Albert Nobbs (trailer)
Director: Rodrigo Garcia (Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Nine Lives, Passengers, Mother and Child)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Finally this is out, so now I don’t have to see the trailer again. I’ve seen it before almost every movie I’ve seen for months, and I can barely describe the feeling of deflation I experience when I see the LD/Roadside logo flash up on the screen and know it’s about to play. Nonetheless, it’s bittersweet, because I can already tell that the token indie trailer slot is going to be taken by Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which looks pathetically vapid. So some Arabic sheik thinks it will be a “miracle for his people” if he can open a new vacation resort, eh? What’s the Arabic word for “Versailles”?
Metacritic: 57

The Grey (trailer)
Director: Joe Carnahan (Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, Narc, Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
I’m a little surprised to notice that I’ve never seen one of Carnahan’s movies, but I have to imagine I’ll see this. Even if it’s shitty I’ll probably enjoy it somewhat, because I can watch just about anything that takes place in the snow. It’s a comfort thing for me, I guess. That’s especially true given our ridiculously mild winter so far here in Chicago; I’m just about willing to get stranded in the Arctic right now myself.
Metacritic: 67

Man on a Ledge (trailer)
Director: Asger Leth
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Trailer is pretty slick but the reviews are bad enough to scare me off. Reminds me of The Negotiator, back in the 1990s.
Metacritic: 41

Miss Bala
Director: Gerardo Naranjo (Drama/Mex, I’m Gonna Explode)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Film about a beauty pageant contestant who is recruited as a drug mule. It’s Mexico’s submission for the Academy Awards, although it missed out on a nomination despite strong critical acclaim.
Metacritic: 81

A Separation (trailer)
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Personal Interest Factor: 9
Iranian film which did get an Oscar nomination, and one of the best-reviewed movies of the year, ranking third on Indiewire’s Critics Survey.
Metacritic: 95

Tomboy (trailer)
Director: Céline Sciamma (Water Lilies)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
French movie about, well, a tomboy. Actually, that’s not quite precise; it’s about a little girl who is mistaken for a boy and rolls with it. Kind of like Boys Don’t Cry for kids, I guess, though hopefully not so grim.
Metacritic: 74

We Need to Talk About Kevin (trailer)
Director: Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Caller)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Another in the Indiewire top 20, so I should probably see it, but my tolerance for evil-child movies is extremely low. I still haven’t gotten over Joshua, one of my least favorite movies of the 2000s. Doesn’t help that it’s only playing at River East.
Metacritic: 71

Also this week:
Amador – Spanish film about immigrants in Madrid
One for the Money (trailer) – new Katherine Heigl movie

At first blush, it would seem that studios trumped indies, or at least edgy indies. The biggest acting snubs, based on expectations (which often just feed on each in an ouroboros) were for Michael Fassbender for Shame, Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Albert Brooks for Drive. All totaled, those three films got only one nomination (Drive, for Sound Editing). But, on the other hand, some categories were fragrantly fresh. In Best Actor, there were the expected heavyweights, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but instead of Fassbender, and also instead of Leonardo DiCaprio (for J. Edgar), who had picked up a SAG and Golden Globe nomination, Demian Bichir, from the little-seen A Better Life, scored a nod. Another, milder surprise was that Gary Oldman, a longtime standout performer, got a nomination for his skillful underplaying in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. For those who always say that these things are predictable and boring, I submit this category in disagreement.

There were plenty of nonsurprises, though, especially in the Actress categories. Meryl Streep extended her record of acting nominations to 17. She has sat through more losses, though, than any other performer. Everyone keeps waiting for her to win her third Oscar–she might do it this year (though I think not).

In the Best Picture category, the rules changed so that anywhere from five to 10 films could get nominated. The requirement was that a film had to get five percent of the first place votes. Nine films made the cut. Most had predicted seven or eight, so I think the party crashers are The Tree of Life, which was a big favorite on critics list but not to the general public (I loved it, but admittedly there are a lot of WTF? moments), and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which didn’t get a sniff from the Globes or the guilds, and has a below 50 rating on Metacritic. That it made it in may be a testimony to the power of Scott Rudin, or perhaps to its 9/11 subject matter (though this did not help United 93 or World Trade Center).

Extremely Loud is a bit of a throwback–it veers toward the sentimental, but not to the mawkish (at least I thought so). Many of the films in the nonette have a nostalgic bent. The Artist and Hugo are both tributes to silent films, while War Horse is consciously modeled on epics from the ’40s and ’50s. Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s return to this category, is about the notion that somehow the past is better than the present, while The Help deals with a difficult time period in a nonthreatening, Oprah Book Club kind of way. The only film from this group that feels modern to me is Moneyball, but even that has some tried and true sports cliches.

Some other ruminations on the nominations: As far as music goes, John Williams received his 46th and 47th (!) nominations, scoring twice in Best Original Score. The Best Song category is a joke–a list of eligible songs are listened to by the branch, who then score them on a 1-to-10 rating. Any song that rates 8.5 are higher can be nominated, but if none of them do the top two are nominated by default. It’s entirely possible that the two songs, one from The Muppets and the other from Rio, did not score higher than 8.5. This category should be ashbinned.

Brad Pitt could end up with three nominations. He’s nominated for acting and producing for Moneyball, and, pending a decision by the Academy, could be one of the producers for The Tree of Life (only three producers can receive nominations for Best Picture from any one film). Pitt could be only the third person to get two nominations in Best Picture in the same year (following Francis Coppola and Scott Rudin).

From now until Oscar night I will focus on the top six categories and my thoughts and predictions, but until then I can say what winner will earn the biggest whoop of delight from me–Mark Bridges, nominated for Best Costumes for The Artist, was a classmate of mine in the theater department at SUNY-Stony Brook with me. We appeared in a few plays together, including Romeo and Juliet (he was Mercutio, I was Benvolio). He was a good actor, but obviously a better costume designer. Go Mark!

BEST PICTURE

The Artist
The Descendants
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
War Horse

I’m going to go with eight nominations, although it could be anywhere from five to ten. If it’s five, The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Hugo and Midnight in Paris figure to be in. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was aided immensely by David Fincher being nominated for Best Director by the DGA. To be nominated, a film must receive five percent of the first place votes cast. Moneyball I have in by a thread.

If the category goes to ten, add The Tree of Life, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or Bridesmaids.
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BEST DIRECTOR


Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Tate Taylor, The Help

It would be boring to just parrot the DGA nominees, so I’ll substitute Taylor for Fincher. It will be interesting to see if Terence Malick gets any love for The Tree of Life, and if he can get nominated here without the film being nominated for Best Picture, which hasn’t happened yet since the Best Picture category expanded from five nominees.

BEST ACTOR


George Clooney, The Descendants
Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Michael Fassbender, Shame
Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Clooney, Dujardin, and Pitt are locks. DiCaprio doesn’t belong here, but seems to have enough star power and enough good will to get by. The remaining spot should go to a man named Michael–Fassbender or Shannon, for Take Shelter. Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is also a possibility, but slight.

BEST ACTRESS

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn


The consensus is, and I agree, that there are six women chasing five spots. The last spot will either go to Swinton, or to Rooney Mara for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. If anyone else gets in it will be a surprise.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Albert Brooks, Drive
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners

The most wide open category, there are another half-dozen or so actors who could gain a spot here, most likely Max von Sydow for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants


As with Actress, this category is six women chasing five spots, but only Bejo, Chastain, and Spencer are locks. Janet McTeer, for Albert Nobbs, is the other possibility. McCarthy received a SAG nomination but not a Golden Globe, while the opposite was true for Woodley. McTeer received both, which means I should have her here, but for some reason I don’t. Just a hunch.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

The Artist
Bridesmaids
Margin Call
Midnight in Paris
Win Win

Lots of room for other films here, including A Separation, 50/50, Beginners, Take Shelter, Tree of Life or Melancholia. The screenwriters branch is frequently the most adventurous.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
Moneyball
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy


If The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has a big day it could be here, too, but I’ll go with the more complex Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to get the fifth spot.


BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Footnote, Israel
In Darkness, Poland
Monsieur Lazhar, Canada
Pina, Germany
A Separation, Iran

The Academy makes this easier, by winnowing it down to nine semifinalists. Don’t know much about these films. Poland’s is about the Holocaust, so that should be in. Pina has the distinct possibility of being nominated for both Best Foreign Language and Best Documentary, which has never happened before.

BEST ANIMATED FILM

The Adventures of Tintin
Cars 2
Puss ‘n Boots
Rango
Rio

Ludicrously, the Academy will allow for five nominees in this category, because of the number of releases. Pixar, even in an off year, may get in, and though Rio kind of came and went it did get decent box office. But a relatively unknown film could knock one of them off and sneak in here.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Bill Cunningham New York
Buck
Paradise Lost 3
Pina
Project Nim

This is a real crap shoot. I could be wrong on all five, though they are taken from a semifinalist list of 15.

Find out Tuesday morning how I did!

The ads say this is not a 9/11 movie, but it sures seems like it to me. Tom Hanks plays the world’s greatest dad (really, he never gets mad?), a jeweler who enjoys sending his son on “reconnaissance missions” that require maps and clues. They are currently working on finding New York’s missing sixth borough (you would think Hanks wouldn’t lead his kid so astray on geography) when “the worst day” happens, and Hanks is killed in the Towers.

The boy, Oskar, played by Thomas Horn, spends a moody year before he can even go in his father’s closet, which is untouched. He finds a key, and, seeking to keep a connection to his father that is waning, endeavors to find what that key unlocks. A child who was tested for Asperger’s, Horn notes that the name “Black” is written on the outside of the envelope that contains the key. He sets about contacting every person named Black in the five boroughs of New York. It’s a good thing I wasn’t around, because I would have been the asshole that said, “What if they live in Jersey?”

Soon Horn is joined on his expedition by a mysterious lodger in his grandmother’s apartment, an old man (Max von Sydow), who does not speak, but has the words “Yes” and “No” tattooed on the palms of his hand, which is a nifty convenience. Von Sydow is such a good actor that at times I forgot he was mute, as you can read his thoughts in his expressions. Though he is a very fine performer, the character seems to exist only to get Horn over his fear of public transportation and bridges.

As I sit here a few hours later, it’s easy for me to pick apart this movie. For one, what American couple would name their kid Oskar? (this made me think of the main character with the same name in The Tin Drum, which is not who I should have been thinking of). The people Horn meets, most of them kind, seem like a Benetton ad (how many Chinese people people would have the surname Black?) But while I was watching it I was affected, mostly because director Stephen Daldry has managed to convince me that I was inside Oskar’s head, and how overstimulated he could be by events swirling around him.

But do I want to spend two hours in the company of a kid like this? Horn, for his part, does a fine job (I was interested to read he was discovered after winning $30,000 on the Jeopardy kids tournament) but the character is so full of tics (such as carrying a tambourine to calm him down) that it made me edgy. He is also not warm and cuddly–he is extremely cruel to his mother (Sandra Bullock, in one of the better performances I’ve seen her give). The film was based on novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, and perhaps being inside the head of a mildly autistic boy works better on the page–I haven’t read the book, but I did read The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time, which is another book narrated by an autistic person. When you actually have to experience the mania of this child you feel like you’re trapped in a Chuck-E Cheese on a Saturday afternoon.

Daldry is a great craftsman, but as with The Reader, he isn’t a particularly great director when it comes to sympathetic characters. He and his editor, Claire Simpson, have made a technically brilliant film. The opening shots of silhouetted figures falling is unnervingly gripping. However, the score by Alexandre Desplat is incessant and overbearing.

The events of 9/11 will continue to be the stuff of movies, I suppose. I think this film does not make the mistake of treating that event as an excuse for a child to find himself, which would be insulting. I had feared a mawkish film, which we do not get. But there is a kind of near-magic realism that gives that day a fairy-tale quality, which could be offensive to some, but could also be an approach that makes it easier for others to cope. Again, this is all problematic.

My grade for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: B.

The Flowers of War (trailer)
Director: Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, Curse of the Golden Flower, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Indifferent reviews have greeted Zhang’s latest, starring Christian Bale in a movie about the rape of Nanking. I had no idea this film had already been released until I saw it was opening here this week, although I managed to see the trailer before Sherlock Holmes yesterday. Apparently it’s been hugely successful in China.
Metacritic: 46

Haywire (trailer)
Director: Steven Soderbergh (Che, The Girlfriend Experience, The Informant!, Contagion)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
By my count (and counting Che as one movie), this is the seventh Soderbergh movie released since I started writing Openings almost 6 years ago. I’m not going to research it too extensively, but I assume that moves him into the lead over Werner Herzog and Woody Allen, who both have six. Can’t think of any other serious contenders. Soderbergh actually has eight if we count Che as two movies, and nine if I count And Everything Is Going Fine, his Spalding Gray documentary that I think played a few shows here last year but didn’t get a real week-long run. Anyway, I’m interested to see if Haywire is any good.
Metacritic: 68

Norwegian Wood (trailer)
Director: Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya, Cyclo, The Vertical Ray of the Sun)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Documentary about the Scandanavian lumber indust … wait, no, it’s a Japanese film about Tokyo students in the 1960s. My mistake. I thought I remembered this being a big critical hit that I’d have to see but the Metacritic score tells me that’s not quite right. Now I wonder if I just don’t remember hearing about it because Jonny Greenwood did the score.
Metacritic: 59

Pina (trailer)
Director: Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club, The Million Dollar Hotel, Land of Plenty, Don’t Come Knocking)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Documentary about choreographer Pina Bausch. This is Wenders’s highest profile release since Buena Vista Social Club, which was over a decade ago already. Problem is, it’s showing in 3D, and I don’t think I want to subject myself to that again. I’ve been meaning to watch Wings of Desire again for months; maybe I’ll just do that instead.
Metacritic: 82

Red Tails (trailer)
Director: Anthony Hemingway
Personal Interest Factor: 5
It’s probably just my imagination, but it seems like there’s a real WTF moment with audiences when the Lucasfilm logo shows in front of this trailer, followed by a WWII dogfight movie. Lucas used to produce non-Star Wars stuff from time to time, but these days Lucasfilm is almost 100% associated with Star Wars and, to a lesser extent, Indiana Jones. It’s been since 1994 that Radioland Murders came out, the last Lucas production that wasn’t part of either of those two franchises.
Metacritic: 43

Also this week:
King of Devil’s Island (trailer) – an actual Norwegian movie
My Reincarnation (trailer) – doc about a Tibetan Buddhist and his Italian son
Underworld: Awakening (trailer) – now in 3D!
The Wages of Fear – a new reissue, great film

The plot concerns French police detective Brunel  -in England on an exchange program – investigating the brutal assault of misanthropic-minded novelist John Morlar (Richard Burton), which almost killed him. As Brunel investigates, he discovers Morlar’s disturbing past and his belief that through psychic telekinesis, he has caused the deaths of family and major disasters. The more Brunel investigates, the more credible Morlar’s claims are.

Many of the elements are there for a quality horror film – good cast, script that doesn’t aim for gutter-level cheap thrills – but for all the hard work on display no fear and tension really comes through.

The plot does sound rather absurd as a concept but that seems hardly unusual for horror films. The premise for ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ seemed even more nonsensical but that worked terrifically well. Why doesn’t this?

One of the film’s main problems is how it frames Morlar. For TMD to work it needs to convince us of the concept of this seemingly ordinary man having the power to cause the destruction of humanity, but it fails. This is because of the way Morlar is framed in the film – he’s entirely viewed through the perception of people recounting him through flashback (mainly his psychiatrist played by Lee Remick).  This makes him too abstract a concept as a personality so we can’t really get inside his head and understand his motivations to make him really compelling.

This also leads to problems when the film tries to establish how misanthropic Morlar’s worldview is. We see glimpses of it here and there – particularly in a courtroom scene during Morlar’s earlier career as a lawyer (well-acted by Burton) but there’s no real context to it so instead of feeling like a considered worldview which makes his potential for destruction even more terrifying, it adds up to very little.

Surprisingly, for all the mayhem Morlar causes the most interesting character is that of his psychiatrist Zonfeld. Well played by the always appealing Remick, her character is more interesting because whereas Morlar is set out early on and his behaviour is fairly predictable, Zonfeld and her relationship is more of a mystery.  The increasing revelations about her help maintain the interest.

For most of the film, TMD does a good job of creating the right atmosphere to make Morlar’s abilities somewhat believable. But it seems to lose its nerve in the latter stages when it goes into specifics in talking about psychics and telekinesis, concepts that were already obvious to the audience. We even have a scene where Brunel watches grainy old footage demonstrating people with the ability to move objects? What’s the point of this? Surely he would’ve known about the concepts already? It seems to be there because the filmmakers lose their nerve and felt they needed to convince the audience some more.

The flashbacks to Morlar’s childhood and previous adult life are a mixed bag. Some (like the killing of his parents) come across as more silly then scary. Others like the destruction of his school in a fire, are more carefully developed to justify Morlar’s source of anger (you’ll rarely find a teacher as loathsome as the one here) so therefore more interesting

The greatest strength of the film is the performances. Despite his star billing as Morlar, Burton’s role actually isn’t that substantial but he does convey an effective amount of menace with his limited character. The real star of the film is Lilo Ventura who is excellent as  Brunel and creates a three-dimensional  persona of what is a fairly conventionally-written character. Indeed one wishes there were more films based around the adventures of his detective character. The cast is full of quality British acting talent, right down to Jeremy Brett (later famous as Sherlock Holmes on TV) who is excellent ina brief scene.

The script by John Briely (who believe it or not, would write ‘Gandhi’ just a few years later) strives for intellectual significance far above the conventional horror film but isn’t capable of breaking the conventions of the genre, resulting in a conventional climax reliant on special effects and destruction for its impact. Jack Gold’s direction is solid but rather dour.

The film is professionally done all-round and is watchable throughout. But it fails to frighten and excite so therefore it must be considered a failure. If nothing else, it does make one appreciate when a truly frightening and scary horror film does come along – they’re harder to do than they look.

Rating: C+

Let’s just grant that I’m not the kind of person that would be nostalgic for Margaret Thatcher. Therefore, I will try to limit my remarks to this film, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, to its cinematic value only. My first response is: why?

The script is written in a familiar biographic form–the remembrances of an old person. Thatcher, played by Meryl Streep, is first seen as if she were some typical woman buying milk at the corner store. Then she is seen having breakfast with her husband, Jim Broadbent. But everything is not as it seems, as indicated by the brief glimpse of a guard with a machine gun in the hallway. Thatcher is indeed a baroness, who slipped out to buy milk against the wishes of her staff, and her husband is dead. In her encroaching dementia, though, he stays with her.

Throughout the two or so days we spend with the elder Thatcher, her life flashes before her. Daughter of a grocer, who was also a mayor, she goes to Oxford, enters the man’s world of politics, and after losing at least one election, gets elected to Parliament in 1959. She marries Dennis Thatcher, and decides to run for party leader. She becomes Prime Minister, and with her conservative, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy, slashes the budget, wages war on Argentina, enrages unions, and finally gets so bossy that she’s pushed out.

As I walked out of the theater, I wondered, what was the point of this film? It seems to have no particular point of view. It does seem to try to bend over backwards to show us she was a loving wife and mother, but even Hitler had a girlfriend–that she seemed to have a normal home life doesn’t excuse anything. Later Lloyd, along with screenwriter Abi Morgan, show us how she was not beloved by all of her people, but aside from her belief that people with problems should fix it themselves, and not look to the government, there’s little of her political philosophy on hand. There’s a bit of her struggle as a woman in man’s world, by showing her in a sea of men in suits, the “lady member’s room” in the House of Commons basically a closet with an ironing board, but Thatcher wasn’t exactly Germaine Greer. I remember people, perhaps her critics, saying she was successful as a woman in politics because she thought just like a man.

So the film shows us Thatcher in her dotage, hallucinating her dead husband, who was a bit of a wag (at one point, he spoils the mystery she’s reading) and shows us the highlights of her life. One critic, I’m sorry that I can’t remember who, compared the film to Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start the Fire”–”war in the Falklands!” There’s the obligatory scene showing her hotel room being bombed by the IRA, but there’s nothing in the script that tells us how she felt about that or what she thought of the Irish situation. It’s just a slide show.

As for Meryl Streep, she’s uncanny in how she can inhabit a character. She’s got the plummy British nuance of her voice down. The makeup focuses on her teeth, which is a bit distracting, but I think that’s because we know what Streep looks like, and therefore know exactly what is real and what is not. If an unknown actress had played the part the makeup wouldn’t have been an issue. I think I detected some leftover voice mannerisms from Streep’s portrayal of Julia Child, though.

The Iron Lady is competently made and acted, but I’m at a loss as to what it was supposed to make me think and feel. Sympathy? Admiration? Don’t judge too hastily? I don’t know. It certainly didn’t change my mind about Thatcher–I doubt it will for anyone, supporter and critic alike.

My grade for The Iron Lady: C-.

Contraband (trailer)
Director: Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík, The Sea, Mýrin, Inhale)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Somewhat generic-looking smuggling movie with Mark Wahlberg, personality-free Kate Beckinsale, and Giovanni Ribisi doing his best to become a supporting-actor equivalent to Nicolas Cage. Kormákur surely must be the only Icelandic director to make an American studio film in recent times.
Metacritic: 53

The Iron Lady (trailer)
Director: Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
I don’t know what to make of this except that the trailer is damn awful, full of very superficial feminist sloganeering (“I have done battle every day!”) on behalf of a woman who detested feminism and what looks like the most obnoxious Meryl Streep performance it is possible to imagine (complete with a stupid-looking dental prosthetic).
Metacritic: 54

Also this week:
Beauty and the Beast – 3D reissue
Joyful Noise (trailer) – Queen Latifah/Dolly Parton gospel choir movie
Man on a Mission (trailer) – doc about a wealthy space tourist
Newlyweds (trailer) – new Edward Burns movie

Set in 1973, during the Cold War, the film concerns the top brass of British Intelligence, known as “the circus.” The head of the organization, known only as “Control” (John Hurt), sends an agent to Hungary on a tip that information regarding a highly-placed Soviet double agent, or mole, is available. That mission goes disastrously awry, and Hurt is forced into retirement, along with one of his top agents, George Smiley (Gary Oldman). But when evidence of the mole reaches the ministry, Oldman is brought out of retirement to track him down. It is one of four men, each given a code name of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, or Poor Man (Smiley, once considered one of the suspects, was labeled “Spy.”)

So what we have is not a whodunit, but a whoisit, with the same level of sophistication of the best Agatha Christie mystery. We are led down certain alleys–in fact, the clues point to one particular man so blatantly at first I knew it couldn’t be him–but the result was a surprise to me, so if you haven’t read the book or seen the miniseries, don’t let anyone dare spoil it for you.

But, my goodness, this film is dense. At least 10 percent of it went by me in a blur. I’ll take the blame for much of that, but there are some things I’m left wondering about. I’ll bring up a few, without spoilers: one character, after changing identities, is teaching school (he has a favorite student who looks like a young Roger Ebert). How did Oldman track him down? Also, at a momentous Christmas party, Oldman sees two people in a romantic embrace. Who were they? I have my suspicions, but I don’t believe this was revealed.

Alfredson’s direction is crisp and efficient (along with his editor, Dino Jonsäter), while the script by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O’Connor works wonders with what must have been an insane assignment. The cast is full of familiar British actors: Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds and Colin Firth are three of the suspected moles, while Benedict Cumberbatch (what a great British name) and Tom Hardy are both terrific as part of team Oldman. I was surprised not to see Michael Fassbender, and then I read he was going to be in it but I had to drop out because of a conflict, and was replaced by Hardy. As for Oldman, it’s hard to believe this is the same actor who became well known for playing Sid Vicious. He’s so good as a wizened veteran of the intelligence wars that I completely forgot who I was watching. He has several great scenes–I think the best is when he tells about his one meeting with “Karla,” the Russian master spy. It seems that Karla absconded with Oldman’s lighter, which of course will be seen before the film is over.

I highly recommend Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but I also recommend seeing it a second time. I will certainly do so, when it’s on DVD, so I can watch with subtitles and a pause and rewind button.

My grade for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: A-.

In the Land of Blood and Honey (trailer)
Director: Angelina Jolie
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I’ll probably see this, but the mediocre reviews have made it a low priority. Jolie directs a movie about the Bosnian War, which seems incongruous even when keeping Jolie’s record of humanitarian work in mind. I know I’ve seen the trailer at least once or twice but I don’t remember anything from it, and at any rate a movie from an American filmmaker told from a Bosnian perspective seems like a problematic enterprise. I dunno.
Metacritic: 55

Pariah (trailer)
Director: Dee Rees
Personal Interest Factor: 8
I’ve seen the trailer for this too many times to count, and I’m fairly impressed. I’m particularly intrigued that the poetry recited and presumably written by the film’s protagonist is actually pretty good and evocative.
Metacritic: 77

Outrage (trailer)
Director: Takeshi Kitano (Kikujiro, Brother, Dolls, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
I don’t really have much to say about this. It’s really not my kind of thing and I don’t see any reason to think that this is exceptional enough to go out of my way to see.
Metacritic: 67

Also this week:
The Devil Inside (trailer) – aka Yet Another Exorcism Movie
The First Rasta – Rastafarian doc
Inni (trailer) – Sigur Rós concert film

Final Standings:

James: 16.5
Jeanine: 13
Nick: 9.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 9.5
Juan: 7.5
Filmman: 7
Rob: 3
Joe: 2.5
Marco: 2

Congratulations, James, who didn’t even play every week! The command center is humming!

Thanks to all who played. AGEBOC ’12 is only four months away!

To my recollection, the first Allen film I saw was a double feature of Take the Money and Run and The Front (which he starred in but did not write or direct). The former is perhaps his purest comedy, a gag machine that just doesn’t quit, and the movie that most people are referring to when they talk about his “early funny movies” (that and maybe Sleeper or Bananas). My indoctrination into the cult of Allen came through his prose. When I was about 15 I was browsing one day in my local bookstore (the Little Professor on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, Michigan) and was attracted to the bright yellow cover of Without Feathers, his collection of “casuals” published in the New Yorker. I was hooked. His surreal humor so synced with my own that I treated that book like a Bible. I still have it, though it his held together with masking tape.

All during high school I copied his style in my creative writing, and became known as being such an Allen fan than I was tapped by the high school drama club to direct his play Don’t Drink the Water and thus I was on my way as a theater geek. But it was Annie Hall that pushed me into the status of cinema geek.

Ironically, I didn’t see Annie Hall in its initial theater run. I didn’t go to too many movies in those days without my parents. The movie came out in March, 1977, just after we had moved to New Jersey from Michigan. Thus I didn’t see it until it premiered on HBO in March, 1978. After the first time I watched it, I was transfixed. I watched it every time it was on HBO–perhaps a dozen times that month. I have seen it at least twenty times since then, most recently last night. I have seen it on a big screen a few times, once or twice in college, and once at a theater in Greenwich Village that ran a double feature with Manhattan, surely the most blissful three hours I could possibly spend in a movie theater. In those days before VCRs, I even set up my cassette recorder in front of the TV set and audio taped the movie, so I could listen to it every time I wanted.

So what is that I respond to so much about the movie? Well, it’s amazingly fucking funny. Almost every line is a laugh line, opening and closing with old Catskills jokes. There are also moments of sublime surrealism in some of his jokes. I think the best sequence starts with Alvy Singer’s (Allen, of course) date with Rolling Stone reporter Shelley Duvall. She asks him if he caught the Dylan concert. He responds, “I couldn’t make it that night. My raccoon had hepatitis.” The joke is then pushed when Duvall asks, “You have a raccoon?” and Allen wiggles his fingers and says, “A few.” Then, cut to them in bed, and Duvall tells him as a lover he is “Kafkaesque.” She also apologizes for taking so long to finish. He replies, “I think too much of a burden is placed on the orgasm.” She thinks he’s quoting someone, and asks, “Who said that?” He says, “I think it was Leopold and Loeb.”

He’s then called away to Annie (Diane Keaton), from whom he is separated. She is having a crisis because there is a spider in her bathroom. He finds a copy of National Review and asks, annoyed, why she didn’t get William F. Buckley to kill the spider. Then, finding black soap on her sink, wonders if she’s joining a minstrel show.

In addition to the unrelenting humor, Annie Hall marks Allen’s maturation as a fillmaker. Much of the credit goes to editor Ralph Rosenblum and cinematographer Gordon Willis, who would enjoy a long collaboration with Allen. To start with, the film is told non-linearly, bouncing from Alvy’s Brooklyn boyhood, growing up underneath the Coney Island roller coaster, to his early days as a comedian, through his first two marriages, to the complete A to Z relationship with Annie. The film also has some extremely long takes–the average length of a take in the film is 14.5 seconds, compared to the average 4.5 seconds. With that knowledge, I watched the movie last night with an eye out for that. Consider the first narrative scene, with Alvy and his friend Rob (Tony Roberts), walking down the street. They start in extreme long shot, almost invisible to the eye, but slowly walk forward, as Alvy lists subtle acts of anti-Semitism he’s experienced, until they are in full frame.

Then there’s the scene in which Alvy’s obsession with the Kennedy assassination interferes with his sex life with first wife Carol Kane. I had never noticed before, but that scene, perhaps two minutes long, is in one long take, and ends with the camera zooming in on Alvy, who talks to the audience.

Allen frequently breaks the fourth wall in the film–he starts and ends the film by doing it, and even does it during the context of actual scenes, such as when he turns to the audience and asks them to clear up a disagreement with Annie. This brings the viewer into a more intimate mode with the character. There are also other unusual aspects of the film. In a scene in a movie line, an annoying man claims he knows all about Marshall McLuhan, so Allen produces McLuhan himself from behind a poster to refute him. Allen uses split screen, animation, subtitles to reflect what characters are thinking, and a technique used by Ingmar Bergman in Wild Strawberries by having characters visit themselves in past situations. I think the best use of this is when Allen recalls his penchant for kissing girls in first grade, despite a little girl’s declaration that even Freud spoke of a latency period. Allen represents himself in two ways–himself as a young boy, and himself as adult, seated at his old school desk. The scene ends brilliantly with Allen wondering what his old schoolmates are doing today, and the child actors stand and recite: “I used to be a heroin addict, now I’m a methodone addict,” or “I’m into leather.”

Above all Annie Hall is a romance, and one that belongs to Diane Keaton. Although Allen and Keaton were previously an item, this is not autobiography, though Keaton’s real last name is Hall (and she did have a Jew-hating Grammy Hall). Keaton has repeatedly said that she never uttered the phrase “la-de-da” until Allen wrote it for her. The film was originally called Anhedonia, a psychological condition that prevents the sufferer from experiencing pleasure, but the choice of calling it after Keaton’s character indicates how strongly she carries the picture. She is a fully-developed character, not an idealized version of a girlfriend, and its her endearing awkwardness that grows into self-confidence, while Alvy Singer does not grow, that is the spine of the film. Allen’s decision to just train the camera on her and let her sing “Seems Like Old Times” is something of a tribute to her as an actress. Of course, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress (the film won Best Picture, Allen won Best Director, and he and co-writer Marshall Brickman won for Best Original Screenplay).

I’ve held this picture in high esteem for so long it feels like a part of me. On one of my first trips to New York City while I was in college I made a pilgrimage to the site of the last shot, which happens to be on Columbus Avenue and 63rd Street, across from Lincoln Center (at the time a restaurant called O’Neal’s Balloon was there; that’s where Alvy and Annie have their last goodbye). I can tell you about the soon-to-be-famous actors who were in the movie, such as Christopher Walken as Annie’s weird brother, Jeff Goldblum as an L.A. guy who has forgotten his mantra, and, very briefly, Sigourney Weaver as Alvy’s date when he runs into Annie and her date, going to see The Sorrow and the Pity. I’ve also, as I’ve become more educated, understood more of the jokes–it took me a while to figure out what Alvy’s second wife meant when she said she had a headache “Like Oswald in Ghosts“–that required understanding the plays of Henrik Ibsen.

Though Annie Hall isn’t as visually stunning as Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters, it has its moments, especially a scene at twilight, with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, when Alvy and Annie first declare their love for each other. Allen says that love isn’t a strong enough word: “I lurve you, I loave you, I luff you.” I feel the same about this movie.

Happy new year, everyone. May all of us have a better 2012 than John Cusack did.

1961 was the year John F. Kennedy implored us to “ask what we could do for our country,” Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record, and, most importantly, a blogger calling himself by the absurd name of Jackrabbit Slim was born.

At the movies, family films were king: One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the highest grossing film, and the top ten was full of other innocuous fare like The Parent Trap, Blue Hawaii, and Lover Come Back. But, somewhat unbelievably, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was sixth that year.

The nominees for Best Picture were:

Fanny directed by Joshua Logan, is one those pictures that nobody makes any more, and for good reason. It was based on a Broadway musical, but had all the songs removed. Leslie Caron plays the title role, a girl who gets knocked up by a young man who heads off to sea not knowing her condition, so she marries a rich old goat (Maurice Chevalier), who accepts the child as his own. I was bored cross-eyed by this, and can only conclude that the Francophilia that somehow launched Gigi to the Best Picture Oscar three years older was still at work in the Academy.

The Guns of Navarone is a classic example of the “mission”  picture–story fuel for boys everywhere to use in playing with their G.I. Joes and army men. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn headed a team of saboteurs set on taking out huge guns on an island in the Aegean that blocked Allied naval traffic. It’s big and epic and a lot of fun, though the special effects, which won an Oscar, look cheesy by today’s standards.  If this movie were made today it would probably be a Michael Bay extravaganza that wouldn’t have nearly the heart of the movie that was made 50 years ago.

The Hustler, directed by Robert Rossen, is the one film of the quintet that, like the Sesame Street song, “doesn’t belong.” A seedy look into the demimonde of poolrooms, it starred Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson, a pool hustler who is at odds with his own soul. Much of the film is an unqualified downer, as Newsman enters a relationship with an alcoholic, Piper Laurie, and the man who becomes his manager, George C. Scott, is one of the more venally evil characters that have been on film. Jackie Gleason is memorable as Minnesota Fats, Newman’s arch rival.

Judgment at Nuremberg is the annual Stanley Kramer socially-conscious picture that were regularities of the time period. This one concerns one of the many trials of Nazis held in Nuremberg in the post-war period, but instead of focusing on the big one, which featured Nazi leaders like Goering, writer Abby Mann centered on a trial of four judges that oversaw sending innocent people to concentration camps or undergoing involuntary sterilization. Mann deservedly won an Oscar for his script, which is heavy on talk but brilliantly so, with big speeches by most of the cast, which included big stars like Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland. An unknown actor, Maximilian Schell, won Best Actor in his role as the defense attorney. A long (three hours) movie, it’s none the less gripping.

The winner in 1961 of Best Picture, and overall of 10 Oscars out of 11 nominations, was West Side Story, based on the musical which in turn was based on Romeo and Juliet. The film, viewed with 50 years of hindsight, is great for unusual reasons–it still remains one of the greatest examples of dance ever filmed. Sure, some of it is dated–the gang members wouldn’t scare anyone, and language like “daddy-o” makes it all seem quaint–but the musical numbers are still staggering in their beauty. Leonard Bernstein’s score is the greatest ever to be written for the American stage, and Jerome Robbins’ choreography is still thrilling to behold. When I was a kid my parents had the soundtrack album, and I listened to over and over again, and if I had that record today I could listen to it now. George Chakiris and Rita Moreno won the Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards for their performances in the film.

If I were a voter back then, I would have been tempted to vote for The Hustler, but ultimately would have probably gone along with the crowd and voted for West Side Story, if only for its innovation and sheer emotional power.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing actually opening in Chicago this week, which is more or less par for the course for the last weekend of the year. I did notice that The Darkest Hour (trailer) is playing here now, but I’m pretty sure that opened last weekend and I just missed it then. Other than that, nothing to report – even Facets is holding over the same movie for another week, and they almost never do that.

Anyway, still lots of movies for me to catch up on, including most of what opened last week. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Fair enough. I interpret Scott’s plea as a call to check my cynicism at the door, and try as I might, I couldn’t do it. To be sure, the film, which can only have been the work of Steven Spielberg, is an impressive production, but I just felt too manipulated to soak in what others may enjoy. This film may be the litmus test of the year. I don’t begrudge others who may find themselves weeping at the end, but my tear ducts remained dry.

As one of its stars, Emily Watson, termed it, the film is “Black Beauty goes to war.” For those who somehow made it through childhood without reading Black Beauty, that’s the story that is told from the point of view of a horse, who moves from owner to owner, good and bad. War Horse adds the element of World War I, as our horse in question, Joey, moves from English to French to German owners, emotionally touching everyone he comes in contact with. Horse lovers will respond to this more than others, I suspect, but it’s a tricky move, because the central character–the horse–isn’t really a character, he’s a creature that others respond to. It’s hard to feel like one is in the shoes of a horse, not only because they are nailed on. We get used to one of his owners, then we move on, and the film becomes a series of herks and jerks that is inevitably leading to a reunion with his original owner.

That original owner is Albie Narracott (Jeremy Irvine). His father (Peter Mullan), in a fit of exaggerated pride, spends much too much on the horse while at an auction looking for a plough horse. Joey, as Irvine names him, is a thoroughbred, not made for farm work. Watson, as Irvine’s mother, is outraged, as Mullan has spent the rent in a foolish gesture. Irvine must train the horse to plough the field to get the necessary crops for the rent, so the first half hour of the film is all about whether a horse can plough.

Things pick up when war is declared, and Mullan sells Joey to the army. Irvine is aghast, but his new owner (Tom Hiddleston), a captain, assures him he will take care of him. But in an ill-thought cavalry charge, Joey ends up in German hands. He is tended to by a soulful young German soldier (David Kross), and then ends up at a French farm, beloved by a little girl and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup). I last saw Arestrup as a vicious criminal in A Prophet, so to see him as kindly grandfather was jarring.

And so it goes for Joey, until he ends up tangled in barbed wire in the no-man’s land between British and German lines. In the best scene of the film, a British and German soldier call off the hostilities long enough to free him, Spielberg’s admittedly unsubtle way of telling us that war is bad and we’re all horse-loving brothers under the skin. While the message is trite, the filmmaking is superb.

And there are times when the genius of Spielberg, despite his over-reliance on sentimentality, shines through. I’m thinking specifically of an execution that is shot through the slowly revolving blades of a windmill, or a pulse-pounding tracking shot that follows Joey racing through the war trenches. And the final shot, photographed by Janusz Kaminski against a setting sun that recalls the end of the first act of Gone With the Wind, is over the top in emotional manipulation, but is beautiful to behold.

At this stage of his career Spielberg may be in an impossible situation with jaded viewers like me. He’s proved everything he could ever possibly prove, so to expect him to continually re-invent himself is probably futile. This is the stuff he does best, and as far as that goes War Horse is quintessential Spielberg. It doesn’t have the wonder of E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the depiction of war is not as uncompromising as Schindler’s List or Saving Private Ryan. But, as he has been quoted, he wanted to make a movie that could have been made 50 years ago, and he and Kaminski studied the films of John Ford to try to achieve that. But, as Orson Welles said of Ford, whom he considered the great master of film, “Sentimentality was his vice.” The same can certainly be said of Spielberg. But for those lean toward the sentimental, War Horse will prove to be a richly rewarding experience.

My grade for War Horse: B-.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of December 30, 2011-January 1, 2012. 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 are worth half a point each.

Bonus questions:

1. Of the films that finished in the top 5 (Mi4, Holmes, Dragon Tattoo, Chipmunks, Tintin), which one will have the biggest percentage drop?

2. Of the films that finished in the top 5, which will have the smallest percentage drop (or greatest percentage increase)?

The deadline is on THURSDAY at midnight, EST.

Standings:

James: 16.5
Jeanine: 13
Juan: 7.5
Filmman: 7
Nick: 7
Jackrabbit Slim: 5.5
Rob: 3
Joe: 2.5
Marco: 2

I assume it’s the first coffee cup that requires a safe word.

The script, written by Christopher Hampton and based on his play The Talking Cure, focuses on the true story of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), a Swiss acolyte of Freud’s, treating a Russian girl (Knightley), who has hysterical fits. What’s interesting about this early sequence is how well she is treated–this is no Snake Pit. Jung uses Freud’s new-fangled psychoanalysis, talking out what makes her go into seizure-like fits, and traces it back to her relationship with her father, who beat her, but also made her excited.

Eventually Jung meets Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and the two form a collegial relationship, despite Freud considering Jung a bit of a kook with references to mysticism and shamanism. This sort of comes out of nowhere in the script, as except for one scene in which Jung proclaims he anticipated the sound of a heater crackling, we don’t get a sense of him as anything but a straight-laced gentleman. That is, until he succumbs to Knightley’s charms and indulges her fantasies of being beaten.

But this makes the film kinkier than it sounds. At several points I wondered if this was a movie at all–instead it just seems like random scenes cut together without any regard for pacing or story. Cronenberg indulges in some transitions I find to be violations of unwritten rules–he has two characters talking in a scene, then cuts to the same two characters, discussing something else, in a different place, without us having any sense of how much time has passed, or the resolution of the previous scene. There’s also a lot of talk about Freud’s fixation on sex, with a few droll lines by Jung about how everything with Freud comes back to sex (I was reminded of the line in the TV show M*A*S*H, when Dr. Sidney Freeman says, “Sex is why we eat, sex is why we go to the bathroom, sex is why we have children.”)

Of the acting trio, there are mixed results. Fassbender has been in a million films this year, and though I haven’t seen Shame yet, I’m betting that his performance as Jung is the dullest of the year. He shows little indication of why he’s doing what he’s doing–he violates a sacrosanct rule by sleeping with a patient, but aside from a slightly wrinkled brow, doesn’t seem to suffer much for it. Knightley has an impossible task–her early scenes she has to go full crazy, thrusting her jaw out like she’s turning into a werewolf. I give her marks for giving it the old college try, and certainly some insane do act like that, but I couldn’t help but see the acting. She’s much better when she’s recovered and studying to be a psychiatrist on her own, debating with Freud over the sexual drive destroying the ego.

Mortensen stealthily steals the show, although I had trouble buying him as Freud, given the little I know about him. There’s a nicely done scene of he and Jung exchanging letters, ending their friendship. Even more vivid in this otherwise dry film is Vincent Cassel as a psychiatrist who has been institutionalized for not believing in repressing anything. When he escapes by jumping over a wall, I wanted to go with him.

I couldn’t help but find A Dangerous Method dull and talky, and was sneaking peeks at my watch often. My grade: C-.

We’ve been reading how unlikely it must have seemed that a French, black and white, silent film would score with audiences. Well, since it’s silent, it’s Frenchness doesn’t matter at all, and it isn’t truly a silent film at all, in that there is synchronized sound and special use of voices and sound effects where needed. Surely it will mean more to those who recognize the tips of the hat to the films A Star Is Born, Singin’ in the Rain, and even Citizen Kane (look for a dinner table scene that is almost a perfect match from that film).

The story is wafer-thin: Jean Dujardin is George Valentin (only one letter away from the great silent film star, Valentino) a huge silent film star. At his latest premiere, he meets cute Berenice Bejo, who is an extra. They have a spark of kismet, but Dujardin is married to the sour Penelope Ann Miller. She hates him–why we don’t know, since he is never less than charming–to the point where she defaces every image of him she can find. Maybe he’s more devoted to his Jack Russell terrier, who performs with him. An R-rated version of this film might have been interesting.

Anyway, Bejo gets a job as an extra on Dujardin’s latest film, and during a dancing scene they fall in love, although it is unrequited. She slips into his dressing room and caresses his overcoat, a bit lifted from Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven, but still lovingly done. The tide is about to turn, though, as studio boss John Goodman shows Dujardin the new-fangled “talkie” technology. Dujardin is adamant that people don’t want to see him speak, and so as silent films fade, so does his stardom, while Bejo becomes a big star.

Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist is clever and looks great. The very first title card is “I won’t talk!,” and the closing bit of dialogue, well, I won’t spoil that. The aspect ratio is the old-fashioned 1:33, and the camera speed, while not the common 16 fps of silent days, is 22 fps, off a bit from the modern 24 fps. I read an article where Hazanavicius points out that if nothing else, those two frames per second cuts eight percent of the running time. The photography, by Guillaume Schiffman, is magnificent, as is the music score by Ludovic Bource, and the costumes, by Mark Bridges (who was a college classmate of mine).

The performances by Dujardin and Bejo are also a joy. Dujardin, as a man of the past, favors the mugging style of silent films, while Bejo has the additional level of playing a woman who acts in talkies while being in a silent film, but she’s terrific. But Uggie, as the Jack Russell, steals the show, especially in a great scene worthy of Rin Tin Tin when he retrieves a bewildered policeman.

For those who thinks an old movie is early Spielberg, the charms of The Artist may well be lost, but those who remember watching the black and white classics on the midnight movie should feel a glow of nostalgia. The production design captures the glamor of the era, down to the gaudy Hollywood mansions to the movie magazines. I liked The Artist a great deal, but it just isn’t deep or substantial enough to warrant “best of the year” accolades. It’s a novelty, albeit an expertly done one.

My grade for The Artist: B+

Anyway, lots of big holiday releases, most of which I’m not exactly beating a path to the theater doors to see. What I’m really excited about is that the Music Box is showing a bunch of Hitchcock movies next week. I’ve seen Rear Window recently, so I’ll skip that, but it’s been ages since I’ve seen Rope, Vertigo, Rebecca, and Strangers on a Train, and I’ve never seen To Catch a Thief. So take that, new movies!

The Adventures of Tintin (trailer)
Director: Steven Spielberg (The Terminal, War of the Worlds, Munich, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
This looks like one of Zemeckis’s stop-motion things, more like the semi-tolerable Beowulf than the mostly painful other two. But I’m feeling charitable about it, so even though I probably won’t like it, I’m looking forward to seeing it. I figure that there’s no reason for Spielberg to make it unless he really wanted to, unlike, say, the last Indy movie. Might have a problem catching it in 2-D, though.
Metacritic: 67

The Artist (trailer)
Director: Michel Hazanavicius (OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, OSS 117: Lost in Rio)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
I’m frankly curious to see what my reaction to this film could be. I feel like it could legitimately go either way, either appealing to my sense of cinema history (like Hugo) or pushing me away with its overt sentimentality (like, well, lots of awards contenders). I have no idea how it will go. Maybe both will happen at the same time.
Metacritic: 89

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (trailer)
Director: David Fincher (Panic Room, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
The latest from the suddenly prolific Fincher, who for my money is in strong contention for the title of most overrated director around. My god, has he got an underwhelming body of work for a guy with such a flawless reputation. Now he’s made a movie that is a remake of a movie I didn’t much like in the first place – and is apparently not terribly different. Yes, it’s fair to say I’m not expecting much. Jackrabbit Slim already reviewed the film, giving it a solid B.
Metacritic: 71

War Horse (trailer)
Director: Steven Spielberg (War of the Worlds, Munich, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Adventures of Tintin)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Man, this doesn’t look very good either. Turns out that guy in the trailer that I thought was Anthony Hopkins is not actually Anthony Hopkins; I guess it’s Niels Arestrup. I’ve seen that trailer probably a dozen times and still have no idea what the movie’s about, except for a horse doing … something. It’s one of the worst-cut trailers for a major studio film in years.
Metacritic: 73

We Bought a Zoo (trailer)
Director: Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of Jerry Maguire, and still haven’t seen Crowe’s earlier films, but Almost Famous was one of the most anticipated movies ever for me. I don’t really know why, except that it just looked like something I’d really enjoy. And it was! I just watched it again a few weeks ago, and loved it more than ever. We Bought a Zoo is pretty much the opposite, from a filmmaker that I would now say I am a fan of (I even really liked Vanilla Sky and didn’t hate Elizabethtown like everyone else), but the movie just looks awful.
Metacritic: 57

Also this week:
Miss Minoes (trailer) – Dutch kids movie starring Carice van Houten that is ten years old
Three Stars – doc about chefs

The Last of the Mohicans

Mohicans just barely edges out Die Hard as my favorite, and while I tried to come up with a lengthy paragraph to explain how I could relegate to number two the John McTiernan masterpiece that is the greatest film ever made, I could finally only think of one word: history.

Where does one begin on the sweeping vistas of Dante Spinotti’s cinematography or the sweeping vistas of the language of a script written by Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe, itself an adaptation of an adaptation of a novel, where, simply, to begin with this True American Epic? Where to begin with how much this movie meant and still means to my life? Sure, there are some naysayers, but to them I politely ask (as I ask of those naysayers of the tv series Rome) to keep your love of truly accurate history at the door and revel in a world of detail that few directors but Mann could recreate so completely and immersively.

It was my first year of college. Mansfield University in Mansfield, PA. The only movie theater was about an hour away in Tonawanda, I believe it was called. My then-girlfriend was Nicole Keller. (Side note: Nicole was killed in a rollover accident a couple years later. Pretty sad.) We had decided we wanted to see a movie, and so we drove the distance to the theater and saw The Last of the Mohicans.

It seems that with some movies their greatness is not fully understood the first viewing. A couple of movies have been like that for me, namely any early movie of Takeshi Kitano or Edward Burns (I swear his movies grow in stature with repeated viewings).

However, with Last of the Mohicans, I walked out of that theater holding Nicole’s hand knowing full-well that I had just had the greatest movie-going eperience of my life. I was caught-up in all the sumptuous detail, and I couldn’t extract my mind from the experience, even after it was over. And that belief stands to this day, through any and every movie I’ve ever seen.

Madeleine Stowe is perfectly cast, her strong voice quavering at just the right moments and commanding the attention of colonels the next: “Duncan, you are a man of a few admirable qualities, but taken as a whole, I was wrong to have thought so highly of you.”

There is redemption through sacrifice. Misplaced ideological beliefs that one’s goal to destroy another is right and proper due to two wrongs making a right. There is ultimate sacrifice for love. There is revenge through love. And there is some of the best classical music ever put to film.

In short, there is no more perfectly encapsulated blockbuster-as-art than Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans, and I am very proud to call it my favorite movie of all time.

To quickly sum up, a journalist who has been convicted of libel (Daniel Craig), is summoned to a privately-owned island in the north of Sweden. A patriarch of a very rich family, Christopher Plummer, asks him to look into the disappearance of his niece some 40 years earlier. Plummer’s family is a gaggle of Nazis and other reprobates, and the whole thing has a kind of “locked door” quality to it, as there is only one way off the island and it was blocked by a traffic accident when the girl vanished.

Meanwhile, we meet Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), by now one of the most celebrated characters in contemporary pop literature. A computer genius with a troubled background, she has a face full of hardware, a body covered in ink, is sexually ambiguous, and isn’t trained in the social niceties. She investigates Craig’s background for Plummer’s lawyer, and then goes about dealing with her new legal guardian, who rapes her viciously. Her revenge is appropriately vicious in turn.

Eventually, of course, Craig and Mara team up, and I think they had better chemistry in this film. For one thing, the characterization of Mikael Blomkvist, as played by Craig, makes him much less of a lady’s man than he is in Larsson’s books. Salander is also less of a super-woman. There’s no inkling in this film that she has martial arts training–when her backpack is stolen in the subway, she retrieves it not like some sort of Jet Li in a Mohawk, but more like a very pissed off teenager. But, Zaillian sticks with the mistake of having the two become intimate. There’s just no reason for this, and it threw both films off their axis. The relationship would have been far more poignant if the attraction between them would have been more avuncular and unacted upon.

The film is over two and a half hours long but seems to go too fast in spots, as the mystery is pieced together rather quickly, to the effect of it being almost beside the point. My memory is fuzzy, but I don’t recall in the other film Blomkvist having a teenage daughter, who here clues him on the solution of a particular puzzle that rapidly unlocks everything else. Instead, Fincher is more concerned with mood, and the scenes that take place on the island reminded me of Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, which had similar characters that were part monster. The opening credits, like something out of a Bond film, had scenes of a dripping oily substance on body parts, set to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” cuing us in for a macabre evening.

I enjoyed this film, and often it found it pulse-pounding, but it has some problems that are unfixable. The denouement, involving Mara helping Craig get revenge on the man who set him up, seems to go on forever. As stated, some of this is Larsson’s uninspired writing–does every villain really explain everything to the investigator before he tries to kill him? But the acting is good–Mara, while not outshining Noomi Repace, does strike me as a more vulnerable figure, and is difficult to take your eyes off of. It is a bit hypocritical, though, for a movie about cruelty to women to have Mara frequently undressed.

My grade for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: B.

Just two weeks left!

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of December 23-25, 2011. 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 are worth half a point each.

Bonus questions:

1. Which film will have a greater percentage drop: Sherlock Holmes or Chipwrecked?

2. Will The Darkest Hour earn more than $5 million?

The deadline is on MONDAY at midnight, EST due to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opening on Tuesday.

Standings:

James: 15.5
Jeanine: 12
Filmman: 6
Nick: 5
Jackrabbit Slim: 4.5
Juan: 3
Joe: 2.5
Rob: 2
Marco: 1.5

Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a writer of young adult novels, which Cody has an abiding passion for (she was signed to write a movie on the Sweet Valley High series). As the film opens, we see that she is a sad and lonely person, as she lives in a messy but chic apartment, has meaningless sex, and her only companion is a lapdog. When she gets an email that her ex-boyfriend has just had a baby, she gets the absurd notion that if she goes back to her podunk hometown she can win him back, and thus will solve all her problems.

This seemed a lot like the Julia Roberts film My Best Friend’s Wedding, and that, believe it or not, was a much better picture, with Roberts at least informing her role with a zany questful nature. Theron, in this film, is a tissue of psychoses, and at no point in this film will anyone be rooting for her. I will give Cody credit for the audacity of allowing her character to have a breakthrough, but then having another character, in a big speech, reinforce her insanity and send her off in a haze of delirium. I wonder what Cody’s intention was for us to think about as we put on our coats–that people who live in small towns really are fat and dumb, and that living in a big city is better, even if we are mentally ill?

Theron’s ex-beau is played dully by Patrick Wilson, who is oblivious to her intentions. Her confidante is Patton Oswalt, who might have been the subject of a better movie. He was viciously beaten in high school by jocks who thought he was gay. He now hobbles around on a crutch, makes his own bourbon, and paints comic book hero miniatures. Roberts sidekick in My Best Friend’s Wedding was the gay Rupert Everett, and while Oswalt’s character is not gay, he might as well be. Cody makes a big mistake by allowing these characters to sleep together.

I really don’t think there’s anything I liked about this film. Reitman’s films are known for their over-reliance on qurkly direction, (he really goes wild in Thank You For Not Smoking and Juno) that I have enjoyed, but here his heart doesn’t seem in it, and he lets the script just play out. That is a mistake, for this script isn’t particularly witty (I think I laughed once, but I forget at what) or emotionally resonant. The attempt to have Theron’s work in progress, about a high school girl who is so popular (she has the yearbook dedicated to her, even though there was another student who died) is band-aided on and laughably amateurish.

Theron gives a technically fine performance, and manages to look beautiful and off-putting at the same time, but I don’t think any actress could have made this work.

My grade for Young Adult: D+

A Dangerous Method (trailer)
Director: David Cronenberg (eXistenZ, Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to this and I don’t want to prejudge it too harshly, but it’s clear that Keira Knightley is going to be a problem for me in this movie. She’s a very limited actress, and any time she has to dial up the intensity (e.g., the “IT EXCITED ME!” line in the trailer), she looks utterly ridiculous. On the other hand, I genuinely look forward to watching Viggo Mortensen ham it up as Sigmund Freud. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender defied all odds by getting through the year without being in a movie with Jessica Chastain. How’d that happen?
Metacritic: 74

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (trailer)
Director: Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Main appeal here is Bird directing and a half-decent title, even though I’ve never been that excited about the M:I franchise. Paramount, curiously, is rolling this out nice and slowly, hitting only 425 screens before expanding wide for Christmas. Apparently, they’re planning the same thing with Tintin and War Horse. The strikes me as a more notable development than Universal’s pointless flirtation with VOD, because unlike Uni’s aborted VOD plan, it’s an experiment that directly challenges the “milk the first weekend for all it’s worth” conventional wisdom that took over Hollywood for good sometime around the release of Batman Forever. Plus, by necessity it actually incorporates word-of-mouth as a marketing strategy, and when’s the last time that happened with a big-studio franchise movie? Never, that’s when. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out for them.
Metacritic: 73

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (trailer)
Director: Guy Ritchie (Swept Away, Revolver, RocknRolla, Sherlock Holmes)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
WB taking the opposite tack from Paramount here, offering up a sequel with a director I don’t care about and an awkward title. This strikes me as an unnecessary sequel anyway, since the first movie was passable at best and AFAIK there aren’t a whole lot of people out there who were a whole lot more taken with it than I was. Is there real excitement out there about this one? I have my doubts.
Metacritic: 50

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (trailer)
Director: Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Sounds like a movie about a legendary turn-of-the-century infield combo and it has a somewhat uninspiring trailer, but a John Le Carre adaptation starring Gary Oldman sure sounds like a winner to me. I’m really glad to see the reviews to strong, because I was a little worried about that trailer when it first came out.
Metacritic: 87

Also this week:
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked (trailer) – no, no, no
That Girl in Yellow Boots (trailer) – Indian film about the sleazy side of Bombay

Written and directed by Preston Sturges, who revolutionized the American movie comedy, it tells the story of a film director (Joel McCrea), who though rich and famous from making light comedies (like Ants in Your Pants 1939), longs to make movies of gravitas and social commentary. His studio handlers don’t want to hear that–his most recent film, a serious drama, died in Pittsburgh.

Sullivan: What do they know in Pittsburgh?

LeBrand: They know what they like!

Sullivan: If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh!

Sullivan wants to make a movie about poverty in America, called O Brother, Where Art Thou? (yes, that’s where the Coens got that title). The studio bosses convince him that he, who grew up privileged, kind of like Mitt Romney, hasn’t suffered enough to make such a picture. That backfires, though, when Sullivan announces he’s going to incognito as a tramp, with only ten cents in his pocket, to find out what suffering is about.

The genius of Sturges’ script is that it succeeds on two levels: first, it is a tribute to comedy, as Sullivan eventually learns that people living in hard times sometimes need to laugh to forget about their troubles. Comedy has always played second fiddle to drama in many people’s minds, even among those who make it. Woody Allen has always said that he wished he were a tragedian, and that those who make drama are sitting at the grown-up’s table. Secondly, though, it also reinforces the division between the haves and have-nots in America; while ninnies in Hollywood lounge around pools, others are barely making it in shantytowns.

The tone shifts from comedy to melodrama often, and at times not easily, but I think that’s the point. The first half hour is flat-out screwball, as Sullivan sets out in old clothes, but the studio has arranged for an entourage to follow him in a bus. When he tries to make a break for it, we get some well done slapstick with the bus racing after him, the inhabitants tossed about (with some wince-inducing laughs earned from a Stepin Fetchit-style black cook).

Late the film shifts to a sweet romance, as Sullivan meets a struggling actress (Veronica Lake), who teams up with him on his trip. Lake, who is one of my favorite of the old movie stars, was just a teenager when she made this film, her first starring role. She was unusually beautiful, but apparently difficult. McCrea passed on making another movie with her, citing “Life is too short to make another movie with Veronica Lake.” Read up on her to hear a typically sad story of failed romance, alcoholism, and madness that ended much too soon at age 51.

The film’s final third dispenses with comedy altogether. Through a series of unfortunate events, Sullivan ends up arrested and imprisoned to a chain gang. He can’t prove who he is, and everyone back in Hollywood thinks he is dead. It is when, as a member of the chain gang, that he attends a movie at the local black church (this expansive view of African-Americans almost makes up for the cook). When he sees how the Mickey Mouse cartoon brings a little life into the grim lives of the prisoners, he changes his tune. The closing line is “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

Now, the film doesn’t always work. For one thing, the cartoon isn’t that funny. It would have been nice if Sturges had gotten the rights to a Chaplin, Keaton, or Laurel and Hardy movie. I’ve never, even when I was a kid, laughed my assed off at a Disney cartoon. And though the film is incredibly audacious for 1941, it still seems to hold back, and can lean toward the corny and sentimental (at one point McCrea says, as if in defense, “What’s wrong with Capra?”).

But these are minor quibbles. The film is so rich, and Sturges such a good writer, that it continues to dazzle. The performances are good down to the minor, with several familiar faces, such as Franklin Pangborn, William Demarest (as a press agent, who’s given to say things like, “It will put Shakespeare back with the shipping news”), and two drolly brilliant turns by Robert Greig and Eric Blore as Sullivan’s British butler and valet. Greig gives a memorable speech about how those who are poor know all about being poor, and only the morbidly rich would find it a glamorous topic.

The movie also is chock full of marvelous whimsy, such as the lines: “What about gin rummy?” “I never touch the stuff.” Or this exchange, early in the film:

Sullivan: I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man!
LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.
Sullivan: A little, but I don’t want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity!
LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.
Sullivan: [reluctantly] With a little sex in it.

The DVD from Criterion includes a documentary on Sturges. He was the first screenwriter to make the leap from writer to director, and at one time in the mid-40s he was the highest paid producer/director/writer in Hollywood. His success ended quickly, though. He also made some other outstanding comedies. The ones I’ve seen are The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story. His great rival as a maker of comedies in those days was Ernst Lubitsch, and Sturges gets an inside joke in when Lake, not knowing Sullivan is a director, and thinking he’s a hobo, jokingly asks him for a letter of introduction to Lubitsch.

Released in 1956, just as the noir style was dying down, The Killing, based on a novel called Clean Break (the title chosen for the film is indicative of Kubrick’s homage–it could be the title of almost every noir ever made) is a heist movie. I love heist movies, and The Killing gets it all. The lead guy is a career criminal who wants to make one last score before retirement, and each of the team has their own reason for taking part. Of course, there’s also the fatal slip up by the chain’s weakest link.

The target is a race track. Sterling Hayden plays the criminal, who wants to rob the day’s receipts. He has enlisted an accountant (Jay C. Flippen) who provides the money, Elisha Cook as a ticket-window cashier, Joe Sawyer as the race track bartender, Ted de Corsia as a cop in deep to a loan shark, a professional wrestler (Kola Kwariani) and a marksman (Timothy Carey). Everything is planned down to the last second, but when weak-willed Cook blabs the plan to impress his wife (Marie Windsor), she in turn blabs to her love (Vince Edwards).

The Killing is full of noir stylistic flourishes, especially the use of light and shadow. The thieves make their plan at a table lit by a solitary hanging lamp from above, so when Hayden leans back, he’s completely in shadow. Kubrick uses tracking shots often, especially in Hayden’s railroad apartment, so that when a camera moves from room to room the camera follows him, even going through walls.

There’s also a lovely ending, which prefigures the end of such films as Ocean’s 11 and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and Hayden’s last line, “Nah, what difference does it make?” is a perfect example of noir ennui. In fact, though the screenplay was written by Kubrick, the dialogue was written by Jim Thompson, who wrote a number of pulp classics. We get a lot of zippy patter, such as when Hayden tells Windsor, “You’ve got a dollar sign where your heart should be.”

The cast, including Hayden, Windsor and Cook, made a lot of noirs over the years. Hayden starred in the best heist movie ever made, The Asphalt Jungle, so to see him here is to remind one of that film. But this film is full of great faces, the kind that seem to be sculpted out of raw meat.

In many of Kubrick’s subsequent exercises in genre, he would transcend the genre and take it a new level. He doesn’t quite do that in The Killing, but it’s an still above average thriller.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of December 16-18, 2011. 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 are worth half a point each.

Bonus questions:

1. Will Twilight: Breaking Dawn fall out of the top five?

2. Will Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked outperform the previous Alvin movie’s opening weekend of 48.8 million?

The deadline is on Thursday at midnight, EST.

Standings:

Jeanine: 9.5
James: 9.5
Filmman: 5
Nick: 4.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 4
Joe: 2.5
Juan: 2
Marco: 1.5
Rob: 1

Jones (with a name that would make a great Bond girl) plays Anna, a British student in college in Los Angeles. She is smitten with a teaching assistant (Anton Yelchin), and leaves him a note on his car. This seems a bit of a male fantasy (the film was written by two men, Drake Doremus, the director, and Ben York Jones)–that a beautiful girl would make a grand, slightly nutty play for a guy like that.

Yelchin, naturally, takes the bait and the two fall in love, but after graduation Jones’ student visa expires. The plan is for her to go back to England for the summer and then return on a work visa. Impetuously and colossally stupidly, she decides to stay. When she goes home for a wedding and tries to get back into the country, they deny her and put her on a plane back to England. What will these two young lovers do?

From the accounts I’ve heard (I saw Jones in an appearance on David Letterman), the dialogue in Like Crazy was improvised, and it seems that way, as much of it is banal. It does ring true, though, especially the awkward moments, such as their first date and whenever they’ve reunited after a long absence. But in the film’s middle section, when they are separated by an eight-hour time time difference and start to drift apart, it’s hard to sympathize with them, because they were so dim. Yelchin even gives Jones a bracelet with the word “Patience” inscribed on it, but this gesture goes unheeded.

Nevertheless, Jones’ performance is so charismatic that she kept pulling me back in. Part of this, no doubt, is because I’m a male, but beyond her physical appeal is a subtle range of acting that is most impressive. Her expression in the airport, when she’s told she will not be allowed to leave the building and be put on a plane straightaway to the U.K., is such a display of devastating sadness that it’s breathtaking. Compared to Jones, Yelchin comes off as a kind of non-entity; it’s her film.

Aside from my mash note to Jones, there’s not too much to shout about Like Crazy. It does capture some of the problems of the long-distance relationship (I should know, I specialize in them). The two end up with other people (Yelchin with Jennifer Lawrence, in an almost silent part). I would like the problem of choosing between Jones and Lawrence, though Yelchin is in torment.

Like Crazy is a nice film that may remind one of one’s youthful romantic adventures, but other than Jones’ performance, I will have forgotten most of it by tomorrow.

My grade for Like Crazy: C+

The Sitter (trailer)
Director: David Gordon Green (Undertow, Snow Angels, Pineapple Express, Your Highness)
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Not sure why I’m including this in the main section instead of the “Also this week” section. It doesn’t look funny, and it has a premise that kinda played itself out more than 20 years ago. Yet here it is. Besides that, when did David Gordon Green become the default director for R-rated comedy? This is his second already this year, and they’re both very badly reviewed as well. Their combined Metacritic score, 69, doesn’t make for a good movie, even if it is appropriate given the sophomoric level of humor the films seem to be indulging in. The whole situation is just sad.
Metacritic: 38

Young Adult (trailer)
Director: Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
A couple weeks after The Descendants comes another movie by a director that I think it brutally overrated. This one concerns me because it sure looks like a movie built around a character who exists mostly as a target for the filmmakers’ scorn. On the other hand, I’ve always thought that Charlize Theron was an underrated actress, even back when she was playing token females in lousy movies.
Metacritic: 74

Young Goethe in Love (trailer)
Director: Philipp Stölzl (Baby, North Face)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Goethe is somewhat of a celebrated figure in Chicago for some reason, and I’m not sure why. The city’s German institute is named for him, as is a street in the ritzy part of the Near North Side and, it appears, a public elementary school on the Northwest side. There’s also this very prominent monument in Lincoln Park. Anyway, I saw the trailer the other day and the movie doesn’t look like much. Reviews indicate the same.
Metacritic: 55

Also this Week:
Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone (trailer) – doc with self-explanatory title
Garbo: The spy (trailer) – doc about a WWII double agent
New Year’s Day (trailer) – Garry Marshall strikes again!

With the Golden Globe nominations announced next week, plus a slew of critics awards, it’s time to try to get ahead of the curve of Oscar prognostication, but this year I gleefully throw up my hands and declare I know nothing. This year, at least in the all-important Best Picture category, is unusually fluid. I have no clue what the favorite to win is. Usually it’s down to only a few films by now, but there’s a wide variety of possibilities this year. Here goes nothing:

Best Picture

Locks: The Descendants, The Artist

Safe Bets: The Help; Midnight in Paris, Hugo, War Horse

Also Possible: Moneyball, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I’m really stretching the definition of “Lock,” since it wouldn’t unduly shock me if either of those two were left out. But I’m pretty sure the nominees, however many there are, will come from this list. The one film that could play spoiler is The Tree of Life. Incredibly Close has not had many screenings, so no one knows if its any good, but if it’s even half-way decent it has all the earmarks of Oscar bait.

Best Actor:

Locks: George Clooney (The Descendants), Brad Pitt (Moneyball)

Safe Bets: Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Michael Fassbender (Shame)

Also possible: Woody Harrelson (Rampart), Gary Oldman (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Michael Shannon, (Take Shelter), Ryan Gosling (Drive or The Ides of March).

If I’m right there are four actors pretty much set, with the fifth slot wide open, though I think Oldman is the frontrunner for it at this point.

Best Actress:

Locks: Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Viola Davis (The Help)

Safe Bets: Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn)

Also Possible: Charline Theron (Young Adult), Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Tilda Swinton (We Have to Talk About Kevin), Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia)

It’s not often the Best Actress category is this deep. My guess at this point is that Theron will get the fifth slot, so the entire category will be previous nominees.

Best Director:

Locks: Alexander Payne (The Descendants)  Martin Scorsese (Hugo)

Safe Bets: Michael Hazavinicius (The Artist), Steven Spielberg (War Horse)

Also possible: Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), Terence Malick (The Tree of Life), Tate Taylor (The Help), David Fincher (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Bennett Miller (Moneyball), Stephen Daldry (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

Director goes the way of picture, as since the Best Picture category was expanded (admittedly a small sample size) no director has been nominated without his/her picture also nominated. That could change with Malick, who would seem to be more of a director’s darling than the average Academy member. But I’m going to guess Allen in the fifth slot.

Best Supporting Actor:

Locks: None

Safe Bets: Albert Brooks (Drive), Christopher Plummer (Beginners), Max Von Sydow (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), Kenneth Branagh (My Week With Marilyn), Ben Kingsley (Hugo)

Also possible: Patton Oswalt (Young Adult), Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Ides of March)

This is a gloriously jumbled category, with no clear favorites at the moment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the eventual winner isn’t even listed here.

Best Supporting Actress:

Locks: Octavia Spencer (The Help), Shailene Woodley (The Descendants)

Safe Bets: Jessica Chastain (The Help or Take Shelter), Berenice Bejo (The Artist)

Also possible: Vanessa Redgrave, (Coriolanus), Carey Mulligan (Shame), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids)

The first four I’m pretty sure about, while the fifth is wide open and subject to a surprise.

Please note these are not my personal preferences. I will have a new slate of predictions before the nominations are announced in late January.

Criterion has put out a two-disc set of his entire oeuvre. His four films fit on one disc, and the other contains a 1964 documentary, as well as a conversation between Rohmer and Truffaut from 1968. (Both were television programs–what great TV the French had!)

Vigo was born in 1905. His father was an anarchist, who died (possibly murdered) in prison. His first film, from 1930, is a 27-minute long silent documentary called À propos de Nice, which shows the sights of that seaside city. Vigo breaks it into sections, at first showing the idle rich, stuffed into their beach chairs like curing hams, and then the workers and poor of the city. He also displays some interesting camera tricks, such as an attractive woman seated in a beach chair. The film dissolves so that she is wearing one outfit after another, from a fur coat to a sun dress to finally nothing at all.

His next film was a commissioned documentary Taris, a kind of how-to-swim instructional film featuring the French swimming champion. It’s the kind of thing we saw in schools when we were kids, though Vigo again allows his creativity to seep in. He shot it in a pool that had portholes in the side, so he didn’t have to use underwater cameras. A shot at the end has Taris, again in dissolve, go from bathing suit to topcoat and derby, and he appears to walk across the water.

The most important of Vigo’s films are his two narratives:  Zéro de conduite, from 1933, and L’Atalante, from 1934. The former is something of a tribute to his father, as well as autobiographical, as it deals with the horrid life of boys in a boarding school. This film nakedly inspired Truffaut, who borrowed a scene from it, when a teacher leads a group of boys through the city, and the boys take off on their own without the teacher noticing.

Zéro de conduite, above all, is a masterpiece of style. The editing is crude, prefiguring Jean-Luc Godard by thirty years, and full of rebellion. The boys, who are looked after by a couple of cretinous housemasters, revolt, and in a brilliantly rendered scene in slow-motion, lead a procession out of their dormitory, holding aloft one boy on a chair while feathers from exploded pillows drift around them.

Also, believe it or not, I thought quite a bit about National Lampoon’s Animal House while watching this film, and would love to ask John Landis if he had it in mind. Not only is there a food fight, but the climax is at a school celebration, attended by dignitaries (some of them are represented by garish mannequins, while the headmaster is a midget with a Smith Brothers beard). I also imagine that Martin Scorsese knows this film well. One of the boys in the film, who tells the headmaster that he is full of shit, is named Rene Tabard, the same name given the film professor in Scorsese’s film Hugo.

Zéro de conduite was banned by the French government for several years, so in an attempt to revive his carer, he took on an existing script which turned about to be his masterpiece, and last film, L’Atalante, from 1934. The simple story of a couple on their honeymoon on a canal barge, L’Atalante is again full of stylistic flourishes that makes the rather banal plot into something more universal and timeless.

Jean Daste and Dita Parlo are the newlyweds. She’s a provincial girl who has never left her village; he’s the skipper of a barge called the L’Atalante. The opening scenes are drolly comic, as the pair walk directly from the church to the boat, with the wedding party following behind, dourly, as if they were in a funeral procession.

The first mate is Pere Jules, (Michel Simon), an old sailor who has been around the world. He is a lumpen, vulgar sort with a homely mug and a fondness for cats. Initially there is a tension between him and the skipper’s new wife, but they warm to each other, and in a tremendously rich scene, he shows her his curios from his travels, including a puppet from Venezuela. He then shows her his tattoos, which he says keep him warm.

Daste reacts angrily to this, even though there is no real chance at romance between the two of them. Later, they will go into Paris and she will be enamored by a street peddler, whom Daste angrily knocks through a window. Parlo, feeling lonely, bored, and unwanted, leaves the barge and heads into Paris, where she is robbed and looks for work. Daste is devastated, and after an undefined period of comatose behavior, including being called onto the carpet by the shipping company boss, Simon goes into Paris to try to find Parlo.

L’Atalante was not a hit with theater owners, and was butchered and retitled by the studio. Vigo, who had shot the film during one of the coldest winters on record, was gravely ill, and could do nothing. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 29, and over the years L’Atalante has had several different versions. A new print was released in 1990 to some fanfare, and I saw that one in New York City. I wondered what all the fuss was about, but to be fair, I was suffering from a wicked ear infection at the time.

The film was restored once again in 2002, and that is the print that is on the Criterion edition. It has regularly made the decennial poll put out by Sight and Sound magazine–it’s highest ranking was in 1992, when it was chosen the sixth-best film of all time.

I certainly wouldn’t put it that high, but it in an enchanting film, with a wonderful, big-hearted performance by Simon, as well as lovely photography by Boris Kaufman (who would go on to shoot On the Waterfront). I watched it twice in the last few days (once with a commentary by Michael Temple, author of a book about Vigo) and it’s pieces of the film that stay with me, such as when Parlo, still in her white wedding gown, walks slowly along the length of the barge in twilight, looking like an apparition, or the scene when Daste jumps into the water, told by Parlo that when one looks into water one sees the love of their life.

Vigo’s untimely early death certainly robbed the world of a major talent–it’s something of the equivalent of the death of Buddy Holly to rock and roll. For those interested in the history of world cinema, his two later films are must viewing.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of December 9-11, 2011. 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 are worth half a point each.

Bonus questions:

1. Will Twilight: Breaking Dawn and The Sitter combine to make over $25 million?

2. Will Young Adult average over $50,000 per screen?

The deadline is on Thursday at midnight, EST.

Standings:

Jeanine: 8.5
James: 5.5
Filmman: 5
Nick: 3.5
Joe: 2,5
Juan: 1
Rob: 1
Jackrabbit Slim: 1
Marco: .5

The latest attempt to dig beneath the surface of Monroe is Simon Curtis’ My Week With Marilyn, and like so many films about out-sized personalities, it takes the annoying tack of viewing her through the eyes of someone completely bland and uninteresting. This has been done with famous personalities ranging from Idi Amin to Tolstoy (I guess James McAvoy was too old for this role) and ends up being about the stick figure in the center.

In this case, we follow Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a young fellow from an aristocratic family who loves the movies. He uses some connections to get a job as Third Assistant Director (basically a gofer) with Laurence Olivier’s production of The Prince and the Showgirl, which co-stars the legendary British actor with the American sensation, Monroe.

I was very much enchanted by the first third of this film, as it depicted what must be the excitement and glamor of behind the scenes at a movie, especially involving such big stars. Kenneth Branagh is Olivier, and while it could have been a simple impersonation (albeit a dead-on one), he gives Sir Larry a full character, tormented by his own insecurities. Julia Ormond plays his wife, Vivian Leigh, aware that she is too old for the part, and also aware that Olivier has cast Monroe with the hope of seducing her. That idea goes right out the window, though, when Monroe finally arrives, complete with an acting coach (Zoe Wanamaker) and full of the Stanislavski method, which Olivier abhors. Thrown in with Monroe’s tardiness, and Olivier would rather strangle her then sleep with her.

Redmayne then becomes Monroe’s confidante, much like a comfort dog. When she asks him, during one of her stupors, whose side he’s on, he tells her “Yours.” It is here that the movie starts curdling, become more lugubrious and solipsistic. I don’t know Colin Clark and certainly wouldn’t call him a liar (the screenplay, by Adrian Hodges, is based on his diary), but the movie comes off more as bragging than anything else. “Did I ever tell you about when I skinny-dipped with Marilyn Monroe?”

The film does feature an outstanding performance by Michelle Williams as Monroe, but interestingly, it’s not a complete one. She is perfect as the offstage Monroe, the women with the breathy voice, the morbid fragility, almost no self-esteem, and one that needs the approval of powerful men (at this point in her life she was newly wed to Arthur Miller, sourly played by Dougray Scott). When Monroe finds Miller’s notebook, presumably of his early ideas for his play After the Fall, she realizes he’s writing about her, and is understandably destroyed. Williams also captures the innate intelligence and humor of Monroe, such as during a press conference and when she basks in the admiration of employees at Windsor Castle. She whispers to Redmayne, “Shall I be her?” and then does her shtick, suggesting that she is firmly aware of the differences between Norma Jean Baker and Marilyn Monroe.

However, I don’t think Williams captures the complete magic of Monroe. We are constantly told by others in the cast what a luminous film star she is (in one perceptive comment, Redmayne points out that Olivier is a classic actor who wants to be a film star, and that Monroe is a film star that wants to be a classic actress), but frankly I don’t think Williams captures Monroe’s singular appeal. I don’t chide her for it; it may be beyond any actress, like asking someone to play trumpet like Miles Davis. Nevertheless, one who has seen Monroe’s films can substitute one’s own recollections of Monroe’s screen persona to fill in the cracks.

Redmayne also has an impossible job. He has to be interesting enough to care about, but not too interesting to overshadow the stars around him. He ends up erring on the former, a cypher with a puppy-dog naivete about the film business and Monroe’s intentions toward him. To attempt to round him out, he’s given an aborted romance with wardrobe girl Emma Watson (finally released from Hogwarts). She’s understandably annoyed at being tossed aside for his ardor for Monroe, but let’s face it: When you have a chance, no matter how far-fetched, at Marilyn Monroe, you take it.

My grade for My Week With Marilyn (a bad title, by the way, since the filming takes much more than a week): B-.

(warning: contains some spoilers)

When I first heard of the TV series ‘Mad Men’, it didn’t much interest me despite the critical acclaim and hype it was getting. Its subject matter – corporate culture of the 1960s – and its targets (hypocrisy, sexism, double-standards of the era and culture) seemed rather obvious and done to death beforehand.

However, I obtained a copy of the first series a couple of years ago and eventually got around to watching it. A few months later, I’ve watched all four series and 52 episodes of the series and am totally hooked on the series and a major fan.

The series centres on a successful advertising agency in early 1960s New York. The central character is Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative director and rising star of the organisation who is never short on brilliant ideas. He is charismatic, intelligent and successful and has a seemingly idyllic home life with a beautiful wife and is a good father to his two children. But inevitably, from the opening episode we see there are many contradictions in his life. Not only is he a serial philanderer, but there are numerous questions about his past that will be answered over the course of the series.

Looking back on the show, what makes it work is that it manages to juggle different styles and modes of characterisation and story-telling so well. On one hand it is often remarkably subtle in its characterisation and done with great patience. Characterisations develop over multiple series, and changes in relationships between characters aren’t signposted; viewers expected to work out for themselves how they’ve evolved.

On the other hand, the show doesn’t shy away from using melodramatic events (often piled on top of each other) for impact and as major defining events in the series. For example, in a Series 4 show Don Draper’s young daughter runs away from home and turns up at his office, while his aged secretary dies of a heart attack at the same time! At times like this, the narrative feels like it wouldn’t be out of place in a soap opera as opposed to a usually restrained drama.

Despite these seemingly uneasy elements, MM works remarkably well. The secret to its success is how substantial and intelligently it treats the characters and issues of the era. It did have a slow start on this aspect. After watching all four series I looked back at the opening episode and it did seem rather clunky and heavy-handed in demonstrating the rampant workplace sexism of the day.  But as the series progressed the writers became more confident in the concept and the way it conveys the culture of the era and major news events have just the right touch. The subtle way the Kennedy assassination is learned by the central characters and people in the workplace is particularly convincing and impressively done. You really feel like this is how it actually was in this time period, a tough thing to achieve.

Apart from Draper, probably the most interesting character on the show is Peggy (Elisabeth Moss). The reason is that whereas most of the other characters are pretty much set in what section of the socio-economic ladder they occupy, it’s clear from early on that her status within the company and general life is much more fluid and unpredictable. She also is a fascinating persona, at times admirable for refusing to accept her lot in life and utilise her talents, at other times self-absorbed and ruthless towards others in her pursuit of success

The show has a plethora of interesting and varied characters, but MM lives or dies on the basis of its central character Don Draper, excellently played by Hamm. He was particularly vital in the opening series as his mysterious past helped drive the drama when the knowledge of supporting characters was only superficial. It was interesting to look back at the pilot episode and notice how Hamm seemed not particularly assured at how to play the character and giving a rather varied performance. But within a couple of episodes Hamm got settled and soon the character seemed to fit him like a glove. Draper is never less than a compelling character to follow.

The greatest tribute one can give to MM is that as a character study virtually all of the main characters grow more interesting and layered as the series progresses. It’s clear that series creator Matthew Weiner has thought deeply about the development of these characters and developments and new knowledge about them are rarely tacked on. As a result, when a main character (like the closeted homosexual Sal) disappears during the show, his presence is greatly missed and you wonder what occurred to his character afterwards.

The show isn’t perfect – I thought the first couple of seasons started rather slowly as there was a lack of narrative drive that strong characterisation could only partially compensate. The writers seemed to be aware of this and the last two series have begun with major events (English management taking over the ad agency, Don Draper and other key personnel leaving to start own ad agency) to create interest at the start.

Also, the usually excellent balance between melodrama and characterisation can feel rather uneasy. Don Draper’s seemingly perfect record with getting women he chases after seems rather a stretch. Also his convoluted and shady past where he transformed himself from a poor farm boy to a slick, successful ad man somewhat strains credibility. In these aspects the show crosses the line from drama to melodrama and soap opera.

But overall, I have very few complaints of this extremely well-made and acted series. It’s certainly more substantial than any cinema release I’ve seen over the last few years. Until watching MM, I haven’t caught up with any of the highly regarded recent TV series that are acclaimed as being part of a golden age of that medium. On the basis of MM, I should spend more time watching these shows and less time at the cinema.

Hugo is a family film, yes. It has some slapstick, a Dickensian villain (or, more properly, and no pun intended, a Hugoian villain), mysterious adventure, cute dogs, and has many scenes of wonder. But beyond that, for those who are armed with the knowledge, Hugo is a valentine to the early days of cinema, and specifically to Georges Melies, who made over 500 films but within a decade was largely forgotten.

Set in the 1920s in Montparnasse Station in Paris, the title character is an orphan who lives inside the station, or more specifically, in the walls and clocktowers. His father (Jude Law) was a horologist, but after dying in a fire Hugo is left to the care of his dissolute uncle (Ray Winstone), who is employed as the clock keeper in the station. Left alone, Hugo scratches out a living by stealing food, all the while working on an unfinished project he and his father were involved in–an automaton.

Hugo has to avoid the eye of the Station Inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), who has a brace on one leg and uses a Doberman Pinscher to chase down orphans. Cohen’s character bears certain resemblances to Inspector Javert, of Les Miserables, who becomes consumed by capturing his quarry. Hugo also has a run-in with a toy store operator (Ben Kingsley), who catches him stealing and confiscates his father’s notebook. Kingsley recognizes something in the book, and reacts crossly whenever he sees Hugo.

Kingsley’s goddaughter, Chloe Grace Moretz, teams up with Hugo, eager to have adventures. Together the two discover the truth about her godfather he is the celebrated filmmaker, Georges Melies,  but he has no interest in reliving his past.

Films about filmmaking are common, even when they’re ostensibly about something else. And film critics tend to like these films. Whether the general public will embrace Hugo, I have no idea, but I think it has plenty to offer. For one thing, the production design, by Dante Ferrati, is breathtaking, as he creates the inner walls of the station as some sort of mechanical wonderland. Secondly, the universal appeal of a story of a plucky orphan boy, which goes back centuries, is rendered with aplomb by Scorsese and his screenwriter, John Logan. It is interesting to think that this a film that might have appealed to Steven Spielberg, and one wonders how it slipped by him. But Spielberg, one imagines, would have gone too far, and ladled the sentiment on in layers, while Scorsese and Logan stick with the story, and let the audience make their own conclusions. I do think it’s the only Scorsese film that’s ever brought a tear to my eye.

For those who know a thing or two about silent films, or Paris in the ’20s, Hugo is a goldmine. There are not only references to Melies’ films, most especially A Trip to the Moon, but also the Lumiere Brothers Arrival of a Train at a Station, Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last, and the automaton, who figures so prominently in the story, has a resemblance to the creature in Metropolis that can’t be coincidental.

In addition to plaudits for Scorsese, Logan, and Ferreti, I must congratulate Robert Richardson for his photography, Sandy Powell for her costumes, and the entire cast for their performances. It is a mark of Scorsese’s humanism that he gives his villain, Cohen, humanity, and Kingsley is absolutely wonderful as Melies. Moretz, who is already something of a wunderkind in film, is enchanting, but Asa Butterfield, as Hugo, gives a solid performance in a role that requires him to carry the film. The film is also rife with Harry Potter alumni: Helen McCrory is Kingsley’s wife, and Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths are part of a parallel series of plots that depict the daily life of those who work in the station.

Hugo isn’t perfect. At times the film drags, and a scene involving a professor of cinema (Michael Stuhlbarg) piles on the exposition. It’s necessary for those who have never heard of Melies, who I’m sure are 99.9 percent of the audience, but it plays kind of deadly. There’s also a bizarre inconsistency of accents. The children have British accents, but others have sort of French accents, and Cohen’s seems Germanic.

But those concerns are largely ignorable, as the sense of magic and wonder will stick with me for a long time. The film will bear repeat viewings, as there are sorts of things to spot–I think I saw James Joyce and Salvador Dali in the station, and unless I miss my guess, Johnny Depp (who is one of the producers) has a cameo as the guitarist Django Reinhardt.

My grade for Hugo: A-.
]]> http://goneelsewhere.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/review-hugo/feed/ 7 Jackrabbit Slim http://goneelsewhere.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/opening-in-chicago-1202/ http://goneelsewhere.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/opening-in-chicago-1202/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:18:01 +0000 Brian http://goneelsewhere.wordpress.com/?p=6339 ]]> Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (trailer)
Director: José Padilha (Elite Squad)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
A few years back, Nick reviewed the first Elite Squad, and now we have the sequel, about massive police corruption, which is apparently burning up the box office in its native Brazil. Anyone seen this yet and have an opinion?
Metacritic: 71

Shame (trailer)
Director: Steve McQueen (Hunger)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
I admired Hunger a great deal and am looking forward to this as well. It’s the first NC-17 movie released by a studio dependant since … Lust, Caution, I think? Granted, a lot of indie movies get unrated that would be NC-17 if distributors submitted them (Tykwer’s 3 is an obvious recent example). Which, come to think of it, probably wouldn’t be a bad idea. If distributors were required to submit movies instead of the system being voluntary, like in the UK, the NC-17 probably wouldn’t have such stigma and the country could take one babystep closer to acting like actual adults about stuff instead of reactionary puritanical morons.
Metacritic: 72

Tyrannosaur (trailer)
Director: Paddy Considine
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Jeff Wells has been promoting this pretty hard over the past few months, to the extent that he paid for media screenings to try to raise its profile. In fairness to him, Strand (the distributor) is an only occasionally useful outfit, but at the same time, Wells’s judgment is highly suspect and everyone knows it. Still, I respect him for stepping up and championing a film he cares about, and it does look pretty good. Nice poster, too.
Metacritic: 63

Also this week:
America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments (trailer) – backlash against fat backlash
Answers to Nothing (trailer) – Beats me. Crash ripoff or something.
Kinyarwanda – film set against the Rwandan genocide
Letters from the Big Man – a woman meets a Sasquatch
Passione – John Turturro-directed musical

I’m a big fan of writer/director Alexander Payne–Election and Sideways are two of my favorite films of the last fifteen years. The Descendants is more in line with the film of his I liked least, About Schmidt, in that it leans toward the sentimental. Payne does better when he casts a gimlet eye on his protagonist.

Here the protagonist is Matt King, played by George Clooney. He is directly descended from Hawaiian royalty and one of the first white families to inhabit the islands. A successful attorney, he is the trustee in charge of a large parcel of oceanfront land that the whole family has decided to sell to the high bidder, who will turn it into a resort community.

That is Clooney’s less pressing concern, though. His wife is in a coma from a boating accident. He is dealing with a troubled 10-year-old daughter (Amara Miller), and a 17-year-old daughter in a private school (Shailene Woodley) who had some sort of beef with her mother. Early on Clooney finds out the disagreement was over his now comatose wife’s philandering.

Most of the film deals with Clooney tracking down the man who was sleeping with his wife. He turns out to be Matthew Lillard, who I remember mostly for playing the obnoxious kid in a series of bad teen films. Here he’s a real estate agent, and has a connection with the land sale. Will Clooney exact his revenge by blocking the sale?

I have a feeling that what appealed most to Payne about this project, which is adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings (the script was co-written by Payne with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) is the sense of place. Hawaii is certainly a distinct place in America, which few of us have visited for more than a week at a time. The opening scenes, of poverty and despair on the streets of Hawaii, include a voiceover by Clooney wondering at the sanity of people who tell him he lives in paradise. From the film you can get the sense of how life goes a little slower there–shoes are optional, and baseball caps and flowered shirts are formal wear. As Clooney says, “Very important people look like bums and stunt men.”

Beyond that, The Descendants also has a keen sense of betrayal, as Clooney and Woodley are both forced to be angry with a woman who can not defend herself. Clooney calls himself the “backup parent,” and seems at a loss how to deal with his kids. Woodley, who is sensational as a teenager burning with rage, bonds with her father over finding Lillard, as if they were on some kind of father-daughter scavenger hunt. The family that sleuths together, stays together, I guess.

But other parts of The Descendants fell flat for me. I didn’t understand the presence of Woodley’s boyfriend, Nick Krause, who seems to be channeling Spiccoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A subplot involving Robert Forster as Clooney’s tough father-in-law also didn’t work. I did like a late appearance by Judy Greer, who gives the film a lift.

On the face of it, The Descendants is a good movie, it just isn’t great. I think I was supposed to care more about these people than I did. Clooney, who shows more vulnerability than he ever has before, and may pick up an Oscar for his effortm (have we ever seen Clooney cry before?) is riveting, but I couldn’t feel myself in his shoes. Maybe that’s because he’s hardly ever wearing them.

My grade for The Descendants: B+

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of December 2-4, 2011. 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 are worth half a point each.

Bonus questions:

1. Will the drop off of The Muppets and Arthur Christmas add up to over 100%?

2. Will The Descendants crack the top seven?

The deadline is on Thursday at midnight, EST.

Standings:

Jeanine: 5.5
Filmman: 4.5
Nick: 3
Joe: 2,5
James: 1
Juan: 1
Rob: .5
Jackrabbit Slim: .5
Marco: o

Hugo (trailer)
Director: Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
After initial skepticism, I’ve now convinced myself that this is something I really have to see. I’ll see it in 2-D, of course, but I’m actually excited about it now. I’m not even sure why I was so skeptical, since even lesser Scorsese (like The Aviator, probably the least of the 4 I listed) is still worth seeing and has good things to offer.
Metacritic: 85

The Muppets (trailer)
Director: James Bobin
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Somewhat torn on this, since I’ve never been a big Muppet fan. On the other hand, it’s not like I’m anti-Muppet, either, and whether or not this movie is any good or not, it sure looks like a good-faith effort to do a new Muppet movie and not a mindless franchise money grab.
Metacritic: 76

My Week with Marilyn (trailer)
Director: Simon Curtis
Personal Interest Factor: 5
I think Michelle Williams is one of the very finest actresses in movies today, but … my lord does this ever look like a chore to sit through. Typical Weinstein awards grab, complete with Judi Dench offering old-lady pearls of wisdom – “first love is such sweet despair.” Yeah, OK, whatever. Meanwhile, if there’s any sophistication in the way this movie views Marilyn Monroe, it’s not evident in the trailer. Instead, it looks like we get to see her through the eyes of some guy who loved her. Novel!
Metacritic: 66

Also this week:
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey (trailer) – doc about Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (trailer) – doc about chef Ferran Adrià
The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch (trailer) – French attempt at action franchise
The Last Rites of Joe May (trailer) – indie starring Dennis Farina
Rid of Me (trailer) – indie quirk set in Portland, Oregon

The film begins with a focus on two junior employees in the risk management department, Zachary Quinto and Penn Badgley. They witness a massive layoff on their floor that includes their boss, Stanley Tucci. Following him to the elevators, Quinto is emotional, but Tucci shrugs him off and instead gives him a thumb-drive with a project he’d been working on. Quinto investigates into the night and discovers something that imperils the firm’s existence.

Quinto calls back Badgley and their superior, Paul Bettany. For the rest of the night Quinto’s discovery is kicked up the chain, to Kevin Spacey, head of sales, to Demi Moore, head of risk management, then Simon Baker, head of securities. The import of what’s happening is so great that something needs to be done before the market opens, so the firm’s CEO, Jeremy Irons, arrives like some god in a helicopter.

As to what the crisis is, Chandor takes great pains to try to explain it. In fact, three times characters ask to have it explained to them in “English.” Irons, finally, asks Quinto to explain it to him as if he “were a small child, or a golden retriever.” Basically, the firm has included, in bundled securities, assets that exceed their volatility measures. If the stock drops by a certain amount, the firm is so leveraged that the loss will exceed the capital value of the company. I’m not even sure of what I’ve just written, but I don’t think it’s important to understand the nuts and bolts of it. What’s important to know is that the firm is in danger of complete destruction.

Irons’ solution is to sell off the toxic asset in a fire sale, even at a loss, knowing that he will endanger the firm’s trustworthiness and throw the market into turmoil. His only concern is getting out with his skin, unconcerned with what it does to the little guy. Spacey, who has worked for the firm for 34 years, has reservations, but Irons responds with a speech that one-ups Michael Douglas’ “greed” speech in Wall Street. “It’s just money, it’s all made up, it’s pieces of paper with pictures on them, so we can get something to eat without killing each other.” Irons says that ups and downs in the economy are part of some sort of natural cycle, and if people are put out of business, oh well.

This is an astonishingly self-assured debut by Chandor. In some ways it reminded me of Glengarry Glen Ross, in that is has a stagey quality (it could have been, with some minor tweaks, a play) but also because of it’s “lift the rock” look at the way things work in America. These are the people who control our lives, but they are people, and they make mistakes.

The acting is uniformly excellent. Badgley and Quinto are both very good (Quinto is one of the producers). Badgeley is the guy who wonders how much money everyone is making, while Quinto is literally a rocket science who has been wooed by the promise of big money. Bettany is a survivor, cogniscent of his own flaws (he pointedly chews Nicoret through most of the film), and Spacey is remarkable as the conscience of the film. Spacey has been coasting since his best work of the ’90s, usually being the Christmas ham in any film he’s in, and usually playing some kind of villain, best exemplified by his recent role in Horrible Bosses. But here he plays a fully rounded character, toning down his knowledge of his own wonderfulness as an actor.

Chandor also shows a good eye for images. I was particularly impressed with a scene between Baker and Moore in an elevator. In between them stands a diminutive cleaning woman, but they are largely oblivious of her and she of them, sort of like how these Wall Street folks don’t care that what they do affects the little guy. The cleaning crew, in fact, are the only appearances that “regular” people make in the film. When Quinto, Badgley, and Bettany go to the roof of the building to look out over the city, they don’t see the people down below, just the lights. The film ends with a character literally digging a hole, and as the screen goes black and the credits roll, the digging can still be heard.

One thing that did not ring true: Tucci is escorted out of the building by security after his layoff, his computer and cell phone shut off. There’s no way he would be able to hand a thumb-drive to Quinto without security confiscating it. Of course, without that, there’s no movie.

My grade for Margin Call: A-.

Bonus questions:

1. Which movie will earn a higher per-screen average: Hugo (1,200 screens) or The Muppets (3,300)?

2. Will My Week With Marilyn earn more than 2 million?

Because of Wednesday openings, deadline is on Tuesday at midnight, EST.

Standings:

Filmman: 4.5
Joe: 2
James: 1
Juan: 1
Rob: .5
Nick: .5
Jeanine: .5
Jackrabbit Slim: 0
Marco: o

Also, feel free to chime in on your favorite banner. There’s still a few hours for someone to submit another one, but my choice so far is for Filmman’s. Thanks for everyone who entered!

1. The Mother and the Whore, Jean Eustacio (1973)
2. Eraserhead, David Lynch (1977)
3. Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese (1980)
4. Satantango, Bela Tarr (1994)
5. Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch (1995)
6. Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett (1977)
7. Veronika Voss, Rainer Werner Fassbender (1982)
8. Sicilia! Daniele Huiller & Jean-Marie Straub (1999)
9. Stranger Than Paradise, Jim Jarmusch (1984)
10. Ed Wood, Tim Burton (1994)
11. Regular Lovers, Philippe Garrel (2005)
12. The Wild Child, Francois Truffaut (1970)
13. The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979)
14. in girum imus nocte et consummimur igni, Guy Debord (1978)
15. Effi Briest, Rainer Werner Fassbender (1974)
16. La Commune (Paris, 1871) Peter Watkins (2000)
17. Manhattan, Woody Allen (1979)
18. Khroustaliov, My Car! Alexis German (1998)
19. Je tu il elle, Chantal Akerman (1976)
20. The Man Who Left His Will on Film, Nagisa Oshima (1970)

I have seen six of these films, numbers 3, 6, 7 (I think–I saw a lot of Fassbender in college and am pretty sure this was one of them), 9, 10 and 17. I haven’t heard of half of these films.

The most significant exclusion is what I’m guessing is the highest-grossing black and white film that fits the time period, Schindler’s List. Interesting.

Any other comments or gripes? As you might expect I would consider more Woody Allen, with Stardust Memories, Zelig, or Broadway Danny Rose (not Shadows and Fog).

Before the wedding Edward confesses that he used to kill people for their blood.  Bella isn’t remotely fazed by this news and shakes it off because he was killing murderers (“You probably saved more lives than you took.”)  So Bella is pro-vigilante/capital punishment.  On their wedding night, Bella and Edward have violent sex that leaves Bella severely bruised all over her body.  But she doesn’t seem to care because she thought the sex was amazing.  I’m not going to judge if she likes it rough, but I had a problem with it.  I think domestic abuse is a serious problem and by rationalizing the bruises by saying “it’s okay because I know he really loves me” is not a healthy or appropriate response.

One last complaint, and I’ll move on.  Abortion.  (Quite a heavy topic for a movie/book aimed at pre-teens).  After discovering that surprise – a vampire can apparently get a human pregnant, there is a great debate about whether or not the “fetus” should live.  It’s a demon, it could kill Bella, etc etc are all reasons why Edward and others want Bella to abort the baby.  But no, Bella feels a “connection” to the baby and would die for it.  Oy vey.

It’s probably hard to make a movie when the source material is bad.  I thought Stewart and Pattinson were okay, but I could never stand Lautner (it only took 5 seconds into the movie for him to take his shirt off).  The wedding and honeymoon scenes were corny and underwhelming, but I really thought the last half was fairly interesting.  A lot of good things happened at the end, and some of the characters who used to be bumps on a log stepped up and actually did something.  Overall, I’ll be glad when this series is over.

Grade: D

3 (trailer)
Director: Tom Tykwer (The Princess and the Warrior, Heaven, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The International)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
I used to think of Tykwer as an interesting voice of world cinema (or something), but lately I’m not so sure. Now he seems like a guy with impressive technical chops but prone to slipshod execution of his ideas. The US trailer for this is pretty good, though, even if it is cut to avoid betraying it as a foreign film. In this case, though, the absence of dialogue serves it well, and the use of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” over scenes of what look like a not-apparently-extraordinary love triangle is unexpected and compelling. Looks worth seeing even if it turns out to be not very good.
Metacritic: 55

Week End
Director: Jean-Luc Godard (Masculin féminin, Made in U.S.A, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, La chinoise)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Another data point in exploring whether or not Godard made a film after 1965 that I can tolerate. This one’s from 1967. The four films I listed were the four he made before this one (and after 1965′s Pierrot le fou, which I do like), and I found all four rather tedious. Before Pierrot, there are many that I do like and none that I find tedious, at least of the ones I’ve seen. Hmmmm…
Metacritic: not listed

The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner
Director: Stephan Komandarev
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Well, I don’t know anything about this, except that it’s Bulgarian and has a title that sounds oddly like a Bono lyric. The synopsis does not sound promising, however; it’s apparently about an old man trying to cure his grandson’s amnesia by taking him on a cross-country tandem bicycle trip.
Metacritic: not listed

Also this week:
Happy Feet Two (trailer) – Couldn’t remember if I saw the first one. My records say no.
Raiders of the Lost Ark – 30th anniversary edition, digitally shown
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (trailer) – Jeanine promises a review!

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of November 18-20, 2011. 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. As per previous years, grosses after midnight on Thursday DO count. Bonus questions are worth half a point each.

Bonus 1:
Will Happy Feet 2 earn more than the 41.5 that the first film made in its opening weekend five years ago? (not adjusted for inflation)

Bonus 2:
Will Immortals fall over 60%?

Bonus 3 Art Project:
Create a banner for the contest! Because I am old and can barely work a toaster I am clueless as to how to make graphics, so those youngsters who know how, please submit a banner. We’ll vote on the winner, who will receive two points.

Deadline is Thursday at 11:59 pm EST.

The film, after a prologue that is sort of a visual poem that foreshadows events that will take place later (and will chase impatient viewers out of the theater), is two films in one. The first half is a wedding reception for Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), held at the castle-like home (exteriors were shot at an actual castle in Sweden) of her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland). The sequence begins with the couple’s stretch limo trying to navigate the winding, one-lane road to the castle, a wonderful metaphor for marriage, and this makes them two hours later to their own reception.

The reception plays out like a black comedy. Dunst’s parents are the twinkly John Hurt and the sour Charlotte Rampling, who openly feud during the toasts–Rampling announces she doesn’t believe in marriage, and didn’t attend the church service. Dunst’s boss, the overbearing Stellan Skarsgard, is also Michael’s best man. She’s an advertising copywriter, and he pesters her for a tagline throughout the party, even assigning a lackey (Brady Corbet) to follow her around to get it. She ends up screwing Corbet in a sand trap of the estate’s 18-hole golf course.

All during the party Dunst suffers from depression, or, as it used to be called before the advent of modern psychology, melancholia. It was here that I had to stop listening to my “wait, but” voice, which grew increasing louder during the second, astronomical half of the film. There is no mention of Dunst being on any medication, and the characters are pretty rough on her when she has episodes, Sutherland going so far as to remind that he is spending a vast amount of money on the affair, so she should cheer the fuck up. Needless to say, the evening does not end well.

The second half of the film is more focused on Gainsbourg, and the sisters invert roles. A rogue planet, called Melancholia, is on a close path to Earth. Sutherland, an amateur astronomer, is excited about seeing the event, and assures Gainsbourg that there is no danger, but Gainsbourg goes online and sees reports that the planet has a slingshot orbit that will indeed cause it and Earth to collide.

Astrophysicists will no doubt roll their eyes at this–first of all, heavenly bodies are named after mythological figures, not mood disorders. Sutherland tells Gainsbourg that with “calculations this large, there has to be a margin for error.” Um, no. But to get bogged down into details in like this is to miss Von Trier’s point. He has made the castle to be a world unto itself. Gainsbourg goes on the Internet, yes, but there is no television, no view of the world at large, which would undoubtedly be in mass hysteria. Von Trier’s end of the world isn’t like Roland Emmerich’s–he’s interested in the internal response, rather than the external.

Dunst, who is by now so depressed she can’t even eat her favorite dish of meat loaf, assumes control in the face of crisis, and Gainsbourg becomes dependent on her. She says something a little mind-bending: “Earth is evil; no one will miss it,” which becomes even more enigmatic when she adds that she has always known that there is no other life in the universe except on Earth. She’s sort of channeling R.E.M.: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

The film is sumptuous. The images are striking, especially of the oncoming planet and the nighttime shots across the grounds of the estate (more than once it’s mentioned that the golf course has 18 holes, but late in the film Gainsbourg carries her child across the putting green with a flag that reads “19″–discuss). The music is mostly Wagner’s prelude to “Tristan Und Isolde,” which is heavily romantic, and persuades us that Melancholia and Earth’s “dance of death” is as graceful as it is catastrophic.

The acting is all around terrific. Dunst has never been better, and is a good candidate for an Oscar nomination. Throughout the film she underplays, never acting “crazy.” She’s strong in both halves of the film. Frankly, before this film I had never taken Kiefer Sutherland very seriously as an actor, but he’s excellent.

The film isn’t perfect, which I think Von Trier would appreciate, as he said he doesn’t want to make polished films, and prefers them to have flaws. It’s pretty heavy-handed to make the obvious use of the word of the title. But I was caught up in the magic of the film–the drowsy, seemingly never-ending wedding reception, and the isolation of the characters in the second half. It is also periodically funny–when Gainsbourg realizes that the planets will collide, she grabs her son and tries to start the car. Dunst asks her, quite sensibly, “Where are you going?” When the world is about to end, there is no place to go. Calm acceptance is the only response.

My grade for Melancholia: A-

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as J. Edgar Hoover, the man some think was the most powerful American of the 20th century. The script, by Dustin Lance Black, (who wrote a much better biographical screenplay with Milk) has a hoary structure–it’s told in flashback, as Hoover dictates his memoirs. I found this structure unbelievably square, but felt a little embarrassed when Black turns the tables at the end of the film and we realize that Hoover is not a reliable narrator.

DiCaprio plays Hoover from the age of 24, when he assisted in organizing the Palmer raids, which struck back at anarchists after the bombing of the Attorney General’s home in 1919, through the wars with celebrity bank robbers and gangsters, to his gathering of secret files on people in power, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy (he is shown listening to a wiretap of an assignation with Kennedy and a woman when he hears of Kennedy’s assassination–fascinating if true).

We also see his relationship with his mother, Judi Dench, who tells him, perhaps suspiciously, that she would rather have a dead son than a “daffodil” for a son, and his long relationship with Clyde Tolson, who was the number two man at the FBI and Hoover’s good friend. The film is coy to a point about their relationship, as nothing has been proven as to their status as lovers, but a key scene that has Tolson erupting in fury at Hoover’s announcement that he plans to propose to a woman (Dorothy Lamour, another amazing fact I didn’t know), spells things out pretty clearly. The famed rumor that Hoover dressed in women’s clothes is addressed here, but in a totally different context than might have been guessed.

Eastwood and Black extend only a little sympathy to Hoover for having a ball-busting mother. Mostly they take a dim view of him, mostly for his vainglorious posturing. When it’s pointed out to him that he didn’t actually take part in the shooting of John Dillinger, he fires the man who did, Melvin Purvis. They also emphasize the nation’s chief law enforcer as a man who cares little about the law. More than once Tolson wrinkles his brow at Hoover’s plan of action and says, “Isn’t that illegal?” Hoover’s anti-communism so overwhelms him that he virtually ignores organized crime, and is so eager to restore his good name that he ignores the doubts over the guilt of Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh kidnapping (this is a major plot line in the film and something I know a little bit about, since it happened just a few miles from where I live, and the full story is far more interesting).

The film is photographed by Tom Stern, and has the look that Eastwood favors, especially in his historical films–diffuse lighting and earth tones. The editing, Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, effectively bounces back and forth through time. But the makeup is spotty. DiCaprio’s old age makeup–he plays the man up until his death at age 77, was better than I anticipated, but the makeup for Armie Hammer as Tolson makes him look embalmed.

As for DiCaprio, he sure works hard. He reminds me of a duck (stick with me) that looks so placid sailing across the surface of the water, while underneath the surface the bird’s feet are moving furiously. Unfortunately, we see DiCaprio’s feet moving furiously. I never forgot it was DiCaprio I was watching, hung up on his accent and facial expressions. Hammer is good, despite his old-age makeup. Naomi Watts, as Hoover’s long-time secretary (he proposes to her, but hires her instead) is largely wasted in a nothing role.

I think my favorite part of the film was learning that Hoover and Richard Nixon hated each other. When Hoover dies, Nixon gives a completely insincere tribute to him, even as he sends his men to raid Hoover’s files, hoping to find his secret stash.

Hoover’s life may be far too interesting to be captured in a conventional movie like this one. The depth of the man’s hatred and lust for power is probably unfathomable, and while Eastwood’s film makes me want to read more about it, it’s unsatisfying.

My grade for J. Edgar: C

Into the Abyss (trailer)
Director: Werner Herzog (The White Diamond, Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, Cave of Forgotten Dreams)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
The latest from the great Werner Herzog, who seems to pop up with a new film every few months these days. This one is a documentary about a death row inmate in Texas, and looks to be his most compelling doc since Grizzly Man.
Metacritic: 77

J. Edgar (trailer)
Director: Clint Eastwood (Changeling, Gran Torino, Invictus, Hereafter)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I’ll go see this just because seeing stuff like this is what I do. But it really looks awful, and Eastwood’s last couple movies have not been good. Besides, I wonder how much there really is to say about Hoover these days. I’ve been thinking that in its own way, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was a very effective J. Edgar Hoover portrayal. He wasn’t a major character in that movie, but he was a big presence nonetheless. And though it was early in his career, I think one can extrapolate the power he would accumulate and the abuses of power that would be so problematic from the way Mann and Billy Crudup portrayed him. Yes, the more I think about Public Enemies the more it gains in stature with me.
Metacritic: 59

Melancholia (trailer)
Director: Lars von Trier (Dogville, Manderlay, The Boss of It All, Antichrist)
Personal Interest Factor: 10
Yeah, I’m excited for this one. I’m glad to see Kirsten Dunst getting a really great role; I’ve always thought she was underappreciated as an actress. And from what I’ve heard, this treads similar thematic ground as Antichrist and advances LVT’s newly found and very bold visual aesthetic – who knew it was coming from Mr. Dogme? – but is more disciplined and maybe not as brutally confrontational.
Metacritic: 81

Red Desert
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni (L’avventura, Blowup, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
Excited about this too. I’ve never really gotten into Antonioni, having only seen Blowup and The Passenger, which I both enjoyed. This movie was earlier than either of those two, and was his first color film. It’s playing in a new 35mm print this week. Great!
Metacritic: no score

Also this week:
Bobby Fischer Against the World – Bobby Fischer doc
Jack and Jill (trailer) – most repulsive-looking Sandler movie ever?
Revenge of the Electric Car (trailer) – followup to Who Killed the Electric Car? from a few years back
The Women on the 6th Floor (trailer) – French comedy about a new maid in a wealthy house

Olsen is Martha, and as the film begins she sneaks away from a commune she lives in based in the Catskill Mountains. She calls her estranged sister (Sarah Paulson), who picks her up and takes her to her lakeside vacation home in Connecticut. The sisters haven’t spoken in two years, but Olsen reveals nothing of her stay at the commune, instead just saying she was with a boyfriend and broke up.

The film then intercuts between Olsen’s induction and indoctrination into the commune, which is led by the charismatic and just a bit scary John Hawkes. We’re not totally sure of what Hawkes is up to or what his game is, but he seems to snare Olsen by crafting a song about her. This despite her waking up one night to find Hawkes humping her from behind.

In the present, Olsen hangs out in her sister’s house, mostly sleeping, but also displaying that some communal habits die hard, like skinny-dipping in broad daylight or crawling into her sister’s bed while she’s having sex with her husband (Hugh Dancy). All the while she refuses to discuss what happened to her, which I imagine is an understandable psychological response, but also is a convenient plot mechanism.

Of course life on the commune isn’t as wholesome as Olsen imagines. It’s totally patriarchal, as the men are allowed to eat first, and the men seem to have free run sexually (at least Hawkes does). When Olsen realizes they are sort of Manson-Family-lite, she rethinks her position. What starts as burglaries ends in violence, which presumably kick-starts her decision to leave.

Though she does leave, her head still seems to be there. Dancy loses patience with her quickly, and when she accuses him of living his life “wrong” by valuing money and possessions, this while she sleeps under his roof and eats his food, he’s had enough. Olsen makes a critical mistake–she calls her commune, which lets them know where she is.

Olsen is amazingly good, and her performance is mostly subtle. A good deal of it is reflected in her eyes, which express a constant bewilderment at being back in the upper-middle-class. Writer and director Sean Durkin has not given us too much backstory–we see nothing of Olsen before her first day at the commune–but Olsen fills in the gaps with her mannerisms, giving us a portrait of a lost woman.

Hawkes is also very good, despite also having to fill in cracks. I think I was influenced by his equally scary guy in Winter’s Bone. There’s a scene where, while teaching Olsen how to shoot, that we learn that he’s not exactly running a peaceful kibbutz. But I would have liked to see more about what he was up to. Did he have a guiding philosophy, or was he just a sexual predator and low-level criminal?

Much of Durkin’s fingerprints in this film are the frequent cuts between past and present, often done so that the situation is almost identical, whether it be the position Olsen is sitting in or the mood of a scene, such that it can take a moment for the viewer to realize what time period there are in. This can be clever, but ultimately becomes a tedious gimmick.

The ending of Martha Marcy May Marlene (the title refers to the different names Olsen is known by during the film, a suggestion that her identity is not her own) is abrupt and ambiguous. I’m pretty sure I understood what was going on, but as the lights came up I was surrounded by some confused patrons.

My grade for Martha Marcy May Marlene: C+

John Huston’s directorial debut, the 1941 film was the third to be made from Dashiell Hammet’s novel. The first was in 1931, but was precode, and instead of rereleasing it, Warner Brothers decided it was too racy and made a remake instead. Then there was Satan Met a Lady, from 1936, which co-starred Bette Davis and was a light comedy. Both of those films were relegated to the ashes of history upon the release of Huston’s film, though, which became the definite private eye film, and many consider the first true film noir.

While watching it this time I focused on what it is I like so much about it. A person’s first few viewings may be required to figure out the elaborate plot (unlike some of Raymond Chandler’s works, The Maltese Falcon does tie up all loose ends; no murders are left unexplained). I think it mainly has to do with the dialogue, which is largely Hammet’s. There’s a story that Huston, who was also the screenwriter, had a secretary type up the dialogue from the novel, which somehow ended up in the studio’s hands. They thought it was great, though Huston had added or subtracted nothing.

For those who have the unfortunate distinction of never seeing the film, I’ll try to summarize. It’s a classic, much-parodied private eye template: a beautiful young woman (Mary Astor) pays a call on a private detective agency. She meets Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart). A chronic prevaricator, Astor tells him she’s looking for her sister, who’s been keeping company with a dangerous man, Floyd Thursby (one of the great never-seen characters in film history). Bogart’s partner, Miles Archer, tells her he will tail Thursby. He ends up getting shot. When Thursby is killed shortly thereafter, Bogart falls under suspicion by the police, especially when it comes to light that he was keeping time with Archer’s wife (Gladys George).

Soon more mysterious characters appear. An effeminate man of vague ethnicity, Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), who smells of gardenia, visits Spade, thinking that Spade knows the whereabouts of a certain black bird. Bogart plays along, and in a fantastic scene he is held up by Lorre, knocks him out, and gains information from him. This leads to his meeting with the “Fat Man,” Casper Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet), a rotund antiques expert with dubious ethics. We learn that all the characters are in search of a centuries old statuette of a falcon, a tribute to the emperor of Spain by the Knights of Malta. Greenstreet has been searching for it for 17 years, and is hungry to get it.

There are numerous twists and turns in the story, and it can be difficult to keep up, but by now I know it by heart, and who killed whom. Another character is Greenstreet’s hired gun, Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook, Jr.). who is also referred to as his “gunsel.” Bogart has great fun tormenting him, frequently besting him and making him look foolish. Cook is full of tough-guy cliches, and after one of them Bogart responds, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”

In a way, the delicious dialogue is somewhat meta–the characters almost realize that they are in private eye story. Bogart, especially, glides through the film with an almost preternatural knowledge. His Spade is honorable but not above looking out for himself–he didn’t particularly like Archer (he was sleeping with his wife) but ultimately he has to avenge him. But beyond that the action is tinged with a gleeful sense of comedy, like the wonderful first scene between Bogart and Greenstreet, which is largely exposition but is also laugh out loud funny. I won’t reproduce it here entirely, but Greenstreet’s overly formal syntax and Bogart’s cut-to-the-chase responses are like beautiful music. Greenstreet sums things up by saying, “I like talking to a man who likes to talk.”

The relationship between Bogart and Astor is also funny. You can sense they’re pretending to love each other, just to get what they want. He knows she’s a liar, and there’s a great scene when he asks her a question and she avoids it by standing, poking the fire, and straightening things. He asks her another question and he says, “Are you going to go around poking the fire and straightening things?” She’s consistently a phony, and when he catches her at it (which is always) he tells, “You’re good, you’re very good.”

Thus, the ending, (skip this if you’ve never seen it) when Bogart sends her over as the “fall guy,” gives the ending a kind of power. We last see Astor as she descends in an elevator, as if dropping down into the flames of Hell. There’s also a touch of Shakespeare, as a policeman, holding the falcon (which is what Hitchcock termed as a “McGuffin”) asks Spade what it is. “It’s the stuff dreams are made of,” Bogart paraphrases the Bard.

There existed some differences from the novel to the screen. Homosexuality was, of course, verboten in films of that era. Cairo is referred to as “queer” in the novel, but anyone with working gaydar can pick up that Lorre’s performance is made to make him gay in the film. Cook is also hinted at being Greenstreet’s boy-toy–”gunsel” was slang for a younger man in a relationship with an older man, and when Bogart suggests to Greenstreet that Cook be made the fall guy, and Greenstreet objects because he considers him like a son, you can see what’s going on. Also, there’s a scene in which Spade thinks that Astor’s character (Brigid O’Shaugnessy) has pilfered a thousand-dollar bill. In the movie, she denies it and he moves on. In the book, he takes her into the bathroom and has her strip. I read the book when I was about 14, so I remember that scene well.

As for the noir aspects, much of that is due to Arthur Edeson’s photography, which, like Gregg Toland’s in that year’s Citizen Kane, used deep focus and unusual angles, especially those from lower view, which exposed ceilings. A great example of this is when Cook awakens after being knocked out, his allies agreeing to selling him out to the police. He looks at each face, staring at him grimly. Bogart’s scene with Greenstreet is also deceptively complicated.

The Maltese Falcon made Bogart a star, and remains of his best performances. He had been playing heavies for years, after more years playing light comedy on Broadway (he originated the line, “Tennis, anyone?”) George Raft turned down the part (he would also turn down the lead role in Casablanca), and Bogart was happy to get a lead role that had moral ambiguity. He was a hero, but he also a man of conflicted emotions. Note how quickly after Archer’s death he has the sign on the windows and doors changed. But he doesn’t betray his bedrock principles, upon which the success of the film hangs.

Greenstreet made his film debut here, at the age of 61. He would end up playing pretty much the same part for the rest of his career. Also in the film is Huston’s father Walter, in a memorable cameo as Captain Jacoby of the La Paloma. His entire role is to stumble bullet-ridden into an office, holding the falcon wrapped in newspaper, and drop dead. Once I was playing the Silver Screen edition of Trivial Pursuit and got a question asking for the name of that character. My opponent, knowing how well I knew that answer, handed me the dice to roll again.

Le Havre (trailer)
Director: Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America, The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, Lights in the Dusk)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Definitely will need to go see this sometime this week. It’s a film from Finland that has been getting warm reviews since it premiered at Cannes, and it’s by a director who’s not well-known enough that I’ve seen any of his movies but is more than well-known enough that I ought to.
Metacritic: 82

Like Crazy (trailer)
Director: Drake Doremus (Spooner, Douchebag)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Trailer is certainly earnest but it gets any emotional heft it has from the use of the song, a cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love”. Reviews are surprisingly strong but I’m conditioned not to trust stuff like this, because it almost always turns out to be crap.
Metacritic: 71

The Son of No One (trailer)
Director: Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Fighting)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Here’s a fun game of “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other” using the cast list of this movie: Channing Tatum, Tracy Morgan, Katie Holmes, Ray Liotta, Juliette Binoche, Al Pacino. Actually, looking at it, a lot of those things is not like the other – I’m not sure one can look at that cast list by itself and have any idea what kind of movie it is, except that Ray Liotta only plays sleazy assholes these days. But the correct answer is Juliette Binoche, who is not someone I’d expect to show up in a gritty American indie cop movie.
Metacritic: 37

Tower Heist (trailer)
Director: Brett Ratner (Red Dragon, After the Sunset, X-Men: The Last Stand, Rush Hour 3)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
A few obvious problems here. One is Ratner; the only movie I’ve ever seen of his was his X-Men movie. I only went to see that because it was a continuation of the first two (good) X-Men movies, and it was by far the worst movie of the first three. Second is Murphy. Yes, I know that this is supposed to be a rebranding of sorts for Murphy, since apparently he’s washed his hands of the kids movies he’s been doing … but let’s be honest, Murphy hadn’t done much good for a long time even before he started his kids stuff. Third is Broderick. It’s a longstanding rule of mine that Matthew Broderick is simply not in good movies, and despite occasional rumors to the contrary, I’ve yet to verify a true exception to this rule.
Metacritic: 58

Also this week:
Urbanized – urban design doc
A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (trailer) – never seen the first two

But Harrison is another matter. Not only because his talents were largely overwhelmed and overlooked due to Lennon and McCartney while in The Beatles (and perhaps post-Beatles in different ways) but because he always seemed a personality full of mystery and contradictions. While he was generally known as the ‘quiet Beatle’ who was considered the most contemplative of the group, there were enough examples of him being quite an intense, even volatile personality. To use a more specific example it seemed bizarre how someone defined by spirituality and search for inner peace would be such a major fan of what would appear to be the antithesis of those concepts,  Formula 1 racing.

Above all else, Harrison in interviews over the years always came across as a thoughtful and perceptive personality (probably the most interesting of the Beatles imo) which made me seek to learn more about him.  I read a biography of Harrison by Joshua Greene earlier this year which was pretty good and provided some insight into him. But I hungered for more so when it was revealed Martin Scorsese’s TV documentary on Harrison ‘Living in the Material World’ was getting a brief cinema release in Australia, I jumped at the chance to see it.

Unfortunately, while there numerous pleasures to be had from LITMW and was glad I saw it, I had a feeling of disappointment by the end.

Covering Harrison’s life in largely chronological order, LITMW has a good beginning with friends and family showing how much his absence has impacted on them. But it falls away once it begins on the Beatles period, mainly because it falls into the trap of not being a documentary about George but the Beatles as a group, and on that level it feels like a pale imitation of The Beatles Anthology 1990s documentary. At times, it almost feels as if Harrison is a periphery figure in his own documentary!

The documentary does pick up once it moves to Harrison’s post-Beatles career. The section covering his debut solo album ‘All Things Must Pass’ is particularly compelling as it illustrates someone -his talents suffocated for years in the Beatles environment – bursting out with a fountain of individual compositions that he’d been stockpiling for years. Seeing the dedication and passion Harrison devoted to the project, it seemed impossible to think the album wouldn’t be anything but a critical and commercial triumph.

Also, the final years of his life are covered effectively. The 1999 incident where a crazed man invaded his home and stabbed him is covered in graphic detail. This sounds rather ghoulish to focus on but it conveys Harrison’s personality, humour and beliefs quite effectively.

But even in the post-Beatles section, the documentary frustrates. Despite being over 200 minutes in length, Harrison’s post-mid 1970s solo music work is totally ignored, including his successful ‘comeback’ 1987 album ‘Cloud Nine’. Even more bafflingly, the successful copyright infringement lawsuit against his hit single ‘My Sweet Lord’ isn’t even mentioned. In a documentary lasting over 200 minutes, such gaps shouldn’t have occurred.

But most frustrating of all in LITMW is that it doesn’t attempt to probe at the contradictions and mysteries present in Harrison’s persona that help make him such a fascinating subject. For example, the general perception on Harrison and drugs is that he largely gave it up in the late 1960s and instead sought out a higher state of being through a spiritual and religious search for truth (something implied in an excerpt from a Harrison interview in LITMW). Yet, Klaus Voorman (a friend of the Beatles since they were in Germany in early 1960s) is fairly explicit in saying that Harrison was getting derailed by drug usage from the early to mid 1970s. Yet, no other mention or investigation is made of this claim elsewhere in the documentary.

That is a constant frustration with LITMW  – things are hinted at with Harrison’s character but never really probed. On some occasions we get an account of someone who was peaceful with his life, on others someone who was in a regular state of agitation. An example being how we get two different accounts of how he handled the end of his marriage to first wife Patti. Disappointingly, the film probably provides less insight into Harrison’s persona than Green’s biography did.

In terms of style, the documentary is unusual in that it has no narration and no attempts to put a biographical timeline on proceedings. This is a positive in that it has a fluid, languid style with its own character which makes it more enjoyable to experience than the standard doco. On the other hand the lack of biographical information means that viewers need to have a deep knowledge of Harrison’s career to fully appreciate the events covered. If you’re a person with limited knowledge of Harrison or the Beatles and want to understand their significance, this isn’t the place to start.

Harrison’s passion in music and involvement in movie production (without him ‘Life of Brian’ wouldn’t have got made) mean that he ‘talking heads’ include not only friends, family and the surviving Beatles, but racing car drivers and members of Monty Python. Standouts are Harrison’s wife Olivia who is tactful and moving in her summation of his final years. As well, despite appearing only briefly, racing car driver Jackie Stewart is notable, particularly as he provides insight into how someone like Harrison would love motor car racing.

While there are many problems with this doco, I shouldn’t be too down on it as there is much to enjoy from it. It is well-made, with an amazing array of footage from the era (much of which I hadn’t seen before). And of course, there is the pleasure of listening to Harrison’s songs, which Scorsese wisely gives them plenty of time to be heard. For Beatles fans it’s definitely worth watching.

But as a portrait of Harrison, this could’ve and should’ve been better. My favourite moment in the doco is when we see a picture of John Lennon sitting in the studio shortly after the death of former Beatle and friend Stu Sutcliffe worked in. The look of vulnerability and devastation isn’t something I’d ever seen before in the usually confident and cocky persona of Lennon.

It’s a great moment, but when the best part of a documentary about Harrison centres on John Lennon, it suggests not everything has worked.

The way the film captures Thompson’s voice had me seeing it as a half-glass full rather than empty.  To be sure it suffers from some of the self-righteousness that Thompson could be prone to, and it at times struggles to find a tone that balances slapstick comedy with moral outrage. Some of the characters are mere stick figures. But Depp’s affectionate portrayal and a script by Bruce Robinson, who wrote and directed the great Withnail and I (but hasn’t made a film in almost 20 years) suffuses the entire enterprise with a kind of joyous reverie that sustains it.

The film is set in Puerto Rico in 1960, and even those who don’t like anything else should glory in the production design. The cars, the clothes, the sets and the music are all terrific. We open on Depp, as a young journalist, awaking after a night of debauchery. He pulls himself together for a job interview at the San Juan Star, an English-language newspaper. The editor-in-chief (Richard Jenkins), despite reservations about Depp’s obvious drinking problem, gives him the job (Depp later learns he was the only applicant). He’s shown the ropes by the staff photographer (Michael Rispoli), who explains that the paper is on its last legs. Depp’s first job is to write the horoscope and do rewrites.

The first half of the film has Depp and Rispoli engaging in picaresque adventures, such as being chased from a late-night encounter at a jungle restaurant, going to cockfights, and escaping from the police (one of my favorite lines of dialogue has Rispoli shouting, “Oh my god, it’s the policeman we set on fire!”). Meanwhile, Depp is seduced by a pair of gringos: Aaron Eckhart, as a shady real estate developer, and his girlfriend, Amber Heard, whom Depp meets when she appears to him in the ocean, like a mermaid.

Eckhart hires Depp to write marketing material for his venture of turning a nearby island that is being used as a gunnery range into a vacation paradise. It’s never clear why Eckhart would put so much stock in Depp, which is a big plot problem. Nevertheless, Depp takes meetings with Eckhart’s backers, including a rabid anti-communist American. Depp tries to keep his attraction for Heard under check, but she doesn’t make it easy.

Eventually the film takes on a more serious tone, as Depp realizes Eckhart is a crook, and that there is a large disparity in income between the likes of him and the peasants. It’s an easy kind of moralizing, and I never quite grasped what the problem was. Is all development bad? Does it lead to poverty? The film is vague on the issue. But it awakens something in Depp, who decides to fight back.

Also in the film is Giovanni Ribisi as a scabrous “crime and religious correspondent,” the sort who is always drunk and listens to Hitler recordings for ironic purposes. At one point he asks Depp to check out his penis, and asks him if it’s the clap. “It’s a standing ovation,” Depp tells him. There are a lot of mordantly funny lines like that, particularly a riff by Depp on Richard Nixon, whom he watches debating John Kennedy. “What is this blizzard of shame?” he asks. “The man lies like he breathes.”

Unfortunately, not all of the dialogue is as rich. Jenkins, a very good actor, is saddled with a comic toupee and some cheesy lines, which make him seem like a version of J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. Heard, who is made to look luminous (not a tough job) isn’t given much character development, instead simply serving as the embodiment of a male fantasy.

But overall I liked The Rum Diary. A scene that has everyone going to a local club to hear music pinpoints the nature of the characters–Depp, Rispoli and even Heard are at home in the sweaty Latin canteen, but Eckhart, pressed in linen, representing the colonialist point of view, is distinctly out of place, and ends up thrown out on his ear.

My grade for The Rum Diary: B

In Time (trailer)
Director: Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne, Lord of War)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
An interesting premise, and an opportunity to watch Cillian Murphy play a weird bad guy for probably the last time before watching Cillian Murphy play a weird bad guy starts to get old. Or maybe it won’t – he has a Walken-esque quality that might have more staying power than I think. Actually, now that I think about it, it might be more Spader-esque than Walken-esque. Which is still good but no one beats the master.
Metacritic: 55

Martha Marcy May Marlene (trailer)
Director: Sean Durkin
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Obviously the big winner this week, as it both looks the most interesting and has the most critical buzz behind it. Won the Best Director prize at Sundance this last year and is getting serious attention for Elizabeth Olsen’s performance.
Metacritic: 75

Oranges and Sunshine (trailer)
Director: Jim Loach
Personal Interest Factor: 6
So I don’t know the history here, but apparently it was once custom for social workers in Britain to basically abduct poor children and send them off as child laborers to places throughout the empire. This was brought to light in the 1980s, and that exposure is the subject of this movie, which stars Emily Watson and Hugo Weaving.
Metacritic: 62

The Rum Diary (trailer)
Director: Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Jennifer 8)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I wasn’t a big fan of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, although it’s been long enough since I’ve seen the movie that I wonder if I’d feel differently about it now. Anyway, I doubt this movie’s all that similar to that one aside from the obvious superficial elements, but I can’t say that I’m feeling the pull here.
Metacritic: 57

Also this week:
Boy Wonder – indie teen vigilante/superhero movie
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (trailer) – biopic about Charlotte Serge Gainsbourg
Jamie and Jessie Are Not Together – lesbian romance
Puss in Boots (trailer) – Shrek spin-off

The film grabs the viewer from the beginning and won’t let go. Shannon, as a normal husband and father, works on a drilling crew. His daughter is deaf, and he does his best to work to communicate with her as she is prepared for implant surgery. But then Shannon starts to have bad dreams. Really bad dreams. They involve storms and someone familiar to him attacking him. At first it’s the dog, then a friend and co-worker. These dreams spook Shannon so much that he starts to go off the boil.

Normally dreams in films are problematic, and the “it’s only a dream” scene is a cliche. But Nichols largely avoids this. When Shannon awakes from a horrible dream, it’s not so much to give us a “whew” feeling, but instead increase the dread. We become aware of Shannon’s problems at the same pace he does. When he starts to hear thunder when there is nothing but blue skies, he understands there is something wrong just as we do.

Shannon visits his mother (Kathy Baker), who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at the same age he is now. He checks out books from the library and sees a counselor. Yet he is still consumed by expanding a storm shelter in the backyard of his rural Ohio home. This creates all sorts of problems with both his employer and his wife (Jessica Chastain, who has been in every movie I’ve seen this year, it seems, and good in all of them). He takes out a risky loan to build it, and even a visit from his no-nonsense older brother (Ray McKinnon, in an effective scene) can’t dissuade him from believing that a horrible storm is coming.

There is so much good about this film that it seems wrong to pinpoint one aspect of it that makes it succeed, but I must start with Michael Shannon’s performance. Shannon often plays men who are not right in the head, so I was worried that it would be a performance like Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining, where the actor’s previous reputation made it impossible to buy him as a normal person. But Shannon is completely convincing as an average Joe, and his breakdown is played in subtle, close-to-the-vest fashion. We understand each move he makes to understand what’s wrong with him, but also feel for him as his obsession overwhelms him. He only erupts once in the film, and when he does it makes it all the more powerful.

After watching this film, I’m wondering how I’ll react to the next big storm.

My grade for Take Shelter: A

The Mill and the Cross (trailer)
Director: Lech Majewski (Prisoner of Rio, Gospel According to Harry, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Glass Lips)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
I had never heard of this until Ebert’s four-star review, but it certainly seems like the goto art movie for this week. It’s about the Bruegel painting “The Way to Calvary” and stars Rutger Hauer of all people. Looks amazing visually and I suspect I’ll regret it if I skip it.
Metacritic: 82

The Skin I Live In (trailer)
Director: Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her, Bad Education, Volver, Broken Embraces)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
Almodóvar, I guess, is something of an acquired taste, and I acquired it around the time that I saw All About My Mother during the Viva Pedro! retrospective several years back. I’ve seen about 10 or so of his films now, and really look forward to each new one. This one looks especially interesting, darker and more twisted than he’s done in awhile, and it’s good to see Antonio Banderas working with him again. If nothing else, his films are always good for a good poster, and the poster for this does not disappoint.
Metacritic: 70

Texas Killing Fields (trailer)
Director: Ami Canaan Mann
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Feature debut by Mann, who is Michael Mann’s daughter, and it’s been getting very mixed reviews. Aside from that, it’s notable for being the 37th movie with Jessica Chastain to open this year. Which I don’t mean as disrespectful in the slightest – in the 4 of the previous 36 that I’ve seen, she’s been very good, playing a wide range of characters. Not sure if I’ll make this one, though. Maybe.
Metacritic: 49

World on a Wire
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
Reissue of Fassbinder’s 3.5-hour sci-fi opus, showing somewhat annoyingly in two parts at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I’ve seen Ali: Feat Eats the Soul but otherwise haven’t yet plunged into Fassbinder’s very short-lived but astonishingly prolific career.
Metacritic: 76

Also this week:
The Mighty Macs (trailer) – Carla Gugino as women’s basketball coach
Johnny English Reborn (trailer) – apparently there was a first Johnny English movie?
Norman (trailer) – quirky indie troubled-teen movie
Paranormal Activity 3 (trailer) – didn’t see the first 2
The Three Musketeers (trailer) – “Can’t we make it more like Resident Evil?”

When analyzing this year’s Best Actress Oscar race, there is one big question–what category will Viola Davis end up in? The actress, who was so good in The Help, will get a nomination, that’s a certainty, but it all depends on where. The history of Oscar playing games with categories is rife with injustices, and it’s not clear that it won’t happen this year. Davis is the lead actress, in terms of screen time and story, but I have the nagging suspicion she may end up in supporting. This is interesting, because if she ends up in supporting she is sure to win; that’s not so certain in the lead category.

With these predictions, I’m going to assume, perhaps incorrectly, that Davis will be shuttled to the Supporting Actress category, and when this happens there will be all sorts of accusations of racism.

Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs) Close was nominated five times in seven years in the ’80s, but came up empty. She hasn’t been nominated since, and has become more accomplished as a television actress. But she has a great shot at returning to Oscar silliness with her role as a cross-dressing person in a period film, which sounds like a natural for the Academy.

Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) This a role-based nomination possibility; almost anyone who snagged the role would have been in Oscar talk. It all depends on how the film is received–it is comes across more as potboiler than “art,” than it likely won’t happen.

Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene) In the spirit of last year’s nomination of Jennifer Lawrence, I like the idea of Mark-Kate and Ashley’s younger sister getting a nod for a small, gritty film about a cult. I think the Academy voters will find it irresistible, too. And John Hawkes is in this movie, too!

Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) It’s fairly certain that La Streep will get her 17th nomination. All the ingredients are here: she plays a real person (Margaret Thatcher), adopts an accent, wears a big wig. The burning question, as it has been for several years now, is whether this will finally be her year to win her third Oscar.

Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn) There have been many actresses who have played Marilyn Monroe over the years, but none has ever been nominated for an Oscar. I like Williams’ chances, as she comes off a nomination last year, and it seems the tone of this is more respectful than sleazy.

Other contenders:

Charlize Theron (Young Adult)
Keira Knightley (A Dangerous Method)
Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
Felicity Jones (Like Crazy)
Juliette Binoche (Certified Copy)
Vera Farmiga (Higher Ground)

And, of course, Viola Davis.

Blackthorn (trailer)
Director: Mateo Gil
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Stars Sam Shepard as Butch Cassidy, long after his apparent death in a South American shootout. Sounds kinda interesting, but reviews aren’t great, and that trailer isn’t all that compelling either.
Metacritic: 60

Fireflies in the Garden (trailer)
Director: Dennis Lee
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Not sure what the story is here; according to the IMDb, the movie premiered back in 2008 at Berlin. Great cast, and in particular I’ve always been a fan of Emily Watson. But reviews are terrible, and almost certainly there’s a very good reason why this took three and a half years to get a US release.
Metacritic: 34

Footloose (trailer)
Director: Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Imagine my surprise when I saw that Craig Brewer, of all people, directed this. I’ve never seen the original, but this is apparently a very close remake. I’m glad I’m not a Brewer fan so that I don’t have to feel obligated to see it.
Metacritic: 59

The Thing (trailer)
Director: Matthijs van Heijningen
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Haven’t seen this original either – in fact, come to think of it, I’ve seen very few of John Carpenter’s movies (4 by my count). Anyway, I doubt this is very good, but the trailer isn’t so bad.
Metacritic: 49

Also this week:
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (trailer) – doc about Black Power movement
Happy Happy (trailer) – Norweigan family dramedy
Munger Road (trailer) – more generic-looking horror
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (trailer) – noisy neighbors doc

The film itself was a forgettable bore and apart from being one of the more notorious financial flops of the 2000s has been totally forgotten today. But there’s one reason it is noteworthy – it is the final film to date that Warren Beatty has appeared in.

And that is noteworthy because even speaking as someone who is hardly a total admirer of his work, he is one of the more significant figures in Hollywood over the past 50 years. For the 1967 film ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ alone (of which Beatty was the main driving force) his impact on American mainstream film would be substantial. But of course he has produced/acted/directed in many more films of acclaim and success over the decades, culminating in him being given the Irving Thalberg Oscar for his lifetime in cinema in 2000.

But while there is much to admire, I’ve felt Beatty has been a generally overrated film figure based on my limited exposure to his work. Take for example his 1978 film ‘Heaven Can Wait’ (which he co-wrote and co-directed as well as starred in). It was an enormous financial and critical success that was showered with Oscar nominations, including three separate ones for Beatty himself. And yet looking at the film today it’s hard to fathom how it got to be so acclaimed and successful.  While undeniably likable, amusing  and affecting in parts, it’s not a particularly substantial work with some incredibly shoddy plot developments in the closing stages of the film. How it got a Best Picture nomination is a bit of a mystery to me.

Another film that I found bafflingly overrated is his 1975 effort ‘Shampoo’ (which he co-wrote as well as starred in). Much acclaimed upon its release, now it seemed much ado about nothing and left me cold.

While Beatty is perceived by many as an iconic representation of modern American film, he’s never appeared to me to be completely at ease and comfortable in his work. There’s always an element of awkwardness as both director and actor (even in good films like ‘Bulworth’) where it seems he’s really working hard just to achieve what many others would achieve naturally.

Funnily enough, this element has worked to his advantage in certain roles. Particularly in the 1974 political thriller ‘The Parallax View’ (one of my favourite all-time films); his rather awkward acting style perfectly suits his character of a journalist who is only moderately smart and in way over his head. Had it starred an actor with a more smooth style (e.g. Robert Redford) or more talented (e.g. Jack Nicholson), the film wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.

I think the greatest compliment one could give Beatty is that from the time when he had a great control over his career post-Bonnie and Clyde, one could almost always count him at least attempting to create a quality film, and not just cruising on auto-pilot. Even in a film like ‘Dick Tracy’, one could feel that a bit more effort than could’ve been expected into this type of film.

Perhaps that’s why he’s stopped making films (although he was never particularly prolific) after ‘Town and Country’ as what was dispiriting about that film wasn’t just its lack of quality or entertainment but that for the first time in decades Beatty seemed to be just phoning it in.

It seems increasingly unlikely now that Beatty will act (let alone direct) in another film. And that would be a shame as despite his limitations, he’s been one of the more noteworthy figures in American film over the past 50 years.

George Clooney, who directs, plays a Democratic presidential candidate. By the time of the Ohio primary, which is on the date of the title (which also refers to political skulduggery, minus the knives, in 44 B.C.) the race is down to two candidates. Since Ohio is an open primary, conservative Republicans are urged to vote for Clooney’s opponent, who is seen as less electable. This is a bit of a fantasy, as Clooney’s first statement as a candidate in the movie is that he is not a Christian, something that would doom any real candidate. This is the kind of wish fulfillment of liberal screenwriters that characterized The West Wing.

Clooney, who is a peripheral character in the film, is managed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a crusty old pro, and Ryan Gosling, a young hotshot. Clooney’s opponent is managed by Paul Giamatti (giving another performance where he wheezes most of his lines). Giamatti asks to meet with Gosling to try to seduce him to come over to his campaign. This sets off a chain of events that snarls everyone, including a young intern (Evan Rachel Wood).

There’s some good stuff here, but I didn’t believe most of it. I have no idea what goes on in a political campaign, but it didn’t ring true to me. For one thing, I had trouble with Gosling. I don’t have anything against him as an actor per se, but I noticed something here. When he’s playing uneducated characters, such as in Blue Valentine or Drive, his vocal technique seemed correct, a kind of streetwise diction. But here it’s the same. A political operative, it seems to me, would be from a top school, and wouldn’t sound like he was pulled out of an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter. You can’t use the same voice as a psychopath from Drive and a campaign manager in The Ides of March. Also, Gosling’s so-called brilliance is never on display in the film. Everybody says he is, such as the scene with Giamatti, who tells him how wonderful he is. It’s telling, not showing.

I also had trouble with the central conflict. Clooney is involved in a scandal that Gosling knows about. I won’t go into details, but it’s the kind of scandal that history has seen before and struck me as totally unoriginal. I’m not sure that, in its earliest form, it would have ruined a candidate. Strangely, it reminded me of the film Easy A, in which a high school girl’s reputation is ruined because people think she had sex. Not in this era, people.

But I do give the film a thumbs up, with reservations. Clooney gives an interesting performance. At first you think he’s playing to his type, a charming, slightly roguish liberal do-gooder, but Clooney gives him shading as the film goes along that surprises. A key scene between he and Gosling in a kitchen at the end of the film is crisply acted, written, and directed.

I also liked Hoffman, who plays a guy who has seen it all. It seems naive that a campaign manager would value loyalty, of all things, more than anything else, but I believed him when he said it. When things don’t go his way, his character accepts it as part of the game.

Where this film disappoints is that it lacks a big picture. One shouldn’t review a film for what it is not, but it seems to me that Clooney missed a chance here to make a statement about the insanity of the American political process. Instead, it’s simply a small study of a few characters. The film teases–it makes references to real political figures, and uses the imagery of Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” posters, but aside from that I don’t see any parallel between Clooney’s character and Obama. I’m a big Obama supporter, but I see nothing wrong with a film taking subtle shots at him.

I did like some of the maneuvering that went on, that I do believe exists. Mostly this entails a senator from North Carolina (Jeffrey Wright) who dangles his endorsement to the highest bidder. That seems completely plausible to me.

My grade for The Ides of March: B-

Margaret (trailer)
Director: Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Been thinking that it’s been a long time since You Can Count on Me without a followup from Lonergan? Well, that’s because this movie was shot six years ago or so, and has been shelved since then in a dispute with Fox. Stars much younger versions of Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, Jean Reno and … Matthew Broderick, so it’s probably not very good.
Metacritic: 58

Special Treatment (trailer)
Director: Jeanne Labrune
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Isabelle Huppert stars as a high-end prostitute who has some sort of a relationship with a psychoanalyst. That sounds pretty terious, and the trailer isn’t great. Of interest mostly because of Huppert and it being one of the few films that First Run Features has distributed in 35mm in the last couple years.
Metacritic: 49

Take Shelter (trailer)
Director: Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
Been waiting for this one all summer. Nichols’s Shotgun Stories was excellent, and the trailer for this is also very good. Reviews are very good, also. Starring the always-interesting Michael Shannon, and of course, Jessica Chastain, who’s made a pretty strong impression this year with good work in a variety of roles. Somewhat lame poster, though.
Metacritic: 84

Also this week:
Puncture (trailer) – Chris Evans, slick lawyer, medical drama, etc.
Real Steel (trailer) – oh Hugh, we weep for thee
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (trailer) – another “horror comedy”, this time with rednecks
The Way (trailer) – Emilio Estevez strikes again!

Written by Will Reiser, based on his own experiences with cancer, the film details the ordeal of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, an unremarkable young man who learns he has a rare form of spinal cancer. He’s got a smothering mother (Anjelica Huston), and a brittle, artistic girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), who promises to take care of him, but we know she’s no good because she doesn’t like fellatio.

Gordon-Levitt goes through the rigors or chemotherapy, befriending two other men going through the process (Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer), mostly through the shared use of medical marijuana. He shaves his head before the hair has a chance to fall out. But mostly he pals around with his old friend, Seth Rogen, a garrulous vulgarian who sticks by him, partially because it’s a good way to score with chicks.

Gordon-Levitt also undergoes therapy, and I guess by the luck of the draw gets a raw doctoral student, Anna Kendrick. She might as well be pictured by the word “pert” in the dictionary; she’s like a porcelain chipmunk. As the relationship with Howard goes sour (she’s played villains in two movies recently–she’s lucky if people don’t hiss at her on the street), the film explores the burgeoning attraction between therapist and patient. I’m guessing this part is fiction–not only is no guy lucky enough to get a cute, young therapist, but that she would fall for a guy with a sallow complexion and a shaved head seems stretching into the realm of fantasy.

What I liked about the film is the chemistry between Rogen and Gordon-Levitt. There’s many good lines of banter between them, especially cracks about Gordon-Levitt’s hairlessness (Michael Stipe and Voldemort are two figures he’s compared to). I find Gordon-Levitt to be a very appealing actor, and he’s fine here, despite his character’s lack of depth.

Which leads to what I didn’t like about this film: it’s lack of messiness. There’s too much patina, too many random details, too many fingerprints of the studio and design team. The film is set in Seattle, which seems random, and both fellows work at NPR, which also seems as if they pulled their professions out of a hat. NPR is going through tremendous budget cuts–no talk about that? Gordon-Levitt is editing a piece on a Hawaiian volcano (he seems to have months to complete it), but the topic lends no more significance than piece about anything plucked from a random Wikipedia search.

50/50 is occasionally moving, but I felt manipulated. Of course, all films manipulate to some degree or other, but I felt this. If this was Reiser’s story, it isn’t anymore, not after it’s been through the Hollywood mixer. It doesn’t really tell me anything new about the subject. I’m sure it’s horrible and transformative, but I didn’t get the full import of this from the film.

My grade for 50/50: C+

50/50 (trailer)
Director: Jonathan Levine (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, The Wackness)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Didn’t really like The Wackness, but this has a good cast, good reviews, and a premise that could work. If nothing else, maybe it approaches subjects like death and grief with a little more honesty and less condescension than Gus Van Sant’s Restless, which I saw yesterday.
Metacritic: 72

Machine Gun Preacher (trailer)
Director: Marc Forster (Stay, Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner, Quantum of Solace)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Yeah, well, the problem here is that they’re trying to make a serious movie with one of the very worst actors in Hollywood in the main role. That’s just a bad idea, Forster’s very spotty filmography aside.
Metacritic: 43

Weekend (trailer)
Director: Andrew Haigh
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Honestly, when I saw this on the schedule, I thought it was a reissue of the Godard film, which is supposed to happen soon. But it’s actually a new film about a short-lived gay romance. Very good reviews.
Metacritic: 81

Also this week:
Courageous (trailer) – at least this one doesn’t have Kirk Cameron
General Orders No. 9 (trailer) – clash between man and nature doc
My Afternoons with Margueritte – France, Gerard Depardieu, old lady
Pearl Jam Twenty (trailer) – Cameron Crowe Pearl Jam doc
Toast – Britain, 60s, food
What’s Your Number? (trailer) – never really understood the appeal of Anna Faris
!Women Art Revolution (trailer) – doc about women artists

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) was a bonus baby phenom. He was drafted in the first round by the Mets and passed up a scholarship to Stanford to play pro ball. But he didn’t live up to the hype–he bounced around the majors for a few years, never playing more than 80 games in a season and retiring with a lifetime batting average of .219. As played by Pitt, this failure fuels his desire as the General Manager of the Oakland A’s to produce a world champion.

The film begins with the last day of the 2001 season. The A’s, who had been up 2-0 in a five-game series, lost to the Yankees (as a Yankee-hater I remember that series well; it hurt bad). Pitt goes to his owner and tells him they will lose three of their best players to free agency, and he needs more money to compete. The owner sympathizes, and in exposition that is for the audience more than Pitt, tells him Oakland is a small market team that can’t compete with teams like the Yankees financially.

Pitt then meets a young assistant with the Cleveland Indians, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). An economics major from Yale, who was probably the last player picked for Little League, Hill is a disciple of Bill James, the former security guard at a pork and bean cannery, who with his self-published Baseball Abstract had created a new way of evaluating players by use of statistics. Pitt hires Hill, and they confront their old-guard scouting staff with names that are immediately scoffed at. The old scouts believe in intuition and judging players by intangibles like physique and the attractiveness of their girlfriends. Hill believes that winning requires runs, and runs require being on base.

Pitt gets a lot of flak, but he’s the boss and the team is assembled and the rest of the film chronicles the season. It doesn’t start well, as manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) doesn’t play the players Pitt wants him to. So he trades them. Eventually the team goes on an epic winning streak and Beane and Hill’s actions are validated–to a point.

I say to a point, because Beane, and the book on which this film is based, is still sneered at by some baseball people. They point to Beane’s never having been in a World Series, let alone won one. The A’s haven’t been to the playoffs since 2006. But it is undeniable that he changed the face of the game. As Red Sox owner John Henry says in a speech at the end of the film, James was right, and those who distrusted him really feared him.

Moneyball was directed by Bennett Miller, who helmed Capote, my favorite film of 2005. I’m eager to see what he does next, because Moneyball is almost pure delight. I’m a baseball fan, as one might be able to tell, but I think this film will appeal to anyone. It doesn’t get too technical–the most arcane statistic mentioned is on-base percentage, and even a novice who has a basic understanding of the game will understand the revolution going on here.

Beyond that, the film exceptionally details the ascent of a mountain of disapproval. Pitt, once he buys into Hill’s argument, is like an evangelist spreading the word. The film is edited at a fast pace, but is not in a rush. There are a few scenes, perhaps too many, of Pitt in an empty stadium, gazing into space, but for the most part the pace is thrilling. I loved the scenes of him working the phones in trades. If that’s not how it’s done, it should be. I came away green with envy–how fun it must be to work for a major league baseball team.

Some may scoff at scenes involving Pitt’s daughter. There’s one scene in a music store where she plays him a song. This could have been disastrously cloying, but I think it added necessary humanity to the character. Again, this movie isn’t about baseball. It’s about a man’s attempt at redemption, set against a backdrop of baseball, and it informs us to a key decision he makes at the end of the film.

As a baseball fan, I do have to point out some errors. Hill’s character is fictional; he’s based on a man named Paul DePodesta, who was already working for the A’s. Also, Jeremy Giambi and Chad Bradford, who are players that Pitt announces he wants after the 2001 season, were already on the team at that point (I remember that because Giambi was thrown out at the plate by the amazing play of Derek Jeter in the 2001 ALDS–his lack of hustle cost the As the series!)

But a lot of it is right on target. I double-checked with Baseball-Reference.com and they had the details right about the game that the A’s set the American League record for most wins a row (how did I forget that?) In movies like this, artistic license is almost always going to intrude, in this case it is at an acceptable level.

The acting here is good all around. Pitt gives the best performance I’ve seen him give. I was particularly impressed with his movement–the athletic grace that defines the smallest of movements, even snapping or pointing his fingers. Hill, in a much less flashy role, is also very good, a man who uses his specialized knowledge to work in a game that he loves. And I would have named you a hundred actors who could have played the pugnacious Art Howe before I got to Hoffman, who has never struck me as an athlete, but, by god, he makes it work. Maybe it’s the buzz-cut.

In some ways, Moneyball resembles last year’s The Social Network. Both detail a change of the guard in a portion of society (granted, Facebook changed a lot more than sabremetrics did, but in a relative way they made just as much a difference). The instigators of that change were both outsiders (Hill is the equivalent of Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg) and both were seen as juvenile upstarts. It’s no coincidence that Aaron Sorkin wrote both scripts (co-writing Moneyball with Steve Zaillian). While Moneyball isn’t as emotionally powerful as The Social Network, both are epic achievements.

I close by noting that Moneyball was originally going to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, who had to back out because of a conflict with Contagion. Both turned out to be good films, but I wonder how Soderbergh’s version would have been different.

My grade for Moneyball: A-

Killer Elite (trailer)
Director: Gary McKendry
Personal Interest Factor: 5
“BASED ON A TRUE STORY!!!!” and starring Jason Statham, Robert De Niro, and Clive Owen’s stupid mustache. They’re chasing assassins. Looks unterrible, I guess.
Metacritic: 43

Love Crime (trailer)
Director: Alain Corneau
Personal Interest Factor: 7
It’s good to see that Kristin Scott Thomas has made a second career for herself playing in French films, because she’s really very good and of course older actresses don’t always have much to do. It’s actually gotten to the point where it seems she’s in every other French movie to get released – by my count, this is at least the fifth French film she’s been in over the past few years. Anyway, here she faces off with Ludivine Sagnier, in what the poster pull-quote calls a “vicious psychological cat-and-mouse game.” I believe it.
Metacritic: 64

Moneyball (trailer)
Director: Bennett Miller (Capote)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
Being a big baseball fan, and one who likes to think of himself as having been ahead of the curve stats-wise, I read the book back when it came out and enjoyed it. It also boggles the mind that anyone, much less anyone at a major studio, thought that a good movie could be made from the material. But apparently someone made one, because here it is and it looks pretty good, if not really all that much like a straight adaptation of the book. Really have to wonder how much it appeals to people who aren’t baseball fans, though.
Metacritic: 87

Restless (trailer)
Director: Gus Van Sant (Elephant, Last Days, Paranoid Park, Milk)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Seems like it’s been over a year since the first one-sheet went up at the Evanston theater, and since then it’s been shuffled from the Columbia mainline to Sony Classics. Looks awfully cutesy, but I’ve been going to Van Sant’s movies as a matter of routine since I’ve been old enough to go to movies on my own. It’s an interesting career to follow; like Soderbergh, he has his ups and downs, and experiments mixed with mainstream work. I did miss Gerry, though.
Metacritic: 48

Also this week:
Autoerotic – mumblecore sex movie
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (trailer) – Hong Kong stunt piece
Dolphin Tale (trailer) – What’s the big deal? I don’t have a tail either, and I can swim.
A Good Man – doc about Lincoln musical
Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (trailer) – doc about mysterious street art

The first era of the movie trailer lasted roughly from the 1930s to the mid-1960s where virtually all the ones I’ve seen seemed to be done in the tone one imagined how a salesman at an old-time carnival would’ve tried to lure people into a freak show  – full of breathless energy and bombast, lots of emphasis on the stars, lots of adjectives in big font appearing, not much conveyance of the tone (let alone plot) of the film (this trailer for ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ being a good example). As a general rule, these types of trailers haven’t aged well and to be honest, it’s hard to envisage how people were enticed by such lured trailers back then.

As reflective in the change in culture and increasing experimentation of mainstream Hollywood in that era, in the 1970s there were examples of movie trailers that were highly unusual. Take for example this trailer for the 1972 film ‘What’s Up Doc?’ which hardly shows any of the film and relies mainly on director Peter Bogdanovich and his stars goofing around on the set. It’s inconceivable to think of a major film being given such a trailer today.

The main change that one notices in movie trailers is that – while many of them are still quite conventional – they are done in a more mature manner and treat the audience like adults, whereas 1930s-1960s trailers treated the audience like kids.

Then, from the 1980s to today we have seen the trailer become taken far more seriously. They are far more slicker than trailers of previous eras are and often give a general idea of the plot (too much in fact it’s been argued) and tone of the film better. Clearly the studios take them far more seriously than they used to.

But despite that, I find watching trailers an often tedious experience now (especially for blockbuster mainstream films) as they seem all done in the same way, even down to the same rhythms. They usually start off slowly, then get more and more frenetic and hyped up (with the obligatory bombastic background music), reaching a crescendo by the end (and the obligatory one-liner from one of the film’s stars) (the Captain America trailer is a good example).

For all the technical expertise that is now on display in movie trailers, they feel so heavy-handed and obvious it feels like a hyped-up version of what we used to see in the 1950s and we’re being treated like children again. Hopefully there’s a change in mindset and some inventiveness comes back into movie trailers in the near future.

But then again, it’s all a subjective thing. In many ways this movie trailer  has all the aspects of a movie trailer I dislike but  I absolutely love it.

Is there any movie trailers – good or bad – that stand out for you?

That being said, here’s my predictions for the five men who will get nominated. I’ll adjust accordingly before the onslaught of awards nominations sometime in early December, when the picture will be much clearer.

George Clooney (The Descendants) The current Hollywood class president, Clooney seems to be an Academy favorite, and The Descendants is getting good word. He is also the director of The Ides of March, and actors lover actors who direct.

Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar) Gun to my head, I’d have to say he’s the favorite right now to win. Though he still looks like he’s 12, he’s been around a long time and been in some huge movies, so at 36 it could be considered a “you’ve paid your dues, kid” award. Besides, he plays a real person and he’s a straight man playing gay.

Michael Fassbender (Shame or A Dangerous Method) He’s been on the cusp of stardom for a while now, and one of these films could do it for him. In the former he’s a sex addict, but it might be too explicit for Academy tastes. In the latter he plays Carl Jung, and costume dramas are more liked by Oscar, so that may the one that gets him a nod. Or he ends up canceling himself out.

Ralph Fiennes (Coriolanus) This one is a hunch, and if the film comes and goes without a trace it will end up looking silly. The Academy seems to hold Shakespearean performances in some kind of awe, and I’ve heard good things about this one, though the play isn’t that well known (I saw Christopher Walken do it at the Public Theater twenty years ago, and it was amazing).

Ryan Gosling (The Ides of March) Another actor who has more than one film this year that could get him a nomination. This one is more likely than Drive, in which he is stoic. The Academy likes performances where you can see the acting.

Other possibilities, in no particular order:

Jean DuJardin (The Artist) A lot of bloggers have him penciled in, but I’m more cautious. I’m not sure how America will respond to a black and white silent film. If he’s nominated, it will be the first performance in a silent film in a loooong time.

Gary Oldman (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) There’s mixed word out of Venice on the film, and Oldman has never been nominated before. I wonder if it’s because he’s politically conservative.

Michael Shannon (Take Shelter) I think this guy’s great, and he’s in another role of someone who’s unhinged. It’s a small film, so he’ll really have to knock people out to break through.

Brad Pitt (Moneyball) His stardom earns him a spot here, but it’s hard to believe the film will catch on. It certainly has very little foreign prospects–baseball is hard enough to understand by those who weren’t brought up on it, but try explaining Wins Above Replacement to them.

Johnny Depp (Rum Diary) After seeing the trailer I’m really stoked to see this, and Depp is an Academy favorite, but Hunter S. Thompson may be too much for Academy tastes.

Paul Giamatti (Win Win) Probably came out too long ago to still be in play; he has a better chance in Supporting Actor with The Ides of March.

There’s a long way to go this year, with a lot of high-profile movies to come, but it’s a sure bet that Drive will be in my top ten. A moody, somber film that recalls movies like Taxi Driver and Collateral, Drive is full of mystery, menace, and gallons of blood. It starts slowly, but the last half is pure adrenaline.

I will admit I had never before heard of the director, Nicholas Winding Refn, who is apparently a big deal among the cognoscenti. He was hand-picked by star Ryan Gosling, who has taken a part with fewer lines than almost any star turn since Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Wefn directs with a sure hand, with some stunning moments that edge close to calling attention to themselves, but serve the story. A scene near the end, in which two characters grapple to the death, is revealed only in shadow in a sunlit parking lot, and it works tremendously.

Gosling is a Hollywood stunt driver, auto mechanic and, on the side, a wheel man for robberies. He’s so mysterious we don’t even know his name. His closest friend, a mechanic played by Bryan Cranston, doesn’t know anything about him before he showed up out of the blue at his auto shop. He is beyond laconic–A.O. Scott compares him to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, but he’s more like Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbit, an autistic savant when it comes to cars. The opening scene shows him doing what he does best–eluding cops after a robbery, his heart rate seeming like is no faster than someone watching golf on television.

But, of course, there’s a girl, and that changes everything. He becomes sweet on his neighbor, played winsomely by Carey Mulligan. She’s got an adorable son and a husband in prison, but when hubbie gets out Gosling goes against his rules and helps the family out, and you don’t need me to tell you that things go wrong.

As one would expect with a movie called Drive there are some awesome car chases, but they don’t dominate the film. Instead the film is more about the gradual lifting of a veil from Gosling’s face. We sense that something happened to him long ago that made him what he was, as he’s not stupid (Ron Perlman, as a villain, mistakenly tells him, “You’re not very good at this, are you?” Boy, is he wrong). There’s a gripping scene after a shootout in motel, with Gosling’s face coated in blood, in which he pauses, considering his next move. It’s an impassive look, but it’s still wrought with meaning.

There is a lot of blood in this movie. I think there’s about a dozen kills, and they’re all bloody. Gosling, though stone-faced, can be surprisingly vicious (Mulligan finds out about that first-hand in an elevator). We’re also surprised by a performance by Albert Brooks as a businessman who’s not entirely on the up and up. Gosling, when introduced, is reluctant to shake hands with him, and says, “My hands are dirty.” Brooks responds, “So am I.” When Brooks later jabs a fork in someone’s eye, it’s kind of like watching Woody Allen garrote someone.

My grade for Drive: A

Bellflower (trailer)
Director: Evan Glodell
Personal Interest Factor: 7
For some reason, even though this is distributed by small-label Oscilloscope, I’ve seen the trailer roughly 100 times over the last few months. It’s a disorienting couple minutes of film with a peculiar emphasis on flamethrowers and wild tone changes, and it gives only a very vague idea of what the movie’s actually about. But it is intriguing.
Metacritic: 72

Drive (trailer)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher II, Pusher 3, Bronson, Valhalla Rising)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
I missed out on Bronson for some reason and really meant to see Valhalla Rising, but failed there as well. Now comes this, which despite the presence of Ryan Gosling sounds just about great (as does the rest of the cast). And since it’ll be playing in wide release for more than a week, I shouldn’t have any problems actually seeing it.
Metacritic: 81

Gun Hill Road (trailer)
Director: Rashaaad Ernesto Green
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Keep seeing this title and thinking about the Tom Waits song “Gun Street Girl”. As it happens, the movie is about a convict released from prison, unable to accept his son who has had a MTF sex-change while he was locked away.
Metacritic: 55

Mysteries of Lisbon (trailer)
Director: Raúl Ruiz (Shattered Image, Geneologies of a Crime, Time Regained, Klimt)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Final film from Chilean director Ruiz, who died just last month at age 70. I unfortunately haven’t seen any of his previous films, but this was getting reviewed as one of his best even before his death.
Metacritic: 82

Straw Dogs (trailer)
Director: Rod Lurie (The Contender, The Last Castle, Resurrecting the Champ, Nothing but the Truth)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Never seen the original Peckinpah version, but despite the low overall Metacritic score, at least a few critics have suggested that this new version holds its own. I imagine I’ll find time for it. Both of the previous Lurie efforts I’ve seen (the first and third listed) were solid efforts even if they weren’t especially noteworthy.
Metacritic: 44

Also this week:
Daylight (trailer) – NOT a reissue of the Stallone movie
I Don’t Know How She Does It (trailer) – Sarah Jessica Parker as do-it-all mom
The Lion King (trailer) – “17th Anniversary reissue!”
Where Soldiers Come From (trailer) – doc about four soldiers serving in Afghanistan

Written by Scott Z. Burns, the screenplay drips with all sorts of technical jargon, and has a cast full of Oscar nominees in lab coats looking at computer screens and furrowing their brows as they attempt to beat the clock to isolate and then discover a vaccine for a nasty new virus. The opening sequence, set to electronic music by Cliff Martinez, is a masterpiece of editing, as it shows how the disease travels from one person to another, from Kowloon to London to Tokyo to Minneapolis. If editor Stephen Mirrione isn’t nominated for an Oscar for Best Editing, then there is no justice.

Mirrione won an Oscar for editing Soderbergh’s Traffic, and Contagion reminds me a great deal of that film, although it doesn’t match the scope or pathos of it. While I enjoyed Contagion’s rhythm and world-spanning action, I strangely wasn’t terribly caught up in any human stories, which is odd considering it’s about a world-wide pandemic. There are attempts to give the film a human face, particularly in the case of Matt Damon, who is husband to the first victim, Gwyneth Paltrow. He and his teenage daughter witness the chaos of looting and bank-storming, and Damon is sort of the everyman of the film. It’s a nice performance, but edges into something out of a Lifetime movie.

Better are the scenes of doctors performing heroically. Laurence Fishburne is the head of the CDC, and Kate Winslet is his field-worker, who heads to Minnesota to track down the source. Meanwhile, Jennifer Ehle (the film’s best performance), Demetri Martin, and Elliot Gould are doctors searching for a vaccine, while Marion Cotillard is a representative of the World Health Organization who travels to Hong Kong and ends up a pawn in a political game. Her story is interrupted for a good chunk of the movie, and does not end satisfactorily, in my view.

The worst part of the movie involves a blogger and conspiracy-theorist, played by Jude Law. We know he’s a bad guy because he has bad teeth, and tells a room full of newspaper employees that print is dying. He publishes theories that the government is in cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies, which isn’t terribly far-fetched, but the way Law plays it he might as well be claiming that the Earth is flat. As Manohla Dargis pointed out in her review, it’s an interesting switch from the muckraking cinema of the 1970s–in Contagion, the government is good, and the press is bad.

Still, on the whole, Contagion is expert filmmaking and as scary as anything from the mind of Wes Craven or John Carpenter. Walking out of the theater you might be searching for a hand sanitizer, and may think twice about shaking someone’s hand. Fishburne notes that the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed 1 percent of the world’s population, but in those days international travel wasn’t nearly what is today.

My grade for Contagion: B

Contagion (trailer)
Director: Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Thirteen, Che, The Girlfriend Experience, The Informant!)
Personal Interest Factor: 10
Good cast, good trailer, interesting subject matter, and one of the most interesting directors working. Yes, I’m looking forward to this one.
Metacritic: 68

The Hedgehog (trailer)
Director: Mona Achache
Personal Interest Factor: 6. Or maybe 5. Or maybe 4
French film about an 11-year-old girl who wants to kill herself when she turns 12, until she gets to know the building concierge. Could either be offbeat and good or quirky and unbearable. Trailer doesn’t give much either way. Doubt I’ll find out, but who can say.
Metacritic: 62

Mozart’s Sister (trailer)
Director: René Féret
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Drama about, well, Mozart’s sister Nannerl. This is sort of what I meant in my description of Circumstance – this appears to be another foreign drama with feminist overtones, and which one is better? I might see one or the other, but probably not both, and they’re mostly indistinguishable to me in terms of appeal.
Metacritic: 72

Summer
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
Director: Eric Rohmer (My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, Autumn Tale, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Eric Rohmer died last year, and I’ve never seen one of his films. As far as I know, he’s the only French New Waver that I can say that about. Conveniently, the Film Center is showing two of his films this week, but unfortunately, they’re from the 1980s, and not from the New Wave period. I’ll probably go anyway but I admit the thought doesn’t excite me much.
Metacritic: n/a

Warrior (trailer)
Director: Gavin O’Connor (Tumbleweeds, Miracle, Pride and Glory)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
I’ll probably see this despite my total lack of interest in MMA and the general feeling that it’s more or less a retread of The Fighter. At least it should be interesting to see Hardy and Nolte in the movie; have no opinion on Edgerton.
Metacritic: 72

Also this week:
Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star – Nick Swardson: born to be the latest Sandler backbencher
Children of Glory – Hungarian movie about the 1956 Olympic water polo team, scripted by Joe Eszterhas
Creature (trailer) – low-budget horror junk
Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain (trailer) – stand-up comedy
Littlerock (trailer) – Japanese tourists in Los Angeles

Final rankings of the 2011 AGEBOC

Jackrabbit Slim 40
Brian 32.5
Nick 24.5
Jeanine 23.5
Rob Hunter 19
Juan 19
Joe Webb 19
Filmman 16.5
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
James 4.5

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

While all this is going on there are scenes from 1997, in which the older versions of the three agents (Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Ciaran Hinds) are in Tel Aviv. Mirren’s daughter has written a book about their mission, and Hinds is not exactly happy about it.

This is good stuff, but it’s like someone telling a long story where you’re wondering what the point is. Then, about halfway through, boom! A major plot twist that smarter viewers than me may have seen coming. From then on, The Debt is one of the better films of the year.

I’m not going to discuss the plot any more than that, lest I spoil it, as to hint at it would ruin it. Suffice it to say that the main issue of the film is the ethical and moral conundrum of telling a lie or revealing the truth, and what it means to each character.

Beyond that, the film, directed by John Madden, is a tense thriller. There are some fine set pieces, such as one in a Berlin train station and another in a Ukrainian hospital. Madden has done well with action films before–his unfairly dumped Killshot was a first-rate crime film. The younger actors dominated the first half, and Chastain, who has had a watershed summer (The Tree of Life, The Help, and now The Debt, when I had never heard of her before) is terrific as a young agent. Sam Worthington is the young Hinds (it’s always a struggle in films like this where one actor looks nothing like the actor who plays him older) and Martin Csokas is the young Tom Wilkinson. There’s also a terrifically sinister turn as the Nazi by Jesper Chriastensen.

The second half of the film is dominated by Mirren, brilliant as ever, who lives with a secret and is forced back into the secret agent business thirty years after she gave it up. I’m extremely heartened by The Debt, a movie for adults that brain-dead teenagers wouldn’t know what to make of (it’s told nonlinearly), managed to finish second in this week’s box office race, opening at multiplexes (I could have seen it at any of five different theaters in my neighborhood). I’m also glad to see that Mirren, by virtue of her dominance on the poster, was the main draw of the marketing. Imagine, a sexagenarian actress as a draw! Unthinkable!

The Debt is a remake of an Israeli film that was unreleased in the U.S., so I don’t know if this one is better. It doesn’t really matter, as this version is a superior spy movie.

My grade for The Debt: B+.

I’ve liked Rudd in everything I’ve seen him in. He’s sometimes been the only good thing in otherwise dreadful movies, like How Do You Know and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The character played here, Ned Rockland, is similar to the stoner portrayed in the latter film, but instead of being a quirky minor role, he’s the center. There’s a risk in building a film around a character that, in amateur hands, could be a one-joke gag, but due to Rudd’s strengths as an actor he overcomes a mediocre script.

Rudd’s Ned is something of an anachronism, a latter-day hippie in the 21st century. He works on an organic farm, and in the opening minutes is busted after selling pot to a uniformed police officer. His naivete and gullibility are so endearing that one feels about him like a puppy–he’s also mistaken for “retarded” more than once, and is the first to agree, although isn’t really stupid, he just refuses to see the bad in anyone.

After serving jail time he finds that he’s been booted from his farm by his now ex-girlfriend Kathryn Hahn. She’s taken up with the equally clueless and good-hearted T.J. Miller. That doesn’t bother Rudd as much as that she is not letting him take his dog, Willie Nelson.

The rest of the film finds Rudd in an odyssey as he bounces from family member to family member. His mother (Shirley Knight) babies him, so he ends up with his eldest sister (Emily Mortimer), who is married to a pretentious shithead (Steve Coogan, underplaying expertly). After he negatively influences their son by showing him Inspector Clouseau movies, he’s off to sister number 2, a writer for Vanity Fair (Elizabeth Banks). Evgenia Peretz is a writer for that publication, so presumably she knows what it’s like there.

Rudd manages to screw up her career in an incident with an interview subject, and moves on to sister number 3, a lesbian stand-up comic (Zooey Deschanel, adorable but in an underwritten role), who is in a relationship with a lawyer (Rashida Jones). Again, Rudd screws things up while trying his best to be affable, and he’s on the outs with the whole family.

There a certain cliche about the wisdom of fools that runs through literature and film, and there’s nothing here that raises the bar on that particular idea. But the film is so good-natured and sweet that I couldn’t help but like it. Jesse Peretz (Evgenia’s brother, and presumably not an idiot) isn’t a magnificent director–the pace could have been a lot snappier–but he’s captured the right tone. What the Peretz’s seem to say is that the world needs more people like Rudd, even if he does do stupid things and wear Crocs in public.

My grade for Our Idiot Brother: B

This looks like the last week of post-summer dead before we start getting some good stuff next week. In fact, besides this weekend, September looks pretty strong, and then we get into Oscar season. Hope it’s a good one, because this year so far has been somewhat lackluster.

The Debt (trailer)
Director: John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Proof, Killshot)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Madden’s fallen on hard times since Shakespeare in Love‘s night of Oscar glory, with two films that came and went without anyone noticing and a third that was notoriously shelved and dumped unceremoniously into a token release in Phoenix or somewhere. This one doesn’t look all that awesome either, but at least it looks like it’s worth seeing.
Metacritic: 66

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (trailer)
Directors: Alex Gregory & Peter Huyck
Personal Interest Factor: 4
This doesn’t look very good to me, and I can’t say I’ve ever been a party in an orgy, but I can’t say I understand much of Roger Ebert’s review. It reads like he had to write so many words about an orgy movie when he was extremely uncomfortable writing about orgies. Oh well. I only bring it up because it seems like Ebert’s doing this a lot lately, playing Grand Philosopher instead of talking about the damn movie.
Metacritic: 46

Higher Ground (trailer)
Director: Vera Farmiga
Personal Interest Factor: 8
I’m a fan of Vera Farmiga as an actress, so I’m naturally curious about what she’s come up with as a director. Also, perhaps because I’m not at all religious myself, I’m always interested in movies that treat religion a serious topic, instead of a cures-what-ails-ya tonic for the rubes.
Metacritic: 75

Life, Above All (trailer)
Director: Oliver Schmitz
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Story about a young girl and her family fighting wicked gossip in superstitious rural South Africa. If nothing else, the trailer makes the movie look very attractively shot.
Metacritic: 65

Rapt
Director: Lucas Belvaux
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Another Euro thriller in what is becoming a regular occurence. Don’t know if I’ll get to this or not, but it looks pretty decent, and like I’ve said before, I do like a good Euro thriller.
Metacritic: 71

Also this week:
Apollo 18 (trailer) – Blair Witch on the moon
Chasing Madoff (trailer) – Madoff investigation doc
Crime After Crime (trailer) – doc about Debbie Pleager, a wrongly incarcerated woman
5 Days of War (trailer) – Renny Harlin does the Georgian War
Saving Private Perez (trailer) – some kind of Mexican war comedy
Shark Night (trailer) – because “Shark Day” is a stupid title

Predict the #1 film of the weekend.

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 Shark Night 3D earn more or less than 13 million?

2. What will be the second highest grossing film of the weekend?

Deadline is Thursday, September 1 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings
Jackrabbit Slim 37.5
Brian 32.5
Nick 24.5
Jeanine 23.5
Juan 19
Joe Webb 19
Filmman 16.5
Rob Hunter 14.5
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
James 4.5

The most interesting about this year is that, for the first time, no one know how many nominees for Best Picture there will be. All we know is that there will somewhere between five and ten. In the Kremlinology involved in deciphering the motivation for these rule changes, one can be a little perplexed. If the absence of The Dark Knight in 2008 occasioned the expansion of the nominees from five to ten, what film made the powers-that-be dial it back?

Some have speculated it was The Blind Side, but that particular film was nominated two years ago, not last year, so if it is the culprit it was a slow reaction. I’m thinking that one of last year’s nominees–maybe Winter’s Bone, which was a worthy nominee–had a paltry amount of votes. Now, any film that doesn’t get at least five percent won’t be nominated, thus eliminating the chance that a film could be nominated with only one vote.

The Blind Side was really the only WTF? movie that was nominated over the two-year ten-nominee period. I liked some more than others, but it didn’t lead to any major embarrassments. I have a feeling that this winnowing process will hurt some films, like Winter’s Bone and A Serious Man, that deserve to be nominated. We’ll see.

And now, my highly unscientific, arbitrary, and clueless list of ten films that seem to stand a good chance at getting nominated. And I’ll also make a guess at how many films end up getting nominated: 7. It’s my lucky number.

Carnage (Roman Polanski, December): Adaptation of the play God of Carnage, with the God edited out presumably for the sensitive American audience. Polanski is a hot button, but this seems like it good be very good, and it has Christoph Waltz playing someone who isn’t a villain, which will be a nice stretch. Also with Kate Winslet, known Oscar favorite.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, Sept. 9); Trailers look promising, great cast, classy director, and a squirm-in-your-seat subject matter. This is the kind of genre film that the expansion seems to have helped out.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne, Nov. 23): I love Payne (not pain–I’m not a masochist), and teaming him with George Clooney seems like good Oscar bait. Payne scored an Oscar nominations for Sideways, so it’s not unprecedented.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Stephen Daldry, December): Daldry has made three movies, he’s been nominated for Best Director three times. The last two were also Best Picture nominees. That could either mean he has momentum, or he’s do for a let-down. I’m betting on the former, given that this is a 9/11 film.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, Dec. 21): Sure to be a box-office smash, and with the Fincher imprimatur should get oohs and aahs from critics. This has a chance to be the one film of the lot that celebrates commerce over art…

The Help (Tate Taylor, Aug. 10)…or it could be The Help, which has sparked debate amongst intellectuals and has also managed to be a big hit. It is a middlebrow examination of a complex issue, which is right up Oscar’s alley. If there were ten nominees, it would be a sure nominee.

The Ides of March (George Clooney, Oct. 2): Clooney could be seeing double-duty in this category. This one is a political drama, which is sure to titillate liberal Hollywood.  Clooney is not guarantee, though–remember Leatherheads?

J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, November) Like Charlie Brown with the football, I keep putting Clint Eastwood down on my list, though he hasn’t hit Oscar gold since Letters From Iwo Jima. A biopic of J. Edgar Hoover with Leonardo DiCaprio seems just the ticket to get Clint back to the Kodak Theater.

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, May 20): Like Eastwood, Allen hasn’t had a chance to refuse attending an Oscars in a while (he was last nominated for Match Point). Given that this was a critical and box office success (his greatest box office success ever), combined with the frisson of his return to favor, makes it film a potential nominee. It will certainly be nominated for Best Original Screenplay, where he’s been nominated more than twenty times.

War Horse (Steven Spielberg, Dec. 28) This has got to be the front runner right now, a gooey adaptation of a novel and play about a boy and his horse, set against the backdrop of World War I. It’s period, it’s sentimental, it’s Spielberg. I should add that Spielberg has only been nominated as Best Director once in the last thirteen years (for Munich).

Other possibilities, in no particular order: Hugo (Martin Scorsese), We Bought a Zoo (Cameron Crowe), Tree of Life (Terence Malick), Young Adult (Jason Reitman), Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd–and Meryl Streep’s shot at a third Oscar), Moneyball (Bennett Miller),  and The Artist (Michel Hazanivicius–a silent movie).

Let the games begin!

Brighton Rock
Director: Rowan Joffe
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Remake of the British film of the Graham Greene novel. Seems sophisticated and classy and right up my alley, despite the lukewarm reviews.
Metacritic: 55

Columbiana
Director: Olivier Megaton
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Looks like a La Femme Nikita for Latin America. And what do you, it was produced and written by Luc Besson. Times critic Mike Hale refers to it as part of the “lethal-woman-in-her-underwear genre,” which earns it a solid 5 from me.
Metacritic: 47

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Director: Troy Nixey
Personal Interest Factor: 3
Has all the trappings of yet another disposable horror film, but it was produced by Guillermo Del Toro, so it might be a bit better than the average horror crap-fest.
Metacritic: 56

Higher Ground
Director: Vera Farmiga
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Directorial debut of the actress in a drama about religion that A.O. Scott compares to Apostle. Sounds good but mighty serious.
Metacritic: 74

Our Idiot Brother
Director: Jesse Peretz
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Another film that seems inspired byJudd Apatow, about a man-child. Paul Rudd stars, and I like Paul Rudd, so sue me. A great cast on paper– Emily Mortimer, Zooey Deschanel, Steve Coogan, Rashida Jones, Elizabeth Banks. But probably a rental for me.
Metacritic: 61

Also this week:

Chasing Madoff: Documentary on guess who.
The Family Tree: A “flat satirical farce,” with familiar faces Dermot Mulroney and Hope Davis.
Circumstance: Persian-language film.
A Proper Violence: Crime drama “drenched in testosterone and festering grudges.”
Special Treatment: French drama with Isabelle Huppert as a prostitute.
Stripped Down: Movie about a strip club, “bad in so many ways I can’t help but feel a slightly tender affection for it.”
Tales from the Golden Age: A six-episode Romanian-language film.

Predict the #1 film of the weekend.

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 Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark earn more or less than 14 million?

2. Will Colombiana earn more or less than 11 million?

Deadline is Thursday, August 25 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings
Brian 32
Jackrabbit Slim 31
Jeanine 23
Nick 21.5
Juan 18.5
Joe Webb 18
Filmman 16.5
Rob Hunter 13.5
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
James 4.5

This film has gotten some pretty bad reviews, but I liked it all right. Maybe it was my mood, or maybe it’s that I could probably stand to see Anne Hathaway reading the instruction manual for an electric toothbrush. She has what they used to call star quality, and even though her English accent comes and goes here, she’s radiant. All by herself she has lifted this film one entire grade for me.

The conceit, and it’s a pretty good one, is that we follow the relationship between two people by looking in on them during only one calendar day through the years–July 15th, the day for a certain English saint who is buried in Winchester. We start in 1988, when Emma (Hathaway) and Dex (Jim Sturgess) are celebrating graduation (they graduate kind of late in the year in England). They really don’t know each other too well, but Hathaway has a crush on him, and they spend a night together, although chastely, and decide they will be just friends (it takes a bit of acting on Sturgess’s part to convince me he would turn Hathaway down–I think he was turned off by her putting Tracy Chapman on her record player).

We then are shown every July 15th in successive years, all they way to 2010. Hathaway wastes her education by sporting a sombrero in a Tex-Mex restaurant. Dex teaches English in India, but then becomes a TV host for some sort of late-night music program. He is wildly successful, but turns into an asshole, and is later called the most annoying man on the telly (he must have been the British equivalent of Ryan Seacrest).

Hathaway takes up with a fellow waiter, (Rafe Spall) an aspiring comedian, and then writes a successful children’s novel and moves to Paris. Sturgess ends up married to an icy blonde (Romola Garai). The feelings between the two linger, though, even when Hathaway ends it after Sturgess shows up for dinner coked out of his mind.

I won’t go any further that that, as most smart viewers will see certain things coming. There’s a dramatic twist at the end that I should have seen coming, but only spotted seconds before it occurred. This scene will make many viewers roll their eyes, but it kept with the melodramatic nature of the film.

I did appreciated that, though there are some coincidences, being that the film is limited to action on July 15th, that not everything happens on that day. There are a couple of weddings in the film, neither of which are on that day, and other momentous events happen off-screen. This gives the film a much more realistic feeling.

One Day was directed by Lone Scherfig, who also made the far superior An Education, but her talent is evident here, taking what could have been a throwaway weepie into something more intricate. This is helped not only by Hathaway (Sturgess isn’t bad, but he’s outshone by his leading lady, something that James Franco can relate to) but by a witty script by David Nicholls, who wrote the book it’s based on. He also wrote the book and script for the charming Starter for Ten, and there’s a lot of great lines in One Day, usually spoken by Hathaway. She says of her new, tattered apartment, “It smells of onions and disappointment,” and describes her conservative swimsuit, “It’s a swimming costume. It’s called the Edwardian.”

My grade for One Day: B

In other news, I’ll be out of town next week. As always, I’ll offer Openings up to anyone who wants to do it, or else I’ll do it when I get back next Monday. Jeanine and I are headed down to Florida, which is the new “western Nebraska” of destinations for me. I’ll check in long enough to submit an AGEBOC guess but mostly I’ll probably not be on the computer much.

One Day (trailer)
Director: Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, An Education)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I thought An Education was better than I expected, but this doesn’t look quite up to that level. I hope this isn’t a complete trainwreck for Hathaway like Love and Other Drugs, which actually made me dislike her a little bit. In other news, I think the poster for this has been in the theater lobby for like 3 years. It’s been a really long time, anyway.
Metacritic: 47

Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (trailer)
Director: Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3: Game Over, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, Shorts)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
I actually liked the first two Spy Kids movies, but I never saw the third, and have lost all enthusiasm for Rodriguez in general. It’s hard to imagine what he could do that would make me want to say, “Wow, that sounds really good.”
Metacritic: no score yet

Viva Riva! (trailer)
Director: Djo Tunda Wa Munga
Personal Interest Factor: 7
I’ll almost certainly miss this, but it looks interesting, a crime thriller from Kinshasa.
Metacritic: 65

Also this week:
Conan the Barbarian (trailer) – pointless remake
Fright Night (trailer) – pointless remake
One Lucky Elephant – doc about a circus elephant
Senna (trailer) – doc about auto racer Ayrton Senna

Predict the #1 film of the weekend.

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 weekend’s #3 film?

2. Will John Sayles’s Amigo, opening at 12 locations, gross more or less than $100,000 for the weekend?

Deadline is Thursday, August 18 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings
Brian 31.5
Jackrabbit Slim 29
Jeanine 22.5
Nick 21.5
Joe Webb 18
Juan 18
Filmman 16.5
Rob Hunter 9
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
James 4.5

Set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963, The Help is about a peculiar social aspect of that time and place. White families of means employ black maids, who cook their food, clean their houses, and, most importantly, raise their children. These children consider these maids more maternal than their distant, social-climbing mothers, but when the time comes to employ their own maids, they resort to their ugly behavior, treating these women like chattel.

The Help focuses on a few households. One is taken care of by Aibilene (Viola Davis), who watches over the child of a woman who doesn’t even know to change the baby’s diapers. The other is the home of Hilly Holbrook, (Bryce Dallas Howard) the queen bee of Jackson society and as mean as a snake. She has a special obsession with toilets–she wants a law passed that all homes must have separate bathroom facilities for their colored help. She fires her maid Minnie (Octavia Spencer) for violating the code of the commode.

Then there’s Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), who went to college with more on her mind that snaring a husband. She is unmarried (something of a scandal) and gets a job with the newspaper writing a household hints column. But she has more serious literary ambitions. Sympathizing with the plight of these women, she endeavors to interview them for a book. After a series of indignities, she gains the trust of Aibilene and Minnie, and they tell their horror stories to her.

Of course how these women were treated is despicable, and only the members of Aryan Nation would think otherwise. But I wonder how many of the people watching this film today, cheering as Howard gets her particularly vile comeuppance, would have been the same people screaming epithets at those students as they tried to enter Central High School in Little Rock, or cheered the death of Medgar Evers. I’m not immune from this–my grandparents weren’t exactly enlightened thinkers on race, and used the N-word casually. This film would have been courageous fifty years ago, and also impossible to release in the South. To watch it today from the safety of half a century seems like watching animals behind a wall of glass.

But The Help was made now, and I can’t judge it on any other terms. As such, it’s a crowd-pleasing absolution for white guilt. And where it succeeds more than other recent films is that the white eyes–Stone’s–aren’t the dominating feature of the film. This film instead belongs to Viola Davis. A similar film, The Blind Side, was all about deifying Sandra Bullock’s character, relegating the black character to the status of family pet. Davis’s Aibilene is no passive bystander. She is the focus of the film, and wears the indignity of her life on her face with such great skill that the faults of the film seem less magnified.

There are faults. A few subplots are either clumsy or bizarre. Once fired, Spencer gets a job with a woman (Jessica Chastain) who is ostracized by the other ladies, presumably because of her white trash origins. The relationship between the two takes on a strange, sit-com like quality. I was also completely uninterested in scenes involving in Stone’s love life. And the villains of the piece, led by Howard, are mostly cardboard.

But the heart of the story, Aibilene’s struggle to maintain her dignity in the face of appalling prejudice, makes this all worthwhile. Spencer is also quite good, giving the Aunt Jemima stereotype a boot in the pants. A lot of other familiar actresses, such as Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, and Mary Steenburgen, also turn in effective performances. Cicely Tyson is also moving in her brief role as the maid who raised Stone, but was sent away in a manner we don’t find out about until the end of the film.

Watching The Help I was reminded of when Roots first aired. Our family, like millions of others, were transfixed by the week it was on television, back in 1977. What a turning point in American cultural history it was when everyone, white people included, cheered when Ben Vereen told good old Lloyd Bridges that if he ever harmed one of his’n again, he’d kill him. That was almost 35 years ago. The Help doesn’t break any new ground, but at least it’s focused on the right character.

My grade for The Help: B-

The film was directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who wrote the ribald and hysterically funny Bad Santa. The script was written by Dan Fogelman. If any of these gentleman had come to me for advice, which sadly they did not, I would have advised them to scrap what they had and tinker it into a straight farce, which it has all the elements of but little of the elan. One of the scenes with the most potential for humor (which is still botched) is when all the characters come together and the men end up in a backyard brawl. More of this was needed.

Instead the film is one of those weepy dramedies about finding our soul-mate. The opening scene has Julianne Moore telling her husband, Steve Carell, that she wants a divorce. Carell is again playing one of his sad sacks, and the shtick is getting old. She has had an affair with a just-as-dreary office-mate, Kevin Bacon.

Carell, wounded to the core, decides to try out the local watering hole, which apparently is the only bar in town, given how many whopping coincidences erupt. For no good explanation, the bar’s Lothario, Ryan Gosling, takes Carell under his wing and teaches him how to be a lady-killer (don’t talk about yourself is one of the main rules). The two end up as unlikely friends, and with a new wardrobe and an expensive haircut, Gosling manages to turn him into a Don Juan. His first conquest is Marisa Tomei, who ends up sleeping with him when he drops the act and impresses her with his hang-dog honesty. It’s an embarrassingly bad scene for both of them.

There are numerous other subplots. Gosling ends up falling for the one girl who turns him down, Emma Stone. If that weren’t enough, Carell’s 17-year-old babysitter, (Analeigh Tipton, who I see was a contestant on America’s Next Top Model) has a crush on him. She ends up taking naked pictures of herself to send to him, which is treated humorously, even while such behavior by teenage girls is in the news as a very serious problem. Carell’s 13-year-old son, Johah Bobo, is in love with Tipton. She catches him masturbating, and he tells her he was thinking about her, always a good way to start a romance. Bobo then spends the rest of the movie stalking and harassing her, but it’s okay but she’s his “soul-mate.” The kid needs extensive therapy.

All of this could have worked with a good script and decent direction, but it was not to be had. Almost every moment seemed phony and contrived, and good actors were wasted. As I said, I’m tired of this character Carell plays–he’s due to play a serial killer or Klansman. Stone overdoes her goofy charm and ends up coming off like a nitwit, while Gosling is so bland you almost forget he’s in the movie, especially when he disappears for a good chunk of it. Moore just looks like she wants out.

I see this film has a 76 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes this easily my overrated film of the year.

My grade for Crazy, Stupid, Love: D

A trim seventy-two minutes, The Set-Up takes place in real time, as we are shown a street clock in the opening moments, showing about ten after nine at night, and before the film ends the same clock reads about twenty after ten. The set, which depicts a street corner in fictional Paradise City, features an arena, which advertises boxing on Wednesdays and wrestling on Fridays. Across the street is the Hotel Cozy, where Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan) is staying, along with his wife Julie (Audrey Totter). Ryan is a thirty-five year-old has been, still believing he’s one punch from the big time. He’s fighting a young kid on this night, and is sure he can take him. Then, he tells Totter, he may get top billing, which could mean $500, and maybe then they could buy a cigar stand in Union City.

Totter won’t go see the fight, she’s tired of seeing him get his brains beat out. He gives her her ticket and heads to the gym. Little does he know that his manager (George Tobias, later known as Abner Kravitz on Bewitched) has sold him out, taking $50 from the opponent’s manager to take a dive. The kid is owned by a local hoodlum, who has big designs on his charge. Ryan’s cornerman (Percy Helton) thinks Tobias should at least clue Ryan in, but Tobias is sure he will lose, and doesn’t want to share his spoils.

The first two thirds of the film show Wise’s brilliance with the camera and his background as an editor (he edited Citizen Kane, after all). There’s a bit of O’Neillian drama in the fighters’ dressing room, where the boxers get ready, swap stories and then head out, and come back some time later, either victorious or near unconscious. One punch-drunk fellow never tires of talking about the guy who lost 21 fights but still became middleweight champ. This is intercut with scenes from the arena, where tiny little subplots are carried out (the writer, Art Cohn, who adapted the film from a poem of all things, deserves a lot of credit here, too). There’s the blind man who enjoys having his friend describe the action to him–when the ref steps in, he calls out, “Let ‘em fight!” There’s the two suburban couples out for the evening, with one of the wives saying the last time she was at the fights she held her hands over her eyes. Of course, she turns out to be more bloodthirsty than anyone. And there’s comic relief with the silent role of the portly fellow who, every time we see him, is consuming a different concession.

Meanwhile, Totter wanders the bustling streets. She tears the ticket in half, letting it rain down from a bridge over a passing train, a marvelous shot that makes full use of image and sound.

The final third of the film is Ryan’s fight. Tobias and Helton give him bad strategy, hoping he’ll lose, but he has no idea he’s supposed to throw the fight. Wise cuts from the fight to the audience, and unlike some sports films, in which shots of the crowd are used to be excessively manipulative, the shots here are picture perfect, and there is never a wasted moment.

The fight itself is also crisply realistic. Ryan was a champion boxer in his days at Dartmouth, and the photography and low angles, with sweat flying from the fighters’ brows, clearly influenced Martin Scorsese in his shooting of Raging Bull. Scorsese provides the commentary for the DVD.

I won’t spoil the ending, because I would hope anyone who loves film will get to see this film without knowing the outcome. Not only is it a classic of its kind, but it’s also a great snapshot of a time gone by, when fight nights were part of American culture, and an underbelly of corrupt city life. For those knowledgeable of the time period, there’s a cameo by the photojournalist Weegee, who plays the timekeeper.

Point Blank (trailer)
Director: Fred Cavayé
Personal Interest Factor: 7
More proof that every Euro thriller that gets released Stateside will be compared to Tell No One. I’m a sucker for stylish Euro thrillers, though, so I’ll try and squeeze this one in if I get a chance. Decent trailer.
Metacritic: 75

Sleep Furiously
Director: Gideon Koppel
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Documentary about the eccentricities of a small Welsh town. Notable mostly because it’s Facets is actually showing a 35mm print, which is quite rare for them. I don’t think I’ll be able to get over there this week, but it’s tempting to try just to encourage the practice.
Metacritic: 64

30 Minutes or Less (trailer)
Director: Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Zombieland was a one-joke bore, and if the trailer is any indication, so is this one. Zombieland had an infinitely better cast, also. This has Aziz Ansari, doing his usual made-for-TV schtick, and Danny McBride, who is a reason enough to avoid the local multiplex as far as I’m concerned. Think I’ll be skipping this.
Metacritic: 49

The Whisteblower (trailer)
Director: Larysa Kondracki
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Story about a prostitution ring run by UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, starring Rachel Weisz as the titular whistleblower. Not great reviews but I’ll go anyway just because I think Weisz is a terrific actress.
Metacritic: 57

Also this week:
Final Destination 5 (trailer) – not going to start with these now
Glee: The 3d Concert Movie (trailer) – 3D “Glee” concert movie
The Interrupters (trailer) – Chicago anti-violence doc

Predict the #1 film of the weekend.

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 Final Destination 5 earn more or less than 21 million?

2. Which will earn more over the weekend: The Help or 30 Minutes or Less?

Because The Help opens on Wednesday, the deadline is Wednesday, August 10 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings
Jackrabbit Slim 29
Brian 25.5
Jeanine 22
Nick 20.5
Joe Webb 17.5
Filmman 16
Juan 14
Rob Hunter 8.5
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
James 4.5

The film doesn’t really concern the “rise” of a planet controlled by apes; it’s more like the birth. The five-film cycle of Planet of the Apes films, which presented itself as a time-loop Moebius strip, covered this in the fourth film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. I saw that when I was a kid, and don’t remember much about it, other than that a virus had killed off all dogs and cats and people kept apes as pets, who got tired of being servants, I guess.

This film, with a good script by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, directed by Rupert Wyatt, hearkens back to a familiar science-fiction template–the hubris of the scientist. Following the long footsteps of Dr. Frankenstein, a biochemist played by James Franco has been working on a cure for Alzheimer’s. He has a personal reason for doing so, as his father (John Lithgow) suffers from the disease. He has tested a drug on chimpanzees which makes them extra smart. His initial subject is killed for being aggressive, but it turns out she left a baby.

That baby, called Caesar and featuring the motion-captured movements of Andy Serkis, turns out to be one smart chimp. Franco keeps him as a pet, and marvels at his brainpower. But when Caesar, defending Lithgow in a neighborhood squabble, gets sent to an ape refuge, he realizes he’s been had.

The sequences where Caesar plots his rebellion and escape are the best parts of the movie, and play like an old prison drama. It is here that nods are made to the original film, with two of the best-known lines being quoted, and even a cameo by Charlton Heston is inserted. I wonder how many got the joke that the orangutan was named Maurice, an obvious nod to actor Maurice Evans, who played Dr. Zeus in that old film.

The resulting show down on the Golden Gate bridge is tense and well-shot and edited, and has the best gorilla death scene since the original King Kong. Given the strong reviews and good business, a sequel, which is set up in the closing credits, should be forthcoming and worth watching.

As for the CGI, which replaces the notion of actors in monkey suits and makeup, I’m of two minds about it. During the opening scene, in which Caesar’s mother is capture in Africa, the obviousness of the special effects distracted me. There was never a moment I didn’t realize that I wasn’t looking at real chimps or gorillas or what have you. But when the apes were viewed close-up, the work with the eyes was effective, and made it seem as if we were looking at real characters. It was always possible to know what Caesar was thinking.

I also appreciated how the film, while being a good action flick, also addresses the slippery ethics of using animals as drug test subjects. I’m sure PETA has given their approval. Though it is science fiction, I am dubious about a drug that makes an ape smart over night. You’d think they’d have to have a little schooling first.

My grade for Rise of the Planet of the Apes: A-.

The Change-Up (trailer)
Director: David Dobkin (Clay Pigeons, Shanghai Knights, Wedding Crashers, Fred Claus)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
There is just nothing about this movie I want to see. I don’t want to see Jason Bateman or Ryan Reynolds. I don’t want to see stale-ass jokes about clueless men caring for babies or women with diarrhea. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, THEY MADE ANOTHER BODY-SWITCHING MOVIE. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. I can take all the comic book movies and sequels and I always roll my eyes when people complain about them and the lack of new ideas and creativity but MY GOD THEY MADE ANOTHER BODY-SWITCHING MOVIE. Game, set, match to the complainers.
Metacritic: 43

The Devil’s Double (trailer)
Director: Lee Tamahori (Along Came a Spider, Die Another Day, XXX: State of the Union, Next)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Story of a guy who became Uday Hussein’s body double. I guess this can go one of three ways. The first is a critical study of a psychopath given unlimited power and the coping mechanisms that those around him have to adopt to survive. The second is exploitative trash that lives vicariously through the psychopath and revels in his lack of humanity. The third is a movie that does the second while pretending to do the first. I think we all know which category this movie likely falls under. It does have Ludivine Sagnier in it though, and if you’re going to make an exploitation movie about excessive debauchery, that’s a good start.
Metacritic: 53

The Future (trailer)
Director: Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
I really liked Me and You when I saw it back in 2005 or whenever, although I’m a little skeptical that I’d like it as much if I saw it again. I did see the trailer for this and it couldn’t make much of it, but at least I can be pretty sure that it will be something distinctive and thoughtful.
Metacritic: 69

The Guard (trailer)
Director: John Michael McDonagh
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I’m sure this is passable entertainment and all, but I also will be very surprised if it amounts to much more than an extended version of the trailer. If it is, great! But it sure looks like a standard buddy-cop movie transplanted to Ireland.
Metacritic: 77

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (trailer)
Director: Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I’m in the weird position of thinking this looks surprisingly good while at the same time knowing that I’ll almost certainly not like it. It’s the same feeling I had before The Wolfman was released last year, and well, that turned out terribly. But I have to admit that this looks decent, as far as it goes, and way better than Burton’s Apes way back when. At least this looks like it has a actual story. Oh, one other thing – will the contrarian Oscar forecasters please stop with the Andy Serkis nomination talk? It’s not happening, we all know it, so please just stop.
Metacritic: 71

The Robber (trailer)
Director: Benjamin Heisenberg
Personal Interest Factor: 8
About a champion marathoner who is also a bank robber that escapes from his crimes on foot. That’s such a genius premise that I almost feel like I have to see the movie just on principle. Trailer’s pretty good, too.
Metacritic: 64

Went the Day Well?
Director: Alberto Cavalcanti (Champagne Charlie, Nicholas Nickleby, They Made Me a Fugitive, The First Gentleman)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Reissue of the 1942 film – which I frankly had not heard of before this reissue – about an English village infiltrated by German spies during the war. Based on a story by Graham Greene, although I don’t see that he had anything in particular to do with the production. I’m pretty much into these reissues without any prodding and this sounds fun.
Metacritic: not listed

Also this week:
Jig – Irish dancing doc
Road to Nowhere (trailer) – Monte Hellman film, HDCAM projection, alas

And I would agree, it is cool. The film tries to mesh two time-honored genres: the Western and science fiction, but it turns out they don’t go together well, not like peanut butter and chocolate. The idea is not new; there was a comic book series in the 1950s called “Space Western,” and this film was also based on a comic book. Of course, they may have gone together better with a director who shows some flair, but Jon Favreau has never shown that kind of dexterity, instead he is a manipulator of special effects; emotions and theme would seem to be beyond him.

As another critic pointed out, this is the second film this summer bearing the name and fingerprints of Steven Spielberg (Super 8 was the other) that might have been much better had he directed. Spielberg is only one name in a long list of producers, and there are enough screenwriters to field a soccer team. I think this film would have been much better if it were written by one person with a good imagination, rather than a team of guys settling for the lowest common denominator.

The film begins with Daniel Craig awakening in the desert. He has no memory of his name or how he got there, and he has a strange metal contraption secured around his wrist. Like Jason Bourne, though, he hasn’t forgotten his skills, and takes care of three hombres who try to capture him. He wanders into a generic Western town that is run by the local cattle baron (Harrison Ford), with a sheriff who tries to keep the peace (Keith Carradine), which is mostly upset by Ford’s half-wit son (Paul Dano). There’s also a mysterious woman (Olivia Wilde) who seems to have strolled in from the pages of Vogue, and has the whitest teeth this side of the Pecos.

All of a sudden this cliche is interrupted by another one, as the villagers are attacked by spaceships. Of course, back then people had no notion of space travel, so they are thought to be demons. They snatch up people using a lasso-like metal rope–it seems to me that beings that can perfect interstellar space travel could come up with better technology.

That’s a key problem with the film–how to have it so people who have nothing more than six-guns and bows and arrows (and a few sticks of dynamite) can defeat an alien race who can travel between galaxies. The script bends over backwards to make things work–I wondered why the aliens, if they were interested in kidnapping humans, didn’t go to a more populated place, like a city, but this is explained, if not completely satisfactorily.

In any event, former enemies, like Craig and Ford, team up with a band of outlaws and Apache Indians to defeat the aliens, glossing the thing with a forced feel-good sentiment. There is little character development–Craig is the taciturn loner who is doing this for the woman in his life, while Ford has a disastrously sappy subplot involving an Indian employee (Adam Beach) who looks up to him like a father. This film is not Ford’s shining moment. It just may be a career low.

I didn’t hate this film, though, mostly due to how it looked. The costumes and sets are rigorously detailed, and the photography by Matthew Libatique is lovely to behold. Coincidentally, I saw again his Black Swan just before this, and marveled at how he was able to handle two completely disparate environments to equally stunning effect.

When I was fourteen I would have loved this film, as it has the requisite action you would expect, there’s just not enough substance and intelligence to make it transcend the studio hacks’ fingerprints. For young boys (and old men) there’s also a completely gratuitous yet tasteful nude scene featuring Wilde.

My grade for Cowboys & Aliens: C

Predict the #1 film of the weekend.

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 The Change-Up earn more or less than 15 million?

2. Will Rise average more per location this weekend than director Rupert Wyatt’s previous film, The Escapist, made in its entire US run ($13,439)?

Deadline is Thursday, August 4 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings
Jackrabbit Slim 28.5
Brian 24.5
Jeanine 22
Joe Webb 17.5
Filmman 16
Nick 15.5
Juan 14
Rob Hunter 8
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
James 2

(warning: contains spoilers for various Payne films)

Recently I managed to watch the 1996 film ‘Citizen Ruth’, the debut directorial feature of Alexander Payne. The film – about a hapless, drug-riddled young woman who gets caught up in the middle of a ferocious abortion debate when she falls pregnant while in prison – is worthy of discussion on its own. It’s one of the more impressive directorial debuts of recent years, as it expertly skewers the fanatisicm on both sides of the abortion debate (while expressing a level of empathy for both perspectives) and how the wishes and needs of the person at the centre of it and what the fight is all supposedly about can be totally manipulated and ignored.

Personally speaking, on a broader level the film carried even more significance in the context of the career of Alexander Payne, a filmmaker I’ve long admired, as it meant I’d seen his entire body of feature film work to date. It led me to consider what about his films it is that so appeals to me and how highly I rate him.

On a basic level a great appealing factor of Payne’s films is how entertaining and compelling they are. Even when decent people like the central character of Jim McAllister in the 1999 film‘Election’ (his best film imo) go through various humiliations and indignities, Payne manages to keep the film bright and bouncy.

But a more specific reason that Payne is such a standout filmmaker is that (in an area that is a general weakness of modern filmmaking) is his ability to analyse with exceptional skill and precision the forces that govern modern society and the types of people that populate it. Whereas most modern films feel generic and could’ve been made decades previously without any significant change, a Payne film feels as if it’s essential to the time and place it’s set in.

Payne’s films are filled with memorable characters that stay in the memory due to how sharply they’re depicted. A constant theme amongst such key characters is that by the definition of society they seem to have obtained a level of success, but in truth they are defined by unfulfilled desires and angst.

The character of McAllister in ‘Election’ is a great example of this. In the opening scenes we see someone who appears to have reached a level of contentment with his life as a decent, well-meaning 30-something person who is in a solid marriage and is respected in his role as a high school teacher. But as the film gradually reveals we see the deep disenchantment he has with his life (something he himself only semi-consciously realises). The destruction of his personal and professional life through delusional attempts at affairs and sabotaging student elections seems plausible because of the convincing psychological underpinning Payne puts into the character.

Then there’s Warren Schmidt in 2002’s ‘About Schmidt’. We are introduced to him at his retirement dinner which in theory should be a celebration of his life and career – a long, prosperous and stable work career for the one company, a long-term stable marriage and the raising of bright and intelligent daughter. It appears at first glance Schmidt has attained all the requirements for what is defined as modern-day ‘success’.

And yet by the conclusion of this film his life has been exposed as a sham. We see that he’s been a complacent, dull personality whose relationship with his wife, daughter and close friend are empty and hollow. His work career was generic so that he was instantly and easily replaced. His realisation of all this by the film’s conclusion and how pointless his life has been is one of the most moving finales of recent years.

McAllister and Schmidt are both narrators in their respective films and it’s fascinating how Payne uses this aspect. While they provide information and personal perspectives, the significance of their narration isn’t the insight they provide, but the lack of insight they provide, revealing how clueless they are about themselves and their driving forces.

Payne’s work isn’t flawless. Sometimes his idiosyncratic style can cross the line from precise social analysis, observation and satire into caricature and patronising viewpoints – certainly these aspects were present at times in ‘About Schmidt’ and ‘Sideways’. Also his most recent film Sideways was his weakest film to date imo. While still a fine film filled with typically entertaining passages and well-written characters, it seemed to lack the sharpness of his best work. Particularly so in the lead character of Miles – full of self-pity and not much else – who was probably the least-interesting major character in a Payne film to date.

But the greatest frustration about Payne’s career isn’t the flaws in his work (which are relatively minor) but his lack of output recently. After the financial and critical success of Sideways in 2004, one would’ve assumed Payne had the clout to deliver more films on his own terms. But, such is the state of modern filmmaking the past 7 years has seen no films from him (with the exception of a delightful short he contributed to the 2006 anthology film ‘Paris, Je t’aime’). Instead apart from a stalled film project there have been divergences into producing of films and TV series and even a script (which he disowned) for an Adam Sandler film.  Perhaps some of this has been what he’s wanted to do and satisfying to him, but it seems to be a major waste of his talents.

The good news is that he has finally got around to shooting a new film – ‘The Descendents’ starring George Clooney – which is due for release later this year. As someone who thinks that no other director has produced better work in the past 15 years, this will be my most anticipated film of 2011.

Attack the Block
Director: Joe Cornish
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Alien invastion film, this time set in the poorer neighborhoods of South London. Very good reviews for the most part, and while this sort of thing isn’t really my thing, it looks as good as something like Zombieland.
Metacritic: 75

Cowboys & Aliens (trailer)
Director: Jon Favreau (Elf, Zathura: A Space Adventure, Iron Man, Iron Man 2)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Probably will see it, but don’t look so good. If the box office estimates are correct, it means that I’ve not only overguessed this week, but that we have to start taking seriously the idea that Harrison Ford is a negative box office draw. When’s the last time a tentpole summer movie didn’t open to at least 50 million (EDIT: Jeanine answers here)? Even Green Lantern managed that much. It’s been a long time since Air Force One, Ford’s last bona fide, true blue hit. And it’s been even longer since The Fugitive, which astonishingly was the last time he was in a movie that currently scores at least a 7 IMDb user rating. People just don’t like Harrison Ford movies much anymore.
Metacritic: 50

Crazy, Stupid, Love (trailer)
Directors: Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Meant to see I Love You Phillip Morris, but it fell through the cracks. This looks like a romantic comedy that probably isn’t all that good, but nonetheless is on the higher end of the scale as far as it goes. Looks better than last week’s Friends with Benefits, for example, and in a different league than Katherine Heigl’s usual stuff. Cast members in its favor: Steve Carell, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei (moderately). Working against it: Ryan Gosling. Indifferent: Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon
Metacritic: 68

Also this week:
Life in a Day (trailer) – Doc made up of YouTube clips
Sarah’s Key (trailer) – Kristin Scott Thomas researches WWII atrocities
The Smurfs (trailer) – Kill me now.

After Horrible Bosses besmirched the memory of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, I felt the need to see it again. It’s a good time for it, as the film turns 60 this summer, and it still seems as fresh as ever. I haven’t seen all of Hitchcock’s films (an unofficial tally comes up with 18, which is just over half) but I’d put it in my top five of his, along with Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho, and Rear Window.

Strangers on a Train is not thought of as top-tier Hitchcock, but has all of the elements that made him great. Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith (who also wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley) and a script that was worked on by Raymond Chandler, the film deals, of course, with murder, but also with Hitchcock’s obsession with guilt and innocence, and of a wrong man being accused. It contains several of Hitchcock’s most famous shots and set pieces, and has one of the great portrayals of a psychopath in movie history.

For anyone who writes or makes movies, the opening is pure delight. Two men are introduced (with shots of their shoes), and meet on a train. One seems perfectly normal, the other seems a little too friendly and intimate. The latter is Bruno Anthony, played in a performance for the ages by Robert Walker, while the former is the bland Guy Haines, a tennis star, played by Farley Granger (I always thought he looked a lot like Jimmy Stewart, and wondered if he was just a fill-in, but I realize now that Stewart would have been too forceful in the role). Walker knows that Granger is married and seeking a divorce to be married to a senator’s daughter (Ruth Roman). He ruminates that a perfect murder would be one in which two men, complete strangers, swapped murders, thus eliminating motive. Granger think he’s a nut, but Walker takes Granger’s mild acquiescence as a green light.

Thus we have the first set piece, a masterful series of shots in which Walker follows Granger’s wife (Laura Elliott) to an amusement park. We know his intention, but the suspense of when and how it will happen percolates. It also includes mordant bits of humor, such as when Walker pops the balloon of a small boy with his cigarette, and the absurd sight of Walker, a solitary man in a suit and fedora, piloting a boat into the Tunnel of Love.

The murder itself is also memorable, shot through the lens of Elliott’s fallen eyeglasses. Hitchcock had a singular ability to make shots like this that had directorial flourish without calling attention to himself–they always served the story. A similar shot is when Granger, now being stalked by Walker (who feels Granger owes him a murder) sees Walker in the stands a tennis match. The heads of everyone in the stands swivel to follow the ball, but Walker’s head does not turn–he’s staring directly at Granger. If I thought of a shot like this I’d be tempted to retire.

As the film goes on and we realize just how crazy Walker is, so does Granger, and we can feel the screws tightening on him. Granger’s character is really a weak man–he seems to have been dominated by his first wife, and the script insinuates that the marriage to Roman is something of a feather in his cap, as he wants to go into politics. I found it interesting to learn that in Highsmith’s book, he does commit Walker’s murder, but in the film he is ostensibly innocent, but one can’t help feel that he somehow did do something guilty.

Walker, enraged that Granger won’t play ball, seeks to frame him by dropping Granger’s cigarette lighter, purloined in the opening scenes, at the murder site. Thus we have a great example of Hitchcock’s McGuffin, a device that everyone in the film is after but doesn’t really matter to the plot. This leads to another great scene, when Walker drops the lighter down a sewer grate. Everything rests on him getting this lighter back, and we discover, perhaps to our surprise, that we root for him to get it, as a closeup of his hand strains to reach the object. Walker, in comparison to Granger, is so interesting that it’s hard to root against him, and furthermore, if he loses the lighter, the movie is over, which is definitely what we don’t want.

Finally the film ends with the spectacular carousel crash (this was not in the original script, and thought up on the fly). It also contains humor, such as the worried mother expressing concern for her little boy on the out-of-control carousel, after which we cut to him, laughing and having the time of his life.

There isn’t a segment of this film that isn’t interesting. The supporting performances are all great, including even Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia as Roman’s sassy little sister. She is supposed to resemble Elliott, and I had somehow misremembered and thought that Patricia had played the murder victim, something I wouldn’t put past Hitchcock. I also got a kick out of the two scenes in which Marian Lorne played Walker’s mother. In the extras, Richard Schickel points out that any middle-aged woman in Hitchcock’s films were presented as monsters. Lorne, who is remembered mostly for playing Aunt Clara on Bewitched, is not exactly monstrous, but dangerously daffy, pampering Walker (we first see her giving him a manicure). She is deaf to accusations against him, and of course she paints the most grotesque paintings. It is one of many of Hitchcock’s demented mother-son relationships.

Strangers on a Train is exhilaratingly fun. Even the tennis scenes at the end are well done, which is unusual for sports scenes at the time. I find it interesting that Granger, who has to try to beat Walker to the murder site, needs to beat his opponent as quickly as possible. If I were presented with that scenario, I’d be tempted to throw the match, losing in straight sets. But Granger never considers this–he is determined to beat his opponent as quickly as possible.

In a sad footnote, Walker, who had a drinking problem, would die within the year, in his early forties. His son, who appears on the DVD extras, looks astonishingly like him.

Predict the #1 film of the weekend.

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 The Smurfs earn more or less than 26 million?

2. Will Crazy, Stupid, Love earn more or less than 19 million?

Deadline is Thursday, July 28 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings
Jackrabbit Slim 26.5
Brian 24.5
Jeanine 21.5
Joe Webb 17.5
Filmman 15.5
Juan 14
Nick 11
Rob Hunter 8
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
James 2

Captain America is the first Marvel adaptation of a superhero that predates the era of Stan Lee, who revolutionized the industry by giving his heroes neuroses and everyday concerns. Cap is a contemporary of Batman and Superman, and wasn’t much more than a patriotic symbol and a square jaw. When Lee figuratively and literally thawed him out of an ice floe in the 60s, he seemed an anachronism, yet has been a staple in the Marvel Universe since then (even though he was killed off at one point).

The film, directed by Joe Johnston, takes the same approach. Steve Rogers, played winningly by Chris Evans, is not a very complex character. He’s scrawny and weak, but he has the heart of a lion, and wants nothing more than to fight against the Germans in World War II. He is classified 4F, but catches the eye of a scientist (Stanley Tucci, great as ever). Tucci, along with Tommy Lee Jones as a classically gruff colonel, are developing a serum to turn men into super-soldiers. Evans is their first guinea pig.

Meanwhile, the head of a Nazi scientific outfit called Hydra, played menacingly by Hugo Weaving, who has a distinctly crimson complexion, has secured a rare artifact that supposedly comes from Odin himself (you would think that since Thor is part of this, they would have mentioned it in his movie. Maybe they did and I didn’t catch it). This, along with Raiders of the Lost Ark, echoes the claim that Nazis are obsessed with the occult. Weaving, along with his scientist right-hand man (Toby Jones, who has the appropriately bulbous cranium for such a role) have developed a weapon from the artifact that can win the war.

After Evans is turned into Captain America (the special effects of putting Evans face on another body is seamless) he is turned into a propaganda figure, selling war bonds and appearing in comic books and serials, a kind of meta approach. Of course when he finds out that his old friend, Bucky Barnes (who was a homoerotic sidekick in the comics) is in danger, he heads out to help him.

Captain America is a lot of fun, with the right mix of action, adventure and humor. Evans, who I despised as the Human Torch, is much more tolerable here. Hayley Atwell, who is the super-cool British Agent Carter, is both his boss and love interest. Evans is teamed with an old-fashioned all-American platoon, including a black and Asian guy (no mention is made of troop segregation), and is a film that celebrates American pluckiness without being jingoistic.

It also looks great. Setting the film in the 40s was a great idea, as this was when comic books were simple and cut and dried, with no gray area between good and evil. The colors are muted, like the newsprint of a pulp novel, and and instead of wearing a Lycra bodysuit, Evans wears what looks like a heavy denim. The only thing he carries that is fantasy is an impenetrable shield made of “vibranium” (I believe in the comics it was adamantium, the same substance that Wolverine’s claws are made of, but I quibble). A superhero carrying something as quotidian as a standard-issue sidearm just feels right.

As fun as the film can be, it doesn’t set the bar very high. For what it is, it couldn’t be much better, but it stops short of attaining an epic status like Batman Begins or Spider-Man 2. But not all superhero movies can be that sweeping, nor should they.

Be sure to stay after the credits finish for a sneak peek at The Avengers film, coming next May. I have to admit I’m excited by it. And I wouldn’t consider Red Skull gone, either (his defeat shouldn’t come as a spoiler to anyone with half a brain). As a guy I knew who wrote for Marvel said of the Marvel Universe, “No one stays dead, except for Uncle Ben.”

My grade for Captain America: B+

Friends with Benefits (trailer)
Director: Will Gluck (Fired Up!, Easy A)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Doubt I’ll get around to seeing it, but doesn’t look too terrible. Kunis’s abilities as an actress are very limited, but this looks like something she can handle. I doubt the movie has the nerve to really follow through on its premise; surely they fall in love at the end, right?
Metacritic: 61

Terri (trailer)
Director: Azazel Jacobs (Momma’s Man)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
A four-star review from Roger Ebert, which used to mean that I’d go see it, but doesn’t these days as much since I’d need 8 days a week just to keep up with them all. Looks very tedious, I think, although John C. Reilly is at least a step up from Paul Giamatti. Most of the time.
Metacritic: 71

Also this week:
Incredibly Small – indie relationship dramedy
Roll Out, Cowboy – rapping cowboy doc
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (trailer) – dull-looking period Chinese film

Predict the #1 film of the weekend.

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 Captain America earn more or less than The Incredible Hulk did over its first weekend ($55,414,050)?

2. Will Friends With Benefits earn more or less than No Strings Attached did over its first weekend ($19,652,921)?

Deadline is Thursday, July 21 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings
Jackrabbit Slim 26.5
Jeanine 21
Brian 19.5
Joe Webb 17
Filmman 14.5
Juan 11.5
Nick 10.5
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
Rob Hunter 7
James 2

In my review of the first part of the closing chapter of the decade-long Harry Potter film series, I wrote about how it had groaned under the weight of its own arcana, and that those who had read, indeed those who had immersed themselves, in Potterana will have an entirely different take on it that us muggles who only bear a casual relationship to the material. There’s less of that in Part 2, but as the film drew to conclusion I could envision those who know the names of the four houses of Hogwarts like they know their own phone number were weeping, while I was looking on, perplexed.

The first hour or so of the film is perhaps the best of the entire series. Hitting the ground running, and making me think back to the first part (a DVD perusal would be ideal homework before seeing), the principle three of Harry, Hermione, and Ron (Daniel Racliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint) have just buried Dobby. I forget how and why the goblin from Gringots is there, but he gets them inside the vaults of the bank in a suspenseful scene, and then they escape on the back of a fire-breathing dragon. Later, at Hogwart’s, Snape (Alan Rickman) and Miss McGonigle (Maggie Smith) actually have a showdown. I was thinking that this was going to be a lot of fun.

Eventually the action became more routine. Voldemort (an excellent Ralph Fiennes), leads his minions into battle at the old school, while the staff and students do everything they can to keep him out. Harry searches for the last of the horcruxes (the pieces of Voldemort’s soul), and tries to figure out a way to kill the ever-present snake at the Dark Lord’s side (I forget what the snake means, other than a sexual metaphor). Luna Lovegood, Harry’s eccentric friend, clues him that he needs to talk to someone dead, so he finds a ghost (Kelly Macdonald). I was hoping he would end up talking to Moaning Myrtle. Whatever happened to her?

As the films went on, and I suppose this is true for the books, too (I only read the first four), the tone changed, and I’m not sure for the better. This last episode contained clips from the earlier films, as we learn the true motivation of a certain character (something I had already figured out a long time ago, so as it was revealed I sat there smugly in my seat). When I think back to the earlier films and remember characters like Myrtle and Nearly-Headless Nick, I kind of felt nostalgic. I suppose that is part of the point–J.K. Rowling’s books, on the whole, can be taken as a story about the end of childhood, though a coda reminds us that life goes on.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is a handsome production, directed with flair by David Yates, with great lighting, pacing and acting, especially from Fiennes and Alan Rickman. Almost everyone who has been in a Potter film returns for a cameo (but was that Emma Thompson or a look-alike–she wasn’t credited). Again I was struggling to keep everyone straight, and a key moment supplied by Mrs. Malfoy had me wondering if I had ever seen her before in any of the films. I also had trouble figuring out how a certain character had in his possession a certain sword. The trouble with films about magic is that there always seems to be some heretofore unmentioned spell pulled out at the last minute to save the day.

For those who love these books and films, I would suspect they will be immensely satisfied by the last shot before the coda. I found much of the ending inevitable if not predictable, but I’m not a true believer. On the whole I give it a thumbs up, but the magic of this enterprise will always be the books. The films have never quite captured it.

My grade for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2: B-

Tabloid (trailer)
Director: Errol Morris (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure)
Personal Interest Factor: 9
Big fan of Errol Morris, who is one of the only genuinely challenging and cinematically inclined documentarians out there. This is about a woman charged with kidnapping back in the 1970s and subsequent media storm.
Metacritic: 78

Winnie the Pooh (trailer)
Directors: Stephen Anderson, Don Hall
Personal Interest Factor: 5
I don’t think it’s all that likely that I’ll go see this, but I have to say, it doesn’t look bad. In fact, it looks downright classical, like something that would have seemed a bit quaint even when I was a kid.
Metacritic: 73

Also this week:
Beautiful Darling – doc about Candy Darling, the Warhol superstar
A Love Affair of Sorts (trailer) – “first full length movie shot with a flip camera” … ick.
The Man Who Fell to Earth – reissue of Nicolas Roeg’s 1975 movie starring David Bowie as a weird alien
Public Speaking (trailer) – Scorsese’s Fran Leibowitz doc

Predict the #1 film of the weekend.

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. Which will earn the most this weekend: Winnie the Pooh or Zookeeper?

2. Will Horrible Bosses drop more or less than 35% in its second weekend?

Deadline is Thursday, July 14 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings

Jackrabbit Slim 25.5
Brian 18.5
Jeanine 16.5
Joe Webb 14.5
Filmman 14
Juan 11
Nick 9.5
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
Rob Hunter 7
James 2

There seems to be a trend at the multiplexes now–the R-rated comedy is back. This summer we’ve seen Bridesmaids, The Hangover 2 and now Horrible Bosses do good business.

The premise of Horrible Bosses is simple, and I suppose universal–it’s only the self-employed or luckiest of us who has never had one. Three chums each have a horror story at work. Jason Bateman works for a sadist, Kevin Spacey. Charlie Day is a dental hygienist who works for a dentist, Jennifer Aniston, who blatantly harasses him sexually (this is a bad thing because he is in love with his fiancee). Jason Sudeikis loves his boss, but when he dies his cretinous son (Colin Farrell) takes over.

As they compare notes they decide to try to hire a hit man to kill their respective bosses. They head to the bad part of town and find Jamie Foxx, who won’t do the job, but will “consult.” He suggest the Strangers on a Train gambit–they should kill each other’s bosses.

This is a good idea for a movie, but fails consistently. There is plenty of blame to go around. To start, the director, Seth Gordon, shows no flair for comic pacing. The film just kinds of lays there, like a dead fish. Scenes drag on for too long and have no sparkle. This should have been a fast-paced farce, but instead plays like a drama.

The screenplay, by three credited writers, is also full of dead spots, and works much too hard to be crude, almost snickering like Beavis and Butt-head as it makes jokes about sex and bodily fluids. I found the whole Aniston thing way over the top. I suppose boys who grew up lusting after Rachel on Friends may get a tingle by hearing her say “I want you to fuck my mouth,” but it has all the wit of a whoopee cushion (it’s interesting that a woman harassing a man is comic, while the opposite would be creepy beyond measure).

Finally, the cast just doesn’t work. The bosses are okay–Aniston certainly has made a departure from the dreary rom-coms she’s made lately, and seems game for anything, and Spacey simply recycles the agent he played in Swimming With the Sharks. But Farrell is a delight. He sports the world’s worst comb over and hides his roguish Irish charm behind a truly repellent character. But again, the writers go over the top when we see his apartment, which Sudeikis calls “inside the mind of an asshole.”

The three leads are a bigger problem. Bateman and Sudeikis are too bland by half, and Day, who seems to be playing the Zach Galifianakis role, over compensates to the point of supreme irritation. For one thing, there’s no particular reason why Aniston would lust after him (if the role had been played by a sweet-natured hunk it would have worked better–Day is short and squirrelly).

The film isn’t a total disaster. I chuckled a few times when the dialogue manages to reach a more effervescent level, especially in the scenes with the three leads and Foxx, who comes off unscathed (his name is “Motherfucker” Jones, and thus the leads call him, properly, Motherfucker).

But on the whole I found Horrible Bosses messy and dreary. I’m not down on crude comedies–Animal House and Bad Santa are the cream of the crop, but they were made by people who knew what they were doing. Not so with Horrible Bosses.

My rating for Horrible Bosses: C-

Horrible Bosses
Director: Seth Gordon
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Metacritic: 58
Strangers on a Train meets Swimming With Sharks. Supposedly very crude and also pretty funny. I’ll probably end up seeing it, despite it seeming awfully familiar, because there’s nothing else to see this weekend.

Ironclad
Director: Johnathan English
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Paul Giamatti, as King John? Now that sounds wicked bad. I’m a sucker for films about medieval England, so I’ll probably end up seeing this somewhere down the line.
Metacritic: 43

Project Nim
Director: Jim Marsh
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Documentary about a chimpanzee taught sign language. Getting strong reviews, but I’ll probably only see it if it’s Oscar-nominated.
Metacritic: 82

The Sleeping Beauty
Director: Catherine Breillat
Personal Interest Factor: 5
A nonpornographic film from Breillat about the fairy tale character.
Metracritic: 67

John Carpenter’s The Ward
Director: John Carpenter
Personal Interest Factor: 3
Carpenter’s first film in 10 years. Supposedly he got fed up with the process. Based on the reviews, he should have stayed retired.
Metacritic: 37

Zookeeper
Director:
Personal Interest Factor: 0
Is there any genre more of a plague in multiplexes today than the live-action talking animal picture? I don’t think so.  A Constitutional amendment should be introduced allowing all who are involved in these things, from the studio head to the key grip, be executed for perpetrating these on the general public. I invite dissent: has anyone seen one that was good?
Metacritic: 31

Also this week:
Beat, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest – doc on the hip-hop band.
Fading of the Cries – “a non-sensical horror romance-hybrid with bats for brains.” (Jeannette Catsoulis)
Farmageddon – doc about government ovesight of farm and food production.
The Ledge – drama about a guy threating to jump off a ledge.
Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish – Shakespeare among the Hasidim.
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness — doc about the Jewish writer.
Summer of Goliath — drama about life in rural Mexico.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of July 8-10 2011.

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 Horrible Bosses earn more or less than 23 million?

2. Will Zoo Keeper earn more or less than 24 million?

Deadline is Thursday, July 7 23:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings

Jackrabbit Slim 18.5
Brian 18.5
Jeanine 16.5
Joe Webb 14.5
Filmman 14
Juan 11
Nick 9.5
Marco Trevisiol 7.5
Rob Hunter 4.5
James 2

The Trip, which is a film that is stitched together from a British comedy series, is something of a sequel to Tristram Shandy, in that again Coogan and Brydon are playing versions of themselves. Coogan has been hired by a newspaper to write reviews of restaurants in the north of England. His American girlfriend (Margo Stilley) is back in her home country, so he has resorted to asking his some-time colleague, Brydon, to accompany him. It’s sort of like a movable My Dinner With Andre with impressions.

The results are uproariously funny and also heartbreakingly sad. There is no credited screenwriter, so I imagine Coogan and Brydon just made it up as they went along. Things get off to a rollicking start at their first meal, when they compare their Michael Caine impressions.

As the film goes on, we see the pathos underneath the humor. “Coogan” is emotionally needy. He misses his girlfriend, but that doesn’t stop him from making two casual conquests in the course of the trip. He is annoyed when Brydon is recognized and he’s not. He fields calls from his American agent, longing to be in films by auteurs. In one hilarious dream sequence, Ben Stiller appears as his agent, telling him the Coens and the Wajchowskis, “both of them,” are interested in him. “All of the brothers are interested in you.”

Brydon is unfailingly cheerful and patient, and extremely happy in cozy domesticity, which seems to annoy Coogan even more. He acts like he can’t stand to be with him, hearing his constant impressions (Brydon can’t go more than a few seconds without doing Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, or Woody Allen, to name a few) but deep down he’s more afraid of being alone. “You’re a good bloke, despite what people say,” Coogan tells Brydon, his way of expressing affection.

Brydon is completely aware of Coogan’s failings, but is too busy enjoying himself to let it bother him. When Coogan, trying to cross a river on stepping stones, gets stuck halfway across, not being able to go forward or back, Brydon calls out, “You’re stuck in a metaphor!”

There are loads of laughs in the film. My favorite bit is when Coogan and Brydon, riding through the stone-walled landscape of the north country (there are some beautiful vistas) riff on a before-the-battle-speech that one might hear in a period adventure film. “To bed!” Coogan improvises, “For we rise at 9:30-ish.” Or when Coogan is smoking pot, and Brydon declines, and Coogan accuses him of not living dangerously. Brydon reminds him of when he had a Red Bull and Coke. There’s also the scene where Coogan tries to deconstruct the lyrics of ABBA’s hit “The Winner Takes It All,” which both men sing with gusto.

I would imagine that Britishers, who have seen these guys on television, would get a lot more of the in-jokes, but even without all the cultural references I thought this was a gas-and-a-half.

My grade for The Trip: A-.

So, here’s to July, marker of the baseball season’s midway point, taxer of our air conditioners … and that’s about it, I guess.

Larry Crowne (trailer)
Director: Tom Hanks (That Thing You Do!)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
I’d say the trailer for this could be summed up as “Tom Hanks rides scooter, Julia Roberts there for some reason.” What a strange thing this looks to be, not just a mid-level star-driven comedy of the type we hardly see anymore, but one that would have looked anachronistically light and fluffy 20 years ago. But I guess Hanks’ last directorial effort was sorta like that too. I skipped that one, but may go see this. Or may not, whatever. It’s not like I feel my life is poorer for having skipped That Thing You Do!.
Metacritic: 41

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (trailer)
Director: Michael Bay (Bad Boys II, The Island, Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen)
Personal Interest Factor: 2
I’d say 1, but it’s another Transformers movie, and I didn’t even see the last one. On the other hand, I’d say 3, just by virtue of it being shot here in town. But I don’t really think I care to see Chicago get blown to bits. I think it would just make me angry, to be honest. Blowing cities to bits is so passé anyhow.
Metacritic: 42

Also this week:
Bride Flight (trailer) – mail order brides head to New Zealand
Monte Carlo (trailer) – teen girls in Europe
Page One: Inside the New York Times (trailer) – NYT doc
Taxi Driver – new restoration

Written and directed by Mike Mills, who previously made Thumbsucker, another pretty good movie that could have been an indie nightmare, Beginners is about a man weighed down by sadness, which is not exactly the kind of story that goes over well in pitch meetings. Ewan McGregor is Oliver who, as the film begins, is dealing with his father’s death. We learn, in flashback, that his father (Christopher Plummer), was a closeted gay man who only comes out after his wife dies.

The current storyline for McGregor is his relationship with a French actress, Melanie Laurent, that is one of the most bracingly honest depictions of a fledgling romance that I’ve seen in quite some time. This, even though they spend their first night together with her not speaking, due to laryngitis (they meet at a costume party, where McGregor is dressed as Sigmund Freud–how Freudian). McGregor and Laurent and the writing all exquisitely present an authentic example of how people become instantly enamored with each other.

The film bounces back and forth between McGregor’s last days with his father, who has embraced his homosexuality by finding a much younger lover and working for the gay rights movement, the relationship with Laurent, and a few far-too fleeting scenes of a young Oliver with his eccentric mother (Mary Page Keller), which could be expanded into a movie I would like to see. McGregor is also an artist of some sort, designing a CD package for a band called The Sads, which prompts him to draw a cartoon history of sadness.

All of this is framed in voiceover narration by McGregor, who moves around in time by showing us images from the years in question. This flirts with being too cute, but Mills holds the line. He also gets nervy by having the dog, an adorable Jack Russell terrier, speak in the form of subtitles. (His first line is “I can recognize 150 words, but I cannot talk”). This is the kind of thing that sounds terrible on paper but is actually very funny, and gives the film a likable weirdness that gets it past all the gloominess that surround the characters.

In an interesting coincidence, I saw this film on one of the biggest weekends in recent gay history–a gay pride weekend that was all the more sweeter after the passage of the gay-marriage bill in New York. However, the issue of Plummer’s gayness, which is prominent in the trailer, doesn’t seem to really matter. McGregor is surprised, but it’s not an issue for him, and it isn’t in the movie, either. It’s really almost superfluous, other than to depict a man who, at the age of 75, is finally being who he really is.

Beginners is a sweet, melancholy little movie, with good performances all around (although I look forward to the DVD with subtitles so I can actually find out some of the things Laurent said that I couldn’t make out). And, depending on how things shake out, Plummer may be in the running for an Academy Award nomination.

My grade for Beginners: B+.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of July 1-3 2011.

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. For the three-day weekend, will Larry Crowne earn more or less than Bad Teacher?

2. For the three-day weekend, will Monte Carlo earn more or less than 8 million?

Deadline is Wednesday, June 29 17:59 pm (blog time).

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

Current rankings:

Jackrabbit Slim 16
Jeanine 15.5
Joe Webb 14.5
Filmman 13.5
Brian 12
Juan 10.5
Nick 9
Marco Trevisiol 6.5
Rob Hunter 4.5
James 2

Bad Boys: Imagine
Hardy Boys with explosions.
And swears. Lots of swears.

For Armageddon
One question: Why not just teach
Astronauts to drill?

Epic Pearl Harbor
Was your Titanic, though not
In the way you hoped.

We suspect even
You, Michael Bay, can’t recall
Plot of The Island.

A third Transformers?
This franchise lasts longer than
The toys ever did.

Bad Teacher (trailer)
Director: Jake Kasdan (Zero Effect, Orange County, The TV Set, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Looks funny, although the developing consensus that the trailer is funnier than the actual film is quite easy to believe. I’ll probably see it because of impending boredom, and because I’m starting to feel the movie mojo coming back after a few slow months for me, but I’m not expecting much.
Metacritic: 46

Cars 2 (trailer)
Director: John Lasseter (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Cars)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
I didn’t realize until just now that Lasseter himself directed this – I just assumed that some farmhand had been given the project, as with Toy Story 3. Not that it changes much, but at least it seems a little more like a personal project than a shameless sequel, even if the shameless sequel idea never made much sense because who wanted a sequel in the first place? By the way, Jeanine and I watched Cars again last night, and it holds up slightly better than I remember. I’m not sure if I’d still put it on the bottom of the Pixar rankings list; I think A Bug’s Life has taken over that spot. That said, a new Cars movie remains a deeply uninspiring idea.
Metacritic: 58

Trollhunter (trailer)
Director: André Øvredal
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Like a Norweigan Cloverfield except with trolls, is what I take away from it. I was going to say that I’m willing to be convinced … but I’m not so sure I am. This kind of thing just doesn’t do it for me.
Metacritic: 62

Also this week:
Buck (trailer) – horse whisperer doc
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (trailer) – Conan doc
The Last Mountain (trailer) – coal mining doc
Make Believe (trailer) – teenage magician doc
Pianomania – piano tuning doc
Rejoice and Shout (trailer) – gospel music doc

The film’s opening dialogue is a voiceover by the mother of the family (Jessica Chastain) distinguishing between the “way of grace and the way of nature.” She is of the way of grace, while her husband (Brad Pitt) is of the way of nature. He will attempt to teach their three sons the notion of survival of the fittest, making them tough. When he over-reacts at the middle child for speaking at the dinner table, she protests, and he tells her that she is always undermining him.

The eldest son, Jack (in a remarkable juvenile performance by Hunter McCracken) rebels against his father, even though he admits he’s more like him than his mother. When Pitt is away on a long business trip Jacks participates in antisocial behavior, like petty vandalism and animal abuse (he straps a frog to a rocket and shoots it into the sky, which I must admit is something that kids that I hung with did when I lived in Texas, although we had the decency to put the amphibian in a small capsule). There’s a great moment when Jack comes across his father working underneath the family car, with only a jack standing between him and mortality. The boy looks at the jack, fantasizes, and moves on, and then in a voiceover says, “Please God. Kill him.”

All of this sounds pretty normal, right? A simple, family drama? Well, early in the film Malick makes either a daring or foolhardy move, depending on your point of view. He embarks on about a twenty-minute history of the universe, starting with the big bang. He takes through the Earth’s volcanic stages, the creation of water, and even a scene involving dinosaurs. Tellingly, that scene involves one dinosaur committing an act of grace toward another dinosaur. It was during this scene I was reminded of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, though Malick’s seemed to have more purpose. All of it is lovingly rendered by the cinematographer, Emmanuel Luzbecki and the five credited editors.