March 3, 2011 · 11:40 pm

Death Defying Acts

Death Defying Acts ended up not really fitting into the blog’s gestalt at all, but I thought it would when I sat down to watch it. It seemed to be in the general vein of The Illusionist or The Prestige, two movies I very much enjoyed, and Houdini is always an interesting historical figure to include in a narrative. Plus, with Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the casting had promise. (Saoirse Ronan and Timothy Spall, it turned out, were in it as well.)

Where to begin with this movie? To start with the positive, I suppose, the art direction was superb, and the cinematography was pleasant (if not quite spectacular). Pearce does a lot of acting, much of it very interesting, and the other three gamely give it their best.

The fundamental problem is the screenplay.  It begins pleasant, but cliché: a plucky young Scottish girl (Ronan) and her mother (Zeta-Jones) are down-and-out entertainers, posing as psychics in low-budget vaudeville style shows. As an aside, asking an audience to ever believe Zeta-Jones is “down-and-out” is a bit of a stretch, though she does well enough with the accent that “Scottish” isn’t laughable. When Harry Houdini comes to town, Zeta-Jones’ character angles to get the money he offers for proof of genuine supernatural contact with the dead.

So far, so predictable. Ronan is aggressively adorable, Pearce and Zeta-Jones make eyes at one another, and Spall is Houdini’s disapproving manager/agent/assistant… it doesn’t really matter. Pearce sells Houdini as a consummate performer, haunted by his own private demons, and in a different movie could have been quite interesting. Up until this point, very average. There’s not much chemistry in the romance, and things seem to be moving in a very foreseeable direction.

Suddenly, though, almost out of the blue, it’s revealed that Zeta-Jones looks very much like Houdini’s (dead) mother did when she was young. The same dead mother he’s trying to contact. The same dead mother WHOSE WEDDING DRESS HE KEEPS IN A LOCKED TRUNK, creepy.

The same dead mother whose wedding dress he makes Zeta-Jones wear at a public séance. For science! But just when you think he’s about to go all Norman Bates on us, Ronan – whose awkward voice-overs don’t do the movie any favors – has an actual psychic experience, all Little Boy in Ragtime style, throwing the séance into chaos and, presumably, throwing us firmly into an alternate reality, as this would have made some headlines.

That’s fine. It’s historical fiction, and at this point, the creepy movie with a fantastical element was much more interesting than anything that preceeded it. By taking a turn for the macabre and the bizarre, I had hopes that Death Defying Acts would redeem itself. (It even has a near-silent but Hamlet-esque moment where Houdini contemplates suicide following the revelation that he wasn’t there when his mother died.)

But then the story fumbles in the final 15 minutes. Houdini comes to their little hut (in the graveyard), and we endure 10 minutes of terrible dialogue, 2 minutes of unsexy, PG-13 fumbling, and Zeta-Jones’ beautiful tears as Houdini drives off into the sunset. Ronan goes on about losing her psychic ability as she grew up, as Houdini is sucker-punched to death, and it’s all a bit of a trainwreck.

My friend and I theorized that, of the two screenwriters listed on the credits, one wrote the original, bad script, and one tried to fix it, but only really succeeded with a few scenes in and around the séance. We can’t know, of course. But the acting, the costumes, and the general design couldn’t save this from becoming a hot mess, in which a terrible ending dragged down even the likable parts of the beginning.

The real shame of it is that some of the elements of this could have been an excellent movie.  But wasting A talent on D material does no one any favors.

Grade: C- Despite Pearce’s good work and lovely visuals, the storytelling is deeply flawed.

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March 1, 2011 · 9:10 pm

The Best of Intentions

I haven’t seen Tron: Legacy yet.

This is not a tragedy, but I do regret it, a bit. I may, in fact, go see it by myself in theaters. Why? Because I’ve been told that if I plan to see it at all, it’s worth seeing 3D (and possibly IMAX, if I’m willing to spend 20 bucks on Tron.)

I’ve done this before. A year ago, no one particularly wanted to go see Avatar by the time I was in a position to see it, but I plunked down the cash and saw it in Imax-3D by myself. And I’m glad I did; the films’ merits were best showcased by the format, and I don’t think I’d have appreciated it as fully watching the Netflix DVD or, perhaps worse but more likely, streaming it over my variably reliable wireless connection.

This is not to say I’m a 3D nut: quite the contrary. I’ve been vociferous in my disapproval for retroactively added 3D – one of the worst things about the terrible Last Airbender was the washed-out, poorly-rendered 3D effects, and it really added nothing to Alice in Wonderland for me.

However, there is a difference for me between a film shot in 3D, and a film that the studios are trying to milk for extra cash. It’s not that the former is always good, but I will pause and seriously consider paying more for the in-theater, 3D experience.

It boils down to directorial intentions.

Now, as a former literature student, I know that authorial intentions are a contested subject, and film studies seem to be no different, from my more limited experience.  We can’t know what a filmmaker was thinking, shot for shot. Even in the age of interviews and the ubiquity of directors’ commentaries, artists are often uninteresting or flat out wrong about their own work.

That said, however, I do think artists – including filmmakers – should be able to show their work to best effect.

Of course, this is a pipe dream, in some ways. Especially for Hollywood films, they are as much or more product than art, and repackaging is par for the course. Colorization, the process of adding color to film originally shot in black and white, is generally frowned upon by film critics, but often undertaken by studios hoping to reach an audience who might avoid older films without it. Though I understand wanting to open a film to a broader audience, the director and the cinematographer made choices of composition and lighting based on the monochrome format.  Including a colorized version on a DVD is one thing, but I am nothing but sympathetic in cases like John Houston’s, regarding broadcasting or re-releasing a colorized film.

In some ways, the DVD has been a boon, in that it has allowed for the option of including both (as my copy of Miracle on 34th Street does). The combination of DVDs and wide-screen TVs has also done great things to popularize letterboxing. (I had the worst time convincing one of my aunts that I wanted letterboxed DVDs when I asked for movies as gifts.) Many sets will include both versions, but formatting for a square screen is slowly fading out, which is just as well for me. Pan-and-scan, as cropping for fullscreen was often called, seldom took composition or framing into account.

There’s certainly a contingent of viewers who feel like this fuss about colorization or aspect ratios or composition is a tempest in a teakettle. After all, many viewers grew up exposed to films on square TVs, cut with commercials, edited for time and content. The good films hold up, for the most part, and who cares about the bad ones?

But the truth is that films that deserve serious consideration deserve to be seen the way the filmmaker intended. This isn’t always possible, of course; not everyone can afford a state-of-the-art home cinema, or to see every movie they watch in the theater. But it pays to take the effort to get close, when given a choice.  As for the less-than-serious films, that’s up to the viewer. I’ll eventually see Rabbit Hole at home, and be no worse off for it, but the enjoyment I got from Iron Man 2 would have been partly lost, watching it at home.

So, since I do intend to eventually see Tron: Legacy out of my deep childhood affection for the original, I really should get my act together and go out this weekend. If I’m going to like it, I should try it at its best. That’s all a filmmaker can ask.

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February 24, 2011 · 11:41 pm

District 9

I’d meant to see District 9 for quite a while (since before it was up for Best Picture in last year’s Oscars), but only got around to it recently. Sci-fi with a political bent sounded up my alley, but it was just never the right time to see it.

Thus, I expected the political underpinnings. I went in knowing a fair bit about what critics had said, just by osmosis. But what shocked me most was the horror aspect of the film.

There’s something intrinsically terrible about the idea of your own body betraying you. This doesn’t only come up in science fiction, of course, but it’s a good arena to explore it on a more extended scale. (See Alien, for example, or even any good werewolf movie.)   The loss of control and familiarity is bad enough, but it also raises questions of the very nature of one’s selfhood.  As such, it suits this film quite well.

But before it gets there, the film wrenches you through a much more visceral sequence of events. The transformation is much worse than, say, a werewolf’s, for a few reasons. First, it’s slow. It presents more like a disease that we’re familiar with than anything magical, and that’s unsettling. Second, it’s repugnant because of the insect-like elements, which are as far from what we think of as “human” as you can get within the animal kingdom. (Insert Kafka joke here.)

Third, there’s the governmental aspect. It’s not so much a conspiracy theory as a reflection of a very believable way that the government might react (especially in the portion of the film before it becomes an extended action sequence). There’s a sort of cold logic to the government’s actions that is unsettling because it is so plausible.

I do have to give credit to Sharlto Copely , for a nuanced performance as Wikus, the film’s anti-hero. He’s not afraid to be cowardly, selfish and unattractive in a variety of ways, and I liked that fear didn’t immediately turn him into a noble champion of the alien cause. He wants his life back, and is willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that outcome.  This isn’t Enemy Mine, and though Wikus and the alien Christopher do develop a rapport, there isn’t time to develop it as far as it might go.

As a film, the gritty style served the tone very well, but my personal preference wouldn’t be for a full mock documentary style. It helps with exposition, but on the other hand, it introduces the question of who and where the cameraman is to the audience’s mind. There are certain sequences that lapse out of documentary and more into traditional narrative film, which was necessary for the plot, but I still found it a bit jarring.

The effects were quite good (the transition for Wikus especially), and the plot moved at a nice clip.  For his first feature film, Neill Blomkamp shows solid directing instincts, though when I found out that District 9 was expanded from a short film, I wasn’t entirely surprised. There’s a sense that the premise is the movie, in many ways, and it struggles now and then with the tension between the plot and the concept.

That said, District 9 was a solid effort, and worth seeing if you’re interested in science fiction, though it’s not a film I’d recommend to everyone. The moral gets a bit heavy-handed toward the end, and the narrative unfolds without a great deal of nuance, but it’s a solid story with good acting and effects.

Grade: B- A rather average plot with solid production values, decent directing, and good acting. Worth a watch.

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February 17, 2011 · 6:45 pm

Winter’s Bone

I had intended to see Winter’s Bone for a long time, and some video credit at Amazon.com finally gave me the nudge. I’m very glad I finally did; it’s an excellent film, and it well-deserves the accolades it’s received. Going in, I knew very little about it, except that it was a small, independent production, and that the acting was apparently very good.

Winter’s Bone is a hard movie to classify.  Oddly (or not), it reminded me most of Chinatown, in many ways, but mainly in the protagonist’s determination to find out what she needs to know, in the face of the clear knowledge it would be safer for her to leave it alone. Though it’s strange to think of a film with a starkly rural setting as noir, its ambivalent morality, unflinching protagonist, crime-laced plot and claustrophobic atmosphere would certainly push it in that direction for me.

Regardless of how you label it (or choose not to), the film is grippingly made. Its pace is slow, yet deliberate, and contributes to a sense of dread and hopelessness which ebbs and flows but never evaporates. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is smart, stubborn and resourceful; on the other hand, at 17, she is often over her head, and left without recourse when she’s opposed by people who dismiss her for both her age and her gender. She’s easy to root for, and her emotions are clearly present, but tightly guarded.

John Hawkes, as Ree’s Uncle Teardrop, similarly gives a raw and naturalistic performance. Whenever he’s onscreen, he was worth watching sharply, building his performance on small details and nuance.

I would love to rewatch this movie on a screen better suited to it than my laptop, but even with the limitations I had, the composition and filming were dynamic and interesting. (I’m not sure if it’s Amazon’s fault, or my video card, but the contrast was hard to get just right, and the resolution was  bit fuzzy, even though I downloaded the film rather than streaming it.) The film was not afraid of lighting highs and lows, and director Debra Granik creates a very present sense of space. The setting seems both empty and cluttered, and the cold pervades as a motif leading up to what I would argue is the film’s climax.

It is something of a hat trick to make a film so unrelentingly bleak that leaves the viewer with a sense of hope, but Granik does manage it. Despite the fact that my predominant emotion during the film was something between fascination and dread, I was left oddly optimistic about Ree and her family, despite the huge challenges still left to them.

Winter’s Bone is an excellent argument in favor of the 10-slot Best Picture nomination rule change, a much better one than, say, An Education or District 9 (review forthcoming).  This film is truly excellent, beyond its standout acting or beyond an intriguing concept. Because of the sort of film it is, there’s no real chance it will win, but the nomination may find it a new audience, and is a way of recognizing an achievement that’s less conventional awards fodder than, say, The King’s Speech (much as I liked that movie as well).

With its dark story, intriguing visuals, and riveting performances, Winter’s Bone is well worth seeing, and I suspect would reward a second view richly.

Grade: A- Though I can understand how some might find the pace a bit slow, I felt it suited the film, and overall everything worked for me.

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February 3, 2011 · 8:48 pm

The Wolfman (2010)

There’s no two ways about it; 2010’s The Wolfman is a terrible movie.

I’ve now seen it twice, willingly both times.

It isn’t that the film has no merits. Given the hell of preproduction, it’s easy to see how this could have been a tribute to the classic horror films, evoking them while doing something new. Even now, it is beautifully shot and art directed, almost sumptuously so; Hugo Weaving is fun, Anthony Hopkins underplays so much he’s almost deadpan, and Emily Blunt actresses her way gamely through the movie. Even Benicio del Toro, bizarre casting choice as he is, gives the tortured victim protagonist as sturdy a foundation as he can manage.

And a lot of the film, like Danny Elfman’s score, is serviceable, if not remarkable in any way. Much of The Wolfman is fine. The special effects are not mind-blowing, but get the job done, and the humorous gore is especially nicely handled.

The story, however, is a hot mess. (More of that in a moment.) What redeems the whole is that the good elements are good enough to keep the film from being painful, but not so good they feel wasted. Instead, we’re left with a worse than average werewolf movie that is perhaps an exemplary case of “fun-bad.” Best watched with a friend or two, and maybe some alcohol, it’s the sort of movie where the ridiculousness mounts in such a way that you can’t help but laugh.

There’s a place for movies like this. It can be incredibly freeing to watch a movie you know will be bad. There’s no pressure to engage with it. You lose nothing if you’re distracted by the pizza arriving, or you and your friend get involved in a digression about Emily Blunt’s film career or other werewolf movies. And since you were never expecting it to be good, it’s hard to be disappointed.

I’m not arguing that filmmakers should set out, intentionally, to make bad films. (The results of that are mixed at best.) I’m simply drawing a distinction between those that “fall with style” and those that just lie there, a broken heap.

The Wolfman starts out a little silly, but well enough. Pretty much everything after the protagonist’s first transformation, though, ceases to make much sense. Around the last act, the movie gives up on any sort of narrative through-line; characters appear places for no good reason, new characters are introduced to be killed almost instantly (goodbye, handsome nameless deputy), Hopkins’ character has no motivation except “BE EVIL,” and Emily Blunt’s character just loses any sense of direction at all.

That said, there are some spectacular and entertaining deaths, there’s a lot of fire, and after a slow middle, the film ends at a pretty good clip. It’s at its best when it skips the romance and the soul-searching, and leans on the very horror clichés that, once upon a time, it meant to do homage. When it’s melodramatic and larger-than-life, the movie manages to compliment, if not match, its artistic backdrop. With a sturdier script, and probably a different lead (though del Toro does his best), this could have been a solid B Movie effort.

Instead, largely because of plot and dialogue, it’s fairly terrible. But it fails with style, and if horror/fantasy happens to be the genre that your tolerance is for, it manages to be a lot of fun.

Grade: C+ How pretty a movie it is pushes it a bit higher than it might have been, enjoyment aside; Hugo Weaving is also worthwhile, and should do more in this mode.

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February 1, 2011 · 8:14 pm

Rocks Fall, Everyone Might Die

Whiy yes, I did just completely forget to post a film review last Thursday. Well done me. Schedule resuming normally this week. Also, spoiler-phobes, be warned that the end of several films (including Toy Story 3) are discussed below.

When an artist, or a viewer, knows that a film will be the last in a series, they suddenly have license to raise the stakes in a way they couldn’t before. One of the biggest reasons it’s hard to create stakes in an ongoing series is a certain reluctance on the part of the creators to either put major characters in enough jeopardy that the audience believes they’re actually in danger, or to invest in more than one or two characters in the first place. The former problem is one that Western comic books often face; the latter is closer to a James Bond scenario, where supporting players come and go and are largely interchangeable.

Stakes, however, are about more than the logical knowledge that a character might or might not die. And Pixar used this knowledge, more than anything else, to create a terrifying sequence in Toy Story 3. Even though it’s the end of the series, and so one or two characters might be lost, I doubt anyone would really believe that the movie would kill all of the main characters at a go outside the context of the shot.  As the toys head toward incineration, a small part of your brain knows something will stop it. But when you trust a filmmaker, as an audience member, you also trust that bad things could really happen. (I could not get over the fact that Disney’s The Princess and the Frog actually killed its comic relief.)

For my generation, I don’t think things were ever the same, movie-wise, after Mufasa’s death. All bets were off, at that point, and it was the first time many of us lucky to have our parents imagined what it would be like to lose one of them.

This is not to say that killing or threatening to kill beloved characters is the only way to create stakes. In Inception, it’s established very early that killing someone in a dream just wakes them up. Though pain is on the table, there’s a safety net in place. But by the introduction of limbo, Christopher Nolan cleverly removes that safety net without violating the premise. Your body can’t die in a dream, but go too deeply, and the mind can get trapped. It’s terrifying, and at the same time supports the greater story he’s trying to tell.

Stakes can go awry, however. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is 2/3 of an excellent movie, but the last act disintegrates.  In part, I feel it’s because it veers away from why it’s so important for the characters to be where they are in the first place. It’s not just their own lives they’re fighting for, but the survival of the planet. The points at which the film is most grounded are those where their struggle is reset in this context; when it’s veers too close to a locked-room horror movie, it gets silly.

Sometimes the first film in a series can have good stakes because it isn’t clear that it’s going to be a series. Obviously, Harry won’t die in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; even if you haven’t read the books, that’s going to be apparent. In the first Matrix movie, on the other hand, it wasn’t evident that any character was or wasn’t safe, and it gave the film’s dangers an added sense of urgency. As with Inception, a world with different rules is still made one with very real and dangerous consequences.

In film, then, as in many story telling media, stakes are the foundation of, and grow out of, solid storytelling technique. Characters must stand at risk of losing something, as concrete as the screenwriters’ clichéd “glass of water” or as intangible as their lover’s affection. There’s a special sort of intensity, however, that comes from the danger of death, either for oneself or someone else. The climax of The Dark Knight has to do, at first blush, with the lives of a great many strangers. In the end, it boils down to the life of Gordon’s son.  By tracking who stands to lose what, you can see where the weight of the film’s emotion falls.

That said, film as a visual medium also has to consider artistic perspectives when making these choices, consistent with the film’s style and tone. The lighting, in the example of Toy Story 3, is a large and memorable part of the scene. Music can be helpful too, though it can risk veering into narm territory if it’s too over-the-top or directly manipulative. There’s a line between drama and melodrama, after all.

Watching a bunch of toys, however, bravely take each other’s hands as they stare death in the face is moving because we’ve invested in the characters, because the threat is real, and because the world of the film allows for the possibility that they might be right in believing they won’t make it.  The film takes the threat seriously, so the audience can too. It develops characters (it’s meaningful that Buzz starts it, and Woody finishes) and it also serves as an emotional punch that the plot has developed toward, not simply a twist for shock’s sake.

Pixar is so successful because it gets these sort of fundamentals right. A lot of Hollywood offerings could stand to take notes.

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January 25, 2011 · 8:11 pm

Oscar Nominees 2010

I don’t know if it was just a better year for movies or if the frontrunners were just obvious earlier, but this year’s nominations seem both predictable and hard to quibble with. The Academy, for the most part, seems to have acknowledged well-made films, if not much off the beaten track. I have seen five of the ten Best Picture nominees so far, and have Winter’s Bone downloaded from Amazon previously. That leaves me four to get myself to before the show – I might actually be able to do that.

As I’ve gotten older, and learned more and more about the Academy, I am less mentally on board with the Oscars. They’re petty, and based on popularity, and all the other complaints that get trotted out every year. Sure. (And they have terrible taste in music: Best Song is almost always a travesty.)

But emotionally, I can’t quite let them go. Part is nostalgia; my father and I both love film, and he and I used to pick apart the nominations and then watch the show together, while largely ignoring the SAG Awards, the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, etc. These award shows were always firmly in the “useful in as far as they help you predict the Oscars” category for me as a child.

And I have to say, I love the schmaltz, to a point. I grew up in the golden Billy Crystal years (his Titanic send-up to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme will always be timeless to me). And though the post-Crystal hosts have been uneven, seeing everyone dressed to the nines, seeing the little montages interspersed throughout the evening, the occasional Adrien-Brody-kisses-Halle-Berry moment… they’re all fun, and as long as I have the distance to treat them that way, I try not to get too bent out of shape.

(My father, to this day can’t watch The Sound of Music without angrily commenting that Doctor Zhivago was ROBBED.)

So while everyone and their mom knows that Hailee Steinfeld was in no way a supporting actress, or that all but one of the Best Actor slots were basically locked even before the nominations were announced, or that Natalie Portman is an all but sure thing, I can’t quit the Oscars altogether. Partly because it’s a link back to movie history, even if the Hollywood machine, political side of it, and partly because I am still at heart one of the little girls practicing her acceptance speech with a shampoo bottle. (Though after last year, I felt less self-conscious about the fact that my imaginary award changed from actress to director when I was 15 or so.)

Comments on the Best Picture nominees I’ve seen: reviews for True Grit and Black Swan are up.

Inception was my personal favorite film last year, but I don’t know that it was the best, necessarily; also, given the type of film it is, it has no shot at winning. It is nice, though, to see it get a nomination, and I think this year showed nicely that there were ten films worth recognizing.

Toy Story 3 was an excellent, heart-wrenching film, and while the Toy Story franchise is not necessarily my favorite part of Pixar, it’s hard to find flaws with it. Again, not going to win, but we’ll see how many years in a row Pixar gets a nomination. (And an easy lock for Best Animated Feature.)

The Kids Are All Right struck me as a movie with some phenomenal acting, but that would have been critically unremarkable if not for the genders of the three leads. I’m not saying it was a bad film, because it wasn’t, and I quite liked both Annette Benning and Mark Ruffalo in it, but the screenplay was a bit “eh” to me. I am all for more mainstream, loving depictions of non-heterosexual, cis-gendered couples in which their sexuality is not a huge deal; I just don’t expect the movie to be patted on the back for that alone.

I am very much looking forward to Winter’s Bone. More word on that once I watch it.

And, finally, on a side note, I was glad to see the Coens get an unexpected nod for Direction, even if I do mourn that it probably knocked Chris Nolan out. Both True Grit and Inception were so-well directed it seems a crime to ignore either.

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January 21, 2011 · 7:19 am

Black Swan

I was not surprised that Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan was a horror movie. I was surprised, however, that it was more or less only a horror movie. From the ads and the bit of critical response I read, I expected something more Yellow Wallpaper-y; a Gaslight style “is she crazy or isn’t she?” psycho-thriller.

The film however, commits early and rather explicitly to the idea that Natalie Portman’s Nina is crazy. The word “nightmarish” has been thrown around, and not without reason. The film has a dreamy sort of logic (or lack thereof) and creates a sense of claustrophobia as we see Nina going farther and farther into her own obsession and paranoia.

I love Swan Lake, and its presence in the film is gorgeously done. Though Nina is problematic, as I’ll discuss in a moment, Natalie Portman does well with what she’s given to work with, for the most part – she’s a little too trembly and whispery, but she does a lot of great nonverbal work. The supporting cast is excellent; Vincent Cassel is creepy, Barbara Hershey is a bit “mommie dearest” but mostly good, and I was pleasantly surprised by Mila Kunis.

There are some really visceral moments in the movie, which I won’t spoil here, but it really does succeed in being scary, at least for me. But the excellent execution can’t, for me, completely erase the underlying issues with the screenplay.

It’s not that I can’t enjoy movies if they have a less than enlightened view of gender – I am a James Bond fan, after all – but in Black Swan, the Madonna/whore dichotomy isn’t examined or undermined. It simply sits there, almost assumed. The repressed, virginal Nina can’t explore her sexuality without going from brittle to shattered; and while I thought that the film might eventually make a statement that violence, not sexuality, was the true darkness Nina is reaching for, all the actual violence in the film is directed inward. The self is the woman’s only possible target in this film, not just for Nina, but generally.

What frustrated me about Black Swan was that, with all sorts of fantastic elements working for it, I felt like the viewer knew oddly little about Nina, considering we’ve been trapped inside her mind the entire time.  She isn’t much except a frame to display neuroses, and while she could work as a character in a different film, the center of this one feels oddly hollow.

While watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think of two other films that clearly had to be influences and, sadly, both stand a bit better on their own for me.  The first is the 1948 film The Red Shoes, which explores the tension and the tragedy of being driven to sacrifice any sort of personal happiness to attain artistic perfection. Vicky Page, the protagonist of that film, is just as haunted as Nina, but is the more tragic because she isn’t crazy. She is caught between art and personal happiness in a way that’s almost simplistic to the point of being archetypal.  It’s a little dated, but still a good watch.

The other film, which has a much closer stylistic kinship to Black Swan, is Carlos Saura’s 1983 Carmen. The mixture of dance and plot is similar, with the dancers’ story echoing that of the piece they’re mounting.  Also like Black Swan, the dance is the center of the story, weaving in and out but always drawing the characters and the viewer back in. However, the inter-character tension is all too real, and the way that the story mirrors life is both more direct and less heavy-handed. We don’t need the choreographer to explain the significance of the dance’s story; it becomes self-evident throughout the film, even if a viewer wasn’t familiar with the story of Carmen.

On the whole, I wasn’t sorry to see Black Swan, but I felt it was a squandered opportunity to explore some interesting themes in favor of just being creepy and shocking. There’s nothing wrong with either of those, but the film is very formulaic about female insanity in a way that is sometimes almost condescending.

Grade B – Well executed, but in need of a firmer, more thoughtful foundation.

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January 18, 2011 · 10:16 pm

What to Watch Tonight

I have about half of a thoughtful meta entry written, but it just didn’t happen. New review this Thursday though – I can promise that.  In the meanwhile, three more recommendations! All available to stream on Netflix, but worth hunting down for those of you without.

Yes, I know I just did one of these.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) –
The original, and still one of the best science fiction films ever made. Its plot is simple, almost fable-like, but like a lot of good alien stories, allows us the illusion of looking at humanity from the outside. The effects hold up decently well, considering the production year, and you get all kinds of nerd cred once you know what “Klaatu barada nikto” means.

The real interest, though in The Day the Earth Stood Still, is the way in which it takes all sorts of tropes and devices that fill the crappy, MST3K-fodder films of the period, and weaves them into a solid, thoughtful story. The moralizing may seem a bit heavy-handed to a modern viewer, but it serves as a nice bookend to 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a Cold War-era cautionary tale.

Blazing Saddles (1974) –
With True Grit poised to nab several Oscar nominations, following the success of a variety of Westerns and neo-Westerns in the past few years, it’s safe to say there’s a renewed interest in the genre. Which is great, as it means more people can appreciate the brilliance that is Blazing Saddles. For my money, it’s one of the funniest movies ever, with the bonus of actually functioning (for 2/3 of the movie, at least) as an example of the genre. (Good parody is funny because it’s true.)

Gene Wilder is brilliant as ever, and Cleavon Little is amazing in the starring role. Madeline Kahn is always worth watching, and the writing is some of Mel Brooks’ very best. If you haven’t seen it, treat yourself, and if you have… treat yourself again. It’s the rare comedy that rewards close re-viewings, but this is one of them.

Star Trek (2009) –
The most recent installment in the Star Trek franchise shows what a good reboot can do. You do enough homage to the original to keep most of your existing fanbase, but you make the huge mythology re-accessable to newbies who might be scared off normally. J.J. Abrams crafts a beautiful popcorn movie, gleefully using and reusing the conventions of space opera while at the same time keeping the film grounded in its franchise.

All the casting is very good – Zachary Quinto is a standout as Spock, but I love Karl Urban’s McCoy. The cinematography gets a little lens-flare happy, as you might have heard, but also isn’t afraid to show off its big-budget effects in ways that actually move the plot forward. Michael Giacchino’s score is also a thing of beauty. Much fun.

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January 6, 2011 · 7:57 pm

True Grit

Remaking True Grit seemed to be a silly idea, on first blush. It’s acclaimed one of the greatest Westerns ever, featuring John Wayne at the top of his game in an Oscar-winning performance. But if anyone was going to do it, the Cohen brothers were a team to raise relatively fewer eyebrows.

Though I’ve seen the original, it has been many years, and I don’t feel comfortable comparing the two effectively without a fresher memory. That said, this True Grit has the feel of a Cohen brothers film right through, and that is both its greatest strength and its biggest weak point.

All the acting is excellent. Jeff Bridges salutes Wayne while making Cogburn his own. Matt Damon and Hailee Steinfeld are both pitch-perfect, delivering the stiff, pseudo-biblical dialogue as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It is Cogburn, not the young Mattie Ross, who seems a bit out of place in his speech, which shifts the alienation to the marshal more fully. The emotional connections are still genuine, however – I was moved by the scene where Mattie begs to go with LaBoeuf (Damon) and the ending was nicely played.

The filming is also, as you’d expect from the Cohen, superb.  Many shots memorably frame themselves, from Mattie entering the boarding house (past a lazily smoking Texas ranger), to the surreal image of a bear riding a horse out of a snowy grove of trees.  The emotional underscoring is also cleverly done; the use of horses to make people look up or down at one another was understated but canny, and the lighting is always more or less natural, but suits the tone of both individual scenes and the film as a whole.

In the Cohen brothers’ films, at least the ones I’ve seen, there’s a recurring sense of emptiness that arises when characters get what they think they want. Though it’s most notable in Fargo, it turns up in films as evidently different as O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading. This film is no exception. It’s never spelled out, but when Mattie gets the revenge she’s after, it doesn’t give her present or eventual satisfaction as far as the viewer can tell. The sorrow of a revenge that doesn’t heal is a subtle undertone of the entire film.

I liked this element of the movie, but the emptiness at the heart of True Grit left some lagging moments on the journey to get there. The pace was variable, and sometimes left me wondering why it lingered or where it was going.  Building character was clearly one of the movie’s greatest concerns, but it also left the plot to start and go as necessary.

This is also completely me, not the film, but the choice of “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms” for the main musical motif distracted me, because all I could think of was Night of the Hunter. The hymn will never be anything but creepy for me.

Iris DeMent does a nice job on the credits version, irony of the choice aside, but it threw me out of the film when it turned up in the score.

Regardless, the film was mostly solid, and did a good job of creating tension and tracing character growth within a relatively slow-moving story.

Grade: B+ Though the pace needed some work, high quality elements combined to make this a compelling and worthwhile film.

 

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January 4, 2011 · 8:13 pm

What To Watch Tonight

Brief ones tonight, but no less recommended than usual. All available to stream.

The 39 Steps (1935) –
Early Hitchcock is still awesome Hitchcock. Reminiscent of North By Northwest (among others) in the way a normal man is drawn into a situation that’s anything but. The atmosphere is creepy, the mystery is intriguing, and the cast (none of whom you’re likely to recognize) do an excellent job. (Even if all I can think of is the Sesame Street sketch.) It’s also only 86 minutes, for those looking for something a bit on the shorter side.

Enemy Mine (1985) –
This is one of my very favorite sci fi movies; it deserves much more attention than it gets. Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset Jr. are spot on as stranded soldiers from opposing sides forced to survive together. Sure, it’s filed with tropes, but it does them thoughtfully and to good effect. The effects are a little dated, but it’s a movie that isn’t about effects so much as concepts. The differences in Draconian and human cultures (and biologies), while glossed, are still intriguingly handled, and even where the movie doesn’t succeed, it tries in interesting ways.

The Fall (2006) –
Please, please watch The Fall. Every rewatch has been incredibly rewarding, but even the first one was enjoyable. The Fall tells the story of an injured stuntman (Lee Pace) and his relationship with a little girl (the astoundingly good Catinca Untaru) as they both heal in a California hospital in the 1920s. The visuals are unbelievably lush, the storytelling (both meta and not) is engrossing, and it marries a sense of fable to a very grounded emotional core. Also, effective use of Beethoven. Gorgeous.

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December 30, 2010 · 7:47 pm

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

I saw The Adventures of Baron Munchausen once as a young child, and remembered almost nothing about it upon reviewing. Certain images struck me, however, here and there: Oh, yes, this is familiar. I sort of remember this. Terry Gilliam’s films are often called dream-like, and this sense is certainly underlined when one is seen through the lens of half-familiarity.

That said, Baron Munchausen is very entertaining from start to finish and doesn’t suffer from the weird devolution that plagues the end of the otherwise very good Time Bandits.  It feels, however, more like a companion piece to the more recent Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. There are the obvious bits he steals from himself; both movies open with a show, and there’s the blending of theatre with reality that underpins both.

Munhausen, however, is mostly light and stays comedic throughout, even in its darker moments. There are plenty of those, though. The friend with whom I was watching commented that, as a child the Angel of Death figure scared her… well, I was going to say “to death,” but you get the idea.

Good old nightmare fuel.

That is totally fair, of course. The ship of despair inside the sea monster is, in many ways, equally unsettling. And even Jonathan Pryce’s turn as the petty tyrant Horatio Jackson is sobering in its way – he doesn’t let you write him off as a ridiculous figure, as much as you would like to.

Amid those elements however, there are some generally hilarious bits. The sultan’s “opera” had me beside myself, and Robin William’s bizarre appearance as The King of the Moon is predictably but enjoyably nutty.  And the dialogue is strange but fun, reflecting the tales that serve as the foundation of the movie.

One of the highlights of the film is a tiny Sarah Polley as Sally Salt. Sally manages to be neither precious or unrealistic, but is a strong character in her own right. Her endless eyerolling at the stupidity of adults is spot on, and her stubbornness keeps the plot moving in a very organic way. Sally has an almost Roald Dahl-ish quality to her, and serves as a perfect foil for the freewheeling titular character.

The art direction is also worth noting (it was Oscar-nominated, though it lost to Tim Burton’s Batman). The sets and costumes establish a fantastical realm that still stays connected to the characters. Even the movie’s “real world” has a stylized element to it, blurring the line between fantasy and reality pleasantly and at will. Having actors from the initial troupe of traveling players turn up as characters later, perhaps most notably with a young Uma Thurman, gives the film a resonance and a through line it might otherwise struggle for.

I love stories about stories.  The Fall, Big Fish, even Stranger Than Fiction are all some of my favorites, and it was great to re-discover Baron Munchausen in all its quirks. It’s broad, but it’s meant to be, and it succeeds at entertaining throughout.

Grade: B+ A pleasant and funny fantasy that doesn’t mind breaking some rules, but mainly aims to please.

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