Two of the best

On two successive evenings, I watched likely Oscar nominees for “Best Picture,” and I found both very much up to the hype.


Winter’s Bone.  Now this is one Sundance prizewinner that I totally endorse.  It deserves the acclaim of its predecessors and more.  Debra Granik’s film does not have any of the deficiencies I saw in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River or Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker.  For me Winter’s Bone worked on many levels, as pulse-pounding suspense, heart-leaping shock, naturalistic portrait of Ozark people and the grimly beautiful landscape they inhabit – film noir meets Southern Gothic.  Adapting a novel I know nothing about, Granik took a small crew and a few professional actors to rural Missouri and recruited the rest of her cast from local folk, a strategy that works wonderfully well, mixing palpable reality with an aura of sympathy and dread.  Jennifer Lawrence is outstanding in the star-making central role as a teenage girl taking care of her younger brother and sister, while looking after her spaced-out mother and tracking down her meth-cooking father, who has disappeared while out on bail, having left the family home as collateral.  Talk about the weight of the world on her shoulders.  But there is nothing frail or shrinking in this young beauty.  Among the fearsome adults she beards in their own dens is her Uncle Teardrop, marvelously rendered by John Hawkes as a scary man with a surprising undercurrent of feeling.  This film could have felt like rural slumming and backwoods exploitation, but instead elicits a classic mix of pity and terror, with respect all round.   (2010, MC-90)


The Social Network.  This acclaimed film stands out most rarely among contemporary American films, in that you’re likely to respond as I did at the end, “Wow, it’s over already?  Those two hours went fast – and full.”  In an era when even the best films seem generally 10-20 minutes too long (unless they cut loose from feature length altogether and run to 5 or 6 – or 10 to 13 -- hours), The Social Network leaves you with an appetite for more.  Credit Aaron Sorkin’s patented rapidfire patter, David Fincher’s swift and sure direction, and excellent acting across the board -- funny, deep, and true characterizations that leave plenty of room for moral speculation.  Jesse Eisenberg comes from two particular favorites of mine, The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland, but transcends himself with a brilliantly controlled portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook while a Harvard sophomore and subsequently the “world’s youngest billionaire.”  Andrew Garfield is Eduardo Saverin, the classmate and friend who provides the initial bankroll, but gets squeezed out when the start-up goes bigtime, and sues to get back his stake in the business and co-founder status.  The general assumption is that Saverin is the good guy betrayed, and Zuckerberg the arrogant selfish bastard with no social skills, who hacked his way to “Friends” across a network because he couldn’t keep them in person.  I take it as evidence of the subtlety of both characters’ portrayal that I could come to see the conflict in just the opposite way, with smooth operator Saverin trying to exploit the brilliance of his obsessive friend’s monomania.  I think every character in the film comes across with a piquant mix of sympathy and satire, even Justin Timberlake’s all-stops-out portrayal of Internet wunderkind Sean Parker.  I was totally into this movie, from the close-up head-to-head first scene between Jesse/Mark and his down-to-earth BU girlfriend, which ends with her walking out of The Thirsty Scholar, a pub near Inman Square, just around the block from where my son lived last year.  So I reveled in the familiar Cambridge vibe, despite the film’s slightly overwrought view of the scene.  And I loved the contrast between the dark wood paneling and three-hundred-year-old doorknobs of Harvard, and the glassed-in funhouses and playpens of Silicon Valley.  I find the widespread comparisons of this film to Citizen Kane quite plausible, and think it likely to deserve every award it wins.  (2010, MC-95)

The New Wave gets old

I have found some of Alain Resnais’ octogenarian caprices quite enjoyable (Same Old Song, Private Fears in Public Faces), but Wild Grass (2009, MC-63) strikes me not as winsome, but winceful.  Count me among those who don’t get the game he was up to, with bizarre, inconsequential characters and aggressively unreal color schemes, and a general unmooring from meaning and narrative sense.  Very little in this film was endearing or engaging to me, despite all the respectable people and evident craft involved.

On the other hand, some might find Eric Rohmer’s swansong, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007, MRQE-63) an equally off-putting exercise in geriatric stylization, but I had the opposite reaction.  With Rohmer I appreciated the amorous obsessions of the old codger and the absolute artificiality of his presentation, more archetypal than merely arch.  Here he twines together two strands of his work – archaic pageants and the erotic complexities of modern romance – into an adaptation of a 17^th century novel’s view of a 5^th century pastoral of shepherds and nymphs, played by very contemporary youths in a bucolic country setting, winding up with a hot twist on Shakespearian-type gender bending.  Rohmer truly animates the ancient conventions of courtly love and brings them into 21^st century relevance, leaving me with a slow smile spreading across my face.

Genre but not too generic

Splice.  Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi/horror mash-up is a knowing wink at the genre of creature feature, made notable by the presence of Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley as a couple of genetic wizards (whose names reference The Bride of Frankenstein), bankrolled by big pharma, but with their own agendas as they create life in a test tube.  There is plenty of humor generated as they parent the rapidly growing half-human, half-CGI creature, as it passes through the “terrible twos” to a highly Oedipal stage of development.  Then there is plenty of yuck as the tale turns bloody and kinky.  This is no Gattaca when it comes to the ethics of genetic manipulation, but within its genre limits it’s shrewd enough to offer more than simple shivers of laughter and dread.  (2010, MC-66)

Whip It.  I will not take the invitation of its title and lash out at this pleasant piece of fluff.  Drew Barrymore’s first directorial effort looks at the revival of women’s roller derby in the hip enclave of Austin TX, whipping grrrl-power, teen yearnings for romance and escape, and sports movie tropes into a familiar yet appealing froth.  Ellen Page has no difficulty in turning on the adorable, and is surrounded by an array of equally familiar but appealing characters.  Her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) wants her to win teen beauty pageants as a way out of their backwater town, but our girl Bliss has her eyes set on a different breakout.  She joins with the likes of Maggie Mayhem and Eva Destruction to become Babe Ruthless, the rookie star of the roller derby circuit.  If you can do without depth or surprise, this is perfectly fun little film to watch.  (2009, MC-68)

Carlos

Olivier Assayas is not shy about vying with The Godfather in this long-form crime saga, which spans two decades of globe-trotting mayhem by the would-be godfather of international terrorism (or political struggle, as the idealogues would have it).  Carlos’s biggest hit (and biggest flop) was seizing a roomful of OPEC oil ministers at a meeting in Vienna in 1974, and commandeering a plane to take them to Libya and then Algeria, before all hostages were released, and the “revolutionary cadre” escaped to fight again.  That takes up most of the middle episode of three, as made for French tv and recently shown on the Sundance Channel, close to six hours in all, with a 140-minute version in theatrical release.  That central drama is surrounded by lots of assassinations and bombings, plus sex and high living, as Assayas tells the story in admittedly speculative though highly convincing fashion.   We see Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan leftist whose brothers were named Vladimir and Lenin, assume the nom de guerre of Carlos, to which the media adds the sobriquet of “the Jackal,” making him a big name in violent circles around the world.  His sponsors shift from Qaddafi to Saddam to Assad, from Moscow to Berlin to Bucharest, as he franchises terrorism around the globe.  Edgar Ramirez, also Venezuelan, has the magnetism and acting chops to draw one through long stretches in the company of an odious man.  In its own reflective thriller mode, Assayas’s film has more to say about the globalization of terror than almost anything I have seen or read.  It’s sordid enough to make you ask why you’re sitting through all those hours of repellent behavior, but compelling enough to never drag.  (2010, MC-93)

Everyone Else

I can only read this title as ironic, because “everyone else” is exactly what this intimate erotic duet excludes.  Two thirtyish German professionals are vacationing together in Sardinia and testing the limits of their new relationship.   Lars Eidinger is a supposedly brilliant young architect waiting for his first prize or commission, big blond and bland, with a passive-aggressive streak.  Birgit Minichmayr is a brash little music publicist, who is always putting herself out there, sexually and emotionally.  The director Maren Ade is a young woman who comes across as a harsher Eric Rohmer, picking apart the strands of mutual self-delusion, through conversation and sidelong glances.  She throws you into close quarters with this couple, without introduction, and lets you figure out just what’s going on between them, as they bounce off each other and a limited number of others.  This is romantic comedy that digs deep enough beneath the skin to hurt, and maintains a healthy respect for the mysteries of human motivation.  It doesn’t assume or assert too much, but just lets us observe and understand, only up to a point, but certainly more than the characters understand themselves.  (2010, MC-71)

Please Give

Nicole Holofcener extends sympathy to all her characters, however annoying they may be.  In Friends With Money, that seemed way more sympathy than they deserved, but here the neurosis and affection are in better balance.  As usual, Catherine Keener is right on the writer-director’s wavelength, as a guilty liberal trying to give away the money she makes with a business that seems ethically questionable to herself.  She and hubby Oliver Platt own a vintage furniture store, which they stock by buying up the contents of apartments of dead old people, from their unknowing children.  They’re waiting to take over the apartment of their next-door neighbor when she dies, and they become involved with the granddaughters who take care of her, deliciously played by Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet.  Ann Guilbert is hilarious as the straight-talking old lady, and Sarah Steele is also good as the acne-plagued teenage daughter of Keener and Platt.  With well-judged but low-key direction, the entire ensemble is delightful and the whole nicely balances wit and warmth, with enough truth to lift the comedy beyond the situation.  (2010, MC-78)

Last Holiday

For more than a decade I’d been looking for this film from 1950, which Alec Guinness made in the midst of his great series of Ealing comedies (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The White Suit, The Ladykillers), and it finally turned up on TCM.  It’s worth keeping an eye out for, though here the comedy is quite subdued amidst darker themes.  The story, by J.B. Priestley, follows an agricultural implement salesman who gets an imminently fatal diagnosis from his doctor and decides to spend his life savings on holiday at a posh seaside resort, where he is taken as a mystery man by an assortment of upper class types.  As with Chauncey Gardner in Being There, his direct statements are taken as having great hidden meaning, so an inventor, a cabinet minister, a gambler, and others, take his word as gospel and offer him unprecedented opportunities, now that he has no time left to take advantage of them. Kay Walsh is good as the head housekeeper with whom he forms a gradually deepening relationship.  The direction of Henry Cass is workmanlike at best, effectively anatomizing class types by speech and accent, and presenting topical satire on the era of austerity in Britain, but signaling the turns of the story so broadly that there is no surprise involved in how it all turns out.  Nonetheless Guinness makes the film something to see.

I am Eye-talian

Luca Guadagnino aspires to the look of Visconti and the soul of Rossellini in I Am Love (2010, MC-79), a film pleasingly saturated with film history, the product of a long-term collaboration with Tilda Swinton, who plays the central role.  She is the stylish matron of a wealthy Milanese family, which owns a textile factory that thrived under the Fascists and thereafter, but is about to be swallowed up by a global conglomerate.  She’s a Russian who was acquired by her husband on an art buying expedition there during the Soviet era, becoming an out-of-place ice queen to fulfill the societal role assigned to her.  Cracks begin to show in her opulent ice palace when the patriarch of the family bequeaths the business to her husband and son in tandem, because it will take two men to replace him.  What gets through one crack is a friend of her son’s, a chef whose food, and then body, initiates her into Lawrentian ecstasy.  This melodrama, luscious and fruity, is served with a sauce of John Adams music, and really indulged my taste for the likes of Sirk and Powell.  It’s all absurd, but swank and powerful, with a strong undercurrent of social critique, of capitalism and Italy in the age of Berlusconi.

A much more homely look at Italian mores is offered in Gianni Di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (2008, MRQE-70), about a middle-aged momma’s boy taking care of his nonagenarian mother and getting snookered into taking care of three other elderly ladies as well, and of the little community they form.  In a way, this film goes beyond neorealism to home movie, with the director starring and shooting in the very apartment where he lived with his own mother until her death, but the film achieves a warmly ironic tone throughout.  The four old ladies are a great aggregate of types, and in its own very domestic way the film offers as much food porn as Ms. Swinton enjoys.  This lunch is light and slight, but quite tasty within its limits.   

Only if ...

Here are several recent films I would commend to your attention only under special circumstances:

Letters to Juliet.  Watch this utterly predictable romantic comedy only if:  you’re in love with the Tuscan countryside bathed in a golden glow; or, you’re in awe of Vanessa Redgrave’s beauty, grace, and depth, and more than ready to see Guinevere reunited with Lancelot in old age, reenacting her real life reunion with Franco Nero; or, you can lose yourself in the limpid pools of Amanda Seyfreid’s saucer-sized eyes; or, you value the energy that Gael Garcia Bernal brings to any size role; or, you can forgive the formulaic writing and directing of Gary Winick to appreciate the light literary wit that pervades this otherwise ordinary entertainment.  (2010, MC-50)

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.  Watch this inoffensive -- try as it might – teen comedy of Jersey kids in the Big City for a long night’s journey to sunrise only if:  you have been thoroughly charmed and continuously amused by Michael Cera in the sitcom series Arrested Development or movies like Juno; or, you have some idea of, or taste for, the downtown music scene herein celebrated; or, you are eager to see the fairly appealing Kat Dennings trade her sports bra for a push-up and have her first orgasm, and to see her ditsy, drunken blond girlfriend Ari Graynor make it safely back across the river to home; or, you don’t choke on the thoroughly chewed piece of gum that makes its way through sticky moments of the film; or, Peter Sollett’s direction sends you back to the master, Marty Scorsese, and After Hours.  (2008, MC-64)

Blind Side.  Watch this surprisingly bad -- and surprisingly successful -- family soap opera with would-be wit and heart only if:  you have never watched an episode of Friday Night Lights to realize just how truthful and involving a story one can weave around high school football in the South; or, you are like Stephen Colbert and “don’t see color” and thus won’t mind the sanitized portrayal of race relations in this film; or, you’re not worried about having your esteem for source writer Michael Lewis called into question; or, you can believe that Sandra Bullock was named “Best Actress” for this adequately charming performance in a role without a lot of nuance; or, you are just in love with the whole Red State fantasy of “mama grizzlies.”  (2009, MC-53)