You Talking to Me?

Filmic Measures: The Dinner Table Rule

2012-02-14T09:46:00.000-08:00

The Dinner Table Rule came about many long years ago when I was writing a review for the forgettable Owen Wilson/Matt Dillon/Kate Hudson comedy You, Me & Dupree. In the closing paragraph of said review I noted that I thought in order for mainstream comedies to work they have to feature characters who you'd feel comfortable enough inviting into your home to sit at your Dinner table. "I wouldn't invite Dupree to my table," I wrote. "I don't know if he'd make it or burn it down."

Then, yesterday, when writing about Bad Teacher, I remembered the dinner table rule again. I wouldn't invite Cameron Diaz's Elizabeth to my table either. She's too selfish and self centered. She'd simply take advantage. Now think of the comparison I made for that movie with Bad Santa. I'd be more than happy to have Billy Bob Thorton's Willy over for dinner. There's a lot of things I'd like to ask him about. There is, after all, something kind of morbidly sweet in the affection he feels for the kid who presents him with a wooden pickle covered in his own blood for Christmas.

You see the Dinner Table Rule doesn't necessarily mean that you like the person you'd invite over (although it helps). It means that there has to be enough human depth presented in a character to intrigue you to want to learn more. Thorton isn't a nice guy in Bad Santa, but he's not a bad guy either, just a bum who's never had an outlet to give a damn about anything before. He is, in his own special way, still capable of good. I'd like to talk to him about that.

But Dupree was a lose cannon and Matt Dillon's affection for him was inexplicable; screwing up everything he touched. Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher simply exploited every situation she was faced with for her own personal gain; and if any of those old hags from Sex and the City ever come around my neighbourhood I'm putting the whole house on lock down.

But how fun would it be to sit down with Emma Stone in Easy A or just about every movie she's been in, or Ryan Gosling from Crazy Stupid Love, Steve Carell from Dan in Real Life or even Jason Biggs from American Pie? Would anyone reject the opportunity to sit down for a meal with any character from John Hughes' classic 80s teen comedies? And let me tell you, if Loyld Dobler from Say Anything ever swung by I'm not sure I'd ever let him leave.

The point is is that a dinner is personal, it's to be shared with people we known and who interest us. We don't let any random stranger off the street into our house. We invite the people over who we want to share an intimate setting with where we can engage in fun banter as well as get to know each other better. The characters thus, that we would invite over, are the ones who have connected with something in us on the human level. We see some of ourselves in them and they've shared something personal with us through their respective films. We want to know more, maybe even be friends.

That's what mainstream comedy needs. It needs to feel like we are being invited into a world and sharing a comedic situation with someone we could see ourselves liking in real life. We want to see good things happening to good people because we're good people as well. We wouldn't invite over the hopeless cynics, the selfish morons or the guys just trying to get laid. Sure, Billy Bob might eat all the chocolate from the advent calender, try to find the hidden safe and take advantage of my kindness, but he would also not fail to get me the Christmas present that I want, even if it is covered in his own blood.

One Minute Review - Bad Teacher (1.5 out of 5)

2012-02-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

Bad Teacher is yet another example of Hollywood's fear of making adult movies for adult audiences. So what we have here is a sitcom, laced with f-bombs and other naughty expletives, cast with stars instead of actors to appeal to the widest market, which ultimately means the lowest common denominator. But the film doesn't work. It takes what should have been a very direct subject and tries to make it acceptable to as large an audience as possible, which also means, unfortunately, it isn't very funny.

The biggest fault is that, it's main character played by Cameron Diaz, isn't a good teacher to be sure, but she also isn't really all that bad either. But of course she isn't or Cameron Diaz wouldn't have been cast. Movies about unlikable people generally don't work as mainstream comedy. Look at Bad Santa, a film both as quirky as it is brutally and apologetically pitch black. That film revolved around a performance by an actor who wasn't afraid to play one mean SOB and it didn't try to appeal to anyone else. And so there's the problem: Bad Teacher is so focused on the "concept" that Diaz is playing a bad person that it fails to get personal with her badness and really expand it into a real character. As an idea, Bad Teacher potentially works. As a finished film it never seems to have gotten beyond the idea stage.

Top Ten Films of 2011

2012-02-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

Back when I started writing about movies, making these lists was my favorite part of the job. Now, all these years and so so many films later, they’re a pain. What do they prove? And, with so many people writing them all at the same time of the year, which ones do we read and which ones do we ignore? This thus, isn’t a list of the 10 best movies of the year but a list of the 10 movies I enjoyed most in 2011. That’s what every list is. No one knows the 10 best movies in a year because no one has seen every movie made in 2011. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.

So what stands out about 2011? It’s a year in which Hollywood went a little old school. They started reaching back into the past and pulling out old trends: action movies gave us character over explosions; romance gave us love over gimmickry; sci-fi gave us ideas over spectacle and homage became the new reboot. It’s just the start. There’s still a lot of work to do (Hollywood still doesn’t fully trust movies based on original ideas or that are aimed strictly to an adult audience), but we’re getting there and at the end of the day, my ten favourite films this year are more memorable, have more longevity and will probably be more likely to be rediscovered in the years to come than in the past several years.

Without any further adieu, the Honourable Mentions in no particular order:
Public Speaking, Winnebago Man, The Adjustment Bureau, My Dog Tulip, Source Code, Water for Elephants, Fast Five, Best Worst Movie, Buried, The Switch, Bridesmaids, Nowhere Boy, Flipped, Mesrine (both parts), Monsters, Catfish, Jack Goes Boating, Book of Eli, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Date Night, Made in Dagenham, Tangled, Fair Game, Looking for Eric, Biutiful, 50/50, Tron: Legacy, Essential Killing, The Rite, Disgrace, The Artist, Carlos, Hanna, Cyrus, Fish Tank, Horrible Bosses, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Pina

10. The Muppets – Both a tribute to the classic format of the Muppets variety show and a new entry into the Muppet movie series, The Muppets, for the first time in a long time, gets exactly right what made Jim Henson’s creations so special in the first place: personality. The Muppets rose above being simply felt and plastic because they possess qualities that the audience could see in themselves. Not much for plot (the Muppet movies never were) the movie is uproariously funny, exciting and is the rare family movie that will appeal as much to the kids discovering these characters for the first time as the parents who grew up with them the first time around.

9. Blue Valentine – An honest and unflinching look at a couple who got together young, didn’t know what to do for one another because they never matured into knowing what to do for themselves and now are married, unhappily and simply going through the motions one day at a time, trying simply trying to get by. A film that is unstylzed and uncluttered, it’s success hinges on the performances of its two leads and in Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling finds actors who are willing to put their scars on full display.

8. Take Shelter - We live in fear every day. That’s just the way life goes whether you realize it or not. We live in fear of disease, plagues, crimes, war, death, God, the realization that one day nature will probably destroy us all, that is, of course, if the earth doesn’t crash into the sun or another planet first. That’s how Curtis (Michael Shannon) lives his life in Jeff Nichols’ eerie and affecting drama Take Shelter. This is a film for our current times and yet is also quite, reflective and, in it’s own special way, biblical, leading up to a challenging conclusion that isn’t afraid to leave audiences with something to ponder on their way out.

7. Beginners – Not quite a drama and not quite a comedy, Mike Mills’ Beginners shies away from every opportunity to become no more than simply a quirky indie dramadey by alternating evenly between two time periods: one of joy and discovery and one of death and self-analysis. The movie encompasses a lot of what one could consider “themes” and yet never burdens itself with becoming about one of them. It’s the story of its characters, living their lives, on their own terms, the best way they can. Christopher Plummer, will win an Oscar for his performance here.

6. Midnight in Paris – Here is a film that proves it is okay to make something for a select audience and let it find them over time. Woody Allen writes and directs three separate love letters here: one to Paris, one to writing and one to the 1920s. It’s a smart and literate film for smart and literate people. It doesn’t belittle it’s subjects in order to appeal to a mass audience but respects them and pays tribute to them, all the while wrapping this up in a story that is warm and funny and, like Paris itself, eternal.

5. The Descendants – Alexander Payne has made a career out of making small movies on large canvasses. The Descendants is a quite and reflective film, so much so that it will take a while to sneak up on you and reveal its true impact. It’s a film about family and history and persevering that in the best way we know how. And Payne, known often as a satirist from his early work, has matured into one of America’s most generous humanists, allowing all of his character the depth and understanding they deserve while never passing judgement. Hawaii has never, in turns, looked so beautiful and yet so common on film.

4. Shame – A brutal film on a brutal subject. Michael Fassbender is fearless in his performance as an upper class New York sex addict. Director Steve McQueen is merciless in his unblinking honesty, never turning the camera away from the truth of the subject, following this character, not to his demise, but to his rock bottom, making the film even more intense and powerful in return.

3. Le Havre – Finnish master Aki Kaurismaki is at his warmest and most deadpan in Le Havre, a quite, offbeat and strangely funny look about two people who come into each others lives and help each other for the better. Simple descriptions do nothing to speak about the brilliance and uniqueness of Kaurismaki and his artistic voice. You haven’t seen another movie like this unless, of course, you’ve seen another Aki Kaurismaki movie, to take a line from Roger Ebert.

2. Hugo – Martin Scorsese makes what could very well be his most personal film. It is a grand family adventure unlike any Scorsese has made before that slowly and poignantly morphs into a love letter to the cinema and the value of preserving its past without any of the heavy-handedness that such a description could imply. No single film made me happier this year with its boundless wonder and joy than this one. A testament to the power that movies once held and the power of what they can still be.

1. Tree of Life – Some filmmakers used to set out to make masterpieces. Not anymore. Tree of Life is a rare jewel to be savoured and treasured as we explore it’s every nook and cranny and revel in the unravelling of its deepest mysteries. A film epic in scope and yet intimate in execution, it aims to do no less than tell the story of the creation of the universe revolving around the trials and tribulations of one southern family. But this is not just a film it is a poem, a prayer, a spiritual experience that reaches for profound highs and touches them all. A film to be ranked, in ambition and scope, among America’s greatest epic masterpieces such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mulholland Drive, Magnolia and so many more. There may never be another movie like this. Cherish it while it is here.

Pina (4 out of 5)

2012-01-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

One of the great special qualities of the movies is that they have the power to both allow us to look at familiar subjects in ways we haven’t quite seen them before or open us up to subjects that we wish to further explore. That’s the greatest asset of Wim Wender’s new film Pina, a tribute of sorts to the late German dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch which, like Bausch’s dancing itself, occupies that middle ground between documentary and performance art.

I have, in many reviews in the past, called for, at the very least, self-sufficiency in movies. Pina shows the value of such a trait. For those who are familiar with the influential talent and her work with the Wuppertal Tanztheater company, in Pina they will find a beautiful tribute, staged in such a tender and yet provocative way that only a master of images like Wenders could create. And for those who don’t know Bausch, Pina acts as the perfect portal through which to discover the strange, expressionist wonder of Bausch’s work in action.

Bausch occupied a space in dance that was just as much about performance art as it was about rhythm and movement. The film is largely comprised of Wenders recreating Bausch’s most famous performances, some of them on stage and some of them out on the streets, in trams, parks, escalators, etc.

One such performance includes one of Bausch’s most famous pieces Café Muller in which a cast of characters seem to wallow around the stage in a melancholic trance, crashing into tables and chairs until a surge of passion brings their bodies to life; and Rite of Spring in which the stage is completely covered in soil as groups of men and women cower from and then interact with one another in a mess of bodies and limbs seemingly strewn about at random.

The thing that strikes me most about Bausch, who, outside the staging of one of her dances in Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her, I have never been familiar with, is the way she used movement, not so much as a display of the beautiful possibilities of the human body but as a means of expressionism. Her dancers stagger about the stage, as if subdued within the troughs of a trance, held up by some unseen force until a surge of inspiration fills their body and sends them into a twisted explosion of movement. It is both startling and hypnotic.

There is, I suppose, no better man than Wenders for the job of staging Bausch’s work (in 3D no less). Wenders, a wildly gifted and consistently inconsistent filmmaker, is, first and foremost, a visual artist. His most successful films follow not subjects but ideas, which he is able to wrap into the visual landscape of his setting. His Wings of Desire followed a pair of philosophizing angels as they walked around Berlin, looking down on the city’s inhabitants, watching them as they make deep and important decisions and observations. And his Paris, Texas followed a man who couldn’t remember who he was, through the desert as he pieced his life back together.

Documentaries have always been a weak point for Wenders though, who would rather dress a subject up than simply observe it in action. His Buena Vista Social Club charted the making of a great album but also undermined it as his camera spun endlessly this way and that, making the film more about the aesthetic quality of its making and less about its subject, and his Notebooks on Cities and Clothes couldn’t quite decide if it was documentary or university art school project.

Wenders, in more subdued mode, here does a nice job of using 3D to provide Bausch’s work with a depth and look that is uniquely cinematic and removed from it’s staged origins, even if all we are seeing is Bauch’s company performing on a single stage.

The problem with the film arises when Wenders wants to go into documentary mode. His large pieces like Rite of Spring and Café Mueller, both of relative length, are intercut with dancers faces looking into the screen and narrating their memories of Pina (who had died of cancer just days before shooting was to begin), their faces static, their lips not moving to the sound of their voice. Other stylistic distractions abound as well as dances on stage are cut away from to view different dances on the street or, in one strange and unnecessary touch, Café Mueller is cut away from to show two dancers, out in a park, standing over top of a miniature cut-out set of Café Mueller, discussing it as it transpires in miniature behind them, cutting into the power and momentum of the actual performance.

But alas Pina is a sight to behold and a film worth our praise. Wenders has done Pina the justice she is deserved and will hopefully give her legacy rebirth just as her life was closing. At the very minimal Pina does something that just about every documentary should strive to do: introduce us to a subject that, by the time it has ended, we want to discover even more about.

The Oscar Nominations for 2011 Are Out: Here are My Thoughts

2012-01-25T10:52:00.000-08:00

Is it really much of a disappointment that Ryan Gosling didn't get a Best Actor nod for Drive? The movie wasn't very good and he was the least interesting character in it. The true disappointment is the lack of love for Albert Brooks in the Supporting Actor category.
Support Actor: Good for Jonah Hill. I think he said it right when he said people tend to associate you with your beginnings and he has spent the better part of his career thus far pegged as a comedic actor. But given his impressive dramatic abilities in both Moneyball and Cyrus this will hopefully open up a lot of new doors for him.
I didn't even know Nick Nolte and Max von Sydow were in The Warrior and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close respectively. Who was it that noted that there was a lot of good acting in sub par movies this year?
There's no one to win Best Supporting Actor other than Christopher Plummer.
Actress: Viola Davis gets the nod over Emma Stone for The Help. I think that's a good thing. Either way I can't help but think this list of five, except for Michelle Williams, isn't really an accurate portrayal of the best performances by an actress this year.
Merly Streep once again proves that her talent is usually above the movies she's in and if they want to succeed they have to rise to her and not the other way around.
I haven't seen Albert Nobbs but I've read the script. It wasn't very good.
Both a white woman and a black woman from The Help have been nominated for Best Supporting Actress. If one of them were to win could we have another Crash vs. Brokeback Mountain debate on our hands?
Wouldn't it be a wonderful surprise if Melissa McCarthy won Best Supporting Actress? Could this be the year The Academy embraces comedy? Probably not.
For the first year in I can't remember how long Pixar doesn't snag a nod in the Best Animated Feature category despite the fact that Cars 2 wasn't nearly as bad as everyone said it was and a general improvement over the original. Tintin doesn't even make the cut?
The 3D in Hugo is probably the best I've ever seen but if Emmanuel Lubezki doesn't win Best Cinematography for Tree of Life, I'll lose a little faith in humanity.
Is The Artist going to win Best Director and Picture? It seems like the front runner despite it's limited market doesn it? It instantly looked like the was between The Artist and Hugo and if Hugo had done better numbers at the box office there's no doubt it would have taken the award. However, Hugo hasn't fared as well with the awards as The Artist and Tree of Life. I think Tree of Life is too "out there" to win Best Picture and Hollywood likes the celebrate itself. This will, I therefore predict, be the year of The Artist.
Werner Herzog gets the shaft in the Documentary category again.
Pedro Almodovar gets the shaft in the Foreign Film category again.
I haven't seen A Separation so for me the best foreign film of the year is still Le Havre, which is, needless to say, not nominated either.
Every year, since the decision to have more than 5 Best Picture nominees there's always been a trivial film that connected with a large audience and a faux-prestige picture. This year those nominations go to The Help and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
They couldn't have just had 10 nominations and threw that extra one to Bridesmaids?
Year after year the original song nominees are getting depressing. What a lost art this has become (a bigger post of this to come)

One Minute Review - Take Me Home Tonight (2 out of 5)

2012-01-25T10:11:00.000-08:00

There's a scene in Michael Dowse's Take Me Home Tonight that, for the five minutes it lasts, is so unstoppably funny that it had to have either been improvised or rewritten by the scene's star Demetri Martin. I say that because Take Me Home Tonight is so sloppily written, so lazy, even in it's desire to be nothing but conventional and so otherwise unfunny that I can't, in any sort of good faith, believe that this scene was written by the same people who wrote every other scene in the movie.

I won't describe it to you, other than to say that the film takes place in the 80s. Topher Grace of That 70's Show is out of college and has no prospects. The summer is coming to an end and he's invited to a party where he's trying to pick up his former high school crush who's banking job sounds a lot more impressive than his video store cashier profession. Grace meets Martin at the party. He's in a wheel chair, wasn't impressed by Grace in high school, is even less impressed by him now and doesn't even consider not letting him know it.

There, I've saved you an hour and a half. Google Demitri Martin and Take Me Home Tonight and try to find the scene on Youtube. Martin's final line in the scene, from off screen as he's rolling away is a real howler. It deserves better.

One Minute Review - Antichrist (4.5 out of 5)

2012-01-25T09:59:00.000-08:00

A lot has been written about Lars Von Trier's Antichrist. Some of it has been good, some bad but most has been written with head-scratching indifference. So much so that I'm surprised I have yet to find anyone who has described it as "flawed" (although, granted, I haven't looked very hard.)

But can anyone, even it's most vehement detractors, openly admit that they think Von Trier turned in anything less than exactly the movie he set out to make in Antichrist? That's it. Game over. The artist has already won. No thoughtless declaration of torture porn, excessive sex or art simply for the sake of art, beyond the point of the film's actual release into our viewing hands matters much. In it's own personal sense then, Antichrist is kind of perfect.

The problem with the film is that, Von Trier, as gifted a visual artist and provocateur as, for better or worse, there has ever been, has released one of the few movies that doesn't require an audience. The success of the film is in it's making. The only audience required to see it are those who continue to need proof that movies like this can still be made.

There is, of course, I'm sure, some meaning beneath this tale of a couple who, after the death of their child, retreat to a cabin in the woods in hopes of mending themselves only to slowly destroy each other both mentally and physically. What it is, I'm not sure. And that's the flaw. The medium is most certainly the message in the case of Antichrist. To rip it apart and burrow deeper inside of it is to tear a hole in the staggering beauty and power of it's immediate surface appeal. Antichrist is not so much a film to be understood as to have itself forced upon you. You see it because you want to know if the tree really does make a sound when it falls in the woods.

Most of that strange hypnotic whatever it is (I deemed it beauty but I'm not sure that's the correct word, maybe aura is better), can be attributed to Von Trier's being influenced by the Russian master Andrey Tarkovsky (to which Antichrist is dedicated).

Much like Tarkovsky's work, Antichrist seems to exist in the real world because it revolves around human people played by faces we recognize, and yet there isn't a single frame that in any way resembles any real place on this Earth. The one definitive difference though is that Tarkovsky's ideas were worth exploring and his journey's worth taking. Leaving his films left you feeling enlightened. Leaving Antichrist leaves you feeling battered and in need of a glass of water.

A Problem With Black and White

2012-01-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

Is it overly optimistic to think that Octavia Spencer's Golden Globe win for her performance in The Help was because she really did give the best performance of the bunch? Or maybe it's overly cynical to think that her win just may have had something to do with proud, back patting, privileged white people showing just how culturally accepting they are? Maybe a bit of both?

That's certainly the vibe I got from the standing ovation Spencer's win generated from the audience as Chris Tucker (he's still around?) stood, beaming, clapping extra hard from the back while looking on with head-held-high pride. The problem with Hollywood is that hindsight isn't 20/20, and as proud as I'm sure some were to see Spencer mount that stage followed by Morgan Freeman receiving a lifetime achievement award from Sidney Poitier who also got audience members up off their feet, I can't help but feel we still haven't made many strides toward racial equity in the movies.

The purpose is not to take away from Spencer who, like her The Help co-star Viola Davis, is a talented actresses who finally found a footing in the spotlight. The problem is that The Help (directed by a white man, based on a book by a white woman) represents just about everything wrong with Hollywood's treatment of African Americans throughout history: they don't trust black people to tell their own stories.

Even good movies are guilty of this: Edward Zwick's Glory was not about the black soldier's in the Civil War but about the white man who led them into the history books and The Blind Side, one of the most shameful offenders to all discussion of race relations in the U.S., wasn't about a black man getting an opportunity to succeed, it was about the white woman who gave it to him. Sure Coach Carter was about a black man telling his own story but replace the bankable Samuel L. Jackson with Charles S. Dutton or Danny Glover and see how fast that version gets green lit.

My sentiments of why people related to The Blind Side are ugly but I fear true. The Blind Side succeeded because it pandered to the absolute lowest common denominator while also aiming to touch the privileged white people who like to pat themselves on the back for doing nothing at all. But the sentiments were all wrong. Instead of looking at our condition and seeing the optimism of a society becoming more tolerant the sentiment was: God bless that saintly woman, who has so much, for letting that big dumb nigger into her home and giving him a chance.

By the end of The Blind Side, when the Sandra Bullock character reads about a teen being murdered in the hood and deems that that very well could have been her boy, that's the very problem with our society. We don't need another movie about the kid who was fortunate enough to run into a wealthy white family. We need a movie about the infinite number of anonymous black youth getting senselessly killed every day just based on the sociology of their situation.

But of course white people are quick to pat themselves on the back for the one case of goodness that they allow to shadow the innumerable injustices and societal division that still exist in America today. Let me ask you this: do you feel good that the U.S. elected a black president or do you feel better about, as a white person, having found it in your heart to vote him in. White people always need to be reminded of and congratulated for how open and accepting of those who exist below them in society they are. Ironically have we ever had a movie whether a rich white family takes in a drug addicted, white trash hobo? Not enough glory to be had from that kind of endeavour.

That's why, last year, when Monique won the Oscar for Precious it seemed more honest and genuine. Once again, it's not to knock Spencer's performance, but in this case the best performance did win, and it won for a film about black people, made by black people and really dealing with the reality of black life. When Monique, in her speech, thanked Hattie McDaniel for going through what she went through so that Monique herself wouldn't have to, it felt, for better or worse, like genuine progress. That's the truth of true racial equity: it works because it factors race completely out of the equation.

Monique, I'd like to think, won, not because she was black, but because, in a category where both blacks and whites were nominated, the best person won. Just like Katheryn Bigelow was not celebrated for being the first woman to win Best Director but because she actually directed the best movie. To be equal is to see each other as humans, nothing more and nothing less. Until Hollywood realizes and embraces this, nothing will ever change.

Mike's Christmas DVD Haul

2012-01-16T20:19:00.000-08:00

Oh boy do we have a big haul this time. Don't let the title mislead you. Not all of this is stuff I got for Christmas but it is, if you need some point of reference, all stuff I got since the last DVD Haul post I did. Here's a look at what's new to my shelves (note, the reason why I'm using stock pictures as opposed to my usual pictures is because, for some reason, Blogger no longer likes to load pictures from my camera. Rest assured, all these releases are authentic):

I had never heard of animator Jan Svankmajer or his surreal live-action take on Alice in Wonderland before, but when I saw it used for $9.99, I was intrigued enough by the artwork to give it a chance.

Douglas Sirk is one of those artists, like Hitchcock, who made mainstream films that no one appreciated as any more than fluff until much later on when critics took a second look and realized that maybe Sirk was on to more than just shameless melodrama after all. His influence continues to be felt, in European cinema especially, still to this day.

Defined a generation. Star Wars will always eclipse George Lucas' sophomore feature, but this film is as good a reflection of the time it presents as any that's ever been made.

I continue to add more Tarkovsky features to my collection as he, along with Luis Bunuel, are the two filmmakers I have recently dedicated myself to becoming more familiar with.

I'm a stand-up comedy snob and for my money, Bill Burr is the funniest guy not many people have heard of.

Say what you will, yes, this isn't major Pixar, but it's an improvement on the original nonetheless.

If you're like me you think all that extreme couponing stuff is just nonsesne. But let me tell you a tale. I was in the U.S. when Barns and Noble were doing their fall half off Criterion sale. Therefore I picked up this John Cassavettes box set for $60, marked down from $120, but I also had a coupon to take an additional 20% off so I actually managed to snag this for an unbelievable $40.

The second movie is pretty so-so but the first Conan film is pure joyous cheese of the highest order.

I love this show. I will continue to watch it for as long as Larry David continues to make it.

File this one under guilty pleasure. I'd never recommend this movie to anyone in good mind, but it has a kind of excessive charm and William Fitchner as the villain delivers one of the funniest lines I've ever heard in a church fill of mostly dead bodies.

I think Louis Malle wins the award for the most movies that I own by a great director but haven't seen. Add this one to the pile.

Another one of Louis Bunuel's gleefully offensive satires. Was any other director in history as cheerfully low-brow as Bunuel? I can't think of anyone.

Caught a couple episodes of this on TV randomly a month or so ago and thought it was fairly clever and funny. I don't always love Ricky Gervais but this was used and super cheap so I thought I'd give it a try.

A new Ingmar Bergman movie released for the first time on DVD in North America and you didn't think I'd own it? For shame.

This movie gets right everything that Drive failed it. It's a clever and highly stylized homage and yet for all of its odd excess (the camera doing barrel rolls, entire fights in a single take, mushrooms growing out of the ceiling, a pounding rave-like soundtrack) it also has a story that you can actually care about. Joe Wright has proven in the past that he can make grand melodrama and now he's shown that he can bring the same kind of style and sophistication to trash as well.

One of my favourite movies of 2010.

One of Akira Kurosawa's none samurai masterpieces. A crime drama and morality play on the division between the high class and the low class in Japan. A fascinating film. Last I heard Chris Rock wanted to desecrate it by remaking it with himself in the lead.

It was five bucks on Boxing Day at Wal-Mart. It was really funny. Why not?

I'm still not sure about this one. When it first came out I hated it, but thought I'd give it another try because I'm older and wiser now. I think Russell made a noble effort, some of the ideas are interesting and it's strange to see that movies like this used to not only get made but released to wide audiences (even if it did tank). However I think this material takes on too frantic a pace and is too quirky for it's stoner philosophizing. Just go watch Waking Life again instead.

Lesser known Antonioni. Seemed to have divided the critics at the time, but then, when has Antonioni not divided a few critics? Haven't seen this one yet but I'm interested as I never even knew it existed until Criterion announced that they were releasing it.

Love this show. I've heard this season loses a little bit of steam but I guess we'll just have to see.

More Tarkovsky.

Someone presented a paper on this movie when I myself presented at the Undergrad Film Conference at the University of Notre Dame and although I had heard of Chantel Akerman, I'd never known what she made or what her contribution to film was. I still don't really know but that presentation made me interested in checking this one out. Thanks to Criterion for finally making it available.

No one does action like John Woo, especially before he landed in North America and this overly violent take on Melville's Le Samurai is about as good as he's ever been.

I love Aki Kaurismaki and I will own anything of his that gets put out in North America. He's also one of those filmmakers who carries on the influence of Douglas Sirk in our modern times.

More Aki Kaurasmaki. I didn't really know this existed until digging a little deeper to find out which of his films are available in North America.

I love Jacques Tati and everything he does. Now if Criterion could get Trafic back in print I'd own all of his features.

Any regulars will know that I'm not always convinced of the need to shell out extra cash for blu-ray (despite how many there are in this haul). I'm especially against getting TV on blu-ray, however this was the only format available where I picked this up used so there you go.

I think these are the kinds of movies you need to keep rediscovering as your mind grows and evolves and is opened up to new experiences. It's finally time then I figure to take another look at these films.

We need more of Ray's films released in North America. Despite my owning all three of the Apu Trilogy films on DVD, they are long out of print and not exactly of the highest quality, which means this is basically the only one widely available to North American audiences.

Minor Jim Jarmusch but Jim Jarmusch all the same. I think the only film of his I don't own is Coffee & Cigarettes and the horrible duo of Dead Man and Limits of Control.

Bunuel's swansong. Now out of print but I managed to snag one for a reasonable price off of Ebay.

See the pattern here?

I kind of hate this movie and very well may sell this copy off after watching it again. The only reason I own it is because it came with our tickets when we went to see Red State followed by a Q&A with Kevin Smith at the Toronto Underground Cinema. Otherwise I wouldn't have even considered owning it.

If Melville was the most influential figure in France on the evolution of American crime films, Jules Dassin was the most influential American playing in that same field. This laid the ground for the Ocean's films and should be studied by anyone wanting to make crime movies.

More Tarkovsky. This is the last film of his I wanted to own on DVD. I still need to get a copy of Mirror but the Kino version is pretty poor with a subtitle translation that makes the film almost unwatchable. Maybe Criterion is on it?

More Bunuel, more sacrilege, but just 45 mins of it for a change this time.

Led Zepplin rock. A lot of purists don't like this concert or the dream sequences. It's not the band at it's best, but it's still a hell of a lot better than most.

Yes, I bought them. Deal with it. The first and third ones are good.

Werner Herzog being typically strange and unique in feature film territory.

The only think with Spike Lee's name on it that I don't own. It was supposed to be the pilot to a TV show but when that didn't work out they just turned it into a feature or something like that? Still, if it has Lee's name on it it has value to me.

A love letter to comedy and a treat for any film buff.

The iconic film that saw both Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis at there best. People still quote this movie to this very day and it's fun to see a time when newspaper men were some of the most dangerous and powerful in the city. This movie is dark and amazing.

One of the few non-Criterion Passolini DVDs that is actually acceptable quality. A strange and challenging film that is not easily forgotten.

There are so many Francois Truffaut movies that few people have seen or even heard about outside of the Antoine Doinel movies. This is one of them.

This movie is a masterpiece on the level of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Mulholland Dr. Enough said.

I always check it out when Kevin Smith drops a new Q&A DVD.

Although I'm in the minority of thinking this is minor Pixar, I still like to keep these movies around in the collection.

I think it's kind of hilarious that Disney put $300 million into what is essentially a stoner movie. It had no chance of becoming a big hit, but it's still, like the original which is also packaged here, a visual feast that isn't easily forgotten.

One of my favourite movies of 2010.

It scared the crap out of me when I was a kid and one day it will do the same for my own children.

More Douglas Sirk.

More Louis Malle that I haven't seen.

Celebrities Behaving Badly

2012-01-06T09:29:00.000-08:00

I just logged on to IMBD but moments ago and was greeted with this headline:

David O. Russell Fingered in Quasi-Incestuous, Transsexual Groping Claim

Apparently the transsexual 19 year old son of Russell's adopted sister is claiming that Russell touched him in a not acceptable way at a gym in Florida. Russell is no stranger to controversy with stories of him headbutting George Clooney on the set of Three Kings after Clooney stepped in and told him to stop abusing the extras and a video of him losing his mind at Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees.

I don't know if the story is true or not and frankly don't really care either way, but what caught me was this: read that headline again. Either the people who write headlines for IMBD are too clever for their own good or just oblivious. Or maybe I just have a sick sense of humour?

Don't know what I'm talking about? Keep reading it until you do.

The Descendants (5 out of 5)

2012-01-02T13:33:00.000-08:00

The most interesting character to think about in Alexander Payne’s new film The Descendants is Elizabeth King, the comatose wife of George Clooney’s Matt King. The only scene we ever see Elizabeth conscious in is the first one in which we get a hint of the boating accident that leaves her waiting to die. What’s interesting about her is that, by the end of the film, when all of the drama that her accident creates has been said and done, Payne doesn’t quite let us know whether to envy her or despise her. Maybe we should do both. In a way she’s the luckiest person on screen, sitting it out while the lives of her family members crash down around them. Is death really the end of life or the first signs of relief from it? And yet, in a strange way, everything that happens throughout the film is, in some small way, kind of her fault. As if she dumped a load of crap on her family, checked out and left them to deal with it.

But that has been, more or less, Payne’s style throughout his career (with the exception of maybe his debut Citizen Ruth): to make small movies on big canvases about desperate men struggling with their simple cosmic purpose of just trying to do the right thing despite all their flaws and shortcomings. What’s the meaning of life, some people ponder? In Payne’s world it’s simply to get by with doing as little damage as possible.

The remarkable thing about The Descendants, and what has been remarkable about all of Payne’s (along with writing partner Jim Thompson) work has been how he finds those small human notes that lie under the comedy. Much like the way Payne treats Elizabeth King, he never passes judgement on his characters, never turns them into two dimensional caricatures and never allows them to fully ever do just the right thing or just the wrong thing. We love them all and yet hold our reservations as well. No one is perfect in Payne’s world. Maybe that’s why it always kind of reminds us of ours.

The film opens as Matt King, the descendant of one of the first white land owners in Hawaii, narrates about his life there. Some people call the place paradise; they can’t imagine how fantastic it would be to live there. Ya, screw paradise says Matt, try coming and giving it a try sometime.

King is in one heck of a dilemma, Not only has his youngest daughter been acting out, getting into trouble at school, his oldest daughter is away at a private school where she can’t get into alcohol and drugs or rebel against her mother, his wife, who he soon finds out after springing daughter Alex from private school, was cheating on him. His numerous cousins are also anticipating that he will make them all a lot of money by selling a piece of land his ancestors have had in the family for generations and which he is the trustee for. To top it all off, he’s just been told his wife will never recover and it’s time to pull the plug, something his overbearing father-in-law (the invaluable Robert Forrest) silently blames him and the rest of the family for. Screw paradise indeed.

The film takes much of its arch as Matt, his daughters and Alex's stoned boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) travel around the islands looking for the man his wife was seeing; wanting to meet him, see what he looks like, confront him, who knows. He hasn’t gotten to that yet.

If all of this sounds like typical sad-sack drama, in theory, it is. What makes it special is how unafraid Payne is of displaying his character’s rough edges. When King finds out about his wife’s infidelity he doesn’t steam, throw a tantrum or any such thing. He runs; down the street, around the bend and to their friend's house to get any information he can. This is, in a perfect blend of mockery and pathos, not a valiant run or a display of grand melodrama. It is the sad, pathetic, desperate run of a man doing the only thing his irrational mind could think to do in that moment. The entire movie is kind of like that: irrational to the point of comedy and yet deeply moving on a human level because of it.

And look at the way Payne treats characters like Sid, dumb, stoned, the kind of kid you pray your oldest daughter never brings home. Matt gets a few laughs at the kid’s expense and then in a subtle scene that sneaks up on us in a way we could never anticipate, Payne gives him the kind of monologue that won Virgina Madsen an Oscar nomination for Sideways. Sid isn’t just a dumb kid, he’s a kid with a heart and a mind and real dilemmas not far removed from Matt’s own. The movie never elaborates on the bond that passes between these two by the end of this scene. It trusts its audience enough not to have to.

And that’s the approach Payne takes through the entire movie: never giving us what common movie logic has dictated his characters should give us. The Forrester character is not a bad man, just his own kind of man, Alex is not a bad kid, just one affected by the actions of her parents, and youngest daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) isn’t troubled in any way, she’s just growing up trying to find herself without the guidance of a mom. Even when we so desperately want King to lash out at his wife for all the drama she has caused, he doesn’t. He holds himself with dignity and respect. He does, most simply, the right thing, the best way he knows he can.

This of course all revolves around the plot involving the land. Should Matt sell to developers and make his cousins rich or should he keep the land, untouched and pure, the way his ancestors inherited it, the way the natives want it to stay, and figure out a way to keep it in the family? The setting is important, not because we rarely ever see dramas set amidst the tropical backdrop of Hawaii, but because it is a land that his been built through the deep heritage of those who discovered it and their descendants who desperately, as history is slowly devoured by commerce, try to keep that family heritage alive as best they can.

The film is thus, at its heart, one about family and the importance of continued bonds. It ends with one simple shot, which some will deem to be too neat and easy, but it’s a shot the film has so rightfully worked its way to deserving. This chapter of this family has closed. For a moment they were on a bumpy ride. What happened was tragic, cruel, unfair and unkind but life goes on, history has been written and these characters continue to learn and grow into the future. Families get shaken up from time to time, kids act out and parents make mistakes, but at the end of the day, no matter the circumstances, a family will always still be a family. That’s history worth preserving.

Happy Birthday to Me

2011-12-29T15:57:00.000-08:00

It's not my birthday until January 3rd but because I am home for the holidays now, I got my birthday cake now which, I think you can agree, is the best cake any film lover could ask for. Check it out for yourself:

Winning at Life...But Losing the Popularity Contest

2011-12-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

It's been almost 2 years now since I've been writing this blog. It's been, as most people I'm sure who don't get paid to write about film, a struggle to keep it up on a regular basis as friends and work and life in general do their best to get in the way. I am, after all, not that Harry Knowles inspired image of the overweight and facial haired movie geek who just sits in the basement watching movies all day.

What I love about my blog is that every single word of it, errors and all, is uniquely my own. I've watched this blog morph over the course of two years from being a once a day, post anything relevant type of endeavour into a more hardened, assured and confident critical space in which intelligent film lovers and just plain old fans as well can come and digest some intelligent film talk where they feel as if they are being spoken to, not down upon. That has always been my goal in writing: write about challenging things in a way anyone could understand and appreciate.

And in my personal opinion I've succeeded. There's so much garbage out there from people who think that because they watch a lot of movies it somehow makes them an authority. Maybe it does on some sort of Trivial Pursuit kind of level, but not on the critical level that all of the most beloved writers of the medium have been.

So it basically came down to me writing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. I've never been burdened by time lines or the rules of how things in the critical community should go. I've never been afraid to call out a movie everyone is in love with as bad or one that everyone hates as good and I'm the first to cll bad criticism as it is. Why would I care what the majority says, I'm writing about my own thoughts and feelings, not that of the critical mass. And most of all, I've put myself, as much as I could, into every single thing I've written. It's why I stopped reporting news stories, because they don't mean anything to me and why you'll only get two Oscar posts from me a year; one before and one after.

The only problem with blogging is that it's just as much about being at the head of a popularity contest as it is about writing quality material that will move people into new directions of thought, feeling, understanding, etc. The only problem is that I'm not willing to bow down to a popularity contest. I'm not here to be popular, I'm here to speak to the people who want to listen. To educate, to enlighten and to, most importantly and above all, through movies, look inside myself and see what makes me tick and what drives me on an emotional and intellectual level. I don't play that comment for a comment game anymore. If I comment on your blog it's because you've roused me to say something. Good for you. If I don't rouse you, I won't be offended if you keep silent.

I have, as it currently stands, 96 follows. Some of them I've deserved and some I've gotten just by going around and telling someone that their maybe kinda okay review was a good one. Shame on me I guess but in life you have to slay a few dragons to get the princess.

What I'm saying here, deep down, is that, over the past two years, if you've read this space thank you. If you've taken the time to leave a thoughtful comment be it for or against what I'm saying, thank you as well. I don't do this for glory and fame, I do it for the film lovers who want to be pushed into thought or feeling. All I do is for you and once again, thank you.

The Muppets (4.5 out of 5)

2011-12-22T09:20:00.000-08:00

What The Muppets succeeds at doing best is being a Muppet movie. That's the best praise you can give it. For a while there, back when they were coming to the end of their tenure as pop culture darlings (they haven’t been in theatres since 1999) it seemed as if they had forgotten how to be themselves. The characters and voices were there but what convinced the world they were special in the first place wasn't.

But the Muppets were a staple of many a childhood (mine included) and although The Muppets is more nostalgia for those days gone past than an exercise in rebuilding a new generation of fans (when I saw it there was surprisingly only one kid in the theatre), a love letter to one of the treasures of those lucky enough to know it in their childhood is welcome in these parts any day.

What The Muppets gets absolutely right, under the loving hands of director James Bobin and writer/star/devoted Muppetaphile Jason Segal, is exactly what Jim Henson gave them in the beginning to render them so timeless: distinct personalities with distinct human characteristics. The Muppets, when they were succeeding, did so not because they were cute and cuddly but because kids and adults alike could recognize a little bit of themselves in each of them.

Kermit the Frog was their noble leader but not above failure, Miss Piggy was vain, Fozzie was sincere but naive and Gonzo just wanted to find his place within a world where no one else like him existed. It’s the difference between pieces of felt with plastic eyes and real characters that make you feel warm and comfortable in their presence. Throw in that Henson was a mad comic genius (I still discover new winks and nods in the original The Muppet Movie all these years later) and you have the perfect family entertainment.

And like The Muppet Movie, The Muppets doesn’t so much tell a story as wrap a lose narrative around a collection of episodes (The Muppets were always at their best within the 30 minute confines of television sitcom). We start with an introduction to a new Muppet, Walter, who lives in a place called Small Town and loves his older brother and best friend Gary (Segal) more than anything. Their bond is touching and pure, but as Gary grows older, gets taller, makes human friends, and such, Walter continues to be the same, always loved and backed by Gary, but not quite fitting in. He finds, as maybe most kids did, refuge in the wonderful world of The Muppets, a place where he feels safe and where he is understood. The other kids may poke fun, but the Muppets give Walter everything he needs.

So when Gary plans on taking his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) to L.A. Walter is elated when, despite some reservation from Mary, he is invited along as well. It will be a dream for him to finally visit the famous Muppet Studios and see where all the magic happened.

But the gang arrives in L.A. only to find the studio to be forgotten and run down. And then, when Walter sneaks away from the tour (led by a funny Alan Arkin), he discovers a plan for an evil oil barren (Chris Cooper) to purchase the studio, demolish it and drill for oil. Unless the long forgotten about Muppets band together again, an unlikely prospect, and raise the money to the buy the studio, it’s lights out on the last standing piece of Muppet history.

So in a desperate attempt to not lose the most meaningful thing in his life, Walter tracks down Kermit in hopes of convincing him to put on one last show to raise the money to buy back the studio. The first half of the movie is thus, in a tribute to The Muppet Movie, a hilarious and self-aware road picture as Kermit and his new friends travel around the country to collect the other Muppets and convince them to come back for one last show leading up to, not unpredictably, in a fitting tribute to their original televised form, that one last show.

That’s all there is to The Muppets. Anyone who knows the Muppet world knows that plot description doesn’t even begin to describe the manic comic energy of these characters and indeed, The Muppets is all smiles from beginning to end with several big laughs and some catchy songs littered along the way.

But no matter how clever the sight gags get, how inside the jokes go, how constant the celebrity cameos are and how shameless the lengths the film will go to get a laugh, The Muppets works because it leaves one with a warm and fuzzy feeling. That’s why the Muppets have endured for so long. They are our friends and neighbors who exist in this world without the slightest hint of irony. It’s what Jim Henson worked so hard to create. He couldn’t have asked for a more fitting tribute to his legacy.

The Hype Argument

2011-12-07T16:34:00.000-08:00

The hype argument to justify not liking a movie is one of the most powerful signs of poor film criticism out there. How many times can you recall coming across a review or editorial in which the writer gives props to a movie for being well made, well acted, well everything but that they just couldn’t get behind because they expected more based on all the positive press? It’s probably been quite a few, which is unfortunate because it may be one of the laziest arguments in film criticism, making the process much less about personal expression and far more about assembly line commodification. It’s depressing how far it sometimes feels we’ve fallen away from the practice of true film criticism.

If you’ve followed this space and my constant editorializing on the art of film criticism you will recognize this as a topic very dear to my heart and one I take very seriously. I am also, for the most part, adverse to film hype. That’s not to say that I don’t heavily anticipate new films from my favourite filmmakers, but that’s not nearly the same thing is it?

The truth is I watch trailers as little as possible (but let’s face it, one can’t avoid them entirely) and I don’t know how many times I’ve suggested a movie for the person to ask what it’s about. Nine times out of ten my answer is always the same: “I don’t know.”

The problem with hype is that it is, when you think about it, a secondary offshoot of the film itself. Whenever I read another lazy review in which the critic declares their expectations were not met due to hype I think, strange, I thought you were reviewing the movie, not the sociology that exists around it.

Okay, fair enough, you heard a movie was great, it wasn’t as great as you were told and now you’re disappointed. It happens. But this is water cooler talk not criticism. The reason why we have critics is because criticism is a profession and an art form. It is a vocation in which we have entrusted a select few more well versed on the subject at hand than us in order to give us something to think about; a starting point for which to help shape our own thoughts and feelings about a particular work and, at the very least, to guide us towards good films and away from bad ones.

So why do I deem the hype argument lazy? Because, every time it is used it acts as an announcement of submission on behalf of the respective reviewer. We are tasked with reviewing the films we have seen not the ones we were hoping to see. To admit that one was disappointed simply because they expected more shows two things. The first is that the reviewer in question has not found their individual voice (great criticism after all is more about knowing what X thought of said work as opposed to hoping that X will tell us what to see this weekend). It means that they have bought into a sort of reverse herd mentality. The majority said it was amazing, I didn’t think it was amazing, therefore it was disappointing. No thought whatsoever has been put into this argument. It’s Antonioni’s Problem of the Bicycle: now that the critic has let us know that they are disappointed we need to know why beyond that they didn’t like it as much as everyone else.

The second problem is that this argument shows that the critic hasn’t put much thought into the film itself or their affective relationship with it: the very foundation of good criticism. It is, as I said before, commodification: this one’s a disappointment, on to the next one. Great criticism, to repeat from older posts once again, is a combination of two things: a writer who knows how to read between the lines and then look inside themselves to understand what a work means to them emotionally, intelligently, philosophically, psychologically, etc., and someone who genuinely knows what they are talking about. The person who is submitting to the hype argument is doing neither.

Instead what they have done is written the movie off instead of giving it its fair due. Reviews should be written in a vacuum. What the world has to say about a specific film is much less important than what you yourself felt about it. That should be at the heart of every review. Being disappointed with a movie and blaming it on hype is to give the movie not a second thought and to pass the blame onto a third party, as if they are scared of taking a strong counter opinion. I have much greater admiration for the writer who writes a negative review about a universally deemed great film by providing intelligent discourse that, even though maybe you don’t agree with, you can’t argue with or dismiss, then the one who simply says they don’t agree with the hype and moves on. Once again: Lazy.

The writer who hides behind the hype machine thus tells us more about themselves as a whole than about the film in question as, at the heart of it, they’ve told us nothing about the film at all. Instead they’ve told us that their thinking mostly resides at the surface, their insights shallow and their patience to actually deal with a film is little. If I walk away indifferent or unimpressed by an acclaimed movie it leaves me with a feeling of utter unrest. Not only do I have to consider why I didn’t like it, but I must also meet it halfway to try to understand why so many people are singing it praises. Anything less is an insult to the film, the readers and even the reviewer themselves even thought they are only ones to blame.

It's Been a Good Year for the Roses...And the Movies

2011-12-05T16:07:00.000-08:00

Every year for the past several years, as films become less and less about stories and characters and more about whose special effects are the biggest, shiniest and can cause the most damage as they crash headfirst into one another, there's always those who will say that the year in movies sucked.

There were a lot of movies that sucked in 2011. There were a lot of movies that sucked in 2010 and 2009 as well. And there were a lot of movies that sucked in 1925 and 1926 as well. There's always going to be movies that suck every year. It's inevitable. There's so damn many of them.

The problem with last year wasn't that it sucked, but that the good movies were just that: good. Few movies left a lasting impact. The Social Network was a timeless film but the highly praised Inception and Toy Story 3 weren't. They were good. Finding ten films to name as the year's best, that were better than good, well that was a bit of a chore.

2011 seemed to pose the same challenges. From January up until September there were a lot of bad movies and a lot of good ones but where were the great movies? Apparently now the question has been answered: they were waiting for Halloween to be over. My last 3 posts have all been reviews and all for films which I have awarded five stars. But they aren't just five star films (like say Inception) they are timeless films that rank among their respective filmmakers' best efforts.

I realized this as I was browsing Rotten Tomatoes. I clicked to see the expanded screen of the week's top box office grossers and found something I haven't seen in a long time. Of the 32 films on the list 22 of them are certified fresh, 9 of them are in the 90% range, 6 are in the 80% range and 5 of them are in the 70% range.

This means two things: 1) out of 32 films out there right now, critics on a whole have deemed that but 10 of them aren't worth the public's time and 2) the vast majority of critics are all in agreement: the good films are really good. Usually highly praised films are followed with sneers, unmatched expectations and general cynicism for some. Not in 2011, where everyone agreed we're in a good spot.

And here's the kicker: I write this on Monday December 12, 2011, weeks still before the release of Young Adult, Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (which, if the script is any indication, will be something special), We Need to Talk About Kevin, Carnage (see comments on Tinker Taylor),The Adventures of Tintin, Girl With the Dragon Tatoo and War Horse. If last year the problem was finding 10, this year the problem will be sticking to just that many.

As a side note I've decided not to publish my year end list this year until into January and probably closer to February. Why? Two reasons: 1) come the end of December there are so many best of lists its hard to care about any on an individual basis and 2) unlike last year I want to take as much time as I need to see the films that I feel could be on it properly.

Hugo (5 out of 5)

2011-12-05T15:41:00.000-08:00

At the age of 69 Martin Scorsese will direct films after Hugo. Some of them, if not most of them, will be great and some of them may even still be on the lips of many long after both America’s greatest living filmmaker has passed on and the sound of Hugo has gone silent. But it’s safe to say that, no matter how many films are still to come from Scorsese, and no matter their quality, none of them will be as beautiful, touching or personal as Hugo. Martin Scorsese has, one film at a time, become the very definition of American film. But he’s no longer that young kid from New York trying to push boundaries and change the landscape of film as we know it. He’s already been there and done that. Now he’s that wise old man, none of the ambition or vision having faded, who looks back at it all and sees just what it has meant. There will not, I think it’s fairly safe to say, be a more magical film released in 2011 than Hugo.

Disguised in the veil of grand family adventure, Hugo is a film that tells the tale of a young boy in Paris. His father (Jude Law) was a clockmaker who loved to tinker and fix things. Together they fixed old gizmos, so primitive by today’s standards that it’s a marvel they even worked at all, went to the movies, and loved each other very much. The father’s swan song was to be fixing up an old mechanical man called an Automaton. These were essentially life-like wind up toys designed to, when wound, perform human tasks. When Hugo’s father finds an old one forgotten in a museum, he brings it home to fix. This one is a writer but before it can again put pen to page an accident happens and Hugo is left an orphan.

He’s taken in by his alcoholic uncle Claude (Ray Winstone) whose job it is to see that all the clocks at the local train station are in working order. Once the boy is taught how to operate the clocks he is left alone to perform the man’s duties and continue fixing the Automaton while constantly evading the pursuits of the Chaplinesque Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) who hates orphans.

In order to fix the Automaton, Hugo begins stealing parts from George (Ben Kingsly) an old man who owns a meagre toy shop in the station. When George catches Hugo in the act he takes the boy’s notebook, the contents of which, mysteriously upset him. Hugo enlists the help of George’s adopted god daughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Mortez) who is an avid reader, has never seen a movie and is looking desperately for a real life adventure.

Scorsese and his writer John Logan, like master storytellers, allow this story to unfold gradually, not revealing all of its secrets up front. This allows the revelation of George’s true identity and the children’s quest to find the missing pieces of the Automaton, and how it’s existence is connected to him, to take the film out of grand family entertainment and slowly reveal a loving ode to the magic of cinema and all of it’s history.

I dare not say another word for fear of revealing anything. Some reviews have pegged Hugo as being a film about the importance of film preservation and restoration. Knowing Scorsese and all his recent invaluable efforts towards these practices it’s a fair assessment, but misses the point. This is not a film about why we should restore old films, but one about the magic that is inherent in them and how that magic shapes and changes our lives from the untold joys they unlock in the imagination of children, to the sweet and tender reflections of times gone past they aspire in adults. Films are, at their very greatest, both dream and memory all wrapped into one. This must have certainly wrung true for
Scorsese, one of, if not the most well versed filmmakers working today.

But the key to Hugo is not that it’s a self congratulatory pat on the back to those who are well versed enough to know the film history that it pays such loving tribute to. It is rather, like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, a tip of the hat to the works of art that defined the medium as we know it, while still creating something new and modern with the love that these reflections of the past have created. Hugo is thus, above all, the perfect anachronism.

So then the question remains, in an age where family films have become lightning paced flashes of colour and sound, will children be able to accept Hugo? Yes, I think, for some they will. Smart, mature ones will especially appreciate it; ones with grand creative imaginations who look at the world and see the magic of endless possibility. It will also appeal to the children who’s bodies have grown and aged but who’s minds have stayed young and alive and the children who are now falling somewhere in between.

Hugo may be a film about film history and other such adult topics mostly left to academia, but it’s also about so much more and so much less than that. It’s proof that happy endings don’t just happen in the movies. They happen between the seats of every theatre all over the world.

Shame (5 out of 5)

2011-12-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

Brandon Sullivan, the hopeless sex addict played by Michael Fassbender at the centre of Steve McQueen’s new film Shame is almost always clinging to the side of a frame that only he occupies. No matter where Brandon goes, there is his face and his body, disconnected from the people around him. It seems a deliberate choice by McQueen to show Brandon this way: no matter on the crowded subway or the full boardroom at work, there is Brandon, a part of normal 30-something upper-class New York life, doing his best to appear to fit in, but always belonging to a lonely space all by himself. From time to time, he’ll let someone in but in all cases it's for sex. You can come into Brandon's world, but don't take your coat off, this space, at the end of every day, belongs to only him.

That’s the approach to Shame, a stark and sexually intense film in which sex is more about Brandon’s desperate attempts to fill some hollow craving inside of himself instead of titillation. There is no pleasure in the sex we see in Shame; only the reality of the man desperately engaging in it. That’s the drama of Shame, which, as can probably be gleaned from it’s title, is not so much about sex itself, but a man who, ironically, can’t seem to function without it but who only seems to be functioning with it.

What makes the film so fascinating is not that this man is addicted to random, anonymous sex, but the way the film portrays how the hollow feeling that he gets from it is the closest he can come to establishing a normal emotional connection. Sex isn’t something Brandon craves for pleasure, it’s the only way, no matter how sick, desperate or pathetic it gets, that he can feel that he is alive. There’s a scene towards the end of the film, when Brandon has just about hit rock bottom where McQueen shows us his face as he reaches orgasm. It’s a twisted sight of torment and self-loathing. If sex in Shame is the only way Brandon can feel anything it is, conversely, the vice he uses as an excuse to continue not feeling anything at all. Even when Brandon's winning he's losing.

Then one day Brandon is startled to find that his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) has shown up unexpectedly and needs a place to stay indefinitely. Sissy is an aspiring singer with a natural talent and, like her brother, a natural pull towards self-destruction; her body, we see in another of the film’s stark and unflinching scenes, mutilated from years of self-abuse.

Although Brandon relents in allowing her to stay, Sissy, being his sister, posses an emotional connection in his life and therefore a threat to its natural balance. He thus takes his frustration out of her, accusing her of being a child who constantly needs to hang on to people and rely on others to get her trough. He blames her for all of the things he hates in himself: he can’t let any meaningful emotional connect sneak into his life and she can’t live on the independence that exceeds her grasp, and while his scars are hidden and personal, hers are physical and on full, naked display. This leads to one of the films most powerful scenes in which Brandon tells Sissy how he really feels, while sitting on the couch, watching a cartoon, facing away from the camera. Brandon is so devoid of anything emotional that McQueen doesn’t even allow us into the scene, instead forcing the audience to casually observe from behind. That's the kind of film Shame is.

Observing is what McQueen does a lot. Like his acclaimed debut feature Hunger, McQueen’s approach is to set his camera and look straight on, never flinching or looking away from what he is capturing. The dialogue is sparse and when it does happen, occurs in unbroken long takes. To edit would be to hide from the raw brutality of what is happening and offer an easy escape. McQueen offers no such easy exits and as an artist looks to capture the events that transpire before his camera without comment or implication, no matter how unbearable they become.

But if Hunger was more admirable for its craft than outwardly enjoyable, Shame is a fascinating and wholly realistic (if unpleasant) journey towards despair and self-destruction. It isn’t about sexual addiction but about a man crippled by his inability to feel anything. Aesthetically every single frame is meticulously composed from the shame of its hero. It offers no indications of how he came to this point or any helpful solutions on how to overcome it. It simply watches, indifferently, as events happen on a journey towards tragedy and doesn’t try to interfere in the least. With Hunger McQueen made a statement. With Shame he’s made close to a masterpiece. This is one of the year’s best films.

Le Havre (5 out of 5)

2011-11-27T15:16:00.000-08:00

Aki Kaurismaki’s is the cinema of restraint. There are no wasted scenes in his films, no dialogue that says anything other than the minimum necessary to make the point, no flamboyant dancing of the camera and no emotions that ever seem to quell beyond a murmur. If anyone every cracks a smile of affection in Kaurismaki’s world it plays more like rapture than a small gesture, as his characters often stand, frozen in contemplative tableaus, often times so pronounced that they boarder on the comedic. These are quite films that play as if part of an extended fairy tale or comic strip; their movement and content limited by the economy of the frame.

That’s the world that the Finnish master lives in: a strange cross between the bright and building melodrama of Douglas Sirk mixed with the offhand static lull of Fassbinder and a comedic touch so deadpan that it, at times, boarders on the surreal. It is, needless to say, an acquired taste for some. “You’ve never seen another movie like this” Roger Ebert once said of Kaurismaki’s Man Without a Past, “Unless you’ve seen another Aki Kaurismaki movie.”

Which brings us to Kaurismaki’s newest Le Havre, which embodies everything that has come to be expected from the director and yet is a little livelier and sweeter than most of his work. Kaurismaki makes films about the down and out: the people who often fall between the cracks of a society that could just as well do without them.

This one focuses on Marcel Marx (Andre Wilms), a shoeshine man in Le Havre who, day in and day out, carries around his tool box and little stand in order to bring in enough money to support his wife Arletty (Kaurismaki regular Kati Outinen) who he loves and who loves him back. There is no dialogue in the movie that ever expresses any outward declaration of love between the two but Kaurismaki manages to sneak it in, rather tenderly, by the way these two hold themselves, act in the presence of each other, create an aura in the room when they are together. That’s Kaurismaki’s approach to all of his drama: to let it linger instead of underlining it. “She’s too good a woman for you.” The local female bartender tells Marcel. “I know,” He replies. “But she’s too good for everyone so for now I’ll do.” The glass is half full.

Then two things happen: Arletty falls ill and is taken to the hospital where it looks unlikely she will live much longer. Not wanting to tell Marcel for fear that it would ruin him; she has the doctor conceal her disease. Meanwhile a shipping crate that was bound for London arrives in Le Harve by accident and is opened to find a collection of refugees from Africa. One, a young boy named Idrissa, is encouraged to run and he escapes.

One day, while eating his lunch, Marcel finds the boy, offers him some food and is followed home by him that night. Where Marcel differs from most Kaurismaki heroes is that instead of being a lonely low class bum wandering through life in no direction in particular, Marcel is a man of little means who instantly, without being asked, wants to help this boy who is of even lesser means. That’s the magic of the film that gives it it’s fairy tale-like quality. This does not bode well with the local investigator who is on the hunt for the illegal immigrant.

The entire film is a wonderful collection of episodes in which friends try to help Marcel who tries to find the boy’s origins and raise the money that would assist him in getting to London. The true treasure of the film is in these scenes where we see the warmth created from a community of low class people banding together in order to help out a fellow drifter who wants no more than they: to simply get by. The film has been described as a fairy tale or fable by many, a quality created by Kaurismaki’s unique worldview: life sucks, but our time in it doesn’t need to.

This story, in typical Kaurismaki fashion, is told in a minimalistic style that is more concerned with the quite nuance of human nature as it propels the story forward. Only in a Kaurismaki film could Marcel get away with the excuse he uses to convince a refugee shelter director that he is the black Idrissa’s uncle and only in a Kaurismaki film could the sight of a yellow dress bring such a smile to one’s face, especially having witnessed the care and love it was packaged with.

If all of this sounds maddeningly vague that’s maybe because there is no other way to describe it. Kaurismaki's films are all touching yet deadpan love letters to the down and out. They are a rebel yell for the lower class without ever raising their voice above a whisper, and that always seem to make a halfway political statement without ever the hint of much politics. The message is always clear: society is structured by ridged and superficial notions of class, but it is those at the bottom, left out and forgotten, who are the most human because they place value on what is most essential to human survival: love, happiness, belonging, and the ability to look in the face of the utterly ridiculous and crack a smile in spite of all the misery that surrounds us.

It’s a world so fiercely and uniquely unto itself that the only way I can describe it is to encourage you to see it for yourself. And it can’t be stressed enough how much you should get going and seeing it for yourself.

The Anti-Anti-Movie

2011-11-15T20:32:00.000-08:00

I've just finished Peter Weir's Gallipoli which tells the tale of hundreds of thousands of young Australian men lead to their deaths in a battle that made really no sense to anyone. It is often, rightfully, compared with Stanley Kubrick's anti-war masterpiece Paths of Glory, which got me thinking: what does "anti-war" even really mean?

You could throw that term in front of a lot of war movies and it would stick. Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, Oliver Stone's Platoon, Speilberg's Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, David O Russell's Three Kings, Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers and so on. But at what point do we define a movie as being anti anything? The reason the term sticks so well and is so uneasily refuted is that when the question is posed of what exactly could be named as an example of a pro-war movie, not too many titles instantly fit the bill.

And they rightfully shouldn't but does that not mean that any movie that depicts the death and destruction caused by war is, in some way or another, anti-war be default? I can't think of too many movies, no matter how graphic or glorified the violence, that would stand up and openly claim themselves to being pro-war because, knowing the innate horrors or warfare, who would ever stand up and make a bold public statement in favour of it?

But let's assume, as we must, that not all war films are anti-war. At what point then does a film justifiably become anti-anything? Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting was originally criticized upon its release by some who felt it was pro-drug in it's stylized glorification and comedic outlook towards a bunch of Scottish junkies. I don't know about anyone else in the world, but seeing images of a man lose his bowels all over the bed sheets or another dive into the filthiest toilet in Scotland, no matter how humorous or stylized, should certainly be enough to turn most rational minds away from the temptations of heroin addiction.

Could this then simply be another one of these faux critical terms that seem to instill an importance in a film that simply inherently exists under the surface anyway based on the content? The depiction of war itself, the realization of senseless death on a massive scale, the confusion and horror of being trapped alone in a place where each new step brings the possibility of death, being the statement in and of itself without taste makers underlining and bolding it for us as well? I've heard many arguments about how Inception is a film about filmmaking, which I always dismiss as too easy a reading: of course Inception is a film about filmmaking. Every movie about dreams is, whether purposefully or not, a film about filmmaking.

That is of course not to take away from films such as Paths of Glory and Gallipoli, which are both, in similar and yet different ways, both very affecting stories that rise above simple depictions of brutal combat. My point is, to come back to it again, at what point do we differentiate a war film from an anti-war film, a drug film from an anti-drug film, a violent film from an anti-violence film and so on? And how then, in all our infinite wisdom and critical capacity can we even begin to answer such a question when it is next to, if not completely impossible to separate a film's content from its message?

The Drug Problem

2011-11-14T13:43:00.000-08:00

I have a drug problem. And that is that too many times too many people have had the same response to my unapologetic distaste for Fight Club, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and so on. And the response is always: "You have to see it stoned."

But why should I? Obviously drugs play a huge part in all art, especially film. Whether that be that the creators were under the influence of drugs, the work is about characters using drugs or whether the film itself just lends a certain special something when watched under the influence. Either way, a lot of people justify bad movies by simply telling you you should have been stoned when you saw it.

I'm a big believer that all great films should be self-sufficient. I don't think that I should have to come to a film with any prior knowledge in order to fully appreciate it. Sure, some movies that are based on TV shows or comic books or represent a small portion of some vast already created world might be enjoyed better the more you are acquainted with their origins, but you shouldn't need to. You needn't have read a single comic book to enjoy The Dark Knight, so why should I have to be stoned to enjoy some films?

It might be true that drugs make some films more bearable or even more enjoyable under the influence. Having just recently watched Tron: Legacy I can use this as an example. Here's a film that is big and bright, has a constantly pulsing electronic soundtrack, is founded entirely on an overworked imagination, it's action all smooth and completely visible as it is happening, which is perfectly suited for any pothead.

But the story doesn't make the least amount of sense. The film is so big on imagination and spectacular special effects that one wonders just how someone could come up with a story that is so messy, convoluted and ultimately meaningless as Tron's. But then again, anyone who has ever watched a movie stoned knows that understanding the nuances of the plot are the least important imperative as understanding anything non-visual is next to impossible.

Maybe Tron: Legacy is some kind of masterpiece under the influence. It certainly is entertaining enough in a flawed forgettable way that most special effects movies are these days when watched with a sound mind. But I don't think I should be required to be high just to find out. To think, however, that Tron: Legacy may simply be a $200 million dollar puff of pot smoke is, let's be fair, pretty amusing on someone's part. People used to get stoned and sneak into screenings of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can imagine it would be a pretty exciting sound and light show. But, even under the influence of nothing, 2001 is a masterpiece.

So here's the problem: drugs are not valid criticism. They shouldn't be the sole variable that makes or breaks a movie. You can smoke your own weight's worth in weed and it will still not make The Rocky Horror Picture Show a good movie, although it will most certainly make it more tolerable and detract from all of the film's problems.

A good film will be good from the ground up. Any substances you want to add on top of it should only make it all the better.

What do you think?

Drive (3.5 out of 5)

2011-11-09T17:24:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is the kind of movie that makes you almost instantly want to watch a better one. In this case, for me, that better one is Sidney Lumet’s swan song masterpiece Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Both films involve bad men dealing with even worse men, revolve around a crime gone horribly wrong and are both modern day reincarnations of the darkened and hardened crime films of the 70s and 80s(some of which Lumet himself masterminded).

But where the difference lies is that Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was about more than the crime. It was about the implications, the aftermaths, the consequences of being stuck in a horrible situation to which there is no simple escape and to which the easiest option is to dig oneself even deeper into the murk. When the shock and awe, the hard talk, the sudden bursts of violence and the fierce tough guy posturing came to a crashing halt, left behind in its wake were damaged men who had bitten off more than they could chew and didn't know what to do about it.

Refn sets himself on the way to the same kind of payoff with Drive but then he stops almost destructively short as he builds towards no payoff in particular. Here is a polished and well made film (as well made as any other crime odyssey that comes to mind) that is all posturing. The film sneers, flexes it’s muscle, exists under the subtle and haunting thump of slow motion images playing under pounding retro 80s synth pop and does not, for any one second, give you any reason to care about a single thing that is going on in it. If you want to get a cheap lesson in pure film style without the burden of enrolment costs, Drive might be right up your alley. If it is, however, depth, compassion, or something that resembles anything slightly human, Drive feels like it is mostly grinding gears.

Ryan Gosling plays the Driver. He has no name which is about right as he is all business and procedure. By day he’s a mechanic and Hollywood stunt man. By night he’s the getaway driver for lowly crooks. He lives by his defined set of rules: he doesn’t carry a gun, he’ll give you five minutes in which he is all yours, a minute too much on either side and he’s gone. And all he does, period, is drive.

He works for Shannon (Breaking Bad’s Brian Cranston) who runs a garage, sets up the Driver’s stunt work and walks with the kind of limp that suggests that the shop probably isn't his sole source of income. He wants a loan to buy a race car which the Driver can drive and make them lots of money.

He approaches Rose (Albert Brooks in a long overdue dramatic role) for a payout and gets it. Rose is some kind of guy. Brooks brings something unassuming to the surface of the role, but this is the kind of man whose words speak louder than his actions. “My hands are kind of dirty” the Driver says when Rose extends it for a shake. “It’s okay”, Rose replies. “So are mine.”

Rose is business partners with a hothead named Nino (Ron Pearlman). Somehow, for reasons too convoluted to explain, the Driver takes a job to help out the recently released husband of his neighbour (Cary Mulligan) who he’s taken quite a shine to recently. The job gets botched, people end up dead, and the Driver ends up with a bag full of Nino’s money.

So goes the set-up which leads the somewhat effective and haunting opening scenes into a conclusion that is populated by short bursts of brutal graphic violence as the Driver and Rose both square off in an attempt to be the last man standing.

All of this, once again, brings to mind the hard-boiled, murky crime pictures of the 70s and 80s from Walter Hill’s The Driver to Michael Mann’s Thief. But where the film falters is in how content it is to simply get by with just being confined to homage. In terms of genre recreation, Refn does an excellent job, going through the motions from the slow tracking cameras, the tight two-shots, the suspense created not through unending stimulation but by taking a static scene and cutting between three or four set objects while tension mounts on the soundtrack. If nothing else, Drive does let us a remember a time when action allowed us to breathe a little.

But the film never quite achieves anything more. Are we at the point in film history where films are praised for their ability to pay homage to a time when movies weren’t so bad? Is seeing something different that stands apart from the over stimulation of today’s action films so rare that we’ll heap praise upon the first one that seems destined to take a different approach? But homage is, at its worst, an ironic post-modern reconstruction of the spare parts of great films gone by. Where Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, to continue with the same example, took the elements and created something new and thrilling with them, Drive’s saving grace is that its irony doesn’t come served with the wink and smirk of most of today’s attempts at homage.

So what do we make of Drive? Who is it supposed to appeal to? What does it want to achieve except show one filmmaker's attempt to mask a shallow story with his ability to recreate the essence of genre’s past? Drive is an exceptionally well made film with a clear vision of what it should look and feel like; filled with good performances, knuckle grinding action in the tradition of the classic car chase movies, a bumping soundtrack and a lot of spilled blood. And then it ends, leaving you in no better or worse shape than when it came to you, to which you nod, give it some points for ambition and then walk away with the realization that the history is far more compelling than the history lesson.

The Sound of Silence

2011-11-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

Not a lot of people like silent films (comedies seeming to be the one exception). It's understandable. They can be long, boring, extremely dated, hard to follow, can be disjointed, don't involve waring alien robots, and require, above and beyond all else, our undivided attention. You can't sit doing something else, listening to a silent film and fill in the blanks. You need to read and watch. The other problem is that, in most cases, because no one owns the rights to them, which version do we pick up? Some have missing footage, some have ugly and careless transfers, alternate title cards, and soundtracks that don't touch anywhere near what the original would have sounded like. I think it's safe to bet that, back when Murnau was making Nosferatu he didn't have Type O Negative's Beatles meets Black Sabbath doom metal playing through his head as inspiration.

I'm in the bandwagon. Most of the way at least. I don't outright refuse silent films and have watched many of the titles by the big names: Griffith, Lang, Stroheim, Murnau, Dryer, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Keaton. But these are films mostly reserved for academic study or those film history completests (I am both) and are, in most cases, easier to admire than outright enjoy.

What inspired all this? Last night I watched D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, his epic, in a way, apology for his previous masterpiece Birth of a Nation, the seminal and hugely racist epic that changed and rewrote film history as we know it. Why did I watch it? Because it is also seminal to film history, it's another notch on my belt, it's something you keep hearing about in film classes, the Babylonian sequences are supposed to be expensive and breathtaking (certainly that tracking shot of the dancers on the steps of Babylonia is one of the best ever committed to film), and all of the above.

Intolerance is, let's admit, long and hard to follow. It's also a visual masterpiece that was, except for Birth of a Nation, like nothing else anyone had ever dare try to attempt before. And as I was watching it, slowly but surely a new realization began to sink in: silent film was the most cinematic film has ever and will ever be. Ah ha. Revelation!

A lot of purists at the time (Munsterberg, Arnheim, etc) thought that sound was the death of film. A lot after that thought colour was the death of film too. Of course it's the standard now and even the huge ambassadors of black and white (Scorsese, Speilberg, Bogdanovich), haven't used it in ages. I think, the major stepping stone that sound and colour contributed, beside the obvious technical breakthrough, is that people felt it was pushing film one step farther away from theatre and one step closer to actual reality.

Reality or realism has always been an issue within film and especially film criticism. Films are criticised because people don't talk or act like that, no one in their right mind would do that and that's just not possible in real life. Fair enough. You've read it plenty in this space as well. But the term is one of those misrepresented critical idioms alongside "interesting" and "flawed." It just doesn't hold sway because it doesn't get used properly.

In that sense, silent films were about as realistic as they needed to be. Realism is not so much about a film's ability to reflect absolute reality (that, you'd have to admit, would be pretty boring), but about creating characters and actions and events that tie believably into the story. There's nothing about Knowing that is believable or realistic, but everything that happens makes sense within the context of the overall narrative. That's realism. That's believability.

The difference between current times and silent times is that, like the theatre, silent films asked their audiences to meet them half way. Just like the physical space of the theatre, which clearly does not take place on the streets, the beach, in front of a sunset, wherever, must be left up to the imagination, much of silent film requires that same leap of faith. We know we are watching a movie, it's thus up to us to imbue the imagines with the realism they are trying to depict.

That's important because, at it's essence, silent film is filmmaking broken down into it's purest form: stories told through pictures edited together to create a whole. That's what every silent film was. That's what the medium of film was founded upon. If anything the advent of sound was an excuse for writers and directors to get lazy: why show what we can just explain much eaier? (of course, such cynicism does not expand to all films, and there are many filmmakers that use dialogue just as much for artistic purposes as those who do as an excuse to be lazy).

The pictures themselves, I think, above all else, add to the pure cinematic experience. That is, above and beyond all else, the images as captured look like nothing other than filmic images. You will never mistake a silent film as theatre or television or any form of art or reality. The thoughts don't even factor into the equation. When I look at Joseph Gordon Levitt and Seth Rogen (to take the most recent example) in 50/50 I see two actors who I know in a film about getting cancer. When I watch Intolerance, I am transported to an olden time in which the men and women and horses in Babylon look like they could actually be men and women and horses in Babylon. The illusion is seamless. There is no sense of actors on a set in front of a camera. Today Babylon would look like it was created inside a video game that could stretch on forever. In that sense, just maybe, the farther we have moved away from silent film, the farther we have moved from realism after all.

Mike's DVD Haul

2011-11-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

Every day it seems like someone is telling me of some new great show that I need to watch. This has never been one of them. I loved the Strangers With Candy movie. I thought it was hilarious and irreverent and Amy Sedaris committed so fully to milking the Jerry Blank character for all it was worth. To my surprise, a lot of fans of the show didn't like the movie, or felt it didn't live up to what was created in the show. I guess I'm going to find out.

Probably one of, if not the, best documentaries about filmmaking ever made. Anyone who loves film and film history should consider this one required viewing.

I haven't seen this but this 90s Sidney Lumet flick seems to have as many lovers as non-lovers so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

Mike Leigh's debut film before he disappeared off the scene from some time and only worked in TV.

I think Todd Solondz is a brilliant filmmaker and I will follow anything her makes. Not a lot of people felt favourably about this one but Blockbuster was closing and it was 50% off. Can't go wrong with that.

An unseen Herzog film for me. For some reason that I can't quite ever put my finger on, I find Herzog's fiction films to be so engrossing in so many different ways.

Heard good things so I picked it up.

One night my girlfriend was watching the hit teen show Pretty Little Liars and when she described the plot to me I said "That sounds like Twin Peaks with teenagers." Thus I was inspired to grab the entire series, including the famous pilot episode all in one convenient package.

From Mike Leigh's first to his newest. Has this man ever made a bad film?

Lesser known Truffaut.

This is one of those TV shows I apparently "have to watch." It was on sale for 12.99 so I figured why not?

Some people consider this to be Tarkovsky's greatest film. I haven't seen it myself but I figured it was time to delve deeper into the Russian master's filmography so why not start here?

I generally am opposed to trading in DVDs for Blu-Rays because I've never once seen a Blu-Ray whose quality was of such staggering greatness that the extra 5 dollars seemed justified. That said my copy of the Exorcist was certainly obsolete and I liked the opportunity to have both the original version and extended version in one package (despite the reality that the original version is still superior.)

Say this on Ebay and thought I'd grab it. I've seen Altman's follow-up Tanner on Tanner and didn't really "get" it but this was apparently something groundbreaking for its time.

Who would have known that Spike Lee would become such an assured documentarian? This is his follow-up to When the Levees Break and finds Lee going back to New Orleans as the city goes about rebuilding itself.

I think Contempt is minor Godard at best. That being said Godard is Godard and this Criterion version is out of print and still superior to that of the recently released Blu Ray version.

Blu-Ray, if anything, is best appreciated when watching animation. This is also the last of the Disney feature films that still needed to be added to my collection.

One Minute Review - Insidious (2 out of 5)

2011-10-31T19:16:00.000-07:00

James Wan is probably one of the most talented directors who has never made a single good movie. And for the fourth time in a row (which has also included the original Saw film, the remarkably awful Dead Silence and Death Sentence) has teamed up with writing partner Leigh Wannell to create another sleek and effective dud.

The film opens with a creepy and brilliant prologue that promises spooky things going bump in the night and ends with a devious title card that promises evil but ultimately delivers cottage cheese.

Wan, as per usual, employs elaborate shots, knowing that there is more suspense and mystery in tracking than cutting, masterfully decorating his way through a story that feels a little like it is being made up as it goes along.

Things begin moving and appearing after a young son goes into a coma that, medically speaking, isn't really a coma, ghost hunters are employed, they explain strange phenomena that in turn explains a lot about what is really happening but not much at all of what its overall purpose is.

It's nice that the film has the common sense to feel retro in it's use of shadows and mood over gore, but just like a lot of those old haunted house movies it eventually throws logic to the wind in an effort to tell a story and the more it tries to explain, the deeper it digs itself into ridiculousness.

50/50 (4.5 out of 5)

2011-10-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

Although 50/50 is at its best in it’s small, quite scenes, it is still, I think, invaluable that the film is a comedy. Of course the description of a 27 year old diagnosed with cancer doesn’t immediately scream laughter, but why should the film not be funny? In the face of complete uncertainly why be stripped of the one last tool we have to cope; to make the most of what could possible be the last moments of our lives; the one last thing we have control of that makes us unique and human? 50/50 isn’t a comedy by choice but by necessity. When we’re left to swim by ourselves, when the odds are in no one’s favour and when it’s inevitable that, at some point in this big ugly process, we will most certainly be staring death in the face, by God the least we can be allowed to do is laugh.

And that’s what 50/50 does. It takes the most hopeless of situations and brings something human out of it. Is humour a way of keeping an arms length from the true gravity of the matter? Sure it is, but what else could a young protagonist want when faced with the untimely possibility that there is nothing really left for him to do except wait to see if he dies? It must be nice to know that, in spite of it all, when many want to treat you like a special sob case, there are friends out there who still know you’re not above a good joke.

Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is 27, works in radio, and is having back pain. Maybe he tried a new sex position and hurt himself offers best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen). That can’t be, he and artist girlfriend Rachel (Bryce Dallas Howard) haven’t had sex in three weeks.

Adam goes to the doctor for an MRI that reveals a rare form of cancer at the bottom of the spine. The plan is to shrink the large tumor down to a more manageable size with chemo and then cut it out. Adam’s odds of survival? About 50/50.

There’s no more need to describe the plot. Along the way we are introduced to Adam’s mother (Angelica Huston) who is overbearing, dealing with a husband who has Alzheimer’s and just wants to care for her poor sick baby who doesn't want to be reminded that he is a poor sick baby. There’s also Katherine (Anna Kendrick), who is currently studying for her doctorate and is assigned to council Adam through the process.

The film is thus a way of going through the motions as Adam slowly, painfully, but not unwillingly takes every day as it comes, walking towards a conclusion that has no more reassurance than the question mark that exists at the end of the road.

Kyle does his best and Rogen provides much of the film’s comic relief as he helps Adam shave his head, uses his friend’s disease to pick up girls, gets high with him, and does his best to support Adam in the only way he can: by being his goofy but caring friend. When the news is broken to Kyle he is as hopeful as he knows how to be: if Adam were a casino game, he'd have the best odds in the house.

Along the way Adam also grows close to two other older chemo patients he meets during treatment. One of them is played by the invaluable Phillip Baker Hall, who has one of those Christopher Walken presences: whenever he is on screen one perks up in expectation of something good going to happen and sure enough Hall walks away with some of the films most insightful and honest moments.

The film was written by Rogen’s friend Will Resier who apparently based the story on his own personal experiences and how Rogen tried to support him. And although it feels like the work of a first time screenwriter (it’s a little to tidy for its own good) it also captures the small, profound moments that only someone who has walked in these shoes could possible have dreamed up.

Director Jonathan Levine and his stars thus don’t back the film up into moments of big melodrama. Instead they keep it quite and human, finding truth in the small moments between friends and family as they all try to find the best way to cope with an impossible situation. The small treasure of the film is in its showing just that: as these people laugh, cry and look into oblivion and do their best to crack a smile. That’s all they can do. When the odds are 50/50 the ball’s in no one's court and the film thankfully doesn’t try to have it any other way.

Filmic Measues: Gateway Movies

2011-10-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

Filmic Measures is a glossery of critical terms and rules in which help us define the movies we watch.

I don't really follow so I'm not so sure if it's the case anymore but once upon a time one of the big arguments against the legalization of marijuana is that it is a gateway drug. Once you have become accustomed to the high that smoking pot comes with it opens the mind up trying other, more stronger highs. Once you've driven 110 on the expressway, why not try 120 as well? And so forth.

In that sense, based on that argument, marijuana is an introduction to drug use: the first step on a path to other things (ed: I am not, of course, making any kind of comment on how much I agree or reject this argument).

There are certain movies that act in the same way: They are the first step into exploring greater, more sophisticated, deeper filmic experiences. Some of them are good in their own right, many of them have achieved a cult status, a couple are unjustly praised by those who are using them as their gateway because they don't know any better and so on. Quality hardly matters in such a case as long as they serve their specific purpose.

Now that I've laid out the foundations let me lead with some examples: The Usual Suspects is a gateway to the classic noir of Double Indemnity or Out of the Past; Pulp Fiction is the gateway to the highly stylised and homage friendly cultural hipness of early Godard like Breathless and Band of Outsiders; Fight Club is the gateway to experimental film-as-state-of-mind works like After Hours, Goodfellas is the gateway to more under appreciated Scorsese classics, Donnie Darko is the gateway to more obscure movies that actually know what they are about; Inception is the gateway to great science fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and even the films of David Lynch are a cross between the surrealism of Luis Bunuel mixed with the Hollywood cynicism of Billy Wilder (if anything has even come close to achieving what Sunset Boulevard did in modern times, it was Lynch's Mulholland Drive). And so on down the line.

Is it ironic that they are all American movies? Maybe it is. Whenever, after all, we see a bland European movie it feels too "Americanized." But that's not the point I guess. The vast majority of film goers learn the trade off of American movies. They strike a nice balance between trying to be (sometimes at least) hip and original while also trying to be popular and profitable (Scorcese, Tarantino, Forester, Soderberg and so on all fall into this category).

Some people, of course, will never get beyond this stage. Some are content not pushing the horizons, not being introduced to new forms of expression, culture, history or society. Fair enough. But if they ever choose, there's a whole new arena of things to experience after the baby steps.

Other Filmic Measures:

Chocolate Bar Movies
Where's the Airship Movies
Monday Movies
The Documentary Rule

TIFF 2011

2011-10-16T15:04:00.000-07:00

Say what you will about Twilight and I don't know if Ashley Greene really has any talent outside of that franchise but she sure is stunning.

Alicia Silverstone is apparently still around. She didn't really stop or anything nor did she look very good. I guess being out of the spotlight for a long time will do that to you.

Ben Foster is very good at playing bad guys and seedy people and, seeing him at the Rampart premiere I can't decide if he's a good actor or is just that way in real life. He showed up, chewing on a douchebag tooth pick, wouldn't sign anything and I can't be sure but I think when someone yelled for him to stop and sign I saw him turn around and mouth "no" at them.

If you look closely and to the right you will see Angelina Jolie waving to the crowd. Everyone was ecstatic when she showed up to the Moneyball premiere.

Ashley Greene signing my girlfriend's copy of Twilight. Do I really need to justify putting up two pictures of her?

Angelina and Brad from behind. There were so many people there that this was the best I could do.

Brad Pitt arrives and then goes to the car ahead of him to get Angelina out.

Chase Crawford. He is in Gossip Girl which I don't watch and he was in the Haunting of Molly Hartly which was horrible. That's about all I know of him.

When Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell showed up to the premiere of Moneyball for a minute, before he turned around, I thought it was Christian Bale.

Canadian director David Cronenberg didn't stop to sign anything. Directors can be weird like that. I guess they figure everyone is there for the stars anyway.

Some kid I don't know. Looks like he's in something on the Disney channel. If anyone knows who he is please share it in the comments.

Evan Rachel Wood looking awesome if you ask me.

George Clooney has a reputation for being very generous to his fans on the red carpet and he proved it again at the Ides of March premiere. He made his car let him out at the very end of the carpet and worked his way through everyone. When he accidentally signed the front of my friend's autograph book she made him sign it inside too and he did.

Gerrard Butler, behind the Elgin Theatre, still the worst and most disorganized location of TIFF.

Gerrard Butler at Roy Thompson Hall as well.

Jeffery Wright's expression as I handed him a copy of Basquiat to sign. He looked at it and said "wow, is that really me?"

Jennifer Garden was so nice and so pretty and signed for so many people. She was truly a class act.

Jessica Chastain. To be quite honest, as you can see in this picture, she looked like a real bitch.

Director Joel Schumacher was the first person to arrive for the Trespass premier. He is just a nice, funny, gay old man. It was raining and he was apologizing for the horrible weather as he was signing for people.

Jonah Hill newly skinny and looking to be having a great time.

This is the kid who played Eddie Murphy's daughter in Imagine That. She was cute and classy.

Kiera Knightly. I need not say more.

Kyle MacLachlan is one of those actors who, when they show up on screen you assume something good is going to happen. He stopped to sign my copy of Blue Velvet.

Madeline Carroll. She was in Flipped and Swing Vote.

Director Marc Forster was reluctant to come over but some chanting finally led to his approaching the crowd for some autographs.

It's a tough call but I don't think anyone looked better on the red carpet than Marisa Tomei. I'd read that she is pretty tough to get an autograph from but she didn't seem to mind stopping for people in Toronto.

Max (son of Anthony) Mingella and Kate (sister of Roony) Mara. I wanted his autograph on my copy of Art School Confidential but honestly didn't even recognize him. Oh well.

Olivia Wilde at the Butter premiere.

I don't care what anyone says about Nicholas Cage, he is easily one of my favourite actors and he was so charming and generous on the red carpet.

Michael Shannon plays a lot of creepy dudes. I guess he is just naturally good at it. It didn't stop him though from coming over to the fans. You can tell he's not a hardened star yet because, when you look at his signature, you can actually tell what it says.

Me and Sarah Polley at the Take This Waltz premiere. She was so nice to everyone. A true class act. I hope the movie does well.

Paul Giamatti more or less being Paul Giamatti. He signed my copy of Sideways.

Ryan Gosling arrives and causes near pandemonium. You could hear the chants of RYAN for blocks away.

Ralph Finnes emerging from behind the Elgin Theatre looking like he wished he could part the crowd with his dark magic.

In this picture you see Sarah Silverman's reaction to my friend who has just handed her a pen with the lid still on it: "Jesus Christ, do I have to do everyone."

Seth Rogen was very charming and sharp looking. That is publicist telling him that my copy of Zack and Miri Make a Porno was the last one he could sign.

Viggo Mortsenson came, signed as much as he could, went inside and then came back out to sign even more once the movie had started. You have to respect that.

Woody Harrelson showed up stoned out of his mind. I expected no less. Even though he missed my copy of Natural Born Killers I still love him.

Emily Blint stopping for a couple of pictures and signatures.

One Minute Review: Due Date (2.5 out of 5)

2011-09-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

You don't often see a movie criticised for the effectiveness of it's actors, but that is precisely the problem with Todd Phillips' Due Date. The movie just doesn't quite work because Zack Galifianakis as the flamboyant actor wannabe Ethan Trembley is too good at playing stupid and clueless and Robert Downey Jr. as uptight Peter Highmore is too good at playing a jerk. They thus, in an unfortunate act, negate the inherent sweetness that made obvious inspiration Planes, Trains and Automobiles so great and end up just kind of cancelling each other out.

Problem is, every time Phillips seems like he is zeroing in on an honest moment between the mismatched couple he pulls back quickly with a lewd remark from Peter or a dimwitted one by Ethan and the movie quickly loses it's momentum as it falls back into raunchy caricature comedy (a scene in which Ethan responds to Peter's story about his father with uncontrollable laughter is particularly unfortunate).

The film is thus no more than a collection of boundary pushing sight gags and throwaway one liners. It features drinking a man's ashes as coffee, a masturbating French Bulldog, bullet wounds, crashed cars, and, in the film's biggest laugh, said French Bulldog getting spit on. And some of it, if maybe less of it than desired, is quite funny. It's proof that Phillips has no problem with pushing the limits for comedy, but falls far short with a story that nearly begs for just a touch of something more human.

Beginners (5 out of 5)

2011-09-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

Beginners is a very funny film but it isn’t a comedy. Sometimes the funniest ones aren’t. Instead it’s a drama. I don’t mean to use that word to imply the heavy-handedness that it sometimes connotes but to use it in that lovely way that David Mamet defines it: it’s about a collection of characters who find themselves in a moment and who we watch as they try to figure it out and do with it only the best that the possibly can given the circumstances.

True drama does not force us into feeling anything other than the empathy or scorn we acquire along the way. Beginners is thus a peek at these people as they love, lose, hurt, jump for joy and ultimately feel their way forward one step at a time. There is no beginning or ending to this story; just the momentary glimpse we are treated to that starts with the opening credits and closes with the ending credits to which we nod our heads and give thanks that we were blessed to have been invited along for the ride.

The story takes place between two intercut time periods. One involves Hal (Christopher Plummer, as illuminating as he’s ever been) whose wife of 40 years has died and who now, in old age himself, has come out of the closet as being gay. It’s not that Hal just woke up one day and realized he was gay, but did what was the right thing at the time and respected his wife until she was no more. That’s how things were back then. It’s not how they are anymore. Sometimes the most profound truths are found in the broadest of spaces.

The other story involves Hal’s son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) who is picking up the pieces and getting himself together after his father’s death. Oliver, a quiet graphic artist who cared for his father right up until the end, finds himself alone and awash in a sea of confusion. His only companion seems to be Hal’s dog, who he communicates to through subtitles, his job isn’t rewarding his creativity and nothing really seems to matter.

At a party Oliver gets a little drunk and meets a quirky French actress Anna (Melanie Laurent of Inglourious Basterds fame) who can only speak through post-it notes due to a throat infection and who leads a life as unstable and confusing as Oliver’s. The two hit it off instantly.

What’s most remarkable about Beginners is how well it juggles it’s drama to strike an even balance in that rare middle ground between comedy and tragedy. The film intercuts these two time periods so that we don’t labour on Hal’s death, which is intercut with scenes of Oliver finding his footing again through Anna, which is offset by Hal’s death and so on down the line, the past and future coming together to create one complete portrait.

The film is smart in that it doesn’t let itself be defined by any single one of its characters. It isn’t pinned down to one overbearing theme or tone or meaning. It’s thus a film of just-so-happens: The film isn’t about an old man being gay but just so happens to have one; it isn’t a film about a young man trying to find himself after his fathers death but just so happens to have one; and it isn’t a love story about two awkward and confused people coming together but it just so happens to have those as well. They are there, but they don’t get in the way of the film being about their life as they live in it, one day at a time.

There’s every possibly for the film to fly off into a messy spiral. It could have been socially conscious of the taboo of coming out as gay, it could have been another weepy indie melodrama about lonely hearts or it could have been a too-hip-for-it’s-own-good exercise in style as director Mike Mills' first feature Thumbsucker was.

Instead it slowly strikes an even and honest balance which manages to allow it to not be tied down by any conventions. Beginners is a film that is so gleefully comfortable just being itself. It takes pride in simply having the courage to be about these people, in the time that they lived and it represents them with respect and care. Any movie can be about something. It takes a truly courageous one to admit that it’s about nothing but the people that it is about and does that to the very best of it’s abilities. This is one of the year’s best films.

The Celebrity Connection:Guillaume Canet

2011-09-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

If the name doesn`t instantly ring a bell that isn`t surprising. I didn`t know who Canet was before last night when I watched the Kiera Knightley and Sam Worthington marital infidelity flick Last Night. The movie was good if not quite as profound as it had hoped to be but Knightley especially brings a lot of character and depth to her performance. It`s one of those walk but don`t run kind of movies whose deliberate pacing and lack of big melodrama made sure that it didn`t really connect with North American audiences.

Regardless, watching it, I couldn`t help but notice Canet (who you may know from Joyeux Noel, The Beach, Tell No One or Love Me If You Dare) who looked strangely familiar:

Could Guillaume Canet really be Patrick Dempsey in disguse. You decide.

One Day (3.5 out of 5)

2011-09-18T12:36:00.000-07:00

The thing about European directors is that they don’t put all of their faith in dialogue. They are okay with letting actions speak louder than words. And they aren’t afraid to hold a scene for a few seconds longer than an American would dare to capture a look or a glance or an embrace that propels the story forward on an emotional level and allows the audience to become emotionally invested in the moment. One Day succeeds on a diet of those very moments in which actors allow joy or hurt to wash over them in an uninterrupted moment of truth. The plot may suffer under the unfortunate burden of a gimmick, but the emotions that course through it are very real.

And the plot is indeed, very much unfortunate. It takes place one day every year from the late 80s until the present. That day is July 15 and the first time we encounter it we find Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) on their graduation day. Obviously coming from a few drinks, Emma and Dexter part from their friends and, not having spoken much to one another, but thinking what the hell, go back to her place.

She is nervous, hasn’t had much experience with this. When she comes out of the washroom she finds him putting his pants back on. He says he’ll stay and they both decide to sleep in the same bed but just remain good friends.

So one day, every year, we drop in on them, whether they are together, apart, single or in a relationship, just to see how things are getting on. Emma morphs from the geeky school girl into a true beauty and moves from plans on grandeur to working in a cheap London taco place, where he is offered a managers job because she seems to have the fewest future prospects, to hooking up with an shaggy bum trying to make a run of being a stand-up comedian.

Dexter has a mom (Patricia Clarkson) who is dying of cancer, a father who is loving but distant, goes on to become the host of some cheap musical variety show, delves into sex and drugs before finally settling down.

Along the way the duo meet up, share pleasantries, exchange entries into their life diaries and go about their business. Sometimes they just stop by to say hi, and sometimes they go off on trips together, sometimes they like each other and sometimes they can see each other slowly drifting away and the whole time you just wish they would both wise up, see the conclusion that is so inevitable to the rest of us and just get on with getting together already.

And yet in spite of all of this there are those little moments that sneak in, between the cracks of scenes in with Hathaway shoots a glance or Sturgess comes to some unspoken realization in which the film let’s us know that, despite it’s plot, it is dealing with serious melodrama and serious melodrama is founded on serious emotions. Hathaway and Stugress make a believable pair and it’s in those quiet human moments where the film settles down, takes a moment to breathe and invests something real into the story. It’s in those moments that the film finds the true beauty that is inherent in this story.

It’s unfortunate then that the film doesn’t have the courage to just tell it’s story straight, as it does just about everything else right. We are jerked around so much in time with such frequency that it’s hard to settle down into the natural rhythms of these characters and their story. The film was directed by Lone Schefig, whose last film An Education also told the story of an unlikely romance but took the time to flesh out a story that unfolded in the moment across a natural span of time.

Here Schefig provides all the charm, heart and wisdom of that film but constantly feels at war against the inherent limitations of her plot and one gets to realizing that, charming as it has been, one day in the life of characters just isn’t enough. Here’s a film that, thanks to its stars and its makers is far better than it should be (it certainly, if nothing less, achieves everything it sets out to), but still just one step short of what it could have been.

Crazy, Stupid Love (3.5 out of 5)

2011-08-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

There’s a way some great actors just have of looking off into the distance that really becomes less about performance and more about finding true emotions. It’s a look without dialogue or anything more than a twist of the side of the mouth or a certain glint in the eye that hits sometime home, be it a man hugging his children or staring off as someone or something leaves him standing behind. It’s also a look that is most startling when comedic actors find it because it’s the moment that they feel comfortable enough with themselves to let the act down and bare some sort of true emotion. Steve Martin does it maybe better than anyone. Now Steve Carrel does it too, first with Dan in Real Life and now, in Crazy, Stupid, Love, he does it too.

It’s a look, especially now in 2011, that makes your realize that movies have become so big, dumb, artificial and ultimately meaningless, that it’s a small treasure to find on that exists at ground level and touches an audience because it deals with people and their actions instead of caricature and plot gimmicks. It’s a look, however that also, unfortunately, makes one wish it had found its way into a better movie.

And thus we have Crazy, Stupid, Love, which, despite its title which promises insights into the strange, nonsensical, sloppy and completely unpredictable nature of love in real life, can’t muster up much more than to be a run of the mill romantic comedy. It tries too hard to be funny, not hard enough to be insightful, not much to be tightly structured and not at all to be anything more insightful than any other bi-weekly Hollywood romance. It’s good, but not good enough.

Thankfully it finds great actors to raise it into something enjoyable. Steve Carrel is warm, funny and human as Cal, long married to Emily (Julianne Moore). His blazer is too big, he wears running shoes with it, his wallet is Velcro and he’s more or less coasting through the routine his life has become. When Emily tells him she has had an affair with a colleague (Kevin Bacon who's name gets the film’s biggest laugh) and wants a divorce he doesn’t want to talk about it and instead, jumps out of the car to avoid her rambling. At least the pavement feels real.

Then one drunken night at the local haunt he comes across Jacob (Ryan Gosling) a smooth operator with the right suite, the right hair, the right shades, the right accent and the right lines. As, night after night, Jacob watches poor Cal make a drunken fool of himself at the bar he calls him over, tells him he reminds him of someone and says he will teach him everything he knows so he can get his life back together and pick up women so that he can get over Emily, his first and only love.

But then as Cal, after much funny teaching, starts to bag any woman he wants, Jacob meets Hannah (the lovely Emma Stone) who he fails to pick up but comes to him after one night realizing her relationship with her moron boyfriend is going nowhere fast. Hannah, for Jacob, is a game changer and slowly the two stories go their separate directions as Cal and Emily begin to realize their mistakes and Jacob begins to give up his ways.

All of this is nice and funny and sweet and utterly forgettable. If it wasn’t for the presence of Carrel, Stone, Moore and Gosling, the movie would be a redundant mess as it spins it’s wheels to an overblown and predictable conclusion.

But alas, in spite of unfortunate subplots in which Carrel dates a crazy grade school teacher played by Marissa Tomei and another strange and awkward one involving Cal’s family babysitter, the film is charming because it’s stars bring it warmth and humour. Carrel especially, under appreciated because he’s pigeonholed into playing morons, has a way of casting, as indicated in the opening paragraph, human glances across a screen that can either melt or lift your heart and Gosling, so very good in so many kinds of roles finds a note for Jacob that is more about personality than caricature.

And that’s what the film offers: the pleasure of seeing the right actors come together and breathe life into an otherwise forgettable work. Crazy, Stupid, Love isn’t wholly realistic, doesn’t have any big moments of revelation like the best romantic comedies do and is more concerned with being clever and witty than about creating a full story that is engaging from beginning to end. These are intelligent and attractive actors. They know how to project humour and emotional depth in natural ways. Now that we’ve seen how good they can be in a film on autopilot let’s pray they find another one soon that is worthy of their talents.

Justifying OUr Shitty Taste

2011-08-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

So, last week I threw out a call to bloggers to "justify their shitty taste." It was really just something I myself wanted to do but thought I'd open it up to others to see if anyone else wanted to contribute on the topic. But two men stepped up to the plate. Thankfully quality is better than quantity and it was two of the best out there.

So, besides my piece on Knowing, be sure to also check out what Vancetastic had to say about Father's Day over at The Audient and what Yojimbo had to say about Crash over at Let's Not Talk About Movies.

Red State ( 2 out of 5)

2011-08-16T14:18:00.000-07:00

Kevin Smith’s new religious thriller Red State suffers from “The Problem of the Bicycle.” For those of you who don’t know, the “Problem of the Bicycle” was Michelangelo Antonioni’s criticism put forward towards The Bicycle Thief and Italian neo-realism as a whole. He basically said that, now that we have a movie about a man stealing a bicycle, we need one which understands the man, his psychology, what makes him tick and what ultimately leads him to the point of theft. Meaningful movies, in other words, needed to be about more than action in the present.

That’s what Red State is: it’s all action and no thought. It's cheap slight-of-hand masked as serious social commentary. Here Smith, breaking away from his typical comedy background, is trying to make a serious movie about a serious subject matter. Stylistically it works just fine as unnerving, bargain basement grindhouse. Intellectually, the movie is a puff of smoke as our hands close on nothing but thin air.

The story focuses on a mad small town preacher named Abin Cooper (Michael Park in a riveting villain role) who is supposed to represent a Fred Phelps surrogate as him and his small family congregation picket outside the funeral of a locally murdered gay teen, waving signs that say the kid is on his way to hell and other such things. Cooper’s presence is so strong around town that a local high school teacher tells her class that not even the neo-Nazi’s want anything to do with him. This is the extent of characterization in Red State.

Then one night three kids sneak off to lose their virginity to a local girl they found online. This is Sara (Melissa Leo) who says no one it getting in her without getting at least two beers into them. The kids drink down and hit the floor. When they awaken they find themselves inside Cooper’s church as he preaches a sermon of hate and then watches as a gay man, bound in plastic wrap and tied to a cross, is murdered in cold blood.

An investigation ultimately brings around the ATF lead by Keenan (John Goodman), who’s orders are to kill everyone inside after a Davadian-like firefight breaks out. This is the extend of social commentary in Red State; that, oh gosh, maybe even the good guys aren't good guys in the end.

In the Q&A with Smith that followed the screening of Red State he indicated that his purpose for making the movie was to take a stance against organizations like the Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church who commit acts of hate in the name of God. This subject matter is exactly the problem as it's too large for a film of such small ambitions. That Smith has no other agenda other than to cut down people like Phelps, he seems the church people as no more than villains. What Smith fails to realize is that great drama is created in the grey areas that exist between ingrained social concepts of good and evil and how, as humans, people have the freedom to cross those lines at their own free will. It's not enough to show that someone drank the Koolaide when what's most interesting is understanding what forces would lead someone to such an act.

Instead, Smith has made what he himself deems a “parlour trick” of a movie in which twists are taken and bodies begin to drop, not so much in order to make any sort of statement, but rather for the director to toy with the audience. He’s proven now he can make a movie in another genre and make it well but Red State too often plays too much like the same kid just in a different candy store.

And then the movie ends, not to give anything away, on several notes that I suppose Smith would like to think of as satire but which take a misguided b-movie and turn it into an ignorant one, revealing the true nature of Smith and his black and white playground politics and leads to a final line of dialogue which corrupts the movie, making Smith just as guilty as those he takes up arms against within the film. If Red State ultimately makes any statement at all it’s that not only am I right and they are wrong but let’s make fun of them for how wrong they are. That Smith can’t find a way to end his film in anything but his standard penis jokes and stoner references reflects the sad state of a boyish mentality trying to juggle with an adult concept.

Smith states that, before wrapping up his career as a filmmaker he wanted to make the kind of film that his contemporaries like Quentin Tarantino and the Cohen Bros make but that he felt he never had the kind of talent as a visual storyteller to pull-off. It’s a funny reference as the Cohen Bros. masterpiece No Country for Old Man is a haunting tale of an evil force that is corrupting society which is both masterful on a suspense level as well as sending out a haunting warning call about the society we life in. That’s what, I think, Red State ultimately aims for, but Smith never even tries to deal with the idea of evil within society or take account for the ideas he wishes to explore. He's too busy making cheap entertainment for that.

There’s no doubt that Kevin Smith is a talented guy. In the comedy realm he has made some singular films which define their generation and has a voice for dialogue that, like David Mamet, Tarantino or Neil Labute is instantly recognizable as his own. But within the realm of drama and suspense Smith is lost in a sea of his own shortcomings, never being able to decide if he’s making a statement of making the kind of entertainment that gets an audience hooting and hollering. He used to make smart movies for dumb people. Now he has, unfortunately, made nothing more than a dumb movie for smart people.

The Road to Fellini's Realism

2011-08-11T16:26:00.000-07:00

Note: For anyone who has followed this blog from the beginning or even just glaced at my profile picture, will know that La Dolce Vita is my favourite movie and Federico Fellini my favourite filmmaker. Over the summer the TIFF Bell Lightbox has been hosting a retrospective of Fellini's work as well as presenting a gallery of images dedicated to him. This coming Sunday I will be seeing Nights of Cabiria on the big screen as well as La Dolce Vita come the end of August. I'm sure I'll have something to say about both when the time comes but until then I publish this essay in anticipation.

The road is a metaphor that could very well describe the entire career of Federico Fellini, whose films, in one way or another, all revolved around a journey of self discovery. So it is ironic that his film, in which respected film critic Roger Ebert called the first “that can be called entirely "Felliniesque"(1994), would be called The Road. In a way it’s a starting point from which Fellini himself would take a journey of self-discovery, establishing the very images, motifs and themes that all of his later work would revolve around. Some of which would be the tone that Fellini’s films created by a rejection of the typical characters found in the neo-realism genre which Fellini was born from as discussed by Peter Bondanella in his book The Films of Federico Fellini. There is also the constant contrast between the circus and religion as discussed by Edward Murray in his book Fellini the Arstist, and finally the constant quest of self discovery that Fellini’s characters take in which they often find themselves trapped somewhere between heaven and earth as discussed by Donald P. Costello in his book Fellini’s Road.

In his book The Films of Federico Fellini, Peter Bondanella talks of Fellini’s departure from his roots as a maker of Italian Neorealist films. Having started in this genre as a writer for Roberto Rossili, Fellini soon abandoned his roots on his third film La Strada, by presenting characters and a plot that surpassed what was found within the neorealist genre. According to Bondanella, “Perhaps his departure from neorealist practice in rejecting the idea of film character as social type is the most important divergence from neorealist practice; but equally important is the fact that the plot and visuals of La Strada reject easy classification as a realistic story of social exploitation” (51-51). If neorealism was thought to have moved cinema away from the Hollywood “dream factory” (43) and into the streets of war torn Europe (43), then Fellini was taking it back into a dream world. According to Bondanella, “Fellini agreed with both Rossellini and Antonioni that Italian cinema needed to pass beyond a dogmatic, Marxist approach to social reality, dealing poetically with other equally compelling personal or emotional problems”(53). Hence, La Strada was born. More so then any of Fellini’s previous films, it was a parable about childlike innocence; about finding the purpose that God put you on earth to fulfill. La Strada therefore gave birth to an even newer realism; Fellini’s realism.

It was easy to see that Fellini’s films, particularly his characters, did not so much offer depictions of realism. Instead they acted as a part within Fellini’s fables. In neorealism it was believed that films should “stress social context” (Bondanella, 43). Fellini rejected this idea; his films were more like a process of working out their maker’s own spiritual life journey through the use of allegory and fable. As Bondanella writes, “More than a story, La Strada is a fable about symbolic figures, and its plot structures this origin in the fable or fairy tale” (52). The way Fellini’s films are structured, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita in particular, is that they both begin and end at the sea; they come full circle back to their beginnings. For Fellini, especially as a Roman Catholic, this book ending represented a new beginning for his characters, a chance for spiritual redemption. Bondanella offers this explanation: “Rather than viewing the world from the perspective of class struggle or class conflict, La Strada embodies a profoundly Christian emphasis upon the individual and the loneliness of the human condition” (54). In using the image of the sea, Fellini is showing the viewers that his films are not about the underpinnings of a Marxist society, but rather the choices of an individual journey; the journey away from the birthplace and back, in an attempt to find, not a place within society, but a place within the spiritual universe. In Fellini’s reality, faith takes precedence over class.

Besides the road, there are two other images that constantly appear throughout Fellini’s body of work, usually appearing in conflict with one another. One of these images is that of the circus: a place of spontaneity and life, a place where it is the norm to think the unthinkable, to believe the unimaginable. To Fellini, the circus was a place of great imagination and invention. Edward Murray in his book Fellini the Artist states that “Where the circus…appears directly in his pictures, it stands as a metaphor, a device for revealing life as a funny- sad experience with cosmic significance” (232). Indeed, to Fellini, a man who liked to create his own reality, whether it was derived from his own life, or a life he had made up, the circus was a place of unending imagination.

The circus however was not the only part of Fellini’s realism. Fellini was a director who was constantly trying to work out the dual nature of reality, trying to blur the lines between the “real and the ideal” (Murray,234). Thus Fellini’s films present a reality that was not the same one that the neorealists dealt with. Rather it was one that was Fellini’s itself, a world in which imagination and performance were held in the highest regard, and thus the circus was always in constant conflict with the church. In reality, the church reined supreme in Rome, and this is why it was under constant comparison to the circus. As Murray helps us understand, Fellini was constantly trying to show us life’s poles, that every road has two paths, more importantly, “life as it is, and life as it ought to be” (234). Throughout his films Fellini constantly presents the audiences with two versions of life. The life that we have, which is one of banality, hurt and sorrow, and most importantly of displacement, and the life that we could have if we lived a little better, were a little more loving, and lived with a little more direction; a true dolce vita.

For Fellini the circus offered direction where the church did not. The church to Fellini “(S)tands for an inauthentic way of life, since it tends to thwart man’s expansive capacities” (Murray,30). The reality of the church was that it presented a strict way of life, a doctrine that was to be accepted and lived by. To Fellini the church undermined an individual’s imagination. The church was not concerned with poles. In Fellini’s eyes, the church only saw one way to live; their way, which Murray helps to illustrate in pointing out that “(H)is attitude towards the Church is a rebellious one” (31). Murray goes on to state that this is because “(T)he polarities that distinguish the Fellinian universe guarantee the director a sufficiently rich assortment of themes with which to capture the interest of the intelligent viewer, who invariably likes to be shown the different sides of every experience”(31). Alas, the church and the circus need each other. If the church only shows us one side of what life should be, Fellini needed the circus to show us the other.

Although Gesulmina in La Strada never comes into such direct conflict with the church as Fellini’s later characters such as Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957) or Marcello (La Dolce Vita, 1960) would, we are still able to get a glimpse of how the circus functioned in Fellini’s realism. The poles in this film revolve around the circus and the world outside which in a way, mimics the reality of neorealism; life in a working class society. We see that Gesilmina is unhappy to hear of her sister’s passing and that she will have to take her place alongside Zampano and his traveling circus-like act. Yet it is when she is performing that reality slips away and for a brief moment, she is happy. The circus is able to strip reality away and offer hope when all seems hopeless. That’s the brilliance of Fellini’s realism, when life seemed to be going bad, there were fantasy places like the circus, or on a larger, more metaphorical scale, Fellini’s films themselves, to escape to in order to find comfort and happiness.

Coming back to the metaphor of the road, in his book Fellini’s Road, Donald P. Costello states that “Throughout all his films, Fellini is concerned with the road of life” (5). There is no doubt that one of the main themes throughout all of Fellini’s films is that of a spiritual journey, of a character who is caught between Heaven and Earth, who must journey down this road in order to find their placement in life. To reinforce this idea, Costello states: “Both thematically and formally, a Fellini film is a journey toward discovery of the essential self” (5). In the director’s own words: “(E)ach time I am telling the story of characters in quest of themselves, in search of a more authentic source of life, of conduct, of behavior, that will more closely relate to the true roots of their individually” (Fellini in Costello, 2). This journey usually must be taken, as Fellini’s characters often find themselves trapped between the earth and the sky. In La Strada, The Fool represents the sky and Zampano the Earth. Similarly 8 ½ finds it’s main character Guido being held to earth only by a rope around his foot, and in La Dolce Vita, Marcello is caught between a flying statue of Jesus and a monster from the sea.

In a similar sense, Costello breaks down the three characters of La Strada into a trinity which involves The Child of the Sea (Geselmina), the Spirit of the Sky (The Fool) and the Man of Earth (Zampano) ( 23, 18 and 27 respectively). These three elements, in one form or another, come to represent the spiritual journey that Geselmina, Cabiria, Marcello, Guido, etc, will all have to take along their road to spiritual fulfillment. It is important to note that each of these journeys end with their character’s finding their way back to be offered the possibility of redemption at their place of origin: the sea. For Fellini the sea represented several things. It represented the innocence of youth, the feminine and most importantly, the beginning of life (Costello, 6). It is at the sea in La Strada where Geselmina, although dead, can complete the purpose of her spiritual journey, which was to help Zampano to understand his loss and find redemption on the beach. In a way, although tragic on the surface, the final scene in which Zampano cries on the beach is a baptism for this man, a rebirth which offers a way to start over on a new path of life. This is ultimately the possibility that Fellini presents all of his characters with at the end of his films, some of whom accept it (Cabiria) and some who don’t (Marcello).

Fellini’s films constantly presented a spiritual journey down the road of life. Through three specific texts based on the director’s work, we can see that this journey stood in constant contrast with the Italian Neorealism movement, which presented characters trying to find their place within a Marxist society. We also see that Fellini was constantly contrasting the church with the circus to show us how he viewed the importance of life and imagination. His films also constantly showed the struggle of a character who was stuck somewhere between Heaven and Earth. Through all of these themes and ideas, Fellini was able to create a realism that was not the one that was shared by his audience but one that existed all to himself: a Fellini realism.

Justify Your Shitty Taste: Knowing

2011-08-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

Here’s an interesting query: You’re running late for work and in one of those “doh” moments can’t find your keys, only to realize they are in your pocket. The whole ordeal only takes about thirty seconds out of your day but, while approaching a stop sign on the way a car appears out of nowhere and runs it. If you hadn’t had that momentary lapse, you very well could have been road kill.

Question is: was our losing the keys just a random hiccup of the brain or part of a preordained destiny? How easy it is to take for granted that stopping to tie a shoe, turning left instead of right, looking down instead of up, etc. could potentially be the difference between life of death, but whose terms do we really operate on, ours or the universes?

Think before deciding. If life is random than we simply go through the motions until our death and everything is meaningless, but if life is predetermined, free will is an extinct commodity, ultimately thwarting many religious and political debates as every suicide or abortion were already planned by a being greater than our human capacity could ever comprehend. If I’m writing this because it’s my destiny, then you’re reading it for the same reasons.

These are the things that entered my mind while watching Alex Proyas’ Knowing, which does something rare for this day and age: it manages to be both a stunning entertainment and unimaginably intelligent. It’s a rare science fiction film that doesn’t compromise its integrity by throwing it away to spectacle.

Knowing is a film that asks its audience to sit, watch, listen and, most importantly, pay attention while it spins its tale of destruction. So rare is it that a film stretches itself without apology to the very limits of its narrative possibilities (even if that means into the realms of the preposterous) these days that it is mistaken as bad filmmaking. Knowing is a film that, like all great science fiction, knows that art is a vehicle for raising questions, not giving them arbitrary answers.

Nicholas Cage stars as John Koestler, a professor of astrophysics who believes that the universe is comprised of a series of random events after his wife was killed while out of town when her hotel catches fire. John has a young son named Caleb who receives a mysterious paper covered in random numbers when a ceremony is held at his school to unlock a time capsule buried fifty years prior. The paper was written by the disturbed Lucinda Embry whose assignment for the capsule was to draw a picture of how she though the future would look.

What John slowly begins to realize after analyzing the paper is that the numbers form a code, predicting all of the disasters that will precede the end of the world. The numbers provide the date of the tragedy, the body count and the coordinates of the location. According to the code there are three disasters left, before the world ends, all three of which, visually speaking, set a new standard in what special effects can achieve.

As John becomes obsessed with the code, thinking that if he could only master it that he could save many lives, desperately trying to track down the late Lucinda’s daughter for answers, Caleb begins being visited by strange, darkly cloaked men whose constant whispers in his head also afflicted the young Lucinda and seem to be telling him something. Is Caleb a messenger for God or a victim of his own psyche?

Proyas, whose Dark City was also a (very different) masterpiece about the nature of human existence, takes what could have easily been a mindless entertainment (as the trailers make it out to be) or an absolute train wreck (as it would have been under original helmer Richard Kelly) and infuses it, not only with mind bending special effects, thrilling chases, and gripping storytelling, but with complex and intelligent images that are constantly contradictory to one another. At its heart Knowing is a constant battle between science and theology, the possible and the divine, the physical and the metaphysical, and so on. It, like The Dark Knight and Watchmen will be the central focus of many scholarly essays to come

The brilliance of the film, and arguably most of its suspense, lies in how it is never quite willing to tip the scales in favor of one side. I dare not even hint at the outcome of the story, which is next to impossible to predict, but to draw attention to how even the circumstances that govern it cannot simply be pegged down to that of the scientific or the Biblical. Can it be that one becomes real or at least possible in light of the other? Or will they constantly cancel each other’s integrity out; the Bible explaining everything that science can’t and science explaining everything the Bible can’t? What does that say about the nature of our existence? It may be easy to write the conclusion of this film off as improbable, but the debates it raises are real and, like all great science fiction, it believes in them down to the very last frame.

It’s truly rare these days to find a film whose vast intelligence is not confined to the insufficient demands of the running time, nor whose ideas are limited to the images on screen. A film whose musings slowly slip from the screen and out into the world because they are larger and more important than just getting a story from beginning to end, acting instead as a catalyst to propel individuals into deep thoughts and conversations regarding matters of their life that they never quite thought to ponder. A film that is, to top it all off, one hell of a thrill ride. Yes, films like that are rare. Knowing is exactly one of them.

A Call To All Bloggers: Justify Your Shitty Taste

2011-08-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

There's a metal magazine called Decibel which I've never read before but their content is always linked on a a popular metal blog called Metal Sucks that I read all of the time.

One of my favourite columns that Metal Sucks always links to is "Justify Your Shitty Taste" in which a reviewer picks an album out of a bands catalogue that is considered by the masses to be a huge embarrassment or misstep of their career and writes a piece justifying why it is that they actually like it.

So, in order to rip off a good idea when I see one, I'm putting out a call to all movie bloggers to justify their own shitty taste.

It's simple: sometime this week, pick a movie that you like that the vast majority of critics and fans have hated and tell us why you think you are right and why everyone should give this movie a second chance.

Then come back here, post the link in the comments section and at the end of the week I will gather all of the links and post them in one place for everyone to enjoy. Let's make this fun and give people a reason to go back and rethink movies that got to critical brush off the first time around.

Quality Control

2011-08-04T19:17:00.000-07:00

As technology progresses I tend to regress in an attempt to hold on to any little piece of the past I can. In May I broke down. It was time to move to Downtown Toronto and so it was time for some new stuff. Let me quote you my specs. I have a 50 inch Panasonic Vierra 1080p 600 Hz Plasma TV. I also have a Toshiba Blu-Ray Player and a set of Bose Cinemate Series II GS speakers. I'm set for the next little while anyway, until I get an HD cable box that is.

The problem with the TV is that for movies to look good you need the Blu-Ray and the problem with the Blu-Ray is that I didn't want it. What's so special about Blu-Ray? I dunno, especially if you don't have a 1080p TV because that's what Blu-Rays play at as well. And Blu-Rays, supposed to be twice as good as DVDs, I'm told, will sometime in the future be replaced by Green Rays, which, you got it, are even better. Yikes.

Some people speak of Blu-Ray as the be all and end all of home entertainment. They trade in all their DVDs for an upgrade and will hassle anyone who doesn't have one into getting one. I don't really buy it.

Sure Blu-Rays do look nice, and they are great for cartoons, but as technology advances and quality improves we move farther and farther away from what movies were initially meant to be. It's funny now to think that you're not in the elite if you don't have the highest quality TV, speakers and players these days, while back in the day many of the smartest and most influential critical minds deemed sound and colour to be the destruction of film as an art.

I'm not going to go back that far and argue the value of that point (there is some, depending on who you read), but now, with home entertainment being a factor in the equation, to me, it doesn't matter what kind of quality I watch at home because, truth be told, if you're not watching a movie in the theatre (or maybe I should say projected on a screen), you're not watching it the way it should be.

But now even theatres have gone the route of technology. I don't think I've ever seen a film projected in digital that I thought looked superior to that old tradition of film passing through a shutter and being projected by light onto a screen. I would take the grit and loveliness of seeing scratches and flecks on a film strip than the clarity of a digital projection. It's the difference between the cackling of a record and the hollow perfection of a CD. Purists will plead no contest in this argument.

And some movies just need it. If you're not seeing Lawrence of Arabia, Playtime or 2001 a Space Odessy projected on 70mm film you're not seeing them. And if you're watching them on TV in a cropped pan and scan format you may as well not even bother.

But I'm getting away from the point. I know the counter argument that some could sing. But if you can't watch a film at a theatre don't you want to be able to watch it the best way possible at home? Yes and no. For most movies, especially without the right TV, if you put both a regular DVD and a Blu-Ray into a Blu-Ray player you won't notice a difference unless you stand back and really stare. So in the long run, who cares?

And some movies, again, are not meant to look bright and sparkling and crystal clear. Some of their charm is in being confined to the technical specifications of film and of wearing the strain of their making on their sleeves. Some movies are supposed to look dark and grimy. Why should the quality of technology take away the natural essence of a film?

Case in point, and the inspiration for this discussion, is Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles. For those who haven't seen it, it was Jackson's second movie and probably, I think I can safely say, not the one that got him the Lord of the Rings gig.

I'd seen the movie before having downloaded and had purchased the DVD a couple of years ago but never got around to it. I was feeling loose and like something a little twisted over the past weekend and plucked the title off my shelf. Putting it in, the first thing I noticed was that it was in full screen and looked horrible, as if someone had just transferred it off of an old, worn out VHS copy. Probably one that had lost it's label and just had Feebles carved into the top of it. I'm exaggerating but it paints a nice picture of the quality of this DVD. And to tell you the truth, it was kind of beautiful.

Meet the Feebles is a cheap movie. It's a deranged puppet movie that has some things more twisted than any film with living actors could have produced and so the bad sound and imperfections in the picture fit it perfectly. If Peter Jackson himself released a director approved remaster on Blu-Ray that went and cleaned up the entire original negative I wouldn't buy it. I have the version that fits the movie perfectly. This isn't supposed to be a flawless looking movie. It's supposed to look cheap and hand-made. That's part of it's charm.

With that, I cherish this DVD and will always stand buy it as the definitive version of this film, unless, of course, you own that old tape that this DVD was transferred from, in which case, you are sitting on a lost treasure.

Not all movies can apply to this logic. Some look very good on Blu-Ray, but none, I don't think, have every been defined by it. The point is then that, to all those who try to sell you on technologies don't get the point and, more than likely, only have a very narrow view on the subject. In which, the simple response is, the best way to view a film is in the best format that expresses the original aesthetic inteions of the film. 200 million dollars deserves, for whatever it's worth, to be seen on a Blu-Ray. Meet the Feebles and others like it deserve to feel like they were sound in the musty back room of someone's cobwebbed basement. For everything in between, it hardly matters either way.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

Mike's DVD Haul

2011-08-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've done one of these since Christmas. The reason being that I don't buy DVDs in mass volumes on many occasions. But this time two occasions came together resulting in my buying a lot of DVDs in a short time period. One of them was the closing of Blockbuster and the other was the summer Barns & Noble half-off Criterion sale, which is, to me, like an early Christmas. That said, here's a look at I have added to my shelves recently:

Dryer's first sound film despite it's lack of dialogue. The this one is often controversial in that it features a story that is hard to follow and nearly impossible to comprehend completely but Dryer creates such a haunting tone that it is unforgettable.

Anyone who has followed these DVD Haul posts know that I am a sucker for Melville and will not be satisfied until I own whatever of his that is available on Region 1 DVD. As much as I love the films of the French New Wave, Melville was doing it first and hipper than most of those guys.

This is a film that came during Robert Altman's time of Hollywood exile and during a period where he thought to adapt as many stage plays to film as possible. This is the best film of that crop and also the one that made Phillip Baker Hall stand out as an actor to watch for.

This film is often considered to be part of a trilogy that Antonioni made which also includes La Notte and L'Aventura, which is a masterpiece. I've often had a love/hate relationship with the Italian cynic's work, especially with being more partial to the life and wonder of Fellini's films but Antonioni is always fascinating, even when he makes you really work for it.

Tracing the beginnings of American independent film can lead to several different starting points. One is with John Cassavettes, one is with John Sayles and his Return of the Secaucus 7 and the other leads to Jim Jarmusch and Stranger than Paradise. Always hip and offbeat, Jarmusch is one of the true original independant voices in American movies even to this day.

To be quite honest I didn't even know this box set was still in print. Jean Cocteau make 4 major contributions to the world of French Cinema and three of them are located here (the fourth being Beauty and the Beast).

I've always been a bit indifferent to Wes Anderson (except for the Royal Tenanbaums) and I didn't even like this movie the first time I saw it, but it has stuck with me all these years as something I can't forget and so I've been craving to see it again and understand what exactly this mysterious pull is.

This is David Mamet's favourite movie. If it's good enough for Mamet, it's good enough for me.

There maybe isn't a great director as diverse as Louis Malle. Here he is dealing with dreams and the surreal. Steven Soderberg tells a funny story about this movie in his cameo in Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

Since I am apperently getting back into Wes Anderson I thought I'd pick this up as well seeing as it was only 4.99 at Target.

Jaques Tati is a one-of-a-kind silent comedian. His films are funny and playful and yet often brilliant and towering technical achievements. For this one Tati built an entire city for his set which, along with his next film Trafic, would be his downfall. Steven Spielberg took a lot of inspiration for The Terminal from this movie.

Fritz Lang's sound masterpiece. I don't even know what to say about this movie other than see it and be wowed by how expereimental it was with sound for it's time. It's also deeply compelling and a brillant attack on Nazism.

I knew what this show was at the time of it's airing but never had HBO and never cared much for TV anyway. Seeing it for 9.99 new I figured I'd pick it up and see what the deal was.

Some people hated this movie. I thought it was a beautful and truthful family film that I would be happy to see with my kids if I had any.

One of my picks for best films of 2010

My pick for the best movie of 2010

It was 4.99, I hadn't seen it, I like Paul Newman. Why not?

Before fizzling out, James L Brooks made two great American films. One was Terms of Endearment and the other was this one which excelled at being both a smart and compelling romantic comedy while also being knowlagable about the workings of TV.

Paul Newman and Robert Redofrd together again. God bless Butch and Sundance but they ain't got nothing on this movie.

Managed to find an out of print copy of Goddard's controversial modern day retelling of the Jesus story with Mary being a modern day teenager.

One of my picks for the best movies of 2010

Love Sofia Coppola and didn't get a chance to see this in theaters. A lot of people hated it, which could mean that it is challenging and mature.

I always held Greg Motolla's follow-up to Superbad in higher regard than it's predecessor. This film is more mature and thoughtful while still being warm and funny. The scene with the discussion of Moby Dick has always stuck with me.

I thought this movie was really funny. Sue me. It also proved that Neil Labute is just as comfortable with slapstick comedy as he is with dark comedy and knows how to take a huge cast of characters and always know where they are.

Although I don't think it's the saviour of all cinema or even one of the best movies of 2010 it is still worth owning to revisit some day.

Werner Herzog and David Lynch team up for a film that takes a conventional story and tells it in unconventional ways as only Lynch and Herzog could do.

When you think of Alain Resnais you think of either this or Last Year at Marienbad. Both are brilliant films.

I don't know enough about Luis Bunuel so this seems as good a place to continue exploring as any.

Ever since seeing Ordet, Dryer has been one of my favourite filmmakers and who couldn't own this, considered one of the greatest silent films of all time?

I'm one of the few who didn't take issue with Steven Soderberg's remake of this film with George Clooney. Still, this is the one to see and as good a place to start if you want to get into Tarkovsky as any.

Captain America (3 out of 5)

2011-08-01T10:26:00.000-07:00

Captain America, I suppose, has to be admired on some basic level, as all film with a certain degree of competence deserve to be admired, in which one can appreciate the acting, the direction, the visual aesthetic and the action. It’s a complete package with the bow on top. Nothing less and not much more either.

I guess one can primarily admire it for it’s having a real human character at the centre of it. Most comic book movies these days are animated video games with human faces that pop up amidst the computer generated effects. Captain America has a lot of that kind of stuff too but it also has a little comedy and a little heart as well. It has, above all, a hero who provides a human centre for the story; one who you could get behind. Not enough to put it in line with Iron Man or The Dark Knight to be sure, but enough to safely say, without much irony, that it’s better than, say, the Transformers movies. Faint praise is still praise, no?

For those who don’t know, Captain America is about Steve Rogers (Chris Evens) a small awkward kid who wants nothing more than to serve in the army and fight for his country in the war. He enlists under several different names but with a list of ailments a mile long is denied at all of them. The kid has guts and heart though and isn’t afraid to take a back alley beating or two from the local bully when need be.

Trying to enlist one final time at the World Fair where Howard “father of Tony” Stark (Dominic Cooper) unveils his first hover car, Rogers is discovered by Dr. Erskine (Stanely Tucci), a German scientist who fled to America away from Johann Schmidt aka Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), a ruthless Nazi who believes he can harness the power from some glowing cube in order to rise above Hitler and win the war.

Erskine, wanting to use this unexplained power for good, selects Rogers as a test subject much to the cynicism of Colonal Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones doing Tommy Lee Jones) and the admiration of potential love interest Peggy Carter (Haley Atwell). Regardless, once injected with this mysterious power, Rogers exits the experiment a muscle bound hunk with amazing physical power.

He is first put to use as an American hero selling war bounds but once he learns that his friend has been captured behind enemy lines and presumed dead, Captain America single handily goes behind enemy lines, infiltrates Red Skull's operation, saves the men and sends Red Skull into a rage.
All of this is all fine and dandy and made with style and humour. Director Joe Johnson does a good job of creating the look and feel of an old newspaper serial of the time and he takes special care of ensuring that there is a human story amidst all the special effects and the action.

However, if there is any problem with this concept it is that, while stacked up against other Marvel comic book films that have defined the genre such as Spider-Man or Iron Man, Captain America simply doesn’t have much personality. Evans in the lead role doesn’t have the charisma or charm to pull off Roger’s sweet naivety even after he becomes Captain America, and Weaving, a great character actor in his own right, isn’t given the kind of depth that goes into making a great villain, especially one as iconic as Red Skull.

And that’s Captain America: a film that is, in these summers of excess, better than most, but not nearly enough to achieve anything close to memorable. Comic book movies used to be based on relatable characters with human traits put into a narrative that doesn’t cross real life, but runs in such a way parallel to it that it’s pointed yet simple messages can jump across the divide and connect with us on some emotional human level. Captain America sets up all the elements to get the first thing right but doesn’t come close enough to approaching the second. Too bad.

Expecting Good Criticism

2011-08-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

The expectation argument is the worst form of criticism out there. I take that back. As someone who has written extensively on the nature of criticism as a practice and an art form unto itself within this space I can more accurately say, it's not even criticism at all. It's just plain lazy as well. It's a cheap and quick excuse to not give a film the time and energy to understand what it did and how you interacted with it, and it's also a form of passing the buck because, of course, if so many other people wouldn't have liked it so much you could have liked it more.

Arguing expectations is like drawing lines in the sand and seeing how the tide comes in. If you draw the line close to the water you don't expect much of the tide and if your line gets washed away your expectations have been exceeded. You can do the same in reverse. The point is is that criticism is not drawing lines in the sand. It's about relating to the water and understanding it's movement and drawing a line based on your feelings and finding in which the water can meet, and balance has been achieved.

Because, to get to the point of all that, criticism is about you in relation to the movie. Expectations are about you in relation to what you've heard. If a movie is better than you expected that doesn't make it a good movie and to expect a movie to be better than what you felt it was does not make it bad. To do this is to judge, as Roger Ebert always argued against, the movie you wanted to see and not the one that has been put in front of you.

Of course justifiable expectations will always exist. When I watch a new Ingmar Bergman movie that I haven't seen I expect it to be great, as Bergman has a track record for making great movies. But if one happens to not meet those expectations this does not mean the film is to be thrown away, considered lesser Bergman, mean it deserves a bad review or any such variable. What it means is that I have some thinking to do. If I watched the Seventh Seal and didn't agree with the critical majority that it's one of the best films ever made the problem is with me not the film and it's up to me to reflect back and understand why this film has been deemed to be such, and in most cases, with both personal and analytical reflection, the truth will reveal itself eventually.

This happened this summer with two films. Cars 2, which was better than the original, was spoken down to because people expect more from Pixar while Transformers 3 was, for some, given a free pass because they weren't expecting it to be better than the awful second film.

Of course, expectations will never be able to be totally managed. Films accumulate history and reputations almost instantly, that will grow and change over time; lesser critics maybe don't trust their literary voice enough to to say the same thing as everyone else but in a compelling and personal way; and truth almost never reveals itself immediately. It requires quite time to sit and reflect and to understand exactly what a movie has done and how that has effected you, because, as I've argued many times before, there is a strong difference between what you like and what is good (the best criticism existing between the two and tying them together).

That is, after all, why we read criticism in the first place. We want to know how a movie effected it's viewer in an intelligent and/or emotional way, not how it fell in line in relation to their expectations. I expect more from critics.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2.5 out of 5)

2011-07-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

The third Transformers film Dark of the Moon has so much (too much really) spectacular action that it’s kind of a shame it got stuck with such a bad action movie. In Transformers 3 you will be treated to just about every kind of chase, stunt, explosion, shoot out, special effect, in the book plus the whole book and the kitchen sink as well. If that’s what you’re looking for, good for you. Look no further. Some people consider that getting their money’s worth and although the Transformers films have been a lot of things to a lot of people, boring they have not been. If however you want, oh I don’t know, say, filmmaking, storytelling, characters, drama, insight, depth, logic, common sense, continuity, or any other such endangered species to the Hollywood summer film landscape, well look elsewhere.

“But Hey!” some will scream. “How can you expect anything more from a Transformers movie when you know exactly what you’re getting before you even get it?” I don’t, but how, I retort, can you be satisfied with so much less? The Transformers films, I have realized, under the both flawed and brilliant reign of director Michael Bay, are not films at all but extended music videos in which there is only the outline of story, character, drama etc., and instead of music the quick, jagged images are instead made up of flashes of sound and colour, of banging and blowing up and rattling as enormous computer generated effects crash headfirst at high speed into other enormous computer generated effects in an orgasm of colour and noise. Transformers 3 is, if nothing else, certainly the loudest movie I have ever bared witness to.

In my last paragraph there I hinted at how Transformers could be so much more, but then again, I’m not sure, after all this, that it actually can be. Of the last film, the thoroughly unbearable Revenge of the Fallen, I complained of the function of the human characters who were essentially real faces that popped up amid the wall-to-wall animation and served no purpose other than to shout inane dialogue, run away from things exploding and ceaselessly fire unlimited rounds of ammunition, achieving upwards of nothing. Sometimes, I said, in particularly ambitious moments, they were allowed to do all three at once.

In this film, which is, for whatever it’s worth, infinitely better than that last one, I realized that it’s actually the Transformers themselves that are the problem. Sure the humans are still about as useful as a tuna flavoured lollipop, but it’s the Transformers that really blow the load this time.

To recap before I finish that thought: Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is now living with his new girlfriend Carly (Victoria Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely). This is one hell of a broad. Not only is she the most understanding girlfriend in all of movies, believing Sam and his crazed stories of saving the world, but she also manages to not even break a hell while in the heat of combat as the warring Transformers lay waste to Chicago. That’s a keeper.

Anyway, The Transformers are now used to help the American’s fight their own conflicts until they discover a piece of hidden Intel which suggests that, when the U.S. finally landed on the moon they discovered a crashed Autobot ship (those are the good guys by the way) that also housed the lifeless remains of Sentinel Prime, the former Autobot leader. Optimus, learning of this, goes to get Sentinel and resurrect him before the bad Decepticons find him and…I don’t know. Something about pillars that could destroy the earth.

This all leads up to a monster of a third act which is straight, unending wall-to-wall combat as the Autobots and Decepticons wage war against each other in Chicago, leaving the city in ruins. Of course, this being a PG-13 enterprise, no civilian is ever seen to be harmed by the warring robots despite the fact that Transformers have to be one of, if not the leading cause of death in the United States.

Nevertheless, into the fold drops St. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and his men who jump out of air crafts above Chicago and sail down like flying squirrels into the city because he apparently didn’t get the hint after the last two Transformer battles that machine gun fire doesn’t contribute anything to a giant space robot war except noise pollution.

Not even mentioning that the film also, for reasons above and beyond what my mind allows me to comprehend, features John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Patrick Dempsey, it’s time to get back to the problem of the Transformers.

If Bay were to allow a genuine human emotion to seep into the movie over the course of the film’s mind battering two and a half hours, and maybe if he’s lay off the pyrotechnics a little than maybe, just maybe there would be something here. But because the film revolves around a nonsense plot involving robots who have, no back story, no empathy, no characteristics and nothing that defines their existence, it is virtually impossible to care about a single one of them. They are thus, when broken down, essentially made to crash into each other, pound each other to spare parts, blow one another up and, ultimately to have faces to be put on t-shirts and be made into action figures and so on.

All of this, as all bad movies tend to, left my mind to wander to this: What is the origin of Transformers? How did they come to be on that distant planet of Cybertron? Because they are machines that leads one to believe that they would have had to be assembled, which explains why none of them are females, but what was the force that brought the first Transformer to assembly? It couldn’t have been human as, until they arrived on Earth no knowledge of Cybertron existed. But it would have had to have been something. And how, if not human, did this mysterious force know to model them after American vehicles?

Of course, the movie doesn’t have any answers to these questions, but I didn’t expect it to. What it does have is a lot of bang-pow-boom-blow-up-fall-down-shoot-shoot-run-jump-crash kind of action. It’s masterfully done but after a certain point it all blends together into one big void of nothingness. I know, I know, why should I expect anything more? Apparently not a single fan of these films does.

P.S. This review is in response to my viewing the film on a true IMAX screen in 3D (the best 3D on the market), which, I fully believe, allowed me to enjoy its non-stop action more than I should have. Anyone who follows the news will know that Bay discussed the film’s being in 3D and would either actually film in 3D or have none at all as he was opposed to the cheap post production conversion that most blockbuster films have. I must say, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, displays the best use of 3D filmmaking (something I am usually opposed to) since Avatar. Not aiming for the cheap gimmick factor, Bay doesn’t use 3D just as a means to throw things at the screen but to use the extra dimension to give his action sequences a fuller range of screen depth. The 3D in this film deepens forward tracking shots and long action shots in order to make the viewer feel as if they are in the middle of it all. This medium is, if you must at all, in my opinion, the way to see Transformers 3.

Midnight in Paris (5 out of 5)

2011-07-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

Midnight in Paris opens with Woody Allen’s traditional jazz score atop many static shots of Paris. We see the famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, it is morning, it is sunny, it rains, it is night, the streets are bare and the streets are bustling with life as people populate the city. They are the most serious and solemn shots in the film as they evoke the realization that although these people live now, they will all eventually fade away, but as they pass and a new population comes and goes, Paris will always live, rich in it’s history, always breathing and growing. Life is short but Paris is eternal.

It’s that quality which maybe most attracts young and middle aged men to Paris in order to ditch everything, live in take up residence there and discover oneself through the creation of great art and literature. It’s about making oneself a peasant for one last crack at attempting something meaningful. Art may be made from suffering but it is also made from freedom. Henry Miller described it best in his opening of The Tropic of Cancer as he haunts the streets of Paris: “I have no money, to resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

Midnight in Paris is thus three love letters rolled into one. It is a love letter to Paris, a love letter to writing and a love letter to the past. It’s a tale of whimsy without being too whimsical. It’s Allen’s most lovely film in years.

The film revolves Gil (Owen Wilson playing the Woody Allen surrogate), a Hollywood script writer who has escaped to Paris with his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) in the hopes of leaving behind the creation of meaningless entertainment and crossing over into grand literature through the writing of his novel. Gil is in love with the idea of Paris, thinks it is even more beautiful in the rain and longs for the glory days of the 20s when the city was alive with great art, literature, music, what have you.

His novel, not appreciated by Inez or anyone else he describes it to is about a man who runs his own nostalgia shop, selling meaningful items from the golden age of entertainment which have now, in the present, been reduced to no more than worthless camp articles.

There he meets Inez’s old friend Paul (Michael Sheen). Paul is one of one of Allen’s favourite targets, a pedantic pseudo-intellectual who knows everything about art and culture to the point where he will even argue his point over that of the tour guide. One night, not wanting to go dancing and having sampled too much wine, Gil goes for a walk by himself around Paris. He rests on a stoop and as the clock strikes twelve a vintage car pulls around and tells him to get in.

He is escorted to a party where he meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, yes that Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who explain to him that some people have come together to throw a party for Jean Cocteau. And is that Cole Porter on the piano? Gil thinks someone is pulling his leg until the Fitzgerald’s, finding out that Gil is a writer, invite him to meet Ernest Hemmingway, who doesn’t want to read his book but will indeed take it to Gertrude Stein for a once over. Gil, overjoyed, goes to retrieve the manuscript but finds that, upon leaving, the glorious 20s party has morphed back into a standard dry cleaners.

And so every night Gil finds an excuse to sneak away so that, when the clock strikes midnight, he will be picked up and taken away to the 1920s. While there he meets Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray and Picasso who is currently dating Adriana (Marian Cotillard), a French beauty who quickly becomes the star in Gil’s eye. She is initially taken by passages of his novel and dreams of getting out of the dreary 20s and escaping back further into the past herself; escaping to a golden era where everything was better

What this amounts to is not one of the great Woody Allen movies in a classical sense in which he finds big revelations about art or culture or human nature but rather one of his more quiet, tender and lovely films. In the same vein as Sweet & Lowdown, Midnight in Paris remembers fondly a time in the past when great art and literature were created by a commune of great minds coming together and ultimately comes to the tender realization that to pine for the past is not enough. One must pay homage to it in order to keep it alive while still finding beauty and poetry in the present to keep the tradition alive and meaningful.

Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crowne

2011-07-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not Larry Crowne was the movie I most looked forward to in the summer of 2011. Having read numerous scripts over my past several years as a paid script reader many of them just sort of blend together. Some I remember bits and pieces of, some I remember the concept or the title or who is supposed to star but some, for all I know, will never come out, and if they do, I missed the memo. Sometimes I will be watching a trailer and the urge will sneak over me that hey, I think I read this.

Such is the script reading business. Not that it matters. For one, it helps to have a fresh perspective when the actual film comes out and for second, don't movies themselves, after a certain point of consumption, take on this characteristic as well?

To get to the point, Larry Crowne was one of the few scripts that stayed with me. I read it and loved it, praised it with recommendations and eagerly anticipated its release. On the page it was magical. It reminded me of the warmth and loveliness of Tom Hanks in Spielberg's hugely underrated The Terminal. It was about the most rare of all leading men: a nice guy.

When I was finished reading the script I just felt good. It is was a nice movie about nice people. Movies aren't very often nice anymore. I felt it was exactly what Hollywood in 2011 needed: a star vehicle with no huge plot points, no gimmicks and nothing but charisma and charm.

And then the reviews rolled in. Larry Crowne now, two weeks into its release sits at 35% on Rotten Tomatoes. Some of the top critics liked it (David Edelstein, James Berandinelli) but the vast majority waved their hands in front of their noses. It was, in a small way, sort of crushing. Even worse, Kid in the Front Row, who was also buzzing about it before it's release, weighed in with equal distaste. What happened?

So here's the question, does one go and see Larry Crowne and hope for the best; that the critics just couldn't see the magic that was so prevalent in the script, with the chance of being horribly disappointed, or do I stay away and keep my memory of Larry Crowne as being one of the nicest scripts I've ever read?

I'll see it of course but the question raised is an interesting one. Should a film be judged based on it's finished product or can it's value exist in the memories we create around it. Should a finished film wreck a good script or a good trailer or even a good song or is it possible to leave the filmic experience behind and just keep what was so appealing to us in the first place?

If I don't see Larry Crowne, it will be, for all I know, a great movie. If I hadn't went on to see some movies they would have remained great simply based on what their trailers offered. But is this enough? Is the final film the total package from which all is judged against or is it just one small step along in the entire personal process of shaping a positive memory about a single work?

Discuss.

Tree of Life (5 out of 5)

2011-06-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

Terrance Malick’s Tree of Life is a film founded on immense contraction. It is at once vast and yet intimate, loud and yet quiet, poetic yet human, spiritual yet scientific and ultimately concludes with maybe the only truth that we can ever really know: that life, existence, the world, the universe, everything, is itself founded on contraction. Without hot is no cold, without day is no night and vice versa on until time runs out. No matter what wall one comes upon on their journey to whatever, they are always at the mercy of the antithesis and the only way to know what is right, not in some grand finite way but rather a personal, individual way, is to grow and change through experience. That's what Tree of Life shows. Simply put, it is a masterpiece.

The next logical thing to do would be provide a description of the story. But how can one even begin? Anyone who is familiar with Malick’s work knows that he is a filmmaker who feels stories as opposed to telling them. His films, for the most part, are a colleague of images and words, jagged angles and beautiful points of view. To attempt to describe them is to back them into a corner and label them as a standard routine in which a story follows itself from a beginning to an end. That’s not what Malick does. Like a poem, his films create feelings through the way they link ideas and images together to create some sort of higher meaning that, this time out, boarders on the profound.

I’ll try my best here. The film opens with Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt & Jessica Chastain) receiving word that one of their sons has died. The film then jolts us back to the very beginning of time as images of barren landscapes shrouded by majestic colours swirl around together. Fire erupts, oceans begin to flow, and dinosaurs walk the Earth and begin to take on human instincts. Evolution is in progress.

In the city is Jack, played by Sean Penn, the son of the O’Brien’s, now grown up and an architect. In a way that is more implied at this juncture of the story, Jack is in the midst of a spiritual crisis. He has found success as an architect but high above all the steel and glass he still sees God’s blue sky and amidst the concrete is His grass and trees.

The film then jumps back to when Jack is a boy growing up in small town America under his parents with his brothers, learning life lessons, rebelling, falling in line and genuinely feeling his way through life one success and mistake at a time.

Near the opening of the film Mrs. O’Brien is heard in voice over explaining that there are two ways to live your life. One of them is with grace because grace doesn’t care and doesn’t aim to please anyone; it can meld itself in any way in such that one is always at peace. The other way is through nature which is sturdy and rigid, never satisfied and always looking to better itself and find praise from others.

The initial suspicion is that O’Brien is talking about the difference between God and nature, claiming God to be all that is good. In time it can be interpreted that this is declaration is a reflection of the roles that each parent plays in Jack's shaping, who, to continue, each take on a form of our belief in God as both the ever loving creator and the remorseless punisher. However the film does not push God above nature or God the punisher above God the protector but delicately shows, over the course and two and half meditative hours, that, like everything, when blended together they shape and define an entire life, leaving Jack to declare “Mother, Father, you will forever wrestle inside of me.”

Over the course of the film we see Mrs. O’Brien being the loving Sheppard, tending to her flock, encouraging them to look to the sky and sees God’s home. While Mr. O’Brien loves his family he is also hard working and believes in tough love in order to persuade his boys to grow up to be hard working men who can make a living and a name for themselves. In yet another contraction the film begins and ends with a spiritual crisis of both parents, realizing that to be defined by just grace or just nature is fruitless and will always leave oneself unsatisfied as only half a life will be lived.

The conclusion of the film takes place in what may as well be considered Heaven for poetic reasons in which Jack finally realizes that he need not be defined by either Nature or Grace, mother or father, God or not, but that the definition in his life is created through all those who have passed through it and what their perspectives have taught him. The closing images of the film, including one of the most startlingly beautiful, shows a changed perspective in which Grace and nature have come together.

Roger Ebert has described Tree of Life as being like a prayer and that’s about right. It follows no conventional structure on the path to creating a personal link between a boy and God or, better yet, a boy and himself, which, depending on your religious belief, is the same thing. I use God for lack of a better word and because the film refers to Him as God, yet one needn’t be thrown off by such interpretations. This is a deeply spiritual film, not a religious one.

It is rare in this day and age that a film be so ambitious and so dedicated to exploring its own concepts in the way in which it chooses. Terrance Malick has been active in the film world for almost 40 years and has only delivered five feature length releases. His films are not for every one. Like a poem they require quiet reflection as their interpretation will be based on how the viewer engages with the images before them. But those who will afford it their time and patience will find themselves renewed by it. In a age of film where personality and singularity of vision doesn’t seem to be worth much anymore, Tree of Life is one of the last few movies we can justifiably call a masterpiece. It is a work to be embraced and savoured

Retro Review Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (1 out of 5)

2011-06-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

The late Gene Siskel used to say that a movie needed to be more interesting than a documentary about its actors having lunch. Now, in 2009, a new method of thinking is needed: a movie needs to be better than playing a video game based on the same material, or, how about one just for Transformers? A movie needs to be better than playing with the toys that it is based on. Take your pick, the moral of the story is that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn’t much more than a video game minus the interaction: it is a big, loud, stupid, uninvolving, empty movie in which the action sequence reins supreme and all else is subordinate to it; the kind of movie that, if not firing on all cylinders, isn’t firing at all.

What’s left is a head-on collision of non-stop special effects and pyrotechnics, aesthetically comparable to a train wreck with about the same amount of emotional and intellectual depth. You could cut every character scene out of the film and wouldn’t lose much. Come to think of it, you could cut any whole section out and would be no worse off. Not a good sign at two and a half hours of running time. Allegedly the screenwriters on the film (three of them) were paid 8 million dollars for their work. Times must really be tough if, or so it would seem, 8 million barely gets a screenplay out of the planning stages.

This, under the obsessive, excessive hand of sometimes great action filmmaker Michael Bay is not filmmaking; it is an exercise in physical, mental and intellectual endurance, created in order to satisfy the narrow minds that need as many visual jolts as there are frames per second. A film built, not from artistry, but to fill a demand for faces to put on t-shirts, and coffee mugs and lip balm, and so on; to sell soundtracks and special editions of DVDs and toys. Who needs a story, or characters, or even coherence for that matter, when you have tie-ins?

So the story: Why bother? There is no story here, there is barely even a script, and what’s there is buried so deep amid piles of useless action that it ceases to be comprehensible: Something about the evil Decepticons wanting to destroy the sun maybe? There is a certain point where, when assaulted endlessly, the senses simply shut down and cease to decipher what is going on. Revenge of the Fallen is a 2.5 hour blur of noise and colour.

But now, isn’t this stupid, after the events of the first film the humans and the Autobots have formed a coalition to protect Earth from Decepticon attacks, which is kind of funny considering how infantile the humans and their weapons were against the Decepticons the first time around. Why are the humans even in the film? All this proves is how useless their presence actually is to the Transformers franchise. Their three possible functions are: fire ceaseless rounds of ammunition to no avail, deliver bad sitcom punch lines or run away from expositions: sometimes, during particularly ambitious moments, all three at once.

The humans are played by Shia Lebouf who is working below his rank when he deserves the kind of fast, intelligent roles James Woods used to get and Megan Fox, the extent of whose talent as an actress is pretty much summed up during the first scene she appears in here. These characters contribute nothing to the already non-existent plot, but are along for the ride out of default: they were part of the first film. But really, any human character could have been played by any actor and it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is too big, too bloated, and too ambitious for its own good. It doesn’t stop to breathe, to develop its characters or at least give reason why they even need to be present in the first place, and doesn’t have time enough to at least create Transformers for us to care about. Think about it: the robots really aren’t that interesting: on their own, only about 5 or 6 of the dozen plus have discernible personalities and when engaged in battle they are simply a smear of spare parts, welded together in combat that flashes by so quickly that the eye can barely focus on it before it’s gone.

To top it all off, the film itself is just sloppily made with some scenes throwing continuity between edits right out the window. What was fun the last time around now feels like a bloated, lazy over-indulgence; as if Transformers has become such a huge franchise that fans wouldn’t even care if the film was made well as long as things blew up real real good.

There is, however, one very entertaining moment in the film, possibility providing an example of the problem with all of the human elements of Revenge of the Fallen. After the Witwicky home is overcome by Transformers made out of common household appliances, the Autobot, Bumblebee, who is hiding in the garage, comes to the rescue and shoots half the house to smithereens. After the incident, one of the characters talks about how they can’t tell anybody about what happened because the Transformers must be kept secret for the benefit of national security. Forget national security, if you live in the suburbs and don’t notice a giant robot Camaro blowing away half your neighbor’s house in one swift move you may be deaf, dumb and blind, or else just in a Michael Bay movie.

Retro Review: Transformers (3.5 out of 5) or Is Michael Bay a Great Director?

2011-06-22T20:29:00.000-07:00

I once saw Martin Lawrence a few years back on the Conan O’Brien show promoting his then new film Bad Boys 2. As is usual, a clip from the film was played, this one showing Lawrence and co-star Will Smith engaged in a high speed chase over a bridge, destroying everything in their path. When the clip ended O’Brien gave positive feedback and Lawrence’s exact response was “That’s the genius of Michael Bay.” I scoffed, Michael Bay a genius? Lawrence was feeding us a line.

I was not among the minority when I denied Michael Bay the right to genius so many years ago. The director has been bombarded by fans and critics alike with every negative adjective imaginable. The man has been called a hack, a sexist, a racist, a fascist dictator, incompetent, etc. Does Bay deserve this, I must ask? Certainly he has made duds (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor), but why do film goers insist on the continual burning of effigies at the alter of Michael Bay, as though he is the antithesis of everything that is good about the cinema? It’s as if the man has single handedly lowered the collective I.Q. of every being who has ever sat in front of one of his films. Do these films really have the same kind of sway that Mites and his magical touch did or something?

The question then is, is Bay a great director? The answer, on a whole is simple: no. But I now understand what “genius” Martin Lawrence was talking about. In an interview, Bay once said that he tells his writers that whenever they want an action sequence just write “Blow Stuff Up” on the page and he will fill in the blanks. This single statement unlocks all of the excitement and deficiencies of the cinema of Michael Bay. Unless he is given characters that are already defined and a plot that will be able to sort itself out, Bay finds himself lost in the ruins of his own excesses. However, Bay is not a filmmaker so much as he is a painter of spectacles; write him a film that provides enough cushioning to hold our interest between his relentless bouts of blowing everything in sight up real good and the man is second to none. Sometimes that’s all genius takes; after all, what more could one really desire from a film about robots from outer space who have come to destroy us?

And herein is where interests begin to conflict. Michael Bay is both the best and worst director for this material. The film’s greatest asset is also its biggest detractor: that is, it’s one, big, long, never ending action sequence stretched out over the unruly span of two and a half hours.

The action is fantastic: big, loud, imaginative, exciting, never-ending and incredibly detailed. Bay went to great pains to incorporate the real with the computer generated. But the man has no control; he doesn’t know when to stop. The entire screenplay must have been comprised solely of Bay’s three favorite words: Blow Stuff Up. There are no characters in this film, no room for actors to give performances as Bay relies, as he always does, on the simple screen presence of his stars, who are forced to go way over the top and then keep going. Every character scene is filmed with the bang-boom-slap-bang mentality of an intense action sequence. It’s great that Bay doesn’t want to lose momentum but there’s not one opening to catch a breath in the whole damned thing. If Transformers were a fish, it would drown. That’s the contraction: it left me with a surge of excitement and a headache.

The plot, as many probably know, is based on a popular cartoon series and toy line from the 1980s in which good Transformers (Autobots) battled evil ones (Decipticons). Of course, my nostalgia over playing with Transformers as a child far outweighs the memories of actual enjoyment that the toys provided. They were clumsy and awkward, sometimes hard to transform. This of course being all undermined by the shadow of intrigue created from getting two toys for the price of one.

The film is like this too: it’s clumsy and awkward, illogical at times (if Disturbia had any thread of realism, someone would notice a transport truck and a couple million dollars worth of cars driving through the suburbs at night, would they not?), which is undermined by how exciting and action packed it is while we play. That’s the genius of Michael Bay that Martin Lawrence was talking about: to accept the illogical and make it as spectacular as possible.

Esteemed critic and film historian David Thompson once said that Stanley Kubrick knew everything about filmmaking but nothing about life. Michael Bay is kind of the same: he knows everything about action, but nothing about humanity. His films destroy everything in their sights while never even considering the many people who have lost their homes or are out of jobs because of the trail of destruction caused by the warring Transformers. Bay doesn’t care about characters who deliver sitcom jokes and soap opera melodrama at a rate that even an ADD sufferer would find excessive, he waves the American flag (quite annoyingly) at every chance he gets and destroys so much property that one almost feels urged to have him brought up on charges of assault to the senses. So much so in fact, that when Optimus Prime as a transport truck, rolls out of an alleyway during the film’s climax, knocking stacks of crates and boxes out of the way, I thought to myself: Now, that’s just excessive.

The Celebrity Connection - Justin Beiber

2011-06-13T16:20:00.000-07:00

I just happened to catch a picture of Justin Bieber at the MTV Movie Awards, accepting an award for something (I don`t know because I couldn`t be bothered to watch) and it struck me that the mini prima dona who shot to fame for reasons that have everything to do with anything but talent, who is sporting a new look, looks remarkably like another former child star has-been:

Could Justin Bieber really just be Corey Haim in disguise. You decide.

The Hangover Part 2 (2 out of 5)

2011-06-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

When a run ragged Bradley Cooper appeared in the first scene of The Hangover, in the middle of the desert on a cell phone telling someone on the other end how he had seriously F.U.’d it was one of the great comedy set-ups. He wasn’t kidding and, with giddy delight we were going to see just how. When Cooper appears in the first scene of the sequel to say he seriously F.U.’d again it feels like we’ve already been there and seen that. The premise is the same but the shock and intrigue is missing.

Not that director Todd Phillips and his team don’t try to keep the shocks coming but that’s just another one of the problems: most of what is memorable in The Hangover 2 is not how quick and hilarious it is, but just how far it is willing to push the boundaries of good taste for a laugh. But the laughs are few and far between, being undermined by the gross and absurd. It’s like Phillips forgot that the premise is the set-up not the punch line this time around.

What made the first film special above all else was that, although set in Las Vegas, it seemed to take place in a surreal parallel world in which a bunch of random objects came together and all fit in such a way that they made perfect sense. It was darn near Kafkaesque. This time the boys find themselves in Bangkok and although everything makes sense again this time it’s not as inspired in it’s madcap schizophrenic way. By the time the film has been reduced to high speed chases away from Russian gangsters and crooked business men one gets the sense that we are looking at a film having fallen to the everything in the sequel needs to be the same but amplified school of thought.

This time out Stu (Ed Helms) is getting married in his fiancée's native Thailand. Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) are invited as well as, after some pleading from Doug, Alan (Zach Galifianakas) who hasn’t stopped talking about Vegas and has pictures from that trip that probably shouldn’t have been published let alone be allowed to hang from his bedroom walls.

Also along is Stu’s brother-in-law to be, the 16 year old Teddy. The boys decide to have one drink on the beach the night before the wedding, thinking nothing could probably happen. Then they wake up in a grungy hotel in Bangkok with a monkey, no sign of Teddy and Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) the Asian gangster from the first film. Chow, knowing what happened to Teddy, is about to spill the beans before taking a hit of coke so big that it kills him. So they ditch the body and begin their search.

Their journey brings them into contact with a mute monk, a tattoo artist played by Nick Cassavettes which is surprisingly mild for a cameo role, a drug dealing monkey, and a club that Alan hilariously mistakes as a magic show.

Some of this is, for what it’s worth, quite funny. But it’s not enough. The movie, like the first one, pushes boundaries, doesn’t care who it is offending and will gleefully go anywhere it needs to for a laugh even at the expense of alienating just about everyone in the audience. I admired that quality the first time around as well and although Phillips has turned in a well made film, and the actors have all done their work something just isn’t clicking. The magic of going on this journey and solving this mystery is gone this time around. The pieces are all in place but they don’t build a new enough puzzle.

In my review of the first film I said that the only way to ultimately rate a movie like this is by how much you laughed. Fair enough. I didn’t laugh nearly as much.

One Minutes Review - Flipped (4.5 out of 5)

2011-06-01T18:07:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite things in the movies is nostalgia. I love the idea of a simpler time where kids were more sweeter and more innocent. Where you could trust your neighbour and appreciate the simple things like touching hands with the boy across the way, weeding the front lawn and climbing the old sycamore tree to take in the view from the top. And of course there was grandpa who wasn't old and senile but was tender, loving and knowledgeable and always knew how to bring all the problems together and set them back on the right foot.

I also love that moment between childhood and adolescence where nothing makes sense, everything isn't as how you imaged in to be and the only way to grow and get on with life is to make the stupid mistakes and then reflect back, hoping you learned from it and didn't do irrevocable damage.

Flipped, Rob Reiner's best film is over ten years, has all of these things. It's a beautiful postcard to the early 60s, and a sweet tale of two kids who live across the street from each other. One is Juli Baker (Madeline Carol) who is desperately in love with Bryce Loski (Callan McAuliffe) from the moment his family moves in across the street. They are both young and while playing their hands connect for a brief moment, more or less sealing their fate.

Grown up into adolescences, Bryce wants nothing but for Juli to leave him alone. His family is upper class, his father, subtly suggested to resort to the booze to make up for a miss life as a musician, is cold and demeaning while Juli's family is poor but full of love and are judged by the state of their front yard. Her father is an aspiring painter which also is greeted with scoffs across the street.

This goes on until, as events must transpire, Bryce realizes that he really likes Juli while Juli slowly realizes maybe Bryce wasn't what she had envisioned after all. This is all told in voice over as the same events are flip-flopped back and forth to be told first from Bryce's point of view and then Juli's.

And holding everything together is Grandpa (the invaluable John Mahoney) who has moved in with Bryce and who is kind, knowing and misses grandma.

All of this is sweet and innocent and doesn't hurt anyone. It takes place in a whimsical movie land which once doubled as America but now, all these years later, seems like a distant fantasy. It's exactly the kind of movie that makes you sit back, smile and remember the days when things were both so simple and yet so complicated all at once. The best days, some may argue, of our lives.

Retro Review: The Hangover (4.5 out of 5)

2011-05-29T13:02:00.000-07:00

In my review of Adventureland I wrote “What is comedy but one of our most powerful psychological tools? It’s a diverse means to compensate, to amuse, to attack, to shelter, to heal and a way to dig deep and unbury hidden pain that lurks just below the surface?”

Todd Phillips’ new comedy The Hangover is none of the above. It has no insight, no emotional crux, and no driving artistic purpose other to be funny, and boy, is it ever funny. The story involves an overnight trip to Vegas that includes, but is not limited to: A chicken, a baby, a tiger, a stolen police car, an Asian gangster, a chapel, a wedding singer who does renditions of 50 Cent songs and Mike Tyson. Why? Well, for no better reason than because these things are funny. This is a rare film that’s every operation is performed in the name of comedy: every line is a punch line, every action is a sight gag and every plot twist is a comic reversal. It mimics the ethos of that scene in Juno where she tells Paulie Bleeker that he is so totally cool without ever really trying only for him to respond that he actually tries really hard.

What’s strange is that The Hangover is actually a good movie: well made and well acted to the point where we sort of actually care what happens to these helpless boobs and so masterfully plotted that all of these things, in their own twisted kind of way, make perfect sense, which, of course, makes it even funnier.

Here’s the story: four guys, the prudish Stu (The Office’s Ed Helms), the carefree sleaze Phil (future star leading man Bradley Cooper), the nearly handicapped Alan (Zack Galifianakis) and the engaged Doug (National Treasure’s Justin Bartha) all head to Vegas for a bachelor party before Doug is to be married a couple days later.

The night begins well enough, lodged in an exquisite villa suite at Caesar’s Palace (not the real Caesar’s Palace Alan finds out because, well, Caesar never actually lived there), with a shot or two of Jager on the rooftop, until the men wake up the next morning with a baby in the closet, a tiger in the bathroom, no sign of Doug and not the foggiest memory of how these things came to be.

That’s the plot description. The men have to put the puzzle together, one piece at a time, in hopes of finding their friend and getting him home before he is to be married. What they discover and how they discover it I dare not even hint at.

On paper, the plot description sounds like a mess of random comedic episodes that all try desperately for a laugh, but the comedy is so well plotted and Phillips so masterfully in control of his tone that it pulls off a tricky feat. The story is so comically surreal that it seems to be unfolding in an alternate universe that takes on the guise of Vegas, but the dots, no matter how improbable, connect so seamlessly that it never feels as though it is overstretching the realms of human possibility, making it, you guessed it, even funnier.

In that sense the film is strangely similar to that most underrated of Scorsese masterpieces After Hours, which sees a mookish copy editor venture out looking for a sexual encounter one night and ends being hilariously pursued by a crazed gang through the streets of Soho who believe him a thief and a murderer. If the Hangover weren’t so deviously perverse it would be considered Kafkaesque. Neat trick, eh?

But the film’s success lies in its stars and their ability to recite razor-sharp dialogue as if, and here’s the key, they were actually talking, not trying to be funny. Take Alan, who is played by Zach Galifianakis, and, let’s face it, steals the show. A bad actor would play this sidekick comic relief part as if he knew he was the funniest thing in the movie (see Dan Fogler do a hatchet job to the same kind of character in the horrible Fanboys), but Galifianakis is too gifted a performer for that and instead builds an original character from the ground up. Alan isn’t funny, stupidity just comes naturally to him, and you love him for it. Watch how Galifinanakis delivers lines of dialogue like, “We couldn’t remember anything last night. Remember?” and you’ll begin to see the next great star of comedy emerging. Or take this exchange:

Stu: I can’t believe I gave my grandma’s Holocaust ring to someone I don’t even know
Alan: I didn’t know they gave out rings during the Holocaust.

There haven’t been lines of dialogue that unashamedly funny since the”Don’t call me Shirley” days of the Airplane and Naked Gun movies.

And that’s it. The movie is funny and then it ends, waiting until the next viewing when it will be funny again. It isn’t sweet, caring, charming, concerned for the well being of anyone, and doesn’t even care if it’s likeable or not despite always somehow managing to be; as long as it’s getting a laugh. Good for it. There aren’t many comedies for adults, about adults anymore. The only way to rate its success then, is in whether or not you laughed. I laughed a lot.

Pondering Kate Hudson

2011-05-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, before Something Borrowed was released, I saw the cover of Ent, the Toronto Sun's Sunday entertainment section and on the front of it it features drawings of Jennifer Aniston, Katherine Heigl and Kate Hudson with the caption saying "The Women Who Are Ruining Romantic Comedy." These three choices peaked my interest and got me to thinking about each lady's respective career. Although she's been in some stinkers, I don't think Jennifer Antison is ruining romantic comedy and she's even been in some good films including the Good Girl, Rumor Has It..., The Switch and so on. And even when the movie is bad, she's at least likable.

Katherine Heigl is in the same boat. She in mostly bad movies, but she maintains her charm throughout them and I don't know but I found The Ringer to be a funny comedy as well as Knocked Up. I've never walked away from a romantic comedy thinking that Heigl had ruined it but yes, seeing her generally throws up a red flag to a movie's quality these days.

Now Kate Hudson. Hudson seems to represent a special case separate of the other two in that no one but Hudson has been in a single movie as excellent as Almost Famous and no one but Hudson has been in so many consecutive bad movies subsequent to the fact. And unlike the other two offenders it is usually Hudson, more often than not, who is the very worst thing about it. Here's a roll call: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Alex & Emma, Raising Helen, You, Me and Dupree, Fool's Gold, My Best Friend's Girl, Bride Wars, Nine and Something Borrowed. Kate Hudson, the most promising of young starlets has been in more bad movies than some actors every get to be in period.

This poses the question: is Kate Hudson the worst leading female star in America? And even more to the fact, who do you think is her male equivalent.

Retro Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End (4 out of 5)

2011-05-21T12:04:00.000-07:00

The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film came out yesterday. Apparently it's not very good but who really expected it to be? Anyway, he's a review for the 3rd film which I wrote several years ago when that film came out.

As I was browsing through reviews on Rottentomatoes.com for Spider-Man 3 I came across a critic who compared it to the work of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. This left me with two possible conclusions: 1) the critic had seen a different version of Spider-Man 3 than I had, or 2) he hasn’t seen much of Bergman’s work. Comparing Spider-Man 3 to Bergman is kind of like comparing the third Pirates of the Caribbean film to Fellini’s Satyricon or Kursoawa’s Yojimbo: anyone with enough courage can do it, but what’s the use?

Herein lies much of the problem with today’s film criticism: the reviews serve just as much of an outlet to stroke the writer’s ego as they do to share their experience of a particular film. Many critics, in my eyes, approach the art from the wrong angle. They are mostly malcontents who believe themselves and their abilities above that of the film they are writing on. This is a stance I try my best to avoid; I approach every film as an equal, to judge it on the basis of what it offers me, not where it places in the ranks of film history.

That is, I believe to be, the essence of criticism. Years ago Peter Howell of the Toronto Star wrote an editorial on how he told his father not to go see Bad Santa, who went and saw it anyway, thus determining that people don’t listen to critics. That I believe Bad Santa to be a truly bold and hilarious black comedy doesn’t help Howell’s point. His problem seems to be in grasping that criticism is not absolute. This is why I don’t see it as the critics' job to advise readers of what they should see and what they should avoid. Truth be told, people are going to see what they want to see, and the only way you may physically influence them is if you write positively about a film that they either have no knowledge of or had no interest in to begin with. The best I can hope for is that, come January when films like Keane or The King appear on my top ten lists, someone will venture out to their local movie store and give one of them a try.

This is why the best criticism avoids the redundancies of what worked and what didn’t (it can, I will admit, sometimes be hard when that’s all a film offers) and instead shares with the reader ones own personal experience of a film. Director Sydney Lumet, in his invaluable book Making Movies states that a good film should leave an audience with a thought or a feeling. I feel criticism should reach for this goal as well: to leave readers with a thought or a feeling; some point of reference from which they can then explore their favorite films (or maybe even themselves) under a new light. Good criticism is equal parts emotion and theory.

An elitist stance is an easy one to take, but not a fruitful one, because it simply gears oneself for disappointment. Of course Hollywood blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean pale in comparison when one has been blessed enough to have seen Renior’s Rules of the Game or Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, but there exists no clear link between these two kinds of films. The world is only one of balance when we are free to choose from different variables. Life is complete in knowing that I can sit down and enjoy both The Fast and the Furious and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander for their own unique reasons. As I have quoted many times before, Pauline Kael once wrote that movies are so rarely great works of art that if we can’t enjoy great trash then there is no point in going. Alas the statement finally requires a bit of retooling: movies are so rarely great art that if we can’t at least enjoy satisfying the simpleton in us, then what is the point in going at all?

Now I’ve been stalling because, between me (someone who writes about movies) and you (someone who reads about them), I find it a truly laborious task to review films like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. There are several reasons for this: 1) the film is unapologetically epic in scope, is populated by many colorful characters, and bears a plot that is complex beyond impenetrability: to try to describe this in less than 1000 words would be an act of shortchanging, 2) Pirates is the kind of film that places all of its worth before our eyes, what you see is what you get. One need not concern themselves with hidden meanings or deep emotional responses; Pirates is all surface and has no problem letting this all hang out before our eyes, and 3) it’s one of these films that some call “critic-proof.” Every critic in North America could say it’s the worst film of the year and it would still probably make 100 million plus on its opening weekend, so why bother?

What I will say is that Pirates 3 is a grand, epic adventure film. It was filmed, like the Matrix sequels, back-to-back with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Doing this, as was the case with the third Matrix film, can be a damaging approach because what we end up with is one film that has been cut in half. It thus diverts from screenwriting mentor Syd Field’s “Paradigm,” which more or less dictates that a film is comprised of three acts, each act ending with a significant plot point which pushes the narrative forward into the next act. To cut one film into two sequels means that the first is all build-up and the second, all pay-off.

Pirates 3, probably the best of the series for my money, however, avoids this; it does not feel like the back end of a film in progress, but rather shows all the potential of the series finally coming together into full fruition. The special effects may be the best ever put on screen, the film is beautifully shot, and the actors are all wonderful. Johnny Depp has become so comfortable as Jack Sparrow that he creates effortless presence, Geoffry Rush as Capt. Barbossa goes way over the top, committing himself to the role fully and without conviction, and Bill Nighy, great actor that he is, creates a fully developed character in Davy Jones while only ever appearing on screen once.

Now is the point where I will leave you with a thought or a feeling. In one of the last scenes, after an exchange between Johnny Depp and Keira Knightly as Elizibeth Swann, Knightly walks off-screen and Depp gives a smile unlike any Jack Sparrow has every given before. It is not theatrical like most of the acting in the Pirates films but rather is an expression of joy and happiness. It seems as if Depp himself is looking out from deep underneath his make-up and costume and letting us know that he has had the time of his life making this film. It’s an encouraging sight; I had the time of mine watching it.

Water for Elephants (4 out of 5)

2011-05-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

There’s an uncanny shot in Water For Elephants that jumped out at me the moment I saw it. It involves the rising of a big top circus tent. Five men stand around a pole with sledgehammers and each hammer it in one swing at a time, moving in a clockwise motion while being filmed from above. It reminded me of one of those old MGM musical swimming pool numbers. What was uncanny about it for me was we’re so used to everything being done with computers and special effects that choreographing 5 men with sledgehammers is a rare treat that is easily taken for granted in this day and age.

The moral here is that it seems like there’s something decidedly old fashioned going on these days. The Adjustment Bureau was focused more on a love story than action, Source Code put ideas first over all that boom boom pow stuff, Fast Five was a fun big budget B-movie with action sequences where one could see what was actually going on and now Water for Elephants gives us two great elements of American storytelling: Prohibition and the circus. It’s not a great movie but it easily brings to mind the greats that made us fall in love with going to the movies in the first place.

Jacob (Twilight’s Robert Pattinson) is on the verge of graduating from veterinary school when he catches wind of his parent’s death in a tragic car crash. Distraught and lost, Jacob packs up his few belongings and heads for the train tracks. The train he hops on just so happens to belong to the circus.
Here Jacob meets two key people in his journey: Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) the beautiful star of the show and her husband August (Christoph Waltz) who is also the ruthless owner of the circus. Jacob convinces August to hire him on as a live in vet, something that those Ringling Brothers don’t have and Jacob quickly becomes August’s right hand man.

However, the relationship isn’t smooth. When August orders Jacob to repair the leg of Marlena’s star horse he diagnoses the situation as a lost cause and kills the animal to relieve it of its pain. This incident forces August to invest in a new star attraction: an elephant that Marlena and Jacob both love and bond over but August believes to be a dumb beast that better make his investment back for the struggling road show and who he treats with cruelty and anger.

As the story goes, Jacob is horrified by August’s treatment of the elephant while also falling in love with Marlena and trying to hide an affair from August that would set him off, prompting one of his favourite pass times which involves throwing passengers off the moving train.

Director Francis Lawrence and his cinematographer do a good job of capturing the beauty and magic of both the American countryside as well as the circus itself, which brings to mind fond memories of Fellini’s best films about the circus as well as Hal Ashby’s illuminating cross country depression tale Bound for Glory.

It ultimately makes sense that most of the film’s pleasure is derived from its ability to be nostalgic without becoming a simplification, which is helped greatly by present day bookends as the invaluable Hal Holbrook narrates the tale.. The story itself is run-of-the-mill and drags in the centre when there’s a lot of training of an elephant that, to be honest, doesn’t have much personality. And yet the film captures the freedom and dread of a time period in which riding the rails, having no connection to anything but the next stop and the next show, was both majestic and frightening because, although freedom has it’s certain poetry, it also comes with the harsh reality that a time will come when one either has to grow up or die off.

From a technical point of view, the film’s greatest asset is the presence of Christoph Waltz, who so deservedly won his best supporting actor Oscar for Inglorious Basterds and is now, one film at a time, proving himself an invaluable presence. August is more of less the drive that keeps the story going as he represents the drama that exists between the two star-crossed lovers. What Waltz does is not so much make August a villain as a man who so determinedly knows nothing but his own way and that way is force and cruelty. Although August is manipulative and heartless he is never evil so much as he is a desperate man trying to keep afloat in a desperate time. It’s the one human element that allows the film to rise above simple nostalgia and be good in its own right.

Something Borrowed (1 out of 5)

2011-05-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

Something Borrowed starts with a problem right out of the gate. Let’s explain the story first. Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Darcy (Kate Hudson) are best friends and have been so for just about all their lives. Rachel has just turned 30 and Darcy is engaged to Dex (Colin Egglesfield, doubling for Tom Cruise circa 1985) who went to law school with Rachel. Thing is, as these things must go, the passive Rachel never told the hunk Dex that she was madly in love with him because, well, guys like him aren't interested in girls like her, despite the fact that he never told her that he felt the same. Now he’s with Darcy, the loud, alcohol swilling, extrovert, but having doubts and no one knows what to do, especially after he sleeps with Rachel.

The problem is that Darcy is so insufferably stupid, selfish and vain that there is never one reason to honestly believe that Rachel would be best friends with her or Dex would want to marry her. The point of a plot like this is the tension created by the common moral dilemma of wanting what’s right for all of the characters but not quite knowing what that should be. In this case the answer is simple: Dex should tell Darcy the truth about Rachel and both of them should get the hell away from her as quickly as possible and live happily ever after.

But as the plot continues to twist and turn upon itself one realizes that not since Closer have three characters so thoroughly deserved one another. However that point of that movie was that four unlikable people all brought the worst out of each other on a single path to self destruction. Something Borrow is so clueless that it wraps all of this up into a what is supposed to be accepted as a cute little romantic comedy although it’s hard to laugh at people who are so dumb, so oblivious and just make you want to run up to them, grab them firmly by the shoulders and smack some sense into them.

There’s also a fourth character, Ethan, played by The Office’s John Krasinski who is a friend of Rachel, male, single, not gay and apparently only along for the ride to be charming support. Right. Krasinski could indeed be charming in his sleep and in turn walks away with the film but apparently neither Ethan nor Rachel have seen any bad romantic comedies before because if they did they would recognize that whenever a name is cast in a major role, especially the fourth player in a love triangle story, they ain’t around to sit and watch from the sidelines. And if you consider that a spoiler you're giving the movie too much credit and yourself not enough.

But of course neither of them knows that because nobody in this movies knows anything. The story, taken from the New York Times Bestseller of the same name, revolves around what Roger Ebert commonly refers to as the Idiot Plot in which twists and turns are laid upon one another despite the logical realization that if just one character would say one thing the entire story would crumble to pieces and a lot of headaches would be saved.

The movie was written by Jennie Snyder whose previous work has all been in TV, which makes sense as she constantly pushes the characters around into different directions with no real insight or clear vision of where any of this is going except to build to a cliff-hanger before breaking for next week’s episode. Therefore we are treated to sloppy, incompetent plotting. Take for example Ethan’s big scene, the only honest one in the entire movie, where he reveals something that should naturally take the plot into its logical conclusion, only to have him drop completely out of the film. But of course, God forbid any of these characters redeem themselves and their stupid, foolish actions and end up with the person they actually should be with.

In essence, for a story like this to work, which keeps getting more and more complex as each new revelation pops up, it needs to be tied around an animate object; something that keeps the story grounded and acts as its centre. The plot of Something Borrowed is woven around a ball of smoke which quickly evaporates as the film weaves an emotional tapestry around nothing at all until it arrives at a conclusion that I won't reveal but that I'll tell you is dead wrong. But hey, some people: if they don't know, ya can't tell 'em.

Fast Five (4 out of 5)

2011-05-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

Fast Five ends with a chase sequence about as ridiculously improbable as you can imagine. It involves two cars and a huge safe chained to the back of both of them. They speed down the streets of downtown Rio, where there is remarkably little traffic in the way, while every corrupt police officer in the city is in hot pursuit.
Logic dictates that this is not humanly possible, that the safe would be so heavy that it surely it would jerk the cars right off the road. Yes it would, and don’t call me Shirley.

The point is, there’s a lot of stupid stuff that happens in Fast Five, and it’s to be cherished. Bad movies will leave you with no other desire than to pick them apart, their every idiocy glaring. But a good movie will leave you having too much fun to care and Fast Five is high-wire, pedal-to-the-metal, guilty pleasure type stuff. Finally someone got the memo that action movies can be fun again. The thing to cherish about the first 2 Fast & Furious movies was that they had A-movie budgets with B-movie minds. They didn’t have a brain in their head and made that a quality not a downfall. The series has finally found that again.

It also helps that director Justin Lin (behind the wheel so-to-speak for the third time) has finally mastered the car chase. It’s a delicate art and although Lin’s hand is not as smooth and assured as Rob Cohen or John Singleton before him, he’s finally learned, after the depressingly awfule Fast & Furious, the value of the long shot and how it’s okay to be able to see everything that is going on.
The most important element at work here is that Lin finally appreciates the importance of distance and space.

Chase sequences work off the premise that, first, the audience feels motion, which is created by swift and extended camera moves and logical editing that creates some sort of reality so that we understand where all the players are in the action and where they are in relation to one another. The importance of camera movement is that action works on the excitement of motion and since the audience’s only connection to the action is that camera, the camera must work with what it is capturing in order to give the audience the sensation of being part of the movement.

The second thing action must do is create danger. One of my favourite action movie shots is in Casino Royale as James Bond chases a baddie atop a high crane is Madagascar. The camera flies in with a shot of the crane as the pursuit goes on. The shot is long and wide and flies over top of the hero the ground is always visible. It’s more exciting than anything else I can think of. They are really up there and they could really fall.

Fast Five more or less opens with an amazing action sequence that involves stealing cars off a speeding train. You know you're in good hands when you get the wide shot as the camera flies in towards the train. As cars are taken off the locomotive in an ingenious and improbable scheme we see all the possibilities from all sides: the ground speeding by below, the desert landscape, the bridge coming up, the drop just beyond it. The real stuff that could kill you that exists outside of this impossible moment. It’s the perfect package. That’s action.

The reason I bring boring old theory into the equation to discuss Fast Five is that a film such as itself needs theory as the only way to justify such ridiculousness. This is a film in which men ramp cars out of speeding trains, take free falls over cliff sides, jump from rooftop to rooftop, barge through concrete walls and glass panes in rabid fist fights and yes, drag a safe down the streets of Rio. If it wasn’t made well it would be a disaster. It’s made very well, with a wink and a nod, and we cherish, not only that we needn’t take it too seriously, but that it takes itself just seriously enough to be made with precision and quality. The film knows what it's doing.

So now the story in brief: After springing Domenic Toretta (Vin Diesel) out of jail he and O’Conner (Paul Walker) escape to Rio where they plan on doing one last job (the train job). Problem is, they partner with a local drug kingpin who has every corrupt cop in Rio in his back pocket so when the job goes south it leads to two subplots, one of which is exciting and the other, at 130 minutes running times, is overkill. The first is that the men, on the run from the Rio goons decide it will be their really last job to rob the kingpin of his savings which is kept in a safe at the local police station. They call up colleagues from former endeavours along with some new faces and get a team together.

Meanwhile, the cars stolen belonged to the Feds so they ship in Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson),a tough-as-nails, no BS, get-the-job-done type of cop who’s t-shirt always seems about 2 sizes too small over his bursting muscles and who's forehead always looks like it just came out of a torrential downpour. Although Johnson’s presence into the serious is more than welcome and he plays Hobbs on that thin line between driven and comedy (walking away with the film’s best line), he feels like an afterthought and spends the entire middle section of the film off screen.

There’s only really so much you can say about a film like Fast Five. Either you buy it and go along for the ride or you don’t. Maybe what I cherish most about this series is that A) Lin injects a nice amount of human scenes into the film that allows it to slow down, take a breather and make us care about the characters and (B), when it gets fired back up, even though it does employ CGI, for the most part the stunts and chases feel authentic. They may be ridiculous, but for the most part, we feel like they are actually happening. And really if you don’t know what your going to get by the fifth time around you maybe never will. I went in looking for a hell of a ride. That’s about what I got.

Mike's DVD Haul

2011-05-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't done one of these since Christmas in part because I haven't had a mass DVD buying spree since then. Regardless I think I have acquired enough now to justify doing a haul post. Enjoy.

I love the way Patrice Leconte's films are about humans who are affected by what one could either call encounters of fate or coincidences in which two people are brought together who don't realize just how much they need each other.

I've never seen a Bela Tarr movie but apparently they are quite a site so I figured I'd go with his most well received film that wasn't over 7 hours long to start.

Leconte again. I haven't seen this one.

Werner Herzog's famous and disturbing portrait of a town in despair, made all the more strange as Herzog filmed everyone except his star under hypnosis. But the film is no gimmick and actually tells a compelling story as Herzog usually does.

I found this used and almost died. This out-of-print special edition gets me one step closer to owning everything Fellini, even if he only accounts for 1/4 of this film inspired by the Italian poet.

Although it's minor Disney with no real compelling songs and not enough depth, I do collect the Disney cartoons and this one is an acceptable enough addition to the collection.

Fellini again. With this one I own everything that Fellini has on North American DVD. Now if someone would just hurry up and release Casanova and Voice in the Moon and I'll have every film he's made and be able to die happy.

Love it or hate it you can't deny it's cultural impact. I usually don't get the special expanded whatever editions anymore because I don't tend to watch the extras but with 3 versions of the movie and a lot of interesting extras I went with it this time.

I don't know if Deny Arcands is Montreal's best filmmaker but he certainly is its most renowned. I haven't seen this one but it's out of print so when the collector in me saw it he couldn't resist.

There's a reason that this blog is named after Scorsese after all.

The Criterion version of what many consider to be Melville's best movie. It may be so but you can't really argue against any of them.

One MInutes Review - NIghtmare on Elm Street (1.5 out of 5)

2011-05-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

No one, I think, with a logical mind will be able to accept anything that happens in the remake of Wes Craven's popular slasher flick Nightmare on Elm Street. That was a problem with the original too, but at least that one had a sense of fun about it and was derived from an interesting concept. This new is one pads all of it's illogical wanderings with a cold and ugly palette to boot.

The problem is Freddy Kruger. He doesn't make sense and with no rules to govern his existence and power he's less a horror movie villain and more a convenience for a screenwriter who wants to make it up as he goes along. The first scene takes place in a diner. A kid follows a waitress into the back only to find Kruger. He wakes up at his table, his hand bleeding from the dream attack. This scene of course presupposes (maybe correctly, but regardless) that everyone will be familiar with the character and understand his existence. Then he is greeted by a teen girl. He tells her he hasn't slept in 3 days until nodding off and stabbing himself in the throat in front of her.

Now here's the kicker. After the funeral, 3 other teenagers all start getting haunted in their sleep by Kruger. If we're to believe the plot (Spoilers if you care) they have all, unbeknowst to them, known each other since grade school, where they all came into contact with Kruger before he was murdered by their parents. Weird, have they not been sleeping since, did they just not realize Kruger was in their dreams until today or did he just magically decide that hey, now that one's dead, I might as well take the other 3 now as well?

This is all wrapped up into an incoherent mess by a music video director who directs the film as if each dream is one in a sequence on vignettes until each teen is picked off one by one by this mysterious force who comes and goes as he wishes, follows no logical arch as a character and and goes through the motions that we've all been accustomed to since the original film dropped in the 80s.