Dead Snow

Everybody hates Nazis.  Everybody hates zombies.  A movie about Nazi zombies - what’s not to love?

Dead Snow has at least a platoon’s worth of Nazi zombies.  They menace a group of medical students at a retreat in a cabin in the Norwegian woods, one of whom is sufficiently self aware to observe, “Can you even guess how many horror movies begin with a group of students spending a weekend at a cabin in the woods?”  The zombies love to decapitate, eviscerate, and (hey, it rhymes) gesticulate, and they do it in pretty much that order.  Of course, the students fight back.  Some of them even survive, for a while.  One guy cuts his forearm off, a la Evil Dead 2, but forgets to attach a chain saw to the stump.  Another, well, let’s just say that if you’ve ever dreamed of seeing a man dangle from a cliff on the large intestine of a member of the fascist undead underground, then this is the film for you.

No, nothing about this film is visionary or original.  It appears to be the work of a guy who set out to make a slick horror film using all the touchstones of the genre.  He gives it a fun twist with the Nazi zombie thing, but you can almost see him checking off the blocks: “Cabin in the woods – check. Horny, half-drunk college kids – check.  Creepy exposition dude – check.”  And so on.  But if you like that kind of thing, if you like over-the-top gore and silly gags and all those horror tropes, you’re going to have a good time with Dead Snow.  Just look at the cover art.  You’ll know exactly what you’re getting.

The Monster Squad

The Monster Squad, a tween horror-comedy from the ‘80s, can’t settle on an appropriate tone.  Going from silly to cruel and back again, the film keeps its audience wondering whether it’s supposed to be fun or horrific.

Here’s the setup: Dracula comes to what appears to be San Dimas, bringing all his friends from the Universal Monsters catalog with him.  He wants to take over the world, and it’s up to a bunch of junior high schoolers, The Monster Squad, to save the day.  Sounds like fun, right?  Work in some sight gags, put the gang in a little peril, finish with a stake in the heart, and roll the credits.  But then the kids get help from a Holocaust survivor who reflects that he knows what real monsters look like, and we’re shocked out of the comfortable universe of the Universal Monsters and back into our (decidedly less comfortable) own.  Before we know it, some monsters are comic relief, others are murderers, and the film can’t seem to figure out how it feels about any of it.

Adding insult to injury, The Monster Squad lacks internal coherence.  It’s as if the Universal went with the first draft that didn’t feature Fred Grandy and never even bothered to send for a more polished product.  There’s a bunch of stuff about a vortex and a rite that’ll do away with monsters once and for all, but the film’s prologue shows us an earlier generation conducting the same rite and creating the same vortex, apparently to no avail.  This leaves the adults in the audience spending the picture’s running time asking, “So what?” Forget about the film’s disregard for human life, its cavalier attitude toward early sexuality, and even its silly anachronisms.  This movie just doesn’t make any sense.

I’m addending my 10-year-old son’s impressions, so you can see I’m not alone.  If you’re looking for kid-friendly, monsterrific fun, skip The Monster Squad and just see the original Universal monster movies again.  They’re better in every imaginable way.
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I liked the movie the first time I watched it, But the second time, I noticed disturbing elements. Some innocent cops got sucked into the vortex that was meant for evil monsters to be sucked in. Some people even died.  So with the deaths, they went from “cheesy non-threatening monsters" to "serious no kidding people-are-dying threatening monsters."
     
Well, it wasn’t all bad.  There were friendly parts. One character was dressing up Frankenstein’s Monster in girl clothes, And the Werewolf mask was cheesy lookin’. Cheesy is good, Because it looks very non-threatening, so it’s “Spooky” not “Scary.” The Mummy and Gill-Man also looked fake and fun.

It’s got elements I liked, & scenes I disliked. Then again, I still could just skip the parts I don’t like. No wait, That wouldn’t work, because that would annoy the people I’m watching it with. Guess I’m still waiting for the perfect movie I’m going to like completely.

Jefferson in Paris

Jefferson in Paris takes one of the brightest, most scintillating intellects of his generation and turns him into a crashing bore.

The film begins in 1784, with Jefferson arriving in Paris to relieve Benjamin Franklin of his duties as ambassador to the court of Louis XVI.  The film doesn’t show us the turnover – I imagine it would have been impossible to make Franklin, the greatest intellect of the previous generation, dull enough to fit into this picture.  So here we are: a charismatic genius dropped into the ferment of pre-revolutionary France, trying to carry on Franklin’s mission of getting Louis to spend less time talking about helping the Americans and more time actually helping them.  He and Franklin were wildly successful, of course: all that French military and economic assistance eventually bankrupted the state and directly contributed to the fall of the monarchy.  This is fascinating stuff, but does the film show us any of it?  No.  What does the film show us?  Jefferson’s love affairs.

Big deal.  If Merchant Ivory Productions had wanted to do a picture about love and sex in fin de siècle France, it should’ve gone with the Franklin years.  They were more interesting.  Jefferson had an (apparently chaste) affair with a well known English artist and may have begun his lifelong relationship with Sally Hemings in Paris, but Franklin - well, this is a family blog.  Look it up for yourself.

Nick Nolte, as Jefferson, does the character no favors.  He comes across as a passionless man even when (supposedly) in the throes of great passion.  It’s as if screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala crafted his voice from the formalized writing style of the time, coming up with something that feels more like a historical reenactment than a dramatic film.

So here we are, with a dull Jefferson in a melodramatic film that turns a fascinating man and time into 139 minutes of tedium.  Give it a pass.

The Social Network

The Social Network is a movie about a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome.  As with many “aspies,” he’s a genius.  Also, as with all aspies, he’s a social incompetent (I’m not casting aspersions.  While genius is a possible side effect of Asperger’s Syndrome, social incompetence is a core symptom.).  He’s smart enough to know that relationships matter and driven enough to pantomime what he perceives to be appropriate behaviors, but he can’t quite get it.  This makes him feel powerless, envious, and angry – why can’t he intuitively do this social interaction stuff that the idiots around him handle so effortlessly?

The guy’s name is Mark Zuckerberg, and he invents Facebook.  Marrying his outsider’s near-clinical observations of how people interact with his genius for computer programming, he figures out how to take the social experience of college and put it on line.  If he can put his thumb in the eyes of those he envies, so much the better.*

But he’s an aspie.  He can’t intuit whether or not someone’s a fraud.  He can’t intuit who his real friends are.  He can’t intuit how to run a relationship, much less a business, because people and their natural social organizations don’t work with the clear, understandable, and unerring precision of computer code.  He can only learn the way you might learn how to do something for which you have no talent: by flailing around until he gets it right.  When he flails around, people get hurt.  When people get hurt and realize he’s now a very wealthy man, they sue.

That’s the core of the movie, and it’s the core of the tragedy of the character of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.  To get us there, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin captures the rhythm of Asperger’s conversation and the calculating, intellectualized nature of Asperger’s interaction.  Jesse Eisenberg, playing Zuckerberg under David Fincher’s direction, redefines his career with this performance.  Together, they capture the singlemindedness of Asperger’s; the sublimated rage of disability; and the helplessness of a young man who’s too smart to realize that, in some ways, he isn’t smart at all.

The Social Network itself seems a bit cold, a bit clinical.  It thinks too much and feels not nearly enough.  But that’s the point, isn’t it?  The Social Network is unblinking in its perception and devastating in its conclusions.  I can’t wait to discuss it with my friends.

*There’s a catch, and you need to know this.  I have it on very good authority that the book upon which this film is based is poorly researched claptrap.  The character of “Mark Zuckerberg,” as depicted in the film, may not reflect the actual guy.

OSS 117: Lost in Rio

OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies is better than OSS 117: Lost in Rio.  But that’s like saying that a strawberry malted is better than a chocolate malted.  Hey, they’re both malteds: you really can’t go wrong!

Lost in Rio, set in 1967, follows French superspy Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath as he ventures to Rio to find a microfilm listing the names of collaborators during the Nazi occupation of France.  His technique?  Waltzing into the German embassy and asking, “Do you have any lists of Nazi sympathers?  Nazi clubs?  Kaffee clatches, that sort of thing?  I mean, you are all German, after all.”  This does not bode well.

And so Lost in Rio grooves along, with OSS 117 happily blundering about, oblivious to the fact that he’s an idiot.  As with Cairo, Nest of Spies, that’s pretty much the whole gag.  He’s good-looking.  He’s suave. He’s a meathead.  Why does this work?  I have to credit star Jean Dujardin, who appears to have studied under Leslie Nielsen.  No matter how nutty things get, Dujardin keeps a straight face, smarmily content in the obvious superiority of his Frenchness.  It’s silly and funny and over the top, and I laughed all the way through it.  If there were an OSS 117 tv series, I’d watch it.

Bride & Prejudice

Bride & Prejudice, Gurinder Chada’s (Bend It Like Beckham) Bollywood–style take on the Jane Austen classic, is fun and colorful and joyful and energetic.  I’d love to see it as a stage musical.

It doesn’t work on film, however. The transitions into song and dance numbers feel jarring and forced.  The movie laughs at, rather than with, its buffoon.  Worse, Aishwarya Rai, as the Indian version of Elizabeth Bennet, is neither as fetching nor as interesting as Meghna Kothari as the Indian Mary Bennet – your supporting actors should never fascinate more than your leads!

Nevertheless, Naveen Andrews and Martin Henderson made for a fine Bingley and Darcy, respectively.  Further, the picture looks fantastic, with great use of color and sound to illustrate cultures and attitudes.  If it could’ve handled the transitions to the production numbers a little better, this picture would’ve had me.

Perhaps if they'd included zombies.

The Man Who Would Be King

The Man Who Would Be King captures the Imperial Moment of Rudyard Kipling, and it does so with beauty and fun.  The film follows two ne’er do well (former) British sergeants as they seek their fortunes in barbarous Kaffiristan, which looks to me like Northern Pakistan.  They’re British as British can be, seeking to expand the cultural empire even while they mean to carve out a little piece of the world for themselves.  The men’s unwavering belief in all things British, especially when surrounded by unfriendly locals, is both touching and telling of a time when such belief would seem not just laudable, but natural.

Michael Caine and Sean Connery play the sergeants, two men who realize that it’s better to be occupy the lowest rung of the social ladder in the far reaches of the Empire (where being British means something) than to work as bootblacks or doormen in London.  After knocking around India a bit, they hit on a plan to become kings of their own realm.  They have a chance meeting with Mr. Kipling, which both creates a framing story and makes the voiceovers organic, and they set out across Imperial India, across the Hindu Kush, and into deepest Kaffiristan.  There, they will be kings, or they’ll get themselves killed - those who will not risk can not win!

The film, from a Kipling story, has everything we could want in an adventure: greed, loyalty, humor, avalanches, desperate battles – you name it.  And Caine and Connery are just delightful in their roles.  They come across like a couple of blokes who’ve been in their share of scrapes and who, though scoundrels, are guys you’d want on your team.  It’s a pleasure to watch pros like this do their thing and, under the hand of master director John Huston, they do it well.

I enjoyed The Man Who Would Be King as an adventure film, as a spectacle, and as a window into a time, place, and state of mind that has long by.  It’s everything I could ask for.

Tron: Legacy

Michael Sheen totally walks away with Tron: Legacy.  Sure, I like Jeff Bridges as well as the next guy, and I definitely want to see Bruce Boxleitner’s plastic surgeon in fifteen years, but Sheen’s the thing I’ll recall when (if) I think back on this film.

It’s a simple setup: the hero needs to get from A to B to C.  B is a bar in the computer world of Tron, and here’s what you need to remember about the computer world of Tron: the hero’s father designed it in the ‘80s.  That means the bar is totally new wave, if new wave had continued to evolve in the technological, synthesized, Daft Punk way it appeared to be going.  And who would run such a place, the hippiest, waviest, grooviest place on the grid?  Why, David Bowie, of course!  But maybe Disney wouldn’t pay Bowie’s quote, or perhaps the Thin White Duke had other commitments, or, well, who knows.  The fact is that instead of David Bowie, Tron: Legacy gives us Michael Sheen (Timeline, Underworld, The Queen, Frost/Nixon, Kingdom of Heaven, New Moon – the man’s clearly a member of Michael Caine’s “if the check shows up, so will I” school of career management) as David Bowie in all his coked-up glory! 

By the looks of it, Sheen’s stage direction boiled down to, “Every character the audience has met so far is boring as hell.  Be a sport and punch things up, will you?”  The man comes through.  He’s so manic, so goofy, so zonked out of his skull on whatever passes for high-octane narcotics in Tron’s world that he becomes a one-man jolt of energy and spontaneity in an otherwise depressingly relentless juvenile actioner.

It’s always a pleasure to see an actor prove that there are no small roles.  Way to go, Michael Sheen!  I look forward to seeing what you pop up in next!

North Face

When a film makes you gasp in horror because some guy drops a mitten, you know it has you.  North Face had me all the way to the credits.

North Face is a mountaineering movie about a team that attempts to scale the north face of the Eiger, “the last problem of the Alps.”    As happens in all the best mountaineering films, things go wrong.  And as happens in all the best mountaineering films, we’re right there on the face of the mountain with the athletes, feeling for a fingerhold and, yes, gasping when someone drops a mitten and realizes his hand will probably be a blackened claw by the end of the expedition.

I hesitate to tell you how things turn out and who does what, but I will tell you that North Face had me, literally, on the edge of my seat for its last twenty minutes.  If you like a cliffhanger, you’ll love North Face.

Ip Man

Ip Man is the best martial arts films I’ve seen Ong Bak: Muy Thai Warrior.

Donnie Yen (who grew up in Hong Kong and Boston) plays Ip Man, the fellow who invented Wing Chun Kung Fu and who, years after the events of this film, taught Bruce Lee.  Here, he’s a prosperous gentleman in the Chinese town of Foshan.  Foshan is a center of martial arts education, and he’s respected as the greatest practitioner around.  Oh, and he’s also a great guy, always willing to help a friend and going out of his way to avoid embarrassing those who would challenge him.

And then the Japanese invade.

And that’s all I’m going to say about the plot, except to tell you that this isn’t the “brave resistance leader” movie I expected.  Ip Man knows that punches and kicks aren’t much good against machine guns, and he’ll be happy if he can just figure out how to keep his family alive through the occupation.  That isn’t to say that there are no punches and kicks, just that they’re carefully set up and they happen for a reason.  Ip Man’s fights may be fun and cool in the beginning of the film, when everything’s generally ok, but they take on considerable dramatic weight after the Japanese show up.  I found myself not just grooving on the choreography and execution, but emotionally engaged in each battle and worried for their outcomes.

Look, you know and I know that the world is full of great dramatic films.  You want to know if Ip Man works as a martial arts picture.  It does, and here’s why:  Sammo Hung, who choreographed and directed the fighting sequences, has been doing this for a long time: he was one of Jackie Chan’s classmates in Peking Opera School, a brutally difficult academy that takes athletic kids and turns them into adults capable of amazing feats of grace and violence.  Hung went on perform in a career’s worth of films and television programs (including a short-lived American cop show), and today he divides his time between performing and directing.  Donnie Yen, the film’s star, has performed against martial arts luminaries such as Jet Li in Hero and Jackie Chan in Shanghai Knights.  In other words, we’re talking about an action director and a star who both know what they’re doing (We expect the opponent stuntmen to know their craft.  Ability to execute stunts is their calling card, while Hero Character actors also need to look good, be able to emote reasonably well, etc.  Sometimes, for Hero Characters, stuntwork ability comes in second.).  This assurance translates into fight scenes that actually make sense, with long takes that allow us to see and appreciate the work and the artistry that the performers bring to the production. 

So what we’re talking about here is a movie with dramatic heft and first rate martial arts action.  Add excellent production values and historical resonance, and we have a recipe for success.  Ip Man is a winner.

Serpico

CHUD.com's Elizabeth Rappe wrote the review of Serpico that led to me to see the film.  She does such a great job, I find I don't have much to add.  Thus, here's a link to Elizabeth's article.

Purple Noon

Purple Noon is a French version of the The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Alain Delon as Ripley.  It doesn’t work because Alain Delon is Ripley.

Obviously, Delon is a fine actor.  His resume reflects that.  But the film never answers the question of why Delon wants to be Dickie Greenleaf when he’s already Alain Freakin’ Delon, probably the best looking guy in Southern Europe.  Purple Noon gives us a greedy Ripley, a jealous Ripley, but it doesn’t give us a grasping or needy Ripley.  Without those elements, this film’s iteration of the character is just a good looking guy who leeches from a rich dude until he gets a chance to kill him.

That isn’t much fun, and neither is Purple Noon.

The Best of 2010

WHAT I THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT I SAW - 2010

2010 has been another great year in movies.  Among the top three films on this year’s list, any one could have taken the top spot.  But #1 is so visionary, so refreshingly original, that I believe it is the best film of 2010.

#10:  Kick-Ass
   
Violent, vulgar, clever, and careful, Kick-Ass is an audacious and original take on the superhero genre.  You won’t see another film like it this year.
   
#9:  The Killer Inside Me
   
It takes great big stones to make a lurid, pulpy novel into a lurid, pulpy movie with world-class production values.  It takes even bigger stones to film its story in all its horror and expect an audience to stick with its antihero.  The Killer Inside Me gambles big and rakes in all the chips, delivering a compelling and disturbing story while establishing Casey Affleck as one of the most interesting young actors working in American film today.
   
#8:  The Secret of Kells
   
In this animated feature, young Brendan is a monk in an abbey/fortress in medieval Ireland.  Torn between the abbot who’s driven to ready for the next Viking attack and the illuminator who unleashes his genius, Brendan finds a magical ally deep in the woods.  The Secret of Kells reflects its milieu with a daring 2-D animation style that reflects the illuminated manuscripts in which Brendan finds his inspiration and his calling.  This film is beautiful and imaginative and delightful.  See it even if you don’t have kids.
   
#7:  The Other Guys
   
It’s hard to make a big budget action-comedy that’s actually funny.  The Other Guys, however, is funny all the way through to the end credits and it delivers on the big action set pieces and it works in a Yojimbo joke.  How many wide-release comedies can you name that work in a Yojimbo joke?  Look for clever supporting work from Michael Keaton, Eva Mendez, and Ron Riggle.
   
   
#6: Shutter Island
   
I define a gadget movie as a film that’s as much a puzzle as anything else, and Shutter Island is a terrific gadget movie.  This challenging and puzzling film features a deeply compelling and disturbing premise, and it comes through on it.  Scorsese orchestrates, shepherding knockout performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo in a film that’s as gothic, creepy, compelling, and horrifying as anything I’ve seen this year. I need to see it again, and soon.
   
   
#5:  True Grit
   
True Grit is a no-nonsense, three act western featuring outstanding work from Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, Josh Brolin, and especially young Hailee Steinfeld, as the heroine Mattie Ross.  The film is full of little moments that define and develop its characters and its world, and we get the sense of a picture whose every detail was carefully designed and executed.  This is as professional as the professional western gets.  John Huston would be proud.
   
#4:  The American
   
George Clooney plays Alain Delon playing a very bad man in hiding from some other very bad men in a film that feels more like a late ‘50s – early ‘60s French or Italian production than a modern American one.  I like Goerge Clooney.  I like Alain Delon.  I like French and Italian movies from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.  And I can’t stop thinking about the sense of world-weariness, fear, isolation, and dread that comes through in nearly every scene of this criminally underappreciated film.
   
#3:  Black Swan
   
I challenge you to name a Darren Aronofsky film that doesn’t rank among the best releases of its year.  Black Swan, the latest in a line of Aronofsky masterpieces, will baffle you and scare you and challenge you and elevate you.  It’s filmmaking about high art that is, itself, high art – a film about a dancer in ‘Swan Lake’ that is, itself, a production of ‘Swan Lake.’  The film enraptured me in the moment, and I think about the sound and imagery of its emotional climax several times a day.  I suspect it will become as much a part of my touchstones of great filmmaking as the sand Kyuko Kishida’s body in Woman in the Dunes or Hugh Jackman in the bubble in Aronofsky’s The Fountain.  You must see this film.
   
#2:  Winter’s Bone
   
Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sprang from the same soil as Mattie Ross, and I think Mattie would see her as one of her own.  When Ree sets out to find her father in the moral and economic wasteland of meth-corrupted Arkansas, she’s in territory as strange and dangerous as the Indian country Mattie penetrates to find her fugitive.  While Mattie had help, however, Ree is alone.  She alone must find her father, dead or alive, so to save the pathetic home in which she’s raising her younger siblings.  She alone must brave the suspicion, the fear, the hostility she meets within her own family.  She must do it all, and Winter’s Bone takes us every step of the way, plunging us into the icy winter waters of its world and daring us to grab hold onto what we may find there.  Winter’s Bone is a perfectly executed, utterly horrifying film.  You must see it.
   
#1:  Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
   
Inventive, audacious, and infectiously fun, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best film of 2010.  The picture crosses from reality to fantasy and back again with delight and energy, immersing us in the mind of its hero so completely that we cease to care about the objectively real and happily ride along with him while he, well, while he works himself out.

Granted, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World isn't the first film to explore boundaries between fantasy and reality; neither is it the first to exist almost entirely in the head of its protagonist. The film recalls Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, which gave us a man-child protagonist whose fantasy world so thoroughly informs his connection with the real world that we cannot understand one without the other.  While Gondry's man-child seems cloying and stunted, however, director Edgar Wright here gives us a man-teen so bursting with geeky enthusiasm, so ready to take the step into actual adulthood, that we root for him instead of just wait for him to grow up.

Scott Pilgrim does this by evoking the Big Three of nerd culture: comic books, video games, and alt-indie rock.  It doesn't do it by just throwing references out there and hoping for a few lightbulbs to come on.  It does it by borrowing graphic references from comic books, co-opting the look and feel of video games from their 16-bit arcade heyday to their modern, hyperrealistic incarnations, and overwhelming the audience both with music and with unique visual depictions of music.  Scott Pilgrim doesn't just reference this culture or remind you of this culture: it immerses you in this culture.  As A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times, "There are some movies about youth that just make you feel old, even if you aren’t. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ... has the opposite effect." 

Bravo, Mr. Wright.  I can't wait to see what you do next.

The Best of 2010 - Honorable Mentions

HONORABLE MENTION #1:  Inception

Inception’s a gadget movie, but it’s an intricately designed and beautifully executed gadget movie.  That, and it’s a whole lotta fun.

HONORABLE MENTION #2:  Hot Tub Time Machine

I fired up Hot Tub Time Machine expecting an amusingly bad flick.  Rather, I got a solid hour and a half of laugh-out-loud class comedy.  This picture is almost enough to redeem John Cusack's recent career.

HONORABLE MENTION #3:  Predators

Nonstop, full-throttle action from start to finish, helmed by a talented director, edited by someone who knows what he’s doing, and starring people who can actually want.  Get yourself a big tub of popcorn and enjoy.

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.