TIFF: Day 1 (Thursday 9/9)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

Oscar Thoughts and Reactions

-The two best moments from before the ceremony both came courtesy of the Precious cast, but they were great moments for totally opposite reasons. The “good” great moment was from Precious herself, Gabourey Sidibe, who was bubbly, engaging, and clearly having a great time. When asked about her dress (which she looked great in: http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-03-08-97515860.jpg), she said “if fashion was porn, this dress would be the money shot.” That was obviously going to be the best quote of the night and the night hadn’t even started yet. The “bad” great moment came during the Barbara Walters Special, while she was interviewing Mo’Nique. When Walters asked her interviewee why she doesn’t shave her legs, Mo’Nique inexplicably hiked up her dress to show off the untamed jungles that she calls her shins. Walters literally looked like she was watching someone get stabbed to death; check it out at the 25-second mark of this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29szcAV8KFo&feature=related

-Between the stage setup and Neil Patrick Harris’ opening song and dance number, it seemed that this year’s producer (Adam Shankman—director of Hairspray) was going for a return to the 1930’s “backstage musical” style of showbiz. Speaking of the great NPH, he was clearly auditioning for next year’s hosting gig, right? I’m good with that as long as he leaves the sparkled tux at home.

-The blogosphere seemed pretty lukewarm on the Steve Martin/Alec Baldwin hosting duo, but I thought they did a good job. They’re no Billy Crystal, but I’d give them a solid B+. I thought they benefited from being able to banter with each other. They’re best moment: telling Christoph Waltz that he had hit the Jew-hunting “motherload” by being in the Oscar audience.

-I thought it was fascinating that in a few cases, the actors who presented the Best Picture nominees had starred in movies that directly competed for a nomination with them (and lost). For example, Chris Pine, star of Star Trek, presented the clip of District 9, the movie that likely killed Trek’s chance at a nomination. Colin Firth presented the clip of An Education, which likely stole many votes from his own A Single Man, and Jeff Bridges introduced A Serious Man, which might have received its nomination at the expense of Bridges’ Crazy Heart. It could have been pure coincidence, but an interesting one at the very least.

-Tina Fey and Robert Downey, Jr. were probably the best presenting duo of the night. It’s just too bad Fey’s dress came from the costume department of Tarzan. http://www.americansuperstarmag.com/sites/default/files/images/tina-fey-030710.preview.jpg

-It’s sad that The Hurt Locker (a movie whose greatness came largely from its suspense, direction, and editing) and Precious (a movie that made its most direct impacts with acting and subject matter) won the two screenplay awards over Inglorious Basterds and Up in the Air, which were both built around some of the best dialogue of the year. I don’t mean to insinuate that the screenplays for The Hurt Locker and Precious were worthless, just that they were less impressive than the movies they beat.

-The John Hughes tribute was fantastic. It managed to do two things: remind you how memorable his movies were, and illustrate how many great actors got their start in his movies (and how many bad actors- yikes!).

-At every Oscar ceremony, there are inevitably a few categories that nobody cares about because they don’t understand them: the awards for animated, documentary, and live action short, and the awards for sound mixing and editing. This year’s ceremony created short videos explaining the importance of those categories prior to announcing their winners, which was very informative and helpful. And getting Morgan Freeman to narrate one of those short videos? Come on… now you’re just spoiling us!

-I saw Ben Stiller’s Avatar riff show up on lists for best moments of the show and worst moments of the show, so people definitely felt pretty strongly about it. I enjoyed it. Anything that makes James Cameron look uncomfortable is a plus.

-Is Best Make-Up a completely dead category? Typically, the nominees in this category created either impressive creature/horror effects (now done predominantly with CGI), or impressive aging/de-aging of actors (also now done predominantly with CGI). If you have to nominate The Young Victoria just to get to three nominees, it might be time to get rid of the category.

-I have mixed feelings on the moving of the honorary awards to a different night. On the one hand, it allows a lot more time and energy to be spent on those awards. More honor, if you will. But on the other hand, it robbed Roger Corman, creator of Attack of the Crab Monsters and Women in Cages, of his chance to give a speech at the Oscars.

-Mo’Nique’s decision to thank the Academy “for proving that it can be about the performance, not the politics” was by far the ballsiest acceptance speech quote of the night, but one that is totally justified. Too often, acting Oscars seem to be decided by a collective feeling of who should own an Oscar, rather than the nominated performance. This year, less so.

-On a night when people with no discernable acting talent like Taylor Lautner and Miley Cyrus were allowed to present at the Oscars, it was refreshing to see a real actress like Sigourney Weaver present Best Art Direction.

-Even though it was clearly only there to pander to ratings, the horror movie montage was nice. A genre unfairly ignored 98% of the time finally got its Oscar moment, and, as with the John Hughes tribute, it reminded us how many great actors have worked in the genre.

-Did the sound guy for The Hurt Locker steal Tom Cruise’s wig from Interview with the Vampire?

-Elizabeth Banks—definitely the best dress of the night: http://www.americansuperstarmag.com/sites/default/files/images/elizabeth-banks-030710.preview.jpg Yowsers!

-The decision to have an interpretive dance troupe perform the Best Original Score nominees was useful but poorly executed. On one hand, it was nice to hear the scores prior to the award so the audience has an immediate opinion on who should win. On the other hand, the dances, though impressive, were too long and way too bizarre. Let’s see a bit of fine-tuning on this segment for next year.

-When Star Trek won Best Make-Up, a snippet of its score was played, reminding me how good it was. Why wasn’t it nominated? Interestingly, the Star Trek score was by the same guy that won Best Score for Up—Michael Giacchino. Not a bad year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2IEesF4GvY&feature=related

-I enjoyed last year’s advent of having five past winners talk about the acting nominees, but it led to a few non-sequiters (why was Goldie Hawn talking about Taraji P. Henson?). This year kept that great idea but improved on it; instead of past winners, we had people with very personal connections to the nominees. It allowed Tim Robbins to honor his Shawshank Redemption co-star.

-The greatest “life imitates art” moment of the night was the revelation that Jeff Bridges was not only The Dude in The Big Lebowski, but he apparently is in real life as well, man. It’s too bad he didn’t come to The Oscars in a bathrobe and pajama pants.

-Have standing ovations jumped the shark? I counted at least four—for Mo’Nique, Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, and Kathryn Bigelow. I’m good with the ovation for Bridges, a beloved actor from a beloved Hollywood family who’s had a great career and earned his first nomination a whopping 38 years ago. I’m also okay with the ovation for Bigelow, who became the first woman to ever win an Oscar for directing. But Mo’Nique and Sandra Bullock? Really? Standing ovations? Mo’Nique’s performance was phenomenal, but it’s really the only impressive thing she’s ever done. And I don’t care that Bullock’s been acting for twenty years… what’s her best movie? Seriously, what’s her best movie? Speed? Remember, a long career and a great career are not the same thing. Audiences at awards shows should be allowed only one standing ovation per night, except in very rare circumstances, when a second one can be permitted. This year Bridges should have gotten the one allotted ovation, and Bigelow received the “rare circumstance” ovation. For the record, here’s the complete list of current actors and directors that I would accept a standing ovation for, given their careers up to this point: Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Quentin Tarantino, Bill Murray, Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep (for when she eventually wins her third Oscar), George Clooney (for when he eventually becomes the only person to own Oscars for acting and directing) and whoever becomes the first African-American to win an Oscar for directing. That’s it. If you just throw them at anyone, they lose all meaning.

-I went 16/24 on my predictions. I missed one award (documentary short) because I knew nothing about the nominees and just guessed. I missed two awards where I predicted upsets that didn’t happen (original screenplay and lead actress), and I missed five awards that were genuine surprises that went against almost every prediction (adapted screenplay, cinematography, foreign film, sound editing, and sound mixing). Not bad, but not as well as i expected.