Film Review: Another Earth

One would think, and rightfully so I believe, that a film about an alternate Earth orbiting around the sky would involve some sort of science-fiction element in its storytelling.  When one is considering Mike Cahill's feature debut, Another Earth, one would surely be wrong.  About as far from a sci-fi film as one can get (other than the peripheral planet X hovering above of course), Another Earth, much like its contemporaneously released brethren from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, Melancholia, is more a look at the psychology of depression and guilt and how we get along with our fellow humans.  Sure, as is the case with both films, there is that initial element of fantasy, but both films, Cahill's moreso considering von Trier's penchant for the absurd, are about as down to Earth as one could imaginably get.  This is a film not about other planets but about human interaction and the effects even the smallest things have on our lives.

Another Earth is the story of a young woman named Rhoda.  In the beginning it seems like a fairy tale as everything is lain out in front of her.  With a scholarship to MIT awaiting her graduation, Rhoda fatefully decides to drive home after an alcohol-infused celebration.  As the radio squawks on about another planet being discovered, Rhoda hits a car stopped at a traffic light, killing the woman, pregnant at that, and her toddler son.  We find out later, after Rhoda has spent four years in prison, that the husband and father had survived the wreck and has just recently come out of a coma.  Now working as a school janitor, Rhoda seeks the man out to tell him what she had done, but instead infiltrates his life and tries to do whatever she can to help him get through his pain.  This is both Rhoda's penance, and her way to her own salvation in a way.

With a more Earthbound sense of dread than the aforementioned Melancholia (Cahill does not hurtle his planet at ours like von Trier does in the Dane's destructive nature) Rhoda seems to ease not only this man's pain but her own as well.  In a way, Cahill's film is about hope (in a way von Trier's could never be) and the goodness that comes from guilt.  With shades of Tarkovsky's Solaris - all of Tarkovsky really - Cahill builds his film up with moments of quiet self-fortitude and a cathartic cadence that drives the film with a methodical beauty hidden below the surface pain and anguish.  Much of this selfless, disarming beauty comes from not only Cahill's subtle direction (again, like Tarkovsky but without the overall bravado) but also from the sleek, workmanlike performance of Brit Marling as the tragic Rhoda.  Perhaps it lacks the cinematic chutzpah of the similarly themed, but ultimately dissimilar von Trier work, but what Cahill's film has going for it is its undying sense of humanity.  It is in this humanity, and not in any perceived science fiction, that Another Earth works so well.

Film Review: Carnage

With obvious comparisons to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (though with more sobriety amongst the characters), this play turned movie, featuring just four characters and set inside one Brooklyn apartment, is a concise, acerbic, beast of a movie.  Starring Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly as a couple whose son is beaten up by another boy, and Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz as the parents of the alleged offender, director Roman Polanski gives his actors just enough room (literally and figuratively) to do their interweaving diatribes of ferocity toward one another, but not enough room to be able to escape the vitriolic barbs of their close-quartered enemies.  Sharply written and sharply acted, especially by Winslet and Waltz, Carnage, based on the play Le Dieu du carnage by Yasmina Reza, is a verbally caustic, attack-ready take on the ideas of societal civility and just how far one will go to either keep the facade up or viciously tear it down - and each character has his or her turn at both sides of the gun

At a very brisk 79 minutes (shot in real time), Polanski never lingers on anything for too long, his subtly constantly moving camera doing physically what his characters do emotionally, but as the niceties of the early scenes devolve into the vicious realities of each character's own psyches (Waltz is the one character that never really tries to hold back his barbarism) the film becomes more and more harrowing and the viewer more and more apprehensive about what will come next, or more aptly, who will come apart next.  The characters begin to unravel - Winslet's indifference turning to open anger, Reilly's affable nature taken over by his inability to have control, Foster's faux liberalism taken to the breaking point of absurdity, Waltz's pomposity beaten down by the loss of his cell phone life line (we see his arrogance curled up on the floor like a reprimanded child) - and with each successive scene they fall apart more and more.  With each passing moment they act worse and worse toward each other - far more childish than either of their children had acted in the first place.

Granted, the film never goes much deeper than a few figurative skin abrasions, and the barbed verbal attacks are nothing when compared to the monstrous goings-on in the aforementioned Virginia Woolf (the added tension of Taylor and Burton's real life relationship added to that as well) but nonetheless, Polanski gets some great, if not exactly powerful (all four have been harder hitting in other roles) performances out of his claustrophobic quartet, and the acid-tongued breaking down of civility is great fun to watch.  Perhaps this is just this critic's own rather warped sense of societal rules.  One could even say it is a giddy treat to see these four supposedly civilized people go from decorum to destruction in less than 79 minutes.  I just wished there had been more - if not more time, at least more viciousness.  Then again, perhaps that is just me.  But really, it is quite fun to watch.

The Best of 2011

I have been busy busy busy this past holiday season, but that does not mean that I forgot about that staple of the year's end.  Another year over and a new one just begun, and that means it's time for the film critic's most anticipated (and sometimes dreaded) annual obligation - the top ten list. A yearly look back at the hundreds of films seen throughout the year and a frenzied shuffling around to narrow your list down to just ten films (or in some cases, trying to find as many as ten films deemed worthy enough). I for one love this annual ritual and wait with giddy baited breath for it to come around, so without further ado, especially since I am kind of late in bringing this to you (but fashionably late dammit!!), I give you my choices for the best films 2011. 

1. The Tree of Life - When I first saw this stunning film up on the big screen (the first of three such visits to the cinema in order to behold this spectacle of light) I knew there would be no competition for the top spot on my eventual best of the year list - and boy was I right.  Resting the proverbial head and shoulders above all other takes, Terrence Malick's brilliant new film is not only the best film of 2011, but also an early candidate for the best film of the decade.  My review can be read here.

2. Hugo - An adventure-filled fantasy film about the birth of cinema, using the most modern of technological moviemaking advances, this 3D motion picture experience from Martin Scorsese is a thing of such cinematic romanticism, with such an audacious love of film and its inherent history (a paean to film preservation if you will) that I defy any true cinephile to either condemn or ignore it.  My review can be read here.

3. Melancholia - In all his hate him or love him glory (or should that be infamy?), Lars von Trier's latest film, taking on the subject of depression hidden in plain and brutal sight, smack dab in the middle of an end-of-the-world scenario, is a nerve-wrangling, twisting, turning, vituosic work of audacious, bullying cinema - and who could ask for anything more.  My review can be read here.

4. Super 8 - Evoking the type of cinema that Steven Spielberg was putting out in the late seventies and early eighties (back when Mr. Spielberg still know how to make us believe) yet still full of the post-millennial chutzpah that is J.J. Abrams, this quaintest of monster movies, replete with those Abramsesque blue lens flares and a camera that seems to never stay put, is the best Summer blockbustery movie that Hollywood has put out in many a year.  My review can be read here.

5. Drive - Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for hire is one of the best genre pieces Hollywood has put out in a long long time.  Cool and aloof, this film by Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn, is a work of sheer subversive beauty.  Toss in Carey Mulligan as the Driver's only possible salvation and Albert Brooks as an against type small time mob boss (he should win an Oscar) and you have the makings of one damn fine motion picture.  My review can be read here.

6. The Skin I Live In - Creepy and exotic, this psychological thriller from Almodovar is the Spanish auteur at his most dangerously Hitchcockian.  A loose adaptation of Franju's Eyes Without A Face (though based on the French novel Tarantula), this strange creature of a movie is at times hilarious and at times harrowing.  I dare even call it a brilliant psychosexual game of smoke and mirrors.  My review can be read here.

7. Certified Copy - Iranian master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has made his first film outside of his native country.  It is a twisting, turning, whirling dervish of cinematic bravura and storytelling audacity.  As we watch Juliette Binoche and William Shimmel make their way through the winding streets of Tuscany, Kiarostami takes us deeper and deeper into his meta-manipulative world of filmmaking, where nothing is ever as it seems.  My review can be read here.

8. Meek's Cutoff - Trudgingly beautiful, this film by the methodically melodic filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, and featuring the director's Wendy and Lucy heroine Michelle Williams in the central role, pissed a hell of a lot of moviegoers off this past year (though perhaps not as many as the number one spot on this list) but what they could not get behind, what they could not understand, was the inherent understated beauty of such a seemingly difficult film (it wasn't really difficult people) as Meek's Cutoff.  My review can be read here.

9. Moneyball - The best damn sports movie ever made.  Yeah, I know that is a pretty bold statement but there you have it - and I am sticking to it.  Looking at the game of baseball from both a statistical mindset (the nerd in me loves that) and a romantic viewpoint (the sentimentalist in me loves that), Moneyball is, and I am going to boldly say it again, the best damn sports movie ever made.  My review can be read here.

10. Attack the Block - Take John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and replace the never-ending onslaught of nonspeaking L.A. gang members with equally non-speaking (though not non-growling) creatures from outer space and you pretty much get the gist of Attack the Block.  This hit genre piece from the UK is a deliriously fun cinematic ride.  My review can be read here.

11. The Artist - There are some quite remarkable shots in this film, many of them done as homage to either specific classic Hollywood works or a generalized silent era style, and it is in these shots that director Michel Hazanavicius brings such vibrant life to his black and white silent film.  The current frontrunner to win the Best Picture Oscar, The Artist definitely has the visual audacity to pull off such a unique victory. My review can be read here.

12. A Dangerous Method - David Cronenberg somehow manages to take the already strange relationship between Jung and Freud and makes it even stranger.  Of course this is what Cronenberg does best, so one should not be surprised.  A psychosexual (that is at least the second time that term has been used on this list) mindfuck of a movie, hiding behind a supposed analytical period piece - and we get Michael Fassbender to boot.  My review can be read here.

13. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - Many say Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an acquired taste, but when the director makes a film that involves ghost monkeys, ghosts of dead wives and a talking catfish who goes down on an ugly princess, how can you not fall in love?  Seriously though, I have always been a fan of Joe (the long-named director's choice of nicknames) but this may very well be the auteur's best work yet.  My review can be read here.

14. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - I must admit to not being much of a fan of the original Swedish films, finding them to be at times thrilling but mostly middle-of-the-road, but put David Fincher behind the wheel and you get a whole other thing entirely.  With the director's more in your face style of moviemaking, this US remake does something not many other remakes have done, and that is improve the product.  My review can be read here.

15. Midnight in Paris - This is Woody Allen as we have not seen Woody Allen in decades. Perhaps his latest film does not quite match up with many of the films from the director's Golden Age (1977-1992) but with its often biting dialogue and obvious nostalgic set pieces (showing a love for a lost Paris that nearly matches his love of the New York of his childhood) it comes closer than anything he has done since.  My review can be read here.

16. Source Code - With more than an air of Hitchcock in it, Duncan Jones' deceptively brilliant Source Code (the director's more visceral, less moody followup to the equally impressive Moon), loosely based on Chris Marker's La Jetee, is one of those rare mainstream Hollywood movies that forces its viewers to stop being mindless automatons, and to think things out.  My review can be read here.

17. Hanna - With Joe Wright's weaving, obtrusive camera, Saoirse Ronan's killer-diller, cold-blooded performance and a visual and aural in-your-face middle finger to the conventions of cinema, this calculating, visceral man-eating movie starts off slowly but once it gets going it does not stop until the abrupt bang bang credits roll.  My review can be read here.

18. Shame - The harrowing story of one man obsessed with sex.  From hard drives stuffed full of porn to old school girlie mags, from paid escorts to random sexual encounters with strangers, from constant masturbatory trips to the rest room during work to desperate and seedy club hopping, Michael Fassbender's sex addict is one of the finest performances of the year, in one of the most dangerously obsessive movies of the year.  My review can be read here.

19. Kaboom - Gregg Araki's sci-fi/thriller/sex farce/comedy hybrid thingee from another seeming planet is a refreshing and unique look at the genre film - several genres at that.  A mysterious movie that combines elements of David Lynch with moments of balls-out sex romp lunacy, this nearly uncategorizable film was one of the surprise highlights of the year.  My review can be read here.

20. The Arbor - Half documentary, half experimental film, have self-referential stage play (yeah yeah I know - math has never been my strong suit), this quite subversive, quite harrowing biopic about late playwright Andrea Dunbar, is probably the most unique film of the year in its use of real life people (Dunbar's actual friends and family) blended with actors lipsynching the actual words of witnesses.  A play within a play within a MacGuffin.  My review can be read here.

21. Beginners - A sobering yet romantic look at one man's journey through the long and laborious death of his newly uncloseted elderly gay father.  And as coolly written and directed as this film is by first timer Mike Mills (no, not the R.E.M. bassist), it is Christopher Plummer's spectacular performance in the film (one that may win the veteran actor his first Oscar) that puts it on this list.  My review can be read here.

22. Rango - Take one animated lizard, give him the voice of Johnny Depp, the wardrobe of Hunter S. Thompson and the demeanor of Don Knotts, and place him smack dab in the middle of a Spaghetti Western styled remake of Chinatown, throw in a wild menagerie of supporting mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds, and you have the best animated film of 2011 - hands down.  My review can be read here.

I suppose some runners-up would be appropriate right now, so here they are, in no particular order: The Guard, Take Shelter, Rubber, Hobo With A Shotgun, The Ides of March, Le Havre, Cracks, Drive Angry, Troll Hunter, Super, Horrible Bosses, Weekend, Higher Ground, Tuesday After Christmas, Another Earth, The Future, Terri, We Are What We Are, Cold Weather, I Saw the Devil, The Muppets, Tabloid, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, Footloose, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men: First Class.

Well that is it for 2011.  Coming soon will be my most anticipated films of 2012 list, so stay tuned.

Film Review: The Skin I Live In

For his eighteenth film, the modern day, melodramatic, maypole dancing Hitchcock-in-drag Spanish moviemaker Pedro Almodóvar, has sent forth the closest thing the auteur has ever come to a true blue horror movie.  With nods to the Master's Vertigo, Franju's Eyes Without A Face (obviously) and, according to the director himself, Tom Six's Human Centipede, this somewhat loose adaptation of Thierry Jonquet's novel Tarantula, is a modern day look at loneliness, betrayal and sexual identity in the guise of a psychological thriller, all with a quirky spin all Almodóvar's own.  The director himself calls the film, "a horror story without screams or frights," but there are frights nonetheless.

The film tells the labyrinthine tale of a man obsessed and the young woman who may be more than meets the eye.  Antonio Banderas, in the actor's first film with his once regular collaborator in twenty-one years, plays a plastic surgeon who, much like Pierre Brasseur's Dr. Genessier in Eyes Without A Face, has become so obsessed with bringing back someone he has lost, that he begins to play God, blurring any line that had once been put in place as an ethics barrier.  We first meet Banderas' charmingly mad Dr. Ledgard ("The things the love of a mad man can do.") as he is watching, on a giant screen surveillance monitor next to his bed nonetheless, a woman that we soon find out is being held as a prisoner in the not-so-good doctor's home.  Vera, a stunning young woman dressed in a neck to toe body suit who wiles the long days away doing yoga, writing on the walls and creating strange dolls, is Dr. Ledgard's prisoner.  The mad scientist's own little experimental baby doll.

Played by the beautiful Elena Anaya (another Almodovar regular, Penelope Cruz, had to back out due to scheduling conflicts), Vera quickly becomes an enigma.  Is she falling for her captor?  Is she plotting another escape attempt?  Is any of this real?  But then Almodovar's entire film is an enigma - even by Almodovar standards, which are pretty lax on the whole subject of linear moviemaking in the first place.  Flashing back to six years earlier and the rape of Ledgard's own daughter and the doctor's kidnapping of yet another person, his daughter's rapist, the story begins to have more twists and turns than even the twistiest of the great Hitchcock, Almodovar's own obsession.  Add in a strange and dangerous man dressed as a tiger ("El tigre que realmente me mal estado."), a dutiful housekeeper/mother hen played by another Almodovar regular, Marisa Paredes, and some rather strange medical implements, and you have one giddily bizarro motion picture.  To say any more would demolish the waking dream of Almodovar's film, so I will let it go at that. 

Film Review: Shame

Starting out matter-of-factly enough to be considered a modern day, sex addict version of Jeanne Dielman, we watch the opening salvo as Michael Fassbender's Brandon - the titular, ostensibly shamed sexual obsessive - goes about his seemingly drudging daily and nightly routine of anonymous sex, ignoring the pleading messages on his voicemail, vigorous masturbation and online porn - all the while dragging along a seemingly worn out penis that even flaccid could easily be mistaken for a nine iron.  Now even though this same said full frontal nudity, along with some pretty graphic sexual encounters (at least graphic for a mainstream movie), saddled the film with that bottom line kick in the balls NC-17 rating, Shame is not actually about sex so much as it is about addiction.  An addiction that in this day and age could be just as dangerous, or at least just as much of a crap shoot as heroin or crack.

To further prove this is a film not about sex but about addiction, one is asked to look at the seeming sexiness of such a sexual film.  Even with all the sex that is going on (some of it peripherally, some of it full frontal and center), never once is this film sexy.  Instead, Fassbender's sex addict goes about in a veritable state of melancholy, his sexual encounters cold and formulaic, his demeanor one of diffident arrogance.  Fassbender, whose smile incidentally, the few times we get to see it, is one of both disarming charity and predatory ferocity, goes about his role as if he is a dead man walking - no emotions (well, perhaps desire and some self-loathing) and no sense of community with anyone around him (well, except for when he is fucking them).  Even when his sister comes to live with him (Carey Mulligan playing what one would call against type - and doing one hell of a job at it) we see a distance between these estranged siblings - Fassbender's cold as ice addict never letting anyone within, emotionally speaking, arm's reach.  Perhaps Fassbender's humanity is hidden away somewhere, only allowed to see the light of neoned night when he thinks no one is looking (Mulligan's haunting jazzy rendition of New York New York brings the man to unwanted tears), but he keeps it so deep inside of him that he cannot even communicate without the aid of sexuality.  This may even be more than alluded to in an incestuous way as well.

Directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one), this highly anticipated followup to the artist-turned-filmmaker's debut feature Hunger (in which most people first became aware of how daring and remarkable an actor Herr Fassbender truly is) is a blast of sexually promiscuous arctic air.  We see a man dying on the inside, unable to open up to anyone, unwilling to give any sort of loving emotion a second thought (if he even allows them a first one), trapped inside his own addiction, needing sex, in any form (and I mean that) to feel alive, yet still feeling dead inside.  We see a man in the ups and downs of addiction - his hard drive being wiped clean at work, perusing subways and back alleys for any human touch - who finally succumbs to his self-destructive habits and hits that proverbial rock bottom of addictions.  It is McQueen who gives his film an air of coolly derisive otherwordliness (the dank subways, the saturated lighting, the aforementioned Jeanne Dielman-esque cadence), but it is the it-boy Fassbender (though judging from the full frontal shots, perhaps it-man is more apropos) who makes us feel both repulsion and empathy for this lost soul and allows us into this world of desperation, this world of the walking dead - this world of shame.

Film Review: The Artist

Playing as homage to a lost period in the film industry, this Star is Born-esque look at the onset of the sound era, done in pin-sharp black and white and an aspect ratio that hearkens back to the smaller screened world of pre-Cinemascope Hollywood, and made as, for all intents and purposes, an actual silent film, The Artist, directed by the charmingly quaint French-born auteur Michel Hazanavicius (now there is an ironic mouthful), and starring French Douglas Fairbanks look-a-like Jean Dujardin in its titular central role, is a quite stunning film to look at - which I suppose is the best thing going for a silent movie.

Granted, the story may leave a bit to be desired - it has been done to death (then again, it is an homage after all) - but when taken as purely visual (though the score, a slew of sound effects and a handful of spoken dialogue give it an audible nuance as well) and as a sort of love story to a time long lost, the film can be a thoroughly enjoyable moviegoing experience - and damn can Hazanavicius, along with cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman, paint a pretty picture in the shadows and lights of black and white. 

Full of stunning shots (many influenced by the same German Expressionists that gave Welles and other Hollywood auteurs their legendary looks) and beautifully stylized set pieces, The Artist need not rely on such trivialities as script and story, for in the end, it is the panache that counts.  Well, that and the ability to transit from the silent era to the sound era as Dujardin's dashing swashbuckler George Valentin must do in the film.  The mostly unknown French actor (his success here - an Oscar nod is imminent - may finally get the actor's Little White Lies its long overdue US release) gives a bravura performance as this Douglas Fairbanks inspired (a bit of Rudolph Valentino may be in there too) work of silent era machismo, and it is this performance that acts as the proverbial heart and soul of the film.

But Dujardin is not alone here.   Bérénice Bejo, an even lesser known Argentinian actress (and not so coincidentally, the director's wife), plays starlet Peppy Miller (with a career trajectory that most resembles a precode Joan Crawford), the Esther Blodgett to Dujardin's Norman Maine (sans the abusive nature of the latter).  We also get a surprisingly svelte John Goodman (at least svelte by John Goodman standards) as the big boss of the studio, James Cromwell as Valentin's more than devoted man servant, and of course, Uggie as Jack the Dog, faithful companion to the big star and the has been Valentin both.  Incidentally, while Dujardin was taking home the Best Actor award at Cannes, Uggie was awarded the coveted Palm Dog (and I am not making this up).

So even if the story is not the thing legends are made of (ironic considering the legendary status of such a  so often told story), the look and feel of the film, along with the near constant homage to cinematic history - everyone from Hitchcock to Lang to Lubitsch and Murnau, to Singin' in the Rain (even Mary Pickford's house stands in for Peppy's) - more than makes up for any perceived (and they may be just that) shortcomings.  Stylish and giddily melodramatic (the silent era melodrama was Hazanavicius' biggest single influence), The Artist may only be a replicate of the edge of the silent era, (sadly we cannot bring back the past - they certainly do not make them like they used to) but what a hell of a wallop it packs into its loving homagist punch.

Film Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Moody and melancholic, its foggy London atmosphere chilling the screen, its grey squat buildings of 1973 Eastern Bloc Europe deadening its hopes, this latter-day adaptation of John LeCarré's 1974 classic spy thriller is near pitch perfect in its boulevard of broken dreams demeanor.  The spies shown here, played by a slew of brilliantly understated actors, have never come in from the cold (to paraphrase another LeCarré novel), and as broken down and beaten as its main protagonist, George Smiley, played with a deceptive canniness by Gary Oldman, seems to be, that too is how weathered, how battled and bedraggled this Cold War remnant shows itself to be - and that is exactly how this film should feel.

Much of this aforementioned gloomy, though appropriately so atmosphere is given its form by the apt direction of Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director who gave us the atmospheric horror film Let the Right One In (and that's how you do a romantic vampire movie!).  A great pic to direct a pic as perversely period as this one.  Add to this the melodic setting-appropriate score by Alberto Iglesias, the composer of choice for the majority of Pedro Almodóvar's films, and the mood-setting cinematography of Hoyte van Hoytema, the man who photographed the aforementioned Swedish vampire film, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an intriguing blend of neo-noir, spy thriller and wouldbe psychological horror movie, all rolled into a chilling, classically-styled cold war entanglement of red herrings and MacGuffins galore.

But it is in this very same convoluted screenplay where TTSS begins to unravel - or perhaps never quite ravels enough.   Many have said (I have not read the book myself) that LeCarré's labyrinthine novel is way too much to capture in a feature length work of cinema, and that even the nearly five hour 1979 UK mini-series version could hardly handle the multitudes of twists and turns that LeCarré had put into his bestseller.  This may very well be true as we see a lot of random threads go in and out here, without ever receiving any sort of denouement, and even though the film is not that particularly difficult to follow (many of its detractors claim it to be close to incoherent), the screenplay by Bridget O'Conner and Peter Straughan, seems at times lazy, but at others downright bewildered and bewildering.  But then this may just be bellyaching on my part considering how in tune every other layer of the film is with what this spy thriller needs to be. 

So while the acting is top notch - not just Oldman, but John Hurt, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch and especially Tom Hardy and Colin Firth - replete with immaculately enunciated spytalk and desperate longing, and Alfredson's concoction of 1970's period drama is near pitch perfect, the film seems to fall a bit flat when it comes to its rendering of a storyline.  This is no truer than in the end, when we finally find out just who the searched for spy actually is, and a feeling of ending not with a bang but with a whimper reverberates throughout this cold cold work of cinematic fiction - especially  when the films leads, crescendo like, to what should be a big bang.   Then again, this is just the culmination of a rather workingman ethic of the time period, so perhaps it does work in a way. - and perhaps this is just bellyaching on my part.  But whatever the case, just to feel the long dead paranoiac atmosphere of Soviet spies and wondering just who is listening in, is worth having to put up with a little less than what meets the eye.

Film Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I must admit to not being much of a fan of the original Swedish trilogy (and I haven't even read the bestselling novels they in turn were based upon!), and I am far from a proponent of Hollywood remaking every successful foreign film they can get their hungry little hands on (why can't American movie audiences just watch a damned subtitled film!?), but put a daring director like David Fincher behind the wheel and place a surprisingly powerful, relatively unknown actress like Rooney Mara as the titular tattooed lady, and you can certainly colour me impressed.

If I had any trepidation going in it would have been on the question of the brutality that was so inherent in the original series, and if a mainstream studio project (and Oscar hopeful to boot) would allow such unapologetic cruelty to be part of its make-up - even when that same said cruelty was integral to telling such a story.  My hopes for such a positive transition from European art house to playing in Peoria were taken pretty high when I first heard that Fincher would be taking the reigns, but they went through the proverbial roof when I finally saw the picture and realized, from the very onset of the succulent black and white opening titles that looked as if they creeped out of a oil-drenched Bosch nightmare, that no one put this baby in a corner.  

Without wavering, Fincher kept the film as brutal and as harrowing as it needed to be.  The director even said, when he was first attached to the film, that he would not soft-peddle the literary content, and that this would be a "Hard R" rated movie.  This may be a turn off for those on the squeamish side (the aforementioned brutality is certainly nothing to be trifled with), but to the fan of the books and/or the original trilogy who want the best adaptation money can buy, and to someone like me who believes in balls-to-the-wall filmmaking, it is the most necessary of evils.  But still, the brutality is only the surface of this intricate and rather convoluted film (sometimes the storyline can more than border on the ridiculous) - the real stuff comes with the performance of Ms. Mara as the socially maladjusted computer hacker genius heroine of the whole shebang.

Setting aside the more than capable performances of Daniel Craig as the inquisitive lead Mikael Blomkvist, Christopher Plummer as the head of the most fucked-up family in Sweden and Stellan Skarsgård as an appropriately slimy wouldbe villain, this is Rooney Mara's film to either sink or swim with.  As tattooed cover girl Lisbeth Salander, Mara (her closest claim to fame being her brief appearence as Jesse Eisenberg's rightfully jaded ex-girlfriend in Fincher's The Social Network) is a steely-eyed force of unnatural nature that can wreak revenge on a repugnant rapist with one hand (clasped around a tattoo gun or a lead pipe) while downloading the most encrypted of code to unearth a sadistic killer of women with the other. 

Complete with a soundtrack from (Oscar Winners!!) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and a roving, aggressive camera that has Fincher written all over its audacious brouhaha, Mara's bodacious performance - a more wily and humanistic version of Noomi Rapace's original Lisbeth - takes this film head and shoulders above the original (a rare thing indeed) and gives the film, even with any viewer of the original knowing exactly what is coming, a true sense of dread and danger.  I still say Hollywood should stop trying to remake every foreign film they can, but in this rare case it actually worked.  Imagine that.

Film Review: Attack the Block

An ode in many ways, to John Carpenter's classic 1976 subversive genre work Assault on Precinct 13 - so much so in fact, that there is no way in hell that writer-director Joe Cornish is not a fan of the aforementioned Carpenter pic - the UK hit import Attack the Block takes the typically B-movie idea of the alien invasion film, tosses it on its head and hands us its deconstructed carcass like a trophy of its cinematic bravura and chutzpah.  In other words, I really really liked this movie - and you probably should too.

Starting out on the dangerous streets of a South London project on what appears to be Guy Fawkes Night, as the fireworks sis boom bah through the night, a gang of five masked teenage hoodlums mug a young woman walking back to her flat, only to be interrupted mid-mugging by a falling projectile that demolishes a parked car nearby.  Needless to say this is the beginning of an alien invasion that ends up forcing muggers and muggee, along with the local drug lord and a pair of seemingly clueless potheads (one played by the ubiquitously goofball Nick Frost) and a couple of cocksure little kid gangbanger wannabes, to team up and save the planet - or at least save the block since it appears to be an extremely localized alien invasion.  With alien beasts replacing the L.A. gang members of Carpenter's Precinct 13 (which in essence were just that director's answer to the walking dead in Night of the Living Dead), and with a tongue-in-cheek satiric tone (Edgar 'Shaun of the Dead' Wright acts as exec producer), Attack the Block is a real kick in the head - for genre fans and non-fanboys alike.

As the hulking, black-furred aliens, impossibly giant sets of fangs glowing in the dark like fluorescent shards of impending death (think the gargoyles from Ghostbusters mixed with the blackest of black bears and something out of an acid-induced Dark Crystal nightmare), make their way into this towering den of iniquity, trapping our not-so-intrepid heroes inside with only each other, enemy and friend alike, to count on, Cornish's film - his directorial feature debut btw - becomes more and more claustrophobic and more and more dangerous.  Fighting the seemingly inevitable destruction of the world, or at least the titular block, collateral and non-collateral damage being ripped to shreds through the halls and elevators around them, this ragtag band of survivors - again, much aligned to the same sort of doomed group from the aforementioned Carpenter classic - Attack the Block is a nearly non-stop adrenaline rush from start to finish.  All-in-all, pretty fucking nifty for such a supposedly B-picture mentality - or perhaps pretty fucking nifty because of its B-picture mentality.

Film Review: War Horse

Despite his irregularly inflated reputation among those movie going masses that flock in droves to see the director's works (and hand him inevitable yet inexplicable accolades), and in spite of the fact that the man can shell out one hell of a good action yarn, making his war torn movies explode with visual audacity, Steven Spielberg can be an extremely cloying, emotionally manipulative and downright syrupy filmmaker.  With War Horse, his epic-wannabe World War I heart-tugging adventure story of a young man and his horse (or actually of a horse and his young man), Spielberg has accomplished to gather both sides of his filmmaking personality, the exciting actioner and the trite manipulator, into one fell cinematic swoop.

Playing at plastic emotions as always, the first act of Spielberg's movie, set in the rolling hills of Devon, England, is one long roiling melodrama of heart and hope and typical Spielbergian hooey.  Once we get into the trenches of WWI France, the film predictably picks up, as the director's true forte is action - and he gives us plenty of it.  As we follow this heroic yet somewhat hapless horse around the battlefields of war torn Europe, at times a steely mount of the allies, and at other times a bruised and battered pack animal of those damned pointy-helmeted boys of the Kaiser, the adventure is ofttimes quite spectacular.  One scene in particular, as we see our intrepid hero running through the ramparts of war, leaping across trenches and facing down tanks, bravely rescuing a fellow equine, charging full throttle through the barbed wire terrors of war, is easily one of the ten or fifteen best filmed sequences in any movie this year.  Sadly though, as the war happily comes to an end, Spielberg throttles it back into the oversentimentalized (and this complaint is coming from a very sentimental critic) tropes that give his films such an unneeded extra layer of thick fattening sauce.

I suppose when all is finally said and done, War Horse is not a terrible film, but then again it is certainly not a film I can recommend to anyone but the die hard Spielbergian filmgoer - whoever they may be.   I once (half-jokingly) included the first twenty minutes of Spielberg's 1998 war opus Saving Private Ryan in my best of the year list, and I could probably do the same here, though War Horse's powerful twenty minutes or so are scattered in pieces throughout, and unlike the aforementioned Private Ryan, these few saving graces are not enough to rescue an otherwise trembling piece of manipulatively emotional moviemaking as War Horse ends up being.  In the end, the better bet would be to go and see the contemporaneously released other Spielberg movie, The Adventures of Tintin (made by the action-fueled side of the director and hence a much better picture) and leave this trying film in the dark - even with its inevitably demanded forthcoming Oscar nominations (cloying has always done rather well at Oscar time) in tow.

Film Review: Young Adult

With Thank You For Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air, Jason Reitman, son of Ivan of Ghostbusters fame, has yet to make a movie that has truly impressed me.  On the other hand, with the aforementioned trio of films, fils Reitman has yet to make a movie that has truly disappointed me.  In other words, the director is very good at crafting inoffensive, mediocre pictures that really have no high point nor low point (okay, perhaps Juno had some high points, but they were more due to the acting not the direction or screenwriting) and are only spotlighted by occasional moments of cinematic artistry.  In other other words, Reitman's still quite young oeuvre is, for better or for worse (you take your pick), about as middle-of-the-road as one can get.  

Now along comes the director's fourth feature, Young Adult.  The film stars Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a disgruntled thirtysomething writer of teen literature who returns to her small hometown to relive her glory days and attempt to reclaim her now happily married high school sweetheart from the perceived horrors of marriage and parenthood.  With this release, my opinion has not been altered in the slightest.  But do not take that as an absolute kicker, for the film does have some things going for it - even if a sense of cinematic wonder is not among these so-called things.  Yes, Theron hands in a rather intriguing performance as the lonely and spiteful former prom queen (if one cares about such accolades, an Oscar nom may be on the horizon), and Patton Oswalt delivers a quite remarkable performance himself as an equally lonely and spiteful, action-figure playing, garage whiskey-making, comic book collecting nerd and former high school nobody who befriends our intrepid heroine (again, Oscar nod could be in the actor/comic/professional nerd's near future), but overall, the film ends up as rather flat and quite predictable.

The film, written by Diablo Cody, whose annoying hyper-speak antics in her Oscar winning screenplay for Juno have been toned down to a more realistic tone here, never takes flight as it should, but again, it never crash lands like it could either.  Simply put, Young Adult is just sort of there.  Never putting forth enough effort to either stumble or shine, it just meanders on to its inevitable, but rightful final act.  The fact that Theron and Oswalt make their characters, neither of which is particularly likable outside of their oft-times brutal honesty (the only characters willing to be honest in the film), is a testament to their individual acting abilities - especially against the backdrop that is Reitman's uninspired direction.  The rest of the cast do not fare as well though, running the gamut from lack of interest (a rather dead-eyed, though possibly purposely so, Patrick Wilson as Theron's long lost, soulless high school sweetheart) to lack of screen time (Mary Beth Hurt and Jill Eikenberry as typically concerned mothers).  In the end though, we may not get the so-desired high points of the Reitman boilerplate standard, but we do get at the very least an interesting look at the perceived notions of adulthood and how they play out as false in almost every level - and no lessons need be learned.

Film Review: Martha Marcy May Marlene

Considering the history of such things, it may sound a bit weird to hear the statement, the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen is a damn fine actress, but nevertheless, there it is.  Elizabeth Olsen, making her feature debut (the actress has several other finished films on the horizon), is actually quite spectacular in Martha Marcy May Marlene.  Of course while her elder twin siblings were busy partying and becoming tabloid fodder, Lizzie was at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, exploring her craft.  Whether acting school is a help or a hindrance (there are arguments in both directions), the fact that the younger Miss Olsen (twenty-one while filming) gives such a stunning and harrowing performance, and gives it with the unique subtlety of a seasoned thespian, makes one toss the idea of hereditary talent right out the proverbial window.  But enough of this sibling rivalry (even as one-sided as it may very well be), for it is the film itself we are here to talk about today.

And as far as that film goes, the mysteriously and alliteratively titled Martha Marcy May Marlene, the directorial debut of Sean Durkin (winner of the Best Director prize at Sundance for his efforts) is just as subtlely harrowing as the aforementioned performance of Miss Olsen.  Taking a look at a young woman, freshly escaped from a Manson-esque cult in the Catskills of New York, trying to attempt submersion back into the so-called real world.  We first meet Martha (or Marcy May as she is rechristened by cult leader Patrick) in mid-escape, shortly before calling her estranged sister for help, and we, along with Martha, will spend the rest of the film in a state of trepidation and worried confusion.  As Durkin leaps back and forth between Martha's uncomfortable homecoming and Marcy May's bewildering life inside the cult, many viewers may become a bit disoriented (at least those not familiar with such non-linear storytelling), but this is just what the filmmaker wants from his audience - a sense of bewilderment, just as Olsen's multi-named, multi-minded title character has.

Making allusions to Martha's sense of reality (at some points one even begins to wonder if it isn't all in her mind) and how manipulated her mind may very well be (at least some of her memories are true, but just how many are to be trusted), Durkin creates a nearly constant sense of looming dread around his star pupil, just as Olsen shows how deep such fear and confusion go.  And the young actress does all of this by merely using the most important tool an actor has - her most expressive face.  Olsen shows such feeling, such deep emotion, without ever resorting to cheap theatrics, that such a gift puts her in a class with more renowned actors such as Kate Winslet, Michelle Williams, Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman.  We see on Olsen's face, the atrocities gone through, the anger and hurt and desperation in such a short life.  Even when the film tends to sag a bit as it inevitably does at times, it is this young up-and-comer that hefts it back up onto her surprisingly powerful shoulders and keeps the harrowing journey going on and on until the final cut.

Film Review: The Adventures of Tintin

Even after seeing the rather rousing Steven Spielberg-directed mo-cap The Adventures of Tintin, I still cannot say I am a big fan of motion capture animation, those cherub cheeked half human hybrids lost somewhere in that uncanny valley one hears speak of, but as far as cinematic adventures go, the director, playing once again at his popcorn-fueled breakneck Indiana Jones/Jurassic Park pace, has created a rollicking, unpretentious, nearly non-stop swashbuckling hell of a fun ride.

First coming into contact with the Belgian comic book adventures of intrepid manchild Tintin back in 1981, after reading comparisons to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and as legend would have it, immediately falling in love with writer/artist Hergé's sleek and simple designs, Spielberg befriended the comic book creator (whose real name was George Remi) and would eventually acquire the rights to film his own version of the adventures of this beloved (but admittedly little-known outside of Europe) comic character.  Cut to 2011, and years of artistic purgatory, and finally the director of E.T. and Hook has put character to screen to create what he himself has rather arrogantly, but innocently enough, called "Indiana Jones for kids."  The end result may feel a little funny at times (I still cannot get past the mo-cap style, though to give the director his due, this is the closest I have yet come to doing so) and the payoff of the finale may not quite live up to the promise of its earlier set pieces, but all-in-all, it is indeed a balls-out parade of action and adventure and good old fashioned storytelling that Spielberg is always capable, of but rarely able to pull off in such a consistently effective manner.

Featuring Jamie "Billy Elliot" Bell in the titular role of journalist-cum-detective Tintin and mo-cap poster child Andy "Gollum" Serkis as his salty, besotted sea cap'n compatriot Haddock (not to mention nerd patrol bro-couple Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in the bumbling roles of inept policemen Thomson and Thompson - two characters that give the film its occasional screwball bent), The Adventures of Tintin is a story of intrigue and skulduggery, full of the MacGuffins of Spielberg's beloved Hitchcock, as well as high seas pirate adventures, Indiana Jones-esque sky hijinx and a Moroccan-set car chase involving man, dog and hawk that will knock your proverbial socks off.  In other words, this is Spielberg, not wearing his morose serious face (which, even though overblown at times, does have its place in the director's oeuvre), but doing what he has always done best - telling a story full of bravura and classical cinematic kismet, while never thinking itself to be too high-minded to laugh at itself and its own tricks and tropes.

This is the kind of classical filmmaking, though ironically here, using some of the most advanced technological tools available, that first made Spielberg a star among the young turk Hollywood of the 1970's, and would inspire J.J. Abrams to make Super 8 earlier this year, his own homage to the director.  I personally have always been much more of a fan of the fun-loving, rather than the serious-minded Spielberg (the director's serious-minded companion piece War Horse is due out any day now and I suspect it will have much the same cloying effect that well-received but fault-laden films like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan had), and this animated adventure tale certainly falls into that category.  It also doesn't hurt to have a screenplay written by Edgar "Shaun of the Dead & Hot Fuzz" Wright, Joe "Attack the Block" Cornish and Steven "Doctor Who" Moffat.  These writers, also in a fun-loving mood, bring the characters of Hergé to bold and brilliant life - even if they are in mo-cap (the process, though at its best here, still has its bugs).

Now here, as in the comic, the character of Tintin is played as nothing more than a pragmatic and idealistic centerpiece for the much more layered supporting cast to rally around (or against as the case may be), so the character seems a bit flat at times, but the playfulness of the comics is given full share of these aforementioned adventures (the opening credits let us know right away that this will indeed be the case) and even the motion capture style has, as they say, come a long way baby.  Playing out as some sort of blend of Indiana Jones (think the original Raiders or even Last Crusade) and The Pirates of the Caribbean (the actual Disney World ride, not the eponymous and increasingly annoying movie franchise) this first in its own inevitable animated franchise (Peter Jackson, who acts as producer here will supposedly take the director reigns of the next one) may not make the best use of 3D and CGI this holiday season (that would be Scorsese's succulent and homage-filled Hugo) but still, The Adventures of Tintin (subtitled The Secret of the Unicorn in some circles), despite its flaws, is one of the most rollicking, unpretentious, nearly non-stop swashbuckling hell of a good times to be had in cinema today.   Granted, it may not be a great film (though solidly good throughout with moments of sheer cinematic giddiness), but it sure is fun fun fun - and that is what this Spielberg is all about.

Film Review: Sleeping Beauty

If for nothing else than bitter audience reactions, Julia Leigh's debut feature film, Sleeping Beauty (no, not that Sleeping Beauty), can be nominally compared to Terrence Malick's bold masterpiece The Tree of Life. The comparisons to The Tree of Life go no further than audience reactions, as the two films are really nothing alike.  While Malick's film is about the deconstruction of memory and the loss and regaining of faith, Ms. Leigh's film is essentially about the attempt of a young woman, who is dead on the inside, to find, for the most part unsuccessfully, an emotional outlet in any form she can find it.  Where The Tree of Life is emotionally provocative and immensely draining, Sleeping Beauty is a void of insular excess, even while showing the most shocking of moments.  In a way though, I suppose one could make a case for a connection, however soft it may be, between these two seemingly dissimilar films.  Both films surely take on issues of repressed memory and the need for an emotional outlet of some sort.  Granted, Malick's film is a masterpiece (and I do not use such a term lightly) and Leigh's, though with its share of cinematic bravura, most certainly is not.

Actually, if Leigh's film need be compared to anything or anyone (even T.S. Elliot said, "No artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone") then it would be to the cinema of Catherine Breillat.  Leigh, in her directorial debut (she is a well-known novelist in Australia), imbues her film with a methodical, determined cadence and an almost deadening emotional effect that is allowed an explosive catharsis only in its final moments.  This is the type of cinema that evokes the measured yet slyly rapturous oeuvre of the aforementioned Mme. Breillat.  Of course the comparisons do not stop there.  Other than Breillat being a novelist of some artistic renown in her own native France, she too released a film called Sleeping Beauty earlier this year.  Entirely different stories - Breillat's is more Gothic fucked-up fairy-tale while Leigh's is more modern fucked-up malaise - but intriguing nonetheless.

But enough of these comparisons (we can say Breillat and Leigh have both been inspired by the likes of Bresson and Bergman and move on) for Leigh's film, whether it resembles the cinema of Breillat or not, does stand on its own merits.  Leigh's Sleeping Beauty is the story of a young, somewhat promiscuous wayward woman trying to make ends meet by taking odd jobs such as waitress, medical experiment guinea pig and a job that seems to amount to scantily clad hostess of a fetish party (perhaps I am just a bit naive, but you have got to see it to believe it).  Eventually she lands a job as the titular beauty.  This job entails drinking a magical tea that puts her to sleep for several hours, in which time various wealthy older men have their way with her.  Hey, at least the money's good - and you have no memory of what has been done to you.  How many jobs offer that?

Emily Browning, last seen in the ridiculously inane Sucker Punch (so her calling card did not bode well for this critic), actually does a rather nice job with this deceptively daring role - just like a heroine from a Breillat film (but we are not doing that comparison anymore, so I digress).   Now, I can understand how many can be lost in a film such as this.  Between the deliberate pacing and the sexual frankness, one can see why certain audiences would feel either bored and/or uncomfortable - even those audiences who say they like art films (you know the kind, they watch Amelie and claim to be a foreign film connoisseur).  Too daring for many, and in a way not daring enough for this critic (the artistic bent in the film could lead some to think it much better than it truly is), Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty is nonetheless, a sometimes powerful look at the so-called breaking point of a person's already fragile psyche. 

Film Review: The Descendants

It has been seven long years since Sideways, Alexander Payne's beautifully fraught paean to the middle age man, but the wait for a new film, just the director's fifth in fifteen years, is finally over. The Descendants, stars George Clooney as Matt King, a Hawaiian land baron who must deal with the stress of his wife being in a seemingly irreversible coma, finding out that she was having an affair and was going to leave him, having to care for his two daughters, one ten the other seventeen, by himself for the first time in his life, and brokering a deal for selling off the family land as all his money-hungry cousins breathe down his neck about it and his father-in-law blames him for the coma. In other words, it is the worst of times and it was the worser of times.

Essentially taking on the struggles of the middle age man once again, or perhaps slightly over middle age man (sorry George), Payne gives us a look into the life of one particular man who should be falling apart were he not as strong as he is - strong even when it looks as if he were not. And it is Clooney who makes this happen. In fact the entire film is George Clooney really. Payne gets a pair of stunningly subtle performances out of both Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as Clooney's daughters, as well as from Nick Krause as a doofus friend of his eldest daughter (Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard, Judy Greer and Robert Forster also have small but productive roles), but when push comes to shove, The Descendants is Clooney's film to fly with or crash and burn with.

Now even though the film, or more accurately, the film's script, does border on the ordinary (though there is some pretty great stuff here, and it does have more maturity than his past works, this is surely Payne's least dynamic film), Clooney does manage to get the film to soar more often than not. With the actor's expressive eyes and unique body language (Clooney, often thought of as more of a movie star rather than as a bona fide actor, really is underrated in many circles) he gives his character both a sense of inherent grief and hopeful optimism, and he blends these two polar opposites into a surprisingly complex characterization of loss and rebirth. It is truly a testament to Clooney's acting ability, his prowess if you will, that a film that would have otherwise gone the way of most typical mainstream movies of this ilk, was made as dynamic as it was.

This bravura performance by Clooney (a work of remarkable subtlety actually) may not put The Descendants in a league with the aforementioned Sideways (this new film may be Payne's weakest work, but is still a film full of emotional depth, and as I stated earlier, surprising maturity), but it does put the character of Matt King in a league with Payne's other great men of ultimate sorrow, like the comic/tragic loneliness of About Schmidt's Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson's most absorbing performance since the seventies), the self-centered insecurities of Paul Giamatti's Miles in Sideways (no fucking merlot!) or the manic desperation of Jim McCallister in Election (Matthew Broderick playing the antithesis of his Ferris Bueller). It may not make Payne's film the great work I wish it had been, but it does raise it to a level it otherwise would not have reached. All-in-all, not a bad deal.

The Cinematheque Reviews: The Muppets

And now let's get things started.  Why don't you get things started.  It's time to get things started.  On the most sensational inspirational celebrational Muppetational.  This is what we call the Muppet Show!   Not since little Carol Anne Freeling spoke the infamous words back in 1986, has the phrase "They're Baaaaack" aroused so much giddy curiosity in those of the X Generation.   Thirty-five years after their TV show made its debut and twelve years after their last foray into the wilds of theatrical release, Kermit, Fozzy, Animal, Beaker, Rowlf, Gonzo and Miss Piggy are indeed baaaack.  Though it may lack a certain something that the original TV show and first movie had, I am still personally pleased as punch.  My review of said new Muppet movie is now up and running over at The Cinematheque.

Read my review of The Muppets at The Cinematheque.

The Cinematheque Reviews: My Week With Marilyn

Yeah yeah, stop your yammerin'.  So she doesn't look all that much like Marilyn Monroe.  Get over it.  She does a relatively good job in an almost impossible role.  Unfortunately the film as a whole, her performance notwithstanding, is just your typical middle-of-the-road biopic, so even if she were to blow us away with her portrayal (sadly she does well, but not that well) it would not amount to much of anything.  But I should stop my yammerin' as well, since I am merely repeating ideas I breach in my review of My Week With Marilyn.  In other words, you should stop reading this and head over to The Cinematheque where said review is now up and running.

Read my review of My Week With Marilyn at The Cinematheque.

The Cinematheque Reviews: Martin Scorsese's Hugo

Best.  3D.  Movie.  Ever.  Is this pure fanboy hyperbole or the real thing?  Obviously I am going to say the latter, though the former does exist inside me at all times, ever ready to pounce.  Seriously though, Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a damn fine motion picture.  In some ways very un-Scorsese (PG rated feel-good family film) but in others (a paean to film preservation) the film is pure Marty indeed.  Just to see Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon in 3D (or at least parts of it) is worth the price of admission - even if it is an inflated 3D price.  So yes, Scorsese (and film history) fanboy or not, this is the best 3D movie ever made.  Granted, I am not a big fan of 3D in the first place, so becoming my choice for best 3D is pretty easy really, but still, it is - so there.  I would also boldly proclaim it one of the finest films of 2011.  Whatever the case, you know the drill by now, as my review of said best 3D movie ever is currently up and running over at the review wing of this conglomerate, The Cinematheque.  Go on over and check it out, as all the kids are saying.

Read my review of Hugo at The Cinematheque.

The Cinematheque Reviews: A Dangerous Method

Chewy Cronenbergian goodness.  I actually use that term in my review of David Cronenberg's latest film, A Dangerous Method.  I am quite proud of the term actually - even if I am not quite sure what it means.  Whatever it means, it is how the film made me feel.  The film is the story of the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and the woman who came between them.  This description seems a bit more salacious than it probably needs to be, but then what appears to be a proper period piece at first, is given a serious Cronenbergian overhaul - a chewy Cronenbergian overhaul of goodness.  But enough of that.  My review of the film (originally seen at this year's Philadelphia Film Festival) is currently up and running over at The Cinematheque.  

Read my review of A Dangerous Method at The Cinematheque.

The Cinematheque Reviews: Take Shelter

When you want crazy, you can't go wrong with Michael Shannon.  Take Shelter is yet more proof of this fact.  I would love to see a (somewhat) surprise Best Actor Oscar nomination come his way in January.  My review of this kinda batshitcrazy movie is now up and running over at The Cinematheque.  I really have nothing more to say about this right now (yeah, I am not going to ramble) so why not check out my review.

Read my review of Take Shelter at The Cinematheque.