Marty

I like Ernest Borgnine.  This guy looked in a mirror one day and didn’t see a short, fat, ugly-lookin’ dude who’d probably go nowhere in the entertainment industry.  He saw an actor, a guy who could make it, and he took his shot.  His first film credit dates from 1951, 6 years after he helped save the world by serving as a Gunner’s Mate (1^st Class) in WWII, and he’s been working ever since.  Most recently (at age 93), he had a key supporting role in last summer’s RED, the movie about how great Helen Mirren looks in a slinky white dress.  Ernest Borgnine is a hero.

Marty, which won Best Picture for 1955 and for which Borgnine took home a Best Actor award, shows us why the man succeeded, and continues to succeed, in his chosen profession.  The film is the story of a man who learns to stop seeing the world through the eyes of others and start seeing for himself.  It’s standard coming of age material, but Borgnine sells it with sincerity and goodwill.  When Marty agonizes over whether to buy a butcher shop, we want him to succeed.  When Marty rescues a sobbing woman who’s just been ditched at a local ballroom, we wish we could show that kind of class in a tough situation.  When Marty tries to balance the demands of his family, his friends, his profession, and his heart, we know something’s going to drop; and we care a lot about what does and what doesn’t.

This isn’t to say that Marty is perfect.  The film, written by Paddy Chayefsky, can veer into the kind of writerliness that may feel right onstage but that, onscreen, feels stilted.  Further, its ending took me by surprise: the credits rolled just as I was settling in for a third act.  Yes, this may be a movie about Marty’s choices, but I wanted to see the results of those choices, the complications they’d cause, and Marty’s way of resolving them.  I wanted a sharper climax, one that would give me a greater sense of closure. 

Nevertheless, I’ll look back on Marty with fondness.  The film allowed me to spend an hour and a half in the company of a guy who wasn’t the handsomest fellow on the block, who wasn’t the smoothest talker, who wasn’t the center of attention.  It allowed me to spend an hour and a half with the best, most decent guy around.  It allowed me to spend an hour and a half with Ernest Borgnine. 

That’s time well spent.

PS  There’s a whole other storyine here about Betsy Blair, the actress who played Clara, the love interest.  The Black List had effectively ended her career when her husband, Gene Kelly, threatened to make no more films for MGM if she didn’t get the part that would eventually land her a Best Supporting Actress nomination.  Her Wikipedia page, linked here (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0086198/bio), provides some details of a life lived with principle and passion.

Toy Story 3

They made Toy Story 3 for kids, right?

They animated it with pretty colors and they used established characters from the first two Toy Story films, which definitely felt like kid-friendly fare.  They set much of the action in a day care center, and they used a fuzzy purple teddy bear for a villain – how much more kid-friendly could they get?

A lot more.  In fact, I rate Toy Story 3 as the most terrifying kids’ movie since Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (You remember Chitty: the Andrews / Van Dyke Disney romp that featured a child abductor who haunted preadolescents’ dreams for years).  The themes center on loss and betrayal and the slow, mortal march of time.  The day care center becomes a chamber of horrors that will make a generation of children scream in dismay at the prospect of spending time anywhere similar.  The visuals include a creepy baby-doll who looks like something out of a Romero film, a gelatinous octopus that’d make Lovecraft shriek, and a Daliesque animated tortilla with Potato Head features that weaves and lurches in sickening contortions.  Don’t even get me started on the aforementioned villain, an evil good ol’ boy of a bear (brilliantly voiced by Ned Beatty) who represents everything wrong with authority and everything to fear in those who promise to look after you.

Here’s the deal: the first films’ Andy’s all grown up and ready to head off to college, and his toys find themselves in a box dropped off at the local day care.  Things seem lovely at first, but it isn’t long before the true nature of the facility reveals itself.  Can our heroes escape?  With Andy leaving them behind, to what do they have to escape?  Why bother?

We’re talking about some dark stuff.  Combine it with some of the film’s unnerving visuals and scary sequences, and I can’t imagine showing it to anyone under the age of ten.  Hell, just writing about Toy Story 3 creeps me out all over again.  If this is a kids’ movie, I’d hate to see what Pixar can put together for adults.

The Town

Brilliant writer and great guy Les Phillips has allowed me to run his review of The Town.  Enjoy.

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THE TOWN (2010, directed by Ben Affleck).  Ben Affleck has become a really excellent director of action.  I don't mean asteroids 'n' scary monsters; I mean his presentations of robberies, gunfights and car chases make them new, with special rhythms and angles.  They look and feel like nothing you've seen.  And Ben loves Boston (and Cambridge).  His footage of the city is special too; the camera lingers on the geometry of the downtown skyline, or it pauses for a second to revere the Bunker Hill Monument, or observe something as small and particular as the toll booth on the Tobin Bridge.  Affleck films a robbery and getaway in the North End, one of the oldest neighborhoods in America, and somehow he fits all the energy and violence into its tight old streets and alleys.  Those sequences are both engineering and filmmaking; it's impressive film art.  The director proved with his first film how well he understands poor white Boston; he "gets" the sociology of Charlestown perfectly.  And, of course, he's Ben Affleck, so they let him film at Fenway Park.

THE TOWN has some absolutely wonderful performances.  Rebecca Hall is superb.  She plays a bank manager, one of the random young professionals who've moved into Charlestown's gentrified sector, in the neighborhood but certainly not of it.  She falls in love with a bank robber -- that would be Doug MacRay, played by Ben Affleck. Why would she fall for a criminal from the 'hood?  Hall makes it more than plausible; we see a refined young woman who's also more than a bit lonely, carrying around some incompleteness that's waiting for somebody to come along.  Pete Postlewhaite is a florist who also happens to be the local crime lord, and he is the most menacing, purely evil florist in all of recorded history; he's a quiet, suggestive Irish serpent.  Jeremy Renner is an utterly convincing Boston boyo, vigorous and vulgar.  Blake Lively has the druggy-slutty girl role, and she makes the most out of her minutes on screen; she's brash, wounded and sorrowful.  I haven't even gotten around to Jon Hamm and Chris Cooper, who are just as fine.  This cast is a tremendous embarrassment of riches, and Affleck makes the most of them.

So there are great visual moments, many fine pieces of acting, many fine scenes.  What's missing from THE TOWN?  A screenplay good enough to weave all this humanity into a persuasive narrative, and deep enough to highlight the moral resonance that's only touched on.  There are several little speeches where characters tell their backstories -- how Doug MacRay lost his mother, how his sidekick has always searched for a family.  But all of these speeches are thin, cliche, sentimental.  THE TOWN announces itself as a story about a community where crime is the dominant art and craft, handed down through generations; about mere theft that escalates into a series of murderous rampages; but there's no moral urgency, no gravity.  When all is said and done, this is a story about some bank robbers.  Also missing:  the central performance that could anchor the film.  Doug McRay is Charlestown's representative man; he's got to embody all the pain and conflict of the cursed reluctant criminal, acting out his fate.  Affleck spends much of his screen time reacting, furrowing his brow, speaking the lines; he's not awful, but he never finds the character.  He's occupying space that needs a great performance.  Affleck can be a fine actor, but he doesn't deliver here.

Ah, but Affleck the director!  GONE, BABY, GONE was a pleasant surprise.  THE TOWN is much more than that; this is a director with real vision and imagination, first-rate talent with actors.  THE TOWN is not quite Affleck's breakthrough, but the next film might well be.

Vivre Sa Vie

You know how, in most films, the camera remains unobtrusive?  Sure, it’s your magic eye into the lives of the people whom it observes, but you don’t notice it.  It’s just there.  In Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, the camera is practically a character.  It jostles for a better view of the proceedings.  It looks around when it loses interest in the actors.  At one point, it rat-tat-tats across a room when automatic gunfire stitches the background.  Watching Vivre Sa Vie makes us feel not like an omnipresent god sitting in judgment, but like an invisible sprite in the room.  Occasionally, people even look right at us.  People’s eyes wander, after all.  Why not in our direction?

This sprite the camera makes of us has an obsession: Anna Karina, star of the film and one of the most mesmerizing women ever to flicker on a movie screen.  It can stare at her for minutes on end.  It can stare at her profile, at her full face, at the back of her head while she speaks with someone else.  Occasionally, Anna stares at it, and us, and our secret gaze projects on her what we will.

Anna’s character, Nana, is a loathsome human being.  She’s selfish and stupid and, as near as I can tell, makes not a single good decision during the entire film.  We meet her as she’s meeting with her husband.  She looks at a photo of her child, then discards it.  She tells her spouse that there’s no point in her coming back: she’d just cheat again.  She’s bad at her job.  She’s behind on her rent.  She’s finding that beauty will only get her so far, and eventually it gets her on what we’ll politely refer to as a “walking street.”  With any other observer, perhaps with any other actress, we’d soon dismiss Nana.  But our invisible sprite loves her, weeps for her, never ceases in its fascination with her.  It pulls us in, focuses us so completely on her that we, too, begin to border on obsession.

And when the camera finally closes its eyes, unable to take any more, we’re left wrenched and lost and devastated.  In 1987, Wim Wenders made a film called Wings of Desire about the angels who follow us and love us and weep for us.  25 years earlier, Godard embodied that angel with a camera and made Vivre Sa Vie.  This is what it’s like to bear witness.  This is what it’s like to love without condition.  This is what it’s like to gaze with the angels’ gaze.

You must see it.  You must experience Vivre Sa Vie.  You must.

Rocco and His Brothers

When I go to Sicily, I see Southern California before it was developed.  I see rolling hills, groves of orange trees, acres of vineyards.  I see a place very much like paradise.  For postwar Sicilians, however, the island was more of a semifeudal hellhole where landholders and padrons divided the fruits of their toil.  For postwar Sicilians, the Crossroads of the Mediterranean was a place to leave.

Rocco and His Brothers, a film by Luchino Visconti, tells the story a Sicilian family that leaves.  The father has died and the mother brings four of her sons to Milan to make a new life under the leadership of Vincenzo, the fifth and oldest of the brothers and a young man who’s establishing himself in the northern city.

He is not happy to see them.  He can barely provide for himself.  Away we go.

To get this movie, I think one must accept that it isn’t a movie that about Sicilians.  Rather, it’s a Sicilian movie.  It has Sicilian attitudes toward family, toward women, toward obligation.  As the members of the family embark on their careers and make their way (or not) in the North, their unique cultural point of view defines everything about them.  When one of the brothers outrages another’s girlfriend, it’s the girlfriend that pays because family comes first.  When someone comes home with blood on his hands, the family’s first instinct is to hide the crime because family comes first.  This outlook so permeates the film that I, as an outsider, found it difficult to relate to these people.  Rocco and His Brothers throws me a bone by giving me one brother who sees things in a more recognizable moral framework, but he’s the family outlier: I got the sense that he’s the one who makes everyone else uncomfortable at dinner.

Is Rocco and His Brothers engrossing?  Yes.  Is it technically adept?  Yes.  Will it leave you scratching your head and wondering what the hell makes Sicilians tick?  Absolutely.  Just don’t go to the island to find out for yourself.  I want to keep it like California before the development.

Rocky

Rocky holds up extraordinarily well.

If you haven’t seen Rocky in a while, you may recall it as a boxing movie.  It’s much more than that, however: it’s the American dream in an hour and a half.  It’s a story about a guy gets his shot and makes the most of it.  It’s a story about compassion, perseverance, and character.  It’s story about finding one’s lodestone.  It’s brilliant.

You know how it goes: Rocky, a semi-pro boxer, works as a small-time collector for a small-time loan shark in hard-times Philadelphia.  Rocky isn’t a very good collector because he lets people off the hook.  He isn’t a very good boxer because nobody has ever taken him under wing and given him the training he needs.  He isn’t good at much, but he is good hearted.  When champion Apollo Creed needs to find a last-minute substitute for an injured opponent, he hits on the idea of fighting a Philadelphian for the bicentennial.  He chooses Rocky based on a one-paragraph description in a boxing digest and offers him the gig.  Rocky thinks he’s being offered a job as a sparring partner.  When he learns that this is a real shot, he takes it.  Cue the training montage.

And it’s great and it’s fabulous and it’ll make your four-year-old try to do one-armed pushups.  But there’s something happening in Rocky to set it apart from other sports fantasy movies.  First, there’s Rocky’s budding relationship with Adrian, the mousy spinster who works at the local pet shop.  Adrian isn’t the beautiful girlfriend of an evil opponent.  Adrian is a delicate shoot whom Rocky cultivates into a magnificent flower, just as Rocky cultivates his opportunity to do something with his life.  Second, there’s Apollo Creed, the Champ.  Apollo isn’t a cruel villain from Conflict 101.  He’s decent and smart and dedicated.  Sure, he treats Rocky lightly – who wouldn’t, in his position?  But the fact that he isn’t a moustache twirler makes Rocky’s story one about overcoming life’s restrictions, not overcoming one man.  Third, there’s Philadelphia itself, a mighty and historic city whose days of industrial-age dominance are long behind it.  We identify not only with underdog Rocky, but with underdog Philly.  It dreams of something better, and perhaps it can make its dreams come true.

These elements work together to make Rocky more than just another aspirational story about an underdog fighting a villain and getting a girl.  They make Rocky universal and inspirational, giving it a power that transcends its era.  The make Rocky about the American dream of finding something within oneself that extends one’s reach, firms one grip, makes the impossible possible.  Rocky isn’t just a boxing movie.  Rocky is a classic.

Floating Weeds

An Ozu picture is a state of mind.  It’s quiet; observant; takes the time to get to know people and their place.  An Ozu picture demands attention and rewards the time and effort to get into its headspace.

I couldn’t give Floating Weeds that kind of attention.  I saw it in snippets of 30 minutes or so.  Just as I entered its meditative state, just as I tuned into its wavelength, life called me away to its demands.  This killed the viewing experience.

I perceived that the village in of the film was a hot, humid, tiny place.  I perceived that everyone knew everyone else’s secrets.  I understood who the characters were and I tracked the elements of the story.  But I didn’t feel myself in the narrative.  I couldn’t stick around long enough for the village to come alive and the characters to become real.

I’m frustrated.  The film is technically perfect, and Ozu’s unique way of staging provides much for the eye and the mind.  But I think I’ve learned my lesson.  I’ll never again try to see one of his films on my laptop as time permits.  I’ll wait for his work to play at the AFI, hire a sitter, and sit in a dark room where I can focus.

I’ll find that state of mind.

Red

RED is a silly, ultraviolent, pulpy action picture that features Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown.

I know.  I had you at “Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown.”  Now, try this on: “Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown, wielding a machine gun.”

Woof.

Here’s the story: Bruce Willis is a retired CIA covert ops guy.  For reasons that will be revealed later, the CIA decides that he and his buddies all need to die, and quickly.  Well, as we’ve learned in The Losers, The Expendables, and The A Team, it’s always a bad idea to try to kill off covert ops guys – they can kill back.

So what?  What differentiates this from the other three “superduper commando teams solve the mystery and kill a bunch of people” movies that came out last year?

Um.  Helen Mirren.  Slinky white evening gown.  Machine gun.

Ok, there’s more to RED than Dame Helen Mirren mowing down hostiles while clothed in a slinky white evening gown.  Bruce Willis is a natural movie star who’s just plain fun to watch.  His team is made entirely of outstanding actors: Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, even James Remar and Mary-Louise Parker.  We also get the Great Ernest Borgnine in a crucial supporting role and Karl Urban and Richard Dreyfuss as villains.  We’re talking about serious wattage here: these people know how to own a movie screen.

And it works.  All that charisma carries RED’s wafer-thin story for a solid hour and a half of gunfire, ‘splosions, and a brand of carefree murder so blasé that we cease to think of the targets as characters and see them as the stuntmen they are.  Red turns out to be silly, fun, anarchic, and a great time at the movies.

I just wish I’d seen it on the big screen.

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.