There Will Be Blood

It may seem churlish to depreciate an ambitious, uneven film with many excellent attributes, lionized by critics, but all I can do is offer my honest and considered response. Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about the progress of an oil tycoon from solitary chthonic endeavor to world-bestriding megalomania is vivid and true in large measure, but succumbs repeatedly to operatic implausibility. Time, place, and technology are rendered with striking verisimilitude, but characterizations and plot points are elided or fumbled. Daniel Day-Lewis’s acclaimed performance is impressively detailed and forceful, but also wildly over the top. As his evangelical antagonist, Paul Dano is simultaneously obvious and enigmatic, as he confusingly plays two brothers on whose parched California land oil is found. A nonprofessional child actor performs admirably as Daniel’s beloved (?!?) son, but his origins and motivations are left shrouded in ambiguity. The discovery and exploitation of oil is brilliantly depicted, epic enough to make the film worth seeing, but character and story are simultaneously larger and smaller than life. And the music, while frequently effective, is way too insistent, contributing to the film’s hectoring quality. This is a film whose aspirations to greatness keep it from being as good as it might be. (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-92.)

Gone Baby Gone

Ben Affleck captures a lot of local Boston color in his first directorial effort, and his younger brother Casey is surprisingly convincing as a juvenile-looking but tough-minded private detective. And Michelle Monaghan also comes through, as his rather implausible partner. Ed Harris is reliably powerful as the police detective they team up with, to search for an abducted 4-year-old girl. Amy Ryan earned her best supporting actress nod as the girl’s dissolute mom, quite a contrast to the saintly Beadie she plays on The Wire. Morgan Freeman, however, is fatally misused in a small but pivotal role as a police captain. The film has an odd structure in that it seems to end at the midpoint and start over, but I could buy that. What I couldn’t buy was its resolution of the moral conundrum it propounds. The choices made are far from satisfying, and the film itself doesn’t seem to know which side to take. It owes a lot to Mystic River, including the writer of the source novel, Dennis Lehane, but here the ambiguities are crippling. Just call it flavorful but flawed. (2007, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-72.)

Michael Clayton

Screenwriter Tony Gilroy’s debut as director is a highly successful attempt to re-capture the look and feel of the wide-screen, not-so-paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 70s. In a year when Sidney Lumet proved he’s still got it, Gilroy revisits Lumet’s heyday, along with others such as Alan Pakula and Sydney Pollack (who actually acts -- and very well -- in this film.) But first off, I have to confess a serious mancrush on George Clooney, who not only has the magic charm of the true movie star, but like Redford and Beatty before him, and Cary Grant before them, uses it to wise effect, to get good films made and to make them better by his presence. Without him, there’s no film, in more ways than can be enumerated. Not that the rest of the cast and crew don’t perform admirably. Clooney is the ex-cop, Fordham-grad fixer in a white-shoe Manhattan law firm, the one who gets his shoes, and everything else, dirty. Tom Wilkinson negotiates the line between sanity and madness as the chief corporate litigator who goes bonkers during a deposition in a class action lawsuit he is defending for a company which markets cancer-causing defoliants -- has he gone crazy, or is he finally sane, crossing over to the other side? Tilda Swinton wonderfully portrays the neurotic but forceful chief counsel for the ADM-like agribusiness. There’s even an excellent child actor as Clooney’s son, who sells an intriguingly interwoven subplot related to a fantasy gaming novel. The story is complicated and convoluted, and makes pleasing demands on the audience’s powers of attention and ratiocination. The plot I’ve leave you to follow -- or not -- for yourself. (2007, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-82.)

Becoming Jane

To truly hate a movie, you have to care about the subject, and I really care about Jane Austen. Despite pretty pictures and pretty people, this attempt to read Austen’s fiction back into her life is pretty bad. Notwithstanding attractive costumes and settings, the film has no feel for period at all. To anyone with the least sense of Regency England, the dialogue and behavior of the characters is repeatedly eye-rolling, painfully incredible. I was quite taken with Anne Hathaway as the “smart fat girl” of The Devil Wears Prada, but oh my, she is more disablingly anachronistic than Keira Knightley in the Pride and Prejudice to which this film transparently tries to be a sequel. James McAvoy has something as a movie star, but nothing to make him a plausible Darcy figure. There is no glimmer of insight into the trials and contradictions of Austen’s life or her creative psychology, the irony into which she poured those contradictions. Instead of the least appreciation for her art, we get latter-day rom-com conventions. I sat though it, but don’t know when I’ve squirmed and sighed so much in the course of a movie. (2007, dvd, n.) *3+* (MC-55.)

On the other hand, I was appropriately on the edge of my seat for Speed (1994, dvd, n.), which was equally nonsensical but true to its own kinetic premise, summed up in the one-word title. I’m not a big fan of the fun of blowing things up on camera, but Jan de Bont’s film moves fast enough to achieve release velocity, soaring into suspension of disbelief as well as gravity. Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock do what movie stars are supposed to do, offer a pleasing fantasy of identification. This is the sort of Hollywood contraption that I would usually avoid, but I was happy enough to catch up with it as a diversion long after its release.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days

I was grateful to see this much-praised Romanian film -- winner of the top prize at Cannes -- on IFC’s On Demand option, while it is still playing in select metropolitan theaters. But the image quality was sub-DVD and a far cry from HD. Nonetheless, I got to see the film that “everyone” is talking about. And Cristian Mungiu’s film -- like Cristi Puiu’s recent Death of Mr. Lazarescu -- suggests that Romania might be the happenin’ place in world cinema these days, with a new iteration of neorealism, in which documentary observation is overlaid with literary and cinematic tropes, in a way that sets critics to salivating. So this film depicts the harsh reality of an illegal abortion in 1987, just two years before the overthrow of Ceausescu, but it is also a noir-ish thriller, with two girls instead of two guys, facing down the system and its evil spawn, doing what needs to be done. The action takes place over one day and night, but the title implicitly gives the age of the fetus. The urge to find out what happens next meets with some visceral shocks, while some scenes are supremely suspenseful. And the film is held together by the great performance of Anamaria Marinca as the friend indeed, who guides her hapless roommate through the ordeal, toward a greater ordeal of her own. It’s well worth seeing, but I wasn’t as blown away as many commentators, less inclined perhaps to the grim and gritty, which this undeniably is. So here’s another critical stampede that I find hard to join, but I will go this far -- this film would likely reveal more and seem better on a second viewing. You should give it a chance, and I’ll give it another sometime. (2008, IFC/OD, n.) *7* (MC-99.)

I am almost too embarrassed by my tech illiteracy to point it out, but you may have noticed I finally figured out the simple process to make my notation of Metacritic rating a link to the relevant Metacritic page. So from now on, please click on MC-number to get more info on the film, read reviews, and compare other critical reactions to my own.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

I’ve never been a lover of video games -- aside from a long-ago, brief but intense affair with Ms. Pac-man -- so I’m not the best judge of Seth Gordon’s documentary about the monumental battle for Donkey Kong supremacy between a mullet-headed slick operator from Gainesville and a Seattle dad laid off from his engineering job at Boeing. The film is well put together, and if I had any sympathy for its subject and object, I might have enjoyed it as much as Spellbound or Wordplay. But not, so not. (2007, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-83.)

Killer of Sheep

This film was made by Charles Burnett for $10K as a thesis film at UCLA in 1977. It got enough attention at festivals to become one of the first 50 films added to the National Film Registry (also named one of the “100 Essential Films of All Time” by the National Society of Film Critics), but was only last year restored and released by Milestone Films. They had finally secured the rights to the music that is so integral to the film’s impact, from Paul Robeson to Dinah Washington. This black & white portrait of an all black community in Watts is photographed in a style that calls to mind Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Leavitt, and the music carries enough emotional weight to make up for some amateurish acting and sound. The lead couple certainly have presence, however, and the groups of kids playing in streets or vacant lots or up on the roof, all breathe with documentary verisimilitude and are captured with a refined visual balance. Even at its modest length, the film is rambling and inconsequential, but as long as your expectations are not raised too high by critical raves, you will find it worth seeing. (2007, TCM/T, n.) *7-* (MC-94.)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel is not just a painter dabbling in cinema, but an artist in film. Here, from a script by Ronald Harwood, he adapts the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, and liberates the audience in the same way the book itself liberated Bauby from the “locked-in syndrome” caused by a major stoke. Only able to move one eyelid, the former editor of French Elle is taught by a therapist to communicate by blinking “yes” as she reads off letters, and with the help of another faithful and lovely amanuensis, dictates an affirmative book about his condition, only to die within days of its publication. This may seem like unpromising cinematic material, but turns out to be moving and exhilarating instead of depressing. The first part of the film is a subjective view of the condition, seen with the same blurred and limited vision that the patient experiences, but gradually we move outside to see Mathieu Amalric playing the role, and back inside to the memory and imagination that makes even such a limited life worth living. The loveliness of the ladies around Jean-Do -- Marie-Josee Croze, Anne Consigny, and Emmanuelle Seigner as his former lover and mother of his children -- are a big part of that sensory delight. And Max von Sydow gives a frail but towering performance as his father. The sum total is beautiful and uplifting, though sad and scary, like life itself. (2007, Images, n.) *8* (MC-92.)

Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide

Once this film was made, you could not find it -- so I won’t talk much about something you can’t see. Williams College showed it in a series on “Tracing Migration” at Images Cinema, but it has not been released stateside, either in theaters or on DVD. I had to see it, however, because it was directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, as the follow-up to one of my favorite films of recent years, The Best of Youth. This film is not in the same league at all, but I found it worth watching, despite significant flaws. The issue of illegal immigration in Italy is viewed through the lens of a 13-year-old son of a factory owner, who falls off a yacht and is rescued by a Romanian youth aboard an old tub already overloaded with a multinational crush of illegals. The son’s eyes are opened by the experience of the Italian “welcome center” where they are all taken once the coast guard picks them up. The audience is meant to lose its innocence and naivete along with the boy. While the film has a worthy documentary impulse, the effect is didactic and misdirected. (2005, Images, n.) *6*

Sunshine

With 2001-like visual spectacle and Alien-like creepouts, among other obvious borrowings, this Danny Boyle sci-fi extravaganza should have been better than it was. Cillian Murphy leads a crew of eight on a mission to restart the dying sun with a huge thermonuclear payload, but their formulaic dynamics (the 21st century update to the WWII bomber crew) make for a glorified Star Trek episode that seems both truncated and overextended at 100-odd minutes. The plot points pile up and the story falls apart, leaving you with special effects that have lost their specialness. Rose Byrne, however, is a name to remember and a face to watch in the future, the next great Aussie actress. (2007, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-64.)

2 Days in Paris

Following in the footsteps of one of my all-time favorites, the dyptych Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, this Julie Delpy effort might have suffered from heightened expectation except that mine had been lowered by lukewarm reviews -- so I have to declare myself pleasantly surprised. I was thoroughly entertained and fell in love with Julie all over again, even though her character is what the French call a “beautiful pain in the ass” (cf. Catherine in Jules & Jim). Julie not only scripts, directs, and stars, but composes the music, and recruits her real mother and father to play her mother and father in the film. Anthony Lane in The New Yorker rightly describes this as “not a vanity project, but an insanity project” -- but I think admirably so. It’s impossible not to see this story as autobiographical -- about a thirtysomething French woman stopping in Paris for two days on the way back from a vacation in Venice with her New York boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) -- but all the characters are seen with such gimlet-eyed satire that it is easy to indulge Ms. Delpy’s highly particular view of the world. These folks are nuts, but in a way that rings true. Whatever Delpy may lack in comparison to Richard Linklater’s real-time, you-are-there intimacy, she makes up for in genuine laughs, and for me even her narrated slideshow passages worked. Despite what you might have heard, this is worth seeing. 2007, dvd, n.) *8* ((MC-67.)

Speaking of films worth seeing, now that I’ve seen it in widescreen glory at the Clark, along with an enthusiastic full house to conclude my “Green and Pleasant Land” film series, I want to bump up my recommendation of Miss Potter (2006), really one of the overlooked gems of recent years, with Renee Zellweger as Beatrix Potter and Ewan MacGregor as her publisher-fiance. (Use “search blog” box above to find my original review.)

A Mighty Heart

This film is an honorable enterprise, but the plus in my rating is more for aspiration than execution. Angelina Jolie admirably avoids the trap of a vanity project in this telling of Mariane Pearl’s story, from the time her husband Danny (reporter for WSJ, and formerly the Berkshire Eagle) was kidnapped in Pakistan till Islamic extremists sent a video of his beheading. And eclectic director Michael Winterbottom brings his on-the-fly, you-are-there style of filmmaking to an arena of urgent interest. Even though the broad facts are generally known, the film’s telling is hectic and confusing, which is no doubt true to the reality of the situation. One big problem is the cipher of Danny, as he appears in flashback. And many of the other characters, far from being idealized, are presented with an ambiguity of motive that might have been revelatory if lingered over, but just adds to the confusion as the incidents hurtle past. The representatives of the Journal, the U.S. Embassy, and the Pakistani secret service all seem as villainous as heroic, and yet we are supposed to admire them in the end? Angelina is the estimable center of the story but does not hog the camera, and in the end not quite enough is made of Mariane’s heroism in not succumbing to hate. The film would probably hold together better on a second viewing, but frankly I’m not eager to see it again. (2007, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-74.)