Doctor Who — "The Eleventh Hour"

So much happens in the first episode of Doctor Who's fifth series that there's no way I could address everything I wanted to in a season-encompassing review, so I'll lay out some thoughts in a separate post.

I had anticipated Steven Moffat hitting the ground running as creative head of Doctor Who; were I to list the 10 best episodes of New Who, all of his penned episodes would make the cut. As I've said in previous Who posts, Moffat's style combines wit, edginess and an atmosphere that relies on suggestion over confrontation to unsettle the audience. His approach was an antidote to the sometimes cloying sentimentality of Russell T. Davies, who stuck to the child-oriented side of the program while Moffat gave kids something to think and fret about.

Brian De Palma: The Untouchables

No one in The Untouchables, either cop or criminal, seems to have anything in the way of a moral code. Their lives are far more existential: the criminal steals because he is a thief, and the cop upholds the law because it is his job to do so. When a reporter asks Bureau of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), dedicated defender of Prohibition, what he would do if the government repealed the 18th Amendment, he replies without hesitation" I think I'll have a drink." Until that day, however, "It is the law of the land."

As for everyone caught in-between, life under a system of legislated morality has seemingly divorced individuals from a sense of right and wrong. Ness' efforts to conduct raids on bootleggers fail because of corrupt cops tipping off Al Capone's men in order to get a few drops of the material they're helping to hide. The title refers to the team of uncorrupted policemen Ness and Irish beat cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery) recruit straight out of police academy to ensure their unblemished records, but it just as well describes Al Capone and his empire, which has such control over the desires of the common American that the boss can openly chat with reporters about bootlegging.

Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)

If the best sequels build off their predecessors in ways that progress and deepen the shared material, then good sequels must at least avoid simply rehashing the original. In many respects, Kung Fu Panda 2 feels like the first installment of a franchise that, to be frank, never needed to be a franchise. But apart from a too-comfortable relationship with fat jokes in times of crises, the film never comes off as a retread. My favorite aspect of the first film was its respect for Chinese culture, incorporating its art and architecture—the latter, in my opinion, being the most beautiful in the world—with reverence as it played around in the digital sandbox. That sense of appreciation of the culture, even if it is a background for Jack Black's decidedly non-classical style, extends to the sequel, and I found it funny how the faithfully rendered Chinese palaces and pavilions almost seemed a flight of fancy on the part of the animators because of their beauty and grace.

If the first film occurred in tucked away villages and training halls, Kung Fu Panda 2 moves deeper into the urban sprawl of feudal China, massive collections of homes under the watchful eye of a pagoda so large that, were it any taller, God would strike everyone in it with different tongues to stop all communication. But the religious elegance of the pagoda, like the rest of Gongmen City, also carries a grim sense of oppression, one heightened when a wrathful prince returns to reclaim the throne his horrified parents denied him so long ago.

Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011)

The success of Bridesmaids prompted the usual round of hollow "Why doesn't Hollywood make more movies like this for women?" hand-wringing on the part of critics and commentators who immediately answered their own rhetorical question by stacking it against the upcoming sequel to The Hangover. The comparison is not totally unjustified, of course; both films revolve around an impending marriage and the far-fetched, manic trials of the wedding party leading up to the date. But to posit this movie, featuring a sharp, human script by Annie Mumolo and star Kristen Wiig, as a rival to The Hangover Part II is to implicit stage it as a rip-off of a far more generic movie.

To be sure, Bridesmaids itself has its predictability—no wedding movie can hold much in the way of outright 'surprise'—yet it approaches even the most tired, overdone twist from a fresh angle, and not simply because it is entirely from the women's perspective. Each character, however exaggerated and caricatured, has moments of three-dimensionality that add depth without shifting into the maudlin and sacrificing humor.

Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2011)

My brief review for Sofia Coppola's excellent Somewhere is up at The Final Girl Project. Coppola's most stripped-down film to date, Somewhere admittedly mines the same territory as Lost in Translation, but this is less a deadpan comedy than a wistful-yet-critical drama about the blurring ennui of Hollywood life, albeit one without sneering damnation. It's hard not to think of the film as autobiographical, but the relationship between a charmed but world-wise Elle Fanning (in a magnificent performance) and her anhedonistic actor father (Stephen Dorff) feels like a stand-in for all emotionally distant relationships. Still, the personal nature of the film adds layers of meaning and emotion to Coppola's indefatigable empathy for her characters. In her minimalism is a genuine emotion that makes this far more than some dry rant about childhood frustrations.

Note: I listed the film as a 2010 release on Sasha's site, but since it didn't receive wide release until this year, I'm going to consider it among this year's releases when I tally my favorites in Decemeber. At the moment, it rates in the upper echelon of the movies I've seen this year.

Brian De Palma: Wise Guys

After the veiled satire of Scarface and the open assault of Body Double, Brian De Palma finally caved to pressure and made the sort of film he'd spent the last few years tearing apart. It is unclear whether Wise Guys is the more devastating indictment of '80s mainstream cinema. No, that's mean: there isn't enough to Wise Guys to pick on one way or another. Everything about its concept and execution (not to mention the presence of Joe Piscopo during his brief flare-out in Hollywood) suggests it was one of the first films to deserve the critical shorthand "would have worked better as a Saturday Night Live sketch than as a full movie).

The premise is, admittedly, amusing: in the insular, self-contained underworld of the mafia, self-sufficiency must be such a priority than even worthless errands cannot simply be done by someone else without ties to the Family. Then again, enforcers and soldiers aren't going to waste time fetching the don's laundry or getting him groceries, so the poor schmucks assigned with these tasks must be so low on the totem pole they must be the part buried in the ground.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Rob Marshall, 2011)

There's no point in even trying to write a pan for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, not after Ali Arikan used his walk-out as an excuse to vent his splenetic fury on the society that would allow it to happen. I sympathize with objections to the piece that cite its lack of hard facts, but then the article openly states it is not a review (and couldn't be, since he walked out) and reads more like an account of the proverbial last straw. Those raising hell over his piece, however, must not have seen the movie, because even if Arikan wanted to discuss the film, I don't see how he could. The fourth installment of this bloated, long-since tired franchise barely qualifies as a movie. In a literal sense, of course, its production value is enormous, worth some $150-250 million depending on the estimate (and that's not even counting the marketing, which has been so overwhelming and seemingly endless I begin to wonder if ads for the movie came with the first pressing of the Gutenberg Bible). Artistically, however, Rob Marshall's insipid, scattershot behemoth is nothing more than a ludicrously expensive cash-in and a woefully safe bet on the presumption that Americans will never ask for anything better.

Through its own ineptitude and transparent avarice, On Stranger Tides ultimately condescends so thoroughly to its audience it's all the more troubling and saddening that so many will cheer it. Marshall, one of the least talented directors to be a star director in Hollywood, pieces together such a disjunctive movie it betrays its apathy on the assumption that the people who see it will be too attention-deficit to care about scenes simply starting and stopping without care for flow or continuity. What am I saying? You need a story to be able to adhere to it.