Third Man Movies & Culture

60 Reasons I Love Movies

2012-02-06T21:00:00.003-06:00

Inspired by this wonderful post by Film Crit Hulk Smash, I felt compelled to offer some of the many reasons, both large and small, that I love movies. Unfortunately, I’m not creative enough to do this in Hulk voice, so I’ll just have to play myself.

1. Because Pulp Fiction taught me my first Bible passage (Ezekiel 25:17).

2. Because of the crane shot in The Shawshank Redemption when Andy Dufresne plays opera music for the prison yard.

3. Because of how many times Bill Murray tries to kill himself in Groundhog Day, and then decides he must be God because he keeps failing.

4. Because of the plastic bag dancing in the wind in American Beauty.

5. Because of ~~the sewers~~, ~~the zither score~~, ~~the cuckoo clock speech~~, absolutely everything in The Third Man.

6. Because of the moment in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when the doctor says “Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.”

7. Because of the Little Tramp versus the eating machine in Modern Times.

8. Because my views on violence were forever molded by a single line in Unforgiven: “It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”

9. Because of how long it must have taken to pull off the mirror scene in Duck Soup.

10. Because of the moment Kim Novak walks out of the bathroom in Vertigo, bathed in green light, and Jimmy Stewart’s sanity crashes down around him.

11. Because This is Spinal Tap made 11 the greatest number.

12. Because of Liam Neeson’s performance when Oskar Schindler regrets not having done more (This ring, this car, etc.).

13. Because of Peter O’Toole emerging from the endless desert sun in Lawrence of Arabia and scoffing at Omar Sharif: “Nothing is written.”

14. Because I once met someone who honestly thinks The Terminator has cinema’s greatest ever love scene.

15. Because the sex scenes in Out of Sight and The Thomas Crowne Affair are even better than the one in The Terminator.

16. Because cinema’s most beautiful kiss takes place in an alley with garbage falling from the sky, and it’s between Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

17. Because Jack Lemmon prefers the name Daphne in Some Like it Hot.

18. Because of Luke Skywalker defiantly watching the dual sunset of Tatooine, right as John Williams’ timeless score reaches its crescendo.

19. Because Wedding Crashers launched the term “motorboat” to the forefront of the cultural consciousness faster than any other term in the history of language.

20. Because Daniel Day Lewis somehow taught even the veins in his forehead to act.

21. Because Fredo broke Michael’s heart. And then Michael had him killed.

22. Because there’s almost nothing as satisfying as a great heist scene.

23. Because even a volleyball can have a great death scene.

24. Because when Grace Kelly asks Cary Grant if he “wants to touch them,” we all know she’s talking about her breasts. But Hitchcock got it past the censors anyway.

25. Because Dustin Hoffman made a better man with Jessica Lange as a woman than he ever did with any other woman as a man. Know what I mean?

26. Because Tropic Thunder forever taught us the error of “going full retard.”

27. Because the endings of The Usual Suspects and Primal Fear still give me goose bumps no matter how many times I see them.

28. Because “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” is one of the most gratifying things you can ever yell.

29. Because John McClane is such a badass that he’s somehow lived through four Die Hard movies (and counting).

30. Because Terminator 2 made me cry as a 10-year-old and Hugo made me cry as a 30-year-old.

31. Because the black and white blood in Raging Bull somehow looks more graphic than red blood ever has or ever will.

32. Because when Nuke Laloosh shakes off Crash Davis’s signals in Bull Durham, Crash makes him regret it.

33. Because Rocky goes the distance while Terry Malloy never made it that far. (“I coulda been a contender.”)

34. Because I swear I’m the only person on the planet that thought Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was good.

35. Because Mary Astor has such a pretty neck in The Maltese Falcon, but Sam Spade lets her hang anyway.

36. Because Dr. Strangelove forever taught us that there’s no fighting in the war room. (And to stop worrying and love the bomb.)

37. Because no matter how fucked up your family is, The Royal Tenenbaums are even worse.

38. Because even a movie about Facebook can be great.

39. Because “Stuck in the Middle With You” will always remind me of torture, Fava beans will always remind me of cannibalism, and pea soup will always remind me of demonic possession.

40. Because I think about Phoebe Cates taking off her bikini every time I hear The Cars' "Moving in Stereo." And other times, too.

41. Because nothing you read about World War II could ever prepare you for the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

42. Because racing Nazis to the Holy Grail and fighting evil bald men in their secret volcano lairs were my top two boyhood fantasies. And they’re still in my top ten as an adult.

43. Because Uma Thurman slicing her way through the Crazy 88 was awesome. Even if there weren’t really 88 of them.

44. Because spending a year and 200 million dollars to take a bunch of no-name actors to New Zealand and film twelve hours worth of movies based on fifty-year-old fantasy novels somehow turned out to be a great idea.

45. Because never again will someone forget to a put a cover page on their TPS report.

46. Because I can’t think about my favorite movies without hearing the scores of Bernard Hermann, Ennio Morricone, John Williams, Thomas Newman, Danny Elfman, Howard Shore, John Barry, Hans Zimmer, Jerry Goldsmith, and so many others.

47. Because the last ten minutes of The Last of the Mohicans are wordless, beautiful, and absolutely perfect.

48. Because Manhattan should always be pulsating to the sounds of George Gershwin.

49. Because of the way Lt. Aldo Raine pronounces “bon giorno” in Inglourious Basterds.

50. Because WALL-E thought that showing EVE an eggbeater and bubble wrap might get him in her ~~pants~~ hard drive.

51. Because of the close-ups in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

52. Because of the rainy rooftop scene at the end of Blade Runner.

53. Because you could ask ten people for their favorite line in Casablanca and get ten different answers.

54. Because after Werner Herzog titled his new movie Into the Abyss, he claims he realized that could have been the title for every movie he’s ever made.

55. Because of Jane Fonda’s zero gravity strip tease in a room with floor to ceiling shag carpet in Barbarella.

56. Because The Doors and Richard Wagner existed 100 years apart in reality, but only about thirty minutes apart in Apocalypse Now.

57. Because someone with money read the screenplay for Being John Malkovich and still gave it the green light.

58. Because the Dunkirk tracking shot in Atonement is one of the few times where the word “epic” is the only appropriate description.

59. Because Mean Streets opens with “Be My Baby.”

60. Because movies are the only art form that combines elements of every other art form: imagery, music, plot, dialogue, character, acting, composition, form, color, pacing, drama, comedy… everything.

Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations

2012-01-27T00:29:00.001-06:00

Here are some random thoughts and reactions I have about the Academy Award nominations. I’ve (mostly) resisted the temptation to wax philosophical on who got snubbed, instead choosing to focus just on the things that are interesting and/or surprising. Overall, I went 34/45 on my predictions of the eight major categories. Respectable, but not great.

· The inclusion of nine movies in the Best Picture race means there wasn’t much consensus in the voters’ first place choices. Because of the new rule that a movie must receive at least 5% of the first place votes to receive a Best Picture nomination, the math indicates that it’s extremely unlikely any of the nominees ran away with a huge chunk of the votes. As Mark Harris wrote in one of his Grantland columns, if the three “front-runner” films (The Artist, Hugo, and The Descendants) combined for 70-80% of the first place votes, then there simply couldn’t be more than 6 or 7 nominees. With nine nominees, we can probably assume that voters ~~didn’t like~~ weren’t as overwhelmingly enamored with the front-runners as they could have been, and that means that a Best Picture upset could be in the works.

· The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for the nine Best Picture nominees are as follows: 97%, 95%, 94%, 93%, 90%, 84%, 76%, 76%, and 46%. Man, that last number really sticks out, doesn’t it? That’s for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which pretty efficiently illustrates how surprising it is to see it make the cut. Especially when that nomination could have gone to a critical and commercial success like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (87%).

· The year’s most decorated performance by a lead actor (with 6 awards so far) has been Michael Fassbender’s sex addict in Shame, so it’s worth wondering why he didn’t make the final cut with the Academy. As a few writers have suggested, it could be something as ~~ridiculous~~ simple as penis envy. Anyone that’s seen Fassbender’s, umm, revealing performance knows the guy isn’t exactly in dire need of more good fortune. But in a year where every film critic and blogger in America couldn’t stop talking about all the great performances by Fassbender and Ryan Gosling (7 good-to-great movies between them in 2011), it’s a bit interesting that neither of them could turn all that goodwill and momentum into an Oscar nomination—something Jessica Chastain successfully did in the Supporting Actress race.

· Speaking of decorated performances from all the Oscar precursor awards, Albert Brooks, as the villain in Drive, managed to win a whopping 17 of the 33 Supporting Actor awards handed out so far, and yet, no Oscar nomination. While I do think it’s surprising, in this case, I suspect it simply comes down to Academy members not liking the movie. Between the over-the-top violence and the long passages with little or no dialogue, Drive left several people with a bitter taste in their mouths (enough that one whackjob even sued the film’s marketing team).

· In the ten years that the Best Animated Feature category has existed, Pixar has been virtually unstoppable. All eight Pixar films released in that span have been nominated, and six of the eight have won, including the last four years in a row. (Monsters Inc. lost to Shrek in 2001 and Cars lost to Happy Feet in 2006, which was the last time a non-Pixar film won the category.) But this year, Cars 2 wasn’t even nominated, marking the studio’s first real failure. It will be interesting to see if this summer’s Brave can get them back on track.

· It’s utterly bizarre that there were only two nominations in the Best Original Song category. While it’s not completely uncommon for a category to only have three nominees (as is typically the case with Best Make-up), I’ve never seen just two. Best Original Song is one of the categories that mandates a certain point total within the vote to be nominated. The lack of more nominees means the voters didn’t find enough quality in the motley crew of eligible songs.

The Third Man’s Oscar Nomination Predictions

2012-01-24T03:42:00.001-06:00

Disclaimer: This is not about what I think should be nominated, only what I think will be. For my opinions about what I think the Oscar nominations unfairly overlooked or gave undeserved credit to, check back the week before the ceremony when I predict the winners and lament the coulda, shoulda, woulda’s of the awards season.

(Nominee predictions are listed in order of how likely I think they are)

Best Picture

The Artist

The Descendants

Hugo

Midnight in Paris

Tree of Life

The Help

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

This year’s Best Picture race is fascinating, because we have no idea how many nominees there will be. At least five are assured, and ten is the max, but it could be anywhere within that span. The kicker is a film must receive at least 5% of the first place votes to be nominated. With around 5,000 Academy members, that means 250ish people need to think a movie is the year’s best. So, at least for this year, passion counts far more than consensus. If everyone agrees a movie was the year’s third best, that counts for exactly diddlysquat.

Only three movies are sure things: The Artist, Hugo, and The Descendants. After that, it becomes a guessing game based on math and demographics. I personally struggle to imagine twenty people thinking The Help is the best movie of the year, let alone 250, but there’s a large number of Academy members who (irrationally?) believe Best Picture must, by definition, go to a movie that enjoyed large box office success, and The Help is the only movie that qualifies out of this year’s contenders. Woody Allen has enough fans (particularly actors and writers) that Midnight in Paris should get to 250 first place votes, and Tree of Life, while enjoying some militant hatred from a lot of people, also has the luxury of inspiring unrepentant gushing from others. If there’s a single movie that benefits from the new rules, it’s Tree of Life. No way does it get a nomination under the old (pre-2009) rules.

Many predictions have the nominees ending at six, while others think War Horse gets in too. But the voters who love nostalgia and old-school movie-making already have other choices, and the reception for War Horse has been just tepid enough that I don’t see how it gets enough first place votes. On the other hand, I think The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will. I look at it this way: What will youngish Academy members who hated Tree of Life and don’t care for silent cinema vote for? For a huge number of film lovers born since 1970, David Fincher is the leading genius of current American cinema, and each of his last two films have received Best Picture nominations. Plus consider these tidbits: a lot of people still think he got gypped last year for The Social Network (Oscar loves a good make-up vote), the book has legions of fans, and the movie was actually, like, really good, you know?

In a year where most of the contenders are long out of theaters, being one of the only great movies fresh in voters’ minds should make a huge difference.

Best Actor

George Clooney – The Descendants

Brad Pitt – Moneyball

Jean Dujardin – The Artist

Michael Fassbender – Shame

Gary Oldman – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Clooney, Pitt, and Dujardin are locks, and it appears five actors are competing for the last two slots. Michael Shannon in Take Shelter is certainly worthy, but the combination of being under-seen and unflashy seems to have killed his momentum, so he’s officially a long shot at this point. While some predictors are leaving him out, I think Fassbender is a lock. He has two things going for him that often lead to nominations: The performance is extremely daring and vulnerable (and prompted George Clooney’s Golden Globes joke about his being a likely ringer in cock-golf), and Fassbender has enjoyed the sort of year that simply deserves recognition, giving good performances in four (!) well-received movies.

That leaves three dudes for one spot. Many believe that slot will belong to Leonardo DiCaprio, but I just don’t see it. To say J. Edgar was underwhelming is a compliment, and the film’s make-up is so universally ridiculed that it’s (literally) difficult to see an Oscar-nominated performance under all that silly-putty. That leaves either Oldman or Demian Bichir (A Better Life), who got the SAG nomination. Both are decent bets and it’s probably a toss-up, but I think voter demographics will sway towards Oldman. The (self-perceived?) prestige of the Academy likes to nominate heretofore-unrecognized craftsmen, and no one fits that mold more than the never-nominated Oldman.

Best Actress

Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady

Viola Davis – The Help

Michelle Williams – My Week With Marilyn

Rooney Mara – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Tilda Swinton – We need to Talk About Kevin

Streep, Davis, and Williams are in for sure, and everyone seems to agree that Mara, Swinton, and Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs) are fighting for the last two spots. But I’m operating on the belief that Mara is also in for sure. She passes every stage of the Best Actress Nominee Triathlon with flying colors: Great performance, uncanny physical transformation, explicit nude scenes. Plus the movie is fantastic and successful, and this may (unfairly) be its best shot at a major nomination.

So it comes down to Swinton and Close for the last nomination, and both are great actresses in widely acclaimed performances. But both films are also still in extremely limited release, so I think it will come down to simply which one more voters have seen. Because We Need to Talk About Kevin has a much more interesting title and premise, while Albert Nobbs probably comes across as boring, that may be all it takes to get a chance with voters who likely have been staring at stacks of 30-40 “For Your Consideration” DVDs for the last two months.

Best Supporting Actor

Christopher Plummer – Beginners

Albert Brooks – Drive

Kenneth Branagh – My Week With Marilyn

Jonah Hill – Moneyball

Nick Nolte – Warrior

The fifth spot is likely the only one that is seriously up for grabs (though various sources think Brooks and Hill might be vulnerable). Armie Hammer has been getting some consideration for J. Edgar, but I’m chalking that up to another death-by-makeup. The movie makes Hammer look like his face was applied by Wayne Newton’s cosmetologist. Max Von Sydow is probably the only other major contender for playing a mute in Extremely Loud & incredibly Close, and Oscar loves it when great actors challenge themselves with limiting their expressiveness. But the film is getting tepid reception and backlash for its sappiness, while Warrior is quickly turning into the movie that everyone seems to agree is being criminally ignored. The Oscars have a long history of loving boxing movies (Christian Bale won last year’s Supporting Actor statue for The Fighter), and they have an equally long history of giving Supporting nominations to actors on the comeback from personal struggles. I think Nick Nolte barely grabs the last spot.

Best Supporting Actress

Octavia Spencer – The Help

Berenice Bejo – The Artist

Melissa McCarthy – Bridesmaids

Jessica Chastain – The Help

Shailene Woodley – The Descendants

This is the acting category most likely to take a major left turn, as only Spencer is a lock. But while everyone else appears potentially vulnerable, there also isn’t a lot of good competition for those spots. The best chance for a shake-up is from Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs), a past nominee. But while her performance is among the most acclaimed of the year, it also runs the risk of not being seen by many people, while her five main competitors all come from some of the year’s most talked about films. While Woodley was left out of the SAG nominations and Chastain turned in so many good performances this year that she could be splitting votes with herself, I still think they both make it in. And if these are the final five, they’re all first time nominees.

Best Director

Michel Hazanavicius – The Artist

Martin Scorsese – Hugo

Alexander Payne – The Descendants

Terrence Malick – Tree of Life

David Fincher – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

This is a particularly difficult category this year in part because the Best Picture nominees are so unknown. But it’s still difficult to fathom any scenario that doesn’t include Scorsese, Payne, and The French Guy (which will probably be Michel Hazanavicius’s official name during the Oscar telecast). That leaves four auteurs for two nominations: Fincher, Malick, Steven Spielberg (War Horse), and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris). I think Woody has a difficult road because he’s such a non-visual director and he’s up against three guys who typically get called “genius” on a daily basis. Plus, he won’t show up for the ceremony anyways, so nominating him is just no fun. Fincher has been nominated for each of his last two films, and his directing style is just so damn stylish. And, again, a lot of people think he got robbed last year, so if anyone’s getting a few sympathy votes, it’s Fincher. Between Malick and Spielberg, I think Malick has a slight edge. The directors branch often likes to give one slot to someone who pulled off a unique and artistic vision, and that describes Malick perfectly. Plus, fair or not, voting for Spielberg just seems kind of boring, doesn’t it? Even if it’s the same faulty logic that cost Michael Jordan an MVP award or two, some voters just hate being predictable.

Best Original Screenplay

Midnight in Paris

Bridesmaids

Win Win

The Artist

Beginners

This is the category that is typically decided most purely on merit. Unfortunately, that means predicting people’s taste, which is even more difficult that predicting their politics. Woody Allen is in for sure, but beyond that, we’re talking wild guesses. I think Bridesmaids is about as close to a sure bet as anything because, really, who didn’t like Bridesmaids? Right, no one. After that, it gets really difficult. I like the chances of Win Win and Beginners because they were incredibly warm, witty, touching, and clever movies, they were very well received, and they’re probably not getting nominated anywhere else (except for Christopher Plummer in the Supporting Actor race). But if they split the vote for people that are only picking one “Indie Comedy,” then they could both be left out. But Win Win seems to be on safer ground because its writer, Tom McCarthy, has been nominated before. Part of me struggles to see The Artist (no dialogue, after all) making the cut here, but consensus seems to suggest otherwise, and I don’t feel strongly enough about anything else. But here are some other films that could find themselves in this category: 50/50, Margin Call, Young Adult, A Separation, Tree of Life, A Better Life, and Take Shelter. See? Lots of options. I could be wrong about 80% of my picks in this one.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Moneyball

The Descendants

Hugo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Moneyball and The Descendants are the only two sure things. Dragon Tattoo should be a sure thing, but it’s writer, Steven Zaillian, is already getting nominated for Moneyball, so voters might not want to pick him twice. At least, that’s what several people are arguing, but I call hogwash. Dragon Tattoo has a reputation for being an incredibly dense novel, but the film doesn’t drag or feel like it has any wasted dialogue. Plus, Zaillian brings the prestige of being a past nominee, so I think he gets in for both films. Hugo isn’t the kind of film that draws attention to its writing, but it’s already received enough Screenplay nominations from other sources that it, like The Artist in the Original Screenplay category, seems to be benefiting from its own momentum. The Help has a good chance for the last slot, but there’s a prevalent opinion (which I agree with) that the screenplay is actually quite average and is only made to look good by a fantastic ensemble cast. War Horse is also an option here, but I think Tinker Tailor has a better chance at the last spot. Turning a difficult novel (one that had already been adapted into a six hour miniseries) into a coherent 2 ½ hour movie while retaining the story’s complexity and intricacies is a commendable achievement that ought to be, well, commended.

Toronto 2011 Diary, Day 3

2011-09-14T02:27:00.000-05:00

Today started at 7:00am with profoundly good luck at the box office. Sometimes, additional tickets for a screening go on sale that morning, and I was hoping this would be the case for a screening of George Clooney’s The Ides of March and the gala premiere of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Amazingly, I scored tickets to both. Combined with the tickets I already had, this meant for one full day of film going.

Film: The Ides of March

Director: George Clooney, who I suspect needs no introduction. But this is his fourth film as a director, following Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Leatherheads.

Notable Cast and Crew: Ryan Gosling stars, with Clooney, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, and Evan Rachel Wood all turning in excellent supporting work. Clooney and his writing partner, Grant Heslov, adapted the screenplay from a stage play.

The Gist: In the days leading up to the Ohio democratic presidential primary, a political strategist (Gosling) experiences a crisis of self when he realizes the governor (Clooney) he works for may not be the perfect candidate he believed.

The Goods: This is a flawlessly crafted film, with absolutely top-notch performances and great dialogue to feed them. But the two real stars here are Clooney’s direction and Gosling’s emotional range. Everything about this movie’s visual style—framing, lighting, angles—indicates that Clooney has completely arrived as a director.

But the movie still wouldn’t have worked without Gosling’s ability to portray his character’s internal conflict. The real arc of the film is about Gosling’s strategist coming to grips with the realities of politics and what it takes to get to the top of that world. For Ides of March to succeed, Gosling’s changing reality has to be conveyed in his eyes, and it is. The film ends with one of the best closing shots I’ve seen in this year or most others.

The one flaw with the film though, is it’s just not as thematically profound as I get the feeling it hopes to be. The ultimate message of the movie (Politics are dirty! You have to cut deals and screw people over to win!) will probably fall a bit flat for anyone that isn’t hopelessly idealistic. But even still, that doesn’t take much away from what is otherwise one hell of a good political drama.

The Grade: A-

Film: Pearl Jam Twenty

Director: Cameron Crowe, a former rock journalist who became immersed in the Seattle music scene of the late 80s and early 90s. Crowe is also the writer director of Say Anything, Singles (which helped break Pearl Jam), Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, and Vanilla Sky.

Notable Cast and Crew: The only real cast is Pearl Jam, but Chris Cornell (former lead singer of Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, and Audioslave) is also featured in interviews.

The Gist: A documentary celebrating Pearl Jam’s 20^th anniversary, and covering the entire history of the band.

The Goods: Pearl Jam Twenty manages to succeed on every level of ambition it shoots for. It’s a lively and informative career history and one hell of a great listen. But more importantly, this film manages to convey why Pearl Jam was a band that mattered. Pearl Jam became the lead spokesmen for an entire generation of disaffected youth, and they did it by refusing to ever sacrifice their principles or their integrity. Even as their career momentum dwindled to a halt in the mid-to-late 90s because of the way they tightly controlled their exposure, they refused to ever give in for success. They are the ultimate “band of the people” because they persistently valued loyalty to their fans more than loyalty to success.

If Ides of March was all about the way people end up sacrificing their integrity, then Pearl Jam Twenty is about the way you hang onto it. In a present day interview, guitarist Stone Gossard even talks about the “birth of no” for the band, and how they collectively decided they would no longer allow themselves to be victims of overexposure. (And just wait until you see Gossard talk about the Grammys!) One of the real treats of the film is seeing the band perform “Alive” at their second ever show, revealing how great they were from the moment of inception. Unlike most bands that form as teenagers and go through years of growing pains, Pearl Jam came together when the members were all in their mid-twenties, and greatness was right there for the taking. Lucky for us, they took it. This is everything you could want from a career spanning rock and roll documentary.

The Grade: A

Film: A Dangerous Method

Director: David Cronenberg, a thirty-year veteran of edgy filmmaking. Most of his early career was spent making psychological horror films, such as Videodrome, Scanners, Dead Ringers, and The Fly. But he’s entered a late career renaissance with his last two films, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, both outstanding dramas about the effect of violence on the human psyche.

Notable Cast and Crew: Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, and Keira Knightley. Christopher Hampton (Atonement) wrote the screenplay, adapting his own stage play.

The Gist: A historical drama about history’s two greatest psychologists, Sigmond Freud (Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Fassbender), who see their relationship change when a new patient (Knightley) comes between them.

The Goods: This is a very well done and compelling period drama, with impeccable acting (and Knightley absolutely steals the show—she’ll be contending for an Oscar), but there are some flaws. First of all, the movie is too short. A Dangerous Method isn’t simply one biopic, but it’s actually about the relationship between two of the most important minds of the 20^th century. Clocking in at barely over 90 minutes, it just feels like more could have been mined out of such a weighty subject.

But more importantly, this never really feels like a Cronenberg film. Most of the director’s work has always been about the common ground where horror, violence, sexuality, and the human mind all intersect. Method has the latter two, but not the former. And while that gripe alone might not make this seem like an underwhelming film, here’s what does: It’s undeniably ironic that a movie about the birth of modern psychology turns out to be the least psychological movie Cronenberg has made in a long time.

The Grade: B+

Film: Drive

Director: Nicholas Winding Refn, the Danish director behind Bronson and Valhalla Rising.

Notable Cast and Crew: Ryan Gosling stars, with Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, and Ron Perlman in supporting roles.

The Gist: Gosling stars as a mechanic and movie stunt driver by day, getaway driver by night. Working on a deal to start professional racing with Cranston and Brooks behind him, he gets caught on the wrong path when trying to help a beautiful neighbor’s husband square his debts.

The Goods: Drive is a fun and captivating action noir film, mixing the car chase exploitation flicks of Roger Corman with the existential French new wave crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville. Gosling’s character (who is never named) preserves his mystique by not speaking much, but the toughness and action star quality is conveyed quite well. What’s frustrating about Drive (and no, I’m not holding the unoriginal plot against it—that’s to be expected from a car chase movie) is that the violence just gets so over the top in a few sequences that it’s remarkably distracting from the movie. So much so that when the end credits roll, the daiquiri mix-like blood spurting might be the image of the film most firmly stamped in your mind. And that’s a shame for such a compellingly cinematic action movie.

And for those of you keeping track at home: In the past two months, Ryan Gosling has successfully played the lead role in a great romantic comedy (Crazy Stupid Love), a great political drama (The Ides of March—see above), and a pretty good action movie. Even while resisting the temptation to overly hyperbolize Gosling, it needs to be asked: How many actors could do that? When was the last time a leading man displayed that kind of range? Kevin Costner made Bull Durham, JFK, and Revenge in a 3-year span, which might be as close as it gets without going back to Hollywood’s Golden Age. It may be easy to forget now, but from about ’87-’93, Kevin Costner had one of the greatest leading man hot streaks Hollywood has ever seen. And Gosling looks primed to challenge that. Stay tuned.

The Grade: B

Up next: Q and A time with Francis Ford Coppola, celebrating 20 years of Sony Pictures Classics, the new Almodovar film, and a fantastic new Indie comedy.

Toronto 2011 Diary, Day 2

2011-09-11T03:07:00.003-05:00

The first full day of the 36^th annual Toronto International Film Festival saw me harness my U2 media pass and attend my first ever press conference. Answering Twitter questions about the From the Sky Down premiere the night before, director Davis Guggenheim, Bono, and The Edge sat down with TIFF Documentary Programmer Thom Powers for a lively hour-long chat.

Many worthy quotes and tidbits were revealed, and you can watch the whole thing on U2’s website, but here are some highlights…

When asked how realistic a break-up might have been during the making of Achtung Baby, The Edge replied that a total crash and burn wasn’t that likely, but “what was really at stake was an ending of the trust the four of us had in each other. In a weird way, that probably would have been more sad.”

When asked about the reasons for doing the film, Bono replied that the band is dangerously close to irrelevance, and it was useful to look back at how they’d dodged that outcome before.

And when David Guggenheim was asked if he still had any questions left for the band after spending so much time with them, he looked over to Bono and The Edge and said “Do you like me?”

I attended two screenings in the evening, one of which received the first standing ovation I’ve ever seen at TIFF. It was called…

Film: The Artist

The Gist: The Artist is a black and white silent film set during the era when Hollywood made the transition to talkies. Chronicling the declining fortunes of silent film star George Valentin and the rise of the beautiful Peppy Miller as Hollywood’s new “it” girl, The Artist lovingly honors and recreates cinema’s first golden era.

Director: Michel Hazanavicius, a veteran of French TV (and he also wrote the screenplay)

Notable Cast and Crew: The two leads are both French actors, Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo. Great supporting work is provided by John Goodman, James Cromwell, and Malcolm McDowell.

The Goods: A lot of people will have a hard time convincing themselves that they want to see a modern day silent film, and I was certainly in that group. But the film was beloved at Cannes and Dujardin took home that festival’s Best Actor prize, so I felt like I had to give it a shot. And I can now tell you, firsthand, The Artist was a profound cinematic experience that I’ll likely never forget. This film exudes such a contagious joy that it’s almost indescribable. The full crowd at TIFF hung on the film’s every moment, and there was a palpable feeling in the room that none of us will ever see another movie quite like it. I confess I have no idea whether this film will find an audience when it gets a theatrical release. Reviews and word of mouth will be behind it (and several critics think it will receive some Oscar nominations—Picture, Director, and Actor all seem feasible), but how many ticket buyers will give it a chance? I hope you do, because The Artist is not to be missed.

The Grade: A

Film: The Hunter

The Gist: The story of a scientist hired by a biological research corporation to go to Tasmania and find the alleged last remaining Tasmanian Tiger.

Director: Daniel Nettheim, making his first feature film after a prolific decade in Australian TV.

Notable Cast and Crew: Willem Dafoe stars as the title character, with Sam Neil in a supporting role. The film was adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh.

The Goods: The Hunter is a deeply ruminative film about man’s role in trying to control nature, and the consequences we pay for it. Much of the conflict in the film is internal to Willem Dafoe’s character, and a huge visual draw for audiences will be the gorgeous Tasmanian wilderness. The movie was very reminiscent of the Robert Redford classic Jeremiah Johnson, and while it’s definitely beautiful and compelling, the resolution feels a bit unsatisfying on levels both practical and philosophical. But there’s a great scene with a Bruce Springsteen song.

The Grade: B

On tap for tomorrow: The premieres of the Cameron Crowe documentary Pearl Jam Twenty and the Ryan Gosling action noir Drive, as well as my attempt to score a ticket to the premiere of the Freud/Jung biopic A Dangerous Method.

For more frequent info on TIFF and more, follow me on Twitter @thirdmanmovies

To see this post on Detroit's Metro Times blog, click here

Toronto 2011 Diary, Day 1

2011-09-10T02:56:00.002-05:00

I arrived in Toronto today a little after 2pm and immediately had to start scurrying. It was a big night, after all. The U2 documentary From the Sky Down, about the making of 1991’s Achtung Baby, was opening the festival at 6:30, and I was responsible with doing coverage for the band’s fan site, atu2.com. In the meantime, all I had to do was shower, change, pick up my tickets and press pass, and get across town to the Elgin Theatre. Easy, right? Well, for those of you that have never seen the ticket line for the opening day of a major film festival, it looks a little like the apocalypse. Just picking up will call tickets took an hour and a half. And would you have guessed that I had to pick up my press pass and my press accreditation (two separate things, I might add) in two entirely different buildings? Yes, the world’s largest film festival does have some minor organization and efficiency problems.

I ended up getting to my seat at the Elgin just as Piers Handling (Director of TIFF) was coming out to introduce the film. But luckily, the initial panic of my first 4 hours in Toronto quickly dissipated, and by the end of the night, I had seen two fantastic films.

Film: From the Sky Down

The Gist: A documentary about the making of U2’s landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby, interspersed with footage of the band revisiting the songs at this summer’s Glastonbury Festival, where they celebrated the album’s 20^th anniversary.

Director: Davis Guggenheim, who has arguably been the best documentary filmmaker of the last decade. He won an Oscar for 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, took on America’s school system with last year’s Waiting for Superman, and held the world’s greatest guitar summit in 2009’s It Might Get Loud.

Notable Cast and Crew: Well, the band, for one. But insightful interviews are also conducted with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, engineer Flood, and manager Paul McGuinness.

The Goods: From the Sky Down is a film about trying to turn massive mainstream success into a meaningful artistic career. Many regard Achtung Baby as U2’s greatest and most important album, and this film adequately and profoundly explains why. By the end of the 1980s, U2 had become the most successful band in the world, and The Joshua Tree was, to many, the decade’s best album. But the band had become the very type of “big rock” they hated, and they knew that they couldn’t repeat the same formulas if they wanted to have sustained creative success. So they went to Berlin, and changed their look, their sound, and their attitude. This intimate look inside that creative process is worth the time to anyone that thinks rock and roll is an important form of artistic expression. If the film has a flaw, it’s that it tries to do too much. The first half is mostly devoted to why the band needed a reinvention, and then by the time you throw in the present day footage of the band getting ready for Glastonbury, there just isn’t enough time to show the actual reinvention.

The Grade: B+

For a more in-depth look at the film, see my coverage for atu2 HERE.

Film: Le Havre

The Gist: Taking place in the eponymous Normandy port city of the title, Le Havre is a French dramedy about a poor shoe-shiner who takes in an illegal African immigrant boy on the run. When a police inspector begins to suspect the shoe-shiner of harboring him, a humorous cat and mouse game ensues.

Director: Aki Kaurismaki, a Finnish director who has been making movies in France for decades, most notably 2002’s The Man Without a Past.

Notable Cast and Crew: Kaurismaki typically uses the same cast and crew for all of his films. Andre Wilms is the star here, but Jean-Pierre Leaud (veteran actor of numerous Francois Truffaut films) also has a small role.

The Goods: A truly wonderful film that goes in directions—both in story and in style—that you don’t expect, it manages to be both relevant and a whole lot of fun. Kaurismaki uses a mishmash of styles that at times recalled Douglas Sirk, David Lynch, and Wes Anderson, but never felt like it was copying anyone. The humor in the film is a bit dry but always feels genuine, while the easy moralizing is mostly avoided. Plus, there’s a great rock and roll segue featuring a local legend named Little Bob. This was my first Kaurismaki film, but it definitely won’t be my last.

The Grade: A

On tap for tomorrow: A press conference with Bono & The Edge, silent film homage The Artist, which was a sensation in Cannes, and The Hunter, starring Willem Dafoe on the hunt for the last living Tasmanian Tiger.

For more frequent info on TIFF and more, follow me on Twitter @thirdmanmovies

To see this post on Detroit's Metro Times blog, click here.

In Theaters: The Names of Love

2011-08-26T15:27:00.002-05:00

The Names of Love

Directed by Michel Lecrlerc

The Grade: B+

The Names of Love is a delightful new French comedy about the generations worth of baggage so many of us carry within the origins of our names. Jacques Gamblin and Sara Forestier star as an unlikely romantic couple trying to come to terms with how their ethnic backgrounds inform and/or impede on their roles in modern French society.

Gamblin plays the boring and uptight Arthur Martin, whose painfully common name (we learn there are over 15,000 Arthur Martins living in France) hides the fact that his mother is an Auschwitz survivor descended from Greek Jews. Arthur falls in love with the beautiful but chaotic Baya (Forestier), who makes sure everyone knows she has an Algerian father. Baya is on a life mission to convert her political opponents by sleeping with them—as Arthur put it, “she uses her body as a weapon of mass destruction against the fascists.”

Forestier, who won this year’s Cesar Award (the French Oscar) for Best Actress in the film, is absolutely fantastic as Baya, who wears not just her heart, but her entire cultural being on her sleeve. We see her choose “whoring” for the greater good that she thinks it can do for the nation’s political climate, and then we watch the upheaval of her world when she falls in love with Arthur. In a particularly memorable moment, we learn why she holds herself responsible for the election of (current French President) Nicolas Sarkozy.

Even if some sequences feel a bit too rushed, the film maintains its grounding via a humorous running commentary by adolescent versions of Arthur and Baya. In his first major film behind the camera, writer/director Michel Leclerc does a wonderful job of finding the whimsical comedy behind a weighty subject matter, and he approaches it with a grace and maturity that point towards a bright future.

Big Man, I'll Miss You

2011-06-19T06:15:00.006-05:00

Hiding on the backstreets

Where we swore forever friends

On the backstreets until the end

-Bruce Springsteen, “Backstreets” (1975)

As I write this, I’m on my seventh hour of watching old Springsteen concert DVDs—an evening spent on the couch, with a 6-pack of beer, and precious time spent with remembered friends. The E Street band has been keeping me company virtually every minute since the news hit… The Big Man had passed away due to complications from the stroke he suffered last week.

People always debate things like who the greatest rock guitarist is (Hendrix? Clapton? Chuck berry?), or who the greatest rock singer is (Lennon? Daltry? Jagger?). Even greatest rock drummer debates have been known to cause serious throw-downs between Keith Moon backers and John Bonham backers (For the record, it’s Moon). But Greatest Rock And Roll Saxophonist? No one argues that one. At first it may seem like a minor achievement, but think about it. How many people can die saying they were the greatest EVER at what they did? Clarence may be gone, but his legacy looms just as large as he always did on stage.

The great critic Greil Marcus once wrote that rock and roll had become “too big for any center. It is so big in fact that no single event can be much more than peripheral.” But continuing, Marcus wrote that Bruce Springsteen “performs as if none of the above were true. The implicit promise of a Bruce Springsteen concert is that This Is What It’s All About.” (Note: the above is actually taken from Dave Marsh’s quoting of Marcus; I have never encountered the original source.)

But where Marcus uses the term “center,” I prefer to say community. Rock music started as “The Counter-Culture,” but counter or not, it was still a culture. It was a community of people who felt they had a common set of values and shared experience. As rock (and popular music in general) expanded, this sensation evaporated.

But a concert by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band was different. It was about re-establishing the community feel that rock music had so long ago abandoned. It was about uniting under the cause of rock and roll ecstacy that seemed to have disappeared. As Bruce himself said in the recent documentary The Promise, rock was about capturing that “never-ending now.” On stage, the E Street Band was there to give it to us.

No one personified this more than Clarence Clemons. In most bands, the frontman exists apart from the rest of the band; the frontman captivates the audience, the band plays the music. But from the cover of Born to Run 36 years ago all the way through the last time they shared a stage, Clarence proved that you don’t need to sing in order to work the crowd.

The first time I saw the E Street Band as an adult was October 2007, towards the beginning of the Magic tour. I went with my girlfriend at the time, Megan, and we showed up early so we could try to get in the pit. The lottery shined in our favor and we ended up about 15 feet in front of stage left, right where Clarence stands. When the band came out, they broke into “Radio Nowhere,” and Clarence started out unassumingly, banging the tambourine. All eyes were on Bruce, and Clarence knew it. After a minute or two, Clarence grabbed his sax and walked up towards the front of the stage. There was a low murmur of excitement from the crowd in anticipation of our first sax solo, but it wasn’t enough for the Big Man—he wanted more. He came right up to the edge of the stage, getting the attention of everyone on his side of the pit, and then started motioning his right hand in a come hither motion with all five fingers. As he amped up the enthusiasm, so did we. “Give it to me,” he was saying. We gave it to him. Everyone in our area stopped paying any attention to Bruce and just went ape-shit crazy cheering for the Big Man. Finally, once we had reached the decibel he demanded, he nodded to us in approval and then went into his solo.

It was one of my favorite random moments from any concert I’ve ever been to. Clarence Clemons had that true sense of the moment that only the best performers ever really understand. When all eyes were focused on Bruce, he brought some attention to himself with just a few flicks of his fingers and a knowing smile. Anytime I hear Clarence referred to as a sideman, I think of that moment, and know that no other sideman in the world could have pulled it off. Clarence Clemons loomed so much larger than life that life just couldn’t contain him any longer.

Rest easy Big Man, and do so knowing that you really were “King of the World, Master of the Universe,” just like Bruce always called you on stage.

In Theaters: Even The Rain

2011-03-11T14:50:00.004-06:00

Directed by Iciar Bollain

The Grade: A-

When the Academy Award nominations were announced this year, many were puzzled at the absence of Even the Rain from the Foreign Film nominations, and now I understand why. Selected as the official entry from Spain, the film actually takes place in Bolivia during the water supply protests of 2000. Gael Garcia Bernal and Luis Tosar play Sebastian and Costa, the director and producer (respectively) of a Spanish film crew who journeys to Bolivia to make an epic movie about Columbus’s voyages to the Americas and his exploitation of the native population. Choosing Bolivia for its appropriate scenery and cheap labor, a local named Daniel is cast in the pivotal role of an Indian who leads an insurrection against Columbus. But as the water company stiffens the price on the local supply, fact and fiction begin to blur as Daniel leads a protest against the local authorities, saying that if the people refuse to act, then “even the rain” will be taken from them.

The opening scene shows a helicopter transporting a giant wooden cross high over the Bolivian countryside, and we’re immediately reminded of the opening of the Fellini classic La Dolce Vita, in which a large wooden Jesus is flown over a Roman beach. This is clever foreshadowing, as La Dolce Vita was partially about the self-absorption inherent within the activities of the upper class—a theme that would repeat itself in Even the Rain. A fascinating tale about the summoning of morality, it’s also somewhat reminiscent of the underappreciated Gulf War film Three Kings, as we see well-to-do foreigners initially try to exploit local resources for selfish ends before getting swept up in the problems of the populace and forced into choosing a side. But even Three Kings didn’t have the successful dual narrative employed here, as the central conflict of the characters in the fictional Columbus film echo what’s happening in the real life of the extras cast in it. During one scene of the film within a film, an advisor says to Columbus “Look into an Indian’s eyes. Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?”

Written by Paul Laverty, the Scotsman who wrote 2006’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and directed by Iciar Bollain, a popular actor and director in her native Spain, Even the Rain creates realistic drama that moves us without ever manipulating us, and the characters each find themselves at a crossroads where their actions will forever define who they are. Bollain uses an interesting tactic during the Columbus film scenes of not allowing the film crew to be seen, thereby lending a greater level of gravitas to the fictional portion of the meta-narrative. The proceedings feel especially poignant because of the beautiful score by Alberto Iglesias, the great Spanish composer who works mostly with Pedro Almodovar, but who also received Oscar nominations for The Constant Gardner and The Kite Runner. The only complaint I can really levy is that the brisk 98-minute running time might have been too short.

The Greatest Opening Scenes in Film History

2010-11-09T05:21:00.017-06:00

So many of the great albums immediately hit you with their best shot. Classic songs like “Brown Sugar,” “Thunder Road,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Respect,” “Purple Haze,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Seven Nation Army” were chosen to open their albums with a bang instead of slowly draw the audience in and build to a climax. Movies traditionally haven’t operated the same way; the classic Hollywood films typically began with by-the-numbers exposition and set-up—and even that was after three or four minutes of boring title cards.

Luckily, times have changed. The Film School Generation of the 1970s began to successfully switch things up a bit, showing willing audiences that there’s no reason exposition and set-up has to be unengaging. Today, thanks to the ever-present ADD experienced by modern audiences, there’s basically a written-in-stone rule that movies have to be exciting from the first moment (and over the last few years, this practice has even led to the near-extinction of opening credit sequences; many films are starting to delay all credits and titles until the end).

So these are the facts, and they are indisputable: a movie’s beginning is now almost as important as its ending. But what are the opening scenes to which all others should forever be judged against? Well, that’s what I’m here for.

First, a few words on some notable omissions:

Up and Saving Private Ryan often appear on lists like this, but I don’t think they qualify, because the early sequences for which they are justly famous (the marriage montage and D-Day invasion, respectively) are actually the film’s second scenes. Jaws and 2001 also get a lot of credit for the way they open, and while it’s mostly deserved, I don’t think either opening stands up well today. I gave good consideration to The Departed for this list, but it’s a bit difficult to distinguish exactly where the opening scene even ends (the title screen doesn’t appear until more than twenty minutes into the film, in what is probably the third or fourth scene). A Clockwork Orange has one of the greatest-ever opening images, but the entire opening scene isn’t as impressive. And lastly, I remember the opening of Mission: Impossible III being particularly great, but I don’t own the DVD and couldn’t find the clip online to save my life, so without a fresh viewing, I opted not to include it.

Let’s get to the list! (Click on the title of each film to see the clip.)

25. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

24. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

A lot of films open with what can fairly be called a teaser. The audience is shown an event that isn’t really meant to make sense, but is intriguing enough to make us stick around for the explanation. In a sense, a teaser intro is a way of saying “we’re going to spend the next two hours explaining how we got here,” so for an audience to accept that inevitability, the teaser better be pretty damn enticing. Goodfellas probably has the all-time best teaser intro (“For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”), but Citizen Kane, with its single word (“Rosebud”), is inarguably the most famous—and influential. Two other great examples are The Hangover (“Things got out of hand, and we lost Doug.”) and Fight Club (Brad Pitt holding a gun in Edward Norton’s mouth).

23. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)

22. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

For some movies, the perfect way to open things is by setting the ground rules. We’re given a scene in which the specific events don’t have a lot of bearing on the plot, but the mentality and attitude established is crucially important. In both Scream and The Dark Knight, we see the villains performing crimes that prove to be unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but the way in which they’re carried out serves as a perfectly ominous message for what’s to come. With Scream’s Ghostface, we learn two simple rules: 1) don’t answer the phone, and 2) at least know your horror movies if you do answer it. And with the Joker, we learn that there simply are no rules. (No Country For Old Men also did this well, with Javier Bardem's villainous Anton Chigurgh memorably killing someone with a cattle stun gun shot to the forehead just a few minutes into the film.)

21. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

At the end of The Social Network’s first scene, the main character is called an “asshole” in a pretty definitive way. But this serves as the film’s way of issuing a challenge to the viewer: This movie is about an asshole, but we DARE you not to find him fascinating. Written by the great Aaron Sorkin, the opening sequence is a hyper-speed conversation that results in a break-up which feels both spontaneous and yet totally justified. But the verbal rhythms of this scene also introduce us to a key element of the characters—their inner rhetoric operates with the speed and efficiency of a microprocessor, and they say what they think. There’s no clip because The Social Network is still in theaters, but anyone that hasn’t seen it yet really should do so. I dare you not to find it fascinating.

20. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

The clip actually omits the first five minutes of the movie, but it still gets the point across: nobody has ever been able to squeeze more drama out of delayed action than Sergio Leone. An incredible amount of time is spent in Leone’s classic Spaghetti Westerns on characters waiting for one another to make the first move. In doing so, Leone draws us into the drama the characters face. As character A waits for character B to draw, and vice versa, the audience starts to experience the same sweat on their brow as the characters, because we’re forced into playing the same waiting game. It’s a daring psychological ploy, because people generally prefer instant gratification, but Leone’s darting camera and extreme close-ups pull it off. It’s not quite fair to say Quentin Tarantino learned everything he knows from Leone, but there’s at least an entire semester’s worth of curriculum in this scene.

19. Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

18. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

Not just two of the most famous opening sequences ever, but, in many ways, the two opening sequences that started to draw attention to the art of a great first scene. What both films do so well is subtly draw you into their worlds so thoroughly that you feel like you’ve always been there. This is important to do in films like these, where the backlog of mythology and relationships is incredibly complex. But the great directors are able to reveal detailed sets of information in effortless ways, and that’s never been on display better than in these two films. And if you were to make a list of the greatest opening lines in film history, Star Wars (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…”) and The Godfather (“I believe in America”) might very well rank #s 2 and 3 behind Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud."

17. Batman (Tim Burton, 1989)

Tim Burton’s original Batman films are inferior to Christopher Nolan’s contemporary versions in almost every single way, but Burton wins out in one key area—his Gotham City is far better realized. In fact, an argument could be made that the original Batman is one of the greatest works of art/set direction in film history, on par with classics of the field like Metropolis, Frankenstein, and Blade Runner. Using a bizarre combination of 1930s era Manhattan, 1970s CBGB’s punk, and Blade Runner-like future gothic, Burton and his collaborators created one of the most unique visions of urban horror that’s ever been unleashed, and it is introduced marvelously in Batman’s opening scene. The clip unfortunately picks up after an initial 20 seconds or so of Gotham images, but you can check them out at the end of this video.

16. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)

The intro of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy had an unenviable task, because it required success on two levels. On the more obvious front, the Fellowship of the Ring intro had to cover an enormous back-story and mythology in a way that was brief, compelling, interesting, and exciting. But that’s actually the easy part of the equation; the difficult part was pleasing the devoted fans of the novels and meeting the expectations that come along with creating one of the most anticipated and ambitious movies ever attempted. Jackson had taken a gargantuan cast to New Zealand for over a year and spent more than 100 million dollars to film what amounted to a twelve-hour film based on a book trilogy that had an impossible-to-please fan base. The financial well being of an entire studio was riding on these films, and Jackson literally could not afford for the intro to be anything but perfect. Luckily, it was perfect. Using a new style of epic filmmaking that was to be endlessly copied in the years to come, a haunting score from Howard Shore, and regal narration by the great Cate Blanchett, The opening of The Lord of the Rings will give you goose bumps. Mission Accomplished.

15. Lord of War (Andrew Niccol, 2005)

Lord of War has an intro that I like to refer to as “Important Unimportance.” As we watch the journey of a single bullet from being manufactured all the way to blowing a nameless kid’s brains out, we don’t learn anything about the film’s characters, plot, style, or really even the theme (the opener is weighty and topical drama, while the film is more like unsuccessful black comedy). And yet… the movie is inconceivable, as well as a hell of a lot worse, without the intro. While it seems easy to conclude that the opener doesn’t add anything to the film besides a memorable credits sequence, the real reality is that the film doesn’t add anything to the opener. The opener was simply too good, and the movie it introduced had no hope of living up. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) also had an a great intro in the Important Unimportance vein, as the theme of coincidence was memorably introduced through three entirely unrelated, yet unforgettable anecdotes.

14. City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)

What City of God’s opening sequence does so well is something nearly unique in film up to that point: it establishes not so much a style of storytelling, but a rhythm. The speed of the cuts intertwined with the music makes the film feel like a carefully choreographed salsa dance—keep up or keep to the sidelines. The entire film operates on this propulsive beat that chugs along so relentlessly the characters end up in a constant reactionary status with their own lives, much like the chicken in this scene. Ending the scene with the 360-degree spin as the main character reverts to his childhood self was an effortless way of establishing where the film is going. In that sense, this intro operates like a teaser that does so much more than tease. In terms of establishing a visual rhythm, the opening sequence of West Side Story (1961) also does a good job, but it’s not in the same league as City of God.

13. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

12. The Player (Robert Altman, 1992)

Occasionally, a movie’s opening sequence will simply dazzle us with its craft, and that’s the case with these two. Both films open with an unbroken tracking shot that looks simply impossible to pull off, and yet there we are watching it. For decades, Touch of Evil had the reputation of having the tracking shot to end all tracking shots, and it was the first shot of the movie! Lately though, as technology and the ambition of great directors continues to exponentially increase, Touch of Evil’s supremacy is constantly being challenged. Just in the last few years, movies like Atonement, Children of Men, and The Secret in Their Eyes have given us shots we never would have thought were possible. But while those films all used their crowning technical achievement as the centerpiece of the movie, The player had the audacity to open with an 8 minute long unbroken shot. The entire film uses meta-fiction quite well, but the theme is introduced in this opening scene. As one character says to another that the opening shot of Touch of Evil could never be topped, that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen. Robert Altman had the balls to not just beat Touch of Evil at its own game, but to tell us while he was doing it. Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) also opens with a tracking shot of similar audacity, but it doesn’t manage to be compelling in the same way.

11. Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Really, this should have been a mortal lock for the top ten, but I’m not totally sure it qualifies because it’s so long. (The opening sequence of Inglourious Basterds is over 20 minutes, while all but four other entries in this top 25 were under 8 minutes.) I finally opted to include it under the following corollary: my blog, my rules. It could be argued that Basterds has the most ambitious opening of any film on this list, precisely because it doesn’t follow any of the most basic assumptions regarding how to open a movie. It jumps right into an important scene, but proceeds along very slowly; none of the title characters or name actors in the film are featured in a scene that lasts for an extremely long time by today’s standards; and the opening scene may well leave you crying—not exactly something a summer movie is supposed to do twenty minutes into its runtime. And as if that all weren’t enough, Tarantino had the audacity to combine Leone style drama with Hitchcock style suspense… and make us fully aware he was doing it. The result was a scene so memorable and powerful, that it effectively won Christoph Waltz an Oscar. (Sadly there's no clip of the complete scene online, but if you've never seen it before, just rent the movie. It's one of the best films of the last several years.)

10. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

Herzog’s films have always been about the grey area where extreme dedication collides with pure insanity, and how the lines between the two can easily become blurred. As a result of this undercurrent, Herzog often ends up making movies about the dangerous quests men embark on, and how they turn out. Aguirre, Herzog’s masterpiece, desires to show us that the quest of the Spanish conquistadors to locate the fabled El Dorado in the 16^th century was borne out of less than pure rationality, and the film does this rather quickly. Using an ethereal score that seems to be floating out of the mist, and an incredibly orchestrated shot of hundreds of people descending a mountain jungle to the depths of madness in a single file line, Herzog accomplishes a singular cinematic rarity: he achieves the entire goal of a film in its first two minutes. Now that’s an opening scene!

9. Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)

8. Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)

Since 2005’s Batman Begins, the franchise reboot has become one of Hollywood’s biggest moneymakers. While the advantage of hindsight enables filmmakers to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, a great reboot is still difficult to pull off. A careful balance has to be found between honoring what has gone before and forging a new identity. While neither of these things is easy, you might have been fooled into thinking so after seeing Casino Royale or Star Trek. Both films open with the never-before-seen origin of their classic characters; we watch James Bond get his first two kills and earn double O status, while we see Captain Kirk’s birth during a catastrophic space battle. James Bond films have long been famous for their pre-credit sequences, but while always entertaining, they are almost never of any consequence. Casino Royale dared to be different. Not only do we watch Bond effectively become Bond, but also the stylish black & white and brutal fistfight clearly signal that the tongue-in-cheek era of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan is gone for good. The sequence serves as a bold statement of purpose for what the new franchise will be, but still has the good sense to end with a nod and a wink to those of us that have been around the block with Bond before, as the classic gunshot framed by the eye is given a dramatic re-creation. Unlike Casino Royale, the opening sequence for Star Trek doesn’t serve as a departure from the norm or homage to it, but it is one of the greatest film-opening action sequences ever created. That may seem less ambitious, but if the ultimate goal of a great opening sequence is to make people salivate for the rest of the film, then Star Trek earns top marks. (Sadly, the only clip of it I could find changes a few crucial parts of the score. Just know that the music is far more dramatic in the real version.)

7. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

The most economical way to use a movie’s intro is to quickly dispense as much background information as possible, so the film can get to the key plot points without wasting a big chunk of running time. Often times, this strategy manifests itself in long text openers (i.e. Star Wars, Gladiator), but isn’t that just the easy way out? The greatest example of the alternative is The Royal Tenenbaums, which we’ll refer to as the “Text Intro After a Cocktail of Speed and LSD” (or TIACSAL, for short). Basically, TIACSAL is a text intro read by a narrator, while the screen imagery dramatizes the text as fast as possible in a medley of bizarrely juxtaposed scenes and events. This had been done before, notably with Jules & Jim (1963) and Raising Arizona (1987), but never this well. The Tenenbaums intro combines the great narrative voice of Alec Baldwin, the strangest family history you’ll ever see outside of a Jerry Springer taping, and the most intricately detailed and idiosyncratic domestic art direction ever captured on film. But the more you watch it, the instrumental version of “Hey Jude” playing in the background becomes the emotional core of the scene; a song about a child in the spotlight needing comforting after his parents’ separation, it provides realistic grounding to the film’s themes… and that timeless “na na na” coda to frame the sequence.

6. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)

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5. The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983)

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4. Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

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3. Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)

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2. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

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1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)

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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Film Trilogy Wraps Up

2010-10-29T07:07:00.004-05:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Directed by Neils Arden Oplev

The Grade: B+ (on DVD)

The Girl Who Played With Fire – Directed by Daniel Alfredson

The Grade: A- (on DVD)

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Directed by Daniel Alfredson

The Grade: C+ (in theaters)

Trilogy as a whole: B+

The Swedish film versions of the suddenly (and posthumously) popular trilogy of novels by Steig Larsson wrap up today with the theatrical release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, so it’s an ideal time to assess the three films together, the first two of which opened in theaters earlier this year and are now available on DVD. The much Ballyhooed Hollywood versions of the films have just gotten underway with director David Fincher, star Daniel Craig, and newcomer Rooney Mara as the titular Girl, but we won’t be seeing the first of them until Christmas 2011, so the Swedish versions have to tide us over until then—a task they accomplish pretty well… mostly.

The first film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, opened back in April, and introduced us to lead characters Lizbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist as they come together to solve the disappearance of a young girl. While the title might lead one to think otherwise, the first film is really Mikael’s story; as an investigative journalist and publisher of “Millennium” magazine, Blomkvist has come under fire for a libel case in which he may have been set up. Prevented from returning to normal work, Blomkvist is hired by the patriarch of the powerful Vanger family to help solve the mystery of his niece’s disappearance forty years prior. Professional hacker Lizbeth Salander, initially working for Blomkvist’s legal opponents to help frame him, ends up aiding him on his new case.

At 152 minutes, the trilogy’s first film is its longest, but it never seems like it. Even though we realize at the film’s conclusion that it was a fairly standard mystery/thriller, it perpetually feels like something greater and deeper while we’re in its throes. Like The Silence of the Lambs, it’s a film in which the supporting character who aids the protagonist ends up being the most compelling person in the movie. We first meet Lizbeth as a waifish, helpless victim of her controllers, but she seizes control of her own life with a flare for the dramatic, and it’s compelling enough for us to follow her story into two sequels.

The second film, The Girl Who Played with Fire, opened this summer, and features a switch in both focus and director. While the first film was spurred along by an extraneous plot that the characters become involved in, the second film permanently changes the spotlight to Lizbeth Salander, her past, and her attempt to extricate herself from that past. (It’s useful to remember that the first book’s original title was Men Who Hate Women, which implies that two sequels focusing on Lizbeth might not have originally been planned for.) Fire is the best film of the trilogy both because Lizbeth is most directly involved in the action, and the action is most directly centered on Lizbeth; the plot arrives out of her character, instead of just existing to give her character something to do, as in the first film. The climactic scene of the film sees Lizbeth rise out of her own grave (literally) to confront her past with an axe to the head (not a metaphor), and in doing so, she becomes the perfect heroine for the new millennium: her weapon of choice is a laptop, but she’s more than capable of getting her hands dirty the old fashioned way. There’s talk in Hollywood of mounting a campaign to get actress Noomi Rapace an Oscar nomination for playing Lizbeth, and if so, this is the movie it should be for.

Unfortunately, the final film—this week’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest—cruelly halts this momentum as efficiently as an opposing coach calling for a timeout. While the first two films effectively created an appetite for seeing what Lizbeth is capable of, the third film (running for a feels-like-it 148 minutes) shackles Lizbeth to a hospital bed and a courtroom chair for well over two hours, giving her nothing more than a cell phone to play with until she finally gets crafty with a nail gun in the last ten minutes of the movie. Say what? While Lizbeth spends the first half of the movie in the hospital, there’s at least the promise that the excitement will ratchet up along with her condition, but once it becomes clear the second half of the movie won’t break free of its legal doldrums, there’s an inescapable feeling that this isn’t what we signed up for.

But here’s what’s worse: on top of Hornet’s Nest killing Lizbeth’s mojo, the plot feels utterly superfluous. The Girl Who Played with Fire was essentially about Lizbeth discovering the truth about her past, confronting the people who wished to control her, and defeating them. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is essentially about… get ready… the exact same thing. All of the revelations and answers were packed into that second film, and it ended with what looked like a resounding victory for Lizbeth. The third film basically tries to tell us “Wait, the fight’s not over! The struggle continues… in the courtroom!” In many ways, Hornet’s Nest provides a valuable lesson for the new practice of filmmaking in which entire series’ are filmed at once: Don’t play your trump card if there’s still another whole film to go.

In spite of all this, the movie could have redeemed itself in the closing bits, but that’s yet another lost opportunity. After winning her freedom and defeating the last of her transgressors, Lizbeth triumphantly goes home and… has a cup of coffee. Roll credits. That would be fine as the ending to an episode of Law & Order, but as the ending of a hotly anticipated film trilogy? It has the audacity to be an anticlimactic conclusion to a movie that was already anticlimactic in its duration, but it gets an “A” for consistency. There was a great shot in the second film of Lizbeth defiantly riding the motorcycle she took from someone who crossed her, looking like quite the badass, and ready to deal with anyone that gets in her way. Would it be too much to ask for the trilogy to have ended with something like that? In many ways, it’s not enough for Lizbeth to simply win; we deserved to see her seize her freedom, but we didn’t get it.

It is, however, useful to remember that these films are adapted from the immensely popular novels, meaning a) any inherent flaws in the plot structure are most likely the fault of the book author and not the filmmaker, and b) if the filmmakers had significantly changed a recently deceased author’s most famous work, there would have been public outrage. So, assuming these adaptations are at least vaguely faithful (I haven’t read the books), I’m mostly complaining about the way Larsson chose to end his trilogy rather than the way Daniel Alfredson chose to film it. Honestly, I sort of feel like the second and third book/movie should have been switched—let the middle part of the trilogy knock around a courtroom while Lizbeth goes crazy with an axe in the finale.

Even still, while not totally placing blame on Alfredson for the lack of ass-kicking in Hornet’s Nest, one can’t help but wonder if a great filmmaker could have found a way to make it more compelling. And this is why I’m suddenly even more intrigued for what David Fincher will do with the Hollywood version of the stories. Fincher, director of the year’s best film inThe Social Network, the modern classics Seven and Fight Club, and the woefully underappreciated Zodiac is a master at slowly building momentum and intensity. Given this, it seems inconceivable that his version of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest will fall prey to the same flaws, but that’s still over a year away. In the meantime, the Swedish version of the trilogy is now complete, and it is overall a very worthwhile movie experience. The first film is little more than a really well done genre film, and the third film, while not boring, does feel a bit useless, but the second film is the true keeper. It is the trilogy’s raison d’etre, and the showcase of a great character who is sure to become a key figure of pop culture.

Note: To see the Detroit Metro Times version of this post, click here.

TIFF Finale: Days 10 & 11 (Saturday-Sunday, 9/18-19)

2010-09-30T15:25:00.002-05:00

Note: Click here to see the Metro Times version of this post, which contains video and photos.

Sometime, you just get lucky. Saturday, September 18—the penultimate day of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival—became that day for me. Let me explain…

Over the first week of the festival, word of mouth began to spread on which movies were the favorites, and one name kept popping up over and over again: The King’s Speech. Starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech is about that friendship between King George VI and his speech therapist. In the weeks leading up to the festival, as I was looking over all of the descriptions and trying to decide which films to see, I read that brief plot synopsis, thought it sounded boring as hell, and didn’t put it on my shortlist of films to try and catch. The film only screened twice, both times occurring in the festival’s first few days, so by the time word began to spread about how amazing it was, I had already missed my chance to see it. Or had I?

For my Saturday volunteer shift, I ended up working a private industry screening of The King’s Speech, and I was one of two volunteers stationed inside the theater to help guard against unlawful piracy in the audience. This essentially meant that I could just stand there and watch the whole movie, which I happily did. I also saw two films later that evening, which both sucked, but my day had already been made.

Movie: The King’s Speech

What Is It? In the mid-1930s, King Edward abdicates England’s throne, leaving his stuttering brother, George VI, to become king and lead his nation into war against Germany. With the advent of radio and the looming conflict, it has never been more important for the King to make inspiring speeches to his people, so he hires a speech therapist to help conquer his stammer.

Director: Tom Hooper—Acclaimed for his TV miniseries work, especially USA’s Elizabeth I and HBO’s John Adams, Hooper’s only previous film was last year’s The Damned United.

Notable Cast: Colin Firth stars as George VI, with supporting work by Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist, Helena Bonham Carter as his wife, and Guy Pierce as his brother.

The Grade: A

Thoughts: If I were forced to bet right now on what will win Best Picture for 2010, I’d lay all my money on The King’s Speech. It is truly a flawless film. Despite a plot that sounds painfully boring, the film races by briskly and is never less than vividly entertaining. There’s a dry British humor that permeates the proceedings, as well as plenty of four letter words courtesy of a radical treatment method. And the acting… oh, the acting. Colin Firth is all but assured an Academy Award, and Geoffrey Rush could quite possibly win a second (he won Best Actor for 1996’s Shine). The King’s Speech is also a beautifully inspiring story about a man’s determination to overcome his disability in order to better serve his country. The film opens in wide release on Thanksgiving weekend, and I urge everyone to make time for it between trips to the mall. My only complaint was that I had to watch the whole thing standing up.

Movie: Stone

What Is It? Filmed at a jail in southeast Michigan, a convict up for parole gets his beautiful wife to try and influence his parole officer’s decisions.

Director: John Curran—Most notable for directing 2006’s underwhelming period drama The Painted Veil, which starred Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.

Notable Cast: Edward Norton plays the titular convict, Milla Jovovich (star if the Resident Evil franchise) plays his wife, and Robert DeNiro stars as the retiring parole officer.

Notable Crew: The film was written by Angus MacLachlan, whose previous screenplay was 2005’s wonderful Junebug.

The Grade: D

Thoughts: The only positive thing I can say about Stone is that it’s an ambitious film that tried to be great. But sadly, that’s where the compliments end. Honestly, this movie is just stupid. All three characters fight for who can be most unlikable, and DeNiro’s parole officer is given a prologue set thirty years ago that not only makes us hate him from the get-go, but feels completely superfluous to the film’s narrative. The acting is fairly serviceable, but anyone who’s seen HBO’s The Wire will immediately recognize that Norton is just doing a really good Bubbles impression, and therefore won’t be able to take him seriously. And you know what’s even worse than a movie with a bad plot and bad characters? A movie with a bad plot, bad characters, and no resolution. When the movie ended (or, more accurately, when the credits started running, since I don’t think it’s fair to say the movie had an ending), much of the audience responded with a disappointing “huh?” And unless you’re a former inmate, you won’t see any recognizable Michigan locations to make the movie worth sitting through. Instead of wasting your money on this, just see The King’s Speech twice.

Movie: Passion Play

What Is It? A trumpet player who’s seen better days and now works for the mob encounters a beautiful winged woman at the circus who might just be an angel. But when his mobster boss wants to claim her for his own, the trumpet player is forced into a tough decision.

Director: Mitch Glazer—a three-decade screenwriting veteran (Scrooged, The Recruit), this is Glazer’s directing debut, and he wrote the film as well.

Notable Cast: Mickey Rourke and Megan Fox play the leads, and Bill Murray uses his dry wit to tackle the mob boss.

The Grade: C-

Thoughts: I saw this movie because I’m a fan of both Rourke and Murray, but I found it to be a pretty forgettable experience. It deserves a little leniency because it is Glazer’s first film as a director, and it’s not totally awful, but I certainly don’t recommend it. The plot feels like Glazer took Wim Wenders’ two masterpieces from the 1980s—Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire—stuck them in a blender, and added a jumbo packet of Cheez Whiz. Murray feels out of place and yet still underused, while Megan Fox is at her best when not speaking. The movie does a relatively decent job maintaining interest with brisk pacing, but the ending is so comically bad that I actually wondered if it was supposed to be funny. I laughed quietly and nervously, just to make sure I covered all my bases as a polite audience member.

The 2010 Toronto International Film Festival came to a close on Sunday, September 19, and I managed to catch two more screenings that morning before I had to skip town.

Movie: The Debt

What Is It? Three retired Mossad agents in 1995 have unresolved issues from a thirty year-old case (the one that made their careers) come back to haunt them.

Director: John Madden—Most remembered for directing 1998’s Best Picture winner Shakespeare in Love, Madden has mostly kept quite over the ensuing dozen years, only surfacing with a few disappointing movies (Proof, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin).

Notable Cast: Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Ciaran Hinds (Munich, Miami Vice) play the 1995 incarnations of the three agents, while Sam Worthington (Avatar), Marton Csokas (The Bourne Supremacy), and beautiful newcomer Jessica Chastain play their younger counterparts.

Notable Crew: Matthew Vaughn, writer/director of Kick-Ass and Stardust, wrote the screenplay with Jane Goldman (his writing partner) and one other.

The Grade: B+

Thoughts: For most of The Debt’s running time, it doesn’t distinguish itself as much more than a well-done espionage thriller, but about 2/3 of the way through, there’s a twist that dramatically changes the meaning, as well as the film’s resonance. Without giving away too much, The Debt reminded me of the way films like Atonement and The Usual Suspects have devoted huge amounts of screen time to the dramatization of events that turned out to be of questionable veracity. It’s also a film about the way our greatest failures never quite manage to completely vacate our lives, and in this sense, The Debt is a film people should relate to even if they’ve never been secret agents. As you might guess from the cast, this is an extremely well acted film, but Chastain is the real revelation. She has the unenviable task of portraying a woman who will grow up to be Helen Mirren, and Chastain brings the necessary amount of vulnerability, toughness, and regality that are befitting of her older counterpart.

Movie: John Carpenter’s The Ward

What Is It? A beautiful young woman with no memory prior to being found by police at a burned-down house is institutionalized during the 1960s. Once in the asylum, she seemingly becomes the target of a ghost who may be a former patient.

Director: John Carpenter—Arguably the most influential post-Hitchcock horror director, Carpenter created a string of classics in the 70s and 80s that surely ranks as one of the better hot streaks in modern Hollywood history (Halloween, Escape From New York, The Thing, Starman, and Big Trouble in Little China all came out in an 8-year span). Carpenter also typically handles writing, producing, and soundtrack duties on his films (he wrote the classic Halloween score). Sadly, his idea well mostly dried up in the 90s, and he’s been more or less retired for the last decade or so.

Notable Cast: Amber Heard (Pineapple Express) stars, while Lyndsy Fonseca (the daughter in TV’s How I Met Your Mother) plays one of the other patients.

The Grade: C-

Thoughts: For my final film of TIFF, I had the opportunity to see something of a bit more prestigious flavor, but I hadn’t yet seen any of the Midnight Madness movies, and I wanted to end the whole experience on something fun. So what better than John Carpenter’s long awaited return to the genre that he helped shape? Just about anything, it would turn out. The Ward literally feels like Carpenter went to a screening of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island earlier this year, felt that movie could have just as easily featured a cast of hot chicks, went home and knocked out a screenplay that night, then started shooting a week later. Even at its worst, The Ward is still relatively watchable and entertaining, but it’s undeniably depressing to see a once-great director resort to using genre clichés when he used to be the guy creating them.

And with that anticlimactic note, my great TIFF 2010 experience came to a close. In 11 days, I saw 22 films (though I slept through almost all of one of them), attended one interview and one sneak preview, took part in 7 filmmaker Q & A’s, knocked out nearly 50 hours worth of volunteer work, lost an incalculable amount of sleep, and, at various times, got behind on such luxuries as eating and bathing. By the end of the festival, I was mostly subsisting on Tim Horton’s doughnuts and coffee shop pastries, because my life savings was being so heavily drained on the public transit system. And yet, my first film festival was undoubtedly one of the greatest and most profound experiences of my life, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Really, the only depressing aspect of the week was how many potentially great movies I didn’t get to see. For the record, here are the top ten films that never quite made it off my wish list:

1. Hereafter—New drama about mortality from Clint Eastwood, which should tell you everything you need to know about why I wanted to see it. Starring Matt Damon, this film inexplicably only screened once (most films at TIFF screen three times), which made it one of the most difficult tickets to come by.

2. Biutiful—Starring Javier Bardem and directed by the great Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (21 Grams, Babel), this film won raves at Cannes.

3. Waiting For Superman—Documentary about the failure of the U.S. education system made by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) and funded by Bill Gates.

4. Blue Valentine—The most acclaimed film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, this relationship drama stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, who are both expected to receive Oscar attention.

5. Another Year—The new film by Mike Leigh (Vera Drake, Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy), several critics have called this his best yet.

6. Of Gods and Men—French drama starring Michael Lonsdale (best known to American audiences as the evil Drax in Moonraker), I talked to a few people who thought this was the single best film at TIFF.

7. Little White Lies—Starring Marion Cotillard, this was the film I had a ticket for, but was forced to trade in for something else when they couldn’t get the subtitles working.

8. The Conspirator—Robert Redford directed film about Lincoln’s assassination, starring Robin Wright and James McAvoy.

9. Barney’s Version—Life reflection dramedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.

10. Machete Maidens Unleashed—A documentary about the huge amount of American B-Movies filmed in the Philippines during the 1970s and the jobs they provided for the indigenous female population. Seriously, just look at that title!

And, lastly, my top ten for the films I did see:

1. The King’s Speech

2. Black Swan

3. 127 Hours

4. Three

5. The Town

6. Inside Job

7. The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town

8. Janie Jones

9. It’s Kind of a Funny Story

10. Tamara Drewe

Thanks to everyone that read along for taking part in my journey. I’m already excited for TIFF 2011.

TIFF: Days 8 & 9 (Thursday-Friday, 9/16-17)

2010-09-23T15:46:00.002-05:00

Note: Click here to view the Metro Times version of this post, which contains photos.

There were a good amount of foreign films I was interested in at TIFF, almost all of which were playing today. I had already struck out on the French film Little White Lies earlier in the fest when the subtitles malfunctioned, so I decided Thursday would be foreign film day, and I woke up at 7:00 a.m. to see what the ticket gods had to offer me.

Sadly, not much. Out of my top five choices, I only scored tickets for two of them. But, both films seemed promising, and the lack of a third film on the agenda meant I had some valuable naptime directly following my volunteer shift.

Movie: Three

What Is It? Hanna and Simon are a happy, middle-aged couple in Berlin, but each begins an affair despite their commitment. Unknowingly, they’ve actually both started seeing the same bi-sexual man, Adam, who doesn’t realize that his two partners are also partners with each other.

Director: Tom Tykwer—One of the best European directors of the last fifteen years, Tykwer took the art house world by storm in 1998 with the widely acclaimed Run Lola Run. He began making films in English in 2002, and was responsible for the underappreciated Perfume: The Story of a Murder (2006) and last year’s good but flawed The International, which starred Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. Three is Tykwer’s first film in his native German in a decade.

Notable Cast: The three principle actors will all be unfamiliar to American audiences, but Devid Streisow, who plays Adam, also starred in The Counterfeiters, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2007.

The Grade: A-

Thoughts: Three has the feel of a modern day Jules & Jim (Francois

Truffaut’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest films of the French New Wave), and replicates the ideal that three people can love each other without compromise. All three actors convince us that they each truly love the other two, and that’s the key to the emotional resonance of the film.

Tykwer’s previous films have all been extremely visually inventive—in Perfume he figured out how to convey scents with color and camera technique, and The International had one of last year’s best action set pieces with the shootout in New York’s Guggenheim Museum—but he really outdoes himself here. The opening credit sequence, which uses power lines viewed from the window of a train as a metaphor for the entire spectrum of human relationships and loves, is jaw-droppingly stunning and should be seen by any lover of film. Tykwer also uses split-screens and image fragmentation in a more ambitious way than I’ve ever seen before.

But Three has a very specific flaw: there are three or four moments when the explicit imagery simply goes one degree beyond what is necessary, or even comfortable. For example, at one point we see—with graphic detail—a man having a cancerous testicle removed. Being an owner of testicles myself, it was an image that I felt no desire to ever be exposed to, and it certainly didn’t add anything to the film. There are also a few moments where the sexual explicitness goes to similar territory. This is an easily solvable problem; if just 10-20 seconds here or there could be cut from the film, it would have earned an “A,” it might have been my favorite film of the festival, and I would have considered calling it a masterpiece. Luckily, it’s not too late for this to happen before the film’s theatrical release, and hopefully someone with Tykwer’s ear will suggest that it does.

Movie: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

What Is It? The winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (meaning it was selected by a jury as the best of the festival), Uncle Boonmee is a Thai film which tells the story of a man on his death bed with kidney failure, who is visited by the spirits of his late wife and his estranged son.

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethankul—A highly original Thai director whose films are largely unknown in the U.S. but have made a significant impact on the international festival circuit. 2004’s Tropical Malady is probably the most notable.

Notable Cast: Weereasethakul mostly uses unknowns and non-professional actors in his films.

The Grade: Incomplete—Well, it was destined to happen. After seven days of the festival, fifteen films, almost forty hours of volunteer work, and a severe lack of sleep, I finally conked out at the wrong time. I dozed off about twenty minutes into the film, and woke up during the audience applause that greeted the end credits. So, I certainly can’t speak for whether the film was any good or not, but I can comment on the style. Weerasethakul’s camera approach really reminded me of Yasujiro Ozu, one of the great masters of postwar Japanese cinema. Ozu often set his camera on one side of a room and used it as a stationary observer of events; no panning, no close-ups, no quick edits. It’s reminiscent of a one-camera sitcom, except done for artistic reasons rather than economic. It’s a unique and interesting style, and one which we certainly don’t see very often, but the long takes and minimal camera activity did me no favors in terms of staying conscious. I heard during the fest that Uncle Boonmee was picked up for U.S. theatrical distribution, so hopefully I’ll get another chance to see it in the near future.

Friday started to bring a definite feel that the festival was winding down. Most of the stars had skipped out by now, and all of the press & industry screenings finished Thursday. The next three days basically just amounted to a giant public sneak preview of upcoming films… but that certainly didn’t mean there weren’t good things happening. Friday actually ended up being one of my best days at TIFF, as I spent part of the morning on E Street Radio talking to rock critic and Bruce Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh about the various Bruce events we took part in over the previous few days, and Friday afternoon I had a valuable meeting with a former Toronto film critic named David Gilmour, now a renowned novelist. Friday evening also brought about two of my favorite films of the festival…

Movie: Easy A

What Is It? Olive is a normal high school girl, but her reputation turns sour when her closeted gay friend asks for help in creating the appearance that he’s straight. Soon, all of the school’s unfavorable boys are bribing Olive to create rumors that they hooked up with her, and she becomes the most notorious girl around. Inspired by “The Scarlet Letter,” which her English class is studying, Olive confronts her detractors head-on by brandishing a red “A” on her school outfits… which have themselves become increasingly risqué.

Director: Will Gluck—A successful TV writer making his first major foray into film.

Notable Cast: Emma Stone (Superbad, Zombieland) stars as Olive, Amanda Bynes (Hairspray) plays her Christian nemesis, and Penn Badgley (TV’s Gossip Girl) plays her love interest. Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson will slay you as Olive’s parents, while Thomas Hayden Church (Sideways, Spider-Man 3), Lisa Kudrow, and Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange) all play staff at Olive’s school.

The Grade: B+

Thoughts: Easy A is incredibly ridiculous, but equally funny and endearing, and it dares to be a sexless teen sex comedy. It suffers from the Juno-like “no seventeen year-old could ever be that witty” problem, and it tries a little too hard to remind us of a John Hughes movie (even name-dropping several of them), but these flaws are easy to look past because the movie is just damn fun to watch.

Emma Stone commands the screen with a sassy performance that should turn her into a star, and there are some truly hilarious lines. Plus, anytime a movie features a foxy chick in lingerie belting out Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” you can sign me up.

Movie: Janie Jones

What Is It? Thirteen year-old Janie Jones has never met her father, and her junkie mother is in dire need of drug rehab. Not seeing any other choice, Janie’s mother takes her to a concert, where she reveals that the down-on-his-luck lead singer, Ethan Brand, is her father. Of course, this is news to Ethan, who never knew he had a daughter, but when Janie’s mother disappears, he and Janie have no choice but to hop onto the tour bus and get to know one another.

Director: David M. Rosenthal—A Canadian director who has made two previous films, along with a couple of shorts and a documentary, but nothing that has made any impact.

Notable Cast: Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) stars as Janie Jones, with Elizabeth Shue (an Oscar nominee in 1995 for Leaving Las Vegas) and Alessandro Nivola (Laurel Canyon) playing her parents. Brittney Snow (Hairspray) plays a band member and Peter Stormare (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Armageddon) plays the manager that can seemingly solve any problem.

The Grade: A-

Thoughts: This is the kind of movie one hopes to find at a film festival. Of course, everyone looks forward to seeing the next big thing; the movies that will get showered with Oscar nominations and box office bucks, and that you can tell everyone you saw first. But if you get really lucky at a film festival, you’ll make a discovery. You’ll see a little film with no buzz, no distribution deal, and just a small hope of finding a substantial audience, and you’ll recognize something special in it. Janie Jones became that film for me at TIFF 2010.

I admit that I saw this film for no other reason than the title— as a film festival reaches its dog days, I found that a great title becomes a perfectly valid reason to see one film over another, and “Janie Jones” is the name of the first song on The Clash’s first album (the main character in High Fidelity called it his all-time favorite “side one, track one”). But I’m truly happy I saw this, and it was one of the highlights of the whole 11-day excursion.

It’s a rock ‘n’ roll road trip movie that has a vague resemblance to Almost Famous, but with the burgeoning relationship between a father and daughter as the core of the movie. Breslin is truly outstanding. Not even old enough to have a learner’s permit, she does all her own singing and guitar playing, and proves that her career will amount to far more than just being the awkward girl from Little Miss Sunshine. And Nivola delivers a performance that’s really touching in its emotional subtlety, as we slowly see him embrace Janie as his own after initially denying her relation.

It will probably be next summer or later before this film shows up in theaters (it’ll almost definitely try to build momentum at Sundance in January before even considering a release date), but if you can keep a file open for it in your mind’s hard drive, you won’t regret it.

On Tap For Tomorrow: TIFF 2010 draws to a close as I see a Michigan-filmed movie that truly sucked, and, by accident, the movie that I’m picking to win 2010’s Oscar for Best Picture.

TIFF: Days 6 & 7 (Tuesday/Wednesday 9/14-15)

2010-09-21T06:49:00.002-05:00

Note: Click here to check out the Metro Times version of this post, which contains photos.

Today began the Great Bruce Springsteen Adventure…

For those of you that don’t know, I’m quite a big fan, and I contacted Backstreets (Springsteen’s fan club/magazine/site), in the weeks prior to TIFF to see if they needed any help covering the gala premiere of his new documentary—The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town. Luckily, they did, and they arranged with Springsteen’s publicist, a very nice lady named Marilyn Laverty, to get me into everything. It was an unbelievable degree of treatment that I was truly not expecting, but incredibly grateful that I received.

It actually started last night, when I had to trek over to the hotel of the stars, The Four Seasons, to pick up my tickets. I got there at about midnight and figured, what the hell, why not hang out in the hotel bar for a drink and try to stalk the rich and famous? One thirteen-dollar beer and no sightings later, I made a quick exit.

At the volunteer shift on Tuesday morning, I was working again in the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which is where Bruce Springsteen’s 6:00 p.m. interview with Edward Norton would be happening. There was an indescribable buzz about the place all day, and Bruce fervor reached a high enough decibel by early afternoon that the volunteers were actually instructed to tell people he wouldn’t be in the building (a blatant lie). It’s funny that the entire week of TIFF overruns Toronto with a gaggle of Hollywood celebrities, and yet the lone rock star seemed to be a much bigger deal than all the rest.

Just as I was heading out for lunch and a nap before the big evening, a cab pulled up and Jon Landau—Springsteen’s longtime manager/producer, and the man responsible for probably the most famous quote in the history of music criticism (“I saw rock ‘n’ roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen”)—and Dave Marsh, Bruce’s biographer, got out right in front of me. I quickly ambushed them and introduced myself, and told them I was looking forward to everything that would be happening that night. “You’ll be blown away,” Landau said to me. This seemed like a good omen.

First up was the interview actor Edward Norton would be conducting with Springsteen (presumably) about the documentary. This was part of TIFF’s Mavericks series, which happens every festival and involves interviews between attendees that might not normally be associated with one another. It turns out this event didn’t even go on sale to the public; all tickets were either press or “know the right person” status, the rush line to get any vacant seats formed the night before, and the rumor of the day was that tickets were being scalped for thousands of dollars. This caused a momentary crisis for me; if I were just willing to ignore my writing obligation and have Springsteen’s publicist potentially send a hit out on me, I could pay off quite a bit of credit card debt. Nah, bad idea.

One of the tenets of the amazing access I was given to the Springsteen camp was that my reviews of the content I became privy to were exclusive for Backstreets, so I can’t actually write about the Mavericks interview on this forum, but you’re welcome to check it out here.

Next up came the movie premiere, where I was seated in a small closed off section with the Springsteen entourage. Landau, Marsh, Marilyn Laverty, Barbara Carr (Springsteen’s co-manager and Marsh’s wife), Thom Zimny (the director of the film), and Patti Scialfa (E Street Band member and Springsteen’s wife) were all present, along with a lot of people from Sony Music. And there I was, seated three rows directly behind the boss himself. Again, I can’t cover the documentary here, but you’re welcome to check out my Backstreets coverage.

After the lengthy standing ovation, Bruce went on the handshake rounds for those of us in his section, and I briefly met the man… though it’s fairly likely he had no idea who I was. Still, it was pretty awesome.

But meeting Bruce wouldn’t even be the best part of the evening. No, that came a few minutes later when Marilyn Laverty and Jon Landau invited me to a special sneak preview of the upcoming six-disc box set being released in November. Taking place at a small theater the next morning, a handful of foreign journalists were being shown never-before-seen video footage and previously unreleased recordings from the late 1970s. Only two Americans were invited—someone from Rolling Stone, and me.

This preview ended up being one of the highlights of the whole TIFF experience (even though it wasn’t associated with TIFF and nobody knew about it except the invited). You can read my Backstreets coverage of the preview here. Bruce and Patti were there, and Bruce even gave a sort of impromptu press conference for us. I also had a good long talk with Dave Marsh, and he invited me on his radio show Friday morning to talk about the preview we were given.

The Bruce Experience ended early afternoon on Wednesday and I spent the bulk of the rest of the day writing my Backstreets coverage, but I did have time to hit up two TIFF screenings…

Movie: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

What Is It? A 3D documentary about Chauvet Cave, which was discovered in southern France in 1994, and contains elaborate cave paintings dating back over thirty thousand years—human kind’s earliest know works of art by a pretty substantial margin. To preserve its pristine condition, the cave has never been opened to the public and images from it have rarely been seen. Director Werner Herzog and his small team were granted access by the French government to fully explore the cave and its evocative imagery.

Director: Werner Herzog—One of World Cinema’s most ambitious and interesting directors over the last forty years, Herzog’s films often involve quests that border on the insane. His greatest films starred Klaus Kinski, and include Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). Recently, Herzog has been on a bit of a tear with the great documentaries Grizzly Man (2005) and Encounters at the End of the World (2008), as well as the Christian Bale starring Rescue Dawn (2007).

The Grade: A-

Thoughts: First thing’s first—this is a two hour documentary about cave paintings. If that doesn’t immediately sound interesting to you, then it probably won’t be.

But warnings aside, this is a great film, and it turned into one of the talks of the festival. Herzog fulfills two purposes here; first, and perhaps most importantly, he shows us the cave. In 3D. This cave is the greatest historical record we have of an entire era of pre-history, and this film is the closest the public will ever get to it. In that sense, we’re simply lucky that Herzog has created this historical document for us. The 3D works extremely well here, and, unlike most 3D films, it feels necessary rather than superfluous.

But beyond just showing us the cave in obsessive detail, Herzog guides our thinking with pointed questions about what it all means. Is this, he asks, “the beginning of humanness?” Is it the origin point of the human soul? The images in this cave predate all evidence we have of any human activity other than simply surviving… so what are we to ascertain from this? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions when you see the movie, but if you’re interested in reading more, check out Roger Ebert’s long journal entry about the film, which contains several images from inside the cave.

Movie: The Bang Bang Club

What Is It? The true story of four ambitious and slightly crazy young photographers, who captured the end of white rule in South Africa from 1990-1994. Their names were Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, and Joao Silva, and they came to be known as The Bang Bang Club. Collectively, their works earned a hefty amount of controversy, as well as two Pulitzer Prizes. But two of them wouldn’t make it out alive.

Director: Steven Silver, who had only worked in TV documentaries prior to this.

Notable Cast: Ryan Phillippe and Taylor Kitsch (TV’s “Friday Night Lights”) star as two of the photographers, while Malin Akerman (Watchmen) plays a newspaper photo editor and love interest.

Notable Crew: Silver wrote the screenplay, while one of Nelson Mandela’s grandchildren, Kwelu, is an executive producer.

The Grade: B

Thoughts: From a directing perspective, this is an extremely well made film, with a plentiful amount of evocative imagery. Silver gives us a lot to think about, and this could be the launching pad to a notable career. But as a screenwriter, Silver leaves a bit to be desired. The movie just feels like it glosses over too many important aspects, and it seems unfair that two of the subjects are given first rate treatment while the other two feel like background characters. The pacing is generally good, but that comes at the expense of developing enough emotional investment in South Africa’s political climate.

The actors do a pretty good job with the accents, though they are by no means perfect. It’s actually Akerman, who had never exhibited any previous evidence that she even could act, who does the best job in that department. But even though his accent wanes in and out a bit, Kitsch is the revelation here. In his first major role outside of TV, he just exudes movie star quality.

On Tap For Tomorrow: My only two foreign films of the Festival, one of which won the coveted Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

TIFF: Day 5 (Monday 9/13)

2010-09-17T03:13:00.002-05:00

Note: You can check out Detroit's Metro Times version of this post (with pictures!) by clicking here.

The big deal for the first Monday of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival was that the brand new TIFF Bell Lightbox officially opened for business (and I had my first volunteer shift there). TIFF’s state of the art new headquarters in the middle of downtown Toronto’s Entertainment District, the Bell Lightbox features five theaters and screening rooms, lecture halls, gallery and exhibit space, a film reference library, a gift shop, and, of course, the TIFF offices.

The doors officially opened yesterday, celebrated by a huge block party and live music on the streets, but today is the first day that TIFF screenings are being held there. The building is being called “the house that film built,” and to celebrate it’s first year, the TIFF brain trust created a list of 100 Essential Films from throughout history, each of which will screen in one of the Bell Lightbox theaters sometime over the next several months. (Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey will screen in December in their original 70mm prints—an event I’m strongly considering trekking back up to Toronto for.) Also opened at the Bell Lightbox today was an exhibit showcasing art and memorabilia from each of these 100 Essential Films, including gorgeous original posters, costumes, props, and photographs from the productions. For my volunteer shift at the TIFF Bell Lightbox today, I was one of many people assigned to help patrol the exhibit and help answer patron questions.

After the shift, I caught three screenings (all of which were pretty heavy and serious in subject), and two of them were among the best of the Fest… as well as potential Best Picture nominees.

Movie: 127 Hours

What Is It? The true story of hiker/mountain climber Aron Ralston, who got trapped under a boulder in a Utah canyon in 2003. After 127 hours, and running out of both food and water, Ralston severed his own arm to free himself.

Director: Danny Boyle—Winner of the Best Director Oscar for his last film, Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle is also responsible for the modern classics Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, as well as the interesting-yet-flawed The Beach and Sunshine.

Notable Cast: James Franco (Milk, Pineapple Express, Spider-Man) plays Ralston, who is really the only character on screen for much of the film. Kate Mara (Shooter) has a small part as another hiker Ralston encounters prior to his entrapment.

Notable Crew: Boyle worked mostly with his Slumdog crew again, as Simon Beaufoy adapts Ralston’s book, and A.R. Rahman provides the score

The Grade: A-

Thoughts: The first thing you need to know is that James Franco WILL be receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. I’m not saying he’ll win, but a nomination is absolutely in the bag. The second thing you need to know is that this movie becomes difficult to watch at times. It’s an extremely intense experience that is often grueling for the viewer, and when Ralston finally has to resort to cutting off his own arm, it’s a pretty gruesome sequence. The third thing you need to know is that Danny Boyle continues to prove why he’s one of contemporary cinema’s most interesting directors. The exciting opening credits alone are worth the price of admission, and the vivid colors and landscapes are truly gorgeous. Boyle also gets creative with how to hold the audience’s attention, but I won’t spoil anything there.

And the last thing you need to know is, if you can stomach through the hard parts, this is the year’s most uplifting movie. I actually started tearing up at the end watching Ralston gain his freedom (remember, even after lopping off his arm, he then had to get out of the canyon with one arm and having gone well over a full day without food or water). Boyle chooses his music at the end perfectly—it’s a Sigur Ros song called “Festival”—and the film closes with the real Ralston with his wife and daughter. It’s a truly inspiring tale of the human spirit, very similar to 2007’s Into the Wild, but without the downer ending.

Movie: Miral

What Is It? The true story of Miral, an orphaned Palestinian girl growing up in Israel in the wake of the Six Days War. She finds herself drawn into the conflict before eventually becoming a sympathizer for both sides.

Diretor: Juilan Schnabel—One of the modern era’s most renowned visual artists, Schnabel entered filmmaking in 1996 with the biopic Basquiat. He has since made 2000’s Before Night Falls, which starred Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp, and 2007’s outstanding The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which earned him a Best Director nomination.

Notable Cast: Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire) plays Miral. Vanessa Redgrave and Willem Dafoe are also in the movie, but their parts are so minuscule and inconsequential that I don’t understand why they bothered.

Notable Crew: The real Miral helped adapt her own autobiography with Schnabel.

The Grade: B-

Thoughts: The first movie of the festival that I was disappointed in; it certainly wasn’t bad, but Schnabel’s previous film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, simply set the bar too high. With that film, Schnabel found remarkably interesting ways to tell the story that could seemingly have only come from a visual artist. With his follow-up, I was expecting another masterpiece, and sadly, I didn’t get one. Miral definitely has some interesting moments, and there are a few flashes of the brilliance Schnabel showed with Butterfly, but for the most part, it’s nothing more than a well-made film of a fairly conventional story that does little to distinguish itself.

Movie: Black Swan

What Is It? Nina, a New York ballerina wins the starring role she’s always coveted, but the director forces her to lose control and embrace her dark side to fully commit to the character. In doing so, Nina begins a decent into her own psyche that just may cause her to lose her grip on reality.

Director: Darren Aronofsky—The director of some of contemporary cinema’s most disturbing and memorable films, including Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and 2008’s The Wrestler.

Notable Cast: Natalie Portman stars as Nina, while Mila Kunis (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and Winona Ryder play rival ballerinas. The great French actor, Vincent Cassel (Ocean’s 12 & 13, Eastern Promises) plays the Ballet director.

The Grade: A

Thoughts: I managed to score the last ticket available at 7:00am this morning, and it was worth it—the best of the Fest so far, and a truly absorbing movie-going experience. The beautiful visuals and the epic slow-build of tension and intrigue ensure that you simply can’t take your eyes off the screen.

If you can imagine a cross between The Shining and Showgirls (only an alternate reality version where Showgirls was really good), then you’re just about there. There’s also some substantial similarity to Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler, which is no accident. Aronofsky said he views them as companion pieces—one is about what people might call the lowest art form, and one is about what could be called the highest art form, but both are about people who sacrifice every aspect of themselves for their art.

Portman is extremely impressive with the range of emotions she captures, and it appears that she did most of her own dancing. She’s nearly as much of a lock for an Oscar nomination as James Franco.

Word of mouth on this film has been great throughout the Festival, and it inspired the longest standing ovation I’ve seen thus far.

On Tap For Tomorrow: The Great Bruce Springsteen Adventure: will your fearless author get to meet his idol? Stay tuned…

TIFF: Day 4 (Sunday 9/12)

2010-09-14T15:12:00.001-05:00

Note: You can check out the Metro Times version of this post (with pictures!) by clicking here.

Not too much to report today besides the screenings (I caught three), so I’ll cut to the chase…

Movie: The Town

What Is It? Four bank robbers from the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown take a beautiful young woman hostage during their latest heist. When the leader of the crew visits her a few days later to try to find out if she knows anything, he begins to fall in love with her.

Director: Ben Affleck—A major Hollywood star since the late 90s, this is Affleck’s second go behind the camera. The first, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, I picked as one of that year’s ten best.

Notable Cast: Affleck, Jeremy Renner (an Oscar nominee last year for The Hurt Locker), Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona, Please Give), Jon Hamm (star of AMC’s “Mad Men”), Blake Lively (TV’s “Gossip Girl”), and Chris Cooper (an Oscar winner in 2002 for Adaptation).

Notable Crew: Affleck helped write the screenplay, his third co-writing credit after Gone Baby Gone and Good Will Hunting, for which he won an Original Screenplay Oscar. And the film was shot by Robert Elswit, who was responsible for the incredible imagery of Good Night, and Good Luck and There Will Be Blood.

The Grade: A-

Thoughts: I left The Town feeling absolutely certain of two things—1) Blake Lively has breast implants, and 2) Ben Affleck is ready to enter the upper echelon of American filmmaking. The first one needs no explanation, so we’ll concentrate on number two. The Town isn’t going to be getting any Best Picture love or anything, because, at its heart, it’s just an excellent genre film. But excellent genre films don’t grow on trees, and I expect this one to be a critical and commercial success.

As an actor, Affleck has inspired more jokes than praise, but he does an admirable job here, holding his own with a great cast. Renner proves The Hurt Locker was no fluke (he’s great), and the gorgeous and talented Rebecca Hall looks ready for the big time. Hamm, looking like he’s enjoying the chance to sport a bit of stubble, provides reliable supporting work as the FBI agent on the case.

In many respects, The Town is like Michael Mann’s 1995 bank robber epic Heat, but an hour shorter. I would have been the first to argue that Heat couldn’t—and shouldn’t—be any shorter, but at just over two hours, The Town doesn’t feel like it short changed any aspects of the plot. This is only Affleck’s second film behind the camera, but he’s proven with both that he’s got the goods. Other than an ending that veers a little too much towards Shawshank Redemption territory, The Town is without flaws, and Affleck’s natural story-telling ability is incredibly apparent.

Movie: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

What Is It? We follow four related Londoners in committed relationships as they each begin to wonder about meeting someone else. The idea of finding a new romantic interest is followed within each of them to varying degrees, and the outcome of each real or imagined infidelity is explored.

Director: Woody Allen—I’m hoping he needs no explanation, but it should be noted that he’s enjoyed a bit of a resurgence lately since he began setting his films in Europe with 2005’s Matchpoint. 2008’s Vicky Christina Barcelona was his best in almost twenty years.

Notable Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire), Gemma Jones, and newcomer Lucy Punch.

Notable Crew: Allen wrote the screenplay (as usual), and the film was shot by the great Vilmos Zsigmond, who worked on such classics as The Deer Hunter and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Grade: B+

Thoughts: The key quality of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is that it’s not about people having affairs and then arguing about it. In fact, we barely see a single scene of couples arguing about affairs. Instead, we see circumstances and encounters that attract people to the idea of an affair, and then we see how they feel about what decision they made. It’s a new approach to an ancient subject, and it feels quite fresh. All of the actors do well, but particularly outstanding are Gemma Jones as Naomi Watts’ mother, and Lucy Punch (who may find herself with an Oscar nomination) as a vacuous hooker that Anthony Hopkins tries to turn into a trophy housewife. Like many Woody Allen films, we don’t reach a conclusion so much as a stopping point, but it serves the story well and humorously.

Movie: Tamara Drewe

What Is It? After many years away, Tamara Drewe returns to her English countryside home with a new nose that makes her startlingly beautiful. A writer’s retreat is occurring at the neighbors, which she has a profound effect on. Meanwhile, two local teenage girls become very jealous of Tamara’s latest love interest, the drummer of a popular London rock band.

Director: Stephen Frears—One of the most dependable directors of the last twenty-five years, it’s unfortunate Frears doesn’t have more name recognition. Among his many films are The Queen (for which Helen Mirren won an Oscar in 2006), Dirty Pretty Things, The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, and High Fidelity—one of my personal favorites.

Notable Cast: Gemma Arterton (Strawberry Fields in the latest Bond flick) plays the title character, and she gets excellent supporting work from a handful of British character actors and newcomers.

Notable Crew: The screenplay was adapted from the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds.

The Grade: B+

Thoughts: Most of what happens in Tamara Drewe defies explanation. The plot involves a ton of shagging, a stampede of cows, a failing American crime writer, and a hilarious teenage girl with a vocabulary that George Carlin would approve of (played by Jessica Barden, she does the best scene stealing work of the year so far; I simply couldn’t wait for her to get back on screen). Sadly, though, without any stars (Arterton isn’t quite there yet, though she will be), I don’t think this little British countryside comedy will be lighting the box office on fire. But if you do get the chance to see it, consider it recommended. It’s an extremely funny film made by a director whose work always has the utmost care and integrity.

On Tap For Tomorrow: The grand opening of the new TIFF headquarters (where my next five volunteer shifts will be), new movies by Danny Boyle and Julian Schnabel, and my last ditch attempt to get in the Black Swan premiere—arguably the fest’s hottest ticket.

TIFF: Day 3 (Saturday 9/11)

2010-09-12T23:52:00.003-05:00

Note: Click here to see the Metro Times version of this post, which features many photos I took through the day.

Woke up at 7am today to try and get more tickets—at TIFF, shows often go off sale when there are still some tickets left, and then those remaining tickets are released at 7am the day of the show. I already had tickets today for Little White Lies and It’s Kind of a Funny Story, but I was really hoping to add Biutiful (Javier Bardem drama by the director of Babel) and Never Let Me Go (adapted from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro and starring Carey Mulligan & Keira Knightley). Struck out on Biutiful, nabbed a ticket for Never Let Me Go, then promptly went back to bed for three more hours.

My day then commenced with the revelation that the showers where I’m staying were temporarily out of commission, which meant no bathing for me today because I’m on a timetable. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this would be a powerful omen for how the rest of the day would go. After lunch and some writing at a café, I headed to Roy Thomson Hall for the gala premiere of Little White Lies, a film I was really looking forward to. Directed by Guillaume Canet (who starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach and directed the great 2006 French thriller Tell No One), Marion Cotillard heads an all-star French cast on a weekend picnic outing of Parisian high society. I arrived at the premiere about thirty minutes before it was scheduled to start, and then waited in line for almost an hour and a half. When they finally herded us in, Canet and Cotillard came out on the stage to announce that they had just flown from Paris to present the film to us, but the new state of the art projection system wasn’t registering the subtitles. So, here was the compromise: anyone that spoke French could stay there and watch the film, and anyone that didn’t could take a four block walk to another theater where the film would be shown with subtitles. Sadly, that means the new show time would be shortly after 3pm, the movie was two hours and thirty-five minutes long, and my ticket to Never Let Me Go was for 6pm and a long trek across town. So Little White Lies and I were not destined to be, at least not today.

After some more writing I headed to the Ryerson Theater, where my next two movies were showing back to back. I bet you’d love to believe this meant I could just stay in the theater, but ooohhhh no, not that easy. After the first showing I had to exit and get in line for the next one, already wrapped around the block. After both films (reviews are below), I then tried to rush the midnight movie, Bunraku. Allow me to translate: TIFF holds a midnight movie at the Ryerson every night of the fest. These are often horror, sci-fi, lowbrow/low budget action, etc. The midnight movie for Saturday was Bunraku, some sort of crime noir with Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore, and Josh Hartnett that sounded interesting. It was sold out, but I tried to rush it, which is an option for every screening at TIFF. Basically, a rush line forms at a screening for anyone that wants to see the movie but doesn’t have a ticket. Then, when the show’s about to start, festival staff counts the number of empty seats and lets that many people in from the rush line. The production and distribution companies for each film are usually allotted an obscene amount of tickets, most of which don’t get used, so this is where the empty seats get created. Often times, over 100 people from the rush line will get into a screening. But for whatever reason, last night at the Ryerson, there was only one person working the box office to sell tickets to the people in the rush line. So by the time they got to my spot in the rush line, the movie had started twenty minutes ago. The guys behind me didn’t seem to think this was a big deal, and they happily shuffled in, but I’m a purist; if I can’t see a movie from the first second, I’m not interested. So I called it a night.

End result for Saturday: tried to see five movies, succeeded with two, and waited in three hours worth of lines for movies I didn’t even get to see. Hopefully Sunday will be better.

Movie: Never Let Me Go

What Is It? Taking place in an alternate present-day England with no disease, people are bred to be organ donors. By their mid-20s, these people begin their donations, and after three or four, they “complete” (die). Living sheltered lives away from real society, three of these people—Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy—have a romantic triangle that plays out against their short, devalued lives.

Director: Mark Romanek—known as one of the best music video directors around (he’s responsible for two of my all-time favorites: Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” and Johnny Cash’s “Hurt”), Romanek made his feature film debut with 2002’s Robin Williams drama One Hour Photo. This is his second film.

Notable Cast: Carey Mulligan (an Oscar nominee last year for the wonderful An Education), Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield (star of the upcoming The Social Network and recently cast as the next Spider-Man) play the three lead characters.

Notable Crew: Alex Garland, writer of The Beach, adapted the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Grade: B-

Thoughts: Overall, it was good, but I liked it better when it was called Blade Runner. Sure, the movies are radically different, but the themes they tackle are so uniquely similar that it’s impossible not to draw comparisons. You can safely think of this as Blade Runner minus the sci-fi elements, with a touch of British class drama thrown in.

As is the case with all of Romanek’s videos, the visuals are generally quite stunning, and the three leads do a wonderful job, particularly Mulligan’s melancholy narration and a scene towards the end where Garfield’s character lets his whole soul pour out.

But the film still has a major flaw that will be obvious even to people who haven’t seen Blade Runner. After we find out who these people are and what they’re destined for about twenty minutes in, very little happens over the next hour. In fact, I started to nod off at times, and I talked to a few other people who felt the same. The film’s final act, where our three characters meet their fates, is truly phenomenal, but the story just didn’t know how to get them there in a way that the audience cares about. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless. Even still, the last twenty minutes make the film overall worthwhile.

Movie: It’s Kind of a Funny Story

What is it? Craig, a typical sixteen-year old in NYC, is feeling suicidal, so he checks himself into the psych ward at a hospital, without realizing that means he must stay a minimum of five days. He meets Bobby, who’s sort of like a fat Yoda to the rest of the ward, and Noelle, also a teen suicide risk, but a foxy one.

Director: Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, the same team that made 2008’s Sugar and 2006’s Half Nelson (which earned Ryan Gosling an Oscar nomination).

Notable Cast: Zach Galifianakis (the break-out star of last summer’s The Hangover) plays Bobby, while relative unknowns Emma Roberts and Keir Gilchrist plays Noelle and Craig.

The Grade: A-

Thoughts: A really enjoyable film that I suspect will find a sizable audience through great word of mouth, a la Little Miss Sunshine and Juno. The most amazing aspect might have been the ability to craft a mental institution dramedy without really recalling One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is about as easy as making a nuclear war comedy without referencing Dr. Strangelove. Using a dazzling array of styles and visual techniques, Fleck & Boden recall the look of films like (500) Days of Summer and The Science of Sleep, but make the outcome feel original.

Some of the best scenes involve slight departures from reality, such as an animated sequence of the cityscapes Craig likes to draw, and a fever dream music video of the ward patients performing Bowie & Queen’s “Under Pressure,” which looked like one of the most fun days of shooting any movie could ever have. Galifianakis also shows in the movie that he has true acting chops beyond just his obvious comedic talent, and I’m making a bold prediction: he’ll get an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

The flaw of the movie is that it acts as though a sixteen-year old can solve many of the problems in a hospital psyche ward after a five-day visit, which is, of course, a slightly over-simplified reality. But the conclusion leaves the characters not with happily ever after, but instead just happy to be, and that should be the dream of any mental patient.

After the screening of It’s Kind of a Funny Story, the cast and directors stuck around for a pretty engaging Q & A, with Zach Galifianakis inciting some uproarious laughter simply with his mannerisms. I even managed to get a question in for the directors; I asked about whether they write scenes with specific songs in mind, and what happens if they can’t get the rights to some of the songs they envision being in the film. Fleck said that sometimes they have backup plans, but it almost always works out. Though he added that in the case of “Under Pressure,” when a bit of difficulty arose, he and Boden told their producers that they wouldn’t make the movie without that song in it. One thing that amazed me at the Q & A is that, while most high school characters in TV and film are played by actors in their mid-twenties, Keir Gilchrist played a sixteen-year old but didn’t even look Bar Mitzvah ready in person.

On Tap for Tomorrow: I have a ticket for Ben Affleck’s The Town, and I’m hoping to get several others (plus it’d be nice to actually see all the movies I have tickets for).

TIFF: Day 2 (Friday 9/10)

2010-09-11T15:51:00.006-05:00

Note: I'm having trouble with pictures on this blog, so I'm abandoning them for now. But, you can check me out at The Metro Times for the version with photos!

Today I went to my first volunteer shift and my first gala premiere. My volunteer shift was about five hours long and I was stationed at the Scotiabank Theater complex. This, I found out, is the site of the majority of the Press & Industry screenings, which I didn’t even know existed. Apparently, the huge schedule that’s given out to everyone which has the times & locations of nearly 1,000 screenings ONLY lists the public screenings, and there are another few hundred screenings just for Press & Industry. So, my job for this shift was to help with line control and crowd organization inside the Scotiabank complex for the P & I crowd.

A bit of knowledge I gleaned from this experience: people with Press & Industry credentials DO NOT like waiting in lines. They seem to think that, even though there are probably a few thousand people with the exact same P & I lanyards, they should be able to go directly to the front of the line. But what fascinated me was that it wasn’t the true media big shots that were disgruntled about the crowds; they, clearly, have done this before and know what to expect. Instead, it was the people who write for some paper in Delaware that’s surely about to go belly-up, or some website that maybe gets ten hits a month, and they think they’re P & I lanyard is a free pass out of ever waiting for anything. I solemnly vow that once I’m successful enough to be lanyard worthy, I won’t be that guy.

The best part of this experience was that two of my true writing heroes, Roger Ebert and Lisa Schwarzbaum, went through the line I was working and I got to check their credentials (as though I didn’t know they belonged). I was really thrilled to see Ebert, jawless, unable to speak, having difficulty moving around, and yet still doing what he loves. I once read an interview with Dustin Hoffman, where Hoffman said, “people retire from a job, but you never retire from your work.” Ebert’s livelihood is about seeing movies and helping to guide the public decision of what is worth our time and money, and he’s still doing it, no matter that it’s become infinitely more difficult, and he certainly doesn’t need the money. You gotta respect that. And Schwarzbaum, it should be noted, was one of the few P & I people through the entire day who took the time for basic social graces; she said hello to the volunteers, and said thank you when we let her in. Sometimes it’s the little things.

After the volunteer shift, I started to get ready for the big gig of the night, the world premiere of the film Trust, much of which was filmed locally in Ann Arbor this past spring (The Gandy Dancer is visible at one point, and Clive Owen & Catherine Keener spin the cube sculpture in front of the U of M administration building). This event brought out the full red carpet, paparazzi, and a line that was the longest I’d seen yet. The general demeanor of the crowd made it seem like we were about to enter a New York opera. Everyone was decked out, and the feeling that we were at something important was inescapable (even if inaccurate). The screening started about 20 minutes late, and I’ve a hunch that’s going to be a frequent occurrence with the gala screenings. David Schwimmer, who directed, was on hand to introduce the film, and stars Clive Owen and Catherine Keener were also present, but apparently just to wave and elicit applause, as neither were given an opportunity to speak.

Movie: Trust

What is it? A domestic drama about fourteen-year old Annie, who starts a romance with a boy online she believes to be sixteen, but who turns out to be a sexual predator in his thirties. Clive Owen and Catherine Keener play the parents trying to handle Annie’s emotions, and their own.

Director: David Schwimmer—Ross from “Friends,” who’s lately turned to directing. His first film, Run, Fatboy, Run, starred Simon Pegg and played at TIFF a few years ago.

Notable Cast: Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, Viola Davis (an Oscar nominee for Doubt), and newcomer Liana Liberato as Annie.

Notable Crew: The screenplay was co-written by Robert Festinger, who also authored 2001’s Best Picture nominee In the Bedroom.

The Grade: B

Thoughts: I won’t lie—I was prepared to completely write this movie off about 1/3 of the way through. It had the feel of a Lifetime movie whose purpose is to be shown in seventh-grade health classes, and Annie makes so many horrendously illogical decisions in the film’s first act that it’s actually difficult to sympathize with her character (even when taking into account that fourteen-year olds are illogical by nature)

But, to the credit of David Schwimmer and his cast, and a subtle shift in focus from Annie to her parents, I got pulled back in to what turned out to be a pretty decent movie. The acting is a huge part of it; Keener is one of Hollywood’s most reliable actresses, Clive Owen is a master of domestic rage (which he harnessed wonderfully in 2004’s Closer), and Liana Liberato is a revelation as Annie, who makes what initially felt absurd actually sort of resonate. Schwimmer hasn’t developed much of a visual style yet, and for the most part he plays it safe, but he does two things here that may point the way to a good career behind the camera: he draws a wonderful performance out of his cast, and he has the balls to end the movie at a place one might not think an ending ought to go. One of the most important abilities a filmmaker has is to control what their audience feels as they leave the theater, and Schwimmer does that quite well with Trust.

On Tap for Tomorrow: My first full day of film going, with tickets to movies starring Marion Cotillard, Keira Knightley, and Zach Galifianakis… but it didn’t quite go off without a hitch.

TIFF: Day 1 (Thursday 9/9)

2010-09-10T18:23:00.003-05:00

And so it begins…

I got to town today late afternoon, picked up my tickets for the shows I had lined up so far, and then headed to my first screening, where I found… wait for it… a line that was literally three blocks long. It was like a voice from on high shouted at me “Welcome to a film festival, rookie!” Luckily, I quickly found out this is par for the course and it’s nothing to worry about. The lines are caused by 1) everyone wants to arrive to screenings early because seats are first come/first serve and sitting in the front row sucks, and 2) every theater used in the film festival is tightly booked and often one screening doesn’t let out until 20-25 minutes before the next one starts. So when people arrive to a show an hour (or more) early, and can’t start getting in until shortly before show time, well, that’s how you get a three block line.

But, I had a ticket, so nothing to worry about. Or so I thought. Pop quiz: you know what sucks worse than the front row? Sitting in the last seat on one side of a tightly packed, sold out show, and not having enough room to angle your whole body towards the screen. So instead I watched my first TIFF movie with my neck craned at a 40-degree angle for over two hours. Luckily, the movie was great, and the director & producer were on hand to introduce the film as well as take a few questions afterwards.

Movie: Inside Job

What is it? A scathing documentary about not just the global financial meltdown of 2008, but how every bad decision our economic leaders made over the last three decades directly led to our current financial reality.

Director: Charles Ferguson—his only previous film was 2007’s Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight, about the botched handling of the Iraq War by the Bush administration.

Notable Cast: Matt Damon narrates, and he did so “for well under his market value,” as Ferguson put it when introducing the film to the TIFF audience.

The Grade: A

Thoughts: First thing’s first: See this movie. When Ferguson spoke for a bit to the TIFF audience prior to the screening, he said that his motivation for making the film was that very few people seemed to understand the origins of our global financial meltdown, and that most people viewed it as some sort of accident. Ferguson, who received his PhD from M.I.T. in political science & economics, knew the reasons behind what happened, and, more importantly, knew they were relatively easy to understand, if only someone were willing to thoroughly explain them. Ferguson also commented that he wanted to make a film that didn’t belong to any political party, and he succeeded. Every President of the last thirty years gets spotlighted on several bad decisions.

Inside Job uses its running time to do two things. Firstly, through Damon’s narration and interviews with several academics, an incredibly detailed (yet easy to grasp) account of exactly how this happened begins to emerge. Secondly, and more entertaining, Ferguson uses new interviews and archival footage of the people that screwed us, and asks them the tough questions. Sadly, most of them refused to be interviewed, which the film uses for comedic effect. (The producer told the TIFF audience that she wouldn’t accept people simply not responding to her requests as a “no.” Instead, she hounded them until they actually declined to be interviewed, so their refusal to take part was on the official record.) Amazingly though, a handful of people did allow themselves to be interviewed, such as one of Bush’s financial advisors who stepped down just two months before the crash because, as he says, “one of my textbooks needed revising.” You might think that would be one of the best quotes from the film, but it’s not even close. Just wait until you see footage of Michigan senator Carl Levin brutally grilling an AIG executive during a congressional hearing. The amount of squirming some of these people do on camera as Ferguson asks them uncomfortable questions is just one of the many rewards of the film.

But the really great thing about this film isn’t just that the subject matter is handled thoroughly and intelligently, but that it exhibits true filmmaking technique to get its ideas across. When the film is covering the “greed is good” glory days of Wall Street in the 1980s, Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” is being pumped out at deafening volumes. In an interview with a pre-scandal Elliot Spitzer, Ferguson has him comment on the “vices” of Wall Street moneymen spending vast sums on prostitutes, which Spitzer smirks and laughs at. In a movie that should be anything but comedic, Ferguson still understands how to use humor to great effect. The pacing of the movie feels like a Hollywood action movie, except the villains win—they took over the world and left it for dead. It’s said that those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it; well, if the current financial status quo isn’t something you’re eager to see repeated, then you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

On Tap for Tomorrow: The red carpet premiere of Trust (a Michigan-filmed domestic drama starring Clive Owen), and my first volunteer shift.

ALSO, check out my latest review for annarbor.com here.

In Theaters: The American

2010-09-09T17:51:00.003-05:00

The American

Directed by Anton Corbijn

The Grade: C+

Midway through The American, we see a few moments of Sergio Leone’s classic Spaghetti Western Once Upon a Time in the West playing in the background. This is wildly appropriate for two reasons; firstly, the Leone style of limited dialogue, long, stark, and sterile passages, and wide angle shots mixed with extreme close-ups is honorably recreated in The American. But more interestingly, Once Upon a Time in the West is appropriate to allude to because it took Henry Fonda, one of the most beloved and gentle figures in Hollywood history, and turned him into an unlikable killer—which is exactly what George Clooney is in The American.

Clooney plays Jack (or Edward, depending who he’s talking to), a sometimes assassin and/or crafter of extremely specific weaponry, who’s hiding out in Sweden enjoying semi-retirement. The movie opens with an attempt on Jack’s life, and Jack reacts in a way that ensures the audience loathes his character from the get-go. Quickly relocating to a small Italian village, Jack gets a contract to provide a rifle for a mysterious and beautiful young woman. Most of the next hour plus is spent watching Jack make a gun, walk about town, and have sex with a prostitute named Clara.

The director, Anton Corbijn, gambles that a good film can still be crafted around the story of an unlikable rogue trying to escape his fate, and normally he’d be right. But when your main character is both unlikable and boring? Well, now you’ve got problems.

To his credit, Corbijn still made an interesting movie, I just don’t know that “good” is an appropriate term to describe it. This is only Corbijn’s second feature, and the first time he’s ever left his rock ‘n’ roll comfort zone. He’s spent the majority of his career as one of the world’s best rock photographers (he’s likely taken every photo of U2 you’ve ever seen, including the great cover of their 2000 album “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” which featured the band in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport), and his first film, 2007’s Control, was a biopic of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division. Adapted from the novel “A Very Private Gentleman,” by Martin Booth, The American is the first time Corbijn has ever worked in fiction.

Even though very little happens, The American is still mildly enthralling, if only for the expertly crafted visuals and Leone-like pacing. Corbijn’s photography has always thrived on the use of negative space, and The American follows the same aesthetic. Clooney is constantly tucked to one side of the frame, with the background typically being the main subject of each carefully orchestrated shot.

The movie concludes on a few interesting high notes, though Jack’s inevitable romantic interest for Clara verges on the ridiculous. As far as the viewer can discern, the only quality Clara possesses is that she spends most of her screen time in various states of undress. The American is, as one would expect from a photographer director, beautiful to look at, but it’s ultimately a fairly sterile and nihilistic experience.

In Theaters: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

2010-09-03T14:27:00.002-05:00

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Directed by Edgar Wright

The Grade: B+

The last decade or so has given us a handful of movies based on videogames (Max Payne, Resident Evil, etc), and a sizable number of movies that quite unintentionally looked like video games (300 and the “new” Star Wars trilogy immediately come to mind). But Scott Pilgrim vs. the World might be the first movie to look like a videogame on purpose, as well as use videogame logic to tell its story. The result feels quite refreshing, and like so many great ideas, it makes one wonder why no one had thought of it before.

Michael Cera, who has evolved into the nerd equivalent of America’s sweetheart (Superbad, Juno, cult-classic TV series Arrested Development), plays the title character: a 22-year old bassist in the yet-to-make-it garage rock trio Sex Bob-Omb. Sharing a squalid Toronto apartment (and bed) with his gay roommate Wallace and Wallace’s unending parade of unlikely male conquests, Scott has started dating a painfully naïve high-schooler named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), who his band mates worry will “geek out” on them. But Scott’s world changes forever when he sees Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), first in his dreams, and then at a party, where he tries to pique her interest with obscure Pac-Man trivia. With her neon-dyed hair and New York bred personality, Scott hopelessly falls for her before finding out the catch: to win Ramona as his girlfriend, he must first defeat, in battle, her seven evil ex-boyfriends.

Adapted from the popular series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim was directed and co-written by Edgar Wright, who previously made the enjoyable genre homages Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Like those first two films, Wright uses Scott Pilgrim to write a love-letter to an art form that is generally perceived as lowbrow. Even before the movie begins, cinema reality is distorted as the Universal Studios logo is pixilated into 16-bit and the iconic score is adapted to sound like it came from the Nintendo classic Metroid.

The key element in Scott Pilgrim’s visual identity is not to craft entire scenes out of CGI, but rather to layer graphics over the frame that evoke recognizable gaming conventions. For example, each time Scott Pilgrim faces off against a new nemesis, a giant “vs.” appears between the combatants and they receive life bars, just as they would in, say, Street Fighter II. Scott receives things like a “1-up,” and his vanquished enemies explode into coins. Various fight scenes pay tribute to classic games like Super Smash Brothers, Guitar Hero, and Tony Hawk.

But the most interesting thing about Pilgrim isn’t its visual ingenuity, but rather how it uses the inane logic of classic scrolling action games to tell its story and segue between scenes. Just as Super Mario could descend through a pipe and be in an entirely different location, Scott Pilgrim can walk through a door and end up further away than the next room. Each stage of the game that is his life comes packaged with it’s own “boss”—one of Ramona’s evil exes—that must be defeated before he can move on to the next level. In the best scene, Scott even harnesses an extra life to restart a level when he doesn’t like how things were progressing on the first go around.

This may all sound ridiculous, and it is. There’s a very good possibility that anyone raised before Nintendo became an inescapable part of childhood will think this is a laughably bad movie. But with original songs by Beck, and a great supporting cast that includes Jason Schwartzman and Chris Evans as villains unreluctant to ham it up, Anna Kendrick as Scott’s gossipy sister, and Hung star Thomas Jane in a cameo as a member of the Vegan police, Pilgrim definitely has a lot going for it. The deciding factor might be this: if you can still name some of the characters from Mortal Kombat, then chances are decent you’ll love this movie. But if you read the previous sentence and thought “kombat” is spelled wrong, Scott Pilgrim might not be for you.

In Theaters: I Am Love

2010-08-12T00:42:00.001-05:00

I Am Love

Directed by Luda Guadagnino

The Grade: C+

It begins like The Godfather. A large, wealthy Italian family gathers for a celebration (a birthday in this case, rather than a wedding), and the family business becomes an important topic of conversation. Director Luda Guadagnino (working from a script he co-wrote with three others) uses the same strategy Francis Ford Coppola harnessed almost forty years earlier to quickly and fluidly introduce every member of a large family and where they stand in the hierarchy.

Tilda Swinton, in perhaps the best role of her career so far (she also co-produced) plays Emma, a beautiful Russian woman who completely recreated herself as an Italian when she married into the Recchis, a powerful and affluent Milanese family. Her husband, Tancredi, and their eldest son, Edoardo, have just been informed they will inherit control of their family’s textile business from Tancredi’s father. We also meet Elisabetta, daughter to Emma and Tancredi, and Antonio, a talented chef and friend to Edoardo. When Antonio later becomes a fixture of the Recchi household (he and Edoardo plan to open a restaurant together) his presence and cooking acumen awaken in Emma a desire to pursue more passion in her life—a challenge Emma is inspired to undertake when Elisabetta emerges as a lesbian. And, as these things so often do, this pursuit of passion results in an affair with Antonio.

The beautifully shot opening sequence is meant to portray the buried emptiness that hides in Emma’s soul, but what it really introduces us to is the emptiness of the movie. From the passing of the torch in the Recchi family that opens the film, and continuing until the final moment, none of the major events that change the characters seem to change them in ways that make sense—and some of those events make even less sense. When Emma begins her affair with Antonio, she seems to exude more passion for his cooking than for him. There is a lengthy and dramatic scene of Emma eating Antonio’s cooking for the first time, where she reacts to a plate of shrimp as though it were sex on a stick. (In an interview with Charlie Rose, Swinton said she and Guadagnino jokingly referred to this scene as “prawnography,” and that it was inspired by the way food was portrayed in the 2007 Pixar film Ratatouille.) Yet when it comes to making love for the first time, Emma and Antonio act as though they are performing a carefully plotted lab experiment; step one: unbutton blouse, step two: unzip pants, etc. We’re supposed to see the passionate core of Emma’s true being coming into its own, but how can we buy into that idea when Emma’s actions don’t really let us?

I Am Love has three things going for it: The cinematography, the score, and Tilda Swinton. Swinton, who has always been a good actress (she won an Oscar for 2007’s George Clooney-starring legal drama Michael Clayton), creates interest and sympathy even during sequences when the story seems to betray her character. And, as anyone who’s seen a trailer for the film can attest, it looks gorgeous. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux (whose most notable previous credit would probably be 2003’s Swimming Pool) excels at finding the beauty and serenity in closely focused shots of ordinary things—flowers, bugs, food, architecture, water, etc. Even many of the shots of people in motion are framed in unique and aesthetically exciting ways, including a faux-chase sequence in San Remo that was clearly inspired by Hitchcock.

The score, by Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Adams, is an interesting matter, because it’s both fantastic, and fantastically out of place. There’s barely a moment when the score doesn’t call attention to itself, but is that really a good thing? In the film’s closing moments, the music crescendos with such bombastic pomp and circumstance that it felt like we were hearing the audio track to the wrong film. It was the sound of The Death Star being destroyed, and evil being vanquished from the galaxy. What it was most certainly not the sound of is the conclusion of a domestic drama. Too bad that’s what was on screen.

For most of I Am Love’s duration, Swinton’s daring performance and Le Saux’s exciting camera work manage to overcompensate for a poorly executed story. But a major event in the movie’s final act, which changes the status quo of the Recchi family in a way that just seems cheap and unfair, really leaves a sour after-taste to a movie that was only vaguely sweet to begin with. I Am Love feels like it’s supposed to be a film about the necessity of pursuing one’s passions, but it nearly turns into a cautionary tale on why not to.

In Theaters: The Kids are All Right

2010-08-04T03:39:00.003-05:00

The Kids are All Right

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko

The Grade: A-

There’s been an increasingly distressing problem with Indie-movies over the last several months, but we’ve finally been delivered the antidote in the form of Lisa Cholodenko’s wonderful comedy The Kids are All Right. The film stars Annette Benning and Julianne Moore as a Southern California lesbian couple (Nic and Jules, respectively) with two teenage children from an anonymous sperm donor, and their world gets chaotic when their daughter (Alice in Wonderland’s Mia Wasikowska) turns eighteen, making her legally allowed to hunt down her biological father. When Paul, the father played by Mark Ruffalo, shows up as an über-cool, motorcycle-driving, restaurant proprietor, only Nic is hesitant to accept him into the carefully balanced family fold, and, as you might expect, hilarity ensues. But something else ensues as well, and it’s that movie rarity we call truth.

The epidemic with Indie-movies of recent vintage has been, quite simply, a lack of reality. This problem, I believe, goes back to the tremendous box office success of 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, which was an enjoyable and funny film, but it created an appetite in audiences to see ironic comedies about families in which every member has an impossibly unique eccentricity (a genre birthed from Wes Anderson movies and the cult TV series Arrested Development). The result has been recent movies like Greenberg, City Island, and Cyrus, which were all funny, and all way too ridiculous for their own good. In each of these movies, the main characters have been so utterly whacked out with increasingly bizarre personality disorders, that it’s been difficult to find a glimmer of reality amidst the comedic devices. An example: when Ben Stiller’s titular Greenberg makes out his grocery list, it contains exactly two items: whiskey and ice cream sandwiches. Did I laugh? Of course I did (it’s funny!), but unless you have a similar grocery list, on what level are we supposed to relate to characters like these?

What The Kids are All Right really has going for it is that it doesn’t feel the need to mortgage the characters’ psyches in exchange for a cheap laugh. Every funny moment in the movie (and trust me, they are bountiful) feels born from genuine human interaction, and so does every moment of heartbreak (yup, there are a few of those too). When we see the first meeting between Paul and his two teenage children, it’s remarkably awkward because none of the three parties know how to temper real conversation with the far more important task of feeling each other out. But in some of the genuine advice Paul later doles out to his kids, we see that maybe fatherhood comes more naturally than he (or we) realized.

But while the title may tell us point blank how the kids are, the great unknown that the movie deals with is in whether the parents are all right. The upheaval that Paul’s presence creates in the meticulously orchestrated family structure that Nic and Jules have created threatens not just the kids’ behavior (watch out, the daughter’s on a motorcycle!), but also the parents. When Paul hires Jules to kick off her new landscaping business with a massive project on his backyard, Nic is queasy about the idea; does she not want Paul and Jules spending time together, or does she have a deeper desire to see Jules fail at her business so she can still feel needed in her role as emotional caregiver of the family?

Cholodenko has made a few movies prior to this one (2002’s Laurel Canyon being the most notable), and she and co-writer Stuart Blumberg drew from her real-life relationship with Wendy Melvoin, former lead guitarist of Prince’s 1980s backing band, The Revolution. But you’d be foolish if you think this movie will somehow not be about real relationships simply because the protagonists are a same-sex couple. Julianne Moore delivers a monologue towards the end of the film that was like a double shot of espresso truth; it’ll really wake you up, and we’ll probably be seeing snippets of it again next awards season.

Really, the only justification I have for a slight docking of the movie’s otherwise perfect grade is the uncertainty in the way one of the characters is left at the film’s conclusion, but it’s not fair to give away too much. 2010 is now more than half over, and this is—along with Toy Story 3—the year’s most original and perfect comedy/drama so far. And how interesting and ironic is it that the originality of The Kids are All Right is rooted in its adherence to reality instead of the departure from it?

In Theatres: Inception

2010-07-18T18:31:00.004-05:00

In Theatres: Inception

Directed by Christopher Nolan

The Grade: A

I walked out of the theatre after Inception—2010’s most interesting movie thus far—with five big questions on my mind (none of which were “what the hell just happened?”):

1. Does Leonardo DiCaprio have a dead wife that he’s managed to hide from the paparazzi?

Over the last decade, one thing about Leonardo DiCaprio has become abundantly obvious: he’s not just in it for the money. DiCaprio has starred in exactly 10 movies in the last dozen calendar years, all of which have been prestige projects by Oscar-caliber directors. Despite a huge demand for his talents, DiCaprio doesn’t even make one movie a year, while most of his fellow A-listers more than double that output. So, it probably goes without saying that when the man agrees to make a movie, on at least some level, he must really love and identify with his character. With that thought in mind, consider this: In each of the last two movies DiCaprio has made, (Inception and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which came out not even five months ago), he’s played a man so consumed with guilt over the death of his wife—for which he may or may not have been responsible—and so tortured over her continued appearances in his dreams, that he retreats into the farthest recesses of his own mind to cope with the memories. I suppose it could be coincidence, but that’s an extremely unique oeuvre for someone to make two consecutive movies in. It makes me want to ask the man “Umm, dude, is there something you’re not telling us?”

2. Does this movie have any antecedent?

The cliché in Hollywood has always been that everything is recycled in one way or another, but consensus seems to be that it’s been getting far worse of late. The past few summers, while still a dumping ground for a hefty amount of franchise trash, have at least given us some genuine classics like Wall-E, Inglorious Basterds, The Dark Knight, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Star Trek. But summer 2010 has not only been bereft of quality (Toy Story 3 has been the only good movie of the season thus far), it’s been downright putrid for originality. It’s one thing to reuse good ideas, but the movies flooding the multiplexes the last several Fridays have seemed to steal bad ideas (and deservedly, most of them have epically failed at the box office). The A-Team, compared to everything else, felt like a good movie simply because it reminded us of the 1980s. If that’s a strategy for quality, we’re in far worse shape than we thought.

And now comes Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest spelunker of the mind. To say the movie is merely original doesn’t adequately get the point across, because calling something “original” these days might just mean it isn’t a threequel. There is undoubtedly a bit of influence from David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), which was the first major movie to allow dream logic to permeate story structure, and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which made a serious attempt to recreate the visual stylings of a person’s subconscious. Nolan does expound a bit on some of the “we’ll introduce the rules as we go along” narrative techniques he first used in Memento (2001), and I suppose it could also be said that the story has echoes of Phillip K. Dick, even though there aren’t any specific similarities. But really, that’s it. While Inception may have a distant uncle or two, it’s totally without parents. And really, how many movies can we say that about?

3. Does Inception have any hope of being considered a success with its alleged 160 million dollar budget?

I worry the simple answer here is “no.” Once you throw in marketing, Inception likely cost upwards of 180 million. On one hand, you could argue the budget is justified because it truly does show up on the screen. The special effects turn the dazzle up to eleven with stunning trickery and jarring visuals—wait until you see Paris turned over on itself—rather than mundane CGI details, and the locations hop from Tokyo to Morocco, then Paris to the Alps (most James Bond movies don’t even cover that much ground). But even though the budget translated directly to quality, I worry that spending that much money on a movie like Inception might have been a poor business decision.

Put simply, Inception has to make substantially over 200 million just to avoid being considered a failure, and it probably has to get within striking distance of 300 million to be deemed a total success. To put that in perspective, only three other movies from 2010 have hit the 300 million mark (Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, and Toy Story 3—all stemming from major properties), while the alleged summer blockbusters Robin Hood, Prince of Persia, The A-Team, and Knight and Day haven’t even made 300 million combined—and those were all supposed to be crowd pleasers. It’s difficult to really call Inception a crowd pleaser because of how much mental heavy lifting it demands from the viewer. Combine that with the fact that Inception isn’t part of a franchise or related in any way to a previously existing property, and it’s difficult to understand how 300 million dollars worth of people will fill the seats. Inception’s marketing team is attempting to sell the movie based on four things: the director/screenwriter of the second most popular film of the last ten years, arguably the best lead actor under forty, a cool concept that has never really been seen before, and previews that give away virtually nothing of the story. Will that be enough? The success or failure of Inception will end up depending on two things—the compulsion many people will feel to see the movie twice, and great word of mouth. Repeat viewers shouldn’t be a problem, but great word of mouth depends on…

4. Will audiences be happy with Inception?

Again, I worry the simple answer is “no.” I have no doubt that sci-fi nerds and cinephiles (like me) will, by and large, love the movie. But what about the couples that go to a movie theatre once or twice a month? Will they like it enough to tell their friends? Or, in the worst possible scenario, will they tell their friends to stay away? Inception is a movie that demands a lot of attention, and doesn’t reward the viewer with easy-to-understand answers or unambiguous conclusions. The climactic half hour of the movie takes place simultaneously on five different planes of consciousness and requires the audience to keep track of the relationships between them. Most people will find the movie’s ending either brilliant or intolerably frustrating, with no in-between. Will viewers appreciate this?

Of course, maybe I’m just being overly cynical. After all, The Dark Knight was the smartest and most complex super-hero movie ever made, and it also made the most money. Sure, virtually every “tentpole” movie released this summer has bombed, but maybe that’s because they mostly sucked. Perhaps a brainy, trippy, well-crafted, innovative movie with astonishing visuals is exactly what audiences have been waiting for. We can only hope, because if Inception doesn’t make its money back, it’s the last 160 million dollar risk on an original concept we’ll be seeing for a looooong time. Savor it.

5. Is Christopher Nolan the best director working right now?

Discounting anyone whose made fewer than five movies (sorry Jason Reitman and Sophia Coppola, your body of work is too small to be in this discussion), and only going on the last 10-15 years of output, Nolan has six main competitors: The Coen Brothers, Clint Eastwood, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, and Quentin Tarantino. Soderbergh, for all of his virtues and risk-taking, has the worst quality batting average of the bunch, so he’s out. The Coens might be the best when they’re on their A-game, but they also released two shockingly bad movies in the past decade (The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty), so it’s difficult to place them at the top. Eastwood and Scorsese have remained unusually vital and prolific well into retirement age, releasing some truly great movies over the last seven or eight years, but Eastwood has also made a few too many average films (Invictus, Changeling, and Flags of Our Fathers), while Scorsese’s résumé is a bit too hampered by our knowledge that his prime was three decades ago. I think Fincher is great, but I remain in a small minority of people who completely loved The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, while barely anybody even saw Zodiac (and for shame—it was fantastic). I’m also keenly aware that I enjoy Quentin Tarantino’s eccentricities and stylistic arrogance—the same qualities that turn many people off his work—perhaps a little too much.

Christopher Nolan, though, doesn’t really have any red flags; he’s made seven movies in twelve years, three of which are masterpieces (Memento, The Dark Knight, and, yes, Inception), and none that rate worse than a “B.” His first movie, 1998’s Following, remains an undiscovered gem; Memento has been cited as one of the most influential of the 2000s; Batman Begins started the current fad of franchise reboots; and The Dark Knight might be the greatest ever of its genre (the super-hero flick). Nolan’s movies have achieved the rare Spielbergian quality of entertaining the masses without sacrificing substance and brains. Nolan would also make one hell of an auteur theory subject, as all of his films have, at their core, been about obsessions that run so deeply they threaten sanity and rationality. Christopher Nolan, until further notice, and with no real power vested in me, I hereby anoint you unofficial Alpha-Dog of the directing community—now please just don’t screw up Batman 3.

The Great Scenes: Five Easy Pieces

2010-06-18T02:25:00.006-05:00

Note: This is a recurring feature on some of the greatest individual scenes in movie history. Please be aware that the posts in this series will often reveal major plot elements, and maybe even surprise endings, of the movie in discussion, so proceed with caution if you haven't seen the movie before.

Five Easy Pieces (1970) – Directed by Bob Rafelson

“Half a Conversation” (scene 27 on the DVD)

Five Easy Pieces is probably most often remembered as being Jack Nicholson’s first starring role in a major Hollywood movie (as well as being his first Oscar nomination as a lead actor), and honestly, it’s really the movie that gave us the “Jack” persona that we all think of (a little rebellious, doesn’t like the rules, has some swagger but also some cockiness, and maybe a bit of crazy). Sure, he refined his signature style in The Last Detail (1973), and then perfected it in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), but this is absolutely where it first manifested. It’s also possible modern audiences will have some sort of vague recognition of the infamous diner scene, without necessarily having any idea what they know it from. But for some reason, the movie isn’t remembered for being what it is: a classic. It never turns up on lists of “movies you must see before you die,” and didn’t make the cut on either version of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 American Films.

The first half of the movie introduces us to Robert Eroika Dupea (Nicholson), a California oil worker who seems to live a pretty typical blue-collar American life, though perhaps a bit of an unhappy one. Robert clearly doesn’t much care for his attractive but fairly vacuous girlfriend, Rayette, who works as a waitress and spends all her free time singing to him. He also doesn’t seem to really like his job or his best friend, and he finds empty sex with a girl he meets at a bowling alley. Robert seems to feel like he doesn’t belong in his own life, but we don’t know why. He finds out from a friend that Rayette is pregnant, and he finds out from his sister that their father has had a stroke and is in dire health. This prompts a road trip back home to the Pacific northwest, with Robert reluctantly taking Rayette along because he didn’t know how to leave her. Robert’s arrival at his family’s home commences the second half of the movie, as well as the revelation of what he ran away from.

It turns out Robert Eroika Dupea (his middle name comes from Beethoven) is a piano prodigy who comes from a long line of classically trained concert pianists, a profession that his father, sister, and brother all share. It’s never explicitly explained why he ran away from both his family and his talent, but it’s plainly visible that he doesn’t feel comfortable in their lifestyle. He falls in love with his brother’s beautiful student and sleeps with her, and then finds out she’s actually his brother’s fiancée. When he tries to convince her to choose him, she asks him “if a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love of his friends, family, work, something—how can he ask for love in return?” This prompts Robert to finally speak honestly with his father, who is unable to respond due to the stroke, but can understand all too well.

In an acting career decorated with numerous accolades and iconic roles, I really believe this is Nicholson’s finest moment. The heartbreaking honesty with which he admits “things go bad” whenever he stays in a place too long, and the way the tears come not by what’s said, but by what he’s unable to say. Considering the almost zany over-confidence that defines so many of his best characters, it’s rather disarming to see Nicholson break down and show so much painful vulnerability. Because this was one of Nicholson’s first major roles, audiences at the time had the luxury of simply viewing the character, and not really seeing “Jack Nicholson: Mega Star.”

If The Graduate (1967) was the first major movie to prominently make a point of showcasing the ennui that an entire generation was experiencing, Five Easy Pieces was surely the movie that turned the “ennui and disaffection laced character piece” into an entire sub-genre of filmmaking. (And where would the careers of Sophia Coppola and Noah Baumbach be without such a genre? Lost in Translation is definitely the feminist grandchild of Five Easy Pieces.) Moviegoers in 1970 had never before seen a character like Robert Dupea, someone who refused to accept the life he was meant to lead, and who clearly wanted to get away from a lot without necessarily going toward anything. The movie also came along at a time when Hollywood was suddenly on the cusp of a new wave that valued truth in character over an audience’s theorized desire to see a happy ending. After spending the movie’s first half looking at the life Robert ran to, and the second half seeing the life he ran away from, the movie ends with Robert running yet again, in a final shot of haunting longevity.

The Great Scenes: Star Wars

2010-06-12T12:59:00.013-05:00

Note: This is the first post in what will be a recurring feature on some of the greatest individual scenes in movie history. Please be aware that the posts in this series will often reveal major plot elements, and maybe even surprise endings, of the movie in discussion, so proceed with caution if you haven't seen the movie before.

Star Wars (1977) - Directed by George Lucas

"Binary Sunset" (Scene 11 on the DVD)

Remember when George Lucas could make a good movie? No, I don’t either, because I actually wasn’t alive for it. But while everyone seems to agree that Lucas used to be a great director, and now he no longer is, not many people seem capable of pinpointing why. What did American Graffiti (1973) and Star Wars (1977) have that the “new trilogy” doesn’t (besides that elusive thing I like to call “quality”)? The scene above goes a long way towards explaining the issue. Watch it again—it’s 36 seconds long, and absolutely nothing happens, but it completely illustrates why Star Wars captured the collective imagination of an entire generation and remains one of cinema’s greatest achievements of entertainment.

“Binary sunset” is pretty close towards the beginning of the film, and all that has really happened so far is that Luke Skywalker, a teenager living in his uncle’s farming community, has just purchased two droids (helper/slave robots) that appear to have previously fought in a major rebellion in other parts of the galaxy. The notion of finding out about this rebellion greatly excites Luke, as farming is all he has ever known, but his prospects for a different life seem quite low. A dejected Luke, who has just found out his uncle expects him to stay on the farm for at least another year, walks outside to look at the beautiful sunset provided by the twin suns of his home planet, Tatooine. Anyone that has seen Star Wars knows Luke’s life changes forever the next morning; he meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, finds out his father was a great Jedi Knight who fought and died in the rebellion, finds his aunt and uncle murdered by the empire, and goes off to help rescue a princess held hostage on a space ship that destroys planets.

A lesser storyteller wouldn’t have placed a transition moment between Luke’s two realities—we simply would have seen Luke Skywalker: galactic redneck one day, and then Luke Skywalker: savior of the universe the next. That’s certainly the Michael Bay way of doing things. But once upon a time, when George Lucas understood the vocabulary of great cinema, he gifted us with a perfect 36 seconds of nothing and everything.

I say nothing because, as mentioned earlier, nothing actually happens in the scene; I say everything because, as corny as it sounds, this is the moment where Luke recognizes his destiny of greatness, as well as the moment where the audience invests in the mythology of the Star Wars universe. One of the best things Lucas did with the original Star Wars was beginning in the middle. He transported us immediately into an epic that had been going on for a long time without us, and then slowly, methodically, filled us in on key important elements of the story. In the movie, Luke represents the audience, as we learn and experience with him the reality and scope of the rebel alliance against the empire. And for both Luke and us, “binary sunset” is the moment where we collectively understand “hey, I think there’s something bigger going on here.”

In all of the great hero sagas and myths, there’s typically a moment where the hero, while not necessarily becoming the hero yet, at least takes the first step towards recognizing that they have a greater calling. For Luke, this is that moment; when he gazes out at those twin suns, with his wispy hair at the apex of 1970s cheesiness, we can see that he recognizes he’s just not meant to be a farm boy. Something inside of him clicks, and we implicitly understand that longing for a life of greatness.

Of course, the John Williams score is of incalculable importance to the scene. People often ask me why I so adamantly prefer film over prose, and this is one of the scenes that I always think of. Could it exist in prose? Sure. Could it work? Absolutely not. No matter how impressive their word prowess, no author could adequately create the “goosebump” effect achieved by the combination of John Williams’ “Force Score” crescendoing in unison with Luke looking down, doubting himself, and then having the inner strength to look back up and metaphorically seize his destiny.

So seriously, how is it possible that the man who gave us those 36 seconds of cinematic nirvana can, 20+ year later, churn out the flaming soufflé of nerd posturing and CGI diarrhea that is the new trilogy? I truly have no idea. The old cliché about success is that it makes us turn our best habits into our worst habits, by overindulging in them while ignoring everything else. I suppose that’s essentially what happened to Lucas; he assumed that the special effects and technological advancements of the original trilogy were far more responsible for its popularity than apparently minor things like character and fun. But even though Lucas has clearly forgotten what makes a good sci-fi adventure movie, the lessons he taught us have not been lost. Check out the trailer for J.J. Abrams’ excellent Star Trek reboot from last summer, particularly starting at about the 55 second mark. Long before he was Captain of the Starship Enterprise, all James Kirk really needed in order to recognize his true calling was to gaze into a binary sunset of his own.

Best of the 2000s: City of God (2003)

2010-06-08T23:49:00.009-05:00

Note: This is the first in what will be a frequently continuing series of posts over the next year that spotlight the best movies of the 00s, albeit in a completely random order.

First up: City of God (2003) – Directed by Fernando Meirelles

Decades from now, when the dust kicked up during the early part of the 21^st century has settled, I expect film historians and enthusiasts will argue that City of God might have been the best movie of the decade. Really, it has everything you could want from a movie: It seamlessly straddles being entertaining and deep, artful and accessible, bombastic and intimate. And it may well be remembered as the movie that finally took the styles innovated by Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, and Danny Boyle and employed them to tell a truly meaningful story about the world we live in (much as I passionately love them, Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels don’t exactly change the way people view the world).

In a scant 130 minutes, first time feature director Fernando Meirelles manages to weave two decades worth of crime in one of the world’s largest cities into a cohesive story about the heartbreaking cycle of violence the children living in Rio de Janeiro’s slums find themselves born into. Centering around Rocket, the younger brother of one of the slum’s original rebels without a cause, we follow his journey as he watches various crime lords rise and fall, all the while continuously trying to pull out of the scene he keeps finding himself tumbling back into.

While you can view the trailer here, you’re better off just checking out the first five minutes of the movie. Very few movies are able to flawlessly draw the audience into a totally foreign world in the span of an opening credit sequence, but City of God is one of those movies. The editing pulsates at the pace of a latin drum beat, while the colors teem with as much life as the rain forest. And we even get a great acting performance out of a chicken. (Sadly, Youtube doesn’t seem to have a subtitled version of this clip; while the style is far more important than the dialogue, know that when you rent the movie, you’ll understand what is being said.)

I’ve always believed in the ability of great films to inform who we are and how we think about things, and City of God is a perfect example. So many of us living in the silver spoon of American life don’t have any conception of true poverty, the kind in which the best prospects for getting out is to live fast and die young. Many characters in City of God aren’t killed as much they are swallowed whole by a way of life they had no power to choose against. Countless TV critics have praised the fourth season of The Wire (and rightfully so) for its expert chronicle of the way young kids find themselves involved in the drug trade; City of God deals with the same issues, except in a world where a way out simply does not exist.

It’s fascinating to watch the movie in hindsight, because it seems like a more realistic and interesting version of Slumdog Millionaire, which, after all, won Best Picture. When Slumdog came out, I called it a live action version of a Disney fairytale. Now, I just think it’s the Disney version of City of God. So for anyone that enjoyed Slumdog, do yourself a favor and check out the caffeinated version.