happythankyoumoreplease (2011) / The Illusionist (2010)

happythankyoumoreplease reminded me of those indie comedies from the 90s that dealt with various creative New York people and their romantic goings on. It's about a short story writer who wants to be a novelist but who lacks the maturity for that and he finds a lost boy on the train who doesn't want to go back to foster care and ends up keeping him for a while. He also picks up this bartender named Mississippi and they amble towards couplehood while his best friend and his cousin (stepsister?) work through their own emotional hangups. It's not groundbreaking and its pretty slight and periodically very cheesy but it was generally entertaining. C


I found The Illusionist to be a film of real grace and a beauty that was at once complex and simple. An elderly French magician in what I assumed to be the late 50s travels around the UK working thankless jobs for an audience that has moved on from his old-fashioned amusements. A young girl attaches herself to him and she seems to believe he's a real magician who can supply her with all the things she desires. They live together. He tries to please her. Life goes on. There was this intense authenticity running through every scene and watching it was an experience of aching beauty and wonder. It's really amazing how affecting all the little details and background characters are. It's definitely the best animated film I've seen in the last year. Maybe in the last ten years. One of the best I've ever seen, I think. It's a little sad that Toy Story 3 is going to win this year just like whatever bogus nonsense beat The Secret of Kells last year. A

Even you, Andrew?

It's so sad to see a respectable critic like Andrew O'Hehir join the ranks of people who ought to know better but were duped by that awful Argentine film that won the best foreign film Oscar this year.

Read it and weep.


I've hardly watched any movies all month. I think I must be cleansing my palate after an overloaded winter of filmgazing obsession.

EDIT-
LMAO. I can't believe that I thought this was one of the three worst movies I saw last year (Worse than A Single Man even.) and a friend who saw it first said he was terrified I'd like it because it'd mean he could never respect me anymore and here's yet another critic frothing about how wonderful this film is.
Roger Ebert, I never!

December Heat / Detsembrikuumus (Asko Kase, 2008, Estonia)

This was Estonia's submission for the best foreign film Oscar. Of the ten I've seen so far, this one is currently ranked at number eight, between number seven from Romania and number nine from Hungary. It's handsomely produced, if melodramatic and intermittently cheesy, but the main thing is that it comes across as a little stridently political, almost propagandistic, which kind of makes sense since it seems like it was basically commissioned by the Estonian government to mark the 90th anniversary of the Republic. Of course, my knowledge of Estonian history is about as vague as possible and is mostly informed by my vague knowledge of the histories of the other Baltic states. I can't really find much information about the specific event depicted in the movie but it seems to have taken place in 1924. What was really strange is that the subtitles were intermittently inept and in particular the dates were rendered in such a way that I couldn't decide even what decade this was taking place in. I think it was more clear in the opening title but I didn't really process it all because of all these infernal latecomers. The dates in the subtitles during the movie ended up being three digits and a pound sign or a quotation mark or something. No, I didn't watch a bootleg with some half-assed internet subtitles, I saw this at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the EU Film Festival, for reals. Anyway... It seems that Estonia had a war of independence in the late teens where they gained their independence for the first time since 1227. Apparently, in 1924, Russia attempted to orchestrate a communist coup in Tallinn, the nation's capital. This is the story of how that coup was prevented, culminating in a sort of silly and hard to believe scene in a telegraph office. Most of the actors are fairly capable. The lead couple is attractive and likable. There's a story about a baker and his wife and son that's pretty effective. I sort of felt like the movie focused too much on a handful of rebels and military personnel and should have liked more context about the locals. It's interesting that the film seems firmly anticommunist and anti-Russian, perhaps resentful toward foreigners in general, but it also depicts rather overtly the abuses of the capitalists during the short-lived Republic. It was certainly engaging but perhaps not quite weighty enough and, I think, a little too nationalistic or something like that. C/C+

Chameleon / Kaméleon (Krizstina Goda, 2008, Hungary)

Chameleon was Hungary's official submission to the Academy Awards this year. Naturally it didn't get nominated and it wasn't even shortlisted. It's an entertaining movie but it's not the kind of movie that would get a nomination, I don't think, aside from the fact that it's not as good as many of the nominations, though ironically it's stronger than the film that won, but then again so was All About Steve.

The film stars Ervin Nagy and Zsolt Trill as Gabor and Tibi, a couple of guys who grew up in a rural orphanage and promised themselves they'd do whatever it took to live in a big city and own a house, so they could be somebody. Tibi and Gabor work as cleaning men in offices and so forth and use the information they glean from garbage cans and psych files to seduce women and steal all their money while they're waiting at the altar. Gabor falls in love with a dancer whose poster he's seen and drops pursuit of an aging antique store owner to pursue this less attainable woman, the daughter of some wealthy business guy. The dancer has a knee injury that might keep her from being an international star and there's only one surgeon who can save her knee but he's also out of reach so Gabor gets to work at getting the girl by conning the doctor into saving her leg. He cons a number of other people along the way and it turns out that he's not the only one who's other than what he seems.

The film is entertaining but it's not very original and there's something about the ending that seems pat and contrived. I've seen this film referred to as insightful but I wouldn't agree with that, I don't think. It sort of seems to comment on Hungary's emerging economic status the way Slovenka commented on that of Slovenia but it's not quite as good as that film and doesn't have as much to say. I mean, all it seemed to say was a bunch of adolescent male nonsense about the value of money and assorted half-baked claims about women and so forth. The movie also plays with homosexuality in a way that's not common in Eastern European films, as far as I've seen, but it really should have been a little more daring. C

Ranking 2009's 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar Submissions

Of the 65 films submitted for this year's Academy Award for best foreign film, these are the eighteen I've seen, in order of my preference.

1. France, A Prophet

2. Israel, Ajami

3. Korea, Mother

4. Germany, The White Ribbon

5. Peru, The Milk of Sorrow

6. Mexico, Backyard

7. Romania, Police adj.

8.Colombia, The Wind Journeys

9. Slovenia, Landscape No. 2

10. Estonia, December Heat

11. UK, Afghan Star

12. Denmark, Terribly Happy

13. Hungary, Chameleon

14. Bulgaria, The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner

15. Belgium, The Misfortunates

16. India, Harishchandrachi Factory

64. Greece, Slaves in Their Bonds

65. Argentina, The Secret in Their Eyes


I thought the top six were great, the next few were good, and the last two were horrible. I look forward to getting to see more of them as they become available.

Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009)

I finally got around to seeing this tonight, which is what I did instead of going to see that Romanian movie I had planned on seeing at the EU Film Festival at the Siskel Center. I used to really like Robert Downey Jr. but he's rather irritated me in recent years. It was refreshing to see him in another movie where I enjoyed him. I certainly enjoyed the movie more than I expected to, based on most of the word of mouth I had picked up on. I mean, it seemed like the prevailing wisdom when it was released was that it was terrible but it seems to me it's more successful than most big Hollywood movies of its kind. Jude Law was pretty decent in it as well and it's nice to see Kelly Reilly's still working. I've seen her in a number of things but never really caught her name or thought much about her though I liked her in those L'auberge espagnole movies. I finally know who Rachel McAdams is, I guess. That's one of those names I always read and never know who she is. She's pretty and such but she doesn't strike me as particularly interesting. The plot is ridiculous but entertainingly so. It was fun. I think it got a bad wrap. I agree that the score was pretty good and the production values were generally slick and fun and I'm giving this movie a C+/B-, I think.

The Secret in Their Eyes / El Secreto de sus ojos (Juan José Campanella, 2009)

I can't think of how to describe my reaction to this movie without using a string of strong epithets. I mean, seriously. This movie is BAD. Really bad. It's kind of like Law & Order: Criminal Intent but with even worse writing. Every single review I've been able to find of this movie online is extremely positive (even the review at Variety is glowing!) and refers to this movie as an exciting, romantic thriller. Um, okay. I don't think I'm giving too much away here by saying that the bad guy is pinpointed by the cop based on his eyes in some old pictures in some old scrapbook of the victim. And then the big insight as to how they'll catch the guy? He likes soccer. Yes, in Argentina, he likes soccer. They may as well have had the entire male population do a lineup for Jesus fuck's sake. But that's not all. I don't want to imply that this is just a police procedural. It's much more meandering and half-baked than all that. The protagonist is in love with his boss. I promise you that although this element of the film may intermittently seem like it has the potential to finally get interesting, it really doesn't. I feel like, if you're living in a retirement home and feeling nostalgic for the good old days when things were easy and you didn't have to think about things to know what was what, then you might like this movie. Otherwise, aside from a few competent camera shots, there is nothing interesting about this movie. I'm really appalled that this movie was shortlisted for the foreign film Oscar, let alone that it won! I mean, we all know that the Academy is composed of a bunch of idiots for the most part but who the hell was on the foreign film panel that thought this was worthy of being shortlisted, let alone being an actual nominee?!?!?! That is some fucking bullshit. So you have an empty plodding thud of a film beating out such outstanding films as A Prophet, The White Ribbon, Ajami, and The Milk of Sorrow. Wow. Fucking disgusting. Things like this make me hate this culture. I'm not even sure I care to find out what the hell is wrong with Americans that this is the kind of shit they like. It sort of amuses me that the Oscars and the Spirit awards were no better (and is many cases worse) than the Golden Globes this year. This movie is puke and not worth your time, if you have a brain, but watch it for yourself and let me know. F

The Milk of Sorrow / La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009, Peru)

What a curious movie. It's hard for me to watch it without being conscious of the foreign film Oscar race. I've seen three of the other nominees and several of the other submitted films and I'm not sure this would have made my list of nominees. It's hard to say though because I feel like I'm still digesting this movie and want to see it again. I certainly loved the way the movie opens. The singing and the deathbed with the mountains in the window and all that are kind of thrilling. The story was touching. I appreciated the restraint. I don't know how I feel about this movie. I liked the music and the framing and the cinematography quite a bit. The mother was phenomenal in her one scene. The protagonist, Fausta, is mysterious and compelling. I sort of felt like there were things going on that I didn't understand culturally, such as the dynamic with the protagonist's boss. There's this great scene though where Fausta's going to work for the rich pianist for the first time and they walk into her yard through a sort of garage door type thing and that scene is an extremely effective evocation of class dynamics. It's past my bedtime. I don't know what I think about this movie yet so I'm going to give it a B+ for now. I think there is probably more depth and truth to this movie than in three or four of the other nominees but I guess I still would have voted for A Prophet just because of how intensely cinematic yet graceful it was. Of course, there's grace here as well. I just don't know. I'm rambling now. Bedtime!

Rant about The Hurt Locker and Avatar and the Academy Awards

I think it's so funny the way people carry on about the money James Cameron spent on Avatar and act like the fact that The Hurt Locker was made for $11 million dollars is some kind of a mitzvah that qualifies a second-rate director like Kathryn Bigelow for canonization. Avatar is one of the finest spectacles in the history of cinema and I think the backlash against it is absurd. Are these the same people who liked Titanic, the Terminator movies, and the Alien movies? Pauline Kael wrote that we feel compelled to watch movies we won't like because we want to understand their effect on other people. I have to say, this Avatar vs. The Hurt Locker meme is one that has me feeling incredibly alienated, like I don't even know what kind of culture I'm living in. Clearly the writing in Avatar isn't great. It is however the best written movie James Cameron ever touched. Anyone who says it isn't is living in very tightly insulated nostalgia bubble. I think Avatar really is a great movie. Certainly it's flawed but whatever dismissive things people say about it being unoriginal or whatever seem so absurd to me. As if Shakespeare's plays were original. We remember them today not because they were original but because they were better done. (I am not comparing this movie to Shakespeare.) I can't understand how people can dismiss it by comparing it to any number of awful movies like Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Last Samurai as if this movie doesn't do what all of those movies tried to do so much better. I'm a fan of the Joseph Campbell school of storytelling and I really think the world would be a better place if people told more of this kind of story. I also think that pretty much every discussion of why this film is somehow reactionary, hateful, or politically incorrect pretty much misses the point. It's pretty clear that Cameron is commenting on American foreign policy and our relation to the middle east and to the world as a reckless, imperialist nation. Some people have said this reading of the film in unfounded and those people are clearly either "slow" or weren't paying attention to the movie. I mean, if all the stuff about getting at the stuff under their feet and all that weren't pretty clear the Colonel very pointedly refers to his military offensive as "shock and awe." I know Joan Didion said the future was always bright in the golden land because noone remembers the past but, come on people, this was less than ten years ago. Anyway, the movie combines this very political statement with a classic hero myth. What's interesting about this myth, however, is that the hero doesn't become a hero until he turns his back on his old self and becomes one of the Na'vi people. For all those people who found it very easy to coast through college writing Marxist critiques about anything imaginable and have remained in that lazy stance, I would suggest that this movie is not about the white man needing to save the native people although clearly there is an aspect of that. It's about taking responsibility for our own sins. It's not about patronizing an imaginary race of natives, it's about returning to our ideals. Anyway, as a good friend of mine said after seeing the movie, "How could I not love Avatar? It's like somebody made a movie out of everything I worry about every day." Sure, it's kind of simple; I don't know if you've noticed but there are "legitimate" journalists debating whether global warming is a hoax or whether the president is a secret muslim spy. Furthermore, I'm not sure it's ever been established that simplicity is a necessary evil. I mean, this is an entertainment film. It's meant to be a spectacle, not a movie about ideas, which makes it pretty funny to me that there are more ideas in this movie than so many of the other groupthink favorites this year. I also think it's funny that some of the same people who criticize this movie (or the politics of Precious for that matter) have written defenses of The Blind Side. Anyway, I think there are flaws in Avatar but that some of the criticisms are petulant and absurd. I also think the series of rites of passages is thrilling, as are the battle sequences. I think that the planet is gorgeous and thrilling and all that pantheist mumbojumbo with the tree and everything is enchanting. Of course, this movie speaks to all my own beliefs and so forth and I understand that it wouldn't appeal to everyone. I think it's absurd though the way many people hate it, given all the horrible movies they seem to prefer.

As far as The Hurt Locker is concerned though I feel like I'm through the looking glass or something. It seems universally acclaimed, adored by both professional film critics and film bloggers alike. Strangely, nobody I really know in real life can stand the film. I went to see it because of all the buzz on NPR last year. A friend warned me I'd hate it and I assumed he was being an old sourpuss. I paid my eleven dollars and my mind was blown by how awful it seemed to me. I found myself texting my friend during the movie about how it was absolutely as bad as he had said it was and that it seemed to get more and more painful as it went on. The writing is a joke. The whole movie plays like a long, mean cliche. It's offensive to the soldiers and the Iraqis alike. It's grossly inaccurate. It presents a completely political war as apolitical. I don't understand what's to like about this movie. I did not like a solitary thing about it. The only thing that kept it from being my worst movie of the year is that I saw The Road directly afterward and The Road managed to be even worse. I don't know. I don't think Avatar was the best movie of the year but I do think a lot of these popular "critical favorites" were dreadful. I mean, The Hurt Locker and Precious won awards for screenwriting last night. If that's not bad enough, there is a huge group of seemingly intelligent people who seem to think that those awards should have gone to Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air.

I don't know. I feel alienated from the world today. I know I dropped my film studies minor in college because I decided that people who study films tend to be geeky fanboys of assorted forms of trash. Boys in brown pants who wore glasses and talked all day about Tarantino and Godard.

My silver linings last night were that Quentin Tarantino lost to a movie whose writing was as uneven as Precious for screenwriting and that my favorite won for best live action short. Yay, The New Tenants!

2009 in Review: Updated and Final (je crois)

Well, the Oscars are tonight and we're embarking on the third month of 2010 so it seems prudent to seal off my 2009 movie matrix. These are all 128 (if I've counted correctly) of the movies I've seen that could be construed to have come out last year. Not a single English-language movie made my "Loved It" list! Come on anglophone world, let's pick up the slack here!!! (Edit- In the Loop and Amreeka came close to making my "Loved It" list. Maybe I did love them and just don't know it yet...)

Loved It
Cherry Blossoms (Kirschblüten - Hanami)
Gomorrah (Gamorra)
Hipsters (Stilyagi)
A Prophet (Un prophète)
Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo)
Summer Hours (L'heure d'été)
Who's Afraid of the Wolf (Kdopak by se vlka bál)
A Woman in Berlin (Anonyma- Eine Frau in Berlin)
A Woman's Way (Strella)

Really Liked It
35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums)
Ajami
Amreeka
Avatar
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)
Backyard (El Traspatio)
The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès)
Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos)
The Cove
Crazy Heart
An Education
Every Little Step
Fish Tank
Flame & Citron (Flammen & Citronen)
A Frozen Flower (Ssanghua jeom)
Half-Life
The Headless Woman (La Mujer Sin Cabeza)
In the Loop
Invictus
Jerichow
Julia
Lorna's Silence (Le silence de Lorna)
The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada)
Mother (Madeo)
Precious
The Rapture of Fe (Ang Panggagahasa kay Fe)
Ricky
A Serious Man
The September Issue
Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo)
Treeless Mountain
Two Lovers
Valentino: The Last Emperor
The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
Women in Trouble
You, the Living (Du, levande)

Liked It
9
(500) Days of Summer
Antichrist
The Chaser (Chugyeogja)
Coco Before Chanel (Coco avant Chanel)
District 9
Drag Me to Hell
Eyes Wide Open (Einaym pkuhot)
Easy Virtue
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
Goodbye Solo
Humpday
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Import/Export
Ink
Julie & Julia
Made in Hungaria
New York, I Love You
Nine
Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.)
Revanche
Rory O'Shea Was Here
The Secret of Kells
Sherlock Holmes
Sin Nombre
Sita Sings the Blues
Sunshine Cleaning
Taken
The 'Thank You' Girls
Trucker
Tyson
Vincere
Whip It
Will Not Stop There (Nije Kraj)

It were so-so.
Adam
All About Steve
Brüno
The Brothers Bloom
Cheri
Coraline
Duplicity
Eastern Plays (Iztochni piesi)
fados
Food, Inc.
The Girlfriend Experience
Good Hair
Hidden Diary (Meres et filles)
The Informant!
Into Temptation
Kathy Griffin: She'll Cut a Bitch
The Last Station
Leaves of Grass
Make the Yuletide Gay
The Messenger
Michael Jackson's This Is It
Moon
My Brother Is an Only Child (Mio fratello è figlio unico)
No Impact Man
Of Time and the City
Paris 36 (Faubourg 36)
Princess and the Frog
Rage
Tokyo!
Up
Up in the Air
Whatever Works
The Young Victoria

Didn't Like It
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Away We Go
Big Fan
The Blind Side
Bright Star
Case Unknown (Enen)
Funny People
The Hangover
Inglourious Basterds
The International
The New Twenty
Not Quite Hollywood
The Obama Deception
Public Enemies
Star Trek
State of Play
World's Greatest Dad

Hated It
El secreto de sus ojos
The Hurt Locker
The Road
A Single Man

A Prophet / Un prophète (Jacques Audiard, 2009, France)

What serendipity that I happen to watch a movie like this when only this morning I had been revisiting Pauline Kael's "Trash, Art, and the Movies.". (Note her use of the Oxford comma!) This is quite an exhilarating film. At times the sustained tension is almost maddening. The film certainly created a tone and held me transfixed for the duration of the running time and although the character is certainly not a hero in any moral sense I certainly found myself pulling for him and feeling elated at his triumphs. Jacques Audiard is a director whose name I had not previously been familiar with although I watched his 1996 film A Self Made Hero almost ten years ago and I remember quite liking that film. His 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped has been chilling on my Netflix queue for quite some time now and I'm certainly anxious to get around to watching that now.

I loved the use of music here, both on the score and the song that plays in the final moments of the film which is too surprising and fitting and perfect and fantastic to name here since I shouldn't like to ruin that surprise for anyone who might happen to read this. Tahar Rahim makes what seems most certainly to be a breakthrough performance as Malik, a 19 year old man who is being incarcerated for six years for some kind of violent incident involving a cop. The film sort of chronicles these six years. He has no friends on the outside and seems to have grown up parentless in assorted institutions. Shortly after he arrives in prison the Corsican gangster who seems to run the place informs him that if he doesn't kill this guy who's about to go to trial and make trouble for the Corsicans, he's dead. It's a great performance and the plot is exquisite with its connections and surprises. I'm not sure what to say here about it but I really loved this movie. I don't know if The White Ribbon is the best of the nominees in the foreign film category this year but, having seen three of the nominees, I'd probably rank it second or third, with A Prophet being my favorite. I think I'd even put Ajami in second place because it showed me some things I didn't know about the world. A+

Film Independent Phooey

So the Spirit Awards are over. The winners are listed here. What a snooze that all is! I think it's nostalgia that makes me so irritated; when I was in college we'd act like the Spirit Awards were the Super Bowl or something. Of course, it all went downhill after they got rid of John Waters and starting changing their name or whatever. How do I take a film award seriously that nominates The Last Station and (500) Days of Summer for best feature and gives the award to Precious over Amreeka and doesn't even nominate Two Lovers in that category. Anvil! for best documentary??? Also, I really kind of liked Humpday but I think it's really disgusting that it beat out Treeless Mountain to get an award. Speaking of Treeless Mountain, it was totally robbed for best cinematography, with all due respect to A Serious Man. I also liked An Education but there's no way in hell it was better than the other nominees in the foreign film category. I mean, I've *seen* Mother and it's certainly not better than that. Maybe I'm just racist against white people. Like Woody Harrelson who deserved supporting actor awards for No Country for Old Men but not for a puke bucket like The Messenger. It's hard to say if I agree with any of the winners because I don't even think the nominations are legitimate. Oh well. FAIL.

The Last Station (Michael Hoffman, 2009)

I'm coming valiantly close to being caught up with what I've been watching. I saw this earlier in the week and I haven't really thought of much to say about it. It was interesting to learn a little bit about the sort of Tolstoy cult that I had seen hinted at before but about which I don't know very much. The trouble is it came across as kind of flat and superficial. I mean, there must have been real issues here but the film shows it as a sort of dry soap opera. I'm having trouble coming to the point I mean. In any event, I felt like the acting was off as well. Christopher Plummer hams it up like a sort of parody of a grand actor. Paul Giamatti is loathsome and cartoonish and typically irritating. With the exception of Helen Mirren the female characters seem similarly one dimensional. James McAvoy is charming and serves as a pleasant anchor to the piece but his character doesn't feel fleshed out enough. Helen Mirren is generally a pleasure to watch and is most of what makes this uneven movie at all worth watching. The cinematography seemed a little off as well. I can't profess to know enough about photography to speak of it intelligently but it seemed like whatever they were trying to do they only managed to do halfway. C/C-

A Second Look at Two Best Picture/Best Actress Nominees

I went back and revisited An Education and Precious last week to refresh my memory. I still don't understand why Tilda Swinton wasn't nominated for Best Actress. Whatever.

The first time I saw An Education I loved it for the most part but I thought the ending kind of ruined it a little bit. This time I was less mesmerized and electrified throughout the movie but I also found it more even. I felt like I watched it more as a serious movie this time, slight though it may perhaps be, and I also appreciated the ending better. I think both of these movies have in common that they largely succeed on the strength of the performances of the actors though this one has better writing, better cinematography, and higher production values. I mean, I know we all get tired of these coming of age stories sometimes but I liked it. I don't know how to talk about this in terms of the Best Picture Oscar because the nominees for this and most categories this year are so ridiculous it's hard to take them seriously. My choice for Best Picture would be Avatar. Second place would go to A Serious Man and I'd probably give An Education the bronze. For the actress award I'd vote for Meryl Streep but Carey Mulligan would be my second choice. I kind of feel like both Mulligan and Sidibe are too young. I don't know what they can do. She was great in this movie. Maybe Gabourey was better but I'm not sure. One of the things I really liked about this movie was the supporting cast. Brenda Blethyn does her thing without overdoing it, like she sometimes lovably can. Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike are great as David's friends. Peter Sarsgard plays this role with such a great blend of charm and sliminess. It's not a movie I'm likely to return back to over the years but it's certainly well put together. B+

I guess I'd put Precious in third place for Best Actress and fourth place for Best Picture. The film is really powerful. The performances by Mo'Nique and Gabourey Sidibe are riveting. It's just that the writing isn't so great and some of the other characters, including the teacher, are kind of hollow. B

Oscar Nominated Live Action Short Films

This is spoiler city so if you plan on watching these and haven't already I guess you shouldn't read this.

My boyfriend and I went to see the Oscar nominated live action short films last week. I had already watched the animated nominees online though I can see after seeing the live action ones on the big screen that it may have also been worthwhile to see the animated ones that way.

Kavi is timely and well-intentioned. It's also a pretty decent short film, even if it suffers from the sort of sentimentalism you might be afraid of... It's about a boy who lives as a slave with his parents making bricks all day in the hot sun while the private school boys play cricket in a small, neighboring field. At the beginning of the film, Kavi seems relatively happy, playing make believe games in his family's domicile, which is basically a brick cell. One morning he's working with his parents, very efficiently like a good boy, when he is distracted by some boys who are, for whatever reason, playing cricket in a small field next to this slave labor camp in the middle of nowhere. He's taken to the boss man and scolded and the boss says the boy is his fastest worker and if the boy can clear away this giant stack of reject bricks, they can play cricket together. As the boy is moving the bricks from one pile to another he overhears one of his fellow slave laborers talking to a couple of journalists or activists or something. They try to get the boy to talk but he runs off with a bottle of soda and his apprehended and punished by the guys in charge. He turns sullen and can no longer enjoy his life there. He gets in trouble the next day for throwing a ball back to the private school kids and the whole family gets beat up on and the boy is chained up in the office. The camp is suddenly evacuated and the cops show up with the two men who were asking all the questions in the woods behind the brick pile but there's nobody there and it seems like the man who runs the camp is going to get away with it but the buy escapes and runs out. There's a ridiculous moment where the boss tries to frighten the boy into keeping his mouth shut and the two activist guys are trying to get the cops to do something other than stand there looking disinterested. It ends with sobering statistics about world slavery. It's well intentioned, pretty to look at, and very engaging but upon reflection it seems kind of forced and manipulative. I mean, I kind of agree with WEB DuBois that any art worth giving a damn about is really some kind of propaganda but I don't think there was enough design here. It seemed simple and lazy, somehow. B

Miracle Fish was the one I had already seen before. I thought it was kind of bad. Both times. When I watched it online it just seemed kind of bland and pointless from start to finish. This time, it was more uneven. The movie starts with a mother dropping her boy off at school. It's his birthday. She has to go see his dad in the hospital. She gives him his lunchbox and tells him there's a surprise inside from his father. He sits in class and the kids behind him throw things at him. He goes outside for recess and finds a miracle fish in his lunchbox. The boys come over to rub it in that he didn't get anything for his birthday because he's poor and he makes up stories about all the stuff he got. They say mean things to him and go off. He goes to the nurse's office but she's on the phone so he shows himself into the sick bay and takes a nap. He wakes up and the school is deserted. He walks around. Finds a book about alien abduction and looks around. Goes to the school store and eats a bunch of candy bars and such. Walks around. You see a bloody handprint on the back of the door when he closes it. He hears a cell phone ringing. He finds and answers the phone and is told to hide. He stands there being difficult. The lunatic who was seen in the background when his mother comes down the hallway and into the room reciting a crazyman spiel like a first year acting student. They have some meaningless chatter. The man is shot. The boy is carried away by a policeman, never loses his composure. This is another movie that isn't thought through enough. This one is even worse though. I can't think of why it was even nominated. There's nothing interesting about this movie. I think this piece here sums it up better than I have. Oh well. D

The New Tenants ended up being my favorite, I think. I liked the weightier The Door quite a bit and I enjoyed the quirkier Instead of Abracadabra but something about this one just worked for me better. It starts with two gay men sitting at a table. One is smoking and reading the paper and the other is eating meat on a stick and, I believe, reading as well. The one who is eating complains about the other one smoking while he's eating and the other one launches into a tirade about any number of things, including Chernobyl, interestingly enough. The movie is basically them sitting there arguing and neighbors dropping by and acting crazy. You realize these guys have just moved in. All hell breaks loose and they do a sort of surreal dance. It's completely implausible but it somehow really works. A-

The Door only falls short of being my choice for the best of the nominees by a hair. It's about this couple and their daughter who are evacuated from their home after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. They leave their whole lives behind and like many other children, the daughter is lost to radiation sickness. The father defies the law and sneaks into the old apartment to steal the door so that he can carry his dead daughter on the door as they had done with his father (grandfather?) It struck me as a graceful, beautiful, humane film. A-

A friend of mine referred to Instead of Abracadabra as the 'Napoleon Dynamite' one. That kind of sums it up. I enjoyed it. I laughed too loud. It's a dark, quirky comedy about a dweebish man still living with his parents and thinks himself a magician. He convinces his parents to let him put on a show for them and ends up putting the mother in the hospital. He falls for the new next door neighbor and invites her to his father's party that weekend. He convinces them to let him perform at the party by saying he'll get a job. The show at the party is like a twisted take on the dance number in Napoleon Dynamite. It's amusing but I don't know if I really liked it that much, if that makes sense. Maybe it's just sort of quirky and disposable. I can't put my finger on what it's missing for me... B/B+

Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shandi, 2009)

I finally made it to see the Israeli nominee for Best Foreign Film today. It was really good. I've seen it described as a network narrative but I don't know that it's as sprawling as that implies. It has that puzzle out of order thing going on though and it actually ends up being pretty effective, I think. It takes place in what seems to be an Arab city on the outskirts of Tel Aviv called Jaffa. It's kind of set up into chapters and it starts off with a string of murders and a demand for blood money and there's all kind of misery and intrigue that follows. It seems pretty true to what's going on over there. It's a mess. But it's a powerful and beautiful film. Watching the movie, it's easy to empathize with most of the characters but you walk away wondering what it will take to bring about some rational decision making. The movie seemed similar to Gomorrah in parts but it ends up feeling more graceful. It's strange that a film with such an ending as it has--tragic and violent--can leave me feeling a kind of grace.

I've spent so much of the past fifteen years gorging myself on American films, sucking up everything on TCM or the Sundance/Landmark Theaters/Independent Spirit waves and now that I've started watching more contemporary world cinema, instead of fixating on those films highlighted in the Auteurs chapters of any film history textbook, I feel like a sponge desperate for news and truths from the world. In the past six months since I stopped reading books and starting binging on movies I feel like I've gained so much understanding about so many modes of existence I had never given enough thought.

It was really great. I hope you see it. A/A-

February Update #3: Trucker/Princess & the Frog and the Animated Feature Oscar/Miracle Fish/Amreeka/Moonfleet/The Cove/Dirty Filthy Love

It's been winter doldrum season so I've sort of been slacking on this thing.
It's been a pretty uneven month, certainly last month was more fulfilling cinematically but I suppose I've filled in some gaps.

Trucker showed up on some end of the year lists and it caught my eye at the video store a while back and I finally got around to watching it a few days ago. Michelle Monaghan is a woman who had been married to Benjamin Bratt, seemingly a great guy, and abandoned him and her child. She works as a semi truck driver now and seems happy with her life of driving, drinking, and no strings sexual encounters. She has what seems like an ill-advised friendship with a married neighbor and after depositing him on his porch she stumbles home to find her ex-husband's wife waiting for her with the discarded son. It seems daddy is in the hospital with cancer and his wife's mother just died so she needs to go away for a few weeks and the mother is reluctantly stuck with her son who is naturally resentful. I guess you can imagine what comes next. The film is likeable. The mother's flight from the definitions the world has imposed upon her is understandable and the characters come across as authentic and compelling for the most part. There's an act of violence toward the end and I'm not really sure it worked for me. I love that it's about working class people, more or less, but it never really soars like Frozen River, as I hoped it might. B/B-

I finally watched The Princess and the Frog so now I've seen all the Oscar nominated animated feature films this year. I feel like this one is probably the weakest even though I think I rated all of them three out of five stars on Netflix, except The Secret of Kells, which I rated four stars. It feels like a Disney movie in sleepwalk mode. It's just a regurgitation onto a standard template with standardly unimpressive music. That said, it's kind of engaging in a slight way. It has the sort of charm I might expect from a well-done direct-to-DVD children's movie. I've never seen All Dogs Got to Heaven 2 but it felt like a sequel to All Dogs Go to Heaven somehow. Maybe the music and the attitude. I feel like it makes sense that their first black princess would find herself in the middle of a sort of bland undertaking and, culturally, it's probably for the best. I'm just glad there wasn't a single rap in the whole movie because that would have been really gross. I liked the touch of bayou flavor in the music and the attempts at local color but it was kind of insipidified during Disneyfication, I think. C

On the subject of the Animated Feature Oscar, I'm not sure if I have a horse in the race. It'll probably go to Up, which I didn't care for all that much, but I'd probably have voted for The Secret of Kells. My second choice would probably be The Fantastic Mr. Fox. I haven't seen Mary and Max and the word I've heard on it has been very splintered but I kind of expected that to get nominated.

Miracle Fish is an Oscar nominated live action short film from what seems to be a much hyped Australian production company. It's about an eight year old boy who gets picked on at school because it's his birthday and all his mom gave him was this lame fortune telling fish thing that looks like it cost one to two dollars. It looks like you can currently buy 12 for five dollars on their website. In any event the rest of the class goes on some field trip or something and he sneaks into this sick room in the nurse's office and wanders out to find an empty school and eventually a gruesome surprise that is neither believable nor interesting. There was something I liked about it but it was generally dull and maudlin and insipid. C-

Amreeka is about a divorced Palestinian woman in the West Bank who works in a bank and lives with her mother and her teenage son. She and her son have to cross through this checkpoint every day and that's fairly miserable and increasingly frightening. They get a permit to emigrate to the USA she had applied for a long time ago and the son convinces her they should go because there is no future for him in Palestine. Things naturally don't go smoothly when they arrive in America but there's none of that forced Lars-von-Trier-esque torture that you might expect from this sort of thing. The kid has troubles at school; they and the cousins they move in with must cope with increasing racism; the mother can find only the most menial of jobs despite her education and her experience. It's a really lovely movie though and it's more bouyant than it sounds. There's something so real and beautiful and human and significant about it. It was mostly all the things I look for in a film. If I had seen it sooner it would likely made my top ten list or at least the honorable mentions. A

Moonfleet is a 1955 Fritz Lang film based on a popular English children's adventure novel from 1898. Similar to Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn it begins with an innocent youth arriving in a sinister English coastal city that seems to make a lot of money off various forms of piracy. The youth naturally finds himself mixed up in the den of thieves and in deep trouble from all sides. I sought it out because it's listed in John Kobal's methodology-challenged book of the Top 100 films of all time but I really don't think it belongs there. It's a decent film but it's not likely that it would even make my top 10 Fritz Lang movies, let alone top 100 of ever. Stewart Granger is kind of dreamy though, Joan Greenwood is appealing as George Sanders's sassy wife, and Viveca Lindfors is kind of electric in her brief, mildly lurid performance as Stewart Granger's gypsy-esque mistress but the story didn't really do it for me. C

I finally got around to watching the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cove last night. The trouble with so many of these well-intentioned things is that they tend to overstep in their stridence. I think this movie escapes that pitfall though and it comes across as pretty veracious throughout. I think that's why it's so effective. It feels like the filmmakers are saying, "We want to level with you hear and we aren't trying to manipulate you except explicitly by showing you this video of a dolphin slaughter and letting you make up your mind." I like that the video is presented with only the sounds of the dolphins and that although the film is set up like a suspense movie it doesn't try to manipulate you with music and they never resort to the sort of hysterics that tend to alienate people from doing the right thing. It was a good and worthy use of time and resources. A

Lastly, the final film I watched in February of 2010: Dirty Filthy Love. It's a 2004 made for British television movie about a man (Michael Sheen) whose latent OCD and comorbid conditions sort of explode when his marriage disintegrates and he loses his job. He meets a plucky nut played by the fabulous Shirley Henderson, whom I've loved ever since I saw her in that Masterpiece Theater presentation of The Way We Live Now (2001). The nut recognizes his OCD and tells him to come to her support group and he does and it's well and then he has a breakdown when his wife gives him a false hope and then moves on. The movie's kind of out there--my boyfriend wasn't really paying attention to the movie and kept remarking that the movie I was watching was really weird--but it's really kind of good. It seemed like a generally honest depiction of a constellation of mental disorders and the acting was pretty good. If only we subsidized the film industry in the United States... It's kind of sad that our nominees for best picture are very often weaker than the average European made-for-TV movie... A-/B+