9 posts from January 2008

Sunshine (Danny Boyle, 2007)
Danny Boyle's sci-fi what-have-you is a fine movie, but I doubt I'll remember much about it in two weeks. I thought that Cillian Murphy's face would be less jarring with time; I was wrong.

Once (John Carney, 2006)
I don't get it.

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)
To say that Funny Games is a movie about the act of watching movies is about as astute an observation as saying that Cloverfield is about 9/11. It's obvious, and I'm certainly not the only one to come up with that nugget of wisdom. I'm sure that boatloads has been written on the film's crazy empathy-challenging pathos before I came along. Funny Games is like Rear Window, only good. Although it doesn't have Barbara Bel Geddes in it. If I ever started a retro-fun-times-pop band (e.g. The Minders, The Apples In Stereo), it would be called The Bel Geddes.

Great World Of Sound (Craig Zobel, 2007)
This movie is great. I could not love it more.

This Is England (Shane Meadows, 2006)
Kind of after-school-specialy, but definitely worth seeing if only for the performance of Thomas Turgoose as the poverty-stricken English kid who falls in with his friendly neighborhood skinheads. That kid is awesome.

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)
About forty minutes of the worst movie you've ever seen followed by a badass fight scene between Viggo Mortensen's penis and a bunch of assassins followed by a pretty solid third act.

Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007)
Woo boy. If I get started on Juno, I'm not going to stop. Let's just say that I wasn't able to watch it clean. The hagiography surrounding this "little film that could" (vomit) was a distraction. If I had to guess, I'd say that my reaction to the film would have been an admiration for its mature anti-bullshit/pro-adorable handling of the romance between Juno and her babydaddy and a strong reaction against the hamburger phone affectation and the cringe-inducing "honest to blog" Juno-speak. That's had I seen it pre-hype. Three things I can say for sure:
1) Jason Bateman is amazing in this film. Really and truly.
2) Anyone who chooses to name themself "Diablo Cody", writes a book about how they decided to become a stripper (even though she went to college, oh my stars!), and then acts indignant when people want to talk to them about stripping, needs to go away. And stay away. From me.
3) Of this year's Juno, Knocked Up, and Waitress, the latter is the only gynocomedy where I actually felt like the character wouldn't immediately get an abortion.

Even a week later, I have very little to say about Paul Thomas Anderson's epic meditation on oil and patriarchy. When my wife and I walked into the theater, an usher was throwing his shoe at a pigeon hiding somewhere in the ceiling. Apparently, the pigeon had been stuck inside for more than a day, and had perched in front of the projector during the previous showing.

To their credit, the Clearview Cinemas employees handled the situation very well, telling us that they honestly couldn't promise that the same thing wouldn't happen to us, and that if we wanted to get a refund now, or at any time during the showing, that would be fine. I don't think anyone left, although I considered it.

The pigeon caused no disturbance. It must have been just as terrified of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) as I was.

So instead of a "review", I'll just share two spot-on text messages I received about the film.

Adam: If I didn't know Kubrick was dead, I would've sworn he directed this movie.
Kevin: This movie should've been called There Will Be Milkshakes.

It's ten minutes, but it's a good ten minutes.

Wait, what does "best" mean again? It means "most obvious", right? And also "least subtle"? Oh, and I think it also means "rushed and hackneyed".

The visual effects in The Golden Compass fail on just about every level. They are neither imaginative nor convincing. Transformers and At World's End are CGI porn, sure, but is that the kind of work the culture should be rewarding? Aren't visual effects, like editing and music, most effective when they're as invisible as the Hollow Man (nominated in 2001 for some of the worst visual effects I've ever seen, by the way)?

By way of counterpoint:

Oh year-end lists. You are a shitstorm of ego, elitism, and posturing. A shitstorm to which I have contributed the odd gust, make no mistake. But, year-end list, it is time to resist the urge to make you. I refuse to join in the cacophony of ill-informed and predictable checklists that serve no purpose besides taste-masturbation.

That said... if I were to make a year-end list... Quiet City would be on it... Right behind Zodiac... and just in front of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street...

No! I cannot resist! I must put numbers in front of the titles and catalog my unique opinion. It says things about me, about my unique identity. My top ten list defines me! No... no... everything is going to be alright. Be strong, strong like John McCain.

Search in every basket of sugar-puppies you can find; you won't find a sweeter, more beautiful artifact than Aaron Katz's Quiet City. In a cultural climate where Juno is allowed to sass its way towards indie cred with its mantle as this year's Little Miss Sunshine, the world is in desperate need of a reminder that the film world doesn't end with Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics.

In Quiet City, Jamie is stranded in New York after she's unable to meet up with the friend she's supposed to be visiting. The young gentleman she's asked for directions, Charlie, invites her to his apartment, and the two dance awkwardly around their obvious affection for one another for about 80 minutes. And that's about it, plot-wise.

Quiet City was made for very little money, and much of the dialogue is improvised. It's got that stuff going for it. But a film doesn't live on cred alone. And I hate to paint this one as some sort of reaction to mini-major co-opting of indie "quirk". Because that's my own personal hang-up, and could not be further from Quiet City's adorable mind.

Is this a film about disaffected rich white people? Yes. At a Brooklyn party following a friend's art opening, Charlie strikes up a conversation with a fellow Park Sloper, and they find that they're both just kind of drifting after having quit their jobs. Charlie suggests that if they could make money with this drifting, if they could pay their bills simply by being the slackers that they are, their problems would be solved. And at some point, Jamie will have to go back to Georgia, leaving Charlie in Brooklyn to deal with these things on his own. But maybe not. There is such a sense of community in all of these films (Joe Swanberg, who made LOL, appears in one of the film's major setpieces, which involves friends sitting around eating cole slaw), and at once a sense of shared upper-class ennui and communal optimism. It's like if Antonioni didn't make you want to kill yourself.

When it comes to these "mumblecore" things (that's the only time I'm using that word, soak it in), or at least the Bujalski films I've seen, I admit that I am a sucker. Their deviously unassuming performances, their complete disregard for the socio-political, their gloriously lo-fi atmosphere...

Oh Quiet City. You are lovely and amazing.

And another thing...
I am also a sucker for any piece of art that acknowledges the existence of Applebee's. Wait. Stay with me, here. In Quiet City, Jamie works at an Applebee's (and is subtly ridiculed for it by friends of friends). In Talladega Nights, the never unbranded Ricky Bobby gathers the family 'round the Applebee's table for famiy dinner. Even in NBC's Friday Night Lights (for which Applebee's is a corporate sponsor), the community often comes together to discuss the latest football game at The 'Bee's. And for me, that speaks so much more effectively to what it's like to live in America in 2008 than, say, those films that try to pretend like we're still living in a world of community diners and small town hospitality. Waitress comes to mind. I liked Waitress fine, but it's such a fantasy that I think a Centaur wouldn't have looked too out of place next to Andy Griffith. No, we live in a world of strip malls, chain restaurants, and Burlington Coat Factory, and it's another thing that Quiet City gets right.

Little Girl: Does your duck do any tricks?
Arthur: No, he's a duck. That's enough.

I liked Duck, although if it had starred anyone but Philip Baker Hall it probably would have been intolerably precious. The year is 2009, Jeb Bush is the president, and social security is a thing of the past. Hall is Arthur, recently widowed and cast to the margins by a callous landlord (Deadwood's Larry Cedar) and, more broadly, by a society that can't be bothered with him. Not only is Los Angeles well on its way to dystopia hell, but the tree that Arthur has come to love as a symbol of his long-dead son is being torn down to make way for condos and a strip mall. He's hit rock bottom, and then Joe appears. Joe being a duckling. Arthur adopts Joe, and as Arthur's life proceeds to fall apart, he wanders around Los Angeles imparting sagely advice to the suicidal (French Stewart), getting wasted at a house party, and befriending a similarly forgotten old blind man.

It's a pleasant movie, and shot on 16mm (hooray!), but it's too long by twenty minutes and the ending feels very saccharine, considering how depressing the film has been up until that point.

Hall is one of the best actors around, and if you haven't seen Hard Eight or Secret Honor, do. Even his small role in Zodiac as a handwriting expert is pitch-perfect, conveying the character's years of developed craft that have transformed into a scary bullheadedness. There's also the great episode of Seinfeld in which he plays library detective "Mr. Bookman". Oh Philip Baker Hall... you are old, you will be dead soon, and that will be sad.

Man oh man, I love Zodiac.

David Fincher, who's responsible for the melodramatic and mythological Se7en, seems here to be issuing a cinematic retraction. In that film, the killer and the detectives hunting him are locked in an existential battle; Morgan Freeman's very soul seems to be at stake (along with Brad Pitt's sanity). And while the ending of Se7en may feel unsatisfying moralistically (Our guys won the day, but did they really?), it at least leaves the viewer with clear questions with which to grapple (and, if we're being honest, pretty obvious answers). Was the fanatical hunt worth the personal cost? (No.) Was justice truly done? (No.) Did the serial killer "win"? (Yes.)

Zodiac, on the other hand, refuses to elevate its subject towards the easy or archetypal, wallowing happily in the tedious procedure of the case's actual events for well over two hours. Jake Gyllenhaal is Robert Graysmith, the San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist who becomes obsessed with the city's resident homicidal maniac. Mark Ruffalo is Inspector Dave Toschi, the detective who spends most of the film trapped in bureaucratic coordination hell, not leaping over moonlit rooftops with his gun drawn (Fincher draws the parallel kind of obviously with the character's incredulity towards a newly released Dirty Harry). And Robert Downey Jr. is loose cannon reporter Paul Avery, whose descent into madness and ultimate obsolescence is one of the film's great tragedies.

It's a serial killer film in name only, avoiding all of the stylistic trappings of the genre so that the murky reality of procedure is allowed to fester in the mind of the viewer. Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt so effectively convey the paranoia and dissatisfaction that drives Graysmith for years after the murders seem to have stopped. The director's stylistic impositions coalesce beautifully with a script that doesn't indulge them, so that Graysmith following another dead-end lead in a cinephile's basement becomes a terrifying crystallization of uncertainty and fear.

I can't figure it out. The film sprawls without focus far past the two hour mark. There is an unhealthy attachment to history, a crime that shitty biopics usually commit without compunction. And yet, Zodiac is the best movie of 2007. I have no answers. Neither does Zodiac. Oh!

I've been really surprised to see it on so many top-ten lists these past few weeks. I honestly thought that I was unique in my appreciation, and I'll admit that I was excited by the fact that the film was so roundly dismissed by audiences upon its release. Here's a movie whose merits I could proselytize, an exciting discovery hidden in plain sight. But I guess I wasn't the only one, and for that I'm truly glad.

I've seen the film three or four times now, but I'm really looking forward to watching the new director's cut that's just come out. Nine more minutes of Jake Gyllenhaal reading files! Nine more minutes of Robert Downey Jr. verging on incoherence! Nine more minutes of the maddeningly inconclusive!

Romance And Cigarettes is what my wife would call a "hot mess". Using the context clues (thanks, Pennsylvania public school system!), I've gleaned that the term refers to something crafted with a whole lot of manic enthusiasm, something that might not be praised for its "craftsmanship" but manages to function admirably on its own batshit crazy merits. She usually employs the term to describe someone who is either A) drunk or B) acting drunk. John Turturro's jukebox musical certainly fits the bill, from its liberal use of Englebert Humperdink's "A Man Without Love" to Christopher Walken's performance as a lovelorn Elvis enthusiast.

James Gandolfini plays Nick Murder, working-class everyman who cheats on his tired-eyed wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon) with the British firecracker played by Kate Winslet. When Kitty finds out about his dalliance, she explodes, turning their three daughters (Mandy Moore, Mary Louise Parker, Aida Turturro) against him and attempting, without success, to cut him out of their lives completely. Nick solicits advice from a co-worker (Steve Buscemi), who offers some of the wisest words of wisdom ever imparted on film, while Kitty turns to her daughters and the aforementioned uncle. Amy Sedaris, Eddie Izzard, Elaine Stritch, and Bobby Cannavale round out the cast.

No one will confuse Romance & Cigarettes with an Oscar contender. It has no unity of purpose; the songs that come to comprise its emotional core are from disparate time periods, regions, even musical styles. The narrative thrust is non-existent, especially in the final third. Some of the performances are cringe-worthy. The cinematography is little more than functional, the editing is clunky.

So why is it so much goddamn fun?

My guess is that it's precisely because no one will confuse it with an Oscar contender. Unapologetically absurd, it rejects the "credibility" that can be the kiss of death to a film about working class angst and embraces its low-budget style whole-heartedly. It feels as if the cast is there as a favor to Turturro, like the cinematographer could barely scrounge together the Vision2 necessary to capture Turturro's nutty Sarandon-sings-Joplin fantasies. There's a definite Do-It-Yourself feel to the proceedings.

That's not to say that the technique is invisible or non-intrusive. Turturro's directorial intentions couldn't be clearer if they were projected in IMAX. Phantasmagorical in imagery and execution, it's a musical, so it's nothing if not a fantasy. But by and large his choices work, and where they don't, the film rides along on the goodwill generated by its fantastic actors and hilarious script.

Released after a two-year stay at the Chateau De A Shelf Somewhere, Romance & Cigarettes was nearly ignored upon finally getting a limited release, saved from obscurity by the marquee cast and a glowing New York Times piece that framed it squarely within that "Little Film That Could" narrative that's been so effectively co-opted as of late. But despite a cast whose cred far surpasses that of faux indies like Little Miss Sunshine, Romance & Cigarettes might actually be the Little Film That Could. Scratch that, it's the Little Film That Does.

Oh! Booyah!

If this review verges on synopsis, I apologize.