Good pictures?

Not making any “Best of 2012” lists, here are some other recent films I’ve watched lately, again ranked in rough order of my enthusiasm, from a couple of sleeper recommendations down to a shrug of the shoulders.

Never on a bicycle -- certainly not a fixed-gear, steel-frame, no-brakes bike – but I have in my time enjoyed the rush of battling taxis, trucks, and pop-up pedestrians, to get from here to there on the streets of Manhattan, so I was primed for Premium Rush (2012, MC-66, NFX), a velocipede comedy-thriller of sorts, directed by David Koepp and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  He’s a champion bike messenger, who is assigned a package labeled as in the title, and has to get it from Upper West Side to Lower East Side, while competing with a Black rival and for a Chica girlfriend who is also an expert rider.  Meanwhile he is being chased by a drug-crazed bad cop (Michael Shannon, in full bug-eye mode) in a patrol car, leading to a chase under the El that pays homage to The French Connection, with the ironic twist of the bike managing to outrace and outmaneuver the car.  JGL does an amazing amount of his own riding down Manhattan canyons in real traffic, but there are four different stunt riders who astonish with all the things they can do on a bike.  I particularly liked the visualization of on-the-fly calculations of routes, from aerial maps to frozen moments at intersections that diagram the possible outcomes of different routes through the melée.  Fast and furious fun, as far as I’m concerned, this movie (in the most kinetic sense) is a premium rush indeed.

Despite some over-obvious plot twists that verged on soap opera, Yaron Zilberman’s first feature film, A Late Quartet (2012, MC-67, NFX) certainly snowed me with its inside view of the Lincoln Center-Julliard-Central Park lives of a group of musicians.  Touching all the high cultural bases, the title alludes to late chamber pieces by Beethoven and T.S. Eliot, but refers specifically to the four string players who’ve been performing together worldwide for 25 years.  Are they entering a late phase, or are they already late, in the sense of defunct?  Christopher Walken plays the eldest (and wisest!?!) of the four, a cellist whose medical difficulties set off the collective crises of the group.  Second violinist Phillip Seymour Hoffman is married to viola player Catherine Keener.  First violinist Mark Ivanir was long ago in love with Keener, but his ultimate, fanatical devotion was always to his own instrument.  Throw in the couple’s ripe young daughter, a violinist who studies with the other members of the quartet, and you have the makings of bedroom farce played with a straight face.  None of that mattered to me because the four players seemed so real, inhabiting a world I’ve been in proximity to but never part of, both the realms of music and musicianship, and of uptown Manhattan.  Walken is superb in an uncharacteristically gentle and sane role, while Hoffman and Keener are reliably fine, and the other players are plausible enough to paper over the script’s flaws.

Yet another Jarecki, this time Nicholas rather than brothers Andrew and Eugene, makes his feature film debut with Arbitrage (2012, MC-73, NFX), a glossy glimpse inside the world of high finance.  Richard Gere certainly looks the part of a big money guy, sleak as a shark, comfortable on TV or the cover of Forbes, really comfortable on his private jet, even more comfortable at his sixtieth birthday party with extended family and wife Susan Sarandon.  Not quite so comfortable with the young mistress he leaves the party for.  His Madoff-maneuvering to salvage a big bet gone bad is soon overshadowed by greater crimes, but our anti-hero barely breaks a sweat or creases his suit.  The feel is right, the look of this particular world, but the twists of the story don’t necessarily carry us along.  Handsome all right, but is it handsomely done?  My reaction was positive, but not enthusiastic enough to urge upon viewers not naturally attracted.  Simply put, it’s not something you gotta see, but something you might want to see.

Turning up on my Netflix queue on some forgotten recommendation, I wondered at first whether The Wise Kids (2012, MC-74, NFX) was just a mistake, some sort of amateurish evangelical production, but soon twigged to the personal authenticity of the story, about growing up gay in a Southern culture where that made you a child of the devil.  The film’s look may suggest a decades-old tv show, but the sentiments are raw and real, and the acting is fine.  Writer-director Stephen Cone plays a youth director at a church in Charleston, whose companionable marriage is tested by his attraction to one of the boys in his Easter pageant.  The boy, played with spirit and appeal by Tyler Ross, seems to be based loosely on Cone’s own experiences.  He’s in the last semester of high school, headed for NYU, and best friends with two girls, a pastor’s daughter who is beginning to have doubts, and another who remains an eager-beaver believer (“Jesus is just awesome!”) shocked by revelations from her friends.  Molly Kunz and Allison Torem are young actresses I would definitely like to see more of.  And the youth director’s yearning wife is well-played by Sadieh Rifai.  It’s a world that may seem backward in time to us blue-state sophisticates, but its authenticity is vouched for by its low budget.  The cast stayed in the director’s parents’ house, and shot scenes there.  It’s a perspective not often seen in the movies, and presented with humor, conviction, and breadth of sympathy.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is definitely the best reason to watch James Ponsoldt’s slight but honest Alcoholics Anonymous drama, Smashed (2012, MC-71, NFX).  She’s a lively young second-grade teacher, whose nighttime carousing with husband Aaron Paul intrudes in the classroom when she drunkenly barfs in (or near) a wastepaper basket.  Nick Offerman (Ron of Parks & Recreation) is a sympathetic vice principal who introduces her to AA meetings.  Winstead’s character is from a hardscrabble background, with bad habits acquired from her mother, whom we see in only one scene, but Mary Kay Place makes it count.  Her husband comes from money, which allows him to get by as a music reviewer, attending concerts and partying nonstop, so he’s not inclined to follow her into sobriety.  Olivia Spencer becomes her AA sponsor, and after a relapse when her past behavior catches up with her, she winds up staying sober one day at a time.  It’s really the plain (though pretty) freshness of Winstead that takes this film out of the realm of the familiar and ordinary. 

Michael Winterbottom turns out at least one film a year, and moves on to the next, always looking for a different subject or approach.  Sometimes the result is superlative, and sometimes it’s merely interesting.  Trishna (2012, MC-57, NFX) interests on several levels.  It’s his third adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel, this time Tess of the D’Urbervilles (previously Jude and The Claim, a McCabe-like Western based on The Mayor of Casterbridge).  Always exploring exotic locales, he sets the story in contemporary India, and one acute pleasure of the film comes from the location shots in Rajasthan, Jaipur, and Mumbai.  Ever the avid absorber of divergent cultures, Winterbottom works in a lot of Bollywood scenes.  It’s not entirely clear that Freida Pinto can act, but ye gods, she’s so beautiful one is happy to watch her just stand or walk.  Maybe the same holds with Nastassi Kinski in Polanski’s Tess, a film I’m always happy to re-watch, and another interesting point of comparison to this adaptation.  (The book I don’t remember well, since I read it as a teenager, well before I could understand it.)  The story’s two principal male characters are combined in one, which makes for a bit of muddle and some arbitrary shifts in personality, and the final third of the film lacks tragic conviction.  Less the hand of fate than the forced hand of the screenwriter.  So the film feels longer than it is, petering out instead of rising to climax, but well worth watching along the way.

More exotica is on view in Chicken with Plums (2012, MC-70, NFX), Marjane Satrapi’s follow-up, both as graphic novel and film, to her wonderful Persepolis (also co-drected with Vincent Paronnaud).  This one is more live-action than animated, but does retain much of the visual magic of graphic panels.  It’s the story of a melancholy violinist in 1958 Tehran, played with silent comedy wit by Mathieu Amalric.  His violin is broken as well as his heart, so he decides to die and takes to bed to wait out the end.  There are flashbacks and flashforwards, fantasies and visual fillips, some of which soar and some of which fall flat, in this fractured fairy tale.  It doesn’t hang together or finally satisfy, but it does have marvelous moments of visual amazement.

Of an inter-related group of three recent offbeat rom-coms, I liked best Your Sister’s Sister (2012, MC-72, NFX), largely because the sisters in question are Rosemary DeWitt and Emily Blunt.  The guy who comes between them is Mark Duplass, as his standard would-be-lovable lunkhead.  Lynn Shelton puts these three together in a picturesque Puget Sound vacation cabin, and puts them through their paces, frequently improvised.  The results sometimes feel fresh and true, sometimes funny, and sometimes forced and evasive, like the ending.

Duplass is crackpot as well as lunkhead in Safety Not Guaranteed (2012, MC-72, NFX).  He places a classified ad in a Seattle paper, seeking a partner in time-travel (with the proviso of the title), and three journalists at a hip magazine go in search of a satirical story behind the ad.  One of them is Aubrey Plaza (April of P&R), who in the way of such things, falls for the subject of their investigation, and gets drawn into his fantasies(?).  Colin Trevorrow’s film is cute enough, but not believable enough to make me care.

The involvement of Rashida Jones (Ann Perkins of P&R) was sufficient to get me to watch Celeste & Jesse Forever (2012, MC-59, NFX), but not enough to make me enjoy it.  She co-wrote the script as well, but the proceedings strike me as too fey (and not in the Tina way).  I still like Rashida Jones too much to bash her earnest and well-meaning efforts here.

Better pictures?

This is the season of the year when I try to catch up with all the best films of the prior year, as determined by annual polls of critics, notably from Film Comment and Indiewire.  Some pictures on these Top 50 lists are better than Oscar’s “Best” and some are worse, but all have merits for those with eyes to see.  I list them according to my own level of enthusiasm, in descending order.

The Loneliest Planet (2012, MC-76, NFX) was a film I wanted to see from the time of its forecast in a New Yorker summer preview as about “a young couple who confront life-changing dangers while backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains,” just a couple of weeks before my son and his girlfriend were about to be backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains.  Thankfully, Nat and Nicole returned without confronting life-changing dangers, but this film had the extrinsic interest of showing me just where they had been.  The picturesque is all well and good, but the surprise came in the brilliance of Julia Loktev’s film, which turns on a blink-of-the-eye sequence halfway through.  What comes before and after is pretty much the same, the couple and their guide hiking though a remote landscape in long, slow shots, but completely different, in a way that is described with an absolute minimum of dialogue.  Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg are excellent as the couple, and their guide is appropriately strange and unreadable.  Admittedly I had an extra involvement in the material, but I found this film stunningly structured and cannily captured, despite its leisurely and seemingly haphazard progress.

Oslo, August 31^st   (2012, MC-84, NFX) snuck up on me in several ways, vaguely familiar through intriguingly different.  After the fact, I realized that I had seen the work of director Joachim Trier and his lead actor Anders Danielsen Lie in an earlier film, Reprise, which I reviewed here.  The set-up was reminiscent of Silver Linings Playbook, but with an entirely different emotional color – a thirtysomething guy is released from an institution (in this case, drug rehab) and goes back to all the things that drove him crazy in the first place, while trying to win back the love of his life.  The story is based on the same novel from which Louis Malle made The Fire Within.  The Oslo setting gradually emerges as a character in its own right, a hip place to be young and smart.  The main character is bright, having made an early name for himself as a writer but then flamed out.  Now his world is dark with wasted opportunity and ruined relationships, and nothing can revive the spark of life within him.  Through a long day and night he tries to find a reason to go on, a way to connect with his former life, old friends and lovers, without running into the same old dead ends.  It’s a highly sympathetic passage through purgatory, but with no purging in sight. Then the dawn of the dateline comes inexorably, for the character and the place.

This is not a review of This is Not a Film (2012, MC-90, NFX), because I take the title as literal description, and not a thought-provoking conundrum on the order of Magritte’s painting, “This is not a pipe.”  Jafar Panahi is under a six-year prison sentence and 20-year ban on filmmaking for what the Iranian government considers sedition.  This message in a bottle was smuggled out on a flashdrive hidden in a cake, and shown at Cannes.  It’s a significant document, bravely defiant, a day in the life of an artist under house arrest in a turbulent society, filmed by another cameraman and his own cellphone.  Panahi is certainly to be supported, and light thrown on his situation, but let’s be honest here, this is not much of a movie.  The most dramatic thing in it is a pet iguana climbing up a bookcase in an upscale Tehran apartment.  You’d be better off watching one of Panahi’s real films, Offside or The Circle, which portray the position of women under fundamentalist rule, as does the film he was stopped from making, and here tries to relate verbally, until he gives up in frustration.

An odd little number that does its business and moves on, Craig Zobel’s Compliance (2012, MC-68, NFX) starts from real events to get inside the story of a twisted prankster, who calls fast food joints impersonating a police detective and induces the manager and staff to hold one of them as a robbery suspect, subjecting her to prolonged interrogation and sexual harassment.  In the vein of the infamous Milgram experiments, how far will ordinary people go in humiliating and hurting a subject at the behest of a remote authority?  Pretty far, according to this film, which plays as impossible bad dream for the characters and as real-life horror story for us.  Well-acted by (crucially) unknown actors in a documentary-like chain-restaurant setting, this movie remains about as tasteful and thoughtful as it could be, given the subject of a teenage girl being molested and tormented.  Makes for a close call, but it remains on the better side of provocative, however violently reactions may diverge.

In Cosmopolis (2012, MC-58, NFX), master of the macabre David Cronenberg adapts a Don DeLillo novel set mostly in the stretch limo of a young titan of finance, as he tries to cross Manhattan to get a haircut, while he is losing hundreds of millions on speculation in the yuan.  Robert Pattinson is suitably vampire-like as the megalomaniac tycoon, and through the day a variety of others spend time in the limo with him, including his art dealer/sex partner Juliet Binoche, his theoretical guru Samantha Morton, and eventually his nemesis, disgruntled ex-employee Paul Giamatti.  There are other encounters with underlings and enemies in amusing cameos.  By the time it reached gunplay, this film had lost me, but up till then I appreciated the phantasmagoria of the novel’s creepy prescience about the financial meltdown of 2008, and the truly horrific characters behind it.

On rare occasions a science fiction film breaks through my indifference to the genre, but Looper (2012, MC-84, NFX) is no Gattaca.  Clever and well-made, with a Terminator-like set-up involving time-traveling hit men, this is the kind of thing I would rarely bother to see.  Looper does have a bit of indie credibility since it reunites the Brick team of director Rian Johnson and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but the obligatory descent into bloodbath was not to my taste.  JGL (with disconcerting fake nose) and Bruce Willis play the same character at different ages, brought face to face by time machine – who will wipe out the other, with what mind-blowing consequences?  There are some good supporting roles -- Jeff Daniels as head of the hit men, Emily Blunt as the mother of an effectively spooky young boy, who may grow up to be the “Rainmaker” -- and some credible design of a dystopian future, plus a plausible switcheroo ending.  But the best I can say is that the movie is okay, if you like that sort of thing.

You can time-travel in the other direction with Farewell, My Queen (2012, MC-67, NFX), Benoît Jacquot’s evocation of three days at Versailles in 1789.  Obviously shot on location, with great attention to styles of dress and décor, peopled with lovely and effective actresses, the film lacks some element of vital engagement, so we get less sense of this Marie Antoinette than we got from Sofia Coppola’s.  Here it’s Diane Kruger with the porcelain glow of a Fragonard figure, while Léa Seydoux is watchful and adoring as her servant reader, and Virginie Ledoyen is imperious as her lover and confidante.  Told from the point of view of the servant girl, the film covers the fall of the Bastille from a downstairs perspective, until it swaps with upstairs as the world gets turned upside down.  It’s all very watchable, but not very involving.