Oscar Season 2011 Roundup (Part II)

Dear readers, it's time to unveil my Top Ten films for 2011. I didn't see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or A Dangerous Method or War Horse yet. But for the sake of argument, here's how I'd rank them today. (I reviewed them all but Weekend, which is a graceful, quiet indie about two gay men sharing three days together, a brief encounter more believable and honest than most romantic dramas. You can--and should--watch it on Netflix.)

Josh's Top 10

1. The Descendants

2. Melancholia

3. Take Shelter

The rest, in no particular order:

4. Bridesmaids

5. Drive

6. Hugo

7. Margin Call

8. Moneyball

9. The Tree of Life

10. Weekend

For some diversity of taste, I pulled strings and got two other Top Ten lists for you readers. The only movie where we three overlap is The Descendants.

Oscar Season 2011 Roundup (Part I)

For last year's roundup, I postulated that the Academy Award voters have moved toward comedies and genre films. We've seen dark films win Best Picture recently (No Country for Old Men, The Hurt Locker), but these past two years have gone in the other direction. Audiences are falling for comedies and movies about the movies.

Many of the top nominees were in the running before anyone saw them, but Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a pleasant surprise. Like The Artist, this film delights as it explores the history of movies. Scorsese makes a compelling case for 3D, playing George Melies's utterly charming 2D movies within the three dimensions of Parisian hustle-bustle. Hugo makes technology seem wondrous again: Melies was a superbly innovative artist, inventing the rules of cinema as he went along, and he's given a sensitive rendering by Ben Kingsley.

Oscar Contenders #6: Life, the Universe, and Everything

Review: The Tree of Life

Yes, there are dinosaurs. They pass by quickly, like many images in Terrence Malick's fifth film The Tree of Life. Their time is fleeting--blink and you'll miss it! And once you see dinosaurs, you know Malick doesn't intend to explain everything. His film captures an essence: pieces of lives as they're lived, memories imagined and real. Does it need to be more than that?

Most of the story focuses on a 1950s family in Waco, Texas: Mr. O'Brien, the engineer father with twenty-seven patents (Brad Pitt); his gentle wife (Jessica Chastain); and three adolescent boys. We see scattered childhood memories as their son Jack looks back (Hunter McCracken at 10; Sean Penn in the present day). The images feel like pure cinema; too much plot would be intrusive. Malick's screenplay feels like the beginning and endings of scenes, with conversations left on the editing-room floor.

Brad Pitt fleshes out a father conflicted between sternness and affection for his sons. Jessica Chastain's mother is more archetype than character--earth goddess, free spirit--but she's filmed with a gossamer beauty that's hard to resist. The story that's told is very male-oriented. But juxtaposed with the Big Bang, all the hangups of patriarchal society seem arbitrary, and I bet Malick intended that.

Every frame is full of light. We feel the stifling fifties suburbia waiting to be opened up, just as we see the universe expand. (This definitely owes a debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey.) But the son Jack grows up to be a corporate worker (Penn), stuck inside a glass elevator, imagining his own escape. Penn's brief scenes were probably fuller in the script; his present-day role is a cameo that doesn't contribute very much to the whole. Where has Jack gone since childhood? Is the beginning the only part of life that Malick wants us to see? Why does Penn look so sad?

The emotions we experience are sometimes outside the story, but each image fills in the larger canvas. Sure, sometimes it reaches too far, as in Jack's afterlife reunion on the beach with his parents, transcending time and space. But focusing on just the O'Brien family in the fifties would have deprived The Tree of Life of its wonder. And this is a wonderful film, if you let it wash over you. What better subject for a sprawling epic than creation itself?

Oscar Contenders #5: Women's Edition

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo + Young Adult

Lisbeth Salander is a rock star. Eerily thin, tattooed and pierced, with jet-black hair, she's both a fierce punk cybergenius and a vulnerable little girl. In the riveting The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist calls upon her surveillance services to aid his search for the long-lost Harriet Vanger, likely murdered 36 years before by her family. Lisbeth joins him in work and even in bed, but keeps her distance, forthcoming with research and withholding emotionally. Relative unknown Rooney Mara accentuates Lisbeth's waywardness. She wears the clothes, but underneath the hardened outside, she looks so impossibly young and fragile. Mara's Lisbeth is a palimpsest: a blank state she keeps erasing, to lose herself in.

The character is interesting enough, and Daniel Craig so quietly appealing as Blomkvist, that we don't think too much about the central mystery. The elderly Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, sly as always) recruits him to figure out which family member killed Harriet. To work, Blomkvist takes up residence on the island, a windy wasteland where we expect violence to erupt any moment. And does it ever.

Director David Fincher has never been squeamish, and he doesn't hold back from the more upsetting moments of the books--including sexual violence. Steig Larsson's novel (originally Men who Hate Women in Sweden) depicts a misogynistic world where "an eye for an eye" prevails. How should we react to Lisbeth's comeuppance against her sexual aggressor? Fincher surely revels in her coolness, but does he want us to cheer or cringe? Since he can't sink too deep into the mystery and its twenty-odd suspects, he instead propels the pace forward. The script feels like an adaptation, sure, and the last half-hour's epilogue is a long-drawn-out tangent, but Fincher has a certain touch. He's a rock star, too.

Oscar Contenders #4: Embracing Our History

Review: The Artist + The Descendants

If The Artist isn't the greatest silent film, it may be the best you've seen. Or the only one you've seen. Writer and director Michel Hazanavicius has an assured touch, moving almost seamlessly from melodrama to comedy to romance. This is classic silent cinema of the Charlie Chaplin variety--a wink to the camera accompanies each tug at the heartstrings. We rely on actors more than ever: their faces, their sighs and smirks. To this end, The Artist mostly succeeds. 


The physicality hasn't quite been mastered. The comedians and tragediennes of the 1920s relied on their bodies, nimble with a gag, drooping like a wilted flower at each tragic intertitle. No one beyond the two leads seems to inhabit a truly silent world, where movement and mime is everything. For the film-within-the-film director, John Goodman has the dour face of a beloved pug, but the script feeds him line after line to orate silently. We don't need to see them speak; we need action.

Oscar Contenders #3: Come Together

Review: Shame + Melancholia

Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) glances at a woman across the subway car, prolonged glances. She adjusts herself, averts her eyes, stands to exit the train. He follows her through the car doors and up the stairs, expecting more, but she gets away before he can reach her. This is one of the most erotic scenes of Shame, director Steve McQueen's study of sexual addiction, but we can read it as a metaphor for the whole experience. After a breathless, enticing first hour, the movie (and Brandon) seem to get away from McQueen.

As confident as Fassbender's performance is, the central character is New York City. For an intimate film, McQueen stays on location often (especially several erotic trysts at the exhibitionist Standard Hotel). Counteracting Brandon's private routine, bare white walls and soulless office job, the streets of New York are both empowering and stifling: just look at that shot halfway through of Brandon running several blocks late at night, ultimately stalled at a red light, jogging in place. There's no real escape in this Manhattan. To this end, Carey Mulligan as his sister Sissy sings a melancholy "New York, New York" in a relentless close-up. Mulligan is surprisingly extroverted; but her childlike qualities are still her most interesting feature.

Oscar Contenders #2: End Times Are Coming

Review: Take Shelter + Beginners

I'll wager that Take Shelter will be swept under the rug in the tidal wave of major winter releases. Michael Shannon is a risky gamble; Jessica Chastain looks familiar to fans of The Help, but not enough to sell tickets. Cards on the table: I'm going to back it for a Best Picture nomination that it will not receive. Director Jeff Nichols provokes an astonishing intensity as he follows a man who readies his home for a terrifying storm. To his wife and daughter, it's the occasional Midwestern tornado; but for Curtis, the end of days approaches.

This twister is not the sort that Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton once chased; it comes from within. Curtis, paralyzed by visions that storms are brewing, obsesses with building a high-tech underground shelter, so much that he (and his family) start questioning his state of mind. He assembles his hideaway like a prophet called by a higher power. Nichols stays away from disaster-movie cliches in his script and direction; the suspense builds up slowly, eerily, like a horror flick without of the ghosts that jump out. The final scene to me pushes the film away from its heightened realism to more overt symbolism (i.e. more esoteric), though it doesn't really spoil the fun.

We aren't privy to what makes Curtis tick; and Shannon reads like he isn't even sure himself. It's a wonderful performance, and it wouldn't work in most actors' hands. Michael Shannon certainly plays crazy men often, but beneath the bug eyes and uneasy smile, he grounds his modern-day Noah in human uncertainty. With his hulking form and gruff mumbles, he's vulnerable and still intimidating. Supporting him is Jessica Chastain as his wife Samantha, protecting their daughter Hannah as dad sinks further into madness. Though it could be enlightenment.

Meanwhile, in Beginners out on DVD, Ewan McGregor deals with a more traditional family loss. His father Hal (Christopher Plummer) has recently passed away, and in flashback, we witness him as a widow who finally comes out as a gay man. His son Oliver (McGregor) questions his younger boyfriend, who has other lovers, but as Hal says, "You always dreamed of getting a lion. And you wait... but the lion doesn't come. And along comes a giraffe. You can be alone, or you can be with the giraffe."

At this early date, Plummer might have a chance at Best Supporting Actor. Though it's a sentimental vote, it's also a reassuring one. He gives the film its spark of life. Plummer's had a long run on stage and screen, and he keeps things honest as a man free to start a new chapter, no regrets. To see him smile offers the deepest glimpse into Mike Mills' directorial debut. Mills writes and directs, just as Jeff Nichols did with Take Shelter, this sweet if lightweight affair. After the unshakeable tensions of Nichols' film, Beginners may help you move past your worries about mortality.

Oscar Contenders #1: Topical Storms

Guess who's written in his blog barely at all this autumn? It may take a hiatus here and there, but I thought you dear readers (the few, the proud) deserved my thoughts about the movies coming out this season. I'm looking forward to a heap of interesting indies, and a Best Actress race hot enough to boil bunnies.

I'm kicking off the season with two films about the most topical of events: the onset of the financial collapse, and the elections to restore faith in American institutions. 

Review: Margin Call + The Ides of March

"These people have no idea what's about to happen," Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) says as he gazes out the windows of his investment firm. The office is a fishbowl: everyone under scrutiny from the outside, trapped in a bubble. The employees watch through glass doors as layoffs pick up, and everyone's on the lookout for a scapegoat. 

But as Sullivan's research that the company has borrowed more than it can chew rises higher in the company, so does the realization that nobody knows how they got here. The firm calls in CEO John Tuld (an unsurprisingly villainous Jeremy Irons), and he begs Sullivan to explain the problem in plain English. One of the film's running jokes is pointing out the increasing ineptness at the top of the office chain: "I don't get any of this stuff," Tuld admits. 

Director and writer J.C. Chandor moves Margin Call forward with focused velocity. He keeps the atmosphere claustrophic, confined to board rooms, offices, and technical financial lingo that lay viewers never have a real chance to parse. All the vocabulary hits us too quickly, and appropriately so. Even the morning sunrise portends the impending collapse more than the inkling of hope. Even timely material like this wouldn't be as riveting if it didn't take a step back. Chandor lets us emphathize with these blindsided leaders; for all their corporate greed, they're as clueless as the rest of us. 

Fly Me to the Seine

Review: Midnight in Paris

I haven't really written about the summer releases I've seen (like Horrible Bosses and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows-Part 2). I didn't see a point. Those movies accomplished what they wanted, but they weren't exactly food for thought. And it gets harder to find words for things that are perfectly fine for one viewing. Sure, you can write critically about anything, but why waste bandwidth?

The sleeper hit Midnight in Paris fits right in with the summer slate. Woody Allen's latest film is warm, affectionate, endearing, charming. The film is a light creme brulee, satisfying to sweettooths and sentimentalists, and perhaps only occasionally to Allen's most ironic, postmodern fans. None of the characters babble in intellectualisms, but there aren't really characters here anyhow.

Many have said that Owen Wilson acts as Woody Allen's stand-in, but the two are kind of opposites. Allen was a character-actor typical of the seventies, polarizing and idiosyncratic, incapable of supressing his opinion. Wilson is an innocent puppy, always casual, barely radical. Playing a frustrated novelist with an old soul, he represents what Woody Allen probably wishes he were: good-looking, easygoing, sentimental more than analytical. The film artfully fills out this wish as Wilson's novelist Gil travels back in time each midnight to the Golden Age of Paris: the gay twenties. Gil gets advice on his book from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein. He finds a kindred soul in Picasso's lover (Marion Cotillard, equally adorable). And he escapes from his fiance's uncharmed family and the faux-intellectual Eurotrash she admires.

Who knows if the spell of Midnight in Paris will last for a second viewing? After a long polarizing career, Allen seems content to deliver us a nightcap. The film looks back to the romance of Manhattan--not a romance between people, but an affection for the city. Here again, the director's vision of Paris feels so evanescent that even thinking critically for a second might disturb our slumber.

Something Old, Something New

Review: Bridesmaids

Though we didn't know it then, The 40-Year-Old Virgin opened the floodgates of contemporary movie-making. So many movies have been birthed by the Judd Apatow factory since that I'm growing wearier with each new bromance.

But then there's Bridesmaids, a "bra-mance" (if I may) that sheds chick-flick conventions for a woman's look at a man's comedy. Star and co-writer Kristen Wiig has given us striking water-cooler talk: why can't women riff on vomit and toilet humor like the boys do? Dress shopping after a cheap Brazilian lunch, the ladies let out more than just tears, rivaling the raunchiest of any bromances.

But Wiig also makes quieter statements about love among friends. Scratch that--just between. Bridesmaids feels sincere because the women never play too nice. Wiig's character, Annie, finds herself trapped in an undesirable job, an apartment with creepy sibling roommates, and pleasure-free hookups with Mr. Wrong. Yet she's thrilled to play maid of honor to her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), until nouveau riche Helen (Rose Byrne) proceeds to steal the spotlight, the party planning, and Lillian's friendship away. We expect the tug-of-war between Annie and Helen to sabotage everything in their wake, as well as the inevitable reconciliation. Rose Byrne plays Helen with grace and an undiscovered knack for comedy: she doesn't see herself as the villain, and she's too clueless to be cold-blooded.

I'm not sold on Kristen Wiig's weird Saturday Night Live impersonations, but her portrayal of Annie is caricature-free. She's refreshing when she doesn't try too hard. Her comedy grows from her physicality: she's angular and wiry, squirming with tension that she releases in manic bursts. Some of the bridesmaids don't have much to play; the good lines go to Melissa McCarthy, who seemingly has no boundaries. Judd Apatow may have pushed too hard to integrate his signature style here--the cruder moments don't always feel authentic. The film may suit fans of Wedding Crashers or The Hangover, but beneath the laughs is a woman who's not afraid to be knocked down.

Written on the Wind

Review: Jane Eyre

If the opening credits hadn't rolled for Cary Fukunaga's new adaptation of Jane Eyre, I might have guessed I was watching Wuthering Heights. Mia Wasikowska as Jane rushes through rain-soaked moors, overtaken by despair and the unceasing storm. She reaches for the house just up the hill, but collapses in the thick heather. Only later, in flashback, do we learn how this quiet, anguished girl came within the grasp of happiness. Or did she? Fukunaga brings out all the Gothic elements of Charlotte Bronte's often filmed novel, and undercuts the hope that romance will conquer.

His film magnifies the tempestuous environment of the Brontes' works. Jane Eyre comes to Thornfield House as a governess under Edward Rochester, and must stand up to his temper and disdain. As Victorian convention dictates, he comes to express his feelings for her, despite her plain, unworldly appearance. But even their first kiss turns from tender to foreboding in Fukunaga's hands. The trees shiver about the lovers, accompanied by a melancholy violin. The natural world is cold to the humans who inhabit it.

The heavy anti-Romantic strain arises logically from Charlotte Bronte's devilish plot twist that arises during Jane and Rochester's hurried wedding. Wasikowska is an apt choice for Jane, with captivating calm and certainty that sustain the heroine through the most trying times. Jane does not lapse into victimhood, even when moors and men alike threaten to overpower her. Judi Dench as Mrs. Fairfax, the Thornhill housekeeper, can be eerie enough as she emerges from the shadows and cozies up to Jane, with an almost too-friendly twinkle in her eye. But she also provides comic relief to alleviate the ominous mood.

I'm not sure if Michael Fassbender is an ideal Rochester. He portrays his conflicted feelings toward Jane well, and plays their intimacy well. But he's more dry than arrogant in his first scenes, and too tamped down (I would say) to seem like a man capable of great passions. Perhaps, though, as Fukunaga's otherwise excellent film seems to impart, the passions are not man's but God's. The true desire of this lot is to survive.

Oscar Season 2010 Round-up

Though the first year of the "teens" produced few Great Films, there was consistency. The top ten at the Oscars, a pack of seldom-changing wolves throughout the award season, moved from Western to lurid thriller to little-seen indie, but all were good popcorn flicks. With the possible exception of Winter's Bone (which I have not seen), ponderous, weighty "films" were off the menu. Message boards raged over the spinning top from Inception, or the was-she-or-wasn't-she psychology of Black Swan--but in the end, both aimed for entertainment. They were no more than movies.

Take The Town. Ben Affleck never seems more at home than in Boston. He assembles an impressive ensemble for an action-packed thrill ride through the streets of Charlestown. Who cares if the apex of Charlestown crime was twenty years ago? All right, the script does indulge in Beantown stereotypes, especially Blake Lively as a white-trash townie. But Affleck embraces the adrenaline of his hometown, delivered with zest by hothead Jeremy Renner and briefly by the late Peter Postlethwaite.

Need two more hours of dropped r's? The Fighter elevates what could be a standard boxing comeback narrative into a superbly acted character piece. Christian Bale chews through the most scenery as ex-prizefighter Dicky, now a crack addict training his brother Micky Ward. Bale, along with fiesty mom-manager Melissa Leo and new supportive but tough girlfriend Amy Adams, tend to overshadow Mark Wahlberg as Micky. But Wahlberg's quietness supports Micky's struggle to find his own voice amid his rambunctious but passionate Lowell community.

King George VI seeks a tutor to regain his voice, marred by a constant public stutter, in The King's Speech. When the sublimely witty Geoffrey Rush tutors Colin Firth (an assured performance) through Pygmalion-like breathing/ shouting/swearing exercises, the picture is delightful. The conflict is largely internal, though the intrusion of deliciously sinister Guy Pearce as Edward VIII (king for a hot second) hints at the external tensions that are lightly touched on--Edward's Nazi sympathies, for instance. Director Tom Hooper avoids the air of stuffy British period films, though the wide-angle lenses used make for some odd (and overstated) cinematography that jars with the subtle work of his cast and script.

Pearce also surfaces in this year's breakout Australian hit Animal Kingdom. When Joshua Cody's mother dies, he moves in with his grandmother "Smurf" Cody and her three sons, who are notorious Melbourne criminals. Jacki Weaver is eerily maternal as "Smurf," overflowing with love but unafraid to resort to any measure to protect her family. The script shuttles back and forth, sometimes lacking in clarity, but the film spins a web of violence and mistrust. Down Under, all bets are off; Animal Kingdom has an edge 2010's big Hollywood releases can't match.

The enigmatic Banksy takes some edge off a street artist's process of creation and installation in the excellent documentary (mockumentary?) Exit through the Gift Shop. Is his subject Mr. Brainwash, an amateur filmmaker, legitimately transformed into a bonafide artist by emulating Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and the rest? Street art often has an everyman charm. But the work remains mysterious even as its creators are shown covering walls with murals at night. How else could we respect it (and should we)? Banksy seems to say, catch me if you can. I make movies, too.

Brazen Saddles

Review: True Grit

Courage, tenacity, reckless determination: just a few implications of the Coens' newest film's title. The brothers' quarter-century body of work speaks to these qualities; their films throttle between comical eccentricity and bleakness verging on horror. Some are sure-headed while others quaver (often the lighter films like Burn after Reading and The Ladykillers). But they persevere into the curiouser and curiouser Wonderlands of small towns and the Wild West.

Their movies are masculine, focused on man's conviction. The film stock is often grainy, a deliberate "indie" touch. Their casts can verge on caricature, laced with colorful tics and regional vernacular. So where does True Grit land in this (simplified, of course) look at their career? It's the second adaptation of Charles Portis' novel, and a surprise major hit at the box office. Despite the prominence of notorious marshal Rooster Cogburn, True Grit is a woman's story.

Mattie looks back from middle age on her one experience riding with the men: her quest to avenge her father's murder. A girl of firmly braided hair and near-ministerial tongue, she hires Cogburn to hunt down the culprit Tom Chaney, and resolves to accompany him. Out in the wilderness, Mattie sees her Old Testament thinking realized with the eye-for-an-eye violence of their journey. Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross as an adult unaware she's only fourteen, or that she's entering a man's world. As her travel companions, Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon make ideal foils. Bridges is eager to get his hands dirty; he sputters and mumbles with comic panache, then drops the swagger instantly when the going gets rough. Damon plays the level-headed fool LaBoeuf with dignity, with a sweet paternal protectiveness toward Mattie. The story falters a little when they reach Chaney at last, the encounter too chance and the villain bland. But it's back on track with the requisite good guy-bad guy showdown.

I watched John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach, possibly the first great Western, just after True Grit. Many reviewers find the Coens' work here more traditional than usual. They honor the genre, but with the toll that seventy years of Westerns have taken. Casualties are few in Stagecoach, and the horses are not sacrificed. But though True Grit's body count is lower than most Coen efforts, their contemporary lens records how random violence can be. Even the innocents who are spared will be wounded. Having grit wins shootouts, just like the good old days, but no one escapes the consequences.

Danny Boy, You Must Go and I Must Bide

Review: Rabbit Hole

Fifteen minutes in, I heard rustling behind me. Soon enough, a mother had scooped up her bags and headed out of the theater with her ten-year-old son. I suppose that there are still people in this world who go blindly to the movies, who buy tickets to Rabbit Hole assuming it's for kids, then are surprised when the film starts. Those who knew the premise of John Cameron Mitchell's film, I think, might also have registered some surprise at its often sunny execution.

Mitchell gained cult status for being outrageous, or at least boyishly defiant: the drag-rock spectacle Hedwig and the Angry Inch and overtly sexual Shortbus were his first films. He handles David Lindsay-Abaire's scenes with the restraint that Ben Brantley noted in the original stage script: "This anatomy of grief doesn't so much jerk tears as tap them."

Eight months after her four-year-old son, Danny, is struck by a car, Becca Corbett (played by Nicole Kidman) struggles to find direction. Lindsay-Abaire avoids the obvious melodramatic tics that could have marred or sentimentalized Becca's recovery. Though she and her husband Howie (played by Aaron Eckhart) fall into shouting matches, we feel an underlying stability in their marriage. But they keep their secrets: Becca follows the high-school-aged driver who caused the accident, due more to chance than his negligence; Howie smokes pot with a friend from group counseling. The film focuses closely on the Corbett family, who has been sidelined with tragedy before.

Nicole Kidman, an actress of natural restraint herself, deserves praise for producing this adaptation, one that required four distributors. She suits smaller projects better than lavish studio remakes. The cast has adopted her instinct to internalize. Kidman's dry pinches of humor flesh out a woman unconvinced by the "God talk" in group, and rankled by her mother's (Dianne Wiest) comparisons to her own grief. Eckhart and Wiest are sympathetic and understated, and Miles Teller is especially refreshing as the bright but scared driver. If much of the drama feels small and familiar, Kidman and company never overplay their hand. "Somewhere out there, I'm having a good time," Becca confesses, as if allowing the audience to feel Rabbit Hole's unexpected positive energy.