Listen Eggroll

14 December 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 12-18 December

LEST YOU BE CONFUSED: Films in /brackets/ I had previously seen. The ratings are on a 100-point scale that merely signifies my personal and highly subjective degree of enthusiasm, and I use the entire damn scale, e.g. 65 is equivalent to 6.5/10, a mild thumbs-up. Anything 70+ I really liked, and 80+ is generally top ten for any given non-phenomenal year.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011, Todd Strauss-Schulson): 65

And boom. Far more knowing and inventive right from the jump—if not for the timing (quick Google research indicates the script was completed by January 2010), I'd swear it was heavily influenced by Community, with which it shares a freewheeling, anything-goes casual surrealism. Some of the material remains too juvenile for my taste (coked-up baby, Christmas Story homage), and the whole subplot involving Elias Koteas' gangster Dad completely fizzles (apart from the headline collage that introduces him). But in the plus column: (1) solid premise, with Harold and Kumar no longer friends at the outset, forced by circumstance to find a middle ground between corporate douche and loser burnout; (2) utter contempt for the 3-D craze, best exemplified by the moment when you're suddenly ducking Danny Trejo's hypothetical tree-delight splooge; (3) racial satire that's actually funny as well as pointed, like the tree salesmen who take turns playing Good Nigga Bad Nigga; (4) numerous Community-style detours into random goofiness—most notably the Claymation interlude, with its catchy tune "It's a Very Jolly Day (For You to Die)," but also stuff like the flashback to Trejo's childhood memory of his mother being killed by a Korean gang, all of which is handled with terrific panache by Strauss-Schulson (they finally found a bona-fide comedy director); (5) flat-out insanity, viz. WaffleBot ("Has this ever happened to you? Or this?"); (6) by far the best use of "Neil Patrick Harris" to date, pivoting expertly (and with some genuinely disturbing undertones; Harris is just fearless) on public knowledge of his homosexuality and his long-time relationship with David Burtka; (7) etc. Sorry for the laundry list, but I'm not exaggerating in the least when I tell you that I laughed more in the first five minutes of this one than in the entirety of the other two combined. Modest potential finally achieved.

Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (2008, Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg): 43

Ye gods. Even more theoretically admirable than its predecessor, but now the racial material is so pointed that it almost bypasses comedy, to the point where you feel actively lectured. Ed Helms as the translator who can't understand Korean-Americans speaking word-perfect English, for example, pushes the idea of willful xenophobia too far, so that it's no longer rooted in our everyday experience; the joke would have worked better had Harold's parents deviated at least a little bit from correct syntax, or spoken with a slight but perfectly comprehensible accent, but that might have made (self-aware) white viewers a tad uncomfortable, so unleash the cartoon buffoons with whom nobody can vaguely identify! See also Guantanamo Bay with its cockmeat sandwiches, George W. Bush as a secret pothead, etc. Less gross-out material this time, thankfully, and Neil Patrick Harris, now a TV star again (his appearance in White Castle having amounted to an audition for Barney Stinson), gets a lot more to do, along with an exit that would have been awesome had they actually stuck with it. (I sat through the end credits knowing there was gonna be some sort of NPH tag, and sure enough. Though partially that's because he's in the ads for the current one.) Subplot about Kumar's ex- belongs in some Sandra Bullock romcom, but I was at least mildly touched by the math poem, if only because I instinctively knew that came from somebody's actual life—no screenwriter could possibly have invented it. As with Paranormal Activity, 0-for-2 so far; you fuckers better be right (again) about Volume III...

\Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle\ (2004, Danny Leiner): 47

Rarely seen \backslashes\ signify a film that previously got a W/O, but to which I felt compelled to give a second chance—in this case, because response to 3-D Christmas has been uniformly positive (even from some people who hated the first two), and because I'm just too stupidly anal-retentive to skip installments in a series. Relieved to find that "Battleshits" was the gross-out nadir, but this is still at best very sporadically funny to my taste, with too many jokes that are juvenile, random or both; even the Neil Patrick Harris cameo (which I didn't get to the first time) amounts to little more than "ha ha he said pussy and trim." Which is a shame, because I love the idea of Harold and Kumar—actually saw a press screening in April 2004, three months before the film was released and well before there was any buzz, having gotten excited about it strictly on the basis of its cast and title. Cho and Penn have an easy, squabbling chemistry in the venerable Cheech and Chong tradition, and I can readily imagine enjoying a movie about their adventures that doesn't pander to current notions of "extreme" comedy. (Ironically, one of the film's best running gags involves a group of idiot frat guys who proclaim everything extreme, at one point inhaling an entire bag of Doritos with that word on the package as if it were Tony Montana's mountain of cocaine.) Just so long as they kept the subtext about assimilation, outsider status and racial stereotypes relatively light, as it is here...

/Gimme Shelter/ (1970, David Maysles & Albert Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin): 56

Starts off in an intriguing reflexive mode, repeatedly cutting to Jagger and Watts watching the film we're seeing on a Steenbeck...except nothing ever actually comes of this device, apart from a weird, vaguely demonic freeze-frame on Jagger's face when he finally goes to leave, the import of which I'm afraid is lost on me. And the whole doc-within-a-doc thing gets abandoned almost entirely once the movie arrives at Altamont, whereupon it becomes almost indistinguishable from Woodstock for a long stretch. (People who claim Gimme Shelter is the ugly flip side of Woodstock apparently haven't seen the latter in a long time.) Ultimately, rather than a probing social document fashioned from what was meant to be a concert film, it's an ordinary concert film savvy enough to capitalize (albeit not very well) on some unruly shit that happened to go down; that the filmmakers withhold the stabbing until the last few minutes and then promptly wrap things up is just inconceivable to me. Maybe it's a Direct Cinema problem—what's missing here is a compelling point of view, a sense that the material has been shaped to some overall purpose. (Which, again, is truly bizarre given the Steenbeck interludes, which would seem to be providing precisely that function, but do not.) Fortunately, the concert footage itself is outstanding, though the Stones get their thunder roundly stolen by Ike and Tina at Madison Square Garden. And seriously, is it just me or does Keith Richard play every single classic riff in the wrong key onstage? (I assumed this was age-related in Shine a Light, but he's clearly been doing it all along.) I never recognize the damn songs until Mick starts singing.

/if..../ (1968, Lindsay Anderson): 68

"Occasional stabs at surrealism are downright clumsy," I carped in my Time Out New York review ten years ago, but they work reasonably well for me now—mostly because they're not in fact "occasional" (which implies "random") but part of a deliberate formal strategy. Anderson spends most of the first hour compiling a keenly observed but relatively low-key portrait of English prep-school life, emphasis on petty tyranny, before gradually introducing discordant elements, many of which vanish almost before you have time to process them. ("Wait, were they just rolling around naked on the floor?") And what a genuine shocker that climax must have been at Cannes, before word got out—though I was surprised to find that it's not nearly as partisan as I'd remembered/assumed, in that the school (and even some of the visiting parents!) return fire. Were I more interested in tales of systemic abuse, I'd probably be more than mildly impressed, but you really have to go full metal jacket to overcome my resistance to that sub-genre; only the caning sequence, in which Anderson cuts to reaction shots of Travis' mates elsewhere on campus while retaining the audio from the gym (specifically the overwhelming sound of Rowntree running across that hardwood floor to deliver each blow), elevates my pulse much. Well,that and McDowell's galvanizing screen debut in hat and mouth-scarf, which I rhapsodized about in the earlier review. Surprised I said nothing about the matter-of-fact depiction of the Whips using the scum as sex toys (complete with a Van Sant-style angelic blond), but maybe I just felt that was a given. Certainly the movie does.

Young Adult (2011, Jason Reitman): 46

Climactic "inspirational speech" by Matt's sister takes such a cathartic wrecking ball to the pseudo-indie self-discovery template that I made a strenuous effort to re-evaluate the entire movie on that scene's behalf, to little avail. Problem is, while the film's overall shape is admirably frank and truthful, its moment-to-moment details are unerringly glib and phony—even when it comes to ostensible no-bullshit spokesman Patton Oswalt, playing the former victim of a hate crime who, conveniently for where the story needs to go, wasn't (and isn't) actually gay. Theron tries hard but is saddled with a cartoon notion of arrested development, which might be fine were Mavis not played mostly for pathos rather than jokes; it seems well beyond Diablo Cody's understanding that a person could be shrewd and together in some respects yet still make horrifically misguided decisions. Mavis' let's-get-wasted relationship with Matt couldn't be more painfully contrived if Oswalt were wearing a T-shirt with SOUNDING BOARD on the front and AUDIENCE SURROGATE on the back. And, like, is Buddy supposed to be retarded or what? No straight male, however happily married, is that insensible to blatant please-fuck-me signals, yet there's no indication whatsoever (until the script needs a cheap surprise) that he's aware of Mavis' intentions, much less ignoring her desperation out of pity. I spent pretty much the entire film wincing...and still those last five minutes or so got to me, not so much for their rug-pulling cynicism as for the entire implicit tragedy of Matt's sister's life, embodied by a speech that unwittingly validates a truly repugnant worldview. It's a moment of razor-sharp insight that deserved a far less comfortably spongy context.

Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011, Brad Bird): 60

Here's the thing: He's actually up there. I understand that there was no real danger, that Cruise was safety-harnessed up the wazoo and tons of precautions were digitally removed in post, so forth, but there's still something genuinely awe-inspiring in seeing a setpiece like this that clearly isn't just a CGI construction. I thought I'd forever lost my ability to disbelieve what I'm seeing in a big-budget Hollywood movie, and was thrilled to be proven wrong. Plenty more spectacular absurdity, too, from the opening jailbreak (which demonstrates almost the same degree of screwball kineticism as The Incredibles) to the hi-tech hallway-replacement scrim they use in the Kremlin (extra credit for not explaining in advance how the device works) to the best use of a tracking monitor since Aliens. Sadly, the movie (ahem) peaks in Dubai—third act, despite the welcome presence of Anil Kapoor, settles for much more routine skullduggery, and also assumes way more investment in the previous installment than I certainly had. We don't care about Ethan Hunt or any of his team as complex individuals, fellas. Just keep putting them in harm's way and then getting them out via the most ludicrous means you can think of. Also, you need somebody to punch up the jokes next time—it's a bit sad to see poor Simon Pegg saddled with the verbal equivalent of exaggerated double-takes. (I can't even remember any of them to quote for you. That's how bland they are.) Still, three decent-to-good films out of four (sorry John Woo) is a pretty impressive success rate. Serious suggestion for #5: Jean-Pierre Jeunet. You guys gave him totally the wrong franchise.

/Jackie Brown/ (1997, Quentin Tarantino): 70

Used to think the vocal minority who consider this Tarantino's best film were insane, but I can at least glimpse where they're coming from now, even if I still think he's being awarded a lot of bonus points just for depicting a bittersweet middle-aged romance (and resuscitating Grier and Forster). Part of what threw me in '97, when I was a relatively impatient lad, was the disjunction between the movie's convoluted plot and its unhurried pace—not having read Rum Punch, I don't know for sure how faithful to it Tarantino was, but it feels as if he included all the long, discursive passages that any "sensible" screenwriter would feel obligated to either condense or chuck altogether. Which makes all the gun-running and deal-cutting and double-crossing seem like just a flimsy pretext to spend time hanging out with some interesting, loquacious people (and De Niro's Louis, whose noncommittal blankness for most of the movie I finally recognize as a brilliantly perverse joke). Much as I now enjoy their company, though, there's still a bit of an emotional void at the movie's center, which Tarantino attempts to fill by leaning even harder than usual on pop music as a universal signifier. Sometimes this pays off—I can't think offhand of another film that gets so much mileage from a car stereo's tape deck (on the wane even at the time), which picks up a mood right where it left off every time you restart the engine—but at other times Tarantino might as well be standing in the background of scenes holding a gigantic Lloyd Dobler boombox over his head. To paraphrase a snippy tweet (by Mark Asch, I think) that I saw right after Hugo and The Artist won the first two big critics' prizes: YOU LIKE OLD MUSIC WE GET IT.

09 December 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 5-11 Dec

My Week With Marilyn (2011, Simon Curtis): 31

Saddest thing about this soggy bit of pop-culture piffle is that it makes me lose some respect for Michelle Williams, whose choice of roles had previously suggested uncommon intelligence and taste plus a complete lack of interest in "career moves." At no point does she transcend the sort of wide-eyed surface breathiness you'd get from any impersonation, despite obligatory efforts to capture Monroe's deep-rooted insecurity. And there's a truly embarrassing moment when Norma Jean deliberately flips her Marilyn! switch to ON for an adoring public and all you see is a very talented and quite pretty actress standing there looking not even remotely like the thunderbolt-from-heaven Movie Star My Week so laboriously contrasts with Olivier's highly trained non-magic. That crippling objection aside, though, this is just plain feeble: A blatant wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the memoir's author restores a broken icon to greatness through devotion and understanding, with every emotional beat painfully telegraphed and a strictly tourist's-eye view of how movies are made. Branagh's peevishishness keeps it somewhat bearable, even if he seems to be conflating the role with his own persona (when Olivier wearily quotes Prospero, he sounds just like Branagh's Hamlet); even there, though, the putrid script—from the dude who wrote Tom and Viv, a movie so boring I'd forgotten it existed 'til just now—undermines his hard work by saddling him with a maudlin speech in which he acknowledges that Monroe has a natural gift he can never possess. If you told me this film had been adapted from a high school student's C- term paper on Marilyn Monroe for drama class, I'd totally believe you.

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010, José Padilha): 69

Much as I admired what Padilha attempted in the first movie (see Michael Sicinski's review for a sharp analysis), reacting oppositionally to BOPE's head banging for two hours gave me a massive headache. So it's a relief to find that the sequel makes no effort to camouflage its disgust with pretty much every facet of Brazil's ruling class, letting the scales fall slowly from Nascimento's eyes as he realizes what he's been unwittingly enabling. Mostly, though, this one's just much more effective in its guise as an action movie, right from the bravura opening that crosscuts an ugly prison riot with a leftist academic's grim statistics (over 90% of the country will be incarcerated by 2081 if current trends continue, he informs his class, all while being relentlessly mocked in voiceover), then combines the two in a way so patently absurd that I laughed out loud—it's almost the same joke that Louis C.K. employed to extravagant expense in season one of Louie. Attempts to make Nascimento a genuinely sympathetic, three-dimensional character (via a subplot in which he struggles to connect with his son) fizzle, and ultimately the film merely laments the near-impossibility of substantive reform (while nonetheless insisting that the effort is worthwhile), but its sheer revulsion at the level of corruption is bracing, especially since it somehow manages to be superficially "entertaining" at the same time. Maybe seeing Padilha's fascinating, little-screened doc Secrets of the Tribe, about warring anthropologists, in between the two Elite Squads helped to put me in the correct frame of mind.

Coriolanus (2011, Ralph Fiennes): 64

Skillfully stripped-down translation of a notoriously problematic play—a tragedy in which nothing precisely tragic happens*, with a protagonist who's never less than fascinating but borders on being inhuman. Not sure a whole lot was gained by the present-day setting (apart from saving a shitload of money on art direction), but shooting in Belgrade does lend a certain despairing quality to what's certainly one of the most physical and least talky Shakespeare movies since Polanski's Macbeth. The big brawl between Martius and Aufidius, in particular, derives considerable power from the juxtaposition of old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat with a blasted modern-day war zone. As director, Fiennes opts for the basics, juxtaposing classical master shots with handheld urgency, and it gets the job done; as lead actor, he tears into Martius' seething, aggrieved misanthropy, and if he can't quite sell the V.iii about-face, in all honesty that's more Shakespeare's fault than any actor's. Coriolanus is just a perverse hero, really—kind of like Thomas More if More had been a humorless, vengeful dick with a mommy complex. Even if you admire his refusal to ingratiate himself with the common man by parading his scars or declaring his fellowship, it's hard not to feel like he's acting as much out of sheer cussedness as personal integrity. In that sense, the movie concludes on a fitting note, eliding the last few lines ("My rage is gone, and I am struck with sorrow"; "Yet he shall have a noble memory") and funeral march in favor of a callous thud.

* If you didn't study drama in school, be advised that people dying is not inherently tragic.

The Interrupters (2011, Steve James): 57

Doesn't entirely pass my standard test for docs these days: Would I rather be reading a book or lengthy magazine article about this subject? (Indeed, the end credits revealed that James was inspired by a New York Times Magazine story, which didn't surprise me at all.) And it's really super earnest, understandably but also kinda tediously. I confess that I zoned out during the long stretches when the Interrupters were reflecting on their own troubled pasts or hanging inspirational artwork with schoolkids, and perked up considerably at the appearance of Flamo, who initially dismisses CeaseFire as useless ("And I respect y'all, y'know what I'm sayin', what you doin' and everything, that's cool, but fuck that") and seems motivated to give it a chance entirely by the prospect of (literally) a free lunch. (Also, best dialogue exchange of the year: "How many kids you got?" "I'm claimin' four.") And while Lil' Mikey's apology to the employees of the barbershop he'd held up ends in forgiveness and hugs, it's riveting because of the woman who feels the need to verbally assault Mikey with the lingering remnants of her pain and terror before she can work her way around to nobility. Even then, though, I still have what I'll call my Wiseman Problem, which is an unshakeable skepticism about whether people are behaving normally in the presence of a camera—I tend to feel mollified about this when subjects at least acknowledge that the camera's there, which almost never happens in The Interrupters except during explicit talking-head interviews. The Arbor remains my doc of the year precisely because of how brilliantly it addresses and complicates that sweeping reservation.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, Tomas Alfredson): 44

Something about the way Alfredson constructs his movies makes me break out in hives. Let the Right One In is perfectly straightforward from a narrative perspective, yet the experience of watching it—even the second time—was syntactically bewildering, as there seemed to be no relationship between contiguous scenes, or frequently even between contiguous shots. Soderbergh has talked about how he cuts the film in his head as he's shooting it; Alfredson apparently does whatever the opposite of that would be. Same deal here, only this time in a much more convoluted context—I was able, with some effort, to follow what was going on, but practically every cut found me screaming (out loud on one occasion; I live alone) WHAT THE MOTHERFUCK AM I LOOKING AT? I can handle the occasional jarring edit for effect, or even a nonstop barrage of them in something explicitly experimental (e.g. Container), but an adaptation of an author as stubbornly plot-heavy as Le Carré needs to flow, to guide us expertly through the thicket. I felt repeatedly stranded, and not in a productive way. And find it inexplicable that I seem to be alone (apart from otherwise admiring reviews conceding that the story is confusing, which they invariably abscribe to the source material rather than to the direction). Odds are I would have found this underwhelming even had it been crafted with more care, as there seems to me precious little emotional purchase in Smiley's professional detachment—the revelation involving his wife at the very end should cut deep, yet even the invented Christmas-party flashbacks expressly designed to achieve that purpose...no, you know what, that's a function of how they were directed/edited as well. Fuck this dude, how does he have a career?

/White Material/ (2009, Claire Denis): 36

Never wrote anything about this one from Toronto '09, and I'm not exactly overflowing with scintillating thoughts right now, either, to be honest. Basically, there is zero overlap in the Venn diagram of White Material's Raw Materials and Things I Find Even Remotely Interesting; it's a film to which I'm able to forge no connection whatsoever. Huppert's stubborn coffee farmer comes across to me not as intriguingly flawed or arrestingly self-deluded but just as a woman too dumb to recognize when things have gone irretrievably to shit and it's time to cut bait; it's like watching someone head back to their house to get their iPad as everyone else flees an approaching tsunami. The sudden introduction of her son nearly an hour in, followed by his equally sudden transformation (before we've even gotten a sense of who he is) into a deranged skinhead lunatic, seems not bold or powerful but utterly arbitrary...except symbolically, by which light it seems overdetermined. And call me nuts but I find that Denis goes weirdly soft whenever she shoots in Africa, as if her childhood memories dull her talent. (Though maybe it's just that her filmmaking becomes more African, given my longstanding inability to appreciate the continent's entire cinema. I'm convinced now that it's a rhythmic issue, ironic though that may sound.) White Material is undeniably "well-made," so my initial rating (44) was more respectful, but this time I spent the entire movie straining to find something, anything that would rouse me from my indifferent stupor, and there was literally zilch*. Where's "Night Shift" when you really, really need it?

* I do like the composition of the shot I used for this week's image, above, but it actually took an abnormally long time to find something good. Partly because the few standouts were all used in the ad campaign.

01 December 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 28 Nov - 4 Dec

/Strike/ (1925, S. Eisenstein): 67

Way more gag-a-minute than I'd remembered—if you didn't know this was Eisenstein, you could easily mistake the first reel or two for a flat-out comedy, albeit one in a significantly more caustic register than the great silent clowns tended to employ. Obviously gets grimmer as it goes along, but the entire film walks a tightrope between propaganda and satire, often to disorienting effect; depictions of the ruling class as leering grotesques bump up against realistic shots of dead cats swinging from rafters, and concrete acts of political violence like the hosing of the crowd are followed by atrocities abstract enough to function as live-action editorial cartoons. (Kurtz's death has always been one of my least favorite parts of Apocalypse Now, but I see now where Coppola got the idea to cross-cut it with animal sacrifice.) Amazing to think that this was shot the same year as Potemkin, to which it functions as a sort of antic dress rehearsal. I do wish, given how much time is spent establishing the menagerie of spies, that the movie had more fun with their various animal personae—for the most part, they're completely interchangeable, and I'm pretty sure several never appear again after being introduced. But maybe that would just get in the way of the collectivism. (I'm not fatuous enough to demand a protagonist.) Also, it's easy to forget today that this was a period piece, set two decades prior (1903); contemporary filmmakers who draw laborious parallels between the past and the present should give it a close look, see how little that sort of thing will likely matter to posterity.

Living in the Material World (2011, Martin Scorsese): 54

Exactly what you'd expect, and devoid of any hint of Scorsese's personality that I could discern. First half is by necessity more a history of the band than a portrait of Harrison as an individual; while it features some terrific archival footage I'd never seen before, it's not notably different in approach or effect than The Compleat Beatles, apart from getting very excited when George finally starts writing songs. (The only truly interesting talking-head moment is when McCartney rather offhandedly suggests that Harrison did so out of a desire for a share of the publishing royalties.) And then Part Two is hampered a bit by the unavoidable fact that Harrison's post-Beatles life just wasn't all that fascinating—admirable, yes (especially his creation of Handmade Films to finance Monty Python's movies), and certainly the polar opposite of the usual rock-star trajectory into drugs and squalor, but a bit tranquil for this sort of epic account. Even the Pattie Boyd affair gets treated by everyone involved as a non-issue, which I applaud as a pragmatist but bemoan as a voyeur. As with LENNONYC, Beatles fans will want to see it mostly for the wealth of stills, home movies and (in this case) personal correspondence—we hear several of Harrison's letters to his parents, written during the height of Beatlemania and apparently read by George himself (though it's hard to imagine why he would have put that stuff on tape, unless he specifically meant to leave it for a project just like this one)*. Also why the fuck do I not have "What Is Life" in my iTunes library? Must remedy.

* Chris Stults, who paid closer attention to the end credits than I did, informs me that the letters were in fact read by Harrison's son, Dhani. Which makes perfect sense. Man their voices are similar.

Tomboy (2011, Céline Sciamma): W/O

Ah, Ms. Sciamma. We meet again. I see you're still rocking the whole uninspired-but-sensitive competence thing. Might I suggest that it's not enough merely to place a young girl in an emotionally volatile scenario and then avoid doing anything crass or hamhanded? You make precisely the sort of film that I always get funny looks for bailing on: understated and compassionate, with a protagonist whose inchoate longing strikes a chord with anyone who's ever been a child. All that's missing is a single solitary idea or image or fleeting moment that I haven't seen in 87 movies just like it. (I counted! #didnotcount) Your heart is clearly in the right place, but you need to ask yourself what you have to offer that could only come from you, and then fashion something from that. You think you're the only director that can give me that Céline Sciamma feeling? I got 20 directors under contract I can ask for a Sciamma-type thing from! Now get lost. There's a war on.

/The Tree of Life/ (2011, Terrence Malick): 70

Previously addressed at Cannes. As much as I admire Malick's universe-spanning ambition, and thrilled again to the creation interlude, this really works best for me as a completely random memory play, unencumbered not just by narrative but by any dramaturgical notion of "conflict." The more Pitt's taskmaster dad becomes the film's emotional fulcrum, the more I disengage, whereas ostensibly mundane stretches of everyday life often have me on the brink of tears. Reflection of wiggling hands in a bucket of water; tree frog climbing a stack of grass that bends beneath its weight; quick glimpse of the kids in Halloween costumes; Mom reading Beatrix Potter at bedtime; "That's where God lives" (which would normally make me gag but accompanied by Smetana's "Vltava" and Chastain spinning truly seems religious); garden hose; sparklers; a shot of Mom bending over to kiss one of the sleeping boys in which the angle of her body suggests utter devotion—I don't know that a feature-length movie could sustain that level of suburban iconography, but I would have liked to have seen Malick try. (If there must be drama, the bit where Jack shoots his brother's finger with the air rifle and then apologizes with a fan, kisses, and an offer to get decked by a 2x4 is more my speed than all the filial angst, which I'm sure is true to Malick's experience but nonetheless feels overly familiar.) And with due respect to those who've valiantly defended it, the ending still seems unbearably kitschy no matter what interpretation one favors. Maybe that's the inevitable flipside of unbearably moving.

/The Conversation/ (1974, Francis Ford Coppola): 81

Massive letdown, despite the high rating. (I'd anticipated 99 or 100, as I once included this on a list of my 20 favorite films of all time.) Structurally it's still magnificent, with the opening surveillance sequence functioning like an overture whose multiple themes subsequently recur in varying combinations—I don't think more than a few minutes ever elapse without our hearing snippets of it, often as aural wallpaper. Furthermore, Hackman is still great, the post-convention workshop party remains a tour de force (there's a cut from a wide shot of Harry and the woman wandering that cavernous empty back room to an equally wide shot of Harry alone that took my breath away), and the ending, while perhaps a bit pat in its irony, nonetheless shredded my soul yet again. But I found myself cringing repeatedly this time at how bluntly Coppola presents Harry's paranoia, and newly aware of how little there is to the man apart from being paranoid. Teri Garr's arm's-length girlfriend exists only to provide clumsy exposition, improbably dumping Harry the instant her function has been exhausted; John Cazale defects to the competition the same day, suddenly pissed off that he hasn't been trusted with sensitive information about the jobs they do. That these crises happen concurrently with Harry's fear for the safety of the couple he bugged, even though both relationships are clearly long-term and Harry's obviously been sealed off since the womb, makes the film feel thin and schematic...as does the backstory about the job Harry regrets, which actually finds him muttering "I can't let it happen again" even as he's being boned. And I apparently repressed all memory of the Fogtown dream sequence, which is just plain embarrassing. All in all, it feels like a slightly bloated adaptation of a perfect short story, masterful but straining too hard for weight. I still like it way better than The Godfather, Part II, though.

J. Edgar (2011, Clint Eastwood): 41

Stunningly rudderless even by biopic standards—but that's perhaps to be expected, given that we're talking about arguably the most fiercely guarded private life of any public figure. Dustin Lance Black's connect-the-dots screenplay for Milk was no great shakes, but at least he had a bunch of dots to connect; nobody really knows what Hoover got up to in private, so Black and Eastwood are forced to engage in timid speculation, none of which feels remotely plausible. Clyde Tolson, in particular, is portrayed by Armie Hammer as little more than a warm smile for most of the movie, so that the scene where he finally plants one on Hoover (and gets rebuffed in a way that suggests it had never happened before) only makes you wonder what exactly we're meant to believe. Were both men happily celibate throughout most of their lives, sublimating their feelings for each other into companionship? If so, why not explore such an unusual dynamic? Instead, J. Edgar struggles to find superficial parallels between Hoover's personal anguish and his professional ambition, hoping we won't notice that the former tends to vanish entirely during obligatory stretches devoted to e.g. the Lindbergh kidnapping. (Not that I'm complaining, as those stretches tend to be the film's most compelling. I'd have preferred a procedural about the birth of the F.B.I., with Hoover just one player of many.) DiCaprio doesn't embarrass himself but never disappears into the role, and must battle (alongside Hammer and Watts) some of the shoddiest old-age makeup I've seen in years; Eastwood, as usual, seems committed to a purely functional visual translation of the script, as well as the notion that dimming the lights will make any shot more dramatic. More dull than risible, though the sole allusion to (largely discredited) cross-dressing rumors, with its Freudian literalization of the "mama's boy," inspired a mighty eyeroll.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925, Rupert Julian): 59

Believe it or not, my first encounter with this chestnut in any form, unless you count the funereal opening notes of Andrew Lloyd Webber's score (which I confess to humming at a couple of key moments—it's really perfect). Not a whole lot to the story, is there? I had a general sense of what to expect, via pop-culture osmosis, but I thought the actual movie would flesh it out a bit, involve some serious demon-wrestling. Chaney's makeup still has the power to repulse, but he doesn't exactly give what you'd call a performance; any sense of tortured longing derives from the intertitles, making it easy to be distracted by the film's stupendous set design. (Reconstruct the catacombs, put in some slow-moving fake gondolas, and you'd have a fantastic Disneyland attraction combining the best elements of the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean.) And when we're above ground, it's like sitting through the romance scenes in the Marx Brothers pictures. Still, great spectacle can be its own reward, and bits and pieces throughout pack an atavistic punch; when Erik wades into the lagoon to hunt Philippe, it's easy to think of him as monstrous in a sense entirely separate from "deformed." (And maybe I'm wrong about Chaney not giving a performance, despite the makeup and the mask—he definitely conveys something in his carriage.) Leroux's original ending has been radically altered, judging from the Wiki-synopsis, but I gotta say I kinda dig Erik's sad little fakeout just before the mob devours him. He gets the last laugh, somehow.

28 November 2011

Viewing Journal: Holiday hiatus

Due to holiday travel and its attendant obligations/distractions, along with a misguided feeling of obligation toward a gigantic pile of year-end awards screeners, there was just no way I was gonna be able to write up this week's films. Rather than skip them entirely, however, I'll give you a quick Twitter-length rundown. Normal updates will then resume. (Also, donations have slowed to the point where I didn't even hesitate out of guilt to take the week off, so now would be a good time to drop me a couple bucks if you were going through withdrawal.)

• Hugo (2011, Martin Scorsese): 48. The magic eludes me, apart from the brief flashback section depicting the creation of Méliès' studio. Entire narrative feels like elaborate yet perfunctory scaffolding for a film-preservation PSA. Still cannot abide Hit Girl (and I never even saw that film). However, I would happily watch an entire movie about Sacha Baron Cohen's emasculated romantic.

• The Collector (1965, William Wyler): 50. Haven't read the novel, but I sense that its virtues have little to do with the abduction plot per se (as was also the case with Stephen King's Misery, a great book about writing turned into a pointless film about a crazy lady). Stamp's performance is all twitchy surface; Eggar fares somewhat better but frequently gets drowned out by Maurice Jarre's overbearing score. Surprised this hasn't been remade.

• Oranges and Sunshine (2010, Jim Loach): W/O. Just curious about Loach Jr., who appears to have inherited Dad's politics but little of his passion. Utterly bereft of even the pretense of artistry—it just proceeds mechanically along the most direct course from point A to point Z, generating the exact same sense of outrage one could get by reading a two-paragraph news summary. Wretched.

• The Muppets (2011, James Bobin): 57. Still have a hard time getting past all the voices being wrong, and some of the pop-culture riffs ("We Built This Fucking City"?) are outright painful. But it's more funny and charming than not, even if sometimes in ways that feel more Conchord-y than Muppety—the "Man or Muppet?" number, for example, bears no resemblance whatsoever to Henson's sensibility, but it still hurt my ribs.

• /To Die For/ (1995, Gus Van Sant): 69. Two brilliant films that unfortunately have nothing much to do with each other. Portrait of a manic careerist draws copious satirical blood (FYRC: Wayne Knight, Supporting Actor) (R = Retroactive), while Phoenix, Affleck and Folland lend startling credibility and poignance to the Pamela Smart angle; where the two are meant to intersect, the going gets implausible, tonally incoherent, or both. Hey look, Kidman's actual face!

• Bellflower (2011, Evan Glodell): 68. Glodell clearly knows these guys are pathetic, in my opinion; that a certain amount of genuine adolescent wish-fulfillment creeps in only lends the film a fascinating tension. Journey from dorky sweetness to epic misogynistic self-pity is abrupt and bracing, beautifully aided by the sulfurous color scheme, ultra-shallow focus and grime-caked lens. Woodrow will now turn into Death Proof's Stuntman Mike.

15 November 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 14-20 Nov

The Debt (2010, John Madden): 60
Fails almost completely as the sober examination of moral reckoning intended, but works surprisingly well as a straightforward espionage potboiler, to the point where I kinda got sucked into it against my will. (Every awards screener sent to me gets at least 10 courtesy minutes, no matter how hopeless its cause appears to be.) Madden still isn't much of a stylist (hadn't seen anything since Shakespeare in Love), but he stages the lengthy flashback's various setpieces with an effective nuts-and-bolts simplicity that feels pleasingly retro; the sequence at the disused train station, classically composed and edited for maximum tension, likely put me in the wrong frame of mind for Scorsese's CGI-vertiginous Hugo, which I happened to see the next day. And while it may well derive from the original Israeli version, the big plot twist's reveal, via what appears at first to be formal ineptitude, is inspired—first time I've tumbled to something by thinking "This is so excruciatingly pointless there has to be a reason f...OHHHHHH." Chastain admittedly seems a little wispy for a badass covert op (not to mention the young Helen Mirren), but nonetheless finally earns the hype in my eyes with an entirely reactive performance that somehow conveys enormous strength and determination primarily through fear and anxiety; her duets with Jesper Christensen as Mengele manqué, both before and after the abduction, are miniature epics of power conceded and seized. By the time the movie shifted back to the late '90s and went all self-righteous and soggy, it was much too late for me to bail.

Like Crazy (2011, Drake Doremus): 43Or Sundance Jury on Crack. Vaguely fragmented style aims for lyricism, but its true function, I suspect, is to ensure that Doremus can just skip past all the dramatic scenes that would expose his Idiot Plot (which by some reports is based on personal experience...but if that's true, and things went down as depicted here, he and his girlfriend were truly blithering idiots). I for one am dying to eavesdrop on the phone call Anna must have made to her parents to tell them she wasn't coming home after all, even though her mum had just got all in her face (telephonically speaking) the previous day reminding her what a disaster it would be if she overstayed her student visa. Instead, we get a cute rapid-fire still-frame montage of all the various positions and combinations of nightwear involved in the couple sharing the same bed for the summer, which montage also conveniently substitutes for the sexual chemistry we literally never see the tiniest inkling of. Then there's the conversation, also conveniently hopscotched, in which they announce to their respective families (Jacob still has a mom somewhere, right?) that they're now getting married, despite having had only sporadic contact for several years and being fresh out of respective serious relationships with other people, on the grounds that this will supposedly clear up the visa problem (but not until six months later), which means we never find out whether their stupidity is congenital or whether they were told in no uncertain terms that that's a retarded idea but went ahead with it anyway. Sadly, Doremus neglected to omit the scene in which Anna's new beau presents her with the deeply romantic gift of...a new chair, to hey just coincidentally replace the handmade chair Jacob made for her at college (a gesture that actually made sense). And he forgot not to cross-cut Jacob boning someone else with Anna boning someone else—a juxtaposition made even more head-slappingly obvious when the PATIENCE bracelet Jacob had given Anna somehow breaks (from the sheer force of New Guy's thrustin', I guess). Like (500) Days of Summer, Like Crazy strives to be harshly realistic about romance's capacity for disappointment and self-delusion, but it's even less tethered to anything remotely resembling actual human behavior, so its good intentions are entirely for naught. Felicity Jones makes a fetching Zooey U.K., though.

/The Big Lebowski/ (1998, Joel Coen): 64All the best moments are in the first hour. Everyone will have their exceptions (and I'll concede the "Just Dropped In" dream sequence), but I've seen this four times now and it always seems like one of the greatest comedies ever made until suddenly it doesn't anymore, right about the time the Dude's car gets stolen. Originally I thought that was because the narrative deliberately goes limp, but now that I have a sense, courtesy The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, of what weak-ass Coen Bros. comedy looks like, I can see a lot of it in Lebowski's weirdly bloated second half, which just plain runs out of creative steam. Granted, this is highly subjective—I've seen people roar at the whole "this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!" routine, which to me plays like a rejected scene from an Adam Sandler movie, and there are probably folks who are tickled by the nihilists and their sketch-comedy accents. But I start out convulsed and wind up at best mildly amused...and then completely flummoxed by Donnie's death, which just seems like a random curveball thrown out of sheer desperation. Might not seem like such a huge stumble were that first hour not a sustained cavalcade of laid-back madcap genius; some of the best bits aren't even jokes per se, just hilarious insights into the way people's minds work. (I'm thinking in particular of the way the Dude parrots whatever he's heard recently, regardless of whether it makes much sense in context: "This aggression will not stand, man"; "A young trophy wife, in the parlance of our times..."; "You mean coitus?") And if the Skandies has no other justification for its existence, we were in fact the only voting body in the world who correctly recognized Jeff Bridges as 1998's Best Actor—not since Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye has anyone been so dazzlingly befuddled.

/The Fisher King/ (1991, Terry Gilliam): 54Starts out very DIE ROBIN WILLIAMS DIE!, equating severe mental illness with improvisational stand-up—even if he's performing the script verbatim, which I doubt, it just comes across as his usual shtick—and enabling Williams' most grotesque pleas for audience sympathy. (I'd also repressed for 20 years the memory of his squat hairy body prancing naked in Central Park.) Nor is Bridges, playing a shock jock, really able to compensate in the other direction, as Bruce Willis did so beautifully opposite Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. And of course Gilliam is the very last person who's gonna be temperamentally inclined to tug the leash. Just when the movie threatens to become completely insufferable, though, Amanda Plummer shows up and somehow imposes her own controlled spaciness onto everybody else, even managing to calm Williams way down. The film's midsection is an improbably charming portrait of two spastics in love, so unfussy and sincere that those qualities bleed into the previously nondescript relationship between Jack and Anne, whose break-up scene is the most emotionally truthful few minutes of Gilliam's career. (Ruehl didn't deserve to beat Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear, but she's much more direct and less showbiz-brassy than I'd remembered. So demoralizing to check her filmography and realize her career effectively ended just two years later.) It doesn't last, and the whole third act—Perry's catatonia, Jack's backslide into tooldom, the Grail break-in—fizzles, mostly because Plummer and Ruehl are both absent until the final few minutes. But just as the lovely waltz sequence temporarily makes Grand Central seem magical, so too does everything surrounding Perry and Lydia's date transform The Fisher King, however briefly.

Carnage (2011, Roman Polanski): 39In which we discover why Albee didn't make both couples George and Martha. As smartly directed and capably acted as you'd expect, but the play itself is just wretched—the sort of gleefully scabrous chamber piece that delights in exposing its characters as ugly, self-absorbed assholes hiding beneath a thin veneer of civilized behavior. This sort of ping-pong hostility represents everything I dislike about contemporary theater; Reza makes it worse by calling attention to the situation's artificiality, repeatedly sending the visiting couple out the door and then engineering some unpersuasive reason why they'd turn around for further abuse. (I honestly couldn't tell whether this was meant as a postmodern wink to the audience or a sincere attempt at narrative plausibility. Either way, it failed.) Everything about Carnage felt surpassingly phony to me, in a way designed to flatter one's self-image rather than inspire productive discomfort—only a person with antisocial personality disorder would identify with these cartoon versions of flawed humanity (assuming that said person experienced an unprecedented spasm of empathy). Waltz has the juiciest role, by virtue of starting out pretty close to the openly contemptuous zone where all four end up, but it's Winslet who comes closest to escaping Reza's moralistic straitjacket, working with Polanski (who keeps minimizing her in the frame) to create one tiny pocket of soiled dignity. The film's finest moment has her quietly retching into a bucket on the far end of the couch as the others snipe back and forth in the foreground; I was right there with her in spirit.

Benda Bilili! (2010, Renaud Barret & Florent de la Tullaye): W/OThere might be a documentary about disabled street musicians I could get behind, but it'd be a lot less blatantly celebratory and up-with-people than this one, which actually opens with the filmmakers declaring love at first sight for the musicians and deciding to fund their first recording session. Got briefly interested when the kid who plays that single-string tin-can lute-thing joined the group, as he seemed almost maniacally creative, but then suddenly a fire broke out and the group disbanded and the kid went back home to another village and "one year later we tried again" and this is the inherent danger of just following folks around with a camera hoping a film will magically come together. Sometimes they do, but more often you wind up with a random hodgepodge of disconnected anecdotes. In this case I'm pretty sure I'd be happier with the album that resulted.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961, Marlon Brando): 69Title alludes to two-faced deceit, and there really are an exceptional number of casual lies tossed around in this cold-hearted Western, which shows unmistakable signs of having been gutted (although Brando must have approved the happy ending on some level, given that he's standing there speaking the lines). I can't really imagine it at five hours, given its elemental nature, but Brando was clearly striving for a tragic purposelessness from which the release version ultimately retreats—it's the same sort of tonal whiplash you get at the conclusion of L.A. Confidential (the movie), when the abrupt restoration of order seems contrary to everything that's previously occurred. Otherwise quite pungent, with enough signs of a controlling intelligence to make you wish that he'd directed more than one film; if he errs on the side of making Rio as taciturnly badass as possible whenever directly confronted, in an almost proto-Clint way, he also declines to make excuses for the dude's craven backstabbing, which turns almost literal (wrong weapon) at the film's deliberately sorry excuse for a climactic showdown. At the same time, though, One-Eyed Jacks frequently does deliver on a basic popcorn level, generating old-fashioned suspense from an attempt to reach a gun from a prison cell (only to find it unloaded) and providing Timothy Carey as a loudmouthed bully for Rio to beat the crap out of when the pace starts to flag. It's a film half-beholden to the traditional Westerns of the '40s and '50s that also half-anticipates the more nihilistic approach that would soon be embraced by Leone and Peckinpah—emphasis on the latter, obviously, since he was one of this film's original directors (along with Kubrick) and some claim that many of his contributions to the script survive. A compromised triumph, paving the way.

10 November 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 7-13 Oct

Higher Ground (2011, Vera Farmiga): W/O

Now and then someone will suggest that I bailed on a film too early, insisting that it gets more interesting later. But while that may well be true—and almost certainly is true in this case, seeing as how the protagonist hadn't even begun questioning her faith yet—it doesn't much matter, because I'm not really sitting there waiting for something to "happen." A talented filmmaker will grab and hold my attention almost immediately, whereas long experience has taught me that if the first two reels are utterly pedestrian, there's virtually no hope. And I saw no evidence that Farmiga, whose work as an actor I generally love, possesses a shred of camera sense, rhythmic intuition or even basic storytelling brio. Nobody's thought this material through in cinematic terms, and so it comes across as a series of Illustrative Moments—each scene a little self-contained step on a mapped-out journey, serving its function and then giving way to the next dramatic bullet point. Not that I needed it to be The Rapture, but there's only so much flatline I can take.

/The Loneliest Planet/ (2011, Julia Loktev): 84

[Pedigree: Locarno '11, TIFF; NYFF; AFI Fest. Opens 2012.]

Previously addressed at Toronto. Feared I might find the first half a little get-to-the-Incident enervating this time, but Loktev has an uncanny knack—also on display in Day Night Day Night—for making the eventless eventful, mostly via attention to arresting details that are unusual without being "quirky." (I was about to note that the "chimpanzee" headstand arguably crosses that line, but then suddenly suspected that that's an actual alternative to e.g. "Mississippi" somewhere or other, and sure enough. Headstand itself's still a bit cute, though.) And I remain in awe of the high-wire act that constitutes the aftermath, in which any and all discussion of what happened gets postponed until after the credits roll—a stunt that only works because of how much goofy downtime we'd spent with this couple before the split-second D'oh! People are reading way too much into Nica needing to hurl near the end (and not enough into her willingness to let Alex tend to her as she does), but I'm happy Loktev opted to err on the side of being misinterpreted as either stridently feminist or anti-feminist (according to personal conviction) rather than signpost a resolution that's essentially unknowable, and may be for weeks or months to come.

/It's a Wonderful Life/ (1946, Frank Capra): 93

"Way darker than its holiday-classic rep" has become a truism since I was a kid, but this viewing (first in 14 years) made me long for the relative cheer and optimism of The Turin Horse. Just days later, the beaming smiles and wing-heralding bells of the finale have already faded, whereas I can't stop thinking of George stalking his house like a caged panther, viciously snapping at innocuous questions from his kids and generally behaving like patriarchy gone rancid. Truth is, for all his principles, George can often be something of a dick even before things go wrong: his reaction when Mary loses her robe is awesomely ungallant, and their subsequent love scene (on the phone with Sam) works primarily because he treats her house as if it were a dentist's waiting room, seemingly disgusted by his own ardor. (Capra beat both Mann and Hitchcock in recognizing the potential for seething anger beneath Stewart's folksy persona.) When the happy ending comes, it's moving in direct proportion to the depths of despondency the film has previously tunneled, and George's realization of how beloved he is by the community can't somehow magically erase a lifetime's worth of regret about all the dreams he abandoned to earn that gratitude. (This is one of those films where it can be provocative to imagine what happens the day after it ends.) Nearly perfect, all in all, though needless to say I'd much rather live in Pottersville than Bedford Falls (va-va-voom!) and don't recoil in horror as intended when it's revealed that without George in her life poor Mary would have wound up as—egad—a SPINSTER LIBRARIAN! Tap that.

/Dazed and Confused/ (1993, Richard Linklater): 78

Can't honestly say I lived this movie, as I was only eight years old in '76 and attended an all-male Jesuit high school, but it wields a powerful nostalgic grip all the same. (And let me note again that 1993 - 1976 = 17, while 2011 - 1993 = 18. Would a high-school movie set in 1994 feel even remotely as retro? Has time essentially stopped?) As a sign of how much my taste has evolved over the past couple decades, I was originally slightly put off by the film's apparent aimlessness, whereas now I'm primarily irked by its sole concession to narrative structure, viz. Pink's internal debate about whether to sign the football team's just-say-no pledge. Nickname notwithstanding, Pink is easily the least colorful of Linklater's gaggle of vividly drawn types, embodied by what really has to be the greatest young ensemble cast ever assembled; people justifiably marvel at how many future stars he discovered, but I'm equally gobsmacked by the performances he got from kids who were pretty much never seen again, like Christin Hinojosa as Sabrina (shy new hazing recruit who hooks up with Dude From Rent) and the amazing Sasha Jenson, who absolutely murders blonde jock Don Dawson's cheerful sense of entitlement (without making him repellent, somehow). This is a world that feels fully inhabited, as if the entire day had been staged in real time and the camera is just capturing bits and pieces of it at random. There's still a slight sense of weightlessness to it all—nobody experiences anything remotely like an epiphany, and next year will likely be much the same—but I'm thankful that Linklater didn't go the American Graffiti route and make some last-ditch bid for Significance by relating the characters' ultimate fates. The final slow fade to black, on the open road as seen through the windshield of Wooderson's car, conveys the same idea far more eloquently.

/Harakiri/ (1962, Masaki Kobayashi): 83

Wish I'd revisited this right before seeing Miike's 3-D remake, so I'd have a better sense of how Kobayashi prevents the woe-is-me flashback from bogging down the entire movie. That's still the weakest element by far, but I think its potential bathos gets forestalled by (a) starker, more elemental direction in the flashback scenes themselves, but even more crucially (b) constant leaps back to Nakadai telling the story in his creepy dead-eyed affectless manner. (If memory serves, Miike lets the entire flashback play out in a single tedious movement.) Everything else is heart-stopping in its meticulous, procedural way, from the excruciating account of Motome's bamboo-blade travesty to the windswept faceoff between merciless avenger and remorseless enforcer. And while Miike's finale merely reprises Nakadai's crazed recklessness in The Sword of Doom, Kobayashi's is notable for how contained and cautious it is—this may be the only remotely credible depiction of a single swordsman doing battle with a small army, a skirmish that lasts as long as it does only because no member of the small army is especially eager to be the dude who gets sliced up so the others can move in behind him. Institutional effacement plays much more bleak and cynical in the original, too—indeed, the entire movie hinges on perverse decorum (on both sides), which is what makes its ugliness so uniquely unnerving. But then, we're talking about a culture that chose to ritualize one of the most painful suicide methods imaginable, treating self-inflicted disembowelment as if it were a trip to the notary public. In that sense, the American title—Harakiri (better known in the West, but more vulgar) rather than Seppuku—couldn't be less appropriate.

03 November 2011

Viewing Journal: 31 Oct - 6 Nov

Here's my standard top-of-the-month reminder that if you read these entries on a regular basis, find them in any way valuable, want to ensure that I don't get discouraged and give up, you should throw me a few bucks (link's at the top of the main page)—whatever you think a month's worth of near-daily capsules is worth to you. The amount is unimportant. (I suggested as little as $2; $5-10 is more common.) Just let me know you give a damn.

Haywire (2011, Steven Soderbergh): 71

[Pedigree: AFI Fest '11. Opens January 2012.]

Fuse this stoic piledriver with Schizopolis and you'd have an outright masterpiece (and guaranteed box-office flop, but oh well): Bravura running/driving/asskicking sequences occasionally leavened by the espionage equivalent of "Generic greeting returned!" and "Imminent sustenance" rather than actual tedious expository plot bullshit. There's enough of the latter clogging Haywire's first act that I briefly thought it had lost me, but once Fassbender shows up for one of the all-time great beatdowns—normally it takes an entire wasted '70s rock band to inflict that much damage on a hotel room—the movie settles into a blissfully workmanlike groove, serving up one old-school, unspectacular setpiece after another. (That last adjective is a compliment.) Carano isn't necessarily much of an actor, but even her slight stiffness has a certain appeal in this context, and the role doesn't demand anything she can't credibly deliver; I'm also susceptible to how much her nose-crinkle makes her resemble the young Ellen Barkin on the rare occasions when she smiles. Mostly, though, she's just a superbly conditioned body in constant motion, anchoring a film that feels like a throwback without going the Good German pastiche route (though I still think that one's underrated). Hard to imagine Dobbs having much to bitch about on the commentary track this time, though it's possible that Soderbergh imposed the flashback structure on him—apart from the opportunity it affords for a nicely disorienting opening scene, not much is gained by having the entire first half take the form of an unlikely story-so-far monologue (told to a civilian, no less). David Holmes, on the other hand, will once again have good reason to bellyache when his superlative, Schifrinesque score gets totally ignored come awards season. If only the music had drowned out some of the more cumbersome dialogue. Don't expend that much effort on the MacGuffin, people. We really don't care.

/A Separation/ (2011, Asghar Farhadi): 95

[Pedigree: Berlin '11 (Golden Bear, Actor, Actress), TIFF; NYFF; AFI Fest. Opens NY/LA 30 Dec.]

Previously addressed here, though I now repudiate my assessment of its visual scheme as "purely functional"—Farhadi has an elegant, fluid sense of how to organize chaotic human behavior for maximum expressiveness, one that extends well beyond his rather obvious (but still effective) strategy of placing physical barriers (usually glass) between characters in nearly every shot. (I think it seemed less impressive to me than About Elly the first time simply because this one takes place in the city, mostly indoors; it's hard to beat the seaside for ready-made grandeur.) Second viewing turned it into a slow-motion disaster movie, as I was even more cruelly aware of various points at which the entire mess could have been happily or at least tentatively resolved, if only various people were capable of looking past the blinders of their wounded pride or crippling fear. "I find that your problem is a small one," rules the judge in the opening scene, unwittingly opening the floodgates for an escalating series of ostensibly larger problems to muddy and distract; only Termeh, the teenage daughter, seems capable of cutting through all the self-involved bullshit and seeing what's really at stake, though even she winds up compromised when forced to join the adult world prematurely. Simply one of the most heartbreaking movies I've ever seen.

/Martha Marcy May Marlene/ (2011, Sean Durkin): 82

Previously addressed at Cannes. Quite the backlash has since kicked in, but detractors have some confused ideas about what the film is trying (or should be trying) to do, somehow writing lengthy reviews that never mention post-traumatic stress disorder or deprogramming. Durkin doesn't employ match cuts and deliberately ambiguous visual syntax in order to draw some fatuous false equivalence between bourgeois society and a dangerous cult—he's giving us the deeply disoriented psyche of someone for whom the recent past is still bleeding into the present. It's a psychological horror film in which the horror stems less from the subjugation, rape and murder seen in flashback than from the present-tense sight of a young woman permanently losing her mooring because she can't bring herself to ask for help. (How people can see the sister and her husband as villains, or even as unsympathetic, is beyond my comprehension. Such is the kneejerk assumption that wealthy = hideous, apparently. Makes for a nice subversion of expectations, but you're not supposed to cling to it until the bitter end, especially when the bitter end strongly implies that the refusal to answer the question "What happened to you?" may get M's only family killed.) Marlene isn't some throwaway identity added to make the title scan better: Olsen is playing neither Martha nor Marcy May at the lakehouse, and if her brilliant performance registers as "opaque" it's because we never actually meet the person trapped underneath all those abortive disguises (with the possible exception of the few seconds right before she gets rechristened by Patrick, but even there I sense that Zoe's primed the pump already). So, no, the movie isn't particularly deep or plausible or character-driven, but then neither is, say, Repulsion. That Durkin creates a similar sense of nightmarish anxiety in a naturalistic context is little short of miraculous.

/Casablanca/ (1942, Michael Curtiz): 80

Reduced to its essence, Casablanca has three crucial scenes: Ilsa's arrival at Rick's, her plea for the letters of transit and subsequent surrender, and the runway finale. Two are among the greatest and most iconic examples of concentrated star power in cinema history; this is the first time I've noticed that the third doesn't really work at all. Her sudden decision to abandon Laszlo seems motivated less by passion for Rick (the happy-in-Paris flashback montage is only missing him pushing her on a swing) than by her marriage to a man so tediously noble that he can't dredge up the tiniest twinge of jealousy or concern about the nature of his wife's apparently tempestuous history with this stumpy saloon owner. Consequently, I actually found the Rick/Ilsa story less moving this time around than I did Rick trying to warn the Bulgarian newlywed away from Renault and then fixing the roulette wheel to save her. Viewed with a critical eye, the film skews a little too baldly manipulative, tossing aside logic to create false suspense (there's no sensible reason for Rick to wait until he's apparently sold Laszlo out to pull the gun on Renault, except to fool us) and leaning hard on catchphrases ("I stick my neck out for nobody" twice; "Here's looking at you, kid" three times). And yet it's still mostly magnificent, with so many great lines that even the ones nobody ever quotes kick like a mule: "I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you, it's poor salesmanship"; "You despise me, don't you?" --> "If I gave you any thought I probably would"; "And remember, this gun is pointed straight at your heart" --> "That is my least vulnerable spot." If not quite the accidental masterpiece of enduring myth, it's certainly the most rousingly entertaining pseudo-political romantic potboiler of its era.

Green (2011, Sophia Takal): W/O

[Pedigree: SxSW '11, AFI Fest.]

On the one hand, it's inspiring to see this loose collective of DIY filmmakers who all support each other and seem completely uninterested in building any sort of traditional "career"; on the other hand, so far I don't like any of the actual films, so maybe hey-let's-put-on-a-show! has its limitations. One problem is they either all think they can act or are all convinced that traditional notions of acting are a crutch (I'm not sure which—could be both, actually), so there's a lot of artless awkwardness on display, as if nobody understands that what Greta Gerwig does isn't elementary. Here, Takal seems to be attempting Shelley Duvall in 3 Women, and while she doesn't embarrass herself (which is an achievement of some sort), neither does she locate a character within the affectation, at least in the portion I saw. And the other two actors, one of whom is (needless to say) a filmmaker himself, are so thin and reedy—by which I mean their dynamic range as performers, not (just) their appearance—as to make virtually no impression. These kids work fast, and no doubt they're learning a lot, and I expect we'll see some terrific work from them down the road...unless being celebrated for their juvenilia permanently stunts their growth. Calm down, tastemakers.

/Cape Fear/ (1991, Martin Scorsese): 57

Really surprised in retrospect that Scorsese allowed Max Cady to be turned into an unstoppable inhuman supervillain, even if that was all the rage at the time. (Most recent credit for screenwriter Wesley Strick: the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot.) De Niro hams it up unmercifully, substituting a sneering drawl for character; I never saw his Fearless Leader, but it could hardly be much more cartoonish. Which is a shame, because the unnatural order he's so garishly upsetting has real bite. Even if Cady is now meant to be just a projection of this family's unspoken anxieties, they deserve a richer avatar; Juliette Lewis in particular is every bit as freakishly unguarded as I remembered, her halting self-consciousness the perfect distillation of adolescent curiosity and confusion. (She's so good that she even manages to briefly settle De Niro down a bit.) Scorsese, for his part, seems to be working hard to live up to Herrmann's score, which was arguably too fervent for the '62 version (a rather modest thriller, as I recall). Yet the film works best at its most restrained, as with the monofilament tied to the teddy bear, whereas grandiose flourishes like Cady on the wall beneath a fireworks display come across as overexertion. Ultimately this seems less like a remake of a (very) minor classic than like Scorsese's game contribution to the then-burgeoning [Whatever]-From-Hell genre—it could just as easily have been The Hand That Rocks the Cradle instead, really. Once the bad guy gets set on fire and returns scarred but unfazed to wreak further havoc, any pretense of consequence is pretty much shot.