Oh, the days are strange right now.
I saw my first film of 2007 (officially, anyway) on Friday morning and my second on Friday night, so it feels like the year is off and running. In the meantime, I’m still mainlining everything I can. I’ve got about 28 films to go before I call it quits for the year, and it makes for some really strange days.
Take today, for example. I started the day with a barbecue with my family outside, playing ball with the baby and having fun. Then after lunch, Toshi hung out with me so we could watch CURIOUS GEORGE. My wife and I went out and did some stuff for a while, hung out until she went to bed, and then I watched Steve Soderbergh’s BUBBLE, which turned out to be a pretty appealing little experiment in naturalism that reminded me of early Errol Morris. I just finished watching Fabien Bielinsky’s last film, the noir thriller EL AURA from Argentina, and I have to say... I sort of loved it. I think it’s at least as good as NINE QUEENS, and it makes me sad to know Bielinsky’s gone now. Next up, I’m about to start TALLADEGA NIGHTS, which I somehow completely managed to miss while it was in theaters.
I love the punchy feeling that kicks in about four films into a marathon. I love this time of year, knowing that I’m revving up to write about it. It’s funny, though... I’m already getting attacked.
I haven’t written my list... haven’t even started with the actual writing of it, or even the ranking of it... and I’m getting angry e-mails. One person wrote me a scathing missive because of the way I categorize the films I see each year. “EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, GOOD, NOT-SO-GOOD, and FUCKING AWFUL.” They were offended by the last category and irritated by the others. They wanted a star system or a number system. “Something quantifiable.” First of all, I’m not a consumer report card. I have strange, particular taste in film. I know what I like. I love films for a lot of reasons other people don’t, and there’s populist stuff that connects with audiences that drives me mental. I can’t tell you if a movie is worth your money/time or not. Only you can, and the only way you’ll ever really know is if you spend the money in the first place.
I hate using stars or numbers to “quantify” a film. I don’t get it. I don’t know the difference between a 4.2 and a 5.9, to be honest. I have broad reactions to films, but then within those broad reactions, I have a million different small reactions that can only be explained through a real discussion of the movie, and not through any arbitrary number I assign to the film.
Even having five categories already makes things a little rigid for my tastes, but in general, if it’s “good” or above, I can at least recommend giving the film a try. Beyond that, you’re on your own. There are some “NOT-SO-GOOD” films on my list that weren’t the worst films of the year by any means, and not really disasters... they just weren’t very good.
Is “FUCKING AWFUL” a little harsh considering ever other category is some degree of good, even if it’s not-so? Yeah, probably. But there are a handful of films every year that make me feel like I’ve been punished, and I reserve the right to punish them back. Just a little.
For now, though, I’m still just watching movies. Everything I can. I did pretty well in terms of seeing things in actual theaters. I went to several screenings in the last few weeks, but the holidays sort of crushed me, and I just didn’t have a chance to write about them.
After my extremely mild reaction to FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS this year, I can’t say I was really looking forward to LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, the second half of his multi-perspective portrait of the battle of Iwo Jima. I think Eastwood, like most major directors, goes through different periods, different personalities, different voices. My favorite Eastwood was for a brief run including films like BIRD, UNFORGIVEN, and WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART. During those years, his filmmaking achieved a sort of effortlessness, a purity of voice that I don’t think he ever had before or since. His current run of films, starting with MYSTIC RIVER, has obviously made some powerful connection with a section of the viewing public, but it leaves me cold, and that bothers me.
Even after having reviewed them and discussed them and even rewatched them, I’m hard-pressed to fully explain why I reject MILLION DOLLAR BABY and MYSTIC RIVER and FLAGS, but I do. On some fundamental level, I reject the very way they go about their business. They feel as forced and phony to me as UNFORGIVEN feels natural and even inevitable. With LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, somehow Eastwood has tapped that earlier style again, and the resulting film is easily my favorite thing he’s made in over a decade.
Iris Yamashita’s screenplay is an exercise in primary colors, but within those broad character strokes she creates, she’s created a very delicate human story. The idea of telling the Japanese POV on a WWII battle is progressive enough from any American filmmaker, but it’s especially bold when you consider how Eastwood is a specifically American icon. His appeal for much of his career has been based on films like BRONCO BILLY or THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES or HONKYTONK MAN or even the EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE films. His earliest fanbase is made up of the exact audience that may see this as audacious and challenging, the mere idea of experiencing empathy for our opposition in what most still consider the last truly moral war. It’s that empathy, the way Eastwood steps outside the American experience, that makes this a stronger film than FLAGS just on the conceptual level.
None of that would matter if we didn’t feel for the characters in the film, and that’s where Yamashita and Eastwood excel. Ken Watanabe had a fantastic year between his performance here and in the little-seen-but-equally-worthy MEMORIES OF TOMORROW. He stars as General Kuribayashi, the man in charge of making the island ready for attack. Kuribayashi is forward-thinking, progressive in his treatment of underlings and also in terms of his education, which took place in America. Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) is also an officer with American ties, having competed in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. The two of them bond immediately, unique among the officers. There’s a formal, hardline rigidity to the way most of the officers on Iwo Jima think, and the common soldiers are constantly bombarded with stories about what kind of monsters the Americans are. We see the enlisted men through the eyes of Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), among others. Saigo is a baker who was pressed into service and who wants desperately to survive so that he can see his daughter, born after he left for the war.
The film takes its time, and so much of it is focused on everything except battle that when the war does finally intrude, it’s upsetting because you know things can’t go well for these people we’ve gotten to know so well. Knowing that you’re watching the losing side in a conflict plays havoc with expectations, and it makes it even more tense than usual. When it looks like all is lost and the only honorable out is suicide, Eastwood doesn’t flinch. He takes you inside the mentality of the men who are ready to do the unthinkable, and when they actually do it, it’s awful because you know there are options that their cultural conditioning just doesn’t allow them to see. For me, the whole movie boils down to a moment inside a cave, near the end of things, when the Japanese have taken a wounded American into their hiding place. He dies, and they find a letter home on his body. As they read the letter aloud, they suddenly get a totally different impression of Americans than what they’ve been told to expect, and they see themselves and their own hopes and fears in what he wrote, and they suddenly experience a shift in their perspective that illuminates what I believe Eastwood is trying to say here. It’s a piercing moment, and the film as a whole has lingered quite a bit with me in the two weeks since I’ve seen it.
Fox was good enough to send me several Academy screeners this year, allowing me to catch up with movies like LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and THANK YOU FOR SMOKING and THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA that they didn’t bother inviting me to see when they screened originally. One of the titles that showed up was NOTES ON A SCANDAL. It’s an uneven film, but there’s a lot about it that I really liked, and it features one of the best human monsters since Tom Ripley in ’99.
Richard Eyre is one of those British directors who came out of decades of TV work, and who is professional, polished, with an almost invisible touch. There are some flourishes here that scream Scott Rudin to me, like the inappropriately portentous score by Philip Glass, but I guess that’s because Rudin though he was making a serious, highbrow lit flick like THE HOURS. NOTES is something much more gloriously trashy than that, though, camp that never once winks at you. The only person who seems completely in on the joke with screenwriter Patrick Marber is Dame Judi Dench, and the result is loads of sly, tart fun.
Dench plays Barbara, a thoroughly institutionalized teacher at an English school. She’s a private little lady with an acid tongue, but she saves her best bon mots for the journal she keeps, where she pours her rage and her wit into scathing dissections of everyone around her. It’s hyper-self-aware work, but at the same time, it’s an attempt by Barbara to romanticize her completely cold and loveless world, her one way of inflating herself while deflating the world around her until, perhaps, she actually fits.
She’s a lesbian, and a deeply closeted one, but the film isn’t about Dench struggling with the identity. There’s something that defines her more clearly than her sexuality. She’s a manipulator. She’s a stalker, and a damn good one. She identifies her prey, then gradually strips away anything that might keep her from her kill. She is a hunter, and the film really kicks in about the moment she sights something new she wants, something she needs... a new teacher, blonde and sultry and practically glowing. Cate Blanchett is probably sexier here than she has been in her last ten films. Dench begins to work her way into the life of this younger woman so she can see what she’s up against. She meets Blanchett’s husband, the obviously-older Bill Nighy, and she meets Blanchett’s kids, including one with Down’s Syndrome (who Dench describes to her journal as “the court jester”) and spends time with the family at meals. She doesn’t really see a way in until Blanchett does something stupid. Incredibly stupid. Self-destructive to an extreme. And Dench watches from the corner, a spider waiting in her web, pleased as pleased can be.
Blanchett makes some horribly frustrating choices in the film, but they’re the sorts of choices that you see people make in real life all the time, and I think Marber did admirable work adapting Zoe Heller’s novel. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s one of the strongest purely adult entertainments of the season, and well worth checking out.
I have to say... I’m confounded by the resistance that many people seem to have to Alfonso Cuaron’s magnificent, moving CHILDREN OF MEN. Working from a difficult novel by PD James, Cuaron has crafted a script along with Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby. That many writers must be a bad sign... right?
Normally, I’d say yes, but here, it seems like something really special happened. Even if I think there are some narrative problems in the last 20 minutes of the film, I admire how dense and subtle this script is. There are several different levels of perception which the film works on, and the more you study the backgrounds and the world and the details of things, the more you see how much careful construction went into making this the sort of experience that you can watch and rewatch, the single most effective vision of dystopia since Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL.
Clive Owen was smart to resist the pressure to play James Bond, and I think what we’ll eventually see from him over the course of his whole career is that he’s more interested in eccentric, individual vision than he is in commercial credibility. The way he plays the hero of this film, there’s an awkward lack of physicality to him. Despite his size, he’s almost frail. He’s not a badass superhero by any means, and that makes his journey in the film more moving. The film’s failures occur most obviously when Owen and other actors stop playing characters and start playing types, especially in the film’s wrap-up. But at its best, the film has a shaggy charm that makes the sad, hopeless world of the movie seem even more bleak in a way.
It’s a very simple set-up. All around the world, at roughly the same time, women stop having children. A generation goes by, and the horror and sorrow of the situation sets in on a cultural level. That’s where the film picks up. Owen plays Theo, a man who is approached by his ex-wife, played by Julianne Moore, who wants him to help her obtain transport papers for a young woman (Claire-Hope Ashitey) who carries inside her the first baby in almost 20 years. That’s pretty much it. The script is deceptively simple, and because the screenwriters layered in so many things so gracefully, it’s possible to watch this different ways depending on you. If you want to watch the film to appreciate the social commentary that Cuaron has layered in visually, it’s a rich and rewarding experience, subtle and nuanced in all the ways V FOR VENDETTA was not. If you want to watch a character study about a walking dead man slowly brought back to life when he encounters hope in a hopeless world, the film works on that level, too. Maybe the only way you’ll leave frustrated is if you want hard SF answers to what has obviously been created as pure metaphor.
The real stars of the film are Alfonso Cuaron and his longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, and their collaboration here is one of the most technically thrilling things I’ve seen all year, a reminder of just how liquid reality can be in the hands of great film artists. Much has been made of the long uninterrupted takes that Cuaron favors in this film, but it seems like most people are only impressed because they are long uninterrupted shots. What I find most impressive about the technique is the way it grounds you in the middle of action sequences in a way that all the frantic MTV-style cutting the world never will. Cuaron makes you a part of these scenes in a way that never lets you off the hook, and his incredibly sure hand as a director combined with the real magic that Lubeski accomplishes is what makes this one of the year’s most compelling experiences in a theater, even if I’m not completely sold on some of the script’s choices in the last few minutes of the film. No matter, and a minor complaint. See this on the biggest screen you can, as soon as you can. It’s worth the effort.
Meanwhile, what the hell do you people see in NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM? I know families get desperate to find anything they can see together at the theater, but there has to be some other choice out there right now besides this generic, poorly-written nonstarter. It’s almost to the point where I wince when I see “Screenplay by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant,” and that bothers me. I like those guys. RENO 911 makes me laugh very hard, and I enjoyed them on THE STATE. They are very funny people, no doubt about it. But lately, if they are the credited writers on a mainstream comedy, it’s going to be cookie-cutter garbage. HERBIE FULLY LOADED, the TAXI remake, THE PACIFIER, and now this... all I can think is that these guys are playing some elaborate practical joke on Hollywood, intentionally writing awful lowbrow crap just to see if they can get it greenlit. As long as there’s a tell-all book down the road called VIN DIESEL AND A DUCK, OR HOW WE RUINED HOLLYWOOD COMEDY AND GOT RICH DOING IT, then all will be forgiven. In the meantime, I guess this movie works if you want to watch Ben Stiller get into a slapfight with a monkey. I thought the cast was wasted, and that’s even more depressing when you’ve got vets like Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney in the cast as well as genuinely good comic actors like Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan.
Obviously, the guy who deserves the most scorn here is Shawn Levy, whose work continues to define mediocrity. He has no flair with actors, no visual style to speak of, and his inexperience with shooting visual effects means that this movie is state of the art if it was made in 1983. Levy managed to direct two of the year’s worst films this year (the horrifying PINK PANTHER remake is the other), no simple task. CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, JUST MARRIED, and BIG FAT LIAR are all perfect examples of how turning in completely anonymous work gets you rehired in this town. At least if you’re going to make films that suck, do so with some style. Suck out loud. This sort of quiet hackery is a perfect fit for the execs at 20th Century Fox these days, so it’s no wonder he keeps getting hired there. For me, the only question is when I’m going to wise up and just quit watching anything this guy makes. Even in IMAX, I had a hard time making it through this one.
I consider Phil Noyce to be one of those guys who has been very canny about his flirtations with Hollywood. He sells out just long enough to establish enough commercial credibility to make something personal, then starts again. Lately, he’s been in personal mode every time out, and the result has been a really strong run of movies. RABBIT-PROOF FENCE, then THE QUIET AMERICAN, and now this. It feels like he’s found his voice as an older filmmaker, and like he can’t go make the impersonal stuff like THE BONE COLLECTOR or THE SAINT anymore. Shawn Slovo’s script for CATCH A FIRE is simple, direct, and heartfelt, and I can see why Noyce wanted to do it. CATCH A FIRE’s great strength is the way it establishes the hearts of its characters in the first act. Derek Luke is phenomenal, and his connection with his family is so beautiful, so real. Then, when the world goes crazy about a half-hour into the film, it’s that much more of a nightmare. Tim Robbins plays a very human villain, and the way the film resolves the conflict between him and Derek Luke is quite moving, and it seems to me that one of the common threads I’ve seen in films with an authentic African voice in the last few years is that the ideas of forgiveness and redemption are very important to many of the cultures on that continent. Considering how violent and terrible their recent history is, that’s even more impressive to me. I commend CATCH A FIRE most for having the courage to have a black lead without feeling the need to introduce a white character to serve as “the audience’s viewpoint,” one of the most insulting things Hollywood does on a regular basis.
Dito Montiel’s autobiographical film A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS isn’t terrible. It’s got some solid performances, there’s a command of time and place to some stretches of the film, and Montiel works well with his DP, Eric Gautier. But there’s a familiarity to this sort of story that is hard to overcome, and Montiel’s film is a little too shaggy to pack any real punch. As crazy as it sounds, I think Shia LeBeouf is far more effective as young Dito than Robert Downey Jr. is as present-day Dito. That’s the fault of the writing first and foremost, though. LaBeouf is just given more to do, and there’s real integrity to his work. I’m not really sure why this guy takes a beating from our Talkbackers, unless it’s because they would hate anyone starring in the silly giant robots movie this summer, but I like LaBeouf, and I think a role like this is important to the way he’s growing as a performer. Channing Tatum, a complete black hole of charisma in the very silly STEP UP! this year, actually exhibits some personality here, and for that alone, I have to assume Montiel is some sort of magician with actors. Rosario Dawson makes a strong impression in just a few moments of screen time, and whoever found Melonie Diaz to play her character as a teen deserves a bonus. Overall, this is the sort of movie that will probably develop a small, passionate audience because they feel the movie speaks directly to them, but I feel like I’ve seen this and heard this and felt this all before, and without something new to add to the conversation, this isn’t a film I’d recommend.
I find myself torn in regards to HALF NELSON. I can see why people are crazy about the performance by Ryan Gosling. Ever since I saw THE BELIEVER in 2001 at Sundance, I’ve been sold on the idea that Gosling is one of the genuine talents of his generation, a gifted and intuitive performer who can generate empathy even when playing the most damaged characters. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck do their very best to avoid the pitfalls of the “noble teacher helping troubled students” genre, and at times, they turn it on its head enough to keep me engaged. Dan Dunne (Gosling) is a junior high teacher at a tough inner city school, and when you see him in class, he’s witty and engaging and he seems to really reach his kids. But in his private time, he’s a world class fuck-up, a crackhead who can just barely keep his life on track. It’s a strong idea... but it never really adds anything beyond that idea.
The first half hour, it’s good. It’s chugging along. It’s not particularly new, but it’s authentic. It has a voice. And then about forty-five minutes in, there’s a scene. And, just... goosebumps. Gosling falls apart while spending a night in a shitty motel room with some woman he just met at a bar, and it’s a scary-real bit of free-fall on his part. It serves to show you just how hard he’s struggling to hold onto any sense of control in every other scene of the film. Scenes like that, and there are several in the film, are what kept me watching. The film is the performance, and the performance is the film. I don’t think it’s a great movie, but I think it’s a fascinating tightrope walk by an actor. He’s real in every moment, but the movie isn’t. It makes a lot of arbitrary choices, which is part of its naturalistic charm. I had a teacher just like this guy in high school, a genuinely good teacher at times, but a train crash in his real life. And the moments where Gosling gets it right, it was like I was seeing this guy again.
And even though I think much of what happens narratively with one of his students, a girl named Drey (Shareeka Epps), is fake and overcalculated, I’ve got to give Epps her due. She’s a great young actor, with a coiled presence that really gives Gosling what he needs in order to shine. She is the perfect person for him to play off of in most of the film, and it wouldn’t work if not for her. I just wish they’d figured out something else to do with her, because the material about her personal life derails the movie for me. Even so, you should see it so you understand the reputation that Gosling is building for himself, a reputation he definitely deserves.
I’ve got so much stuff I’ve been working on for you guys, including my ten best list as soon as I finish watching a few more films, a visit to the offices of TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, reviews of the first few films I’ve seen from 2007, and the return of the DVD column, which will be undergoing some changes as we gear up for the year ahead.
Guess I’d better go get some more of that ready to post for you, and I’ll also continue to review the holiday movies I’ve been catching up with. Should be a good January and a great 2007.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
