Not Just Movies

The Front Line (Jang Hun, 2011)

2012-01-25T19:01:00.000-06:00

Jang Hun's The Front Line liberally takes from Saving Private Ryan, but then so does every modern war movie about a past conflict (and, often, a present one). Yet despite its own occasional bumps, I much prefer Jang's more idiosyncratic yet thematically consistent vision to Spielberg's sloppy hodgepodge of tropes. It captures the particular bitterness of civil war better than just about any work of film or television made about our own, and its flashes of quintessentially Korean cinematic oddness don't detract from the impact of the final moments. And the use of the contested hill itself as a messenger system between sides as each constantly wrests control of the area from the other is one of the most ingenious commentaries on the absurdity and waste of war.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #3: Martin Amis — Money

2012-01-23T10:54:00.000-06:00

Like a Bret Easton Ellis novel as written by John Kennedy Toole, Martin Amis' Money is a savage gutting of the Reagan era as seen through the eyes of a clever but myopic and narcissistic glutton. John Self may not be as fat as Ignatius J. Reilly, but his appetites are more varied and vulgar, as his primary love is money, the root of all evil that allows him to trace his way along several crass desires. As Self gets deeper and deeper into the movie production from hell, everything slowly tilts off its axis until the detestable man is almost rendered sympathetic by the orgy of self-absorption and ego-stroking that surrounds him. I've yet to read a better takedown of the movie industry and celebrity, and the moralistic comeuppance that collapses on the narrative in the final chapters is so uproarious and insane that Amis narrowly avoids preaching for the ghastly hilarity of it all. I'd previously known of Amis solely as Christopher Hitchens' best friend, but now I'm eager to delve into the next book of his I can get my hands on.

50 Book Pledge #2: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — A Study in Scarlet

2012-01-20T15:46:00.000-06:00

BBC's simply fantastic Sherlock series inspired me to revisit the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I was happy to stumble across some great new hardcovers from Barnes & Noble that collect all of Doyle's Holmes books into two volumes that cost only $8 apiece. I started, naturally, at the beginning, with Doyle's debut Sherlock novel, A Study in Scarlet. Man, it's amazing he ever built an iconic series out of this book, as it awkwardly ports over the mystery of Edgar Allen Poe (who is namechecked unflatteringly) without carrying over much of the suspense. It hardly even qualifies as a detective novel, with Holmes solving the case almost instantly and Doyle dragging the thing out by suddenly diverting into a strange flashback that uses inaccuracies about Mormons to paint an unintentionally hilarious "sinister" portrait of the religion. Doyle would go on to make one of the most well-known characters in literary history, but you'd never know it just by reading this.

50 Book Pledge #1: Vladimir Nabokov — Pale Fire

2012-01-20T15:37:00.000-06:00

Nabokov's Pale Fire may be even better than his Lolita. A total put-on of a work—consisting of a poem by one "John Shade" and a foreword and commentary by Charles Kinbote—Pale Fire almost immediately reveals itself to be a farce, with the foreword so self serving on Kinbote's part that even the praise he lavishes upon his "dear" friend John is, on some level, all about him. The poem itself is neglected, a beautifully structured poem of unabashedly prosaic subject matter, speculating on life by way of the sights and sounds immediately at the poet's disposal. This style was anachronistic even when Nabokov published the book, but there's something charming about "Shade's" creation. That only makes Kinbote's resultant breakdown of the poem all the more hilarious. Vividly skewering the ability of critics to read anything in a work of art, especially if it conforms to some preconceived notion they have going into a piece, the notes flagrantly ignore the sensual (in the literal sense) quality of the poem to speculate about Shade's supposed allusions to the country of Zembla, which Kinbote may or may not have ruled before being deposed. There's not a single page of these notes that didn't make me laugh, even when it delved into darker realms of black comedy. Nabokov loved his pranks and jokes, and Pale Fire is his most immaculately crafted gag.

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

2012-01-20T07:33:00.001-06:00

The trait that links all four Mission: Impossible movies, each helmed by a different director of wildly differing stylistic sensibilities, is a certain amount of incomprehensibility. De Palma's original, which has aged better than any of its successors, is a smorgasbord of that filmmaker's love of audience manipulation, leftist politics, and metacinematic pranksterism. John Woo's sequel is, if anything, even crazier, replacing the peevish joke structure of De Palma's satire with pure, free-form abandon. J.J. Abrams' installment significantly pared down the twists and turns of the franchise's plots, making for the most conventionally satisfying of the series, yet the one that leaves me the coldest.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, the first live-action venture by animation superstar Brad Bird, is at once the most gargantuan, ridiculous of the movies and the most cogent entry, occasionally explained to the point of tedium. It makes for an uneven effort, one that comes alive every time Bird stages another setpiece and grinding to a halt when the holdover influence of Abrams' pedestrian hit weighs down every bit of dialogue. Happily, Bird, perhaps self-conscious about the expectations upon him, absolutely loads his movie with fantastically over-the-top sequences that make for perhaps the most popcorn-worthy of this franchise.

Opening with a delightfully bizarre sequence involving LOST's Josh Holloway, Ghost Protocol moves swiftly into a prison break in Russia that bails out our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Though a bit stiffly presented at first, this setpiece encapsulates the best of the series: it's crazy to the point of comedy (both for its physical properties and the input of a surveilling Simon Pegg as Benji) yet suitably impressive in its staging. Once out, Ethan and his rescuers—Benji and Jane Carter (Paula Patton)—receive a mission to infiltrate the Kremlin, but in true Mission: Impossible fashion, everything soon goes haywire.

Ghost Protocol reveals itself to be a nuclear thriller, a decidedly old-fashioned plot with decidedly old-fashioned villains. Perhaps the dilapidated subject matter explains the recurring imagery of malfunctioning technology. Old gear shorts and fizzles, while even new gadgets fail when needed most. The conceit suggests Bird's awareness that this franchise is outdated. This is not a new realization; De Palma structured the first of these movies as an investigation of what a Cold War spy series would mean in the absence of the USSR. And now that Bond himself has undergone a makeover to cut the waffle, Bird's too-clever-by-half trick doesn't have much bite, and he comes to rely on it to the point that it becomes a crutch. Nevertheless, the director's playfulness toward the genre is a refreshing bit of self-awareness, albeit an unsurprising one from the man who gave us a superhero movie as sly as The Incredibles.

With this gleeful energy, Bird comes the closest to the spirit of De Palma's film, and he even carries over a few other traits of the first of the franchise's entries. De Palma assembled one of the strangest casts for an ostensible mainstream cash-in on a TV show, with actors of multiple nationalities and ethnicities breaking up the all-American, all-white tone of so much blockbuster cinema. Likewise, Bird stacks his cast with an oddball assortment of actors, putting a visibly aged but still-virile Cruise with the youthful but out-of-shape Pegg (at 41, he still looks as if he has baby fat), Patton, Midnight in Paris' Lea Seydoux, Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor (magnificently OTT, as ever), Michael Nyqvist from the Swedish Millennium films, and more. Considering that Hollywood's casting hasn't gotten much more diverse since De Palma's poked fun at it, Bird's lineup is one of the film's most entertaining aspects.

But the real reason to come to these things is the ludicrous setpieces, and Bird doesn't disappoint. The sequence where Hunt must scale some floors 1000 feet in the air in the Burj Dubai in minutes as everything goes wildly awry. I don't know what it is about this franchise and its vertiginous centerpieces, but this bit blows away the previous stunts. Seen on an IMAX screen, the camera's looks to the ground below create a queasy sense of fear, while the framing of Hunt's climb made me wonder "How did they DO that?" incessantly. Yet even better—to these eyes, anyway—was the sequence shortly thereafter, where Ethan chases his target through a swirling sandstorm that reduces visibility to mere inches and howls over the soundtrack to equally block out the audio. The chase is one of the most thrilling in recent memory, a rust-colored maelstrom that borders on the surreal for its many reversals, lost leads and resumed pursuits, and a frame that is always changing yet strangely static, given the constant blur caused by the sand. There are other delights, from a whacky Kremlin break-in to an even odder party crashing in India, but nothing matches that wild chase through obliterated Dubai streets.

Where the film loses me is in the need to back up all these wonderfully quirky, nonsensical pieces into some kind of coherent whole. The opening bits of Holloway and the prison break are great for how immediate and unexplained they are, and the drawn-out truth behind both takes away from their spontaneity and silliness. Both De Palma and Woo made even their explanations confusing as hell (though I'm not sure Woo did so intentionally), but Bird clarifies in a way that advertises his skill for making coherent narratives, a valuable talent but one misapplied here. Bird also picks up the baton from Abrams re: the simplistic use of romance and shattered love as a motivation. The threat hanging over Ethan's wife moved the third film, and Carter's rage over her lover's death prompts many of her actions, reducing her character to borderline sexist motivation as a woman incapable of behaving like a professional, elite spy after suffering an emotional gut-punch. Likewise, Jeremy Renner's character teases out a mystery that loses all of its force when he spills the beans, and even when his own interpretation of events is later reversed, Renner's whole subplot fails to add anything and saddles the excellent actor with too much arbitrary baggage. This is Screenwriting 101, and it adds all-too-easy foundations for a franchise that, again, works best when it is convoluted beyond all get-out.

Nevertheless, Ghost Protocol is a hell of a good show for an animation director looking to break into live action, demonstrating that the recent trend of live-action filmmakers moving into animation is not a one-way bridge. Bird's familiarity with boundless framing gives his action pieces an exuberance that makes their absurdities infectiously engaging. I understand that the complaint that everything makes too much sense is an odd one, and one I wouldn't apply anywhere else, but I did still feel nagged by certain pieces of exposition that felt all too common after the extraordinary creativity Bird brought to the project. But that imagination overpowers even the tiniest of quibbles, and Ghost Protocol is easily the finest of the series since De Palma tried to kill the franchise before it started with the first.

I'm on Episode 50 of the Matineecast

2012-01-16T09:07:00.000-06:00

So, last week, Ryan McNeil of The Matinee asked me to do a podcast with him on War Horse and Steven Spielberg in general. I happily agreed and we had a fantastic talk last Wednesday, so good I feel guilty for rambling on and on well past his usual time limit thanks to my inability to condense myself. I am equally unable to listen to myself, so I don't know what the poor man cut out to make me look good, but know that it must have been a Herculean task to whittle down my incessant run-on thoughts into something approaching coherence. Ryan's a great guy, and I really appreciated the chance to chat with him.

Check out his latest podcast now over at his site.

El Sicario, Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi, 2011)

2012-01-12T12:19:00.000-06:00

In an age where "FAKE!" greets even the most honest video, the almost-too-consistent dramatic ups and downs of this extended talking head about a reformed assassin for the Mexican drug cartel will certainly strain the credulity of some. And this is wholly leaving out the conclusion of the man's life story, which is so conveniently moralizing that it could play at schools and church groups (especially church groups). Nevertheless, the sicario's monologue is so enthralling as to make something compelling of 80 minutes of a masked man mostly sitting in a chair explaining himself. I know of at least one person who compared the man's confessional to Spalding Gray's ability to hook a crowd with just his speechifying, and that strikes me as more than apt.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Criminally Underrated: Jackie Brown

2012-01-12T12:11:00.000-06:00

Jackie Brown is one of my favorite movies, and I've been meaning to write a full post on it forever. I wrote a brief piece for my lovely Twitter pal Sasha James a while ago, and now I've done a longer, if still insufficient (given my deep love of the film) article on the movie for Spectrum Culture's "Criminally Underrated" series. And even now I'm still not satisfied with commenting on the film; I may yet write an even larger piece on the movie and how it shapes my entire view of Quentin Tarantino.

But for now, head on over to Spectrum Culture to read my review of this incredible, occasionally neglected, masterpiece.

Jennifer Egan — A Visit from the Goon Squad

2012-01-05T09:20:00.000-06:00

Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel/short story collection/who-cares A Visit from the Goon Squad has racked up enough accolades for a defining work of our time. After reading it, I can only pray "our time" is not set in literary stone by such shoddy, ignorant documentation. The much-touted stylistic shifts are hardly whirlwinds of upheaval, and the characters are drawn so thinly as to be nothing more than vehicles for easy tragedy, tragedy that works neither on a human level nor the allegorical, societal plane she seeks to pinpoint. A few bright spots of wit and clarity can be found among the detritus, but I regret to say I found the book to be such a disappointment of half-baked literary knowledge and easily exploited tropes that I was stunned to learn that it was not, in fact, some English major's creative writing exercise.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Capsule Reviews: Weekend, Tuesday After Christmas, Into the Abyss, Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2012-01-05T08:53:00.000-06:00

Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)

Occasionally a bit precious in its cinematography (one too many woozy shots and obvious visual cues), Andrew Haigh's Weekend is nevertheless a bold, beautiful film that uses the magnificent performances of its leads to confront cinematic complacency and limitations upon homosexuality. Glen (Chris New), the aggressive art student, is defiant about his sexuality in response to the heteronormative society around him, which he convincingly argues is more "in your face" than even the loudest queer. Russell, the shy one, still wrestles with his sexuality, and Tom Cullen captures the feeling of being the odd man out at a party (whether the stranger at a farewell bash or the one gay man among straights) better than just about anyone.

It's impossible to leave the sexuality of the characters out of discussion, as the tenor of their conversations and behavior with each other is informed by the social limitations imposed on homosexuals; by denying the naturalness of their expressions, the outside world makes their private chats more open and frank than heterosexual couples who've been together for years instead of hours. Cullen and New are so effortlessly natural with each other that not only are they believable as a couple, they are two of the few romantic screen pairings one could buy having a life-changing dalliance in just two days. Haigh still has some kinks to work out with his direction, but Weekend announces the arrival of one of the most nuanced, real makers of romance, and in this respect, the sexuality of the lovers in question couldn't matter less.

Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, 2011)

If Weekend's naturalism quietly revolutionizes the indie romance, the elegant long-takes and flawless rapport of Tuesday, After Christmas' actors adds new textures to over-familiar adultery dramas. On paper, this film is as clichéd as it gets: a husband in a comfortable family unit risks it all for a fling with a younger, attractive woman. But Muntean and the actors craft realistic interactions—the married couple in the film are husband and wife in real life—that make Paul's quandary agonizing rather than perfunctory. In this modern age of decreasing average shot length, a film like Tuesday, After Christmas reminds us of the dramatic possibilities of simply holding a shot, which prolongs the perfectly ordinary conversations between characters to the point that one almost expects a bomb to go off. Why else would a shot be held so long over (seemingly) nothing? Muntean's long takes allow the actors to add tiny exchanges that make their relationships more real and therefore more meaningful, and the decision Paul must make by that post-Christmas Tuesday promises to be devastating regardless of what we eventually see him choose.

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)

Perhaps the most standard, TV-ready documentary Werner Herzog has ever made, and that includes his early work for German television (which are among his most poetic works). Yet if the film lacks Herzog's usual magic, it also makes for an above-average opinion piece that bluntly voices the director's views on capital punishment while still directly confronting the horror of the death row inmates' crimes. Herzog's use of archival footage and relatively straight interviewing style reveal he'd be a fairly successful "normal" documentarian. Still a major presence in his storytelling, Herzog nevertheless mostly steps back to let the interview subjects speak for themselves, only interjecting to push them on unexpected tangents that end up revealing more than the standard questions would have. Herzog captures the full ugliness of the situation—the two partners in crime blaming each other for the crime that got them incarcerated, the shame and rage the people connected to the perpetrators and victims feel—but it is precisely because he goes for the complete portrait of devastation that his adamant stance against the death penalty carries any weight. But if Herzog does not poeticize this subject, he nevertheless searches for the beauty and humanity in this dark tragedy, and he even finds vague whispers of hope littered among the bodies of the dead murdered by criminal and state alike.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2011)

If Into the Abyss leaves out Herzog's style but still makes an impact, Cave of Forgotten Dreams showcases his ability to make poetry of reality but lacks the grounding element that keeps his best work from simply drifting aimlessly. Herzog's speculation of peoples past based on the cave art they left behind broaches ideas of the foundation of all artistic expression and, therefore, communication. But he fails to tie delicate play of light and simulated movement over the beautiful and miraculously preserved cave paintings to the grandiose free association that usually strikes metaphysical pay dirt. Occasionally, Herzog's tantalizing meditations, linking the caves to German Romanticism and Wagner, recall the best of the director's thin but evocative spoken thoughts. But given Herzog's interest in casting these surprisingly sophisticated paintings as not simply the beginning of art in general but proto-cinema itself, it's a shame that the film doesn't feel more resonant throughout.

Blind Spots 2012

2012-01-02T13:52:00.002-06:00

So, various bloggers I read and like have decided to address various, wait for it, blind spots in their movie viewing in 2012. I consider much of my blog writing an attempt to fill various gaps in knowledge, but I love a good writing meme, and considering how many "must-sees" end up falling through the cracks as I get distracted with other things, perhaps listing 12 here (one per month) will at least commit me to watching some of the movies I tell myself I must see with all haste.

Actress [a.k.a. Centre Stage] (Stanely Kwan, 1992)

I love me some Maggie Cheung, and this film sports what, as far as I've seen, is her most lauded performance. Based on the tragically short life of '30s Chinese film star Ruan Lingyu (whose own seminal film The Goddess I also need to see), Actress got plenty of plaudits, the most prominent of which was Jonathan Rosenbaum listing it among the best films of the '90s.

L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

A) It's Robert Bresson, thus necessitating I see it. B) It's on damn near every serious list of the best films of the '80s, a decade I'm still slowly mapping, cinema-wise.

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

I believe it was on Twitter that the Self-Styled Siren (probably the best film writer in the country at the moment) argued for the underrating of William Wyler, furthermore arguing that this movie was the best Best Picture winner ever. I think she meant that literally, but I also got the sense she was speaking in terms of the mental image of a Best Picture winner, a.k.a. a typically middlebrow, easily digestible affair. But if the Siren sees artistry in it, you can be damn sure it's there, and I love the handful of Wylers I've seen.

Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)

Comparisons to Kubrick and a celebrated score by my favorite modern film composer, Alexandre Desplat. I have neglected this for far too long.

Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

Supposedly one of the most unsettling films ever made. Given my preference for horror in the Repulsion vein of disruption and disturbance over jump scares, Nic Roeg's movie should be for me.

Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926)

This has just been a major oversight I've sought to correct for a while. Murnau was perhaps the first poet of the cinema, and I've been looking forward to completing my gaps in his filmography.

Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)

Another film starring Maggie Cheung, this one by one of my favorite modern directors, Olivier Assayas, and drawing its subject matter at least partially from the director of the next film on my list...

Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916)

I've only seen short films by Feuillade and found them to be incredible, the perfect balance between Méliès' fantasy and the Lumières' flat documentation. I'd therefore like to check out one of his serials, and I think I'll start with this one, though Les Vampires and the Fantômas series are also priorities.

The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)

Davies Distant Voices, Still Lives is a masterpiece, and this sequel seems to get about as much praise. I figured I'd watch this in anticipation of Davies' new film, The Deep Blue Sea, which toured the festival circuit last year but has yet to get wider release in the States.

Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

The only von Sternberg/Dietrich collaboration I've seen is The Blue Angel, but I have it on good authority from several that this commercially unavailable pairing brings out the best in both of them. Considering how great The Blue Angel is, I can't wait.

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

I am deeply ashamed to admit I've never seen any Minnelli film, a problem I hope to rectify in the coming days with my new Blu-Ray of his Meet Me in St. Louis. But while the rest of his acclaimed musicals are also on my to-watch list, I must finally stop neglecting to see this drama, praised to the high heavens by damn near everyone I know and follow who's seen it.

There's Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956)

Douglas Sirk, maker of hyperstylized Technicolor films, also made equally artistic black and white films, or so I'm told of his four monochrome features. I can't remember where I saw a rave for this but it made me more eager to watch it than even Sirk's Faulkner adaptation The Tarnished Angels, which I may also get around to this year.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

2011-12-31T20:18:00.001-06:00

David Cronenberg throws the audience for a loop from the start of A Dangerous Method. The stately opening credits, unfolding gracefully over close-ups of ink blotting the pages of correspondence, is so elegant that it cannot even be taken for a sort of proto-Rorschach test. It is as conventional and soft a commencement to a costume drama as credits can be. Then, Cronenberg cuts straight to a shot of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) shrieking, cackling and hissing against the glass, resembling less her usual, composed and corseted ladies than Jane Eyre's Bertha, the embodiment of the repressed female id. In an instant, the director pushes under the "proper" surface of the period drama to confront its twisted secrets. The fact that most of the film occurs in bright daylight is no coincidence; the monsters that eat at these characters are not creatures that come out in the night. They are in all of us at all times, whether they're visible or not.

Cronenberg's style has always been formal, but A Dangerous Method is so classically composed that a newcomer would never guess its maker had also directed such body horror classics as Videodrome and Crash. Yet by placing Sabina's "hysteria" upfront, the director clues us in on his basic aim: the film is merely the psychological root of his horror movies. As Knightley writhes around in mental agony, Cronenberg fully subsumes his tumorous grotesqueries fully into the mind, which can torment the body well enough without tumorous growths or other icky, hyperbolic infections. As Glenn Kenny rightly put it on Twitter shortly after the film's premiere, Sabina, and her sexuality, is the traditional monster in a typical Cronenberg film.

Taken to the Burghölzli clinic outside Zurich, Sabina is placed under the care of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbener), then the assistant to the hospital's director. Jung decides to treat Sabina with the "talking cure," a theory developed by Sigmund Freud but potentially never applied to a patient. Sabina's case will eventually bring Jung into contact with his idol and, for various reasons, help tear them apart. Their interaction, along with Jung's increasingly unethical relationship with Sabina, subtly brings out the theories of both psychiatrists, even as the director gradually reveals that the doctors themselves embody these same prototypical ideas about the workings of the human mind.

Viggo Mortensen plays Freud with such paternalism that he casts himself as the Oedipal father to be destroyed by Jung, something that the Austrian even voices aloud later in the film. Freud looks to Jung as a potential successor but urges the man to stop bringing "mysticism" into psychoanalysis just as the field is finally beginning to be accepted by the scientific community at large. But Freud's anti-religious streak has a clear personal impetus: he confides in Jung that the Jewish identity of the Viennese psychoanalysts will make the struggle to be taken seriously that much harder. A confused Jung asked why that would matter, to which Freud dryly responds, "That, if I may say so, is an exquisitely Protestant remark." Jung comes to resent what he perceives to be Freud's close-mindedness on this issue, but Freud's little jab has a point. Not that the man can't be unreasonable: having to support a wife and six children on a modest income, Freud casts petty sideways glances at the wealth into which Jung married, tacitly sniping the opulent house and travel conditions the Swiss doctor enjoys.

Sabina's own mental state is more explicitly revealed through Knightley's performance. Her bony, angular frame is perfect for Spielrein's wracked, involuntarily self-punishment, her uncontrollable sex drive clashing with her virginity until it seems as if her body thrashes in such fits because that drive is looking for an alternate escape. (The blood of her broken hymen shown later in some ways seems like the remains of some felled mythical beast, or at the very least the opening of a release valve.) She exhibits the animus, the male within the female, when she takes the initiative in kissing Jung, and it's amusing that the progressive psychiatrist would take the all too traditionally male excuse of subsequently blaming her for "seducing" him. Later, Sabina finds herself directly and indirectly trapped between Jung and Freud when she becomes a psychiatrist in her own right and must write her own dissertation with the divergent theorists' views. Her heart favors Jung, but her head tends to side with Freud, who at one point conspiratorially tells the Russian Jewish Spielrein of Jung, "Put not your trust in Aryans," asking for her allegiance out of the same religious identity he buries in public.

Cronenberg uses split diopter lenses to crush characters against each other while still emphasizing distance. It makes Jung, Freud and Spielrein into each other's dualities, even their shoulder angels. It also has the effect of making every bit of dialogue resemble the setup for Jung's approach to Freud's talking cure with Sabina, in which he places the woman looking forward as he sits behind asking questions for minimal distraction. This turns every conversation into a therapy session, which somewhat resembles a Catholic confession, a wry twist given Freud's overt objection to religious influence in his scientific approach.

Long, generally static takes drag out these forms of therapy to excruciating lengths. When Sabina finally voices what it is that torments her, Cronenberg lingers on Knightley's face, horrified at herself for speaking aloud her demons. Indeed, it can be harder to watch her come clean about her sexual hangups than it is to see Seth Brundle catalog his own rotted-off body parts in The Fly; at times, Cronenberg moves in so close and refuses to cut for so long that my eyes darted every which way but toward the screen in sheer discomfort. But that's the point; Knightley, aghast at herself for revealing her kinks, is not so different from people today, who continue to hold such open conversation about sex taboo a century later. By breaking through the social barriers that cage her, Sabina is set on the path to recovery. As utterly agonizing as it can be, opening up can be healthy, and sometimes talking really can be a cure.

There are jokes sprinkled throughout A Dangerous Method—Freud in particular is wry and witty, and he is always seen with a cigar in hand or mouth—but the film has an air of quiet tragedy to it, the important breakthroughs made by Jung, Freud, even Spielrein (her dissertation on the links between sex and death almost certainly influenced some of the two men's later theories) nevertheless unable to fully overcome their fears and desires. Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), the brief prodigy of Freud, advises Jung "Never repress anything," but as the closing text of the film reveals, he'll die penniless and hungry by the end of the decade. That places Otto at one extreme, and the totally inhibited Sabina of the film's beginning at the other. But the medium between the two, Freud's assertion of a necessary level of repression, is anything but a happy one. A Dangerous Method closes with Jung sitting in empty social comfort, paying a dear psychic price for that normalcy, the full extent of which is borne out with the revelation of his subsequent breakdown. We also learn that Freud had good reason to worry about his ethnic and religious identity, him being kicked out of Vienna in 1939 and Spielrein murdered by the SS in 1942. The sense of barely suppressed pain and sorrow that ends the film is only worsened by these intertitles, making for one of the most tragic of Cronenberg's films. But there is hope for the future: as Jung's expositional title card notes, the same nervous breakdown that incapacitates him during the First World War will only make him emerge a stronger psychiatrist. As he says to the equally troubled but accomplished psychoanalyst Sabina has become by the end, "Only the wounded physician heals."

2011: The Year in Review

2011-12-31T07:38:00.003-06:00

The last year-end post, I swear. Last year I did a similar round-up separate to my best-of list, but this year I had even more reason to hand out "awards" for various accomplishments. I joined the Online Film Critics Society in October, and just last week I sent in my first ballot for their awards. Since I had all that written down, why not post it here along with other final mentions I wanted to make to close out this excellent year in film? Besides, this year has been so wonderful that I'm almost reluctant to let it go without one last good celebration. So without further ado, the awards:

Best Director
Terrence Malick, Tree of Life

Reaching the apotheosis of his fragmentary, personal and universal side, Malick moves beyond Emerson into the realm of Joyce, finding a mix between the microcosmic and universal that shouldn't work (and doesn't, for many) but makes for the most deeply felt experience I can recall at the movies. Malick folds time and space onto his humble Texan family, at once emphasizing their unremarkable perpetuation of eternal cycles and their own variations and decorations that make them singular among the other links of this chain.

Runners-up
Raul Ruiz, Mysteries of Lisbon
Apicatpong Weerasethakul, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Kelly Reichardt, Meek's Cutoff
Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In

Best Actor
Peyman Moaadi, A Separation

Simultaneously selfish and selfless, defiant but quietly despairing, Peyman Moaadi is frustrating and heartbreaking as the estranged husband trying to care for his daughter and Alzheimer's-ridden father. But his self-righteousness slowly fizzles as he inadvertently brings more stress and potential ruin upon his splintered family. Moaadi never loses the character even as Nader moves the story into darker, more complex moral realms, and when he sins, he does so with wrenching believability. Much of the film relies on him, and Moaadi pulls it off flawlessly.

Runners-up
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
George Clooney, The Descendants
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Hunter McCracken- The Tree of Life

Best Actress
Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia

Capturing depression better than practically anyone I've ever seen on the screen, Kirsten Dunst's bravura performance in Melancholia is the endothermic opposite of the usual von Trier heroine. Where his other leads suffer, she seems to inflict suffering, not in the grisly and loony way of Gainsbourg's She in Antichrist but in a cosmic sense. The chickens come home to roost for the world that so viciously tore down previous protagonists, as Dunst's powerfully detached, numbed woe brings about the planet's destruction. Payback's a bitch, and Dunst is subtly terrifying as she presides over the apocalypse with a silent approval for the end of days.

Runners-up
Mia Wasikowska, Jane Eyre
Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Michelle Williams, Meek's Cutoff

Best Supporting Actor
Christopher Plummer, Beginners

There are huge gaps in my familiarity with Christopher Plummer's filmography, but this is the brightest and most touching role I've seen him take. And what a performance it is: seen in the protagonist's flashbacks, Plummer's newly out dad is alive and energetic even as we mostly see him in hospitals. Having hid his real self behind a wall of emotional remove, Hal basically has to live his denied life in the four years between his confession and his death, and Plummer grounds the man's newfound joie de vivre in a half-spoken past of deep pain and misguided decisions. His son, who remembers only an almost professionally loving man, cannot comprehend his dad's sudden sweetness, but that doesn't stop him from being completely devastated by Hal's death. Hell, I was too.

Runners-up
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Albert Brooks, Drive
Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life
Patton Oswalt, Young Adult

Best Supporting Actress
Elena Anaya, The Skin I Live In

Even without the film's twist, Elena Anaya gives a powerful performance as a compliant prisoner of a madman. Once the full truth is revealed, however, Anaya becomes the crux of the film's gender politics and its ingenious statements on the way gender roles have been socially ingrained into our biology. Anaya is as mysterious and affecting after the reveal as she was before, and she helps The Skin I Live In become one of Almodóvar's best.

Runners-up
Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life
Hayley Atwell, Captain America, The First Avenger
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
Rose Byrne, Bridesmaids

Best Ensemble
The Descendants

Alexander Payne's film is not only stacked with great actors, they each get a moment to shine as friends, family, and even a few enemies filter through a hectic time in Matt King's life. The leads are superb, with Clooney giving his best performance to date and Shailene Woodley offering up one of the best youth performances in years, but the supporting cast rises to meet them at every turn. I can't discuss Judy Greer's performance without spoiling it entirely, but she is but one of many fantastic side-players, along with Beau Bridges' Dude-esque burnout with a buried edge and Robert Forster's father-in-law, who deals with his grief in anger. I can't help but love a film that knows the value of a good set of character actors.

Runners-up
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Bridesmaids

Best Screenplay
A Separation

There's no way to summarize Asghar Farhadi's A Separation without leaving out a massive part of its essence. To call it a marital drama misses how quickly it becomes a more complicated legal narrative, which also omits certain twists and turns that deepen it. And to call it a social critique of Iran is accurate but limiting, leaving out the universal truths of humanity it explores. No one in this film is fully pitiable, but neither are they loathsome. These characters are the most absorbing and compelling of the year, all thanks to Farhadi's script.

Worst Screenplay
Green Lantern

My head says Red State, with its belligerent but directionless tweet-ready screeds, but my heart calls out for Green Lantern, which proves that comic-book writing is clearly much harder than some snobs think. Four (four!) writers worked on this abhorrent mess and demonstrated an incompetence with the material that borders on willful disrespect. Unable to conceive of the dramatic possibilities of a man so fearless he is stubborn, they rewrite him as a smarmy coward who fall into heroism solely through plot holes. How can Hal Jordan quit the Lantern Corps before he's even finished training but keep the ring? Why does an eons-old rule about the ring seeking out the fearless suddenly change to the ring simply believing in someone to become fearless after a while, like some supportive chum? And why does the script have Hal beg the Guardians to let him defend his planet when no one has even remotely objected to this? Not a damn thing in this horrid screenplay makes sense, even with its own internal logic.

Best Editing
Film Socialisme

It actually wasn't easy to vote for Godard given the competition. Terrence Malick's battery of editors made outright tone poetry of the director's usual over-coverage, while Carlos Madaleno and Valeria Sarmiento made Raul Rúiz's 266-minute epic as fleet as a blockbuster. But no other film was as intellectually provocative and dense as Film Socialisme, and the editing serves as the foundation for its various dialectics and visual puns. Godard does not simply treat editing as a means of progressing or even just juxtaposing, and he generated a puzzle to be mulled over for years with his work here.

Runners-up
The Tree of Life
Mysteries of Lisbon

Worst Editing
Red State

Not only is the linking of the shots a prime example of the worst kind of "realism" action, the overall pace is so erratic that the film never establishes itself before its sudden upending. The film has no remote sense of pace, slamming on the brakes instantly for a monologue that was, amazingly, even longer in earlier cuts and should have been trimmed more. Smith's film suffers enough from its muddled messaging, but the editing only makes everything worse.

Best Score
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Not as instantly classic as Reznor and Ross' Social Network soundtrack, this bleak soundscape is nevertheless head and shoulders above a generally weak year for scores (I was surprised that none of Alexandre Desplat's scores won me over as they usually do). Where both Williams' and Bource's compositions were giddy, ebullient throwbacks, this all-too-modern digital howl was as cold and static as ice. This has the effect of generating not even dread but a simple numbness that affects the extremities like a bitter winter day. Impressively, the pair totally avoid rehashing their previous work, and indeed this score is less thriller-like, despite the film's subject matter, than The Social Network's. God only knows how long they can keep this up, but for the moment, no one can touch Reznor and Ross.

Runners-up
John Williams, The Adventures of Tintin
Ludovic Bource, The Artist
Cliff Martinez, Drive

Most undervalued player
Oscar Isaac, Sucker Punch and Drive

As the villain in Zack Snyder's unbearable sub-feminist romp, Isaac actually did a great job of capturing oily misogyny and power-hungry masculinity as Blue, creating a more concrete and tactile sense of danger and menace than Snyder's huge but weightless CGI sequences. In Drive, he was even better. The second his character comes on-screen, freshly released from prison, a dread rises in the throat that he will be the bog-standard bad father and obstacle in the budding romance between Driver and Irene. But Isaac sidesteps that pitfall by making Standard into a decent, loving man who got mixed up in the wrong crowd and is now desperate to protect his family. In what may be that film's most touching scene, he describes meeting Irene and falling in love, speaking with wistfulness, a twinge of humor, and a lot of regret that creates a character's whole life in just a few minutes.

Best Heroes
1. Ameena Matthews, The Interrupters

In a film about real-life heroism, none emerge more iconic than Ameena Matthews. The daughter of a notorious gang leader and an ex-con like all the rest of the interrupters, Matthews is not some ivory tower do-gooder merely looking to help out. She has been the people she castigates and lectures, and she can speak to them with a familiarity that is unforced because it is genuine. As witty and maternal as she is forceful and passionate, Matthews is one of the most compelling figures to appear before Steve James' camera, and the director does not want for dramatically captivating subjects.

2. Moses, Attack the Block

Introduced as a common ghetto thug robbing equally poor people, Moses seems an unlikely choice to be one of the most inspiring action heroes of the year. But when aliens threaten to tear apart his already run-down hood, the young man fights back hard for his community, clearing getting out aggression on all the other things that kept him and others down for so long. John Boyega's hard face is still lined with just enough baby fat to make him convincingly naïve, but then, no one expected the first Moses to deliver anyone from harm, either.

3. Peggy Carter, Captain America: The First Avenger

With Natalie Portman's astrophysicist in Thor turning into a drooling, jelly-legged schoolgirl at the sight of Chris Hemsworth's abs, I had no hope for any engaging blockbuster heroine this year. Then along came Peggy Carter to right so many of Marvel Studios' wrongs. Attracted to Steve Rogers' sweetness as much as his super-soldier bod, Carter can nevertheless get along perfectly well without him. Strong, hard-willed, and human, she is not only one of the most complex female characters to appear in a superhero film but one of the most complex characters, period. There was much to love about Captain America, really the only summer blockbuster that worked, but nothing in it was half so good as Peggy.

4. George Smiley, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

George Smiley handles his enemies with elegantly inelegant practicality, gauging their weaknesses and finding the path of greatest ease and efficiency to taking care of the problem. Oldman is so still he could double for the coat rack, nor does he raise his voice in the explosive outbursts we've come to expect from the actor. Looking like an accountant more than a tuxedo-wearing, lady-bedding Bond figure, Smiley is carefully modeled to be unremarkable, but it seems as if even those close to him have been sucked in by the persona, and the loneliness he feels as a cuckolded and forcibly retired old horse gives his investigation of British intelligence an air of wounded betrayal. But even with his preoccupations, he still proves deftly able to corral a group to hunt down the traitor among them, and if there is no joy in Alfredson's film, there is a sad sort of satisfaction in seeing Smiley prevail.

5. Marcel Marx, Le Havre

It takes a talent of Aki Kaurismäki's level to make something original and genuinely poignant out of a selfish white man who learns responsibility through helping a disenfranchised black child. But damned if Marcel Marx isn't one of the freshest characters in some time, so removed from the insistent messaging of these sorts of movies by Kaurismäki's deadpan that the viewer has a rare chance to simply see a human being help another one. Oh, the political commentary is overt, but the handling of it is graceful and naturalistic, more so even than the similarly complex reading of like material with Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor. André Wilms enduring puckishness ensures that Marcel remains funny and peevish, but his ability to ingratiate himself upon others only makes his consideration

Best Villains
1. Loki, Thor

Cunning, deadly, and the only truly Shakespearean element of Kenneth Branagh's Thor, Loki single-handedly elevated that film from an elaborate commercial for Bod Body Spray into something occasionally compelling. Tom Hiddleston makes an instant, breakout impression as the god of tricks, his heartbreaking feelings of neglect and not belonging keenly felt on Hiddleston's boyish but wracked face. Less brutish than the other Marvel villains thus far assembled in their run-ups, Loki works instead through intellect and sedition. It's no wonder Joss Whedon would want him to square against the Avengers instead of some giant, lunkheaded killing machine.

2. Robert Ledgard, The Skin I Live In

In his own way, Ledgard messes with an audience's sympathy regarding rape and loss more than Lisbeth Salander. Almodóvar's melodramatic horror constantly redraws the lines with revealing flashbacks, shifting attitudes for the character from revulsion to empathy. Eventually, however, the full scope of his insanity is revealed, turning an unbalanced man into a mad scientist who brings about one of the most transgressive films about gender politics ever made.

3. Bernie Rose, Drive

With the exception of the protagonist, every character in Drive carries huge gulfs of baggage and half-spoken backstory that makes them frighteningly tactile. Well, none is more tangible (or frightening) than Bernie Rose, played by Albert Brooks in a performance that is at once easy playing against type and something far more sinister. Brooks, as I said in a chat under my original review, plays a shlock movie producer-cum-gangster like a Jewish mother, always vaguely exasperated by "having" to kill someone and complaining about the mess. Smart enough to avoid trouble, he's also the last person with whom you want to get in too deep.

4. Lord Shen, Kung Fu Panda 2

Voiced with insane hubris and frenzy by Gary Oldman, Lord Shen is also so fluidly animated as to be scary in his grace. Hollowed out by soulless ambition, Shen is almost as tragic as Po, even as the same events that make the heroic panda's life sad were initiated by the evil peacock. Occasionally reflective, mostly power-hungry and occasionally even a bit funny, Shen was a huge step up from the previous Kung Fu Panda's villain, so good the writers could hang a much deeper, yet more action-packed, story on his cannon-obsessed feathers.

5. Chad, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

A riotous inversion of the usual hillbilly horror movies, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil cast not a pair of cabin-dwelling good ol' boys as terrorizers of pretty young things but the kind souls who find themselves misunderstood by prejudiced and judgmental kids. Leading them is Chad, a twisted sadist with an axe to grind against rednecks who will sacrifice all of his friends to kill these two hapless fellas. It's a superb twist, and one that only gets crazier as more of Chad's background is revealed.

Best Catchphrase
"Rhinoceros!" Salvador Dalí, Midnight in Paris

Best Use of 3D That Finally Made the Technology Palatable Just When It Was Thankfully Dying
Hugo

Most Welcome Surprise
Warrior

Besides Attack the Block, of which I heard only vague hype before getting passes to a free screening, the film that blew me away with the least amount of pre-viewing interest was Warrior. Sports movies aren't my bag, a sports movie about the new fad of mixed martial arts fighting even less. But Warrior will soon go down as one of the best the genre has to offer, a Greek tragedy on steroids that complicates the audience's sympathies and stages its fight scenes with brutal precision that feels triumphant and abhorrent in equal measure. Buoyed by three excellent performances, Warrior is also the most unexpected actor's showcase of the year.

Biggest Disappointment
Shame

A great many of the year's big awards-baiting films failed to win me over, but none tackled more complex themes than Steve McQueen's Shame. The film addressed psychic wounds, confused desires, and the social stigma of a natural function that turns something beautiful and pleasurable into a sinful act (even when viewed secularly). But the disservice the film does to this material makes it more disappointing than the more ho-hum letdowns of, say, The Artist or Martha Marcy May Marlene. But not even Fassbender's mesmerizing, frightening performance by a man consumed by his demons can add much texture to McQueen's overly fussy direction, which recalls not so much the modern alienation of his hero Antonioni so much as the fatuous, emptily erotic fashion shoots of that director's protagonist in Blow-Up.

Best Scene
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: opening credits

David Fincher's opening credits are so varied and well-crafted that Matthew Zoller Seitz did a fantastic series of video essays on them last year. I hope he sets aside the time to do one for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo when it comes to home video, as it may be Fincher's best. Like the sequences for Se7en (which generated a sickly, unstable atmosphere of recorded murders) and The Social Network (which indirectly toured the landmarks of America's creation myth in Boston), the hyperedited animation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo's opening sets the tone, plot, and themes for the rest of the film. USB cables entwine characters into an embrace that asphyxiates them with the forced proximity, while penetrative and groping actions speak to the misogynistic elements to arise. Some might fairly criticize Fincher's film for being overlong, but he proves here that he has the story down in under three minutes.

Runners-up
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: dealing with the mole
Drive: elevator beating
Adventures of Tintin: Bagghar chase
Take Shelter: shelter climax

Worst Scene
That agonizing, comically self-absorbed close-up during the world's slowest, mostly unintentionally hilarious rendition of "New York, New York" in Shame.

Best Part of a Bad Film
The bromance in Paul

It's weird to celebrate the defining aspect of a film without liking the movie as a whole. But if Paul never congealed into a working, fully engaging picture, the hetero-life mate chemistry between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is so strong that I couldn't be mad at the film for fizzling. And even though Seth Rogen occasionally made me laugh as the titular alien, I often found myself wishing I could just keep watching these geeky oafs bumbling around America without the awkward extraterrestrial comic-thriller tacked on.

Worst Part of a Good Film
The opening narration of The Descendants

The Peaks and Troughs Award for Same-Year Quality Gaps
Gary Oldman, Red Riding Hood and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Breakout Stars
Jessica Chastain: The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, The Help, every third film released in 2011
Michael Fassbender: Shame, A Dangerous Method, Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class
Tom Hiddleston: Thor, Midnight in Paris, War Horse

Most Inspiring Critical Impact
#teammargaret

Kenneth Lonergan's long-delayed and -litigated follow-up to 2000's You Can Count on Me came out for barely a few weeks in Atlanta, at which time I was stuck in Auburn and unable to see it. My regret was only compounded by its near-total disappearance from discussion until a small band of film writers started trumpeting its merits and pushing for the film to have a more reasonable distribution to other critics. Though Fox Searchlight seems almost opposed to supporting its own film in any way (those lawsuits must be acrimonious indeed), the efforts of these impassioned people on Twitter got the film screenings it otherwise never would have seen. Almost certainly the most visible example of the lingering power of film criticism to effect some kind of influence, it is also a great demonstration of the supposedly cynical and bilious profession's capacity for celebration and championing of unsung art.

Best Poster

The Ides of March

Runners-up
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

13 Assassins

Tyrannosaur

Midnight in Paris

Best Film That Would Have Been on My Best-Of List Had I Not Seen It Last Year
Certified Copy

Abbas Kiarostami's cryptic, witty comedy-drama was far and away my favorite film of 2010, and seeing it on a big screen this year only deepened its many layers. Even in this much better year for film, it would have appeared at number 2, had I waited to count it among U.S. release dates. One of the best works by perhaps the world's greatest living filmmaker, Certified Copy is as dense as his self-reflexive '90s work even as it is one of the director's most accessible films, and I hope that rumor of Criterion's unwillingness to release it on home video is just that.

Best previously released film I saw for the first time in 2011
Love Exposure

Sion Sono's sui generis collision of extremities and pop culture is at turns gonzo, repellent, high comic and remarkably affecting. The fleetest film to stretch well beyond the three-hour mark since Seven Samurai, Love Exposure uses its wild setpieces, beyond-Buñuel religious satire, gore and fixation on erections to capture something approaching the teenage experience of modern, desensitized youth and the deep yearning beneath the façade. It's offensive and bewildering, but also brilliant and beautiful. One of the great works of the previous decade.

Most Anticipated Films of 2012
This is Not a Film; Kill List; The Raid; Django Unchained; The Turin Horse; Moonrise Kingdom; The Avengers; The Master; The End; The Deep Blue Sea

The Best Films of 2011

2011-12-30T15:39:00.003-06:00

[Note: Films chosen by non-festival U.S. release date]

With best-of lists having trickled in since the start of the month, I've seen more than one critic alleging this year to be a particularly weak one for film. A great deal of this list contains films I watched after reading such statements, and I still couldn't believe the lunacy of those proclamations. I have known since September that I wouldn't be able to limit my selections to a mere 10 or even 15 picks, and the intervening months have given me such an embarrassment of riches that to even make a selection of 25 films feel constricting. Indeed, there are more than 10 other features that I shuffled around for days, more than willing to give them a spot on this list but unable to remove others. Admittedly, much of the Oscar bait fell flat, or succeeded in much smaller, human ways than the insipid, spoon-fed Academy crowd likes to honor. And yet, 2011 also featured more grand artistic statements than any year in recent history, sporting two films that potentially redefine the possibilities of the artform itself (and maybe even three, if, unlike me, you managed to see This Is Not a Film). And heck, one of the best of the year's films, Certified Copy, isn't even on my list, because I saw it last year and put it on that year-end round-up.

More than that, this year has been fun too. Oh, not with the summer blockbusters, which, with the exception of the surprisingly fine Captain America, were lifeless and dull. But this has been a great year to simply see great directors play in the sandbox, whether it was Gore Verbinski and Steven Spielberg playing around with animation to beautiful effect or David Fincher making something of a career summary out of an unnecessary remake or Martin Scorsese making a family film that reveled in the timeless ability of cinema to make us all kids. In fact, Scorsese actually made the best Spielberg film in a year where that director made two movies of his own! And no one made a movie half as playful as Raúl Ruiz, whose final release (but not final completed work, the prolific bugger) before his death sent him out in glorious style. Any way you slice it, 2011 ruled, and I can only feel pity for anyone who can't find at least a few items to love among these 25 excellent works of film.

25. Warrior (dir. Gavin O’Connor)

This unexpected triumph won me over instantly, and it’s only grown in my estimation since. Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton are heartbreaking as damaged, viciously estranged brothers each fighting in an MMA tournament for a cash prize that they each want for equally sympathetic reasons. This forces the viewer to actually appraise these characters, studying their flaws and their redeeming facets, rather than focusing simply on who wins. But more wrenching than either brother is the father who drove them to this state and now wants forgiveness more than both of them. Nick Nolte gives one of his best performances as a man trying to go straight and baffled to learn that, sometimes, that’s just not good enough. Nolte’s gravelly voice and lumbering frame has always made him imposing, and indeed he is still intimidating even when set against his muscle-hardened sons, but here he is devastating, a broken man who has placed himself beyond reconciliation. At times, Warrior generates such soul-emptying sorrow that one understands why these men would need to beat someone else to a pulp just to feel anything at all.

24. Rango (dir. Gore Verbinski)

Entire sequences of this film—see: the “Ride of the Valkyries” scene—work only as deflated pastiche, but Gore Verbinski’s Rango is a rousing liberation for a talented director who let things get out of hand on the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels but finds his groove again with even less attention to physics. Gorgeously animated with some surrealist touches scattered among the Western homages, Rango is also the best showcase Johnny Depp has had in a while, free to ham it up while finding more nuanced expression through a CGI chameleon’s face than, lately, his own. It might go over kids’ heads, what with its so-detailed-as-to-be-frightening character design and a plot ripped, of all things, from Chinatown, but Rango is so full of invention that it is better marketed to those who enjoyed the ambition of the Pirates films but wanted a more coherent story to go with them.

23. Attack the Block (dir. Joe Cornish)

Cornish’s feature debut isn’t quite so clever as it thinks it is, but its premise was one of the higher concepts of the year: aliens only ever seem to crash in Manhattan or, as Bill Hicks used to say, out in the middle of nowhere, but what if they landed in the ghetto? Well-shot and paced to be perhaps the most jot-inducing film since Sam Raimi went hog-wild with Drag Me to Hell, Attack the Block rarely moves through a scene without a jump scare, a laugh, or both. Even in the shots where everything grinds to a halt to deliver The Message are so corny as to seem deliberately hokey, though that might be the affection talking. Cornish’s film features fantastic performances from a cast of mostly unknown kids, and there are more stand-up-and-cheer moments in any one act than there are in any of the blockbusters that received a proper release this year.

22. Young Adult (dir. Jason Reitman)

Being anti-narrative doesn’t inherently make one clever, but the sheer savagery of Diablo Cody’s and Jason Reitman’s second collaboration is balanced out by its unmistakable recognition of humanity’s all-too-real inhumanity. More sociopathic and emotionally maladjusted than Lisbeth Salander, Charlize Theron’s Mavis unsuccessfully remakes the present into the past and will not see reason when her flimsy world collapses. Neither will Patton Oswalt’s daringly unsympathetic Matt, who further complicates the already confrontational decision to make a woman a rom-com anti-heroine and offers an equally unlikable (kind of) hate crime victim. Cody takes post-Office discomfort to its zenith, which you could be forgiven for mistaking for its nadir. Reitman wisely stays out of her way, perhaps out of fear. Who can blame him?

21. Drive (dir. Nicholas Winding Refn)

An unorthodox throwback to early Michael Mann with the flecks of Mann’s later maturation sprinkled through, Refn’s Drive cites countless other films yet is never truly defined by its references. Boiling down the existentialist driver so much that even the existentialism evaporates, the film leaves a series of perfectly shot vignettes of emotional isolation and indentured servitude, where every character must constantly atone for someone else’s actions, or at least settle them. Calculated to the nth degree and occasionally held for so many beats that I wondered if the hard drive might have frozen, Drive nevertheless set me on edge more than nearly any modern thriller. Heck, I might have been even more stressed out with subsequent viewings. Drive makes for the perfect continuation of Valhalla Rising’s unsettling questions of man’s preternatural need for violence even as, by way of embracing the beauty of L.A. with the bad, moves beyond such fixations.

20. The Arbor (dir. Clio Barnard)

An unorthodox documentary that cuts the waffle of talking heads and reenactments by combining the two, The Arbor instantly transcends its gimmick to present a gorgeously shot rumination on a troubled artist’s life and the ripples of abuse and hardship emanating from it. Despite its florid, perfect cinematography (it could easily be mistaken for an Angela Arnold film), The Arbor makes for a more harrowing kitchen-sink drama than Paddy Considine’s more explicitly graphic Tyrannosaur. The most pessimistic, yet honest and necessary, documentary about art not always being enough to save the gifted but tormented since Crumb analyzed its subjects insane brothers.

19. A Dangerous Method (dir. David Cronenberg)

Cronenberg at last reverse engineers his gory body horror back to its purely psychoanalytic roots, making a film about Freud and Jung themselves as they meet and eventually fall out over the theories rising from a special case. A surprisingly talky picture for a Cronenberg film, A Dangerous Method nevertheless uses its classical form to probe around the characters and their inner demons, be it the wracking sexual desires of Sabina, the Jewish insecurity of Freud or the Oedipal aspirations of Jung to unseat the "father." Bright light fills the screen, reminding us that the world that looks so sunny and normal is populated with people struggling with their subconscious urges at all times. That's as true, if not more so, of the doctors engaging in this early form of mental treatment as their patients. As Jung said, in the film and in real life, only the wounded physician heals.

18. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (dir. David Fincher)

To some extent, all of David Fincher’s films are about alienation and isolation, going back to Ripley being left friendless in a religiously zealous, all-male prison colony in Alien 3 (another film about a strong but vulnerable woman forced to contend with misogyny and sexual abuse). The Girl With the Dragon is perhaps his most alienated yet, set on a frozen, secluded island and steeped in Mikael Blomkvist’s obsolescence (the film employs a more current distrust of all journalists than could be seen in the book) and Lisbeth Salander’s social incompetence. This is the second film in a row Fincher has toyed with the effects of a digital world, wherein an unprecedented level of connection only serves to separate us more than ever. And speaking of The Social Network, by the end of his detached layering of information, Fincher reveals Harriet Vanger herself to be just another legend, real but abstracted into an apocryphal cultural memory used to scare local children into behaving, not all that unlike the creation myths at work in "the Facebook movie." Fincher cannot overcome certain fundamental flaws, but the fact that he turns an author's ludicrous wish-fulfillment fantasy into something of a creative summary of his own work makes The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a marvel even beyond the level of its unexpected playfulness.

17. Poetry (dir. Lee Chang-dong)

Even if one didn’t know Lee Chang-dong was an author, the word “novelistic” would spring to mind for his elegant, wrenching movies. Poetry embodies its titular subject with a visual grace of composition that foregrounds the complex issues its protagonist must overcome while always rooting these stomach-turning situations in a world of calming beauty. Its finale, like poetry itself, alters reality by honoring it, by absorbing it until one passes through to the other side of limitless possibility where agony and ecstasy co-mingle. Even at its most troubling, Poetry is still affirming, powered by a low-key but profound performance by its lead and a mature evaluation of art as a means of escaping reality without simply ignoring it.

16. Take Shelter (dir. Jeff Nichols)

A character drama wrapped in psychological horror, Take Shelter is by turns frightening and devastating, driven by Michael Shannon’s agonized performance as a man aware of his madness but unable to control its effects on him. Nichols’ stark direction leaves gulfs of space around Shannon but makes everything feel small, as if all that area around the actor were just a solipsistic projection. I’m still thinking about the enigmatic coda, but it’s the climax, inside Curtis’ fortified shelter with his family, that stands as the most disturbing and wrenching scene of the year, an extended play of suspense, despair and crippling fear so wracking and claustrophobic that it cannot be walked off when exiting the theater.

15. The Descendants (dir. Alexander Payne)

If you can get past that tedious opening narration, which barely lasts a few minutes but feels like an hour’s worth of exposition, The Descendants undergoes a fast chrysalis into a beautiful, internal film that makes for one of America’s most subtly written and acted films about family, of dealing with the dead and dying as well as the living. Even when the characters dip back into expositional speech, they leave details unsaid that speak volumes, with George Clooney giving a beautifully old-school performance that restricts his pain to a few open expressions but leaves that overwhelming pain in his eyes for the audience to see on their own. Blessed with a dynamic supporting cast, Payne’s film occasionally falters but always regains its footing with the addition of a new voice or the closure of an old one.

14. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (dir. Tomas Alfredson)

Alfredson paints a huge canvas of proscenium-lined sets and big stakes, but nothing summarizes the film’s true tone like seeing the confining, secretive pods that house each spy within the gargantuan, spacious warehouses. These people work in a vast world but compartmentalize their tasks and, ultimately, themselves. Alfredson blends sex and politics, using strained, secretive relationships to capture the intense loneliness of this isolated life. Cold and reserved with a dense plot, Alfredson’s film nevertheless emerges the unlikeliest tearjerker of the year, its muted pains of personal and national betrayal mixed until an attack on the Crown becomes indistinguishable from a lover's unfaithfulness.

13. The Adventures of Tintin (dir. Steven Spielberg)

According to Hitchcock, Spielberg was the first director not to see the proscenium arch. Yet it takes a film like Tintin to show even the limitations of the filmmaker’s previous works. Physically impossible (and yet, logically sound, in an unexpected way), Tintin, like Rango and Fantastic Mr. Fox, demonstrates what happens with gifted live-action filmmakers turn to a format that offers them infinite possibilities. Action sequences unfold in epic scale and length, with the camera always moving in and out of various focal points as the frame collapses and reforms without cuts. The witty script by British heavyweights Wright, Moffat and Cornish is cheeky fun, but it takes a backseat to watching a great filmmaker simply having the time of his life. The exuberance is so infectious that all is forgiven for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

12. Another Year (dir. Mike Leigh)

Mike Leigh’s latest is one of his best, a character drama that strikes a human balance between his more miserable depictions of British life and the desperate joy of Happy-Go-Lucky. The married couple at the center of everything are so in love that their chemistry feels developed over decades, their unflappable kindness persevering even at the most stressful times. Then there’s Leslie Manville’s whirlwind performance as Mary, the alcoholic burnout who’s subconsciously given up on happiness and seeks to tear everyone else down to her level. It’s a terrifying, acutely real performance (we all know someone like Mary, and if you don’t, it’s because you’re that person) that impresses as much as the shifting photography that brings wildly different moods with each change of season.

11. Le Havre (dir. Aki Kaurismäki)

Kaurismäki’s tale of an old man helping an African immigrant on his way to London is hardly a stylistic change for the director, who continues to employ dry, even dehydrating wit and muted but precise visual schemes to match. But its tone is certainly far more optimistic than the usual fare, with Kaurismäki clearly looking at his scripted interactions not as his usual surreal scenario but as a model for proper, ethical human behavior in a global community. It’s still funny as hell and, as ever, there’s time for some rock ‘n roll, but Le Havre is an unexpectedly graceful film from one of the great comic writer-directors of our time.

10. The Strange Case of Angelica (dir. Manoel de Oliveira)

Protuguese maestro de Oliveira has lived so long that his own life doubles as an oral history of political and artistic evolution of the 20th century, and The Strange Case of Angelica makes for a summary for the now 103-year-old. Returning to his home region, the director fears for the passing of the ways of life he remembers and the rising of new issues, be they global warming or mere industrialization. His hope for escape comes in the form of a young, dead aristocrat, who visits the young but old-fashioned protagonist in reveries that seem to have come from silent film. Every shot is its own tableau vivant, enshrining the people of the film with an immortality the director thinks will outlive us all.

9. Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese)

Derided by some as nothing more than a $150-million advertisement for Scorsese’s various film preservation projects, Hugo instead presents a love of art (literature is mentioned as often as movies) as a redeeming force for broken, lonely people. Tying 3D to the cinema’s beginnings as a kitschy curiosity limited only by its makers’ imaginations, Hugo finds a balance between old and new that makes both more exciting, tangible and affecting. The unfortunate use of blue/teal color schemes aside, the cinematography is crisp and meticulously calculated to explore both the advantages and drawbacks of 3D, and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing gets to be more playful than usual, her unfailing abilities used here to create wonder and giddiness rather than tension. This project is so unlike Scorsese’s usual stuff, yet few of his films more wholly capture who he is as a filmmaker and a person.

8. A Separation (dir. Asghar Farhadi)

The best-written film of the year by a mile, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation explores the stubbornness, the deflected responsibilities, and the weighty lies people tell to maintain a sense of comfort and order that speak to universal human behavior. No one is evil in this film, but everyone is guilty, and they all know it too. That’s why no one will apologize for anything; it would be a sign of weakness for the rest, all ready to pounce on the first to turn his or her back on the pride. Even the film’s denying last shot constitutes an act of selfishness on behalf of the one character who previously had shown none. If this sounds like a cynical film, it isn’t, but its view of the lies we tell ourselves and others to feel superior is nevertheless unsparing.

7. The Skin I Live In (dir. Pedro Almodóvar)

Almodóvar has played with Hitchcockian ideas and shots before, but The Skin I Live In strikes me as perhaps the boldest step forward with gender identity and brutalized norms in film since Vertigo. Both films are, in essence, about a madman’s attempt to remake the living into a facsimile of a dead lover, but Almodóvar’s twist takes the gender commentary even further, and it proves one of the most shocking touches in a career largely defined by unabashed effrontery. It’s also a perfectly constructed film, so fluid it never becomes clear you’re watching a horror-thriller until some new revelation creates a sinking feeling in the stomach.

6. Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier)

Lord knows how, but Lars von Trier made his most honest movie out of his most self-aggrandizing. Split into two distinct halves, one a Dogme-esque beourgeois satire, the other an epic acceptance of the apocalypse in response to such stultifying life, Melancholia holds together by the power of Kirsten Dunst’s performance. The endothermic core to every tortured woman in von Trier’s filmography, Dunst’s Justine is not the put-upon sufferer but the void of suffering itself, so vast and dense that she can draw a hidden planet to Earth with her own gravitational pull. Both she and von Trier present one of the most accurate, recognizable portraits of introverted depression put on screen, even as they work on a massive canvas.

5. Meek’s Cutoff (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

The un-ending will infuriate many, but I continue to hold Meek’s Cutoff as the finest anti-Western since Dead Man, and the purgatorial wandering to that film’s pure hell. The wandering souls move across parched Northern plains and rocks in an increasingly desperate search for food and water, and the native they capture may well be leading them to their doom as vengeance. Reichardt’s intimate neorealist/quasi-mumblecore trappings proved the perfect background for an unromantic period piece, the weathered cinematography and agonizingly long takes having the look of being coated in dust. A taxing film, but also one from which I could never avert my eyes.

4. Mysteries of Lisbon (dir. Raúl Ruiz)

Ruiz’s penultimate film is a triumph of directing qua direction, with the camera utterly uninhibited as it elegantly, but puckishly, passes through various tales that subvert its narrative bildungsroman further and further with each new tangent. At four-and-a-half hours, it feels a third the length, with Ruiz’s chiaroscuro tableaux and his ever-wry camera placement such a visual feast that the hours whizz by. But even for all the self-aware artiness of it all, Mysteries of Lisbon gently, empathetically tackles weighty themes of inherited sin, doomed romance, a lack of filial and national identity, and more. The prolific Ruiz managed to complete one film after this and start on a second, but even to a neophyte, Mysteries feels like a grand, gorgeous summary.

3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has topped himself so many times now that I cannot even bring myself to call this film his masterpiece in spite of its supreme aesthetic grace and its rich thematic commentary. A Buddhist rite of passage for film stock to Inglourious Basterds’ Viking funeral, Uncle Boonmee uses its protagonist’s lives as an excuse to pay tribute to Thai film history, as well as to look ahead to the unknown, scary but potentially rewarding digital frontier. The film also expands the boundaries Joe previously set for himself in nearly every respect, from thematic ambition to structural experimentation. Joe looks upon the death of film, as of Boonmee, with somber regret, but in the film’s enigmatic but mystifying coda, he looks forward to the next stage, tacitly accepting digital as but the next incarnation of cinema.

2. Film Socialisme (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

Jean-Luc Godard’s latest is surely one of the most divisive releases of the last few years, its fragmentary “narrative” and even aesthetic sure to piss off more people than it attracts. But even as someone who still has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to Godard, I was fascinated by the film, even when I was frustrated with it. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her showed Godard trying to find a socialist aesthetic, one that did not privilege any one narrative or shot pattern, and Film Socialisme seems its endpoint, where the film itself is given to everyone. An unexpected companion piece to David Fincher’s mainstream remake of a bestseller, the film digs into Godard’s long-running desire to make a path for cinema to unite the world by despairing that the increased ubiquity of methods of recording and documentation have only further distanced people. But that only makes Godard try harder to find a new kind of film, and his experimentation here is as poetically resonant as it is challenging. Indeed, for all the intellectualism of the obscure references (what narrative there is depends on an apocryphal myth told to the director by Jacques Tati) and challenging construction, the film is deeply, almost painfully beautiful at times, with the civil war between a shot’s image and sound as vicious, radical, forging, and hopelessly sad as the conflicts Godard routinely references. At 80 years old, Godard can still push the boundaries of possibility, not just of his own craft but cinema as a whole.

1. The Tree of Life (dir. Terrence Malick)

Malick’s magnum opus collects the pieces of a sparse but rich 40-year career into a summarizing collage of autobiography and cosmology. Yet the grandeur of its images and the minutely remembered suburban, postwar Texas only serve to make the director’s vision more tactile and intimate, and I can think of no film ever to make me feel as if I were watching my own memories when nothing in it comes close to my time period. Malick’s Joycean construction eschews clarity of speech, action and thought, yet few films are as lucid and instantly understandable, even if the meaning drawn from its direct appeal is different for each viewer. No film has ever affected me as strongly, or in so deeply personal a way.

Other films I loved (no order): The Interrupters (Steve James), Somewhere (Sofia Coppola), Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson), The Woman (Lucky McKee), 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike), The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (David Yates), Hanna (Joe Wright), Beginners (Mike Mills), Weekend (Andrew Haigh), Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Mundean), Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)

Update: To see a ranked list of all the films I saw this year, check out this post I made at MUBI.

War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

2011-12-29T20:33:00.000-06:00

Like his other release this year, The Adventures of Tintin, Steven Spielberg's War Horse indulges in the best and worst of a particular facet of the director's talent. Tintin lacks a proper dramatic arc and works largely without any stakes, yet it showcases Spielberg's talent for choreographing dynamic, vast setpieces of eye-popping visual marvels. War Horse, the more low-key, Oscar-friendly picture, contains moments of such beauty as to border on the poetic, matching the most abstract and haunting shots of the director's canon. But it is also such a hand-holding, tedious affair as to display the most immature, irritating traits of Spielberg's storytelling. In other terms, if Tintin displays Spielberg at his most childlike, War Horse shows him at his most childish.

War Horse barely even gets started before it's in your face with forced wonder, opening on a young English farm boy, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), watching the birth of a foal with fascination. But the film moves through a quick series of shots that continue to convey Albert's instant love of this creature, even as the edits clearly hop over a significant portion of time. Within seconds of screen time, the foal grows into a yearling, but Albert has that same dopey look on his face. Does that mean he walked around like the village idiot for weeks, even months, gawping at a damn horse? And when Albert's lovable alcoholic father (Peter Mullan) buys the horse at an auction just to get one over his landlord, the lad is so overjoyed that the very real possibility his dad just made them homeless matters nothing next to owning "Joey," All the while, John Williams score insists you take a handkerchief, regardless of whether your eyes are wet. This is not the organic Spielberg who could masterfully manipulate an audience to genuine reaction; this is a battering ram methodically slamming against the portcullis until it can break through and shove the intended emotional response down everyone's throat.

A few treacly, minor triumphs categorize this first segment, as Albert trains Joey to plow in order to satisfy that landlord, played by David Thewlis in a one-note sneer he occasionally tries and fails to deepen. But even the small victory of plowing a rocky field Bought by a sweet, naïve captain (Tom Hiddleston) as his personal war steed, Joey gets steered into the battlefront, where the cruelty of WWI will wrench him constantly into new ownership and halt the film once more to let some other character give off a whiff of emotional heft before moving off again.

Spielberg excels at investing audience sympathy in non-human subjects. E.T. is equally as worthy of the audience's love and worry as Elliot, while David the robot is more recognizably human than any of A.I.'s actual homo sapiens. But as one can see by the initial focus on Albert over "Joey," the horse in War Horse is not really the star, merely the vehicle for dragging along the plot like that plow he must tug while still on the farm. If Spielberg innovates anything here, it is to at last make a non-human character as much of a blank canvas for projection as poorly written human ciphers. David and E.T. come with their own personalities, but Joey is just there, smoothing the narrative transitions between perspectives as the POV is handed off with the horse's reins. When Joey at all features front and center, it is either to get a laugh for his cheek or a tear for his hardship. Yet the only true subjugation of this poor creature is by the director, who puts Joey in precarious situations simply for the empty rush of concern the audience might feel for him.

Shot with a refreshing amount of color, War Horse moves so far away from the "realism" of so many Spielberg-Kaminski pairings that the director and cinematographer move into near-Technicolor levels of old Hollywood filmmaking. When the horse finally goes to war an hour into the film, Spielberg treats us to images that survey war with formal remove instead of handheld verisimilitude, and his shots are stunning. The sudden mounting of horses hidden in a wheat field, sending grains flying into the air like a blizzard as a cavalry materializes, is gorgeous, thrilling, but also tense. Likewise, Spielberg's method of eliding over the deaths in the resultant charge into machine guns, by showing now-riderless horses bounding past the gun placements, is oddly serene despite the horror of what it depicts. Furthermore, the shots of trench warfare manage to top even Stanley Kubrick's ability to evoke sheer, senseless carnage in Paths of Glory. The trenches are claustrophobic death pits clouded over by gunsmoke and rendered chaotic by constant bombardment, but no man's land makes these sweltering, overcrowded holes look like Xanadu. Crisscrossing webs of barbed wire become clotheslines for fallen soldiers, festering puddles of stagnant rainwater splashing god knows what bacteria on the few who wade through them without dying. War in War Horse despite its lack of desaturated film stock, the omission of blood, and the perfection of its craftsmanship, occasionally looks more hellish and insensible than battle in Saving Private Ryan.

But as much as the film might show off the director's clear mastery of classical filmmaking, it also reveals the oversimplifying limitations of that method of storytelling. Richard Curtis, who co-wrote the magnificent Blackadder Goes Forth (still my favorite work of fiction, humorous or otherwise, on WWI), helps pen a depressingly thin portrait of WWI-era Europe. The opening segment is a cut-out of prewar English life: Mullan looks more like an old comic-strip drunk than Captain Haddock himself, while Emily Watson makes Important Statements about everything from the folly of buying the horse to the heroism her husband hides from the world. (At all other times, she stands in front of the homestead as if she forgot what continent and time period she's in and is expecting Sherman to burn the farm to the ground any second.) Class, a key factor in the outbreak and strategies of the war, is here reduced to a few broad sketches, which might have been permissible if the story were really Joey's. But our beloved war horse is on the other side of the battlefield when the fleeting grasp at class commentary in the British trenches is made, making the half-hearted attempt at depth all the more meaningless.

The fatuous, hollow manipulation of so much of the film is all the more frustrating for the moments where everything comes together and Spielberg shows his talent for hooking an audience. After denying the Germans humanity in Saving Private Ryan, here they get to be as real as the Englishmen, which is not saying much, but still. A sequence of a young soldier using a captured Joey and another English cavalry horse to abduct his younger brother from going to the front lines, trading certain death for a merely probable one for going AWOL, is both stirring and bleak. And one scene in particular will go down as one of Spielberg's best moments: Joey finds himself ensnared by barbed wire in no man's land between German and British trenches, and a soldier from each side heads out in peace to help the beast. It's a beautiful, unforced exchange, the teasing conversation that the two men strike up more like the taunts of rival football fans than soldiers sworn to kill the other for king (or kaiser) and country. Highlighting the pointlessness of WWI without having to make any big speech, this scene finds real affirmation in the momentary ceasefire, a reminder that war is something "other people" declare, and that those sent to die in it often share more with the people shooting at them than the high command that keeps pushing them forward.

But even this magnificent scene is hobbled by a simperingly dumb visual gag of nervous Germans chucking their wire cutters over the top when the two exposed men ask for a second pair. Like that unnecessary extra scream in Jaws involving the severed head, this one shot shows Spielberg getting greedy, doing a disservice to his own greatness by trying too hard to get one more reaction out of the audience. And that is but the least egregious example of Spielberg's awkward, counterproductive attempts to elicit some form of response from the audience he used to know how to play like a symphony. In my review for Tintin, a mechanical but spectacular delight, I noted that Spielberg made his first film since Jurassic Park that made me feel unabashed, "How did he do that?" wonder. But War Horse aims to be more moving fare, which Spielberg has made more regularly in the second half of his career. Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, A.I., and Munich all make for complicated and ambiguous dramas that find the doubt, even the incurable pain, in their subject matter. War Horse ends with the most contrived happy ending since everything magically turned out OK for the main family in War of the Worlds.

Spielberg has long been able to tell children's stories that set kids on the path to growing up, often in harsh terms. War Horse tours the audience through the horrors of the first War to End All Wars, only to dump us off unchanged at the end. Like the horse it pretends is the protagonist, the film has no understanding, no insight, into what it sees. Its most affecting moments seem to occur almost in spite of the movie as a whole, which routinely finds ways to maintain the audience's overall comfort level while milking them for sympathy. It's just a crying exercise, something to cleanse the body of toxins to send back out into the world, none the wiser but vaguely refreshed. There is merit in that kind of film, but War Horse wants to be so much more, to be so captivating and resonant from start to finish, that even its ephemeral pleasures must be considered a failure.

Books I Read in 2011

2011-12-28T09:09:00.005-06:00

I fell shamefully behind on reading when I went to college, first overburdened by an engineering course load then spending so much time writing stories for journalism assignments or delving deeper and deeper into film to tend to my literary interests. This year I vowed to get back into the groove and challenged myself to read 40 books before New Year's. Just last week, I succeeded. For the most part, I read a lot of great books over the year, so I thought I'd share some brief thoughts for them after the jump.

1. The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy — Bill Carter

Less dramatically intense and straightforward than The Late Shift—in part because of the more diverse late-night field that now exists and because so much of the central conflict occurred on television and in constantly updated Internet stories—New York Times television writer Bill Carter’s investigative look at the latest fiasco at NBC is nevertheless well-researched and narratively assured. Perhaps a bit too unwilling to lay blame at anyone’s feet, Carter points out the surprising ties that bind Conan and Leno, from their mutual sense of company loyalty and work ethic to their worship of the Tonight Show franchise and overriding desire to be a part of its legacy.

Carter presents the issue of the Tonight Show as the product of so many compounded mistakes that no one, not even Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker, can be held responsible for the resultant train wreck. But even setting aside my own Team Coco bias, it seems as if that tangled web was primarily woven by NBC executives and Leno, but the depth of Carter’s reporting ensures one cannot stay mad at anyone for a series of decisions made in the attempt to please everyone. But those in entertainment should know you’ll never be able to make everyone happy, and as much of a White Person Problem as this whole saga is, I continue to marvel at how gripping the story can be.

2. Absalom! Absalom! — William Faulkner

William Faulkner’s writing is hilarious, poignant, allegorical, immediate and, quite often, borderline infuriating. It took me three goes with this novel before I finally understood the truth: stop trying to figure it out. Yes, Absalom! Absalom! is allegorical and symbolic, but it works by letting its endlessly overlapping and conflicting histories add up to an emotional, even semi-spiritual, portrait of the post-Reconstruction South. The “truth” of Quentin Compson’s assembled chronology of the Sutpen clan is irrelevant: what matters is just what the contradictions say about them, and of Compson, and of the entire Southern sensibility. Most importantly, though, it speaks to the desperation of the soul, that terrible need in all of us to know ourselves, to know and make our place.

Faulkner’s structure is breathtaking: you cannot even call it ouroboric because that would imply a circular movement. This is less the sight of the snake eating its own tail than the excreted remains of self-consumed serpent. Nearly everything one needs to know is located in the first chapter, but different perspectives encroach, all of them adding, at least, characters’ subjective interpretations and, at most, their freewheeling speculation. There’s Rosa Coldfield’s ingrained hatred casting nightmarish shadows over Thomas Sutpen, Mr. Compson speaking more analytically but also reverently, Sutpen’s own words passed through several generations of lips or, most hilariously, Shreve’s conjecture, an outgrowth of his intense fascination with the corkscrewing story as well as his fed-up attempts to get to the damn point (rarely has a character served as a better stand-in for the audience). And at the center of it all is Quentin, so discombobulated by the Sutpen legacy and what it means to him that he’d eventually throw himself off a bridge, though in true Faulkner fashion, he’d technically already done that.

There are few things more gratifying than wrestling with an accepted masterpiece until you find that when you stop trying to appreciate it, it’s a damn sight easier to love it. It’s till a challenge, but I couldn’t put it down, finally enthralled by Faulkner’s most towering work, even if I still prefer Light in August.

3. Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy

Review here.

4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain

Huck Finn is a serio-comic masterpiece, one of a handful of books in any language to truly contain a laugh a page, but also that rare comedy that can step outside itself in horrifying moments of clarity that do not derail the comedy even as they deepen the text. I remember disliking the final chapters when I read this my freshman year of high school, utterly failing to see Twain’s intention: by reintroducing Tom Sawyer, he completely changes our view on that erstwhile protagonist by divorcing us critically from antics that now seem less precocious than sociopathic and deranged. Furthermore, Tom contrasts the absurdity of romanticism with the meaningful drama of Huck’s realism.

I re-read this over the latest censorship fuss to plague the novel, and as ever I remain in the camp arguing it should never be altered. Twain knew exactly what he was doing using that word, and it makes his satire all the more lastingly piercing.

5. Silence — Shusaku Endo

With Martin Scorsese finally on-track to adapt this long-gestating project, I decided to give the source material a go. I discovered two things: 1) It's obvious why Scorsese would want to film it, what with its themes of religious doubt and suffering lining up neatly with his own preoccupations and 2) As good as the book is, there is room for improvement. Endo's writing segues awkwardly from an epistolary collection of writings from his protagonist, Rodrigues, to limited third-person, a shift that would work better in film where perspective can more smoothly change. By the same token, Endo's direct but resonant prose contains an undeniable power.

The best art dealing with faith is made by those grappling with belief. Endo's priest hero heads to Japan unable to comprehend the rampant apostasy of the recently converted and even a few European priests, despite the reports of horrid, unimaginable torture placed upon them. Once he arrives, however, the unforgiving attitude of the ruling daimyo toward Christians, and even the harsh terrain, confront the zealous missionary with the first resistance to religion he's ever experienced, and all he can notice after a time is the deafening silence of God in response to atrocity. But Endo, who presents Japan as a nation inhospitable to the vision of a Christian God, intriguingly reveals his own unique (and culturally Japanese) take on God/Jesus as a being that sufferers with his followers instead of simply looking down from above. A fascinating, moving book that will certainly rank as one of my favorite artistic endeavors to wrestle with faith

6. The Awakening — Kate Chopin

Read for my American literature class. Before it was assigned, I’d never even heard of the book, or Chopin, despite her groundbreaking influence on my favorite Southern writers. Though her writing only flirts with the stream-of-consciousness Gothic qualities that Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner would later perfect, you can still see the germinating seed here. Still, the novel itself is a bit dry, restrained by its Victorian sentiment of freeing a woman solely by having her act like the selfish, lustful image of man and not by truly probing femininity and gender rebellion. I enjoyed it more as a tongue-in-cheek version of a horror story (Egads! A woman declaring independence!) than as an examination of what it means to be a woman, but that may have been Chopin’s intent all along.

7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce

Having read only the tiniest excerpts of Joyce in high school, I figured it was high time to dive into that most celebrated (and feared) of 20th century writers. Despite the lengthy annotations (nothing compared to his two biggest works, which contain hundreds of pages of notes), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man alerted me quickly to the rhythm of Joyce’s prose, a bouncy livelihood which more than compensated for his dense lingual experimentation. Given the novel’s focus on a young man who finds himself through his talent and rejects what he considers the banalities of the world, I’m surprised this doesn’t get mentioned alongside The Catcher in the Rye more often, but Joyce goes far deeper than Salinger ever dared, not only conveying Stephen’s growth through the narrative but the text itself. The book starts with a children’s tale using children’s words, and it ends with a well-articulating, radical artistic manifesto (an expression of one’s thoughts made more literal in the epistolary last chapter). Some might accuse Stephen of arrogance, but Joyce is simply refusing to apologize for presenting a truth: an artist, a true artistic genius, must step outside normalcy to better create. Political and religious imagery runs through the book, but Stephen rejects both to pursue creation.

There’s simply too much here to spotlight, but I would like to register just a snippet of Joyce’s gift for wordplay: Stephen Dedalus, a combination of the first Christian martyr and the mythological architect of the labyrinth in Crete, a dichotomy Joyce circles around throughout. Stephen’s father’s name is Simon, and when Stephen has a rush of spiritual shame that leads to a brief dalliance with Catholic living he briefly considers using money to atone for his sin, thus making him guilty of simony. And I cannot quite put into words why I am so affected by one of the last passages in the book, written in the terse bullet-form of a journal entry but full of meaning, as it addresses the genuine humility underneath some "know-it-alls": “Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less.” I find this passage as beautiful as the novel’s most flowery runs, and there are many. A masterpiece.

8. Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky

A terrifying outpouring of bile that at every turn reveals the unutterable sadness beneath the unnamed narrator's screeds. So short it barely constitutes a novella, Notes from Underground nevertheless troubles me more than nearly any other work of art. But its cathartic honesty only makes it more necessary; writing it probably kept Dostoevsky from killing someone.

9. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

Few things in life are more delightful than sitting back and watching Jane Austen work her magic with the English language.

10. Jurassic Park — Michael Crichton

God, this might be even more awkwardly anti-human than the special-effects bonanza movie.

11. Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 — Paul Tingen

Tingen makes some weird diversions into talk of Zen Buddhism, and he is occasionally too eager to use all of the notes he collected (every journalist knows you never use all your research) but otherwise his meticulous cataloguing and interviewing adds invaluable insight into the neglected and even mocked late-career of an American icon. I love Electric Miles, and some of the revelations here only made me appreciate Miles' daring sonic explorations even more.

12. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë

HATED this in high school, couldn't put it down this time. I still don't quite cotton to its almost emo romance, of two insular people basically retreating from the rest of the world to live their Gothic life, but the mash-up of social romance with Gothic horror is not only entertaining but often riotous. Brontë gets in a number of fantastic jabs.

13. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 — Hunter S. Thompson

One of my all-time favorites, densely involved in the minutiae of political wheeling and dealing to the point that it can be hard to follow, yet so ingeniously scribbled by Thompson that it is compulsively page-turning. I reread it all the time, and you can be damn sure I'll be breaking it out in this upcoming election season, which promises to be an outright farce .

14. The Dirt — Motlëy Crüe

I've never hated the members of a band so thoroughly, nor have I ever been so unable to put down a book. The confessions here are demented and disgusting, but the occasional moment of clarity of the addict makes for harrowing self-evaluations. Vince Neil's self-loathing over his fatality-inducing drunken driving is particularly brutal in its honesty. A trashy read, but a revealing one.

15. Ulysses — James Joyce

Life-altering. My collection of posts for each chapter can be accessed here.

16. Leviathan — Scott Westerfeld

Intriguing take on steampunk that also explores a what-if? history re: Darwinian theory and genetic engineering. Shame it's a YA novel, as the story constantly moves away from its fascinating world to focus on clichéd storytelling elements further restricted by the age of the intended audience.

17. The Sirens of Titan — Kurt Vonnegut

One of Vonnegut's best. Surreal and silly, but often so piercing it hurts. Up there with Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle for me.

18. Swamplandia! — Karen Russell

Half of this book is a masterpiece. The magic realist chapters with the daughter make prose poetry out of banal, even ugly, tracts of land. Sadly, the stuff with the brother rates as dimestore anti-capitalist satire, and a garish plot-twist that launches the final act is a predictable and cheap ploy for shock. It's a shame; Swamplandia! started out as one of the most lyrical, intoxicating reads of recent years, only to end up an all too typical disappointment.

19. The Great Terror: A Reassessment — Robert Conquest

Review here.

20. Hitch 22 — Christopher Hitchens

Even his damn memoir is combative. I still can't really write about Hitch yet. Maybe I'll try if and when I get through that massive final collection of essays.

21. The Lost World — Michael Crichton

If Spielberg's poorly aged Jurassic Park is nevertheless an improvement over Crichton's original, it's hard to say who came out worse with their respective sequels. Spielberg's Lost World is a soulless, pedestrian waste of time and perhaps the director's worst film. Crichton's book may be even worse, a lethargic trudge through a pointless plot that exists only to posit how the dinosaurs went extinct. Because we were all on pins and needles to hear what Crichton thought about that.

22. What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years — Ricky Riccardi

Riccardi can be a bit too defensive of Armstrong and defend some questionable career decisions, but his book is as vital as Tingen's on Miles' late career. He makes a compelling case for the artistry, even the barrier breaking of Satchmo's mainstream success, and it sent me scrambling to save up the cash for the new 10-CD collection of Armstrong's post-Hot Fives & Sevens career. It's sad how many supposed music lovers seem to think that Armstrong's legacy stops after those short years near the start of his professional life.

23. The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton

Succeeds at capturing the rule-ordered social world of the setting that the pain of forbidden love never quite breaks through. I actually prefer Scorsese's film of the work.

24. Dubliners — James Joyce

A suffocating portrait of Dublin, but one that also finds meaning and occasionally even beauty in the characters trapped by Ireland's necrotic past. "The Dead" is, of course, a masterpiece, but I'm still captivated by most of the stories, which can be so cynical, yet so human. It's an inexplicably attained balance, and it's no wonder Jennifer Egan recently failed so badly at writing a postmodern Dubliners for America (more on that later).

25. Franny and Zooey — J.D. Salinger

I never took to Salinger in high school, but I should give him another try now that I'm no longer around people who are, like, TOTALLY inspired by Holden Caulfield. This bifurcated novella was a refreshing reentry into the late author's work, a slightly precious but intensely moving account of genius children in serious danger of falling into incurable waste as young adults. Its short length gives the work a brevity that gets to the heart of the story quickly without sacrificing style.

26. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky

One of the most psychologically rich novels ever written. Whole pages of neurotic word soup pass without so much as a single paragraph break, but I never once got tired of Dostoevky's epic. Overwhelming in the best sense, Karamazov covers so much ground that only a book like Ulysses, which chased profundity by running in the opposite direction, to minute observation over cosmic melodrama, could find something else to say about the human condition in its wake. The "Grand Inquisitor" chapter is one of the most incisive, brutal things I've ever read.

27. The Help — Kathryn Stockett

An insipid bit of revisionist nonsense that allows a white woman to kind-of, sort-of, not-at-all address her own upbringing by a black maid. But Stockett is so invested in learning that she was actually loved by her own help that she won't let anything in the book that even hints at the possibility that a black woman forced to neglect her own children might only not love a white baby but could utterly resent it. Stockett even talked to former maids who expressed this view while conducting research, but funnily enough that didn't make it in the novel. And why should it? Her deceptive structure only gives the impression of telling black women's stories.

28. Light in August — William Faulkner

I had to wash The Help out of my mouth with a book by a white person that actually gets racism right. Faulkner's novel is a harrowing reckoning of the South's racial past, its shuddered waves of shame and self-repulsion more suffocating even than his works on the South's broader issues with self-identity and lack thereof. My favorite Faulkner.

29. Culture and Anarchy — Matthew Arnold

Keeps all the good bits from Plato and leaves out that whole "censor and punish the artists" chestnut. I still think there's a limiting view to Arnold's philosophy, but this a nice stepping stone to more engaging (to me) philosophers like Levinas.

30. Twilight of the Idols — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love Nietzsche. He's so easy to misconstrue that I'm afraid to even say what I think he believes on any topic, but he is so witty and combative that his philosophy is fantastically readable. As something of a self-summary of intent, Twilight of the Idols is accessible even by his standards, and I loved his thoughts on religion.

31. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov

As I recall, Lolita was the one Stanley Kubrick film I didn't like, and I was reluctant to delve even into its lauded source material for fear of its potential romanticization of a repellent affair. Happily, Nabokov's playful prose subtly undermines its rhapsodic narrator, carefully making clear that Humbert's self-justification is just that, and that his perceived romance with a girl wise beyond her years is actually a psychologically scarring event that tears down that old-young pairing that runs through literary history. I toed the water with this at first, but I emerged as ready to sing its praises as the host of more qualified literary critics.

32. Elective Affinities — Goethe

Too odd for me to even go into. Not entirely sure what the book is saying beyond the idea of human chemistry being as irreversible and natural as elemental chemistry, but then maybe that's the whole point. I was intrigued throughout, but I don't necessarily know that I enjoyed it.

33. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited — Robin Wood

This critical assessment, split between Wood's original edition and a revised evaluation not only of other Hitchcock films but his own previous writing, is indispensable. Wood's knowledge of various critical theories and his ability to fluidly connect them to practical, demonstrable examples not only deepens our understanding of one of the great directors but also makes complex academic theories more palatable and cogent to a layman like me. This book makes me want to be a better critic, and I think that reading it while taking a class on critical theory helped me understand some of the writers I was reading in that class so much better.

34. A Visit from the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan

I should have a full review up for this on another site sometime in January, but for now I'll just say that Egan's sub-Joycean stylistic exercises left me underwhelmed, and her characters were so crudely drawn that I could not believe anyone could see any humanity in this work. As social critique, it is laughably clueless, and as literary experimentation, it is infuriatingly safe.

35. Images: My Life in Film — Ingmar Bergman

A surprisingly bouncy read that offered enjoyable insights from the director into his own work, and not always positive self-assessments. Naturally, the autocritique lacks the more layered study a detached critic could bring, but Bergman is sufficiently candid that Images is never just a parade of compliments and self-justification.

36. James Joyce — Richard Ellmann

Review here.

37. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller

I'm going to make a habit of reading this every few years. I first read it in high school and found it funny. Now, I couldn't make it past a page without laughing, even as the more traumatized segments of sheer horror affected me more profoundly. Christopher Hitchens once advised readers to "stay on good terms with your inner Yossarian," and I have a better idea as to why after rereading this all-too-sane farce on the sheer madness of war and the bureaucracy that carefully orders that madness into official insanity.

38. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings — ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi

I had a hell of a hard time understanding Levinas at first, even compared to my normal difficulty with philosophy. Yet once he clicked, I found I delighted in his thoughts more than just about any other thinker, his beliefs on our innate ethical responsibility to others the most affirming philosophy I've ever heard. There are still huge gaps even in this introductory collection of essays I found impenetrable, but I was not only stimulated by what I understood but utterly moved.

39. Mirroring People — Marco Iacoboni

My critical theory professor gave us this final read as, I suspect, his idea of a reward for getting through various philosophical essays over the semester. Whatever the reason, this fleet, intelligent but layman-targeted explanation of mirror neurons was a great read, and one that offered empirical biological data to support Levinas' assertions of ethics. The notion that we are neurologically predisposed to engage in mimetic and empathetic behavior is exciting, not merely for its revelations of human communication but its implications for treatment of disorders like autism.

40. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Stieg Larsson

I touched on my feelings on this book with my review of David Fincher's adaptation of it (which not merely surpasses the Swedish version but improves on this source material). Larsson broaches so many interesting ideas but constantly pulls back to rant about the state of investigative journalism, even using an extraneous act after the mystery climax to settle Mikael's scores. Furthermore, Lisbeth Salander, so tragically seen as some kind of feminist action heroine, is so blatantly the fetishized projection of this male author that I couldn't help but feel embarrassed at times. Still engagingly page-turning enough to keep me going, but I was amazed that someone managed to make a near-great film out of this, given what a near-abysmal novel it is.

Capsule Reviews: Trespass, My Week With Marilyn, We Need to Talk About Kevin

2011-12-27T19:13:00.002-06:00

Trespass (Joel Schumacher, 2011)

Having premiered at TIFF in September and come to DVD not two months later, Trespass couldn't possibly have been any good, but its badness is still striking. Shot with colors so artlessly exaggerated it looks merely as if someone adjusted the color balance rather than composed anything, Trespass wouldn't be interesting if it were lensed by Emmanuel Lubezki. A bog-standard house thriller with a simperingly moralistic message about family, the film proceeds with hilariously random flashbacks, endless narrative diversions, and hopelessly absurd dialogue. Nicole Kidman still can't get her emotions to match her starched facial expressions, while Nic Cage plays the fast-talking diamond dealer with his usual incoherent yelling. (I confess that his agonized cry of "You shit fucking animals!" is something of a highlight.) The film does improve (by which I mean becomes even worse) when someone socks Cage in the mouth and he speaks with a thick voice the rest of the film. But not even the delight of Cage at his worst can make up from Schumacher's clumsily overactive direction or the constant addition of conflicts thanks to useless reveals.

My Week With Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011)

When a film summarizes itself with its opening text scrawl, it has to work twice as hard to make the audience care for what is to come. But Simon Curtis' lazy sorta biopic doesn't have an ounce of insight in it, printing the legend and never engaging Monroe on any human level. We get a glossed-over view of her instability, with the brilliant Michelle Williams setting aside her command of elegantly controlled body language to offer up an Oscar-ready performance of big accents and aggressive acting. Kenneth Branagh, however, redeems much of the film's facile approach, giving his finest performance in years as a crotchety, thin-lipped Sir Laurence Olivier, looking for rejuvenation in co-starring with Monroe but discovering only his obsolescence in the process. But he can only overcome so much; Curtis even presents Monroe as an airhead in her private life, taking her to a giant library only to have her rush to a massive dollhouse to ooh and aah. By presenting her as naïve and simple behind closed doors, the director never truly delineates between the real woman and the ass-shaking, pose-striking, kiss-blowing sex symbol who turns on every time the press finds her.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

We Need to Talk About Kevin has two strong factors in its favor. One is the direction of Lynne Ramsay, who relies on striking, even idiosyncratic visuals and her actors' body language to convey story and emotion while still being lucid enough to not only follow but predict (almost to the film's detriment). The other is Tilda Swinton, who captures the trauma and paranoia of being not merely the witness to but the ultimate target of her child's killing spree, not only scanning her memories to find out where it all went wrong but feeling the hot sting of hostile stares from the community that blames her for her son's rampage. Together, Ramsay and Swinton create a claustrophobic mood wracked with doubt, as even Eva begins to wonder if she truly is at fault.

Where the film falls down is in its handling of Kevin, who upends whatever nature vs. nature debates arise from some of Eva's memories by being so innately evil that comparisons to such films as The Omen and The Bad Seed have cropped up everywhere.. Every child hired to portray the child at various stages has dark, expressionless stares and absent humanity, which makes the occasional glimpse of a slapped hand or a cutting remark from Eva or a violent video game enthusiastically played seem like belated attempts to add a counterbalance. When young Kevin caustically responds to his mother's remark about matching a room to his personality with, "What personality?" he lets on more than he realizes. At times, the film displays the more nuanced tone of the visual assembly that makes Kevin almost compelling, but soon he's back to that lifeless look in his eyes, leaving me wanting more of these complex moments.

Nevertheless, Swinton is so good at finding depth in the only person ever simplified more than the child killer in such situations, and Ramsay's direction is often so compelling despite its occasional obviousness, that We Need to Talk About Kevin emerges one of the finer films of the year. When everything, or even just most things, click, it makes for a haunting study of survivor's guilt that even manages to find hints of redemption amid the bleakness of the red-soaked visuals and Johnny Greenwood's howling score.

The 10 Worst Films of 2011

2011-12-27T14:20:00.003-06:00

Given that I do not do this for money and therefore mostly have complete freedom in my film selections, my worst-of list is always void of some of the more popular choices. Indeed, not a one Happy Madison production makes my list this year despite all three 2011 efforts from the company making the rounds on damn near everyone's worst-of list. I did almost see Jack and Jill out of sheer morbid curiosity, but sanity prevailed. Nevertheless, I still saw my share of absolute duds this year, for as much gold as 2011 offered, it also had more than its fair share of god-awful pieces of trash. So if I may, let me purge but 10 of these miserable experiences from my mind forever.

10. Cars 2 (dir. John Lasseter)

The first Cars was a useless but benign romp, a half-baked concept built upon themes that had already been explored with far greater depth in the Toy Story films. But money talks, and the runaway merchandising success guaranteed a sequel, one that abandoned the thin premise of the first only to come up with an even more asinine narrative of global conspiracies and spy chases. An already nonsensical universe becomes downright insane, but far worse is the focus on rustbucket hick Mater as the protagonist. Being There with big oil commentaries and gunfire, Cars 2 has nothing for children or their parents, and it stands as the first Pixar film to be motivated solely by financial greed rather than artistic ambition. Judging from the sudden greenlighting of sequels, however, it sadly may not be the last.

9. The Help (dir. Tate Taylor)

Dressing up the brutality of Jim Crow-era Mississippi with sugary pastels and sorority girl shrieks, Tate Taylor's adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's unseemly wish-fulfillment novel makes that book look like Light in August. Dumping racism into one perfectly coiffed avatar, The Help fatally lowers the stakes even as it promotes minor "triumphs" as big victories. There's something intensely gauche about staging a tearjerking "hurrah" around a black woman being told she can work as a white family's maid forever, to say nothing of the greatest win being the white woman's book deal. A great movie was never going to be made out of this novel, but Taylor takes what minimal stabs at emotional complexity Stockett made and tosses them out for an unending series of easy shocks and easier resolution.

8. Red State (dir. Kevin Smith)

I'd been eagerly awaiting this since 2007, but Kevin Smith's vague stab at horror is not scary, timely or insightful, nor is it even coherent. Crawling out of the gate with a series of dragging monologues, Red State only gets worse when it gets down to the action, shot with handheld cameras and editing so erratic as to make Michael Bay films look like Béla Tarr's. Eventually, Smith's half-baked rants against church and state give way to a wannabe Coen brothers film, complete with a shaggy dog non-ending that, if nothing else, shows how sophisticated the Coens are at pulling off that sort of thing. For years, I bought the notion that no one would bankroll Red State because it was too darkly uncommercial. Now I'm simply left with the impression that the Weinsteins know when to save their money.

7. Season of the Witch (dir. Dominic Sena)

I only permit myself one Nic Cage film a year on a worst-of, which always gives me a bit of a Sophie's Choice. But what makes Season of the Witch so unbearable is not the fact that it is a terrible Nicolas Cage film but that it has none of the freewheeling mania of a Nic Cage crapfest. Both he and Ron Perlman look as if they had to stare at their paychecks off-screen to keep going. The movie isn't even about witches but demons, but it's a slog to even make it to that contradictory revelation with all the hilarious anti-war commentary as filtered through the Crusades (Cage and Perlman kill a LOT of people before they realize it's wrong). The film is so dim, so murky and so cheap that I could have sworn I saw it in 3D. I suppose the fact that I didn't is the movie's one saving grace.

6. The Iron Lady (dir. Phyllida Lloyd)

It takes a lot for me to feel sorry for Margaret Thatcher, especially when her biopic presents her absurdly cruel right-wing views as shows of feminine strength. But Phyllida Lloyd's utterly embarrassing The Iron Lady so vigorously exploits Thatcher's current dementia as a plot device that I was left repulsed, watching at times through my fingers. Haphazardly constructed as a borderline farce about a plucky brownshirt showing men a thing a thing or two, The Iron Lady says nothing about Thatcher's deeds and even less about her character. All the film can do is present Thatcher outside her politics as a symbol of female empowerment, but it takes moral shortcuts to do so, such the prime minister defending the dispatch of troops to die for the Falklands by saying she "does battle" every day in a man's world. Suddenly, the excuses for Iraq don't seem so bad.

5. Sucker Punch (dir. Zack Snyder)

I'm already amused by some critics carping on David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for not casting Lisbeth Salander as some kind of symbol of feminist empowerment, as the horribly reductive image of that character they have in mind is really no different from the one they rightly lambasted in Zack Snyder's wankfest of teenage metalhead notebook scribbling. A woman trapped in an abusive asylum acts out elaborate revenge fantasies that suspiciously double as music videos, allowing Snyder to feel as if he's engaging in Girl Power while really just continuing to mold his tortured ladies into thin veneers of action heroines. In a way, he succeeds: they are as hollow and repellent as so many of the males in action films. Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish and Oscar Isaac elevate the film somewhat, but they are actors, not miracle workers.

4. Transformers: Dark of the Moon (dir. Michael Bay)

The fourth worst film of the year is actually a marked improvement over its 2009 predecessor, a disgusting movie on the short list for worst films ever made. But just because Bay holds his shots for two seconds instead of .5 doesn't make things any neater, and the fascism of the series reaches fever pitch. This is a film where the heroes let thousands, if not millions, of humans die in order to teach them a lesson about never doubting your "protectors." Replacing Megan Fox with an even more blatant prop of a woman and (finally, I admit) relegating Sam to being the side player of the story, Bay finally disposes of that pesky human element. How sad and revealing it is that this may be the reason this film is the "best" of the three.

3. Red Riding Hood (dir. Catherine Hardwicke)

Catherine Hardwicke's hackdom knows no bounds. No, I take it back, now her incompetence has been bounded by post-Twilight rip-offs that make her job on that franchise's first film look like Best Director material. Red Riding Hood is such a miserably turgid movie that it cannot even be laughed at. A return to production design for Hardwicke, who celebrates with a village that looks made of toothpicks and trees with spikes on them. Movie magic! Gary Oldman, who gives the most nuanced and quietly powerful performance of his career this year as George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, has rarely been so firmly in paycheck mode, screaming at the top of his lungs in magnificent velvet. This isn't the first time he's taken a crap gig, but this role is more depressing than most, and it's saying something when not even an unhinged Oldman can inject life into your dour movie.

2. I Melt With You (dir. Mark Pellington)

Valhalla Rising for Ed Hardy enthusiasts, Mark Pellington's childishly nihilistic rumination on midlife crises is comical in its pretension. Bad as the dialogue is, Pellington shortchanges his own movie by constantly prioritizing his rocking but ill-fitting soundtrack over the film itself, which suggests that even he got bored while watching it in the editing bay. The characters are uniformly simplistic, with only Christian McKay doing anything at all like "acting," and he departs the film sooner than the rest to get a head start on damage control. But he leaves the film with another hour of ludicrous spirals into druggie madness that teach the audience nothing but acts like every bullshitting fast-talker who thinks he's the only one brave enough to tell you the "truth." A hideous film in every respect.

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (dir. Rob Marshall)

Gore Verbinski finally freed himself from service on this franchise in time for mega-hack Rob Marshall to drive it to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Marshall's primary impact has always been to remind people that, by way of comparison, Baz Luhrmann actually knows what he's doing, and his profoundly artless sequel tosses out what vestiges of entertainment remained in this franchise. Not a single action sequence wows, not a line of dialogue doesn't feel forced, and not a single second of Johnny Depp's acting doesn't come off as soulless and bored. Jack Sparrow has gotten ever more manic as these films have progressed to make up for the fact that his actual character keeps losing more and more of its charm, and the increased hamminess only works against the streamlining brought on by budget cutbacks. Some will call this an improvement over the third film, but at least movie tried to use its big, stupid nonsense to an end. This film, like the pirates it parades around in empty setpieces, just wants more money.

Capsule Reviews: Submarine, The Iron Lady, I Melt With You

2011-12-24T19:37:00.000-06:00

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2011)

Referencing The Catcher in the Rye with equal parts sincerity and irony, Submarine likewise moves so awkwardly between self-aware hipness and uncomfortable neediness that it never settles into anything other than an attempt to make some Welsh kitchen-sink version of a Wes Anderson film (think the cutting scene of The Royal Tenenbaums stretched to feature length). Ayoade, so effortlessly quick on The IT Crowd, languishes behind the camera, holding some potentially funny and/or insightful moment until it simply collapses. There's a lot of potential here, and I like that Craig Roberts' (a fine newcomer) character arc is paced with an exponential growth rather than a facile epiphany, but I was still left wanting more from this.

The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011)

To say that The Iron Lady resembles a television movie is an insult to television. Incoherently assembled into a downright hysterical mélange of randomly ordered shots that turn the political career of one of the most controversial figures of modern international politics into a you-go-girl story of a gung-ho women sticking it to all those men who thought she couldn't do it. Not that I'm a supporter of Thatcher's in any respect, but to reduce her life to such shallow nonsense is laughable: upon arrival at Parliament as the only woman, she opens the female bathroom to find naught but a chair and an ironing board. And I haven't even broached the subject of its handling of Thatcher's dementia, which it uses so unsubtly as to generate compassion for the real Thatcher not for her deeds or motivations but merely out of disgust for this level of exploitation. Jim Broadbent plays her hallucinated, dead husband like Jacob Marley come to haunt Scrooge; well, that or he's Margaret Thatcher's peevish but affable Tyler Durden. As the entire film branches out from this addled present, perhaps that explains why the movie is so completely chaotic in its construction, but whatever the reason, I ended up feeling sorry that an old woman had been so crassly used for a film that combines the worst of The King's Speech and J. Edgar into one garish whole.

I Melt With You (Mark Pellington, 2011)

I Melt With You is a glibly nihilistic tour through a midlife crisis that really thinks it's saying something. Four friends meet up for a yearly drug vacation in a house on Big Sur's shoreline that looks as if it would cost more to rent for a week than most houses are to own, where they engage in brotastic antics edited with masculine zeal. But when a cruel twist after one too many Oxycontin orgies uncovers a 25-year-old pact that the men made in college, which they decide to honor because that is what grown men do. Pellington, a music video director, packs the film with great but horrifically misapplied tunes that he seems to prioritize over the actual narrative, which vaguely trundles about dealing with some unexplained past as the present becomes an increasingly incoherent hodgepodge of fatalistic statements. Its self-flagellating tone borders on the parodic, and every intended shock is but one more unintentional laugh. The men are bad enough, but I was perhaps most irritated by the waste of the always-excellent Carla Gugino as the world's most clueless police officer, who basically comes in just to vent the smell of unwashed dude yet gets bizarrely emotional over the fates of these idiotic, self-immolating strangers. An utter piece of trash from start to finish.

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)

2011-12-23T08:35:00.000-06:00

Much as I desired some kind of return for silent filmmaking in the 21st century, Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist does not resemble a silent picture so much as a talkie with the audio track removed. Lacking all the propulsion of silent cinema, the capacity for rich visual storytelling that seemed fast ay any speed, The Artist lethargically moves through its pastiche. As a billet-doux, the film is sufficiently earnest to be charming, but it never displays any particular insight into the silent era, making even its homage thin.

But then, Hazanavicius' jumping-off point appears not to be the silents themselves so much as Singin' in the Rain, the 1952 masterpiece that also dealt with the change from silents to talkies. The Artist is the flip-side of that, not about the song-and-dance people who made up for the camera's loss of lyricism but those on the other side of the spectrum, unable to adapt to the new format. In a sense, the hero of The Artist is Lina Lamont, albeit more likable and earnest. But if Kelly and Donen's work was a sincere, if teasing, testament to the event that gave their own careers a boost, The Artist too often feels suffocatingly nostalgic in a lecturing way, even as it does not capture the tone the silents.

Opening at the premiere of the new George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) film, The Artist shows the final twilight hurrah of this Douglas Fairbanks-esque silent star, his picture playing to a packed house as laughs and cheers roar soundlessly from the crowd's throats. On- and off-screen, Valentin is a mug, his gigawatt smile powering all of Tinseltown and his multiple curtain calls but another chance to charm the crowd with physical tricks performed with his trusty dog, whom he clearly considers more of a co-star than the film's leading lady. Walking out of the theater, he bumps into a young woman, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), whose frame-halting looks get her on the cover of Variety, burying the actual review. Peppy takes the press to the studios, where she gets her way onto the set of George's new movie and begins a meteoric rise.

So far, so good. But when Hazanavicius jumps forward two years to 1929, George finds his world turned upside down. With talkies now the rage, the head of the studio (John Goodman) shuts down production of silents, but George refuses to accept this defeat. The actor suddenly becomes a director, bankrolling his own silent adventure movie, a garishly outdated affair even as seen during its construction. When George and his dog enter the theater on opening night, they increase the audience size by a third. One block over, the marquee that once bore George's name in massive letters now sports Peppy's fresh face as audiences flock to this new talkie bombshell. What had been a light, if still stodgy, love letter to silent cinema now becomes an embittered, morose tale of forgotten talent.

But not even this tone, which lasts up until the film's final few minutes, carries any real heft. Part of this isn't the director's fault: he's done a good enough job of capturing the general beats of silent melodrama that anyone can guess how the story will resolve. But the unimaginative framing, which shows off the sterling set design but does little to generate mood through the visuals, leaves this section, covering the second and nearly all of the third acts, hopelessly flat. For a silent feature, the characters often have to "voice" their feelings, even as the actors routinely demonstrate that they could do it all on their own if the camera pulled back and let them loose.

But what makes The Artist all the more frustrating are the instances where Hazanavicius clearly demonstrates a skill above mere competence. A scene of Peppy, the top half of her body obscured by a setpiece, engaging in a dance-off with George is an early highlight of pure elation, a simple but playful exchange between two people already flirting each other before even making eye contact. Likewise, an all-too-brief moment of Peppy gently, lovingly acting out her budding love for George with his empty suit jacket, threading one of her arms through a sleeve to make this ghost embrace her, is so well-performed, delicate and touching that its almost immediate interruption is the film's most painful seconds. And when all is well again and George gets his Hollywood ending at the end, the dance sequence between the two leads is so effervescent that it nearly excuses the entire hour that preceded it.

"If that's the future, you can have it!" George says of the encroaching talkies shortly before his fall, but it's hard to see what's even so different about those initial talkies that threatened an entire way of filmmaking and gave birth to an all-new one, given how uniform the movies within the movie are to the film itself. There is something genuinely exciting about a silent film being a hit with festival and limited-release crowds, not to mention heading the Oscar pack. But it would be even more thrilling if The Artist actually felt like a true silent, classic or modern, instead of a typical Oscar movie with a light twist.

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2011)

2011-12-22T18:46:00.000-06:00

Poetry, like Lee Chang-dong's previous Secret Sunshine, is suffused with cool blue, from the daytime sky to clothes to interior decorations. Not a single shot lacks this calming color, yet like Secret Sunshine, Poetry is a film of intense, devastating emotions and tragedies. Its very first scene drifts over from the idyll of children playing to a girl's corpse floating facedown in the river, and the story only becomes more wrenching from there. However, Lee does not use this juxtaposition of sunny visuals with dark narratives as an ironic counterpoint; his stories do not undermine the beauty of the world around them so much as make that beauty all the richer. Even in a world so besotted with ills, there is still unfathomable, almost spiritual grace and pulchritude.

More so than Secret Sunshine, Poetry stresses that point at every turn. The protagonist, Yang Mija (Yun Jeong-hee), lives on government welfare and the money she gets caring for an elderly man who cannot be but a few years older than her. From the moment we meet her, Mija displays a troubling forgetfulness of words, and when she goes to a clinic to get her arm checked, the doctor on-hand sends her to Seoul to have her head examined. Her own problems are bad enough, but certain revelations threaten to send the film into an abyss of pain. But Poetry is a film about perseverance, of passing through the terrible sights right in front of us to experience that glorious world around us. Naturally, art is the means of seeing the full picture, yet Lee does not use expression to simplistically ignore the reality it transcends.

Mija, a kind woman with preserved beauty, decides to keep her mind working by enrolling in a poetry class, where she reacts to the instructor's metaphorical instruction with an almost childlike literalism, interpreting his talk of poetic inspiration as a goal to be achieved rather than a state of mind. But she cannot probe deeper into the reality of being because her meekness causes her to sweetly but unmistakably retreat from the world. Not that she doesn't have good reason to: already dealing with her early-stage Alzheimer's, Mija must also contend with her unruly grandson, Wook, who runs with a rough crowd of five equally rude and terse boys. One day, the parents of those boys invite her to lunch, where they reveal the sickening fact that this silly gang had something to do with the aforementioned girl's suicide. The adult men look for some excuse, any excuse, to shift even some of the blame off their sons, and they have already set in motion a plan to buy off the girl's family to protect everyone's honor. Coerced into cooperating, Mija can only numbly agree, able to contain her sorrow and anger only by ignoring it where possible.

With a graceful, patient approach to pacing, Lee lets the poor woman languish for a while without losing the overall thread of the story. Still hunting inspiration as if buried treasure, she occasionally spouts poetic verse without realizing it. "But nouns are most important!" she says with a heartbreakingly mirthless laugh when a doctor officially diagnoses her dementia and says she will first forget basic nouns, yet that same hindrance allows Mija to circumnavigate the nominal in the manner of a true poet. However, these flashes are short-lived, the engine turning over but never quite starting. Here Lee makes his clearest commentary: her gasps of poetic license tend to come when she starts to approach her situation, not confronting her predicament but at least gearing up to do so. The men send her to plead with the girl's mother to accept their hush money, but when Mija meets the woman out in a field, she ends up waxing on apricots and flowers, saying beautiful things but never getting around to the reason why the two are talking. That fleeting capacity for art fades when she follows its loftiness away from the necessity of facing up to her real issues. Art may work as escapism, but it cannot do so for long. Indeed, it is not until the end, when Mija makes a sudden decision to truly resolve her grandson's situation that she can craft a poem that at once captures reality and breaks through it to deeper levels of truth.

Lee's direction similarly seeks a balance between an honest appraisal of the world—achieved through primarily static takes that run long enough to capture nuanced, realistic gestures and actions—and a more visually eloquent portrait, created with his gorgeous, singular use of hyperreal color. A shot of raindrops hitting a notebook is so perversely ordered in its chaos that it almost resembles animation, each drop blotting the naked page as if ink splattering. One briefly recurring scene places the members of the poetry class one by one at the head of room, each describing "the most beautiful moment" of his or her life. Notably, all of the stories are rooted in deep pain or hardship, be it an agonizing pregnancy and delivery or the small victory of a man who lived in a basement his whole life finally saving up enough to afford his own apartment. The point of this exercise is clear: to find an abstract inspiration from a concrete memory, to link the overcoming of pain with the overcoming of prosaic senses.

The film's coda is certainly a transcendance of the previously realistic events, an ambiguous, ethereal montage that suggests death and resurrection, or maybe even an alteration of reality through the power of art, the poet literally taking the place of the subject. Maybe the most haunting yet lyrical narrative break since the achingly heartwarming what-if? montage that closes 25th Hour, Poetry's final minutes show the clear hand of a novelist, willing to challenge the audience by setting aside narrative consistency so that the style becomes the theme. In a film comprising nothing but poignance, this conclusion is the most poetic and affirming statement of all.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)

2011-12-21T21:12:00.005-06:00

Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is to sexism what Kathryn Stockett's The Help is to racism. Both work less as attempts to grapple with serious topics than shallow wish-fulfillment fantasies by those unaffected by the subject matter. For Stockett, a white woman, it was the harshness of the Jim Crow era as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not racist that black people not only trust her but risk their lives to secure her book deal. For Larsson, who helplessly witnessed a gang rape as a teenager, it is Sweden's startling patterns of sexual abuse as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not sexist that the avenging fury of violated Woman herself not only trusts him but screws him. Furthermore, as it was written while Larsson was in hiding over his reporting, the book also addresses his longstanding issues with toothless investigative journalism and Sweden's lingering extreme-right element.

Yet David Fincher's adaptation is not really about any of those things. Tossing out Larsson's self-righteousness entirely, the film also reduces protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's almost comically active sex life—it's amusing that the novel's version of Blomkvist gets laid as much as James Bond, and he's played here by the man himself, Daniel Craig. But Fincher even hacks out the questionable feminist empowerment of Lisbeth Salander, presenting her violence with a coldness that robs her vengeance of its bloodlust. Instead, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo acts as a retroactive bridge between several of Fincher's films: it links the religion-tinged carnage of Se7en with the analytical anti-whodunit of Zodiac, as well as that film's painstakingly slow-going, interpersonal analog with The Social Network's ultra-fast, beyond-humanity digital. If Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about the late author's preoccupations, then Fincher's is about his own.

This is evident from the opening credits, which recall the playfully dark titles of Se7en. A music video montage set to Trent Reznor's and Karen O's industrial version of "Immigrant Song," the blackened, fragmentary images not merely offering visual cues to the characters and plot (Lisbeth's various tattoos come to life, and misogynistic violence comes through with an image of a fist shattering a woman's face like a vase) but themes as well. USB cables swirl out like tentacles that ensnare the male and female figures, smashing them together, penetrating them, and suffocating them. The story concerns a decades-old murder that long preceded the digital age, but the constricting credits montage suggests that, now, the problem is not that a murder will go unsolved but that the tools that make such crimes nearly impossible to escape may kill us all.

Despite a healthy running time of 160 minutes, Fincher and writer Steve Zaillian streamline a great deal of the book's diversions. What they don't reduce is the dialogue. Everyone talks, talks, talks in this movie from the start to the stop, with hardly any shots letting Fincher's elegant direction and Jeff Cronenworth's crystal clear, hyperreal cinematography speak for themselves. Yet there's something about the staging of this endless speech that avoids mere exposition, or avoids the manner in which exposition typically operates. As with Zodiac, which obsessed over the solution to its case over the motive, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does not care for the reasons for any given situation. We never learn why Blomkvist cared so much about the story that got him convicted of libel at the start, why the perpetrator behind the 40-year-old mystery Blomkvist is hired to solve truly does what he does, nor even why Lisbeth is so maladjusted. Even when Fincher and Zaillian toss out some kind of motive, it is but half of the equation—a whispered hint of the killer's childhood sexual brainwashing or Lisbeth's muttered admission of the action that got her placed under the care of the state—that avoids full explanation not out of ambiguity but indifference. It is enough merely to know what happened, especially as the question of Harriet Vanger's disappearance is so strange that the what is more interesting, more convoluted, and more surreal than the banal horrors that prompted it.

Fincher's direction matches this emotionally removed attention to detail, and despite the darkness of the film (literal and figurative), the director hasn't been this playful in some time. Insert close-ups tell the audience what each character is seeing without resorting to POV shots, adding to the info dump that Ignatiy Vishnevetsky so brilliantly educed in his own essay on the film. Vishnevetsky likewise sees Fincher's bypass of the "whys" for the "hows," but he goes one step further in describing how Fincher "foregrounds everything," constantly adding new data to the digital image. Montages intricately document every step of a sequence, whether is Lisbeth cooking Ramen or Mikael assembling a makeshift, even cinematic flipbook of static photographs that the camera moves in close to document in almost Godardian fashion.

This approach, of course, is embodied in Lisbeth, whose photographic memory, mathematical ability and hacking skills link her to The Social Network's Mark Zuckerberg (and, to a lesser extent, the similarly obsessive and bright Robert Graysmith in Zodiac) as much as the heavily implied Aspberger's syndrome that afflicts both. Rooney Mara, who stole Fincher's previous film in its first five minutes and absconded with it when she left the frame, makes it obvious why the director fought to cast her in this role. Like Zuckerberg, Lisbeth has everything figured out but people, which she places under her area of understanding by hacking into their personal devices and creating files of every action and transaction of their lives. Unable to read social cues and communication, she instead makes readable documents of people. In this way, she simplifies them, though I doubt even she could reduce herself to a brief synopsis.

Mara plays Lisbeth with the perfect mixture of frail vulnerability and uncontrollable rage. Nursing some unspoken hang-up, Lisbeth always averts her eyes in conversation, cagey and perpetually uncomfortable. Yet when she does raise her head, Mara's doe eyes blaze with such ferocity that even those who win her trust have reason to be afraid. Unlike Noomi Rapace's muscular frame, which suggested the ability to fight back, Mara's lithe musculature emphasizes the physical weakness that places Lisbeth in constant jeopardy, highlighted in her dealings with a sadistic, rapacious guardian, by far the film's most stomach-twisting moments. Her muffled shrieks of fear and anguish as he rapes her made me shake so badly I dropped my notebook, but that same delicacy gives her shows of strength and merciless payback their surprise, and I was nearly as troubled by her getting even with the disgusting Bjurman. The development of a sexual relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael in the book smacks of the aforementioned wish-fulfillment, but here Mara plays Lisbeth's sudden attraction with pure aggression and dominance, an assertion of strength and control to outpace her uncertain, confused feelings. It's still an incurable flaw held over from the novel, but Mara removes the ridiculous motivations Larsson put into the character's head, making her romance all the more impulsive and yet another event to be catalogued.

Pale and detached, Mara looks like death, especially with her bleached eyebrows, which make her face more skull-like and recall the hikimayu style as used in Japanese cinema, where it creates unsettling visages of demons and ghosts. God knows what's going on behind those eyes of hers; if the film is like Mikael, not trying to pry into anyone's subconscious, Mara's Lisbeth is so innately defensive that she still keeps her guard up just in case Fincher gets the urge to try her.

Where the book used the pair's discrepancies of technical know-how as a means of highlighting the ethical gap between Mikael's old-school journalist and Lisbeth's unrepentant hacking, Fincher simply focuses on the technological gap itself. Mikael, no stranger to poring over old documents and conducting interviews, does the legwork, talking to reluctant, even hostile, sources and using intuition to piece together clues into impressive new breakthroughs. But Lisbeth can perform equally admirable work in the time it takes for Google to return however many thousand results for a search term. In minutes, she progresses a case farther than it's ever gotten in 40 years. Fincher characterizes them by their fluidity in laptop usage: Lisbeth can clear an entire screen of snooping in a few keystrokes, while Mikael has to bumble around for agonizing seconds just trying to maximize the screen. In the book, Mikael's final-act acceptance of Lisbeth's illegally obtained files serves only to victoriously resolve an unnecessary bookend plot. Fincher, on the other hand, depicts Mikael's lapse of ethics for what it really is: a sign of the old way dying out after the completion of one last analog case, and a total ceding of authority to the new digital way of being. The director adds in cheeky reminders of our technologically driven lives: early on, everyone in the frame reaches for his cell phone when one rings, all of them instinctively ready to answer a call as if grabbing a gun for self-defense. On the frozen-over island where Mikael investigates Harriet Vanger's cold case, he spends much of his time, like the director in The Wind Will Carry Us, simply searching for reception, and it is that lack of signal, as opposed to the now-unthinkable prospect of people simply turning off their phones as in the novel, that leads to a the film's climactic, suspenseful showdown with the villain.

The deflation of Mikael's triumph goes hand in hand with the removal of visceral pleasure from any of the film's resolutions. Whether it's Lisbeth dealing a much-deserved but grisly comeuppance to Bjurman or the solving of the film's driving anti-mystery and subsequent confrontation with a killer (himself laughably normal and unremarkable, even putting on Enya to hang and gut a victim), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo never ruminates on its actions. Everything is just more info to be logged and uploaded, objectively recorded with detached but expertly crafted direction by Fincher. Earlier I mentioned Godard, and the use of store-bought surveillance cameras and Web searches recalled Film Socialisme in the presentation of a world without secrets, where everything is documented and privacy is but a distant memory. Well, there is still one secret in this film, which might explain why the discovery of a serial rapist/murder almost comes with a sense of nostalgic wistfulness and regret.

Film Socialisme — First Thoughts

2011-12-21T17:47:00.000-06:00

I had planned to hold off on seeing Jean-Luc Godard's latest feature until I had caught up with the director's filmography. However, my Godard retrospective got incredibly side-tracked, and my impatience got the better of me, even as I knew I should have waited. Having stalled out in Godard's mid-'70s period, I am unfamiliar with his subsequent "return" to cinema and the more poetic and autobiographical tone his work from the '90s-on purportedly evokes. As such, I was unprepared for the sheer beauty of Film Socialisme, as well as some of its more obscure touches, some of which, I'm told, have roots in the filmmaker's epic Histoire(s) du Cinéma while others appear to be things one simply must know about the director and the philosophies and personal information he's parsed out over the decades in interviews.

Ergo, this will be merely a preliminary assortment of thoughts, largely aided by the invaluable annotations of David Phelps, whose relatively brief but dense article is a necessary acknowledgment of the film's rich tapestry of allusions, which are impossible to sort out even with the fully translated subtitles. I know some will instantly reject the notion of having to read notes on a film to understand it, but I have no issue asking for help. I could not read Ulysses without the help of three consistent sources and scattered support for certain sections, so why should I be so arrogant as to dismiss Film Socialisme for not being "gettable" enough for me? (People can be quick to assert superiority over anything that exists outside their reach.) Phelps' annotations were a fantastic launchpad to figuring out some of the film's stranger moments, yet even without the benefit of Spark Notes—hell, even without the benefit of understood language—Godard's most recent feature is such a work of art that it mesmerized me from the start.

Split into three sections, Film Socialisme begins and ends with a tour of Mediterranean hotspots aboard a tacky cruise liner (is there any other kind?). Shot with breathtaking HD digital, the first section vividly captures the yellow, blue and occasionally red hues of the ship's deck, recalling the pop art infusions of Godard's mid-'60s color films. The people who roam the decks and cabins come from all over Europe, resulting in a dizzying collage of languages with nary but a broken, pidgin subtitling called "Navajo English" to help the audience. But then, the full translation doesn't help much more, as Godard clearly uses his non-actors as mouthpieces to voice his political and aesthetic concerns; besides, the use of other languages allows the filmmaker to engage in multilingual puns on the level of Joyce (at all times, this film offers reminders that Godard is to cinema what Joyce is to literature). Godard knows translation can never capture the textures and nuances of the original language, and the filmmaker's unsympathetic treatment of those confused enough without the Navajo impediment should recall Vladimir's warning to the audience in Pravda: "If you don't know Czech, you better learn it fast."

But if the first section casts the cruise ship as a microcosm of Europe, it also presents the setting as a parody of the continent's present and past: characters speak of great historical failings while Godard films the asinine activities the tourists use to amuse themselves. He especially likes to film scenes in the dance hall with something approximating a cell phone camera, resulting in heavily pixellated image that sounds like hell opening up as dance music blasts into a low-grade microphone. It looks, and sounds, like every quick bootleg on YouTube, and Godard holds these unbearably cacophonous shots so long that I began not only to process the commentary of bourgeois Europeans drowning out reality with white noise but simply to wonder if contemporary dance music is made intentionally abrasive to be accurately reflected by phone recordings.

The characters who do focus on serious matters, at least beyond merely namechecking past atrocities, search for the truth of the Moscow Gold, which Godard has re-imagined into a symbol of Europe's history from colonialism to the present. The gold is the closest thing the film has to a narrative motivation, with Palestinians, Russians, Mossad agents and others trying to uncover what happened to the Spanish reserves. The many ways in which that wealth has passed hands is manifested in the character of Goldberg, who has many names and alliances. Goldberg's Jewish name and clear association with money raises questions of anti-Semitism, but Godard's backstory for the man casts him first as a Nazi and later as a supporter of Algeria's FLN movement. Besides, I don't think I caught a single reference to Judaism or even Israel that wasn't matched with another visual or spoken comment on Palestine. One title card lays Hebrew over Arabic, and when Godard says Jews invented Hollywood, his preceding statement of Hollywood being the "Mecca of cinema" turns a casual piece of anti-Semitism into a juxtaposition he finds ironic. Likewise, given Godard's cinephilia, albeit a lapsed one, to say that the legendary producers and studio heads who built the town were Jewish does not inherently strike me as an insult. Goldberg himself certainly doesn't seem to be a bad man in any way, and his potential ethnic identity seems to speak more to the links of venality and betrayal that connect all peoples.

So, the opening third uses this constant overlap of nationalities, loyalties, languages, and past and present to stress, above all, the separations between the peoples of Europe. The second section, titled "Quo Vadis Europa," moves the "action" to a gas station in rural France, populated only by the Martin family and a handful of people who unsuccessfully attempt to interact with them. Yet the isolation proves ironic, the family, and particularly its children, resembling the tiny seed that may one day germinate into a mighty plant. Well, maybe not the whole family. One of the parents (or maybe both, or maybe neither) seems to be running for office, but it is the children who seem most poised for change. Then again, maybe they are the ones running for election.

The adolescent son, Lucien, is cantankerous and unformed: he violently conducts an imaginary orchestra while wearing an old CCCP T-shirt, mixing a vague understanding of art with a disastrous example of misapplied socialism but nevertheless a starting point away from the capitalism Godard hates. The teenage daughter, Florine, is more developed, and it is through her that Godard lays out a radical, confrontational, yet strangely poignant and hopeful view of the future. Flo haughtily commands chastises potentially paying customers who use the verb être ("to be"), admonishing them to use avoir ("to have") instead, believing the more active verb to be "better for France." She challenges her parents' views and asserts the need for more youth involvement. Asked what it is she wants, she responds with characteristically Godardian fragments that are nevertheless evocative and powerful: "To be 20 years old. To have reason. To maintain hope. To have rights where governments only have wrongs." This message is even more resonant upon reading Phelps' notes, which explain that the French New Wave was kicked off by a similar pronouncement by Charles Péguy in 1957.

Needless to say, this section is borderline infuriating with the Navajo titles, and I had to switch over full-time to a proper translation. Nevertheless, the section remains visually transgressive, with that saturated color more consistently calm than the use of multiple image qualities. Yet Godard still toys with the look, in one shot altering the color balance to such a radical degree that a banal shot of Lucien sitting on some stairs drawing becomes a fauvist painting of exploded yellows, turquoises and neon greens.

That shot reveals Lucien to be drawing on a Renoir painting, suggesting a liberation and redistribution of art itself that will be more forcibly referenced in the penultimate shot of the film, where an FBI anti-piracy warning fades to reveal a quote: "When the law is unjust, justice bypasses the law." The documentation of everything by people in this film, whether touristy snapshots or the TV crew frantically trying to interview the Martins, points to a world where everything is recorded (surveillance cameras and Google appear in the first section to also stress this), and Godard believes that the old forms of recording should be made equally accessible. This very film seems to have been uploaded to torrents almost immediately, if not with the director's consent then at least without his open disapproval. Godard actually donated €1,000 to the case of an alleged music thief recently, suggesting his support for the "liberation" of copyright.

By titling the work Film Socialisme, Godard seems to be mourning the passing of both, the former replaced by digital video of varying quality, the latter never having truly blossomed to deal with a world that still revolves around money. The apocalyptic howl of wind and waves on the cheap recording mics and the concluding montage of Europe's failings is expressly pessimistic, although, amusingly, the greatest tragedy may be the comparison of the Odessa steps sequence of Potemkin with a group of children standing on those same steps in the present saying they've never even heard of that film. The ignorance of artistic history thus joins with that of sociopolitical change. But to dismiss the film as some kind of old man's rant—which so many have done even as they obliviously cite the film's intoxicating visual beauty—is to misunderstand or outright ignore the clear display of fairness and even hope. The oblique approach to the movie, located somewhere in the nebula between essay and narrative film, may seem removed, even elegiac, but socialism, through the medium of film, can still right the wrongs, if both are applied correctly.

In separating out the stereo tracks into an aural dialectic, Godard returns to some of the more challenging aspects of the DVG, but his juxtapositions here make analytical debates out of rhetorical flourishes, and his willingness to leave in the mistakes (the jump cuts of yore now appear to be the buffering of today) and to even hand off his camera to others opens up untold possibilities I have only begun to examine. Godard's hyperintellectual, referential modernism is still on display, but the old-fashioned octogenarian nevertheless shows a curiosity for new technologies and means of communication. Hell, he even demonstrates his understanding of the Internet by making his very own cat video, one of many moments in the film so disarmingly funny that even the densest segments don't feel so self-serious. The endless punning in particular shall take me eons to sort through.

I will need to return again and again to Film Socialisme to truly unpack it, and I dare not write about it again until I've filled the gaps of knowledge in his filmography. But I was as excited and enthralled by Film Socialisme as any other masterpiece I saw this year, and its ability to make dialectic of the emotional states of weary surrender and renewed, more-powerful-than-ever optimism is one of the most intriguing, complex, potentially rewarding arguments Godard has ever mounted for art, politics, and the union of both.

Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz, 2011)

2011-12-20T11:19:00.000-06:00

Shot with oil-on-canvas-toned cinematography and dovetailing into so many random narrative threads that Laurence Sterne might have expressed his approval, Raúl Ruiz's epic, penultimate completed feature Mysteries of Lisbon scarcely looks like the usual period costume drama. Instead of the director falling back to let the art design do all the work, Ruiz makes his camera the most visible and alluring aspect of the whole production. His direction moves in pendulous swings, oscillating back and forth between conflicting perspective, truth and fiction, past and present (if a present even exists), all within the same elegant long take.

Having previously seen but one other Ruiz film, I am sorry to say I cannot comment on how much of the filmmaker's tics and themes are reflected in the gargantuan adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's novel. And as the book itself does not seem to have an English translation, I cannot even say whether the oddities contained herein are those of the author or the director. Nevertheless, the film—actually edited down to its four-and-a-half-hour running length from a six-hour miniseries—certainly feels like a summation, and I could easily spot structural and stylistic similarities between this and Three Crowns of the Sailor: idiosyncratic, rhythmically arrhythmic editing patterns; unorthodox shot placement; and a narrative style that hinges on a constant intrusion by a new voice who seizes the reins to tell his own story that sends any hint of plot consistency out the window.

Beginning as a bildungsroman, Mysteries of Lisbon charts the reminiscences of Pedro da Silva, whom we meet as Joao in a religious school. But when the "orphan's" mother, a destitute countess with a tragic past arrives to meet her abandoned son, the film sets in motion its relay race structure, constantly moving to new narrators, new recollections, new adventures. After flashbacks uncover Angela's doomed romance and her subsequent marriage to a horrifically abusive count, we see the countess retreating into a convent after the man's deathbed repentance, depriving Joao of the parent he only just discovered. But then, she's already deprived him of his own story, and he won't get it back until the last hour of the film, at which point he appears as an adult with a different name, so that it takes a few of his final section just to recognize him.

Rather than simply chart Pedro/Joao's life, the film instead heads down various rabbit holes, with characters gliding into frame to announce they have a story to tell as Ruiz accommodates them like a polite person who cannot bring himself to protest the intrusions. These incessant diversions generally revolve around the same basic plots of tragic romances leading to death and lifelong misery, of constantly reversing fortunes, and of bitter retreats into the oblivion afforded by monasteries and nunneries, where religion can shield one from this awful world.

This has the effect of making the narrative cyclical even as it gaily bounces around time and subject. The recurring tidbit of scandalous pre-marital affairs leading to bastard children suggests that everyone in the European nobility is illegitimate, a potential commentary exacerbated by the fact that all of them live a lavish lifestyle yet are utterly broke. Ruiz's treatment of organized Christianity, shown to be a force of mental oblivion, is more ambiguous: does its sheltering protection offer some modicum of peace for these troubled souls, or is it merely a means of ignoring oneself?

Yet the film's true themes work on a more intimate level, and Ruiz ties them to his camerawork. André Szankowski's cinematography renders the Romantic absurdist tales of duels, disguises and despair with faded, naturalistic (though clearly artificial) chiaroscuro, muting the sense of adventurousness with a more tangible empathy. Mysteries of Lisbon, despite its remove and careful construction, feels for its characters, moving beyond any statement on European history to closer examine the ideas of Romanticism. Passionate romance never succeeds, and babies are often left without either of their parents as the survivor cannot bear the reminder of lost love. Some of the characters openly link their lack of parentage with a lack of national identity—the film is primarily set in the confusion of post-Napoleonic Europe—but it's the unending personal loss that affects these characters. That's true even in more ridiculous circumstances, such as Elisa, the jilted countess who manipulates the adult Pedro into avenging her honor for the one man who got the better of her in her series of games. Even this woman, who has so casually toyed with so many, can feel when hints of amorousness are not reciprocated.

Nevertheless, what truly marks Mysteries of Lisbon is its playfulness. Ruiz will film a dialogue is just about every way except for the pat use of shot/reverse shot close-ups. His off-kilter framing breaks up the naturalism and makes each shot a sumptuous, occasionally surrealist treat. One scene of dialogue occurs in a long take as two men sit before a gigantic fresco, the camera pulled back to soak in the painting, which clearly matters as much to the scene's layout, if not more, than the important conversation being had in front of it. Elsewhere, a close-up on a coffee cup shows a man's reflection rocking back and forth in the disturbed liquid, only for Ruiz to then layer in a shot of the cup itself over another frame as if the glass of the camera lens is reflecting it. The director also frequently inserts shots of Joao/Pedro's diorama of a theater throughout, the cut-outs matching the action to add new perspectives on what is happening, and also to suggest that the whole thing might be a put-on.

That feeling is only exacerbated by other narrative points.. As the narrative pushes further and further away from Pedro, one last glimpse of the boy as a child shows him stumbling into a forbidden room at Father Dinis' college that reveals the priest to be the master key of the film, his collection of disguises linking him to all the filmed exploits in some form or fashion. And when everything winds down with a reflective Pedro at the end, the unreliable narrator reaches the peak of his ambiguity, leaving the audience wondering if anything shown has been remotely true. But that is a trivial issue, for Ruiz's ever-expanding story is deliberately, giddily about its own construction and artificiality, from the foreshadowing tiles over which the opening credits are placed to the way in which dead characters can casually return in the flesh in order to play new roles in other vignettes. Ruiz, who defied doctor's orders to make this film, injects himself and his touches into the work as much as a fearless writer makes the style of literature as important as the content, if not more so. Some may dismiss this as indulgence, but when the results are a magical and, for a 266-minute feature, as fleet-footed, cinema could use more of this kind of self-servitude.

Capsule Reviews: Bellflower, Happy Feet Two, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

2011-12-18T17:01:00.000-06:00

Bellflower (Evan Glodell, 2011)

The focal properties of Evan Glodell's self-made camera as seen in Bellflower seem to work not along lines of length, clarity and fuzziness instead defined along the horizontal axis of the 2D screen. The yellow-toned haze makes for a fitting mirage feel, given the characters' fixation on a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic future of oily conflagrations in scorched-earth deserts. Having seen George Miller's films as kids, Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden hope to make the ultimate death machine on four wheels, complete with a whiskey fountain in the glove compartment, because what is the point of life after The End if you can't get loaded? Yet the film doesn't present, or at least does not ultimately present, Woodrow's childish obsession as some charming quirk despite his initial "indie" feel as a socially awkward but adorable dork. Eventually, however, Glodell upends the macho posturing as Woodrow slowly spirals off his axis.

Impressively technical given its paltry $17,000 budget, Bellflower manages to tell its story primarily through images, sinking further and further into Woodrow's demented point of view as his boyish imagination carries through to its logically violent endpoint. Unfortunately, the visual storytelling is undercut by any and all dialogue, which is typically delivered in the manner of the poor kid who has to be the narrator for a school play. Furthermore, its lugubrious movement becomes less a hypnotic tour through a stunted, aggressive man's psyche than a mere slog, the flights of hyperviolent fantasy not revealing so much as absurd. Glodell's film aligns along several parallels with Nicholas Winding Refn's superb Drive: both deal with spaced-out car fixations, both feature psychopathic protagonists waiting to be unleashed, both sport throbbing electronic scores (though Cliff Martinez leaves the work here in the dust), and both offer their makers the chance to strut their stuff. It's a testament to Glodell's almost innate skill that at times he can be as visually exciting as a proven stylist working with his biggest budget yet. Nevertheless, Bellflower's descent into grim fantasy bears out all the isolated flaws of Drive and blows them up, and for all the film's impressive elements, its most lasting impression was the hope that Glodell gets offered something better off the strength of it.

Happy Feet Two (George Miller, 2011)

At once incoherently overloaded and desperately spare, the sequel to 2006's unexpected delight Happy Feet is a joyless slog. The animation is still bright and cheerful, though the penguins themselves just look awkward. The plot doesn't congeal for nearly a full hour, and by then the musical numbers have proven so irritating that even the suspense of whether an entire colony of penguins might perish fails to generate any narrative oomph. The subplot involving an existentially independent krill and his fretful buddy (Brad Pitt and Matt Damon) is amusing, and the frequent scale changes that shrink and expand the frame to show their location in the grand scheme of things allows Miller to play with the possibilities of animation. But the whole thing is so inert and uninspiring that the candy-coated whimsy never takes hold as it did in the first film. George Miller is one of the few directors capable of consistently making sequels that top his first franchise entries (see both Mad Max sequels and Babe: Pig in the City), but at last he finally makes a follow-up that adheres to the usual level of sequel quality.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig, 2011)

From the moment Craig's camera moves away from the clean and nervous undergrads to the hillbillies they perceive as hick killers, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil routinely subverts the typical horror conventions, making for a sort of Grendel to hillbilly-killer movies' Beowulf. Alan Tudyk and Taylor Labine are fantastic as the dim but good-natured hicks who find themselves misunderstood as monsters by those who always saw them as such. Their constant bewilderment at the gruesome carnage that unfolds around them through horrible accidents is hysterical, and Craig displays a talent for staging gory yet uproarious deaths that recall Edgar Wright's gifts for comic bloodbaths. But even amid all the ludicrous deaths is a more organic, character-driven comedy that makes full use of Tudyk, Labine and Katrina Bowden, who gets the chance to show that her funniness on 30 Rock isn't merely the result of Tina Fey's writing.

The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

2011-12-18T06:56:00.000-06:00

Written as one extended climax, The Adventures of Tintin can be a draining experience, and one generally bereft of traditionally dramatic human elements. Yet the film bursts with such exuberance and imagination that even the Uncanny Valley limitations of motion-capture animation vanish in Brobdingnagian sequences so vast they make the special effect showcases of the Indiana Jones films look like the Super-8 pictures Spielberg made as a teenager. However well or poorly Spielberg's crack team of British writers capture the spirit of Hergé comics, Tintin is remarkable first and foremost for allowing one of cinema's biggest dreamers the opportunity to do anything he wants to do.

Spielberg's camera, already so active and eager in his live-action films, is here unmoored from any hindrance, be it spatial dimensions, production safety or physics itself. Every shot swoons, tilts, zooms and soars with elegance, creating such fluid motion that scenes routinely flow into each other through sudden inversions of scale and setting. A massive setpiece shrinks into a puddle of water stepped in as the focus shifts, or a camelback trek through an endless desert forms on the back of a hand. Such segues make the film even more vertiginous, a dizzying, unabashed exercise in style over substance, one constantly in motion as the 3D communicate the unstoppable momentum, not unlike action lines in a comic. But when the artist in question is one of the medium's great stylists, sometimes it's more rewarding to simply sit back and be wowed.

Even the traditionally animated opening credits evoke a sense of goofy yet epic exploration, condensing the entire film to a shadowplay of whimsy and intrigue. The camera finally pulls back from this dynamic opening to reveal the 3D world, which instantly looks different from previous forays into mocap. Faces still have an awkward stiffness to them, but clear advances in the technology make for a far greater range of expressions and naturalness than the clumsy, even repellent animation that has obsessed Robert Zemeckis for whatever reason. Tintin himself (Jaime Bell) is the most porcelain-looking of all the characters, but his immediately apparent and unquenchable thirst for adventure makes his unblemished face endearing rather than creepy, and the grizzlier, more textured friends and foes he encounters on his journey make for artfully simple black/white designations of comic book heroes and less pure beings.

The animation in broader terms is simply stunning. The jam-packed mise-en-scène is never incoherent, and the detail of background characters is so good that some looked just like real people. Coordinating what Spielberg wanted took plenty of man-hours (he completed the physical filming for the motion capture by March 2009 and animation has taken up the intervening two years), but the results are breathtaking, complex yet ultimately lucid. The animation also benefits from the lighting consultation of Spielberg's regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, whose advice here benefits the film's gorgeous aesthetic as much as Roger Deakins' work on Wall•E made the animation not merely technically beautiful but artfully arranged. Kamiński helps lay out a noirish world in the first half that makes brilliant (in both senses of the word) use of blinding lights piercing fog and night to illuminate and disorient in equal measure. Street lamps, headlights, even muzzle flashes have a lyrical quality to them only enhanced by the danger they signify.

Combining several of the comic book stories into one narrative, Tintin moves at breakneck speed, instantly introducing a model of a ship that contains part of a guide to treasure and spiraling into a global trek by the end of the first act. The action moves at a similar pace, with even a minor apartment chase between a cat and Tintin's trusty dog Snowy working as a display of uninhibited camera movement. But soon such silly bits morph into gigantic, freewheeling pieces of constantly evolving mise-en-scène that layers utter pandemonium without the shot ever losing focus. To pick but one of several lengthy examples, a chase through the streets of Middle Eastern land "Bagghar" features Tintin, Snowy and their perpetually drunken but necessary ally Capt. Haddock (Andy Serkis, yet again putting in an expressive and multifaceted mocap performance) chasing after the stolen clues to sunken treasure. Spielberg piles on the absurdities, from a misfired rocket exploding a dam to a tank jutting into view, dragging along the building it unsuccessfully attempted to drive through. The action even splinters off in different directions, but Spielberg manages to track one character until he comes back in contact with another headed in an opposite direction, not cutting but merely arranging the progression of stunts until everything folds back to the other focal point.

It's tempting just to list all of the things that happen in any given sequence, though that would necessitate several thousand words to simply account for the objects in the frame. But the sheer giddiness of the construction is hard to shake off; after a decade and a half of more serious, dark films, Spielberg evokes open-mouthed, ecstatic wonderment for the first time since he panned up to show that brachiosaur in Jurassic Park. I went into Tintin looking forward to whatever the astonishing writing team of Edgar Wright, Steven Moffat and Joe Cornish came up with, but as much as I enjoyed their jokes—a scene with bumbling Interpol detectives Thompson and Thompson and a pickpocket achieves screwball-era verbal acrobatics—I kept coming back to Spielberg's unleashed id, where his visual creativity moves unbounded and his childlike exuberance and darker thoughts can coexist in ways they never quite managed to in, say, Hook. Through Haddock, the film touches upon the notions of failure, depression and redemption, and I noted that, after that absurd retooling of E.T., Spielberg no longer seems to have a problem with guns appearing in a film ostensibly for children (hell, Tintin himself gets off some rounds). But even those more grim facets cannot for one moment lessen the overwhelming delight of the picture, one of the purest expressions by one of the most resolutely uplifting of filmmakers.

Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2011)

2011-12-17T17:24:00.000-06:00

Jason Reitman's and Diablo Cody's Juno showed a self-consciously "quirky" high-school girl growing up quickly to deal with an adult problem, her cloyingly quirky lingo falling by the wayside as she matured into an empathetic, responsible person. Young Adult depicts the inverse of that story, of the prom queen who never outgrew that period of her life where she was some form of royalty, her preserved physical beauty akin to Dorian Gray's aesthetic mask. Soulless and resolutely conceited, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a profoundly unlikable character, a vile creature who despises anyone kind enough to spare her pity and insists on remolding the scariness of the real world back into the teenage years she ruled. Some may blanch at Mavis' sheer mean-spiritedness and unbending attitude, but whom do we see more in real life: the Junos who can quickly adapt and mature, or the Mavises?

Theron plays Mavis as if using the part as a screen test for her upcoming turn as the evil queen in Snow White and the Hunstman. She peers at the world with narrowed, confrontational eyes, perpetually disgusted by the normalcy of adult life but unable to see that she's encased herself in amber. Living in a high-rise tower in Minneapolis, Mavis ghostwrites young adult fiction that allows her to hang onto her perversely stretched youth, and her friend drips steel-melting acid as she sarcastically reassures Mavis that she's completely moved beyond the one-horse town she talks about incessantly. That fixation on her glory days compounds when her old flame sends her a birth announcement, inexplicably prompting a decision to return to her hometown to win him back. Cody and Reitman sell it like the starting point of a romantic comedy, but as Mavis obsessively replays Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept" from a mixtape that ex- made her in high school on the way home, her drive resembles Travis Bickle heading for the pimp instead of the usual chasing a lover at the airport. Reitman even zooms into the innards of the cassette, the meticulous overview of its parts visualizing just how completely Mavis has crawled inside her teenage shell to hide from adulthood.

That gutting of traditional romantic comedy mechanics extends through the whole film, which never fails to present Mavis' dream of breaking up the happy marriage of her beloved Buddy (Patrick Wilson) as predatory, not affectionate. As a director, Reitman wisely stays out of Cody's way, but he films everything in harsh, revealing terms, casting unwelcome light on the wrinkles forming on Theron's face to the dirty trackpad of her clearly well-used Macbook. Even wretchedly obvious shots that disdainfully linger on chains like Staples and KFC work by conveying Mavis' stuck-up, hypocritical POV, the immaturity of this film school-grade "commentary" reflecting a character, not the director. Rather than throwing an arm around a lazily superior audience to coddle them, the film practically sets itself against the crowd by mocking such holier-than-thou distaste of mass culture as childish.

And if that doesn't set you on edge, Mavis takes back over after this early montage to seize control of the rest of the movie, and her actions continuously the viewer's patience with her sheer nastiness. Greeting Mavis back in Mercury is not Buddy but Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), a doughy nerd who was left crippled by a homophobic beating in high school. But Matt's bitterness soon crowds out any instant sympathy, and he proves as unable to move beyond his past as Mavis. Oswalt brings some of his buried aggression from Big Fan to the part, forming Matt into a mound of impotent fury so hell-bent on feeling sorry for himself that he even hates other disabled people for stealing attention from him. Oswalt essentially plays Mavis' unheeded conscience, but Matt is so unpleasant in his own right that his warnings about leaving Buddy seem to stem more from practical worry than moral concern. The comedian gets most of the film's outright punchlines, but he delivers them with an edge; when Mavis airily explains what a zombie is, Matt snaps, "I'm a fat geek, I know what a zombie is." On paper, that joke reads as mere banter, but Oswalt reads it as if barely keeping his temper in check, anxious to keep check of that myopic grasp on pop culture that constitutes the only territory he knows and controls.

Mavis and Matt make a hell of a misanthropic double act, sniping at everyone within eyesight, including each other. Both receive so much pity from those around them that the brutal takedowns they lob between them are perhaps the first honest assessments they've ever heard of themselves. Matt, who knows he would have no shot with someone like Mavis even at his best, can taunt her for failing book series and her emotional cocoon. Mavis, so unconcerned with hurting someone's feelings, can harangue Matt for being so unapproachable because of his personality, not his disability. (And as a YA writer, she naturally uses hacky, clichéd lines that play on his crutch to do so.)

But not even these confrontations can shake something loose in either character, and Young Adult routinely sets up the usual plot points designed to offer some kind of breakthrough—a drunken kiss, the aforementioned exchange of critical evaluations, even an almost painfully sad scene of shared grief—only to collapse back into self-delusion. I winced all during a party scene near the end, waiting for the explosion that had to come, which it did, albeit in a wholly unexpected manner that managed to sidestep the easy way out but revealed a clarifying piece of information that does nothing to alter one's opinion of Mavis.

This is not easy stuff, and even those who typically have no problem with unsympathetic characters have responded viscerally to the film's unrepentant pessimism. But Cody is no mere nihilist, and Young Adult is filled with good people living contented lives. But they are not the stars, and their lives are not glorious and remarkable in the way they need to be to counteract the two principal players, who view such prosaic happiness as beneath them yet can attain nothing better. One of my notes for Young Adult said it was a better horror film than Jennifer's Body, but upon further reflection, I cannot call it such because it all feels too real and unexaggerated. Some people will never learn, so close-minded that nothing will penetrate years of self-deception and insecurity manifested as perverse haughtiness. Those who dismiss Cody as someone writing what she thinks is teen slang have already had two demonstrations of her criticism of youth and all its inexperience and arrogance. If Young Adult cannot convince them of her rejection of such self-involved attitudes, then perhaps Mavis and Matt aren't the only ones clouded by shallow prejudices.

The Interrupters (Steve James, 2011)

2011-12-16T21:37:00.002-06:00

Too many shots of curbside shrines litter Steve James' new documentary, The Interrupters. Too many goddamn shots of goddamn patches of decorated dirt with names and final ages fading up over the soggy teddy bears and perfunctory "R.I.P." scrawls on taped-up cards. James captures so many ambulances racing down Chicago streets to the next act of violence that the vehicles become a sort of active transition, a Kurosawa screen wipe between scenes. With such chaos raging on American streets, it's no wonder so many in the film compare urban Chicago to a war zone, and oddly fitting that the founder of a program to address the uncontrollable waves of brutality is an epidemiologist by trade.

Gary Slutkin speaks of the titular Interrupters, a sub-category of his original Cease Fire program, in such technical terms, referring to them as the "initial interruption of transmission." Not, as you may have noticed, the "cure." James is not so presumptuous as to suggest a clear path to more peaceful streets, and his subjects are too battle-scarred to even speculate about such a lofty goal. But it is precisely that temporary aberration, that minor impediment to the unmitigated outbreaks, that sets the stage for a cure. James has always been a filmmaker with a fair hand but a clear point of view, but here he finds a topic without an opposing side. Viewers can form their own opinions about the two basketball prodigies and their families, as well as whether Stevie's crimes should be handled with empathy and study or swiftly condemned and punished for their vile nature. But no one can honestly take a position against CeaseFire, which looks out upon a community where few poor minorities live past 30 and says this cannot continue.

That gives The Interrupters more of a "preaching to the choir" feel than the documentarian's other work, the choir here being practically everyone. Yet James, as ever, makes compelling, intimate drama of social quagmires. If Hoop Dreams is all about the country's misplaced and commercialized values system and Stevie probes the issue of crime and whether one can ever truly reach that crime instead of merely handling each criminal, The Interrupters can only worry about effecting an armistice. It cannot ask similarly high-minded questions because bullets are still flying, and unless the assembly of reformed gangbangers looking to prevent future incarnations of their mistakes can stop them, there won't be anyone left to answer any queries.

As a documentary filmmaker, James excels at finding intensely dramatic stories, and this subject is so immediate that the Interrupters literally have to break up a potential stabbing right outside their office, a situation that spiraled out of control from someone merely talking smack. At a youth transition home, a nearly lethal fight breaks out over a matter of five dollars. Some question Cease Fire using ex-cons and enforcers from the same streets, but one look at how quickly horror can escalate, it soon becomes painfully apparent that only such people can mediate the street war. Even children in the area are so jaded by violence that they need someone who has survived this world to be believable. One interrupter comes to a school designed to help traumatized kids recover and tells them to confide in him. Beside him, a chirpy teacher awkwardly seconds that and says they can talk to her too, but the kids barely even turn their attention to her, looking to unload their secrets and horrors to someone who actually knows. At one point, the director of CeaseFire, Tio Hardiman, meets with some representatives from South Africa to talk about the program, and they express open hesitation about the lack of cooperation between the program and cops, even when Hardiman explains how important it is that the members remain neutral to keep the peace. I couldn't help but find it strange that such trepidation came from citizens of a country that has fresher memories than most of the hostility that can exist between the people and the authorities.

Watching the Interrupters work is akin to witnessing bomb disposal. The altercations that lead to so many deaths in Chicago are often spontaneous and driven by uncontrollable tempers, and to insert oneself into such scenarios takes guts. A recurring "subplot" involves a volatile man who calls himself Flamo, a man driven insensible by his desire for revenge for a slight, willing to die or go to jail and to leave his family without a child and a father. One interrupter, Cobe Williams, deals with Flamo's volcanic rage, clipping the right wires to calm him down without setting off the explosion. Too see Cobe, and the others, placing themselves into such perilous situations is as inspiring as it is suspenseful. Like every free throw shot in Hoop Dreams, every intervention here carries all the more weight for being real.Knowing that every time the Interrupters fail to mediate a feud, someone dies, hits home with brutal drama, Likewise, each success feels all the more joyous for having literally saved a life, maybe even more, as violence begets more violence within mere hours in Chicago, like bacteria multiplying on a petri dish.

But no one commands the audience's attention like Ameena Matthews. The daughter of one of Chicago's most notorious gang leaders, Matthews cleaned up her act and steals the show as the most forceful personality in CeaseFire. On the surface, she looks like she'd be helpless in this line of work, with her short frame and al-amira-covered head. Yet she speaks with a blunt honesty, a wit and righteous fury, that makes her perhaps the most effective member of the Interrupters. Her combination of toughness, harder than the most steely male she confronts, and maternal care makes her trusted by practically everyone, and when she stomps fearlessly into the middle of a group of rough-looking men to admonish them with a boy's obituary, any instinctive fear one might have for such a suicide mission abates when she cows them into shame; James even catches one kid wiping tears from his eyes as she speaks. Ameena is one of those people who will remain in the same neighborhood until she dies, whose impact may never reach beyond that community's borders, yet who articulates and acts upon such a simple goodness that she gives the impression of being able to save the world.

As with James' other films, The Interrupters offers no easy answers, either for the personal stories of constant struggle or the societal issues they embody. With Chicago politicians so desperate to get their districts under control that they beg for the National Guard to patrol city streets, with children as shellshocked with PTSD as returning veterans, barely any hope survives. But some does, and the bittersweet epilogue shows how the actions of these dedicated, reformed criminals, however small, can have demonstrable consequences. Even if they only help one person break the chain of aggression and vengeance, lives will be saved. Chicago will see too many more of those wrenching shrines before the problem is solved, but who could argue that there being fewer of them is anything less than a step in the right direction?

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)

2011-12-15T18:01:00.000-06:00

Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is one of the wildest farces in the lurid melodramatist's oeuvre, even as it is also one of the least shocking. The director's pet narrative tics of rape and other forms of abuse are nowhere to be found, with the worst cruelty inflicted by a male upon the female protagonist that of dumping her via answering machine. Even when sexual relations with a terrorist come into play, it is solely in terms of pure comedy, an absurd twist that adds just one more damn hurdle in the heroine's desire to kill herself. Some days you just can't win.

Only a director with a filmography like Almodóvar's could put this material into a film and have it be the one movie of his that isn't a black comedy. Instead, Women is a lighthearted take on his usual gender politics, where the women are hysterical, overwrought and dangerous, but still more appetizing than the men, who are lustful and cowardly and afraid to show the emotions that the women personify. But at the end of every crying jag over deceitful or departing lovers is the realization that they were too good for those assholes anyway, a Lifetime movie message made effervescent and utterly, joyously insane by Almodóvar's singular postmodernization of kitsch.

The opening credits, of vibrant fashion mag cut-ups arranged into collages of fetishized body parts at advertised products, looks like someone took Godard's Une femme mariée and poured paint on it, a montage of commentary as suggestive as it is hilariously dispensable to the story to follow. Almodóvar moves from these credits to a woman, Pepa (early Almodóvar muse Carmen Maura), coming out of her Valium-induced slumber. Her lover, Iván, a smooth-talking lothario, revealed his true colors by breaking up with Pepa by answering machine—not even a damn phone call—but this pathetic move cannot make Pepa see what a horse's ass he is, and she calmly gets another refill of sleeping pills to dump into some fresh gazpacho as a last meal.

Before she can get around to the small matter of offing herself, however, Pepa must deal with a variety of mad distractions. First, her bed suddenly catches fire, which she finally puts out after impatiently watching the conflagration as if weighing her options. Then comes Candela, who irritates Pepa by leaving a series of frantic, clearly urgent messages that the woman instantly deletes in the hopes of getting to one left by Iván. When the poor friend finally just comes to Pepa's penthouse, she relates a story of sleeping with an Arab man who turned out to be a Shiite terrorist planning a hijacking. Petrified that police will consider her an accomplice, Candela is, if anything, more suicidal than Pepa, unwilling to even alert the authorities to a possible attack in order to avoid any suspicion. Finally, Iván's son from a previous relationship, Carlos (a young Antonio Banderas with a dorky '80s haircut), comes to look at the apartment that Pepa wants to sublet, allowing the protagonist to vent her sadness to a relative of her lover's. Carlos also brings along his fiancée, Marisa, a woman with the face of a Hapsburg and a snotty, spoiled attitude to match.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown steeps its absurdities in overblown color, with every object shaded in every conceivable hue save one that looks "normal." The apartment balcony is so overwhelmingly florid that it almost resembles the oneiric balcony at the start of Hausu, where the overlit and stylized porch is so candy-colored and bright that it repels instead of allures. Almodóvar loves to toy with perfectly framed inanities, such as the mobile set of a mambo-loving taxi driver, a garish explosion of trinkets and tastelessness that wouldn't be equalled until the glittering dollhouse of a cab at the start of The Darjeeling Limited. He also includes enough close-ups of high heels to make Buñuel proud. Or horny. Or both. Other delights are innumerable, but I have a particular soft spot for the gonzo TV ad for detergent framed as a mother cleaning the bloody clothes of her serial killer son, with detectives bursting in and standing back, impressed, at just how well the product eradicates potential evidence. I also love the occupations of Pepa and Iván, both voiceover artists who dub American films. Almodóvar shows them overdubbing Johnny Guitar a similarly gender-bending exercise in gaudy, brilliant melodrama. Later, their talents extend to the diegetic world, the voices of the two emanating from Carlos' mouth as he reads correspondence between them.

For a film about harboring terrorists, insane women, drugging cops and grieving lovers, the stakes are low, which makes the tizzies into which everyone works themselves so much funnier. Pepa isn't the only one of Iván's jilted lovers, and he even drove Carlos' mother Lucia (Julieta Serrano) mad. She goes completely unhinged at the end, leading to an uproarious chase scene of the dragon lady riding on a motorcycle firing wildly at that damn mambo cab, a close-up of her pancaked-pale face static with liberated craziness as her hair billows behind her is one of the most hysterically terrifying shots in cinema, and windswept look when she dismounts and hunts for Iván somehow makes the situation even funnier and scarier. After being put through hell, Pepa finally realizes she's too good for Iván at her moment of triumph, a feminine victory checked by the overwhelming desire it creates in the viewer to yell, "Now you get this?!" Equally true, if just as silly, is the smaller lesson learned with the coda, where Pepa returns home and has a chat with a much more pleasant Marisa about how sometimes, a nice nap can be as refreshing as a good screw.

Project Nim (James Marsh, 2011)

2011-12-15T06:53:00.000-06:00

James Marsh, director of 2008's spellbinding, playful documentary Man on Wire, initially presents Project Nim, the story of a mid'-'70s language acquisition experiment on a chimpanzee, with a similar sense of wonder and magic. The baby chimp, though harshly removed from his mother, finds warmth and love from the people who handle him, and photographs and archival footage of his bulbous eyes, too big for the head that has not yet grown into them, too cute to handle. Every breakthrough of communication feels like a triumph, with every word of sign language Nim learns opening new possibilities not merely in linguistic study but for fundamental questions about nature vs. nurture, the mental potential of other species, and more.

Soon, however, Project Nim becomes something else entirely. Marsh shifts his focus from the late chimpanzee to those who came into contact with the animal as what initially seemed a straightforward study spiraled wildly out of control. The basic structure of the experiment soon falls apart, and those in charge of it try to fix the situation by taking steps that essentially invalidate any data gathered. Further ethical violations turn the entire procedure into a farce, with more than one female member engaging in trysts with the NYU professor who created the study, hippie assistants giving Nim beer and weed, and the original caretaker and primary teacher losing it and obsessing over Nim's sexual identity instead of teaching him language.

"It was the '70s," laughs the daughter of that woman as a means of justification, still in disbelief over the whole situation decades later. Even when new assistants come in to handle Nim, their initial dedication to more scientific behavior soon finding an inconsistent balance of analytical study and over-attached frolicking. The researchers all say the goal was to raise Nim as if he were a human child, but Nim is treated like a fascinating aberration from the start. The head of the project, Herbert Terrace, later concluded that the experiment had been a failure, that chimpanzees could only use sign language for basic wants, not real communication, but it doesn't take a qualified researcher to spot the flaws in that conclusion when Nim is raised just to use language to get things.

People fail Nim in various ways, be it Stephanie going crazy over Oedipal complexes and necessitating removal from her home or Terrace not anticipating the full danger a growing chimp poses to people, forcing the isolated creature to be mercilessly dumped in a primate holding facility that even its former employees described as a prison. Marsh captures waves of grief and outrage in his subjects, their anguish at losing what feels like a family member never so overwhelming that one can forget all of them have kept Nim from his true family all his life. But Nim has a clear effect on everyone, and even those considered villains by some of the others reveal a clear regret over their actions. Marsh introduces an animal tester who bought out the ailing chimp facility where Nim gets sent with a glacial camera shot that presents the man as some kind of supervillain, but he immediately speaks of hating the cruelty of his job with a passion.

"You had to be true of heart," says one handler of working with primates. "If you had dark places in you, they'd know it and they wouldn't like you." Marsh underscores the irony, and the accuracy, of that statement by bringing out his subjects' dark places as they were exposed by Nim, with even the most good-natured of people committing some clear error in dealing with the chimp. The director uses these various character blemishes to craft an elegy for a beloved but mistreated creature, something that brought love and pain into the lives of those who knew him. Marsh has a wealth of archival footage, but his signature use of fractured recreations and ethereal tracking shots around his subjects, simply observing silent talking heads, continues to be an effective, elegant means of generating a connection to the usual banality of filmed interviews. It also has the effect of turning the tables on the observers, now poring over them looking for intriguing data as they watch the roaming camera with mild discomfort at the surveillance. Like Nim, they aren't always so charming, and Marsh is no more objective a researcher than they. But he sees the genuine passion they have for Nim, and while that doesn't forgive the strange, sad life of one chimpanzee, it does find a closure the interviewees never saw in their all-too-short interactions with the touching creature.

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)

2011-12-14T11:14:00.001-06:00

Asghar Farhadi at once places A Separation within Iranian social critique and moves far beyond it from the first static two shot that follows the credits sequence. Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) talk to a judge about getting a divorce, and the official's refusal to grant it reminds Western audiences of the religious hold still in effect on nations like Iran. Even the nature of the marital dispute invokes the country's strict social regulations, with the rift coming from Nader's desire to stay in the land Simin so desperately wants to leave. But the shot never leaves the couple, never shows the symbol of governmental oppression who will not grant their request. Soon the two seem to stop noticing the third party altogether, bickering with each other and only turning to the befuddled judge to ask for his support, not in any legally binding sense but in the manner someone asks a friend to agree with a minor dispute. Within minutes Farhadi firmly repositions the film's focus from a potential social commentary to a complex human drama that, like the husband and wife do the judge, demands the audience pick a side, only to make every set of choices too passionately argued to make a decision easy, if at all possible.

Farhadi wastes no time setting up intractable feuds. Simin's desire to raise her daughter outside Iran's constrictive theocracy naturally earns sympathy from this secular viewer, but she callously disregards Nader's reason for wanting to stay, namely, his Alzheimer's-stricken father who needs his son's care. This is but the first of the film's many quandaries of responsibility and ethical obligation: Simin has grown weary of caring for her father-in-law and feels no inherent accountability for the man, while Nader could not live with himself if he shuffled off the onus of caregiving to a stranger and left. Who's wrong here? Not even a judge can say, and when the couple returns home, Simin decides to cut off the whole argument by moving back in with her parents, leaving Nader and their pubescent daughter Termeh to fend for themselves.

Simin's annoyance at her current lifestyle becomes clear largely in her absence. Left to fend for themselves, Nader and Termeh reveal a complete lack of basic know-how as a result of the wife tending to all the housekeeping. They hunch over the washer as if it were an alien device with indecipherable settings, Termeh at last hitting upon the idea of always setting it to a particular type of wash because the number designating it as such is the most faded, suggesting the most frequent use. Her desire to leave also reveals another key flaw in Nader's seemingly noble endeavor to look after his father, namely that Simin is the one who does most of the work in cleaning and caring for the old man. And despite being so willing to leave the father behind, Simin recognizes the man needs help, so she hires a pregnant woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), to come look after him. From Simin's point of view, this is an act of kindness, but a series of incidents erupts from this decision that will implicate every introduced character in some terrible breach of ethics and duty.

Razieh's presence only compounds the issues of responsibility, and Farhadi's camera stays with each character just long enough to privilege that person's particular perspective before introducing a voice that viciously undercuts that outlook. With Nader and Termeh gone during the day, the camera can only stay with Razieh, who has accepted money to look after Nader's father but was not told of just what she would have to do. Cleaning up an incontinent man goes against her deeply held religious beliefs, and the stress of handling a grown person as a child grates before the first day is done. With Razieh, one sees her objections; she's not trained for this, and to spring the hardship of caring for an Alzheimer's patient on a stranger is unfair. But when Nader returns home to her objections and, later, her horrifying failures to adequately look after her charge, his concern for his father overrides any consideration of her reasonable objections.

Motivation is always clear in A Separation, Farhadi's script giving the characters ample chance to explain themselves. But their motivations lead to selfish, narrowly considered actions that spiral so far out of control that all anyone can do is look for anyone else to blame, not merely out of self-protection but psychological inability to cope with the thought of being even partly to blame for the gut-wrenching occurrences littered across the film. Late in the film, when Simin must return to handle a crisis that threatens to send Nader to prison, the husband contends that her departure caused all of this, and Simin has been off-screen for so long that Farhadi almost, almost, seems to be agreeing with him. Then Simin caustically reminds her estranged husband that she was only gone a week, that his own failure to handle the basic functions of surviving without her has led to a disaster in mere days. I remember Hatami from her star-making turn in the devastating Leila, where she played the spineless woman so ingratiating to her husband's family that she helped tear apart her happy marriage trying to do what she thought would please her already-content husband. Simin is light-years away from Leila, a steely force of resolve who can shred her husband's self-righteous guiltlessness in seconds, even twisting the knife as she mockingly reminds him of the mistake he made in throwing a pregnant woman from his doorstep.

The legal case that arises from that forcible expulsion, and the tragedy that potentially arises from it, defines the narrative direction of the film's second half, but it really serves to introduce another facet to the film's questions of deferred responsibility, that of telling the truth and using lies not merely to protect one's life but the whole fabric of one's surroundings. The principle parties, Nader and Razieh, clearly lie to protect themselves, but even outside forces weigh in for both parties. Razieh's violent husband Hodjat (a frightfully volatile Shahab Hosseini) and Termeh's teacher give their own testimonies, each with their own omissions or fabrications to look after those they know. "If she's supposed to tell the truth, why should she be careful?" Termeh asks her father when Nader warns a neighbor that investigators are coming, but she soon finds out herself when she and Razieh's own daughter, Somayeh, must testify on behalf of their parents and must choose between their own doubts as the prospect of sending a parent to jail. No one is innocent, but Farhadi shows how the prospect of chaos can so naturally, even benignly, cancel out the ethical drive to do the right thing.

No one ever apologizes in A Separation, not once. The desire to do so occasionally manifests itself on the faces of the characters, especially in the first deposition scene where Nader and Razieh exchange accusations. Nader's fury at the trial cannot mask his horror at learning of Razieh's pregnancy and the effects he may have had on it, and when Nader reminds Razieh of how she treated his father, she cannot bear to stay in the room. But neither offers a word of apology. To do so would be to admit fault, which no one can do, because the first person to show such "weakness" will, as they all see it, have to accept culpability for everything that has gone wrong. Nader cannot even bring himself to say that he's sorry to Somayeh for putting her through a situation she doesn't understand, only patronizing her with hollow reassurance as adults so often do to children when they themselves cannot justify their actions.

That inability to admit any kind of fault becomes a driving need to see someone else cave, and the final meeting between aggrieved parties, an attempt at brokering a peace set up by a weary Simin and Razieh, becomes one last spar between Hodjat and Nader for supremacy, with each man now trying to outwit the other side. One of them at last "wins," but the victory is so hollow it satisfies nothing more than one man's useless pride. It also marks the final break for our separated couple, who continue to foist off responsibility by leaving one last point of order in court to their poor daughter, who, after helping everyone else throughout the film, finally gets her own moment of selfishness by not revealing to the audience what her decision is. Of all the self-serving decisions in the film, some of which carried terrible consequences, this one is, structurally speaking, the most upsetting for its lack of closure, yet also the most forgivable. It is also a poignant close to the most devastating multiple-character study of the year, one that contains all the trappings of a movie about Iran's restrictions (religious and civil), only to examine the far broader limitations we all place on ourselves, usually without even knowing it.

A Warrior's Heart (Michael F. Sears, 2011)

2011-12-14T08:15:00.000-06:00

Take the lifeless romance of Twilight, add two of that franchise's side players, then mix it all together with a family channel movie about lacrosse and you've got A Warrior's Heart, a film that makes neither its characters nor that private school wank of a sport engaging. Shot like an overeager parent's filming of a game, A Warrior's Heart tries to teach us about maturity and filial responsibility through a sport so marginally popular that they couldn't even find enough extras to fill bleachers at matches presented as national events. Also, lacrosse's Native American history gets dragged into this, because if there's one thing WASPs love, it's to feel like a part of cultures they marginalize and patronize. I didn't hate this movie as much as my picks for the true bombs of the year, if only because it's clearly something meant for a sappy TV channel that fell into theaters by unhappy chance. Still, that doesn't mean I don't loathe the thing.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, 2011)

2011-12-12T21:07:00.000-06:00

Few words are exchanged during the first 45 minutes of Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death, an account of the infamous atrocities that occurred with the fall of Nanking to the Japanese in 1937. Lu confines the dialogue to barked orders, frantic cries and warrior yells from the vanquishing and vanquished. Mixing the black-and-white moral gulf of Schindler's List with the shaky-cam "realism" of Saving Private Ryan, the director draws out the Japanese entry into the city in such a way to create a mood of unending chaos and carnage while also emphasizing a suddenness to the breakthrough, of the KMT soldiers and civilians within the walls having anticipated the city's fall but not on such an overwhelming scale. Fortifications that repelled who knows how many enemies for centuries are reduced to rubble in seconds by Japanese tanks, and a mass panic by the leaderless KMT enlisted only leads them to the waiting arms of the surrounding invaders. Those who stand and fight only prolong the inevitable, making further pandemonium as the bodies keep falling.

City of Life and Death is not a film about the few who survived. The best comfort anyone can hope for is a quick, painless, dignified death rather than one by torture or rape, where mercy killings are the gentlest show of grace. Emphasizing the sheer vastness of the killing, the most prominent KMT fighter of the first act dies by the end of the siege, his corpse discovered by a comrade whose brief shock soon melts to numbness. And when the Japanese take total control of the city and its inhabitants, the terror only becomes more random, more incalculable. Everyone is vulnerable, and Lu introduces his primary cast of characters solely through their actions, each dealing with the takeover in his or her own way. To define them with dialogue and exposition would make them stand still to long, making them too vulnerable for any passing Japanese.

Lu's film displays an immaculate construction despite the occasion incoherence of the rapid editing and insert shots that disorient more than clarify. Cao Yu's crisp black-and-white photography captures every minute travesty in stark detail. Scattered shots—of a Japanese soldier almost playfully throwing a child out of a window to kill it, of a woman too proud to cut her hair later limping back to the rest of the women having been violated—stick in the mind with unwelcome firmness, the sharpness of the image forcing the viewer to look upon such sights with no escape.

Yet the same perfection of design also brings up the usual quibbles over atrocity films. Any film about a tremendous historical horror inevitably brings up questions as to its handling of that event and whether it captures the full breadth of the human failing or just wallows in misery. The debate over Schindler's List may last forever, and I myself grapple with it with each viewing, even if I always come out in support of it. City of Life and Death does not turn away from the repulsive actions of the Japanese, for it cannot; to do otherwise would be to soften the truth. Yet the director frames the endless cycle of murder and rape with such formalist designs that the beauty of the image sometimes outweighs the content of those images. Consider the scene of Mr. Rabe, the old Nazi emissary left impotent and devastated by the cruelty around him, quiveringly announcing to assembled women that 100 of them will have to "volunteer" to become comfort women. A master shot of the gathered people stresses the striking elements of the shot's framing more than the situation, and the close-ups of resigned hands slowly lifting into the air only further compositional technique over moral impact. What should be a profoundly disturbing scene instead becomes a lyrically pretty one, its tragedy artfully arranged at the expense of the women being sacrificed for the sake of the others.

Likewise, the attempts to humanize the Japanese feel like perfunctory efforts that only halfheartedly make the case for any depth of feeling in the enemy at all. The film's most visible Japanese soldier, Kadokawa, struggles with the bloodletting and sodomizing all around him, but he displays a clear disdain for such from the start. Instead of presenting him as a character grappling with a budding conscience, he is miserable throughout, and the subplot of his misguided love for a Japanese prostitute says nothing about the character not already obvious and makes for the most awkward parts of the film.

Far more complex is the one scene in the film where a Chinese civilian, heretofore so obsessed with getting himself and his family to safety, develops a sudden calm and selflessness, his almost friendly acceptance of his now-doomed fate such that the previously taunting officer who orders his death averts his eyes from the execution in shame and guilt. It is that ability to continue to commit unspeakable acts while knowing, deep down, of their unforgivable sins that makes the actions of the Japanese, or the Nazis, or the Soviets, or the Americans or any other power in any war so insolubly timeless.

Nevertheless, Lu's film is so stunning at times that I was drawn despite my routine objections to the same elements that captivated me. Given how poorly served the Holocaust typically is by cinematization, perhaps it's a blessing that relatively fewer films about the Rape of Nanking exist. But films like City of Life and Death hinder as much as they help, and the sudden relief of the ending does not balance out what came before or even slightly dampen the nauseated effect of such enormous ruination. Lu's undeniable skill with a camera make me eager to check out his earlier, smaller features, but City of Life and Death shows that his ability to frame an epic far outstrips his capacity to make it mean something.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)

2011-12-11T23:10:00.000-06:00

I only ever saw a piece of Niels Arden Oplev's original film adaptation of Stieg Larsson's exposition-heavy bestseller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Barely 10 minutes into watching it from start to finish, I wish I'd left it that way. Replicating all the source material's overreliance on plot and painstakingly spelling out not merely every event but every feeling, Oplev's film omits Larsson's ocasional grasp of atmosphere and the tease of his parceling out of information. I'm still working through the book, but so far I've found Larsson at least playful enough to, from time to time, have a character acknowledge the long-windedness of the speech and backgrounds. Oplev, however, recreates without wit, and his direction manages to feel plot-heavy even when no one is speaking.

Looking like the miniseries it actually is, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo frames its chilled cold case mystery in flat, serviceable terms. Much as thrillers hinge on a sharp screenplay, they ultimately require great direction, great coordination of cinematography and editing, to stand out. Oplev's film feels like Masterpiece Theatre, not a sinister, gripping, immediate experience. At 150 minutes, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is long but still within the realm of potential suspense. But Oplev's pedestrian assembly cannot even faithfully recreate the fits of tension within Larsson's own book, much less add any of his own with the aided power of cinema.

The director does find a saving grace however, in the form of Noomi Rapace. Her Lisbeth Salander doesn't look as unorthodox as Larsson sketches the character, her stylish hair and piercings giving her a more attractive look. But Rapace plays the character with such masculine aggression and emotional coolness that her goth pin-up looks take on the intended harsh edge of Salander's sociopathy. To alleviate Salander's remove, Rapace presents the character's softer side more readily, a side few characters in the novel get to see and even fewer experience more than once. Back her into a corner, though, and Lisbeth will fight back, sheer strength of will and righteous misandry overcoming even the strongest, most violent male.

But Oplev insists keeping focus upon the technical protagonist, disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), who is even more unengaging here than in the novel. There, at least, we had a grasp of his credentials and talents, even if they were mainly laid out in exposition, and the character served to air Larsson's grievances as a daring journalist in an increasingly mollified and blindly obedient field. Here, Blomkvist displays just enough competence to find his way to Lisbeth when she deliberately leaves a hacked trail back to her so simple my mother could track her down. Lisbeth is the clear star of the series, with her vigilante retribution and genius intellect casting her as a viscerally effective superheroine, and Blomkvist proves so useless without her that his scenes feel like mere padding.

The narrative, of an old capitalist titan hiring Blomkvist to uncover the truth of his beloved niece's 40-year-old disappearance, allowed Larsson to delve into the themes he held dear as a journalist: the aforementioned sorry state of journalism, Sweden's extreme right sect, and an abhorrence for violence against women ingrained in the writer after helplessly witnessing a gang rape as a teenager. Oplev covers this terrain but gives no dramatic oomph to any subject, never selling the disgust that rolls off the page when Larsson broaches each topic. And it seems tragically obvious in retrospect that the one artfully arranged moment of the entire film involves Lisbeth's treatment at the hands of her legal guardian, the use of obscuring close-ups and tinkered-with sound mixing for the one moment that would have benefitted from Oplev's banal, matter-of-fact staging.

Likewise, the director's other flashy touches, reserved chiefly for flashbacks of both Lisbeth's and Blomkvsit's childhoods, only reveal his fundamental limitations as a shooter. Scenes simply start and stop without any sense of construction, especially before the two leads team up and editor Anne Østerud simply cuts haphazardly between their storylines. It's hard to believe that a longer version of this film—by a full half-hour—exists, as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo could use with more than that amount of trimming. I'm slightly worried to see that David Fincher's version sports the same running length, but frankly, the rapidly edited trailers for the upcoming remake sport more atmospheric, evocative tones than the whole of this interminable slog.

The Best Albums of 2011

2011-12-11T17:22:00.004-06:00

I'm never on top of new music at the best of times, but 2011 proved an even more pathetic year than usual, with me belatedly catching up on every recommendation I could get. Still, I did manage to hear some fantastic albums, as well as discovering more than a few talents that demanded my previously distracted attention. I was also happy to discover more jazz, as I'm always woefully behind on that front when it comes to new sounds. I can rarely write about music, so forgive me if my justifications for each album sound a bit by-the-numbers. I do greatly enjoy all of these records, though, and I hope you'll give them a spin or two.

20. Wilco: The Whole Love

Despite my love for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco have never been particular favorites of mine. The Whole Love, however, is the first major reminder since the aforementioned opus that I should take this band more seriously. As varied as YHF, The Whole Love nevertheless mixes its adventurousness with a more casual, fun tone. The silly organ grind of "Capitol City," the rocking stomp of "Standing O," and the bouncing fuzz of "I Might" make for enjoyably hooky listens. Meanwhile, more meditative tracks like "Black Moon" and sonically probing ones like "Art of Almost" show a band still reaching for new expressions. Don't let the low placement here fool you; I only recently listened to this, and it will take some more time to fully unpack.

19. Frank Ocean: nostalgia, ULTRA

I confess no fondness for OFWGKTA and even less for its most visible member (though even I cannot deny the brilliance of "Yonkers"), but this self-released, R&B-soaked mixtape by Frank Ocean is enough to make me forget and forgive the collective's sub-Wu Tang excesses. nostalgia, ULTRA features smooth R&B saturated with invasive, modern production techniques that actually work to the music's advantage. Ocean's immaculately assembled ditties recall prime-era Prince in their ability to evoke strong emotion with a solid beat and idiosyncratic lyrics. Where Tyler the Creator's weirdness only grates me, Ocean makes me keen to see where he goes next.

18. Ty Segall: Goodbye Bread

I only just discovered Ty Segall a month or so ago, but I can already see him becoming a favorite. His garage rock stylings are a delight, not pyrotechnic so much as arsonist. Goodbye Bread combines that sound with a classic glam rock (think New York Dolls, T. Rex), and despite its fuzzy Cro-Magnon shuffles, it covers a clear range of stylistic material. Without ever turning into anything like a depressing album, it nevertheless grows darker as the music continues, and the music gets more complicated with it. Yet much as his spacey warble and chugging grind harks back to old eras, there's something special about this guy I want to keep track of. Goodbye Bread still leaves room to grow, and I hope I have time to catch up with the rest of Segall's work before he does.

17. Björk: Biophilia

Björk's cross-format opus revels in the artist's idiosyncratic tastes, dealing in subject matter that necessitated the consultation of scientists of various stripes, from astrophysicists to molecular biologists. The music itself is only more daring, with musical instruments being invented specifically for recording and unorthodox objects like a Tesla coil being used for musical purposes. As an experiment, Biophilia is bold, if esoteric. As an album, it's no less challenging, but fans will find her best work in ages, perhaps since Vespertine or even Homogenic. Even at its most obtuse and technological, Biophilia is never less than involving, especially for those already predisposed to Björk's beautiful weirdness.

16. (tie) Various Artists: Drive (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) / Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Cliff Martinez's score might get the short shrift when preceded by the electropop tunes that I still cannot believe did not come out in the '80s, but the whole damn CD is endlessly listenable, with Martinez's simmering, synthesized tension matching up and splintering off from such gems as "Nightcall." As a throwback to the old Tangerine Dream-esque scores, it is a vast improvement, not only bettering the uncomfortable burbles of processed suspense but adding deeper moods of hollowness and barely checked emotions I never heard in the old soundtracks.

Meanwhile, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross swoop in the second year in a row to throw down the gauntlet with another digital soundtrack that wholly avoids replicating last year's magnificent score for The Social Network. In fact, the two are inverses of the other. The Social Network, a classically-ordered drama of chilly relations between distant men, featured a soundtrack of hissing, frantic tension. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, on the other hand, complements an actual murder mystery with a frigid, removed soundscape of gentle, spacious notes. Yet Reznor and Ross have judged it perfectly; even reading the book to the soundtrack works, its haunting refrains as cold as the leads on Harriet Vanger's disappearance, the occasional, faint, howling shriek like her ghost in the machine, screaming for release. I wanted to avoid listening to this until I heard it in the context of Fincher's film, but even on its own, it's another triumph from the unlikeliest pair of Oscar winners ever.

15. Tim Hecker- Ravedeath, 1972

Ambient usually puts me to sleep, which may be the point. Tim Hecker's latest, however, is so haunting I can't help but be riveted. The sonic wash never seems to float through any recognizable notes, bending and hissing in undulating sustains that would be infuriating if they didn't betray so much variance happening at the far ends of audibility. It's background music, to be sure, but background music that makes whatever you're thinking about in the foreground suddenly a whole lot less interesting.

14. tUnE-yArDs- w h o k i l l

As potentially irritating as it is ambitious, Merrill Garbus' project tUnE-yArDs has a hell of an album with w h o k i l l. Smashing together every genre within reach to serve up some deliciously angry lyrics about violence along ethnic, gender and economic lines. And those lyrics aren't always condemning; at times, Garbus fantasizes about inflicting some pain of her own, a simmering feeling she does not dispel by the end. Any album that begins with the lines, "My Country 'tis of thee/Sweet land of liberty/How come I cannot see my future within your arms?" cannot be all bad in my book, and I loved almost every second.

13. Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues

I never leapt on the indie folk bandwagon, and though I admired a great deal of Fleet Foxes lauded debut, I never fully loved it. This more refined, propulsive follow-up, however, marries the best of the band's first work with more intricate songwriting. The structural chug of "Battery Kinzie" juxtaposes the airy, ethereal vocals, while the instrumental "The Cascades" layers simple guitar riffs into something elegant and otherworldly. Even the more folk-y of the tunes is more adventurous, lyrically and sonically, than the excellent standard the band already set for itself. Fleet Foxes and the Sun Giant EP made me curious, but Helplessness Blues made me a fan.

12. Ambrose Akinmusire: When the Heart Emerges Glistening

Akinmusire was one of my favorite discoveries this year. The 29-year-old trumpet player not only sports one hell of a supporting band of similarly aged musicians, they somehow have a rich, developed history between them despite their age. Their interplay reveals an intuitive command not only of jazz rhythms but pop mechanics, and Akinmusire himself knows how to stretch a riff when he finds a particularly juicy theme. For such a young man, he displays none of the self-consciousness of a rising star looking to prove himself. Instead, the compositions stress cohesive phrasing over flashy runs, and Akinmusire dazzles by the range of sounds he coalesces into graceful wholes instead of launching into a series of arpeggios. You can hear damn near everything floating around in this sound—free jazz envelope-pushing, hard-bop rhythms, even contemporary sounds in the softer moments—but Akinmusire never cedes prominence to any one style.

11. Destroyer: Kaputt

Destroyer's ninth LP is a seemingly impossible assortment of genres, from acoustic indie to funky bass and disco pop. And as with M83, Destroyer rehabilitates the soft jazz saxophone without a trace of irony, as you can hear on the spaced-out title track. Dan Bejar outdoes himself with some tracks, particularly the sweeping "Bay of Pigs (Detail)," which uses the disastrous Cuban invasion as the launchpad for numerous, obtuse lyrical asides over shape-shifting electronic texture. Even better is "Suicide Demo for Kara Walker," with woodwind textures and melancholy lyrics more indie-cinematic than damn near anything that came out of Sundance this year. This likely won't make Bejar are star, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't.

10. The Throne: Watch the Throne

Jay-Z and Kanye West don't make for a particularly surprising pairing, but when the results are this good, who cares? Treading in the same pomposity that made West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy such a delight, Watch the Throne nevertheless enhances West's capacity for self-critique and atonement with the help of Jay-Z's reflection. Hence, the album can go from the compelling braggadocio of "Otis" to the gorgeous "New Day," in which the pair speculate about fatherhood and the challenges of raising children as rich moguls who must also stay true to their roots. 'Ye says the line "I might even make him be Republican/So everybody know he love white people" without anger or, even more disturbingly, irony. In its own way, that line is more confrontational and daring than anything OFWFKTA have yet made. Perfectly produced (duh), Watch the Throne is two mainstream giants stretching themselves comfortably, but they still prove that not everyone who succeeds is a hack.

9. Sonny Rollins: Road Shows Vol. 2

One of the true living legends of jazz, Rollins proves at 81 that he still has chops to burn and can even twist the mistakes brought on by old age into hastily improvised new directions. These live cuts are all dynamite, but nothing can top "Sonnymoon for Two," during which Rollins is joined by perhaps that other living master of sax players, Ornette Coleman, for their first-ever live jam. Content with themselves, the two don't fight for dominance or even join in a fiery combo; instead, they playfully dart around each other as if they were 30 again. Rollins' current lineup (as heard on the bookending tracks from Japan) is tight enough to bounce coins off on, but the stunt casting of his birthday show is anything but a gimmick.

8. M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

To steal from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, M83's latest is an epic of epic epicness. Gargantuan electronic rhythms, choruses that can only be described with words like "soaring," and beats that demand the listener jump and dance define the constant peaks of the album. Picking favorites is difficult: I could easily go for the catchy squawk of "Midnight City," the anthemic "Reunion" or the especially retro pop of "OK Pal." At last, I think I settled for "Steve McQueen," which seems, miraculously, to layer in even more sounds than the other tracks. Forget waving cigarette lighters, you could only do this song justice by brandishing the Olympic torch.

7. Tom Waits: Bad As Me

Waits' cut-the-waffle album cannot be said to be a real return to form (he never left it), but it does serve as a wonderful sampler platter for his talents. The songs may be brief, but the range is vast, from the shuffle of "Chicago" to the defiant stomp of "Satisfied" to those quintessentially Waitsian ballads like "Last Leaf" (with guest vocals by Keith Richards(!)). Not a duff track here, but my favorite has to be "Hell Broke Luce," a more lyrical social commentary than the overlong "Road to Peace" off Orphans that also reconfigures PJ Harvey's album-length kiss-off to the fallen British Empire as an apocalyptic, in medias res conflagration of our own crumbling power. Waits follows that song with the deflated, boozy bawler "New Year's Eve," turning those screams of end-times fear into a beautifully intimate lament.

6. The Roots: Undun

A concept album of death and pain told in reverse, The Roots' Undun is the band's most flowing document, a strong contention for a group that makes everything they do smooth. Last year's How I Got Over showed the potential influence of all those introspective indie rock groups they saw night after night on Jimmy Fallon's show, but Undun is even more personal even as it reincorporates more of the band's famous neo-soul grooves. The final, four-part suite is short and gently composed (save for the frantic piano playing of the third movement), but it may stand as The Roots' most ambitious work to date, surpassing even "Water" from Phrenology. Elegant and elegiac as it is, Undun reveals a great many scars from the group's lives, a reminder that those larger-than-life celebrities sometimes know all too well the horrors of the "normal people."

5. Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Suffering from LCD Soundsystem withdrawals, I was pointed in the direction of Girls just in time for this magnificent album to be released. Though the two groups sound entirely different, I understand why people have turned to Girls: they have LCD's ability to incorporate their influences into a cohesive sound without simply regurgitating those sources. Owing more to the Beach Boys than Daft Punk, Girls further take from their idols here by refining their craft into instant, hooking gems. Even when they stretch out, as they do in the draining, spacious "Forgiveness," the band is never anything less than immediate, and the deliberate childlike sense evoked by the the album's lyrics only make Father, Son, Holy Ghost more innately satisfying.

4. Fucked Up: David Comes to Life

I'm still unpacking the witty, self-aware rock opera narrative, but it's hard to pay attention when the epic sweep of Fucked Up's David Comes to Life hits at every turn. Damien Abraham's edged but jubilant howl perfectly embodies the combination of thick walls of noise and catchy melodies that define the band's sound. I found this ambitious, complex piece even more rousing and demanding of a sing-along than Titus Andronicus' more direct The Monitor. Hardcore punk hasn't aimed so high since Hüsker Dü and the Minutemen hung it up.

3. The Devin Townsend Project: Ghost

Devin Townsend's music has always been beautiful, even at its most processed and brutal. But Ghost is something else, a blissful, lilting soundscape that puts the artist's gifts for layered production to softer use. The result is a graceful, and logical, conclusion for Townsend's eponymous project, a name that always evoked a sense of introspection and self-analysis and autocritique. Woodwinds and acoustic guitars make for the perfect antidote to Deconstruction's pummeling, as well as, strangely, the perfect chaser for same. Picking highlights is impossible; most of Townsend's records have a smooth flow, but Ghost feels more like one document than even his similarly ambitious and unexpected Synchestra. The least aesthetically indicative of Townsend's albums, yet also the one that perhaps best proves his genius.

2. PJ Harvey- Let England Shake

Rare is the PJ Harvey album that does not demand to be considered among the fruits of its particular year, but Let England Shake is an especially ripe pick. Hauntingly lyrical yet unmistakably polemical, Harvey's album is her most immediately accessible and visceral since Rid of Me even as it displays bountiful evidence of her growth since then. I've listened to this album more than any other in 2011, and I still get chills when I hear her refer to butchered soldiers as "lumps of meat."

1. Matana Roberts- Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleurs Libres

The first of a planned 12-part cycle, Matana Roberts' Coing Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleurs Libres is a twisted, agonized, grieving account of African-American history that at times sounds as if John Zorn went back in time to crash the jam at Coltrane's funeral. Roberts' sax playing is electric, and no less terrifying than the primal shrieks of pain she sprinkles throughout. The album boasts such intricate, flawless playing that I still haven't accepted that it was, in fact, all recorded live, but the incendiary energy erupting from the band could only be generated by musicians playing to the rafters. Coin Coin Chapter One covers such vastness of emotion and narrative that I wonder where Roberts can go with the rest of the cycle, but I damned sure can't wait to find out.

Honorable Mention: LCD Soundsystem's final show

I shouldn't count a bootleg among the best albums of the year, but be thankful I didn't just list it as my number one pick as I'd like to do. The Tarantino of music groups, LCD Soundsystem always found a way to shamelessly embrace and repackage various influences in original ways, and their send-off is an orgiastic tribute to James Murphy's love of music and the astonishing canon he built up, a freewheeling run-through of all the hits for a band that seemed to have nothing but. Recorded by Pitchfork, the bootleg's soundboard is flawless and crisp, but even with the crowd noise turned down, the energetic roars of approval cannot be fully silenced. This show is destined to become legion for anyone who hopes to go out on a high note and leave the audience wanting more.

Immortals (Tarsem Singh, 2011)

2011-12-07T09:47:00.000-06:00

Dressing up 300's presentation ancient Greek carnage with even more slow-motion, gore and fussy but meaningless art direction, Tarsem Singh's Immortals represents a significant step backward for the director whose long-gestating labor of love, The Fall, made him an instant cult icon. Immortals, sadly, resembles more the director's prior The Cell, a thin, borderline offensive premise made both more alluring and more repellent by Singh's grandiose, immaculate designs. Most of the shots in this film display an intricate control of mise-en-scène, but the florid colors, precise blocking and refreshing use of tactile objects where possible only make it more frustrating that no one apparently stopped to take stock of how awful all those obsessively arranged objects were.

Awkwardly inserting itself between a revisionist exposé of how great but mortal deeds become godlike and an endorsement of supernatural mythology, Immortals never properly finds its footing. Vaguely retelling the story of Theseus (Henry Cavill), the film depicts the mythological hero as a peasant who has honed his fighting skills from childhood under the tutelage of a kind old man (John Hurt) who just might be more than meets the eye. Theseus' village, a stacked network of homes etched into a sheer cliff face near Mount Tartarus, comes under fire by Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), the king of Crete, who seeks to free the Titans caged in the giant mountain to bring about the death of the gods he despises. We soon learn that gods do indeed exist in this world, but despite the threat of unleashing the Titans, they force the humans to fight their battle for them.

This is but the first and most prominent element of the film to make no sense. Zeus (Luke Evans) warns any other god who might think of helping Theseus and the tiny contingent of support the man amasses because "the law" forbids gods to interfere in the affairs of man. Heracles, one of a number of children he made with a human women, is literally standing there when he says this. His daughter, Athena (Isabel Lucas) also mentions Zeus being that old man who coached Theseus from childhood, which the supreme god defends by saying he was in human form, the supernatural equivalent to, "I smoked, but I didn't inhale." There is a point to be made here about the hypocrisy and egomania of the gods, a point the Greeks themselves made in some of their myths, but Singh presents this arbitrary restriction without comment, needing any excuse to ward off the audience asking, "Well why doesn't Zeus just put a lightning bolt up Hyperion's ass and end this now?"

Not much else in the film obeys any logic, internal or otherwise, either. Singh stages a number of swordfights without any grounding in drama, making the hacking and slashing feel more like a video game cutscene than a film. In fact, I kept thinking of the God of War games while I watched CGI bubbles of blood explode out of people slashed with rote button-mashing repetition. Those games not only have a more engaging mythological revisionism, they better capture and critique the unchecked arrogance of the gods. They also give some sense of scale as to the difficulty of killing an immortal, which here seems a matter only of getting the drop on a timeless being. The Titans themselves just look like charred people, and the gods can kill them nothing more than chains and the rod part of Poseidon's trident. If they were this easy to kill, why imprison them in the first place? And why, when the gods have to finally face their old foes, do only six of them show up? This is fate-of-the-world stuff, Hephaestus, maybe get off your ass.

Yes, yes, it's just an action film, and one more visually sophisticated than the usual tat. Singh said he set out to cross Fight Club with Caravaggio, and he largely succeeds. But that artiness privileges the tableaux of the master shots, not the eventual slide into incoherent action scored to what sounds like Hans Zimmer's "braaam" refrain from Inception crossed with an audio recording of a hurricane taken with a cellphone. The climactic battle betrays Singh's flaws when it comes to handling the variables of people, who cannot be so minutely controlled in large numbers and undo all that work he put into the lovely tunnels and caves. By founding his film on prettiness, not humanity, Singh not only prevents any kind of moral connection to the violence but perversely beatifies it. One could justify this as the director canonizing the all-too-real deeds of man into a great mythological event, but even the depictions of torture in this movie are so finely crafted as to revel in the blood.

Immortals does get a few things right, chiefly in that portrayal of ancient Greece not as some utopian place of peace and wisdom but a bloodthirsty place of horrific war and atrocity. Hyperion in particular is, despite the thin reasoning behind his quest to bring about the end of the world (between this and Star Trek, I'm so sick of people taking out the loss of a loved one on an entire planet), frightfully plausible. He plans his subjugation across generations, trying to leave as many descendants as possible not merely to perpetuate his own line but to leave genealogical scars of his conquest in order to gain victory even in death. But Immortals never capitalizes on these brief displays of clarity, soon dropping right back into the saber-rattling, blood-letting glory of war. Then again, its costumery and staging are so absurd that the fights here are more likely to be canonized by Aristophanes than Homer.

Warrior (Gavin O'Connor, 2011)

2011-12-06T21:53:00.000-06:00

From the second the camera settles on Tommy (Tom Hardy), a former Marine sitting on his father's doorsteps drinking, no one could fail to see that something is wrong with him. Tommy carries scars not only from Iraq but his childhood, and at times it seems as if the ones from the latter affect him more than those of the former. Any good sports movie (and quite a few bad ones) is never about the sport itself, but Warrior is, appropriate to its chosen activity, especially blunt in its placement of the sport as incidental to the real story told through it.

But then, everything in Warrior is blunt, from Gavin O'Connor's meaty, intimate fight scenes to the hyper-masculine dialogue to the borderline shameless appropriations from other fighting movies like Rocky. Despite that thick-headed approach, Warrior routinely subverts expectations and rearranges clichés into something fresh. By casting Tommy as a Marine, the film links the impulses of war and sport (the latter originally a means of staying in shape for the former) as a way for broken people to act out their latent aggression. And by ultimately pitting him against his brother, O'Connor presents us with two rivals equally worthy of the audience's sympathy. What seemed from its marketing to be a formulaic cash-in on a fad instead emerges one of the most even-handed sports films I've ever seen.

With terse exchanges, Tommy evokes a rich history of abuse at the hands of his father, Paddy (Nick Nolte), whose sobriety is given none of the respect and sudden forgiveness it always brings in the movies. Some wounds don't heal, and Tommy viciously undercuts the father's attempts at a reconciliation. If anything, Paddy's sobriety only makes the man angrier, for now he lacks the villain who motivated him; Tommy clearly went to Iraq to get out his fury, but he only returned with more anger and bitterness, and MMA is just another legal way to hurt people in an attempt to beat his pain into something else.

O'Connor contrasts this broken, volatile man with his brother, Brendan (Joel Edgerton), who used to be in the UFC but gave up fighting to start a family. He even works as a high school physics teacher, where he looks completely in his element teaching Newton's laws to attention-deficient but affectionate pupils. Where Tommy is a hulking mass of quivering, anxious rage, Brendan has leaned, still muscular but clearly someone who has to go to a regular job every day. His face is soft and complacent, but it also sports some slight discoloration soon explained as the result of moonlighting as a fighter in local matches to make extra cash to pay off his crippling mortgage. This completes O'Connor's bleak view of modern America, a place where one must resort to violence either to make money or escape oneself. The interests converge with a major MMA tournament in Atlantic City with a $5 million prize. With the noose tightening around Brendan, he decides to go for broke to protect his family. Tommy, meanwhile, gets wind of the same tournament, and he guns for the prize money to keep a promise to a brother-in-arms, a comrade he clearly views as a relative more than anyone in his own family.

For a 140-minute film, Warrior is remarkably concise. It restricts the interaction between brothers to only a single pre-climax scene, but it's enough. Tommy, his puffy lips giving him the appearance of always recovering from a punch to the face, drawls out insults to the brother he feels abandoned the family when their mother needed him most. Brendan, strong but disciplined and tamed, is more plaintive, apologizing for his naïve, self-centered behavior as a 16-year-old and growing ever more desperate in his pleas as each one falls on deaf ears. Both actors add minute but deepening touches to round out the dynamic between the two brothers. The steadfast loathing in Hardy's eyes silently seizes upon the self-doubt that enters into Edgerton's softened pleas, betraying a nagging guilt that confirms Brendan's culpability. Within minutes, the past, said and unsaid, between the brothers comes out in full, and the conflict that motivates both offers no moral high ground for either party.

Even better is Nolte's Paddy. Audiences by now are used to Nolte's grizzled, almost possessed image and voice, but Paddy offers a more complex portrait of addled gruffness. Though we eventually see the Paddy his children feared and despised—and he proves more than worthy of that hatred and terror—we meet the old man as a repentant grandfather hoping to make peace with both his sons, only to receive curt rejection from both. Tommy is painful enough, returning from a war zone even madder at him than before, but Brendan's denouncement is too much to bear. Nolte has an absolutely devastating scene on the lawn of Brendan's home when he comes to tell his son of Tommy's return and also his own thousandth day of sobriety. Clearly hopeful this milestone will convince Brendan to let him see his grandchildren, Nolte's shaky, cautious smile turns to despairing shock when his son maintains his position forbidding his father to see the kids. Brendan turns to head back inside, and the camera reveals the two children standing in the doorway. In a flash, Nolte's face turns into a horrid combination of agony and ecstasy, his voice breaking with the joy of seeing his grandkids (one of them for the first time) and then crumbling with the pain of having to remain where he is like a stranger as Brendan shoos them back inside, the girls unaware who that strange old man with the funny look on his face is. I've never seen this side of Nolte, and it struck me as much as the later scene of the old Paddy clawing his way back into the open, his red-faced, inchoate gurgling scarier, yet no less tragic a display of powerlessness, than crying at the sight of his granddaughters.

With that kind of pain eating away at the characters, it's no wonder that getting thrown around a cage for a few minutes might be considered a form of relief. O'Connor's fight scenes are gruesomely intimate, the tangle of bulky but lithe limbs mixing the elegance of martial arts with the showboating bestiality of wrestling. In filming Tommy's swift assaults, O'Connor goes for sheer speed, and even then he's barely able to keep up for the blur of flesh that speeds into whatever unlucky opponent faces off against him. Brendan, on the other hand, fights more traditionally, going for the pin instead of trying to knock out people three times his size. O'Connor takes his time with these fights, but he also gets a bit closer, getting into the techniques Brendan must use to even the playing field between him and top-shape fighters. The final fight, naturally, combines the two elements, making for a grisly duel all the more repellent because both characters are so well-defined and sympathetic that seeing either get hurt offers no pleasure.

Still, there are some aspects that grated. Brendan's side occupation naturally runs afoul of the school administration, but O'Connor shows even the people who punish Brendan rooting for him to win in front of students, and the constant cutaways make for nothing more than a cute distraction. Furthermore, as much as the film succeeds for its directness, some parts are just too on the nose, especially Paddy listening to an audiobook of Moby Dick throughout, its physeterid tale of obsession and self-destruction conveniently breaching now and again at just the right time. Having said that, Nolte does capture some of that Ahab madness when Paddy falls off the wagon, but that only makes the use of the book on tape more obvious.

Overall, however, Warrior typically sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the genre. The film's originality didn't hit home until the penultimate match, between Brendan and a legendary MMA fighter named Koba. In most other sports movies, this would have been the climax, our hero pitted against some undefined, massive obstacle, a vaguely foreign Cold War reheat propped up to be beaten by a fresh-faced American to (somehow) bring honor to the nation. But Koba is just the last thing that standing between a long-delayed settling of scores, one transfixing because the players involved seek not personal or national glory but some kind of breakthrough between each other. Besides The Wrestler, no sports movie has made me care so much about its characters since Hoop Dreams.

Gallants (Derek Kwok & Clement Cheng, 2010)

2011-12-05T19:01:00.000-06:00

[This film is being considered for 2011 end-of-year lists.]

Like my favorite Chinese genre films, the kung-fu movie Gallants is as much a comedy as an action movie, and as sloppy as it is elegant. Perhaps the funniest joke of all is its half-hearted insistence that martial arts brings only pain, a message it immediately scissor-kicks with a gonzo celebration of asserting one's dominance. Yet Gallants is, on the whole, too clever to corner itself as a mere paean to beating the crap out of other, and for all its slapstick, the film has moments of surprising grace in its treatment of the weak and forgotten standing up for themselves, even if Derek Kwok and Clement Cheng mercifully toss out the maudlin Big Theme moments for the sake of more action.

A sardonic wit infuses the film from the start, with narration that casts the banality of the story in epic terms and uses wonderfully pulpy animation to make the tiniest quibbles between fighters into legendary duels. When the narrator settles on Cheung, a lanky, bespectacled bottom-feeder who accepts abuse from everyone (including children), he makes plain his contempt for the lad, referring to him as "pathetic" more than once. Looking to rid himself of the scum, Cheung's boss sends him on a trip without pay to settle a disputed contract between the owners of a tea house and the property's lessor. When Cheung arrives, he finds himself caught up in a deep rivalry between martial artists that is so laughably provincial that only a scrawny fool like Cheung could mistake it for something inspiring.

Gallants frames its conflict as semi-generational, with the owners of the tea house being two geriatrics who have lived in the building since it was a dojo and have remained to care for their long-comatose master, Law. Tiger and Dragon are permanently handicapped from various fights, but they still show some considerable skills when much-younger thugs attempt to try anything. The camera matches their moves, an overarching dignity and formalism broken up by grisly, brutal shocks of pain. The directors employ the usual tricks (what is it with Chinese genre films and quick zooms, anyway?), but they never let the duels slip into incoherence.

The comedy is, of course, insane, with numerous jokes arising from the sudden waking of Master Law after 30 years. Having been unconscious so long, Master Law not only has to deal with having no idea what passed during that time but the lingering effects of brain damage on his cognition. He mistakes Cheung for both Tiger and Dragon, leading to a funny scene in which he commands "Tiger" to escort the two old pupils he no longer recognizes out of the hospital but also demands "Dragon" stay to pour him some tea. Likewise, his random outbursts—such as huffing that they should have taken a cab to get to the dojo more quickly as he sits in a taxi—provide hilarious relief for the mounting action.

Yet his delirium also carries traces of tragedy. His inability to recognize Tiger, Dragon and Dr. Fun after they devoted themselves to his vegetative body for 30 years devastates the three of them, and his spaced-out joviality clearly disappoints both Cheung and Kwai, the young woman whom Tiger and Dragon saved as a child. Both of them expected a warrior worthy of his legend, and instead they get a goofy, senile old fart. The directors also check themselves late in the film when Cheung is finally starting to come into his own through kung-fu. Suddenly, the bad guy, who knew Cheung as a child, confronts the boy about how Cheung used to bully him as a kid. Instead of blindly reveling in the protagonist finding himself through learning combat, Gallants hoists some accountability on the young man to complicate his breakthrough.

Such displays of what could almost be described as "depth" overcome Gallants' occasional pandemonium of conflicting moods, flecking its farce and action with some seriousness. The cast are uniformly excellent, with Teddy Robin stealing the film as Master Law; he even gets a lovely final speech that counterbalances his absurdity. That push-pull doesn't always work, but when all the lopsided pieces of Gallants fit together, it's a hell of a fun movie.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)

2011-12-05T06:58:00.001-06:00

With its blocky opening narration and almost immediate diagnosis of hopelessness, Alexander Payne's The Descendants seems destined to hobble itself out of the gate, with not even its parched wit capable of saving it. Slowly, however, it emerges one of the most honest, least insistent films Hollywood has ever made on the subject of saying goodbye, with all its regrets, frustrations and revelations both welcome and unwelcome. Payne, who co-wrote the adaption of Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, uses the few plot hinges merely to explore the contours of human reaction to a tragedy, making for one of the most subtle, interior movies I've ever seen get greeted with almost universal, instant praise.

The title refers to the unexpected ancestry of protagonist Matt King (George Clooney), a lawyer who resides in Oahu. King is the descendant of Hawaiian royalty, a princess who married a white missionary. And as he explains to the audience, his lineage gives him and his extended family ownership of a 25,000-acre land trust, which is set to expire in seven years. Rather than wait for the land to legally fade from their hands, his cousins want to sell the property for development, making them all extremely rich. Matt, the trustee of the land, is all on-board with this plan, until a boating accident leaves his wife in a permanent coma and changes the way he thinks about everything.

I say permanent coma without fear of spoiling, for the film openly states the hopelessness of Liz's condition within the first 10 minutes. The Descendants is not a film about the possibility of everything going back to normal but of making peace, of reassessing one's life and finding ways to cope with dramatic upheavals. And by deliberately preventing any kind of Hail Mary finale that miraculously restores Liz to full health, Payne and co. take away the safety net, ensuring that the emotional tumult Matt and the other characters endure is not for nothing.

Clooney gives what may be his best performance as Matt, whose conflicted attitudes toward his family only make the strain of Liz's accident harder. Matt is so stressed that even his narration is stand-offish. His first words in voiceover mock the views of those who think that life in Hawaii is magically better when he's watching his wife die in a hospital. "Paradise?" he hisses rhetorically. "Paradise can go fuck itself." Often absent with work, Matt must suddenly shoulder the responsibility of his two daughters: 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), both of whom nurse their own issues regarding their family. Scottie gets out her feelings over her mom's condition by showing photos of her to disturbed classmates and bullying the other children. Alex, on the other hand, knows a secret about her mother that drove a wedge between them just before the accident, tearing her between hatred for her mother and anguish at this turn of events.

Payne's film manages to capture these conflicting, often contradictory, reactions with clear humor but also a masterful grace that suggests a peak for the writer-director, who has never put forward the nuance and full emotional range of his characters so strongly. In another film, one could accuse the constant shifting of character relations and behaviors to be the sign of characters remolded for plot convenience. But by largely stripping away the plot from this story, Payne illuminates the messiness of grief, the way it wracks us with anger one second, sadness the next, and how people make armistices with each other even as they find new enemies. Payne trusts his audience to follow the erratic but never arbitrary emotional arcs of his characters, and anyone remotely paying attention will understand completely how Alex can be so belligerent to her father when they reunite yet almost become his partner when the two go searching for answers about Liz's life.

The most classical of modern movie stars, Clooney has always been solid in a literal sense, physically and emotionally. He confines his tears to a few quiet moments, away from others, almost away from the camera itself. The narrow range of expression Clooney allows himself makes Matt's feelings hard to place, leaving his erratic actions to suggest the play of thoughts tugging at the poor man. The fraying lawyer can scream his grievances at his comatose and turn around and slap his daughter for doing the same mere seconds later, able to vent in private but refusing to let his children be jaded as he is. Writing about what Clooney does here is extremely hard, because he doesn't use any of the tics actors employ for this stock kind of performance. He doesn't tremble, doesn't act outwardly aggressive, doesn't go numb. Instead, he deals with each reaction as it hits him, even if they're only seconds apart, but he also continues to operate in the world around him, not retreating as such characters often do.

But Clooney isn't the only standout here. Besides the two fantastic performances by the actresses playing Matt's daughters, The Descendants boasts a number of character actors putting in fantastic work. Nick Krause initially takes up space as Alex's spaced-out, rude boyfriend, but a small exchange between Matt and Sid late in the film completely alters the way Matt (and the audience) perceives the boy, and Krause doesn't have to change his performance at all to handle the shift. Beau Bridges appears as a cousin looking for that payout from the land trust deal, the kind of affable burnout so lively and easygoing you never feel as sorry for him as you probably should. Best of all is Robert Forster, who plays Matt's father-in-law but just as easily could be Matt's dad for how completely Forster taps into Clooney's wavelength. Forster essentially acts out the film in miniature, experiencing the full emotional range in only a few minutes of divided screen time. He, too, holds his tears, but he does not hold his tongue, and his vicious rants put Matt and Alex in their place just when they start to absolve themselves of any culpability in their positions.

Indeed, in its elegant view of grief, The Descendants also broaches the subject of responsibility and the need to settle one's affairs, even if they are of one's family. Matt must contend not only with his dying wife and his troubled children but that trust of land passed down through generations until those who own it not only don't look Hawaiian but cannot speak the language. But they were still entrusted with it, demanding more than just financial considerations in its handling. That point is humanized at the film's climax when Judy Greer's character must handle an issue of her husband's that proves the most harrowing moment of the movie. It is precisely these mature actions that make the seemingly sorrowful ending one of hope and affirmation, confirming this as Alexander Payne's best work to date and one of the finest American productions in years.