After months and months of reading praise for Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker, I finally was able to see the film on DVD.  (Once again, thank you Netflix!)  I am extremely pleased to report that, for me, the film lived up to its hype.

In the bravura opening sequence, we meet Delta Company, an elite unit of the U.S. Army serving in Iraq.  Delta Company consists of the men who get called in to disarm and/or detonate I.E.D.s (Improvised Explosive Devices) and all manner of other sorts of explosives before they can kill any U.S. servicemen/woman or others.  The tense, harrowing first few minutes of the film tell us everything we need to know about the incredible bravery and ability of the men of Delta Company who we’ll be following through the film, the excruciatingly difficult task that they are called upon to deal with every single day, and the high fatality rates of their assignments.

The Hurt Locker focuses on three men in Delta Company.  Anthony Mackie plays Sgt. JT Sanborn — a tough, by-the book officer of great professionalism.  Brian Geraghty plays Specialist Owen Eldridge, the youngest member of the team.  Eldridge struggles with the weight of the life-and-death assignments that he must take on every day, but we never see those concerns affect his performance in the field.  Then there is Staff Sgt. William James, played by Jeremy Renner in a phenomenal, star-making performance.  SSG James is assigned to head up Delta Company after the death of their previous field leader.  James is an extraordinarily talented officer, but we quickly learn that he is not one for by-the-book procedures.  This brings him into conflict with Sgt. Sanborn, who judges James to be reckless and dangerous.  Young Eldridge finds himself caught somewhat in the middle.

That could be the plot of a great movie, but The Hurt Locker isn’t really a drama about conflict within a military unit.  Though we see evidence of that conflict that I have just described over the course of the story, The Hurt Locker isn’t concerned with typical Hollywood war-movie character arcs or story-lines.  Rather, director Kathryn Bigelow has created a film whose main purpose, it seems to me, is to put the viewer right in the middle of the intense, every-moment-could-be-your-last job that these men serving in Iraq have been given.  Through careful direction, tight editing, and above all stupendous acting, The Hurt Locker consists of one nail-biting sequence after another.

The film is episodic in nature.  In less capable hands this could be a weakness, undermining the narrative thrust that a successful film needs to achieve.  But under the sure guidance of Ms. Bigelow, the episodic structure of the film becomes something extremely powerful.  In each new sequence, the men of Delta Company are confronted with yet another harrowing encounter, where death seems to be one small wrong move away.  I kept expecting some larger storyline to emerge.  About an hour into the film, Delta Company is traveling through the desert after having completed an assignment when they encounter a broken-down truck of English mercenaries who have captured two members of the insurgency.  One of the mercenaries is played by Ralph Fiennes.  Aha, I thought, this is going to be the story that takes us through the rest of the film.  Maybe Ralph and his guys aren’t what they seem.  Maybe the insurgents are going to get away somehow and our guys are going to have to track them down.  I’ve seen a lot of war movies, and I could begin to guess how this was going to play out.

Thankfully, I was totally wrong.  We spend an intense 10-15 minutes with Ralph Fiennes and his team in that difficult situation (in which the characters find themselves pinned down by snipers).  But then the film moves on to the next day in the life of Delta Company, and we never see those English dudes again.

As I wrote a moment ago, it would be easy for this episodic structure to fall apart by the end of the film.  I have seen similarly structured movies that are interesting for the first half, but after a while one gets bored by the assemblage of short, disparate adventures.  But in The Hurt Locker, not only did I find myself growing only more engaged with the characters and the film with each “episode,” I would argue that this structure is the very point of the film, and the key to its power.  It doesn’t matter how tough one particular day is in the life of the men of Delta Company.  The next day, and the next tough assignment, is just around the corner.  The Hurt Locker isn’t the larger-than-life story of movie super-heroes — it’s the true-to-reality story of the brave, talented, and very human men (and women) who take on this work.  And that makes it all the more compelling.

If it were about a fictionalized conflict, The Hurt Locker would still be a visceral, edge-of-your-seat action film.  That it attempts to capture the experiences of some of the men and women serving our nation in Iraq gives it an increased resonance that only adds to the film’s power.  This is a masterfully assembled piece of work.  It’s difficult to watch at times, but it is well worth your time.

Though 2009 is well in the past, I’m still trying to find time to watch those 2009 films that I missed (some of which I listed when writing my Best Films of 2009 list).  At the top of my I-really-wanted-to-see-it-but-never-did list from 2009 was Duncan Jones’ little sci-fi film, Moon.

When I say “little,” I am referring only to the budget (5 million dollars).  Because in no other way is Moon a “little” film.  No, Moon is a phenomenal achievement, and it surely would have made by Best Films of the Year list had I seen it in time.

It’s the near future, and the great Sam Rockwell (Galaxy Quest, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Frost/Nixon) plays Sam Bell, working alone in a small helium-3 mining station on the moon.  His only companion is the station’s computer, Gerty, (voiced by Kevin Spacey, perfectly cast).  Sam is nearing the end of his three-year contract and is anticipating his return to Earth and to his family.  Of course, it’s not going to be that simple.

I’ve barely said anything about the film’s story, but I really think that’s for the best.  This is a film best appreciated going in cold, without knowing any of the plot twists.  Suffice it to say, when a distracted Sam crashes one of the station’s small rovers, he unwittingly sets into motion a chain of events that leads to things quickly going more and more awry in his once-efficient little moon station.

Moon is an acting tour-de-force for Sam Rockwell.  With the exception of a few other people glimpsed briefly on computer monitors, Sam is the only character on screen for the entire film.  But he dominates the screen so thoroughly that I didn’t even really consider that fact until well after the film had ended.  Mr. Rockwell has always been known for bringing a particularly idiosyncratic brand of humanity to the flawed array of characters he has portrayed on screen, and his Sam Bell in this film is a spectacular example.  Once the plot gets going, Sam’s ordered life starts to fall down around his ears, and the way Mr. Rockwell brings to life his increasing desperation, and also his surprising inner reservoirs of strength, is wonderful.  Shame on the Academy for not nominating this spectacular acting performance!!

Writer/director Duncan Jones jokes in the DVD’s special features that the most recent example of an “indie” sci-fi movie that he can think of is Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which was made for around 50 million dollars. Moon was made for 5 million.  To say that my jaw was on the floor when I learned that this movie was made for such a miniscule budget would be an understatement.  Every single cent of that budget is up on screen, and I would argue that Moon could hold its own with any other big-budget sci-fi film made for many times its budget.  The exterior effects shots are beautiful, and the interior of Sam’s moon station is wonderfully realized.  Then there is Gerty, brought to life through a fiendishly clever combination of visual tricks and just a tiny dash of CGI (not to mention Kevin Spacey’s unique voice).  Bravo to all of the filmmakers and artists involved in this film.

I’m a big sci-fi fan, and I have often lamented on this site how rare it is to find intelligent, adult sci-fi made for the big screen these days.  Moon is all of those things in spades, and I suspect that even non sci-fi fans would really dig this movie, if they gave it a shot.  I am so glad to have seen it, and I can’t wait to see it again.

After watching Michael Moore’s latest (and last?) film, Capitalism: A Love Story (read my review here), I started thinking about his previous movies. Despite my enjoyment of his work, I realized that I’d never actually seen his very first film: Roger & Me.

Hello, Netflix!

Released in 1989 (though Mr. Moore was working on the film for several years prior to that), Roger & Me is an unflinching look at the devastating effect that the shutdown of several General Motors factories (eventually resulting in the firing of approx. 80,000 workers) had on Moore’s home-town of Flint, Michigan.

As Mr. Moore admits on the DVD’s commentary track, he not only had never made a movie before Roger & Me, but he knew very little about what went into making movies. But he (and a small team of partners) taught themselves everything they needed to know (about filming, sound, editing, etc.) over the course of assembling their film. This gives Roger & Me a raw, unpolished, feel which, to my mind, wound up working in Mr. Moore’s favor in enhancing the film’s effectiveness. This isn’t a slick-looking documentary. This feels like a film put together by a bunch of average folks, trying to address a situation that they felt passionately about.  That passion is another key to the film’s strength.

Right from the beginning, Mr. Moore is a major (perhaps THE major) character in his film. Roger & Me opens with a montage of Mr. Moore’s home-movies, as he introduces himself in voice-over and describes his early years growing up in Flint. Mr. Moore’s on-screen involvement in his films has by now grown tiresome to some, but here his presence helps ground the film as a whole. Moore grew up in Flint, his father (and, it turns out, many other members of his extended family) worked for GM. At one point in the film, following a sheriff’s deputy evicting people from their homes who couldn’t pay their rent after having been laid off by GM, Moore discovers that one of the young men being evicted is someone he went to high school with. This is a personal story for Mr. Moore, about HIS community, and his anger and frustration at the way GM abandoned Flint underline every frame of the film.  This lends the over-all film a gravity that a more polished but less-personal film would have lacked, I think.

As always, it can be hard to separate a discussion of one of Mr. Moore’s films from a discussion of his politics. The central question of what sort of responsibility a corporation has to its employees (and the communities in which the corporation grew prosperous) is a thorny one, and perhaps not so simplistic as it is presented here. Still, Moore’s key point, that GM shut down its plants in Flint (throwing tens of thousands of lives into turmoil and devastating Flint) DESPITE THEIR BRINGING IN RECORD PROFITS DURING THOSE YEARS is a hard one to argue against, and Mr. Moore spends much of his film showing us in great detail how hard so many families of Flint had it when the company pulled up stakes.

Mr. Moore has drawn some criticism, over the years, not just for his liberal leanings but also for some of his filmmaking techniques. In 2006, the film Manufacturing Dissent (which I have not seen) accused Moore of dishonesty in the making of Roger & Me. While it does seem that Moore played things a bit fast and loose in his editing of the footage (the eviction scenes intercut at the climax of the film with GM chairman Roger Smith’s cheery Christmas message did not actually take place at the same day), I can’t say that I get terribly worked up about those sorts of editing games. (In that specific example, does it matter if the two events did not actually happen simultaneously? Does that in any way undercut Mr. Moore’s point about General Motors’ uncaring attitude towards the effect of their plant closings on tens of thousands of American workers? Not to me.)

Roger & Me is a tough film to watch (and not just for the did-I-really-just-see-that graphic scene in which a former GM worker, reduced to selling rabbits for meat, kills and skins a rabbit before our eyes). In today’s tough economic climate, the film is more relevant than ever. Whether you agree with Mr. Moore or disagree with him, back in 1989 he was clearly already wrestling with some of the key issues that face our Democratic and Capitalistic society as we move forward into the twenty-first century. Are those two ideas compatible? What sort of nation do we aspire to be? What is stopping us from getting there?

I’ve been reading Drew McWeeny’s writings about film for, oh, probably a decade now.  I first found his work when he wrote for Aintitcoolnews.com, though these days he has a terrific blog over at Hitfix.com.  The dude has some sharp opinions, and while I’m not always in agreement with him, I can always count on his pieces being interesting & insightful, to say the least.  I’m a big fan.  Drew recently started a series called “The Basics,” in which he writes about a film that he considers one of the “essentials” — a film that anyone who takes film seriously should see — and then another, younger writer, William Goss, writes a response.  To read more about this series, click here and then here.

With their latest installment, Drew opened the door for others to chime in with their opinion.  Since the film in question is Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan, I jumped at the chance to share my two cents!

I am an enormous Woody Allen fan.  I have seen every one of his films (with one exception, Interiors, a situation that I’m sure I’ll remedy someday, but I must confess to not being in any rush), and many of them I have seen too many times to count.  But while I recognize that Manhattan is one of Woody’s most well thought-of films, I’ve actually only seen it one time, about 15 years ago.  I remember enjoying it, but I didn’t think it was of the level with what I would consider to be Mr. Allen’s masterpieces, films like Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bananas, etc.  (It probably didn’t help that I watched Manhattan less than a month after first seeing Annie Hall, a film that absolutely blew me away and that remains easily one of my top ten favorite films of all time.)

So, prompted by this “The Basics” series, I was excited to go back and re-watch Manhattan.  Would my opinion of the film change?

Filmed in gloriously beautiful black and white, Manhattan follows several good-natured but lost urbanites as they try to find some measure of love and happiness.  Woody Allen plays Isaac, a television comedy writer unhappy with his job who dreams of writing a novel.  When we meet Isaac, he’s involved with a much, much younger woman: the 17 year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway).  Meanwhile, his married best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) is having an affair with Mary (Diane Keaton).  While Isaac and Mary strongly dislike one another when they first meet (at an awkward encounter in a museum), they gradually strike up a friendship and ultimately start seeing each other.

None of the elements of that plot might sound particularly innovative.  Indeed, change the names and you’d have the plot of about twenty other Woody Allen films.  But, while I still don’t think this film comes anywhere close to the genius of Annie Hall, while re-watching the film I could easily see that there is something special about Manhattan.  The now-familiar elements common to many Woody Allen pictures come together in a particularly successful manner.

Right from the opening moments it is clear that this is a film with more on its mind than one might expect.  Manhattan opens with a series of beautiful shots of Manhattan, taking us on a visual tour of the city set to the entrancing music of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.  We then hear Woody Allen’s opening narration, as Isaac attempts to write the opening sentences of his novel by describing the intense love that his main character feels for the city of New York.  The images are stunning, the music is phenomenal, and the narration is a riot.  This is the way to start a movie!

It’s a fun game to play, when watching a Woody Allen movie, to try to suss out just what is autobiographical and what is not.  While I have no real way of knowing just how similar Mr. Allen is in real life to his standard intellectual, nebbishy film character, it seems clear that the sentiments expressed in this opening montage genuinely belong to Mr. Allen.  As the film progresses, we’re continually brought back to shots of different areas of the city (accompanied by Mr. Gershwin’s melodies).  This fascination with the architecture of New York (along with the film’s title, of course), seems to indicate that Mr. Allen was setting out to give his film a broader scope than just a depiction of the love-lives of a few confused New Yorkers.  In many ways, this movie is a love-letter to the city of New York, and I really engaged with that aspect of the film.  Isaac’s identity as a New Yorker is a central part of who he is, and the thought of leaving the city is inconceivable to him.  I wonder whether Mr. Allen felt that way himself, back in 1979.  Either way, that love of New York is central to the film, and I think is plays an enormous part in the great affection that many feel towards it.

There’s some wonderfully inventive and idiosyncratic filmmaking on display here.  I really can’t heap enough praise on Gordon Willis (the man who shot The Godfather, for goodness sake!!) for his astounding work in the film.  He and Mr. Allen were quite daring with their willingness to, occasionally, let their characters step into total darkness before emerging again into the light (for example, when walking down a city street at night).  They also weren’t afraid to keep their camera steady while characters walk in and out of the frame during the course of a conversation.  (That actually happens so often during the film that it’s probably not enough for me to write that Mr. Willis & Mr. Allen weren’t afraid to allow that to happen — I’d say it represents a conscious stylistic choice.)  Far from being distracting, to me it directs the viewer to focus one’s attention on the words being spoken by the actors.

And what a fine cast of actors this is.  The women are particularly notable.  Mariel Hemingway is quiet and wise, not to mention stunningly beautiful, as the young object of Isaac’s affection (though he spends much of the film trying to convince her that they’re no good together).  Diane Keaton is equally engaging (to Isaac, and to the audience) as the older woman (though younger than Isaac, he’s quick to remind us!) who is, in many ways, the exact opposite of Tracy.  Keaton’s Mary is outgoing and chatty, and possesses the life-experience that young Tracy has not yet acquired — she’s been involved in a number of failed relationships, and while those experiences clearly left some scars, Mary hasn’t allowed herself to get too beaten down by life.  Then there’s Isaac’s ex-wife Jill, brought to wonderful life by a young, gorgeous Meryl Streep.  Jill is a dynamo, one who apparently grew quite weary of Isaac’s neuroses and peculiarities.  (So weary, in fact, that she left him for another woman!)

What I really enjoyed about this story is that all three of those women — each of whom represent a powerful place in Isaac’s life — are all presented as fairly well-rounded and complex individuals.  Readers of this blog might recall my profound hatred for Mr. Allen’s most recent film, Whatever Works, primarily because of the disdain he seemed to show to all the women in the film, each one of whom was depicted as essentially brainless.  In both Manhattan and Whatever Works, the central character has entered into a relationship with a very young girl.  But whereas Evan Rachel Woods’ character Melody (in Whatever Works) was depicted as a brainless, gullible fool, Tracy seems to have quite a good head on her shoulders.  She’s infatuated with a much older man, true, but she seems to be able to hold her own quite well with Isaac and his friends, and her reaction to Isaac in the film’s climactic scene is measured and intelligent.  When we first meet Diane Keaton’s Mary, she is presented as having the exact opposite opinions as Isaac does.  But the film doesn’t make fun of those opinions (well, not too much, anyways), and it doesn’t mock her as an over-intellectual know-nothing.  In fact, in some ways, we start to see Isaac come around to some of her ways of thinking by the end of the film.  Then there is Jill.  As Isaac’s ex-wife, we could easily expect her character to be depicted as a cold shrew played simply for laughs.  And while she is quite firm towards Isaac (and doesn’t hesitate to spill the beans on their failed relationship in the book she authored), she also seems pretty tolerant of some of his crazy behavior (she’s pretty chill, for example, that he may or may not have tried to run her and her new partner over with a car!), and the two of them seem to be on decent terms with one another, willing to cooperate in the raising of their son.  It is a delightful thing when a comedic film is able to craft real characters, rather than one-dimensional, one-note caricatures.

OK, so far I have been pretty much singing Manhattan’s praises!  I’m really glad that I gave it another try.  But while I have come around somewhat on this film, I still wouldn’t consider it in the very top-tier if Mr. Allen’s large body of work.  It’s hard to compare it to his comedic romps like Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Play it Again Sam, and What’s Up Tiger Lily? (a ludicrously magnificent and under-loved film!!), all of which have much dearer places in my heart than does Manhattan.  It makes a bit more sense, perhaps, to compare Manhattan to Crimes and Misdemeanors and Annie Hall, two films that, as I wrote above, I consider among Mr. Allen’s very best.  All three are films that are very very funny, while also telling deeper, honest stories.  Annie Hall in particular stands out for me because I feel it contains the very best aspects of Mr. Allen’s work — tremendous humor (tell me that Marshall McLuhan scene isn’t a killer), innovative cinematic techniques (the split-screen scene that contrasts a meal at the Halls versus a meal at the Singers; or the moment when Annie & Alvy’s thoughts are suddenly spelled out for us on the bottom of the screen), and an honest, rich story that doesn’t fall into any hollywood ending cliche traps where boy and girl live happily ever after.

Manhattan possesses all of those aspects — just, for me, a bit less successfully than does Annie Hall, a film where I found myself laughing harder and engaging more deeply with the central relationships.  One aspect of Manhattan that gives me a bit of pause is Isaac’s sexual relationship in the film with a girl who is only 17 years-old.  That’s a bit unsettling even without taking into account any other aspects of Mr. Allen’s personal life.  I’m a liberal guy, but my feeling that Isaac and Tracy’s relationship isn’t the right thing for either of them lingers throughout the film, and that prevents me from really investing in their storyline.

That objection aside, I can nevertheless comfortably state that Manhattan is a tremendously potent film that has aged incredibly well.  It’s the forebearer of so many “romantic comedies” that came after — films that, as Drew puts it so well in his review of Manhattan, are far too-often neither romantic nor comedic.  Just painful.  (I love a good romance, but my wife can tell you how bitterly I’ll resist going to see any of today’s agonizingly unfunny so-called “romantic comedies.”)  Manhattan is a film cut from a different cloth, and I wish more filmmakers (including Mr. Allen himself!) were making films like this today.  (But let’s just make the young girl in the film 21 next time, OK?)

I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Zemeskis’ Contact when it was first released in 1997.  For years now, it’s been a movie that I’ve been eager to add to my DVD collection, but I was holding off for a better special edition than the bare-bones DVD release from ‘97.  It’s been a long wait, but when Contact was finally re-released on disc in a jazzed-up new edition — and on blu-ray, no less — I eagerly snatched it up.

Based on Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact tells the story of Ellie, a young girl whose interest in science and astronomy are fanned by her father.  Through much of the early parts of the film, we follow Ellie’s development as a scientist and her growing fascination with the search for signs of extra-terrestrial life.  It’s a search that increasingly comes to seem like a fool’s errand as, over the years, all of the sources of funding for that research dry up.  If that was the end of the story, of course, there wouldn’t be much of a movie.  Needless top say, Ellie and her team do eventually discover a signal that appears to be extra-terrestrial in origin, and their quest to unlock its meaning leads Ellie on an astounding journey and brings mankind to an incredible turning point.

I’ll stop my summary there, even though I have really only covered the first thirty-or-so minutes of the film.  For me, the most compelling aspect of Contact is watching the story unfold and gradually become bigger and bigger.  I still remember my pleasure in seeing the film for the first time and thinking to myself, with great delight, “just how far are they going to take this??”  Even having seen the film and knowing what’s coming coming, I still find the story to be terrifically engaging.

I am an enormous sci-fi fan.  Sadly, the vast majority of sci-fi films seem to revolve around menacing aliens and action-adventure hi-jinks.  Now, I’m all for a good action movie, and there have certainly been plenty of action/adventure sci-fi films that I have thoroughly enjoyed.  But I love that Contact is a much more cerebral story, one in which the science of the tale is just as important as the narrative’s twists and turns.  It’s also a story that is centered by the character of Ellie’s emotional journey, and that is what gives the film its power.

Jodie Foster is quite compelling as Dr. Ellie Arroway.  She brings a fierce commitment and intensity to the role.  Foster is an actor who always seems to be thinking — you can see it in her eyes — and that is key for her performance as this brilliant and driven woman.  I love that the central character in this sci-fi story is a woman, and I love that she is as complex and interesting a character as we see here.

The ensemble that surrounds Ms. Foster is also top-notch.  David Morse (The Negotiator) is very tender as Ellie’s father, and he steals the few scenes that he is in.  I love David Morse, and it’s terrific to see him in this sort of role (as opposed to the scary bad-guys he usually plays).  William Fichtner (a face I guarantee you recognize, even if you don’t know his name — he’s been in a ton of TV and film roles, and recently he was the bank manager menaced by the Joker in The Dark Knight) brings an interesting spin to what could easily have been a boring role as Ellie’s friend and fellow scientist, Kent.  Tom Skerritt (Picket Fences) is terrifically smarmy as David Drumlin, Ellie’s superior who is convinced that she’s wasting her life.  Then there’s James Woods and Angela Bassett as members of President Clinton’s cabinet, Jake Busey as a menacing preacher, John Hurt as an enigmatic multi-billionaire… I could go on.  The cast is a delight, and every one of these skilled actors brings a lot of life to their characters (many of whom only appear in a few scenes and so have a very short time in which to make an impact).

Then there’s Matthew McConaughey as Palmer Joss.  Joss is a man with whom Ellie finds herself continually entwined over the course of the years chronicled in the film.  The two have an undeniable connection, right from their first meeting.  They have a great many similarities, but an entirely different set of belief systems:  Joss is a man of God, while Ellie is a woman of science.  This might seem like the plot for a dumb “opposites attract” story, but thankfully Contact is a much more interesting film than that.  Yes, Ellie & Joss are opposites who do attract one another, but what is really of interest is the contrasting of their two philosophies and ways of looking at the universe, from which most of the emotional energy of the film comes.  While Ellie is the central character of the film, I very much appreciate the filmmakers’ efforts to give Joss’ philosophies equal weight and merit in the story.  I know that some people think of McConaughey as the film’s weak link, and without question Jodie Foster is a far superior actor than he is.  But I must say, I quite enjoy McConaughey in this role.  His surfer-boy good looks and lackadaisical manner make Palmer Joss a much more interesting fella than a lot of the spiritual folks we usually see on film, and I think he has a nice energy with Ms. Foster.  It’s an unusual role, but I buy it.

Visually, Contact is a stunner — and the film looks positively GORGEOUS on blu-ray.  Robert Zemeckis’ affection for visual effects serves him quite well in helming this large-scale, epic story.  Contact is a film whose scope just grows and grows as the narrative progresses, and Zemeckis and his team bring the sci-fi aspects of the tale to believable life.  The man knows how to tell an adventure story with a sci-fi bent (Back to the Future), and he does a great job at balancing the script’s philosophical underpinnings and strong focus on character with the story’s exciting suspense and, eventually, adventure aspects.  He’s assisted by a smart script (adapted from Mr. Sagan’s novel), but it’s his sure hand as a director that keeps everything together.  (Watching this film again makes me sad that Mr. Zemeckis’ latest movies, in which he has been exploring the world of motion-capture technology – The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol – have left me so disinterested.)

Contact is a great film, and it was a delight to revisit it again after so many years.  This sits proudly on my DVD/Blu-ray shelf.

Burt and Verona (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) are expecting their first child.  When they learn that Burt’s parents are moving away, they realize that they have nothing tying them to Denver any longer.  (Verona’s parents have passed away.)  So Burt & Verona decide to travel around the country, visiting various friends and family-members in an attempt to find a new place to live that they think will be a good place to raise their baby.  What at first seems like a fun adventure turns dispiriting rapidly as they discover that everyone they visit has fairly crazy ideas about parenting.

Written by Dave Eggers (author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) & his wife Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, The Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road), Away We Go is a quirky film filled with quirky characters.  Your tolerance for that approach to creating characters will determine how annoying you find this to be as the movie progresses.  The characters are, for the most part, painted in pretty broad, caricature-esque strokes.  They are funny and painful and sad, but not all that deep.  I really enjoyed the individual performances of the actors playing the various folks who Burt & Verona visit  – Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, Chris Messina, and Melanie Lynskey (who, by the way, had a heck of a year in 2009 with this film along with her roles in The Informant! and Up in the Air) — so much that this trend didn’t really bother me too much until I sat back and thought about the film afterwards.

In my review of Woody Allen’s 2009 film, Whatever Works, I described my frustration at the enormous condescension that Mr. Allen’s screenplay seemed to be showing towards every character in the film with the exception of the Woody Allen stand-in character played by Larry David.  I felt the same sort of condescension here.  Burt and Verona are presented as the only sane characters in an entirely insane world.  Burt’s parents (played by Catherine O’Hara & Jeff Daniels) might be hysterical (I’d like to see a whole movie about these two!), but they and are jaw-droppingly self-centered and, shockingly, have no apparent interest in their grandchild-on-the-way.  Verona’s friend Lily (Janney) is crass and her husband (Gaffigan) is a buffoon.  Burt’s cousin LN (that’s not a typo) and her husband Roderick are bizarre hippie-intellectuals who have sex in the same bed where their children sleep and breastfeed other people’s babies.  Burt & Verona’s friends Tom & Munch are by far the most normal of the bunch, but even they have their problems (which I won’t spoil here).  I understand the point that Eggers & Vida were going for, that new parents need to find their own way in the world and not try to mimic anyone else’s parenting techniques or lifestyles, but I think Away We Go would have been a much deeper film if it hadn’t been so quick to go for the laugh at the expense of the characters who Burt & Verona meet.

What saves the film for me are the understated, heartfelt performances that Krasinski and Rudolph turn in.  Both have proven themselves to be extraordinarily funny TV comedians (on The Office and SNL), but I was quite pleasantly surprised by what fine actors they both show themselves to be in this film.  Rather than going for broad comedic performances, both actors keep themselves reined in, using subtlety as opposed to over-the-top exaggeration.  At the same time, both Krasinski and Rudolph bring a lot of warmth and humanity to their characters.  Burt and Verona are both flawed and very human, but we really feel their love for one another and their fervent desire to do right for their child on the way.  Although they’re in their thirties, there’s a sense of immaturity to Burt and Verona.  Not frat-boy behavior like you’d see in The Hangover, it’s more a sense that they haven’t quite figured out what they want their lives to be yet.  That journey is at the heart of Away We Go.

I saw this movie a few months ago, when my wife and I were at a similar point in life as Burt and Verona: on the cusp of becoming first-time parents.  This gave me a connection with Away We Go that I might not otherwise have felt.  Even trying to separate that emotional connection out from my judgment, I can still say that there is a lot to enjoy in Away We Go.  There is some terrific humor to be found, and the core of the story is compelling.  And any movie that contains the unique scene in which Burt begins to suspect that Verona is pregnant is A-OK in my book.  I just wish that the characters surrounding Burt & Verona on their journey had been given more complexity.  I’m a big fan of Sam Mendes’ work, but with Revolutionary Road (read my review here) and now Away We Go, I can’t say I’ve felt nearly as engaged by his films lately as I was by American Beauty and The Road to Perdition.  But I do still respect him as a potent creative force, and I look forward to seeing what he does next.  (James Bond???)

Before seeing his latest film, The Lovely Bones, I thought it fitting to seek out a gaping hole in my Peter Jackson viewing filmography: his 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures.  I’ve been hearing/reading about this film since the lengthy pre-release build-up to The Fellowship of the Ring.  (By the way: Wow!  It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since Fellowship, which was released in 2001!!)  Heavenly Creatures seems to be rather well thought-of, and since the Lord of the Rings films have made me a life-long Pater Jackson fan, it seemed crazy that I had never seen this movie.  It’s a situation I was happy to remedy last month.

Heavenly Creatures tells the true-life story of the friendship between two young New Zealand girls in 1953/4.  Melanie Lynskey plays Pauline.  An artistic, shy introvert, she is friendless and miserable at the Catholic school which she attends.  Her world changes, though, when Juliet Hulme, played by Kate Winslet, arrives at her school.  Juliet is from a wealthy family, and her travels with (and without) her parents make her seem extraordinarily worldly to Pauline.  Like Pauline, she is artistic and bucks authority, but Juliet more outgoing and brazen.  The two bond almost instantly.  Deep friendships like these happen between schoolgirls all the time across the globe, with less tragic outcomes.  But here, the increasingly unhappy home lives of each of the girls pushes them to become more dependent upon one another’s company, and they begin to withdraw more and more deeply into their shared fantasies.  Feeding off one another, those escapist fantasies soon take a terrible turn.

Heavenly Creatures is the first screen role of both Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet.  It’s no surprise that this proved to be a star-making turn for Ms. Winslet, as she displays terrific abilities and assurance for such a young actress (not to mention great beauty).  As for Ms. Lynskey, I was delighted to realize that this was her first screen role as well.  She’s nowhere near as well-known as Kate Winslet, but if you were an avid movie-goer in 2009 then I’d wager you’ve enjoyed her work.  (She had key roles in Away We Go, The Informant!, and Up in the Air.)

Heavenly Creatures is an interesting film.  I found it to be a bit hard to get into, at first.  There was something about the first 45 minutes that kept me, as a viewer, from being sucked in to the story.  I wasn’t sure if it was the script, the acting, or the directing, but everything seemed a bit “stagey” and over-wrought (filled with dramatic zooms and music that didn’t seem to quite fit the proceedings).  With a based-on-a-true-story like this one, I was expecting a more naturalistic tone.  But as the film progressed, I realized that Heavenly Creatures is not only Pauline & Juliet’s story, in many respects the film is crafted so as to be from their viewpoint.  So of course things seemed overly-dramatic — EVERYTHING is overly dramatic to a pair of 14 year-old girls!

As the film progresses, we see Pauline & Juliet’s fantasy life grow and deepen, and in several inventive sequences we, the audience, are included in their fantasies.  It is here where one can begin to suspect what might have drawn Peter Jackson — the man who would go on to direct The Frighteners, The Lord of the Rings, and King Kong — to this film.  That’s not to say that Heavenly Creatures is a visual effects extravaganza!  Oh no, the effects are very low-key, and confined to a few scenes.  But these effects sequences are handled with great skill, and are an inventive and effective visual way at allowing us to understand Pauline & Juliet’s developing fantasy world.

I found myself most engaged with the film during it’s brutal final 20-or-so minutes.  Once the girls decide on their horrifying course of action, Mr. Jackson takes us step-by-step through their preparations, their anticipation, and finally through the terrible moment itself.  This is an agonizing sequence to watch unfold, and it is finally here where we see Mr. Jackson’s skills as a filmmaker on full display.  The suspense and growing dread at what one knows is coming was positively painful to bear, and I found myself almost begging the movie to cut away!  Powerful stuff.

I can’t say that I was thoroughly taken by Heavenly Creatures.  Perhaps the film had been built up a bit too much in my mind.  There is, without a doubt, a lot to enjoy: Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey’s first screen performances, the fantasy sequences, and those tense final 20-or-so minutes.  The film is perhaps most interesting as a peek at several great talents (Winslet, Lynskey, and Mr., Jackson himself) that were about to emerge than it is a fully successful motion picture in its own right.

Still, I’m glad to have finally seen it, and it proved to be an interesting point of comparison with Peter Jackson’s 2009 film, The Lovely Bones.

Sometimes I get DVDs and I watch them immediately, devouring the movie and the special features within 24 hours.  Sometimes I’ll get a DVD and, for one reason or another, it will sit on my shelf for months and months.  Such was the case with the Director’s Cut of Ridley Scott’s 2007 film, American Gangster.

I enjoyed American Gangster when I first saw it in theatres.  I didn’t love it the way I love some of Scott’s other films (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, and the vastly underrated Kingdom of Heaven), but I quite liked it, and when I saw that an extended version of the film was available on DVD in early 2008, I snapped it up.  I’ve really enjoyed the extended versions of several others of Ridley Scott’s films, most particularly the extended version of the afore-mentioned Kingdom of Heaven, which is a revelation in contrast to the theatrical release, so I was excited to see this new version of American Gangster.  But, for whatever reason, I just never got around to watching the DVD until recently.

American Gangster tells two parallel stories.  One half of the film is about Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington.  The movie opens with the death of Frank’s mentor, the powerful Harlem drug-dealer Bumpy Johnson.  Frank marshals his keen intellect and all that he learned from Bumpy in order to take control of the Harlem drug scene.  His boldest move was to travel to Southeast Asia in order to purchase heroin straight from the source, enabling him to bypass all the other crime-figure “middle managers” and sell a more powerful product at cheaper prices than his competition.  That coup, combined with his patience and his near-fanatical focus on avoiding the spotlight, enabled him to amass an extraordinary amount of power and money all while operating under the noses of what local law enforcement officials weren’t on the take.

Russell Crowe plays Richie Roberts, a New Jersey cop with a fierce sense of honesty.  In an infamous story depicted early in the film, he finds a million dollars in cash but turns it over to his superiors in the department rather than keeping it for himself.  In contrast to those qualities, his personal life is a disaster, and when the film opens his wife (the wonderful Carla Gugino) has decided to divorce him.  Richie eventually gets himself involved with (and becomes a key figure in leading) the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, where his investigative skills and a decent amount of luck puts him on the trail of Frank Lucas.

American Gangster is a film dancing on the edge of greatness.  Washington and Crowe both turn in powerhouse performances, and they’re both so engaging that both halves of the film’s story-line feel equally significant and interesting.  (A great script and some fine editing help with that as well.)  They are supported by a wonderfully deep ensemble, including Josh Brolin’s scene-stealing turn as the corrupt New York Detective Trupo; Chiwetel Ejiofor (who I first saw in Serenity and who has been amazing in each of the 10,000 films he has been in since then) as Huey Lucas, one of Frank’s many brothers who for a short while serves as Frank’s right-hand man; Cuba Gooding Jr. (who is terrific, demonstrating just how good he can be when used well) as the flashy Nicky Barnes; and Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from The Wire!) as one of Frank’s competitors, Tango.  But my favorite supporting actor has to be Armand Assante’s phenomenally bizarre and iconic performance as the powerful Italian mobster Dominic Cattano.  His performance is an inch away from falling into over-the-top silliness, but he never crosses that line.  He’s only in a few scenes, but many of his lines (delivered in his terrific accent) are the ones that I most remembered after finishing the movie.

Ridley Scott is a phenomenal director, and his unique talents really shine through in this film.  The special features on the DVD emphasize the enormous size of the film — there are 135 speaking parts and hundreds of short scenes taking place all over Manhattan, New Jersey, and also Vietnam, Bangkok, etc.  Mr. Scott’s experience in juggling epic films (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven) surely helped him keep everything under control and pull the film off.  (In his commentary track, Ridley speaks several times of the importance, for him, of not dwelling on how much needed to be accomplished — rather, he says, he just took each day at a time, putting together the film piece by piece.)  Scott is also famous for his involvement in the production design, the location scouting, and everything else that goes into the look of a film — costumes, props, etc.  That enormous care that he and his team poured into those details is evident in every frame of the film, which does a superb job of capturing the feel of New York in the 1970’s.  Nothing feels out of place.

So why did I write, above, that American Gangster is a film dancing on the edge of greatness?  What prevents me from unabashedly recommending this film as a triumph?

Mainly, it’s that the whole thing feels rather familiar.  There have been a lot of amazing movies chronicling the rise and fall of crime figures (The Godfather films, Goodfellas, Casino, Scarface, etc. etc.), so while everything that one watches as American Gangster unfolds is pretty great, it is tainted by a bit of a feeling of “been there, done that.”  For me, at least.  (As an example, the climax of the film is structured as a montage — we see footage of Richie’s closing the net on Frank’s partners and accomplices, all while Frank is in church with his mother, and the whole sequence is scored to the music of the singing in church.  I’d be impressed by the stark contrast that sequence created between Frank’s facade in church and the realities of his life if Francis Ford Coppola hadn’t done pretty much exactly the same thing in his famous climax to the Godfather more than thirty years ago.)

OK, some small spoilers ahead, so be warned.

The only aspect of the film’s story that really struck me as being totally unique were the events of the film’s very final moments. In a series of text pieces, we learn that after spending years working to take down Frank Lucas, and serving as the prosecuting attorney in the case that put him behind bars, Richie Roberts and Frank Lucas struck up a friendship.  The two men wound up working together as Frank provided evidence that allowed Richie to expose an enormous amount of corruption in the New York city police department.  Years later, Richie became a defense attorney, and his first client was none other than Frank Lucas, as Richie argued (successfully) that Frank’s sentence should be reduced as compensation for his aid in all those other cases.

That is an astonishing turn of events, and I really enjoyed learning more, in the DVD’s special features, about this most unlikely of friendships that ultimately emerged between Frank and Richie.  That’s why I think it’s an enormous failure on the film’s part that that twist was saved for a “wow” moment in the film’s final minutes.  Despite the movie’s length (the theatrical cut was about two hours and forty minutes, and the Director’s Cut clocks in at almost three hours), I feel like the film needed another half-hour at the end to more thoroughly explore that extraordinary turn of events.  THERE’S the part of the story — the TRUE story, mind you — that really is unique, and could have separated this tale from all the other similar crime films.  A big missed opportunity, I think.

I was hoping the Director’s Cut would address some of those concerns.  There are an additional couple of minutes added on to the very end of the film that give us a few more scenes between Richie and Frank that take place years after the main events of the film.  These are some nice moments, but I was still hoping for more.  As for the rest of the changes to the film: it’s funny, there are apparently about twenty minutes added on, but other than the new ending I didn’t notice any other differences.  True, I saw the theatrical version over two years ago, but I usually have a good eye for changes made in these sorts of extended cuts.  (Take a look at my anal accounting of all the adjustments made to the extended episodes of Battlestar Galactica’s final episodes on DVD!)  I guess it’s a good thing that all the new additions blend seamlessly into the film, but I must report that this new cut doesn’t dramatically change any of the film’s story-lines or its over-all impact.

It may not be the most groundbreaking film every made, but American Gangster is an entertaining tale well-told by a bunch of craftsmen at the top of their game.  If you like a good crime saga, check this one out.

Charlyne Yi (who you might recognize from Knocked Up) doesn’t really believe in the concept of falling in love.  She’s not sure such a thing as love truly exists — and if it does, she’s not sure it’s something that she’s capable of.  So she sets out with her friend, director Nicholas Jasenovec, to film a documentary about love.  The two travel across the U.S., interviewing all sorts of everyday people (along with the judge in a divorce court, an Elvis who marries folks in Vegas, Seth Rogen, and a few other not-quite-so-everyday folks) about their thoughts regarding true love.  Things get more complicated when, while filming the documentary, Yi meets Michael Cera at a friend’s party, and the two hit it off and begin dating (an awkward process captured on camera by the documentary crew).  Do her interviews with people — or her burgeoning relationship with Michael Cera — change Yi’s feelings about love?

If Yi’s happening to fall into a relationship with Michael Cera while at the same time filming a documentary about love seems like a wild coincidence to you, then you’d be right!  Because things aren’t quite what they seem.  The interviews that Yi conducts are absolutely real.  But the Nicholas Jasenovec that we see on-camera isn’t actually the Nicholas Jasenovec who directed this film — it’s an actor, Jake M. Johnson!  And while Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi did date, their courtship as we see it was staged for the camera.

What we’re left with is a rather bizarre hybrid film.  The movie is constantly bouncing back-and-forth from the real footage (the interview segments, which are like much more in-depth versions of all the couples we see telling their how-they-met stories from When Harry Met Sally) to the staged footage (of Yi and Cera, and of Yi and Johnson/Jasenovec).  What’s really intriguing is the way the film doesn’t hesitate to make clear to us that that footage is staged — or, at the very least, manipulated.  Almost every time that we might find ourselves drawn in to Yi & Cera’s story, the film draws our attention to the artificiality of those moments.  (In one scene, we see Yi and Cera playfully interacting on a beach, and then beginning to walk hand-in-hand down the shore-line.  It’s a tender moment… until we see Johnson/Jasenovec run into the frame wondering if perhaps they could do another take.  In another scene in Yi’s apartment, we see her first kiss with Cera… and then the camera pulls out to see a camera-man and a sound-guy perched on the next couch, recording the moment.)  Even the interview footage is played with, as we often cut away from the people telling their stories to see endearingly low-tech cardboard cut-out recreations of those stories animated by Ms. Yi.

Part of me wishes that Paper Heart had gone fully one-way or the other… either being a real documentary about American perceptions and beliefs about love, and how our attitudes toward relationships have been shaped by our culture, and the stories we tell one another… or a more fully-realized scripted version of the story of this tentative romance between two young people.  But I suppose then we’d be left with a much less unique — and probably much less interesting — film.

It’s quite a delight to see such a distinct voice captured on camera, and Charlyne Yi is certainly a unique voice.  From her stumbling, halting interview method to her wonderful little animation scenes, Paper Heart is fully imbued with her personality.  The degree with which one engages with that personality will, I think, strongly influence whether one engages with this film or not.  Personally, I found it charming, if perhaps a little slow.  (But the film has a phenomenal ending.)

Paper Heart isn’t a movie I can imagine myself re-watching all that often, but I’m certainly gald to have seen it.  I am eager to see what Charlyne Yi does next.

When unsuspecting passers-by step through the magic mirror in Doctor Parnassus’ traveling imaginarium, they find themselves transported into a world in which their innermost thoughts and desires are brought to life.  Watching The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, I feel as though I have been treated to a similar experience: a trip inside the very mind of writer/director Terry Gilliam.

It’s pretty astonishing to me that Terry Gilliam has only directed seven films since Brazil back in 1985, and only thirteen feature films in his entire career.   (I’m including in that count Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which he co-directed, and Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, in which he directed the opening short film, The Crimson Permanent Assurance.)  Mr. Gilliam has had an extraordinary string of bad luck, over the years, in his attempts to make the movies he sets his heart on making (click here for more information on his doomed effort, at the start of the decade, to bring to life his film version of Don Quixote, which was to star Johnny Depp), which in part accounts for the sparcity of his films.

Therefore, any new Terry Gilliam movie should be a source of much rejoicing.  And yet, I much confess that I have not actually seen the three films that Mr. Gilliam has directed since Twelve Monkeys in 1995: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Tideland (2005), and The Brothers Grimm (also released in 2005).  I’m not sure why, exactly.  Something about those three films just didn’t appeal to me.  But ever since first reading about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus a few years back, I was excited and intrigued to get a gander at what Mr. Gilliam was putting together.

As in many of Mr. Gilliam’s films, Parnassus has a twisty plot that would be extraordinarily difficult for me to really explain to you, nor am I all that sure that I should even try.  I will tell you that Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) has apparently been engaged in a thousand-year duel with the devil (Tom Waits) over whether mankind’s imaginations or our more prurient instincts represent the dominant force in our nature.  Their latest wager involves the fate of Parnassus’ young daughter Valentina (Lily Cole).  Hard times have befallen the aged Parnassus and his small troupe, which includes the wise Percy (Verne Troyer) and the young Anton (Andrew Garfield).  It seems that, in our modern world, Doctor Parnassus’ traveling imaginarium doesn’t attract anyone’s attention or interest any longer.  But things change when Lily rescues an enigmatic and amnesiac young man named Tony (Heath Ledger) from an attempted suicide.  Will Tony help Doctor Parnassus, or wind up destroying him?

Heh.  That’s certainly a bizarre synopsis, and trust me that there is a whole heck of a lot more than that going on in this film.  But you’re best off going in not knowing anything more — just sit back and enjoy the ride.

And what a ride it is.  The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus feels like Terry Gilliam unchained, and the CGI effects — while dodgy in places (this isn’t Avatar) — enable Mr. Gilliam and his team to bring to life all of the bizarre, zany ideas in Gilliam’s imagination.  Anyone who has ever seen any of the animation that he did for Monty Python has an idea of the types of crazy imagery that seem to populate Mr. Gilliam’s internal imaginarium, and it was a great delight seeing those visions brought to large, colorful life in a way I never had before.

As for the story around which that amazing imagery has been wrapped, well, let’s just say that narrative coherency has never been one of Terry Gilliam’s strong suits.  There is a whole heck of a lot of weirdness in the film that is never really explained, and the degree to which that bothers you will affect your ultimate enjoyment of the film.  Usually that sort of thing bugs the heck out of me, but there was so much greatness on display here that, surprisingly, I didn’t find that I really minded.  There is enough information given that the story hangs together.  Sort of.

The film succeeds, in my mind, because of the energy and enthusiasm that the ensemble of actors bring to the proceedings.  Christopher Plummer never ceases to astound me, and he imbues a great seriousness and tragic depth to the titular Doctor Parnassus.  Lily Cole has a unique beauty, and she brings an intriguing otherworldliness to the young Valentina.  It’s no wonder all the men in the film seem to be besotted by her.  Andrew Garfield does a nice job as Valentina’s friend, Anton, who is clearly in love with her.  This could be a tough role — he is called upon to create a sympathetic character who is also a good deal of trouble, and Mr. Garfield finds that balance well.  Verne Troyer is always fun, though I would really love to see him in a film that doesn’t make jokes about his height.  (There’s nothing in this film that comes anywhere near the level of Austin Powers offensiveness, but still, the couple jokes at his expense were wildly unnecessary, in my opinion.)  I did appreciate that Troyer’s character, Percy, seems to be the most honest and loyal character in the piece.  Tom Waits was an inspired choice to play the devil, and he absolutely owns the film every moment he is on screen.  A phenomenally wonderful cinematic creation.

Which brings me to Heath Ledger, in his final role.  It is tough to watch this film without having the experience colored by his untimely death, and it is tough to shake that context when considering his performance.  I can say that I was a bit surprised by the character that Mr. Ledger created here, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been.  If his too-short career demonstrated anything, it’s that Mr. Ledger was able to be something of a chameleon, creating entirely new and different characters with each role that he took.  His Tony is charismatic but dangerous, and Mr. Ledger is a joy to watch perform.

But I must say that, of all the bizarre characters in the film, Ledger’s Tony was the one who I never really got a handle on.  As a key example, while I can understand Tony’s desire to hide away from his former life (once we discover its details), I never really understood the ease with he throws himself into a position as a member of Parnassus’ troupe.  (In one scene he is scared and befuddled by Parnassus’ weird gang, and in the next, Tony is in costume and prancing around wildly, in an attempt to draw passers-by to Parnassus’ show.)  I am unsure how much of this confusion is due to a flaw in the storytelling, and how much of it is due to the way that Mr Gilliam and his team had to piece the unfinished film together around what had been shot prior to Mr. Ledger’s passing.

But I will say that my favorite parts of the film were the sequences inside the imaginarium in which Mr. Ledger’s role was temporarily played by three different actors: Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell.  (This creative solution to Mr. Ledger’s unfinished performance was what enabled Mr. Gilliam to complete the film.)  The transitions between these different actors is creative and very smooth, and all three really knock their all-too-brief appearances out of the park.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is perplexing, weird, and wonderful.  It’s not for everyone, but it is without question one of the more unique films to be released this year.  If you’re a Terry Gilliam fan then seeing this is a no-brainer.  Even if you’re not, I hope that movie-goers interested in seeing Heath ledger’s final performance will give this a try.  It might not be a wholly-satisfying movie-going experience, but it will certainly give you a whole heck of a lot to think about and to talk about.

I read all the bad reviews when Woody Allen’s latest film was released this past summer.  But I was dubious.  Larry David starring in a Woody Allen film seemed like a genius idea, to me.  How could a combination of those two neurotic, grumpy Jewish comedians not yield something at least remotely interesting?

Well, go rent Whatever Works and find out.

Or better yet, trust me, DON’T.

Whatever Works is a catastrophe of epic proportions and one of the worst films I have seen in a long, long time.  After 30-40 minutes of the film had elapsed, I was already supremely bored, and only sheer force of will (and the hope — ultimately dashed — that maybe something funny was just around the corner) allowed me to finish the film.  It is certainly one of the worst Woody Allen films I have ever seen.  (Celebrity has always been, in my mind, Woody’s worst film — though now it has strong competition.)

Larry David plays Boris Yelnikoff (as Woody Allen a character name as you’ll ever find), a man described as a genius physicist but who we mainly see as an irritated complainer hanging out in his bathrobe in and around Grennich Village.  Unhappy in life and love and convinced (as so many Woody Allen protagonists are) that life is meaningless and that he is surrounded by an unending parade of idiots and incompetents, Boris spends much of the film vacillating between miserable and merely unhappy.

One night a beautiful homeless Southern girl, Melody (played by Evan Rachel Wood), follows Boris home.  Despite her stunning beauty, Boris is entirely uninterested in her (and indeed spends much of his time berating her for her stupidity).  He does, though, take some pity on her and allows her to stay with him in his apartment.  Then, in one of the most staggering and unconvincing plot twists I have ever seen in a movie (and I have seen a lot of movies with space aliens and time travel), Melody falls in love with Boris and the two get married.

The above paragraph summarizes the entire first half of the film, all of which seems to be nothing more then a lengthy set-up for what was, I supposed, intended to be a hilarious comedy of culture-shock when Melody’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) and, later, her father (Ed Begley Jr.) show up in New York looking for her.  While the movie does, briefly come to something-approaching-life for a few minutes following Ed Begley Jr.’s introduction into the film (at about the one hour mark), it’s far-too-little and far-too-late.

Woody Allen’s movies have often been characterized by some condescension to non-Manhattenites, but Whatever Works is overflowing with it, and this left a bad taste in my mouth.  Melody is depicted, from start-to-finish, as an empty-headed dunderhead.  When we first meet her she is unable to understand that Boris is joking when he sarcastically comments that he used to play for the Yankees, and when we leave her at the end of the film she has to be told “I’ll explain it to you later” about what has just gone down.  Her mother is predictably disdainful of Boris when she arrives in the city, but she is quickly exposed as a hypocrite as, after just a few days in Manhattan, she transforms into a bohemian artist taking photographs of nudes and living with two men.  Her father is similarly depicted as foolishly hypocritical, as the stuck-up Southern man quickly realizes that he is, in fact, a homosexual mere days after he arrives in the Big Apple.  And so on and so forth, ad ridiculous infinitum.  It’s one thing to find comedy in the failings of others, but I feel Mr. Allen looking down his nose at every single character, other than Boris, presented in the film.  Not a one of them is anything approaching a fully realized, human character.

If any of this was even remotely funny I might excuse these flaws, but it’s not and I don’t.  Larry David tries his best, but he is stranded by the material (as are all the other fine actors).  What a waste.

Having watched Fantastic Mr. Fox, the phenomenal new stop-motion animated film from director Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited), I am almost forced to reconsider all of his previous (also wonderful) films.

Mr. Anderson’s work has always been characterized by an extraordinarily stylized look to his sets and staging.  (The Royal Tenenbaums, my favorite of Mr. Anderson’s films, must be considered a triumph of art direction amongst its many other great qualities.)  Now it seems to me that Mr. Anderson has always been approaching his movies as if they were animated films: pouring never-ending attention into the creation of the artificial worlds that his characters inhabit.  (In animation, this is of course necessary: there are no “standing sets” to use – everything must be designed from the ground up.)

Or maybe I should put it this way: in stop-motion animation, Mr. Anderson has found a perfect stylistic vehicle for his particular idiosyncratic method of storytelling.

Adapted from a book by Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr. Fox focuses on a family of foxes who enter into an escalating feud with three cruel farmers: Boggis, Bunce, and Bean.  What is remarkable is that this animated fox family is just as fully-realized as any of the clans seen in Mr. Anderson’s previous films.  Each character is filled with flaws and with strengths.  Each feels, well, human!  George Clooney voices the title character, Mr.  Fox, who is inventive and fearless… but also dangerously reckless and oblivious to the walls he is inadvertently building up between him and his son.  Jason Schwartzman plays his son, Ash, a teenaged (in fox-years) boy who idolizes his father but, sensing that he is not going to get the approval he seeks, has withdrawn into teenaged “this is all stupid” rebellion (that includes the wearing of bizarre outfits).  Meryl Streep is the patient mother of the brood who deeply loves her husband yet must admit, in a powerful moment late in the film, that she never should have married him.

Does this sound like your every-day animated film so far?

It’s just amazing, really, how Mr. Anderson (working with co-writer Noah Baumbach, who wrote and directed the magnificent film The Squid and the Whale) has shaped Roald Dahl’s tale into a film whose character drama fits perfectly in with the rest of Anderson’s filmography.  But he has done so without losing the charm and heart of Mr. Dahl’s original tale – particularly when it comes to bringing to life the increasingly escalating lunacy (and violence) of Mr. Fox’s back-and-forth feud with the farmers.

I haven’t even mentioned the enormous ensemble that surrounds the Fox family.  As in Mr. Anderson’s other films, much of the fun in Fantastic Mr. Fox comes from the terrific group of actors who have been tasked with filling in the edges of the story (and the world that has been created).  Bill Murray plays a worried badger, Willem Dafoe plays an antagonistic rat, Wally Wolodarsky plays a friendly opossum, Eric Chase Anderson plays Kristofferson (a cousin of the Fox family with whom Ash falls into a rivalry), and lots of other familiar and impeccably-well-cast voices.  But my favorite supporting role was Michael Gambon (now best known as Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series) who plays the villainous Mr. Bean, a terrifying menace that bedevils the Fox family (and all the other animals in the vicinity of his and his brothers’ farms).

The stop-motion animation – so rare to see nowadays – is wonderful and brings just the right hand-made feel to this very human story.  Having dabbled myself in stop-motion animation as a kid, I can only raise my glass in stunned appreciation to the magnificent artists who must have spent months bringing this tale to life, one teensy tiny movement at a time.

Don’t make the mistake as dismissing Fantastic Mr. Fox as a kids movie.  (It really isn’t for kids at all – well, certainly not young kids.  I was somewhat frustrated to have seen this movie in a theatre in which most of the seats sold seemed to be filled by parents and young kids.  Needless to say, most of the laughter heard as the movie unfolded came from the adults.  A lot of the kids seemed bored or a bit confused.)  But I was absolutely delighted by every frame of the film. Fantastic Mr. Fox is exciting, funny, and poignant, and clearly the work of an extraordinarily talented group of craftsmen guided by a director with a unique vision.  What more could I want to see in a film??

Simply fantastic.

I missed Coraline in theatres when it was released back in February of 2009, so I was thrilled to finally have a chance to watch this wonderful film on DVD last month.

Adapted from a novel by Neil Gaiman (a legend among comic-book fans for his beautiful series The Sandman), Coraline is the story of a precocious, lonely little girl named (you guessed it) Coraline.  She and her parents move into a new house, and the energetic and creative girl is soon left to her own devices as her parents busy themselves with their work and the business of setting up a new home.  Her parents are not the over-the-top hateful, neglectful sort that one sometimes finds in children’s fantasy films, but both seem overworked and overtired, and are unable to give Coraline the attention she craves.

Things seem to change for Coraline when she discovers a tiny secret door in her room that leaves her into a parallel world filled with happier doppelgangers of everyone in her life.  Her “other-mother” and “other-father” are cheerful and incredibly attentive to Coraline’s desires, cooking her enormous delicious meals and putting her to sleep in a beautifully decorated bedroom.  True, the buttons that these “other-folk” seem to have instead of eyes are weird, but so what?

You can probably guess that this idyllic other-world has a scary dark-side hidden not-too-far underneath all the wonder, and soon Coraline must use all of her wits to save herself and her family.

Coraline is a jaw-dropping, gorgeous wonder of stop-motion animation.  The fantasy tone with an undertone of great creepiness brings to mind Tim Burton’s exercises in this genre (The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride), but Coraline has a look and style all its own.  Co-writer and director Henry Selick and his talented team of artists and technicians have brought every tiny detail of this world to life, and they quickly prove as capable of capturing the loneliness of an empty, old house as they are at the fantastic merriment of a performance of circus mice in the other-world that beguiles Coraline (at least temporarily).  Each frame of this film is stuffed-to-overflowing with glorious eye-candy.  But I am happy to report that the “just how did they do that?” wonderment of this life-long animation fan quickly faded into the background as I stopped thinking about the technical aspects of the film and just found myself swept along in the ride.

The voice-cast acquits themselves well.  There are some famous names in the mix (Dakota Fanning voices Coraline, Teri Hatcher is her mother and John Hodgman is her father) but no one overshadows the material.  Each actor is a fine fit with his/her character.  In particular, Datoka Fanning does a terrific job in bringing Coraline to life, and embodying this heroine with a spirit that is uniquely her own.  I must say that I also really enjoyed Ian McShane as Coraline’s enigmatic upstairs neighbor, the Russian acrobat Sergei Alexander Bobinsky.

There is enough humor and psychological sophistication in Coraline to make it thoroughly enjoyable for adults, while also being fantastic and scary enough to be quite engaging for kids.  That is a tough balance to find in an “all ages” film not bearing the Pixar logo.  I feel like Coraline was a bit overlooked this year.  Having seen it now, I’m surprised that I didn’t read more praise of this fine film when it was released at the beginning of the year.  Coraline is a delightful and unique creation, and it is well-worth your time.

Ever since Snatch back in 2000 I’ve been waiting for Guy Ritchie’s next great film.  Finally, just squeaking in before the close of the decade, it has arrived: Sherlock Holmes.

As you’re all probably very well aware, Sherlock Holmes stars Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson, and represents Mr. Ritchie’s reinvention of the Holmes mythos.  Though perhaps reinvention is entirely the wrong word, as in many respects Ritchie & his collaborators have stripped away a lot of the baggage that the character has accumulated over the years (and over many, many, many film and TV depictions) and brought Holmes & co. a lot closer to their original literary origins in the prose of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I am most pleased to report that this new film is an absolute delight.

Let’s begin with the cast.  Robert Downey Jr. is perfectly cast as Holmes.  The intelligence, roguish arrogance, and manic energy that Mr. Downey Jr. has brought to his best roles is in full evidence here.  His Holmes is a man just-on-the-edge of psychosis.  He thinks so much faster than the ordinary man that, when his intellect is not engaged by a difficult case, he hits a wall of boredom that borders on desperation.  Downey’s depiction brings this almost dangerous aspect of Holmes’ personality to the forefront — one never knows quite what this man is going to do next.

A lot of reviews have, I felt, needlessly spoiled the clever way in which Mr. Ritchie & his collaborators have brought to life Holmes’ faster-than-belief thought processes, so I won’t go into detail here.  I’ll just say that it’s an engaging device that serves as an excellent storytelling tool.  It also connects this version of Holmes to the world of the super-hero (I’m reminded of the visual method in which Sam Raimi illustrated Peter Parker’s faster-than-the-eye Spider-Sense in the first Spider-Man film) and this is not a complaint.  With his incredible intellect, Holmes is a super-hero in many ways, and the way in which Ritchie & co. don’t shy away from these pop connections is part of what makes the film so relentlessly entertaining.  But more on that in a minute.

Jude Law is also perfect as Watson.  I’ve always respected Jude Law as an actor, but frankly it’s been quite a while since I was really taken by one of his performances.  (I might have to go all the way to his standout role in the otherwise terrible A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.)  Law’s Watson is no goofball, no bumbling idiot as the character has often been played.  Rather, Law’s Watson is tough, intelligent, persistent, and incredibly loyal to his friend Holmes — a man who seems to drive every other human being around him to absolute distraction.  Law’s Watson is the essential second half of Sherlock Holmes, the man without whom Holmes would certainly be lost within his own psyche.  It’s a pleasure to see the pair played as total equals.  I was also greatly pleased by the amount of humor that Mr. Law brings to the role.  I’ve known that Robert Downey Jr. could play comedy, but the twinkle in Law’s eye throughout the film keeps an essential heart and lightness to the proceedings.

Of course, what’s a hero without a villain, and the stupendous Mark Strong dazzles as always in the role of Lord Blackwood.  In the film’s opening, Mr. Blackwood is apprehended by Holmes and Watson and hung for his crimes.  That doesn’t seem to stop him.  I’ve been blown away by Mr. Strong’s intensity and charisma in every role in which I’ve seen him (Syrianna, Body of Lies, Stardust) and those qualities serve him extremely well here.  He brings an intruiguing charm to this villain, preventing Blackwood from becoming a boring “heavy.”  No, this character is electric, and he commands the screen whenever he appears.

The final piece of the puzzle is Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler.  She’s sexy and funny, and is a good fit with Downey Jr. and Law.  She’s great, though I can’t say she’s quite so perfectly cast as those two gentlemen.  (After having seen the film, I couldn’t possibly imagine two other actors as Holmes and Watson in this film, but I’m not quite sure I could say the same for Ms. McAdams.)  She also gets a bit too damsel-in-distressy for a woman who is described as having twice outwit Holmes, but that’s a fault of the script.

Other than that complaint, though, I really loved the script for this film.  It’s verbose (this movie is filled with characters — and actors — who really love to talk), and as thoroughly complex and twisty as a good Sherlock Holmes mystery ought to be.  But Sherlock Holmes is a film that makes sense, and when the explanations do come all the pieces seem to fit together nicely.  When Blackwood’s mysticism entered the story, I was a bit worried that the film would take the easy way out by explaining some things as magic (as if that’s any sort of explanation), but I needn’t have worried.

The whole package is tied together by Guy Ritchie’s confident direction.  Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch were both intense, fast-paced action-filled films that were populated by characters spouting mouthfuls of dialogue, and Mr. Ritchie brings that same style to bear here.  It’s a bracing wake-up call to these characters and this universe.  Sherlock Holmes is a smart movie that is also a heck of a lot of fun.  There are several engaging action set pieces, and even when characters aren’t fighting (and there aren’t nearly as many fight scenes or explosions as the trailers might lead you to believe), he keeps things zipping along with great energy.

I should also mention the terrific score by Hans Zimmer.  There are several catchy motifs that recur throughout the film, and a lot of interesting instrumentation choices: violins, banjos, accordions, and more.  There was something about the score that reminded me of the classic score for Carol reed’s The Third Man, and that’s a high compliment indeed.  (Click here to read an interesting interview with Mr. Zimmer on his score for Sherlock Holmes.)

The film sets itself up for a sequel nicely (making clear what challenge awaits our hero next in the same way that the closing moments of Batman Begins did — and hmm, there’s another comparison to a super-hero film…), and I for one cannot wait.  Let’s go, fellas!  The game’s afoot!

I finally signed up for Netflix, and my first selection was quite a winner: the small Irish film Once.

This is an extraordinarily delightful film, exactly the kind of unique little movie with a voice all its own that I love to be surprised by.  I’d read about the film when it got some acclaim on the festival circuit a few years back, and I remembered the endearing Oscar acceptance speech by it’s two lead actors/musicians.  But I went into the film knowing almost nothing else about it, only to immediately find myself quite taken with the film as the story unfolded.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova play the leads, whose names are never given.  He’s a guitar player who plays his music on a street corner in Dublin when not working in his father’s vacuum cleaner repair shop.  His music is brilliant, but he seems stuck in a rut and having trouble getting over a relationship that apparently ended poorly.  She cleans houses and sells roses on the street, and lives in a small apartment with her mother and daughter.  She’s married, but apparently on poor terms with her husband who lives elsewhere.  It also turns out that she is an extraordinary musician herself, but she has little avenue for artistic expression.  She hears Glen Hansard’s character perform on the street one day, and the two strike up a friendship that turns into a musical collaboration.

I am an avowed hater of “chick flicks,” but that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy films with deep emotion.  Quite the contrary: I absolutely love being swept away by the emotions of a film with heart.  I just can’t stand films that are filled with manipulative schmaltz, or paint-by-numbers plots that lead to simplistic happy endings.

I can imagine someone reading my above description of the plot and thinking that they know for sure how the story of this man and woman will unfold, but trust me, Once is anything but a typical romantic film.

The film consistently avoids taking the usual narrative path.  (With one tiny exception: The filmmakers did include a scene where a bored technician/producer dismisses their music but then comes around after hearing one song.  After seeing John Michael Higgins absolutely eviscerate that exact type of cliche scene in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, I can never again watch that familiar scenario unfold without a laugh.)  OK, but other than that I was extremely pleased to see the film avoid all the usual DRAMATIC with a capital “d” moments and predictable complications that one might expect to see in this type of film.

Which is not to say that the film is not extremely romantic.  I defy you not to be captivated by the connection that gradually builds between these two, formed by the music that they enjoy and then create together.  There is a scene in which she brings him to a music shop where she’s able to use one of their unsold pianos to play.  At her urging, he begins to play her one of his songs on guitar, and he helps her pick up the main chords on piano.  Gradually the two begin to sing together — tentatively at first, then they both find themselves pulled into the song.  It is a magnificent, beautiful sequence, and a stand-out moment in the film that has stuck with me ever since seeing it.

I am not a musician, so I don’t really feel qualified to discuss the music in the film, but I can tell you that this film is FILLED with music — much of it written and performed by Glen and Marketa — and it is absolutely wonderful.  In the special features on the DVD, writer/director Jon Carney talks about how his script for the film was very short, as he wanted the story to be told primarily through music.  He was wildly successful.  One of the special features on the DVD is titled “A Modern Day Musical” and covers the music of the film.  It’s funny — until I got to that featurette, I never thought of the movie as a musical.  But of course it is, in that that so much of the story is told through the music being played and sung by the two main characters.  But the music is so seamlessly integrated into the story, I didn’t even notice!  Once doesn’t feel like any musical I’ve ever seen, in which every few minutes everyone bursts into song.  Because so much of Once is about the struggle to create music, every song we hear over the course of the film feels totally natural and integral to the story.

I should also add that the songs are terrific.  Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are both phenomenal musicians.  I am also happy to report that, although neither one had ever acted before, they are both fine actors.  In the DVD special features, Mr. Carney talks a lot about the lengths he went to in order to make the two of them comfortable so that they would be able to act in a real, naturalistic way.  Again, he succeeded wildly in his efforts.  It certainly helps that much of the film is pulled from Glen & Marketa’s pre-existing friendship, and their own music, but still one should not dismiss their fine performances.  I don’t think you’d have to look too far to find examples of someone trying to be him or herself on camera and winding up looking stiff and fake.

Once is a terrific film — I’m so happy to have seen it, and I highly recommend it to all of you!

An indeterminate number of years in the future, mankind has ravaged the Earth and is forced to turn to alternative sources of energy.  By far the best is the ore nicknamed “unobtanium” (talk about a macguffin) that has been discovered on the alien world called Pandora.  Unfortunately, Pandora is home to a bunch of pesky natives, the Na’vi, who don’t take kindly to the shiploads of humans arriving on their planet with their giant bulldozers.  So the company supervising the mining sub-contracts the Marines to protect their workers and, of necessary, destroy any belligerent Na’vi.

But some scientists, lead by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), would prefer to find a diplomatic solution to the escalating violence with the Na’vi.  As such, they have constructed artificial Na’vi avatars — fully lifelike and functional Na’vi bodies that can be controlled by a human mind.  The idea is that these Avatars will be able to assimilate into the Na’vi culture better than a human ever could — learning about them, and hopefully eventually being able to reach an understanding with them.  Tom Sully was one of the highly-trained humans who had been preparing to control an Avatar, but when he is killed, the company must turn to his twin brother, Jake.  (Since the Avatars are apparently created specifically to match the genetics of their individual human controller, only Jake can substitute for his brother.)  Jake, a Marine who has lost the use of his legs, is excited by the chance to be useful again, and even more overwhelmed by the sensations of controlling a Na’vi body, through which he can at last walk (not to mention run, jump, etc.).  Things get even better for Jake when the mutilated Colonel Quaritch, who supervises the Marines on Pandora, approaches Jake with an offer: if Jake will feed him all the tactical information he gains about the Na’vi during his Avatar’s time amongst them (which the Colonel can use to wipe the Na’vi out once and for all), the Colonel will see that the military pays for the expensive medical procedures necessary to restore Jake’s legs.

Of course, once Jake’s Avatar actually gets accepted into Na’vi society, things become a lot more complicated, morally, for Jake, and he finds himself caught between two societies that are rapidly heading for a collision.

Avatar brings with it an enormous amount of hype and expectation — almost more than any movie could possibly live up to.  It’s the first narrative feature film from Director James Cameron since the extraordinary success of Titanic back in 1997.  Mr. Cameron has directed some of the most influential sci-fi films ever made (and also some of the very best): Aliens, Terminator, T2, The Abyss, and also the terrific True Lies, and as we all know, Titanic shattered worldwide box-office records and became something of a cultural phenomenon.  For the past decade Mr. Cameron has been working on developing new technologies and entirely new approaches to film-making (involving extensive motion capture of his actors, the creation of 3-D environments, etc.).  Avatar is being seen by some as a movie that will change movie-making forever.

No surprise, Avatar doesn’t quite live up to that billing.  But if you take away the expectation and the build-up engendered by the decade-long wait, you are still left with a very solid, entertaining action-adventure film with a bit more on its mind than just sci-fi shoot-’em-ups.

The story is a familiar one — white man goes native, and begins to see his own culture differently and question his previously-held values — and that hinders Avatar from feeling like a completely revolutionary movie-going experience.  I’d wager that thirty minutes into the film, most movie-goers will have a pretty decent idea as to how the story is going to play out.  That’s not to say the story is BAD — quite the contrary.  Cameron has always done a good job at taking familiar narrative beats and character types and bringing fresh life to them, and he does a decent job of that here.  No character feels like a cypher who you forget the film is over — even the supporting characters with limited screen-time feel like people(or Na’vi) who you understand and believe.  And while the broad strokes of the story are familiar, the sci-fi wrappings of the story are fresh, and the framework allows Mr. Cameron to make a number of comments about environmentalism and the dangers of losing sight of one’s values in a war on terror.  Granted, none of these morals feel revelatory or particularly complex, but I’m happy to see that Mr. Cameron had more on his mind than just shiny special effects.

Speaking of shiny special effects, though, I saw Avatar in Imax 3-D, which is without question the best way to view Mr. Cameron’s creation.  To state that the visual effects are absolutely extraordinary would be to short-change them.  The scale of the film is jaw-droppingly vast, whether we’re seeing the interiors of the space-ship that brought Jake and his fellow complement of Marines to Pandora or marveling at the gorgeous vistas of Pandora’s lush jungles and bizarre, floating mountains.  Every environment to which we’re introduced has been realized in enormous detail and brought to life by the CGI effects in a way far beyond what could ever have been accomplished by more traditional methods of camera tricks, matte paintings, or model work, and also far beyond even the best CGI effects of the past twenty years.  The space-ship effects are cool, but it is the world of Pandora that is the real achievement.  I’ve seen alien jungles in sci-fi films before, and they always look like either a) a set, or b) an actual jungle on Earth with just a few weird prop plants thrown in.  But Mr. Cameron and his team have created a fully-realized WORLD on Pandora, filled with an enormous variety of fauna and wildlife that I couldn’t begin to describe here.  We spend a huge amount of the film’s running-time amongst the jungles of Pandora, and at no point was I anything less than mesmerized by the alien world that I was seeing being brought to life before my eyes.

(This is the type of fully-realized, never-been-seen before alien environment that I remember expecting from the Star Wars prequels, which also came after a decades-long wait and accompanied by their directors’ proclaiming that he had waited to make the film until he had perfected the technology necessary to bring his visions of alien worlds to life.  But whereas the Star Wars prequels ultimately disappointed even on that level — giving us environments that looked beautiful but far too clean and, well, computer-generated, Pandora’s environments feel far more ALIVE to me.)

I was also stunned to consider, after having seen the film, just how much screen-time passes without any human characters whatsoever, with only CGI-created Na’vi characters (over ten foot tall blue creatures) on screen (interacting, by the way, in a completely CGI environment).  The film hinges on our accepting these “special effects” as living, breathing, REAL creatures, and in that the movie succeeds without question.  Yes, they are obviously CGI “effects” (how could these aliens be anything but?), but I never found myself distracted from the story by contemplating the visuals (either because I was impressed by how life-like the CGI was, or because I was bothered by a fake-looking effect).  The Na’vi just ARE, and I think you quickly stop thinking about how they were created, which of course is the goal of any good visual effect — to NOT be noticed.

In the same way that I give Andy Serkis enormous credit for bringing Gollum and later King Kong to life in Peter Jackson’s films, Sam Worthington as Jake and Zoe Saldana as Neytiri (the Na’vi who Jake first meets) must be given great praise for their performances.  I’ll have to wait for the eventual DVD/Blu-ray special features to learn more about the technical processes that combined their performances with CGI designs and animation to bring their characters to the screen as we see them.  But it seems clear to me that their believability as performers was just as important to this process as the technical achievements of the animators and CG technicians.  When we watch Jake’s Avatar and Neytiri interact on screen, these blue alien creatures are alive without question.

The supporting actors are also a fine bunch.  I was thrilled by how much screen-time Sigourney Weaver had as Dr. Augustine.  Somehow I had gotten the idea that her role was more of a cameo, but she is a central character to the film.  It was an absolute delight to see Sigourney back on screen in such a meaty role.  Once again her collaboration with James Cameron has borne potent fruit.  (And I must admit to have gotten a fan-boy thrill when I saw her wake up in another cryo-tube at the start of the film!)  Stephen Lang brings great menace to the role of Colonel Quaritch — he’s a great bad-guy, menacing without too-terribly-much moustache-twirling.  Giovanni Ribisi does nice work as the rather heartless Parker Selfridge, the head of the corporate mining efforts on Pandora.  (By the way, did anyone else catch the quick reference to the corporation as “the company”?  Was that an Alien/Aliens reference??  I choose to think so!)  I was also pleased to see Michelle Rodriguez in a nice role as a tough woman who wasn’t a, well, a bitch.

Then there are the 3-D effects, which I think were as much a focus of Mr. Cameron’s technical efforts over these past number of years as were the creation of believable CGI creatures and environments.  Seeing Avatar in Imax 3-D was a delight.  While I wouldn’t necessarily say that the 3-D effects make you feel as if you’re actually IN the movie, they do enhance the already extraordinarily immersive environments.  And when the action comes — ho boy.  There’s a lot of build-up to the ultimate third-act throw-down, and it is quite a spectacle.  The combination of the 3-D with the CGI (not to mention the terrific sound-effects and score) creates a visceral, edge-of-your seat effect that was a ton of fun.

Avatar is not a perfect film.  It doesn’t represent an entirely new paradigm of movie-making, and I don’t think it’s going to make my top-ten list of 2009 movies.  But it is a throughly entertaining adventure story with a surprising amount of heart.  I feel like I took a trip to an entirely alien world for a little over two-and-a-half hours, and I’m eager to go back!

Director Jason Reitman continues his winning streak with his third film (after Thank You For Smoking and Juno), Up in the Air.

George Clooney (continuing to prove that he is a far better actor than you might think a fellow with his movie-star good looks and fame would need to be) plays Ryan Bingham, a man whose job is to fire employees at companies whose bosses don’t have the desire or the guts to do so themselves.  Every day, Ryan flies to a different city, back-and-forth across the United States, to fire different people from a different company.  It’s a job that most would probably find tremendously distasteful.  But Ryan loves it.  It’s not that he gets pleasure from firing people.  (Actually, he’s quite skilled at helping newly-fired employees get over the shock and anger of being fired — and by someone they’ve never met, to boot — and he seems to enjoy the moments of human connection when he’s able to help one of those unfortunate souls find some shred of a silver lining to their situation.)  It’s more that he loves the unattached, free-as-a-bird lifestyle that his constantly-traveling ways allow him.

Ryan relishes having no ties.  His apartment (that he barely sees) is completely empty and unadorned.  He isn’t married, doesn’t have any kids, and is distant from his family.  While most Americans would probably side with me in hating the experience of flying, Ryan loves it.  He relishes having frequent flyer cards and valued customer status at airlines, car-rental organizations, and hotels across the country that enable him to zip in and out (cutting ahead of the rest of us poor folks waiting in endless lines) with just the swipe of a gold card.  He loves staying in hotels, he loves having a drink in airport VIP lounges, he loves flying.  In Ryan’s mind, he is entirely free.

Ryan’s perfect-to-him life is shifted, though, by two developments.  One is positive: at a hotel bar one evening, he strikes up a conversation with a beautiful woman who, it turns out, is just as much of a travel-junkie as he is.  The woman is Alex, played by the luminous Vera Farmiga (Matt Damon’s girlfriend in The Departed), and she and Ryan seem to immediately realize that they have each found a special connection with the other.  The other change is much more negative to Ryan: an ambitious young woman named Natalie (Anna Kendrick), newly hired by his company, has developed a system in which Ryan and his peers can fire people without every leaving their company headquarters.  Instead of paying enormous sums to fly back and forth across the country, they could instead use today’s modern web-cam software to simply set up video links with the companies who hire them.  While his boss (Jason Bateman) is ecstatic, Ryan is devastated by the threatened sudden end to his jet-setting ways.

Up in the Air is a marvelous concoction.  It is a dramatic film, but contains a lot of  humor as well.    It has a somewhat outlandish hook (Ryan’s lifestyle is an extreme one, to say the least), but is populated with characters who are refreshingly human.  Jason Reitman balances all of the elements well, keeping a lot of different tonal plates spinning while never allowing the film to shift too hard in one direction or the other.  (In less skilled hands, this movie could have been a real bummer ,or, on the other hand, a frivolous comedy with no dramatic depths.)  I did get a bit worried for a few minutes during the film’s third act.  The visit to Ryan’s sister’s wedding and what happens at Ryan’s big presentation both were story points that shifted uncomfortably close to Hollywood movie cliché.  Thankfully, the film quickly regains its footing and settles on a more ambiguous ending which seemed much more in line with what had gone before.

Mr. Reitman is ably assisted by a top-flight cast (no pun intended).  George Clooney brings a tenderness to Ryan that was surprising, and creates a main character who one can’t help but root for despite his rather abhorrent profession.  Vera Farmiga is equally compelling as Ryan’s mirror image and romantic partner.  She is a hard-working business-woman who avoids falling into any simplistic “bitchy” stereotypes.  Rather, Alex is warm and friendly, and the connection she forms with Ryan is well-realized.  Anna Kendrick also brings a great amount of depth to her role as the young woman, Natalie, whose actions threaten to overturn Ryan’s life.  As the film progresses, we get to know Natalie a lot more than I had at first suspected, and I was pleased to see her begin to learn just how much she had to learn without ever being made to look stupid or idiotic.  (In many respects, actually, she might be right in terms of the many areas in which she disagrees with Ryan!)  Jason Bateman doesn’t have any jokes to crack but is still terrific in his brief role, and talented folks like Zach Galifianakis, J.K. Simmons, Sam Elliott, Danny McBride, and many others do a great job in cameo roles.

Up in the Air isn’t an earth-shattering film.  It’s not the most dramatic film you’ll see this year, nor the funniest.  It won’t have the cultural impact that Juno did, that’s for sure.  But it’s a smart, adult little movie, and it’s well-worth your time.

This, my friends, is how you follow up a Best Picture Oscar win.

After No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers released the wonderfully bizarre Burn After Reading (read my review here). Less than a year later, they have bestowed upon us the even more wonderful (and even more bizarre) new film, A Serious Man.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a mild-mannered Jewish physics professor living in Minnesota. Despite (or perhaps because of?) his seemingly gentle, meek nature, trouble upon trouble piles atop poor Larry’s head, as if he were an American suburban reincarnation of the prophet Job. Larry’s son is constantly getting into trouble in Hebrew school, and seems less interested in preparing for his Bar Mitzvah than he is in watching TV and listening to records. His daughter rushes out of the house whenever she can. His wife has informed him that she is having an affair with Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed, creating one of the most stand-out characters I’ve seen on the big screen recently in just a few scenes). Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind, a familiar face from Spin City and Curb Your Enthusiasm), who might be a genius or who might be completely mad but who definitely has problems, has moved into the house with them. Meanwhile, Larry is up for consideration for tenure, but the head of the university board has informed him that someone has started writing them letters that are enormously critical of his teaching abilities. Also, a Korean student failing his class has attempted to bribe him for a passing grade and becomes belligerent when Larry tries to turn down the offer of money.

The Coens (ably assisted by terrific performances across the board from their cast) do a masterful job in creating a slow-burning feeling of powerful dread. It seems clear from the opening frames that things are not going to go well for this Jewish suburban family.  Although this is a very funny film, it is also one that does not shy away from examining the small miseries that can accumulate in a modern life. In addition to the Coens and their actors, credit must also go to the haunting score by Carter Burwell. (There’s a short theme of several notes on a piano that recurs throughout the film that I found to be at once poignant and also evocative of coming doom.)

The narrative is strengthened by the Coens’ care in ensuring that the troubles that beset Larry aren’t over-wrought typical “movie” problems, but more mundane (though no less crushing) sorts.  I particularly appreciated the fact that (small spoiler ahead) a scene that shows us that Larry has engaged in a fling with the gorgeous pot-smoking housewife-next-door didn’t actually happen — it was just a dream.  (Otherwise I’d have felt that I was in The Ice Storm.)

The film is filled with fantastic vignettes that have stayed with me long after the end credits rolled. The “goy’s teeth” story might rival the commode story (from Reservoir Dogs) in terms of mid-movie show-stopping hilarity.

I also loved the opening scene in the shtetl. What a fantastically unusual way to open a movie! It is true that, after the movie ended, I had to spend some time pondering what the heck that sequence had to do with the rest of the film, but I must say that I LOVED that the Coens didn’t feel the need to spoon-feed us those answers.  Plus, I think that if you paid attention to the themes of the film, the connection of that introductory vignette to the rest of the story is fairly clear. (My conclusion: it was an illustration of the “it’s a matter of perspective” differences seen so often in the rest of the film.  To the wife, the elderly visitor is clearly a dybbuk, and to the husband he’s just an old guy. Neither one can find any way to comprehend the other’s point of view.)

As for that ending — boy, I guess the Coens really love ending their films about 15-20 minutes before you expect them to!!  Though this wasn’t quite as much of a fuck-you ending as that of No Country For Old Men (whose sudden ending really sunk what had until then been a phenomenal film for me), but I was equally shocked here when the lights came up.  HOWEVER, while I was startled that the movie was just OVER all of a sudden, I do think that the ending (with both literal and metaphorical tornadoes of further trouble on the way for the Gopniks) did seem fitting for the narrative of the film as a whole (which I did NOT think was the case with No Country.)

I should also mention, if you haven’t figured this out yet, that A Serious Man is an extraordinarily Jewish film. Apparently, the Coens have based much of the story on their own childhoods. To whatever degree that may be, this film is steeped in the experience of growing up Jewish and middle class in suburban America. I mentioned above the Coen’s willingness to avoid spoon-feeding their audience (with a clear explanation of the opening sequence). They similarly demonstrate a brave determination not to over-explain (or, frankly, just to explain even once) most of the Jewish terms and phrases (Hashem, dubbuk, tikkun olam, get, etc. etc.) that pepper the film. I thought this worked wonderfully, as it allowed me to fully enter this world the Coens were creating (or maybe I should say re-creating, from their youth in the ‘60s) without getting bogged down in boring explanatory exposition, though I wonder whether a non-Jewish audience member would have trouble following all of the details.

But speaking for myself, I absolutely adored A Serious Man. It is another triumph from the Coen Brothers, and the type of unique, I’ve-never-seen-a-film-quite-like-it idiosyncratic work that I’m always on the look-out for when I go see a movie. Wonderful. It may not have gotten a very wide release, but do check it out if it’s still playing at a theatre near you.

The exclamation point in the title of Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Informant! should tip you off right away that this isn’t another ultra-serious film about a corporate whistle-blower a la The Insider.  (That’s not a knock against The Insider, by the way, which is a terrific film.)  But Steven Soderbergh has something else in mind with this movie.

A plump Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a biochemist who is also the youngest vice president of A.D.M., a giant manufacturer of, among other things, the amino acid lysine that is a core component of much of the food that we eat here in the U.S.  In the 1990’s, Mark supplied the F.B.I. with evidence implicating A.D.M. in a price-fixing scheme with several other worldwide companies in their business.  But, of course, this based-on-a-true-story tale (originally covered in the book The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald) is a lot more complicated than that.

Steven Soderbergh is an extraordinarily intelligent filmmaker, and when his films work for me (Out of Sight, The Limey, Traffic, Full Frontal) or when they don’t (The Good German, Solaris, and Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve which convinced me I didn’t need to see Thirteen), I always know that there will be something there of interest in the viewing.  Each of his films that I have seen has been remarkably different in style and tone from all the rest.  He consistently reinvents himself as a movie-maker, and that is endlessly fascinating to me.

Here in The Informant!, he has managed to tell what is really a very serious story in a manner full of whimsy.  Matt Damon dances along the fine line between drama and farce with the elegance of an actor skilled in both arenas.  His bizarre, rambling voice-overs that run throughout the film are wonderful — my favorite part of the movie.  Not only are his non sequitur observations hilarious, they also embody the idea that this numbskull is really the hero of his own story.  This idea is further enhanced by Marvin Hamlisch’s wonderfully over-the-top score (in which he practically gives Mr. Whitacre his own theme music!).  All of that silliness could easily tip the film over into total lunacy, but Mr. Soderbergh keeps his hands firmly on the reins, making sure than the audience is kept engaged with Mark’s unfolding story.

I should also mention here that it’s absolutely terrific to see Scott Bakula (Dr. Samuel Beckett himself) in a big role as F.B.I. Special Agent Brian Shepard.  Bakula’s best roles have been mostly confined to TV for the past two decades, but he really is a wonderful actor with a lot of charisma.  He does great work here, and I’d love to see him in more movies down the line.

The Informant! is a bizarre little film.  It’s not for everyone — I could see some audience members having trouble figuring out a movie like this that skirts continuously between drama and comedy.  While I wouldn’t say that I walked out of the film thinking to myself “this is a film that I will definitely own on DVD,” I quite enjoyed it.  There seems to be an ever-shrinking market for small little films like this, and that’s a shame.  As long as Steven Soderbergh keeps making new weird and interesting movies like this one, I’ll keep going to see ‘em.

Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, starts off strong.  The film juxtaposes narration from a movie about the fall of the Roman Empire with images of the United States of America from the last year and a half.  Moore’s point is clear.

It is hardly surprising, for anyone who has ever seen a Michael Moore film before, that Mr. Moore is taking this position.  After movie after movie filled with enormous criticism of the actions of the auto industry, the medical & health insurance industries, and more, Capitalism: A Love Story seems to be the ultimate, logical progression of Mr. Moore’s anger: an attempted condemnation of the overarching system of life here in the U.S.: Capitalism.

So how well does he make his case?

After the terrific opening, I felt the first half of the film floundered somewhat.  Mr. Moore presents several anguishing stories, each of which are certainly tragic and worthy of outrage.  (One vignette that sticks with me is the plight of a group of kids sentenced to lengthy stays in a privately-owned juvenile detention center in Wilkes-Barre, PA, by a judge in the pocket of the owners of that center.) But this first half of the film feels all over the place.  The vignettes are sad, but the connection to Moore’s overall message about the inherent evils of Capitalism seems thin.  (Judges and other important officials have certainly been bribed in non-Capitalist countries…)

There are other flaws with this first half.  Early on we meet several families being evicted from their homes, and we’re clearly meant to feel great sympathy for them.  But we don’t learn more about the circumstances of their evictions until much later in the film.  Without that background, I didn’t find the images of these families to be all that effective — frankly I responded the opposite way, reacting against what I perceived as Moore’s attempt at manipulation of the audience.  Yes, families being kicked out of their homes is a terrible sight.  But until and unless we, the audience, learn the reasons behind their evictions, watching those images unfold did not, for me, help Moore make his point.

Then there is the time spent with actor Wallace Shawn.  I absolutely adore Wallace Shawn (and not just for his most famous role as Vizzini in The Princess Bride), but what the heck do I care what he has to say about the economic situation in America today?  That’s nice that he seems to agree with Mr. Moore, but so what?  I was quite perplexed by the focus on Mr. Shawn in the film’s early-going.  It just added to my sense that the first half of the film was bouncing around aimlessly.

It sort of feels like Mr. Moore was working on a movie and then, once the economic collapse happened last year, he decided to shape his film around that topic — but he didn’t want to lose the material he’d already been working on.  (Having done a good deal of reading about the film after seeing it, it does seem that Moore was hard-at-work on this film before the collapse last year.)  The result is a film that, while extraordinarily powerful at points, loses some of its effectiveness because it seems to lurch constantly from topic to topic.

This is particularly frustrating because, in the second half of the film, once Moore starts directly addressing the recent economic collapse, the film really takes off.  Obviously there is a lot of anger out there about what went down, and rightly so, and Moore is extraordinarily effective at cutting through all of the complicated talk and double-speak to shine a harsh light on the actions of many in the finance industry and our government.  The exchange in which Mr. Moore tries to get an understandable explanation for derivatives out of a pleasant-enough-sounding Wall Street banker is a riot (and makes my stomach clench), as does some frankly shocking exchanges with members of Congress about how little they knew about the bailout they approved.  Some statements by Rep. Marcy Kapur (D-Ohio) are particularly eye-opening.

All of the above is intercut with several of the stunts for which Michael Moore is known for (and which you might have seen in the film’s trailers), such as his arrival at AIG headquarters with an armored car so that he can demand the return of the bailout money, or running yellow crime scene tape around blocks of Wall Street.  These are great moments.  But overall, the film is pretty light on Mr. Moore’s trademark humor.  The man seems clearly frustrated that, after twenty years of making movies (and TV shows such as his fantastic The Angry Truth series) about these types of subjects, these problems seem to have gotten worse rather than better.

Hey, I am too!

While a far cry from his strongest work (which, for me, would be Bowling For Columbine), I still found Capitalism: A Love Story to be a worthwhile (even if at times frustrating and aggravating) film.  Agree with him or disagree with him, Mr. Moore is unafraid to look head-on at the many enormous problems facing our nation today.  For that he has my respect, and my attention.