update. best of 2012 fever. Academy Awards.

I've spent the past few months trying to catch up on what I missed in 2012, which seems to be almost everything, based on the top ten lists I've scoured the internet for. (Okay, for the most part I just used the ones aggregated by Metacritic.) It's gotten to the doldrums of this annual process where I needed sort of a break so I've spent the past few days watching Fritz Lang movies and random film noirs on Netflix. Strangely, I've seen all of Metacritic's top 30 except for two that are readily available on Netflix and ostensibly films I would enjoy (Deep Blue Sea and that Oslo movie). I don't know why I'm holding off on watching them. Anyway, if there is one type of movie I never get tired of watching it's noirish old thrillers. Even clunky old ones like Jules Dassin's gloriously overrated but strangely compelling in its deceptive simplicity The Naked City.

Anyway, it was of course the Oscars yesterday. Like every year, I thought most of the nominees were glaringly mediocre. Even the better ones, for the most part, didn't strike me as particularly excellent. But so it goes. Of the best picture nominees, I would have voted for Amour. I didn't love the ending and think it strange that everyone has been gaga over Emanuelle Riva while seeming to forget that Jean-Louis Trentignant basically carried the movie. But honestly I was impressed by all three of the main performances, the other being that of Isabelle Huppert. But when is Isabelle Huppert ever not phenomenal?
It blew my mind when I realized this, but I probably would have selected Silver Linings Playbook as my second choice. I know a lot of people thought it was simple or trite or I don't know what, but I thought it was, for the most part, pretty well executed. There was some good, snappy dialogue and compelling characterizations that mostly made up for the missteps like the silliness about the letter and the oddly off-key counselor. My third pick would probably be Lincoln, as I did love a fair bit about it. I mean, I thought Sally Field was mindbendingly miscast and for me she seemed to be doing that thing where seasoned film stars gradually revert to playing caricatures of themselves. I found Tommy Lee Jones a little overearnest, but by the end I think he sold it, though I don't think the film really handled the bit about S Epatha Merkerson very deftly. I'm not sure if that fault lies on Spielberg or Kushner, but I have more faith in Kushner so let's blame the king of overblown shlock. It was be uncharitable to say anything about Joseph Gordon Levitt, but Daniel Day Lewis and David Strathairn were quite effective as Lincoln and Seward. I guess I didn't say much nice about it there, but in general it was pulled off well and the correlation to the gay marriage debate was present without shooting too far.

As for Beasts of the Southern Wild and Django Unchained, all I can really say is they were okay. Pleasant enough to watch, but I somehow couldn't connect to the former and found the latter kind of problematic. I expected to find the latter problematic, but it ended up being for different reasons than I anticipated: more narrative than moral. Oh well.

I disliked Argo and Zero Dark Thirty for similar reasons. In general, I found them disrespectful of the truth and the people they depicted. Especially Argo, but while Argo was reckless in a child of the 80s kind of way, I found Zero Dark Thirty almost Orwellian in its lack of context or any discernible morality. Maybe worse than that but possibly because of that, I also found it immensely tedious. Sad to say, but it kind of but a chink in my affection for Jessica Chastain. I don't really have much nice to say about Life of Pi. Or anything at all really. I mostly just thought it was really stupid and half-baked. I guess I didn't identify with it at all.

I didn't really care about any of the acting categories because they didn't seem to nominate any of the right people this year. I'm fine with Daniel Day Lewis, I suppose, because I haven't really thought of anyone else I'd have liked to see win. David Strathairn would have been my pick for best supporting actor, had he been nominated. I also felt like Michael Pena and Jake Gyllenhaal in End of Watch probably deserved acting nominations more than some of the actual nominees. I'd have picked Amy Adams for supporting actress, though I probably would have preferred for Doona Bae (Cloud Atlas) to be nominated. For best actress, I would have likely voted for Emanuelle Riva, but I feel like it would have been more interesting if Keira Knightley (Anna Karenina) or Melanie Lynskey (Hello I Must Be Going) had been nominated. Or Helen Mirren (Hitchcock), or Michelle Williams (Take This Waltz).

I haven't seen No, but of the four foreign film nominees I've seen I may have picked Amour, although I really feel like I have been rooting for War Witch. Then again, I feel like Romania's Beyond the Hills really should have been nominated because that probably should have won. Of course, I say this having seen only like 11 of the submitted films, so who knows. Anyway, mostly just glad that Caesar Must Die didn't get nominated because it's terrible. I also quite like Christian Petzold's Barbara, but it really had no chance of winning an Oscar. Actually, Beyond the Hills was probably too complicated to win anything either. Oh well.

For the short films categories, I was happy that Paperboy won since it was the best of the mediocre nominees, and while I would have voted for Henry, I'd have been happy with any of the nominees winning except for Buzkashi Boys, which was the weakest to me, but probably just because I don't care about sports, boys, men, or father/son relationships. Especially when it involves headless goat carcasses. I only saw one of the short documentaries, Inocente, which won. Honestly I didn't care for it much at all. I think it's a story that's been told better by other people and I thought the filmmakers made the mistake of exalting the child while slamming the mother. I don't know, based on the trailers for the other films I'm really surprised it won because it seemed the weakest to me.

I haven't seen The Gatekeepers yet, but of the four nominees I saw, I liked them all, though as is typical, I think the weakest film won. It took a great story and mangled it, I thought. Anyway, I would have picked How to Survive a Plague or The Invisible War and I would have nominated The House I Live In and/or Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel over 5 Broken Cameras or Searching for Sugarman.

I thought all of the animated movies were pretty weak, but in my opinion Brave, which won, was the strongest. I really didn't think it was anywhere near as weak as people said it was, and of course I thought the other four nominees were pretty bad. My favorite animated movie of the year was Consuming Spirits, though even if it were up Oscar's alley, I don't know that it would have been eligible this year. Sigh. Maybe next year. As of yet, it remains my favorite English language movie of last year and one of the top five altogether.

Not much to say about the other categories except that the music in Life of Pi is the one thing I liked about it.
Anyway. Not really sure this was very interesting to read, but I felt like I should get back into posting here.

Beasts of the Southern Wild and the State of the Oscar Slate

I put off watching BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD because I was worried it would fail to meet my expectations. My suspicions were confirmed tonight. It's an interesting movie, worth watching, one would say, but I'm not sure it quite lived up to its potential. Much like just about any other Oscar nominee I could think of, but WRECK-IT RALPH comes to mind, it's a great idea not fully realized.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson, 2012)

When it comes to trying to write on here about a movie as tedious and silly as this dumb movie, I begin to see that it takes a very special kind of person to review films. Everybody knew the plot going into this thing. I mean, I never read any of the books, but I saw the cartoon when I was a child and understood the rough sketch of the plot. So all that's left to talk about here is how silly it all is because it takes itself so absurdly seriously. I found it dull. It seemed to me, that it was being presented as a spoof of the previous films since it had all the weaknesses and none of the strengths of that film. D

Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012, USA)

Over the years I've had a number of friends who were bipolar or some other kind of crazy that was in the same ballpark. Lord knows I'm probably not too far off that field myself. Thus, I confess to having been pretty excited about seeing this movie, though somehow I resisted, presumably out of fear of disappointment. I finally went to see it the other night after the Oscar nominations were announced since it was one of the handful of nominated films I hadn't seen yet. While I'm a little surprised by all the acting nominations, I have to see I was more or less satisfied with the movie. There are a few rough patches toward the beginning, generally the parts that try to present "mental illness" to the naive audience. I understand how problematic those scenes can be so I wasn't really surprised that there were moments that didn't quite ring 100% true. I was surprised that every scene involving the shrink seemed off. I don't know if he was miscast or the part was 'miswritten,' but it was a minor distraction. It's a slight film, but at its heart it's more or less truthful about its subject matter. True to the director's style, the film contained scenes that were so energetic that they seemed improvised, and these were probably the strongest moments in the movie. I really believe that the scene where they make the crazy bet that sets up the big climax is the reason this film received so many nominations. I understand the criticisms about this movie being too optimistic about this couple's chances. Certainly there will be rough patches, but I don't think that negates the ending. B+

Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012, USA)

Before seeing Zero Dark Thirty, I was prepared to be scandalized and horrified, the same way I was when I saw The Hurt Locker. (Un)fortunately, the film is far too dull to be scandalous. The torture scenes are pretty tame, especially if you've seen documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side. The film is basically a plodding procedural thing. I found it hard to care about anything because the entire thing was almost completely devoid of context. So I waited for something that felt like three hours for the big climactic scene to occur. This, again, was ruined by a dearth of context, though unlike the rest of the film it spared the audience the silly dialogue that seems to be Bigelow's hallmark. My only feeling after seeing the film was a desire to know who all the collateral damage types were, like the parents gunned down in front of their children, who may have just been neighbors. I found it really hard to tell what was happening during the big climax. I didn't care for the film, but it was too ponderous to get very revved up about. Also, I like Jessica Chastain. I've loved her in some roles. But I don't understand why her performance in this movie is seen as so incredible. The movie never asks any questions, like whether it was worth all the resources and lost lives to kill this man in the middle of the night. It felt worth it when I first heard the news, but watching this movie I started to wonder. Perhaps that was intentional, but again, Bigelow doesn't seem to like to get herself muddied up with ideas so it's hard to believe that's the case. C-

Awards Humbug

When I was younger my best friend and I would get so excited about the Oscars, scrambling to see the nominees and then putting together a fabulous Oscar party. Either I'm getting older or the ceremonies are getting ever more tedious. Probably both, but how can I know? I'm surprised that I've gotten to that attitude that always made me bristle when I encountered it in others: I don't for the life of me understand the point of giving out these awards. Well, scratch that. I understand multiple points for the awards. I just believe that the extent to which these awards mean anything is severely limited. The Spirit Awards are still marginally interesting to me, but my relationship to the Academy Awards is generally characterized by a blend of indifference and frustration. I mean, how do you get excited about a thing like that when this crap exalting groupthink prevails. I'll admit that Lincoln is partially redeemed by a few strong performances (like David Strathairn, whom nobody seems particularly interested in nominating for anything) and an interesting script, but, hello, it's total kitsch, and Sally Field, bless her heart, certainly didn't help matters. Argo, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty are all mind-numbingly unremarkable. Well, the Tarantino one was remarkable for making me think about how much liked Lars Von Trier's Manderlay better, just like, I suppose, I couldn't stop thinking as my mind wandered during the insipid Argo how much I liked Persepolis. Then you have the adaptation of Les Miserables that was so botched and marred by bad style that you'd think it was directed by the same guy who delivered the shlocky The King's Speech. I haven't seen Life of Pi, Beasts of the Southern Wild, or Silver Linings Playbook, but I'm hopeful they'll be better than most of the other presumptive nominees. Right now, the only credible nominee is the uneven, Spielbergified Lincoln.
What was so great about Marion Cotillard in Rust and Bone? I like her, and it was a decent performance, but why has the borg decided it was such a powerful performance? Because she's vain and likes to dance with killer whales and get banged by abusive men? I don't know, I think that movie was kind of overrated. And for man-acting, the only performance that will likely be nominated which is neither bad nor inconsequential is that of Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln. I mean, again, I like Hugh Jackman, but his turn as Jean Valjean made me feel like I was watching a spoof on SNL. Actually, I felt that way through most of the movie, so it's probably Tom Hooper's fault, but why not blame the lot of them, I say. Ben Affleck was fine in Argo, but is that what this award means? Award to the least inadequate high profile performance?
It's been a lousy year at the cineplex. I'm hoping I love Silver Linings Playbook and Beasts of the Southern Wild enough that I don't spend the next two months sulking about the fact that I can't think of a single mainstream film that I liked better than Cloud Atlas  or Sleepwalk with Me. What???? Thank god that living in Chicago means I can see movies any day of the year that have nothing to do with the cineplex. I feel like I'm being an elitist here, but seriously, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo are the best you've got?

PS- Also, don't even get me started on Seth McFarlane. I appreciate that he's a fellow traveler on the yellow brick road and all, but if Ted (or Magic Mike, btw) get nominated for anything, something inside me will probably die. Speaking of the yellow brick road, I'll probably plotz for shock if How to Survive a Plague gets nominated since those documentary voters sure hate gay people. I see on one of those odds websites it's currently ranked as second choice to win the award, but I'm pretty skeptical, if past is prologue.

Directors Guild Awards nominees

-Ben Affleck, Argo 

-Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty

-Tom Hooper, Les Miserables

-Ang Lee, Life of Pi

-Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

______________________

I hope Life of Pi is better than the other nominees because it's really depressing that these are all they've got. I'm sorry, but Les Miserables was a mess and the other three were towering mediocrities. Of the four that I've seen, I'd probably have to say that Lincoln was the most worthwhile. Of course, these same people gave this award to The King's Speech (aka, PUKE) and The Hurt Locker (aka, UGH), so clearly the award doesn't mean so very much.

Hitchcock (Sacha Gervasi, 2012)

Hitchcock has a lot in common with My Weekend with Marilyn. They're both nostalgia trips and they're both likely to be forgotten. I can't think of why a film with such an A-list cast was directed by the director of Anvil, but I will say for it that the marital tensions between Alfred and his wife seem to ring true in the film. I never really believed Hopkins in this film, and I never really cared about his Hitchcock. Helen Mirren does a good job as his wife and James D'Arcy is pretty effective as Anthony Perkins. Toni Collette seems wasted in a role that makes her glorified wallpaper. Jessica Biel and Scarlet Johansson do well enough what they have to do in this picture, though their roles might be underwritten and Scarlet Johansson sometimes seems to fall out of character. Pleasant, but slight. B-

Rust and Bone / De rouille et d'os (Jacques Audiard, 2012, France)

I've loved the few Jacques Audiard films I've seen so I had high hopes for this one. It's about a down and out Belgian guy who's just rescued his son from his junkie mother and moved in with his sister and then he ends up being friends with this Sea World type lady who loses her legs in a freak accident. He's a former boxer and has anger management issues, sometimes to the damage of dogs and children around him. She's naturally depressed about losing her legs, which she had been proud of, and the movie is partially about whether we should judge her for her vanity. It's kind of a strange movie, as far as the plot goes, but it's also strange that it sets up these two as a couple we should root for, even though I'm not at all sure it seems like a healthy relationship. I didn't really get what all the buzz was about after the movie. The friend I saw it with said she didn't feel like she experienced anything different from what she experienced reading the synopsis and that she was generally bored. I wasn't quite as bored as she was, but I didn't really know what people were responding to other than the attractive cast until I read a few reviews later that day, particularly Andrew O'Hehir's, and realized it was a straight people movie... C

Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012, USA)

Of the end of the year prestige type movies, this is one I had particularly high hopes for. Perhaps that's what set it up for disappointment. I was really struck by how unremarkable it was. It skimmed along on the surface from episode to episode, often feeling disingenuous or mendacious. The acting was okay, but most of the characters felt two dimensional. It also seemed to suffer a little bit from the "Will somebody please worry about the rich white people?" scenario. They never really established why we should care about these whiny privileged people. I also couldn't help but draw comparisons to the Chris Marker film The Embassy, which was inspired by the Chilean coup in 1973 that claimed the lives of Salvador Allende and countless others. Given that the events that inspired both movies are claimed to have been the result of American interference in the domestic politics of foreign countries, I have to say I found to feel too badly about the people in this story. There is one comment in the film where someone asks whether justice for the former shah would be the worst thing, and by extension one wonders if justice for the people who propped him up would be the worst thing as well. Mostly though, I feel like the movie is this glib story of Hollywood heroism that doesn't succeed in making you care too much about the people being rescued. I was also distracted by all the reports of historical inaccuracies in the story. It felt like a pointless manipulation and it left me as cold as Saving Private Ryan, in certain respects. C

Les Mis reviews and Tom Hooper

I keep seeing this mixed reviews about how people liked the acting and such in Les Miserables, but Tom Hooper's direction has all the delicacy of any exercise involving a sledgehammer. Tom Hooper? Heavy handed? You don't say. I guess they were all drunk when they saw the infernal The King's Speech. Oh well, darling, at least the singing is reportedly good. I wish John Cameron Mitchell or Sam Mendes or somebody had directed it, but only annoying hacks like Tom Hooper, Adam Shankman, and Rob Marshall get to direct anything like this. Maybe Baz Luhrman should have directed this one instead of ruining The Great Gatsby for a whole new generation. (Though Carey Mulligan seems enchanting in the trailer.) It would have been a mess, probably, but probably an enjoyable mess.

Post Vacation Update

I've been travelling the past few weeks in South America and the Caribbean. Somehow I thought I'd be so bored I'd spend the whole time watching movies on my computer. I'm happy to report the contrary, however, as I hardly watched anything at all. I watched Like Crazy while I was holed up with a case of la tourista in Colombia. On a flight from Medellin to Miami I watched Frankenweenie and half of The Bourne Legacy. That's about what I can remember. I guess I'll decide whether to post about those when I'm refreshed enough to put together sentences again. I have this feeling that I'm terribly behind in my holiday season film watching, but I think I'm still too exhausted to make it to the movies. As for my vacation, I'm already editing the rough bits out of my memory bank, but I can say with certainty that I loved Medellin, Colombia, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, even though I don't so much speak Spanish.

ParaNorman (Chris Butler & Sam Fell, 2012, USA)

A young boy who can see and speak with the dead must save his Salem-esque town by resolving a 300 year old curse, which ultimately means learning how to forgive bullies. To be honest, I found it tedious for the most part, and intermittently grating. The stop motion animation is creepy and weirdly ugly. It was like looking at ugly carpeting for an hour and a half. A promising enough cast is wasted on recycled storytelling and unappealing animation. Really, the animation reminds me of that hideous animation you see these days on children's television programs. The basic shell of the story is compelling, but it's buried in so many cliches and under so many shrill characters spouting so much bad dialogue that even the things I liked about it started to wear thin. I have friends who liked this, so I guess other people like this sort of blander than Tim Burton childhood kitsch. I didn't see anything particularly interesting or engaging though.
D

Les Miserables anticipation fatigue

I'm entering that exhaustion phase of film anticipation that comes when a movie has been promoted for what seems like eons. To be honest, I was more than a little excited that Les Miserables was finally coming to the big screen. I've also been more than a little nervous that the director is Tom Hooper, since I found The King's Speech more than a little annoying.

Anyway, I'm still bursting with anticipation to see whether and how Anne Hathaway can carry off the line, "Come on, Captain, you can wear your shoes, don't it make a change to have a girl you can't refuse?" I can't even imagine those words coming out of her mouth since she strikes me as a bit prim, but she's pulled off being a junkie, so maybe she can pull off being a whore...

Worst Comedies of All Time

I guess FILM.COM has this list of the worst comedies of all time. Apparently over there at film.com the world started in 1984. Probably these kids are sheltered and don't know anything about movies from before E.T., though one of the authors, let's call her Molly Q. Millennial, says in a comment that the worst comedies are all from the past 20 years. I guess it never occurred to her that people thirty years from now will never have heard of Freddy Got Fingered. In general, the list is pretty uncontroversial, except for what kind of psychopath would include Who's That Girl on a list like this unless they were born after 1985 or before 1965? Also, it's not controversial to put All About Steve on this list, but I always felt that it was better than The Blind Side anyway, not to mention countless 'successful' romantic comedies like Sweet Home Alabama. Of course, I went into All About Steve expecting it to be bad so maybe my expectations were too low. I actually thought it was better than a lot of the movies of its sort. I mean, I haven't even seen New in Town, but I'm sure it's substantially worse than All About Steve. But why do people always have to be hating on Pat? Bullies, I say.
Anyway, I'd also suggest that Rhinestone (1984) transcends the conventional good/bad dichotomy, though I wouldn't necessarily go as far as saying I would watch the movie in one continuous sitting. Of course, this brings us back to what a questionable exercise it is to assert a supposedly objective evaluation of art. I'm willing to concede none of these movies are particularly good, with the exception of Who's That Girl of course, but I'm not sure it's a very well considered list of the the 'worst comedies of all time.' Which comedies have you seen that were more painful than these? For the record, the worst SNL films are Coneheads  and MacGruber.

End of Watch (David Ayer, 2012)

There are a number of reasons I'm not generally a fan of cop dramas. My stepfather was a cop, I'm generally resistant to authority, I find them strong on machismo and weak on sociology. They tend to feel sad and tense and generally oppressive. More generally, they tend to overly simplistic, reactionary, and borderline fascistic. This film is a typical buddy cop drama in a lot of ways, but it sidesteps a lot of the frequent weaknesses. The characters are more developed and the dialogue is stronger, for starters. The approach is more naturalistic, even though some of the subject matter is really kind of sensationalistic. Given the news reports about the Mexican drug cartels, it doesn't seem like anything here is particularly implausible though.
The focus of the story is the relationship between two beat cops who work in South Central LA. Played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña , they seem relatively authentic. Gyllenhaal is the war vet taking courses so he can go to law school. This higher education justifies the film's strangely half executed found footage conceit. He's recording everything for a documentary class he's taking to satisfy an arts requirement. The found footage conceit in the original script was apparently scaled back during preproduction, and some viewers seem to find its vestigial presence more confusing or frustrating than anything else. Personally, I didn't get too invested in the conceit. While watching it, I assumed that the video would somehow come into play as evidence, a turn of events that is foreshadowed by another cop's remark about the dangers of filming their work because it could be subpoenaed. Ultimately that ended up as something of a red herring, but I still found that that constant thread of the filming somehow made the characters seem more human. It was just this running bit that gave a sense of continuity. Peña's character is sort of a romantic and the head of a young family. There is a certain sweetness in the way that Gyllenhaal seems to follow Peña's path with his best girl Anna Kendrick, whose milquetoast quality works oddly well here.
I made a mistake partway through the film of looking at the film's Wikipedia page because I wanted more information about the director and supporting cast. It turns out there's a spoiler embedded in the title. It seems like it might not be much of a spoiler if you've seen the trailer, which I haven't, but as someone who knew nothing, it alerted me that the film was going in a somewhat different direction than I was anticipating. After that, it became pretty clear how the film would end. I thought it would surprise me for a while, but then it didn't. So sad. Oh well. As a whole, I found the cast relatively strong and the characters relatively sympathetic, which is probably something of a feat in a film like this.
When I was thinking about this movie it reminded me of my thoughts during the film festival. How do you give an objective assessment of a film? I have my own ways of assessing films, usually based on how much they stir me in the gut or in my head, but sometimes the rubrics people use in assessing film don't seem to make sense. This isn't really my genre. It's sort of predictable, the characters may be a little sanitized, it's kind of dour sometimes. Still, considering the genre it really excels. It made me appreciate what cops do in a way that few films have inspired. I grew very fond of many of the characters, even a couple of the thugs in the neighborhood. There are these great ironic moments, like the one where the dynamic duo is arguing about a rubber band while gangland assassins are in the car behind them discussing whether or not they will attempt to kill them at the stop sign they're approaching. I don't know that I'd watch it again, but it impressed me in what it did well. I don't know that everyone would like it, but I'd probably recommend it to most people, as long as they don't mind movies that are kind of serious. It's strange to me that this film was written, directed, and produced by the writer of The Fast and the Furious.
B

Steven Spielberg Top 5

Largely because of my tendency to agree with JR Jones, I tend to read the Chicago Reader film feed pretty regularly. Monday there was an interesting top 5 from a writer named Drew Hunt, whom I've honestly not taken much note of before. It seems to be an installment of his "Monday Top 5" series, which I sort of vaguely recall having read before. This particular list is of Steven Spielberg films, and while I don't necessarily feel the same about all these movies as Hunt does, I was pleased to see that it didn't focus on a lot the Steven Spielberg movies that make him one of my cinematic bêtes noires. I've been more annoyed than anything else by films like Saving Private Ryan, War Horse, the Indiana Jones films, and even The Color Purple (I loved the novel though) . I guess starting even with E.T. as a small child I never seemed to be able to connect with these over the top bourgeois populist entertainments, but there were some exceptions. Hook came out when I was in middle school, and I tended to like that largely because I really liked Julia Roberts at the time. I loved Schindler's List when it came out and I probably still think it's his best film, though I haven't seen Amistad, Lincoln, Munich, or The Terminal.

There's no sense in going in reverse order here, because the best film is obviously Schindler's List, though Drew Hunt seems to disagree because it's not even in his honorable mentions, let alone his top 5. Just to make sure we kill all the suspense here, there's no Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind here because I mostly think those movies are really boring.

1. I'm aware that some people have some problems with Schindler's List (1993), like maybe it's too manipulative or operatic or I don't even know what. It's absurd because these are the criticisms you could throw at almost his entire body of work, but it works in Schindler's List, in contrast to almost all of his other movies.

2. Sugarland Express (1974) found Goldie Hawn at the top of her game. And Steven Spielberg's kitsch was still somewhat restrained by the 1970s aesthetic.

3. Duel (1971) is a classic. I say this without even having seen the last ten minutes or so, but I tell you I saw enough. One day I'll need to find out if I'm right.

4. Minority Report (2002) could have gone either way, but the world is a better place because Samantha Morton has magic powers and her witchcraft made the entire film soar. Well, that's how I remember it anyway.

5. I'm still going to post this thing because hardly anyone reads it anyway, but I'm starting to wonder how all these real writers of content manage to come up with these things all the time. I honestly haven't seen most of these movies in years and years and years. With that said, of all those other movies I haven't seen in years, I'd probably pick Empire of the Sun (1987) as my fifth best Spielberg film, although part of me wonders if it's only because it was the favorite film of my best friend in high school. I don't know, I remember thinking it was a respectable film at the time. Anyway the only other possible contenders I could possibly think of would be AI or Always. Actually, to be honest, I fell asleep once when I saw Munich in the theater. It seemed pretty good, but I was super exhausted. Beyond that, I think Catch Me If You Can was somewhat better than I expected, and I'm hoping Tony Kushner's hand will mean I like Lincoln. So yeah, I guess that's why it's Empire of the Sun, even though it's no The Killing Fields.

Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012, UK)

A few years ago I had only seen a few of the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films and Dr. No. At the time I had a job where not much happened, but I could basically watch TV all morning, and Spike had a Month of Bond thing where they played almost all of the Bond movies in chronological order. Honestly, I'm not that huge a fan of the series. I liked some aspects of some of the installments and I liked some films better than others. I probably liked Sean Connery the least and possibly Pierce Brosnan the best, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I say all this to put in context my assertion that I think that Skyfall is probably the best James Bond movie I've ever seen. It has a lot of the weaknesses that characterize the previous films, and it leans heavily on the template that pretty much every James Bond movie is structured by. As usual there are two love interests here, but the interesting one (aka, the bad one for whom things don't work out too well) is probably among the most mesmerizing Bond girls in history. Honestly, I'm having trouble writing about this movie because in order to discuss how it fits in with the tropes of the series there are all kinds of spoilers that come into the equation. I guess what's interesting is that this movie fulfills most of the expectations you'd have for a Bond film, but it does so in ways that are sometimes inventive or even challenging to the canonical representations, particularly the role of Moneypenny, who appears very late in the film.

My boyfriend, like some of the reviewers I've read, complained that many of the action sequences seem weirdly slow or non-thrilling. I agreed, but I felt like it fit into the larger agenda of the film, all character development and ruminations on what it means for him and M to still be at this. Much of the acting is pretty good, particularly by Bérénice Marlohe (the bad girl, pictured above) and Judi Dench (as usual, M). Daniel Craig, Ben Whishaw (Q for Quartermaster), and Naomie Harris (Eve) are pretty strong as well, though Whishaw and Harris have weaker moments to offset their stronger moments. Javier Bardem is generally strong in his performance, though it sometimes (as is probably appropriate for a James Bond film) borders on cartoonish. The one off note for me was Ralph Fiennes. In fact, his first scene is a conversation with Judi Dench, which really becomes an object lesson in why she's considered such a great actress. Compared to him, she's so present in her role, so in command of what she's doing. There are a few criticisms you could make, particularly about the tightness of some of the action sequences, but except for one thing, which takes up less than thirty seconds of screen time but still manages to almost sink the entire film, I wasn't particularly bothered. But then, there's that thing that happens. I'd heard people talking about how absurd it is what the characters do in a pivotal moment of the film, acting stupider than anyone ever would for no particular reason at all, and as the movie progressed I had started to wonder if I was somehow missing what those actions were. Let me tell you, if you go see the movie, you will know it when you see it. It's like something from Scooby-Doo or one of those stupid spoof comedies like Scary Movie. I really couldn't believe it. The shock of it has dissipated and I'm not bothered by it as much as when I was watching the movie, but last night in the theater, I felt like my mind was blown by the inexplicably stupid direction the film seemed to be taking. Oh well.
B
For what it's worth, I also quite liked the Adele song and think it fit in with the movie better than they sometimes do, and the opening montage was also generally well executed.

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012, France)

You can't really deny that this film is a pretty pure example of masturbatory filmmaking. The filmmaker here has cobbled together all of these concepts of his in a way that seems very personal, and possibly somehow autobiographical. At the same time, the audience is constantly stroked, exactly like the audience in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris for being hip to what he's doing here or there. It's also pretty easy to say it's like a David Lynch movie, but not as straightforward. For me, there were stretches of the film that I found tedious or insipid, but there were also segments that I found compelling or even beautiful.

Denis Lavant, who played the main character Merde in that annoying middle section of that omnibus film Tokyo! from 2008 or something, is back here playing the same character and about ten others. In the film, he is chauffeured around in a limosine, possibly with bodyguard protection, and taken to different "sessions" or appointments. The almost mystical chaufffeur is played by mesmerising Édith Scob, who is perhaps best known as the girl in Franju's Eyes Without a Face. Like many of the characters in the film, it's hard to know whether to think of them as benevolent or menacing. Perhaps, as in many dreams, the figures are meant maintain the suspense of that mystery. They make nine or so stops and at each stop, Lavant plays a different character: a gypsy beggarwoman, a green screen actor, that same stupid troll from that Tokyo!movie, an emotionally abusive father, a murderous gangbanger, etc.

Man is said to differ from other apes in his propensity to ask why. So watching all these episodes, which end in the chauffuer donning her Eyes Without a Face mask and leaving the cars to themselves, it's hard not to try to make connections. He's clearly working through something about the artist's role, probably about his own life as well, since the protagonist's name is the director's real middle name, and it ends with a photograph of his lost lover. Like any other story about artists, it's easy to see metaphysical themes in the piece. Maybe god is in all these people in all these acts. I don't know, maybe this guy is just self-absorbed and preoccupied with the grotesque. I can't tell if it's because I had lost patience by that point in the film, but I was really surprised by how absolutely bored I was during the entire Kylie Minogue scene. In constrast, I was pleasantly surprised by Eva Mendes in the film. She's in the session with the stupid troll, but for some reason the troll shtick just barely tips toward succeeding in this film while it pretty squarely hit with a thud in Tokyo! Weirdly, my biggest reaction to the film is that my new dream is to enter Paris by car some day. I think I've been to Paris three times, but all three times I entered by train. In fact, I don't think I've ever even taken a cab in Paris, but this film makes driving around Paris look incredibly beautiful, all the while eschewing a lot of the kitsch that that idea is probably conjuring in your mind. In fact, there are all kinds of gorgeous views of the city, particularly as they stand atop the historic Samaritaine department store, which is allegedly being converted into a hotel, according to the interwebs.

I imagine I will probably watch this movie again at some point in the future, but I can't think of many people I'd recommend it to. I'm honestly surprised by the critical reception it's received. It won the awards for best film, best director, and best actor at the Chicago International Film Festival. I wasn't surprised at all to find out at after seeing the film that the director's mother is a long time friend of the festival organizer. Maybe it was nepotism, my cynical side says. Of course, it's also true, as the French say, à chacun son goût. I don't know, I can see making love letters to the movies, but for me there needs to be more than that, and this film didn't really connect to me like it seems to connect to a lot of other people. Oh well.
C

It occurs to me while reading through these reviews that I really did love the film for about the first third and it gradually kind of wore on me. Like Roger Ebert apparently, it brought to my mind the Walt Whitman line, "I contain multititudes." I guess I'd also agree with Ebert that the film is exasperating and sometimes funny, though I didn't really sop it up as much as he did. It's amazing how all these reviews keep talking about how exciting and not boring this movie is, since I was more or less bored for much of the second half of the film. The sessions in the latter half become increasingly more dour and confounding, I thought. In reading these reviews though, it's surprising how many people, like myself, seem to have forgotten about one of the more enjoyable scenes in the film, the entr'acte, in which a band of hipster accordionistes rampages through an old church.
I've also discovered that the title refers to old film cameras and the movie, shot on digital for financial reasons, seems to be about the death of film in some ways, though the director says allegedly that this movie isn't about film at all. I feel as gypped as the next guy when it comes to seeing a movie in digital projection, but I don't know how thrilling a two hour lament on the subject is.
It's funny as I read through the reviews listed at mrqe.com, everyone seems to agree that this movie will elicit all these possible responses from the audience. It's a unique film, but it's not as unique as people say it is. It can be touching, it can funny, and it can be frustrating, but I really don't see why people react so strongly to it. There was one review somewhere that said that the film says most of what it has to say in the first few episodes. I'd agree with that. My own experience of the film is that it would have benefited from some trimming, since like I said before there were some significant dull patches in the second half of the film.

Surviving Progress (Mathieu Roy, 2011, Canada)

Apparently based on the book A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, this documentary looks largely at the inherent dark side of progress. If you're a thinking person, you've probably thought about most of this stuff already, but I did learn one interesting concept from the film: the progress trap. Essentially, progress has a tendency to lead to a saturation point past which dire consequences occur.  A primitive example is native people driving herds of mammoths over cliffs and driving the extinction of their main food source. The film features people such as Margaret Atwood and Jane Goodall talking about primates and progress and the ecological dangers facing us today. It's interesting, but I often found it difficult to pay attention to because it's so distressing. I think I will probably endeavor to read the book, and I may watch the film again when I'm feeling more emotionally robust.
B

Now streaming on Netflix, btw.