It’s been popular to say about Ben Affleck that he reached his peak with his Oscar win for co-writing and co-starring in Good Will Hunting, and while his co-writer and co-star Matt Damon went on to an interesting career combining good commercial films (the Bourne trilogy) and interesting left turns (The Good Shepard), Affleck stranded himself among brain dead blockbusters. I can hardly count myself as an Affleck fan, and even I would say that view is quite reductive. True, Affleck hardly distinguished himself in movies like Armageddon, Daredevil, and Gigli, and letting his off-screen antics overwhelm his on-screen performances was never going to help his career. But he was a good collaborator with Kevin Smith (Mallrats and Jersey Girl notwithstanding), playing a more than credible romantic lead in Chasing Amy, a more than credible villain in Dogma, and had a lot of fun in Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back. He was good in supporting roles in Shakespeare in Love and Boiler Room, and while he struggled with his parts in Bounce, Changing Lanes, and Paycheck, at least the movies themselves showed good taste in projects. And he came back in with his surprisingly affecting performance in Hollywoodland. Now, with Gone Baby Gone, he makes his directorial debut, and while he’s still got a ways to go, he may have a future behind the camera yet.
Affleck also co-wrote the screenplay with Aaron Stockard, adapting the Dennis Lehane novel, the fourth of his series of novels about detectives Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), who at this point are partners personally as well as professionally. When a little girl named Amanda goes missing, and her aunt Bea (Amy Madigan) appeals to them to join the police in helping find her, Kenzie and Gennaro are both reluctant to take the job, because they guess it would only end in heartbreak. And the police, headed by Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman), who runs a unit devoted to finding missing children, and detectives Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and Nick Poole (John Ashton), don’t want Kenzie’s help either. Finally, Kenzie is not encouraged by Amanda’s mother Helene (Amy Ryan), an alcoholic and crack addict who has a chip on her shoulder against the world. But Kenzie and Gennaro do end up taking the case, only to find as bad as they thought things would get, it actually is much worse.
Just as Good Will Hunting benefited from Affleck (and Damon) knowing the neighborhood of Boston so well, so does Gone Baby Gone. Affleck has cast many of the smaller parts with Boston natives, and he films the city well while avoiding the obvious landmarks (Fenway Park). However, he does lack a certain cinematic sense as a director, and as a writer (this may have been apparent in Good Will Hunting, but Gus Van Sant knew how to make that picture move). A good example comes early on in the movie, when Kenzie and Gennaro go to a bar Helene used to hang out in – if it wasn’t for the acting, you’d never know the scene was supposed to be tense (the patrons and bartender are decidedly hostile towards the detectives), because Affleck shoots it in such a plodding manner. The scenes between Kenzie and Gennaro also suffer here – Affleck spends too much time on their personal relationship, and not enough on their professional one, whereas Lehane gave equal time to both. I always thought Monaghan was a bit too wan for the role, but she might have been able to bring a grittiness to the role had Affleck allowed her to. Finally, I’m admittedly a big fan of the novel, but the movie often just seemed like a greatest hits version of the novel, with no flow to it. It doesn’t help Affleck and Stockard try to make the motive for what really happened to Amanda more of a mystery than it was in the novel; it cheapens it somehow.
Still, once the movie hits the halfway point, it does settle down into what made the novel so riveting. And except for Monaghan, Affleck gets great work from his cast. Harris, Freeman, Ashton, and Madigan are all playing parts they’ve played in the past, but they’re able to do their thing again in style. And as a fan of TV’s The Wire, I was thrilled to see Michael K. Williams in the small role of a cop who’s friendly with Kenzie (his role is bigger in the novel), even though I only saw it as Omar playing a cop. But the real surprises here are Ryan and Affleck’s brother Casey. I also mostly know Ryan from The Wire, as Beadie Russell, the dock officer who helps investigate the major case in Season 2. On the show, she was friendly with the dockworkers but quiet and unassuming with her colleagues, which cloaked her intelligence. As written, Helene could have been a one-dimensional white trash addict, but Ryan invests her with an anger against the world and a surprising vulnerability – when she finally realizes the enormity of her part in Amanda’s disappearance, and begs Kenzie to find her, you understand what makes Kenzie defend Helene’s fitness as a parent later to Gennaro. As for Casey Affleck, I wasn’t a fan of his in the Jesse James movie, and wasn’t looking forward to him here. He seemed a little young for the part as well. But he turns that into his advantage here, showing an inner toughness and a desire not to be pushed around or taken for granted. And, of course, he shows off Kenzie’s vulnerability as well. As the movie shows Ben’s possible future as a director, it also shows off Casey’s possible future as a leading man.
If they’re enjoyable enough, sometimes movies that don’t quite hang together can still be a better time than movies that are well crafted but empty. Such is the case with John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes, which finally came out in theaters last September after being on the shelf for two years due to studio trouble. Although Turturro has made a big leap from his first directing effort, the earnest but plodding Mac (I never saw his next effort, the theatrical movie Illuminata), he still has problems here; the movie takes a tragic turn in the last third that it doesn’t quite earn. That doesn’t change the fact, however, that next to Once, this was the best musical I saw at the movies last year. The story, like in most musicals, is pretty simple; Nick Murder (James Gandolfini), a construction worker, is married to Kitty (Susan Sarandon), a dressmaker, but is also involved with the sexy Tula (Kate Winslet), and when Kitty finds out and throws him out, Nick tries to win her back. What distinguishes the movie is the characters will often break into song – not into originals, but singing along to established songs. So Gandolfini belts out Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Man Without Love” (along with singing garbagemen), Sarandon (though her voice is dubbed) and a gospel choir rip through “Piece of my Heart,” Winslet sexes up Connie Francis’ “Do You Love Me Like You Kiss Me,” and even Christopher Walken, as Kitty’s cousin Bo, gets into the act by crooning “Delilah” (as well as dancing, of course). This isn’t the only craziness Turturro throws in – Mary-Louise Parker and Aida Turturro both play Nick’s daughters (Mandy Moore, who belts out “I Want Candy,” is the third daughter), even though they’re only a few years younger than Gandolfini in real life – but trust me, it all fits. I think it was Turturro who called this a working-class Dennis Potter musical, and the label fits because like Potter, Turturro knows how to use music to express his character’s feelings. And it’s definitely working class – the characters are unapologetically profane (the movie earns its R rating), but none of them are cartoonish (Tula actually loves Nick), and none of the performers condescend to their characters. True, there may be a touch of Ralph Kramden in Gandolfini’s performance, but that’s inevitable, and Gandolfini even sings well. And Sarandon and Winslet are as alluring as they’ve ever been. Along with Once, this was the only other musical I saw last year that never sacrifices feeling for form. Do yourself a favor and check this one out.
The problem with James Gray’s We Own the Night is not the fact the story is familiar – hell, There Will Be Blood, my favorite movie of last year, tells a very familiar story. The problem is Gray, who also wrote the film, tries to act like you’ve never seen this movie before. Once again, Gray turns to the twin poles of family conflict and crime. This time, the family members in conflict are Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix), a nightclub owner in 1980’s Brighton Beach, and his brother Joe Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg), who, like their father Bert (Robert Duvall), is a cop. Bobby’s nightclub is owned by Russians who, as it turns out, do business with the Russian mob, which involves drug dealing. Bobby at first turns a blind eye to all of this, particularly because he and Joe don’t get along, but when mobsters try to kill Joe, Bobby agrees to work for the cops. Gray has certainly advanced stylistically – there’s a car chase in the rain that’s up there with the great ones, and the first look at the nightclub (to the tune of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”) is a tracking shot that doesn’t make you think of Scorsese. And there’s no fault with any of the performers; Phoenix, Wahlberg and Duvall may be tracking in familiar territory, but they go through their paces, and Eva Mendes is also good as Bobby’s girlfriend. But Gray is more concerned with punching up the portentous tone of the movie than bringing anything new to the table or at least finding a way to make the familiar more interesting.
For all of you who only know George of the Jungle from either the catchy theme song (“Watch out for that tree!”), or the energetic but ultimately bland Disney live-action movie version in 1997, you should check out the complete TV series, which is being released on DVD this week. As Jay Ward’s previous, and best-known, series Rocky & Bullwinkle spoofed serials and spy movies, George parodies Tarzan. And unlike the movie, which relied too much on physical humor, George at its best crackles with the verbal wit that characterizes Ward at his best – for example, George tells Ursula (his girlfriend) he knows a white hunter named Weevil has gone because “See no Weevil, hear no Weevil, speak no Weevil.” The DVD set also includes the two lesser-known and less funny segments that also aired on the show, Tom Slick, the race car driver, and the superhero Super Chicken, but it’s worth it just to watch George, Ursula (or is it Fella?), Shep the elephant dog, and the ape named Ape. Just watch out for that tree.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
An Evening with Sidney Lumet, and RIP Roy Scheider
Although film repertory houses having been dying out all over the country for decades now, a few are still going strong, and one of the better ones is Film Forum in New York City. It’s there that a co-worker and I went to see one of the true survivors of the movie business, Sidney Lumet. It’s true when people hear the phrase “New York filmmaker,” most of them think of Martin Scorsese, or maybe Woody Allen, or Spike Lee, but Lumet also belongs in that category, even though that label is also somewhat reductive towards his rich and varied career. It’s true he’s made his share of stinkers (I have no desire to sit through Deathtrap or The Wiz again), but when he’s good, he’s very good, as films like Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, and his new one, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead demonstrate. So I was very glad when the host and interviewer, Foster Hirsch, left my co-worker and tickets to tonight’s show (Hirsch is a customer at the video store I work at, and my co-worker and I are friendly with him).
As you might figure, the theater (which, alas, is pretty tiny; Film Forum gets great movies, but as befitting a theater depending on memberships, has lousy seating. As glad I am that Martin Scorsese spends a good amount of his money on film preservation, I wish he or someone would throw some of that money towards making sure the theaters showing those restored movies were nicer. But I digress) was packed, and as entertainment, we were shown the original theatrical trailers for both 12 Angry Men and Murder on the Orient Express, neither of which resembled the finished movie (we can debate till the cows come home on how today’s movies compare to past movies, but the trailers today are undeniably better than the ones even 30 years ago). Then we saw a rare clip of Lumet acting, as a Dead End kid in One Third of a Nation, opposite Sylvia Sidney. Finally, Lumet and Hirsch came out, to great applause.
Although Lumet did talk briefly about his showbiz origins (his parents were in the Yiddish theater, and he is one showbiz veteran who actually encourages children to go into the business), and how he lived through his early years (he grew up during the Depression, “which most of you may come to know” he joked), mostly, Hirsch talked about Lumet’s 50 years in films. Of course, they talked about how fast Lumet usually works (after working with him on The Verdict, Paul Newman called him “the only man I know who would double-park outside a whorehouse”), which Lumet calls not a product of working in television (which is where he got his start), but just his natural tempo. First, they showed a clip of 12 Angry Men, and Lumet mentioned how little film he shot compare to most films (60,000 feet of film, whereas most films shoot over a million feet). Hirsch also praised the opening scene, where you see the defendant’s face, and immediately, you think of him as a person rather than an abstract thing the jury will later deliberate over. Following that, we saw a clip of The Fugitive Kind, and Hirsch mentioned, for the only time that evening, how he thought it didn’t quite work. Lumet refused to tell tales out of school, but he did mention how star Anna Magnani had a difficult time on the set, because she wasn’t fluent in English, and was recovering from a romantic breakup. He also told a tale illustrating his approach to actors; Marlon Brando had a big speech to deliver in the movie, and every take, at the same exact point, he blew the take. Lumet felt it had something to do with something personal Brando had told him that was interfering with his ability to deliver the speech, but he felt mentioning that personal thing to Brando would have violated his trust. After about 30 takes, Brando finally got the speech right. Afterwards, Brando asked Lumet why he didn’t say anything, and when Lumet said it wasn’t his place, Brando kissed him on the cheek, and they never had a problem again.
One of the knocks against Lumet is that he has no visual style. His counter to that is he has one, it’s just always subordinate to the story and the characters. An illustration of this came with the next clip shown, from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, based on the Eugene O’Neill play, and one of Lumet’s best. It’s when Katharine Hepburn delivers a long speech on the unsuitability of a doctor treating her husband (Ralph Richardson), and the camera holds on a medium shot of her, her husband, and their sons (Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell) at the dinner table, instead of cutting away. He also pointes out that each of the characters were shot differently and lighted differently, and mentioned any critic worth their salt should recognize something like that. After that came a clip from The Pawnbroker, where a ride in a subway car reminds Rod Steiger of his time in a concentration camp. Since the film, to Lumet, was about memory (in his book Making Movies, Lumet distinguishes what the story of the movie is about, and what the movie itself is about), he edited the scene so the regular subway and the prisoner trains were done in precise increments, to illustrate Steiger’s state of mind. While Hirsch brought up how hammy Steiger’s performances can be, Lumet said he’d rather work with someone who gave too much than too little (which, to be fair, is another knock against him). That same year, Lumet made Fail Safe, which had the unfortunate luck to come out after Dr. Strangelove, which had a similar story (albeit a wildly different approach). They were made at the same time and released by the same studio, and Lumet wanted his film released first (he thought it would even help Strangelove), but to no avail. Next up was The Hill, Lumet’s first collaboration with Sean Connery (they made four movies together), and Lumet agreed with Hirsch that he tended to work with actors he liked many times (he claimed to avoid the lunatics when he could).
One of his most famous partnerships, of course, was with Al Pacino. They only made two movies together, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, but both of them are among both Lumet and Pacino’s seminal works. Lumet mentioned how with Pacino, as with other acting greats he worked with, he merely got out of his way and let him act. He also mentioned again how the theme of Dog Day Afternoon – in Lumet’s words, that freaks aren’t as freaky as you might think – dictated the look of the film, which strove for realism. Totally opposed to that is Network, which was highly stylized, and they showed the famous “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” scene. Lumet also illustrated how modest he is about credit when he mentioned how the film is really Paddy Chayefsky’s and not his, crediting Chayefsky with wrapping the message inside of humor to make it work better (Hirsch also brought up the hard part about watching it today; namely, everything the film predicted would happen has come true, except no one has killed anyone on the air for ratings – yet. So except for Faye Dunaway, it’s not as funny as it may have been 30 years ago). After that, Hirsch returned to Lumet’s New York oeuvre with Prince of the City, my personal favorite of his films, and Lumet mentioned how he took a writing credit on the movie only because Jay Presson Allen asked him to work out the structure for her, since she was busy writing a couple of other movies. He also mentioned how he felt his ambiguous feelings towards the Treat Williams character – was he a hero or a rat? – helped the film. Another one of Lumet’s common genres is the crime film, and while The Verdict is more a legal drama, it does deal with a crime. Lumet denied any life experience influencing his choice of movies, but did admit he finds cops, lawyers, and their stories fascinating. Finally, we ended with a clip from his most recent movie, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a melodrama, and while Lumet has directed all kinds of movies, he is still fond of melodrama as a genre (his next film, Getting Out, is also a melodrama).
I do wish the audience had been allowed to ask Lumet questions (I would have asked if any more of his films, including The Offence, one of his best and most unsung movies, was coming out on DVD in the near future). I also would have chosen some slightly different clips - from Prince of the City, for example, I would have chosen when Treat Williams runs into one of his former partners near the elevator and begs forgiveness, rather than when Williams is chasing a junkie in a parking lot in the rain (although Lumet said he was proud of that moment because Kurosawa praised it). Finally, while Hirsch made it more a conversation than an interview, which meant it was that much more entertaining and insightful, I do wish he had challenged Lumet a little more. Still, I definitely got my money’s worth out of the night. Lumet knows his stuff, and he knows how to please the crowd.
And now, a few words on the passing of Roy Scheider. I know there are people who gnash their teeth at yet another piece extolling how great the movies of the 1970’s were, but one thing you can undeniably say is male actors who weren’t necessarily traditional leading men were allowed to flourish as they hadn’t since the 30’s and early 40’s, and haven’t since. Scheider was one of those. Although he doesn’t have a lot of screen time in Klute, where he played Jane Fonda’s pimp, and he was second banana to Gene Hackman in The French Connection (he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but unlike Hackman, he lost), he lends both movies an air of authenticity, which he carried to the enjoyable knock off of the latter, The Seven-Ups. Still, he had more range than just a hard-nosed tough guy, as he showed in perhaps his two most celebrated roles – Chief Brody in Jaws, and Joe Gideon in All That Jazz, which garnered him his second nomination. In the former, he played a man not in control, with appealing vulnerability and confusion (as when a grieving mother slaps him in the face) that serves as almost a riposte to Robert Shaw’s masculine caricature Quint, and in the latter, Bob Fosse’s 8 ½ (for all intents and purposes), he not only showed he could sing and dance, but he also played the character with the least amount of self-indulgence that I’ve seen in any movie remake/homage of Fellini’s film. And while neither Marathon Man, where he played a supporting role as a spy who happens to be Dustin Hoffman’s brother, nor Last Embrace, where he plays a widower spy who thinks someone is trying to kill him, were completely successful as pictures, each featured Scheider to great effect; watch his confrontation with Olivier in the former, or when he finds out the identity of the killer in the latter.
While on stage, he started the 1980’s off in triumph with his turn in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (he started out in Shakespeare plays, and he explained his love for them when he said that whatever the royalty may be saying or doing, it’s the gravedigger who explains what’s really going on), Scheider’s career hit a rough patch starting that decade and never really stopped. As critic Ryan Gibley pointed out in It Don’t Worry Me, his excellent critical study of 1970’s cinema, Scheider would come more and more to seem like a man out of his time when every leading man all of a sudden needed to look like Tom Cruise In fact, when Scheider got his own TV series in the 1990’s, SeaQuest, he later complained he was being phased out in favor of younger co-star Jonathan Brandis. Still, Scheider was appealing even in substandard fare like Still of the Night, Blue Thunder, and 52 Pickup, as well as better, if not great, fare like 2010 and The Myth of Fingerprints. And he shone in the highly underrated The Russia House as a spy who believes in glasnost, but maybe not Sean Connery (his interrogation of Connery is a highlight), he chewed up the scenery with style in Naked Lunch while giving new meaning to the term “mad doctor,” and was menacing as a gangster in the very offbeat Romeo is Bleeding (although, like everyone else, he’s overshadowed by Lena Olin as a hitwoman). He will be missed.
As you might figure, the theater (which, alas, is pretty tiny; Film Forum gets great movies, but as befitting a theater depending on memberships, has lousy seating. As glad I am that Martin Scorsese spends a good amount of his money on film preservation, I wish he or someone would throw some of that money towards making sure the theaters showing those restored movies were nicer. But I digress) was packed, and as entertainment, we were shown the original theatrical trailers for both 12 Angry Men and Murder on the Orient Express, neither of which resembled the finished movie (we can debate till the cows come home on how today’s movies compare to past movies, but the trailers today are undeniably better than the ones even 30 years ago). Then we saw a rare clip of Lumet acting, as a Dead End kid in One Third of a Nation, opposite Sylvia Sidney. Finally, Lumet and Hirsch came out, to great applause.
Although Lumet did talk briefly about his showbiz origins (his parents were in the Yiddish theater, and he is one showbiz veteran who actually encourages children to go into the business), and how he lived through his early years (he grew up during the Depression, “which most of you may come to know” he joked), mostly, Hirsch talked about Lumet’s 50 years in films. Of course, they talked about how fast Lumet usually works (after working with him on The Verdict, Paul Newman called him “the only man I know who would double-park outside a whorehouse”), which Lumet calls not a product of working in television (which is where he got his start), but just his natural tempo. First, they showed a clip of 12 Angry Men, and Lumet mentioned how little film he shot compare to most films (60,000 feet of film, whereas most films shoot over a million feet). Hirsch also praised the opening scene, where you see the defendant’s face, and immediately, you think of him as a person rather than an abstract thing the jury will later deliberate over. Following that, we saw a clip of The Fugitive Kind, and Hirsch mentioned, for the only time that evening, how he thought it didn’t quite work. Lumet refused to tell tales out of school, but he did mention how star Anna Magnani had a difficult time on the set, because she wasn’t fluent in English, and was recovering from a romantic breakup. He also told a tale illustrating his approach to actors; Marlon Brando had a big speech to deliver in the movie, and every take, at the same exact point, he blew the take. Lumet felt it had something to do with something personal Brando had told him that was interfering with his ability to deliver the speech, but he felt mentioning that personal thing to Brando would have violated his trust. After about 30 takes, Brando finally got the speech right. Afterwards, Brando asked Lumet why he didn’t say anything, and when Lumet said it wasn’t his place, Brando kissed him on the cheek, and they never had a problem again.
One of the knocks against Lumet is that he has no visual style. His counter to that is he has one, it’s just always subordinate to the story and the characters. An illustration of this came with the next clip shown, from Long Day’s Journey Into Night, based on the Eugene O’Neill play, and one of Lumet’s best. It’s when Katharine Hepburn delivers a long speech on the unsuitability of a doctor treating her husband (Ralph Richardson), and the camera holds on a medium shot of her, her husband, and their sons (Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell) at the dinner table, instead of cutting away. He also pointes out that each of the characters were shot differently and lighted differently, and mentioned any critic worth their salt should recognize something like that. After that came a clip from The Pawnbroker, where a ride in a subway car reminds Rod Steiger of his time in a concentration camp. Since the film, to Lumet, was about memory (in his book Making Movies, Lumet distinguishes what the story of the movie is about, and what the movie itself is about), he edited the scene so the regular subway and the prisoner trains were done in precise increments, to illustrate Steiger’s state of mind. While Hirsch brought up how hammy Steiger’s performances can be, Lumet said he’d rather work with someone who gave too much than too little (which, to be fair, is another knock against him). That same year, Lumet made Fail Safe, which had the unfortunate luck to come out after Dr. Strangelove, which had a similar story (albeit a wildly different approach). They were made at the same time and released by the same studio, and Lumet wanted his film released first (he thought it would even help Strangelove), but to no avail. Next up was The Hill, Lumet’s first collaboration with Sean Connery (they made four movies together), and Lumet agreed with Hirsch that he tended to work with actors he liked many times (he claimed to avoid the lunatics when he could).
One of his most famous partnerships, of course, was with Al Pacino. They only made two movies together, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, but both of them are among both Lumet and Pacino’s seminal works. Lumet mentioned how with Pacino, as with other acting greats he worked with, he merely got out of his way and let him act. He also mentioned again how the theme of Dog Day Afternoon – in Lumet’s words, that freaks aren’t as freaky as you might think – dictated the look of the film, which strove for realism. Totally opposed to that is Network, which was highly stylized, and they showed the famous “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” scene. Lumet also illustrated how modest he is about credit when he mentioned how the film is really Paddy Chayefsky’s and not his, crediting Chayefsky with wrapping the message inside of humor to make it work better (Hirsch also brought up the hard part about watching it today; namely, everything the film predicted would happen has come true, except no one has killed anyone on the air for ratings – yet. So except for Faye Dunaway, it’s not as funny as it may have been 30 years ago). After that, Hirsch returned to Lumet’s New York oeuvre with Prince of the City, my personal favorite of his films, and Lumet mentioned how he took a writing credit on the movie only because Jay Presson Allen asked him to work out the structure for her, since she was busy writing a couple of other movies. He also mentioned how he felt his ambiguous feelings towards the Treat Williams character – was he a hero or a rat? – helped the film. Another one of Lumet’s common genres is the crime film, and while The Verdict is more a legal drama, it does deal with a crime. Lumet denied any life experience influencing his choice of movies, but did admit he finds cops, lawyers, and their stories fascinating. Finally, we ended with a clip from his most recent movie, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a melodrama, and while Lumet has directed all kinds of movies, he is still fond of melodrama as a genre (his next film, Getting Out, is also a melodrama).
I do wish the audience had been allowed to ask Lumet questions (I would have asked if any more of his films, including The Offence, one of his best and most unsung movies, was coming out on DVD in the near future). I also would have chosen some slightly different clips - from Prince of the City, for example, I would have chosen when Treat Williams runs into one of his former partners near the elevator and begs forgiveness, rather than when Williams is chasing a junkie in a parking lot in the rain (although Lumet said he was proud of that moment because Kurosawa praised it). Finally, while Hirsch made it more a conversation than an interview, which meant it was that much more entertaining and insightful, I do wish he had challenged Lumet a little more. Still, I definitely got my money’s worth out of the night. Lumet knows his stuff, and he knows how to please the crowd.
And now, a few words on the passing of Roy Scheider. I know there are people who gnash their teeth at yet another piece extolling how great the movies of the 1970’s were, but one thing you can undeniably say is male actors who weren’t necessarily traditional leading men were allowed to flourish as they hadn’t since the 30’s and early 40’s, and haven’t since. Scheider was one of those. Although he doesn’t have a lot of screen time in Klute, where he played Jane Fonda’s pimp, and he was second banana to Gene Hackman in The French Connection (he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but unlike Hackman, he lost), he lends both movies an air of authenticity, which he carried to the enjoyable knock off of the latter, The Seven-Ups. Still, he had more range than just a hard-nosed tough guy, as he showed in perhaps his two most celebrated roles – Chief Brody in Jaws, and Joe Gideon in All That Jazz, which garnered him his second nomination. In the former, he played a man not in control, with appealing vulnerability and confusion (as when a grieving mother slaps him in the face) that serves as almost a riposte to Robert Shaw’s masculine caricature Quint, and in the latter, Bob Fosse’s 8 ½ (for all intents and purposes), he not only showed he could sing and dance, but he also played the character with the least amount of self-indulgence that I’ve seen in any movie remake/homage of Fellini’s film. And while neither Marathon Man, where he played a supporting role as a spy who happens to be Dustin Hoffman’s brother, nor Last Embrace, where he plays a widower spy who thinks someone is trying to kill him, were completely successful as pictures, each featured Scheider to great effect; watch his confrontation with Olivier in the former, or when he finds out the identity of the killer in the latter.
While on stage, he started the 1980’s off in triumph with his turn in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (he started out in Shakespeare plays, and he explained his love for them when he said that whatever the royalty may be saying or doing, it’s the gravedigger who explains what’s really going on), Scheider’s career hit a rough patch starting that decade and never really stopped. As critic Ryan Gibley pointed out in It Don’t Worry Me, his excellent critical study of 1970’s cinema, Scheider would come more and more to seem like a man out of his time when every leading man all of a sudden needed to look like Tom Cruise In fact, when Scheider got his own TV series in the 1990’s, SeaQuest, he later complained he was being phased out in favor of younger co-star Jonathan Brandis. Still, Scheider was appealing even in substandard fare like Still of the Night, Blue Thunder, and 52 Pickup, as well as better, if not great, fare like 2010 and The Myth of Fingerprints. And he shone in the highly underrated The Russia House as a spy who believes in glasnost, but maybe not Sean Connery (his interrogation of Connery is a highlight), he chewed up the scenery with style in Naked Lunch while giving new meaning to the term “mad doctor,” and was menacing as a gangster in the very offbeat Romeo is Bleeding (although, like everyone else, he’s overshadowed by Lena Olin as a hitwoman). He will be missed.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
New DVD releases February 5
According to the song by Rodgers and Hammerstein in Carousel, June is busting out all over, but this month seems to be the one busting out all over with big movies. Seven big named movies are being released this week, and the only one I haven’t seen is The Jane Austen Book Club. So let’s get right to it.
When he gave Backbeat a positive review, the late Gene Siskel mentioned he had given a positive review to every movie about the Beatles. I thought of him when I was watching Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, her attempt to tell a tale of the 60’s through use of 33 of the Beatles songs, ranging from “It Won’t Be Long” to “Let it Be.” I also thought of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first attempt at doing something like this, which turned out to be akin to watching a train wreck, and American Dreams, the TV show about a family going through the turmoil of the 60’s. Taymor’s movie is better than the former (which is damning it with faint praise, of course), but reminded me too much of the latter to be entirely successful. For all of Taymor’s visual audacity, and some inventive reworking of the classic Beatles oeuvre (“I Wanna Hold Your Hand” reinterpreted as a song of longing), the film never really transcends the clichéd storytelling.
In a nutshell, the plot revolves around Jude (Jim Sturgess), a dockworker from Liverpool who comes to America to look for his father (Robert Clohessy), a janitor at Princeton. While there, he’s befriended by Max (Joe Anderson), a rebellious student, and his sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), who at first seems like the all-American girl. Max eventually drops out of Princeton and moves to New York City with Jude, and Lucy joins them when her boyfriend Daniel is killed in Vietnam. While there, they and a host of people, including Sadie (Dana Fuchs), a flower child singer, and JoJo (Martin Luther), a psychedelic guitarist, become swept up in the revolution sweeping the country. Also, Jude, a cartoonist, falls in love with Lucy, but becomes alienated from her as she becomes obsessed with the antiwar movement. Again, this sounds awfully familiar, and the stilted dialogue (“I’m sorry if I’m not the man with the megaphone, but this is what I do” Jude retorts to Lucy at one point). It could also be that Sturgess irritated me most of the time he was on screen, especially when he was singing. As for that singing, I alluded to how Taymor and her companion, composer Elliot Goldenthal, have some interesting interpretations of some of the Beatle classics, like Max singing “Happiness is a Warm Gun” at a VA hospital while a nurse (Salma Hayek) administers a morphine shot to him. But just as often, the songs are done too literally, as when Jude and the others living at the apartment try to get Prudence (T.V. Carpio) to come out of the room she’s locked herself into by singing “Dear Prudence.” Wood manages to transcend the clichéd material most of the time, and Hayek, Bono (as Dr. Robert, singing “I Am the Walrus”), and Eddie Izzard (as Mr. Kite) deliver sharp cameos. But the definitive movie using Beatles music as a backdrop (as opposed to being about the Beatles themselves) has yet to be made.
After sitting on the shelf for almost two years, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford inspired either love-it-or-hate-it reactions upon its release. I’m afraid I’m closer to the latter camp. It’s not like there’s nothing to recommend about this film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins gives this picture a dreamlike quality, and Brad Pitt is both charismatic and dangerous as the legendary outlaw Jesse James (although the film does shy away from some of his more unlikable qualities, like being a Confederate rebel). There’s also good supporting work from Sam Shepard as Jesse’s brother Frank (even though he’s only in the first half hour of the movie), and Sam Rockwell as Charley Ford. But the narration by Hugh Ross drowns the film in self-importance. Worse, while I normally like Casey Affleck (he’s much better in next week’s release Gone Baby Gone), he comes off mannered and forced here as Robert Ford, the aspiring gunslinger who wanted to be Jesse James but later agreed to kill him. And Dominik, who also wrote the film (adapting the novel by Robert Hansen), is highly uneven in the telling, as the narrative moves in fits and starts. When a co-worker asked my review of the film, I mentioned it was what would happen if Terrence Malick didn’t have the talent to match his ambition. It’s a smart-ass answer, but it unfortunately happens to be true here.
You have to say this for Neil Jordan – when he goes mad, he goes mad all the way. In 1999, he attempted to marry the serial killer genre with the fairy tale genre with In Dreams, and failed spectacularly. Now in his latest movie, The Brave One, he again tries to make a modern day fairy tale, this time within the vigilante drama. This time, I was going back and forth on the entire picture; every time I was about to dismiss it outright, something would come back to keep me interested. Usually, this was not the main storyline of Erica (Jodie Foster), the radio show talk host who, after surviving a vicious attack by thugs who killed her doctor fiancée (Naveen Andrews); while Foster internalizes everything to good effect, and is credible as a fighter, her story still falls back on some hoary clichés (like why would any sane person be in Central Park in that area that time of night?). No, the story that intrigued me was of Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), who, while trying to track a killer of his own, gets involved with the murders Erica commits, and even becomes friends with her. Howard isn’t exactly playing a new character here – like Morgan Freeman in Seven, he’s someone who’s seen too much but is trying to make sense of it anyway. Howard speaks in his slow drawl, when trying to draw out a witness, asking a favor from his ex-wife (Zoe Kravitz), or talking with Erica, as if he’s thinking about what he really wants to say, and doesn’t trust himself otherwise. He provides a moral center to this film. And whatever you might think of Jordan’s view of the city, he and cinematographer Phillipe Rousselot do evoke both Erica and Mercer’s states of mind quite well. But the movie lost me in the last act with a climatic scene that totally goes off the rails. This being Neil Jordan, who rarely does anything half-ass, it’s not surprising that he’d aim high and miss, but without giving anything away, I find myself saying something unusual about a vigilante movie; I didn’t get pissed over moral failure, but plot failure.
Speaking of which, another honest to goodness failure, and a spectacular one at that, is Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur’s follow-up to his 1998 film Elizabeth. I generally don’t like sequels anyway, but rarely has a director fallen so far from his original movie to the sequel made from it. Kapur’s original followed Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) before she became “The Virgin Queen”, and the palace intrigue that threatened to remove her from the throne almost immediately after she took it. There, Kapur and writer Hossein Amini took what should have been just another costume drama and made a spy thriller out of it. This time, Kapur and writers Michael Hirst and William Nicholson try to keep the spy thriller part – outside forces, mostly Spain, are still trying to unseat the Protestant Elizabeth from the throne and put her sister Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton) on it – while also adding costume soap opera, in the form of Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), who comes to England from the colonies, and finds himself attracted to not only Elizabeth, but also her lady-in-waiting Elizabeth Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish). What could have been either a cogent drama or a fun romp becomes a ridiculous and incoherent mess. Kapur and cinematographer Remi Adefarasin abandon the dark look of the first film for the look of a typical colorful costume drama, and the result just makes everything look like a soap opera, and not a very entertaining one at that. Worse, the actors are forced to spew some particularly ripe dialogue (as when the Spanish king exclaims “England is ensnared in the devil!”), and good actors such as Blanchett, Owen, and Geoffrey Rush (reprising his turn as advisor Francis Walsingham) are left stranded. The only ones who make an impression are the ones who get to use silence, like Morton, who manages to be regal and fanatical, and Cornish, who made an impression on me for the first time, and manages to rise above the decidedly purple prose here. Shoot ‘Em Up was the worst movie I saw last year, but I walked out of that one; unfortunately, I stuck with this one all the way through, thinking it could only get better. It didn’t.
Sometimes, the most frustrating careers in Hollywood aren’t the hacks who are inexplicably allowed to keep directing, but the middling directors who hit excellence every once in a while and are fair to middling, or less than that, the rest of the time. Robert Benton falls into this latter category. The Late Show remains one of the better reworkings of the detective genre in the 1970’s, standing alongside such classics as Chinatown and Night Moves, and Nobody’s Fool is an incisive and richly detailed study of a small upstate New York town, and an overgrown boy of 60 who finally learns to take some responsibility. The rest of Benton’s career, at least as far as a director, is categorized by some okay films (Nadine, The Human Stain) and near misses (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart), with the occasional dud (Still of the Night). It’s hard to make even a bad film in Hollywood, let alone a good one, but you wonder what allowed Benton to strike lightning twice, and only twice. His latest middling effort is Feast of Love, taken from Charles Baxter’s novel. As with the novel, it’s meant to be somewhat of a romantic fantasia about several relationships at various ages (though presumably because romantic fantasy wouldn’t work as well in cold weather, the movie moves the novel’s Michigan setting to Portland, Oregon). The unluckiest in relationships by far is Bradley (Greg Kinnear), a coffee shop owner who is dumped by his first wife Kathryn (Selma Blair) for another woman, and then his second wife Diana (Radha Mitchell) for David (Billy Burke), the married man she’d been seeing. Somewhat luckier are Oscar (Toby Hemingway), who works at Bradley’s coffee shop, and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), with whom he meets cute at the shop (it’s the type of movie where she gets hired to work there right on the spot), but even they fall on tough times. Standing in observance of all of these couplings is Harry (Morgan Freeman), a retired college professor who lives with his wife Esther (Jane Alexander), and is lonely ever since the death of his son.
What made the novel work was Baxter’s nicely detailed portraits of each character, and his ability to ground his fantasia in reality. Benton, unfortunately, is a literalist, and he and writer Allison Burnett keep the skeleton of the plot without having any heft to it. Worse, the dialogue they come up with sounds stilted on screen. Benton is to be applauded for how matter of fact he is about the nudity (only Freeman and Alexander remain fully clothed of the main characters), but it’s the only magical element of the movie. Hemingway and Davalos may be pleasing to the eye, but their characters and performances have little depth. Likewise, Freeman and Alexander are always enjoyable to watch, but they are basically playing the same roles they always play, and it’s getting a bit tiresome. And while Kinnear and Blair are talents, they have nothing to work with here. Only Mitchell manages to triumph over the material. She always retains an air of mystery about her, and you always want to know what she’s thinking or feeling. That’s a quality Feast of Love could have used a lot more of.
The best new release coming out on DVD this week is Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris. Delpy wrote, directed and co-stars in the movie, and also cast her former boyfriend Adam Goldberg as her screen boyfriend, and her real life parents as her on-screen parents. And the film is very Woody Allen-esque – Marion (Delpy), a photographer, and Jack (Goldberg), an interior designer, are spending two days in Paris with Marion’s parents before they go back to New York, and while there, they keep running into all of Marion’s ex-boyfriends, most of whom remain on good terms with her – too good, according to Jack. As a director and writer, Delpy does have a tendency to let things run on too long – the scene where she berates the one ex she hates is a good example – but mostly, she runs things on an even keel, and never lets the jokes overplay the characters. It also helps that, unlike Allen nowadays, she knows how to make these characters talk believably. She’s also generous with her co-stars, and Goldberg, who can get stuck in shtick, responds well; though he’s basically “the ugly American,” he actually underplays here, and his double takes are as funny as his one-liners. And the abrasive nature of the film may be off-putting to some, but to me, it kept things from getting dull and staid. Most romantic comedies deal with the beginning of a relationship; rarely do we get one that starts at a comfortable (or complacent) middle. That alone lifts Delpy’s movie, despite the somewhat pat ending, above most of what passes for comedy these days.The two best re-releases this week both work the comedy/drama side of the street. Billy Wilder’s The Apartment may not be his best film – I reserve that honor for Some Like it Hot – but it’s his best melding of cynicism and sweetness. Wilder and collaborator I.A.L. Diamond deftly combine the twin tales of insurance agent C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), who lends his apartment out to co-workers for their sexual trysts, and his crush on elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). Lemmon, of course, is an old pro at combining comedy/drama. The real stars here are MacLaine, who gives an edge to her lovable pixie that she normally didn’t, and Fred McMurray as C.C.’s boss and Fran’s married boyfriend, who once again plays against type for Wilder as a snake in the grass. Also, the final line stands up with Wilder’s own “Well, nobody’s perfect” as the best ending line in movie history. Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie owes a big debt to Wilder not only in, like Some Like it Hot, in being a cross-dressing comedy – although here, Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) dresses up as a woman (Dorothy Michaels) not to save his life, but because he’s been out of work as an actor and needs a job desperately – but also in blending comedy and drama. Some carped then, and today, how Hoffman getting in touch with his inner woman grates today (Dennis Lim did just that in a recent article in the L.A. Times), but the film’s message, for the most part, is subservient to the comedy, and the comedy today remains as funny as ever. Pollack doesn’t miss the farcical elements of the picture – the scene where Michael finally reveals to everybody who Dorothy is remains one of the funniest scenes ever – but grounds them in reality, making them all the more funny. Having Hoffman, a troublemaking Method actor, playing a troublemaking Method actor doesn’t hurt either, but there’s also great support from Pollack himself (as Michael’s exasperated agent), Bill Murray (as his roommate), Teri Garr (as his girlfriend), and Jessica Lange (as Dorothy’s co-star).
When he gave Backbeat a positive review, the late Gene Siskel mentioned he had given a positive review to every movie about the Beatles. I thought of him when I was watching Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, her attempt to tell a tale of the 60’s through use of 33 of the Beatles songs, ranging from “It Won’t Be Long” to “Let it Be.” I also thought of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first attempt at doing something like this, which turned out to be akin to watching a train wreck, and American Dreams, the TV show about a family going through the turmoil of the 60’s. Taymor’s movie is better than the former (which is damning it with faint praise, of course), but reminded me too much of the latter to be entirely successful. For all of Taymor’s visual audacity, and some inventive reworking of the classic Beatles oeuvre (“I Wanna Hold Your Hand” reinterpreted as a song of longing), the film never really transcends the clichéd storytelling.
In a nutshell, the plot revolves around Jude (Jim Sturgess), a dockworker from Liverpool who comes to America to look for his father (Robert Clohessy), a janitor at Princeton. While there, he’s befriended by Max (Joe Anderson), a rebellious student, and his sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), who at first seems like the all-American girl. Max eventually drops out of Princeton and moves to New York City with Jude, and Lucy joins them when her boyfriend Daniel is killed in Vietnam. While there, they and a host of people, including Sadie (Dana Fuchs), a flower child singer, and JoJo (Martin Luther), a psychedelic guitarist, become swept up in the revolution sweeping the country. Also, Jude, a cartoonist, falls in love with Lucy, but becomes alienated from her as she becomes obsessed with the antiwar movement. Again, this sounds awfully familiar, and the stilted dialogue (“I’m sorry if I’m not the man with the megaphone, but this is what I do” Jude retorts to Lucy at one point). It could also be that Sturgess irritated me most of the time he was on screen, especially when he was singing. As for that singing, I alluded to how Taymor and her companion, composer Elliot Goldenthal, have some interesting interpretations of some of the Beatle classics, like Max singing “Happiness is a Warm Gun” at a VA hospital while a nurse (Salma Hayek) administers a morphine shot to him. But just as often, the songs are done too literally, as when Jude and the others living at the apartment try to get Prudence (T.V. Carpio) to come out of the room she’s locked herself into by singing “Dear Prudence.” Wood manages to transcend the clichéd material most of the time, and Hayek, Bono (as Dr. Robert, singing “I Am the Walrus”), and Eddie Izzard (as Mr. Kite) deliver sharp cameos. But the definitive movie using Beatles music as a backdrop (as opposed to being about the Beatles themselves) has yet to be made.
After sitting on the shelf for almost two years, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford inspired either love-it-or-hate-it reactions upon its release. I’m afraid I’m closer to the latter camp. It’s not like there’s nothing to recommend about this film. Cinematographer Roger Deakins gives this picture a dreamlike quality, and Brad Pitt is both charismatic and dangerous as the legendary outlaw Jesse James (although the film does shy away from some of his more unlikable qualities, like being a Confederate rebel). There’s also good supporting work from Sam Shepard as Jesse’s brother Frank (even though he’s only in the first half hour of the movie), and Sam Rockwell as Charley Ford. But the narration by Hugh Ross drowns the film in self-importance. Worse, while I normally like Casey Affleck (he’s much better in next week’s release Gone Baby Gone), he comes off mannered and forced here as Robert Ford, the aspiring gunslinger who wanted to be Jesse James but later agreed to kill him. And Dominik, who also wrote the film (adapting the novel by Robert Hansen), is highly uneven in the telling, as the narrative moves in fits and starts. When a co-worker asked my review of the film, I mentioned it was what would happen if Terrence Malick didn’t have the talent to match his ambition. It’s a smart-ass answer, but it unfortunately happens to be true here.
You have to say this for Neil Jordan – when he goes mad, he goes mad all the way. In 1999, he attempted to marry the serial killer genre with the fairy tale genre with In Dreams, and failed spectacularly. Now in his latest movie, The Brave One, he again tries to make a modern day fairy tale, this time within the vigilante drama. This time, I was going back and forth on the entire picture; every time I was about to dismiss it outright, something would come back to keep me interested. Usually, this was not the main storyline of Erica (Jodie Foster), the radio show talk host who, after surviving a vicious attack by thugs who killed her doctor fiancée (Naveen Andrews); while Foster internalizes everything to good effect, and is credible as a fighter, her story still falls back on some hoary clichés (like why would any sane person be in Central Park in that area that time of night?). No, the story that intrigued me was of Detective Mercer (Terrence Howard), who, while trying to track a killer of his own, gets involved with the murders Erica commits, and even becomes friends with her. Howard isn’t exactly playing a new character here – like Morgan Freeman in Seven, he’s someone who’s seen too much but is trying to make sense of it anyway. Howard speaks in his slow drawl, when trying to draw out a witness, asking a favor from his ex-wife (Zoe Kravitz), or talking with Erica, as if he’s thinking about what he really wants to say, and doesn’t trust himself otherwise. He provides a moral center to this film. And whatever you might think of Jordan’s view of the city, he and cinematographer Phillipe Rousselot do evoke both Erica and Mercer’s states of mind quite well. But the movie lost me in the last act with a climatic scene that totally goes off the rails. This being Neil Jordan, who rarely does anything half-ass, it’s not surprising that he’d aim high and miss, but without giving anything away, I find myself saying something unusual about a vigilante movie; I didn’t get pissed over moral failure, but plot failure.
Speaking of which, another honest to goodness failure, and a spectacular one at that, is Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur’s follow-up to his 1998 film Elizabeth. I generally don’t like sequels anyway, but rarely has a director fallen so far from his original movie to the sequel made from it. Kapur’s original followed Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) before she became “The Virgin Queen”, and the palace intrigue that threatened to remove her from the throne almost immediately after she took it. There, Kapur and writer Hossein Amini took what should have been just another costume drama and made a spy thriller out of it. This time, Kapur and writers Michael Hirst and William Nicholson try to keep the spy thriller part – outside forces, mostly Spain, are still trying to unseat the Protestant Elizabeth from the throne and put her sister Mary Stuart (Samantha Morton) on it – while also adding costume soap opera, in the form of Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), who comes to England from the colonies, and finds himself attracted to not only Elizabeth, but also her lady-in-waiting Elizabeth Throckmorton (Abbie Cornish). What could have been either a cogent drama or a fun romp becomes a ridiculous and incoherent mess. Kapur and cinematographer Remi Adefarasin abandon the dark look of the first film for the look of a typical colorful costume drama, and the result just makes everything look like a soap opera, and not a very entertaining one at that. Worse, the actors are forced to spew some particularly ripe dialogue (as when the Spanish king exclaims “England is ensnared in the devil!”), and good actors such as Blanchett, Owen, and Geoffrey Rush (reprising his turn as advisor Francis Walsingham) are left stranded. The only ones who make an impression are the ones who get to use silence, like Morton, who manages to be regal and fanatical, and Cornish, who made an impression on me for the first time, and manages to rise above the decidedly purple prose here. Shoot ‘Em Up was the worst movie I saw last year, but I walked out of that one; unfortunately, I stuck with this one all the way through, thinking it could only get better. It didn’t.
Sometimes, the most frustrating careers in Hollywood aren’t the hacks who are inexplicably allowed to keep directing, but the middling directors who hit excellence every once in a while and are fair to middling, or less than that, the rest of the time. Robert Benton falls into this latter category. The Late Show remains one of the better reworkings of the detective genre in the 1970’s, standing alongside such classics as Chinatown and Night Moves, and Nobody’s Fool is an incisive and richly detailed study of a small upstate New York town, and an overgrown boy of 60 who finally learns to take some responsibility. The rest of Benton’s career, at least as far as a director, is categorized by some okay films (Nadine, The Human Stain) and near misses (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart), with the occasional dud (Still of the Night). It’s hard to make even a bad film in Hollywood, let alone a good one, but you wonder what allowed Benton to strike lightning twice, and only twice. His latest middling effort is Feast of Love, taken from Charles Baxter’s novel. As with the novel, it’s meant to be somewhat of a romantic fantasia about several relationships at various ages (though presumably because romantic fantasy wouldn’t work as well in cold weather, the movie moves the novel’s Michigan setting to Portland, Oregon). The unluckiest in relationships by far is Bradley (Greg Kinnear), a coffee shop owner who is dumped by his first wife Kathryn (Selma Blair) for another woman, and then his second wife Diana (Radha Mitchell) for David (Billy Burke), the married man she’d been seeing. Somewhat luckier are Oscar (Toby Hemingway), who works at Bradley’s coffee shop, and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), with whom he meets cute at the shop (it’s the type of movie where she gets hired to work there right on the spot), but even they fall on tough times. Standing in observance of all of these couplings is Harry (Morgan Freeman), a retired college professor who lives with his wife Esther (Jane Alexander), and is lonely ever since the death of his son.
What made the novel work was Baxter’s nicely detailed portraits of each character, and his ability to ground his fantasia in reality. Benton, unfortunately, is a literalist, and he and writer Allison Burnett keep the skeleton of the plot without having any heft to it. Worse, the dialogue they come up with sounds stilted on screen. Benton is to be applauded for how matter of fact he is about the nudity (only Freeman and Alexander remain fully clothed of the main characters), but it’s the only magical element of the movie. Hemingway and Davalos may be pleasing to the eye, but their characters and performances have little depth. Likewise, Freeman and Alexander are always enjoyable to watch, but they are basically playing the same roles they always play, and it’s getting a bit tiresome. And while Kinnear and Blair are talents, they have nothing to work with here. Only Mitchell manages to triumph over the material. She always retains an air of mystery about her, and you always want to know what she’s thinking or feeling. That’s a quality Feast of Love could have used a lot more of.
The best new release coming out on DVD this week is Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris. Delpy wrote, directed and co-stars in the movie, and also cast her former boyfriend Adam Goldberg as her screen boyfriend, and her real life parents as her on-screen parents. And the film is very Woody Allen-esque – Marion (Delpy), a photographer, and Jack (Goldberg), an interior designer, are spending two days in Paris with Marion’s parents before they go back to New York, and while there, they keep running into all of Marion’s ex-boyfriends, most of whom remain on good terms with her – too good, according to Jack. As a director and writer, Delpy does have a tendency to let things run on too long – the scene where she berates the one ex she hates is a good example – but mostly, she runs things on an even keel, and never lets the jokes overplay the characters. It also helps that, unlike Allen nowadays, she knows how to make these characters talk believably. She’s also generous with her co-stars, and Goldberg, who can get stuck in shtick, responds well; though he’s basically “the ugly American,” he actually underplays here, and his double takes are as funny as his one-liners. And the abrasive nature of the film may be off-putting to some, but to me, it kept things from getting dull and staid. Most romantic comedies deal with the beginning of a relationship; rarely do we get one that starts at a comfortable (or complacent) middle. That alone lifts Delpy’s movie, despite the somewhat pat ending, above most of what passes for comedy these days.The two best re-releases this week both work the comedy/drama side of the street. Billy Wilder’s The Apartment may not be his best film – I reserve that honor for Some Like it Hot – but it’s his best melding of cynicism and sweetness. Wilder and collaborator I.A.L. Diamond deftly combine the twin tales of insurance agent C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), who lends his apartment out to co-workers for their sexual trysts, and his crush on elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). Lemmon, of course, is an old pro at combining comedy/drama. The real stars here are MacLaine, who gives an edge to her lovable pixie that she normally didn’t, and Fred McMurray as C.C.’s boss and Fran’s married boyfriend, who once again plays against type for Wilder as a snake in the grass. Also, the final line stands up with Wilder’s own “Well, nobody’s perfect” as the best ending line in movie history. Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie owes a big debt to Wilder not only in, like Some Like it Hot, in being a cross-dressing comedy – although here, Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) dresses up as a woman (Dorothy Michaels) not to save his life, but because he’s been out of work as an actor and needs a job desperately – but also in blending comedy and drama. Some carped then, and today, how Hoffman getting in touch with his inner woman grates today (Dennis Lim did just that in a recent article in the L.A. Times), but the film’s message, for the most part, is subservient to the comedy, and the comedy today remains as funny as ever. Pollack doesn’t miss the farcical elements of the picture – the scene where Michael finally reveals to everybody who Dorothy is remains one of the funniest scenes ever – but grounds them in reality, making them all the more funny. Having Hoffman, a troublemaking Method actor, playing a troublemaking Method actor doesn’t hurt either, but there’s also great support from Pollack himself (as Michael’s exasperated agent), Bill Murray (as his roommate), Teri Garr (as his girlfriend), and Jessica Lange (as Dorothy’s co-star).
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
New DVD releases January 29
By now, everybody knows the story of The Invasion. By that, I don’t just mean the plot of the movie, which is familiar to anyone who has seen Don Siegel’s cult classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Phil Kaufman’s hit remake of the 1970’s, or Abel Ferrara’s underrated 1993 shocker Body Snatchers, or Robert Rodriguez’s mediocre knock-off The Faculty (though whether it’s his fault or writer Kevin Williamson’s remains somewhat unclear). I mean how Warner Brothers was unhappy with Oliver Hirschbiegel’s version of the movie, and brought in the Wachowski brothers and director James McTeigue to make it more to their liking. The end result pleased neither critics nor audiences, but it really isn’t that bad. While the formula is tweaked with somewhat (instead of a alien clone of the person, the change comes from within), the basic hook of the story remains the same – something from space (this time caused by a space shuttle crash) lands on earth, and the result is people start saying things like “My husband is not my husband,” and before you know it, everyone except a few hardy souls are emotionless pod people. The hardy souls in this one include Carol (Nicole Kidman), a psychiatrist whose patient (Veronica Cartwright, who was in the Kaufman version as one of the hardy souls) is the first to wonder about her husband, Ben (Daniel Craig), a scientist who has a crush on her, and his colleague Dr. Galeano (Jeffrey Wright), who, of course, is the one to discover the correlation between sleep and the aliens taking over.
Both Siegel and Kaufman’s films relied not just on scares, but a sociological element (depending on your point of view, Siegel was skewing either Eisenhower conformity or feeding into Communist paranoia, while Kaufman took on the whole 70’s self-help movement) which made their films deeper and more frightening, while Ferrara and Rodriguez went for straightforward shocks (Ferrara did it successfully – Meg Tilly as a pod person is as creepy today as it was back in 1994 – Rodriguez less so). Hirschbiegel is going in the former direction – on the film’s most successful level, it suggests what the world would be life with a truly epidemic viral infection (the alien is passed along either by contact – Carol’s ex-husband Tucker (Jeremy Northam), a specialist with the CDC, touches a piece of the shuttle wreckage and becomes infected – or orally – he ends up spitting on Carol). There’s also a nifty, somewhat underdeveloped stab at having the pod people influence real events going on now (peace in the Middle East!), which is contrary to the thesis of the film, set down by Russian diplomat Yorish (Roger Rees), who seems to think we’re at our most human when we’re at our most destructive. And there are some creepy scenes, as when Carol manages to escape onto a subway train, and is warned by a passenger not to show emotion to fool everyone else.
The problem is the film seems to have been itself taken over by the pod people. I didn’t mind the brief flash forward scenes; to me, they added to the creepiness. And the happy ending isn’t entirely unexpected; after all, the only version to date that is able to go all the way with an unhappy ending is Kaufman’s version (even Siegel’s version had a tacked-on ending with the army ready to fight the aliens). But all of the previous versions, even the Rodriguez version, had a core of people we were meant to identify with, and were sad to see turn into clones. Kidman, Craig, and Wright are gifted actors, but they have nothing to work with, though Kidman gets to do the controlled panic she’s done before. It’s as if the studio sucked all the life out of them, and replaced it with the story of Carol wanting to protect her son Oliver (Jackson Bond), and while it makes sense plot-wise (because of a childhood disease, Oliver is immune from the alien), it seems like a very conventional resolution.
Joe Menendez’s Ladrón que Roba a Ladrón may be a knock-off of con/heist movies like Ocean’s 11 (the new version) and The Sting, but at least it’s a fairly entertaining knockoff. As usual, the con men here are merely trying to bilk a bad guy rather than an innocent, although in this case, the bad guy has been bilking the innocent. Mocte Valdez (Saul Lisazo) is a former thief who now bilks innocent Latinos, mostly illegals (the film is set in L.A.), with infomercials selling fake cure-all products. His former colleague Emilio (Miguel Varoni) wants revenge for that, although, of course, his rage is more personal. The twist here is, as his partner Alejandro (Fernando Colunga) explains, their normal crew won’t do it (they don’t accept Emilio wanting 50% of the cut on this deal), so they use illegals that aren’t thieves but are skilled at the positions they need. They include a mechanic (Ruben Garfias) and his daughter (Ivonne Montero), a construction worker (Gabriel Soto), and an actor (Oscar Torres) who can pretend to be a union official to organize the workers at Valdez’s complex (when he confesses he’s from SAG, the workers excitedly wonder if Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts will picket with them). Movies like this, of course, depend on how smoothly the plot runs, and surprising us at the end. On the latter front, Menendez disappoints somewhat – I guessed two of the major twists – but he does fine on the former. This isn’t as deep as, say, Nine Queens (another Spanish con movie, which had a more Mamet edge to it), but it’s fun.
Ever since seeing him as Michael Douglas’ obnoxious son in the deadly remake of The In-Laws, I’ve always dismissed Ryan Reynolds as the poor man’s Jason Lee. However, he has shown possibilities in talent lately; he was one of the few good parts of Smokin’ Aces, and he’s not bad in the lead role of John August’s The Nines. As he proved in his script for Go, August does like to play around with the story, and like that one, this movie actually has three stories in one: in the first Reynolds is Gary, an actor who is under house arrest after being drunk and disorderly, the second has him as Gavin, the creator of a TV show vying for a spot on the air, and in the last one, he’s Gabriel, a video game designer who may be controlling all of them. Hope Davis (a flirty neighbor in the first, a network exec in the second, and a jogger in the third) and Melissa McCarthy (Gary’s publicist in the first, the star of Gavin’s show in the second, and Gabriel’s wife in the third) appear in all three sections as well – in fact, all three stories revolve around Reynolds being torn between the two of them. After the intriguing set-up of the first segment, and the dead-on satire in the second (it’s shot as if it was a Project Greenlight-like documentary about the pilot), the film does falter in the third segment, and also becomes somewhat pretentious (what with language about “the creator”). However, it’s at least an entertaining mindbender, and well performed. I always thought McCarthy laid it on a bit thick as Sookie, the chef who was best friends with Lorelai Gilmore in TV’s Gilmore Girls, but she gets to combine her sweet nature with an edge here, and it gives her role some bite. And Davis, as usual, effortlessly shines – she’s rarely been as sexy as she is the first segment, and her performance in the second is on a par with Sigourney Weaver in the earlier film The TV Set. As for Reynolds, this is the first time I’ve had a sense of him paying attention to the other actors, instead of grandstanding. He develops actual chemistry with Davis and McCarthy, and has a presence without them as well.
This week’s major re-release is Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day. While it was a modest hit upon its initial release in 1993 (making about $70 million), it has since become a cult classic, and many consider this Bill Murray’s best performance until his turn in Rushmore five years later (Murray himself considers it and Rushmore as two of the best scripts he ever read). Somewhat surprisingly, and sadly, it’s also the last time frequent collaborators Murray and Ramis (Ramis wrote or co-wrote five films of Murray’s, and appeared in three of them) worked together on a film; they stopped speaking to each other after the film was wrapped. The film itself is a good example of the yin/yang working relationship the two had; Murray gave Ramis’ comedy an edge, while Ramis brought out Murray’s charm and sweetness (Wes Anderson, Murray’s latest collaborator, has drawn out his melancholy side, and filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola and Jim Jarmusch have followed suit). As Phil, the weatherman who reluctantly covers the Groundhog Day celebration and finds himself living the same day over and over, Murray uses his usual deadpan comic style to a deeper effect than in his previous movies with Ramis. Whereas his characters in, say, Stripes and the two Ghostbusters movies (to say nothing of Caddyshack) were overgrown boys, Phil is undoubtedly an adult, and is charming to no one who knows him very well (his “performance” as the weatherman is the only charm he has. As with Scrooged, this makes his redemption all the more touching, because Murray really works at it, rather than coasting on any sentimental feelings. And he has genuine chemistry with Andie MacDowell as the producer he falls in love with (it helps she tones down her mannerisms). When I first saw the movie in theaters, I thought the film became too pat and sentimental at the end (an admitted weakness of Ramis throughout his career), but as the quality of mainstream comedies has dimmed in recent years, that sweetness seems more earned all the time. This 15th anniversary edition features some new documentaries and deleted scenes.
Both Siegel and Kaufman’s films relied not just on scares, but a sociological element (depending on your point of view, Siegel was skewing either Eisenhower conformity or feeding into Communist paranoia, while Kaufman took on the whole 70’s self-help movement) which made their films deeper and more frightening, while Ferrara and Rodriguez went for straightforward shocks (Ferrara did it successfully – Meg Tilly as a pod person is as creepy today as it was back in 1994 – Rodriguez less so). Hirschbiegel is going in the former direction – on the film’s most successful level, it suggests what the world would be life with a truly epidemic viral infection (the alien is passed along either by contact – Carol’s ex-husband Tucker (Jeremy Northam), a specialist with the CDC, touches a piece of the shuttle wreckage and becomes infected – or orally – he ends up spitting on Carol). There’s also a nifty, somewhat underdeveloped stab at having the pod people influence real events going on now (peace in the Middle East!), which is contrary to the thesis of the film, set down by Russian diplomat Yorish (Roger Rees), who seems to think we’re at our most human when we’re at our most destructive. And there are some creepy scenes, as when Carol manages to escape onto a subway train, and is warned by a passenger not to show emotion to fool everyone else.
The problem is the film seems to have been itself taken over by the pod people. I didn’t mind the brief flash forward scenes; to me, they added to the creepiness. And the happy ending isn’t entirely unexpected; after all, the only version to date that is able to go all the way with an unhappy ending is Kaufman’s version (even Siegel’s version had a tacked-on ending with the army ready to fight the aliens). But all of the previous versions, even the Rodriguez version, had a core of people we were meant to identify with, and were sad to see turn into clones. Kidman, Craig, and Wright are gifted actors, but they have nothing to work with, though Kidman gets to do the controlled panic she’s done before. It’s as if the studio sucked all the life out of them, and replaced it with the story of Carol wanting to protect her son Oliver (Jackson Bond), and while it makes sense plot-wise (because of a childhood disease, Oliver is immune from the alien), it seems like a very conventional resolution.
Joe Menendez’s Ladrón que Roba a Ladrón may be a knock-off of con/heist movies like Ocean’s 11 (the new version) and The Sting, but at least it’s a fairly entertaining knockoff. As usual, the con men here are merely trying to bilk a bad guy rather than an innocent, although in this case, the bad guy has been bilking the innocent. Mocte Valdez (Saul Lisazo) is a former thief who now bilks innocent Latinos, mostly illegals (the film is set in L.A.), with infomercials selling fake cure-all products. His former colleague Emilio (Miguel Varoni) wants revenge for that, although, of course, his rage is more personal. The twist here is, as his partner Alejandro (Fernando Colunga) explains, their normal crew won’t do it (they don’t accept Emilio wanting 50% of the cut on this deal), so they use illegals that aren’t thieves but are skilled at the positions they need. They include a mechanic (Ruben Garfias) and his daughter (Ivonne Montero), a construction worker (Gabriel Soto), and an actor (Oscar Torres) who can pretend to be a union official to organize the workers at Valdez’s complex (when he confesses he’s from SAG, the workers excitedly wonder if Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts will picket with them). Movies like this, of course, depend on how smoothly the plot runs, and surprising us at the end. On the latter front, Menendez disappoints somewhat – I guessed two of the major twists – but he does fine on the former. This isn’t as deep as, say, Nine Queens (another Spanish con movie, which had a more Mamet edge to it), but it’s fun.
Ever since seeing him as Michael Douglas’ obnoxious son in the deadly remake of The In-Laws, I’ve always dismissed Ryan Reynolds as the poor man’s Jason Lee. However, he has shown possibilities in talent lately; he was one of the few good parts of Smokin’ Aces, and he’s not bad in the lead role of John August’s The Nines. As he proved in his script for Go, August does like to play around with the story, and like that one, this movie actually has three stories in one: in the first Reynolds is Gary, an actor who is under house arrest after being drunk and disorderly, the second has him as Gavin, the creator of a TV show vying for a spot on the air, and in the last one, he’s Gabriel, a video game designer who may be controlling all of them. Hope Davis (a flirty neighbor in the first, a network exec in the second, and a jogger in the third) and Melissa McCarthy (Gary’s publicist in the first, the star of Gavin’s show in the second, and Gabriel’s wife in the third) appear in all three sections as well – in fact, all three stories revolve around Reynolds being torn between the two of them. After the intriguing set-up of the first segment, and the dead-on satire in the second (it’s shot as if it was a Project Greenlight-like documentary about the pilot), the film does falter in the third segment, and also becomes somewhat pretentious (what with language about “the creator”). However, it’s at least an entertaining mindbender, and well performed. I always thought McCarthy laid it on a bit thick as Sookie, the chef who was best friends with Lorelai Gilmore in TV’s Gilmore Girls, but she gets to combine her sweet nature with an edge here, and it gives her role some bite. And Davis, as usual, effortlessly shines – she’s rarely been as sexy as she is the first segment, and her performance in the second is on a par with Sigourney Weaver in the earlier film The TV Set. As for Reynolds, this is the first time I’ve had a sense of him paying attention to the other actors, instead of grandstanding. He develops actual chemistry with Davis and McCarthy, and has a presence without them as well.
This week’s major re-release is Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day. While it was a modest hit upon its initial release in 1993 (making about $70 million), it has since become a cult classic, and many consider this Bill Murray’s best performance until his turn in Rushmore five years later (Murray himself considers it and Rushmore as two of the best scripts he ever read). Somewhat surprisingly, and sadly, it’s also the last time frequent collaborators Murray and Ramis (Ramis wrote or co-wrote five films of Murray’s, and appeared in three of them) worked together on a film; they stopped speaking to each other after the film was wrapped. The film itself is a good example of the yin/yang working relationship the two had; Murray gave Ramis’ comedy an edge, while Ramis brought out Murray’s charm and sweetness (Wes Anderson, Murray’s latest collaborator, has drawn out his melancholy side, and filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola and Jim Jarmusch have followed suit). As Phil, the weatherman who reluctantly covers the Groundhog Day celebration and finds himself living the same day over and over, Murray uses his usual deadpan comic style to a deeper effect than in his previous movies with Ramis. Whereas his characters in, say, Stripes and the two Ghostbusters movies (to say nothing of Caddyshack) were overgrown boys, Phil is undoubtedly an adult, and is charming to no one who knows him very well (his “performance” as the weatherman is the only charm he has. As with Scrooged, this makes his redemption all the more touching, because Murray really works at it, rather than coasting on any sentimental feelings. And he has genuine chemistry with Andie MacDowell as the producer he falls in love with (it helps she tones down her mannerisms). When I first saw the movie in theaters, I thought the film became too pat and sentimental at the end (an admitted weakness of Ramis throughout his career), but as the quality of mainstream comedies has dimmed in recent years, that sweetness seems more earned all the time. This 15th anniversary edition features some new documentaries and deleted scenes.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Oscar nominations, and a final word on Heath Ledger
Although there are several reasons why the Oscar nominations this year are not being greeted with the enthusiasm/derision as they usually are – the writer’s strike, the awards fatigue that always sets in, the fact there are few, if any, “audience-friendly” films among the major nominees, and, of course, the tragedy of Heath Ledger’s death – it’s still the Oscars, and, for me anyway, it’s still fun to put in my two cents, so here we go:
THE GOOD
Tommy Lee Jones: Let me preface by saying that I didn’t like In the Valley of Elah at all; whatever you think of the spate of Iraq-themed movies of the past few months (and to come), I think Elah was one of the more facile examples of that genre. However, Jones gave an honest performance in the movie, particularly because he wasn’t afraid to make the character unlikable.
Laura Linney: One of the knocks against the Oscar acting nominees is they traditionally involve some kind of gimmick. Whatever you think of the Best Actress nominees this year (and I’ll be debating the merits of one of them below), four of them undeniably have a gimmick aspect to them: Cate Blanchett was playing an historical figure, Julie Christie must deal with Alzheimer’s, Marion Cotillard was playing a drug addict and had to have a heavy makeup job to resemble her character, and Ellen Page was dealing with pregnancy. Linney’s character had no such afflictions – sure, her father was suffering dementia, but she was the caretaker, not the one suffering. And she did nothing obvious in her performance. She just played this character in an unsentimental way, again not making her likable, but making her believable and true. It’s not the type of acting that usually gets recognized, and for most of this awards season, she hasn’t been, so it’s nice to see Linney getting recognized here.
Philip Seymour Hoffman: I would have understood if Hoffman was ignored by the Oscars simply because the voters this year couldn’t choose which of his excellent performances deserved to be there. Was it his outwardly confident but inwardly sad and raging payroll manager whose robbery plan goes horribly wrong in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead? Or was it his concerned but self-involved literature professor forced to take care of his dad in The Savages? Personally, I think the voters got it right in choosing his performance as Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent who helped Charlie Wilson run his war. From his first moment on screen (where he gets the classic line “Excuse me, what the fuck!”), he owns this movie.
Hal Holbrook: Yes, it’s a sentimental nod to a respected actor who’s never been nominated before. Yes, his character in Into the Wild can be seen as a cliché. But Holbrook never played his role as a cliché, and that’s what matters.
Amy Ryan: I’ve been a fan of Ryan’s ever since I saw her on TV’s The Wire, and I was afraid she’d be overshadowed by her more high-profile co-stars. She takes the stock role of the junkie mom and adds anger and vulnerability to the role.
Tilda Swinton: There have been plenty of corporate villains in films, but none like the one Swinton played in Michael Clayton. She may appear to be unruffled, but she’s really unsure of herself. And the decisions she makes in the film come less out of any cold-bloodedness on her part then on her need to please her boss. While Swinton at times struggles with her accent, that’s the only false step in an otherwise note-perfect performance.
Tamara Jenkins and Sarah Polley: Quite frankly, I was hoping one of these talented women would be nominated for Best Director, since they both did terrific jobs on that score. But I’m glad they both got a screenplay nod for taking different stylistic approaches to a similar theme – how we confront aging in this country, or more to the point, how we don’t confront it.
“Falling Slowly” – Shoot ‘Em Up, my least favorite movie of the year, could have been nominated for an Oscar, for all I cared, as long as the most transcendent song of the year got nominated. I was going to kick in my TV set if it didn’t.
No End in Sight: Once again, this was a fine year for documentaries, but this one was the best on all levels, technically and thematically. Without grandstanding, it made a clear case as to what’s happened to Iraq, and us, since we invaded them.
There Will be Blood: It goes without saying how I’m thrilled my favorite movie of the year garnered eight nominations, including Best Picture, Actor, Director, and Adapted Screenplay.
THE BAD
Atonement: It would be uncharitable for me to suggest this was nominated for Best Picture because it was a sop to those who only like tasteful literary adaptations, because I’ve liked many of the tasteful literary adaptations that have shown up in that category (The English Patient, for one, was my favorite movie of the year it won Best Picture). This film, however, had too much clanging symbolism (sometimes literally, like the typewriter keys) and show-off scenes (the war section, particularly that tracking shot) to be effective as a movie, let alone as an adaptation.
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age: I think Cate Blanchett is the best actress to come to Hollywood in the last 10 years or so, and she fully deserved her nomination for playing Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Her work in this movie is another story. Granted, it’s not entirely her fault; the movie itself is awful, and dragged other talented performers down in its wake besides her (Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush, and Samantha Morton, to name a few). But she was melodramatic and unconvincing where she had been anything but in the first movie.
Casey Affleck: This year, we saw Affleck give a terrific performance that shows he can finally escape out of his brother’s shadow. I’m talking, of course, about his work in Gone Baby Gone. In the Jesse James movie, on the other hand, I know I’m in the minority on this, but I found him mannered and repetitive.
Dario Marianelli: Again, one of the main reasons why I didn’t like Atonement was that pounding typewriter, which was in perfect complement to the thudding score that hit us over the head with the theme of the film.
That’s who I think shouldn’t have been nominated. In part two, here’s who I think was unjustly ignored:
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead: Granted, it had a small studio behind it, who couldn’t make sure Academy members actually saw the thing. But this was one of the great comeback stories of the year: 83 year old Sidney Lumet comes back after over a decade of either bad (Guilty as Sin) or worthy but flawed (Night Falls on Manhattan) films to make a dazzler that stands up with his best films (Prince of the City, Serpico), and both he and the film get ignored. At the least, he and writer Kelly Masterson should have been nominated.
Into the Wild: The speculation seems to be the poor showing this film had among the nominees was because of some kind of backlash against Sean Penn. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, it’s too bad. This was his most mature work as a writer/director, and his screenplay, at the least, should have been nominated. And granted, the Best Actor category is always a tough category to break into, and none of the nominees gave bad performances. But Emile Hirsch broke out of his usual teen roles to give a gutsy and compelling performance (which he lost weight for). Also, Catherine Keener provided a great balance to the movie with her sympathetic portrayal of a hippie who reaches out to Hirsch, and I wish she had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Zodiac: It’s being said now David Fincher’s film about the infamous serial killer got shut out of the Oscars because (1) it was released too early in the year, and (2) it had to compete with too many other dark-themed movies this year. That’s probably true, and too bad, because at the very least, Jim Vanderbilt should have been recognized for his script, Robert Downey Jr. for his work as the crime reporter who becomes spiritually broken while covering the case, and Harris Savides for his breathtaking cinematography.
Angelina Jolie: I’m sorry, but whatever you think of Jolie in real life, I think she disappeared into the role of Marianne Pearl in A Mighty Heart. There were no histrionics, no “Oscar-bait” scenes (a meaningless term anyway), just an honest portrayal of one woman trying, and failing, to rescue her husband.
Josh Brolin: Next to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, Brolin had the best year, performance wise, even if I didn’t always like the movies he did. At the very least, he should have garnered a Supporting Actor nomination for either his work in No Country for Old Men (or Best Actor, depending on what you think of his role), or his portrayal of the corrupt cop in American Gangster (which was the best performance in that overrated movie).
Leslie Mann: Whether you think Knocked Up was a funny and pointed film telling guys in their 20’s and 30’s to wake up and get over themselves or a wish fulfillment fantasy ignoring the reality of relationships and abortion, you can’t deny Mann lent this movie an edge in her portrayal of one half of a couple that has seen better days. Few scenes in movies were as compelling as the one where she gets turned away from a nightclub, and I think her work merited a Supporting Actress nomination.
Shélan O’Keefe: This was a terrific year for child actors, from Dillon Freasier in There Will Be Blood, to Edward Sanders in Sweeney Todd, and even Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, whose performance I did like. But none of them matched O’Keefe in playing a child who, through circumstance as well as temperament, becomes wiser, and sadder, beyond their years.
Jonny Greenwood and Eddie Vedder: Every time the Music Branch of the Academy takes a step forward (letting two rap songs win Best Song this decade, for instance), they take a step back, and disqualifying both Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood, which added to that picture’s dread, and Vedder’s songs for Into the Wild, which evoked Chris McCandless’ rebellious spirit, qualifies as a major step back.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days: Along with the Music Branch and the Documentary Branch, the Foreign Film Branch is the one that usually sits on its brains for a living. Last year, all but one of the nominees (Water) was at the very least a good and challenging movie. Granted, I haven’t seen any of this years nominees yet, but I find it a little hard to believe any of them could be better than Cristian Mingiu’s harrowing tale of trying to get an abortion in communist Romania.
I was going to make a blog entry devoted to Heath Ledger, but there’s a lot said already. I will not speculate in any way on his death, or what may have led to it. I will add my voice to those who say a potentially fine career was sadly cut short. Whatever you thought of 10 Things I Hate About You, he actually underplayed his role as the bad boy, making him all the more charming and watchable. And he proved he was willing to jump towards more challenging roles in The Patriot, despite being saddled with a silly romance plot in that movie. He seemed adrift in the next few years after that in his starring roles (A Knight’s Tale), only able to get a chance to show his stuff in supporting roles in films like Monster’s Ball and Lords of Dogtown (where again, he was able to underplay to nice comic effect). Of course, he broke through in a big way in Brokeback Mountain as someone who repressed feelings he didn’t quite understand as if his life depended on it. Finally, while Cate Blanchett has deservedly gotten most of the praise for I’m Not There, next to her, Ledger is the best thing about it, capturing Bob Dylan’s moody charisma. He will be missed.
THE GOOD
Tommy Lee Jones: Let me preface by saying that I didn’t like In the Valley of Elah at all; whatever you think of the spate of Iraq-themed movies of the past few months (and to come), I think Elah was one of the more facile examples of that genre. However, Jones gave an honest performance in the movie, particularly because he wasn’t afraid to make the character unlikable.
Laura Linney: One of the knocks against the Oscar acting nominees is they traditionally involve some kind of gimmick. Whatever you think of the Best Actress nominees this year (and I’ll be debating the merits of one of them below), four of them undeniably have a gimmick aspect to them: Cate Blanchett was playing an historical figure, Julie Christie must deal with Alzheimer’s, Marion Cotillard was playing a drug addict and had to have a heavy makeup job to resemble her character, and Ellen Page was dealing with pregnancy. Linney’s character had no such afflictions – sure, her father was suffering dementia, but she was the caretaker, not the one suffering. And she did nothing obvious in her performance. She just played this character in an unsentimental way, again not making her likable, but making her believable and true. It’s not the type of acting that usually gets recognized, and for most of this awards season, she hasn’t been, so it’s nice to see Linney getting recognized here.
Philip Seymour Hoffman: I would have understood if Hoffman was ignored by the Oscars simply because the voters this year couldn’t choose which of his excellent performances deserved to be there. Was it his outwardly confident but inwardly sad and raging payroll manager whose robbery plan goes horribly wrong in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead? Or was it his concerned but self-involved literature professor forced to take care of his dad in The Savages? Personally, I think the voters got it right in choosing his performance as Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent who helped Charlie Wilson run his war. From his first moment on screen (where he gets the classic line “Excuse me, what the fuck!”), he owns this movie.
Hal Holbrook: Yes, it’s a sentimental nod to a respected actor who’s never been nominated before. Yes, his character in Into the Wild can be seen as a cliché. But Holbrook never played his role as a cliché, and that’s what matters.
Amy Ryan: I’ve been a fan of Ryan’s ever since I saw her on TV’s The Wire, and I was afraid she’d be overshadowed by her more high-profile co-stars. She takes the stock role of the junkie mom and adds anger and vulnerability to the role.
Tilda Swinton: There have been plenty of corporate villains in films, but none like the one Swinton played in Michael Clayton. She may appear to be unruffled, but she’s really unsure of herself. And the decisions she makes in the film come less out of any cold-bloodedness on her part then on her need to please her boss. While Swinton at times struggles with her accent, that’s the only false step in an otherwise note-perfect performance.
Tamara Jenkins and Sarah Polley: Quite frankly, I was hoping one of these talented women would be nominated for Best Director, since they both did terrific jobs on that score. But I’m glad they both got a screenplay nod for taking different stylistic approaches to a similar theme – how we confront aging in this country, or more to the point, how we don’t confront it.
“Falling Slowly” – Shoot ‘Em Up, my least favorite movie of the year, could have been nominated for an Oscar, for all I cared, as long as the most transcendent song of the year got nominated. I was going to kick in my TV set if it didn’t.
No End in Sight: Once again, this was a fine year for documentaries, but this one was the best on all levels, technically and thematically. Without grandstanding, it made a clear case as to what’s happened to Iraq, and us, since we invaded them.
There Will be Blood: It goes without saying how I’m thrilled my favorite movie of the year garnered eight nominations, including Best Picture, Actor, Director, and Adapted Screenplay.
THE BAD
Atonement: It would be uncharitable for me to suggest this was nominated for Best Picture because it was a sop to those who only like tasteful literary adaptations, because I’ve liked many of the tasteful literary adaptations that have shown up in that category (The English Patient, for one, was my favorite movie of the year it won Best Picture). This film, however, had too much clanging symbolism (sometimes literally, like the typewriter keys) and show-off scenes (the war section, particularly that tracking shot) to be effective as a movie, let alone as an adaptation.
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age: I think Cate Blanchett is the best actress to come to Hollywood in the last 10 years or so, and she fully deserved her nomination for playing Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Her work in this movie is another story. Granted, it’s not entirely her fault; the movie itself is awful, and dragged other talented performers down in its wake besides her (Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush, and Samantha Morton, to name a few). But she was melodramatic and unconvincing where she had been anything but in the first movie.
Casey Affleck: This year, we saw Affleck give a terrific performance that shows he can finally escape out of his brother’s shadow. I’m talking, of course, about his work in Gone Baby Gone. In the Jesse James movie, on the other hand, I know I’m in the minority on this, but I found him mannered and repetitive.
Dario Marianelli: Again, one of the main reasons why I didn’t like Atonement was that pounding typewriter, which was in perfect complement to the thudding score that hit us over the head with the theme of the film.
That’s who I think shouldn’t have been nominated. In part two, here’s who I think was unjustly ignored:
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead: Granted, it had a small studio behind it, who couldn’t make sure Academy members actually saw the thing. But this was one of the great comeback stories of the year: 83 year old Sidney Lumet comes back after over a decade of either bad (Guilty as Sin) or worthy but flawed (Night Falls on Manhattan) films to make a dazzler that stands up with his best films (Prince of the City, Serpico), and both he and the film get ignored. At the least, he and writer Kelly Masterson should have been nominated.
Into the Wild: The speculation seems to be the poor showing this film had among the nominees was because of some kind of backlash against Sean Penn. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, it’s too bad. This was his most mature work as a writer/director, and his screenplay, at the least, should have been nominated. And granted, the Best Actor category is always a tough category to break into, and none of the nominees gave bad performances. But Emile Hirsch broke out of his usual teen roles to give a gutsy and compelling performance (which he lost weight for). Also, Catherine Keener provided a great balance to the movie with her sympathetic portrayal of a hippie who reaches out to Hirsch, and I wish she had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Zodiac: It’s being said now David Fincher’s film about the infamous serial killer got shut out of the Oscars because (1) it was released too early in the year, and (2) it had to compete with too many other dark-themed movies this year. That’s probably true, and too bad, because at the very least, Jim Vanderbilt should have been recognized for his script, Robert Downey Jr. for his work as the crime reporter who becomes spiritually broken while covering the case, and Harris Savides for his breathtaking cinematography.
Angelina Jolie: I’m sorry, but whatever you think of Jolie in real life, I think she disappeared into the role of Marianne Pearl in A Mighty Heart. There were no histrionics, no “Oscar-bait” scenes (a meaningless term anyway), just an honest portrayal of one woman trying, and failing, to rescue her husband.
Josh Brolin: Next to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, Brolin had the best year, performance wise, even if I didn’t always like the movies he did. At the very least, he should have garnered a Supporting Actor nomination for either his work in No Country for Old Men (or Best Actor, depending on what you think of his role), or his portrayal of the corrupt cop in American Gangster (which was the best performance in that overrated movie).
Leslie Mann: Whether you think Knocked Up was a funny and pointed film telling guys in their 20’s and 30’s to wake up and get over themselves or a wish fulfillment fantasy ignoring the reality of relationships and abortion, you can’t deny Mann lent this movie an edge in her portrayal of one half of a couple that has seen better days. Few scenes in movies were as compelling as the one where she gets turned away from a nightclub, and I think her work merited a Supporting Actress nomination.
Shélan O’Keefe: This was a terrific year for child actors, from Dillon Freasier in There Will Be Blood, to Edward Sanders in Sweeney Todd, and even Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, whose performance I did like. But none of them matched O’Keefe in playing a child who, through circumstance as well as temperament, becomes wiser, and sadder, beyond their years.
Jonny Greenwood and Eddie Vedder: Every time the Music Branch of the Academy takes a step forward (letting two rap songs win Best Song this decade, for instance), they take a step back, and disqualifying both Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood, which added to that picture’s dread, and Vedder’s songs for Into the Wild, which evoked Chris McCandless’ rebellious spirit, qualifies as a major step back.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days: Along with the Music Branch and the Documentary Branch, the Foreign Film Branch is the one that usually sits on its brains for a living. Last year, all but one of the nominees (Water) was at the very least a good and challenging movie. Granted, I haven’t seen any of this years nominees yet, but I find it a little hard to believe any of them could be better than Cristian Mingiu’s harrowing tale of trying to get an abortion in communist Romania.
I was going to make a blog entry devoted to Heath Ledger, but there’s a lot said already. I will not speculate in any way on his death, or what may have led to it. I will add my voice to those who say a potentially fine career was sadly cut short. Whatever you thought of 10 Things I Hate About You, he actually underplayed his role as the bad boy, making him all the more charming and watchable. And he proved he was willing to jump towards more challenging roles in The Patriot, despite being saddled with a silly romance plot in that movie. He seemed adrift in the next few years after that in his starring roles (A Knight’s Tale), only able to get a chance to show his stuff in supporting roles in films like Monster’s Ball and Lords of Dogtown (where again, he was able to underplay to nice comic effect). Of course, he broke through in a big way in Brokeback Mountain as someone who repressed feelings he didn’t quite understand as if his life depended on it. Finally, while Cate Blanchett has deservedly gotten most of the praise for I’m Not There, next to her, Ledger is the best thing about it, capturing Bob Dylan’s moody charisma. He will be missed.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
New DVD releases January 8
For actors who have a larger-than-life, or at least highly extroverted, persona, there’s always a danger that when they have to play a regular guy, they flatten themselves out and become one-dimensional. Sam Rockwell doesn’t have that problem in playing Brad, one half of the yuppie couple in George Ratliff’s horror/thriller Joshua. Rockwell has toned down the hipster persona that’s served him in movies like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy just enough to fit the contours of the movie. Brad is a Wall Street trader, and Rockwell’s air of confidence fits that part of him well. Even better, though, are Brad’s scenes with his family, whether it’s with his wife Abby (Vera Farmiga), trying to convince her everything will be alright with their new baby, or with his son Joshua (Jacob Korgan), being the dad who thinks everything seems cool. But when Brad’s façade cracks, as when he discovers his dog is dead, Rockwell doesn’t sentimentalize his grief either, but plays it openly. It shows Rockwell has a lot more to give if he wants.
Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the weak link to Joshua is, well, Joshua himself. Many critics thought the film went off the rails when the first half, portraying how the marriage of Brad and Abby slowly becomes undone, descended to the cheap horror stunt of the two of them discovering while their baby girl may keep them up nights, it’s Joshua they need to be worried about. But the real problem is the way Korgan plays the role. I’m perfectly willing to believe this is Ratliff’s fault, but the fact is, after five minutes with Joshua, any one in their right minds would have called the child psychologists pronto (Brad may be self-absorbed, and Abby is obviously pitched to hysteria, but they’re not stupid). I had some problems with the recent horror film The Orphanage, but at least that kid acted like a believable kid. Korgan is fine when he’s playing the piano (and admittedly, when he plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” at his school talent show, that was quite creepy), but it all becomes stupid pretty quickly. Oh, and the religious fanatic mother-in-law (Celia Weston) was obvious as well. Yes, the first half, dealing with the disintegration of the marriage, was tense and compelling, and while Farmiga was definitely channeling Robin Wright, she does pull it off. And Dallas Roberts has some nice moments as Abby’s brother. But overall, the movie only serves to prove indie horror films can be just as wrongheaded as the big studio ones.
Near the beginning of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, Dr. Searle (Cliff Curtis), the doctor/psychiatrist on the spaceship Icarus II, is sitting in the observation room, looking at the sun from their (relatively close) vantage point, and wanting to just drink the experience in. That scene perfectly distills the essence of Boyle’s films; he wants the viewer to see the movie not as a story to watch, but as a mood piece to groove on. The problem is, more often than not, Boyle’s mood pieces only go so far before they run out of gas (exceptions being Trainspotting and 28 Days Later), and so it is with Sunshine.
Reuniting with writer Alex Garland (who wrote 28 Days Later, as well as the novel that The Beach was based on), Boyle continues his genre hopping (he’s done, among other things, a yuppie thriller (Shallow Grave), a romantic comedy (A Life Less Ordinary), and even a kids movie (Millions) with his attempt at science fiction. Icarus II is being sent to the sun to somehow re-ignite it and put an end to the chill that has descended over Earth. Besides Dr. Searle, the other astronauts include Robert Capa (Cillian Murphy), the nuclear scientist (they intend to explode a nuclear bomb inside the sun), Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), the botanist (she grows the garden on the ship that provides oxygen), Trey (Benedict Wong), the navigator, and Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada), the captain. Boyle and Garland basically sketch in these characters; they’re more interested not just in the ship, but the mission, or rather, the enormity of it. It’s not just the fact that they’re trying to save the earth, Boyle and Garland seem to be saying, but the fact that they’re trying to restart the source of all life. The scenes of characters just staring at the sun may not move the plot forward in any discernible way, but they make you feel what the characters are feeling, and that’s no mean feat.
The problem comes for Icarus II when it picks up a distress beacon from Icarus I, the first ship that tried this mission, which failed for an inexplicable reason. And that, regrettably, is when the movie starts to go off the rails. Boyle’s balancing act of Kubrick and Solaris (the Tarkovsky version) turns into an Event Horizon retread (which was itself a retread of other, better films), as a villain character is introduced, and things start to go haywire. Did the studio pressure Boyle and Garland into this plot turn that becomes predictable and annoying? Or is it another example of Boyle not being able to end his stories right? Whatever the reason, it’s still disappointing. You can’t really blame the actors; all of them are reasonable enough as scientists and astronauts, and no one tries to steal the movie from the other. Still, Sunshine, like Boyle’s other films, seems to burn out too quickly.
The original version of 3:10 to Yuma, by director Delmer Dawes, adapted from the short story by Elmore Leonard, featured some subtle filmmaking and not-so-subtle acting. This remake by James Mangold is the opposite. For the most part, Mangold sticks pretty close to the original story – Dan Evans (Christian Bale), a poor farmer, agrees to be part of the posse that escorts notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the train station so he can be sent to a federal judge, but Evans and the others must not only contend with Wade’s gang, led in his absence by the psychotic Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), but also Wade’s attempts to psych out Evans. At nearly two hours long, Mangold’s version is about 25 minutes longer than the original, features a sequence involving Luke Wilson as an outlaw that seems unnecessary (though admittedly, Wilson is surprisingly good playing a villainous character), and psychological baggage that spells out everything for the viewer (Evans wanting to prove himself to his son, and having physical and psychological wounds to overcome). Finally, I don’t want to give anything away, but the ending feels like a compromise between Leonard’s and Dawes.
Mangold does handle all of the gunplay and violent passages well, but his best work comes with the performances. As Wade in the original, Glenn Ford certainly brought the requisite charm, but he lacked the appropriate menace. Crowe has that menace down pat, but he never overplays it, nor does he overdo the charm. And the scene where he seduces a barmaid (Vinessa Shaw) is quite sexy. Like Crowe here, Bale is not exactly stretching himself with this part – Evans fits in maybe a little too well with his recent parts of silent conviction (most notably, of course, Bruce Wayne). But the way Bale internalizes the conflict he feels between doing what he thinks is right (taking Wade to the train station) and maybe doing right by his family (taking Wade’s money and letting him go), which is much better than Van Heflin, an actor I like, merely indicating that conflict in every gesture. As for the rest, Peter Fonda lends his usual dignity to the role of Byron, the Pinkerton man who has been tracking Wade for a long time, and Alan Tudyk brings humor to his role as the doctor who comes along (Gretchen Mol, unfortunately, is wasted as Evans’ wife). But Foster tops them all, channeling Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, and playing Charlie as someone who, for all his psychotic nature, has a little-boy need for approval from Wade. 3:10 to Yuma was hailed by some upon release as reinvigorating the Western. I wouldn’t go that far, but it is a solid example of the form.
The re-issue this week that’s getting the most play is the 50th anniversary release of Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, but there are better, less heralded re-releases to get excited about. If she’s remembered at all today, Sondra Locke is most likely thought of as the bitterly estranged ex-girlfriend of Clint Eastwood. But she was a good actress when she got the right role, and her very first film, Robert Ellis Miller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, adapted very well by Thomas Ryan from the Carson McCullers novel, gave her a good one. She plays Mick, a teenage girl right on the brink of womanhood, and while it’s a potentially clichéd role, Locke never makes a false step. Whether affecting airs at a party she’s thrown because she thinks it’s what she’s supposed to do, squabbling with her parents (as per normal in these kinds of stories, her father (Biff McGuire) wants to give her everything, but from Mick’s point of view, her mother (Laurinda Barrett) always stops him), or her reaction after losing her virginity to her boyfriend, Locke seems entirely natural.
As anyone who’s seen the movie or read the book recalls, Mick is only one major part of the story. The other crucial role is of Singer (Alan Arkin), the deaf mute who moves into the small Southern town where Mick and a host of others reside. Singer, an engraver at a jewelry store, has come to this town to be close to Spiros (Chuck McCann), his closest friend and another deaf mute, who is also mentally challenged. Singer finds himself interacting not only with Mick (he rents out a room in her house), but also Blount (Stacy Keach), a drunk radical, Dr. Copeland (Percy Rodriguez), a bitter black man who counts Singer as his first white friend, and Portia (Cicely Tyson), Copeland’s estranged daughter. The idea of an afflicted person bringing people together like this, of course, has potential to be a mawkish and unbearable story, but neither Miller nor Arkin overdo this. Arkin, in fact, gives the most restrained performance of his career, keeping things simple and direct. Even in the one scene where his inability to speak drives him to frustration, as when he’s trying to get Portia to come with him to her father, he resists the urge to sentimentalize Singer. Miller likewise avoids the usual trap of Southern movies, which is to make everything garish. It could be argued he goes a little too far in that direction, making the film seem too episodic. And, of course, fans of the novel will miss Biff, the owner of the bar/café Blount and Singer hang out in, and Blount’s radicalism is toned down for the movie (though Keach lends his role authority). But those are minor quibbles; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is quietly affecting and moving.
Another movie dealing with a young woman’s awakening is Robert Towne’s Personal Best. Although it was a box-office failure, this tale of two track stars training for the 1980 Olympics did cause quite a stir when it came out because it involved a lesbian relationship between Chris (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory (Patrice Donnelly), those two athletes, and because Chris later breaks up with Tory and becomes involved with Denny (Kenny Moore, a track writer and former runner; he later appeared in Towne’s Tequila Sunrise and co-wrote Without Limits with Towne, another great movie about track and field), an Olympic swimmer. For the latter, Towne makes no moral judgment in having Chris go from Tory to Denny; it just happens. As for the former, Towne doesn’t descend to the made-for-TV theatrics that mar even John Sayles’ otherwise fine film about a lesbian relationship, Lianna, but presents it in an honest and direct matter. And he gets an erotic charge out of the material (watch the arm-wrestling scene between Chris and Tory) without becoming a voyeur. Also refreshing is how the other characters react to it; Terry (Scott Glenn), Chris’ coach, doesn’t worry that two of his athletes are involved, or that they’re both women, he worries Tory may be acting needy to distract Chris from her abilities.
Just as important as the way Towne handles the relationships, however, is the way he handles the track background. Movies about athletes tend to overlook the training and the ability, as if “heart” was all you needed to win. Towne doesn’t make that mistake, concentrating on how Tory, Chris and the others prepare for meets, and how they worry about whether their bodies are up to the strain (this extends to how the athletes behave off the track as well – the scene of the women in the locker room is done without a hint of voyeurism, as is the scene where Denny is peeing in the bathroom and Chris wanders in. It’s all natural and unaffected). And while I tend to think of Towne for his great dialogue, he mostly tells the story through images (though Terry does get off a zinger when he complains about what he has to put up with coaching women; “Does Chuck Noll worry that Franco Harris is going to cry because Terry Bradshaw won’t talk to him?”). Also, the performances are first-rate. Moore and Donnelly are non-actors, yet they seem born for the camera. Glenn, of course, has the crusty but kindhearted part down pat. But Hemingway is the one who drives this movie. Chris starts out being awkward both physically and emotionally (after the first race, she throws up), yet at the end of the movie, she’s the one who’s strong, and Hemingway takes you through that journey without a false step.
Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the weak link to Joshua is, well, Joshua himself. Many critics thought the film went off the rails when the first half, portraying how the marriage of Brad and Abby slowly becomes undone, descended to the cheap horror stunt of the two of them discovering while their baby girl may keep them up nights, it’s Joshua they need to be worried about. But the real problem is the way Korgan plays the role. I’m perfectly willing to believe this is Ratliff’s fault, but the fact is, after five minutes with Joshua, any one in their right minds would have called the child psychologists pronto (Brad may be self-absorbed, and Abby is obviously pitched to hysteria, but they’re not stupid). I had some problems with the recent horror film The Orphanage, but at least that kid acted like a believable kid. Korgan is fine when he’s playing the piano (and admittedly, when he plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” at his school talent show, that was quite creepy), but it all becomes stupid pretty quickly. Oh, and the religious fanatic mother-in-law (Celia Weston) was obvious as well. Yes, the first half, dealing with the disintegration of the marriage, was tense and compelling, and while Farmiga was definitely channeling Robin Wright, she does pull it off. And Dallas Roberts has some nice moments as Abby’s brother. But overall, the movie only serves to prove indie horror films can be just as wrongheaded as the big studio ones.
Near the beginning of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, Dr. Searle (Cliff Curtis), the doctor/psychiatrist on the spaceship Icarus II, is sitting in the observation room, looking at the sun from their (relatively close) vantage point, and wanting to just drink the experience in. That scene perfectly distills the essence of Boyle’s films; he wants the viewer to see the movie not as a story to watch, but as a mood piece to groove on. The problem is, more often than not, Boyle’s mood pieces only go so far before they run out of gas (exceptions being Trainspotting and 28 Days Later), and so it is with Sunshine.
Reuniting with writer Alex Garland (who wrote 28 Days Later, as well as the novel that The Beach was based on), Boyle continues his genre hopping (he’s done, among other things, a yuppie thriller (Shallow Grave), a romantic comedy (A Life Less Ordinary), and even a kids movie (Millions) with his attempt at science fiction. Icarus II is being sent to the sun to somehow re-ignite it and put an end to the chill that has descended over Earth. Besides Dr. Searle, the other astronauts include Robert Capa (Cillian Murphy), the nuclear scientist (they intend to explode a nuclear bomb inside the sun), Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), the botanist (she grows the garden on the ship that provides oxygen), Trey (Benedict Wong), the navigator, and Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada), the captain. Boyle and Garland basically sketch in these characters; they’re more interested not just in the ship, but the mission, or rather, the enormity of it. It’s not just the fact that they’re trying to save the earth, Boyle and Garland seem to be saying, but the fact that they’re trying to restart the source of all life. The scenes of characters just staring at the sun may not move the plot forward in any discernible way, but they make you feel what the characters are feeling, and that’s no mean feat.
The problem comes for Icarus II when it picks up a distress beacon from Icarus I, the first ship that tried this mission, which failed for an inexplicable reason. And that, regrettably, is when the movie starts to go off the rails. Boyle’s balancing act of Kubrick and Solaris (the Tarkovsky version) turns into an Event Horizon retread (which was itself a retread of other, better films), as a villain character is introduced, and things start to go haywire. Did the studio pressure Boyle and Garland into this plot turn that becomes predictable and annoying? Or is it another example of Boyle not being able to end his stories right? Whatever the reason, it’s still disappointing. You can’t really blame the actors; all of them are reasonable enough as scientists and astronauts, and no one tries to steal the movie from the other. Still, Sunshine, like Boyle’s other films, seems to burn out too quickly.
The original version of 3:10 to Yuma, by director Delmer Dawes, adapted from the short story by Elmore Leonard, featured some subtle filmmaking and not-so-subtle acting. This remake by James Mangold is the opposite. For the most part, Mangold sticks pretty close to the original story – Dan Evans (Christian Bale), a poor farmer, agrees to be part of the posse that escorts notorious outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the train station so he can be sent to a federal judge, but Evans and the others must not only contend with Wade’s gang, led in his absence by the psychotic Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), but also Wade’s attempts to psych out Evans. At nearly two hours long, Mangold’s version is about 25 minutes longer than the original, features a sequence involving Luke Wilson as an outlaw that seems unnecessary (though admittedly, Wilson is surprisingly good playing a villainous character), and psychological baggage that spells out everything for the viewer (Evans wanting to prove himself to his son, and having physical and psychological wounds to overcome). Finally, I don’t want to give anything away, but the ending feels like a compromise between Leonard’s and Dawes.
Mangold does handle all of the gunplay and violent passages well, but his best work comes with the performances. As Wade in the original, Glenn Ford certainly brought the requisite charm, but he lacked the appropriate menace. Crowe has that menace down pat, but he never overplays it, nor does he overdo the charm. And the scene where he seduces a barmaid (Vinessa Shaw) is quite sexy. Like Crowe here, Bale is not exactly stretching himself with this part – Evans fits in maybe a little too well with his recent parts of silent conviction (most notably, of course, Bruce Wayne). But the way Bale internalizes the conflict he feels between doing what he thinks is right (taking Wade to the train station) and maybe doing right by his family (taking Wade’s money and letting him go), which is much better than Van Heflin, an actor I like, merely indicating that conflict in every gesture. As for the rest, Peter Fonda lends his usual dignity to the role of Byron, the Pinkerton man who has been tracking Wade for a long time, and Alan Tudyk brings humor to his role as the doctor who comes along (Gretchen Mol, unfortunately, is wasted as Evans’ wife). But Foster tops them all, channeling Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, and playing Charlie as someone who, for all his psychotic nature, has a little-boy need for approval from Wade. 3:10 to Yuma was hailed by some upon release as reinvigorating the Western. I wouldn’t go that far, but it is a solid example of the form.
The re-issue this week that’s getting the most play is the 50th anniversary release of Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, but there are better, less heralded re-releases to get excited about. If she’s remembered at all today, Sondra Locke is most likely thought of as the bitterly estranged ex-girlfriend of Clint Eastwood. But she was a good actress when she got the right role, and her very first film, Robert Ellis Miller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, adapted very well by Thomas Ryan from the Carson McCullers novel, gave her a good one. She plays Mick, a teenage girl right on the brink of womanhood, and while it’s a potentially clichéd role, Locke never makes a false step. Whether affecting airs at a party she’s thrown because she thinks it’s what she’s supposed to do, squabbling with her parents (as per normal in these kinds of stories, her father (Biff McGuire) wants to give her everything, but from Mick’s point of view, her mother (Laurinda Barrett) always stops him), or her reaction after losing her virginity to her boyfriend, Locke seems entirely natural.
As anyone who’s seen the movie or read the book recalls, Mick is only one major part of the story. The other crucial role is of Singer (Alan Arkin), the deaf mute who moves into the small Southern town where Mick and a host of others reside. Singer, an engraver at a jewelry store, has come to this town to be close to Spiros (Chuck McCann), his closest friend and another deaf mute, who is also mentally challenged. Singer finds himself interacting not only with Mick (he rents out a room in her house), but also Blount (Stacy Keach), a drunk radical, Dr. Copeland (Percy Rodriguez), a bitter black man who counts Singer as his first white friend, and Portia (Cicely Tyson), Copeland’s estranged daughter. The idea of an afflicted person bringing people together like this, of course, has potential to be a mawkish and unbearable story, but neither Miller nor Arkin overdo this. Arkin, in fact, gives the most restrained performance of his career, keeping things simple and direct. Even in the one scene where his inability to speak drives him to frustration, as when he’s trying to get Portia to come with him to her father, he resists the urge to sentimentalize Singer. Miller likewise avoids the usual trap of Southern movies, which is to make everything garish. It could be argued he goes a little too far in that direction, making the film seem too episodic. And, of course, fans of the novel will miss Biff, the owner of the bar/café Blount and Singer hang out in, and Blount’s radicalism is toned down for the movie (though Keach lends his role authority). But those are minor quibbles; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is quietly affecting and moving.
Another movie dealing with a young woman’s awakening is Robert Towne’s Personal Best. Although it was a box-office failure, this tale of two track stars training for the 1980 Olympics did cause quite a stir when it came out because it involved a lesbian relationship between Chris (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory (Patrice Donnelly), those two athletes, and because Chris later breaks up with Tory and becomes involved with Denny (Kenny Moore, a track writer and former runner; he later appeared in Towne’s Tequila Sunrise and co-wrote Without Limits with Towne, another great movie about track and field), an Olympic swimmer. For the latter, Towne makes no moral judgment in having Chris go from Tory to Denny; it just happens. As for the former, Towne doesn’t descend to the made-for-TV theatrics that mar even John Sayles’ otherwise fine film about a lesbian relationship, Lianna, but presents it in an honest and direct matter. And he gets an erotic charge out of the material (watch the arm-wrestling scene between Chris and Tory) without becoming a voyeur. Also refreshing is how the other characters react to it; Terry (Scott Glenn), Chris’ coach, doesn’t worry that two of his athletes are involved, or that they’re both women, he worries Tory may be acting needy to distract Chris from her abilities.
Just as important as the way Towne handles the relationships, however, is the way he handles the track background. Movies about athletes tend to overlook the training and the ability, as if “heart” was all you needed to win. Towne doesn’t make that mistake, concentrating on how Tory, Chris and the others prepare for meets, and how they worry about whether their bodies are up to the strain (this extends to how the athletes behave off the track as well – the scene of the women in the locker room is done without a hint of voyeurism, as is the scene where Denny is peeing in the bathroom and Chris wanders in. It’s all natural and unaffected). And while I tend to think of Towne for his great dialogue, he mostly tells the story through images (though Terry does get off a zinger when he complains about what he has to put up with coaching women; “Does Chuck Noll worry that Franco Harris is going to cry because Terry Bradshaw won’t talk to him?”). Also, the performances are first-rate. Moore and Donnelly are non-actors, yet they seem born for the camera. Glenn, of course, has the crusty but kindhearted part down pat. But Hemingway is the one who drives this movie. Chris starts out being awkward both physically and emotionally (after the first race, she throws up), yet at the end of the movie, she’s the one who’s strong, and Hemingway takes you through that journey without a false step.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Best And Worst of 2007
I’m not one of those people who thinks 2007 has been an exceptional year for movies – there were too many films that were either disappointing (In the Valley of Elah, Lust, Caution) or ones that were good but, considering their directors, could have been better (Eastern Promises, Rescue Dawn). Nevertheless, there were a lot of very good movies, if only one that I’d call an out-and-out masterpiece. Here, then, is my top 10 list for the year, along with my honorable mentions, my favorite performances of the year, and the five films that were the worst I saw in 2007:
There Will Be Blood: Whatever you think of him as a filmmaker, there’s no denying Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who wears his storytelling ambitions on his sleeve. While his previous epic tales (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) looked inward to his own feelings about the world and human relations, his latest film, loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, looks outward to the familiar tale of a man (Daniel Day-Lewis, in another mesmerizing performance) who reaches the top of his profession but becomes isolated from himself. What Anderson does is combines the epic reach of his tale with the intimate details of his characters in a way few other directors have. The result is the one true masterpiece I saw this year.
Black Book: I know there are people who’d rather eat holiday fruitcake every day for a year than watch another WWII-related movie. But in his comeback movie, Paul Verhoeven destroys all of our preconceptions about the “last good war.” There were definitely good guys vs. bad guys, but as Verhoeven vividly demonstrates in this tale of Dutch Jews fighting against the Nazis, the lines between them weren’t always as clear as we’d like them to be.
Michael Clayton: Making his directorial debut, writer Tony Gilroy makes the rare thriller/drama that didn’t feel like it came of a machine marked Thriller 101, that gave its characters and dialogue space to breathe, and exuded intelligence from every frame without being heavy-handed about it. And while George Clooney and Tom Wilkinson have deservedly been getting credit for playing two corporate sharks that belatedly see the light, it’s Tilda Swinton who deserves the most kudos playing a corporate villain like we’ve never seen.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead: Sidney Lumet comes roaring back to prominence and relevance by taking one of his favorite movie genres – the New York City crime melodrama – and, despite the fractured narrative, making it simple, tough-minded, and heartbreaking, especially in the last 15 minutes. It helps he has great actors at the helm, particularly my nomination for this year’s acting MVP, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
No Country for Old Men: Part of the backlash against this latest effort from the Coen brothers is how this movie is all formalism. That may be true, but when the formalism in question – sharp writing, tight direction, nail-biting suspense even without a score to juice things up, and pitch-perfect performances from the cast, especially the chilling Javier Bardem – is so acutely done, it’s hard for me to complain.
(tie) Away From Her/The Savages: Both of these films are from women directors tackling issues normally dealt with in disease-of-the-week TV movies with an honesty normally not found in those efforts. Both of them feature strong performances not only by the afflicted – Julie Christie in the former, Philip Bosco in the latter – but also by those dealing with the affliction – Gordon Pinsent in the former, Laura Linney (in the lead performance of the year) and Philip Seymour Hoffman in the latter. And while they have different styles in telling their story – the former’s gentle lyricism contrasts with the latter’s brutal humor – they’re both damn good.
Once: Since Moulin Rouge kicked off the “musical revival,” most of the films in its wake – even the good ones like Chicago and Sweeney Todd – have merely copied the old stage-to-screen musicals of the 50’s and 60’s, being as concerned with the surface than the feeling below, if not more. John Carney’s film doesn’t resonate because of its smallness of scale compared to those other musicals, but because it produces more genuine feeling not just in its story, but also in the very music driving the story.
No End in Sight: What makes Charles Ferguson’s documentary about what went wrong in Iraq so compelling and heartbreaking isn’t just the calm outrage that fills every frame, but the idea that the people who were initially in charge and knew what they were doing were set aside for the people who got us in this mess today.
Zodiac: What made David Fincher’s docudrama about the infamous serial killer was not the level of detail he, writer Jim Vanderbilt, and a top-notch cast (especially Robert Downey Jr.) brought to the story, although that certainly helped. It was also the rare serial killer movie – hell, the rare movie – that dared to explore how our obsession with serial killers, from any perspective, has been less about understanding the monster beneath than fetishizing the details of their workings.
Into the Wild: In his acting, writing and directing, Sean Penn has usually hewed to the position of the outcast staying on the edge of society. What makes this movie, based on the true story of Chris McCandless, so appealing is not just that Penn’s work here is his clearest declaration of that position, but also because for the first time, he tempers that position with the mature outlook that maybe parts of that society may be more help than hindrance – and McCandless came to that outlook to late to save himself. And Emile Hirsch’s performance as McCandless clearly shows him as a talent to watch.
Honorable mention:
The Bourne Ultimatum: Paul Greengrass, Tony Gilroy, Matt Damon and company prove once again you can make a blockbuster into a good movie if you know how to do it right.
I’m Not There: Although it didn’t hit me on the emotional level I think it aspired to, Todd Haynes’ fractured biopic of Bob Dylan is still an impressive achievement.
Juno: I’ll leave the debate over how “indie” this comedy is to those who care about such things, and say simply this comedy both made me laugh and moved me, an increasingly difficult thing to do these days (and earns points for getting Jennifer Garner to act).
A Mighty Heart: Whatever you think of Angelina Jolie’s real-life activities, she didn’t grandstand here, but gave a quietly powerful performance in Michael Winterbottom’s first-rate docudrama.
The Namesake: Forget Atonement; this was the class literary adaptation of the year. And with this, A Mighty Heart, and his small role in The Darjeeling Limited, Irfan Khan proves he’s a talent to watch.
Best performances of the year:
Best Actor: Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah. As usual, this category is overflowing with contenders, including Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will be Blood), Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild). But while I didn't like the movie he was in, Jones' performance haunted me from beginning to end.
Best Actress: Laura Linney, The Savages. In contrast - or was it reaction - to last year's abundance of great roles for women and great performances by them, there weren't as many lead actress performances to cheer about (though Julie Christie (Away From Her), Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart), Ellen Page (Juno), and Halle Berry (Things we Lost in the Fire), among others, shone through). But even in a better year for women, Linney, who also had an MVP year with great performances in Breach and Jindabyne, gave her character the most dimensions, and made us care about her even when we didn't like her all that much.
Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War. It's almost unfair picking Hoffman's best performance from his work this year. But in this performance, Hoffman disappeared into his character completely, more so than in his other admittedly stellar work this year. And even though this was another good year for supporting males (including Josh Brolin in American Gangster, Ed Harris in Gone Baby Gone, Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton, and Irfan Khan in The Namesake and A Mighty Heart), Hoffman stood out.
Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton. Cate Blanchett got all the ink for her Bob Dylan impression in I'm Not There. Amy Ryan has been winning all the awards for her crack-addicted mom in Gone Baby Gone. Leslie Mann did the comedy with an edge like no one else in Knocked Up. And Shelan O'Keefe topped a strong year of child performances with her heartbreaking work in Grace is Gone. But all of these, and other great supporting actress performances, were giving archetypical, though very good, performances; Swinton took a familiar part - the corporate villain - and turned upside down all our conceptions about it.
And now, the five worst movies of the year:
Shoot ‘Em Up: The only movie I walked out of this year was this so-called tongue-in-cheek action comedy, which insisted it was clever and funny instead of being offensive and tiresome. And it’s sad Clive Owen, who was in my in my favorite movie of last year (Children of Men), was in my two least favorites of this year, this and:
Elizabeth: The Golden Age: Let' see: Shrek the Third? Live Free or Die Hard? Pirates of the Caribbean 3? No contest: this was by far the worst sequel of the year. Director Shekhar Kapur goes from the entertaining and artful potboiler of the first movie to an incoherent mess, dragging a talented cast (including returning members Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush) down with him.
Smokin’ Aces: Once you get past the novelty of R&B star Alicia Keyes playing a lesbian hitwoman, there’s really no point to this empty-headed action fest. Also, memo to Jeremy Piven – stop playing every part as a variation on Ari Gold.
Angel-A: Luc Besson’s incredibly annoying “romantic fable” puts you in the uncomfortable position of wondering if La Femme Nikita or The Professional were ever that good in the first place.
The Heartbreak Kid: Granted, I’m coming to this conclusion later than many other critics, but here goes; Ben Stiller has effectively killed off his career unless he drops his shtick and stops making painfully unfunny comedies like this woeful remake of Elaine May’s sharp comedy.
There Will Be Blood: Whatever you think of him as a filmmaker, there’s no denying Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who wears his storytelling ambitions on his sleeve. While his previous epic tales (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) looked inward to his own feelings about the world and human relations, his latest film, loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, looks outward to the familiar tale of a man (Daniel Day-Lewis, in another mesmerizing performance) who reaches the top of his profession but becomes isolated from himself. What Anderson does is combines the epic reach of his tale with the intimate details of his characters in a way few other directors have. The result is the one true masterpiece I saw this year.
Black Book: I know there are people who’d rather eat holiday fruitcake every day for a year than watch another WWII-related movie. But in his comeback movie, Paul Verhoeven destroys all of our preconceptions about the “last good war.” There were definitely good guys vs. bad guys, but as Verhoeven vividly demonstrates in this tale of Dutch Jews fighting against the Nazis, the lines between them weren’t always as clear as we’d like them to be.
Michael Clayton: Making his directorial debut, writer Tony Gilroy makes the rare thriller/drama that didn’t feel like it came of a machine marked Thriller 101, that gave its characters and dialogue space to breathe, and exuded intelligence from every frame without being heavy-handed about it. And while George Clooney and Tom Wilkinson have deservedly been getting credit for playing two corporate sharks that belatedly see the light, it’s Tilda Swinton who deserves the most kudos playing a corporate villain like we’ve never seen.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead: Sidney Lumet comes roaring back to prominence and relevance by taking one of his favorite movie genres – the New York City crime melodrama – and, despite the fractured narrative, making it simple, tough-minded, and heartbreaking, especially in the last 15 minutes. It helps he has great actors at the helm, particularly my nomination for this year’s acting MVP, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
No Country for Old Men: Part of the backlash against this latest effort from the Coen brothers is how this movie is all formalism. That may be true, but when the formalism in question – sharp writing, tight direction, nail-biting suspense even without a score to juice things up, and pitch-perfect performances from the cast, especially the chilling Javier Bardem – is so acutely done, it’s hard for me to complain.
(tie) Away From Her/The Savages: Both of these films are from women directors tackling issues normally dealt with in disease-of-the-week TV movies with an honesty normally not found in those efforts. Both of them feature strong performances not only by the afflicted – Julie Christie in the former, Philip Bosco in the latter – but also by those dealing with the affliction – Gordon Pinsent in the former, Laura Linney (in the lead performance of the year) and Philip Seymour Hoffman in the latter. And while they have different styles in telling their story – the former’s gentle lyricism contrasts with the latter’s brutal humor – they’re both damn good.
Once: Since Moulin Rouge kicked off the “musical revival,” most of the films in its wake – even the good ones like Chicago and Sweeney Todd – have merely copied the old stage-to-screen musicals of the 50’s and 60’s, being as concerned with the surface than the feeling below, if not more. John Carney’s film doesn’t resonate because of its smallness of scale compared to those other musicals, but because it produces more genuine feeling not just in its story, but also in the very music driving the story.
No End in Sight: What makes Charles Ferguson’s documentary about what went wrong in Iraq so compelling and heartbreaking isn’t just the calm outrage that fills every frame, but the idea that the people who were initially in charge and knew what they were doing were set aside for the people who got us in this mess today.
Zodiac: What made David Fincher’s docudrama about the infamous serial killer was not the level of detail he, writer Jim Vanderbilt, and a top-notch cast (especially Robert Downey Jr.) brought to the story, although that certainly helped. It was also the rare serial killer movie – hell, the rare movie – that dared to explore how our obsession with serial killers, from any perspective, has been less about understanding the monster beneath than fetishizing the details of their workings.
Into the Wild: In his acting, writing and directing, Sean Penn has usually hewed to the position of the outcast staying on the edge of society. What makes this movie, based on the true story of Chris McCandless, so appealing is not just that Penn’s work here is his clearest declaration of that position, but also because for the first time, he tempers that position with the mature outlook that maybe parts of that society may be more help than hindrance – and McCandless came to that outlook to late to save himself. And Emile Hirsch’s performance as McCandless clearly shows him as a talent to watch.
Honorable mention:
The Bourne Ultimatum: Paul Greengrass, Tony Gilroy, Matt Damon and company prove once again you can make a blockbuster into a good movie if you know how to do it right.
I’m Not There: Although it didn’t hit me on the emotional level I think it aspired to, Todd Haynes’ fractured biopic of Bob Dylan is still an impressive achievement.
Juno: I’ll leave the debate over how “indie” this comedy is to those who care about such things, and say simply this comedy both made me laugh and moved me, an increasingly difficult thing to do these days (and earns points for getting Jennifer Garner to act).
A Mighty Heart: Whatever you think of Angelina Jolie’s real-life activities, she didn’t grandstand here, but gave a quietly powerful performance in Michael Winterbottom’s first-rate docudrama.
The Namesake: Forget Atonement; this was the class literary adaptation of the year. And with this, A Mighty Heart, and his small role in The Darjeeling Limited, Irfan Khan proves he’s a talent to watch.
Best performances of the year:
Best Actor: Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah. As usual, this category is overflowing with contenders, including Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will be Blood), Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild). But while I didn't like the movie he was in, Jones' performance haunted me from beginning to end.
Best Actress: Laura Linney, The Savages. In contrast - or was it reaction - to last year's abundance of great roles for women and great performances by them, there weren't as many lead actress performances to cheer about (though Julie Christie (Away From Her), Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart), Ellen Page (Juno), and Halle Berry (Things we Lost in the Fire), among others, shone through). But even in a better year for women, Linney, who also had an MVP year with great performances in Breach and Jindabyne, gave her character the most dimensions, and made us care about her even when we didn't like her all that much.
Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War. It's almost unfair picking Hoffman's best performance from his work this year. But in this performance, Hoffman disappeared into his character completely, more so than in his other admittedly stellar work this year. And even though this was another good year for supporting males (including Josh Brolin in American Gangster, Ed Harris in Gone Baby Gone, Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton, and Irfan Khan in The Namesake and A Mighty Heart), Hoffman stood out.
Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton. Cate Blanchett got all the ink for her Bob Dylan impression in I'm Not There. Amy Ryan has been winning all the awards for her crack-addicted mom in Gone Baby Gone. Leslie Mann did the comedy with an edge like no one else in Knocked Up. And Shelan O'Keefe topped a strong year of child performances with her heartbreaking work in Grace is Gone. But all of these, and other great supporting actress performances, were giving archetypical, though very good, performances; Swinton took a familiar part - the corporate villain - and turned upside down all our conceptions about it.
And now, the five worst movies of the year:
Shoot ‘Em Up: The only movie I walked out of this year was this so-called tongue-in-cheek action comedy, which insisted it was clever and funny instead of being offensive and tiresome. And it’s sad Clive Owen, who was in my in my favorite movie of last year (Children of Men), was in my two least favorites of this year, this and:
Elizabeth: The Golden Age: Let' see: Shrek the Third? Live Free or Die Hard? Pirates of the Caribbean 3? No contest: this was by far the worst sequel of the year. Director Shekhar Kapur goes from the entertaining and artful potboiler of the first movie to an incoherent mess, dragging a talented cast (including returning members Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush) down with him.
Smokin’ Aces: Once you get past the novelty of R&B star Alicia Keyes playing a lesbian hitwoman, there’s really no point to this empty-headed action fest. Also, memo to Jeremy Piven – stop playing every part as a variation on Ari Gold.
Angel-A: Luc Besson’s incredibly annoying “romantic fable” puts you in the uncomfortable position of wondering if La Femme Nikita or The Professional were ever that good in the first place.
The Heartbreak Kid: Granted, I’m coming to this conclusion later than many other critics, but here goes; Ben Stiller has effectively killed off his career unless he drops his shtick and stops making painfully unfunny comedies like this woeful remake of Elaine May’s sharp comedy.
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