have become excited, and this prospective film would have instantly become the stuff of my daydreams. It's not often that I wish I had seen a movie a decade earlier, much less one I admire anyway upon seeing it at 26, but that's how I felt right after 3 Backyards, Mendelsohn's second feature. It has a keen sense of mystery, and seems to willfully evade what might reasonably be expected of it — qualities that used to be more important to me than almost anything else in a movie.

Probably best not to impose some big interpretation on 3 Backyards. Somewhat reminiscent of Magnolia, it weaves in and out of three things-are-not-what-they seem suburban storylines — each concerning characters trying to stray outside the bounds of the lives they've made for themselves, attempts that ultimately only amplify their desperation into a form of panic — but refuses to tie them neatly together. This is one overgrown vine tangle of a movie. It should be said, though, that 3 Backyards possesses a rhythm all its own, with the score by Michael Nicholas being a particularly crucial component, and work by Koteas, Edie Falco, and Embeth Davidtz that's nearly astonishing in its emotional precision.

***

I'm not sure there has ever been a more perfect movie for people who want to get exactly what they pay for at the multiplex — nothing more, nothing less — than Battle: Los Angeles. Is there anything else that can be said about it?

***

This blog was formed largely with the intention of taking a somewhat sardonic look at American studio product and the ridiculous process of awards-season consensus formation, and as a result there's a lot of mediocre (maybe worse) writing in these pages about largely disposable films. Jokes have taken precedence. There has always seemed to me to be an exceedingly personal aspect to films-I-love advocacy that I have never been entirely comfortable with. But if I have one consistent regret about this site, it's that I too often have wound up maintaining a kind of radio silence on works, particularly foreign ones, of more lasting significance.

So I'd like to say a word now about Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light. Guzman is a 69-year-old Chilean director probably best known for making in the 1970s the multipart Battle of Chile. His latest nonfiction film, like Mercedes Alvarez's The Sky Turns, which recently finished a weeklong run at Anthology Film Archives, engages history in both geologic-cosmologic and local-political terms, and to astounding effect. Nostalgia for the Light is primarily about the search for the universe's origins in Chile's Atacama Desert, a humidity-less zone that offers astronomers clear vaults, and what Guzman sees as the collective immemory of his country toward the atrocities of the Pinochet regime. The director also follows a number of women who have spent decades scouring the desert for the remains of their loved ones. Their extreme form of remembrance is compared and contrasted with the astronomers’ attempts to reconstruct impossibly remote astral events.

Though Guzman here is prone to making perilously loose connections — pointing out that the calcium in the bones scattered about the desert came out of the Big Bang, for instance — his micro/macro images (a ghost-town wind chime of spoons; the clockwork rotations of a telescope; cloudless expanses, at dusk tinged supernova blue) are so lucid in themselves, and in the way that they interlock, that his point never gets lost. This is not an argument so much as a meditation anyway. And it is at times almost unreasonably beautiful.

FEBRUARY 2011

2011-03-02T10:15:00.001-08:00

*Strongman (Zachary Levy, 2009)
Paper Lion (Alex March, 1968)
Big Fan (Robert D. Siegel, 2009), revisiting
*North Dallas Forty (Ted Kotcheff, 1979), revisiting
Into Eternity (Michael Madsen, 2010)
The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009)
How I Ended This Summer (Aleksei Popgrebsky, 2010)
Zero Bridge (Tariq Tapa, 2008)
Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010)
Conviction (Tony Goldwyn, 2010)
Cold Weather (Aaron Katz, 2010)
*The Sky Turns (Mercedes Alvarez, 2004)
Putty Hill (Matthew Porterfield, 2010)
Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)
The Eagle (Kevin Macdonald, 2011)
Cedar Rapids (Miguel Arteta, 2011)
Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010)
*Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

*Highly recommended

DOUBLE INTEGRITY

2011-02-22T20:27:00.000-08:00

In documenting an overturned insurance-salesman convention, Cedar Rapids also quietly, almost imperceptibly, upends conventions of a different sort. Rookie attendee Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), generally tolerant but little-traveled, is startled to find a black man standing at the door of his hotel room, but recovers quickly upon learning they're roommates. Ron (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) explains to Ed that, due to the hotel being overbooked, he's offered to make room in their suite for another guest. Tim, seeing only two beds, asks where the hypothetical third will sleep. The couch, Ron explains, folds out into a bed. Helms so often plays the hen-pecked or the put-upon, and does it so well, that it's hard not to see Tim — astonishingly naive and square — ending up on the couch in a moment of humiliation and bottled-up anger.

He never does, though. And neither does Tim, the morning after presumably getting drunk for the first time (shot of choice: cream sherry); ignoring Ron's intimations that it would be a good idea for both of them to turn in at a reasonable hour, due to important presentations on the following day; and making out with a topless woman (Anne Heche) in the hotel pool, wake up in a hangover panic, entirely unprepared for his morning appointment. Tim's crises are deeper-seated than that. He's entirely ready to deliver his sit-down speech, but irked by the direction in which the meeting might be headed.

If Miguel Arteta's fifth comedy of discomfiture also does hit a lot of expected beats on the way to its happy ending, it's hugely refreshing to see a film about integrity that itself often refuses to take the easy way out. Ron gives off a nearly smug air of satisfaction after turning in a "fair to middling" performance at his one-on-one with the president of the professional organization that organizes the annual Cedar Rapids convention; John C. Reilly's Dean Ziegler, a hard-drinking veteran wannabe poonhound with a heart of gold, constantly tells horrifically profane jokes that are somehow also hopelessly stale. These are more than Midwestern grotesques, though. The script by Phil Johnston reveals their respective knee-jerk intolerances — Tim's possible racism, Dean's disappointment in his nephew's Down syndrome, not to mention his gay jokes, etc. — but shows them coming together, no sweat, when the occasion calls for it.

PUBLIC SPHERES

2011-02-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

At The Atlantic this week, a brief consideration of Exit Through the Gift Shop and its Oscar crypto-campaign. In weeks prior at the same site, a primer on pro-football movies and a post-mortem on two movies that just didn't cut it with the Academy.

Also reviewed this week, two intriguing independent films: Zero Bridge, playing at Film Forum, and Putty Hill, at the Cinema Village.

THE SIGN OF 'CORE

2011-02-17T15:14:00.001-08:00

The best thing that can be said about Cris Lankenau, an actor with a Hulot-like leaning-tower posture who portrays the amateur-detective protagonist of Aaron Katz's Cold Weather, is that he plays exasperation more convincingly than expected. The movie puts Mr. Lankenau through a series of vividly soggy, bric-a-brac-evacuated tableaux, boxing him into awkward improvisations with other people his age. Cold Weather has a cleverly side-armed genre delivery, and a few eye-popping shots, but all the personality of a rain slicker. The verbal exchanges in this movie are so devoid of meaning and nuance and so glacially paced that it begins to seem like a vital component of this on-screen version of Portland, Oregon, is that everyone there is slow on the uptake, and that if you move there from Chicago to inhabit but refrain from furnishing a perfectly nice apartment, you will also very quickly become slow on the uptake — and perform a job as featureless as possible, either at an exceedingly normal office or an ice factory. How anyone can sit through this movie and afterward declare "I doubt there will be a better American film this year" is beyond me.

JANUARY 2011

2011-02-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

*The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006)
Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010)
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)
The Leopard (Luchino Viscont, 1963)
The Thorn in the Heart (Michel Gondry, 2009)
Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho, 2008)
*2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Night Catches Us (Tanya Hamilton, 2010)
I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, 2009)
Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, 2007)
*Stone (John Curran, 2010)
The Way Back (Peter Weir, 2010)
The Woodmans (C. Scott Willis, 2010)
The Housemaid (Im Sang-soo, 2009)
Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962)
*Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
Animal Kingdom (David Michod, 2010)
Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954)

*Seen before. But in the case of 2001, seen in 70mm for the first time. I revisited Stone for this reason, and Dogtooth for this reason.

THE DEFINITIVE 2010

2011-01-18T20:01:00.000-08:00

I have so far made up two best-of-2010 lists, both slightly different from each other, due to different deadlines and rules of eligibility. Below is a third list, what I will call the "definitive" list. I have caught up with several interesting things I hadn't seen in time for the first two lists — Secret Sunshine, True Grit, Tron: Legacy, Night Catches Us, I Love You Phillip Morris — but none of them ended up sneaking onto the updated version. Other than that, the usual rules apply. I am too lazy to type them here.

1. Daddy Longlegs
2. Our Beloved Month of August
3. Sweetgrass
4. The Oath
5. Mother
6. Carlos
7. Everyone Else
8. The Father of My Children
9. Green Zone
10. Lourdes

Honorable mention, in no particular order: The Fighter, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Social Network, The Girl on the Train, The Red Riding Trilogy, Buried, Mundane History, Another Year, The Kids Are All Right, The Crazies, American Radical

Some outstanding performances, in no particular order: Ronald Bronstein, Daddy Longlegs; Sylvie Testud, Lourdes; Joaquin Phoenix, I'm Still Here; Kim Hye-ja, Mother; Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right; Christian Bale, The Fighter; Rhys Ifans, Greenberg; Jemima Kirke, Tiny Furniture; Chris Evans, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; John Hawkes, Winter's Bone; Michael Shannon, The Runaways

BARNEY'S [[[[VVRSSNN]]]]

2011-01-14T14:16:00.000-08:00

A bit on Green Hornet director Michel Gondry's last two films at The Atlantic, and a review of Barney's Version at Reverse Shot.

GRIZZLY PAIR

2011-01-11T19:23:00.000-08:00

In Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, an overserious nurse (Michelle Williams) deflects the attentions of her husband (Ryan Gosling), who in addition to being terminally unambitious has over the years grown to resemble a sunglasses-at-night incarnation of Earl Hickey. Who can blame her? But then again, what self-respecting macho cutup could possibly tolerate such frigid superiority?

This is one of those closed-circuit nightmares — part of the movie's extended marriage meltdown even takes place in the cheekily dystopic "Future Room" of a sex motel — in which romance is always already doomed to failure (Mike Nichols's Closer comes to mind as another). Cianfrance and his leads come up with some nice moments as the writer-director cuts back and forth between impending breakup and the earliest days of the relationship — stylistically this movie is perched in a very intriguing place between the Euro-elliptical regional poetry of Lance Hammer's Ballast and the less punishing Broken Social Scene dioramas of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson, which also starred Gosling. If Blue Valentine's characters occasionally seem to go in and out of focus, at least it looks like someone's in control.

But by the end Cianfrance is toggling between Cindy and Dean's marriage and absolute rock bottom, and the amusing effect is of a filmmaker so disillusioned with the idea of romance that he has encouraged viewers to apply this same foolproof six-year countdown to their own relationships (as my viewing companion pointed out, there are virtually no kindly friend characters to put a buffer between Cindy and Dean and the audience). The unhappy peripheral couplings — Cindy's parents, Dean's parents (revealed by Dean verbally), or Cindy and the wrestler Bobby Ontario, a name too good to feel true — are basically it. Based on the evidence here, Cianfrance appears to be a practitioner of shit-got-real-ism, but one to watch all the same.

THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IN REVOLT

2011-01-11T19:12:00.000-08:00

Apparently there are a lot of fans of The Fountain hanging around the internet.

I also reviewed of a good new Romanian film called If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle. And, last but not least: the results of another year-end poll in which I was proud to participate (I also wrote blurbs for my top two films of the year, Our Beloved Month of August and Daddy Longlegs). Coming in at number one: Everyone Else.

ENTER THE GRID

2011-01-07T06:34:00.000-08:00

I watched the entirety of Tron: Legacy, that piece of laser-tag Mouse House corporate mythology, and I'm still pretty sure I have no idea who or what "Tron" is. Biodigital jazz, man.

CATCHING UP IS HARD TO DO

2011-01-03T20:33:00.000-08:00

At The Atlantic, I propose that the feature-film A-Team adaptation was the bigget snub from the recently(ish) announced Golden Globe nominations. The following week I wrote about two new(ish) foreign Christmas movies: A Christmas Tale and Kisses. And then I closed out the year with a brief gloss on the most underrated films of the year that are currently available on home video, which somehow led to a flame-war-in-miniature between Carl Monday and sundayblues. Politics: so divisive.

At Reverse Shot, two year-end blurbs: an appreciation of Sweetgrass, which earned a slot in the site's top 10, and an "offense" about Catfish.

And at The L, a review of Somewhere, which starts off nicely but becomes everything you'd expect and less.

LOOKING FOR OSCAR

2010-12-16T19:52:00.000-08:00

Friend: I have this great new British movie starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush that is inspiring and great.

Me: Oh, cool. Let's watch it sometime!

Friend: Well, you see the thing is, this movie, you can only watch it through the peephole in the front door of your apartment. It's this weird thing; it's the only way you can watch it. And, actually, the optimal conditions for showing this movie are in a stairwell that has beautiful flaking wallpaper that has a shabby-chic thing going on, with the projection of the movie smushed up against a corner somewhere — with you behind your door, of course, standing up, slightly hunching over. I don't know, man. That's how they want people to be watching this movie. But it's actually really good, though, I swear!

***

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is a movie about a frenzied young woman (Natalie Portman) whose daily commute is scored to a foreshortened variation of the Law & Order noise, and who before she knows it experiences firsthand the amazing, but thoroughly scarifying, transformational power of art, projecting herself as a technically graceful incarnation of the Brundleswan. If we are to take her final words at face value, which I think we are meant to, her lead performance in the opening-night staging of Swan Lake is "perfect" (except for that time she fell — the rest must have been slightly better than perfect to compensate).

Like The Wrestler, this is a film about the steep physical cost and the (very) fleeting but substantial rewards of performance. Thus, it only makes sense that Black Swan's rewards — the actual rehearsal scenes, and only the parts of them when bodies are in motion, not when Vincent Cassel's director Euro-ominously reiterates the same bits of exposition over and over — are only too fleeting. The rest is strictly, though at least studiedly, secondhand: In addition to Cronenberg, Powell, De Palma, and Polanski get gleefully rehashed here. It's hard to shake the sense that Aronofsky still thinks he's atoning for The Fountain, which after a certain amount of time he may or may not feel comfortable declaring to be ahead of its time.

Many have found Black Swan uproariously hysterical. I laughed twice during this film, and I would find the prospect of having to watch it again impossibly agonizing. But then again, I have found the cases for this movie generally more persuasive than the cases against it.

***

David O. Russell's The Fighter, a butt-rock vernacular film about the sweet science of family squabbles (executive-produced by Aronofsky), is more or less a knockout — though you'd never guess it from the credit font, which is the most nondescript white sans serif you will ever see in your life. The Fighter's fluid camerawork, by Hoyte Van Hoytema, occasionally recalls the more lucid moments of Olivier Assayas's collaborators, and its free-wheeling, deranged/arranged sense of local commotion recalls no one less than Robert Altman. This is that rare American movie in which people repeatedly get shoved in the face, and we feel the terrible exhilaration of insults being made up on the fly.

There is one very irritating scene in which Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) takes Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams) to see Belle Epoque on their first date and they are hectored by a guy with a sweater around his neck who loudly quotes the Times review of the early Penelope Cruz vehicle. I imagine Russell, supposed film nerd, and the bajillion screenwriters who worked on this movie felt compelled to make clear their sympathies in this moment: They're in the corner of the people who are bitching about the subtitles. This scene betrays an uneasiness with the brash working-class milieu, or at least with how it's being perceived, that isn't very evident elsewhere, and it effectively pulls the punches of the scenes that immediately follow. I wish the Belle Epoque outing had been excised from The Fighter, but, as Micky fights whenever the opportunity arises, so too I'll take the good movies I can get.

ORDERS OF ORDERS OF BUSINESS

2010-12-16T19:25:00.000-08:00

A look at some of Christian Bale's most sinewy work, and a review of the atrocious film Hemingway's Garden of Eden, which as of tomorrow the Quad Cinema will have worked out of its system.

Also this week, I submitted a top 10 of 2010 for a poll. I still have some films to catch up with (most notably True Grit), so a possibly somewhat different annotated list will be forthcoming, but here is how things stood as of Tuesday:

1. Daddy Longlegs
2. Our Beloved Month of August
3. The Oath
4. Sweetgrass
5. Mother
6. Carlos
7. Everyone Else
8. The Father of My Children
9. Green Zone
10. Lourdes

BENDERS

2010-12-03T11:42:00.000-08:00

Three weeks' worth of Atlantic columns: On how the duds of summer (namely The Last Airbender and Jonah Hex) look now, in the dead of fall; on the underappreciated Beowulf, from Robert Zemeckis, whose favorite holiday appears to be Christmas; and a revisiting of the slow-burn hollers-have-eyes drama Winter's Bone, which has started filling out its trophy shelf.

TRAGICALLY CANADIAN

2010-11-16T16:39:00.000-08:00

On Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

THE CAVE OF FORGOTTEN PRIORITIES

2010-11-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

The tragedy of Danny Boyle's 127 Hours is that wild-man adventurer Aron Ralston (James Franco) went to Utah's Canyonlands National Park for the weekend without telling anyone — not his family (from whom he fields cordially desperate voicemails), not his co-workers (actually, co-worker), and not his friends. Actually, he doesn't appear to have any of the latter. In the film's most alarmingly ridiculous flashback, we learn that Aron once went to an NBA game with a blond girl (Clemence Poesy) he met in a snowbound SUV full of naked people, but that he either quickly tired of her company or became unable to pay attention to anything but the sports occurring in front of him. She got tired of his acting distant and split.

But Aron is a charming young man! If he wanted to, he could have so many friends! So goes the screenplay's constant scolding. An early sequence during which he plays tour guide to two lady-hikers (played by Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn) shows that, for all Aron's manic behavior, he's an entirely sociable person. But he's after more elusive visceral thrills than flirtatious small talk — Boyle opens with predictably kinetic split-screens of teeming hordes, providing the simplest possible urban-overload explanation for what drives Aron to routinely disappear without a trace into the wilderness — so he runs off on his own again. Shortly thereafter comes the big teachable moment: While maneuvering down a crevice, Aron gets his arm wedged between a boulder and a rock face, pinning him in such a way that he must saw his own arm off in order to survive. The best part of 127 Hours is the sound that accompanies the deliberate bone breaks that precede the self-amputation.

In his tight spot, Aron alternates between contritely emoting into the video camera he has brought along and wholesale hallucinating. One of these dehydration visions shows Aron with another young man in Canyonlands. They both marvel at a bizarrely perched spherical rock formation. Presumably intending to convey the heightened-dream-sequence nature of the moment, Boyle cranks up the color of the chalkstone to burnt orange — but this just makes the massive rock look like a giant Nerf ball, which had me examining the integrity of every rock surface for the remainder of the film — distracting to say the least.

The Nerf-tones do, however, serve to underscore that 127 Hours is primarily — somewhat absurdly — a film about being a responsible sportsman. If you're going to shoot hoops alone, consider making it a safe game of one-on-one, make-it-take-it. If you go water-skiing, make sure there's somebody to watch you from the back of the boat. If you're looking to max out while weightlifting, make sure you have a reliable spotter. If you plan to go hiking and mountain-biking and mountain-climbing in the middle of nowhere, make sure you tell your mother, especially if your father is in New York and she's in for a "quiet weekend." She's begging for you to notify her!

Danny Boyle and Slumdog Millionaire screenwriter Simon Beaufoy have taken a harrowing real-life survival story and turned it into the ultimate after-college special.

ROLLING BOYLE

2010-11-06T16:40:00.000-07:00

On Sunshine and The Beach: "Danny Boyle's Uneven Road to 127 Hours."

NOBODY ELSE IS BLOGGING ABOUT IT, SO WHY CAN'T WE

2010-11-06T16:16:00.000-07:00

Took in two Boston-set films today, Damien Chazelle's black-and-white sometimes-musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench and Ben Affleck's I-fell-in-love-with-a-hostage ballad The Town. Hanging around the margins of both films is a white-mustachioed actor named Frank Garvin. In Guy and Madeline, he plays a retired police officer named, yes, Frank. He is the unlikely father of a 12-year-old but passes his time pacing around public spaces, trying to ensnare attractive young women in conversation (in a glaring false note, he manages to bring home the character Elena, played by Sandha Khin). Garvin portrays an active police captain in The Town; he mostly stands around and looks gravely dignified in an old-timey sort of way.

Some questions: Is Affleck a fan of Chazelle's debut film? Is Garvin the real-deal heart and soul of Beantown? Or is he merely the patron saint of soulful New England law enforcement? Or is he local color incarnate, able to variegate the setting even when the film is in black and white or traffics in shades of gray?

IT'S LIKE A JUNGLE SOMETIMES

2010-11-04T15:29:00.000-07:00

Los Muertos.

Holy Rollers and Solitary Man.

The Crazies, The House of the Devil, and House.

Fair Game.

DEATH IN THE FAMILY

2010-10-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

Hereafter, Nowhere Boy, Vision, Leaves of Grass.

WE WRITE WHAT WE WRITE

2010-10-09T15:09:00.000-07:00

More text: three NYFF pieces (on Julie Taymor's The Tempest, the Mexican horror film We Are What We Are, and the festival in general). I also interviewed the critic Saul Austerlitz, the author of a new history of American screen comedy called Another Fine Mess.

TUESDAY, AFTER WRITING SOME STUFF

2010-09-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

From the New York Film Festival: The Social Network, Le Quattro Volte, The Robber, and Tuesday, After Christmas.

YOUR TONGUE WOULD SLAP YOUR BRAINS OUT TRYING TO GET TO IT

2010-09-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

Gigli seven years later.

New release: Kings of Pastry.

METHOD MAN

2010-09-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

On Joaquin Phoenix's "retirement" and Two Lovers.

ORDERS OF BUSINESS

2010-09-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

This week, I wrote about The Red Riding Trilogy and My Dog Tulip. British stuff.
The Portuguese film Our Beloved Month of August, which is playing at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan until Thursday, is an amazing film. The 9:15 showing on Friday night was practically empty, so I feel obligated to provide at least a little advocacy here. More than anything else, the film reminded me of Abbas Kiarostami's '90s films, with its playful mixture of fiction and documentary, the making of the movie and the movie itself — though the writer-director of August, Miguel Gomes, seems to distance himself from the narrative that makes up much of his film's second half, a sort of Partridge Family melodrama with supernatural elements. I should note, for non-New Yorkers, that you can watch the film for $3 at Mubi.
I kept a list of all the films I had seen in August on a Post-it. I put the list into my pocket the other night, and now I can't find it. August was very busy, and so I didn't get to many movies I wasn't intending to write about elsewhere. But I remember seeing Salt, Dinner for Schmucks, and Alice in the Cities (for a second time) for fun.
Every time the Morning Glory trailer plays before a movie, as it did before the screening of The American I attended on Thursday night, I feel a peculiar mix of excitement and shame. Excitement because when the Natasha Bedingfield song starts blasting, my right cheek begins to tingle. (This also happens when I hear the spoken-word part at the end of Stephen Malkmus's "Jo-Jo's Jacket," among other things.) Shame because, well, this is the trailer for an uplifting comedy about a morning show starring Rachel McAdams.

STATUS UPDATE

2010-08-27T17:39:00.000-07:00

I made it a personal challenge to sneak a reference to the Sandra Bullock-Keanu Reeves supernatural romance The Lake House (time-collapsing epistolary correspondence as metaphor for IMing!) into this gloss on the Internet in movies. Couldn't quite pull it off. Oh well. And it's Dinner for Schmucks, I realize.

I also wrote a review of The Milk of Sorrow, which opens today in New York.

ME, ORSON WELLES, AND AN ENTIRE CLASS OF HIGH SCHOOL SOPHOMORES

2010-08-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to get a drink after work at my favorite terrible bar near Madison Square Garden. Things were relatively quiet in there until all these fake-ID kids started streaming in, jostling around my barstool and ordering Long Island Ice Teas. I could barely get around these children to get to the bathroom. I left after I elbowed a few of them.

So I wake up this morning to some commenter calling me a member of "the older generation" on this post in which I wrote about Zac Efron and Miley Cyrus. "[N]o offence dude but 'The Last Song' isn't really aimed at your age group." Well then thank God. This must be one of those privileges of growing older. If The Last Song were aimed at my age group, then we'd all be well-advised to duck and cover — and we can't really bend over anymore, so that's more or less out of the question.

Naturally, with the way things are going around here, I have forgotten to post two things on this blog: a thing on Duplicity, and a review of A Film Unfinished.

THE NYFF LOOK BOOK: MEEK'S CUTOFF T, AND BEYOND!

2010-08-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

The New York Film Festival announced its full 2010 lineup this week. I'm looking over the Film Society of Lincoln Center website. I'm thinking cool that the closing-night movie is Clint Eastwood's Hereafter. Now things are getting a little weirder, and I'm wondering my God what is Matt Damon wearing in that kitchen there. The film's script "unfolds three intersecting stories"; is Matt Damon wearing some kind of form-fitting plush bathrobe that gradually unfolds into three separate garments? Was Joseph Beuys the costume designer?

Also, this movie sounds like Cloud Atlas.

WE'RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER DREAM

2010-08-06T17:40:00.001-07:00

A few words on Inception, which has largely evaporated from my memory since I saw it four weeks ago. I am naturally tempted to say it has exited my mind as rapidly as a dream upon waking, but that would be an exaggeration. I thought the film was a staggering effects spectacle, and a serviceable enough drama with serviceable enough performances from an interesting ensemble of performers, spanning Toms Berenger and Hardy. I didn't dislike much about Inception, aside from its painfully protracted on-the-fly explanations of its dream logic; when this comes out on DVD, its first 90 minutes might usefully be indexed as a single chapter entitled "Dreams for Schmucks."

Christopher Nolan's previous non-Batman film, The Prestige, is a crackerjack film I admire very much. Like Inception, it takes an ingenious movie-metaphor conceit and uses it as a foundation for an elaborately planned, clean-lined brainteaser — "Are you watching closely?" is even a rather grandiloquent refrain in The Prestige. The tale of rival magicians in Victorian London has the requisite last-act surprises. One of them is rather obvious all along, but it serves as a sort of smoke screen for more unsettling revelations: The Prestige's final scenes horrifyingly show the human cost of the film's central illusion. It's a neat resolution, but one that doesn't cheapen anything.

Inception, by contrast, leaves some question about whether all of the film's action takes place in Dom Cobb's dream, but that lingering doubt — although, if you ask me, that top isn't going to stop spinning — lowers the stakes of the preceding action considerably. Cobb is finally home, having opted out of a Solaris eternity with a simulacrum of his deceased wife; no matter what "level" we're on here, the circuit is closed, the nightmare safely over. The audience is once and for all out of the "shared dream" of the movie, so in that way this conclusion works, but it doesn't exactly encourage reflection on the meaning of the film's various dreamscapes.

IS IT A CRIME TO LOOK AT LANGE

2010-08-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

Marky Mark and the funny bunch?

On being a teen in Sicily.

Video of the week!

ONLY BUILT 4 HYPER LINX

2010-07-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

At the L, The Extra Man.

At The Atlantic, The Runaways and Flicker.

JULY: IF YOUR NAME IS RAF SPIELMAN, YOU GET EXACTLY WHAT YOU ASK FOR (AND MORE)

2010-07-30T18:16:00.000-07:00

Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009) — High hopes for this one. Found it more in keeping with a certain strain of provocation cinema perpetrated by directors with perpetually tensed neck muscles than the long-take formalism that I perhaps too easily take a shine to.
Restrepo (Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, 2010) — I am kind of disgusted by the fact that I ate popcorn during this.
Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958) — The second Mann film I'd seen, after T-Men. Some breathtaking stuff. But I remain kind of disgusted by the way the chomper in front of me was eating popcorn during this.
Cyrus (Jay and Mark Duplass, 2010) — Among the implausible treacle, one of my favorite scenes of the year: Jonah Hill performing a laptop/keyboard bliss-out for John C. Reilly's audience of one.
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009) — Eat, love, but don't pray. There are birds in the church.
Knight and Day (James Mangold, 2010) — I saw this almost entirely for air-conditioning purposes, and for that kind of thing it is just the ticket. Smartly structured as a series of blackout removes.
*The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006) — Inception is half as satisfying.
*The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958) — Eli Wallach is terrifying in this. Lean.
Desperate (Anthony Mann, 1947) — Some astonishing expressionist photography here.
Strange Impersonation (Anthony Mann, 1946) — A totally preposterous and engrossing plastic-surgery thriller. This will one day be included in a great series alongside Eyes Without a Face and Face/Off. If it hasn't already happened.
Brooklyn's Finest (Antoine Fuqua, 2009) — Copera.
Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) — The Prestige is twice as satisfying. If Nolan could get away with blowing up a hospital in real life, I'm afraid he might do it.
The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010) — Peerless farm-to-table cinema. As in Laurel Canyon, Cholodenko somehow manages to make domestic tumult seem pleasant. I think this is a virtue, but I'm not sure.
Firefox (Clint Eastwood, 1982) — This is actually pretty boring until you remember that it's about stealth planes and Clint Eastwood passing as Russian. And then there's a great extended dogfight sequence to reward you for staying with it.
*Breach (Billy Ray, 2007) — This has only gotten better.
Hopscotch (Ronald Neame, 1980) — Revelatory Cortazar adaptation. Just kidding. This is what Jeffrey Wells might call "no-laugh funny."
Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1962) — Of all the films listed here, this is the one I most look forward to watching again. Italian courtrooms can get crazy!
The Extra Man (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2010) — Anything but this.
Flicker (Nik Sheehan, 2008) — If you can't Beat 'em ...
The Runaways (Floria Sigismondi, 2010) — This is some sort of turning point for Michael Shannon. Perhaps it just means that he will no more stalk Court Street during the daytime.
The Sicilian Girl (Marco Amenta, 2009) — Further proof that Italian courtrooms can get crazy.
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe, 2009) — Uh.

*Revisitings

IN THE LAND OF THE BLIND, THE MAN WITH ONE EYE IS MUTE

2010-07-16T14:19:00.000-07:00

Valhalla Rising is really bad.

Brooklyn's Finest is actually not that bad.

BORED ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

2010-07-10T14:11:00.001-07:00

At The Atlantic: the upcoming Inception provided an opportunity to revisit The Prestige; the week before, I proudly waved the themed-viewing flag. These color bars don't run.

SENSUAL REDUCTION

2010-07-08T22:43:00.000-07:00

I Am Love stars Will Smith as a Shrek fan who must stave off the vampires from ... Pardon me, this is embarrasing, let me collect my notes ...

Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love is similar in many respects to Jonathan Glazer's Birth: Both films follow upper-crust women going in for so-called forbidden love; both films luxuriate in so-called moneyed atmospheres; and both films somehow fall short (Birth by only a hair's breadth, I Am Love by considerably more) of matching their sumptuous visual registers to the pompous assembly-line staccato of their musical scores. This comparison points up the fact that I Am Love could have used some sustained mystery element to keep it interesting.

The feat of Tilda Swinton's performance — in which she speaks Italian in a Russian accent and fearlessly bears her all — is almost too astounding to discuss. But after too many characters and too many subplots there is little left to ponder during I Am Love but the erotics of chef's tasting menus. The chef in question has a beard and no discernible personality; food is the color of his energy. The film's notion of midlife liberation is an appealing one, but must it come slathered in such stinky cheese?

As Swinton's character, Emma Recchi, unhappily watches Philadelphia in bed with her husband (Pippo Delbono), Guadagnino ladles on a little complimentary Demme-glace. Elliott Smith leaks out of the young lesbian daughter's earphones. I emerged from this film not profoundly moved by its characters' journeys but with a new the-'90s-were-melodramatic read on some of that decade's cultural touchstones.

WINTER'S ZONE

2010-06-25T22:28:00.001-07:00

Green Zone, out on video this week, is one of my favorite movies of the year so far. Daddy Longlegs, Sweetgrass, The Oath, Mother, The Father of My Children, and Everyone Else are some others.

I LOVE THE MIAMI VALLEY OH!

2010-06-23T14:42:00.000-07:00

A review of 45365, closing today at Anthology Film Archives, at Reverse Shot, where there is also a new issue up.

A LONG TRIP WHERE THERE ARE NO PHONES

2010-06-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

Brian Koppelman and David Levien's Solitary Man is a movie about an oil slick of an old man, Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas), on the verge of being excommunicated by his daughter (Jenna Fischer), a woman well-practiced in issuing wit's-end ultimatums. Her husband (David Costabile), Ben's son-in-law, lurks slump-shouldered around the edges of these father-daughter scenes. We are asked to accept him as both a hopelessly prissy wet blanket and the most responsible, upstanding citizen in the room. This is a ridiculous noncharacter, a device, which is not so forgivable in the kind of modest character piece Koppelman and Levien are after here.

Then there is the case of Daniel Cheston (Jesse Eisenberg), a tentative liberal artist who stumbles into this scenario. To him, Ben is a sort of mentor, though Ben winds up learning a thing or two about friendship from Daniel (imagine that). At one point, Daniel sits with Ben on a couch and, mason jar full of suds in hand, gushes about the keys to his newfound contentment — girlfriend, upper-class status, program housing (Koppelman's screenplay forces Eisenberg into the awkward position of having to nonchalantly say the words "Eclectic House"). It's hard enough to stomach what's being said here, but it's even harder to accept that these two people would ever find themselves having this conversation.

Then Ben goes and does something sleazy, and the situation makes a little more sense, but the feeling that this film is a sort of virtual experience, a series of levels on which the protagonist must demonstrate the comprehensiveness of his failings as a human being, never dissipates. If Children of Men was a first-person savior, then I suppose this might be described as a first-person disappointer.

BAD GUY SEEKS GOOD BOOK

2010-06-18T14:17:00.000-07:00

Mostly on The Book of Eli, but a little bit on Collapse.

SHUTTER TO THINK; BETTER YET, DON'T THINK AT ALL

2010-06-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts on Shutter Island and Tony Manero.

A PIECE OFFERING

2010-06-04T15:11:00.001-07:00

The Wolfman on video.

The Convention at the IFC Center. Not sure who the Euro-bros in that picture are.

SEASONALLY AFFECTIVE

2010-05-28T10:49:00.000-07:00

In two new American films, the fall foliage of upstate New York is really something to see, even for those who wouldn't normally seem to care about such things. In Nicole Holofcener's Please Give — a film in which a cast of prickly characters slowly comes to terms with the fact that ugly but comfortable chairs will likely be haunted for all times — the ever-so-slightly dowdy mammogram technician Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) must put up with co-workers who hound her about whether she's going to drive to some New York magazine-approved spot to see the leaves change. When she actually finally does make that trip, she seems very pleased, much to her surprise. Her warm-fuzzies are tamped down only by the fact that her inveterate-crank grandmother (Ann Guilbert) refuses to take in the view.

In the Safdie brothers' extraordinary Daddy Longlegs, bad dad Lenny (Ronald Bronstein) — an impulsive projectionist perpetually in crisis mode — horns in on a couple's romantic early-fall road trip. He hasn't been out of New York City in four years, he says, and he's ecstatic about the prospect of roaming around in open space. With his kids in tow, he occupies the unhappy couple's entire backseat. A while into the drive, he hands a custom highway mixtape to the front only to see it refused, slammed against the dash. The driver claims to be allergic to music. Lenny laughs the whole thing off quietly. The car ride seems to take forever. When they finally arrive at their destination, somebody remarks upon the temperature (in the 50s) and they take a boat out on a lake. Lenny pretends to fish for salmon off the side of the motorboat with his bare hands as a water skier trails behind.

In Please Give, an epiphany might sneak up on anyone at any time. The film ends in some sort of denim boutique with everything as it should be. Mother (Catherine Keener) looks on at daughter (Sarah Steele); daughter finally gets the expensive jeans she's deserved all along. In Daddy Longlegs, absolutely everywhere — that lake upstate, the natural history museum, the supermarket, the Roosevelt Island tram — is a way station. Things change at a rate that doesn't allow for reflection, much less any feeling of contentment, however fleeting. The film marvelously captures a flux somewhere between jumbled kid's-eye view and a-million-things-at-once parenthood. Lenny's first response to the angry principal of his kids' school is to laugh at his name, Mr. Puccio. Lenny goes to see the autumn leaves but forgets to look at them entirely.

THE SHOCK OF THE NEWELL

2010-05-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

In honor of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

LOCO MOTIVES!

2010-05-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

Andre Techine's The Girl on the Train is out on video this week. I wrote a post about it.

ABOUT A MOUNTAIN, UNDER A ROCK

2010-05-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

On North Face, a German mountain-climbing drama out this week on home video. Earlier this week, I also wrote a short review of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a documentary currently playing at Film Forum.

KRUEGER TOWN

2010-05-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

The primitive search engine used by the kids in Samuel Bayer's A Nightmare on Elm Street regurgitation is called Gigablast ("Blast off!" says the search button). An addled teen takes a psychostimulant called Zonerol. These made-up proper nouns -- vaguely riffing off real-life equivalents, of course -- push this movie's waking world closer to a dream state, making it even more disorienting than it intends to be. And that's before the film devolves into the total micronap obliteration of any distinction between dreams and reality. Cheap jolts come at the expense of accumulated horror: There is little sense of the gathering danger of these high schoolers falling asleep, where they will invariably encounter the former gardener-pedophile Freddy Krueger, only the retroactive realization that they have already begun to snooze when Freddy shows up all of a sudden brandishing his trademark garden-trowel/knife gloves.

Every surface of this movie appears digitally retouched, and because of this I was especially surprised when the bronzer-slathered kids with sculpted noses bit the dust early on. The dark-haired artsy misfits prevail. They listen to music on headphones, make charcoal sketches, and hang out in independent bookstores. The exteriors of their beautiful homes are established by crane shots during which the camera ascends and then descends slightly, mimicking an elevator that only has one floor to travel. With a credit sequence by Saul Bass.

TAXI TO THE EVEN DARKER SIDE

2010-05-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

This week, I wrote about a grim but compelling 2003 film by the currently imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi, and the superb new documentary The Oath, which unfolds mostly in Yemen.

Alex Gibney should've called his new movie Casino Jack and the United Spate of Condiments.

TROUBLES EVERY DAY

2010-04-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

Five Minutes of Heaven is new on DVD. Some words I wrote about it.

ANTON CHEKHOV'S WHY I DIDN'T GET MARRIED

2010-04-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

An adaptation of The Duel is out today at Film Forum. Reading the novella will probably not take you much more time than seeing the movie.

AFTER LIFE, BEFORE THE PARTY

2010-04-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

The Lovely Bones really is a (glorious) disaster!

VLADIVOSTOK: TIGER TRAP

2010-04-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala is a very beautiful but very dull movie about a hills-dwelling rube who agrees to guide a largely undifferentiated group of surveyors through the forest. Dersu is as wise and loyal as this movie is long. Two great man-up-against-the-elements sequences though - one in river rapids and the other on a wind-wasted frozen lake, a lunar expanse at the end of the earth.

THE WEEKEST LINKS

2010-04-16T15:48:00.000-07:00

A busy week, and now some proof of it: a quick gloss on mid-career Alain Tanner, in particular Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000; a (hopefully somewhat persuasive) bit of La France advocacy; and a slightly longer diagnosis of what's ailing The Joneses, a "satire" starring Fox Mulder that opens today in theaters.

EGOYAN'S LOCATION SCOUT: 'I HAVE A VERY PARTICULAR SET OF WINE BARS'

2010-04-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

These days the very intelligent Atom Egoyan would be much better off recording an informal DVD commentary-type lecture on the movie he wants to make than shooting and editing an actual movie. His attempts to court mainstream success by constructing whols films around single pervy set pieces - a menage a trois in Where the Truth Lies, a lesbian sex scene in Chloe - have become increasingly uncomfortably robotically silly.

But Egoyan's undergirding ideas can still be interesting. Chloe is a film that quite explicitly goes out to everyone who's ever gotten a boner in the real Toronto, the actual Toronto, not the bland everycity that for decades movie moguls big and small have leered at through their swirling-double-vision tax-break goggles.

You want to see the way the afternoon light comes through the large plate-glass windows of luxe cafes? You want to see some immaculately suffocating interiors, like a house that looks like a hotel lobby? You want to see some attractive people conduct an affair behind a greenhouse shed? Yeah, fine, I hate it but I do. And I'll pay to see Egoyan's next movie. But I think I'd rather just listen to him talk about all this stuff.

AUSTIN LEGAL

2010-04-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

Beeswax is out on DVD this week. It is a good movie. Here are some of the reasons why.

The critical ambivalence toward the word "mumblecore" has by this point almost become part of its definition, but you've got to start somewhere. And I'd rather get the word out of the way up front than have it be the indecisive twentysomething elephant in the room.

THE BOND OF MATRIMONY

2010-04-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

When I first moved to New York, before I started my job but after I'd found an apartment, I went to the movies so many times. The highlights of that week were mostly French. I saw Contempt for the first time, and took in Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and Philippe Garrel's I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar at Cinema Village.

I also saw a matinee of Married Life that week. A very lightweight film in context, but it nonetheless surprised and delighted me, mostly because I didn't much care for Ira Sachs's Forty Shades of Blue. Anyway, Pierce Brosnan's new ubiquity gave me occasion this week to revisit the film and something about it.

DALAI LAMA, MEET PRINCE CHARLES

2010-04-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

Here is my review of The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom.

SPINNING OUT OF KONTROLL

2010-03-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

Armored!

SHOOT THE MOON

2010-03-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

The Father of My Children screens this evening and Saturday at New Directors/New Films. It's also coming out from IFC in a couple months, but it's worth seeing however, whenever. Some words I wrote about it.

The film's director, Mia Hansen-Løve, who is just 29 years old, has also appeared as an actress in two Olivier Assayas films, Late August, Early September and Les Destinées Sentimentales. And her new film in many respects resembles Assayas’s last, Summer Hours. Superficially, it stars Alice de Lencquesaing as a seemingly otherwise occupied teenager. It also deals more broadly with how a family copes not just with loss, but with the artworks suddenly orphaned by that loss.

Summer Hours is a film I admire, but Hansen-Løve's film stands up remarkably well in this comparison. For all Assayas's strengths, in his global narratives he often misses the mark on the finer everyday details. The characterization Juliette Binoche's successful art-director-of-an-online-magazine boyfriend in Summer Hours is to me the archetypal example of this weakness, mostly because it elicited a lone, but Ziegfeld-resonant, guffaw from an audience member at a 2008 New York Film Festival screening. But how about that website takedown of Michael Madsen's character in Boarding Gate?

One of Hansen-Løve's primary strengths is these kind of fringe characterizations and shadings. Nothing in her second film feels blinkered, guessed, or half-thought-through, with only one later scene in Switzerland - a little too reliant on a tempestuous-artist cliche - feeling slightly off.

MY GREENBERG-Y NIGHTS

2010-03-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

My post this week at The Atlantic concerns an ongoing feud and Noah Baumbach's first two films. An addendum to the feud part: It seems to me that this occasionally strained but largely civil Leonard Lopate Show interview from 1996 throws into serious question the talk of a late-1980s WNYC shouting match between Noah Baumbach's mother, Georgia Brown, and Armond White.

HOW MUCH WOOD WOULD A VIENNESE CHUCK IF A VIENNESE COULD CHUCK WOOD

2010-03-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

This week at The Atlantic I discuss the last two films by the writer-director Gotz Spielmann, both available on DVD. The temptation to invoke the name of Thomas Bernhard while discussing shabby Austrian locations and glowering Austrian people was, as always, great. But I resisted.

MAYBE THE INTERNET IS OKAY AFTER ALL

2010-03-05T13:22:00.000-08:00

A new post up at The Atlantic's Web site today.

Tomorrow evening the Thai film Mundane History screens at BAM. If there's one film worth seeing in their Rotterdam series, I'd say this is it.

BELATED FEBRUARY

2010-03-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

Audience of One (Mike Jacobs, 2007)
A Room and a Half (Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, 2009)
A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)
Il Divo (Paolo Sorrentino, 2008)
High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1964)
Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, 2009)
Antares (Gotz Spielmann, 2004)
October Country (Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, 2009)
Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)
R (Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm, 2010)
C'est deja l'ete (Martijn Maria Smits, 2010)
Mama (Yelena Renard and Nikolay Renard, 2010)
The Temptation of St. Tony (Veiko Ounpuu, 2009)
Un lac (Philippe Grandrieux, 2009)
Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell, 2009)
Cold Water of the Sea (Paz Fabrega, 2010)
Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio, 2009)
Street Days (Levan Koguashvili, 2010)
Miyoko (Yoshifumi Tsubota, 2009)
Mundane History (Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2009)

STRAP YOURSELF TO A HOMETREE WITH ROOTS

2010-03-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

Finally saw this in 3-D IMAX the other day.

I guess people probably already made that joke like three months ago.

The most interesting and ultimately problematic part of Avatar for me was the Na'vi humanoids' New Agey, wondrously biotechnological way of melding with other organic life-forms via some kind of organic-USB tendrils at the ends of their rat tails. In scenes supposedly depicting communal harmony, I glimpsed something more sinister: enormous winged creatures not only surrendering their bodies but also their minds to these lithe blue beings for a mere quick high, a dilating of the pupils; the swaying in unison during the downloading of collective memory from a crystalline tree a vision of total hive-mind submission.

ROTTERDAMMERUNG (TWILIGHT OF THE ROTTERDAM)

2010-03-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

A very cool series of competition films from this year's International Rotterdam Film Festival starts at BAM tonight. I watched a bunch of the films and wrote a sort of overview. Certainly not some of my best writing, but my impressions are there.

I also just realized, right this very second, that St. Tony drives a Bentley, not an Aston Martin.

SNOW BLOGS

2010-02-26T14:15:00.000-08:00

What I hope is the first entry in a new weekly feature is up at The Atlantic's new Culture Channel. You can take me to task in the comments! You can accuse me of being a hack!

PREFAB CULT CLASSIC

2010-02-17T20:53:00.000-08:00

o i c u r a midnight movie!

PILGRIM'S PROGNOSIS

2010-02-17T14:04:00.000-08:00

Lourdes plays at Film Forum today through March 2. I consider it here. Recommended.

SO FAR OVER THE EDGE OF DARKNESS

2010-02-12T16:31:00.000-08:00

At the L, something on Lessons of Darkness, playing at MoMA in the coming days. I am very fond of The White Diamond and last year's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, but Lessons is the only Herzog film that's floored me since high school. I first saw it a few years ago, and was excited to have a reason to revisit it a few weeks ago.

FIVE-ALARM FIREBRAND

2010-02-10T07:00:00.001-08:00

Up this morning, a review of the documentary American Radical, opening at Anthology Film Archives this weekend.

Norman Finkelstein, the radical of the title, kind of reminded me of Michael Ruppert, the subject of Chris Smith's Collapse. Both are fiercely committed to revealing their ugly versions of how the world works, at the cost of just about everything else - personal, professional, and otherwise. They try to temper their similar (and at least partially counterproductive) brands of alarmism by calling them scholarship. They're also combative showmen.

RE-JUVIE-NATION

2010-02-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Juvenile Court ...

ALMOST ALL OF THESE FILMS ARE QUITE GOOD

2010-02-01T21:17:00.000-08:00

Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1950)
Pripyat (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1999)
7915 Km (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2008)
Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke, 2008)
House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)
The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock, 2009)
Elsewhere (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2001)
T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
Garbage Dreams (Mai Iskander, 2009)
The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009)
Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)
Juvenile Court (Frederick Wiseman, 1973)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
Delta (Kornel Mundruczo, 2008)
American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein (David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier, 2009)
*Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1992)

*Revisiting

PLANET WAVES

2010-01-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

Two things up this week at the L: a write-up of the reissue of the 1977 Japanese horror comedy House, and a longer overview of Austrian documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter's (Our Daily Bread) six features.

Watching Garbage Dreams at the IFC Center last night, an interesting but somewhat too-smooth (dramatically speaking) documentary about Cairo's trash-collecting Zaballeen, I found myself wishing the film had some of the patience and formal assuredness of one of Geyrhalter's dispatches. This really brought the scale of his achievements into perspective for me in a new way.

For its part, House is immensely entertaining. I don't usually go in for the kind of midnight-movie camp promised by the trailer, but its a surprisingly fascinating film, both aesthetically and subtextually. And I realize there were probably any number of self-consciously silly horror films that served as inspirations for the "flying objects" episode of Garth Marenghi's Darplace, but I can't shake the suspicion that House was one of them.

DECEMBER TO DISMEMBER

2010-01-03T10:43:00.000-08:00

Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968)
Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)
Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 2009)
The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallee, 2009)
Armored (Nimrod Antal, 2009)
Big Fan (Robert Siegel, 2009)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar, 2009)
A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009)
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009)
Herb & Dorothy (Megumi Sasaki, 2008)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)
The Year After Dayton (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1997)
Washed Ashore (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 1994)
The Chaser (Na Hong-jin, 2008)
Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005)
Where the Sidewalk Ends (Otto Preminger, 1950)
Crazy Heart (Scott Cooper, 2009)
The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009)
Invictus (Clint Eastwood, 2009)
Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

SEOUL ASYLUM

2009-12-30T13:53:00.000-08:00

Today, a film called The Chaser opens in theaters, or at least one theater, that theater being the IFC Center. More here!

WHAT HAVE YE VOTED FOR

2009-12-23T17:58:00.001-08:00

I lived a (minor) lifelong dream of mine about a week and a half ago by casting my lot in a year-end critics' poll, the results of which are now online. I wrote the blurb for Revanche, which came in at 19, and an honorable mention sentence for my favorite film of the year (so far), Bright Star.

The outcome of the poll is interesting. 35 Shots of Rum is a respectable number one, and all of the top eight are films I really admired. There are a few titles on the list I missed (24 City, Night and Day, and You, the Living) during - at least in the first two cases - their too-brief theatrical runs. There are a few films whose high placement I can't abide by (Thirst at 12, Up at 15), and a couple films by favorite directors that I would confidently classify as misfires (The Limits of Control and Public Enemies, both on the cusp of the top 10). But I guess that's what makes these things interesting.

I will post a bona fide top 10 of 2009 in a few weeks - there are films left to see, and there's some reevaluation left to do - but here's the top-20 ballot I turned in on the 14th:

1. Bright Star
2. Revanche
3. A Serious Man
4. Birdsong
5. Gomorrah
6. 35 Shots of Rum
7. The Windmill Movie
8. Inglourious Basterds
9. Julia
10. Lorna's Silence
11. Tulpan
12. Still Walking
13. Adventureland
14. Broken Embraces
15. I'm Gonna Explode
16. Police, Adjective
17. The Messenger
18. Bronson
19. Fantastic Mr. Fox
20. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

MILES OF CELLULOID

2009-12-16T22:32:00.000-08:00

Buying a ticket to Up in the Air put me over 400 points on my Regal Crown Club card. I'm not exactly sure what passing this threshold means, but I hope I can expect more popcorn coupons! Plus, it makes a good icebreaker.

ALOFT ON THE ZEITGEIST

2009-12-16T14:14:00.000-08:00

Up in the Air is a film about a quip-happy, commitment-averse man, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who fires people for a living. Flyover country is his domain - the movie celebrates airline hubs, and a veritable breadbasket of aerial shots seem to declare, "You call that a city? I call it liminal!" - but he's only truly at home when he's flying over it. "Where are you from?" asks a Chesley Sullenberger look-alike (Sam Elliott) who represents commercial aviation's bygone glory days and who seems to be on a layover from an entirely different movie. "I'm from here," Ryan answers. Needless to say, this exchange transpires on a plane.

Ryan, who is essentially an exceedingly well-oiled, self-aware bromide delivery system, enjoys being suspended - he practically exults in it - but he is also a bit old-fashioned. Though Ryan is certainly some stripe of workaholic, he maintains a side gig as a motivational speaker, and he has also managed to remain a man over whom no BlackBerry has dominion, God bless him, and so when at one point he reclines in his Hilton bathrobe and commences sexting, there seems to be a glimmer of genuine amazement in his eyes: what a marvelous, newfangled device that can instantaneously transmit to me arousing images of Vera Farmiga! It is this hint of aw-shucks-ness, on top of the tacked-on testimonials of Real Fired People and its heartland stomping ground, that makes Up in the Air ideal for critical pronouncements in the form of "The [insert superlative] American film of the year."

The first syllable of the protagonist's last name evokes both an upstart search engine and a mid-'90s show on Nickelodeon that tried to tell tweens what the hot new was; this movie is going for fresh, of the moment. It goes down smoothly, of course, and even becomes involving in stretches, particularly when Ryan attends his sister's wedding with Alex (Farmiga) in tow. Most exchanges between Ryan and his go-getter accidental protege, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), are predictable, but it's nonetheless hard not to root for them to learn from each other. There's something sort of airless about the whole movie, though, and in a way that's not altogether easy to describe.

I think my main problem with this film, and all of those directed by Jason Reitman (that also includes Thank You for Smoking and Juno), but especially the other one also written by him (Thank You for Smoking), is that the jokes, of which there are many, primarily seem to amuse themselves. It's easy to imagine their writer laughing to himself and shaking his head, "I'm so bad!" - so cynical or irreverent or what have you. Reitman now seems to be making a thing of sneaking a half-ingenuous form of fellow feeling into films about brutal marketplace realities. There is hope yet that this 32-year-old director will move on from this self-satisfied, check-swing iconoclasm, but it's looking like he's about to get a raft of statues to convince him to keep things just the way they are.

PRINCE ALBERT IN A CANISTER

2009-12-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

The Young Victoria begins baiting Oscars in the full view of the public on Friday. To mark the occasion, I consider the film here.

A NOVEMBRIST HISTORY OF CINEMA

2009-11-30T20:35:00.000-08:00

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967)
Hospital (Frederick Wiseman, 1970)
The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)
5 Against the House (Phil Karlson, 1955)
Humpday (Lynn Shelton, 2009)
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)
The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
Murder by Contract (Irving Lerner, 1958)
Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000)
The Sniper (Edward Dmytryk, 1952)
The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)
Collapse (Chris Smith, 2009)
The Messenger (Oren Moverman, 2009)
A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemeckis, 2009)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)
*Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Rebecca Miller, 2009)
2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009)
Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)
*A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)
The Moon Is Blue (Otto Preminger, 1953)
Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1944)
Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)
Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949)
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009)
An Education (Lone Scherfig, 2009)
Small Change (Francois Truffaut, 1976)
Home (Ursula Meier, 2008)
The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009)

*Theatrical revisiting

NOBODY DOESN'T LIKE PIPPA LEE

2009-11-30T20:19:00.000-08:00

A slightly belated (for technical reasons) review of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee here.

CAMEOGATE: THE DAMNING LEAKED E-MAIL

2009-11-29T21:45:00.000-08:00

From: Guy Pearce's agent
To: Kathryn Bigelow, John Hillcoat, various casting directors and producers
Subject: The New Guy
Timestamp: Approximately two and a half years ago

Hey guys, I just spoke with Guy and wanted to follow up with all of you. Guy still says he's really busy with other stuff, but that he hasn't lost interest in acting, he just really wants to be able to "cut to the chase" (his phrase). So he wanted me to sort of start getting the word out - without really officially getting any word out, if you catch my drift - that he's eager to work, he's just only looking to take very small but very significant roles at the very beginning or very end of modestly budgeted prestige pictures, preferably with genre elements or at least some amount of violence.

Okay, cheers.

NO OFFENSE, KID, I'VE JUST HAD IT UP TO HERE WITH YOUR FACE

2009-11-25T22:11:00.000-08:00

The popular kid, Me and Orson Welles's Zac Efron, takes a brutal drubbing, or perhaps eyelash-plucking. I haven't seen this movie. Maybe everyone is right. Seems a little harsh, though.

"[W]ith every close-up of the brutally uncharismatic Efron we see not the outsized emotions of a naive teenager willing to do anything for art and love, but a Tiger Beat cover with a Depression-era hairstyle."
-Michael Joshua Rowin

"But in the spotlight, there’s a blandly eager high-schooler (Efron, unable to penetrate the cute), who’s conscripted into the zesty goings-on. Would someone please drag him offstage already?"
-Joshua Rothkopf

"Efron has yet to learn that smiling pretty is merely a component of acting, not its entirety. He makes for a supremely passive lead whose chemistry with Danes is nonexistent; he seems infinitely more enamored of his image in any reflective surface than in his ostensible love interest."
-Nathan Rabin

"Emphasizing the hollowness of the rookie’s trial-by-Orson story is Efron himself, who's prettier than Claire Danes (playing Welles’ secretary and sometimes screw toy) and who’s long-lashed, smirking, pristine nothingness made me want to hit him in the face with a shovel."
-Michael Atkinson

IDIOT BOX TALES

2009-11-22T00:08:00.000-08:00

The Box was a cable television channel linked to a 1-900 number. Twenty-four hours a day, the station displayed a full-body image of the elderly thespian Frank Langella. You could call in and, for a fee of 99 cents, request a certain piece or part - any individual piece or part - of Langella's body be digitally erased on-screen for approximately three and a half to four minutes.

One time in seventh grade, my friend Marco stole his mom's credit card and came right over to spend the night. He finally got the nerve up to call in to the Box at 1 in the morning and asked for the epidermis; when his request finally came on, I just completely lost it and passed out. He had to use the smelling salts that he also stole from his mom's purse to bring me to again.

DANSE LIKE NOBODY'S WATCHING

2009-11-05T11:49:00.000-08:00

Frederick Wiseman's new film, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, opened at Film Forum yesterday. Here are some words I wrote about it.

WOULD YOU RATHER GET STRUCK BY LIGHTNING OR HAVE A TELEVISION CHUCKED AT YOUR HEAD?

2009-11-04T08:39:00.001-08:00

I review two of this week's new releases, both of them fairly underwhelming, over at the L: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire - is that subtitle legalese? a tribute to the novelist? both? does it matter? probably not? - and Act of God, an unfocused, wannabe-rapturous effort from the director of Manufactured Landscapes, one of the finest documentaries of the decade, if you ask me. I wrote a couple of paragraphs about that film here.

FALL CLASSICS

2009-10-31T20:54:00.000-07:00

Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, 2009)
Sweet Rush (Andrzej Wajda, 2009)
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, 2009)
Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009)
Surrogates (Jonathan Mostow, 2009)
A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)
Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, 2009)
Bronson (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2008)
*Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)
The Night of Counting the Years (Chadi Abdel Salam, 1969)
Passion (Gyorgy Feher, 1998)
White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)
Boomerang! (Elia Kazan, 1947)
Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956)
Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)
The Maid (Sebastian Silva, 2009)
American Torso (Gabor Body, 1975)
Shadowboxer (Lee Daniels, 2005)
Mellodrama (Dianna Dilworth, 2009)
Searching for Elliott Smith (Gil Reyes, 2009)
Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994)
It Happened in Hollywood (Harry Lachman, 1937)
Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961)
The Crimson Kimono (Samuel Fuller, 1959)
Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949)
Act of God (Jennifer Baichwal, 2009)
Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952)
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (Frederick Wiseman, 2009)
High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968)

*Revisiting

HOW WE ARE HUNGARY

2009-10-23T21:09:00.000-07:00

I watched an interesting movie called American Torso.

GOING POSTAL, GLACIALLY

2009-10-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

A short post on Gyorgy Feher's Passion, playing today at MoMA. A very good film. If you are kind enough to click, please pretend that that "stylistic" in the second paragraph is not there.

MONSTER'S BAWL

2009-10-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

Where my consideration of Where the Wild Things Are is.