Everyone Else (2009, Maren Ade)

A subtler take on a prickly, Cassavetes-style relationship drama, Everyone Else examines the friction-filled love affair between Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and Chris (Lars Eidinger). As the film begins, the two are left on their own in sun-drenched Sardinia, where Chris, an architect, has been hired to do some improvements on a rich man’s vacation home. But while Chris makes a few stabs at work, most of his time is spent with Gitti as they try to enjoy some time on their own.

Soon, however, their personalities get in the way of their enjoyment. To begin with, Chris discovers via phone that he’s lost a prestigious competition, then hides the bad news from Gitti for several days, allowing his unexplained disappointment to cast a pall over their holiday. Then an encounter with one of Chris’ colleagues and his wife leads to a pair of awkward dinner parties in which Chris and Gitti’s issues come to the fore.

Ade, to her credit, never puts too fine a point on the frictions that exist within the relationship. Based on their actions in Everyone Else, it’s clear that Chris takes his artistic principles very seriously, but is somewhat spineless and eternally conscious of his self-image. On the other hand, Gitti is more impulse-driven, which gives her a kind of honesty that’s bracing in some circumstances but a hindrance in social situations, in which her inability to shrug off something she finds disagreeable leads to difficulties that might otherwise have been averted.

I won’t delve too deeply into the plot of Everyone Else, which is best experienced with as little advance knowledge as possible. However, it’s fascinating to see how Ade, ably assisted by Eidinger and Minichmayr, portray in detail the relationship between Chris and Gitti. We’ve all known couples like Chris and Gitti, in which their outward affections barely mask the hostility they feel deep down. There’s some truth to the old saying that opposites attract, but at the end of the day those opposites need to be compatible, personality-wise.

In most movies about relationships, love is depicted as the end result, and they all live happily every after. But even the happiest of couples- hi, honey!- knows that it’s nowhere near that simple, and for all couples who think in the long term, the make-or-break issue becomes not whether love is shared but rather whether the partners can make the relationship work. Everyone Else is about a borderline case- two people who may like (or even love) each other, but aren’t sure whether that’s enough, or should be. On that basis alone, it’s more realistic than most movies of its kind, and better to boot.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Inception (2010, Christopher Nolan)

There’s a certain paradox to the notion of Christopher Nolan making a “dream-film.” Nolan’s work has always been distinguished by a Swiss-watch precision and intricacy, and this springs from his writer’s need to focus on those aspects of the film that are relevant to the story. But dreams, as most anyone can tell you, aren’t so coherent. Often, the content of dreams is born less out of specific situations in one’s life than from deep-seated desires and anxieties which manifest themselves in strange ways. As a result, Nolan’s multi-level dream narrative doesn’t come off as a dive into the unconscious so much as a complex multi-player video game, in which the participants join in with an ostensibly unified purpose but are at the mercy of their own skill sets, personalities, and limitations.

But if Inception isn’t really convincing as an according-to-Hoyle dream film, it thrills on just about every other front. To begin with, Inception is a marvel of screenwriting structure, as Nolan uses the device of dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams to craft the cinematic equivalent of Russian nesting dolls. Even if the concrete goals of the story are fairly clear- the cranial crooks need to implant an idea, while team leader Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) has to come to grips with his wife’s death and find a way home to his kids- Nolan’s story is complex, as Cobb’s team must burrow deeper in their mark’s mind while fending off his built-in defenses.

That the film is never confusing is fairly amazing, and a testament to Nolan’s skill as a filmmaker. Rather than rushing through to the job itself, Nolan takes plenty of time to explain the rules of the game and to establish the different dream-worlds they will inhabit. So once he has to cross-cut between the different dream levels, we’re always sure where everyone is- no mean feat when you’ve got four or more levels to deal with at once. Additionally, Nolan’s screenplay employs a device in which time expands with every further level the characters visit- ten seconds of “real world” time equating to three minutes in the first level of dreaming, an hour in the second level, and so on. This leads to a riveting use of cross-cutting in which the team must wrap up its mission while, in the highest dream level, the team’s van ever-so-slowly plunges off a bridge into a river. If they don’t finish up before they hit the water, the mission will fail.

Inception is most successful as pure spectacle. Even if they don’t feel like dreams, there are images in the film that are astonishing, some of which appear in the trailers, others of which I won’t spoil here. Inception’s effects are always convincing and often transcendent, all the more so because they’re so perfectly integrated into the worlds of the characters. And if the so-called “human interest” comes up short here- wait, Nolan’s using the dead-wife plot again?- perhaps that’s because Nolan intends them not as fully functioning characters but as someone’s “projections.” Ah, yes- but whose? (That said, Tom Hardy rules, which is something I never imagined myself saying after his performance in Star Trek: Nemesis.)

One thing is clear, Inception is a movie that I’ll need to see more than once so I can watch it freed from my initial expectations. Now that I have a better idea of what Inception is and what it isn’t, I should be able to judge it more on its considerable merits. And now that I know what to expect, perhaps now I’ll be able to better determine what exactly Nolan’s game is. Because if my experiences with his work have taught me anything, it’s that there’s always more going on than Nolan lets on the first time around. Even if there’s not- well, it’s still pretty doggone awesome. And isn’t that enough?

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Winter's Bone (2010, Debra Granik)

In many ways, the Ozarks world of Winter’s Bone harbors a way of life that seems to have changed little since the Great Depression. Oh sure, the cars and clothes are newer, and the local underground industry has switched from moonshine to crystal meth. But the mentality feels mostly the same- fierce territoriality, a strained-at-best relationship to the Law, and tenuous blood ties that only hold up to the point where they stop being useful. It’s a pocket of America that feels like a distant planet compared to the contemporary suburban sprawl, to say nothing of the big city, and it’s the kind of place where those who hail from elsewhere thank the heavens that they weren’t born, and where those who were born there rarely manage to escape.

Under the circumstances, it’s sort of amazing that Ree Dolly (played by Jennifer Lawrence) turned out so well. The offspring of a largely absent, ne’er-do-well father and a mostly catatonic mother, 17-year-old Ree is shouldering the responsibility for keeping her family going. She has dropped out of school to raise her younger brother and sister, but she motivates them to do their homework and quizzes them on their math and spelling. She assembles the meals primarily from what’s on hand and what can be hunted in the nearby forest. Money being tight, she could go around asking for charity, but she lives by the wisdom, “never ask for what ought to be offered.” It would be easy for her to fall in with the meth cookers in order to earn a living, but like the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta before her, she won’t fall into the rut. And when she discovers that her family could get kicked out of their house after her dad has skipped bail, she’s not about to sit around and wait for the inevitable.

One of the wonders of Winter’s Bone, based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell, is how much it reveals about both its heroine and its setting not through tiresome exposition but through action. Granik and co-screenwriter Anne Rossellini don’t toss in so much as a throwaway line about Ree’s upbringing, but judging by her resourcefulness it’s clear that she had to figure most of life out for herself. In her hardscrabble way, Ree is the most heroic character I’ve seen at the movies all year, and Lawrence is a dynamo, less an up-and-comer angling for a career boost than a young performer with serious chops that were just waiting for be revealed. Lawrence isn’t playing a Hollywood hillbilly- Ree is a clever young woman whose circumstances have made her wise beyond her years, and she knows how to navigate a world that spits out weaker souls.

It’s a world that Granik portrays in such depth that Winter’s Bone never simply feels like a vehicle for its young star. The visual style of the film never falls into Southern Gothic clichés, but finely straddles the line between naturalism and noir. She then fills this world with a vivid gallery of supporting players, from the great John Hawkes as Ree’s uncle Teardrop, who reluctantly aids her on her quest, to Dale Dickey as Ree’s most intimidating obstacle, a local crime queen who has her fingers in lots of pies, all of them rotten. And throughout the film, Granik fills the frame with detail after vivid detail, from the crowds at the local cattle auction to the way a birthday party turns into a sing-along. It rang particularly true that the only option for young adults aside from crime is the military, which reels in many of its enlistees with the promise of money, travel, and the allure of potential heroism.

Winter’s Bone won the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this past year. But while this award’s pedigree often suggests bland off-Hollywood fare that’s low on legitimate entertainment value (i.e. Quinceañera and Personal Velocity), Winter’s Bone is never less than riveting. A tense thriller, a study of an unforgettable character, and as lived-in a portrait of the South than any film I’ve seen since The Apostle, Granik’s film is a major achievement, and one that will, I hope, kick off long and fruitful careers for both its director and leading lady.

Rating: 9 out of 10.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, Banksy)

At a time when some documentaries can’t even manage one compelling through-line, Exit Through the Gift Shop has three. The first and most obvious is its documenting of the vital but necessarily secretive world of street artists. For that, we mostly have Thierry Guetta to thank. Guetta, a Frenchman by birth and compulsive videographer by nature, fell into the orbit of the Los Angeles street art scene through a relative and proceeded to film many of the movement’s most prominent figures at work, including Shepard Fairey, creator of the iconic “Obama/Hope” graphic, and eventually Banksy, generally thought to be the world’s foremost street artist. If Exit Through the Gift Shop had no other redeeming qualities, it would be invaluable for the footage of these artists at work and as a demonstration of the surprising amount of effort, artistry, and risk they face to bring their work to the world, even if it will inevitably disappear within a day or so.

It’s Guetta’s efforts to film street art in action that led to his relationship with Banksy, which form’s the film’s second fascinating thread. Guetta, a genuine eccentric whose most obvious characteristic is his undying enthusiasm, fell in with Banksy and his crew and filmed a number of their works, from the “murder” of a London phone box to an anti-Guantanamo Bay piece he hung at Disneyland. But while Guetta won Banksy’s respect for failing to rat out his friend to Disneyland security, Guetta’s attempt to assemble his footage into a documentary was a disaster, and Banksy more or less hijacked the project by encouraging Guetta to go out and make art on his own.

It was this turn of events that finally led to the film’s third and perhaps most thought-provoking thread, in which Banksy uses both Guetta’s previously existing footage and footage taken of Guetta readying his art-world debut to ponder the nature of street art itself. Throughout Exit Through the Gift Shop, we are shown examples of how “street art” can contain artistry and ideas (as compared to old-school graffiti artists with their hasty aerosol scribblings). However, when Guetta is given a chance to make art of his own, he mostly just steals ideas from the artists he once followed. A kind of street-art Eve to Banksy’s Margo, Guetta fobs off his works on art fans primed for something new and edgy (but not informed enough to recognize that his art is derivative and uninspired), selling works for a total of more than a million dollars at his first public exhibition. Given the secondhand way Guetta achieved success by riding the coattails of his more established betters, it somehow seems fitting that he ended up getting commissioned by Madonna to design the cover of her latest greatest-hits album.

By the end of the film, Exit Through the Gift Shop has metamorphosed almost imperceptibly from a street-art primer to an often hilarious poisoned-pen letter to the man who gave this project its start. Some might argue that, by re-appropriating Guetta’s footage to his own ends, Banksy is no better than Guetta, but I’d say that the difference is that while Guetta is selling his secondhand goods to the world as his own vision, Banksy has basically given Guetta the latitude to hang himself by his own rope. Furthermore, Banksy’s efforts have turned Guetta’s formless video into something akin to a street art manifesto, reclaiming it from those pretenders who buy expensive photocopying equipment and employ dozens in their efforts to sell millions of dollars of “edgy” works in galleries, and returning it to the artists in the streets, who haunt Kinko’s by day and climb out on roofs and evade police by night for almost no monetary gain. True “street art” may not technically be legal, but thanks to Banksy- and to some extent, Guetta- it’s never looked nobler. And even if, as some have claimed, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a hoax, I’d say the points it makes stand either way.

Rating: 9 out of 10.

Father of My Children (2009, Mia Hansen-Løve)

When we first meet Grégoire Canvel, the protagonist of Father of My Children, he’s juggling two cell phones in an attempt to resolve the problems of the day. Grégoire (played by Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is a film producer who specializes in backing brilliant but prickly filmmakers most producers wouldn’t touch- a figure inspired by the late Humbert Balsan, who backed difficult projects by Lars Von Trier, Bela Tarr, Clare Denis, and others. Why does Grégoire do this? It’s partly because he cares more deeply about cinema than his colleagues, and partly because he sees himself as an underdog, fighting the good fight for art over the bottom line. But because of the nature of the job, virtually every day brings a new crisis, and when this is the case the only reasonable response is to deal with the immediate crisis, lest one go nuts from fear of what’s going to appear on the horizon.

Trouble is, Grégoire’s in-the-moment fixes are beginning to catch up with him. He’s running out of money, favors, and goodwill. Filmmakers still seek him out because they don’t know where else to turn, but how will he fund their work with no money? His dream is die, a massive crisis for with no available solution that doesn’t leave him hanging out to dry. A man whose livelihood has depended on his ability to find quick resolutions, Grégoire can only contemplate one possible way out. It’s often said that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but in light of the decisions Grégoire has made throughout the film, it’s more or less inevitable that he’d end up that way.

Father of My Children would be pretty grim indeed if all it was was the story of one man’s downward spiral. However, Hansen-Løve has more on her mind than Grégoire Canvel’s demise. Instead, Canvel dies roughly halfway through the story, with the remaining duration devoted to his family’s behavior in the way of tragedy. Suicide may remove Grégoire’s need to deal with his problems, but the problems themselves remain, and his widow Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) does her best to manage the crises he left behind and resolve them in a way that honors his memory. Meanwhile, daughter Clemence (played by de Lencquesaing’s own daughter Alice) finds herself making discoveries both about her father and herself. Tragedy places both Sylvia and Clemence in a position where they must reveal parts of themselves they wouldn’t have needed to otherwise, and while they don’t always succeed in their new goals, they forge on in a way that Grégoire could not, and Hansen-Løve clearly admires their efforts. Father of My Children doesn’t exactly tell a new story, but it tells its story gracefully and great subtlety, which is just as rare a commodity as originality.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Despicable Me (2010, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud)

One of the most enduring moviegoing grips is the old saw that Hollywood is running out of fresh ideas. And considering the lucrative kids’ market, it’s little wonder that most studios play it safe by rehashing hit properties for family audiences. So it’s admirable to see Universal, not usually known for animated fare, releasing a more or less original property like Despicable Me, especially at the height of the summer season. However, one of the disadvantages to starting up a potential franchise is that it requires a kind of media carpet-bombing to build awareness that isn’t necessary for stuff that has been around for years. Thus, while Disney and Pixar can get away with a few Toy Story 3 trailers that show everyone that, hey, Buzz and Woody are back in a new adventure, the folks behind Despicable Me have to work harder to get the word out. Anticipating this need, Universal released their first teaser last summer, and since then they’ve rolled out several other spots to play in theatres and on television. Consequently, much of the movie’s highlights have been spoiled by the advertising campaign. Sure, the studio has successfully marketed their movie into a family blockbuster, but it already feels like I’ve seen most of the good stuff after a single viewing.

Is this unfair? I suppose, especially since I usually try to confine my thoughts on a movie to what happens between the studio logo and the final MPAA rating card. But it’s also sort of inevitable, seeing as how I can’t exactly hook myself up to Dr. Mierzwiak’s memory-expunging machine before watching a movie (if I could, I’d use it to experience some of my favorites again for the first time). And strangely enough, going into the movie with most of the money moments pre-spoiled for me had a side effect of allowing me to better-appreciate the smaller sight gags, especially the background architectural stuff that otherwise might be lost. Additionally, the story’s inevitable turn toward the maudlin was far less grating to me here than in many other cases where it spoils the fresh hilarity. Nonetheless, Despicable Me isn’t good enough to overcome that feeling of déjà vu that was caused by its advertising campaign. Perhaps now that everyone is familiar with this movie, its large grosses will allow Universal to be more confident in what it has that they’ll be able to surprise us a little with the inevitable sequel.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

Cyrus (2010, Jay and Mark Duplass)

Watching Cyrus, the latest from indie-world favorites the Duplass brothers, I was reminded of George Ratliff’s awesome Joshua, one of my favorite films of 2007. Not that the two movies were similar in look or feel, mind you, but both movies use popular genres to address anxieties that are fairly common. In Joshua, Ratliff tackled the worry faced by many fathers that the apple may fall disconcertingly far from the tree, while here the Duplasses take as their premise the anxiety faced by would-be stepfathers that they might not blend into their future families quite so smoothly as they had hoped. But the differences stop there, since Joshua is a sure-footed work from a filmmaker in full control, while Cyrus has been made by a pair of directing brothers who don’t seem to know where to progress from their promising idea.

The most obvious manifestation of the Duplasses’ tentativeness is their complete lack of facility with the camera. In their three films to date, the Duplass brothers have employed a handheld camera to underline their films’ ramshackle, lo-fi nature, but particularly in Cyrus, it seems they’ve confused this scruffiness with an honest-to-goodness aesthetic. Unfortunately, waving a digital camcorder around like a semi-distracted dad at his kids’ soccer game does not a style make. The Duplass brothers are convinced that nearly every moment that’s even remotely significant (and many that aren’t) needs to be punctuated by a quick zoom, but after one or two instances in the first couple of minutes this is merely annoying. There’s just no evidence that there’s an assured hand on the camera at any point during Cyrus, and the Duplasses would do well to consult the films of the Dardenne brothers or, more appropriately, Lukas Moodysson’s Together for tips on how to do it right.

This unease behind the camera wouldn’t be such an issue if the script was better- after all, last year’s Humpday, which starred one of the Duplass brothers, was no great shakes cinematically but was distinguished by its sharp screenplay. Unfortunately, once it lays down its premise, Cyrus isn’t thought through very well. Once the film has established the relationship between John (John C. Reilly) and Molly (Marisa Tomei) and introduced Cyrus (Jonah Hill), Molly son and semi-covert disrupter of their relationship, the Duplasses seem content to hit the obvious beats. There are many directions the Duplasses could have taken this premise, such as by steering it somewhere truly dark, or by making the rivalry between John and Cyrus subtle so that Molly couldn’t even detect it. Instead, the movie’s trajectory feels pretty formulaic, with the conflict coming to a boil, followed by a misunderstanding that briefly tears apart the couple, then some final-act redemption for Cyrus. It all feels too easy, as if in spite of the Duplasses’ ongoing commitment to grungy moviemaking is a mask for their desire to be comfortably Hollywood in their storytelling.

Trouble is, by aiming to bridge the gap between a no-budget Sundance favorite and a big-budget crowd-pleaser, Cyrus ends up scratching neither itch. It’s a shame, really, since the movie begins with a great deal of promise. The Duplasses wisely realized when making Cyrus that the movie wouldn’t have a prayer unless we were rooting for John and Molly’s relationship, and the movie’s opening does a fine job of making their courtship not only believable but highly sympathetic. Reilly has made a cottage industry of playing endearing schlubs, and just because he’s the obvious choice for this part doesn’t mean he’s not awesome at playing it. And Tomei is just as good in the role of a woman who’s finally dipping her toe back into the dating pool after spending most of her adult life raising her son (also, is it just me or is she getting hotter as she ages?). Even Hill is fine as Cyrus- the role is written more as a plot device than an actual character, but Hill’s performance goes beyond placid stillness and a thousand-yard stare to suggest some tumultuous goings-on below the surface. There’s so much that’s good in Cyrus that it’s a shame that the Duplass brothers don’t know what to do with it. Shame, really.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010, David Slade)

Who is Bella Swan, really? I’m not talking about the role she plays in the Twilight saga. What I’m asking is who she is when she’s alone. Does she have any hobbies? Does she keep a journal, or doodle in a sketch pad, or enjoy going to hear live music? I only ask because there doesn’t seem to be much to her, at least not in the movies (I haven’t read the books, so I couldn’t make a judgment on that front). Hell, even the memorably antisocial Travis Bickle watched TV and went to porn theatres. To these eyes, Twilight heroine and lip-biting enthusiast Bella is perhaps the least compelling protagonist in a Hollywood blockbuster in many a moon.

This isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, of course- I mean, Keanu Reeves’ Neo didn’t have a whole lot going on in his life either. But despite being boring as ass, it seems like nearly everyone Bella meets in the Twilight series thinks that she’s totally awesome. Her gaggle of human friends seem to be constantly seeking approval from her even though she doesn’t really hang out with them outside of school, and not one but two supernatural hotties are practically at each others’ throats (literally) to win her heart. Almost the entire Cullen family falls for her instantly, and the one who doesn’t (Nikki Reed’s Rosalie) resents her because of her own personal issues. Similarly, the Quileute tribe practically takes her as one of their own, even making her the first outsider to attend a tribal council meeting. Hell, she’s the reason for the climactic battle in Eclipse. Yet Bella herself hardly seems worth the trouble, and this makes much of Eclipse, and the franchise as a whole, pretty hard for me to swallow.

Of course, this wouldn’t bother me so much if Eclipse gave me a little more to think about. Has anyone else noticed that this movie just kind of sits there, story-wise? I’m not talking about incident, since I suppose plenty of stuff happens in Eclipse. I’m talking about plot. As any decent writing teacher will tell you, plot doesn’t simply mean incident, but rather a series of incidents leading to change. At the end of the day, what changes occur in Eclipse? Not many. Sure, Bella finally says yes to Edward’s proposals of marriage, and Victoria gets killed in the final battle, but for the most part Eclipse is prolonged buildup to Breaking Dawn. It’s pretty much all setup, with almost no surprises. And did this really need to be two-plus hours long? Not remotely.

It doesn’t help that it’s not especially well-made. Say what you will about New Moon, but at least it’s a good-looking movie, with interesting camera angles (I dig the overhead shots in the forest chase scene) and some well-deployed uses of color, particularly once the gang heads to Italy. By contrast, Eclipse is cinematic cold oatmeal- not offensive by any means, but just kind of blah. I’m not even talking about making things pretty, but director David Slade can’t even manage a single shot that intrigued me enough to want to know more. He’s so eager to shoot the onscreen action in closeup that it’s difficult to tell where the characters are in relation to each other, especially during the action scenes. He even botches the scene in which the army of “newborns” emerges from the water by not being patient enough to keep his camera on the surface of the water for a few seconds before the first head pops out.

Listen, I don’t want it to seem like I’m piling on a movie that’s not my cup of tea. There’s nothing in Eclipse that angered me or made me want to hurt myself like I did during Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Heck, there are even a few things I like, such as Billy Burke’s performance as Bella’s bachelor dad, who reacts to the endless drama in his daughter’s life with a sort of irritated resignation that’s always good for a chuckle. All in all, it’s a fairly inoffensive time-waster of a movie, one that’s of interest primarily to the legions of fans who clamor to see their favorite characters and scenes play out on the big screen. I certainly don’t begrudge them their love for Twilight- I have my soft spots too, and hey, at least they’re reading something. I might not be that keen on Eclipse, but then, I don’t really matter compared to all the people who are already counting down to Breaking Dawn next year, which will bring the hotly anticipated wedding of Bella and Edward. And I suppose I’ll watch that one too, not least because I’m genuinely curious what Edward will have to say to Bella now that he no longer has the option of proposing marriage ten times per day.

Rating: 4 out of 10.

Ratings for 2010 releases

Here is my list of ratings for 2010 Muriel-eligible films I’ve seen thusfar. Click on the underlined titles for more detailed thoughts on them. The ratings scale is explained at right.

10 ratings
Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos)

9 ratings
Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
The Social Network (David Fincher)
Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik)

8 ratings
Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)
Carlos (Olivier Assayas)
Everyone Else (Maren Ade)
Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve)
The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)
How Do You Know (James L. Brooks)
Inception (Christopher Nolan)
Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek)
October Country (Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright)
Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)
True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen)

7 ratings
Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette)
The Fighter (David O. Russell)
Get Low (Aaron Schneider)
Hadewjich (Bruno Dumont)
Jackass 3D (Jeff Tremaine)
Let Me In (Matt Reeves)
Lourdes (Jessica Hausner)
Mother (Bong Joon-ho)
The Oath (Laura Poitras)
A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)
The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore)
Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor)
The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel De Oliveira)
The Tillman Story (Amir Bar-Lev)
Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn)
Vincere (Marco Bellocchio)
White Material (Claire Denis)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)

6 ratings
127 Hours (Danny Boyle)
And Everything Is Going Fine (Steven Soderbergh)
Animal Kingdom (David Michod)
Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)
Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)
Buried (Rodrigo Cortes)
Catfish (Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost)
Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl (Manoel De Oliveira)
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé)
Get Him to the Greek (Nicholas Stoller)
Greenberg (Noah Baumbach)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (David Yates)
How to Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders)
I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Ficarra and John Requa) {3}
Inside Job (Charles Ferguson)
Inspector Bellamy (Claude Chabrol)
The Karate Kid (Harald Zwart)
The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko)
The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper)
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole (Zack Snyder)
Ondine (Neil Jordan)
Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980 (James Marsh)
Restrepo (Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger)
Smash His Camera (Leon Gast)
Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin)
The Square (Nash Edgerton)
Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski)
Vengeance (Johnnie To)

5 ratings
Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton)
Amer (Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani) {2}
The American (Anton Corbijn)
Cyrus (Jay and Mark Duplass)
Despicable Me (Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud)
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino)
I’m Still Here (Casey Affleck)
Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau)
Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg)
Micmacs (Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
Please Give (Nicole Holofcener)
The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella)
Splice (Vincenzo Natali)
Stone (John Curran) {3}
The Town (Ben Affleck)

4 ratings
Chloe (Atom Egoyan)
The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom) {3}
Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
RED (Robert Schwentke)
Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 (James Marsh)
Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1983 (Anand Tucker)
Tiny Furniture (Lena Dunham)
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (David Slade)

3 ratings

2 ratings
The Spy Next Door (Brian Levant)

1 ratings

0 ratings

Additionally, here’s a list of movies I’d like to see before filling out my Muriels ballot this year. Naturally, some are more urgent than others, though ideally I want to see them all if I have time (ha ha). So if anyone should happen to have a copy of one or more of these on DVD that he or she would be willing to let me borrow, I would be most appreciative.

Also, the number in braces {like so} represents my level of anticipation for this particular film. The number corresponds to my post about the movies I still “need to see” before I feel confident filling out this year’s Muriels ballot. Basically, {1} is for my most highly anticipated movies, and so on.

(30 Nov: In the interest of making this list rather less intimidating for me, I’ve pared it down somewhat. As always, if there’s anything you think I should add, let me know.)

Scheduled to come to Columbus:
Ne change rien (Pedro Costa) [Feb 11 @ Wex] {2}
The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet) [Feb 11 @ Gateway] {2}

In town this week:
Another Year (Mike Leigh) [Feb 4 @ Drexel] {1}
Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell) [TBA @ Gateway] {3}

DVD release TBA:
Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman) {2}
The Concert (Radu Mihaileanu) {3}
Four Lions (Chris Morris) {3}
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea) {3}
Hideaway (Francois Ozon) {3}
Monsters (Gareth Edwards) {3}
My Dog Tulip (Paul and Sandra Forefinger) {3}
Neil Young Trunk Show (Jonathan Demme) {3}
Tamara Drewe (Stephen Frears) {3}
Unstoppable (Tony Scott) {3}

Vincere (2009, Marco Bellocchio)

It’s rare to see a movie with an emotional pitch as high as Marco Bellocchio finds in Vincere. The later scenes in There Will Be Blood were awfully fevered, but even the preternaturally confident PTA didn’t attempt to sustain it throughout an entire film, although Magnolia came awfully close. So it’s sort of awe-inspiring to witness Bellocchio maintain such this tone throughout Vincere. From the central performances of Filippo Timi as the young Mussolini and the blistering Giovanna Mezzogiorno as his obsessed first mistress on down, there’s almost nothing subtle about this movie. But then, why should there be? Vincere story is a sad saga of real-life injustice, an impassioned woman who was steamrolled by a man’s ambition and buried by a system that would do anything to reward his success. Sure, she clearly had a few issues, but it doesn’t make it right that Il Duce would lock her up and take away their son simply to protect his image in ultra-Catholic Italy.

Compared to most biopics, Vincere’s script is extremely elliptical, hitting nothing but the key points of the Ida Dasler story to the extent that non-Italians might get lost at some point. Bellocchio careens from one big scene to the next with no down time (as Krusty the Klown might say, it’s the tightest 122 minutes in showbiz), resulting in a lack of depth to the story. Similarly, even if Bellocchio’s brio doesn’t flag, the story itself does, growing repetitive in the final hour. Really, there are only so many ways to liven up Ida screaming out the truth only to be slapped down by the authorities. But while I wasn’t particularly moved or fulfilled by Vincere, I found it fascinating all the same. Asked to choose a word to describe it, I’d have to pick “operatic”- indeed, a handful of the characters break out in song during the film- and I for one would be excited to see Bellocchio (or someone just as capable) tackle this story in opera form. As is, it’s not great, but it’s pretty awesome all the same.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Toy Story 3 (2010, Lee Unkrich)

In the interest of avoiding any long dry spells like I had between the Muriels and the White Elephant this year, I recently decided to post a few thoughts on every movie I see. Which is a great idea in theory, but sometimes it’s hard to think of anything insightful to add to the conversation. I’ve found myself in this situation with two new releases, Toy Story 3 and Please Give (or as I like to call it, Please Give the Vultures What They Want So They’ll Stop Hovering Already). In the case of Please Give, etc., I think that Craig Kennedy over at Living in Cinema has said it pretty well, and all that’s left for me to add is that despite my misgivings about the movie, it did satisfy my Rebecca Hall thing, so it was worth it for that anyway. Rating: 5 out of 10.

With Toy Story 3, it’s a little trickier, since my inability to think of something insightful to write has less to do with my thoughts neatly dovetailing with those of other (better-known) critics than the fact that it more or less scratches the itches the other two Toy Story movies scratch. Even more than most successful third installments, Toy Story 3 traffics in the viewers’ nostalgia for- and familiarity with- the previous films, to the point where in the opening scene I got a smile on my face when I heard the line, “I’ve got my dog, with a built-in force field!”, knowing exactly what would happen next. Like everything Pixar does, this reaction is completely intentional, since Toy Story 3 is about re-familiarizing us with the world of Andy and his beloved toys, all the better to ponder what’s going to happen when this world falls apart. Yes folks, Toy Story 3 is about moving on- saying goodbye, accepting one’s fate, and finally starting anew.

One of the most notable elements of the third (and, it would seem, final) Toy Story adventure is how much more Andy there is in the story. In the first two films, we caught glimpses of Andy and his relationship with the toys, but for the most part the toys were defined by their actions when he was absent- they established their own personalities and had their own adventures, but aside from Woody’s brief flirtation with museum-based immortality, they never acted in a way that ran contrary to their loyalty to their owner. So it’s a little startling to discover in Toy Story 3 that Andy becomes an active character in the story. Oh sure, most of the film is about Buzz and Woody and the gang and their trials and tribulations, but it’s also about Andy and how he has to come to terms with his feelings about the toys as he stands on the cusp of adulthood. As Andy grows up, is there still room for his old best pals?

What makes Toy Story 3 so effective from an emotional standpoint is that way it contrasts the trajectory of a human life (Andy’s, to be specific) with that of the toys. Whereas Andy grows up over the course of eighteen years and must then find his way in the world, a toy is more or less born to its appointed purpose. But once it’s fulfilled this purpose, what then? Toy Story 3 presents four options- going into storage until Andy “needs them again,” being donated to a day care where they’ll be played with but never belong to anyone, getting thrown away and eventually incinerated, and finally being given to another young child to be loved similarly to the way they were before. It’s a credit to the movie that it presents all four options with a surprising amount of emotional complexity, without ever feeling like Pixar is sacrificing entertainment value.

Considering how well thought out all four of these options happen to be, it’s almost disappointing that Unkrich and his team feel the need to introduce a villain into the story in the form of Lots ‘o’ Huggin’ Bear (voiced by Ned Beatty). Part of me wondered whether it might have been possible to follow the characters through these different potential fates without throwing a bad guy into the mix. However, these thoughts didn’t occur until well after the film was over. As I sat in that darkened theatre, all I could think of was how well I’d gotten to know- and like- these characters over the years. Most of all, I was grateful at getting the chance to spend a little more time with them. And in the end, it seems that Andy himself was grateful too.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Final thought: What’s the deal with Ken? Unless the story requires it, the Toy Story movies have generally kept mum on the origins of the toys. But I can’t help but wonder how Ken got to the point at which we meet him. After all, here’s a Ken doll who, by his own admission, has never met a Barbie before. And while that’s certainly not impossible, it doesn’t seem likely. For one thing, the Sunnyside day care seems to depend on donations for its supply of toys. Which makes me wonder what kind of kid would have a Ken doll with a dream house and a full closet full of clothes but no Barbie. Ken can protest all he wants that he’s “not a girls’ toy,” but let’s face it- have you ever known someone to have a Ken independently of Barbie? What is Ken if not Barbie’s ultimate accessory, a hunky himbo to be dressed up while providing Barbie a male companion, all the better to reinforce the marriage fantasy that’s drummed into little girls’ heads from the cradle?

… Sorry about that. But it does make you think a bit, I suppose. I mean, it’s not like Ken has forgotten. He’s not a Buzz Lightyear, whose memory can be wiped clear with the touch of a cleverly hidden button. A much more likely scenario is that Ken came into the world at Sunnyside. For most characters in the Toy Story universe, life begins when their boxes are opened. Look at the way Buzz sprang to life in the first film only after Andy has ripped the package open and stood him on the bed. Similarly, in TS2 New Buzz comes “out of hypersleep” once the original Buzz opened up his box in an attempt to steal his tool belt. So while Ken has no doubt been on a shelf next to Barbie at some point, he wouldn’t have been aware of it until the box was actually opened. Which leads me to believe that rather than being bought and taken home and played with as part of the Barbie world, he was given directly to Sunnyside, clothes and dream house and all, probably due to a toy store having to get rid of excess Ken stuff.

Of course, the Prospector complicates matters. If the story of Stinky Pete’s box never having been opened (at least, not from the outside) is true, then that shoots a hole in the box-opening theory right there and it’s back to the drawing board for me. Still, it’s possible that his box was opened at some point for some reason or other, especially if he’s been around and harboring seething resentments for space toys for nearly half a century. And besides, aside from The Velveteen Rabbit’s concept of Nursery Magic, can you think of a better explanation?

I know, I know- I’ve thought entirely too much about this issue. And normally, I’d say that I’ve done more thinking about it than the filmmakers have. But this is Pixar, where everything is planned and thought through, and somebody along the line must have thrown out the question of how exactly Ken could have gone through several decades (according to IMDb he’s a mid-eighties model) without having encountered a Barbie. Even if they don’t come out and explain it in the movie, I’m sure they didn’t throw the idea out there without thinking it through. And isn’t it a testament to how much fun the film is, and how well thought out the Toy Story world has been so far, that I’m entertaining these thoughts at all?

Now, to figure out what’s up with the Potato Heads. I mean, their parts can operate independently, and Mr. Potato Head is about to walk around by using, at various point, a flour tortilla and a cucumber for a body. Are they Voltron-esque beings who are able to combine autonomous components to create a greater whole? And what happens when their parts get mixed up, as they’re bound to be at some point, with Mr.’s arms and/or eyes ending up on Mrs., and vice versa? Hey, there’s a gag for Toy Story 4…

The Karate Kid (2010, Harald Zwart)

Am I strange for thinking this works better than the original? I watched John G. Avildsen’s 1984 take on this story not too long ago, and aside from the character of Mr. Miyagi, I found it pretty creaky. But its formula was pretty solid- new kid in town gets beaten up by martial-arts-practicing bullies, gets training from a mysterious master/handyman, and gets back at them in the ring. Granted, it’s not exactly a sophisticated story arc, which is part of the reason it’s more effective when the hero and his nemeses are in their early teens rather than nearing their high school graduation. Likewise, it’s more believable that these villains could be manipulated by their instructor, considering how hormone-addled and insecure boys tend to be at this age, grasping at anything that makes them feel tough and in control.

Of course, a drawback to the change in age is that it can be a little difficult to watch little Jaden Smith get the tar kicked out of him early in the movie, but Smith, small of build but full of attitude, is more believable as someone who would run afoul of bullies than affable goofball Ralph Macchio. It’s too soon to tell whether Smith is more than a talented child actor, but he’s definitely got presence to burn, not to mention his father’s natural charm and ease in front of the camera. His teacher, Mr. Han, lacks the self-aware eccentricities of Pat Morita’s Miyagi, but Jackie Chan’s uncharacteristically low-key performance is good nonetheless, and Chan and the filmmakers deserve credit for not simply trying to make him another Miyagi. And Taraji P. Henson doesn’t get much to do as Smith’s single mom, but she makes the character work.

Having transported the story to China, Karate Kid 2010’s titular martial art has been replaced by kung fu. And while the climactic fights are just as effective as those in the original- they’d be even better if not for the use of a distracting Jumbotron- Mr. Han’s unconventional teaching method of “hang up the jacket” just doesn’t have the same magic as “wax on, wax off” and “paint the fence.” But for the most part, the new Kid doesn’t screw up what worked in the original, while finding ways to change the formula mostly for the better. It’s not great art, but it’s solid entertainment, especially if you’ve got an age-appropriate kid who’ll respond to what the movie is selling. I’m surprised to find myself not so much dreading the inevitable sequel so much as wondering where they’ll take the franchise from here. Jaden Smith meets Tony Jaa in The Muay Thai Kid, anyone?

Rating: 6 out of 10.

Get Him to the Greek (2010, Nicholas Stoller)

Russell Brand’s dissolute rock god Aldous Snow was one of the highlights of 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and now with an expanded role he’s still pretty damned hilarious. But with the increased screen time has come a need to provide Aldous with a more rounded character, which means that instead of showing up now and then to make humping motions and glower lasciviously, he’s now grappling with daddy issues, relationship woes, and a relapse into drug addiction. Now, the scenes involving Snow’s issues aren’t bad per se. Trouble is, they don’t mesh particularly well with the funny stuff. When Stoller follows an hour or so of binge-drinking and late-night partying with scenes about Aldous learning to face up to his addiction and growing the hell up, it feels like someone laced my candy with vitamins so I wouldn’t feel so bad about gorging on empty calories. I know that we’re all supposed to have positive messages in our Hollywood movies, but when it comes to comedy, everything is forgivable just as long as it’s funny.

That said, Get Him to the Greek does mostly deliver the laughs. It’s not as consistently funny as Forgetting Sarah Marshall was, but the highs are much higher this time out. As the hapless studio flunky assigned to accompany Snow to a special concert, Jonah Hill takes what in other hands could have been a straight-man stick in the mud and makes him just as funny as Snow, albeit in a fussier sort of way. And while I wasn’t quite as taken with Sean Combs’ work as Hill’s vulgar, manipulative boss, I enjoyed the performance all the same, along with the rest of the supporting cast. And few can touch the Apatow team when it comes to great, out-of-nowhere cameos (there are two here, neither of which I’ll spoil for you). But the movie’s success rests primarily in Brand’s shoulders, and he delivers not only in the comedic set pieces but also in the straight scenes and even in the concert sequences. If nothing else, Brand’s performance is even more committed here than in Marshall, and while I’m not sure there’s much more to be done with Aldous, it’s a testament to Brand’s talent that he’s made it this far.

Rating: 6 out of 10.

The Secret in Their Eyes (2009, Juan Jose Campanella)

Not hard to see how this ended up winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar last year, considering that its primary competition was the behind-bars brutality of The Prophet and the didactic scolding of Michael Haneke’s man’s-inhumanity-to-man illustration The White Ribbon. Compared to those two, The Secret in Their Eyes is pretty standard awards-bait, a gussied-up big-screen version of Law and Order in which the melancholy undertone doesn’t get in the way of the Very Bad Guy getting more or less what’s coming to him. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, then how else would you describe a serviceable murder mystery with relatively standard characterizations and bolstered by a handful of memorable scenes?

Of course, the word “memorable” doesn’t necessarily imply “awesome”, and there are few better recent examples of this than Secret’s much-ballyhooed centerpiece sequence, in which the hero and his hard-drinking sidekick (guess what happens to him?) finally track down the baddie at a football match. For some reason, Campanella felt it wise to shoot the entire scene in one extended “impossible” take, beginning with a helicopter shot into the stadium, then following the hero through the crowded bleachers, followed by an extended foot chase, after which the culprit jumps down onto the field and is eventually apprehended. Granted, it’s all very technically impressive how Campanella and his visual effects team put it together. The problem is that it’s so attention-grabbing that it took me right out of the movie.

Now, I’m a fan of long takes- seeing as how I’m a DePalma fanboy, this should go without saying. But in order for them to work, one of two things has to be true: either the camera movement looks and feels like something a camera could actually do, or the movie that surrounds the shot isn’t aspiring to realism. However, this shot failed both of these tests. It would be one thing if Campanella was making a frenzied movie-movie kind of thriller (a la DePalma), but most of The Secret in Their Eyes is relatively sedate stylistically. Therefore, as soon as the camera descended into the crowd of football fans, I became absorbed less in what was happening in the story than I was in how impressive the shot was. So, a lesson to all filmmakers with any sort of budget for special effects- just because you can create something snazzy doesn’t make it the right choice. As far as I’m concerned, that single shot brought my grade down one point by itself. And when the movie’s only pretty good to begin with, that makes a world of difference.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009, Werner Herzog)

I recently read an interview with Elliott Gould in which he described himself as a “jazz actor,” and watching Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, I realized that the same label could be applied to Nicolas Cage. In his signature roles, Cage doesn’t adopt a straightforward approach to characterization, but rather treats the script as the theme and proceeds to riff on the material he’s given. In many ways, Lt. Terence McDonagh is the ultimate Cage performance, full of unorthodox acting choices that work beautifully. Cage goes over the top all right, but it never feels like he’s simply hamming it up for the hell of it. Everything works in the context of the character, from his repeated dialogue quirks (dig his disbelieving chuckle whenever he mentions the henchman “G”) to the character’s outlandish behavior. It would be sort of unbearable if Cage appeared to be breaking a sweat, but he inhabits the character so fully that he seems completely in control even in the character's craziest moments.

Take the already legendary bit in which McDonagh turns up to interrogate an old woman, delivering a half-crazed monologue while shaving with an electric razor. On the one hand, it’s an almost surreal touch. But unlike, say, Marlon Brando offering George C. Scott a Milk Dud in The Formula, it makes a certain amount of sense- McDonagh’s been going nonstop for three days, and he’s become so blinkered by the case (and so strung-out on drugs) that he no longer has time to shave at home. And if it disorients the woman, so much the better.

Similarly, BL: PoCNO can be seen as a spiritual cousin to The Long Goodbye. Like Altman’s film (which- whaddya know- stars Gould), Herzog’s is a genre offering that’s not content to color inside the lines, inside using the framework to explore the confines of the formula. And if Herzog’s film isn’t the masterpiece that Altman’s is, it’s less because his material isn’t as good- although it’s hard to beat Chandler’s best novel for source material- but because the filmmakers’ approaches to genre exploration are difference. Altman exploded the detective mystery by transplanting a 1940s story to the alien world of 1970s Los Angeles, thereby exploring the contrasts of the genre conventions to the morality of the later period.

By contrast, Herzog couldn’t care less about the genre in which he works, treating the script as almost an excuse to chase after the things that really interest him- New Orleans post-Katrina, the implacability of nature (those iguanas!), and a hero so rotten that he poisons damn near everyone he encounters. Even psychoanalysis gets thrown out the window here- none of the Catholic guilt of the first film. Instead, Herzog and Cage make McDonagh a guy who has so much fun being bad that it becomes infectious. It’s this sense of fun that makes BL: PoCNO something of a tough nut to crack- it’s rare to find a movie that invites us to enjoy a character this irredeemable, after all. But in the hands of Herzog and Cage (two great surrealist tastes that taste great together), it’s more than a guilty pleasure- it’s one of the year’s most irresistible entertainments.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Me and Orson Welles (2008, Richard Linklater)

It’s become something of an awards-season cliché that actors are bound to get plenty of hype for playing famous people. Frankly, I’ve gotten a little tired of it- yeah, I suppose it’s neat to see, for example, Jaime Foxx playing Ray Charles, but once the initial charge wears off, the idea of one celebrity playing another feels like a thespian parlor trick designed to grab the attention of Oscar voters. However, Christian McKay’s justifiably feted turn as the late Mr. Welles is an exception- a full-blooded creation that transcends the requisite mimicry. McKay’s work is spellbinding, and his Welles is the rare interpretation of a historical figure that would be just as compelling a character had he not existed in real life.

Naturally, McKay has an advantage over bigger name stars in that he doesn’t carry the same amount of star baggage, which allows him to slip more easily into the role itself. But the brilliance of McKay’s performance is that he understands, deep down, that the image of Orson Welles that looms so imposingly over film and theatrical history was as much of a creation of Welles as it was the great man’s honest-to-goodness personality. His brash charm and titanic ego weren’t merely the results of his genius- they also allowed his genius to function in a society that can be brutal to those who stray too far afield from the safe and mediocre. Yes, Welles could be a bastard to those around him, even his closest collaborators. But who could possibly argue with the results?

Great man aside, Me & Orson Welles isn’t a great film about the theatre in the way that Topsy-Turvy is. Much of this is due to how blinkered its story is- young hero Richard (Zac Efron) is cast less than a week before opening night, and is sort of carried along by circumstance, with the assistance of plucky ambitious Sonja (Claire Danes) and the blessing of Welles himself. Welles casts a long shadow over this story, to the point where even his absence is defined by the fact that he’s not there. But while this isn’t particularly satisfying from a dramatic standpoint, it feels strangely right in light of the character of Welles. Throughout his career, the Welles mystique dominated practically everyone with whom he worked, although Joseph Cotten carved out a solid career on his own and John Houseman became an eminent figure in his own right after parting ways with his early associate. And needless to say, Richard and Sonja are hardly Cotten and Houseman, and they quickly find themselves swallowed up in Welles’ grand design.

But what I found particularly refreshing about Me & Orson Welles was that, for all his flaws, Welles is never made the villain. But then, Linklater has never been about bad guys. His potentially villainous characters are generally buffoons who need to be taken down a few pegs, such as Greg Kinnear in Bad News Bears, O’Bannion in Dazed and Confused. And if there’s one thing Welles isn’t, it’s a buffoon. He’s an egomaniac, a blowhard, a taskmaster, and a philanderer. But as Linklater’s forebear Renoir once put it, “everyone has his reasons.” Linklater is clearly on Welles’ side not just because of his genius and charm, but also because his shortcomings are part and parcel with his brilliance.

Also, I would be delinquent in my duties as a critic (albeit an unpaid non-pro version of one) were I not to mention the film’s other great supporting performance, courtesy of Zoe Kazan. Admittedly, the scenes involving Welles are the centerpiece of the film, and the primary reason for seeing it. However, Kazan is so good as Gretta, an aspiring writer with whom Richard has an ongoing flirtation throughout the film, that her scenes have a charge all their own. Gretta is the only major character in the film who exists independently of Welles, and in the hands of a lesser actress these scenes would feel like half-hearted stabs at a romantic subplot. But Gretta is no obligatory love interest, and Kazan’s presence transforms her scenes with Efron into a refreshing reprieve from the intrigues of the Mercury Theatre. Kazan is what is so often referred to as an “unconventional beauty,” but she’s warmer and more genuine than any number of cookie-cutter starlets, with a smile that’s absolutely glowing. In her own luminous way, Kazan gives just as much of a star-making performance as McKay does.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Antichrist (2009, Lars Von Trier)

One of the challenges of reviewing a movie as visceral as Antichrist is that it’s difficult to see past the initial impact to the headier stuff on display. I saw Antichrist for the first time on Friday night, and since then I’ve been turning it over in my head, trying to puzzle out what Von Trier is doing with the film. However, my more immediate reaction to it was closer to stunned silence at the sheer force of the filmmaking and the often-shocking imagery. Make no mistake- Antichrist hits, and hits hard.

“If nothing else, Antichrist is the best horror movie in years,” I told a friend the other day, and I stand by this statement. With all his aspirations to artistry, Antichrist is first and foremost a horror movie, and a highly effective one (read: scary) at that. Much like Kubrick’s take on The Shining, most of the horror in Antichrist comes not from the explosion of violence and gore that comes in the last couple of reels, but rather from the creeping dread in the build-up to that point. And I do mean “creeping”- Von Trier’s use of extreme slow-motion in a number of sequences in Antichrist is nothing short of stunning, giving already some already gorgeous images a hypnotic effect while burrowing themselves into your consciousness. If I had trouble sleeping the night after I saw Antichrist, it’s these shots that were to blame.

Thankfully, Antichrist gave me plenty to think about during my sleepless hours. The best horror films tend to smuggle in their ideas as subtext, but Von Trier foregrounds his here in a way few horror filmmakers have. Antichrist is a thicket of themes and theses, tackling topics ranging from the historical repression of female sexuality to the sinister qualities of the natural world. In addition, Von Trier the limits of psychology and psychotherapy, examines the grief process, and the dissolution of a loving marriage in its wake. All this set against the portrayal of a world seemingly ruled over by a deity who appears to be anything but benevolent. Pretty heady stuff, I’d say.

Even more than most of Von Trier’s films, Antichrist has been a target for plenty of criticism from those who believe the filmmaker to be an inveterate misogynist. But while the film eventually becomes the story of a woman who goes nuts and subjects her husband to unspeakable violence, I don’t think it’s as simple as it appears to be at first glance. After all, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, fierce and fearless) is still reeling from the accidental death of her son, which Von Trier shows in agonizing detail in the film’s opening scene. And rather than trusting her treatment to the medical establishment, her therapist husband (Willem Dafoe) takes on the case himself. He then proceeds to fully embrace his therapist role, making himself emotionally unavailable at precisely the time she needs a loving husband most. What’s more, his therapy techniques are dubious at best, consisting of Freudian psychobabble and face-your-fears platitudes, the latter leading them to their cabin in the woods (called “Eden”), which she harbors fears for even under ideal circumstances.

So yeah, He probably isn’t helping her sanity much. But just as important is Von Trier’s acknowledgement of the longstanding male fear of female sexuality, which have manifested themselves in alarming ways throughout the centuries. Before her son’s death, She was working on a graduate theses that examined these historical practices, but in light of the circumstances surrounding the boy’s accident- She was making love to her husband when the boy escaped his crib, and indeed she is shown having an orgasm just as he plunges to his death- she would understandably connect her carnal urges to destruction. So considering her extreme guilt coupled with her overwhelming grief, and exacerbated by the forbidding surroundings of Eden, the violence She displays in the final reels of Antichrist isn’t much of a stretch for the story.

This is made explicit in what is perhaps the film’s most notorious shot, in which She takes a pair of scissors to herself and snips off her clitoris. In other hands- for example, Takashi Miike at his laziest- this might have come across as an empty shock tactic. However, in the context of Antichrist, it’s anything but. Having already supplied us with images of historical persecution of women- torture, executions, and the like- von Trier uses this shot to summon up an image of contemporary persecution, one practiced among cultures that are still suspicious of the female sex. That Antichrist shows a woman doing it to herself is especially horrifying, since She has become so afraid of the destructive power of her sex that she feels the need to remove it altogether.

Even setting aside the film’s rather politically-incorrect views on gender, Antichrist is a von Trier film through and through. He’s arrogance in dealing with his wife’s mental health is similar to that displayed by Tom Edison in Dogville and Grace in Manderlay. And the use of hypnosis as a key plot point hearkens back to von Trier’s earlier work, from the narration of both The Element of Crime and Europa to the harrowing final scene of Epidemic. And like many von Trier films, Antichrist is a portrait of a social institution- a marriage, in this case- that is sent into disarray by the addition (or subtraction) of a key ingredient. After little Nick falls from the balcony, nothing can be put back together again, until, yes, “chaos reigns.”

Alas, Antichrist isn’t one of von Trier’s best films. For one thing, von Trier doesn’t quite manage to make his multitude of ideas cohere in an interesting (what does She’s sexual psychosis have to do with her phobia of the outdoors, for example?). Likewise, while some of the film’s more infamous elements- such as the aforementioned self-mutilation- make sense thematically, others seem to be included primarily for shock value, lending credence to the naysayers who dismiss von Trier as a mere provocateur. All the same, Antichrist is an important film, one for critics and cinephiles to dismiss at their peril. Von Trier claims that he made the film while suffering through a bout of severe depression, and the frayed-nerve filmmaking on display here is clearly born out of a very dark and personal place. For all its flaws, Antichrist feels like a key work for its maker, and I suspect that its reputation will only grow once the shock has worn off.

Rating: 8 out of 10.

2009 Releases by Rating

10 ratings:
Up (Pete Docter)

9 ratings:
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
Lorna’s Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

8 ratings:
Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson)
Duplicity (Tony Gilroy)
Julia (Erick Zonca)
Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola)
Two Lovers (James Gray)
You, the Living (Roy Andersson)

7 ratings:
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord and Chris Miller)
Coraline (Henry Selick)
Crank 2: High Voltage (Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor)
Disney’s A Christmas Carol (Robert Zemeckis)
Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi)
Fados (Carlos Saura)
Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
Hunger (Steve McQueen)
In the Loop (Armando Iannucci)
The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh)
Observe and Report (Jody Hill)
Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki)
Revanche (Götz Spielmann)

6 ratings:
(500) Days of Summer (Mark Webb)
24 City (Jia Zhang-ke)
Adoration (Atom Egoyan)
The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda)
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp)
The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)
Land of the Lost (Brad Silberling)
The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)
Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli)
Public Enemies (Michael Mann)
Star Trek (JJ Abrams)
Sugar (Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden)
Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain)
Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim)
Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy)
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Chris Weitz)
Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze)
Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer)

5 ratings:
17 Again (Burr Steers)
Angels and Demons (Ron Howard)
Away We Go (Sam Mendes)
Brüno (Larry Charles)
Capitalism: A Love Story (Michael Moore)
An Education (Lone Scherfig)
Funny People (Judd Apatow)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (David Yates)
Hotel for Dogs (Thor Freudenthal)
Inkheart (Iain Softley)
Monsters vs. Aliens (Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon)
A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)
Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Tyson (James Toback)
Watchmen (Zack Snyder)
Whatever Works (Woody Allen)

4 ratings:
Big Man Japan (Hitoshi Matsumoto)
Extract (Mike Judge)
G-Force (Hoyt Yeatman)
Taking Woodstock (Ang Lee)

0 through 3 ratings:
None… yet.

Still need to see:
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier) [opening 4 Dec]
Anvil!: The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi) [now on DVD]
Avatar (James Cameron)
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)
Big Fan (Robert Siegel)
Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders)
Bright Star (Jane Campion)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar)
Bronson (Nicolas Winding Refn)
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (Frederick Wiseman) [coming in February]
An Education (Lone Scherfig) [now playing]
Home (Ursula Meier)
Humpday (Lynn Shelton) [now on DVD]
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (Terry Gilliam)
Import Export (Ulrich Seidl)
Invictus (Clint Eastwood)
Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke) [now on DVD]
The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson)
Mammoth (Lukas Moodysson)
Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater) [opening 18 Dec]
Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo)
Passing Strange: The Movie (Spike Lee)
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire (Lee Daniels) [now playing]
Red Cliff (John Woo)
Rembrandt’s J’Accuse! (Peter Greenaway) [now on DVD]
The Road (John Hillcoat)
A Single Man (Tom Ford)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Storm (Hans-Christian Schmid)
The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)
Thirst (Chan-wook Park) [now on DVD]
Up in the Air (Jason Reitman]
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
World’s Greatest Dad (Bobcat Goldthwait)

The Silence of Lorna (2008, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Sometimes, even the greatest of artists can become the victims of sky-high expectations. Take the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, whose latest film Lorna’s Silence, despite almost universally positive reviews, has been given a curiously muted reception. “Ho-hum,” many critics seem to be saying. “Another hardscrabble, socially-conscious bit of cinema vérité from the Dardennes.” That’s a shame, really- sure, it’s interesting to see when talented filmmakers tackle many different genres and styles (it’s why Soderbergh is fun to watch even when he’s spinning his wheels). But with the Dardennes working at such a consistently high level, it’s churlish to complain that they just keep on cranking out another great Dardenne brothers movie every three years or so instead. Truth be told, it sounds a little like bitching that Dickens never wrote a book about giant killer robots- pointless and borderline absurd.

The Dickens comparison isn’t an idle one. Like Dickens, the Dardennes specialize in stories about criminals and the lower classes (come to think, wouldn’t you love to see them tackle a non-Tradition-of-Quality Dickens adaptation?). And like Dickens, the ability to tell a good story has always been the backbone of their work, even more so than their aforementioned social consciousness and the dual undertones of Christian spirituality and Socialist politics that have always been central to their style. The Dardennes’ gifts for storytelling don’t manifest themselves in plot gimmickry, but a knack for immersing the audience in the world of their characters, and allowing their narratives to progress in interesting directions not through the grinding gears of the plot machinery but through the decisions and limitations of their characters. More than most filmmakers, the Dardenne brothers use their story premises as a starting point rather than the rail on which the film rides- perhaps this is why I find Rosetta to be the least of their post-La Promesse works, since it’s the one that feels most beholden to its premise. By contrast, Lorna’s Silence finds their gifts in full flower.

SPOILERS follow, naturally.

In their previous film The Child, the Dardennes told the story of a young man who viewed his newborn baby merely as a meal ticket, going so far as selling him to an adoption racket for quick cash. In Lorna’s Silence, nearly all of the characters operate on that same level of morality. In their eyes, no one has any worth aside from the many they can bring in. The title character, an Albanian immigrant played by Arta Dobroshi, is part of a marriage racket in which Eastern Europeans can receive Belgian citizenship. Lorna is married to a junkie named Claudy (Dardennes regular Jérémie Rénier), who has been paid to marry and will be paid to divorce. After the divorce, Lorna will in turn be paid to marry, then divorce, a Russian, before she’s free to marry her longtime boyfriend. Of course, as the racket’s ringleader Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione, another Dardennes favorite) states, if Claudy was to kill himself by overdosing, he wouldn’t have to be paid off, right?

You see how it goes. But let me just point out how deftly the Dardennes handle the theme of a person’s worth in the story. In lesser hands, this theme would be harped upon in dialogue throughout the film, until the good people learned a lesson in what really matters in life and the bad people were punished for their greed. In The Silence of Lorna, no one is let off the hook. Lorna is an opportunist whose primary concern is her own monetary gain, and her beloved boyfriend Sokol is happy to play along. All the while, everyone uses poor Claudy, who they simply refer to as “the junkie.” Of course, when Claudy decides to clean himself up- for real this time- that isn’t part of the plan.
It’s Claudy’s character arc and eventual fate that lead to my favorite moment in the film, as well as perhaps its best example of its makers’ storytelling gifts. After establishing the deep-seated need of this most pathetic of junkies (without a hypodermic in sight, might I add), the Dardennes and Rénier manage to find a way for him to pull himself out of his addiction. In turn, the sincerity of his efforts have managed to break through the defenses of his de facto wife, who at first decides to help him recover in exchange for a divorce, but who eventually begins to feel for her him. Unlike the other men in her life, Claudy doesn’t see Lorna as a meal ticket (he even trusts her to hold his money rather than clutching it greedily as the others do), and in turn she learns to respect enough to call him by name rather than simply as “the junkie.” If love doesn’t exactly blossom, a kind of need does, based on his desire to get better and her craving to be needed for more than just her money.

In Claudy’s final scene, he and Lorna visit a general store when he sees a used bike for sale. Figuring he needs something to occupy his days so he won’t fall off the wagon, he buys the bike and decides to ride around town. As he pedals away, Lorna briefly chases him as a smile brightens her face, sharing in one of her husband’s rare moments of triumph. Then there’s a cut, and we see Lorna alone, solemn, gathering some of Claudy’s clothes in a plastic bag. It isn’t until she arrives at the morgue that we discover that he is dead, and not until still later that we’re told that Fabio arranged for him to die in an overdose. At first glance, this decision by the Dardennes might sound callous, as if they thought Claudy wasn’t worthy of an onscreen death. But in practice, it’s both bold and incredibly merciful. Rather than having our last image of Claudy be as a screaming victim or a cold corpse on a table, they instead show him riding off into the sunset, for one at peace with himself.

Alas, Lorna doesn’t get this same kind of happy ending. The mercy she showed to Claudy doesn’t simply disappear with his death, and she begins to believe that she’s carrying Claudy’s child, despite all evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, none of her mercy is returned to her. After the deal with the Russian falls through (due to Lorna’s “hysterical” pregnancy) Fabio decides to have Lorna killed, a decision that’s not half as harrowing as the one where Fabio and Sokol divide up Lorna’s money while she watches, leaving her a measly 100 Euro. I guess that when all you’re worth to others can be counted in money, that money’s going to dry up sooner or later, and then what are you left with?

At least one critic I’ve read has labeled Lorna’s Silence misogynistic in part because of Lorna’s mistaken belief that she’s pregnant. However, I don’t share this opinion. For one thing, false pregnancy (also known as pseudocyesis) is hardly uncommon. But in the context of the film, I believe that this plot development makes perfect sense. Caring for Claudy satisfied Lorna’s latent need to be needed, and this need gives her something to live for other than just money. At the end of the film, Lorna has to flee Fabio and hide out in a cabin in the woods, with almost no money, no friends, and no prospects. If she’s found, she’ll certainly be arrested or killed. But she clings to her hope, misguided though it may be. As a result, the final scene is unbearably sad- not only because we know the truth, but also because she doesn’t. It’s a heartbreaking ending, and a perfect one. I wouldn’t expect any less from the Dardenne brothers, and while that might come back to bite me in the ass later, I certainly won’t whine about it now.

Rating: 9 out of 10.

Funny People (2009, Judd Apatow)

Judd Apatow has worked in comedy since he was a teenager, and his knowledge of the business comes through in the details of his latest film, Funny People. The movie is full of small touches that are completely convincing, and were no doubt inspired by the experiences of Apatow and his cast of comic ringers. For example, look at the scene in which Seth Rogen, playing a struggling stand-up who gets hired as a writer by superstar Adam Sandler, is pitching his new jokes to the boss- instead of laughing at the material, Sandler simply nods and says, “yeah, that’s funny,” thinking less about his personal thoughts on the joke than about how he can get a laugh out of it. Funny People is best in moments like these, and the movie is full of them- like the beatific smugness of a young comic who has landed the lead in a crap sitcom, or an up-and-comer who posts videos of himself frolicking with cute kittens to generate traffic for his blog.

Unfortunately, the movie as a whole doesn’t live up to these details. Funny People has enough storylines and ideas for three or four movies, but Apatow can’t find a way to bring them together into one. Apatow’s directing style has always been loose, but when you’re trying to cover as much ground as he does here, some discipline is required, but Apatow just can’t bring himself to impose a structure on his material. Instead, he lets his cast riff, sometimes to hilarious ends, but more often leading to scenes that flail around on the screen in search of a purpose or a payoff. This is especially damaging to the film’s less overtly funny scenes, in which the lack of discipline dulls the impact they might otherwise have had. The result is a 2 ½ hour movie that seems to drag on endlessly, especially in its second half.

Not helping matters is Sandler’s presence in one of the film’s two central roles (Rogen plays the other). Sandler equips himself fairly well in the first hour of so of the movie, in which he plays George Simmons, an emotionally stunted big-screen superstar who is singularly unequipped to deal with the news that he’s contracted a terminal disease. In interviews, Apatow has said that he wanted to make a movie about someone who learns all the wrong lessons from his brush with death, and in the first half of the movie Sandler holds up his end of the bargain, playing the sort of blinkered asshole whose first impulse when faced with his own mortality is to do stand-up comedy routines about how much his fans will miss him when he’s gone. His private life consists primarily of torturing his new assistant/joke writer/flunky Ira (Rogen), who is the closest thing to a friend that he has.

These early scenes work fairly well since Sandler can do the selfish prick thing fairly well, since his lack of expressiveness dovetails perfectly with a comedian’s need to distance himself from sincere emotion. However, he’s not up to the later scenes in the film, in which he pays a visit to Laura, “the one that got away,” played by Leslie Mann. In these scenes, George and Laura are revealed to still harbor feelings for each other, but I wasn’t buying it. For one thing, I didn’t believe that Laura would be willing to leave a comfortable life (albeit with a loutish and allegedly unfaithful husband played by Eric Bana) for a guy who by all accounts treated her pretty shabbily. But just as unfathomable is the idea that George would consider- even briefly- the possibility of settling down. Sandler is just too much of an emotional blank to hint at the reserves of emotion behind a guy who spends his time telling dick jokes and sleeping with fans who want him to do silly voices in mid-hump. It’s not as big of a stretch as, say, his performance as the world-class chef and all-around snuggly-bear who inflames Paz Vega’s passions in Spanglish, but still- the colors Sandler needs for his scenes with Laura just aren’t to be found in his box of acting Crayolas.

But even without Sandler, the Laura scenes feel fairly problematic. Compared to the scenes of George’s lonely life and the rivalry between Ira and his friends, life with Laura is depicted to be an almost over-the-top take on domestic bliss. This would be fine, except for the fact that Laura is played by Apatow’s real-life wife Leslie Mann and her children are played by their real-life daughters Maude and Iris, who get ample opportunity to tell jokes and act cute for the camera. I don’t begrudge Apatow his happy family life, but in depicting the transcendent awesomeness of his wife and kids it does feel like he’s showing off. I mean, the “peanut butter game?” Really? Really?

Taken as a whole, Funny People is just too messy and problematic to be considered successful. However, there are enough little bits of goodness in it that it can’t be ignored. Chief among these is Rogen, who once again reveals unexpected chops as an actor. Playing a character far removed from his slow-burn psycho in Observe and Report, Rogen makes Ira an essentially good guy who is trying to make it in Hollywood but doesn’t quite have the stomach for it. At one point, Ira has to screw over his friend to further his career, but while it’s the kind of fairly small thing that surely happens all the time in the business, it’s apparent that Ira is conflicted about it, and Rogen suggests this without going over the top. Apatow clearly has affection for Ira, but he also knows that the comedy scene is full of guys like him, who haunt open-mic nights and grasp for any chance they can find to make a name for themselves. We can’t all be George Simmons, Apatow seems to be saying, but that’s probably a good thing. Of course, that’s not much comfort to Ira.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

Up (2009, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson)

Much has been written about how Pixar has become the surest thing in Hollywood. But with this level of consistency- even Cars, which was a low point only by Pixar’s lofty standards- has come a certain level of shrugging from the critical establishment. “Ho-hum,” we joke. “Another awesome Pixar release. What a shocker.” This is, to say the least, unfair, not least because although the element of surprise has long given way to an almost ironclad reliability, the movies have actually become more diverse in the past few years. The early Pixar releases stuck to a dependable formula- two buddies save the day, usually backed by a ragtag group of wacky misfits- ever since The Incredibles, Pixar’s features have grown increasingly unique. Incredibles’ colorful animation covered for the fact that it was a superior superhero movie, Ratatouille was a French-inflected foodie drama about an unlikely genius, and WALL*E was a cross between a silent film about a single-minded robot and the outer-space epic Jacques Tati never got around to making. And Pixar’s growth continues unabated with their latest, Up, which to these eyes may be their best film yet.

If nothing else, Up would be notable as the first animated film to get me choked up in a decade, when I was similarly affected by The Iron Giant, directed by future Pixar favorite Brad Bird. Even more impressive is that this happened within the first ten minutes of the film, before the story proper has barely begun- we meet the young Carl Fredricksen as a child and see him befriend future wife Ellie through their mutual love for rip-roaring adventure. Then the film cuts to a montage of their lives together- the idealistic early years (marriage, buying the old home that once served as their clubhouse, saving for their dream vacation to South America) followed by the onset of harsher realities (digging into the vacation fund for mundane reasons, going to work, growing old), set to Michael Giacchino’s lovely musical theme. By the time Ellie passes away- leaving Carl sitting alone on the altar of the church where they were first married- Up had worked its magic on me. In retrospect, I liked that directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson weren’t sticking to the traditional rules of family movies, which normally dictate that only the bad guys are allowed to die. But in the moment, all I could do was sit back and let the movie work on me, and marveled that, for once, a montage actually worked the way it should.

When I say that Up is old fashioned, I mean that as a compliment. Make no mistake, Pixar’s wizards have spared no expense to provide cutting-edge animation, even going to far as to cave into the the market’s (and Disney’s) demands to release the film in 3D in select venues. But its most notable virtues are of the old-school variety. As with WALL*E last year, Up tells its story primarily through its visuals and sound effects rather than relying on copious spoken exposition. Of course, it should go without saying that Up is gorgeous to look at- the South American jungle is rendered in a vivid color palette, and even the interiors of the film are filled with wonders great (the cavernous dirigible Carl encounters on his journeys) and small. But the visual style of the film goes beyond simple aesthetic beauty. This is most evident in the film’s use of circles and squares, which can be seen first in the respective character designs of Carl and Ellie. Carl, with his blocky head and lantern jaw, contrasts with the more casual and easygoing Ellie, whose face is rounder and softer. And this pattern continues throughout the film- in Russell (Jordan Nagai), the pudgy Wilderness Survival Scout who becomes Carl’s inadvertent traveling buddy, in the contrast between the friendly dog Dug (the movie’s breakout supporting character) and his more ferocious canine cohorts, even in touches as small as the picture frames in Carl’s home.

Of course, none of this would matter if Up failed in the narrative sense. Thankfully, the film never lapses into the familiar formulas beloved of so many big-budget animated films. As Ebert likes to say, it doesn’t have a plot, but a story- more specifically, a fantastical adventure yarn. One of the advantages of the animation medium is that the filmmakers can apply the long-established laws of “cartoon physics,” in which the rules don’t have to be equivalent to real life just as long as they remain consistent in the film’s world. Up creates a delightful world in which houses can take flight if one uses enough helium balloons, and a young boy can be jostled and whipped around with no lasting damage done (following a particularly perilous adventure, Russell giddily proclaims, “that was cool!”). Naturally, certain rules still apply, but they’re for comic effect as much as anything else, as when Carl faces off against his childhood hero, the adventurer-gone-to-seed Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), and the fight is interrupted by both characters’ back problems. There’s plenty of action in Up, but lots of comedy too, both in between the action scenes and during them as well. The film’s priceless comedy bits are a reminder that Docter also helmed Pixar’s best comedy to date, 2001’s Monsters, Inc. But the humor is never simply silly for silly's sake, but is grounded in the film's world. For example, Dug and friends aren't furry people, but dogs who have been given the gift of human speech, and they're funny not because they talk but because of what they say.

Seeing the movie a second time recently, I realized that many of Up’s effects are achieved through means which usually come off as cheap and manipulative- not only montages and the death of an elderly character, but also such tropes as daddy issues and a child put in danger. The difference here is that they actually work. Perhaps it’s because Docter and Peterson don’t linger on them too long, or maybe it’s because they’re able to tweak them in interesting ways. Either way, the movie works like a charm. Up isn’t a pandering kids’ movie but an honest-to-goodness “family movie” in the classic sense, the kind of full-blooded entertainment that appeals to parents and children alike, similar to such sentimental favorites as Back to the Future. But Up is its own animal, and like ever-loyal Dug, it’s an animal that one looks forward to keeping around for years to come.

Rating: 10 out of 10.

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Nearly every discussion of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom begins with its content. On the one hand, this is only natural. After all, when a movie is as notorious as Salo is, you don’t bury the lead. Yet on the other hand, doing so creates something of a mistaken impression among those who read reviews of the film. When the first thing someone hears about a movie is how “extreme” and “controversial” it is, too often one jumps to the conclusion that it’s some sort of geek show, something to be avoided by all but the most thrill-seeking of moviegoers. I know that the impression of Salo that I’d harbored for years was that it was some kind of high-toned exploitation classic. But now that I’ve seen the film, I realize how far off base my impression was. Make no mistake- Salo’s characters engage in some of the most terrible acts of brutality and degradation I’ve ever seen onscreen. But exploitation this isn’t.

One of the most surprising thing about Salo is how little Pasolini depends on visceral shock- no mean feat for a film that subjects its characters to rape, torture, coprophagy, and many other sorts of humiliation. But then, “characters” doesn’t seem to be the right word for Salo’s young victims. For the most part, Pasolini has no desire to make us care about, let alone identify with, the teenagers who are kidnapped and enslaved by the quartet of bluebloods known as the President, the Duke, the Bishop, and the Magistrate. Occasionally, some humanity will shine through- for example Eve, the girl whose mother was murdered- but these tiny glimpses of personality merely tease the audience to feel for the people onscreen before being stomped out of them.

The preceding paragraph might sound like I’m criticizing the film, but I’m not. Pasolini’s lack of character investment doesn’t make Salo a bad film, but rather a fascinating one. By not rubbing our faces in the brutality onscreen, Pasolini instead asks us to ponder the ideas behind the story. Many of these ideas deal with Pasolini’s depiction of social class. Pasolini was an avowed Marxist who throughout his career demonstrated contempt for Italy’s bourgeoisie, and Salo isn’t remotely subtle in the way it shows its upper-crust characters exploiting their social to their own ends. Pasolini has no love for this outmoded system which places a few above all others and more or less grants the privileged carte blanche to trample the others as they please. In a strange way, Salo feels like a Marxist corrective to films that depict the noble aristocracy with warmth and nostalgia.

But Salo is actually more complicated than that. On one level, Pasolini is depicting the perversity of the aristocracy, as when The Duke says, “the only true anarchy is that of power.” Yet the film also invites us to consider the pathology behind the powerful. Consider two central scenes of the film’s infamous “Circle of Shit” set piece. The first comes when The Duke berates the aforementioned Eve for crying for her murdered mother then forces her to eat his feces. It’s clear in this scene that The Duke relishes the power he has over his victim, especially when he says, “that whining’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard.”

But what to make of a later scene in which the entire group- both captors and captives- sits down in the dining room to eat the shit they’ve collected especially for the occasion, with the captors clearly enjoying the meal? And how about the ecstasy on the Duke’s face when another girl pisses on his face, or the storytelling sessions in which aging prostitutes regale the group with tales of their own youthful humiliations? From the time The Bishop states his philosophy that “all’s good if it’s excessive,” there’s more going on in with these characters than a straightforward power trip. It’s as if by sexually abusing the teenagers, the bourgeois are saying not “you’ll take your punishment and enjoy it,” but rather, “you’ll take your punishment and enjoy it as we do.”

In researching this review, I discovered that Salo is a town in Italy that served as a puppet republic for the Nazis near the end of World War II. Because of this, it’s not hard to read Salo as a condemnation of Italy’s collaboration with the Hitler, even if the events we see on the film were inspired not by real life but a novel by the Marquis de Sade. In the first few minutes of the film, we see young men being taken away by the aristocrats not to be prisoners but guards, and from that point they much of their retainers’ more menial tasks. One of the men even calmly explains, “we’re only following orders,” just before he leads four of the captors’ daughters to be married to their fathers. In the film’s final scene, while one of the captors watches his colleagues torture the teenagers through opera glasses, we see two of the soldiers sitting off to the side, bored. They strike up a conversation about on of the soldiers’ girlfriends before getting up and lazily dancing to a tune on the radio.

It’s not the subtlest depiction of the way people become desensitized to brutality that isn’t happening to them, but then, Salo isn’t a subtle film, nor does it mean to be. Nonetheless, it’s typical of Pasolini’s strategy throughout the film- to provoke the audience in a way that incites them to think once they get past the so-called “gag reflex.” Is it any wonder the film is a favorite of both Michael Haneke and Catherine Breillat? Far from the gross-out cult object its reputation would suggest, Salo a movie that demands to be taken seriously, full of ideas so potent that it remains as controversial and shocking now as it was three decades ago.

Incidentally, I wasn’t able to find a good place to mention this in the review, but this is my first exposure to Pasolini. As always, I’d be happy to hear any recommendations of which of his other films are especially worth seeing.

Also, for another take on the film, check out my bud Andrew Bemis’ review.

Star Trek (2009, JJ Abrams)

Superficially speaking, Star Trek seems to have everything one could ask for from a summer blockbuster: likable stars, snazzy effects, and lots of explosions, all given a high-gloss sheen. And in this respect, the movie delivers what it promises- the response so far has been almost totally positive (its current Metacritic score is 84), and it should prove to be a big hit. Yet despite all this, Star Trek left me strangely cold. As a fan of the original series and the majority of the movies it spawned, I’m no doubt biased toward the first incarnation of Trek, and judging by the enthusiasm that many non-fans have for the film, my response is hardly typical. But I suppose that this is part of my problem with the movie- that Paramount and director JJ Abrams have made such an effort to appeal to non-Trek fans that they’ve lost some of what made the original series really feel like Star Trek to me.

One thing that really stood out for me (and not in a good way) was Abrams’ restless camera, which contrasts pretty decisively from the stationary setups of old-school Trek. Abrams hails from the world of television, and indeed this style of camerawork has become a TV staple ever since shows like Homicide and ER began using it extensively in the nineties. But while Abrams uses this device as a means to liven up the action, particularly in the scenes on the Enterprise bridge, it was mostly a distraction for me. What’s more, by trying to heighten the tension of every scene on the ship, the movie’s actual action and suspense scenes make less of an impact, since almost everything is pitched at the same momentum. Maybe it’s just that old-fashioned stately squareness is one of the things I find most endearing about old-school Trek- it was never about high-octane action or “cool,” and while the market may demand a Star Trek that’s half Joe Camel and a third Fonzarelli, I don’t have to like it.

That said, I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I would, and it’s certainly not the “Star Trek Babies”-esque spinoff I’d originally feared. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Abrams is less interested in a traditional prequel than a full-scale reboot- less Phantom Menace, more Batman Begins. And while some scenes seemed wrong to me (particularly the stuff between Spock and Uhura), I didn’t have much trouble accepted most of what happened in the movie. Similarly, the new cast isn’t Shatner and company, but nor do they try to be, and most of them find their own takes on the characters while remaining true to their original natures. Chris Pine’s Kirk has his own kind of devil-may-care approach, Zachary Quinto’s Spock is more hard-nosed than Nimoy’s (of course, he’s younger too), and Karl Urban’s Dr. McCoy is a blast- who knew this guy had it in him? If only Abrams can settle down a little prior to the inevitable sequel (but what will it be called?), this new Trek franchise could very well have its own Wrath of Khan-caliber installment. Of course, that’s a pretty big “if,” and judging by the applause after my screening last weekend, newly-converted fans will be craving more of the same. Oh well… Rating: 5 out of 10.