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-

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

Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs, 2012, USA)

This more or less autobiographical drama is about a documentary filmmaker who takes a break from cheap flings long enough to have a years long frustrating relationship with a crack addict. In the lead role is Thure Lindhardt, whom I recognized from Danish films Flame & Citron and Brotherhood, both of which I probably liked better than this movie. Lindhardt plays Erik, the documentary filmmaker who spends a lot of time on those phone lines that existed before people starting hooking up through websites like gay.com and manhunt. Because much of the film takes place in the 90s, in Manhattan. It's one of those movies where you can always tell what year it is by what cell phone someone is using. Anyway, he hooks up with Paul (Zachary Booth) and gets smitten with him even though he's basically a closeted homosexual with a crack problem.

For me, the film was too cavalier about all the drugs. I guess it reminded me of my own life in the 90s, to some extent, but I feel like the weakness of this film is that the director seems too uncritical of the character based on himself. He's a sweet and likeable character, but I ultimately didn't find him believable. I almost felt by the end of the film that the director used it in such a way as to grant himself absolution for something.

I liked the film, I guess, but something about it seemed flat to me.
B-

A Royal Affair / En kongelig affære (Nikolaj Arcel, 2012, Denmark)

This film seems to have done well in Denmark and it seems poised to do well enough in America. I got the impression that it was going to get released here early in the spring. I got a sticker for checking in to this movie on my GetGlue app, which tells me that someone is actually pushing this movie. It's based on a true story, alledgedly one of the great stories of Danish history, according to the director, who also wrote the screenplay for the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

This film deals with the end of the Danish feudal system and the ultimate rise of the Enlightenment in Denmark. It seems that feudalism lasted longer in Denmark than in the rest of Europe. Mikkel Boe Følsgaard stars as the mad king Christian VII and Alicia Vikander stars as his wife, Queen Caroline. Both actors are relatively new here but give performances good enough that they're considered breakout performances. I particularly like Vikander as the queen. Mads Mikkelsen seems to be the number one actor in Denmark for the past several years. If you're like me, you've probably seen him in After the Wedding and Flame and Citron. If you aren't like me, you've probably seen him in Clash of the Titans and Casino Royale. In any event, he's at the center of the film as the Enlightenment oriented doctor beloved by both the king and queen, who have pretty much been estranged since they first met. In these days when the oligarchy is threatening centuries of progress, this film actually seems pretty relevant. I think we have this illusion that the forces in our world which enjoy wealth and power could somehow be checked for the greater good if the need and the will arose. This film argues that, at least in the short term, it's best not to underestimate them that has.
B

Our Children / À perdre la raison (Joachim LaFosse, 2012, Belgium)

Belgium's submission to the Academy Awards foreign film competition, this film is apparently based on a true story. Perhaps if I had known that going in, it would informed my viewing in such a way that I didn't find the film such a downer. It kind of uses the Lars Von Trier template where you start out with this great woman, and this case a very likable new husband, and drag her through endless unpleasantness until something dramatic happens. The film starts with the woman ( Émilie Dequenne) in an emergency room telling the nurses that her children needed to be buried in Morocco. We then see some small coffins being transported and then we start at the beginning of their friendship. She's a school teacher dating this resident at a hospital or something, played by the guy from A Prophet (Tahar Rahim). The old guy plays his friend/mentor is the old guy from A Prophet (Niels Arestrup). For financial reasons the couple move in with the older friend, who turns out to be married to the guy's sister, and the wife starts banging out kids while the audience is left wondering what kind of strange relationship is going on with the two men. The husband gradually becomes less and less sympathetic, but the movie still seems to expect us to sympathize with him and his desperate family. I just read a review that called the film emotionally draining and that's exactly how I would describe it. Maybe it's because I'm not particularly interested in all this breeding stuff, but I didn't find anything particularly appealing about the film as a whole, though I like most of the actors well enough.
C

Black's Game / Svartur á leik (Óskar Thór Axelsson, 2012, Iceland)

Pretty much everybody I met at the festival liked this movie. Ever the contrarian, perhaps, I wasn't quite as impressed. I thought it was a tacky, violent movie that glorified violence, nihilism, substance abuse, and cheap sexuality. The main character Stebbi is a miscreant who has just stumbled out of a jail where he's been booked for fucking some kid up when he was drunk. He runs into an old acquaintance from his hometown, Toti, all muscles and Satanic tattoos. Eventually, Stebbi does a dangerous job for Toti so this gangland lawyer will get him off of this heavy assault charge. Things go wrong during the job and Stebbi proves himself by going psycho on some important gangster or something. This earns him the nickname Psycho. Things go okay for a minute and then go out of control when this Satanic black metal looking criminal mastermind shows up and pushes it to the fucking limit. I didn't really buy all the plot elements, particularly a string of things toward the end of the film. It's also hard to care too much about these people because they're all evil, even though Stebbi is kind of attractive.
C

Diaz: Don't Clean Up This Blood (Daniele Vicari, 2012, Italy/France/Romania)

This film tells the story of the brutality that emerged as a response to the protests that occurred during the 2001 G8 Summit n Genoa, Italy. It focuses on these media centers were all sorts of journalists, activists, and random people who couldn't find hotel rooms in the city congregate and sleep. After the film the actor suggested that the shocking response of the police force to these protestors was a political act by Berlusconi, who was having some trouble and needed to appear capable and strong. The actor also mentioned that the director said he actually left out a lot of the more harrowing things that occurred because he didn't think the audience would believe it all. So if you're wondering if it was really as bad as this, it was apparently worse. The film does a pretty good job of establishing likeable characters, which makes the brutality that ensues even harder to watch. There film is, to a small extent, in a not entirely chronological order. These flashes out of time serve to build tension throughout the film. I almost feel traumatized watching this movie. It's really disheartening to see what it looks like when people dare to talk back to money in any real way. About a week after I watched this movie, I saw the Danish film A Royal Affair, and I can't help feeling like the situation we have today isn't as far from serfdom as we'd like to believe.
B

Out in the Dark (Michael Mayer, 2012, Israel/Palestine)

Yet again the sociopolitical situation in Israel is dramatized through a gay love story. An ambitious Palestinian university student from Ramallah falls in love with an Israeli lawyer from Tel Aviv. Complications ensue. This is an entertaining, if not terribly original film. I guess what makes it more successful than, say, The Bubble, is that it's more upfront about the seriousness of the political situation, probably because that other film is more of a comedy. You basically have the Palestinian family on one side, all terrorists and gangsters who have nother better to do, it seems, than persecute gay people and stockpile weapons. On the other hand, you have the cruel Israeli security service, who according to this film blackmail gay Palestinians seeking refuge in Israel and then betray them when they are no longer useful. The director claimed at the screening that the events in the film are based on real events that happened to various people they interviewed in the gay underworld of Tel Aviv. If that's the case, Israel seems far less progressive than it's given credit for being. My boyfriend's stories about visiting Israel have always left me with a desire to visit the place, even though he, like most young American Jewish people I know, isn't particularly fond of the place. After seeing this movie, I'm not sure I really would want to visit the place anymore. I wonder if it would make much of a difference in the middle east if their cities were more colorful. They're so stark looking.
It's entertaining and I'm glad enough that I watched it, but, I guess I wouldn't say it's extremely well made. I liked the actors.
B-

Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012, Romania)

It's so funny how I've been putting off writing about this movie because it's so hard for me to discuss things that I like. Silly me. This is definitely one of my favorite films of the festival. It's from the director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. On the surface, this movie couldn't seem much more different, but it actually has a lot in common. As in the earlier film, Mungiu creates here an unsettling atmosphere that permeates the entire film, and really both films are about the ways in which the state has failed its people and the search for an understanding of modern Romanian identity. They're also both made beautifully. There is a sort of grace in this film which I don't know how to explain.

This film is based on a non fiction novel based on events that took place in 2005 in a rural monastary in northeastern Romania. I'm fascinated by how divergent the various accounts of the real life events have been.  It's about two friends who grew up in a small town orphanage where they were subject to all kinds of abuse and exploitation. One of the girls has gone to work in Germany as a waitress, perhaps, and the other has entered a very traditional monastary located out in the hills outside the town they grew up in. It's traditional in that it has no electricity or running water, not in the sense that it's old. I read a great article about how all these churches and monastaries are popping up all over Romania since the Iron Curtain fell and the crisis is that there aren't enough qualified clergy to run all these places. The story behind this particular monastary is an interesting enough story for its own film.

Anyway, the girl who has been working in Germany, Voichita, comes back to Romania to get her diploma so she can get a new job and perhaps stay in Germany indefinitely. She seems to believe that her friend, Alina, will leave the monastary and come with her, but Alina doesn't seem to understand it this way. Voichita stays with her friend in the monastary and they have plans to leave, but some sort of mental illness or something seems to get in the way, which naturally leads to an exorcism.

In the accounts that I've read online, either the character upon which Voichita was based was schizophrenic, an ordinary modern girl with no history of mental illness, or a convert who joined the order and begged for Satan to be driven from her body. In real life, the priest was only 31 years old. A former soccer player who had been recruited to run a monastary after studying theology in a community college after a year. I guess there had been monks there, but they all left when all these nuns showed up.

I found the film fascinating. I really enjoyed reading about the actual events after I saw the film. I would love to read the novel the film is based upon, but it doesn't seem to be available in English, at least in the USA.

It's a beautifully shot film and everything about it was good, in my opinion. But the audience I saw it with seemed just as divided as the reviews I've read. The guy two people down from me said as the credits began to roll that it was beautiful. A moment later, as people began filing out this lady kind of passed over us saying how horrible it was. After they both left the lady who had been talking to me earlier said she thought it was pretty but she didn't know what it was supposed to be about. I suggested that it was interesting because it dramatized the tensions between the old world and the modern world. I also said it was interesting how many of Romania's social problems contributed to this situation. You have the notorious Romanian orphanages, which in this case didn't protect the children from a notorious pedophile filmmaker, and it's hard not to see that the situation would have been avoided if Romania's healthcare system hadn't been so overburdened and inaccessible. It seems like the societies of the world are returning to their natural states, in which the state is only there once they've failed long enough to have somebody at which to point a finger.
A

Werckmeister Harmonies - Milk - Frost/Nixon

I finally after months got around to watching Werckmeister Harmonies, at work today. I'm not sure I know what it's about and suspect that if I understood what he was getting on about I'd probably roll my eyes or something. But it's a lovely movie to experience on a sense level. It looks beautiful. Sounds beautiful. The camera work and music are bewitching. The acting is good. Once I was able to overcome my impatience, it really charmed. It's a masterwork in tone, I might say. "You've gotta see it for the tone, man!" ;-)

Then tonight I got hijacked by A--, despite my own plans to go see Ballast at UWM and then watch the Benjamin Button movie...

She subjected me to two of my least favorite critically-acclaimed mainstream movies of last year: Milk and Frost/Nixon. I can't believe that Milk was nominated for a screenwriting Oscar because the writing in both movies is generally clunky and, at best, uneven. One is adolescent, the other is glib. Watching them both for the second time, I decided that Frost/Nixon was worse than I thought it was the first time I saw it but that Milk was a little more complicated: It seemed like they shot two movies about Harvey Milk (a good one and a bad one) and then mashed them up together. The acting in Milk was definitely better than in the other film. I also thought that the adaptation of the play Frost/Nixon to the movie was horrible. I mean, maybe it's a Brechtian device but it seemed like half of the actors were under the impression they were performing a play in front of a live audience and I thought a lot of the dialogue might have worked better on the stage but it stunk up the movie house. Then, the efforts to open the play up for the screen were laughable. A-- said she thought it was nice, RETRO! Ha! I thought it was kitsch. Ron Howard is such a douchebag.

Why didn't anyone making Milk realize what a mess that damned script was? (Edit 11/9/12: A better question might be why audiences ate it up. The answer probably has something to do with the fact that the most popular review of Mission: Impossible on Netflix describes it as a thinking man's action film...)

Also, what's with all these movies jockeying for the Silliest-Misuse-of-Puccini's-Tosca-in-a-poorly-scripted-film-of-2008 award? I didn't even know such a thing existed but I can't think of any other reason why Milk, Quantum of Solace, and whatever other movie that was all decided to try to steal the crown from Philadelphia for most nauseating use of opera in an overheated movie...