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.

The Razzie Hunter (Where's The Tourist?)

Yawn. Ten nominees for Best Picture, and at least nine of the ten films are already locks. Mark my words, this week's noms will hold few surprises. What to look forward to instead?

THE 31ST ANNUAL RAZZIE AWARDS (with MY predictions)

WORST PICTURE
The Bounty Hunter
The Last Airbender
Sex and the City 2
Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Vampires Suck

Of all these films, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler should be the most ashamed. We knew what to expect from the rest. And why is The Bounty Hunter always on my Netflix home page? Shockingly, it's the highest rated of these five on IMDB (with a lustrous 5.2).

WORST ACTOR
Jack Black, Gulliver's Travels
Gerard Butler, The Bounty Hunter
Ashton Kutcher, Killers and Valentine's Day
Taylor Lautner, Eclipse and Valentine's Day
Robert Pattinson, Eclipse and Remember Me

Hard to blame Valentine's Day or Eclipse on one single actor. But don't you get the feeling Ashton has Punk'd us once too often? This could be an award for career lowbrow acting (a.k.a. Where did your That 70's Show potential go?).

WORST ACTRESS
Jennifer Aniston, The Bounty Hunter and The Switch
Miley Cyrus, The Last Song
The Four "Gal Pals", Sex and the City 2
Megan Fox, Jonah Hex
Kristen Stewart, Eclipse

Megan Fox could win for her Mickey Rourke tattoo. But I'm giving it to the veterans. Ladies, do you need a new swimming pool? A third house in Maui?

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.

The Never-ending Story

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

Raise your hand if you rolled your eyes when Warner Bros. announced that the seventh Harry Potter book would be split in two. By the end of the franchise, I will have shelled out around sixty dollars for eight matinees, adjusting for inflation and omitting repeat visits. Imagine those paychecks. But as A.O. Scott noted, the Harry Potter film series has also been good to the audience.

If the movies aren't J.K. Rowling's originals, we have much to be thankful for. Chief among them is the studio's commitment. Despite a revolving door of directors, the actors were able to inhabit their characters across eight films, with the late Richard Harris the lone exception. Released over a ten-year period, the films mostly allowed Hogwarts students to age with their characters. 

Just think of the mediocrity of other recent franchises; the Narnia films come to mind. The Potter success came at the same time as the books (and the midnight releases, costume parties, collegiate Quidditch...). After the first Harry Potter film, the rest never felt overwhelmed by CGI and special-effects wizardry. Warner Bros. was smart not to convert the seventh film to 3-D. 

Good choice: Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is a quieter adventure. It makes its emotional impact by placing the three young heroes in the real Muggle world for large stretches. Stripped of constant reliance on magic, this movie lets itself be morose and even unexpected. Harry and Hermione burst into spontaneous dance to the radio, their only window to the world in their isolation. A London coffee shop shootout, with eerie silence exploding into Tarantino-sudden violence, and the Ministry of Magic infiltration show the films at their best.

Some of my generosity may be rescinded with the eighth installment. The final fifty pages do not quite live up to all that comes before. But for now, I'll enjoy this intermediate film, a film of anticipation, which satisfies (oddly enough) by continuing.

Bing Crosby's White, Weird Christmas

Everyone dreams of a white Christmas. That is, until they are sitting in Logan Airport (as I am), enduring gate changes and flight delays.

But earlier this week I watched White Christmas (1954) for the first time, and zoned out a lot to think about snow. White Christmas has the most famous standard ever standard-ed, some Irving Berlin (including an homage to "Abraham"), and Vera-Ellen's freakish skinny legs, but I wondered if it was a classic for the right reasons.

Then Bing Crosby opened his mouth. Not to sing, though that's also worthwhile. But I'm convinced nobody has ever talked like Bing Crosby in White Christmas. Granted, I haven't seen all of Bing's ouerve. If his lines here are an accurate representation, though, Bing is the lovechild of Dashiell Hammett and Dr. Seuss.

Danny Kaye: I guess I just laid an egg.
Bing: An egg? Brother, you laid a Vermont volleyball!

Danny Kaye: I don't seem to have any cash.
Bing: Where'd you leave that? In your snood?

Does anyone still wear a snood? And when did Vermont reign supreme in the volleyball championships? Other classics:

I don't know what you see in this tall drink of charged water, but after you get to know him he's almost endurable. 

You're lucky! You might have been stuck with this weirdsmobile for life! 

The thing about Bing is that he was possibly the squarest man in America. Or so we remember him, with his pleasant boo-doo-doo baritone. But he also experimented with jazz and black music early in his career. Let's not forget that he crooned in blackface in five (!) movies. Uncomfortable now, no question, though I bet he felt some kind of musical hipness just by dressing up and getting down with it.

He's always playing himself, but it's a self that's always in character. He constantly dons roles within his films. But he's so genial and, I'll say it again, pleasant on the ears that those characters always seemed just like Bing. The Bing we could identify with. And so it's easy to overlook that he was an odd duck. Or that he tried very hard to be an odd duck. Even in Holiday Inn (1942), he was spitting out lines like "take a slug out of the mug."

Is he going for Tough Guy? Is he trying out Cool? Somehow, it makes my days merry that normal old Bing Crosby himself was a weirdsmobile.