Day 32: Another Earth

"What would we really like to see if we could stand outside ourselves and look at us?"

Okay, fuck this movie. I know that I should maintain some modicum of journalistic integrity, but this isn't an academic pursuit, so I feel comfortable in saying that everyone involved in the making of this film can fuck right off. I should have known better. Within five minutes a four year-old kid is killed. I should have just turned it off. I wanted to, but I decided, okay, let's see where this is going. It actually went somewhere pretty promising, and then took a big giant shit on any hope I had for it to turn around.
I haven't been this angry about a film since I walked out of AI.

Rhoda (Brit Marling, who also co-wrote <shakes head>) is a seventeen year-old girl about to go to MIT when she does what any seventeen year-old brainiac would do. She gets drunk and decides to drive home. The hip-hop dj on the radio informs us about some news that's off the chain. Scientists have discovered another planet exactly like earth just to the east of the North Star. Drunk and gazing at the star, Rhoda plows into a car carrying John Burroughs (William Mapother, Ethan from the good season of Lost) and his family. John's wife and son are killed, actually his son is thrown through the windshield and into the street, and John lapses into a coma. Rhoda goes to jail and four years later gets out and everyone is going crazy with Earth 2 fever. Apparently Earth 2 is an exact duplicate of our planet, so everyone on our planet has a counterpart on Earth 2.

Now, this aspect of the story is fascinating and the implications are worth being explored. However those implications are relegated to a few radio and television sound bytes, and instead we're stuck following the story of Rhoda. Rhoda finds out that John is out of his coma, looks up where he lives and goes to apologize, but chickens out and says she works for a cleaning service and is offering a free trial to clean his house. Now, rather than being a decent human being and just leaving, she ends up cleaning his house several days a week. You can't really blame John, he has no idea who she is because he says later in the film that he never wanted to find out who the driver was for fear he would do something horrible to her. Rhoda however knows full well what she's doing and actually ends up falling in love with John. Okay, fuck her. How fucking dare she! Who does she think she is? Yeah, everybody deserves redemption and a second chance and all that, but go fuck some guy who's family you didn't kill you twisted bitch.

Okay, sorry. So Rhoda enters this contest being held by a very thinly veiled Richard Branson-esque dude to win a seat on a shuttle to Earth 2. Of course she wins, because why else would that contest exist? Now, Earth 2 continues getting closer and closer, and I'm no scientist, but isn't that sort of impossible? I mean, it starts out only being visible at night, but before long it's huge in the sky at all times of day. Wouldn't that affect our gravity or the tides or do something drastic to our planet? If the film wants to be taken seriously as both a human drama and science fiction, the science needs to be rooted in plausibility at the very least.

But I digress... so Rhoda wins the contest and becomes so consumed, I would assume, with guilt that she finally confesses to John who she is. Now he actually tries to choke her, but he doesn't, and this would be where I lose sympathy for him. So here comes the truly unbelievable part; Rhoda goes home and sees a man on the news (I'm not making this up, his name is Ari Gold, but it's not Jeremy Piven) talking about  his theory of how the moment when we discovered there was another earth, our symbiosis with Earth 2 ended, and all of our counterparts diverged from us and everyone on Earth 2 would now be on a different trajectory from us. So Rhoda reasons that since the moment Earth 2 was discovered was mere moments before she plowed into the Burroughs family car, maybe they're still alive up there. When she goes back to John's house to sell him on this theory, her impassioned speech consists of her saying "maybe they're alive, maybe they're not." I'm paraphrasing, but she does a piss poor job of selling the dude on it, that's for sure.

Anyway, flash forward four months and we see that she gave her ticket on the spaceship to John and he's the one going to Earth 2, not her. She comes home from work and finds her counterpart from Earth 2 standing by her garage waiting for her. Roll credits. Fuck that noise! Her letter that got her on the space ship dealt with her seeking redemption as an ex-con, so her responsible Earth 2 counterpart wouldn't have written the same letter and wouldn't have gotten the ticket. I know it probably means that John got to Earth 2 and tracked her down and sent her to meet her counterpart, but if that's the case, fuck him for doing that to her. Was he trying to ruin both versions of this girl? I mean, I don't blame him if he was, but the film has a higher opinion of him as a character than I do, so it doesn't add up for me.

Man alive, this one was a doozy. I think the main reason it made me so mad is that it seemed like two separate screenplays they mashed into one when they couldn't make either of them work. The Earth 2 stuff is cool, but it's almost an after-thought in the film they ended up making. It's a plot device and that's a cheat. There was so much cool stuff they could have done with that, but they focused instead on a horrible woman and her horrible plan and it just made me furious. There's a great movie in here somewhere, but director/co-writer/cinematographer/editor Mike Cahill was clearly not the guy to mine it. He fills the film with so much self-important nonsense, slow motion, fast zooms, more slow motion, even more slow motion, that it makes the whole endeavor that much more ridiculous as a result.

Tasha Robinson of avclub.com compared the film to the vastly superior Moon, and she couldn't have been more off the mark on that one. There's nothing redemptive about these characters, Rhoda's a selfish asshole, John's a dickhead with a short fuse (granted he lost his family, but he's not a very nice dude), and nobody else has much of a character to speak of. I was even sad to see Wes Anderson regular Kumar Pallana show up in a thankless role as a janitor who's given nothing to do except pour bleach in his ears off-screen. Don't worry about why, it's just another hollow attempt to make you care
about characters who don't deserve our sympathy.

Tomorrow I'll be looking at Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story with John C. Reilly and Jenna Fischer.

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Happy New Year and some news for January

Big thanks to everyone that's been reading and commenting, either here or on facebook. So here's what I'm thinking... this coming month, I'm going to have a theme. Since I've done a ten best list every year since 1995, I'm going to be looking at movies from my best of list that I haven't watched in a while. For example, I picked Cradle Will Rock as the #2 movie of 1999, but I can't even remember the last time I watched it. All of this will lead up to long form reviews of my ten best on the last ten days of January, so I'll post my review for my #10 choice on the 22nd, all the way through my #1 on the 31st. I'll leave some wiggle room in case I see a film in the theater that won't make my list, but I want to review. So here are some of the films I'll be reviewing this month in case you want to see them before I post my reviews:


Cradle Will Rock 1999 dir. Tim Robbins
The Constant Gardener 2005 dir. Fernando Meirelles
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story 2007 dir. Jake Kasdan
Mysterious Skin 2005 dir. Gregg Araki
Bad Education 2004 dir. Pedro Almodovar
The Fountain 2006 dir. Darren Aronofsky
X2: X-Men United 2003 dir. Bryan Singer
Road to Perdition 2002 dir. Sam Mendes
Billy Elliot 2000 dir. Stephen Daldry
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World 2010 dir. Edgar Wright
Avatar 2009 dir. James Cameron
L.A. Confidential 1997 dir. Curtis Hanson
Fargo 1996 dir. Joel Coen
United 93 2006 dir. Paul Greengrass
Frost/Nixon 2008 dir. Ron Howard
Amelie 2001 dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet

That's a few, I'll come up with more between now and then. I'll also end my embargo on directors in February. In case anyone hadn't noticed, I'd been avoiding reviewing more than one film by any given director. I'll put a stop to that soon as it's been killing me. It was an exercise to stretch myself, but it's been a bit stifling.
I'm open to any other suggestions anyone may have. One last favor, I would ask you to share this with friends who aren't reading it, or people you know who I may not know, that would find this interesting. I'd like to open up readership a bit, so any help my devoted readers can give would be appreciated.
Thanks everyone, and happy new year!

Day 31: Monkey Business (1931)

"One of the stowaways goes around with a black mustache."
"Well, you couldn't expect a mustache to go around by itself."

When I was around eight or nine, AMC, which is now primarily known for their groundbreaking original programming, used to have Marx Brothers marathons on New Year's Eve & Day. In fact, my old VHS copies of their films were taped during one of these marathons. The Four Marx Brothers made a total of five films together at Paramount Pictures from 1929-1933. Their first two were based on their smash hit Broadway shows The Cocoanuts & Animal Crackers, and their last two are widely regarded as two of their best, Horsefeathers & Duck Soup. Smack dab in the middle is arguably their weakest effort, their first original screenplay, Monkey Business.

The brothers, playing nameless castaways on a cruise ship bound for the United States, find their way through several madcap adventures, none of them particularly inspired. The plot, razor thin though it be, concerns a gangster named Alky (Harry Woods) trying to kill and/or extort money from a wealthy businessman by the name of Big Joe Helton (Rockliffe Fellowes). Groucho and Zeppo find themselves in the employ of Alky, while Chico and Harpo come to work for Helton, but the latter don't offer much protection from the former, and the former seems to have no interest in actually killing the latter. Still with me?

When the ship docks in New York, Helton is to throw a party to introduce his daughter Mary (Ruth Hall) who has fallen in love with Zeppo. During the party, Alky and his thugs kidnap Mary, hide her in a barn, and it's up to the brothers and Helton to rescue her and save the day.

It's a pretty lame plot even by the subpar standards set by the brothers other efforts, but it's filled with some pretty decent comedy bits. The most inspired bit in the whole film is recycled from their vaudeville days when, in an attempt to get off the boat, they steal Maurice Chevalier's passport and one by one, try to pass themselves off as the famous crooner. It's hilarious, but I've seen a video of them doing the original bit, and this feels shoehorned into the film and subsequently not as inspired as it had been. In another, Harpo hides out in a children's puppet show on the ship and masquerades as one of the puppets as the Captain and First Mate try to wrestle him out.

It's unfortunate that even the best bits are pretty thin and unmemorable. There are half a dozen scenes in any of their other films that are better than even the best in this one. A key missing element here is Margaret Dumont, the legendary foil for Groucho. Her presence is sorely missed here, and without her, Groucho flounders a bit, delivering witty one-liners to a random assortment of people, none of whom can live up to the incredible Ms. Dumont.

The physical comedy is top-notch as always, and Harpo is really in top form here. He's always been my favorite Marx Brother, and his prop work and physical bits are hilarious. He's even given a foil of his own during his harp scene, when he accompanies a soprano singing "O Sole Mio," and is given a wonderful opportunity to infuse his harp playing with some very funny asides. His best work lie just ahead of him in their next two films, but he really steals the show here even with the weak material. Chico on the other hand is given some really bad bits in this film. His comedy has always relied heavily on word play and almost every single bit he does in the film is a stretch at best, like confusing vessel for whistle, and the endless puns about his grandfather's beard. It's really weak sauce and Zeppo is as superfluous as he's ever been.

There are much, much better Marx Brothers films out there and I urge you to seek them out (any of the four I mentioned in the first paragraph would be preferable, along with their first two MGM efforts A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races). I would recommend Monkey Business only for the die hards, and even then, it resides next to Room Service, At the Circus, The Big Store and Go West as lesser works (don't even get me started on Love Happy and A Night in Casablanca). Granted it's still funnier than most movies being made today, but they made much better films and you should do yourself a favor and watch those first.

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Day 30: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

"Your time is over and you're gonna die bloody. All you can do is choose where."

The opening credits of 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid read like a who's who of the best in their field. Paul Newman and Robert Redford star, Edith Head did costumes, Conrad Hall shot the film, Burt Bacharach wrote the music, William Goldman wrote the screenplay, George Roy Hill directed... it's a formidable assemblage of talent. Why, then, does the film not totally work? I know that this is blasphemous in some circles (my father saw this movie over ten times in the theater and still quotes it at random), but I think that this is one of the truest examples of a film that is not better than the sum of its parts.

Let's start with the good. The script is fantastic, filled with snappy, endlessly quotable dialogue. The cinematography is breathtaking, seamlessly switching from the sepia-drenched opening to the vast, technicolor beauty of the first hour. Paul Newman may be the most charming actor that ever lived. He's the kind of actor who rarely, if ever, made a misstep, and he's at the top of his game here, just two years removed from his career best performance in Cool Hand Luke. Robert Redford is also very good, though Sundance is more stoic than charming and chooses his words more carefully than Butch does, making it the more thankless role. The music is also great, having won Bacharach two Oscars, one for the score and one for the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on my Head." That sequence is great and any time that song shows up in a lesser film (I'm looking at you, Spider-Man 2) it will instantly call this scene to mind.

So, it seems like a pretty good film, so why didn't I like it? Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say I didn't like it, I just don't think it's as good as it should have been. The main reason is the simple fact that no matter how much charm the two leads bring to their roles, their characters are thoroughly unlikable. The first hour when they're being pursued and are constantly on the run and relying on their wits, the film breezes and it's really fantastic. After they jump off the cliff and escape their pursuers, deciding to go to Bolivia, the film grinds to a halt. The odd montage of pictures of their exploits in New York was the first sign that something had gone awry. Stylistically I didn't have a problem with it, I just didn't like the sheer length of it. It's nearly seven minutes of film spent just showing pictures of Butch, Sundance & Etta (Katharine Ross) having fun on Coney Island, etc. but no human connection to this whatsoever.

Once they get to Bolivia and resume their outlaw ways, I lost all sympathy for them. Sure there were charming moments, like Etta teaching them Spanish and them mangling it at every opportunity, but it was all in service of them stealing from people who basically had nothing to begin with. I think the major issue here is that they seem to be stealing because they're bored. There's nothing else for them to do, so they do the only thing they know how to do. Even in their attempt to go straight and get jobs, is the audience supposed to be happy that they steal back the money that was stolen from them? It's a morally ambiguous quagmire that the film gets bogged down in, and I couldn't help but lose what little sympathy I already had for them.

The early scenes breeze by, the fight for control of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang between Butch and the gigantic Logan (Ted Cassidy, best known as Lurch from The Addams Family); the constant run-ins with Woodcock (George Furth); Sweetface's betrayal; the opening card sequence where a young Sam Elliott accuses Sundance of cheating... all of these scenes are fantastic, and led to my favorite scene where they break-in to the office of Sherriff Bledsoe (Jeff Corey) and he gives them the advice I quoted at the top of my review. It's a great, quiet sequence that put the fear of god into them and should have made them seek redemption, but I can't move past the second half where they spit in the face of any hope of redemption.

The ending is iconic, of course. The final freeze-frame is actually the cover-art for the blu-ray, and reminded me too much of that awful Planet of the Apes dvd that was released in 1999 or 2000 where the cover art was Taylor at the Statue of Liberty. But in the end, it's hard to feel bad for them. Their talk of Australia should induce an emotional response of some sort, like Rizzo's dreams of Florida in Midnight Cowboy does, but they've moved beyond redemption at that point, and part of me was almost bored to tears waiting for them to get theirs.

I assume this review will be one of my more controversial as I'm taking down a sacred cow for a lot of people, so I would like to hear what the unabashed lovers of this film think. Leave your comments below!

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Day 29: Brother's Keeper

"We've never had a murder here, as I ever remember."

D.A. Pennebaker, Albert & David Maysles, Errol Morris, Michael Moore, Barbara Kopple. All pioneers of the documentary form, all heavy influences on the work of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. Best known as the team that has spent much of the last two decades exploring the story of the West Memphis Three in their Paradise Lost series, they have taken a number of diversions over that time. Most famously Berlinger went off to helm the sequel to The Blair Witch Project and alienated Sinofsky in doing so. The two reunited for 2004's Metallica doc Some Kind of Monster, but have mostly worked apart in the ensuing years.

Their first collaboration was 1992's Brother's Keeper, a warts-and-all look at a small town in central New York state, and what the citizens of the town of Munnsville saw as a gross miscarriage of justice. The focus of the film is the Ward brothers, Delbert, Roscoe, Lyman and William, four men who have lived in Munnsville their entire lives as farmers. The eldest, William, is dead and an examination of his body leads police to believe that he may have been murdered. The surviving brothers are rounded up for some questioning and at the end of a marathon interrogation, they receive a confession from Delbert to having suffocated William in a mercy killing. However, there is more to this story than meets the eye (there has to be I guess, otherwise, why document it?) You see, the brothers are all varying degrees of illiterate and are all pretty simple (there has to be a nicer way of saying that), so many people in town feel that Delbert was tricked or coerced into signing a confession. They bail him out of jail and proceed to help raise money to mount his defense.

Taking a page out of the Errol Morris playbook, the film is very deliberately edited, revealing bits of information at varying times to create suspense. It starts with a lot of interviews with the Ward boys, various townsfolk, and a lot of blustery, self-important law enforcement-types, and culminates in Delbert's trial. The filmmakers build suspense very well, and if you don't know the verdict, the moments before it's read are some of the most intense they captured on film. They're savvy filmmakers, but not so consumed with technique that they fail to capture the human element happening around them. They clearly have a lot of love for the Ward family and do everything in their power to show where their allegiances lie. They devote next to no time to the opposing view, mainly because they feel, rightly, that it's a crock of shit. Be warned, I'm going to be spoiling the verdict, so if you haven't seen the film or don't know the outcome, read the review after doing so.

We're presented with the "evidence" against Delbert which amounts to his confession and the testimony of the first medical examiner (holy hell he's an insufferable douchebag). I suppose it's hard to spend the amount of time the filmmakers spent with these brothers and not feel for them and not demonize the other side, but their case against Delbert is tenuous at best. They only include one particularly astute insight by the prosecution, when one of the officers says something to the effect of "the Ward brothers are outcasts in their own town, but when the people saw how they were being treated, they rallied around them and stood up to protect one of their own." It's clear that even the most die-hard Ward supporter in town still handles them with kid gloves, but that doesn't mean that they won't protect them when they see a blatant disregard for justice.

The scene where the prosecutor puts Lyman on the stand is very difficult to watch. This is a man who hasn't travelled more than five miles from his home in his life being asked to take the stand and answer questions. He falls apart on the stand and can't stop shaking. It probably single-handedly doomed the prosecution's case and rightly so. It was a bush-league move by a district attorney looking to build a case on nothing. The boys obviously had no legal counsel when they were interrogated initially and these prosecutors had nothing to go on beyond some circumstantial evidence that doesn't hold any water.

Late in the film there is a scene where the brothers hire a man to come and slaughter one of their pigs, and it's shown in brutal detail. It's played late in the film like the directors' trump card, almost like a victory lap for their argument: How could Delbert possibly have killed his brother when he has to hire someone to kill an animal? It does give one pause, and I personally began to feel it was almost too stagey. When Delbert is being cross-examined by the prosecutor late in the film, he asks him about what shows he watches. Among them he lists Matlock, and when asked to describe it in more detail, he says that it's a show where Andy Griffith plays a defense lawyer. Now, the non-cynical part of me wants to think that he's now wiser about the world and knows what a defense lawyer is, but there's this creeping suspicion in me that says maybe he's not as dumb as we've been led to believe.

Who knows? His acquittal and ability to go back to his normal life is all that matters. Even if it was a mercy killing, it was between family members and the police and state had no right to interfere. It's not like this man posed a significant threat to anyone, and it seemed more like a land grab than anything else to me on the state's part anyway, so so much the better the case never panned out.

It's a fascinating film and highly recommended for lovers of documentaries. Even though they are borrowing liberally from their heroes like the Maysles and Errol Morris in particular, Berlinger and Sinofsky create their own style, one that blends the best worlds of both of those filmmakers (the intimacy of the Maysles with the clincical precision of Morris). Andrew Jarecki perfected this blend some 11 years later with Capturing the Friedmans, but even that masterpiece's roots can be seen here.

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Day 28: Winnie the Pooh

"I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me."

When Disney animation studios released the hand-drawn The Princess and the Frog in 2009, I was one of very few people who delighted in its old school Disney style. Many people I've talked to about that film found it dull, which I've never understood. I thought it was the best non-Pixar product that Disney put out in the last decade. Last year's Tangled was very good too, but it was computer animation, and Pixar has a corner on that market at Disney as far as I'm concerned, so why even bother? This year, Disney returned not just to hand drawn animation, but to a gentler animation style that hasn't been seen since I was a child, with Winnie the Pooh.

Based on 3 A.A. Milne stories that they have not yet animated on film before, Winnie the Pooh is the seamless blending of those three stories into one narrative that clocks in at just over an hour. The first thing that the filmmakers need to be commended for is the hiring of Book of Mormon and Avenue Q's  Robert Lopez and his wife Kristin Anderson-Lopez to write the songs for the film. They are inspired, charming and endlessly singable. Anyone with children can look forward to hearing these songs being sung for days on end afterwords.

The voice cast is spectacular as well. Jim Cummings has spent the last four decades being an unsung hero of Disney voice work, and has been doing the voices of both Pooh and Tigger for the last two decades. His voice work is of the highest order and he captures both characters so well, sounds exactly like Sterling Holloway and Paul Winchell, and somehow manages to infuse it with something that makes it his own and not just a carbon copy of the original masters. Tom Kenny, a name that every Mr. Show and Spongebob fan should already know, does the voice for Rabbit and makes him just as insufferable as ever.

Pixar stalwart Bud Luckey takes over duties for Eeyore and sounds so much like Ralph Wright, the original Eeyore, it's almost enough to make you forget that Peter Cullen had been doing the voice for much of the last two decades. Travis Oates started doing the voice of Piglet a few years back and does a wonderful job, and Craig Ferguson is equally great as the pompous Owl. Rounding things out is John Cleese as the narrator, taking over duties from Sebastian Cabot. It's no secret that I'm a huge admirer of Monty Python and Cleese has always been able to infuse even the most important sounding delivery with the right air of utter foolishness, making him the only choice imaginable.

The stories are all familiar to Pooh lovers, Pooh attempting to track down honey, the whole gang trying to find a new tail for Eeyore, and then saving Christopher Robin from a beast called The Backson which is merely Owl's misinterpretation of the boy's note saying he would be back soon. It's certainly not new territory, but the way that the animators and writers wove the stories together is great and the short film just flies by.

The animation is sublime. I took my girls to see it this summer, but somehow I think it looks even better on blu-ray then it did on 35mm (blasphemy, I know). When it was shown in theaters, it was preceded by a short that's included on the dvd called "The Ballad of Nessie" narrated by Billy Connolly that is also wonderfully whimsical and helps pad the already short run time by another five minutes.
Winnie the Pooh is a must-see for parents, but I think that even the most cynical among us will find themselves falling for its charms. I would be hard-pressed to say I've seen a better animated film all year, and with two girls, I've seen them all. Give this film an hour of your time to try and melt your hard heart. You won't regret it, I promise.

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Day 27: Wag the Dog

"The war's not over."
"Yes it is, I just saw it on the television."

1997 was the last time we saw Robert DeNiro in a film, he actually did two that year, Jackie Brown and Wag the Dog (Copland don't count folks). Sure, he's done a lot of movies since then, but has anyone taken the guy seriously in the last 15 years? I liked Analyze This and Meet the Parents and The Score, but DeNiro the actor... DeNiro the respected statesman of American cinema... that guy left us in 1997. He's still the standard bearer for crazy method acting; Whenever an actor loses or gains a ton of weight for a role, he's immediately compared to DeNiro. I've been lulled into a false sense of security by his presence in a trailer too many times in the last decade but the guy hasn't made a good movie in so long, I'm not surprised when he turns up in dreck like New Year's Eve and Machete.

In Wag the Dog he plays Conrad Brean, a political fixer called in by the current President's administration to help them fix a pretty big problem 11 days before the election. Apparently the sitting President is being accused by a teenager of sexual misconduct and his people need Conrad's help in sweeping this thing under the rug. He decides to fly to Hollywood to meet up with a big time producer named Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman very clearly paying homage to his good friend Robert Evans), to enlist his help in manufacturing a war.

Stanley brings in his friends songwriter Johnny Dean (Willie Nelson), Liz Butsky (Andrea Martin) and The Fad King (Denis Leary) to help in coming up with all of the various elements that accompany a war and how to help sell it to the American people. When the CIA eventually exposes that there is no war, Stanley and his team turn the tables and change the focus of the story to a soldier left behind enemy lines named Willie Schumann (Woody Harrleson, brilliant beyond words) and hope to deliver him safely home the day before the election.

The film skewers so many targets with marksman-like precision; It's a satire of Hollywood, Washington D.C., the American public at large, and the media. The fact that the film was released jut months before the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal shows just how prescient the film was at the time of its release, let alone how well it holds up some 15 years later. I do wonder how the events would play out in the age of the internet, 24-hour news and social networking.

It might almost make a remake or revisiting worthwhile, which is something I never say, but you just know that, for example, the young actress played by Kirsten Dunst would be live-tweeting from the set of the secret news footage shoot before anyone could get her to sign any sort of non-disclosure agreement. It would add an interesting set of elements to the story, and with all the other shit getting remade these days (Footloose? Seriously?) at least this would be worth exploring.

Dustin Hoffman is fantastic, as always, and is one of the only living actors that can work effortlessly in both comedy and drama. You never see him working, it all just happens, and his performance here is sublime (all the more so if you've seen The Kid Stays in the Picture). DeNiro is great too, as he always used to be, and is far more effective as a comedic actor when he's doing less. All the mugging he's doing in the comedies he's made since Meet the Parents undermines any of the subtlety he brought to roles like this one. His scene in the bar with William H. Macy and Anne Heche is great and he shows how good he can be when given good material. Speaking of Anne Heche, she's equally good and has no small task ahead of her, playing all of her scenes with two screen legends, but she holds her own and manages to garner laughs and prove she's worthy of the role.

Barry Levinson has always been a very good director for writers and actors, as he never does anything flashy or upstaging as a director. He trusts his actors enough to just get out of their way and let them do their thing, and it almost always works. In his best films like Diner and Rain Man this has served him well. Whenever he's tried to do too much visually, his lack of skill as a director betrays him, like in Toys, Sleepers, Young Sherlock Holmes, the list goes on.

In fact two years ago, he reunited with DeNiro for the insider comedy What Just Happened? that I had hoped against hope would be a return to form for both and be a worthy successor to Wag the Dog. Instead it fell woefully short of the sum of its parts, and was borderline unwatchable. Thankfully Levinson's most recent film redeemed both him and one of DeNiro's contemporaries who also had seemed beyond redemption, when he did You Don't Know Jack with Al Pacino. With the right script, maybe Levinson's the guy to give DeNiro another shot at redemption, but I don't know how fleeting it will be. Any lover of cinema has got to be optimistic though that it will pay off great dividends.

Tomorrow's film will be Disney's 2011 hand-drawn animated Winnie the Pooh.

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Day 26: The Artist

"..."

Michel Hazanavicius directed two films which achieved some small modicum of success here in America with his OSS 117 spy spoof films. They both starred the incredibly charming French actor Jean Dujardin as the eponymous character, a distinction he has again here with Hazanavicius' latest film, the almost totally silent 2011 film The Artist. The mere novelty of it being a silent movie made in the third century in which films have been made is enough to get it the notice and attention it's been getting. Novelty is one thing, a film has to have more going for it than a gimmick, and thankfully The Artist coasts for most of its running time on the sheer personality, charm and magnetism of its leading man.

Shot in a 1.33:1 ratio used for most films of the silent era, The Artist opens in 1927 with the story of George Valentin, the biggest silent film star of the time, premiering his new film A Russian Affair. At the premiere, he has a chance encounter with a young starlet named Peppy Miller (the thoroughly beautiful and equally charming Berenice Bejo) and the two are photographed together by the press and she makes the front page of Variety with the headline "Who's That Girl?" It doesn't take long for everyone to find out as she is cast as an extra in Valentin's next film, A German Affair, and Valentin takes the girl under his wing and gives her the advice that she has to have something that makes her stand out from the other girls. The two have a lot of romantic chemistry, but don't act on it as Valentin is married to the stoic and dour Doris (Penelope Ann Miller).

Through a montage we see time passing, and Peppy is working her way up the ranks in Hollywood, and before we know it, it's 1929. The head of the studio that Valentin works at, Al Zimmer (John Goodman), shows George some footage of a talking picture. Valentin laughs and scoffs whereas the suits in the room all feel as though they've seen the future. When George finds out that the future of the studio is in talkies, he quits in a fury and vows to make silent pictures on his own, without studio financing. Naturally one of the new starlets for these talkies is Peppy, who begins her ascent, just as George is making his descent. A wonderfully staged encounter between the two at the studio, features him heading down the stairs just as she is heading up them. It's a nice visual aesthetic, one that is employed one or two more times in the film.

Valentin shoots his new, self-financed silent film and it is set to open on the same day as Peppy's new star attraction. The releases also coincides with the stock market crash, in which Valentin loses all of his assets, including his wife Doris. His film bombs, he loses everything, and his career is in shambles. All of this is of course juxtaposed with Peppy's new career as a major player in talking pictures, and we see that she still carries the torch for George when no one else seems to. She is spotted as one of a dozen or so people at the opening of his film; when he sells off his possessions to get some money, she ends up buying all of them through some of her servants at auction. It's all very sweet and touching, and Peppy is always seen as someone who has undying gratitude for George for giving her her big break. Since the film is just coming out, I won't spoil it any further, but the film follows these two characters and their encounters and lives through the end of 1932.

Overall, I really enjoyed the film. I think it's a delightful film that will melt even the most cynical of hearts, but I do take issue with all of the awards attention it's been garnering. I realize that most of the major award contenders this year with the exception of Hugo are very serious films, but that doesn't make The Artist a better film by comparison. I fear it's being unfairly elevated in peoples' minds because of its gimmick. It's a very good film that's being treated like a great one, and nothing will make people sour to a movie faster than that (Brokeback Mountain anyone?)

The score, costumes, art direction and cinematography are all wonderful. Dujardin and Bejo are irresistibly charming and eminently watchable. There are lots of great little cameos and nods to the silent era, and fans of Chaplin, Keaton and the like will get little kicks that others may not. The dog steals the whole film. There's a lot to love about this film, but it's hard when a producer like Harvey Weinstein gets his hands on a charming little film like this and starts trying to sell it to people as the greatest thing they've ever seen. This is not a movie which should be sold to people, it's the kind of little gem that people should discover on their own, but it will likely win tons of awards and end up becoming as derided as Slumdog Millionaire (though unfairly I think as Slumdog is rightfully derided as the shallow film it really is).

Go see The Artist and marvel at the love that it's filmmakers have for film. Whatever you do though, don't go see it because you think it's going to change your life or be the best film of the year, because it's neither of those things.

Tomorrow's film will be Barry Levinson's 1997 satire Wag The Dog with Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro.

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Day 25: A Christmas Story

"In the heat of battle, my father wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan."

Nostalgia weaves its way through all of our lives. Just the other night while watching Midnight in Paris, there were several conversations about both the power and danger of nostalgia. It holds a powerful sway over our memories and makes things retrospectively seem sunnier. The good tends to outweigh the bad in our memories of everyday life. We all have deep, dark, nasty shit in our past that we can't sunny up, but it makes the not-so-bad times that much better in our minds. Bob Clark's 1983 film A Christmas Story based on Jean Shepherd's awesomely titled short story "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash," resides firmly in the halls of nostalgia.

Bob Clark directed one of the most successful R-rated comedies of all-time with 1982's Porky's. 1983 found him releasing both that film's sequel and A Christmas Story, an odd one-two punch. Diversion alert: It's widely accepted by me that there are only three directors in history who achieved the feat of directing two masterpieces in the same year: Victor Fleming in 1939, Mel Brooks in 1973 & Francis Ford Coppola in 1974. It's hard to call A Christmas Story a masterpiece, but it has undeniably woven itself into the tapestry of American Christmas traditions. I would go so far as to say it is the most widely beloved feature length Christmas film, and is second in people's minds only to the Rankin-Bass animated specials of the 60s and 70s.

The film tells the story of young Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), the prototypical American boy of the early 1940s who has but one wish for Christmas. He's put all his eggs in one basket, and all he wants for Christmas is a "Red Ryder carbine action 200 shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time."

Anyone who's ever had one wish for Christmas like this forms an instant empathetic bond with Ralphie and shares in his single-minded desire for the gift of his dreams. I imagine this phenomenon isn't exclusive to those who celebrate Christmas, but for the purposes of relating to this film, it helps if it was a Christmas gift that you coveted. For me it was The Masters of the Universe Slime Pit, and Christmas morning 1986 I got the shit out of one! It's probably the most vivid Christmas memory for me, and anyone who shares in that experience can't help but get caught up in Raphie's plight.

His mother (Melinda Dillon), father (Darren McGavin), teacher, and even Santa Claus himself warn Ralphie that he'll shoot his eye out if he gets one. This becomes the cock-blocking maneuver that every adult in Ralphie's life seems to use in justification of not letting him have one.

I think that the film's firmly rooted love of the time period and pre-WWII nostalgia is what gives the film its almost universal appeal. It's not a great film, it certainly wasn't well received upon its original release, critically or commercially, yet it has endured somehow. It has a unique, for its time, understanding of childhood and depicts what it's like to be a kid so well, it almost seems made by kids. Every adult in the film is aloof, overbearing, or some combination of the two. Its style was mimicked almost immediately by the television show "The Wonder Years," which also captured the American childhood experience very deftly, but it owes its very existence to the style created by Clark and Shepherd. Having Shepherd himself do the narration is a stroke of genius and his asides throughout the film are incredibly well observed, pithy and often hilarious.

I wonder what it's like seeing this film for the first time at my age. I wonder if it's as instantly captivating as it was when I was a kid. I think it's a film that needs to be latched on to in childhood. The young at heart would be endeared to it as well, I imagine, but I came of age in the perfect time with this film. There was no over-saturation of the film as there is now (thanks a lot Ted Turner). My VHS copy was taped off of HBO by my dad, and is missing the first seven minutes or so. I remember watching the dvd for the first time about 10 years ago and being floored by the fact that there were scenes I hadn't seen before.

Nowadays, all you need to do is pop on the tv any time in the month of December and you can see Flick getting his tongue stuck to a flagpole, or the waiters in the Chinese restaurant butchering Deck the Halls, or Ralphie in his pink bunny suit. The film is a part of the fabric of our lives in this country now and is almost impossible to see intact from beginning to end for the first time now. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly been built up by the masses to be a whole lot better than it actually is. But isn't that the whole power of nostalgia in the first place? If you haven't seen it before, I hope you enjoy it. If you don't, give it a year and try again. It's almost impossible not to find it charming at the very least.

I have no idea what tomorrow's film will be, but I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.

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Day 24: The Boat That Rocked (Pirate Radio)

"All over the world, young men and young women will always dream dreams, and put those dreams into song."

Richard Curtis is one of the most interesting writer/directors around. He got his first big break writing for Black Adder with Rowan Atkinson before penning one of the best screenplays of the nineties with Four Weddings and a Funeral. He continued writing very lucrative screenplays such as Notting Hill and Bridget Jones' Diary, before trying his hand at directing with 2003's Love Actually. The common thread with all of these is his adeptness at handling multiple character arcs within the context of a larger story, and his latest film The Boat That Rocked, released in America as Pirate Radio, is no exception.
Set in 1965 & 66, the film focuses one of a group of ships that broadcast rock and roll radio programs 24 hours a day, as in the United Kingdom, rock and roll was only broadcast for less than an hour a day.

When you consider the fact that no less than three of the best rock and roll bands of all time were from England and recording at that time, it seems all the more tragic that this music was relegated to pirate radio stations. The film tells the story of Radio Rock and it's colorful assortment of deejays and technicians, lead by station owner Quentin (Bill Nighy). There's The Count (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), Dave (Nick Frost), Nigel (Rhys Ifans), Simon (Chris O'Dowd), Angus (Rhys Darby) and Bob (Ralph Brown, whom you may remember as the roadie Del in Wayne's World II).

Into this world is thrust Carl (Tom Sturridge), Quentin's godson, who has been sent by his mother (Emma Thompson in a great cameo) to live on the boat. Carl is the ultimate outsider at first: young, naive & callow, but he soon integrates himself into the crazy world of these crazy people and finds himself having the time of his life. This story is juxtaposed by the story of Minister Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh, wonderfully stuffy) of the British Parliament, who has been charged with figuring out a way to ban these pirate radio stations. He turns to an ambitious young assistant by the name of Twatt (Jack Davenport) for help with this, and Twatt works tirelessly to figure out a way to shut them down. The joke about his name is not entirely played out after the first joke, but it does get a little tired.

Curtis' gift for handling multiple characters, stories and arcs serves him well here, but the main issue I have with many of his screenplays inevitably becomes the large amount of filler that ends up on screen. This is not to say that it's no enjoyable, I actually really like pretty much all of his films, it's just that he tends to divert the story towards small moments and conversations that do nothing to move the plot forward. Case in point, the entire subplot dealing with Simon's 17 hour marriage and the elaborate game of chicken which follows takes up roughly fifteen minutes of the running time, and does nothing to move the story forward. It's great character development for Simon, Nigel and The Count, but it really doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the film.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is great as always. He is the most reliable character actor alive, and his mere presence in a film elevates it immediately. The rest of the cast is great as a whole, though Nick Frost and Chris O'Dowd stand out in particular. Carl finds out that his father is aboard the ship, and though we're led to believe it's most likely Quentin, it turns out to be the reserved early morning dj Bob. We find this out halfway through the film, and then Carl and Bob have a total of two scenes after this revelation dealing with it, so there's seemingly no real reason for it to have been there in the first place. I understand that the film is by and large about Carl's journey of self discovery, but the biggest revelation of his entire life is given pretty short shrift.

All of this is not to say that I didn't enjoy the film. I really liked it quite a bit. The third act in particular is very strong with the Parliament passing a law banning pirate radio and the station deciding to stay on the air. The boat picks up anchor and heads for international waters, but the engine is so old and out of shape that it ends up blowing a hole in the side of the boat and dooming everyone on board. If you've seen the trailer for the film, you've already seen how it ends, but I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't as it's actually really well done, and should not have been given away in the trailer. This is the kind of movie that people who like the other movies Richard Curtis has done will like. I doubt it will win over any converts, but you'll find solid entertainment if you're a fan of his work.

Tomorrow I'll be looking at the perennial Christmas favorite, Bob Clark's A Christmas Story with Peter Billingsley and Darren McGavin.

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