An Education is a fine, engrossing character study set in a particular time and place, and studded with fine performances. The only thing keeping it from absolute excellence is a conventional structure that ultimately lets a little air out of the film’s tires.

The setting is Twickenham, England, a suburb of London. The time is 1961. The protagonist is Jenny, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, played by Carey Mulligan. She is smart and has an ambition to be accepted to Oxford, or rather that is the ambition of her father, a bumptious but meek man (Alfred Molina) who is both a tightwad and a dullard. Her mother, Cara Seymour, has drifted into a life of obsequiousness to him, though flashes of personality indicate that Mulligan is her mother’s daughter.

Enter David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), a rakish older man who gives Mulligan a lift in his sports car in a driving rainstorm. He is witty and dashing, and knows how to have fun, which earns Mulligan’s affection immediately, as she wants to shake off the dust off her provincial town and listen to French records, read books, and be a full-blown Bohemian. Sarsgaard wants to show her things, and together with his friends, Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike, they paint the town red, going to swanky restaurants and classical music concerts.

Sarsgaard is the kind of guy who can want something from someone and manage to spin it so he can make it seem like the thing he wants is the other person’s idea (he does with Molina when he wants to take Mulligan on a weekend trip to Oxford, dropping the name of C.S. Lewis while doing it). Of course this means he’s a man of slippery ethics, as Mulligan finds out while witnessing what kind of business he and Cooper are in. But she’s too dazzled by him to let it bother her, despite the protestations of a sincere English teacher (Olivia Williams) and an officious headmistress (Emma Thompson).

After all, her parents don’t object. In 1961 a 34-year-old man could court a teenager without too many eyebrows being raised, and Mulligan realizes that her father thinks her being provided for in a marriage to a man of means equals an Oxford education. Therefore when she discovers a secret about Sarsgaard her entire world crumbles.

The film is based on a memoir and written by novelist Nick Hornby, and the screenplay crackles with clever dialogue. The direction, by Lone Scherfig, is unobtrusive–this is not the work of an auteur. The smartest thing Scherfig does is let her writer and cast dominate, particular the lead. A lot of ink and pixels have been expended on how this is a star-making turn for her, and I’m not disagreeing, as its a performance of incredible poise and depth. Her facial expressions at certain points in the film will linger with me a long time, and I feel, after just under two hours in her company, that I know the character she creates well.

The supporting cast is just as strong. Sarsgaard has played these sorts of shifty types before–he’s an actor that specializes in ambiguity–but it’s strong work (his best performance remains the one he gave in Shattered Glass as a man with impeccable integrity). Molina, touted as a surefire Oscar nominee, is good, but the part is the flimsiest in the film. He’s a man who’s afraid of life–he has to be dragged to a fancy restaurant because he’s worried he won’t know how to order a starter–and he’s funny, but there’s something phony about the character. He gets a speech at the end that’s supposed to tell us all about him, but instead it only makes him more obscure. Williams, who previously played a different kind of sympathetic teacher in Rushmore, is quietly effective as a woman whom Mulligan initially wants to be nothing like, but later finds she has a lot to learn from.

It’s the film’s final moments that knocked it down a peg for me. I’ve seen too many films that climax with a character receiving a letter from the college they hope to attend to see it pop up in a film like this one, and then a voiceover narration by Mulligan closes the film. I’m not against voiceover narration, but it hadn’t been heard at all up until the final minute of the film, so it was awfully jarring to hear it, especially since the dialogue was particularly trite.

That quibbling aside, this film has a wonderful look and great performances, and is one of the better films of the year.

With the release of A Christmas Carol, it would appear that the holiday movie season is officially upon us. I’m not too excited about that movie, but there are a few other interesting movies out this week.

Bliss
Director: Abdullah Oguz
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Turkish film about a young woman who escapes an honor killing by fleeing her small village.
Metacritic: 76

The Box (trailer)
Director: Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Previously reviewed on this site by Nick, who concludes that it’s “a step in the right direction” for Kelly after Southland Tales. That sounds good to me … I didn’t hate Southland Tales as much as everyone else.
Metacritic: 45

A Christmas Carol (trailer)
Director: Robert Zemeckis (Contact, Cast Away, The Polar Express, Beowulf)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Zemeckis used to be a favorite of mine, but I confess that I don’t understand the appeal of his motion-capture movies. This one looks pretty bad, both in the sense that it doesn’t look very good, and in the sense that it actually looks bad. Maybe the movie looks better, but so far it doesn’t seem like the motion-capture stuff is advancing at all.
Metacritic: 54

The Fourth Kind (trailer)
Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Personal Interest Factor: 1
The fifth kind: anal probes. The sixth kind: nattering on about your abduction to a disbelieving, state-appointed psychiatrist. The seventh kind: being brainwashed by aliens into seeing stupid horror movies.
Metacritic: 34

The Horse Boy (trailer)
Director: Michel O. Scott
Personal Interest Factor: 3
Documentary about parents who take their autistic child to the outer reaches of Mongolia in order to treat him.
Metacritic: 63

The Men Who Stare at Goats (trailer)
Director: Grant Heslov
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Reviews haven’t been the greatest, but it looks like fun to me. Director Heslov co-wrote Good Night, and Good Luck with Clooney.
Metacritic: 56

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (trailer)
Director: Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Tough call on this one. A lot of good reviews, dating back to Sundance. But I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t look like two hours of pure misery.
Metacritic: 76

(Untitled) (trailer)
Director: Jonathan Parker (Bartleby, The Californians)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Comedy starring Adam Goldberg, set in New York’s art world. Haven’t really heard anything about it.
Metacritic: 59

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it’s not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time.” – Mohandas Gandhi

Hillsong United started out as a band playing music for their local church (Hillsong) in the youth ministry (also called United) in the late 1990s.  As their talents matured and the songs caught on they made a commitment to release an album every year “as long as God keeps bringing us songs.” Their popularity continued to extend beyond their home in Sydney, Australia and reached the far corners of the Earth. In 2005 they embarked on a 2-1/2-year world tour (not contiguously) that took them to places they had only heard of and opened their eyes to things they had only read about. They decided to document their journeys and this movie (as well as last year’s double-album and the continuing movement at www.i-heart.org) is the result. I’m almost positive they set out to make a concert DVD & CD project but along the way it turns out everyone was more touched and changed than they originally thought possible.

The purpose of the film is summed up fairly well in the  final trailer by United frontman (if you can call him that) Joel Houston when he realizes that the streets the band travels down to get to the concert venues are likely to be unchanged by what happens inside the venue itself. “Maybe we’re missing the point,” he laments.

I knew I was in for something different than a feel-good “Christian” movie when the title opened with a reading of Amos 5:21-24 where God basically says he doesn’t want our religious meetings or fancy projects or schemes. He wants justice and fairness. This is something the Western church has generally been lacking in for a long time. The film says we know it, but are we doing anything about it.

From the title and for the next hour the movie takes us basically around the world with the band and seeing the plight of young and old everywhere. There is a focus on consumerism, slavery, image-consciousness, materialism, AIDS, the downtrodden, poor, homeless, hopeless, etc… Throughout it all I found myself feeling concerned, but like I had heard it all before. The band recognizes this as well as they admit to knowing it’s going on, but always changing the channel or walking/driving past and going on to the next thing.

Young people are interviewed all around the world and a few are picked out to show their self-centeredness and unaware of the world outside their own bubble. I thought to myself, aren’t most teenagers that way? I don’t blame them – they’re just finding out who they are. Some want to be schoolteachers, others want to be actors and one guy said what we’d all like to do - make a lot of money without having a lot of responsibilities. Sign me up!

Each country or struggle was its own vignette that sometimes felt separated from the other parts of the film. After about 45 minutes I was wondering what was going on. They did not delve deep into any one struggle and just gave us a few glimpses into things like: refugees displaced by war or natural disasters, the child slave/sex trade, racism, genocide and the poor all over the world. I was feeling frustrated because it was a high level view of so many issues plaguing our world at home and abroad but they kept shuffling on to the next place or next horror.

At about the 1 hour mark the background music starts building and the voiceovers and images get more frenetic. Everyone is feeling helpless at seeing and experiencing all of these injustices and wonders what to do. It was then that I finally got what they were trying to do. The band can only relate their experiences and for them they got off a plane, got on a bus or in a van, drove to a venue, setup & soundchecked, played, packed it all back up and got on another plane. There was maybe a few hours to spend with a local church or ministry or people and see what was happening and then they were off to the next thing. That is the experience I was feeling just watching it unfold: “You’ve only spent 5 minutes on this thing or 2 minutes on that and then rushed off to the next issue. What are we supposed to do with so little time?” And that is exactly how they felt.

After the crescendo the movie took a different tone and started speaking (indirectly) to the church – to Christians. Though the Gandhi quote above was not used that sentiment was felt throughout the latter half. The movie is bookended and sprinkled throughout with excerpts from Robert Kennedy’s historic speech in South Africa 1966 which concluded by saying that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own (which he quoted from his brother). If I could sum up the 2nd half of the film it would be those final words.

The focus was certainly on youth and young people but it was really for everyone. The message was to stop just “doing” church and actually start living what you say you believe. People like Mother Theresa should be the rule and not the exception. We know that and say that , but do we believe it? And if we do then it’s time to start acting on it rather than keeping it inside. I know that but I always allow something else to get in the way. There was a pastor in India who told of his passion being so great and crying out to God to call him wherever He wanted him to go. The man was just waiting for “the call.” After some time (I can’t remember whether it was days or weeks or months) he says he finally realized he was in the middle of extreme poverty and injustice and it was like God said to him, “Are you still waiting for the call?” He woke up and that is what the church needs to do.

Someone in the movie said Christians are all too often known for what we are against. We have made big things out of small things (poilitical issues) and small things out of big (social justice). One of the pastors said the message of Jesus is perfect (i.e. – love your neighbor as yourself) and therefore the only thing that can screw it up is people – is Christians. And he is totally right. None of these things are new revelations, but there has to come a point where you say “no more” as Martin Smith does in this video below:

So what do we do? What do I do? I saw the movie with a friend of mine and we both agreed that the injustice is staggering and overwhelming. What can I do? Is giving $5 to someone on the street going to change anything? And is that really costing me anything or am I doing it to make myself feel better?

What I took away from it just to get more serious and be more intentional about seeing the needs locally. I drive everywhere and rush from place to place, thing to thing, event to event. I’m always concerned about what’s next and never realizing where I’m at. Another quote from movie was, “People always say ‘We are the future.’ And that’s true. But we’re also the present.” If I could learn to live now in this moment, I think I would have wider eyes to see what is happening around me rather than reading about it online or seeing it on the evening news.

I don’t know if this film is going to change anyone or if it’s going to be a flash-in-the-pan. My goal is to not let it be a two-hour experience one Wednesday night back in November of 2009…somewhere in the distant past. I’ve got to start with myself and if others can too then maybe the church can start becoming what Jesus prayed it would be 2000 years ago – that they will know we are Christians by our love.  

Nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain.

Crap, it’s Friday. I almost forgot to do Openings! Perhaps it’s because there’s really nothing going out this week that seems at all worthwhile. Nonetheless, my apologies for being a few hours late.

Bronson (trailer)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher, Pusher II, Pusher 3)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Prison story that won some hype at Sundance, especially for the performance of Tom Hardy as over-the-top psycho “Charles Bronson” (there’s a long true story here if you want to look it up). Anyway, since I’m blessed with an abundance of time, I’ll probably check this out sometime next week out of boredom as much as anything else.
Metacritic: 69

Labor Day (trailer)
Director: Glenn Silber
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Documentary of the 2008 election filtered through the eyes of SEIU – partly financed by SEIU.
Metacritic: 18

This Is It (trailer)
Director: Kenny Ortega (Newsies, Hocus Pocus, High School Musical 3: Senior Year)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
For more than a decade, I’ve made an effort to see films that get Ebert’s 4-star rating, but this is the second time in the last month that I’m going to have to take a flat-out pass (the other was We Live in Public. Perhaps not coincidentally, both films are documentaries of a sort, and even more to the point, both trade in a sort of celebrity-worship culture that I have no interest in or use for. Besides which, random Michael Jackson rehearsal footage constitutes a movie these days?
Metacritic: 67

21 and a Wake-Up
Director: Chris McIntyre
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Never heard of this before, but both Chicago critics hated it. Based on the director’s stay in an Army hospital during the Vietnam era.
Metacritic: not listed

The Yes Men Fix the World
Director: The Yes Men
Personal Interest Factor: 5
The Yes Men are what you might call industrial pranksters; they do stuff like pose as corporate representatives for companies that they don’t represent to take responsibility for disasters that the real companies certainly do not take responsibility for. That’s all well and good – I have no real sympathy for corporate interests in general – but, well, eh.
Metacritic:

Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Released by IFC Films.

(Note: This review discusses specific events late in the film, so SPOILER ALERT. Seriously, I’m giving away the whole game here. Be aware that you may find the discussion overly graphic and/or repulsive.)

Danish director Lars von Trier has long had a reputation for misogyny, and there’s little question that he’s prone to putting his actresses through the proverbial wringer. Of his past work, I’ve seen Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville, and all three featured stories that put their heroines through wave after wave of abuse and humiliation. Dogville eventually allowed Nicole Kidman’s character to turn the tables on her tormentors, but by and large, all three films portrayed these characters as innocents under assail. That may be a form of casual misogyny itself – seeing women as helpless, innocent, and frail – but I thought the targets of those films were the male characters and their unrelenting weakness and cruelty.

While that may also be the case – to an extent, anyway – in Antichrist, there’s no denying that it’s a different beast altogether. The film is about a couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (given no names, and referenced in the credits only as “He” and “She”), who are grieving over the loss of their infant son. He is a therapist, and takes it upon himself to treat her extreme grief. Eventually, as part of her treatment, he moves them to their isolated cabin in the woods, which they call “Eden.”

At this point, it’s clear that von Trier has more on his plate than simply the interactions between a grieving couple in a broken marriage, and indeed the film becomes a merciless allegory of grief, pain and despair. von Trier introduces different religious and historical elements into the story in such a flurry that it’s hard to keep up with them – Satan, the burial and resurrection of Christ, witch trials. Finally, the film climaxes in an eruption of sadomasochism so brutal and hopeless as to suggest that the world is a fundamentally evil place.

It’s an understatement to say that this is an ambitious film, but I found myself wondering if von Trier really has the discipline as a storyteller to pull it off. If the film were less of a frenzy, it may have been overwhelming, but I think von Trier goes so far over the top as to undermine himself. For example, it’s one thing for a man to have his genitals crushed by a fireplace log. When you proceed to have a woman jerk him off, however, and then have him ejaculate blood while he’s passed out … how is one supposed to take that kind of imagery seriously?

I’ve written before about my innate self-defense mechanism that kicks in when a movie becomes difficult to watch. Simply put, when I’m pushed too far, that fourth wall is broken, and I find myself consciously thinking about how everything I’m seeing is fake. One example that I’ve used in the past is during 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, when we’re given a lingering shot of the fetus on the bathroom floor. Up until that point, I had been absorbed in the film, but that shot took me out of it. As it lingered, I found myself thinking that it obviously wasn’t real, and as the shot continued it started to look like the fake it was. It was a mostly masterful film, but that shot was a miscalculation.

Instead of a single shot, I think the entire last act of Antichrist is a similar miscalcution. Besides the bloody ejaculation, we’re treated to seeing Charlotte Gainsbourg drilling a hole in Dafoe’s leg and fastening a grindstone to it. We’re shown a graphic (but again, obviously fake) shot of her cutting off her own clit with a pair of scissors. He’s buried alive before being dug up again. And he strangles her in a long, drawn-out sequence. Perhaps I’m simply unwilling to face the horrors in the world, that I find myself unable to take these images seriously. Or perhaps I simply understand that I don’t have to just because I’m at the whim of some huckster with a movie camera.

I wish I could report that the film is an admirable misfire. I generally do admire Lars von Trier and his willingness as a provocateur. Some of the less painful imagery is astonishing; in particular, von Trier and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, along with their special effects artists, have created an effect in some shots I haven’t seen before, where landscapes appear to move like animated paintings. And the performances by Dafoe and Gainsbourg are certainly worthy of respect, even if I couldn’t help but think “Green Goblin!” a half-dozen times as Dafoe glowers into the general vicinity of the camera (probably my fault more than his or von Trier’s). I feel it’s worth seeing if you’re an admirer of the director or otherwise up to the most challenging semi-mainstream film likely to appear for some time.

But I genuinely feel that the movie is a failure of communication. Whatever von Trier’s intentions, they’re lost in a mix of heavy-handed symbolism, impenetrable allegory, and corrosive imagery.

Part seven of our discussion on the films of the 00’s, this time focusing on 2006.

1) Best of 2006?
2) Worst of 2006?
3) Most underrated?
4) Most underseen?
5) Most overrated?
6) Best performance(s) of the year?
7) Best single scene/sequence of the year?
8) One thing you could change about any single film in 2006 (Example: different cast, different director, different style, different release date, different studio).
9) Most memorable (good or bad) theatergoing experience of the year?
10) Most influential film/performance/style/director?

Obviously feel free to answer only the questions you’re interested in or to write/respond to something else entirely.

2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005

And here it is:

A completely pointless, toothless, plotless, wholly non-scary, poorly-written, acted and directed genre exercise that has gotten drunk off its very own brand of ‘request me!’ Kool-Aid.

Paranormal Activity Directed by Oren Peli

Please ignore the poster. It is not one of the scariest films of all time. It does not leave an imprint on your psyche. I would have thought audiences would have learned, after Blair Witch Project, that just because you say it, doesn’t make people believe it. (I am still convinced, all these years later, that so many people went to Blair Witch because they couldn’t figure out why they didn’t see what so much of the ‘hype’ told them they should).

Perhaps I’m being too hard on the movie. But I expected better than a b-level exercise in an already-tired “Let me follow you with a camera, wait, you’re upset, wait things are happening, wait, now you’re angry, wait, this is going to work, wait, this is worse than it seems, wait, this is what happened before, wait, we’re all…” but then, I wouldn’t want to spoil the completely expected and really pretty standard ending you’ve seen in a million other movies of this type, in one similar derivation or another.

The movie opens with loving couple Katie and Micah moving into a nice new home that, surprise! is visited by a presence that really doesn’t like the nice, smiling young lady.

And that’s about it, folks. The hauntings get increasingly severe, there are moments and issues the director touches on but that go nowhere, and I mean genuinely creepy instances occur but then are thrown to the movie ether to focus on a really trite demonic specter. If the director had placed his faith in the story he was building and had he not focused so much on this one pretty intense ‘Macguffin’, he really may have had something here. Never has someone getting up and turning and just…standing…been so effectively creepy.

As it is, he has twenty minutes of a smiling, loving couple and something like sixty minutes of running with a camera, a shaking chandelier, a weird Ouija sequence that is almost laugh-out-loud ridiculous, and baby powder footsteps walking across the floor. (I just chuckled a bit thinking today’s kids would even sit through the rest of the movie after the Ouija sequence).

The poster says ‘Don’t see it alone’. Do yourself a favor. Only see it alone. Because whether you bring a date, a relative, or an enemy, it’s going to still be a pretty bad movie.

Directed by Spike Jonze.

Where the Wild Things Are is a film for all ages, but not in the same way as something like Toy Story.  It’s an emotional film that more adults may identify with than kids.

Max (Max Records) is a young boy who runs away after having a fight with his mother (Catherine Keener).  Through his imagination, he ends up on an island and meets the giant creatures known as the wild things.  They decide to make him king because he convinces them he has special powers and can make everything perfect.  After a while, it becomes apparent that Max doesn’t have special powers and the wild things return to their unhappy state.  Max tries to make amends and “travels” back home.

There are no adults in Max’s imagination.  The wild things act how Max would act, which is the true genius of the film.  Everyone wants to be true friends and do everything together.  They run around.  They destroy things.  They build a fortress.  And they have dirt clod fights.  The strained relationship between Carol (James Gandolfini) and KW (Lauren Ambrose) is possibly reflective of Max’s parents divorce, but in a much less mature way.  I also suspect “downer” wild thing Judith (Catherine O’Hara) in some way represents Max’s older sister.

I was thrilled to see the Jim Henson Creature Shop do the costumes.  I’ve always been a fan of Jim Henson, and think the creatures really capture the spirit of his work.  It’s too bad the heads were CGI, but logistically it seems there was nothing else that could be done.

Speaking of Henson, in many ways  Where the Wild Things Are is similar to Labyrinth.  There is a recurring theme of friendship and betrayal.  And instead of songs by David Bowie, we get songs by Karen O (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs).  But there is no clear cut divide between good and evil in WTWTA.  Is it possible that Max is both the protagonist and the antagonist?

Spike Jonze does a great job capturing the emotions and imagination of a child (and Max Records is great as Max).  In some ways it brings me back to my own childhood.  My mother used to type up my stories as I told them to her.  I once had a huge meltdown after someone called me names.  And I ran out of the house and went for a long walk before coming back.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought of their childhood while watching this movie.  I’m thinking that Where the Wild Things Are will become one of my favorites to be added to classics like Princess Bride and Labyrinth that I will enjoy watching for years to come.

Amelia (trailer)
Director: Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair, The Namesake)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Sounds like this one is a pretty huge misfire. Let’s be honest, though, there was never any reason to think that “Hey, let’s make a movie about Ameria Earhart’s love life!” would be a winner, either creatively or in terms of box office.
Metacritic: 41

Antichrist (trailer)
Director: Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville,Manderlay)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Been steeling myself for this one since the disastrous screenings in Cannes. Thing is, von Trier’s films are always hard to watch in some sense or the other, and he always is tough on his female leads. And a lot of critics hated Dogville, also, but I thought that one was interesting (missed Manderlay, sadly). I guess what I’m saying is that I suspect the whole controversy is overblown, but I’ll see for myself.
Metacritic: 52

Astro Boy (trailer)
Director: David Bowers (Flushed Away [co-director])
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Looks harmless enough but still not anything I really feel the need to see.
Metacritic: 55

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (trailer)
Director: Paul Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy, In Good Company,The Golden Compass)
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Blah, blah, blah, vampires, blah, blah, blah.
Metacritic: 44

An Education (trailer)
Director: Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Strong reviews since it premiered earlier in the year at Cannes, and even the trailer is charming. Looking forward to it.
Metacritic: 84

Léon Morin, Priest
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville (Les enfants terribles, Bob le flambeur, Les doulos,Army of Shadows)
Personal Interest Factor: 10
Melville is one of my favorite directors, based on the four of his films that I’ve listed (and especially Army of Shadows), and every chance to see another one is exciting to me. The Gene Siskel Film Center is doing a weeklong run of this film as the centerpiece to their mini-retrospective of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s career, which will also include, among a few others, Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid and Godard’s Pierrot le fou.
Metacritic: not listed

Saw VI (trailer)
Director: Kevin Greutert
Personal Interest Factor: 1
I’ll let the Personal Interest Factor speak for itself, I guess.
Metacritic: no score yet

Walt & El Grupo (trailer)
Director: Theodore Thomas
Personal Interest Factor: 3
I’ve never heard of this; apparently it’s a documentary about Walt Disney and his crew of animators taking a trip to South America on a government-sponsored goodwill mission in the 1930s. I’ll leave any further comments to Joe, our resident Disneyologist.
Metacritic: 58

Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto. Reissued by Janus Films.

(Note: Specific plot points discussed, so beware of spoilers.)

Rashomon was Kurosawa’s first big international hit, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and being recognized with an Honorary Academy Award in the US (Oscars for foreign films were not awarded at the time). It made a star of Toshiro Mifune, the film’s leading actor. And Kurosawa, of course, went on to create any number of classic films, eventually passing away in 1998 with his status as a master of cinema secure.

The film’s great contribution to cinema is its structure of dueling flashbacks. After a wealthy man is found slain in the woods, a notorious bandit Tajomaru (played by Mifune) is arrested, and he tells the court that he lured the dead man into the woods to capture him and rape his wife. A duel between the two men follows, and Tajomaru tells of his respect for his adversary and his honorable death. When the wife – and then the dead man, summoned by a medium – give their stories, however, their testimony hardly matches Tajomaru’s, and in all we see four distinct, incompatible versions of the events.

By all accounts, Rashomon introduced the concept of unreliable flashbacks to a wide audience, and the film’s influences can still be seen today. Recently, films like Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects and Joe Wright’s Atonement have used the device to pull the rug out from under their viewers, but Kurosawa’s intentions are more complex. He questions not just the reliability of eyewitness testimony but the nature of memory and even objective truth itself.

After all, the natural question to ask is which of the film’s characters we can believe? The answer seems to be that all of them have motives to hide the truth not just from the court but from themselves. The plain suggestion made by the film is that not only are these characters unreliable, but anyone’s interpretation of what they see and remember is based on their own personal motives and biases. Perhaps none of us are capable of relaying the objective truth of what we see, and if we can’t, does it even exist?

The movie also finds Kurosawa subtly mocking the well-known – and perhaps stereotypical – preoccupation with personal honor in Japanese society. Not only does each character give different testimony, but Tajomaru, the dead man, and his wife are all so driven to preserve their sense of honor that they each admit to being the killer rather than dishonoring themselves. Tajomaru has no difficulty admitting to being a rapist and a bandit, but he assures the court that he had nothing but respect for the man’s swordplay and gave the man an honorable death. The wife is so overcome by shame that she inadvertantly slays her husband, apparently in a trance. And the deceased himself claims to have committed suicide at the shame of being overcome by a bandit and failing to protect his wife. In a society that was still reeling from their destruction during World War II, this must have seemed like a hollow joke, and indeed the film – and Kurosawa himself – was not popular with Japanese moviegoers at the time.

To be completely honest, I don’t think Rashomon holds up as well as many other Japanese classics. The framing device, featuring three men holed up during a storm in a ruined castle, doesn’t really cohere with the rest of the film, and seems to contain as much heavy-handed symbolic importance as narrative relevance. At times, the pacing lags. And the ending veers dangerously close to outright mawkishness. Personally, among Kurosawa’s 1950s work, I much prefer Throne of Blood or Ikiru.

Yet it’s undeniably an important film. I was lucky enough to see a newly restored 35mm print that’s playing here in Chicago, and it looks wonderful. Hopefully, this restoration makes its way to DVD (and Blu-ray!). Whatever its minor flaws, it’s certainly essential viewing for anyone interested in Japanese film and foreign film in general.

Written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen. Released by Focus Features.

The middle of the decade found the Coens in something of a rut. Intolerable Cruelty was poorly received, although I found it amusing, and The Ladykillers is indisputably the worst film of their career. After taking a few years off, though, they returned with a couple of fine films, and A Serious Man finds them still on a roll with one of the best films of their career.

The film is about Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish professor from suburban Minneapolis whose life is crumbling around him. His wife announces that she’s fallen in love with a neighbor and wants a divorce, he’s having problems at work, and his aimless and socially inept brother won’t move out of his house. He’s fearful of his Gentile neighbors, and he’s mortgaged to the hilt so money is tight. And to top it all off, his TV reception is fuzzy.

Larry’s response to his troubles is to seek wisdom from the rabbis, and the intersection of his misery and religion form the heart of the film. He wonders why he is earmarked for such suffering when he’s been trying so hard to be a good, serious man, while the rabbis do their cheerful best to remind him that just maybe he isn’t meant to know. “Accept the mystery,” one character tells him, and even though the line comes in a different context, it serves as the most straightforward statement of the film’s guiding ethos.

The Coens have always had an arch sense of humor, and that’s perhaps more true than ever with this film. In some ways, Larry bears some resemblance to Jerry Lundegaard, William H. Macy’s character from Fargo, in that they both always seem about to explode as their bad luck continues to accumulate. Larry is a much more sympathetic and complex character, of course, but as with Jerry, the Coens seem to take some perverse pleasure in watching him squirm. If there’s one constant in their career, it’s the humor to be found in watching the best laid plans go awry. More so than their other films, however, the best laid plans this time around have a more existential bent. Who is Larry, if he is not who he thought he was?

In terms of casting, the Coens take a much different approach than they have lately, with no big-name actors in the cast and only one, Richard Kind as Larry’s misfit brother, that I even recognized (aside from a cameo by Fyvush Finkel, although I didn’t exactly “recognize” him). Stuhlbarg is excellent, balancing a sympathetic portrayal of his character with the movie’s not-so-vague sense that Larry is missing the forest for the trees. Another standout is Fred Melamed as the worst kind of asshole – the kind that is easily able to convince the world that he’s a deeply decent fellow, even while looking someone in the eye and stabbing them in the chest.

With No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, and now A Serious Man, the Coens have made a trilogy of sorts that reflects an uneasiness that has been central to the American experience during the Aughts.  No Country warned of the consequences of unchecked arrogance, and Burn disguised seething rage against American intelligence services behind a dopey violent farce. Now comes A Serious Man, which openly asks how “serious” American middle-class priorities can really be considered to be. If the film’s ominous ending gives any clue to the answer, it’s “not so much.”

I hope Nick doesn’t mind me borrowing his dormant topic…

I attended a concert last week where they showcased the increasingly popular “I Am T-Pain” iPhone application during one of their in-between moments. I caught it on video. The audio isn’t too great, but if you turn it up I think you can get the gist of what’s happening.

A friend of mine had mentioned this application to me last month, but I didn’t realize how much it had taken off. Auto-tuning (a specific sort of pitch correction you can read about here) came to prominence through Cher’s 1998 hit Believe:

Even though it’s been around a long time I’m now beginning to notice it everywhere. Yesterday I found “auto-tuning the news” which left me in stitches. Just the thought of politicians and heads of state singing back and forth was enough to make me chuckle, but their execution here is mostly flawless. There are 9 so far, but I’m only putting up the first 2.

#1

#2

Not sure if someone changed something behind the scenes or if WordPress rolled this out across the board: but GE is now mobile browser friendly. Screenshot is from an iPhone. Pretty cool.

Whip It is the perfect embodiment of a directorial debut for Drew Barrymore. She is, for all her charm, not a particularly good actress. She doesn’t have a big range, is not an elocutionist of any distinction, and has never shown a great depth–she won’t be performing Chekhov any time soon. But her innate sunniness, along with a little-engine-that-could biography, have made her an appealing star. Whip It operates in the same manner. The film is at times a technical mess, and is littered with cliches, but earns my recommendation based on an undeniable attitude and a winning performance by Ellen Page. It exists in a cinematic world that doesn’t exist in real life, but very may well in Barrymore’s imagination.

The film is set in the world of roller derby. The last movie I saw in this milieu was Kansas City Bomber, starring Raquel Welch, when I was twelve (I saw it in a double feature with Bless the Beasts and the Children). That may be the last studio film about a sport that is pretty much an anachronism now. It was popular in a pre-cable TV era, sort of a distaff version of pro wrestling, and was a forum for attractive but butch women to knock each other around for the blood lust of the audience. Whip It therefore has a unique challenge–it’s about a sport that no one really remembers. I suspect more people know quidditch than they do roller derby, and the film has to take a few minutes to explain the rules.

Page plays Bliss, a high school girl in a nowhere town in Texas. Her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) pushes her into beauty pageants, where the mother excelled. But Page has eyes for the Bohemian culture of nearby Austin, and likes to wear ironic t-shirts and boots bought in a head shop. It’s in that shop that she serendipitously grabs a flier for roller derby, and on a lark she and her friend (Alia Shawkat) attend. I have no idea is there is really a roller derby culture in Austin or anyplace else, but this is where the film displays the most verve and creativity. The film is written by Shauna Cross, based on her novel, and she is either a creator of new worlds or a keen observer of a sub-culture. Lower middle-class women, many with tattoos and menial jobs, spend their limited leisure time engaging in a rough and tumble sport, in themed teams (the Hurl Scouts wear faux Girl Scout uniforms, the Holy Rollers in Catholic school-girl outfits) and vivid pseudonyms, like Smashley Simpson, Eva Destruction, and Bloody Holly. On what seems to be a strictly amateur basis, they perform in a warehouse for a small audience and then hawk merchandise after it’s over.

Page, captivated by the world, decides to lie to her parents and try out, even though she’s too young and has to regain her skating form by using Barbie skates. But she’s fleet, makes the team, and adopts the moniker of Babe Ruthless. She bonds with her teammates, none more so than the motherly Kristin Wiig as Maggie Mayhem, and falls for a gangly indie-rock boyfriend (while they were wooing each other a teenage girl behind me sighed rapturously, “I like this guy!”)

 The cliches then start coming, fast and furious. They are of two types–the sports-movie cliches, where the once bad team finds their mojo and challenges for the championship, and the child-defies-parents-but-then-parents-come-around cliches. However even when I wanted to groan at them I was enchanted by the whole thing, and much of the credit has to go to Barrymore. She may not know how to transition between scenes, but all that time on movie sets has taught her how to earn her characters devotion. And, of course, she is good to her actors and lets them shine. Page plays a very different character than Juno. She’s not especially bright or glib, just a girl who is trying to find an identity and escape her mother’s shadow, and the camera loves her. If Bliss had decided to take up quilting there may have been a move in that.

Harden also is successful, walking a difficult line of being an overbearing mother without being a stereotype. Daniel Stern is the father, a good-ol’-boy who’d rather watch football than deal with a family crisis. He is also successful in taking a cliche–the parent who allows his child to spread their wings–and creating something interesting. I find it interesting that Wiig, such a gifted sketch comedian, plays a character who is not funny, but she is very good. Juliette Lewis is Iron Maven, the villainous captain of the rival Holy Rollers, is effective, as is Andrew Wilson as the Hurl Scouts coach, and Jimmy Fallon as the louche ring announcer.

Another character in the film is the city of Austin which, as it did in films like Slacker and Death Proof, comes across as a easy-going Bohemian enclave in a state otherwise as red as a beefsteak tomato. To the kids in Page’s town, it is something like the Emerald City, a place to aspire to, peopled by hipsters who indulge in cool pursuits and aren’t bogged down in the petty concerns of middle-class suburbia. The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, one of the most celebrated independent movie theaters in the country, makes a cameo. This film makes me want to go there.

Some may not be able to get past the obvious story points. Almost every plot turn of the script is obvious, there are no surprises. Yet in this instance familiarity brings comfort, and I left Whip It charmed and entertained.

There are few things more exciting to me than having the privilege of watching a classic silent film in 35mm with live accompaniment.  I have seen The Phantom of the Opera (1925)  (full orchestra), The General (organ) and Battleship Potemkin (piano).  I can now add Nosferatu to the list.

The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago is playing Nosferatu as part of their “Art of the Remake” series.  Next week they will show Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu.  I’ve seen both films on DVD, but I love having the opportunity to see them in 35mm.

Nosferatu was directed by F.W. Murnau and the screenplay “freely adapted” from Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Henrik Galeen.  Max Schreck infamously plays the vampire Count Orlok.  His long dangling fingers and rat-like teeth were enough to make me uncomfortable that my neck was exposed.  It isn’t the greatest film story-wise, but the use of shadow makes it iconic.  The most unforgettable scene takes place when the shadow of the vampire reaches out and clutches the heart of Ellen, the film’s heroine.

This was a 1996 restoration print on loan from a private collector in Milwaukee, which I thought was interesting.  The film quailty was stunning.  It’s just a shame the projectionist couldn’t keep it in frame the entire time.

The piano accompaniment was pretty good for the most part.  It must have taken a little while for the pianist to really get in the spirit of things because the musical phrases seemed fairly detached at the beginning.  Of course I’m a bit of a music snob, so maybe no one else noticed but me.  Things got better after Count Orlok was introduced.

I’d like to thank the private film collector in Milwaukee, the Gene Siskel Film Center, and pianist David Drazin for making this all possible.  This was quite a treat.

Hey everyone, hope things are well.

Black Dynamite (trailer)
Director: Scott Sanders
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Blaxploitation spoof that … well, you know what? I haven’t seen much blaxploitation in my day: the original Shaft, some of Foxy Brown on TV, and that’s probably about it. But I’ve always gotten the vague sense that most of them spoof themselves, like exploitation movies of any other genre. They’re not meant to be taken seriously. Spoofing them is either stupid or a pointless nostalgia trip or both.
Metacritic: 70

The Damned United (trailer)
Director: Tom Hooper
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Not sure why I don’t care more about this, other than I feel like these annual good-natured British imports are all vaguely the same movies, imported to allow affluent suburbanites to watch formulaic comedy-dramas while feeling like they’re watching art movies. See also the upcoming Pirate Radio. Strong reviews, though, so I might check it out anyway in case I’m wrong (happened once).
Metacritic: 80

Law Abiding Citizen (trailer)
Director: F. Gary Gray (Friday, The Negotiator, The Italian Job,Be Cool)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Perhaps it’s somewhat irrational on my part, but I’ve gradually come to think of Gerard Butler as one of my least favorite actors. I haven’t even seen many of the movies he’s been in: The Phantom of the Opera and 300, and that’s about it. But he seems to have a knack for starring in movies that I simply don’t want to see, like a male version of Kate Hudson but without an Almost Famous to redeem himself.
Metacritic: 37

More than a Game (trailer)
Director: Kristopher Belman
Personal Interest Factor: 1
I feel like I’ve seen this trailer so many times that I really don’t want to hear LeBron James’ name ever again. Tough luck for me, I know.
Metacritic: 60

New York, I Love You (trailer)
Director: Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston, Randy Balsmeyer
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I saw Paris, je t’aime, and thought it was an interesting though mostly forgettable anthology. The general idea was to have a different director make a short film about each of Paris’ 18 arrondissements. Now there’s a follow-up about the city of New York, only this time with a less interesting lineup of filmmakers and actors (Brett Ratner?). Apparently another film is planned for Rio, the bastards who stole the Olympics from us. Not that I’m bitter.
Metacritic: 53

Rashomon
Director: Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Ikiru,Ran)
Personal Interest Factor: 10
Hey now. I watched this on DVD a few years ago, but now the good people at Janus have put a new 35mm print out into the world. Obviously an all-time classic and can’t be missed.
Metacritic:

The Stepfather (trailer)
Director: Nelson McCormick (Prom Night)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
My question about these things is why more interesting actors aren’t cast in the villian roles. I mean, what difference could it possibly make for the studio? In this case, we get Dylan Walsh playing the titular step-parent. Who wants to see that? Why not aim high and try to get someone like Michael Keaton? His career has been stuck lately, give him a call! Or maybe William Hurt is willing to goof around for a few bucks. Or if you want to go a little younger, try out Luke Wilson. But Dylan Walsh, seriously? That’s not even trying.
Metacritic: no score yet

We Live in Public
Director: Ondi Timoner (DiG!)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Tedious-looking documentary about that, according to the Metacritic summary, “reveals the effect the web is having on our society.” I’ll tell you what effect the internet is having on our society – every week people all over the world get a list of movies opening in Chicago, a one-stop shop complete with trailer links, Metacritic scores, and pithy commentary. Suck on that, internet pioneers!
Metacritic: 69

Where the Wild Things Are (trailer)
Director: Spike Jones (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation.)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
I think my personal trajectory on this movie has been similar to most people’s: initial skepticism, followed by outright dismissal, followed by being surprised by how great the trailer looked, followed by growing anticipation as the good reviews started to trickle in.
Metacritic: 71

While I’m no expert on the history of the Academy Awards, I’d dare say it would be hard to find a film that was nominated for Best Picture within the last 45 years that’s been as forgotten as 1965’s ‘A Thousand Clowns’ has. Based on a highly-regarded 1962 play, it was well enough received critically to be nominated for 4 Oscars including Best Picture and winning one for Martin Balsam as Best Supporting Actor.

And yet despite its critical success and pedigree it’s so ignored today it hasn’t even been released on DVD. Why is this? Perhaps it’s in part because the original play itself hasn’t endured with recent revivals seeing it being perceived as dated.

But the great irony is that as a film, ATC was probably ahead of its time. It was a sign of some of the themes that would dominate Hollywood movies by the decade’s close.

The story centres around Murray (Jason Robards) who has effectively dropped out of society because of his distaste for the conformity and dishonesty of the ‘rat race’.  He takes care of and shares a good relationship with his eccentric but intelligent 12 year-old abandoned nephew Nick but that is all threatened when Child Welfare representatives threaten to take him to a foster family. Murray is then faced with a dilemma: either get his old job back and sell out on his principles or lose Nick.

As is made clear from the pre-credits sequence, there’s nothing that Murray despises more than having a conventional 9-to-5 steady job , with life becoming dominated by deadening routine and having to compromise ideals and views on others and society to become a ‘success’. For someone who prides himself as an individual, being at the behest of bosses and making compromises to ‘climb the ladder’ is a fate worse than death.

This explains why he undermines welfare agency representatives Sandra (Barbara Harris) and particularly Albert (William Daniels) when they check up on him. Albert represents everything Murray resents; a by-the-numbers man devoid of passion and individuality governed by routine. With the help of Nick he seeks to totally undermine his smooth, superior exterior and regimented processes and turns him to a dishevelled, agitated mess.

The central character of Murray is a fascinating one. On one hand he’s full of roguish charm and wit while on the other he is immature and irresponsible. While one can emphasise with his dissatisfaction with the society he lives in, he doesn’t have anything of substance to replace or challenge it. In his bohemian attitude and perspective one can see shades of the youth/hippie anti-establishment movement that was just around the corner for American society but at this point in time he isn’t part of a growing social trend; he’s an individual fighting vainly against the conventional thinking of how one should live one’s life.

And it’s this attitude that underlines his relationship with Nick. It isn’t a conventional father/son type relationship; indeed of the two Nick often comes across as more mature. It’s more a friendly camaraderie with Murray wanting to see him develop into a genuine individual not afraid to say what he truly thinks, even if it offends others. When Nick does display this ability in the closing scenes of the film, Murray’s reaction is the equivalent of a father seeing his son winning an academic award.

ATC really comes into its own in the final 30 minutes with firstly a marvellously written and acted scene between brothers Murray and Arnold (Martin Balsam). Arnold is the antithesis of Murray and is able to argue convincingly and passionately that he has nothing to be ashamed about for the life he has chosen. Equally compelling is a concluding scene where Leo (Gene Saks), a dismal children’s comedian, arrives to Murray’s place trying to entice him back to his old job as his gag writer. 

There are weaknesses in the film with a major one being the romance between Murray and Sandra. It might have been plausible in the setting of the theatre but in the more realistic setting of film it feels contrived and never convinces for a second. The film also doesn’t really succeed in ‘opening out’ from its theatrical base. While the location footage of New York is great to view, the segments come across as padding, especially rather gooey scenes with Murray and Sandra gallivanting around NY.

But weaknesses are easily outnumbered by the film’s strengths. It’s particularly impressive that the likes of Leo and Albert – who could’ve easily been caricatured villains – are given depth and in their own way are quite sympathetic. All the performances are first-class, especially Barry Gordon as Nick who gives one of the more impressive child acting performances.

Unlike other Best Picture nominees of 1965 such as ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Dr. Zhivago’ it’s unlikely that ATC will ever get a deluxe DVD treatment with deleted scenes and multiple commentary tracks. But at the very least it deserves to be on DVD and it deserves to be seen by a modern audience.

Coco Before Chanel (trailer)
Director: Anne Fontaine (The Girl From Monaco)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Perhaps some Oscar buzz for Audrey Tautou? That would be about the only reason I’d want to see this.
Metacritic: 65

Couples Retreat (trailer)
Director: Peter Billingsley
Personal Interest Factor: 3
Good thing we’re not in the middle of an AGEBOC contest, as I would have really blown this last weekend. $35 million to watch Vince Vaughan do his warmed-over motormouth schtick? Come on.
Metacritic: 24

Free Style
Director: William Dear (Harry and the Hendersons, If Looks Could Kill, Angels in the Outfield,Wild America)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
I don’t even know what this is. Something about soccer and High School Musical. On the other hand … Harry and the Hendersons, that takes me back. I remember going to see that when I was a kid.
Metacritic: 29

Good Hair (trailer)
Director: Jeff Stilson
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I like Chris Rock. He’s never really found a movie project that suits him, though, has he?
Metacritic: 71

In a Lonely Place
Director: Nicholas Ray (Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger than Life,The True Story of Jesse James)
Personal Interest Factor: 10
Saw a double-bill of Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger than Life earlier this year, and while there’s a certain dated aspect to both, it was a lot of fun. This is one of Ray’s earlier features, with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.
Metacritic: not listed

Paranormal Activity (trailer)
Director: Oren Peli
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Played some midnight shows last weekend, and now opened for real this weekend. Lots of hype but I guess I’m not plugged in enough to feel any excitement for it.
Metacritic: 66

A Serious Man (trailer)
Director: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, No Country for Old Men,Burn After Reading)
Personal Interest Factor: 10
I think that I look forward to a new movie from the Coen Brothers more than any other director(s). With that said, I certainly hope to like the film more than I liked the trailer, which is incredibly abrasive.
Metacritic: 79

Trucker (trailer)
Director: James Mottern
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Lots of acclaim for Michele Monaghan’s performance as a, well, truck driver. I always thought that Monaghan was better than the roles she’s been playing, so I’m glad that she’s got something going for her.
Metacritic: 60

The box office failure of Jennifer’s Body was the story upon its release a few weekends ago. I caught it just before it seems to be on its way out of theaters (there were only two shows, one of them at 10:35 in the morning–AMC has a $6.00 A.M. show price that rocks, for those of us who have no family or social lives). It wasn’t great, but I was into it and never bored. Why it failed is a question for those who study marketing, because I have no clue what makes the masses happy.

The focus of the marketing was all about the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, and one of the stars, Megan Fox, and both of them have been caught up in an absurd kind of backlash that I can’t pretend to understand. With Cody it might be that would-be screenwriters, whom I imagine are legion in the L.A. environs, are jealous of an ex-stripper who scored big on her first try, with Juno. That and her dialogue contains an abundance of preciousness and pop-culture effluvia that defies reality. Jennifer’s Body has some of that–a line said by Fox, “Move on, dot org,” will be the equivalent to Juno’s “honest to blog”–but I found most of the writing to be smart and nicely off-balanced the horror.

Yes, this film is a horror picture. It has a comic tone, but there’s no denying this a red-blooded fright flick, and as such it has more than its share of thrills and creeps. Director Karyn Kusama seems to have done her homework and channeled the best horror movies, from the Universal classics to Nightmare on Elm Street, and maybe even she or Cody read some of the books by Richard Laymon, who specialized in combining horror and teen sexuality. Jennifer’s Body is not torture-porn, and may disappoint those who demand buckets of gore, but I found it to be evocative, especially a climax in an abandoned natatorium, which is beautifully shot by M. David Mullen.

The story is about two high school girls, played by Fox and Amanda Seyfried. The latter actress is really the lead, though she’s frumped up in contrast to her more glamorous co-star. “Hell is a teenage girl,” is Seyfried’s first line of dialogue, doubling as tag line, and the spine of the piece is an examination of friendships between teenage girls, particularly when they have drifted into different social circles. Seyfried’s Anita (known as “Needy”) is the bookish, good girl, while Fox’s Jennifer is a queen bee, a cheerleader and non-virgin (she’s not even a “backdoor virgin,” as she tells Seyfried,going to say that she had to sit on a bag of frozen peas). They were friends as a small children, and have maintained the relationship, however tenuous.

Fox drags Seyfried to the local bar (the girls live in the vividly named Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota) to see a band she likes. The band is a great creation, the kind of band that is so calculating (they wear eyeliner and aspire to be “like that guy in Maroon 5″) that they would probably would become popular. They are later described as “agents of Satan with really awesome haircuts.” When a fire that is eerily reminiscent of the one in Rhode Island kills several patrons, the band, fronted by Adam Brody, lures Fox into the band’s van. The next time Seyfried sees her friend, she’s vomiting thick, black blood.

It seems that Fox’s Jennifer fell victim to a botched Satanic sacrifice (that she was not a virgin is key) and has become a succubus, feeding on some of the boys of Devil’s Kettle High. She starts with the football star and then a Goth boy (leaving him looking like “lasagna with teeth”). Seyfried suspects that Fox is not quite right, and the resulting showdown could be a metaphor for the mild-mannered girls of the world standing up to the popular crowd.

As for Fox, I haven’t seen much of her acting. Mostly I’ve seen her in magazine pictorials, where she excels (she’s also a gift to journalists for her exceedingly quotable interviews). A lot have slammed her for this and other roles, and while I can’t disagree I wonder if she isn’t getting a fair shake. The role of Jennifer calls upon two modes that aren’t exactly conducive to Oscars: a superficial bimbo and then a demon-possessed succubus. Both of these modes require Fox to exhibit a kind of glassy-eyed soullessness that could be easily attributed to bad acting. Until she’s called on to play something else (that doesn’t require being second fiddle to giant robots) I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, and continue to study the matter.

Matt Damon as "The Informant!"

In the Best Actor Oscar race this year, there are some heavy hitters on the short list, including a few previous winners, but the field overall is weak, much like two years ago when Ryan Gosling snuck in. There’s also a plethora of geezers among those mentioned by the Great Mentioners, which could make this one of the oldest aggregate quintets in Oscar history.

I see two slam-dunk nominations, both of them members of the Ocean gang: George Clooney, earning advance raves for his role as an itinerant businessman in Up in the Air, and Matt Damon, so marvelous as The Informant! Damon’s role is outwardly very comedic, at which Oscar normally turns up his nose, but I think the effect is so strong in this picture that Damon will not be overlooked. He could double-dip this year, as he has a prominent supporting role in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus.

Speaking of Invictus, that film stars previous winner Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, which sounds like an Oscar nomination if there ever was one. But no one has seen the film. The same for Daniel Day-Lewis in the big musical Nine. Johnny Depp managed to snag a nomination for an intense actor doing musical comedy, but Sweeney Todd wasn’t light-hearted fare like Nine is. Last year’s winner, Sean Penn, stars in the enigmatic Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, but it’s unclear how large Penn’s role is.

If three of the nominees come from the list above, I would suspect the other two would come from these: Jeremy Renner, so good as a bomb-disposal unit soldier in The Hurt Locker, Colin Firth as A Single Man or Michael Stuhlbarg as A Serious Man (I’m going to confuse those titles and blend them into A Simple Man all winter), or Viggo Mortensen in The Road. That film has seen some wildly diverging advance critical response, so he’s a real wild card.

Then there are the old-timers: Christopher Plummer in The Last Station, Hal Holbrook in That Evening Sun, Michael Caine in Harry Brown, or Robert Duvall in Get Low. Apparently the last of these has been pushed back to 2010, and I’m not sure if Caine’s film has found a distributor yet, but if it does watch out.

As a liberal, I sometimes feel as though the right-wing has a chokehold on the national media, what with all the attention that professional entertainers like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh get. Therefore I’m appreciate of the left’s own baggy-pants clown, Michael Moore. He’s an entertainer, too, and throws it out there, and sometimes gets a little sanctimonious. But as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, “I know, I’m a bigot, but for the left.” And Moore is a muckraker, a rabble-rouser,a provocateur, for the left. I can go see his movies and think to myself, “What he said.”

In his latest jeremiad, Moore takes on what supposedly is the bedrock American system, capitalism. Although he rightly points out, during a visit to the National Archives, that’s there’s nothing in the Constitution that specifies our economic system. We have been led to believe over two plus centuries that the free market is synonymous with all that is good about America, and is somehow also Christian, as well. Moore says hold the phone, that capitalism should play second fiddle to democracy, and perhaps we should rethink everything.

The format is familiar. Moore comically uses stock footage, including home movies of himself as a child, to show how things used to be good and the American dream was possible(aside from details like institutional racism and an immoral war in Southeast Asia). He pins the beginning of the end on Ronald Reagan, the “spokesmodel as President,” who allowed Wall Street to run amok (he includes a dire warning by Jimmy Carter that is awfully prescient, but you can understand how Carter got defeated). The financial industry in the U.S. has had a free pass ever since, with the Treasury department basically being an arm of Wall Street (this is in both Republican and Democratic administrations). Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, one of the heroes of this film, describes it as a “financial coup d’etat.”

Moore also is there with the people who are suffering, and at times this edges into the overly maudlin, but most of it should get you angry. He’s there when people are foreclosed on, mostly because of predatory lending. One family in Peoria had their interest rates jacked up until they couldn’t make the payments anymore. He’s there with two families who had a loved one die, and the companies they worked for (Wal-Mart was one) had taken out life insurance policies, collecting substantial sums while the families got nothing (these are known in the business as “dead peasant” policies). He wonders why airline pilots, who are responsible for the safety of their passengers, make less money than a manager at Taco Bell. He’s there with the workers at Republic Windows and Doors, who are fired and then denied severance and vacation pay.

Some of the tacks Moore goes on are outrageous, but seem more like isolated scumbaggery than an indictment of capitalism, such as the case of judges in Wilkes-Barre sentencing kids to a private juvenile detention center and then getting kickbacks. Where the film soars is when it takes dead aim on the notion that capitalism simply doesn’t work. He has some eye-opening chats with priests, including the Bishop of Detroit, who flatly state that capitalism is evil and antithetical to Biblical teachings (Moore has a hilarious bit with a redubbed Jesus film, Christ telling a lame man, “I can’t heal you, you have a pre-existing condition”). He comes down hard on Alan Greenspan, no surprise, but also on Democrats like Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad, who are in the Banking committee yet took sweetheart mortgages from Countrywide Financial. He includes hopeful footage of the election of Barack Obama, but you won’t feel good when you hear that Timothy Geitner and Laurence Summers are yet more stooges of the financial system who is now in a position of power.

The last third of the film focuses on the bailout, and I was for it, but now I’m not so sure. Moore equates it to a robbery, with Wall Street backing up a truck to the Treasury building and absconding with 700 billion dollars. He includes George W. Bush’s fear-mongering speech that no bailout would lead to the sky falling, and I bought that. There’s no way of knowing whether that scare tactic was based on reality or whether it was just politicians cutting deals with fat-cats.

The film predicts a rebellion between those who have nothing and those who have everything. A 2005 memo from Citibank to their biggest investors talks of a “plutonomy,” where the society is ruled  by the rich. One percent of the population own ninety-five percent of the wealth. The memo points out that the fly in the ointment of this ideal plutonomy is that we are a democracy, and the poor still have the right to vote. For now. But that makes the rich scared. I hope they are.

The film ends with Moore showing Franklin Roosevelt’s 1943 State of the Union address, in which he proposed a second bill of rights. They included the right to a job, the right to a living wage, the right to a decent home, the right to an education, the right to health care. Roosevelt died a little over a year later, this utopia unrealized. At least it was unrealized in the U.S. Moore points out that all of these things have been achieved in the countries vanquished in World War II: Germany, Italy, Japan (Italy guaranteed equal rights for women in 1947). Turns out that they had new constitutions written, largely by men from Roosevelt’s administration. It’s therefore ironic that these things didn’t get accomplished here.

In an interesting statistic, Moore shows the results of a poll that says thirty-three percent of young people think that socialism is the way to go. Of course socialism has been long painted as a dirty word, but with the far-right fringe tossing the word around as if it were equal to Satanism there has been a renewed interest in finding out just what socialism means. It will be interesting to see, if the dichotomy between rich and poor continues and the plutonomy takes hold, what future generations will decide to do about it.

I spent the first ten or so minutes of The Invention of Lying with a goofy grin on my face. I was in the hands of one of my favorite comic geniuses, Ricky Gervais, and the premise was delicious–we are shown a society where people have not evolved (Gervais’ word) the ability to lie. Therefore there are no untruths of any kind–no flattery, no fiction. Entire industries have taken on completely different complexions. Advertising, for instance. Coke puts on commercials that warn that drinking the product can lead to obesity, and says simply, “It’s famous.” Pepsi counters with, “When you can’t get coke.” The film business centers around dry documentaries about history, hosted by academic types about topics like “The Invention of the Fork” or “Napoleon, 1812-1813.”

Gervais plays a screenwriter for the studio, Lecture Films, but he’s stuck with writing about the 1300s, which means he’s always writing about the black plague. He pines for a beautiful girl, Jennifer Garner, who goes out with him but dutifully tells him that he is not attractive enough for him. The next morning he gets fired from his job.

So far, so good. But as the film went on the smile went away and I was crestfallen to realize that Gervais’ first film script ends up being completely toothless. He takes that great premise (a nursing home has a huge sign that says, “Sad Place for Hopeless Old People”) and turns it into a conventional romantic comedy. This, despite it’s audacious take on religion, which could have been scathing satire but instead is just pablum.

When Gervais’ character realizes he can lie (there isn’t even the word “lie,” or “truth,” so he has trouble defining what he does to friends) he conjures up a whopper: there is a man in the sky who controls everything, and after we die we go to a wonderful place where we will see again everyone we loved and get our own mansion (and get free ice cream all day). If we do three bad things, we go to a bad place. All of this he has written down in ten bullet points on two pizza boxes, a clever gag. But this zing at religion doesn’t have the bite of Bill Maher, instead it comes off as a half-baked idea. So the world of the film has existed entirely without theism until Gervais’ pizza box moment. What would a society like that be? We only skim the surface in this film, and it settles for Hollywood glibness. I think a discussion over beers after the film would be more interesting that what Gervais comes up with.

The film also completely avoids the other profession that would be completely different if truth were mandatory, politics. I guess that would necessitate an entirely different film.

Aside from the script taking the easy way out, I have to agree with Manohla Dargis in her review–this film looks terrible. Gervais co-directs with Matthew Robinson, who has no other credits. Gervais has directed TV, but The Invention of Lying has no visual style and often has incompetent camera work and poor editing, with comic beats lasting far too long. I also found some of the scriptwriting lazy. After Gervais’ character realizes he can lie, he sets about making people’s lives better. We see him visiting characters we’ve seen before as miserable wretches, but he tells them something and they get happy all of a sudden. What he tells them we don’t know, because the soundtrack is a zippy pop song. I’d rather have heard what he said, which isn’t immediately obvious.

For fans of The Office and Extras this film has to be a disappointment, although I am interested to see what Gervais comes up with next. I would prefer he steer clear from rom-com templates and try something more daring.

I’m writing this on Thursday night, so that I don’t have to distract myself in the morning while I’m watching the Olympic vote. I’ve been worried about Rio since the finalists were announced, but I also get the feeling that the IOC wished that a different South American city was available besides Rio. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens in the morning.

Big Fan (trailer)
Director: Robert Siegel
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Siegel wrote The Wrestler and is making his directorial debut. Patton Oswalt plays a loser sports fan. Might be decent.
Metacritic: 71

The Boys Are Back (trailer)
Director: Scott Hicks (Shine, Snow Falling on Cedars, Hearts in Atlantis,No Reservations)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
I hated Shine so much – it still infuriates me that Geoffrey Rush won an Oscar for that stupid mumbly shit – that I’ve skipped every Hicks movie since. I see no reason to change that policy at this time. This movie seems intolerable anyhow.
Metacritic: 59

Capitalism: A Love Story (trailer)
Director: Michael Moore (Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11,Sicko)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Barack Obama could do a lot worse than by cribbing health care talking points from Sicko – both in a political and substantial sense. Moore quite simply made the best argument for comprehensive reform that I have seen. Most reporters and commentators have yet to really try. But for some reason, I don’t have the same confidence in Moore when it comes to analysis of the financial system. It’s an easy topic with which to make an argument that sounds good but is actually terrible, and as great as Sicko was, Moore didn’t always choose the soundest arguments in either Columbine or Fahrenheit. Though I enjoyed those movies quite a bit as well…
Metacritic: 60

Crude (trailer)
Director: Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Documentary about the long-running lawsuit between Chevron and native Ecuadoreans over contamination of the Amazon.
Metacritic: 74

The Invention of Lying (trailer)
Director: Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I’ve always thought that Ricky Gervais was somewhat overrated, but then again, I’ve never actually seen any of his stuff. Basically, my opinions were based on talk show appearances and perhaps an SNL guest spot. At any rate, this project seems more like *his* project than his other movies, which basically seemed to be assembly-line comedies that Gervais was plugged into. So, I dunno. May go, may not.
Metacritic: 58

Toy Story
Toy Story 2 (trailer)
Director: John Lasseter (A Bug’s Life, Cars)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
I love the Toy Story movies – I’ve written about them here and here – but I can’t really abide 3D. So if I want to watch them, it’ll have to be at home. Bring out the Blu-rays!
Metacritic: 96

Whip It (trailer)
Director: Drew Barrymore
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Drew Barrymore makes her directorial debut, with a movie that absolutely drips Drew Barrymore-ness. I don’t think there could be more pluck crammed in here.
Metacritic: 68

Zombieland (trailer)
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Looks sort of funny, albeit in a way that the trailer is likely just as satisfying as the movie probably will be. I kinda miss seeing Woody Harrelson; I thought he’d be a lot bigger in the aftermath of Natural Born Killers that he turned out to be. Speaking of which, WB is finally issuing the director’s cut of NBK, and it’ll be out on Blu-ray in a couple weeks. Cool.
Metacritic: 75

The leaves are changing color, the air is getting crisp, baseball’s postseason is about to begin and, best of all, it’s Rocktober!

Bright Star, which tells the brief story of the romance between poet John Keats and his neighbor, Fanny Brawne, gets off to a stuffy, Masterpiece Theater sort of start, but the accumulating emotion, centered around his untimely death, crept up on me, and made the film a very rewarding experience.

Written and directed by Jane Campion, the film is set in the years 1818 to 1820. Keats (Ben Whishaw), in his early twenties, struggles with poverty as he pursues his calling as a poet. He relies on the generosity of his friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), also a poet. Brawne (Abbie Cornish) is from the middle-class, with a younger brother and sister, and excels as a seamstress. The act of stitching, whether of Brawne’s threads or Keats’ words, is a prevalent theme throughout the film.

Keats has limited renown and less money, so a marriage with Brawne is out of the question. Brown and Brawne share a mutual disdain, which makes their housing situation difficult when the Brawne family move into the same house with Brown and Keats. The center section of the film sags a bit when we get different iterations of how unfair it all is that though they love each other, it’s just not to be between our two lovebirds.

The final act, though, is very moving. When Keats stumbles in after getting soaked in the rain, the savvy viewer will get that “uh-oh” feeling, even if they don’t know their literary history. Watching the principles come to grips with the inevitable is exquisite drama, and when Fanny’s mother (Kerry Fox) acquiesces to their engagement it would take a stone heart not to be affected.

Given that her movie is about a poet who used vivid natural imagery, Campion’s film is something of a visual poem. There are exquisite scenes from all four seasons, with abundant uses of natural beauty (the first line of Keats we hear in the film is “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”). There are some remarkable shots: a servant in a kitchen, looking like something out of Vermeer; Fanny leaning back on her bed, flush with the excitement of love, a curtain billowing out of a window before her; a room full of butterflies; a long shot of three figures stalking angrily across a meadow. Full credit should be given to the cinematographer, Greig Fraser.

Cornish dominates the film. At first she is like a Jane Austen heroine, bristlingly ahead of her time, but then playing two basic notes: pining for John Keats, and grieving for him. Despite these limitations, she excels. She reminded me a lot of Charlize Theron, but without the self-consciousness. Her scene of anguish after learning of Keats’ death is draining to watch. She will certainly be on the short list of Oscar hopefuls.

Whishaw is also fine, playing a consumptive genius without sentimentality and fully-shaded. One can really believe he is a poet, too. There’s a great moment for English majors when he’s called upon to recite a poem and responds with “When I have fears I may cease to be,” and then can’t remember it (this was at a time when people recited poetry for amusement, a charming thing that almost makes up for the abysmal health conditions). But the best performances may be by two supporting players, Schneider and Fox. Schneider, almost unrecognizable from his current role on TV’s Parks and Recreation, plays Brown as a brash, bearish man who is protective of Keats but lacking in tact. When the arc of his character is complete, and he realizes he has failed his friend, Schneider nails the scene brilliantly. Fox, who has less to do, is an integral player in that it is she that sets the tone of John and Fanny’s relationship, and when she changes the film changes with her.

A final note to complain about boorish movie audiences: over the closing credits Whishaw recites “Ode on a Nightingale.” Nevertheless, patrons at the theater I attended stood up and put their coats on, chatting loudly, their rudeness on full display. And these were not teenagers, but respectable Princeton citizens of a certain age. Another reason why I’m watching more and more films at home.

Earlier this year I joined Disney’s D23 on an impulsive whim. Sometimes I am given to these flights of fancy and usually pay for it, literally in dollars, soon thereafter. However it has only taken me 6 months to see a return on that investment: admission for 4 to the soon-to-be-opened Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco. This visual/architectural/technological/audtorial spectacle is sure to be the destination of many a pilgrimage from the time it opens this Thursday October 1st.

There are countless Disney fanatics who can (and probably already have) go into great detail about anything and everything, including ‘easter eggs,’ found in each of the museum’s 10 galleries. I am not that person, but I will do my best to try! As they would not allow cameras of any kind inside, and I had to rush through due to my tickets being for the last timeslot of the day, my memories will have to suffice.

Ticketing Counter and Lobby (courtesy of the Blue Parrot)

The lobby is where I we spent the least amount of time, though I’m sure 30 minutes could have gone by in a blink. If I remember correctly there was a wall with detailed Disney family history, a re-creation of Walt’s living room, various Oscar statuettes (including the miniatures created especially for Snow White) and other displays that we had to hurry by. Museum admission operates on timed tickets scheduled 15 minutes apart. Once you gain entry you can stay as long as you like, but you will not normally be allowed in before you time window. Because of previous engagements I had to take the absolute last timeslot which gave use an hour and 15 minutes to view it all. This was the absolute minimum recommended time and I should say you could spend twice that time and still be whizzing by many points along the way.

After having our tickets scanned and entering Gallery 1 I knew we were going to run out of time. The museum is set up in a chronologically (and technologically for that matter) linear fashion. The first gallery begins with Walt’s birth and some personal stories told by Walt himself through plasma TVs and direct overhead speakers. The next room showed some early drawings and his own testing of special effects and camera tricks before he got to Hollywood. By the time we left the first gallery a kind attendant (can we call them Cast Members? I don’t know…the organization is separate from the Walt Disney Company) directed us towards and elevator and told us to keep in mind that there were still 9 more galleries to go.

Gallery 2 (courtesy of the Blue Parrot)

The elevator ride up to the 2nd floor was a treat. It was a normal sized elevator but decorated to look like a train car with “windows” looking out at the scenery. Walt’s voice accompanies the ride up and I was shocked to find that even the 15-second elevator ride was entertaining. Once you step off the elevator you enter the limelight of Hollywood. You are shown monitors describing Walt’s Alice Comedies and his other early achievements. It is also here that the interactive exhibits become more prominent.

Rotary Candlestick Phone

In addition to the video screens with directed speakers, the next few galleries sport “personal” audio information devices in the style of an old telephone earpiece (shown at right hanging in the cradle of a “Candlestick” phone). My daughters got a kick out of picking them up and holding them up to one ear. The audio plays automatically in sync with the video screens and can be manually started with the push of a button. As you travel through the museum, the style of handset progresses to the modern telephone (of Walt’s time) style. The technology of the displays continues to progress as well.

Gallery 3 introduces Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. Artifacts and original sketches are littered throughout all the room. One new exhibit display allows you to play a “mini-RockBand” foley game in which you time your hits/pulls/cranks on various devices to match the sound effects of the image on screen. This was, of course, another hit with my kids. More and more monitors with Walt and other animators describing how they made their magic continue to fill each room. The gallery was also the first time I saw a touchscreen on display, but it definitely wasn’t the last. 

The next 3 galleries were kind of a blur because everywhere we turned the kind ”purple people” (employees all wear a lone-sleeved coat of purple) were  reminding us that we only had 45 minutes left to see ’X’ number of galleries. There were the 1930s capped off by Snow White exhibits. The 1940s saw tales of a Union strike and all the work that was done for the war. More and more monitors began using touchscreen technology along with an iPhone-esque slide-browsing technique. I even think I got to see Microsoft Surface in action on one of the displays. Gallery 7 brought my next “wow” moment, however.

Gallery 7 (photo by Mike Kepka, San Francisco Chronicle

This picture may be too small to do it justice, but the seamless interactivity on display here is an awe to behold for a techie like myself. Overhead there are a dozen or more projectors that display various images and movies on a flowing ribbon that surrounds the room. Not a pixel is out of place and very rarely does any stretching or warping occur. If it does, it appears it was meant to be that way. Projectionists probably know, but I had fun just trying to figure out how there is no bleeding over the edges (i.e. – onto the wall) or other anomalies that should happen when not projecting on a flat surface. The interactive exhibits in this room are the where I could lose most of my time, however.

Utilizing what I call an overhead ”touch screen projector” images are displayed on a table in front of you. The wall in front of you has a plasma display and as you touch the projected images on the table the screen displays information (text, picture, audio, video, etc..) about what you touched. There is a list of hundreds of topics each with dozens of items to drill down in to. There is information about actors/actresses, interviews with animators, movie and charater summaries…seeming endless amounts of data on all things Disney. Again my kids enjoyed the interactivity, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I would have been content to spend my whole day just going through that one exhibit.

From the Walt Disney Family Museum's Facebook page

Gallery 8 is an interesting design choice. It’s a long downhill hallway. To the left are floor-to-ceiling glass windows that overlook the Presidio, bay and Golden Gate bridge. On the right are monitors all displaying the same thing. However, they are all facing the opposite direction, so you have to turn around (hopefully not into oncoming traffic) to view them. We were there in the early evening as the sun was going down so you had to face the sun to face the monitors. We were hurry through, though, because we had heard that the piez-de-resistance was Gallery 9 and we weren’t disappointed.

After you turn the corner from the previous gallery you realized that it all has been leading up to this gigantic two-story open air gallery. This is, I’m sure, one of the reasons they don’t allow cameras. It has to be seen and experienced to understand it. There is a winding walkway that takes you from Walt building his personal railroad through the building of Disneyland.

Artist's rendering of Gallery 9 is pretty close to the real thing (courtesy of MiceAge)

There is a model of the original Disneyland that is just a joy to look at. Hanging from the ceiling over the entire room is a sphere upon which projected images make it look as though it’s a perfectly round screen with hardly any portion untouched by the projectors. As you keep moving you see more and more exhibits with artifacts and drawings and models and miniatures and videos and….! This gallery is overhwelming but in a good way. It ends with Walt discussing his purchase of some land in Florida that could be the “biggest thing” he’d ever done.

Then, like that, you enter a narrow room where a small television is playing a newscast (I don’t know if it’s historical or newly created for this exhibit) describing Walt’s death and immediate reactions. On the opposite wall there are facsimiles of political cartoons and telegraphs and letters written to his wife that show just how shocking and sorrowful his death was to the world. It was an emotional and sobering gallery that completely caught me off guard. I guess I sometimes forget that though his name, company, ideas and inventions live on the man himself is no longer with us.

Your final room, before you get to the gift shop (of course), is resplendent white with variously arranged screens summarizing everything we have seen: the life of a uniquely gifted visionary that has impacted so many all over the globe.

There is a gift shop and cafe as you exit, but since we got out late the cafe was closed and we could only stay a few minutes in the gift shop. There was also a stairwell leading down below where I guess some offices, conference rooms/classrooms and the theater are located. Alas, my whirlwind tour was at an end. Perhaps next time I’ll wander downstairs to the conference rooms or take in a screening at their 114-person theater. It would definitely be worth it.

WDFM Theater (photo by Mike Kepka for the San Francisco Chronicle)

Finally some bonus video footage (not mine):

Worst of the Worst (courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes)

I know James has his “Decade In Film” series running, but after seeing this on Rotten Tomatoes I just had to make a post. I’m usually a little ashamed that I haven’t seen the balance of AFI’s (or critics or whoever’s) top 100 list. However, I can say that I am fully proud that I have only seen 7 of these worst 100 movies (and even then only 1 in the “top” 40 – Kickin’ It Old Skool). Thoughts?

Bright Star (trailer)
Director: Jane Campion (The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke, In the Cut)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Seems like it’s been forever since Jane Campion had a new film, but while it actually has been, part of that perception is that I never saw her last two. In other words, it’s been over a dozen years since I’ve seen one. While I’m on the subject, The Piano is one of the great neglected movies on DVD, having only ever received (in R1, at least) a non-anamorphic bare-bones release over a decade ago. Might have to make that suggestion on Criterion’s Facebook page.
Metacritic: 81

Disgrace
Director: Steve Jacobs
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Never heard about it until I saw Ebert’s 4-star review this morning. Stars John Malkovich as a disgraced South African professor.
Metacritic: 71

Fame (trailer)
Director: Kevin Tancharoen
Personal Interest Factor: 1
What do you do if you’re a struggling studio and you want to get a piece of the High School Musical action, despite not having the rights to High School Musical? Here’s the answer, I guess. Gonna learn how to fly!
Metacritic: 47

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (trailer)
Director: Bob Gosse (Niagara, Niagara, Julie Johnson)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Don’t care at all about this, but I’m intrigued by the line from Frank Scheck’s review (from The Hollywood Reporter) that is excerpted on Metacritic: “outdo[es] Dumb and Dumber in sheer grossness and detail with its depiction of the unfortunate effects of explosive diarrhea.” It’s worth noting that D&D is neither particularly gross nor detailed in this aspect; that scene was based completely on Jeff Daniels’s facial expressions and perhaps a couple of mild sound effects.
Metacritic: 34

Pandorum (trailer)
Director: Christian Alvart
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Pity poor Dennis Quaid. First GI Joe, and now this.
Metacritic: no score yet

Paris (trailer)
Director: Cédric Klapisch (L’auberge espagnole)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Interest here stems mostly from the presence of Juliette Binoche. It’s about a guy needing a heart transplant, who moves in with his sister and her three kids. That’s all I know.
Metacritic: 61

The Providence Effect
Director: Rollin Binzer (Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
With a title like that, you’re probably swearing that it’s a Christian-themed movie, possibly with someone like Kirk Cameron in the lead, but it is in fact a documentary about a successful prep school here in Chicago.
Metacritic: 71

Surrogates (trailer)
Director: Jonathan Mostow (Breakdown, U-571, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
Jonathan Mostow used to be a semi-prominent action director, but each of his movies has been less satisfying than the last. Roughly the same can be said of Bruce Willis over the last who-knows-how-many years.
Metacritic: 47

A Woman in Berlin (trailer)
Director: Max Färberböck (Aimee & Jaguar)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
I don’t really know how to say this, but … I’m awfully tired of over-earnest WWII movies being an instant ticket to credibility. I’m sure that this has all kinds of emotional truth and carefully calibrated moral ambiguity and whatnot, but it just looks like an enormous chore and if I’m being completely honest, I’d just as soon not bother.
Metacritic: 74

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You never know what you’re going to get with a Steven Soderbergh film, and with The Informant! you’re not even sure as the closing credits roll. I think it’s a psychological drama masquerading as a comedy, but it might be the exact opposite. Some critics, specifically A.O. Scott, write that this genre-bending is part of the film’s genius, but I’m not so sure. This film may be as bipolar as its main character.

Viewers can be excused if they swallow this film as nothing more than a comedy in the Coen Brothers tradition, from the exclamation point at the end of the title, to Matt Damon’s cheesy moustache, to Marvin Hamlisch’s bouncy score, which recalls the canned music from 1960s sit-coms. Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a bioscientist who has made VP at agricultural conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland. He comes to his bosses with a story about a Japanese rival looking to extort money in exchange for information on a saboteur, and in turn the FBI is brought in (primarily in the form of agent Scott Bakula). This, though, is just the start of a slippery slope of misinformation, as Damon goes to work as a mole for the FBI, gathering information on price-fixing.

What starts as a film about corporate malfeasance that any liberal could love, Soderbergh slowly twists it into something else entirely. Whitacre, it turns out, is entirely unreliable, and I won’t say more in order to avoid spoilers. Suffice to say that the film is really about a pathological liar, and the destruction of a man’s life. It gets harder to laugh at the more the movie progresses.

But there are plenty of laughs. Soderbergh frontloads the film with manic comic energy, and also peppers the cast with stand-up comedians (including cameos by both Smothers Brothers). I found the funniest bits to be Damon’s running commentary of stray thoughts that come in his head, even as he’s meeting with FBI agents or his bosses, about things as meaningless as neckties or how polar bears hide their black noses when they hunt (“How do they know they have black noses?” Damon wonders).

Whitacre is an inspired creation. This is based on a true story, but I have to believe that everything we see of Whitacre is Matt Damon alone. He plays the man as an overfed, seeming well-meaning Midwesterner who is over his head, but as the movie progresses darker and darker layers of Whitacre emerge, and Damon, while hilarious through most of the film, also can be chilling in his pathology.

I think this film edges around greatness, but never gets there, and I left the theater underwhelmed. I’d give it an uninspired B-minus, but will expect Damon to be in conversation when it comes to Best Actor nominees.

Last Thursday night was the world premiere for Richard Kelly’s The Box, his third film after the excellent debut Donnie Darko and embarrassingly bad follow-up Southland Tales. The world premiere took place at the opening gala for Fantastisk Film Festival in Lund in the south of Sweden, inside a huge tent erected in the Lundagård park especially for the occasion.

While the idea of having a world premiere inside a big tent is audacious – and there was no doubt that the organizers had spent a good deal of time making it as viable an option as they could within their budget constraints – the reality was that the seats were cramped and uncomfortable, the sound for the feature badly calibrated during the first ten minutes and the projectionist had to take a five minute break in the middle of the film to change reels. It was fun trying it once but I would reconsider such a venue next time. I did like the big fountain sticking up out of the main reception area.

My mobile camera doesn't work very well with bad lighting, as you can see

The Box takes place in Virginia during the winter of 1976. Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) are a stable couple with one quiet but intelligent teenage son; she a school teacher and him a scientist at NASA working on the Mars program, having dedicated his life to become an astronaut. They wake up one early morning to find a small box at their doorstep. Inside it is a wooden box consisting of a red metal button and a letter telling them to wait for instructions. Later that afternoon Arlington James Steward (Frank Langella), a man with half his jaw missing, drops by their house to explain the nature of the box. If they press the button someone they don’t know will die and they will receive a payment of one million dollars. They have twenty four hours to make a decision. Initially dismissing Mr Steward as a hoax or madman, during the following day some of the preconceptions of their lives are tested and as the deadline approaches pressing the button becomes a tempting possibility.

Based on Richard Matheson’s short story Button, Button (also filmed as an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1986) The Box has many hallmarks of what you might now call Richard Kelly’s style. The plot is labyrinthine, going off on tangents that appear to lead nowhere, and it probably requires more than one viewing to make sense. There is an all-encompassing conspiracy and potentially the fate of not just the main characters but the world at stake. There are enough odd sci-fi elements for three films. The characters will occasionally ramble philosophically about their dilemmas.

The film looks great and could just as well have been filmed in the seventies, if it weren’t for Kelly’s apparent fondness for whatever cgi software James Cameron used in The Abyss. Despite that, Mr Steward’s facial deformity is probably the main effect in this film, and Langella is such a professional actor that he steals the film from under Diaz and Marsden’s feet. Diaz is a capable actress, and she doesn’t embarrass herself here, but even though she plays a cripple in this film, I doubt she will ever win an Oscar. Marsden is solid in his role. The score is supposedly by members of Arcade Fire but I can’t say I noticed. It sounded like most scores for these kinds of films.

To be blunt, The Box is a much more concentrated and even restrained effort than Southland Tales but it still makes you worry that the wunderkind let initial success go to his head. The film starts off well, with a sense of atmospheric paranoia (the 70s setting serves well in this regard) but as the director slowly introduces one plot element after another, some of them bordering on silliness, it begins to test your patience. It’s hard to discuss the film without going into spoiler territory (as Ms Diaz apparently did at Comic-Con) but the central question – “Would you kill someone you didn’t know with the press of a button for a million dollars?” – shouldn’t require the wild plot this film has. There is a scene at a library involving water that I still don’t quite understand the point of. There are also two jumps in time between a car crash, an airplane hangar and the couple’s house that seemed to be missing a few scenes.

The Box is a gothic sci-fi thriller melodrama that some will like but more than a few will shake their heads at. I liked it, overall, and I’d probably watch it again, which is the best compliment you can give this film. Kelly is a good director, but as a screenwriter he tends to want to include any and all elements that appeal to him, even though it makes little sense to the overall picture. He’s not exactly a master of restraint. I would like to say that Kelly was back on track, but this is more of a step into the right direction, even though I wonder where it’s leading.

A bit short on the comments this week. We’re flying to Denver early in the morning and I still need to pack. Fortunately, other than The Informant!, there’s not a must-see this week. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Amreeka (trailer)
Director: Cherien Dabis
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Story of a single Palestinian mother who emigrates to the US in search of a less sectarian environment.
Metacritic: 70

The Burning Plain (trailer)
Director: Guillermo Arriaga
Personal Interest Factor: 5
I could feign interest if I wanted, based on Arriaga’s pedigree, but seriously, there’s no reason to think this is good. The reviews are pretty tepid and the trailer could hardly be worse
Metacritic: 53

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (trailer)
Director: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
Personal Interest Factor: 2
I like food. But the thought of it raining food is far more off-putting to me than the thought of a talking rat who is a chef. This movie looks frankly disgusting to me.
Metacritic: 68

The Informant! (trailer)
Director: Steven Soderbergh (Bubble, The Good German, Che, The Girlfriend Experience)
Personal Interest Factor: 10
Steven Soderbergh makes a Coen Brothers movie. Can’t wait.
Metacritic:

Jennifer’s Body (trailer)
Director: Karyn Kusuma (Girlfight, Æon Flux)
Personal Interest Factor: 2
I guess this movie’s supposed to have pedigree because Diablo Cody wrote it, but … please.
Metacritic: 44

Lake Tahoe
Director: Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Never heard of this movie until I started writing this tonight, but Eimbcke’s Duck Season, about a couple of kids home alone during an afternoon, was a charming little movie from Mexico. I doubt I’ll have the time to see this, but if I do, I might check it out.
Metacritic: 72

Love Happens (trailer)
Director: Brandon Camp
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Self-help guru who can’t help himself, a woman who’s sworn of romance, etc. You know how it is.
Metacritic: 37

No Impact Man (trailer)
Director: Laura Gabbert, Justin Schein
Personal Interest Factor: 1
I’ll be honest. I recognize the good intentions here but it looks as tedious as a movie possibly could be. And as activism, it strikes me as quite likely to counterproductive to its cause; the last thing people want to be told is that they’re going to have to adopt extreme lifestyle changes in response to environmental crisis. Far-fetched do-gooder shit like this gives liberals a bad name.
Metacritic: 63

I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising Intro to Theology teacher screened 9 for his charges, but I would be if it were shown to film students. The film is loaded with religious allegory, but despite evocative animation the story is routine adventure.

Directed by Shane Acker, based on a short film of his that is unseen by me, the film is co-produced by Tim Burton, and I remember when I first saw the trailer for 9 Burton’s name popped into my head before I saw his name in the credits. It has his visual fingerprints all over it. I’m not sure of the reason for this–did Burton influence Acker, or was Burton drawn to it because it tickled his sensibilities–but in any event this film looks a lot like Burton films such as Edward Scissorhands and the Henry Selick-directed Nightmare Before Christmas.

9 concerns a time just after the expiration of the human race, which have been destroyed by machines that were created as their salvation. This, of course, strongly smacks of the Terminator films, and there’s also quite a bit of The Lord of the Rings in the story, as a small band of individuals go on a quest to save their kind (Acker was an animator for The Return of the King). Where Acker shows some originality is the characters themselves: they are dolls, about a foot high, made of burlap, with binocular lenses for eyes.

These dolls were created by the scientist who also invented the machine that destroys humanity. He makes nine of them, each marked by a numeral. The story begins when the last, 9, is created, and he stumbles into being. Soon he meets others of his kind, namely 2, an elderly inventor. When 2 is grabbed by a spidery robot and taken to a distant structure, 9 wants to save him, but the leader of the group, 1 (natch) balks. 1 is a representative of fundamentalism–when 9 asks why “the Beast” (surely a reference to Satan) is after them, 1 scoffs and says that these questions are pointless. 1 is at odds with the scientific 2, and is interested only in preservation, preferring to hide away and leave 2 to his fate.

9 influences 5, who is sort of the Samwise of the group, to help him, and they meet up with 7, the only female and a warrior who wears a bird skull as a helmet. But while trying to rescue 2, 9 awakens the dormant mother machine, and there’s hell to pay.

Some of this is engaging, but I was gripped with a sense of impatience almost immediately, as if I’ve seen this all before. We’re all familiar with the look of post-apocalypse–the perpetually dusky skies, the ruined buildings, the detritus of human existence such as old cars, newspapers, and broken doll heads. And though the film is very short and gets into the action right away, the core of the action is so simplistic–characters are attacked, some get taken, remaining characters go to the rescue–that a metronomic quality of the film overwhelms the theme.

What is most interesting about 9 is that theme, which is one of the most basic to humanity though it is relatively unexplored in films that play in multiplexes: who created us, and why are we here? The dolls of 9 struggle with this in different ways, with 1 choosing not to even think about, to 7 choosing to fight, to 9 questioning. With the character 6 Acker even references deeper meaning, with the character being fashioned out of what looks like mattress ticking that resembles the rags worn by those in concentration camps during World War II.

But all of that goes by the wayside when the mechanisms of the plot muck up the works. I give screenwriter Pamela Pettler a perverse sort of credit, because I wouldn’t be able to type lines of dialogue such as, “We’ve got to go after them” (I believe this is said more than once) or “I started this, and I’m going to finish it.” I’m not even sure small children would enjoy this film, as it is almost unrelievedly grim, and has an ending that is spiritually uplifting (it made me think of the end of Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves) but won’t send kids out of the theater looking to buy action figures.

Alien: The Director’s Cut
Director: Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Body of Lies)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
I saw a DLP reissue of Alien several years back, which I guess was the “Director’s Cut” being shown again now. The Music Box is showing it this week (in 35mm) for it’s 30th Anniversary, and obviously it holds up pretty well. Fun fact: to this day, I’ve yet to see Aliens.
Metacritic: 83

The Baader Meinhof Complex
Director: Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Body of Evidence, The Little Vampire)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
The final Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee to open here, about the notorious Red Army Group. Reviews have been good, but you have to admit, Edel does not have an inspiring filmography to date.
Metacritic: 73

I Can Do Bad All By Myself (trailer)
Director: Tyler Perry (Why Did I Get Married?, Meet the Browns, The Family That Preys, Madea Goes to Jail)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Say what you will about Tyler Perry – and I can’t really say much, since I’ve never seen any of his work – but he’s settled into a two-films-a-year output level that’s putting even Steven Soderbergh to shame. If nothing else, the man is extraordinarily prolific.
Metacritic: no score

Import/Export
Director: Ulrich Seidl
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Film about two people leaving home in search of better lives. Premiered at Cannes two years ago.
Metacritic: not listed

9 (trailer)
Director: Shane Acker
Personal Interest Factor: 9? No, 7.
Weirdly enough, this reminds me of the artwork for the liner notes of The Smashing Pumpkins Machina/The Machines of God. I don’t know why that is; they aren’t at all similar. But they’re both appealing to me in the same way. Of course, that album wasn’t very good.
Metacritic: 60

The September Issue (trailer)
Director: R.J. Cutler
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Documentary about Vogue editor Anna Wintour, the inspiration for Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. Seems like stright-up cult-of-personality type stuff and I’m really not at all interested.
Metacritic: 69

Sorority Row (trailer)
Director: Stewart Hendler
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Am I missing something, or is this just a straight-up ripoff of I Know What You Did Last Summer? Which was itself a stright-up ripoff of a teen horror novel that I remember reading, although I don’t remember its name. Which itself was probably a straight-up ripoff of something else that I don’t know about.
Metacritic: no score

Whiteout (trailer)
Director: Dominic Sena (Kalifornia, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Swordfish)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
Kate Beckinsale in an Antarctic murder mystery. Maybe Werner Herzog should have made this movie instead of Encounters at the End of the World. “The gay penguin did it!”
Metacritic: 36

This is the first of Bobcat Goldthwait’s directorial efforts I’ve seen, but I was well aware of his comedy, having once seen him in person. He was something of a bomb-thrower, basing his comedy on saying something outrageous for the sake of outrageousness and not being particular sophisticated about it. There’s some of that in that World’s Greatest Dad, a movie on the whole I liked, but is awfully thin gruel.

The central joke is that an obnoxious teenager, who doesn’t do anything much but jerk off to Internet porn, dies accidentally by autoerotic asphyxiation. His sad sack father, a schoolteacher and frustrated writer (Robin Williams), decides to cover up the cause of his son’s death and makes it look like a suicide. He then crafts a suicide note that makes his son seem like a misunderstood genius.

Goldthwait pushes this as hard as he can. Daryl Sabara does a great job making his character reprehensible, and you can believe that a parent of his would question the concept of unconditional love. Sabara is rude, crude, and without a redeeming characteristic, yet I think I’ve known people like him. Williams gives one of those performances that makes you forgive his work in crap like RV, playing a mild-mannered poetry teacher with gracious humanity. I particularly liked a scene where he breaks down in sobs while looking at a  newsstand filled with his son’s favorite porno mags.

That being said, World’s Greatest Dad is a 100-minute film that could have been half that. When Williams’ ruse turns his son into a deceased hero, with kids wearing his image on t-shirts and listening to his favorite music (Williams tell them it’s Bruce Hornsby, who is really his favorite singer) he realizes that his life is starting to become everything he dreamed of. His secret relationship with a pretty young art teacher (Alexie Gilmore, bearing a perhaps unfortunate resemblance to Shelley Long) hits its stride, and after he fakes his son’s journal, he makes contacts with publishers.

The ending is kind of predictable, and Goldthwait pulls back his claws for a resolution that is morally correct but toothless. All along I was rooting for Williams to make the most of the situation, which I guess makes me a bad person. Goldthwait does score some points satirizing the reaction to teen suicide, but I’m not sure it wasn’t said already twenty years ago in Heathers (“I loved my dead gay son”).

If you would allow me, for just a moment, to speak on something I bring up not to be a firestarter, not to throw tinder on a smoldering set of pine needles nestled somewhere deep in the San Fernando Valley, but rather to ask, to foment discussion and out of a true sense of “Why?”: How have these films become the critical and commercial success they have? Are they popular because of their pedigree? Their director, stars, filming location/backstory, etc.? Are they looked-upon as they are because everyone everywhere decides you must look on them with reverence simply because everyone else tells you to?

If you can explain to me why these films are what they are and the reason they are that way, then please, by all means, let me know. But do not just throw in simple explanations like: “You’re retarded, that’s why you don’t get it.” (And please don’t use retarded as a pejorative. It’s juvenile and really insensitive.)

So with no further adieu, I give you Part 1 of the list of movies that I just. don’t. get.

First-and-absolutely-foremost on my list is that bloated carcass of an “epic”:

1. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Lawrence of Arabia

Okay. I know what you are all going to say. I know the backlash this will engender and I know I must be out of my mind. But I’m being completely honest when I say I Just. Don’t. Get. It. This is a bloated 3-hour mass of men riding camels through the desert. I tried recently to watch this again and, once again, I saw the same thing. So what is it? The cinematography? Then say that. Is it the direction? Then say that. Is it the acting? All this seems to me is a director at the height of his power making the movie he wanted to make…and everyone drinking the Kool-Aid of an obvious master.

2. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

No Country For Old Men

Okay. I’ll give you Fargo. Probably more-so, Raising Arizona. Hell, I even loved Hudsucker Proxy for what it was. But this movie? With a script that was probably thirty pages of actual screenplay that goes nowhere but back around on itself and  a thumb-its-nose-at-convention ending, I think this is a great example of critics getting together and asserting their will for a pair of filmmakers who are well-liked and who can influence academy voters and decided they would make a campaign to elevate a decent movie that is simply a generic heist thriller polished with the wry approach of two masters-of-the-game. Even more criminal than how Kevin Costner and Dances with Wolves took the Oscar from Goodfellas was the idea that this movie could beat There Will Be Blood and the upstart Paul Thomas Anderson. “Okay, Coens, you have Tommy Lee Jones as a sheriff? Javier Bardem in a bowl cut? A suitcase of money? Josh Brolin finally coming into his own? And what do you have, Paul? Daniel-Day? With a Noah Cross voice? And a really good oil derrick scene? Here’s a cinematography Oscar.”

3. THE STING

The Sting

This is another one I’ve watched three times now and still don’t get it. Robert Redford and Paul Newman? Okay. Robert Shaw being snakily mobbish with his amazing acting skills? Okay. That soundtrack? I get it, but you’re losing me. The entire movie shaped around, as far as I can tell, a fake horse race? You’ve lost me completely, and even though my eyes were nearly closed at the end all three times, I still kinda get what the woman represented. Either way, and regardless, why put so many double-crosses into a movie one could care less about? If someone can explain this one, please do, I’m ALL EARS.

4. THE APARTMENT

The Apartment

I recently watched this one based on, if I remember correctly, something someone wrote on this site. After being pulled in by the initial cinematography, which is quite good with shots of the office area, I became quite baffled by the dour nature and complete lack of focus in the script. Jack Lemmon mugged more than he ever had and his character was so agreeable to being put-upon, even during a ridiculous last-minute call by one of his superiors, it didn’t seem he was even his own person. There are limits to what you would let people do to you, promotion or corner office or not. And the unlikability of Shirley MacLaine’s character was completely unexpected. Overall, I simply. Didn’t. Get it.

5. THE ENGLISH PATIENT

The English Patient

This should have been much higher on the list. This is a movie that so obviously relied on its bloated ‘epic’ moniker to snatch the nine oscars it won and utilized a, at that time, mis-realized military-like campaign by the Weinsteins to take oscar gold. With its over-edited and convoluted beginning that seems to go nowhere after the plane accident but to meander through time and tragedies with Ms. Binoche, I just don’t see the allure of The English Patient. I’ve tried most of these films three times, just to give them a chance, but after number two of this butt-numb-a-thon, I won’t let this go on any longer.

Well, there are the first five. Let’s hear it.

And to add a note to the proceedings: Why the hell is Seinfeld finally mastered for Hi-Def but The Abyss is not?!

The winner is (drumroll please)… James!

Few will be surprised by this. It’s been largely expected for a while. He was close to losing it for a short time there, but he stuck through and proved to all in the last weekend that he’s a worthy winner of this year’s AGEBOC. Just plain well done and played.

I was thinking long and hard about some form of prize. Maybe some flash animation with the winner’s name, fireworks going off in the background. But then I’d have to learn programming, plus it would be kinda cheesy, so I skipped that.

It was when I was walking inside a weird Asian trinket shop that I saw it. It called to me. I realized that it was what we had been looking for so long, unconsciously. I haven’t given him a name yet.

It’s getting a little metal plaque at the bottom that says “King of the AGEBOC”. (Added a small note there just for appearances sake, so you can get an idea of what it will look like once it’s done.)

The recipient of the prize must agree to the following conditions:

1. The recipient shall pass on (paying postage and all) the prize to the next winner of the AGEBOC. Unless that winner is him- or herself, then he or she can keep it, until there comes another winner of the AGEBOC.

2. The recipient promises to take care of the prize and buy a new one (with a metal plaque saying “King of the AGEBOC”) that looks similar or better, if he or she loses, breaks or damages the prize beyond recognition and/or use.

3. The current recipient makes sure that the next recipient/winner repeats and agrees to the above conditions.

I’ll mail it to James once the engraving’s done.

Runner-up is Brian, winner of last year’s AGEBOC, who was very, very close to taking it home again this year again. Good job, man! For him I have this (remember to enter your name in correctly). Almost as good as that trip to Mexico, eh?

Everyone, thanks for joining! I do f-ck up sometimes with the schedule of this thing, but overall I’ve had a fun time. Hope you did, too.

Honorable mentions:

Most mysterious disappearance: Rhymerguy

Best newcomer: Rob

Best single weekend prediction: Joe Webb scored a total of 7 points in the May 29 – June 1 weekend

Final score:

James: 38.5

Brian: 31.5
Rob: 30.5
Joe Webb: 22.5
Nick: 19.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 19
Filmman: 13
Marco Trevisiol: 9
Jeanine: 9
Juan: 7.5
Rhymerguy: 4

Part six of our discussion on the films of the 00’s, this time focusing on 2005.

1) Best of 2005?
2) Worst of 2005?
3) Most underrated?
4) Most underseen?
5) Most overrated?
6) Best performance(s) of the year?
7) Best single scene/sequence of the year?
8) One thing you could change about any single film in 2005 (Example: different cast, different director, different style, different release date, different studio).
9) Most memorable (good or bad) theatergoing experience of the year?
10) Most influential film/performance/style/director?

Obviously feel free to answer only the questions you’re interested in or to write/respond to something else entirely.

2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004

As is usually the case for Labor Day, it’s a good weekend to be out of town. We’ll be spending the next few days in Mexico City, seeing the sights, dodging the bullets, and getting high on the toxic fumes suspended in a permanent haze four feet off the ground. Or so I’ve been led to believe by a bunch of people who have never been there.

Only things I’m going to miss, movie-wise, are a couple of screenings of restored prints of John Sayles films, Return of the Secaucus Seven and The Brother from Another Planet. Pity, but it can’t be helped.

All About Steve (trailer)
Director: Phil Traill
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Funniest thing about the trailer is the tagline that it’s from the producer of Miss Congeniality. Far as I can tell, that producer is … Sandra Bullock herself. I guess the link between the two movies was just not clear enough. Relatedly, this may be the worst-reviewed movie of the year, excluding those that were withheld from critics in the first place.
Metacritic: 13

Extract (trailer)
Director: Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, Office Space, Idiocracy)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
I was a big fan of Idiocracy, and of course Office Space remains a classic, but this looks like relatively average for Mike Judge. Maybe there’s more to it than the trailer suggests. Also, I think Jason Bateman’s one note persona (i.e., “smartass exasperation”) plays better on TV than in the movies.
Metacritic: 60

My One and Only (trailer)
Director: Richard Loncraine (Richard III, Wimbledon, Firewall)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Renée Zellweger FAIL
Metacritic: 64

Still Walking (trailer)
Director: Kore-eda Hirokazu (Maborosi, After Life, Nobody Knows)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
A good example of how there’s always something to discover when it comes to cinema. Kore-eda has been making highly regarded movies for over a decade, but I’ve never seen any of them. If the reviews are to be believed, this may be his best yet.
Metacritic: 92

Tony Manero
Director: Pablo Larrain
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Chilean film about a man who, according to Metacritic, “is willing to lie, cheat and kill in order to become John Travolta’s character in the cult classic Saturday Night Fever.”
Metacritic: 72

World’s Greatest Dad (trailer)
Director: Bobcat Goldthwait (Shakes the Clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Well, I dunno. Here’s an interesting and counterintuitive thought: for all the crap Robin Williams takes – from myself included – his career over the past decade has been much more respectable than most of his contemporaries. Sure, he’s done his fair share of crap, but he’s also made a few interesting choices. Compared to, say, Steve Martin or Eddie Murphy, he looks pretty good.
Metacritic: 69

What filmman wants, filmman gets.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of September 4-6, 2009.

The one who predicts closest to the total Friday to Sunday gross for the #1 film wins 4 points. Runner-up gains 2 points. Predicting within half a million earns 2 extra points.

Notice! In this, our last installment of the summer AGEBOC 09, predictions will be sent over email. I’ve checked, and all except Juan and Rhymerguy should know my address. If any of those two wish to email me, I’ll send a mail to them over the email address they’ve put in their comments accounts. Participants predictions will be shown on Thursday after deadline.

Otherwise it’s business as usual. You know the deadline, you know how many points are given out. Three people are competing for the win here: James, Brian and Rob. They’ve done good over the past few months and I’m not going to throw in some lame 5 point questions just so someone can swoop in and win over other people’s, eh, hard work.

If other people wish to join in so they can take points instead of them, then they are of course still welcome to do so. That’s only fair.

There will be prizes, of a sort, though the specifics are still being worked on. Prizes will be given out next Monday the 7th of September.

I’ve enjoyed doing this. For a short while it was one of the few structured things I was doing in my life (weird as that may sound). As other things came into the forefront, I’ve been sorta slipping, as people have been correct to point out. I’m not a very disciplined and organized guy, though I try to be.

I’m looking forward to when James takes over this thing for the fall/winter.

Bonus questions:

1) Will Extract make more or less than 11 million this weekend?

2) What will be the #3 film of the weekend?

Deadline is Wednesday September 2 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

To find out the rules of the game, go to the main thread for AGEBOC 09.

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 34

Brian: 31
Rob: 30
Joe Webb: 22
Jackrabbit Slim: 19
Nick: 17
Filmman: 13
Marco Trevisiol: 9
Jeanine: 9
Juan: 7.5
Rhymerguy: 4

Well, my last day at work was today, which means that Openings will return to its previous Friday morning schedule starting next week. On one hand, I’m a little bit relieved, as I’ve had very little to do at work lately, and while it’s good to get paid I don’t think anyone really likes feeling useless. On the other hand, I’m back to looking at an uncertain future. On the third hand, we’re going to Mexico next week and that will be fun. On the fourth hand, though, this means I might have more time to get back to writing the odd review here and there, plus the mysterious new feature that I’m planning and just haven’t gotten around to initiating. On the fifth hand, it’s impossible to ponder the vastness of space.

Le combat dans l’île
Director: Alain Cavalier
Personal Interest Factor: 10
Re-issued French conspiracy thriller from 1962 playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week. Never really heard of it, and I’m not familiar with Cavalier at all, but I love stuff like this more than just about anything.
Metacritic: Not listed

The Final Destination (trailer)
Director: David R. Ellis (Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco, Final Destination 2, Cellular, Snakes on a Plane)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Way back in the day, I remember people saying that the first Final Destination was pretty decent, but I never saw it. Obviously, I then skipped the next two sequels, as well. This one looks unbelievably stupid, even by the standards of the genre. Killer escalators? Deadly car washes?
Metacritic: 38

Halloween II (trailer)
Director: Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, Halloween)
Personal Interest Factor: 1.01
Again, very little interest in sequels of movies that I didn’t see in the first place. I guess if I had to choose, though, I’d take this over The Final Destination.
Metacritic: 50

It Might Get Loud (trailer)
Director: Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Gracie)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
This seems like a decent idea for a documentary, and as it turns out it’s about three guys who actually seem like interesting people to hear talk about playing guitar.
Metacritic: 71

Taking Woodstock (trailer)
Director: Ang Lee (The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brockeback Mountain, Lust, Caution)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
It’s always worth going to an Ang Lee movie, but this one looks highly suspect in my view as I’ve never understood why Woodstock was such a big flippin’ deal. Reviewed here already by Marco Trevisiol, who says, “Overall, the film has significant deficiencies and isn’t the substantial, insightful work it could’ve been … [b]ut it is entertaining and occasionally captivating.”
Metacritic: 55

Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love (trailer)
Director: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Documentary about Senegalese singer Youssou Ndour.
Metacritic: 58

Ang Lee’s latest film ‘Taking Woodstock’ is – as the title implies – centred around the 1969 music festival held in New York, one of the iconic pop culture events of the 1960s. It attempts to be both a character study and convey the experience of what it was like to be at the event. While it doesn’t really work as a character study it’s much more successful on the latter theme.

The character study is focussed on Elliot Teichberg, a Jewish closeted homosexual who has moved back from Greenwich Village to help out his parents on their dismal and dilapidated motel in the Catskills. Out of this dreary existence, he seizes an opportunity to bring a music festival to the area to create some activity for the family business and the town, not realising that it will be much, much bigger than he ever anticipated… and inevitably have a major impact on him and his future.

One reason it struggles as a character study is that Elliot isn’t a particularly compelling character. We don’t get many revealing insights into his persona or even know that much about his background. Despite him playing a pivotal role in the creation of the festival, he’s actually quite passive and seems to function at times purely as our eyes and ears of the event.

Another reason it struggles on this front is that the pivotal character of Elliot’s mother is the weakest aspect of the film. Very broadly played by Imelda Staunton, she may not be the biggest stereotype of an overbearing Jewish mother I’ve seen in a film, but she’d be close. She does have one or two amusing scenes but she’s such an obnoxious caricature that it was impossible to care or emphasise with her (which the film tries to do towards the end) and as a result the dramatic interaction with Elliot is severely weakened.

Plotwise the film isn’t particularly well structured. Some interesting subplots – the negative reaction of the locals to Elliot’s role in bringing the festival there, the enormous technical difficulties in organising such an event , anti-Semitic attacks on Elliot’s family – are either not followed through or forgotten in the latter stages of the film.

But in a funny way, the fragmented structure of the film probably works to its advantage in recreating the experience of what it was like to be there at Woodstock, which itself was messy and disjointed.  The film’s great strength is that it feels genuinely authentic as a recreation of what it was like to be a spectator there. This is in part because the film’s perspective is from that of the locals so we see from the very beginning how it’s transformed from a sleepy, small town to a buzzing mini-metropolis. The film portrays this well by making the pre-concert scenes quite languid in pace, in contrast to the lively and effervescent scenes once the concert and youth in their hundreds of thousands come to town.

The film captures the concert atmosphere superbly. There’s a marvellous scene where we follow Elliot as he’s riding on a motorcycle to get to the concert site and we pass by numerous amounts of people, congregations, gatherings and various types of transportation; it perfectly illustrates what a once-in-a-lifetime experience it would’ve been.  Split-screen style footage (imitating the famous 1970 documentary of the event) is also used at regular intervals to demonstrate the vibrancy and chaos of the event.

The fact that the concert and musicians itself aren’t shown (whether in recreations or in actual archive footage) has been criticised but I think this works to the film’s advantage. The film isn’t about the musicians themselves but about the spectators who went there and what it was like for them.

With the exception of Staunton, the performances are fine. Demetri Martin is quite good as Elliot considering the limitations of his role although I got quite a shock learning after seeing the film he was 34 in real life in 1969; the way the film portrays him and how he acts in the role, you’d think he was in his early 20’s. Henry Goodman delivers a nicely nuanced performance as Elliot’s father and Eugene Levy and Jonathan Groff are standouts in support roles.

Ang Lee’s direction on individual scenes is mixed. There’s one very subtle, well done scene early on when Elliot is on the telephone which perfectly captures how trapped and dissatisfied he feels with his life. In contrast there’s another early scene when Elliot goes into a diner and the locals (all unhappy at him bringing the event to the town) in unison become silent and turn towards him menacingly; it’s a trite effect straight out of a lousy sitcom.

Overall, the film has significant deficiencies and isn’t the substantial, insightful work it could’ve been. But it is entertaining and occasionally captivating and is one of the more enjoyable films I’ve seen in 2009. If nothing else, it sure makes you envious of those who went to Woodstock.

NOTICE! This was supposed to be the last of the AGEBOC 09’s, but due to management failure the challenge will be extended one more week, where there will be special rules and prizes.

The new deadline is

Thursday 9pm

(because there are midnight showings for the two horror movies released this weekend).

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of August 28-30, 2009.

The one who predicts closest to the total Friday to Sunday gross for the #1 film wins 4 points. Runner-up gains 2 points. Predicting within half a million earns 2 extra points.

Bonus questions:

1) Yes or no: Will Halloween 2 earn more in its opening weekend than the previous installment ($26,362,367)?

2) Yes or no: Will The Final Destination earn more in its opening weekend than the previous installment ($19,173,094)?

Deadline is Thursday August 26 at 9:00 pm (blog time).

To find out the rules of the game, go to the main thread for AGEBOC 09.

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 33

Rob: 29
Brian: 26.5
Joe Webb: 22
Jackrabbit Slim: 18
Nick: [disqualified for reasons of distraction, formerly 14]
Filmman: 13
Marco Trevisiol: 9
Jeanine: 9
Juan: 7.5
Rhymerguy: 4

Better Late Than Never Edition. This week, I’m trying something a little different. I’m going to assign each movie a Personal Interest Factor, a number between 1 and 10 that serves as a gauge to how much I want to see any given movie. Obviously, the higher the number, the more I want to see it.

To be clear, this does not measure how likely I am to see a movie; I go to see stuff I’m not excited about all the time. It’s just a measure of how excited I am.

Art & Copy (trailer)
Director: Doug Pray (Surfwise)
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Documentary about advertising, looking at some famous marketing campaigns from the past few decades. I mostly resent marketing mindsets and truly hate most advertising so this isn’t exactly in my wheelhouse.
Metacritic: 53

Cold Souls (trailer)
Director: Sophie Barthes
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Quite simply, this looks incredibly tedious. I’ve always thought that Paul Giamatti was an incredibly overrated actor, an opinion that’s only gotten stronger as Giamatti has gotten more repetitive and untethered with each passing role. You watch – eventually the world will come around to my way of thinking on this, just as it has (more or less) with Kevin Spacey.
Metacritic: 69

Fifty Dead Men Walking (trailer)
Director: Kari Skogland
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Story about an IRA turncoat starring Jim Sturgess, Ben Kingsley, and Rose McGowan(?). Yikes. Sounds intense, but director Skogland’s previous movie work looks like it exists entirely in the direct-to-video realm.
Metacritic: 58

Flame & Citron (trailer)
Director: Ole Christian Madsen
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Danish film about that country’s WWII-era resistance that Nick reviewed for this site fourteen whole months ago. He says, “It’s a good, sometimes very good, film, but it’s not the great film it aspires to be.” I’m just happy that it’s being released here; didn’t look like it was going to happen. If nothing else, if the trailer is any indication it’s beautifully shot.
Metacritic: 74

Inglourious Basterds (trailer)
Director: Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Vol. 1)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I’m frankly surprised that a new Tarantino arrives this weekend, and it’s all I can do to even care. Where did this apathy come from? Possibly, it was Grindhouse, which at the time was a questionable idea and in retrospect seems like an attempt at career suicide. If nothing else, it signaled loud and clear that QT had devoted his career to esoterica that I only vaguely understand and which I have a hard time getting excited for. Says Jackrabbit Slim in Gone Elsewhere review: “It’s a lot of fun, but there are plenty of places you can get up to go to the bathroom.”
Metacritic: 69

The Marc Pease Experience
Director: Todd Louiso (Love Liza)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Had not actually heard about this until earlier in the week, as it appears to be a straight dump by soon-to-be-defunct Paramount Vantage. Starring Ben Stiller and Jason Schwartmann in a story about … something, presumably. Who knows.
Metacritic: 31

Post Grad (trailer)
Director: Vicky Jenson
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Looks like an ABC Family sitcom given feature treatment. Harmless enough.
Metacritic: 35

Shorts (trailer)
Director: Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, Spy Kids, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Fitting, I suppose, that Tarantino and Rodriguez have movies opening the same day. They should, like, show this and Inglourious Basterds as a double feature, with, like, a bunch of fake trailers and stuff. I’m telling you, box office gold!
Metacritic: 53

Weather Girl (trailer)
Director: Blayne Weaver
Personal Interest Factor: 1
A TV weather girl loses it on the air after learning her boyfriend is a cad. That right there is about all it takes for me to want to avoid it.
Metacritic: 47

X Games 3D: The Movie (trailer)
Director: Steve Lawrence
Personal Interest Factor: 1
I don’t even watch the X Games in 2D at home. I don’t know anyone who does. Does anyone? It seems very odd that a movie gets made out of it.
Metacritic: 44

You, the Living
Director: Roy Andersson
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Swedish film that’s gained some notoriety lately as a film that Armond White actually likes. I think it’s supposed to be good, but I’ll be darned if I know what it’s about, even after reading the lengthy synopsis on the Facets website.
Metacritic: not listed

As with all of his films, Inglourious Basterds doesn’t take place in any world we would recognize, but in the head of Quentin Tarantino, where a fevered imagination dreams of countless films, from the highbrow to the lowest of the low. In a sense, he doesn’t create new works but mash-ups, regurgitations of everything he has seen in altered ways. In some cases, such as Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, he took the memes and tropes of crime noir and reinvented them, making him the most audacious American filmmaker in action.

I stand behind no one in my admiration for Pulp Fiction (it’s where I get my nom de blog), but like many, I’ve found his post-PF work–Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, and Death Proof, to be a squandering of his talent. Instead of continuing the exciting work of his first two pictures, he’s become hermetically sealed in his own world of hack cinema, reproducing what he loved as a child, like Miss Havisham preserving her wedding cake. To be sure, each of these pictures had a lot to admire, particularly Kill Bill, but it was akin to Picasso spray-painting a subway car.

I regret to say that Inglourious Basterds is another film in this decline. I did like it overall, and if this were a film made by someone completely unknown I’d say “the kid’s got something,” but nothing exists in a vacuum and there’s no mistaking that it was made by Tarantino. I give it a thumbs up on its amusement park thrills, but a thumbs down when considering what it could have been.

Of course Tarantino can’t make a straight World War II film. Instead he has crafted a spaghetti Western as war film, with a touch of the grindhouse he so loves. We know that right away with the Ennio Morricone music and a title card reading “Once upon a time…” a sure allusion to Sergio Leone. The prologue takes us to the French countryside, which if you squint could double for Nebraska, and a family who happens to be hiding a family of Jews. A contingent of German soldiers arrive, led by Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, a sure Best Supporting Actor nominee), who is known as the “Jew Hunter.” It is here that Tarantino, somewhat ham-fistedly, begins his tale of revenge of Jews against Nazis.

The film is told in chapters, which make abrupt leaps in the story. We go from that French countryside, where one Jew escapes, to the Basterds themselves, a guerilla unit of Jewish-American soldiers, led by Lt. Aldo Raine, played amusingly by Brad Pitt. The character’s name is a reference to 1950’s character actor Aldo Ray, and Tarantino gives Pitt a scar around his neck (Eastwood in Hang ‘em High?) and a Li’l Abner accent. That the character comes from Tennessee, Tarantino’s birthplace, is certainly no accident, as Raine is a foxy fellow who never fails to spin a clever aphorism or get the better of his enemy. Pitt certainly seems to enjoy himself, taking special delight in pronouncing Nazi as if it rhymes with “patsy.”

The Basterds are a gang of vicious thugs, including a psychopathic German and a Red Sox fan with the moniker of “the Bear Jew” (played by Eli Roth, who should stick to making vile horror films–he’s no actor). Roth’s method of execution is to use a baseball bat to the melon of his victim (Robert DeNiro’s Al Capone in The Untouchables?). Pitt has charged his Semitic squad with collecting as many Nazi scalps as they can (Raine is part “injun,” and the Germans know him as “Aldo the Apache”). I’m not Jewish, so I have no cultural response to seeing Jews portrayed as sadistic brutes, but I suppose if Spielberg could do it in Munich Tarantino has a right to.

All too soon we leave the Basterds (the film seems to flag whenever Pitt is away) to meet the girl who escaped in the first scene, her identity changed and running a cinema in occupied Paris. Played by the excellent Melanie Laurent, she’s reminiscent of a Hitchcock blonde–icily sexy. A young German war hero (Daniel Brühl) takes a shine to her, and since he’s the star of a new propaganda film (he’s the German Sgt. York) he arranges for her theater to host the premiere of the film. Revenge immediately pops into her head.

But, as the commercials says, that’s still not all! We then meet some British (including a heavily made up Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill and a what-the-fuck? cameo by Mike Myers) planning to blow up the theater the night of the premiere. They enlist a suave film critic, Martin Fassbender, (Tarantino sucking up to the scribblers who will pass judgment on him?) to join up with the Basterds and a German movie star (Diane Kruger, another Hitchcock blonde) to infiltrate the German high command. So we essentially have Tarantino laying plot upon plot, an extreme case of overkill that bloats the film to two-and-a-half hours.

And it is a long film. There are several times during the film I got the fidgets. Tarantino has a difficult time with all the languages being spoken. There’s a restaurant scene that has German being translated into French with English subtitles. Aside from being a cinematic Rosetta Stone for future linguists, this was stultifyingly inept. When Kruger and Fassbinder meet up in a tavern, a scene that must last half an hour, he has the characters playing twenty questions far longer than anyone can tolerate. Tarantino has never been one to follow the rules set down by Robert McKee–the scene in Pulp Fiction where Travolta and Jackson actually stop the plot to debate whether a foot massage is cheating is famous for this–but in Pulp Fiction it was funny and entertaining, not so in Inglourious Basterds.

But toward the last third of the film I got into it, and enjoyed the ending, which rewrites history and has Pitt delivering a coup de grace that will rank among the great ending scenes in film history. All of the classic Tarantino quirks are on display: foot fetishism, the Mexican standoff (including two characters debating just what exactly constitutes a Mexican standoff), the idiosynchratic score (this will be the first and presumably last World War II film to contain a David Bowie song), brief voice roles by Samuel L. Jackson and Harvey Keitel, and winking at the audience stuff like identifying the Nazi bigwigs with a kind of telestrator. Tarantino, like the blowhard at the bar who knows everything, also makes sure to include as many film references as he can, whether it’s dropping names like G.W. Pabst and Emil Jannings or having his British character refer to “Jerry” like they were right out of some forties war flick.

I’ve been kind of long-winded, so let me sum up by saying Inglorious Basterds gets a solid grade of B from me. It’s a lot of fun, but there are plenty of places you can get up to go to the bathroom. I’m still waiting for Tarantino to fulfill his early promise, but perhaps he’s not interested in doing that, and instead is satisfied in these well-wrought doodles.

The month-long, ultra- dramatic countdown on Quicktime’s website for the teaser of James Cameron’s Avatar has hit zero.  In keeping with FOX’s new strategy of fucking up everything they touch, the trailer has still not gone live nearly one hour later.

The good news is that it IS available via MSN’s website, in French, right here.

Initial thoughts:

The stuff with the space marines looks awesome…like an unofficial, mega-budget sequel to Aliens.  Unfortunately, things rapidly head south once we linger on Eric Bana 2.0 staring at some stupid looking Nightcrawler-wannabe in a tank.  Then, it goes full-Delgo and I lost interest completely.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of August 21-23, 2009.

The one who predicts closest to the total Friday to Sunday gross for the #1 film wins 4 points. Runner-up gains 2 points. Predicting within half a million earns 2 extra points.

Bonus questions:

1) What will be the #2 film of the weekend?

2) What will be the #3 film of the weekend?

Deadline is Wednesday August 19 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

To find out the rules of the game, go to the main thread for AGEBOC 09.

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 30.5

Brian: 26.5
Rob: 24.5
Joe Webb: 22
Jackrabbit Slim: 18
Nick: 14
Filmman: 13
Marco Trevisiol: 9
Jeanine: 9
Juan: 7.5
Rhymerguy: 4

I just got my issue of Twilight Entertainment Weekly, and it’s their fall preview issue, so that can only mean one thing—it’s time to start thinking about what movies will be up for the Oscar. This year there is a new wrinkle that will change the landscape of prognostication: there will be ten Best Picture nominations, doubling the field. Oscar hasn’t done this since 1943, too long ago to be relevant to how it will affect this year’s nominations. As Grace Slick said forty years ago this weekend at Woodstock, “It’s a new dawn, people.”

There is two ways this could go. Sid Ganis, president of the Academy, opined that it might mean that more different kinds of pictures would be nominated: comedies, foreign films, documentaries. Fat chance.  I think it may allow more boffo box office adventure films in (surely a ten-picture field last year would have  included The Dark Knight), but I don’t envision voters creating in their minds a comedy slot, a documentary slot, a foreign film slot. Instead, I’m guessing what we’ll get is more of the same—instead of five films of a certain prestige released late in the year, we’ll get ten.

So on to my annual wild-ass guesses. In past years I came up with ten possibilities for five nominations. I’m going to stick with ten guesses, but of course I’ll probably only hit about five on the head. If I do more than that I’ll be pleased with myself. In alphabetical order:

Avatar (Dec. 18, James Cameron) The Academy has given a cold-shoulder to sci-fi/fantasy, but opening it up to ten may help here. If this film is as visually dazzling as everyone thinks it is, that could be the ticket into the top category. It certainly should earn lots of tech nominations.

An Education (Oct. 9, Lone Scherfig) Lots of good buzz about this one, about a British teenager in the early 1960s who is courted by an older man.  Certainly a lock for a Best Actress nomination for newcomer Carey Mulligan. Could be the critical sleeper of the year.

The Hurt Locker (July, Kathryn Bigelow) This may be wishful thinking on my part, since the film has been disappointing at the box office and will be hurt by a summer release. But damn it’s a good movie.

Invictus (Dec. 11, Clint Eastwood) A no-brainer: Clint Eastwood directs Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. Don’t know if it’s any good, but it certainly will give the Academy a huge boner. The only downfall will be that it’s too earnest (see Cry Freedom).

The Lovely Bones (Dec. 11, Peter Jackson) Got pushed back specifically to be awards bait, this could be dreadful but Jackson is certainly an Academy favorite. Adapted from a novel by Alice Sebold, it’s about a girl who is murdered and then watches over her family from a heaven-like place. If the movie takes the weird sexual turn the novel does, it could be too disquieting for Oscar.

Nine (Nov. 25, Rob Marshall) Ever since Chicago won Best Picture every year another musical comes along and it’s touted as the presumptive Oscar favorite. But more and more it’s looking as if Chicago was an aberration, not the start of a trend. Phantom of the Opera, The Producers, Rent, Dreamgirls, Sweeney Todd—zero Best Picture nominations among them. Nine, based on a Broadway musical that was in turn based on Fellini’s 8 ½, certainly has a good pedigree—there are six Oscar-winners in the cast.  I’m putting it on the list, but wouldn’t be shocked if it underwhelms. And what’s with all the movies with that particular numeral in the title? We’ve got Nine, 9, and District 9.

Shutter Island (Oct. 2, Martin Scorsese) Scorsese’s been on an Oscar roll—he’s had three Best Picture nominations in the seven years. This one is a genre picture, reminiscent of Cape Fear, but you can’t count Marty out.

The Tree of Life (Dec. 25, Terrence Malick) Sean Penn and Brad Pitt bring the star power, and the mystical Malick directs. Don’t know much about it, but it must be remembered that the difficult Thin Red Line got a Best Pic nod (of course The New World was ignored).

Up (May 28, Pete Docter) This is problematic. No way Up is nominated if there are only five nominees, and it may still get overlooked because animated films are ghettoized in their own category.  What could happen is that if it does get nominated, and the Academy sticks with ten nominees, it may be the end of the Best Animated Film category, as it may be deemed unnecessary.

Up in the Air (Dec., Jason Reitman) George Clooney as a businessman who practically lives in the air. Clooney has a knack for picking good projects, and Reitman comes off the big success of Juno. Smells like a hit and Oscar-friendly to me.

There are a lot of films that I’ve left off that are ripe for nomination, including films by Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodovar, and Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu. There’s even one, The Road, which I had on my list last year that got bumped to this year. I guess the thing I’m most hoping for is that many of these films are good.

I’m joining the consensus of critical opinion about Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia by stating that it is half a good movie. The half about Julia Child discovering her talent for cooking and co-writing a cookbook that changed the ways Americans thought about food is well done, with yet another smashing performance by Meryl Streep. The other half, about a plucky office drone who decides to make all 524 recipes in Child’s book, is a warmed over Lifetime film and a drag on the whole enterprise.

Child was the wife of a career diplomat who, as the film begins, takes a post in Paris in 1949. She is looking for something to do (she was always a woman who worked, the couple met while they worked for the O.S.S., which has led to rumors that she was a spy) and finally lands on taking cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu. Despite some sexist reaction, she flourishes, and eventually meets two French women who are trying to write a French cookbook in English (which apparently didn’t exist at the time). With her husband’s support, Child works for years to get the book published.

Julie Powell (Amy Adams) has a thankless job fielding the sometimes heartbreaking problems of those affected by the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center. She wants to be a writer, but has a problem sticking with things. She too has a patient husband (Chris Messina) and eventually comes with the idea to write a blog about making all the recipes in Child’s book.

This sounds like a good concept, but I’m afraid Ephron isn’t a talented enough writer or director to make it work. The sequences involving Powell seem to have been written with a chisel, they are so unsubtle. For example there’s a very poorly written scene with Powell having lunch with her much more successful friends (they’re always on their cell phones!) and then the obligatory scene in which Adams and Messina have a bad fight and he stalks off. I have no idea how true this is, but even if it were it’s too tidy and seems jerry-built.

The Child scenes, though, are much more palatable, but it’s not so much for the writing and directing as it is because it’s just a better story, and it has the incredible talent of Meryl Streep going for it. I feel bad for Amy Adams, who in review after review is being found wanting when it comes to Streep, which is kind of like being the second-best golfer to Tiger Woods. I will say this, though, Adams is definitely in danger of being typecast as a chirpy, perky woman. In some of her scenes she seems to still be playing the fairy princess in Enchanted. Even when she’s having an emotional breakdown she comes across as absurdly adorable. This woman needs to play Lady MacBeth, stat.

Now for Streep. How many more superlatives can be tossed her way? It’s only August, but I have a gut feeling this performance will be the one to beat for Best Actress come Oscar time, as the Academy is about due to award her a third Oscar (I think they wanted to last year for Doubt, but had to give one to Kate Winslet first). Only four other actors have won three or more Oscars (not counting honorary awards): Katharine Hepburn with four, and Walter Brennan, Ingrid Bergman, and Jack Nicholson with three. Streep is an actor who works from the outside in, as she starts with Child’s distinctive fluty voice but moves beyond impersonation into transformation. She even acts tall (Child was six-two). Other actors have done this (Laurence Olivier started by figuring out his character’s walk) but Streep, who has played women from all sorts of places, has made a name as the greatest chameleon in film history.

Credit is also due to Stanley Tucci, who plays Paul Child. Julia Child was not what anyone would consider sexy, but the relationship between Streep and Tucci is a pleasure to watch (and they even get a little frisky in the sheets). There’s also a great moment when Child makes a vulgar simile that brings the house down.

I’d like to add that I saw this in a matinee on a beautiful summer day and the theater was more than half full, which is unusual (I almost always see matinees with only a handful of other patrons), and there wasn’t a face under twenty-five. It’s nice to see adults at the movies, even if they should have gotten a better movie. They all seemed to enjoy it.

American Casino
Director: Leslie Cockburn
Documentary about financial institution hijinks in the subprime lending industry. Spoiler alert: they screwed everything up.
Metacritic: not listed

Bandslam (trailer)
Director: Todd Graff
Looks harmless enough.
Metacritic: 65

The Beaches of Agnes
Director: Agnès Varda (Cleo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, The Gleaners and I)
One of my priorities for the week, it appears to be one of the increasingly rare films that qualify as documentaries but play around with the form and offer something different. Varda, of course, has been making movies for decades, but Cleo from 5 to 7 is the only one I’ve seen (I enjoyed it).
Metacritic: 85

District 9 (trailer)
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Already reviewed at Gone Elsewhere by filmman, who calls it “a distinct and wholly original take on the alien sci-fi genre” before letting the superlatives fly. Myself? Eh, I’ll see it sooner or later. I’ve fallen for fanboy hype one too many times to get too excited now, although I acknowledge that this one seems a cut above the usual.
Metacritic: 81

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (trailer)
Director: Neal Brennan
I’ve never really thought of Jeremy Piven as someone who I’d go out of my way to see in a movie.
Metacritic: 40

Lorna’s Silence (trailer)
Director: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (The Promise, Rosetta, The Son, L’enfant)
New film from Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, about an Albanian woman struggling to survive in Belgium. I saw L’enfant a few years ago, and it was something of an experience. I’d love to see this one, also, but there’s so much playing these days that I find myself not quite able to keep up.
Metacritic: 84

Ponyo (trailer)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki (Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle)
And here we have a real-life, honest-to-goodness dilemma. I would love to see this, but I have little interest in seeing the American-dubbed version, which as far as I know is the only version in theatres. Ebert has an easy way around this: “You dummy! All animated films are dubbed! Little Nemo can’t really speak!” Of course, that’s true, but it doesn’t really get me anywhere. For one thing, it sounds downright Turner-esque – it’s easy to imagine the Ted saying, “You dummy! It was always in color! Chaplin wasn’t really monochromatic!” For another, as Ebert must know, almost all foreign films of a certain age are dubbed – would he want to watch a version of Bicycle Thieves (for example) with Tom Hanks doing the voice of Antonio? I would think such a thing would be a travesty. Why would an animated film be any different? To me, that it is a Japanese film is part of the appeal, not something to be worked around. So I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Metacritic: 89

Spread (trailer)
Director: David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Asylum, Mister Foe)
I’m perfectly good with not seeing another movie about the Den of Sin That Is Los Angeles again. I guess the most surprising thing about this is that it’s not based on a novel by Bret Easton Ellis.
Metacritic: 40

Thirst
Director: Park Chan-Wook (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance)
I hope I have the time to see this, too, as I fear a one-week-and-out scenario is developing. For whatever reason, it seems like only a very small percentage of Korean films get a meaningful U.S. release – it must be the most active film industry in the world to be relegated to such a niche role here. In this case, the film has a decent distributor (Focus), who hasn’t even bothered to put a trailer on Apple. Unfathomable.
Metacritic: 71

The Time Traveler’s Wife (trailer)
Director: Robert Schwentke (Flightplan)
I honestly don’t understand, from watching the trailer, what this movie is even about. Girl meets time traveler, girl grows up, gets married to time traveler, and … is upset because he’s always out time traveling. What? This sounds like a hackneyed setup for a conflict, or is it just me?
Metacritic: 47

Triangle
Director: Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Johnnie To
The idea here is that you have three directors, but only one narrative. So instead of an anthology, as such, you end up with a sort of tag-team arrangement. That sounds interesting, I guess. Anyone have anything to add? I would think that such a project would be something that would get more press, and maybe it did – it’s been over two years since the film premiered at Cannes.
Metacritic: not listed

Throw Down Your Heart
Director: Sascha Paladino
Documentary about banjo player Bela Fleck traveling to Africa.
Metacritic: 65

District 9 is a distinct and wholly original take on the alien sci-fi genre. A relentless action film that moves at full-speed right from the beginning, it’s a deftly-handled, tightly-written and furiously-paced parable about humans and aliens struggling to co-exist.

District 9 Directed by Neill Blomkamp

The idea that one can mix the tenets of a fully-formed parable within the genre framework of a kick-ass action picture is quite staggering to watch unfold. As with Sleep Dealer before it, District 9 (albeit on a much slicker and far better effects budget) proffers remarkably deep ideas about humans and what it means to exert control over another race. The fact that the race in question is from another planet holds absolutely no bearing in our belief in or our ability to surrender to this supremely talented filmmaker, a young man who has created a living society of creatures through amazing special effects for the budget and incredibly seamless direction and camerawork and placed them in a world that we feel exists completely.

It is a testament, also, to the digital camera that will, quite easily, supplant the Genesis and even the Filmstream as the go-to digital cameras for “New Hollywood”. The striking resolution of the images blew away anything in Zodiac or Superman Returns. (Shot on Filmstream and Genesis, respectively.) The film-like images and lack of digital-flash in the movement was a wonder to behold. Unlike other major action films shot on digital, this movie moved and moved and moved and jumped and jiggled and never stood still, but not once did it feel as though we were watching a video image (except when it was supposed to feel that way), and never once did we say ‘hold still’. The format worked for what the movie was and the camera is nothing short of a sensation and mark my words, it will be used for many years to come on many more major movies. It’s nothing less than a complete game-changer.

The movie itself relies more on the framework of its ideas than anything substantially deep in the plot department as it sets up a situation that involves a worker for a major arms dealer/everything-else-controlling-corporation going into the slum to clear all the aliens into a de-facto concentration camp with the thought of making the aliens’ lives better. What everyone knows but fails to acknowledge (except an extremely perceptive talking head) is that this corporation wants to control alien weapons, and they will do genetic tests to achieve just that goal.

When the main character ignorantly infects himself with alien DNA, the corporation finds out and wants to take his tissues for experimentation. The rest of the movie is a race against time to find a way to ‘cure’ the lead character’s transformation. What really solidifies the amazing structure of the movie is its absolutely pitch-perfect and satisfying ending, the first ending in a long time that left it wide-open for a sequel while being insanely satisfying in itself. (A lot like the final episode of The Shield. A lot.)

But what struck me the most, and what no review I’ve read has yet touched on, is just how…completely ‘modern’ the director’s and writers’ handling of the material comes across.

At times, this is as close to watching a first-person shooter as you’re going to find. That is in no way a knock on the film, quite the contrary, it gives such a visceral feel to the film while at the same time triggering something within the viewer that says: “I know this conceit…and I really, really like it.”

The allusions to popular video games are sometimes so strong, one in particular involving a pig and a “Blackwater” Agent, that I wondered why more of the young men in the crowd didn’t yell “BFG!” or “Half-Life” when many of them so obviously knew what had happened. And honestly, I had to take a second and say: “Please, please give this man the Halo movie.”

For me, it was incredible to see this, the first director actually using the video game conceits, sometimes to the letter, for an action film that you may as well, at times, have been playing with a joystick in your hand. The way people died, even…I just…unless you’re an avid gamer, which many in the audience obviously were, I’m not sure you’ll understand. This was the first movie in a long time where the crowd was audibly gasping in fear and anticipation and then cheering at situations on the screen. In so many aspects, this movie represents the ushering in of a new era. Its implications will be felt for many years to come.

We have only just begun to touch the surface of modern filmmaking and like OK Computer in ‘96, District 9 will be seen as the movie that correctly ushered in a new way to treat an old art form.

And these shorts just keep getting better.

Just when I think I’ve found my favorite early works, another comes along to take its rightful place at the top of the food chain.

First, is Burton’s stop-motion masterpiece, VINCENT.

This is a strikingly-shot and handsomely-written film spoken in a verse-style that appears to be an autobiographical script of what one would surmise Mr. Burton grew up wanting to be.

The young man involved describes how he grew up wanting to be Vincent Price and how he has different ideas of things he wants to do compared, I assume, to what the status quo says to do.

Enough from me. Enjoy this, the first Tim Burton film. A true masterpiece of lighting, animation and writing.

“You’re not Vincent Price, you’re Vincent Malloy. You’re not tormented or insane, you’re just a young boy.”

Why this has not become a legendary children’s story, I don’t know.

**Interesting fact: Burton’s girlfriend, an executive at Disney, produced this.

The next I could only find in three parts:

His first major foray into directing, with big names and production values, but still an early film, was FRANKENWEENIE.

Filled again, with stark blacks and whites and harsh shafts of light in a world that, rather than seemingly shot on a backlot, seems to exist perfectly in that Leave It To Beaver world where if you visited the backlot, you would think you were intruding on a neighborhood you shouldn’t be disturbing.

This is, once again, a masterpiece of the psychological underpinning of what it takes to be a child in a world that shows how random terrible things can happen…and what some children think they may be able to do to reverse the awful fates that befall some things.

No doubt, Burton just wondered what it would be like to bring back a dead dog, but he added so much more depth to that simple idea.

Dare I say, I feel, after viewing these two films, Burton has fallen far off his initial brilliance as he made his way through the studio system. What types of movies could this man have made had he stayed independent?

My love of Batman aside, that movie now seems like a large wart of a blemish on his career, a steam-rolled contract hit fostered by those two wunderkind of the Sony system who, it seems, fooled everyone in a town where what you can say and get means more than what you can do. But who am I to question men who make so much money in a very profitable business.

And please don’t get angry, but after these films, Burton strikes me as the dark version of Steven Spielberg, making pitch-prefect representations of the dark side of suburbia, what kids think of when they think about what they wouldn’t want to tell anyone.

All of that aside, this is a great movie, a sign of a brilliant talent, and a very enjoyable watch, with an ending that brings child and adult together in the implication of Burton saying that no one is immune to child’s impulses.

This month at New York City’s Film Forum there is a huge series called “Brit Noir,” a retrospective of British films, mostly from the post-war period, that feature the seamier side of life. There are a total of 44 films being screened, and I would love to see every one of them. In one of my alternative lives, the one where I’m an independent man of means who lives in a fab Greenwich Village apartment and dates intellectual European girls who wear a lot of black and look like Audrey Hepburn, I would see each and every one. Instead I’ll have to settle for renting the films that are available on DVD.

Of the 44 films I’ve only seen two previously. One of them is Night and the City, and the other is The Third Man, which opens the Film Forum series. I hadn’t seen The Third Man in quite a while, though, so I purchased the Criterion Collection’s DVD version and spent an enjoyable Sunday afternoon watching the film and the many extras.

The Third Man, which was named in a poll as the best British film of all time, is described as a “non-auteur film.” This is because the idea germinated from the writer, Graham Greene, who was sent to Vienna by the producer Alexander Korda and asked to come up with a script. Greene had the kernel of an idea about a man who comes to a city to visit a friend, but hears that he is dead. Later, he is shocked when he sees the man alive. Greene researched Vienna, and learned about the ubiquitous black market, specifically the horrific practice of stealing penicillin and then diluting it for sale, which wreaked medical havoc on children and others.

The film was directed by Carol Reed, who has a somewhat unsung film legacy. He is certainly best known for The Third Man among the cognoscenti, but earned an Oscar for the lavish musical Oliver! Now I happen to think Oliver! is a terrific film, but that view is not universal, especially among those who feel that Reed’s work in the forties and fifties is largely forgotten.

The Third Man, like Casablanca, is called a happy accident, as many things fell into place (hence the “non-auteur” tag). Consider the music, which is one of the aspects that it’s best known for. Reed was in a wine bar in Vienna when he heard a man playing a strange instrument that he later learned was a zither. Reed got the bright idea to use it for the film, jettisoning a score played by the London Symphony Orchestra and using nothing but the zither playing of Anton Karas. The main theme would become a smash hit, making Karas a millionaire.

Then there’s the cast. Originally it was conceived for Cary Grant as Holly Martins and Noel Coward as Harry Lime. This would have made the film much more British in tone, as the roles ended up going to Americans: Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. It was Welles who would provide the film with a speech that would give The Third Man its most lasting legacy.

The story concerns Cotten as Martins, a hack writer of pulp Westerns who arrives in post-war Vienna, which is reeling from the bombings and shortages of every kind.  The city is divided into zones controlled by the Allies: Britain, France, Russia and the U.S. Martins has been promised a job by his old school chum, Lime, but shortly after arriving he learns that Lime is dead, and arrives at the cemetery just in time for his friend’s funeral. There he meets a British military policeman, Trevor Howard, who tells Martins that Lime was a ruthless racketeer. Martins doesn’t believe him, and begins to dig into the circumstances of Lime’s death. When he gets conflicting witness reports involving a third man at the scene, he gets very suspicious, and teams up with Lime’s girl, played by Alida Valli, to get to the bottom of things.

The film has the essential form of classic noir, with the amateur sleuth, the mysterious beauty, and several suspicious characters (a Baron who carries around a miniature Pinscher, a pinch-faced doctor, and a jocular Romanian). Greene, who despised much of American culture, scores several points by making his leading man a bumbler. In one of Cotten’s early scenes he is seen walking under a ladder, and Howard describes him as “born to be murdered.” He haplessly tries to seduce Valli, and gets bitten on the hand by a parrot. Sam Spade he’s not.

In contrast, Harry Lime is viciously competent (yes, I am revealing Harry Lime is alive, it’s not a well-kept secret among film buffs). Welles was wooed to play the part, though the American producer David O. Selznick objected, saying Welles was box office poison. He was convinced to play the part by Reed, who told him that his part was small but that he would steal the picture. In many ways Welles involvement in the film was like Marlon Brando’s in Apocalypse Now–he earned a truckload of money for a few days work and exhibited diva-like behavior (he refused to film the climactic scene in Vienna’s sewer, necessitating it be rebuilt in England’s Shepperton Studios). The difference is that Welles elevated The Third Man to classic status while Brando almost sunk Apocalypse Now.

Harry Lime was said to be modeled after Kim Philby, a British double-agent, whom Greene remained friendly with even after Philby was disgraced. Indeed, Lime, with Welles as his voice, has a somewhat British demeanor, and is clearly Martins’ better. The first appearance of Welles, hiding in a doorway, a cat at his feet, with a light exposing his smirking face, is one of the most striking in film history. The conversation that Welles and Cotton share on a Ferris wheel at the end of the picture is one of the most famous. In some respects it is to film what Hamlet’s soliloquy is to drama, posing the moral question that hung in the air following the atrocities of World War II–how much is a human life worth? Welles asks Cotten to look down at the people below and wonders, “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

Of course Cotten is appalled, but doesn’t have the words to express a counter-argument. Welles then improvises the film’s most famous passage: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Because Welles wrote this bit, it is erroneously thought that he wrote all of his part, or even directed his scenes or the entire film, and in some interviews he didn’t deny it (later in life he did). He was good-humored enough to relate that the Swiss pointed out to him that they have never manufactured cuckoo clocks.

Welles did later give Carol Reed all the credit, and a lot of credit is due him. Greene’s script is magnificent, but Reed gave the film a look that has entranced audiences for sixty years. For one thing it is one of the best examples of a film that makes a city a character. They filmed this thing on the streets of Vienna, with all the Old World charm and rubble intact. Reed utilized the narrow passageways brilliantly, using light and shadow to an astonishing effect (credit here also to Robert Krasker, who won an Oscar for cinematography) and used an old noir trick of wetting the streets before shooting, making the cobblestones glisten. No matter how many times I see the film, I can’t help but go slack-jawed at certain moments, such as when the old balloon salesman enters the square, or the way the shadow of a small boy makes him look like a giant, or the breath-taking final chase sequence in the sewer. To make the film even more expressionistic, the scenes are frequently filmed at an askew angle, which annoyed some critics but will remind others of the shots of the villain’s lair in the old Batman TV series.

Then there’s the very ending, a long shot of Valli walking toward the camera out of a cemetery, passing Cotten as he stands to the side, a perfect summation of the film. Ironically it wasn’t the ending Greene wrote–he crafted a happy ending, with Cotten and Valli going off arm in arm. Reed argued against it, and Greene later fessed up that Reed was right.

“The concept is if we’re talking about a creature with supernatural abilities, Moby Dick, then every whaler will have supernatural abilities, too. Something. They can fly. I don’t know, they can bend bullets, whatever.”

- Timur Bekmambetov on his upcoming adaptation of Moby Dick

I’m getting the above tattooed on my chest tomorrow.

Previously: James jokingly correctly predicts that the film will have a supernatural aspects

Okay…I understand this series is only three posts into its run, but this, for me, is the most impressive piece so far.

An early student film from Oliver Stone entitled: Last Year in Viet Nam

Filled with some striking imagery, some impressive camera work and framing and some pretty obvious early hallmarks of an important talent, this is the most fully-formed, mature work I’ve seen in this early series.

The film, about a soldier’s return to New York from Vietnam, is a silent film shot in black and white in an apartment and on the hardscrabble streets of New York. Interspersed with these scenes are color shots of jungle and forest and river and ocean, an obvious allusion, I feel, to the only place the soldier is now comfortable, where his life is real, in the jungles of Vietnam and nature.

When we return to the streets of New York, we switch back to black and white and we see sparse settings with few people and an obvious sense of dread and abandonment of life.

I really liked this film and apparently it was originally twelve minutes long. Will search for the entire piece, but for now, enjoy this early student film of Oliver Stone.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of August 14-16, 2009.

The one who predicts closest to the total Friday to Sunday gross for the #1 film wins 4 points. Runner-up gains 2 points. Predicting within half a million earns 2 extra points.

Bonus questions:

1) What will be the #2 film of the weekend?

2) What will be the #3 film of the weekend?

Deadline is Wednesday August 12 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

To find out the rules of the game, go to the main thread for AGEBOC 09.

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 29.5

Rob: 23.5
Joe Webb: 22
Brian: 20.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 18
Nick: 14
Filmman: 13
Marco Trevisiol: 9
Jeanine: 9
Juan: 7.5
Rhymerguy: 4

Part five of our discussion on the films of the 00’s, this time focusing on 2004.

1) Best of 2004?
2) Worst of 2004?
3) Most underrated?
4) Most underseen?
5) Most overrated?
6) Best performance(s) of the year?
7) Best single scene/sequence of the year?
8) One thing you could change about any single film in 2004 (Example: different cast, different director, different style, different release date, different studio).
9) Most memorable (good or bad) theatergoing experience of the year?
10) Most influential film/performance/style/director?

Obviously feel free to answer only the questions you’re interested in or to write/respond to something else entirely. The lists themselves are just a starting point designed to foster discussion.

Previously: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003

Part of the reason I found (500) Days of Summer to be ninety-five minutes of uninterrupted bliss is that I feel like I could have written it. In fact, I did some years ago write a screenplay that is very similar to it in plot and style, so much so that if my script were ever produced people would think I was influenced by this film. In baseball terms, this movie was right in my wheelhouse.

While I enjoyed the dickens out of it, a smile plastered on my face throughout, I recognize that the film is a delicate high-wire act, with a script that teeters on the overly precious. But it always stays on the wire due mostly to the capable hands of its leading man, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I’ll say it right now: Gordon-Levitt is the best actor under thirty in Hollywood films today.

In (500) Days of Summer (those parentheses are annoying to type) he plays Tom Hansen, a greeting-card designer and alround decent guy. When a new girl, Summer (Zooey Deschanel) starts work at his office he’s instantly smitten, but insecurity keeps him at bay. Finally, after a drunken night of karaoke, they start dating, even though they have a fundamental disagreement about the nature or even existence of love: he thinks it’s essential part of a person’s happiness, and is tied up with destiny, while she thinks it’s all a fantasy. This difference in philosophy will ultimately take its toll.

The film is told in non-linear fashion, with each scene identified by one of the five-hundred days between Tom meeting Summer and his getting over her. This keeps the story from bogging down, and we get the pleasure of watching Gordon-Levitt veer from giddy puppy love to post-breakup despair. The direction by Mark Webb also keeps things interesting, as he utilizes all sorts of tricks to keep it varied, from effective use of split-screen at a party (one side shows Gordon-Levitt’s expectations, the other reality) or when Gordon-Levitt wanders into one of his character’s sketches.

But this film really belongs to the writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. It percolates with terrific lines and forays into Tom’s psyche. I especially liked when he, in full self-pitying mode, goes to an art cinema and sees himself in a French film (complete with mime and balloon) and then a Bergman film, that ends with a funny take on the chess on the beach scene from The Seventh Seal. There are all sorts of small details that make the film enjoyable, such as Tom taking counsel from his much younger sister.

That is not to say that there aren’t a few problems with the film. At times it does edge into gooey preciousness, such as when Tom and Summer play house in an Ikea. Tom’s best buddies are kind of stock characters, even if they do have a lot of funny lines, while Summer isn’t a completely rounded character. I get the feeling (especially from an opening title card) that she’s based on someone who broke the heart of one of the writers, so perhaps that’s why she seems alternately charming and cold. She’s supposed to be quirky (Ringo’s her favorite Beatle) but I found the characterization wanting. No fault of Deschanel, though, who is luminous.

But those are small potatoes in what is otherwise a pleasure. The film bears a huge debt to a couple of other films, most notably The Graduate, which is spoken (Tom’s over-romantic nature is chalked up to a misreading of the film as a child, and then when Summer sees it she breaks into sobs and breaks up with Tom shortly thereafter). There’s even a key moment set to a Simon and Garfunkel tune. The unspoken is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, another biography of a relationship that doesn’t work told in non-linear form. Instead of romanticizing New York, this film does the same for Los Angeles, as Tom loves its architecture. The film is set in L.A. but has only one scene which is set in a car, and Tom is even able to walk to work. I wouldn’t have thought that possible.

After a light slate last week, the movies open with a vengeance again this week.

Adam (trailer)
Director: Max Meyer
The trailer for this is reasonably engaging, yet there’s something that is ever-so-subtly off-putting about it. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Perhaps it has something to do with the title, which is horrible. Besides being hopelessly generic, it invites us to look at the movie solely in terms of Adam’s character, which then implies that the other characters – and especially the woman played by Rose Byrne – are afterthoughts or otherwise not priorities. And that, in turn, makes the movie seem like it’s exploiting the main character’s illness (if we call Asberger’s an illness) for the sake of making something “sweet.” Or, I dunno, maybe I’m reading too much into it. Still a bad title, though.
Metacritic: 58

The Answer Man (trailer)
Director: John Hindman
I guess every character actor of a certain age does a movie like this (i.e, an indie about a lonely middle-age to elderly man who is rejuvenated by the attention of a younger woman) sooner or later. Jeff Daniels is a little younger than most actors when they play this role, but it is what it is. Speaking of bad titles, this one apparently was called Arlen Faber when it premiered at Sundance. Yikes.
Metacritic: 44

Brighton Rock
Director: John Boulting
Rialto Pictures’ latest release, of a 1947 film based on a novel by Graham Greene. I had never heard of the movie before this week, but I love this kind of stuff.
Metacritic: not listed

The Cove (trailer)
Director: Louie Psihoyos
I guess this is the must-see of the week, having gathered near-unanimous positive notices to this point. It’s a “pulse-pounding eco-thriller” about Japanese harvesting of dolphins.
Metacritic: 82

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (trailer)
Director: Stephen Sommers (The Jungle Book, The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, Van Helsing)
Well, Van Helsing is on the short list for worst movie of the decade, at least out of stuff I’ve seen, so there’s that. Plus, unlike Transformers, I never played with G.I. Joe toys as a kid (or watched the show). So I don’t even have any nostalgic curiosity going on here.
Metacritic: 32

Irene in Time (trailer)
Director: Henry Jaglom (Babyfever, Last Summer in the Hamptons, Festival in Cannes, Hollywood Dreams)
Jaglom, I gather, is a sort of cult figure, although I can’t say I’ve ever heard of any of his movies. I’m operating out of ignorance here, but he seems like more obscure version of Alan Rudolph, or perhaps the cinema world’s equivalent to Lyndon LaRouche. I dunno.
Metacritic: not listed

Julie & Julia (trailer)
Director: Nora Ephron (Sleeples in Seattle, Michael, You’ve Got Mail, Bewitched)
It occurs to me now that I’ve never in my life seen a movie that Nora Ephron directed, which, when you think about it, might be the only thing she has in common with Satyajit Ray. At any rate, this has the best odds to break that streak since probably Michael, although I wouldn’t say that the odds are exactly good.
Metacritic: 65

Paper Heart (trailer)
Director: Nicholas Jasenovec
Sorta-documentary about Charlyne Yi’s ruminations on the nature of love. If Jeanine really wants to see it, I might could be persuaded to tag along (or might not), but I’m not likely to see it otherwise. It has the feel of something that would make a great short but semi-tedious feature.
Metacritic: 54

A Perfect Getaway (trailer)
Director: David Twohy (The Arrival, Pitch Black, Below, The Chronicles of Riddick)
It occurs to me now that I’ve never in my life seen a movie that David Twohy directed, which, when you think about it, might be the only thing he has in common with Erich von Stroheim. At any rate, this has the best odds to break that streak since probably Pitch Black, although I wouldn’t say that the odds are exactly good.
Metacritic: 63

Revanche (trailer at official site)
Director: Götz Spielmann
Austrian film that is the fourth of the five 2008 Foreign Film Oscar nominees to open stateside. I don’t rightly know anything about it, but it seems worth checking out.
Metacritic: 83

Rumba
Director: Dominique Abel
Never seen a trailer, and I’ve only lightly skimmed the synopsis, but the second still on this site is enough to scare me away from this movie. I know this is Wellsian in the extreme, but I simply have no desire to see a movie in which those two people dance.
Metacritic: not listed

…by ranking him below Jay Leno’s new series in search results for “The Tonight Show”.

The indignity of it all.

Baby Mama is a comedy about Kate (Tina Fey), a single, successful late-30s businesswoman who suddenly has a desire to have a child but finds that her body seems incapable of having one. She turns to surrogacy and frictions arise with the working-class surrogate mother Angie (Amy Poehler) whose personality and attitude towards pregnancy are at complete odds with Kate’s high-maintenance views. When Angie moves in with her after leaving her cheating husband the friction inevitably increases.

In its opening third the film seemed to be about how two characters from vastly different socio-economic backgrounds would learn to adjust and like each other in a challenging situation. While it appeared to be heading down a predictable path I was quite fine with that as it was enjoyable enough and had a pretty good comic sensibility.

But alas, from the moment we learn that Angie is in fact faking the pregnancy that the film falls apart. While still having its reasonable share of funny moments, the plot (even by mainstream Hollywood standards) becomes increasingly contrived. The finale where numerous idiotic events occur to create a happy ending – which would’ve been much easier to do if they’d stayed with the plot of the opening third – is mind-numbingly idiotic.

(Warning: spoilers follow)

To use one example of a problematic plot turn, at a fairly late stage in the film Kate learns that the baby Angie is carrying (who is pregnant through her husband) isn’t hers. You would presume this piece of deceit would be devastating for her and would lead to much understandable bitterness and anger towards Angie. Instead, after some brief remorse from Angie at a court hearing, that is all forgotten and Kate is right by Angie’s side as she’s about to have her baby as if she’s her best friend!

It’s a shame that these plot weaknesses hurt the film because it has a reasonable share of funny moments, helped by writer/director Michael McCullers who displays a decent sense of comic timing. As for the cast, while Fey and Poehler weren’t really successful at creating fully-fledged three-dimensional characterisations (especially Poehler) their comedic skills ensured they were enjoyable to watch. Steve Martin is mildly funny in a minor role as Kate’s boss but the real standout support performance was Sigourney Weaver who, as the somewhat eccentric head of the surrogate institute, is very amusing and avoids the obvious trap of overplaying her role. Greg Kinnear was somewhat wasted as Kate’s love interest and Maura Tierney continues to be stuck with thankless support roles that she was doing back in the 1990s.

Despite its good qualities this film wasn’t a particularly satisfying experience. Even in a conventional comedy like this some level of intellectual rigour needs to exist for it to work successfully.

(Note: image from http://seantm.blogspot.com/)

As blatant a rip-off as I’ve ever seen:

(Tip of the hat to Brad aka ‘Juan’ for pointing it out)

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of August 7-9, 2009.

The one who predicts closest to the total Friday to Sunday gross for the #1 film wins 4 points. Runner-up gains 2 points. Predicting within half a million earns 2 extra points.

Bonus questions:

1) Will Julie & Julia earn over or under 20 million?

2) Will A Perfect Getaway earn over or under 6 million?

Deadline is Wednesday August 5 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

To find out the rules of the game, go to the main thread for AGEBOC 09.

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 27.5

Rob: 23.5
Brian: 20
Jackrabbit Slim: 18
Joe Webb: 18
Nick: 14
Filmman: 12
Marco Trevisiol: 8.5
Jeanine: 8
Juan: 7.5
Rhymerguy: 4

Volume 2 of this series now focuses on two of Scorsese’s early short films.

The first is:

What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

This was a Scorsese short film that seemed to fall between his first film, Vesuvius VI (which I couldn’t find, and which is apparently, amazingly, a Roman Epic inspired by 77 Sunset Strip. Man…I want to see that) and It’s Not Just You, Murray!, about an aging mobster, which seems to be available on an anthology entitled Early Works.

In this short, you can find the energy and style that would color his later films. There are some really-well-done camera shots, like at 3:18, an awesome dolly around an illuminated face.

The second short, made in 1967, arguably his most popular and well-known, is the short entitled The Big Shave or Viet-’67.

This is apparently an allegory on the Vietnam war how Scorsese saw it at the time. I was a bit trepadatious about how much praise I’ve heard about this short, but it’s surprisingly well-made and really rather affecting, given the idea of what Scorsese was obviously going for, given the alternate title.

It’s a very simple short, and pretty powerful. With an economy of place and some great music, we watch a man enter the bathroom and…shave. What happens at the end is where it gets pretty powerful and intense.

One thing that sticks out to me, pretty greatly, is how well-edited the two shorts happen to be. Operating at a pretty high level for being so early.

Enjoy. Let me know what you think…