Kiss Me Deadly

Valued friend, great writer, and all-around terrific guy Les Phillips has given me permission to run his review of Kiss Me Deadly.  After seeing the film based on his recommendation, I realized that he summed up my feelings perfectly.

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KISS ME DEADLY (1955, directed by Robert Aldrich).   The first scene of KISS ME DEADLY is unforgettable:  the eloquent, urgent face of a desperate woman – it’s Cloris Leachman  She’s running toward us along a dark highway, clearly running for her life, fighting to tell her secret and fighting to save herself – from what threat or horror, we don’t know. 

 

That’s the prelude to one of the best crime movies ever made.   What sets it apart?  There are many noir or noirish films with convoluted plots, saucy molls, and decrepit private-eye offices.  Many are suspenseful, energetically directed, and framed in good black and  white photography.  KISS ME DEADLY has all that, plus the sheer brutality that only a Mickey Spillane novel can inspire.  Aldrich captures Spillane's direct, casual, dark violence beautifully.  He also gave KISS ME DEADLY a new plot – we got gangsters here, certainly, but we’ve also got the Cold War; something radioactive this way comes, and lurks at the center of the mystery.

 

Aldrich makes a corpse rolling down a loopy stairwell into poetry in motion.  And the actresses!  A revelation in each small part, no common performance or gesture where something weird will do.  Ralph Meeker is Mike Hammer, and he’s properly sadistic but also strangely bland.  This is probably a good thing.  The action, the plot, the dames are the point of KISS ME DEADLY.  A friend says that Aldrich should have cast Richard Widmark; that would have been overkill, no pun intended.  What a good film.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I’m not a Roald Dahl guy.  James and the Giant Peach creeped me out.  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang scared the hell out of me.  Fantastic Mr. Fox, while technically adept, had me looking at my watch.

The film, a masterpiece of stop-motion photography, follows the stupendously selfish Mr. Fox as he puts his family and community through his mid-fox-life crisis.  But it never gave me a reason to identify with the eponymous fox, however fantastic he purports to be.  It never gave me anything I could use to hook into the story and lose myself there.

Technical wizardry’s great and all, but story is everything.  Roald Dahl just isn’t my kind of storyteller.  There was nothing for me in the world of the Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The Worst Movies of 2010

Hollywood gave us a lot of great movies this year: so many, that my usual Top Ten will overflow into some Honorable Mentions! 

There's no good without the bad, however.  Thus, I regret to bring you the Worst of 2010.  May God have mercy on our souls.

THE 4TH WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR:  Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.  In Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone resurrects the spirit of Wall Street, punches it in the nose, and hits on its girlfriend.  Not only does he make a lousy movie about Hero Gekko, he tarnishes the memory of his earlier masterpiece.  After this, I’m done with Oliver Stone.

THE 3RD WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR:  MacGruber.  MacGruber is painfully, embarrassingly unfunny.  I felt bad for everyone involved in this picture, including the kid who sold me popcorn.  This film will put a bullet in the head of the career of what’s his name as surely as The Ladies’ Man killed Tim Meadows.

THE 2ND WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR:  The Expendables.  Look, I enjoyed Rambo and flat-out loved Rocky Balboa, but the only thing that could have made this movie sadder would’ve been watch to these guys actually sit around and shoot their steroids.  I don’t ask for much from my action films, but I do demand two simple things:  people to root for and information to comprehend whom they’re killing and why.

THE WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR:  Dinner for Schmucks.  The only reason I didn’t walk out of this mean, hateful, hypocritical, and unfunny comedy is because I saw it in the middle of the desert while on duty with the Navy and hey, what else was I gonna do?  It was free, but I don’t care: I still want my money back.

Coming up:  Honorable Mentions for the Best Movies of 2010.

Agora

It’s so precious and fragile, civilization.  Your city can reside at its heights, and you at the heights of your city.  You can read the words of the ancients and build upon their knowledge and be a part of the growth of your species.  Then it can all come down, and you with it.  It’s what can happen when no one stands up to the crazy people.

In Agora, Hypatia teaches in the Great Library of Alexandria, the repository of Western Civilization’s knowledge and the center of its intellectual life.  She teaches in an environment much like that of a St. John’s College seminar, leading her students in discussion of the great thinkers who have come before them and exploring the flaws in their reasoning.  Alexandria’s a city in ferment, with the rising Christian sect challenging the established order of the Pagans and Jews, but that competition seems distant and unreal.  Euclid and Aristotle and the problems with Ptolemaic astronomy seem much more present.  Until, that is, the crazy people start killing each other.  That’s when the burning starts.

To give us this story, the story of the burning of the library and the dawn of the Dark Ages, Agora begins by recreating ancient Alexandria.  Blending inspired set and costume design with detailed CGI matte work, the film makes its Alexandria feel like a thriving, dynamic, restive city.  I’ve read about Alexandria, sure, and I’ve seen photos of ruins in National Geographic.  Heck, I flew over the site of the old city the other day.  But now, after seeing this film, I can visualize what it may have looked and sounded like to the people who actually lived there.  That’s a feat in itself.

A world is not enough, however.  Every story needs its beating heart, and this one has Hypatia, daughter of the Library’s curator, tutor in its seminars, and perhaps the greatest mathematician and natural philosopher of her age.  Rachel Weisz, as Hypatia, has given me cause to reconsider her as an actress.  She’s always been a great beauty and perfectly fine performer, but here she captures the joy of thought.  We see her reasoning through the great scientific questions her day (some of which wouldn’t be answered for a millennium – oh, how much we lost when the crazy people took charge), and Weisz walks us through her frustrations, her ideas, her breakthroughs – all without histrionics, but with subtle changes in her face and body that suggest the genius behind the beauty.

The film combines these elements to break our hearts.  We know what’s coming, we know nothing can stop it, and we weep for the people of Alexandria and a civilization heading toward eclipse.  Crazy people thrive on all sides, in all factions, and the sane people don’t realize the threat until it’s too late.

If you care about ideas and the history of ideas, you need to Agora.  This film will break your heart.  If not, well, you’re crazy.

True Grit (2010)

Let me tell you when Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit captured my imagination.

Early on, young heroine Mattie Ross has outfoxed a town businessman, talking him out of several hundred dollars.  She’s in conversation with him again and she offers a new proposal.  He stops and looks at her with fear in his eyes.  With a slight tremble, he asks, “Are we trading again?”

The actor who plays the trader, Dakin Matthews, isn’t a top-billed guy.  He’s just another character actor in a film that’s loaded with them.  But he and creators Joel and Ethan Coen put so much life into his moments that they pop off the screen.  They told me that nothing in this film is being taken for granted, and that every moment will have something to offer.

Now, let me tell you when True Grit earned my goodwill.  In the 1975 film Rooster Cogburn, John Wayne’s Rooster tells Katherine Hepburn that he rode with Quantrill’s Raiders.  The Raiders, a group of Rebel guerrillas, conducted the massacre in Lawrence, Kansas.  “Over four hours, they pillaged and set fire to the town and murdered most of its male population. Quantrill's men burned to the ground one in four buildings in Lawrence, including all but two businesses. They looted most of the banks and stores, as well. Finally, they killed between 185 and 200 men and boys.”  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Massacre)  That information killed that particular film for me, because I couldn’t root for one of Quantrill’s Raiders.  In True Grit, Jeff Bridges’s Rooster tells Matt Damon that he rode with Quantrill, and Damon’s character immediately lays into him about the massacre, disparaging Quantrill as a murderer.  Cogburn’s response:  “That’s a damn lie!”  I loved this touch because it let Rooster off the hook – he must not have been on the Lawrence raid, which gave him the ability to idolize a charismatic leader and stay true to his sense of personal justice.  At last, I could root for this character!

True Grit is full of moments like these, inclusions like these.  Joel and Ethan Coen crafted this film with great care, getting each detail right and absolutely nailing the beats of a tight, three-act, action/comedy/western.  The film is beautifully photographed, perfectly paced, and finely performed.  I loved everything about it.

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky does not make bad films.  He makes brilliant, cinematic pictures, the kind that one should enjoy on the big screen with the big sound.  Black Swan is one of these, an intense investigation of art and insanity that takes big chances and comes through.

Natalie Portman plays Nina, a dedicated ballerina of the New York stage who wins her first lead role: the Swan Queen in ‘Swan Lake.’  Nina’s a tightly controlled individual, emotionally stunted and constrained by a domineering mother and her own drive for perfection.  When she lands the Swan Queen, she doesn’t know if she can do it.  But she tries and tries and tries, drilling and drilling and forgoing sleep and dropping weight from her already elfin body until the combination of stress, malnutrition, and exhaustion renders her psychotic.

And here’s the thing that bothered me about the film, at least in the first two acts: why would anyone put themselves through that kind of torture for the amusement of rich people?  For that’s what the ballet, as presented here, clearly is: an amusement for rich people, the kind who enjoy putting on tuxedoes, drinking champagne at fund raisers, and having a fine night out.  I mean, I get it: ballet is Nina’s world, and achieving perfection in that world is her goal.  But so what?  How is that a noble or worthwhile goal, when perfection merely equates entertaining a few hundred people for a couple of hours?

Ah, but in that third act, when Nina dances the role of the Swan Queen, it clicked.  Her dance is so transformative, so magnificent, that I saw that she wasn’t dancing for the amusement of the rich – she was dancing for art itself, for that quest to attain the summit of human achievement, for the glorious exultation of not technical perfection, but artistic perfection.  What I had seen as a waste of time transformed into humanity personified.

Was it worth it?  Was the psychosis, was the pain, was losing everything for an ideal worth the loss?  I think that Nina would say yes.  As for me, all I know is that I walked out of the theater challenged, elevated, and transformed.  That’s what happens when I’m exposed to real art.

Predators

Six years ago, Nimród Antal broke into the international film world with Kontroll, a moral allegory about Budapest subway cops.  With Predators, Antal proves that he’s no niche director.  Not only can he deliver food for thought with a film like Kontroll, he can serve up the popcorn with an action blockbuster that’s the best Predator movie since the original Predator, made back in 1987.

In Predators, a group of military and criminal toughs (including obvious choices like Danny Trejo and surprising ones like Alice Braga, Adrien Brody, and Topher Grace) awaken to find themselves trapped in an alien world.  They’re in a Predator game preserve, and we in the audience strap ourselves in for another take on The Most Dangerous Prey.  This one delivers its share of gunfights, ‘splosions, courage, and cowardice, and it does so with élan.

First, it gets all the action movie stuff right.  The set pieces pop and the choreography makes sense.  We understand who (or what) is chasing whom (or what) where, and why.  You may not think this matters, but try sitting through The Expendables and trying to stay engaged while you have no idea what’s actually going on during the climactic battle.

Second, real actors play the action heroes.  When a director tells Adrien Brody to look mean, or angry, or hurt, or haunted, or whatever, he can actually do it.  The same goes for, oh, Lawrence Fishburne and the aforementioned Braga and Grace.

Third, it’s just plain fun.  It begins with a guy falling through the air, his pulse racing and the wind howling in his ears as he curses at his parachute to open before he runs out of sky, and it doesn’t slow down.  Sure, it takes moments to let us enjoy things like really enormous alien derelicts and  the spectacle of a yakuza dueling a predator in a field of windblown grass.  But it does so with its eye on the clock, its foot on the gas pedal, and a crazy gleam in its eye.

By the time the credits rolled, I had a gleam in mine.  Predators is the best action film I’ve seen in some time.  I can’t wait to see which genre Antal takes on next.

Gremlins

I’d never seen Gremlins before the other night, snuggled up on the couch with my 10-yr-old and expecting a fun little Christmas movie about cute furry creatures who turned into monsters that wreak family-friendly havoc.  I’m pleased to say that I mostly got what I wanted, but those monsters were deadlier than expected.  Gremlins turned out to be an effective horror-comedy.

Here’s the plot:  It’s Christmas Eve.  This guy wants to go out with Phoebe Cates, which is understandable (Fun fact: the commentary’s filled with stuff like, “Hey Phoebe, remember that one time you smiled at me in the lunch line?” “Umm, no.”).  His dad brings home a cute, fuzzy little Christmas pet, which we know will later turn into an evildoing gremlin from which Cates must eventually be rescued.  We’re talking about serious dramatic tension here, as we know springtime is only four or five months away and our hero’s gotta come through if he wants a red bikini in his future.  So the stakes are high.

Once the fuzzy pet multiplies and its offspring turn into monsters, Gremlins hits a delightful stride.  The eponymous gremlins are funny and wicked and evil and deadly but, most importantly, they’re practical.  Not only are they practical, but they’re masterpieces of puppetry and stop-motion photography, proving yet again that there’s no reality like objects that are actually, objectively real.

Not only does Gremlins bring nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat suspense in the form of the hero’s romantic aspirations, it provides lots of wicked gags and imaginative uses of those devilish little puppets.  This picture has it all – silly jokes, jump scares, and unbounded creativity.  It’s a nearly perfect Christmas movie.

Auto Focus

Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus ranks among the saddest biopics I’ve ever seen. 

Robert Crane is a nice guy.  He’s funny, likeable, and doing well for himself in the world of LA radio.  When he gets the call to star in “Hogan’s Heroes,” a sitcom that, essentially, plays Stalag 17 for laughs, he’s pretty well set for life. 

But Bob Crane, family man and churchgoing father of three, is not equipped to handle the temptations of fame.  He doesn’t succumb to alcohol or drugs, however – it’s sex that gets him.  All of a sudden, he’s attracting hangers on.  All of a sudden, he’s enjoying nearly limitless access to willing women.  And when one hanger on becomes his supplier of women, his enabler and even coach, well, it’s only a matter of time.

The underappreciated Greg Kinnear plays Bob Crane, and he’s perfectly cast.  Kinnear, an inherently likeable guy, keeps us on his team after Crane has alienated his family, his friends, his agent, and even himself.  The justly appreciated Willem Dafoe plays John Carpenter, Crane’s confidant, enabler, groupie, and (perhaps) would-be lover.  Dafoe does some heavy lifting here, giving us a man whose job depends on his access to celebrities and whose combination of pushiness and neediness mask a deep, deep hunger for love.

As you may know, someone murdered Bob Crane in his sleep in 1978.  When the Scottsdale, AZ police entered Crane’s hotel room, they found it filled with audiovisual and photographic equipment, homemade porn tapes, and the trappings of a man who’d given himself over entirely to his addiction.  That’s why Auto Focus feels so sad: Crane didn’t survive his journey to rock bottom.  He never did pull himself together.  He died alienated from everyone who loved him.  What a way to go.

The Killer Inside Me

The Killer Inside Me is a lurid, pulpy adaptation of a lurid, pulpy crime novel.  Thus, it’ll do all the things pulpy crime novels do: it’ll horrify, it’ll titillate, it’ll probably skeeve you out.  If that’s you’re thing, have at it.

Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff in a West Texas town.  He has a boyish look and a high-pitched voice and he says “sir” and “ma’am.”  He seems like a nice fella.  Sure, he falls for a local prostitute and finds himself enmeshed in a blackmail scheme, but that isn’t anything that couldn’t happen to Joseph Cotton or Fred MacMurray.  It’s what happens next that’ll surprise you.

I hesitate to go too deeply into just what does happens\ next, because I think the surprise is half the film.  Instead, I’ll tell you what I think you need to know in making your rental decision:  this is a film of sex, violence, good, and evil.  It’s trying for pulp, and it succeeds: it’s everything pulp fiction is supposed to be.  If that’s you’re thing, The Killer Inside Me will work for you.  If not, well, move along.  Nothing to see here.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

There’s no wonder left in the Harry Potter universe.  We’ve grown used to apparations and apparitions.  We’ve run out of people to meet.  Things are falling apart.  Thus Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I, all out of delight, consoles itself with running and fighting and late-adolescent sexual tension.

That isn’t, ipso facto, a bad thing.  The film manages its running and fighting and late-adolescent sexual tension perfectly well.  It’s just that it isn’t much fun.

Nevertheless, the film works, but mostly because we’ve invested in these characters over the years.  Since the picture doesn’t bother to establish its people independently, I can’t imagine a newcomer to the Harry Potter universe getting much out of it. 

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Up yours, Oliver Stone.  No really.  You turn Bud Fox, the hero of Wall Street, into an incorrigible jerk and a profound fraud, and then you turn Gordon Freaking Gekko into a hero?

This may seem a minor point.  After all, Fox only turns up in passing, running across Gekko at a charity dinner and making brief conversation.  But Stone reveals Fox to have been evil all along, waiting for the heat to cool on the events from the first film to flip the beloved airline that served as Wall Street’s MacGuffin so he could sell out his father and live like a self-centered jackass for the rest of his existence.

This, of course, guts Wall Street.  Since Fox’s moral journey had been fraudulent, the audience surrogate got no real lessons.  The means there’s no story at all – the hero didn’t change

Yeah, I know they’re your characters you can do whatever you want with them.  Get bent anyway.  You killed Wall Street when you made Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.  I’m done with both of them.

The Expendables

The Expendables should be a good time at the movies.  You know the hook: bring together many of the biggest action stars of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and today and set ‘em up on a “men on a mission” picture.  But it’s a joyless picture, with no sense of fun and an editing style that robs the audience of pleasure.

Here’s an example: Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren fight.  Now, you could market a whole film entitled simply Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren Fight.  These guys are respected martial artists and legitimate stuntmen: all you need to do is put them in a gym with a choreographer for a few days, let them put something together, and roll the film.  We, the audience, want to see these men’s expertise in action.  But director Sylvester Stallone and editors Ken Blackwell and Paul Harb (This picture’s Stallone’s baby though, so I’m assuming he wielded significant control over the editing process) don’t trust us to pay attention to a long take, or even a series of mid-length takes.  They quick-cut from shot to shot so quickly that it looks like they’re trying to hide the incompetence of pretty actors, not showcase two of the most respected stunt fighters in the business.  In the end, I had only a fragmented impression of two guys fighting.  The film gave me no artistry to enjoy.

Here’s another example: at the end, there’s huge climax with lots of gunfire and ‘splosions.  I’m the target audience for this kind of thing, but the editing created such discontinuities that I had no idea of geography of the battle.  I knew the good guys were killing the bad guys, but I had no sense of how each bullet fired or objective taken got the good guys closer to winning.  All I knew was that stuff was blowing up real good, but even that gets boring if I don’t know why it’s getting blown up.

Look, I didn’t go into The Expendables expecting Hamlet.  But I did have a minimum expectation of being able to enjoy an hour and a half of good stunt fighting and practical stunt work, not to mention being able to keep track of who was shooting whom and why.  The Expendables failed to deliver on these reasonable expectations.  This film is a failure.

The Other Guys

The Other Guys is laugh out loud funny from beginning to end.  I loved it.

Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Jackson play The Guys – the hero cops who crash the cars, collar the perps, and get the girls.  Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg play The Other Guys – the guys who fetch coffee and get stuck with the paperwork.  Wahlberg was a rising star on the NYPD until he made a critical mistake and got shuffled to a lousy division and a lousy partner in Ferrell, and Ferrell’s just a schmuck who’d rather work boring building permit violations in front of his computer than get out there and blow stuff up.  Wahlberg hates Ferrell and the complacent mediocrity he represents.  Ferrell, well, he’s a happy schmuck.

So it’s an odd couple comedy, and Wahlberg and Ferrell make it work.  They pair shares perfect comic timing, and the writing pops (With extra credit for a Yojimbo joke!  I mean, really, who writes Yojimbo jokes into their mass-market comedies?).  The setups and payoffs work just right, and even the jokes we see coming twist and turn in different ways.  Add a villain who’s just villainous enough for the story yet still goofy enough for a comedy; a big third act action finale with first rate practical stunts and seamless CGI integration; and great supporting work from the likes of Michael Keaton, Eva Mendez, and Ron Riggle; and you have the recipe for a first-rate action comedy.

What a treat.

The American

George Clooney is Alain Delon in The American.

Yes, his character’s name is Mr. Butterfly and his character is, well, American.  But this doesn’t feel like an American film.  It feels like a French or Italian film, a Le Samourai or Rififi.  And Clooney feels like an older Delon in it.  He has the looks, talent, and charisma of a bona fide movie star, and he’s finally getting old enough to be interesting.

The film is set in rural Italy, a small town called Castelvecchio where Clooney, a killer and a very bad man, hides after a job gone wrong.  It’s adapted from a book entitled A Very Private Gentleman; and Clooney is private, indeed.  He walks alone.  He dines alone.  He even screws alone, flatly declaring to his prostitute of choice that he’s there for his pleasure, not hers.  But the local priest takes an interest in him.  The prostitute takes an interest in him.  Soon, he’s not so private any more.  This can’t end well.

But enough of the plot teaser.  What you really need to know is that The American is a pleasure and a delight.  It is so wonderful to see a film that’s pitched toward adults for a change.  Yes, The American underlines things for an American audience that, perhaps, an Italian neorealist crime drama or a French noir might leave implied.  Nevertheless, here’s a film about grownups who react in grownup ways to grownup situations.  When the priest looks into Mr. Butterfly’s eyes and tells him that’s he’s empty, that he has nothing, we look into Clooney’s eyes and we see it.  When the spark of a soul begins to glow in those eyes, we see that too and the actor doesn’t need to sing in the rain to show it to us.

Yes, The American is for Americans.  There are chases and gunfights and nudity that I’d call superfluous if the actress under discussion wasn’t so statuesque that she could’ve made And God Created Woman.  But it isn’t all chases and gunfights and nudity.  Much of it concerns itself with the slow reawakening of a damned soul.  It’s fabulous, classic stuff.  Alain Delon would have been proud to star in it.

Mother

I’ll level with you: I watched Mother curled up on the couch, wracked with stomach cramps while my body either expelled or adapted to some new microbe I ingested at an Arabian Shawarma shack.  Perhaps I’m not the most reliable person to consult regarding this film.

Yet I enjoyed it, as best I could.  Mother tells the tale of the mother of a mentally retarded young man who has been accused of murdering a schoolgirl.  This sounds like the setup for a standard detective story, but here’s the twist: Mother is a little, well, off.  She seems awfully devoted to her son and sufficiently unhinged that I wouldn’t want to stand in her way. 

The film delights in hooking us into the mystery while creeping us out with its protagonist.  I attribute its success to Hye-ja Kim, who plays Mother.  She’s canny yet naïve, loving and ruthless (I first wrote loving but ruthless, but those traits often go together.).  She’s fascinating, and Kim does an amazing job of bringing her to life. 

I don’t wish gastrointestinal difficulties on anyone.  But if, like me, you have a weakness for roadside grills, you can do worse than Mother to get you through it.  Enjoy, I guess.

Dinner for Schmucks

I hated Dinner for Schmucks.  Hated it, hated it, hated it.  The movie’s a fraud.

Here’s the deal.  Paul Rudd is career-oriented guy on the way up.  This means, of course, that by the end he’ll throw it all away and only then be ready for true love because he’s in a romantic comedy.  Steve Carrel is an idiot.  I’m talking about a deeply, deeply stupid man.  For Rudd to ascend to the next rung on the socioeconomic ladder, he must find an idiot and bring him to the titular dinner, where rich people mock idiots for their amusement.  Because that’s the kind of thing rich people do because they’re in a romantic comedy.

Ok so far.  We know where this will go: Carrel will reveal himself to be a font of wisdom and courage, Rudd will find his moral compass and get the girl, and we’ll all feel better about ourselves because the film will confirm our suspicion that we aren’t rich because we aren’t morally bankrupt. 

But here’s the underlying structural problem of the film:  it wants us to sit in judgment on those who laugh at the stupid, but it devotes almost all of its running time to laughing at the stupid.  It’s like Dinner for Schmucks is saying, “They can’t laugh at dumb people, because it’s morally wrong.  We, however, can laugh all we want because, well, because we paid our money, godammit, and we want comedy.”

I didn’t laugh.  I just felt alternately sorry for and angry with everyone involved in this film.  How stupid do you have to be read this script and not see its profound hypocrisy?

Winter's Bone

WINTER’S BONE is one of the scariest, most horrifying films I’ve seen all year.  And it isn’t even a horror movie.

Ree Dolly lives in a dirt road cabin in rural Missouri.  Just seventeen, she cares for her two younger siblings and her catatonic mother.  Her father’s a felon, a meth cooker, and he posted the cabin and land for his most recent bail bond.  The sheriff comes around to tell her that her dad jumped bail.  She has about a week to either find him or clear off.  Nobody cares that she and her charges have nowhere to clear off to.

None of which is scary or horrifying.  It’s sad, and it’s compelling, but the scary and horrifying part comes later, when she starts looking.  See, Ree Dolly has deep roots in Southern Missouri.  She’s related, one way or another, to nearly everyone who might know where her father is.  Problem is, she’s from an extended family of drug makers, drug dealers, and drug takers.  Her people, the only people she has, treat her with hostility, suspicion, and fear.  Yes, there are some bright spots, but this young woman lives in a universe so full of secrets and violence that even her closest allies think nothing of threatening and intimidating her not because they have particular cause to, but because it’s the only way they know how to deal with people.

WINTER’S BONE combines this poisonous social atmosphere with the cold, icy, wet, and dead milieu of wintertime among the rural poor in Southern Missouri.  Ree’s increasing desperation combines with the brutality of her physical and social worlds to create a sense of claustrophobia, hopelessness, dread, and even fear.  When her quest culminates in an episode of jaw-clenching, gut-roiling horror, we’re left aghast and destroyed.

This is amazing stuff.  Jennifer Lawrence gives Ree such hard-edged, desperate, and even mean humanity that we feel for her and we root for her, even though we may not necessarily like her.  The supporting cast, particularly Deadwood’s John Hawkes as an uncle who’d be a nightmare in anyone’s family and Dale Dickey, a second or third cousin who’s even worse, flesh out a world of bitter, hard, and variably moral people that felt utterly authentic and absolutely scary.

As I think of it, I can’t recall a foot WINTER’S BONE puts wrong.  This film will find a place on my top ten of 2010.

City Island

There’s this island in the Hudson. It’s called City Island, and it’s technically part of the Bronx, but it seems like a whole other world from the rest of that borough. It’s bucolic, with fishermen and working class folk living alongside newcomers who must have paid in the millions for the waterfront homes they’ve purchased there.

There’s a family on this island, the Rizzos. The parents yell at the kids and at one another, everybody smokes in secret (thinking everyone else has quit), and they seem to have settled into a comfortably dysfunctional groove. Andy Garcia, the father in the tableau, has a secret: the illegitimate son he abandoned long ago. Now, the grown-up son is in trouble. Garcia brings him home. Revelations impend.

The illegitimate son serves two purposes in this film: he provides dramatic tension (For how long can Garcia hide his past?) and dramatic complication (Will the son, unaware of his bloodline, sleep with his stepmother or half sister or both?). These keep us interested while everyone else in the family finds themselves and their collective identity. Not to say that finding oneself and one’s collective identity is inherently boring, but there’s nothing like a bomb under the table to keep those not directly involved in the finding interested in the proceedings.

And how do the proceedings go? Well, they struck me as quite writerly. Everyone harbors a dramatic secret. There’s a quirky neighbor. Nobody stutters or says the wrong thing – in fact, they all seem to speak in modulated tones of the writer’s voice.

That’s not to say this is a bad film. I liked this family and I cared about how they’d (inevitably) work things out. Garcia’s terrific, Julianna Margulies (as the Mater) provides a carefully tuned performance, and Emily Mortimer (as one of many catalysts) is every bit as good you’d expect. But they never felt quite real, going through their crises on their charming little island. Nevertheless, I wish them well. Warts and all, they’re a lovely family.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

I’m having trouble with The Girl Who Played with Fire.  I liked the two leads, I enjoyed seeing more of Sweden, a country I’ve only passed through on my way to other places, and I found the villain sufficiently monstrous.  But I’m still not entirely sure what happened.   I don’t understand how the ball got rolling.  I mean, one minute, Noomi Rapace’s character is living in the sun, happy as can be.  The next, she’s back in cold, cold Stockholm.  Why did she return, other than a dramatic imperative that a popular character must return to the site of its home market?  And the villains, how do they know each other, really? 

Either the source material’s weak or this film got butchered for a US release.  Either way, you’re going to have to work through a bit of muddle so you can enjoy the sleuths, who are well drawn, the settings, which are lovely, and the mystery itself.  Perhaps you can explain it to me.

Shinjuku Incident

In Shinjuku Incident, Jackie Chan plays an illegal immigrant to Japan. He (literally) washes ashore with no papers, no money, no chances. He steals shoes. He hides from the police. Eventually, he links up with other illegals and begins to form a life. But it’s hard, doing nasty and dirty work for wages far below minimum. Perhaps there’s an easier way – those gangsters seem pretty well fed. Chan takes a few tentative steps into crime, just to get by. Turns out, the man has courage and leadership skills. And we can see the arc from there.

We’ve seen movies like this before. Shinjuku Incident’s unique contribution is its Tokyo setting, its subculture (formerly rural Chinese illegal immigrants), and its star. This isn’t a stunt movie – Chan is more likely to pick up a pipe and start flailing than kick anyone in the face. Rather, it’s a bullet for Chan’s resume as a serious actor. Elastic and amazing as the man may be, that middle is getting thicker and those joints are getting creakier – there’s just no way around it. Fortunately, the man doesn’t embarrass himself. He uses his likeable persona to keep us on his side as his dealing grow increasingly shady, and he gives us character’s moral evolution in natural, lifelike steps.

Yes, he’s about ten years too old for the part as it’s written (or, perhaps, for the women cast as his love interests), but what’s a little vanity in a major film star? He works in the role, and the film works because of him, and Shinjuku Incident shines a light on a whole new subculture. Not bad.

Bardelys the Magnificent

Bardelys the Magnificent, a silent from 1926, features good stunts, one of the most wonderfully sneering villains I’ve ever seen put to film, and a lead actress whose technique appears so modern that she could roll into a contemporary romantic comedy without missing a beat.

John Gilbert plays Bardelys, a Don Juan type of character in pre-revolutionary France.  The ladies love him, the men don’t mind him because he’s such a nice guy, and even the King thinks he’s got it all going on.  But there’s trouble in Paris. The villainous Chatellerault (Roy D’Arcy) has returned after being spurned by the fair Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman).  Chatellerault, shamed by his failure, challenges Bardelys to a bet: if Bardelys can marry Roxalanne in two months, he’ll cede all his properties to the famed paramour.  If not, Bardelys, loses everything.  Bardelys takes the challenge, and the laws of drama take over from there.

So, what makes Bardelys the Magnificent worth your time?  Not Gilbert, who’s fine and all, but lacks the charisma of a Douglas Fairbanks or a Rudolph Valentino.  I mean, yeah, he can fence with the best of them and seems a decent fellow, but I sensed that the film assumed he’d be an audience favorite while he struck me as a second rater.  The stunt work, while not spectacular, is quite nice.  The fencing matches look good, the acrobatic bits look natural, and the action set-pieces give the impression of carefully designed and executed stunts.  If that’s your thing (and it is mine), you’ll surely enjoy it.  The villain, well, now we’re getting into it.  Roy D’Arcy blew me away.  This guy mastered the moustache twirl, the disdainful sneer, the deep insecurity covered by haughtiness and volatility.  And hey, he can even do a pretty good pratfall when asked.  D’Arcy’s Chatellerault ranks right up there with Hans Gruber in the pantheon of great screen villains.  But you wanna see something that’ll really blow you away?  Check out Eleanor Boardman as Roxallane.  Her performance stands out not just from this film, but from silent film in general, because she’s doing something completely different.  While nearly all silent film acting seems aimed at the rafters, with big gestures and expressions to ensure everyone’s comprehension, this actress carries and expresses herself naturally.  When she shrugs, when she smiles, when she doubletakes, she looks like a real person and not a Silent Era Actress.  It surprised me, it refreshed me, and it delighted me.  I thought it was about the coolest thing ever.

So if you like silents, check out Bardelys.  You’ll predict the story and you may not warm to the lead, but I guarantee that you’ll delight in the villain and love Eleanor Boardman.  This is a good time at the movies.